On the FIRE subreddit, anyway, they're very clear that:
1. It's the FI part that really matters. RE is just one possible choice of what to do with it.
2. It's silly to make yourself miserable until you're FI.
3. FI is not magic. It will not meet your expectations unless you've carefully thought through what it is you want to do with that freedom.
Another way of looking at that situation is to ask why this cohort of some of the most driven, value-sensitive people in the labor force are so miserable with their leadership that they will voluntarily subject themselves to such a regime for the rest of their life, not for sipping mai tais on the beach but just to implement "...but without that leadership". It is nearly a truism people leave managers (doesn't even have to be direct managers) and not companies.
And if you do not accept that truism, the question still stands, just in a different area. Why are our workplaces so systemically dysfunctional that it gives rise to this behavior in a cohort that arguably should be highly coveted and aggressively retained by their employers?
There are a lot of posts in FI subreddits/forums where people have retired early and are totally lost, asking what they should do to find meaning or enjoyment out of life now that they're not working. They've spent so much of their time and energy of their prime years on working and saving that they haven't had anything left over to discover what sorts of things really bring them fulfillment, and it's incredibly disheartening to see.
The buried lede on those stories is they will not spend out of their FIRE budget on activities to bring that fulfillment, leaving them with somewhat limited choices depending upon their personalities and proclivities (see below), and many have not even planned for how much that will cost.
There are very few personality types that would be happy as a clam spending a hundred years puttering around the stacks of libraries researching a particular scholarly pursuit, then spend another hundred on another specific area, for example. The list of what we do not know is practically infinite, and were I immortal, I could burn a few thousand years researching subjects I find fascinating. Cheap for someone on even lean-FIRE.
There are still quite a few areas of the world that are very sparsely-mapped and their microbiomes sparsely-cataloged to help preserve their bio-diversity. I could spend quite a few centuries just doing that, while hiking and camping. Relatively cheap as pursuits go.
Refurbishing and repairing old artifacts would require some spending on tooling and supplies, but still cheaper than say, learning to fly. I could spend a few thousand years just learning different trades to master craftsman skill levels.
I find the RE experiences others relate that they feel aimless baffling, but only due to my personality. So it is not surprising to me that different personalities cannot conceive satisfaction within the same pursuits. Pursuits that could cost far more than they realized they needed to budget for. FIRE is more about knowing your self than hitting an appropriate total that survives a 2% SWR.
I used to think this way, now I severely disagree, I think nowwhat you want in life cant be anticipated with thought, it can only be hewn out of a rough stone through trial, error, success, and reflection. Atleast thats been my arc over the last 16 years working towards happiness and freedom.
For example, have you ever had a long term regret that you finally faced only to come away thinking, "Now that Im in this position, I should have never regretted not being here." The regret disappears and you feel much more confident in your ability to steer yourself.
You only gain true perspective through actions, not thought, how could you, your thoughts are siloed from reality.
As an analogy, I'm a big believer in caloric intake determining weight for most people. Consume more calories than you use and you will tend to gain weight. Consume less and you will tend to lose weight. So to get a caloric deficit you can exercise more or eat less. But... it's 90-95% diet.
Bringing this back to FIRE, the key lesson I think is that what matters in having financial freedom is controlling costs not maximizing income. Expenses can (and often do) _easily_ rise to your level of income. People fall in these traps of thinking they need a $5m house instead of a $2m house, or a bigger boat or a third vacation home.
But if you control your expenses AND can be happy then you doubly benefit: you increase your savings (and thus the time required until you have financial independence) AND you decrease how much money you need in retirement because you're accustomed to lower costs.
So the point of FIRE is (IMHO) not to seek satisfaction through material things but rather through your approach to life and your experiences.
I've seen this with coworkers who convince themselves they need $50,000pa/child for private school, $500k+ plus to pay for each child's Ivy League education and so forth and kill themselves to achieve that. Worse, they can become bitter and unhappy as they realize how long that will take them to achieve even as the top 1% of earners.
So not only are they working super-hard for longer they're seeing their families less and bringing home this negativity and entitlement. All of that is a prison of your own making.
FIRE philosophically is about really examining what you need and what's really important.
In software right now, I think it’s not difficult to have a sustainable low-six-figure job where you take vacations and have activities and off time to enjoy them.
These jobs have things like accrued PTO, limited perks, and relatively inflexible time-off tolerance that is highly dependent on the manager's whim.
"Not difficult" is relative, really.
40hr/week is the unsustainable part.
I think 20h/week is a more reasonable target if you want to enjoy things beside work.
Of course it's okay to work 40h/week if you really want to, or even more, if you enjoy it, but you should really think hard about whether that's really what you want, or if it's just what your employer wants you to do.
That's what I have an issue with.
When I'm working on a problem, I cannot simply forget about it at 3pm and head to the beach to enjoy life. The problem will be in my head 24/7 until one of us gives up.
But now I'm the age that he was back then, and I find I can compartmentalize or turn off work thinking easily. I'm not suggesting it's a factor of age, exactly, but perhaps some other change that occurs over time? Not really sure, but something in my head definitely changed.
This is also something you can learn through techniques that fall under what HR might call mindfulness. After a while, you have a mental git stash that you can just pop. It's not entirely lossless, but the benefits to life are immense.
