You’ve optimized your 401k. You’ve got a spreadsheet that calculates your FI date down to the day, assuming a 7% real return and zero unexpected emergencies, because obviously nothing unexpected ever happens to anyone. You’ve read the blogs, listened to the podcasts (hi), and you can recite the 4% rule like it’s a nursery rhyme.
There’s just one problem: nobody in your real life wants to hear about any of it.
Your coworkers think maxing out a 401k is “aggressive savings.” Your sibling asked if you’re in a cult when you mentioned geographic arbitrage. Your spouse loves you, truly, but has reached a hard limit on Roth conversion ladder conversations at the dinner table. This is the quiet tax of pursuing financial independence: it can be a little lonely. You’re running a marathon that most of the people around you didn’t sign up for and don’t really understand.
Online communities help. The FI subreddits, the Facebook groups, the forums (including the one we’re building right here at BiggerPockets Money) are great for asking questions and getting validation that no, you are not insane for tracking your net worth monthly. But there’s a ceiling on what a comment thread can do for you. Text on a screen can’t replicate the feeling of sitting around a fire pit at 11 p.m. with someone who just gets it, who nods along when you say “one more year syndrome” without needing it explained, who laughs at your spreadsheet jokes because they have the same spreadsheet. (And they’re mentally clocking that joke to use in the future, themselves.)
That’s where in-person FI events come in. They’re not just nice to have. For a lot of people on this path, they’re the difference between feeling like a weirdo with a calculator and feeling like part of a community that’s headed somewhere good together. Let’s talk about four ways to make that happen, because the FI community has built an entire ecosystem of ways to find your people in real life.
CampFI: Summer Camp for Grown Adults Who Like Index Funds
Remember camp? The s’mores, the awkward icebreakers, the feeling of making a best friend in 48 hours flat because you were forced to share a cabin? CampFI takes that exact energy and points it at financial independence instead of canoeing badges.
CampFI is a three day and night retreat held at various locations around the country, including the Rocky Mountains near Colorado Springs, the Midwest, and Texas, with new spots popping up as demand grows (and demand has grown a lot, most weeks sell out well before the event). Each retreat typically pulls in 50 or more campers, all somewhere on the spectrum from “drowning in debt” to “already financially independent and just here for the vibes.” That range is intentional. CampFI’s organizer Stephen Baugher is explicit that this isn’t a stage for finance bloggers to talk at an audience. It’s a weekend where everyone is both a teacher and a student, trading tips on backdoor Roths over breakfast and swapping geographic arbitrage stories on a hike in the afternoon.
The structure is loose by design. There are speakers and sessions, sure, but the real magic happens in the unscheduled hours: the late night conversations, the group hikes, the moment someone finally says out loud the thing they’ve been too embarrassed to admit to their non-FI friends, like “I make six figures and I still feel weird buying name brand cereal.” Turns out, that confession lands a lot softer with a room full of people nodding along.
Accommodations vary by location, and tickets run about five hundred dollars for the whole weekend, which is a pretty stunning amount of value when you consider you’re not paying for a hotel and you’re getting a community out of the deal. And meals. If you want a no-frills, high-connection way to dip a toe into in-person FI events, CampFI is the gateway drug. Most people who attend their first one end up coming back, often more than once a year.
EconoMe: The Conference That Calls Itself a Party About Money
If CampFI is a cozy weekend with friends, EconoMe is the big, loud family reunion. Held every spring in Cincinnati at the University of Cincinnati, EconoMe bills itself, accurately, as the largest gathering specifically built for the FIRE movement. We’re talking 500 attendees over three packed days of keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops, and enough social programming to make you forget you came here to talk about asset allocation.
The story behind it is a good one. Founder Diania Merriam started the conference after discovering blogs like Mr. Money Mustache and Frugalwoods along with books such as Your Money or Your Life and The Simple Path to Wealth, using what she learned to climb out of $30,000 of debt in 11 months and start saving and investing 60% of her income. When you’ve lived the transformation yourself, you build an event that reflects it: equal parts education and celebration.
