Totally agreed. My husband doesn’t necessarily approve of every purchase I make, but we have a budget, which I am largely responsible for, and I don’t buy a bunch of stuff he thinks is crap. One of our recent purchases was a fairly pricey end table for my end of the couch. I’ve been looking for the right one for months, I finally found The One, and it instantly elevated our space, allowing us to get rid of the little wooden toddler desk I had been using in a makeshift way.
But while he didn’t begrudge me this purchase, we did have a conversation about how he is tired of stuff and just wants to get off the consumerism treadmill. And I get that, I’ve felt it myself at times, and I’ve tried to be mindful of that, and not just buying things for the sake of buying them.
I don’t know if you guys do this but my husband and I both have a certain amount of discretionary income set aside where we can spend it on anything we please. He spends it mostly on action figures, but still spends way less of it than I do, but the whole point is we don’t have to stress about blowing the budget on random shit because that’s what the discretionary money is for.
We have kind of weird system. We basically maintain our own finances and somehow we organically figured out who pays which bills (ie I pay the phone, she pays the cable/internet, so on and so forth). Money gets automatically funneled into retirement accounts. Credit cards get paid each month. No debt outside our mortgage. As long as each of us are spending less than we bring in, we can spend whatever we want on discretionary stuff (within reason). It comes out more or less even.
We actually have a pretty high net worth. Maybe if we had been super-disciplined and planned better we could be retired now. But truth is we actually wanted to enjoy life to the extent we could afford. We also grew up in a generation where squireling away every penny to live a FIRE lifestyle wasn’t a thing.
I never understood the FIRE lifestyle. It seems like 40 years of extreme austerity in exchange for maybe a few decades without having to work, but it’s still roughly the same amount of time working, plus people tend to hate it when they find themselves with nothing to do. I suspect retirement is going to be kinda hard for me when it happens eventually. I do better with structure, and, well, work.
That’s more or less what we do too, except it’s more along the lines of anything over $200 has to be jointly decided, but anything under is fine, as long as we’ve got the money in the budget.
That way, we’re not quibbling about ice cream or anything small like that, and nor is either of us buying large purchases that blindside the other person and derail any plans we might have.
If it’s roughly the same amount of time working, I don’t think it’s FIRE, it’s just being cheap. (Which is a perfectly valid lifestyle also, but getting to retire significantly earlier than you would otherwise is the whole point of FIRE.)
I don’t get it either- it seems like either you wlll have a lifetime of austerity ( first to save enough and then to make it last) or you aren’t really retired (writing books, managing real estate investments).
I think that depends on whether the “same amount of time working” means hours or years. My son’s job requires him to work 35 hours a week - if he works 70 hours a week ( which he has done for weeks at a time) , he’ll earn more than twice as much because of time and a half.
Yes, that’s what I meant by that. If you double your workload for forty years and then live an unspecified amount of time without a job, are you really working less?
I’ve seen some articles about FIRE regret, usually when they figure out they didn’t have as much money saved as they thought and aren’t really living the lavish lifestyle of their dreams.
FIRE is all about work a high paying job while living a poor life from 25 out of college to 35, so 10 years working, then live off the investments from 35 to 85, so 50 years retired.
As opposed to most people who work 40-50 years after they end school, then live 10-15 in retirement, all of it relatively decrepit.
Huge difference in how much of your life is labor vs how much is leisure.
I have heard a lot of people TALK about FIRE over the last 25 years, but have yet to see anyone hit the numbers you’re talking about.
My brother declared that he retired at 41 after a fairly lucrative ten years as a defense contractor “rainmaker” after eight years in weapons systems development.
But he has spent the last twelve years managing rentals and Airbnb units. He doesn’t have a 9-5, but he’s definitely not retired by most people’s definitions. He’s also taken on numerous consulting gigs, early on in his “retirement”
I know a surgeon who probably did have enough to put his feet up at age 40. But of course he wanted to spend $250k a year, so he’s in his early 50s and still operating every day. Ten years at $500k+ with a spouse pulling in another $250k for some part of that is not enough to pile up the $10M they would need to last them 40-50 years. He’s probably well past that amount now, but he’s 10 years past the time he said he was going to retire, when he was finishing his residency.
