The original FIRE movement was all about living frugally, fighting lifestyle inflation and western hyper consumption, and saving like mad in order to invest early and take advantage of long term compounding.
It's become perverted in recent years by high salaried hyper consumers who have started idealizing "fatFIRE", which is really only achievable by a small group of people.
100% agree with this. The FIRE movement (or the equivalent before it gained this name) was about average people using frugality, investing, sensible leverage, and luck to get ahead and (semi) retire much earlier than usual. It has since suffered an influx (at least in popular online circles) of high earners scoffing at the idea that anyone could achieve financial independence with a frugal lifestyle. This despite the trivial mathematics proving it is indeed very possible for average earners, perhaps even more so recently given the bull markets.
I've worked with some very intelligent, brilliant people, who simply cannot comprehend how their own financial spending is foolish, or more likely, know this and choose to play ignorance. I've always found it fairly bizarre, almost like an addiction. It's fascinating how some people can be so skilled in one domain, but so lacking in self-control, especially when obtaining said skill requires enormous self-control in the first place.
It is quite fascinating. I've known incredibly high income earners and brilliant engineers who have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in cash earning near 0 percent. It blows my mind how absurdly financially illiterate so many people are.
And beyond that, so many of my peers hit the ground running on the hedonic treadmill right out of college, quickly filling up their consumption habits to meet their newly high income, while I continued to live low and plow huge amounts of my paycheck into my investments. Well, they're all still slaving away with no end in sight and I'm financially independent after many lucky breaks in my early investments that wouldn't have happened if I didn't have such a frugal mindset early on.
It seemed so obvious to me that this would be the outcome. I still don't understand how so many people can't seem to grok how much early sacrifice can yield outsized reward down the line.
One of them here, although I'm working on it. There is a lot of things here going on, and I don't think you can just stamp this with "lol how reckless these people are"
- Separate investing and frugality/budgeting. I guess a lot of those people do actually one of those, but not the other.
- You talk about high earners/engineers. In most of they earning life they never knew the need to ration, or lacking funds - so with the trajectory they see in early adulthood, especially if they like what they do, and they're successful, there simply isn't any recognizeable need to save for later (or even retire early)
- Maybe you like dealing with money, watching stock news early in the morning - I hate it. I hate the thought of dealing with this. It's an active aversion. Of course, the majority of investments should be "set and forget", but it's not always apparent how (especially outside US) and you need quite some research beforehand.
- Coupled with this, you put your life savings in a thing that you don't understand, won't follow. There may be a not entirely unfounded fear of South Park's "aaaand it's gone"
- There is something absolutely tempting about money sitting directly available on an account. Especially when you're young and single, you have no idea what happens with you next year, or what you will probably spend on. Walling away your funds is a critical and worrysome thought.
Sure, you can sum this all up as "financial illiteracy", but they are still cemented in valid concerns or life experiences, instead of mere negligence.
> Of course, the majority of investments should be "set and forget", but it's not always apparent how (especially outside US) and you need quite some research beforehand.
I really wish things like annuities or pensions were available for the 21st century economy. So many people don't want to deal with investing and understanding markets (which change!) and avoid making smart decisions.
There should be a way to just put money in a magic box that pays a little bit back each year, and every time you put money in it grows a bit more.
That index is up over 25 years. You'd be even better off if you were buying during the bear periods. AND you're not including dividend reinvestment.
A quick check here, https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio, with JPXN between 2002-2021 investing a static amount monthly and reinvesting dividends suggests you would have doubled your money over the period.
Bad compared to US growth to be sure. You're right that Japan is a great example of how this strategy doesn't work as well for people locked in to stagnating economies.
> You're right that Japan is a great example of how this strategy doesn't work as well for people locked in to stagnating economies.
that's why you don't invest in a single region. A globally diversified portfolio (which, to be fair, is more difficult to achieve for people in some nations that's not the west) is what's required to get the market returns.
Sure. You can cherry pick a time period in any index that would be bad. That's why the 4 percent rule only works for most retirement historical starting years, and why some people choose to work towards a more conservative 3 percent withdrawal rate.
Retirement always was and will continue to be a risk that depends both on how much you've saved and how well the economy will continue to function and grow once you're no longer working. Like all things in life, nothing is certain.
> FIRE movement is largely a result of crazy high salaries and a booming stock market, it wont last forever.
