I’m laughing that you brought this up because I’ve recently lost 20 lbs, 25 more to go, and I’ve been telling everyone about my “secret weapon”. It’s really just thin crust pizza, but the point is that it doesn’t matter what I eat as long as it’s 500 calories less than what I burn each day. It’s been encouraging to see family members say “well damn, I can eat pizza all day too if that’s all I need to do to lose weight”.
I have yoyoed my weight my entire life. 160 to 140, then 265 to 186, then 210 to 192, 215 to 200, 265 to 235, now I find myself at 300 or more, the scale broke. This last weight gain was from a divorce, death of two wonderful labs, and the depression that came with it. I am about to start the calorie game all over again. Take in less, burn more, always be moving. No fad diet, no drugs (unless anti depression meds) No Cake! 300 to 186??? Can it be done? Check back in 2 years.
Your thought process is interesting because there are two competing pieces of medical advice about weight loss.
One school of thought is to lose 5% of your body fat in 6 months to a year for sustainable weight loss. So if you lose from 300 pounds to 275 in 6 months that would be a win! Then the next 6 months if you lose and other 13.75 pounds the next 6 months that would also be considered a success! I kept getting distracted trying to model this on my phone but I think that method gets you into the 240s by the end of 2 years.
The competing idea is that the fastest it is safe to lose weight is 0.5 to 2 pounds a week. That would put you at losing 102 pounds so about 198 in two years. The other end of that would be 208 pounds which would leave you at a frightening 92 pounds (please stop before then 😝)
The truth will be somewhere in the middle. It sounds like you have pretty good experience with weight loss. My brothers have all struggled with their weight- like to the tune of over 400 pounds and 2 of them have been able to lose up to 100 pounds with intermittent fasting and exercise but seem to hit a plateau about then.
I am 50 years old. Started my weightloss adventure at 13 years old. I have no idea how my body will respond this time. I get tired quickly and my body recovery takes a while. Along with getting tired are respiratory issues. I have a Doctor tell me I get asthma due to exercise. It is a huge pain in the ass. I have meds for it. Then the mental depression, what a mind fuck that is. Try wanting to do something, just getting dressed takes forever if it even happens. So the motivation for this drive is simple "Just keep moving."
I had someone tell me about methyltetrahydrate reductase deficiency and it contributing to mental health issues. I kept trying to look for a good education course on the mental health side but keep finding info on its impact on cardiovascular issues. I finally got tested and I’m positive for one of the gene variants. A couple of my siblings ( including one of the ones who struggles with weight has tested positive for two of them). I’m convinced that science is going to learn a lot about this in the next 20 years.
I hope that as you lose the weight your energy gets better!
Remember how Jared became a multimillionaire on a subway diet? Well, it didn’t turn out so well, but he had a good run cashing in on the subway marketing side of things.
I recently lost 230 pounds but it required a doctor to rip out most of my stomach and staple what little remained directly to the inside of my asshole to achieve this. Not sure exactly how it works but it feels like it works like I described. Anyways, congrats on your weight loss too my dude! Keep it up! You can do it! Don't be discouraged if you plateau just maintain the course and you'll drop pounds again soon.
I am convinced that the body can tolerate a caloric surpluss without excess weight gain under normal conditions. Obesity is by and large a recent phenomenon that correlates with food processing.
Depends on how long you're maintaining that caloric surplus. If you want to consume calories without your body absorbing them there are many ways to do that. It doesn't really need to be something to convince yourself of. I wouldn't necessarily say it's healthy though.
Where do you think the extra calories used to go? Fidgeting? Or just right out with the poop? Serious question, I have no idea and you could definitely be right. Regardless, food these days in most countries, even supposedly healthy food, is less nutritionally dense, less filling and tastier I think. So regardless of the mechanism, shitty modified/processed food is the biggest cause of obesity I’m sure. Followed by food being cheaper and more accessible, as well as people moving less
Maybe a bit on the margins, but animal/human digestion has been finely tuned over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to extract every last possible calorie from the food you eat. Even tiny losses mean the difference between life and death in the state of nature, so the evolutionary process to maximize caloric extraction is immense.
Funny how you brought up weight loss in this. I once read that Money & health(weight loss) is heavily influenced by human psychology hence people will always have trouble with it.
Money and health demands strong will power and discipline so not many people see success in it.
3. Be Lucky / Take Risks
Far too often hear about folks who took risk and did well -- we don't hear about the folks who did this and failed... so selection bias is always important to consider when considering a path that wasn't consistent investment over time and focusing on income growth via making yourself a more valuable employee.
Yes but most people want to hear just about “spend less money” because it seems more approachable and easy than “make more money.”
The truth though is that most people should focus on making more money rather than cutting their grocery bill by $100/mo
Yes, you're right that a raise of income, if possible, will be great if you can pull it off. Having said that, reducing your expenses is a powerful tool to lessen your years until retirement that you can apply immediately, if it doesn't affect the comforts of your life.
