This Is Goodbye
whatlifecouldbe.eu/2020/12/08/this-is-goodbye
MrsW

December 8, 2020

Hi guys. It’s been a while. We’ve been meaning to write this post for a few months now,
but life kept getting in the way. We haven’t written anything on the blog this year apartfrom the announcement of FIWE 2020, which ended up getting canceled due to thecovid restrictions.
It’s time to face the facts – What Life Could Be has run its course, served its purpose,and it’s time to move on. I suppose it’s pretty obvious that our hearts aren’t in it anymore.
We could have just closed the site down. But we wanted to say one last goodbye before
we hang up our hats for good. So let’s explore why we’ve run out of steam. We’ve
realized that…

…We Just Don’t Enjoy Writing
Neither of us particularly enjoys writing blog posts. It seems strange that we started ablog in the first place then, but at the time we didn’t know that we weren’t writers andwe were caught up in the enthusiasm of this new movement we’d just discovered, so wedecided to give it a go.
It went fine for the first couple of years. We told our story and became part of the FI
community both in Germany where we lived at the time and in Europe in general. We
met a tonne of fantastic people, many of whom have become good friends.
But then our enthusiasm for writing posts started to tail off, mostly because…
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…We Don’t Have Anything Left to Say
Let’s face it, there’s only so much to say about FIRE, and it’s all been said already. Manytimes. We just don’t feel we have any value left to add. We could tell you guys more
about our FI life here in Romania, but to be honest it’s not that interesting. And we’redefinitely done writing about personal finance and investing since…

…We Have FIRE Burnout
We’ve been intensively involved in the FIRE community in Europe since 2014 and whileit’s been an amazing experience, our enthusiasm for talking about FIRE has tailed off.
Over the years we’ve read literally thousands of blog posts about all aspects of FIRE,
listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, and been to countless meetups. It’s all beeninteresting, but like we said above, there’s only so much you can say about FIRE, and weneed a break for a while. Which means that…

…We’re Putting Our Energy into Other Things
We both have a tonne of other projects we want to devote our time and energy to at themoment, but none of them are FIRE-related.
We’re also spending boatloads of time with our kids, especially this year due tolockdown and school closures. (We’re just starting week 6 of homeschooling for thisschool year.)
Besides looking after the kids, running the house, working in the garden, and pursuing
our other projects we just don’t have time to write blog posts and maintain the blog.
Something’s gotta give. We’ve decided to be honest with ourselves – and with you guys
– and admit that it’s time to wave goodbye to What Life Could Be.

So What Now?
We’ll keep the site online for two weeks after we publish this post, then we’ll shut it
down forever.
We were keeping the site active so we’d have somewhere to publish information about
Financial Independence Week Europe. But we’ve decided to give FIWE a new home atFIREhub.eu, the site we co-founded at FIWE 2017.
In the next couple of weeks we’ll be moving all information about past FIWEs to theMeetups section of FIREhub. And we’ll be putting out information about future FIWEs
via FIREhub and its related facebook page.
We still can’t be sure whether there will be a FIWE in 2021 because the covid situationis still so uncertain. Once we make a decision, we’ll let you know via FIREhub.

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All that’s left to say now is a huge thank you to all of you. To everyone who’s been aregular reader, commented on our posts, and reached out to us in various ways over theyears. Some of you even took a chance on us and signed up for a FIWE event. We hope
to see a lot of you again soon once this crazy world has sorted itself out.
Thank you, and goodbye,
Mr & Mrs W

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