It's significantly more than 50% of the time that's available to me, by the time you factor in the things that i do because of work it's getting to around 70%.
Not that many people have done it their entire lives in the way we do today. Now we have the majority of millennials with 2 people trying to do a 40 hour week along with all of the other things that need to be done. I would argue a 40 hour work week + extras is great if i'm not cooking, cleaning, doing much childcare etc.
If we look back at pre-industrial humans we'll see that the striking thing is quite how much time they spend not doing anything productive.
Terrible at math (heh) but its something like multiply 24% by 2/3. Aka 24/3=8
Any suggestions?
Might only take a few years to save the required amount.
20k? did you miss a digit? That's less than my rent for the year...
for 3 days anything that pays more than $18 an hour and allows for flexible scheduling
you don't need a degree for this.
Medical transcription, coding and billing, working as a PA, Truck driving, nursing the list goes on.
This is not at all "average" in countries outside of the US. Here in India, for example, a $100K job is kinda like winning the lottery.
For reference, going by the exchange rate it equals somewhat close to 7.5M in local currency. Handymen and people in other labour-heavy jobs don't earn this much in their entire life, considering a 30 years of active work life. Only the top 0.01% (yes, we are an extremely populous country) people have that kind of jobs.
Going by the PPP ratio[0] of 21.99, you still need to be earning upwards of 2.2M annual, which is hardly 1% of the population, and majority of them have taken upwards of 8-10 years of work to reach there (which means 1/3rd of work life is gone).
The argument could also be made that buying stuff is cheaper in countries like ours, but that doesn't stand for _good_ quality items. As an example, the laptop you can buy for $1k in the US is far superior to what you can buy for 22k and slightly comparable but still better than what you can buy for 75k. If you are lucky enough with means to import, good luck with ~78% import taxes and duties. You don't make these purchases often, but when you do it breaks you. Things like dishwasher, vacuum cleaners, etc are so much more common in the US and almost considered a basic necessity whereas owing to cheap labour (and traditional lifestyle) we subscribe to househelp, which isn't really "cheap" or scalable and the cost of these items is high too.
All of this, to say that
> they might be better off scaling back to a sustainable 40hr/week job
is neither practical nor helps in a poor country where an "average" person is working more than half their lives just to make ends meet.
[0]: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...
But seriously it can also get tiresome when people constantly have to call out others for failing to formulate every observation in globally inclusive terms that cover all humans rich and poor.
- Salaries are decided monthly and unless you are an hourly billed consultant, you cannot negotiate your working hours to be lesser. - Part-time jobs do exist, but only low paying labour intensive jobs which won't leave enough energy for you to be working 2 jobs. - Shifts are again meant only for such jobs as described above. - Employment agreements explicitly prohibit you from "working" to earn in any other way. Getting a passive income is okay, but you cannot work / render services elsewhere to earn.
From junior to senior level employees, almost everyone in all sorts of jobs is overworked. Average workday last close to 10 hours, excl commute et al. Pandemic and WFH have worsened this if anything.
Be mindful. Informed. Increase your knowledge, consider alternatives, and make decisions given an expanded list of options. (Don't just go with the default, common, mainstream way of thinking that leads to people retiring at age 65 after decades of hating their job.)
I'm a proponent of many of the concepts of FIRE, but in some ways, the attitude started way before I started reading Get Rich Slowly, and Mr. Money Mustache. I'm all about putting effort into things I really care about, while being efficient and judicious with effort being put into things I don't care about. Work is usually not at the top of my list on things I care about. So I have changed jobs frequently to find ones that pay better than the last, and are also a better fit for me. Shorter commute. Better team. More engaging work.
Along the way, spending below my means and ensuring money I do spend actually provides the result I expect (i.e. lasting happiness that a lot of spending doesn't really provide) has been instrumental in making thoughtful decisions while also accumulating that cushion that can eventually wean me off paid work as a necessity.
In other words, I don't choose jobs that suck because they pay well, so I can get to a "finish line" faster. I put all the variables into play, and make sure I'm enjoying life now while also expanding the flexibility I'll have in the future.
While we agree on a lot of things, maybe we read different "FIRE discussions" because many of them factor these things in. Compulsory work limits your options, and even more so, spending all your money or beyond your means limits your options indefinitely. That doesn't mean retirement creates happiness, or is a prerequisite for a good life, but getting beyond that work requirement can certainly give you a lot more freedom in how you choose to use your time.
Great insight that is worth repeating.
One of my biggest problems with FIRE discussions is how much they reinforce the idea that retirement is a prerequisite for achieving happiness. This leads a lot of FIRE-minded people to double down on jobs they hate that consume too much of their time and energy, only because they think it will better enable them to be happy later.
For the lucky few who can be early employees at unicorn startups, that might be true. For the average FIRE person working a $100-200K/year job, they might be better off scaling back to a sustainable 40hr/week job and making a point of taking vacations and doing activities in their off time. Even if that means taking a paycut and delaying their target retirement date.
You don't have to wait until FIRE to start taking vacations, doing hobbies, or working on projects. If a job is consuming so much of your life that you feel you don't have time to do anything else, it's time to reevaluate the job.