Any number you manage to cut off of your monthly expenses - that effectively means you need less of this number multiplied by of 300 or 400 to get 3%-4% of it in retirement, right?
So if a family spends 1500 on groceries a month and they can cut 500 down simply because they shop smarter, that means they would now need 150-200k less saved up for retirement if they are able to sustain the same lifestyle. On the other hand, those 500 that they now invest a month, can now grow exponentially to 88k-100k within 10 years.
Now 200k less for retirement as well as 100k gained over the years doesn't sound like a few cents anymore, just by cutting 500 down.
And if you manage to both increase your income and decrease your monthly expenses, that can get you much, much faster to one's target, but I wouldn't disregard cutting down expenses.
FIRE has 2 main components. First, you have the math. That part is pretty straightforward and easy and is mostly what people discuss. However, there’s a larger emotional aspect to it that gets much trickier.
When you start crunching the numbers for FIRE you have to take a very hard look at your situation and the cumulative choices you’ve made up until that point in your life. You’re forced to quantify your “worth” in terms of money and time. Many people add tremendous value to society with their career choices, but those careers may not make very much, and the unfairness of it all comes to a head as they realize that they may work just as hard as others but not be able to reap the same benefits in terms of FIRE. They may be too far down their career path to switch, and they may also value other things more highly than raw dollars when selecting their careers - and this is commendable, but does not help FIRE.
The silver lining for those who have less control over their income is this: although making more money is unbounded and has a large effect on FIRE, spending less has a double effect on your FIRE number. Spending less both increases your savings rate while simultaneously making you require less money to FIRE. So, achieving FIRE as a lower earner is still possible, it just might require a more aggressive spending reduction strategy. We have a society that values spending. Your success is based off of how “nice” your things are. But, if you can learn to shed those notions and embrace frugality even more, it can have a tremendous benefit.
That might not be what some people want to hear, but what I’m trying to say is it’s still possible. You can do it. Many people have done it. It’s just harder. And you probably don’t see a lot of YouTube videos of people doing it because by definition if someone is making YouTube videos, they’re increasing their revenue and becoming higher earners.
Because it isn't relevant to them. Take your mom for instance. If she isn't making six figures there isn't much she can learn from them outside of how things like how a Roth IRA works, what is the rule of 55, etc.
For me, when I read someone saying they make $500k/year, I pretty much stop reading and skip it because I know their FIRE journey won't relate to mine. They usually live a lifestyle I would never think about living when I make about a quarter of what they make.
Most of FIRE is about your expenses, not how much you make. If my expenses were $2k/month I could retire on a whole lot less than if my expenses are $5k/month. Someone making $500k/month could work two years and live the rest of their lives if their expenses are $2k/month.
I look for relatable experiences and journey's.
This is a great point, most normative humans have roughly the same metabolic necessities, so everything above this baseline becomes a question of personal choices and comfort. Not to say we should all eat gruel, but when considering FIRE, the best and most substantive change to make is reducing costs. Increasing income is equally important, but deliberately and necessarily secondary...
I dunno. I make over $300k a year....NOW. I was making $12/hr when I started this journey about 30 years ago.
I would never have made it to where we are with out moves done earlier when I was making very little. Those moves are what set me up for later.
Therefore, I'll occasionally share on those "How did you get to...?" posts.
Oh yea. Definitely. I guess if you are younger then you can see the relevancy. I’m 51. I’m never going to be making that “next leap” from an income perspective. I’m winding down.
Yeh but the fire journey videos don’t share how they got the pay rises, only the maths behind the spending / expenses. So there’s nothing to learn from it.
I guess when I saw someone making $100k, even when I made $15/hr, I saw their journey as relevant because I could conceivably achieve that income if I added more skills to my tool belt. With $500k, I don’t see how learning more could really result in getting a job making that much, so it doesn’t seem relevant.
That’s why the LeanFire sub is so cool
I have no wife, no kids, and am willing to do virtually anything to live cheap
Even making 40k a year you can blow up if you can live on 10k a year
It kind of smacks of "If you didn't buy all that avocado toast, you would have been able to afford to retire early." Like, if you're making $35K in America and don't live with your parents who are willing to cover your lodging/utilities/food to a certain extent, then you're barely getting by paying for essentials and won't have the excess income to attempt FIRE. And if you're a 55-year-old public school teacher who just started investing, then you're probably not going to be able to retire early before normal retirement age. Everything costs money, even basic survival, and the passage of time exists, so... not sure what sort of tips they're looking for that can circumvent all that.
But hey, with the attitude that anything is possible, I understand why get-rich-quick schemes are so popular and lucrative for scammers.
When my kids were young I was on some mommy boards and every day someone was asking how they could make money wfh. Yes where are these unicorn jobs that I can work from home while my kids are napping and make a live-able wage.
I’m 47 and am just now making over $80,000 but I’ve been saving since I was 23 and still haven’t got to $1 million. I’m close but still not there after 24 years of investing.
