If “we could all” is constrained to households earning 6-figures, I tend to agree. I doubt a household making $30K/yr could realistically live on $10K/yr.

(Further, if everyone FIRE’d, growth would slow to the point where you’d need to save more to generate the same income from investments. We’re so far from that being any kind of practical worry, that it can be safely ignored I think, but would be a concern if it became more than vanishingly uncommon almost-fringe behavior.)

Isn't the FIRE person just delaying it's consumption? At some point the saved up money will be spent, therefore I wouldn't expect it to have a huge negative impact on economic growth

I think generally no: FIRE adherents are planning to retire early (the “RE” in FIRE) and expect to spend less over their lifetime than a standard American working that same level of job/income for 40 years instead of 10 or 15.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

FIRE, or any retirement strategy tend to rely on smart investment to generate income, and investment only makes the difference between how much worker is getting paid and how much they generate.

If we all become full time investors, who do we invest in?

There'll always be generational differences. FIRE is no different from normal retirement, only it's taken to greater lengths.

Normally people in generation X spend the first 40 adult years producing goods & services, partly consumed by themselves, partly exchanged for credits with old retired people of generation X-1.

After generation X is done with this working period, they retire, now holding credits. They exchange their credits for goods & services produced by generation X+1.

And so on and so forth.

FIRE simply shifts the lengths of the working periods and generations. Instead of working from 20 til 70, it may be from 20 til 60, or 50, depending on how successful you are in accumulating credits.

The credit system ensures that this doesn't really turn into a big issue. After all, if people are hugely successful accumulating credits and stop producing, and the population of producing people becomes small enough, then the exchange rate of goods&services to credits will worsen. The demand of goods & services will be lower than the supply, such that goods & services cost more credits. This is a natural incentive for people to start producing again, as the value of their accumulated credits goes down, but the value of them spending their time earning credits goes up.

Of course credits is money and the worsening exchange rate is inflation.

In short, we could all FIRE (i.e., every generation can retire at some point). But we cannot all FIRE at extremely early ages. The FIRE movement is essentially exposing the 'true' retirement age possible if we were more deliberate and intentional about our production & consumption. In a world where we all consume as much as we can, it makes sense we may need to work many years till an old age. A world in which we consume much less means we can produce much less, and thereby work less and retire sooner (or retire partially, i.e. parttime work).

It's not delaying but also reducing it significantly - the FIRE person lives on 1/3 a typical income and saves the other two over the course of a compressed career. Typically they retire once they've saved 25X their yearly expenses and then draw down at a rate of 4% a year, putting any excess capital gains towards their portfolios to offset inflation.

So consumption is reduced by 60% over the course of a lifetime, which by most metrics would shrink the economy by a similar amount - of course, most FIRE people also keep being productive after retiring, so it's probably not so straightforward to account for everything.

Depends if it's "lean" or "fat" FIRE.

Objectively, a lot of the consumption of modern Western life is unnecessary. We don't have to drive out to dinner, there's edible food at home. We could skip those bucket-list vacation trips, purchasing new items instead of making-do with old, we could live in more modest housing for our income levels.

It's kind of trippy to imagine what the large-scale effects would be. If everyone cut their consumption by 1/3, our economy would contract a lot, but long-term it'd be healthier, right? Less waste, more efficiency, less environmental degradation overall, though I'll admit we need new technology to replace old dirty technology in energy. Overall, it's a very interesting subset of Westerners, the FIRE group.

Probably an argument that a forty hour workweek makes that kind of unnecessary consumption possible. People with time and groceries would probably make dinner rather than go out

How is that consumption "unnecessary"? I bet 99% of the people here would not save money or time by working less hours and using that time to cook more often. Time spent cooking, cleaning pans, shopping and sorting/storing groceries etc can easily be >$100/day

As long as you’re not making elaborate new recipes all the time, but variations on the same several, shopping and cooking don’t take nearly that long. I cook three or four big meals a week, generating a lot of leftovers.

Since I’m in the habit of cooking and keep a well-stocked pantry, the time from “what’s for dinner?” to “time to eat!” is faster when I cook than if I order delivery.

Then again, I’ve cultivated a love of cooking and a like for grocery shopping, so neither feels like a chore. My husband appears to have cultivated a non-aversion to kitchen cleaning and a keen appreciation for lower-sodium meals, so win-win.

I'm not sure about that, even when my wife and I were both working full time we still cooked all our own meals. It's not that much of a burden.

In-person shopping for food (including travel to/from the place of purchase), food prep, cooking, and the associated cleanup is an enormous time sink. Perhaps you have free time or are already used to spending a lot of it on these tasks, but let's not pretend that it's "not that much". It's huge.

