Why I love FIRE. (yet still do not consider myself a FIRE blogger)
FIRE, or Financial Independence Retire Early, has been kicking around the internet for a decade or so in its current form. Before that, I think it was called living below your means and investing. Potato, po-tah-to.
The essence of the FIRE movement is the idea that a person could theoretically live off of 50% or less of their income while investing their savings, thus reducing the time they would be obligated to work for a living. There is some very simple yet brilliant math that supports this idea. Since I am more of a “living a life of meaning” type of blogger, I will link you to brilliant FIRE people for details at the end of this post.
One of the things that struck me when I first discovered FIRE was the idea that I didn’t have to replace my annual salary in retirement. I only had to replace my annual expenditures. For example, if you have 300 times your monthly expenses, (or 25 times your annual expenses) invested in the stock market and averaging around 7%, you can live off of around 3-4% of that sum. Someone with a monthly expenditure of $5000 would need $1.5 million, vs someone with a monthly expenditure of $10,000 who would need $3 million.
That meant a relatively higher earner could voluntarily choose to live on a lot less, invest the difference, and be work optional in a short period of time.
I don’t consider myself to be the most financially savvy person out there. Far from it. I’ve made lots of mistakes and have had to repeatedly hone my strategy to overcome the worst of them. I had massive ($200k +) student loan debt, I got married and then divorced early in life, I paid a financial advisor, I bought their insurance, I didn’t max out retirement plans when I could have. All of the mistakes.
When I realized, early into my career, that I simply couldn’t do it until I was 65, I knew I had to figure something out. When I found FIRE, the idea of being able to opt-out of work if I chose was a revelation. Before that, I figured I’d have student loans, a mortgage, and car loans forever and that was just how life worked. With FIRE, I knew I had far more agency over my destiny. Which was freeing indeed.
Fast forward to today, I am now work-optional.
But wait, I am now working on this, so am I really retired?
You got me. I guess I’m not.
But now I have work that is meaningful to me. Using the concepts of FIRE allowed me the breathing room to step away from something that didn’t fit. I finally had time to ask myself what I really wanted out of life. I had the option to choose from all that life had to offer instead of staying in a job that was burning me out and leaving me feeling anxious and depressed.
What gets me excited are the IDEAS that drive FIRE, or any other big goals that a person might have. I’ve named this blog “Live Free and Happy” because underneath just about anything we as humans undertake, we are looking for these things. We make decisions, large and small, that we think might bring us greater freedom and happiness.
When I embarked on my journey to financial independence, my main goal was to be free from having to work at my job anymore. I thought that would bring me happiness. But when I got to my goal, freedom and happiness still seemed just out of reach.
In this blog, I want to deeply explore this phenomenon.
I want to talk about freedom and happiness as ideas that are totally separate from our goals and achievements. Our western culture has been conflating money and possessions and status with freedom and happiness for years. In the United States, one of the richest, most educated, capitalistic societies of all time (ever in the history of humanity), we are the most anxious, depressed and sick.
Isn’t it obvious that something isn’t adding up?
I realized I needed to make my own personal leap; a paradigm shift. I had to look at how I was thinking and break down my assumptions. In doing this, I realized that a lot of what I thought about freedom and happiness were ideas from my family or my culture…and not all of them fit me as a person.
The western cultural narrative around having stuff wasn’t necessarily what I believed. When I looked at what I truly wanted, it was less about stuff and more about freedom and happiness. I realized I could take action from a different place. I could choose my own financial (and other) priorities. I didn’t have to follow family or cultural narratives around freedom and happiness, I could curate my own.
For a deeper dive into the concepts of FIRE, I highly recommend:
JL Collins and his book, The Simple Path to Wealth
And, if you want to go crazy, you can start with the website that was my very first introduction to FIRE,