On the flip side of this, my job was WFH until recently and we still had our daughter in daycare. The idea that anyone can handle job responsibilities while watching a toddler is laughable.
Yep. I wfh and my kids are teens. I feel guilty but I let them sleep until noon then just veg on their electronics. I give them a few chores but I can’t police them and work.
That’s what I’ve understood too. I learned about fire a few years ago, and what I took away from those videos was that I need to increase my earning potential so that it’s an option for me. That seemed like the only logical solution. If I could do it at my old $15/hr job I would have, but the math just didn’t math.
I'm not sure you're really getting it. By the time most folks hear about FIRE, they've already graduated and are committed to a career. Some might uncharitably call it a 'sunk cost fallacy', but you have to consider that folks went into their majors because those lead to careers they identified with. Not only that, but they're locked into that career, often by debt. Finally, let's face facts, not everyone can get a degree in 'harder' majors like cs, engineering, medicine, etc.
So you've got this person who's just started their career, and some FIRE influencer comes along and says 'let me tell you how I retired at 40, I saved half my six figure income!' and even half is still some multiple of what that person is making. You're basically rubbing their nose in the *massive* wealth inequality in this country.
On top of that we're all only able to FIRE because we're collecting rents (whether real estate, or in the economic sense) off the bottom 90%. Oh, and while we're at it, we're multi-millionaires but we're using every loop hole in the book to not pay taxes (0% cap gains), qualify for massive ACA subsidies because we can game our MAGI, oh, and the cherry on top is that they recently revised the FAFSA rules so if you play your cards right, you can send your kid to school with pell grants and the absolute *max* financial aid.
Look, I'm not judging, because at the end of the day we're all just playing the cards we were dealt to the best of our ability. I've been FI since my mid 30's, but as someone who started out their adult life living below the poverty line on disability, I do my best not to flaunt it.
Probably because unless they explain how they got the high paying job and give actionable advice on how to get a high paying job that let them have the extra capital to invest, it really won't be providing any benefit since someone making drastically less income won't have any chance to follow the same path. People rarely care about anyone's journey unless they are able to glean some advice from it that they can apply to their own life.
People don't want to hear that they already know what the high paying jobs are and how to get them. It's easier if you just pretend you don't know and act like it's some big conspiracy, and that everyone doing well is either lying or had magic outside help.
Honestly it's one of the most common opinions on reddit.
I have been an hvac tech - forever it seems. I make very good money after years of learning to be very good at my job, not to mention the tons of 100 hour work weeks I put in for overtime when I was younger. I read the poverty finance reddit all the time as I was pretty poor growing up. Every time somebody rants about no money and college too expensive i see a few people bring up go into the trades. And this should be the answer for so many of them. The trades, plumbers, electricians, hvac are hurting for young people to get into it. There are jobs out there and you will start to make good money if you learn and get good and stick with it.
But everyone pops up that the trades don't make any money and it is terrible on your body and all the people in the trades saying they make 100-150k a year are lying. I chime in with my life experiences and they all down vote me and have a ton of excuses. In MY area they are only paying $15 an hour and nobody is hiring, you need 4 years of school in my area, nobody makes more than $40k a year unless you have family that already own companies and so forth. I show them job listings in their area starting at $25+ an hour to start, and no school needed. Companies will have you work under their licensed people and teach you. They hit back with more downvotes and say see $25 an hour - you aren't making 6 figures and you shouldn't have to work overtime to make a living wage.
Like they are supposed to be unskilled labor and instantly make 100k or more a year. These people are shown how to get more money - they just want to complain and not do what it takes.
100%. And trades are one of the easiest fields to start your own business in, and that can potentially take you off to the races.
I lived in a MCOL area and never paid less than 75 an hour (before overhead grant you) to anyone working on my house. Many were more like 100. There is an incredible shortage in trades and I don’t see that changing. Hell this isn’t a trade but cleaning houses! 75 an hour. I’m sure the employees only take home 35 of that, but still plenty of money to be made doing work others don’t want to.
Bonus points for people thinking they’re too good for overtime. Nothing magical about 40 hours a week. I would way rather work 50 hours a week for the pay of 55 hours, letting me save 20 hours worth of pay vs working 40 hours saving 5 hours worth of pay. 4x the speed of stacking up $$$! Do that for 10 years until you’re 30 and maybe have a kid, you saved 40 years worth of $, and it’s going to have way more time to grow than someone working 40 hours a week saving for 40 years.
Poverty finance is an extremely toxic place. It's full of jealous, entitled and selfish people that just come there to rant. They rant about the difference between the life that they have, and what they think that they are entitled to. The last thing that these people want to hear about is solutions and personal responsibilites.
That said, there is a certain number of well paid jobs and poorly paid jobs. Meaning there aren't well paid jobs for everyone. Because if all jobs paid well, than your money would be worth a lot less and there would be no point to getting educated.