Shopping for the four of us in this house takes about three man hours a week. Cooking about 15. That is much less than an hour a day per person. If we felt like it we could optimise the shopping even further by only shopping when we were already passing the supermarket on the way to or from work.

If we felt like it we could do the shopping online and cut it down to a few minutes a week.

Cooking Sunday dinner for four today took me less than two hours. Would have been faster if I had not prepared everything from scratch.

18 hours per week, and a lot of that is spent whether you are cooking for 1 or for 4, so those that live alone are talking about 15-16 hours per week. A whole waking day.

I think my mother realized this implicitly when I was a kid. She wasn't so motivated to cook when it was just for herself, but was when it was for the entire family.

I guess in the end, it needs to become a team effort for a team result to become efficient.

I'm interested in the recommendations here to help solve that problem, there are some new ones I haven't heard before: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ost9hc/folks_in_vh...

We share the work between the four of us so it is much less than an hour a day per person. I bake a large loaf every other day, it takes an elapsed time of 24 hours but only 15 minutes of that is actual work.

It depends a lot on how varied a menu you want/require (or your spouse does....)

Cooking with variety (or "buy whatever's on sale") is really hard if you also want to do it cheaply (minimize waste & spoilage, especially). Cooking the same few meals, maybe with some seasonal rotation, is easy because you can get the measurements of what you need each week ver exact to keep spoilage very low, and arrange them so waste from one meal always goes into another later in the week.

Like anything, it’s a skill that you develop over time. Certainly at the start, you might find that cooking respectable meals takes more out of you than just ordering them. But at some point, with enough practice, this flips for most people.

Of course, there might also be some survivorship bias here. And food delivery changes things (but, so too does grocery delivery).

I'm a good cook and have been cooking my whole life. Cleaning easily takes as much time as the cooking, sometimes more.

Well if it is just an equation of time for you, is there any sort of multitasking you can do to get more out of it? I find that I’m able to pay full attention to audio-based media when cooking meals I’ve made before, and especially when cleaning up. So if any of your day is otherwise spent with audiobooks, news, etc, maybe you could do your cooking with the time you usually spend listening to those, and sort of get it for free?

Ironically I think things like a regular cooking + cleaning regime and staying very close to home are most palatable when they’re essentially forced by a 9-5 job. With time on my hands I’d have much more pressing desire to explore, sample, and generally spend on what the world has to offer.

FIRE = Financial Independence, Retire Early for those who don't know.

I like the concept. There are even young people experimenting with retirement but for typically one year, also known as a 'gap year' where they don't work/study - they just explore.

In Europe, a gap year has been a thing for couple decades now, if not more.

Depends where in Europe. Definitely not common in France. I know it’s common in the UK, not sure about other countries

It's been a thing since at least the 1660s, when people called it a "Grand Tour".

Before Covid made it impossible, I wanted to do this for at least 6 months. I still hope I get the chance to travel for an extended period of time .

This gap year has been pretty common in Europe/Aus/NZ for a while. Lots of young people do it. We even have visas for it called "working holidays" so they can work a part-time bar job etc, so you dont need to save up much to do it.

I missed my chance on this. I hope I'll get another after my kids grow up a bit. I believe this is called "sabbatical" (except in this case it'll be self-funded).

Can confirm. Am young person considering this. Though I'll be taking it to study, mostly :)

A big part of FIRE is putting your income i to index funds that get profit from mindless consumption, unlimited growth and capital extraction. I think if everyone would do that there wouldn't be any return on the investments.

Most people in the FIRE community are still under 50. I'm watching to see how this plays out.

It’s kind of an interesting thought experiment. Think for a second how much many of our incomes depend on ad revenue. Certainly if a large contingent of consumers massively cut their spending we have to work harder and longer for the same pay. And so on across all jobs producing discretionary goods and services.

>Think for a second how much many of our incomes depend on ad revenue.

I don't think advertising makes that much difference. Most people spend all their earnings. The only thing advertising does is direct where it is spent.

>Certainly if a large contingent of consumers massively cut their spending we have to work harder and longer for the same pay.

If we all did it then we wouldn't be working longer and harder for the same pay.

  > I don't think advertising makes that much difference. Most people spend all their earnings. The only thing advertising does is direct where it is spent.

Even if it were true that advertising only directed where money was spent, there'd still be 2/3 less money to go to advertising or anything else if everyone was making 1/3 pay.

  > If we all did it then we wouldn't be working longer and harder for the same pay.  

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Economies of scale mean that you're more productive with more consumption. IE) If you write code for a living, you're generating more value the more people who use it. If less people use it, you have to work harder to get the same level of value and the same pay.