EconoMe is explicit about the two problems it’s trying to solve, and they’re worth sitting with for a second. The first is isolation. Pursuing FI is unconventional, and that can leave you without anyone in your daily life who wants to talk about money management or lifestyle design. The second problem is more sneaky: motivation rot. You spend the first year or two of your FI journey buzzing with energy, optimizing every line item, refining your investment strategy, feeling unstoppable. Then you hit the accumulation phase, the part where you’ve already done the optimizing and now you just… wait. For years. While your money compounds in the background like a pot of water that takes forever to boil. That stretch is where a lot of people lose steam, and EconoMe exists partly to hand you a recharge.
The conference leans into the idea that financial independence isn’t only about the math. It’s also about expanding what you can imagine your life looking like once the math works out, which is a nice antidote to the spreadsheet-brain a lot of us develop. If CampFI is about deep one-on-one connection, EconoMe is about plugging into the whole scene at once: meeting the bloggers and podcasters you’ve been listening to for years, discovering corners of the FI movement you didn’t know existed, and leaving with a renewed sense that yes, this is still worth doing.
ChooseFI Local: Finding Your People Without Leaving Town
CampFI and EconoMe both require travel, a few days off work, and a bit of a financial outlay (even if it’s a friendly one). Not everyone has that kind of flexibility, especially if you’re early in your journey and every dollar is earmarked for debt payoff or your emergency fund. That’s where ChooseFI Local comes in, and it might be the single easiest entry point into in-person FI community on this whole list.
ChooseFI Local is a network of over 300 city and regional groups spanning the United States and stretching internationally into Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, and beyond. These aren’t curated retreats with a ticket price. They’re grassroots meetup groups, usually run on Facebook, organized by volunteers in the community who just wanted to find other FI people near them and figured other people probably wanted the same thing. Spoiler: they were right.
The groups exist to do three things: organize social meetups so members can meet face to face, organize educational meetups where someone presents a case study or a strategy breakdown, and share local resources, whether that’s a tip on a credit union with a great rate or a heads up about a low cost coworking space. Some city groups are buzzing with monthly events. Others are smaller and more informal, just a handful of people who grab coffee every so often. Either way, the barrier to entry is about as low as it gets: find your city, request to join the group, and show up.
There’s something powerful about this option specifically because it removes the excuses. You don’t need a plane ticket or a weekend off. You need an evening and a coffee shop. If you’ve been wanting to dip into in-person FI community but the idea of a multi-day retreat feels like too big a leap, start here. Check choosefi.com/local, find your city or the closest one to you, and see what’s already happening before you assume you need to build it from scratch.
FI Friends Travel: Because Your Adventures Can Have Better Conversations
Here’s a fun wrinkle on the in-person event concept: what if the event was also an epic adventure? That’s the idea behind FI Friends Travel, founded by Kristen Knapp, who also runs the ChooseFI St. Louis local group. After attending CampFI and EconoMe herself and getting hooked on the FI community in real life, she built something that takes that same connection and points it at international travel.
FI Friends Travel organizes small group trips for people in the FI community, with destinations that have included Portugal, Turkey, and Amsterdam and planned trips to Japan, and even an African safari through national parks tracking wildlife across places like the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. Rooted in core FI values like intentional living, smart money habits, and maximizing time well spent, the trips appeal to travelers who value purpose as much as place. And here’s the part that should make you sit up: this isn’t a financial conference disguised as a vacation. There’s no breakout session on tax loss harvesting wedged between dinners. It’s people-first travel where the financial independence connection is the reason everyone ended up in the group, not the topic of conversation once you’re there. (But, I mean, whenever the FI group gets together, money conversations DO pop up…)
One story floating around the FI Friends Travel community sums up exactly why this works. A group of 14 mostly strangers went on a trip to Portugal together. Because they were all part of the FI community, they got along amazingly well, in what the organizer calls “FI magic” because it never fails. Eight of those 14 liked each other so much that they later reunited at a CampFI event in Colorado Springs. That’s the whole thesis of this article in one anecdote: shared values create instant trust, instant trust creates real friendship, and real friendship is portable. It travels with you from a retreat center in Colorado to a riad in Marrakesh to wherever you end up next.
If you’ve already got the travel bug and the FI bug, this is the rare chance to scratch both itches with the same trip, and to come home with friends instead of just photos.
