What’s not to love about FIRE? “Financial Independence (to) Retire Early.”
Sometime in the past five or ten years, an online community sprang up to discuss frugal living with the goal of early retirement. In reality, this isn’t a new concept. The retirement “model” of the West has been to save for decades with the goal of living your “golden years” with a mix of government-provided healthcare, a company-provided pension or your own 401(k), and some leftover personal savings to get you through your final years on this earth. Whatever’s left gets left to your spouse or your kids.
Do you have to follow this model?
Does this work for you? What if you don’t live 80+ years? Did you spend your life’s energy at work only to die before 65? Will you be able to enjoy your hobbies when you are 70+?
FIRE seeks a new model, where you work hard in a career for a fixed amount of time until you have accumulated enough savings investments or passive income to generate monthly income to provide for the rest of your years. In many cases, you scale down your lifestyle and spending both in the working and early retirement years. We want you to think of doing this anyway! Keep your fixed costs like housing as low as possible. It hasn’t been around long enough to see how the FIRE folks do after 40+ years of non-working. The risks are obvious: spending your savings too fast, outliving your savings, not having affordable health insurance during early retirement, and foregoing prime earnings years. (After many years away from your industry, re-entering as a senior-level professional may be too difficult).
As we get further into this blog, there is much to discuss about FIRE strategies—how to get to financial independence (something we think everyone should strive for), when to retire, how to retire, how to model retirement strategies, inflation, etc. For now, we want to say that FIRE is intriguing to us, but this is not solely a FIRE blog nor will it ever be one. If you want to set goals for early retirement, we encourage that, as it means you will be setting specific yearly goals to reach those targets.
Are you striving for FIRE? Do you not like how it prioritizes an earlier life of “leisure”? Maybe you reached FI already but forgot to RE?