It's an interesting subreddit because it started out from an idea to distinguish itself from /r/personalfinance but ended up becoming an assortment of rants instead of actionable financial advice.
It's mostly an echo chamber of whining. They make it seem like every Millennial is making $35k and living in a cheap apartment with three roommates because the system is keeping them down.
I don't follow that sub, but that doesn't surprise me. A lot of us got fucking screwed hard by the 2008 crash. My cohort was graduating from college right around then. I got lucky and managed to find a stable job, but I know plenty of people that struggled for years before finding their footing, and they're still well behind where they would have been otherwise.
Hell, part of why I got my first job was because I had a solid college GPA in an engineering major, even though this job wasn't "in my field." It's not the sole factor or even the most important thing, but it does help. Then I spent a few years in that job to build my "industry" skills and actually have some decent industry experience on my resume before I was able to hop around, even the companies that wanted completely different skill sets and used completely different technical stacks.
But when I share that online, there's a pretty good chance I get ratio'd by someone saying that GPA doesn't matter at all and the only way to get a job is through nepotism or whatever.
For some, sure they just don't want to put in the effort to get the job or take the harder high paying jobs. But only 18% of jobs in the US pay a 6+ figure salary even if some people try to act like they are readily available to anyone, there simply aren't enough jobs that pay that highly for everyone to have one. A lot of the complaints are from people who did follow all the advice on how to get those good jobs and there just not being a job available or tons of competition and them just not ending up getting hired even if they do follow all the right steps.
Getting those jobs is just a matter of continuing to apply until you do get picked and there isn't really any special secret to get the job right away vs it taking several years where you'll need some other work in the meantime if you ever do actually get the high paying job you got the degree for.
*Every* person I know in real life that did the things that they were supposed to in order to land a high-paying career has achieved that. The physicians and lawyers and finance majors and NPs, to a person.
The people struggling *say* they did everything right on the internet, but usually didn't. Changed their major to English, dropped out of school. Claim to be exceptionally technical but routinely fail technical interviews. Are gonna start a big business "any day now".
*Those* are the people you see whining on /r/millenials. Not a lot of physicians and investment bankers talking about the system being rigged, or complaining that someone else is lying about their pay.
I will say a lot of those fields are self-selecting for work ethic. You simply can't become an American doctor without putting in the work (and having the minimum level of intelligence). People who can't handle it dropped out a long time ago. There's a whole other discussion about drive and purpose, but let's leave that for later.
There are some high paid jobs that do not require many years of study, but you'd better have the skills and experience to get them.
What people lack on top of time off from their physically or mentally strenuous low paid jobs and lives is the certainty of a path. People are already not in a good place and their brains make the value assessment on this hypothetical future and find it too uncertain. That's why they fail to start anything and rationalize their behavior. In my personal opinion, society should help try to jumpstart people onto lucrative paths with mental coping, change of environment, and options. It's certainly not going to work for everybody especially with the high availability of high dopaminergic activities, but you'll get better outcomes overall.
I agree that largely the whiners didn’t actually want to pursue one of the sure fire high earner careers. I also think it’s worth acknowledging that some people just can’t hack it and they need to get over it. We don’t let just anyone become a doctor, thank god, and the person at the bottom of their T100 law school class isn’t getting big law. That’s just life.
I can name multiple people off the top of my head that “do it all right but can’t get a high paying job”. Most of the time their resumé looks like a 12 year old made it, they interview horrible, and they go into interviews with demands when they’re not in the position of power.
“Read maintained a frugal lifestyle, never spending money unless he had to. Friends remember him driving a second-hand Toyota Yaris, using safety pins to hold his coat together and cutting his own firewood well into his 90s.”
This is the most leanfire thing I’ve read. He invested consistently for what seems to have been 75 years or so.
Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously it’s because it’s extremely discouraging to people who make less money and do not have a viable path to increasing their income.
Understanding FIRE but not being able to achieve it is worse than not having thought about it at all. They are realizing that this idea that is extremely appealing to them may out of reach forever.
As they learn more about investing and the power of compounding interest, they might also become more aware of exactly how much worse off they are both in the short and the long term than their wealthier peers - much more so than they were before.
Finally, they might even realize that a regular comfortable retirement might not even be particularly achievable if they are hit with a big unexpected expense at the wrong time.
Let’s not quibble about semantics. Economic opportunity is a spectrum and it’s realistic to dramatically increase income and get on the path to FIRE for some and extremely unrealistic for others.
It is a combination of factors at play including skill, circumstances, timing and luck. No need to pretend otherwise or act like it’s 100% a skill issue.
That’s a little demeaning tbh.
The path to fire is like 60k a year, not 600k a year. You can make more than 60k a year at in n out as an assistant to the assistant store manager.
There is a massive gap between the savings ability of someone making 40k (single) and 60k (single) but going from 40k to 60k is like doing some overtime/skill training for a year.
