Matt Strum, our founder
Matt Strum, founder

FI Me To The Moon started like many things start: a person wants something, looks around, and then decides to build it himself. Our founder, Matt Strum, went through a year-long journey of discovery in his early 30s after learning about financial independence (or “FI”). He was enthralled by the simple, yet powerful concept of splitting up retirement into the separate concepts of FI and stopping working.

Matt grew up with a pretty average upbringing financially. His father worked in the Air Force and moved around every few years, giving a fairly stable financial upbringing (albeit nothing fancy). Like most, Matt didn’t learn too much about personal finances, other than the run-of-the-mill make-money and go-to-college goals. He paid for college by working and receiving scholarships. Like many, he even took on student debt in the five digit range. Through his 20s, Matt didn’t really focus much on optimizing his financials at all except for increasing income. Although it served its purpose well, Matt eventually felt like he needed to work on more than just income. That’s when he discovered FI.

In early 2018, Matt decided to hunker down and learn everything he could about everything related to spending and earning money. How to save towards retirement. How to optimize where that money goes. How to earn extra money. How to get the most benefits from the money that gets spent. How to structure investments. What to care about when spending money. Etc. He stumbled onto the concept of FI and noticed that it provided a great framework that gives purpose to all those things: optimizing your life for now and later, not just for the money, but to live the life you want, now and in the future.

After about a year, Matt decided that as a software engineer, he could provide the FI community with tools specific to their needs. There are plenty of generic solutions out there that are great but don’t cater towards them or provide less-than-steller experiences. Matt founded FI Me To The Moon with the goal to provide a place where people could learn about FI and apply it to their lives either through just educating themselves through content and services that we provide.

We hope you enjoy what’s here and what’s coming down the pipeline. Let us know your thoughts on anything you get from our site or comments on things to improve. We’re extremely early and have a lot of things to test out, together we can help people take control of their financial lives today and into tomorrow.