Productivity per employer has gone up a lot, ideally everyone would be earning more, but at least some are. FIRE doesn't require a booming stock market to work... It simply requires places to put capital that return annually (ideally perpetually). For example buying solar panels is a form of capital sink that has a practical return annually, or sinking money into a home or insulation. At some point someone's savings + annual "income" will be enough to survive on.
No. Let’s say everyone in the world is relying on savings + investment income for living (the end goal of the FIRE movement?). Then who will produce food (no one is doing any labor)?
FIRE is possible for everyone only when full automation is developed.
That’s definitely and decidedly not the end-goal. Most people don’t retire entirely, they just switch to work that’s more interesting to them, on their own terms. Maybe fewer hours.
But I’ve never heard anyone proposing that nobody should ever work again — you still need to work for long enough to build up a big portfolio. Maybe you can choose to just work 20 hr weeks for your entire 40-yr career… or 60 hour weeks for 15 years, then retire early. But the idea is that if people could consume much less, then we could build a better economy that supports everyone needing to work less in a lifetime.
the people who have not yet FIRE'ed would have to do it, and they do it because they are getting paid by people who are FIRE'ed - presumably, with the intention of FIRE'ing themselves after reaching some target net worth. Unless you're claiming that somehow the population would stagnate and no new people would be born, this will continue to work.
Why does it have to be possible for _everybody_ to be in the same position, at the same time, for FIRE to work?
People that FIRE are still working - they're just compressing their working years vs higher income vs lower spending. Everyone is "producing food", just for a shorter portion of their life than normal.
It's not possible for everyone to FIRE, is the point.
Society needs to produce X amount of goods and services to sustain itself. If insufficient goods and services are produced, you get stagflation that kills your retirement nest egg. It's reasonable to say that a society where everyone stops doing work they don't like around age 35 cannot possibly produce enough goods and services, unless these people also die by 40.
I also don't buy the idea that it's possible to utilize only ~10-20 years of high productivity from an average person to sustain that person perpetually. This would only be possible with much more advanced automation than what we currently have, in everything from food production to medicine.
FIRE works for now because productivity continues to grow, at least in the US, and in part due to population growth. It also does only work for a small subset of the population (be it high earners or high savers), because the larger this subset, the higher the systemic risk. And it's a bad idea to advocate FIRE as a culturally sustainable approach to life. That idea is absurd.
> I also don't buy the idea that it's possible to utilize only ~10-20 years of high productivity from an average person to sustain that person perpetually.
Check out earlyretirementextreme.com
The author shows how it can be done in 5 years on a sub-$100k salary. The catch though is that he doesn't have children. With dependents, it would probably be more like 10 years.
high salaries and booming stock market are the result of an increased standard of living due to technological advances. If you looked at the standard of living of a middle class person in 1975 it would be worse than someone making $15/hour today on average.
More and more people are not interested in spending 50+ hours a week in bullshit jobs to just be able to buy a Mercedes and join a golf club. A lot of us are perfectly happy driving Toyotas.
You can FIRE with any salary range with thoughtful spending (save before you spend) and common-sense investing (buy-and-hold, cash generating assets). Though the recent stock market opens up many opportunities for FIRE, it is an age-old proven way to retire or do-your-own-thing rather living paycheck-to-paycheck
I do not see how this is possible for the bottom few income deciles considering healthcare costs. Definitely not possible for many more income deciles if you have children and still want to protect against healthcare costs.
Good point, let's all FIRE tomorrow and see what happens. That age-old "work to collectively add value to the economy" thing really gets old after awhile.
The funny thing is most working people will look at the spending levels required to achieve FIRE and decide they don't want to make the sacrifice. They are in a prison of their own making.
Of course it's easy to see how they arrived in this situation. There is a constant stream of propaganda telling us we need to spend in order to become successful. Without that SUV you aren't a good parent, without the big house you can't be a good partner, without the expensive holidays you must be a loser. Thank Bernays[1] for all of this.
Not many people can resist that and take a different path which is why we don't need to worry about "what if everybody does it".
Some will probably bail out of FI when the market slows/crashes in the short term, but some will definitely stick with it! People have been doing the same thing for 50 years, there’s just a community aspect with a name now.
Even if the growth doesn't last forever, many people are beyond reasonable thresholds. Having made their money, people are downsizing in innovative ways - leaving America for 6 months for a cheaper country, relocating to a lcol place or even casually experimenting with starting another business.
Short of a multi year recession, most FIREed folks will survive. You don't need to get another job when you can just downsize your expenses in bad years.