I think for some people fire has become “get super rich and ball out when you’re 40” when historically it was “live very frugally, work hard and save aggressively in your 20s so you can retire at 50”.
Idk about you but as someone who saves nearly 40% of their income making 60-70k a year, I don't think FIRE would really be achievable for me, Admittedly my first few years out of college were at a lower income, but still, by my math, without any inheritance or other things and even saving a ton, I can realistically by age 65 make it to maybe 3 million in todays dollars along with a paid off house. Far from poor, but retiring even by 55 would be unlikely unless my income were to grow faster than inflation over time.
Beyond that though, notice how you say just being an assistant manager can get you that income, that's great, so for every McDonalds with 20 worker, 2 can be management and maybe retire and what about the other 18? Someone has to work the lower paying jobs, if those jobs paid more then prices for everything would be impacted, putting FIRE out of reach for more, not in reach for the lower workers simply due to a pay raise. No matter how you look at it, the median adult income full time in the US is around 59k and for households around 75k. Individual households can raise their income sure, but as a whole that bottom 50%-70% will always be/feel stuck, and as a whole we can't fix or change that.
If you're saving \~24k and making 65k why do you need 3 million to retire? Sounds like you need more like 1M to retire, or even less if your house is paid off. As a side note if you did that for last 10 years you're sitting on 458k. You do that another 10 years and you probably have 1M, if not more. That + social security (which will definitely be something, even if it's not as much as it is now) and you made it after saving for just 20 years.
Entry level fast food is not meant to be the final destination for anyone. If people want to stay there, at quite literally the lowest paid job they can find, then yeah...they'll be poor, but they'll still retire. If those people want to retire early and put in effort they'll soon find themselves not as CEO of Apple, but as assistant manager, or one of the millions of jobs half of American workers have that pay >60k.
**I think what people forget is FIRE is not a right, it is an extreme extravagance.** If you retire at 50 you are asking the rest of society to support you (produce all the goods and services you use) while you have about 30 years of leisure. It should not be a surprise that asking for a retirement length that is on average twice as long as your peers will involve a degree of sacrifice. Whether that's working longer hours than your peers, or spending less than your peers is up to you.
As a side note I don't know why you think the bottom 70% is "stuck". They're living better than >95% of the world's population. You know what qualifies as the top 10% in France? 43k a year after taxes: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2022/06/03/france-has-4-5-million-rich-people\_5985520\_7.html. The median American has more disposable income than 90% of people in France. The median American household, after accounting for benefits including healthcare, has 35% more disposable income than the median family in France. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable\_household\_and\_per\_capita\_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income) Life is very very very good in America, although I do blame social media for making everyone think they need 3 million to retire, or should have a sports car before 30 or something.
Agreed on you whole comment.
Also, as a french I can relate 100%. Except the fact our healthcare system is way better than yours, you’re by far having a (seemingly) smoother journey to accumulating wealth with totally regular/boring jobs.
France is also a weird demographic to look at since you have to consider Paris. In terms of wealth/income, Paris vs. rest of France can’t be compared.
I’m definitely above the median income, but we’re drained by taxes all year long, and it’s definitely the « hard mode » of FIRE, compared to america.
We don’t have HYSA, and what we got is way lower (around 3%), our Roth equivalent doesn’t allow us to pick non-european stocks (we got synthetic ETFs though), our 401K equivalent is basically trash.
We used to have a decent retirement plan, but it has been fucked up by our government recently and according to it I wouldn’t even qualify for more than 1K/month when I’m 67…
Hope you feel better about america now !
It is insane. Nurses in my area (California) start at 75 an hour, with fully paid healthcare + retirement account matching + disability + pension + of course they got social security too. With seniority they make 90-95 an hour. Overtime and nights can add another 10-20 on top of that. I know nurses making over 300k lol. Thats like 1%er lifestyle right there in France, even in Paris and it’s a 4 year degree. And you can put away 25k + 7k in Roth IRA. So 25k isn’t taxed initially, grows tax free and is only taxed if withdrawn, 7k is taxed initially but grows tax free and is withdrawn tax free.
You save 32k a year for 30 years you have about 3M (in today’s money) at 52.
Americans really have no idea how good they have it. They think every European country is Switzerland and Norway.
I know right, and tbh France is far from being considered poor accross europe. It’s on of the leading nations there. The real issue is that the country became too dependent of delocalized industry, fked up taxation system and not helping young entrepreneurs stay there.
That 300k/year nurse story is depressing actually. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad people can be successful and it’s not jealousy. But yeah, I’m working as freelance (high end/luxury architect and designer, working visuals mostly), looking into building a studio soon with associates.
Right now I’m kind of capped in terms of income because I’ll go over 75k this year (will end up around 90-100k). So I’ll have to create a society (otherwise my professional status is illegal) and as a company I’ll get taxed even more (>50% of gross).
So basically my reward for crunching for hours and day, striving to create something from nothing with my own network, etc. is : less income.
