As 20+ year IT worker there are days I get jealous of the guys doing the trash pickup and other such jobs thinking man even if it is in sucky weather they get outside time. Probably gonna get stronger now that I am working in a command center with no windows.
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The one job I miss more than any other is working at Carlisle United matches. Yes, It was minimum wage, working five hours on a freezing Tuesday night in December can be pretty miserable and you have to work on Boxing Day/New Years Day/Good Friday/Easter Monday, but I miss all the regulars in the section of the crowd I had to look after.
If I woke up tomorrow and I somehow wasn’t disabled then I would be on the phone asking the local football clubs here if they needed anyone.
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I feel your pain . Retired less than a year after 30+ years in software dev. I’m still discovering all the costs of cubicle domestication on my mind, body and soul.
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20+ years as an engineer and the cube farm takes its toll. I’m retiring soon and it wouldn’t be realistic without my spouse’s military pension and insurance. The insurance is the most important part for us.
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Really, because I see 41 likes on a comment that he was interested in FIRE until he found out it was only worth subscribing to if you’re rich to begin with. If that’s not snark, that’s just dumb since it misses the whole point of FIRE. Followups then claim that only people with connections can live cheaply (having visited and hung out with bohemians and starving artists in cities all over the place, that’s laughable to me - for every trust funder, there are dozens if not hundreds of others that are scraping by scrimping and being creative/living alternatively). Further complaints include mentioning how it’d be impossible to retire early saving 2-10%. Yes, yes it would - again, the whole point of FIRE involves saving larger and larger amounts of income and cutting more expenses. It’s a lifestyle choice, but to say that it’s impossible is the same as complaining how it’s impossible to lose weight on the Standard American Diet (yes, it is) and then pointing at people who are doing keto or whole30 or other ways of eating, well that’s only for the metabolically privileged, or isn’t worth doing at all for X reason.
(TBF, I’m not the world’s biggest MMM-fan, and I don’t think the report actually does any favors to FIRE’s perception, interviewing basically a bunch of privileged white families that had upper-middle class incomes, but the FIRE principles espoused have broad applicability for anyone in the rate race, and are actually much more useful for lower-income earners, IMO.)
Personally, I see a lot of denial in this thread but ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I’ve also been on bb since Mark turned it into a weblog, so no need to in/out-group anyone btw, although I will admit to rarely stepping into the comments anymore (due to that sort of mentality among other things).
I don’t think we necessarily disagree on any of the substance of the economic realities in the US or how poorly served the majority is (I view the US as a particularly broken society and economy), but there are a couple points of exception - the fact is that those that aren’t in the moneyed class don’t have any education in how money works, the differences between assets and liability, or even the basics of investing - only half of Americans own any stock, and the top decile owns over 80% of it. Anyone who gets wrapped up in FIRE is going to be exposed to better ways of thinking about money.
I agree that anyone that doesn’t make a living wage isn’t going to be in a position to make any financial decisions (the EPI estimates that this has improved since the 1995 peak, but is still around 10% of workers making less than a living, see also) and specifically mentioned that, but the other 90% has some level of disposable income with which to make decisions.
I also find your style of rhetoric very distasteful. “In that society, no, not everyone can achieve FIRE.” Did anyone ever claim this (in the report or in the comments) or is this a wholly fabricated strawman you just put up to knock down?
Also, I agree that criticizing people for buying modern necessities is mean-spirited, but that appears to again, be something that you alone are projecting - I did a search through the thread and no one has mentioned anything about that.
(Valid and at the crux though is the question of whether people would be better off spending money on the latest incremental flagship phone upgrade, or carrying on with a functionally equivalent existing phone or a lower end model. Evaluation of these sort of personal decisions is where having FIRE being a strong counterpoint in the personal finance memetic landscape serves as at least some sort of anchoring/window shifting vs the much more crowded field of conspicuous consumption).
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I’ll let you in on a secret that they didn’t really call attention to in the video. Almost all of these people are software developers or in an engineering background. Mr money and his wife were both engineers making around 100k each. Its quite easy to save over 50% of your paycheck if you live like any other middle class person and don’t over spend. You also need to take into consideration that all of these people were able to more easily attain their retirement goals due to the downturn in the economy in 2007. Just imagine saving 50-75% of your paycheck when the stock market is rebounding 20-30% a year. The next generation of FIRE people will not have it this easy.
It’s a combination of high stock returns over the last 10 years, being frugal, and having dual incomes in a high paying career. Being a software developer myself I can tell you how huge of an advantage it is. Imagine when the market was tanking and everyone was losing their jobs and homes, if you were a software dev you were still in extremely high demand. You could now buy homes almost half off or get another to rent out. This is what the rich do. Let everyone burn, and take their stuff for pennies on the dollar when the bank takes it all back. This is why its expensive to be poor; everything costs you more. Interest rates, loans, even cashing a check. You are vulnerable when you’re poor, and everyone will take advantage when you have nowhere else to go.
