I’m a 47-year-old bloke originally from Wellington, New Zealand. Right now I’m living out of a bag, flying out of Perth to the Jundee gold mine in outback WA on an 8/6 roster — eight days underground, six days off — and spending my breaks drifting around Southeast Asia looking for somewhere to call home.
My stuff is in a storage unit in Brisbane. My kids are in New Zealand. My next swing starts in a week.
This site is where I document the journey. No bullshit, no get-rich-quick garbage, no motivational poster nonsense. Just the honest reality of what it takes to start over at 47, kill your debt, and try to build something that actually lasts.
How I got here
I didn’t arrive at the mines in a straight line.
I spent the last few years in Brisbane working as a builder — hands in concrete, long hours, doing it tough like most tradies do. Good honest work, but the kind that grinds your body down and leaves little to show for it financially. Before that, a decade in Linux systems and network engineering. Servers, networking, development — I was good at it, I loved it. But life moved, the industry moved, and somehow I ended up on the tools instead of the keyboard.
Now I’m underground pulling gold out of the WA goldfields and spending my weeks off in Southeast Asia trying to figure out how to make sure this is the last time I ever have to start from scratch.
Why FIFO
Honestly? The money. But also the time.
An 8/6 roster means I have six full days off every fortnight. Not a weekend — an actual week. Time to think, plan, train, and build. FIFO gets a bad reputation and some of that is deserved, but for someone trying to construct a financial future while holding down a physically demanding job, the roster is genuinely one of the best structures available to working people. The pay is serious. The time off is real.
I’m not here to romanticise it. Being away from your kids is hard. The camps can be isolating. The work is demanding. But the opportunity is real if you’re disciplined enough to do something with the money rather than spend it all during your week off.
What I’m building
The plan has a few layers.
First things first: I’m killing debt. That’s the immediate priority — before investing, before property, before anything else. Every swing I do chips away at it. It’s not glamorous but it’s the foundation everything else sits on.
Once the debt is gone, the next step is property. My goal is to build a portfolio of apartments and investment properties across Australia and New Zealand — assets I can eventually place in trust for my children. Something that outlasts me. Something that means they start from a better position than I did.
Alongside that, I’m building this site and exploring other income streams — merch, content, whatever makes sense as I go. The long-term picture is enough passive income that I don’t have to work. Not necessarily to stop — but to have the choice.
I want to retire as a digital nomad. Laptop, slow travel, no fixed address, no alarm clock. Right now I’m in the scouting phase — moving through Southeast Asia on my breaks, training Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and MMA wherever I land, and looking for the right city to eventually set up a base. Somewhere with low cost of living, good gyms, and enough of a community that it doesn’t feel like exile.
What you’ll find here
Honest writing about FIFO life, personal finance from a working-class perspective, and the practical stuff nobody explains properly — rosters, tax, managing money when it comes in big lump sums, keeping your head straight when you’re a long way from home and the people you love.
I’m not an expert. I’m a Kiwi tradie who taught himself Linux in the nineties, built houses for a decade, and is now three months into mining gold in the WA desert while sleeping in cheap guesthouses in Thailand on his days off. I’m figuring this out as I go, and I’m writing it all down.
If that resonates — if you’re older, starting late, carrying debt, and wondering if it’s still possible to build something — this site is for you as much as it is for me.
It’s not too late. But we can’t waste time either.
Let’s get on with it.