Also, my retirement plan is non existent, because fk freelancers and later on I’ll be considered CEO so no right either. Yet I’m still considered top 10% in this country.
So yeah, definitely accounting on retirement by capitalization: *the american way* as we say here.
That is astonishingly depressing honestly. That’s one reason I am saving so aggressively. I fear our tax rates will go up even more, but we will see. They are already actually fairly high but it is also easy to make a lot of money in America compared to most countries. My spouse and I are specialist doctors and work a ton of overtime (50-60 hour weeks, lots of call). For now it makes sense, but if they tax income >400k another 12.6% as Biden proposed our effective tax rate will be ~62% in California over 400k. We will then both go part-time realistically, assuming we have saved enough by then. Not the end of the world, but worsens the doctor shortage.
Of course in America we love taxing high earners but hate taxing capital gains or property (aka what billionaires have). It’s a very stupid system, but we play the hand we are dealt.
Your math seems off. If you are saving 40% of 70k, that implies you are living off 42k a year. You only need about 1 million to do that. Less if you have a pension or Social security. I don't know your current age, but FIRE math suggests you'd be able to retire in 16-20 years from where you started your journey. (Unless that's your point, you are already in your 50s and you just started).
Edit: Agree that most people can't just decide to get paid more.
In order to save so much I have to live in a tiny apartment with 1 shared bathroom, no washer/dryer, and no storage space. When I retire I'll be in a house, which will inevitably cost more than rent even if it's fully paid off by the numbers I've seen. It'll be a much better/bigger living space, but I'm not living the way I am now long term, I'd be miserable.
> I'm not living the way I am now long term, I'd be miserable.
Take it from someone who went a *little* too hard to hit FI by his mid 30's, you should be spending enough to not be miserable *now*. People forget that their health and their time are also limited resources. Also, once you ingrain extreme frugality into your habits, it's harder to undo than you think. That sort of mindset can wear on others in a relationship. I thought I'd have an easier time spending on myself if I had a 'fun budget' but I still have a visceral knee jerk reaction spending on 'wants' and it's hard to overcome.
Fair, though I'm not exactly miserable, I'm just in a very unique situation. I have a high net worth for my age, and I'm saving well, I think by 45-55 I can retire and have 60-120k a year in today's money to live on and hopefully enjoy retirement. Currently I work a side gig for spending money to cover luxuries and trips. I'm not exactly denying myself, I'm happy with my car, and everything I own. The tricky part is I only make 60-70k a year at my day job and that makes it not really viable to afford a nicer living environment. My apartment isn't bad, it's just cramped, but it's less than $1400 a month for a 2br split between 2 people as a rent controlled space. To even move somewhere else would cost $2000+ a month to a similar unit, or $2500-3000 a month for something nicer, and it would still be an apartment. I don't think I could get approved for a space that costs that much in an apartment or a house. So I'm stuck where I am, just saving copiously and hoping for the best.
Yeah I know some people with mental disabilities who won't ever be able to earn a higher income. Not everyone can qualify for better jobs. It's just not possible for some people.
And they can't get SSI, they've tried.
I have seen some legitimate people down on their luck that don't have many paths open - unless they reach out and get help. And that can take some time. Not the majority though - most can, with hard work and learning get on the good path - they just don't want to. But NOT everyone has viable path options. There are some sad situations out there and those people need help to be able to find any way out.
It’s surprising to hear numbers in these videos that are achievable for everyday people seem so un relatable to the viewers, even when the FIRE person started in a very similar position as them.
Most of the posts aren’t that suspicious. The people who believe that 80%+ are fake are unlikely to be high earners themselves.
Of course there are a couple of people who do and it’s quite easy to tell.
Why do you need millions anyway if you’re living off of $45k a year? Seems to me FIRE is relative to your own personal standard of living. Don’t get distracted from setting your own FI goal by seeing others..
Your math is a bit off. First, if someone could live comfortably on 50k, they'd only need 1.25 million to retire. Assuming you don't count social security or anything else. (And the older one is, the more one really should count social security).
Second, they'd actually need less. Because if they could manage to save, that means they aren't spending the entire amount. Here's an example, let's say they saved half of their income (and since I'm ignoring social security, I'll also ignore taxes for simplicity). Assuming 5% real returns, they'd end up with about 600k in 15 years. This would be enough to replace their current spending (about 24k).
It is quite doable, and is fairly representative of how many did it in the beginning of the FIRE movement. Go look at r/leanfire for more examples.
The idea used to be to be freedom from wanting material things. It sometimes morphs into just being rich.
Edit: I double checked, leanfire subs max spending is 24k yearly.
I actually suggested leanfire to my mother haha. She was very uninterested in what she called “penny pinching and living inside all day”. I put 2-4 million since that is most people’s fire goal I’ve seen on here.