I’ve heard some people rebranding it as the “FINE” movement, with the NE standing for “Next Endeavor.” That is, you don’t fully retire in the sense of no longer working. You still do something, but with the goal that what you’re doing now is something more enjoyable. While you may earn some money at it, you’re not dependent on that money to live, as you would be with a traditional job.
It seems to me that one of the biggest hurdles for this kind of thing, at least if you live in the US, is health insurance. If you don’t work a traditional full-time job with traditional full-time job benefits, you’re going to be on your own when it comes to buying health insurance and dealing with medical expenses, which could potentially eat into your savings quite a bit.
That’s absolutely correct. I retired “early” ( 58, so not FIRE early) and the only reason I could was because my pension comes with the same health insurance I had when I was working.
Bringing it back to the OP subject some … I’d feel I failed in teaching my kids something of our core values if they were aiming for FIRE. Yes we need to work to make enough to cover our needs, but kids of mine, please don’t settle in on doing something as work that you can’t wait to stop doing as soon as possible, just because it pays enough to help make stopping work sooner possible. Do that “more enjoyable” thing that you personally value now and keep doing that enjoyable thing longer instead! Work has to be about money and benefits and saving so you have options… but it is a huge loss if it is not also at least as much about feeling satisfied in what you do. If they choose a path in which they are working every day with the main thought of looking forward to when they are done doing what they are doing? That is sad.
It’s not really about working less total hours. For FIRE to really work, I think you need a job where you make a lot of money at an early age. FAANG tech company. Investment banking. Private equity. Hedge funds. Big Law. Top tier management consulting. Big-4 accounting. You go “all in” on your job from a 22 year old college grad through the next 15 years, by which time you’ve probably made partner or managing director or equivalent. You save all your money and invest it wisely on income producing assets like rental properties or live off the dividends and interest. So now you are a multi-millionaire in your late 30s with self-sustaining income streams and can do whatever you want.
A couple of challenges:
All these jobs are highly competitive and require expensive schooling. So at the very least, student debt may be a factor.
They typically require you to live in expensive locations like New York or San Francisco.
Most people have trouble living like a monk. I would have a lot more money if I didn’t spend my 20s and 30s Living in Boston and New York. Going out every weekend. Bars. Night clubs. Strip clubs. Summer houses. Ski houses. Vacations to London, Paris, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Rio, Hamburg, Aruba, Amsterdam. Expensive dinners. The occasional Broadway show with my wife. But I wouldn’t trade those experiences just to have a bigger pile of money I’m not spending in my 40s and 50s and beyond. I’m also not living outside my means either.
Boredom or lack of purpose. Not going to work is fun for a month or two. Longer than that….
Honestly this very concisely captured it early in the thread.
If your goal is to stop working by your early 50s then you make trade offs in a variety of ways, as above, and possibly even with your investment volatility tolerance thus highly likely having lower long term returns. Maybe you don’t commit to saving for your kids college education either as retirement early is the prime focus. So on.
Personal priority was in order maxing out on the 401k, making the 529 contributions and paying for education out of cash flow as needed, living in nice house in the neighborhood of our choice. Other savings was not high priority. Other “stuff” wasn’t. We didn’t ever drive luxury cars and keep/kept our cars for a long time. Status stuff never appealed to either of us but my wife knows and prefers quality and does engage in some “retail therapy.” On my side I tend to only buy new things when my wife tells me I have to. Again family of origin stuff; her family was definitely wealthier than mine was. It evens out budget wise.
What we should have done better was have calm conversations about the trade off decisions in front of the kids. Been better role models. But there never were many crazy wants or divergent wants or values to have to negotiate over. The trade offs were therefore never really discussed explicitly other than implicitly understood.