‘Spending our prime years like monks feels like a waste of life’: Why retiring at 35 isn’t as freeing as the F.I.R.E. movement promises

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  via Sasun Bughdaryan

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• FIRE is one of the most popular financial advice subreddits, and its legion of devoted followers continues to grow. FIRE stands for “Financial independence, retire early.” The FIRE lifestyle is for people who are willing to live on less and save as much as they can early in their careers so they can retire early and forgo working for the rest of their lives. At least, that’s what it is at its most extreme. 

• There are different types of FIRE. Lean FIRE is when you retire on as little as you possibly can and live extremely minimally for the rest of your days. Fat FIRE requires a much higher net worth upon retirement, as it involves planning for a luxurious retirement. Barista FIRE is a semi-retirement strategy where you work a part-time job, often to cover health insurance, but rely mostly on your savings and investments to cover costs. 

• Working enough to save enough to retire in your 30s is not easy. It takes a real toll on your health to be constantly working and making no time for your pleasure and relaxation. Not to mention the toll that it can take on your relationships. One aspiring FIRE participant took to the internet to bemoan that his wife wanted to decrease their savings rate from 60% to 40%.

  
   “Our net worth just crossed the $450k mark, which feels great on paper. However, we’ve hit a serious wall. To maintain this rate, we’ve cut almost all ‘unnecessary’ spending. We haven't taken a real vacation in years, we drive 15-year-old beaters, and my wife is starting to resent the ‘frugality at all costs’ lifestyle. 

  
   Last night we had a breakdown. She basically said she’s tired of living like we’re broke when the bank account says otherwise. She wants to dial back the savings rate to 40% so we can actually travel and enjoy our 30s.

  
   According to my math, if we stay at 60%, we hit our ‘Fat FIRE’ number in 7 years. If we drop to 40%, it pushes that date out by about 3-4 years.

  
   To me, 3 years of extra work feels like a massive sacrifice. To her, spending our ‘prime years’ acting like monks feels like a waste of life. I’m struggling with the engineering mindset of ‘optimize everything,’ but I'm realizing I might be optimizing for a future that our relationship won't survive to see.”

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  via Gabriel Ponton (Unsplash+)

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story}

• You never know what’s going to happen in your life. You could spend ages 22 to 40 working like a dog, only to pass away before you get to see any of the fruits of that labor. I’m not saying that saving for retirement is fruitless because “we might not live to see tomorrow.” That’s the mentality of someone who will be working until they’re 79 because of their poor decision-making. Any lifestyle that is so extreme that it splits your life into two halves, one of endless work and the other of endless play, is bound to breed dissatisfaction in both halves. Humans need work and play, even if that work doesn’t make us money, and despite the fact that play might eat up some of our disposable income.

• With FIRE devotees, you often see the conflation of money and time. The classic saying is “time is money,” but with FIRE, they see every dollar spent as a fleeting moment that could be spent retired. While most of us wage earners see the relationship between time and money, we don’t think about the three months of retirement we’d lose if we went on vacation with our family.

  
   “I don't know how to enjoy spending money on normal life stuff anymore, even though mathematically I know I can afford it. Last weekend, some coworkers invited me to a cabin trip, and my immediate thought was ‘that's 3 more months shaved off compounding if invested instead.’ I actually opened my spreadsheet while sitting at the bar with them. I felt insane after I caught myself doing it.”

• Thousands of FIRE enthusiasts completely abandon the idea of getting married and having children solely because it cuts into their FIRE timeline. I’m all for people choosing not to have kids because it’s not for them, but prioritizing an early retirement over everything else that makes life worth living makes me question the sustainability and fulfillment this lifestyle offers. What’s the point of retiring early if you have nobody to share your retirement with? If you spend 20 years of your life obsessing over nothing but making money, you’re going to be lost once you finally achieve it and realize you sacrificed precious youth that you’ll never get back. 

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  via Vitaly Gariev

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• I’d rather do FIRE than live on the other extreme: saving absolutely nothing for retirement, consistently accumulating debt. But it’s not wise to spend decades of your life living with a stressful all-or-nothing mentality in relation to money. It makes sense that in an increasingly unpredictable future, you’d want to take as much control of your life as possible. But saving 60% of your income to be miserable just to live on a limited fixed income in early retirement is not the best way to spend your 30s. Life is more than just retirement, and if you’re retired by 55, you’re going to wish you could take it all back to be broke and employed at 25.

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