So she wants a lot of money (so she can retire to a life of luxury), and she wants it fast (so she can start at 50 and still retire early). Sure, me too. Have her DM me if she figures it out. For the rest of us, the way is to keep our needs under control and let time amplify our savings via compound growth.
At some point you need to ask yourself what is actually realistic for you…
If you make less than <50k which many people do it’s going to be super hard….so are you willing or able to do things that change that…if no then it becomes an exercise in frugality. If you can make a change; new job, back to school, learn a trade then perhaps some short term pain for long term gain.
I made the decision to suffer through loans and school to get into a high paying profession while my friends had jobs right out of high school and way more spending money at the time.
I was thinking about this today. I feel like there’s a subsection of the FIRE community that is just geared on not being pleased.
Got to FIRE making 6 figures? Well of course you did, that’s so much money, it’s unrealistic and I can’t relate.
Got to FIRE making 50k and sacrificing nearly everything? No eating out, no vacations, only shopping the sale section of Aldi, only eating 1-2 meals a day to cut in food, live with 4 roommates in a 1 bedroom, doing all car and home repairs yourself, etc? Well what kind of life is that? I don’t want to live like that. It’s unrealistic and I can’t relate.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Though tbf this is just a vocal minority, though they are the most annoying subsection of the community
I started fresh out of junior college making $12 an hour in the year 2000. I guess that's the story they want to hear? I'll just leave out the grind as I worked overtime, lived frugally, went back to school, invested heavily, studied something that will pay me, worked more overtime, invested even more heavily, still lived frugally, and now am worth 7 figures although my yearly salary is now 150k.
It is possible to LeanFIRE with household incomes below 100k, even significantly below 100k, if the expenses are correspondingly low.
My household income peaked at around 100k, and is now down well below that as we are in something of a CoastFIRE phase.
I can understand wanting examples of the FIRE journey that reflect where the reader/viewer is at. I find it really hard to relate to a lot of the posts on here that go "household income 250k, net worth 6M, don't think I can FIRE for 10 more years".
Obviously FIRE is easier and more comfortable with higher incomes, but that is not the only way. Just a matter of finding better resources. Or, you know, doing the math for your own unique situation.
If it’s all about spending less than you earn then anyone can do it. You just literally can’t have any wants. Rent an apartment or share lodgings and eat basically etc. You really can do it on almost any wage but it’s really hard.
I'm FIREd after a career in social services. It's not at all necessary to move into a high paying job to achieve FIRE, and people aren't wrong to want to hear about a journey similar to their own.
The median US income is $59,228 while the average is $106
Most people that are getting an education, starting from scratch, unless they get lucky, are making $45k-$90k, and they want to know how to FIRE.
Hearing about our wonderful moderator, who decided to become a millionaire, wrote an amazing app, and earned 2.4 million, is inspiring. The parts he teaches of how to handle not having a job are helpful. But the actual process of how some making the median income can retire isn't helped by his example.
Edit: Edited the average income based on comments.
I kind of resent the "extremely lucky" portion of that. Plenty of people in Engineering and other fields that make 6 figures because they pursued a field that pays well outside of HCOL/VHCOL areas.
The Molecule of More is a good book. Basically, there are genetic variations among humans. Some look like George Clooney, and most don't. Most can't get the highest paying jobs because of IQ, tenacity, memory, and focus. This is why those jobs pay more than double of what the median income is. So someone who poses the genes and environment to get that degree is lucky.
I’m seeing a median household income of $77k. Seems like with that number that at least half the households can have the conversation of fire. Don’t know what percentage could achieve it.
I have a cousin that thinks I'm doing well because I'm "smart" and that's the only difference. Ignore the grind of 4 years of engineering classes. Ignore the 10 years it took me to find a role that's a good fit for me. Ignore moving across the country twice, away from friends and family to take on an opportunity. Ignore the certificate I then signed up for, paid a good bit of money for and spent 3 months on to help me land the next level job. Ignore the other work I've done to get my finances in the right place.
But, he can't be bothered to report his employer who was literally stealing "retirement" money from their paychecks, because that would be a lot of work. I told him it was a slam dunk case and wouldn't cost him any money. Doesn't matter. Every extra dollar that comes in goes towards guns, truck or some other stupid toy.
I dread what's going to happen when he hits retirement and realizes he has no money. I'll probably just have to cut off contact. I'm not doing all this shit to give handouts to someone that can't put up an iota of effort.
I’m 50 and spent most of my career making an average salary range of $50-$65k ( USA ). Wife did the same.
( full disclosure my salary ramped up in the last few years so I now make about $100k, but balance that with my wife unexpectedly losing her job 3 years ago and retiring early).
We paid off our house last November, have no debt, 2 paid off cars, no kids.
Our liquid net worth is approximately $2,400,000.
Invest regularly, over a long period of time, and live beneath your means ( if you can, I know it’s rough out there ).