FinTalks and the Cruise That Doubles as a Support Group
If you want a taste of in-person connection before you commit to actual travel, FinTalks is the warm-up act. Founded by Amberly Grant, it’s a weekly live video discussion group where a diverse crowd of FI folks talks through money topics and trades real life experience, with guest speakers who have ranged from Mr. Money Mustache to ACA experts to a retired FBI agent (because as you know, financial independence attracts an eclectic crowd).
It’s not quite in person, but it’s a far cry from scrolling a forum alone at midnight, and it tends to be the on-ramp to something bigger: the FinTalks Cruise. This multi-night cruise, first to the Caribbean and most recently to Alaska, built around a small group of FI travelers who share scheduled discussion sessions alongside the regular cruise chaos of pools, dinners, and late night hangouts at the pizza place. FinTalks members get priority booking and a discount on the cruise, so if the weekly calls hook you, the boat is right there waiting. It’s proof that you can combine a beach vacation with the best parts of a CampFI weekend. Check it out at amberlygrant.com.
Beyond the Budget Retreats: The One Built for Couples, Not Just Individuals
Here’s a gap most of these events don’t address: Money conversations in partnerships are more than just about money. They are about what money represents. For one person, saving might represent safety and security. For another, spending might represent freedom, joy, or making the most of life. For someone else, having a plan might create peace. While to another, too much planning can feel limiting and stressful. Most FI events are built for the individual chasing the number, not for two people trying to get on the same page about it. And when two people with different experiences, histories, and beliefs come together, extra effort and new skills are sometimes needed to traverse money conversations successfully.
Beyond the Budget Couples Retreat, hosted by Angela Koivula, Ph.D. and Lisa Buning, M.A., Ed.S., a real life couple who are both trained couples therapists and Angela is also a financial educator, is built specifically for that gap. It’s an immersive couples retreat planned for the mountains of North Carolina, designed around the idea that money touches nearly every part of a relationship, yet most couples never actually learn how to talk about it. Rather than a straight money bootcamp, the retreat is built to help partners work through the emotional, relational, and practical sides of money together, with the goal of leaving more aligned on both the relationship and the future you’re building. It’s still in its early stages, with a waitlist open for the 2026 retreat, so consider this an invitation to get in early rather than a fully proven track record. If your FI journey has occasionally turned into a budgeting argument in the car, this is the event built with exactly that couple in mind.
Search Beyond the Budget Couples Retreat to join the waitlist and get details as they’re announced. Or click on their website here to sign up to hear details as they are released and learn more about the event hosts and Beyond the Budget Retreat Founders, Angela and Lisa.
So Which One Should You Actually Do?
Here’s the honest answer: start with whichever one matches your current bandwidth, then let it snowball. Zero travel budget right now, which is exactly why you’re pursuing FI? Start with ChooseFI Local. It costs nothing but an evening. Want a low-stakes weekly habit before you commit to travel? Hop into a FinTalks call and see if the cruise calls your name later. Got a long weekend and a few hundred dollars for a deep, slightly unhinged-in-the-best-way bonding experience? Book a CampFI. Want the biggest stage with the most energy, meeting a few hundred of your future best friends at once? EconoMe is calling your name every March in Cincinnati. Already got a passport that needs more stamps? FI Friends Travel will let you see the world with people who won’t roll their eyes when you mention your savings rate unprompted. And if your FI journey is actually a two person project and the budgeting conversations have gotten tense, get on the waitlist for Beyond the Budget Retreats and work through it together instead of around each other.
None of these are mutually exclusive. A lot of the most plugged-in people in this community do several at once, year after year: CampFI for close friendships, EconoMe for the big recharge, a local ChooseFI group for the steady drumbeat of regular connection, a weekly FinTalks call to keep the conversation going between trips, a FI Friends Travel trip or a FinTalks Cruise to see the world with people who get it, and a couples retreat to make sure the person across the dinner table is just as on board as the spreadsheet says they should be.
The math of financial independence is something you can absolutely do alone, with a spreadsheet and enough discipline. But the experience of it, the part where you actually feel supported and understood while you’re grinding toward a number, that part goes so much better with company. Your portfolio doesn’t care if you’re lonely. You do. So go find your people. They’re at a campsite in Colorado, a conference hall in Cincinnati, a Facebook group for your own city, or possibly a beach in Portugal, just waiting for you to show up.
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