The good news is anyone can still eventually become rich, but it will take a lot longer with more sacrifice if you have a more average income or are starting later in life. It is up to you to make this happen and every decision in your life will either pull you closer or pull you away from this goal. FIRE may not be realistic for most people, but the lifestyle and goals used to attain wealth are proven and solid. You just need to find ways to adopt a similar mindset and see what works for you. Just don’t be fooled into thinking it’s going to be easy like in the video unless you have a similar income and expect the market to keep going up at the pace its been.
Don’t have kids until your 30’s or have no kids, go into a STEM field or run a business, invest as soon as you get out of college, educate yourself with books that teach you how to invest, create multiple streams of income(stocks, real estate, side hustle), live on half your income and invest the rest, find someone to marry who shares the same goals and income level, ride the biggest stock market recovery in history, retire early. This is every couple in the video. Hopefully this gives a little context and perspective.
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And @thekevincurry was correct. As I clarified in response to his post, being rich to begin with isn’t only defined in terms of starting financial capital but also in terms of social capital.
Social capital isn’t only about connections (as you imply) and professional networking and mentoring, but also about various support systems (family, real community like those bohemians) and societal privileges (e.g. being white or a “model minority”, having your mental and physical health, being a cisgender male, being born into an affluent and stable family, etc.) and inside knowledge (e.g. being a techie who knows what the most cost-effective gadgets and services are). Late-stage capitalist society starves 80% of people of both financial and social capital to one degree or another.
The whole point of FIRE, as the acronym implies, is to achieve financial independence and retire early. What you’re describing is a means that (some) people can use to get there (to be clear, being out of debt and living within one’s budget and educating oneself is not the standard definition of financial independence).
People here are not missing the point about that. Far from it, they understand how compound interest works and know what it takes and how long it takes to reach FIRE money. As noted by myself and others, fewer and fewer people can afford to do that in the U.S., pushed to the wall as they already are. Cutting fat is fine, but cutting muscle and bone doesn’t help in the long run. If you don’t think that’s an issue for most people, let’s do some rough and round-number calculations of the sort FIRE gurus like to use to sell their schemes:
Assume that a household that achieves FIRE at age 40 in 2018 operates on approx. $40k/year. Based on the 4% rule, that means the household has saved up roughly $1-million in investable assets. Assuming the two spouses both got college degrees and jobs right out of college, they would have had to amass that $1-million between age 22 and 40, or 18 years. Assuming an average and conservative 5% annual ROI on the money they put aside, the household would have to save approx. $34,000 each working year to hit the FIRE goal, or $17,000/year/spouse. Generously assuming they’re each socking away an average of 30% of their gross earnings each year, they’re each making $57,000 per year.
This adds up to a total average household income of $114k/year over that timespan (compare to the median household income of $62k, or the annual $30k full-time income of a single person making $15/hr). A household making that much money in the U.S., especially one effectively free of all debt, implies a lot of things about the spouses’ existing financial and social capital. They may not have a college education, but if they’re both skilled tradespeople who started working at age 18 they’ll still need to be good businesspeople to each hit an avg. $57k/annum over 22 years of steady work.
[ETA: FIRE by 50 is closer to, though still above, the current median household income; FIRE by 60 is more FIR than FIRE]
That’s leaving out the effects of things like a serious or chronic medical condition or caregiving costs for children or elderly parents or living situations that make being thrifty difficult for a poor person (e.g. food deserts, bad public transit, no public libraries with free Internet, the municipal citation f*ckbarrel, etc.). It also leaves out the increasing difficulty of finding a job that pays that well outside of a (usually expensive) city.
So while the budgeting and frugality tips and an education on the magic of compound interest are useful for anyone who want to pull themselves out of debt or build a small emergency fund and maybe begin thinking about putting money toward an age 65 retirement, they can’t make over half the population financially independent by age 40 or 50.
That’s a good example of what I’m talking about, because the Standard American Diet (or a more unhealthy variant) is the only choice that’s given to poor people by corporate America between work time constraints that don’t allow for cooking or and decisions not to place proper markets in neighbourhoods.
I didn’t say it was impossible, nor did anyone else. We said it’s impossible for many, if not most people. I said if you have a choice it’s a great and much healthier lifestyle option, but that fewer and fewer Americans are afforded that choice.
[I’m not sure why you’re assuming this would happen in this topic, especially given my response to you and that you’re not driving trollies. But sorry to hear you’re _disappointed_ in the comments section. Moving along…]
We also agree that better financial education is needed, as I noted. But entire multi-billion-dollar industries are built on the foundation of that not happening for at least 50% of the population (including the 40% who can’t save up $400 in liquid savings for an emergency), so oddly there’s no sense of urgency from state education depts.
Also, it’s not a co-incidence that the top decile holds 80% of the equities market at any one time; hoarding is a big factor in generating inequality and concentrating wealth.
There’s a difference between being poor (that 10%) and being broke (another 30-40%), but being broke doesn’t allow for a lot of leeway to invest, either. So here’s a wild suggestion: before we start looking at ways to get a select group of fortunate people to retire early or have financial independence, let’s focus on giving all Americans single-payer universal healthcare and a living wage (or perhaps a proper UBI). In the case of a UBI, everyone is effectively financially independent because no-one needs to worry about working a job they hate in order to have food and shelter and health insurance: it’s livin’-frugal FIRE for everyone, starting at age 18.
