Welcome to FinBase ????
The Financial Basecamp is a personal finance blog devoted to helping everyone climb their financial mountain. The ultimate goal of this blog is to assist you in reaching financial independence. Financial Basecamp (also known as FinBase) is a financial independence brand dedicated to empowering people of all ages, backgrounds, and economic situations to harness money and personal finance to buy back their lives.
The History of Financial Basecamp
FinBase was started as a way to aggregate and simplify financial independence information online to help readers become global, socially-responsible, and self-aware citizens leading fulfilling, joyful lives. Just like mountaineers follow a specific, mapped route to summit a mountain, Financial Basecamp creates a guide for one of the most life-changing ascents you will ever make — the journey of attaining personal financial independence.
Your personal finances may seem like a mountain you can’t move, but our goal is to break things down into actionable steps that will help you begin your journey to financial independence. The thoughts and ideas expressed herein have proven successful for us and for many others, and we’d love to share them with you.
What is Financial Basecamp?
FinBase is not a step-by-step, get-rich-quick magic bullet. Nor is it a regurgitated Wikipedia page about money (though we do provide practical information about money, personal finance, economics, and a variety of other subjects).
Instead, FinBase is a climbing guide, training ground, and basecamp for your own personal financial independence adventure: it’s the place to learn, gear up, train, climb, and share the peaks and valleys of life (and enjoy all of the breathtaking views!).
We’re in this for the long haul. It’s not a sprint, and it’s not a marathon — it’s a climb.
Financial independence changes with you as your needs change. This site is as much a site about you as it is money.
Our Mission
The mission of Financial Basecamp is to assist you in reaching financial independence and in becoming a global, socially-responsible, and self-aware citizen leading a fulfilling, joyful life.
Our Values
The Financial Basecamp guides its actions according to the principles of kindness, honesty, joy, integrity, hard work, determination, faith, hope, and charity.
The Financial Basecamp Founders
1776
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Excerpt from the United States Declaration of Independence
Present Day
“Volunteer at a hospital. Learn to fence. Write a children’s book. Read more classic literature. Have a family. Go trail running. Attend Wimbledon.” – Excerpt from the Chalkboard Wall of John and Bethany’s First Apartment
We were quite the picture, sitting on the neglected carpet of our first apartment, hands covered with pastel supermarket chalk. Newly married, we had managed to find an apartment that allowed us to paint the walls, and we had promptly chosen to paint an entire wall with chalkboard paint. We used it for many purposes, but on this night, we had written on it a list of all the things we wanted to do with our lives. Our weekend activities weren’t always so philosophical, but this evening’s exercise had been spurred by the unavoidable, life-altering events of a few months earlier when we had been forced to accept the frosty reality that our life would never be what we thought it would.
After struggling with a sudden onset of debilitating health challenges, Bethany had been diagnosed with a neurological disorder and had undergone subsequent brain surgery. For many months, she could hardly do anything at all, and thereafter, found she could no longer participate in or fully experience many beloved activities. As she continued (and continues) to experience crippling pain, the idealistic vision we had of our life together seemed to implode on itself.
That night, we tried to reconcile our hopes for the future with the facts of her illness. Hundreds of years after the Declaration of Independence was written, we found ourselves pondering the three oft-quoted unalienable rights and how they could possibly be ours to grasp. As we made a list of goals and accomplishments we wanted to achieve, interests to undertake, and the type of people we wanted to become, we contemplated how we could possibly obtain all that we wanted to in the face of unwanted adversity. What liberties did we have now that we would experience the effects of chronic illness? How could we still pursue happiness? Could we maintain the quality of life we had wished for?
Though life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness might be inherent freedoms, today’s financial ecosystem usually render them mutually exclusive. If you want to support your life, you trade your time and liberty for a job. If you want to pursue happiness or have the liberty to do nothing at all, you trade your pay grade and quality of life. And in our case, Bethany’s restricted physical abilities limited us more. We felt confused and discouraged.
Time passed, and through a divine act of God, we stumbled upon the financial independence movement. This novel perspective on money, finance, and life slowly unfolded itself as the answer to many of our questions. Through financial independence, we knew we would be able to spend all the time in the world on the things that mattered most to us, and Bethany’s health could always come first.
Financial independence is comparable to watching the sun set over the ocean — beautiful when viewed alone, but unforgettable when enjoyed with someone else. We knew these truths we discovered weren’t our truths, and they were meant to be shared. So, we started this blog, in an effort to empower anyone and everyone to enjoy their life and liberty while pursuing happiness.
While we believe that there are times where God will move mountains, it’s often that He helps us climb them instead. The growth, knowledge, and wisdom obtained along the journey are invaluable, and we know it makes reaching the summit that much greater. We’re here to share what we’ve learned along the way, so you can begin making your climb as well.
We’re humbled you’ve read this far. If you’re anything like us though, you’re not just interested in reading about someone else’s story; you’re here to write your own! So get your gear and join us on the climb towards financial independence — we’ll be your guides each step up the mountain.
After all, the journey to financial independence is not one that is meant to be travelled alone.
Let’s climb,
