The Start of Something Big?
We’re planning an event called Financial Independence Week Europe. These are the thoughts/plans we have so far.
We started our blog to get to know the FIRE community all around the world. Since we live in Germany, we’d especially like to reach out to the community on this side of the ocean.
We hear about so many meetups and conferences in the US (FinCon, Chautauqua, Camp Mustache and so many more) and now it’s time for us Europeans to get together!
First Steps
First, we’d like to start with a brainstorming week in mid-2016. We’d like get some European FI bloggers together in Budapest in a small group (maybe 10-15 tops) to:
- Get to know each other
- Brainstorm about how a European FI week could look and how we want to do it
- See who wants to get involved in organising it and how
- Enjoy and eat ourselves through the city
- Generally have great time with no fixed agenda!
Our Main Goals for This Meetup
- Build a community
- Learn from each other (i.e. through case studies)
- Inspire and be inspired
- Discuss EU-specific FI topics/tools/strategies
Why Budapest?
- It’s an amazing and inexpensive city.
- It’s accessible from anywhere in Europe. You can fly/drive there easily from anywhere.
- We know it, we love it, we can’t get enough of it!
- The food there is just mind-blowing.
- There’s just so much to see and do there.
The Vision (Rough Plans for 2017)
- Organise a 1-2 week meetup or small conference type of thing in Budapest or Stuttgart
- Have an agenda, presentations, workshops, discussions
- Plan in enough free time as well to explore the place
- Organise an affordable, nice location with accommodation for all of us
- Open the event to bloggers, people who have already reached FI, people who are on the way and want some help
- Maybe invite relevant guest speakers/professors/experts in the field depending on the topic of the meetup
- Limit the number of participants (20-25?) so that we all get to know each other and have a great time
- It should be a community-building and teaching event as well
Application process:
- We don’t want to make the event commercial – it should be accessible to everybody (everybody will pay their own expenses, including speakers).
- Anyone interested can submit a short video or text where they describe their situation, what help they need, how they can contribute to the community and why they’d like to participate.
- The organisers will select the participants.
Let’s Create Financial Independence Week Europe
All these are obviously just rough plans, but we wanted to share them with you to see whether anybody is interested and to have a discussion about it in the comments section.
We’re going to keep posting updates on this, so if you’re interested, don’t forget subscribe to our list.
What do you think? Would you like to participate? What are your thoughts on our initial plans?