Make it a little more generous and more people might invest in the market. I would love to see the MMMs of the world spending more time pushing for that if they truly want all Americans to have the modest and pleasant and healthy lifestyles that they enjoy (although some of these gurus would have to sacrifice the smug sense of superiority they display).
I don’t care what your opinion of my style is. I’ve read enough FIRE forums and their financial self-help predecessors over the years to repeatedly see the attitude of “anyone can do it, so what are you waiting for?” present explicitly or subtly (and understandably so, since they’re selling books and seminars and such). If you want to claim this is false then you might want to reconsider who’s in denial here.
So I stand by my statement: no, not anyone can achieve FIRE by age 40 or 50, not by a longshot. The basic advice is solid (if recycled and repackaged), but for more than half of Americans the best it can do is get them out of debt and living within their means – no small thing in this consumerist society.
No, I’ve seen that attitude, too, especially amongst the conservative advocates of bootstrapping financial responsibility but also from mainstream celebrity finance gurus. You just indulged in it yourself, even though most poor people aren’t choosing to upgrade their phones unless their carrier pushes the “opportunity” to do so (at no flat upgrade cost for the new device, because the carrier is making its money with “slightly” increased service fees that it would charge anyhow). That isn’t conspicuous consumption so much as someone being gulled.
Even if they’re educated to avoid that kind of counter-productive spending decision it can only get them so far. Skipping a daily cup of pre-work coffee from Starbucks will save a lot of money (approx. $1300) over the course of a year, as will staying with an old phone and getting a cheaper cell phone plan (say $240/year saved). For most Americans, even those starting at age 22, it’s still “putting a dent in my consumer and student debt” money, not “invest it and FIRE at 40 (or 50)” money.
tldr; the goal of FIRE before age 60 (heck, afterwards, increasingly) is unrealistic for the majority of people under our current economy, but the goal of getting out of debt and living within their means is well within reach for them. That, and fixing the economy, is where the focus should be.
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In the end, the F.I.R.E. program is about living like a poor person. D.I.Y. isn’t an option for the poor. It’s the only choice. Prepping your own meals isn’t a luxury, it’s a daily task. Plumbing or electrical problems? You take care of those yourself because you can’t afford to pay anyone to do it for you. Clip coupons, take a second job, work 60-80 hours a week, do everything you can to stay afloat and it won’t make a difference. You’ll be poor, stay poor, and die poor because none of this is a lifestyle choice. It’s a lifestyle of necessity, constant desperation, and fear. But hey, lets’ write about Yuppies who slum it as a lifestyle choice and prop them up as clever go-getters in an age of austerity.
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just wait til they hit, like, 45, and discover cocaine. ALL OVER.
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It took me years of a stable career to really pay off the debts from my 20’s. And it wasn’t “ohh, I’m gonna charge all my drinks at the club and worry about the credit card later”, nor was it “I can’t afford this trip to but I’ll just charge it”. It was not having a college degree and starting over in a new (albeit cheaper) city. Not “should I charge this restaurant dinner” but “hey ramen noodles in giant boxes, I can eat all week!”. Especially being self employed when I first started out. No money from parents what so ever. I’m just glad I never went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for an education and am autodidactic.
As for people saying “I retired in my thirties and it’s not the dream I expected”, maybe try volunteering. Seriously. If you find a part time job bagging groceries fulfilling, let me tell you how amazing it will be when you actually do something that makes an even bigger impact on someone else’s life and you leave that part time job for someone who actually needs the money or the hours. Volunteer at a hospital, or your nearest volunteer Fire/EMS agency. Or one of the many organizations taking at-risk kids out hiking.
I think that kind of highlights the contradiction: If you are disciplined enough to do what it takes to retire in your thirties, you might not have the personality that can enjoy retirement when you get there. At leas in OUR modern society.
Maybe it’s different now with the ACA but until we get true single-payer healthcare that is not based on capitalism, the idea of entrepreneurial success is one based on privilege. Are there a few straight-from-the-mean-streets success stories? Of course, there always are. But that’s like saying “I’m going to grow up and be a sports star millionaire”. Healthcare is not normally something you think about in your 20’s, but it’s one big reason you can’t retire early in this country. And the longer you work, the more important (and expensive) it becomes.
The problem in our economy (even more so now then 30 years ago) every little mistake you make in your late teens/early twenties magnifies the farther down the timeline you go. It’s tough at that age to realize that most SMART things you do at that age will also be magnified as time goes on. I worked with a guy who went into the fire department at age 21 and never went into debt except for a house, which he paid off in 15 years. Now in his 40’s owns two houses that are worth way more than he paid, has no debts, has a ton in retirement funds, etc. Being smart and responsible and stable pays dividends. That’s nothing new. Whats new is the level of psychological warfare going into separating young people from their money. Add to that the rent-seeking economy and you can look forward to a lifetime of subscription fees and never owning anything.
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