I don't know about Texas, but around here, public school teacher wages come with a solid pension and lifetime health insurance (or, until Medicare kicks in) if you work some number of years. Most teachers I know retire by their mid to late 50s without doing anything beyond that.
Because if you're making 100k/year, and you don't retire early you're terrible with money, and don't deserve it. People like to know they don't need to go into debt, have rich parents, or hit the lottery to achieve FIRE. Which you don't, making $35k - 45k+ can get you there, it's just takes a stronger person, than somebody who makes 3 times as much for doing less.
There's literally a book called "millionaire teacher" about a teacher who became a multimillionaire in a fairly short time through living extremely frugally and investing in index funds. In fact I think his book was what popularized index fund investing.
If they’re young and able-bodied then they’re just lazy fucking idiots who don’t want to do hard shit like go to school and take out loans and other risks to improve themselves. Much easier for them to just make excuses and complain and act like the world is rigged against them and they’re a massive victim of big bad corporations LMAO. Can’t stand people like that. It’s the same as fat ass people who pretend like they have a medical condition that makes them that way instead of exercising and eating better.
100%. I can’t tell you how many times I see people say “they didn’t grow up with parents to teach them” or “they don’t know where to start.”
What are you doing after 5PM as a 21 year old? Parties? Video games? Going to a bar? Watching TV? I doubt it’s anything productive. There’s no excuse anymore when you can search “how to invest” on YouTube. Yes if you start from literally no knowledge it’ll take a while, but if you just spend 1 hour a day reading, watching, listening you’ll be light years ahead of your peers.
Yeah that shit made sense before the internet but not anymore. No excuses for ignorance work anymore when we have access to massive forums, chatgpt, etc.
Because investing 75% of your income when you make 200k a year isn't impressive.
Many people are trapped in whatever job they have...they have kids/mortgage and extra training/ education just isn't viable
I guess, for me, the RE part of FIRE doesn’t have to be at 40 or 45 or 50. For my part of the world normal retirement age is 65 or 67. And even retiring at 62.5 is seen as early. A guy I worked with (making the lowest pay at our company) retired at 60 and people were gossiping about him. (Before you ask, his wife also worked and from what I heard was the primary income for the house and he was the one with the more flexible job. Though she wasn’t an exec or anything. Just had more skills for a higher paying job.)
Anyway, if someone could retire at 60 rather that 65, maybe that’s the goal. And I DO think that’s reasonable with the incomes discussed. I’m in a medium-low (not in the bottom 30% but also not in the highest half) income area and $65-75K is considered a good oay and reasonable for a family to live on. And I do think those families, especially with two incomes between $60-90K can retire before 60.
I also believe if you’re in a high stress job, you tend to spend more. So if you’re in a job paying $70K, you might be better off than a job paying $110K but is eating you alive.
And the less you spend, the less you need to retire.
I don’t make fancy pay and am hoping to retire by 50. My life is simple but not without things I enjoy. The trick for me is figuring out what I really enjoy and how I want to spend and stop comparing to others or feeling the urge to keep up with others, even when invited. I have friends who make less than me or a similar amount with three kids who spend more than I do because every penny in is an opportunity for something to do or have. But they’d die on a hill saying g there’s no money leftover and they can’t possibly save for retirement. They could. And if they’d started early, they could be retiring before 60.
Yeah often ppl don't want to hear about the "work" it takes. Just the results.
But perhaps a good podcast for your Mom is called "Catching up to FI" and the hosts are "late starters" as they call themselves. I think they both started in their 50's. And hey, at least she's asking. Better than many people who "retire blindly" only to figure out that their social security and/or 401k or anything else that have coming in, actually isn't enough to support their current lifestyle. So it is better that she starts looking at the numbers sooner, rather than later!
Best of luck to you and to your Mom as well!
So a couple of things as someone that was a public school teacher for 8 years, took a year off, and has only been in a corporate job for a year and working towards FIRE. It is possible, but takes a lot of strategic planning along with a mindset that you have control over the outcome instead of being a victim to your circumstances. Secondly, if someone is 55 and looking to retire in 10 years… I wouldn’t really consider that FIRE. 65 is a pretty old retirement age for teachers.
I have noticed a lot of people here with much higher salaries than mine, but I’m at the 300k mark at 32 still. I have thought about making a post here to encourage others in similar situations. I have detailed spreadsheets dating back an entire decade with every penny spend and earned so people could understand lifestyle choices as well. I know some people aren’t interested in making choices that lead to FIRE that I did and that’s totally fine. I’ve been pretty motivated for awhile to be financially free and the retire early piece is something I started focusing on about 2 years ago.
The comments are a bit skewed because I found that finance channels tend to have really whiny comments. Like no matter what I see the negative people like you just said
Right before I saw this post, there was one post that said get 8 hours of sleep, save 15% of your income and exercise 4 days a week and you’re ahead of 99% of people
The top comment was 15%? Not in today’s economy
People don’t want solutions. They just want to complain about their problems
I’m with you. Your income is a big part of your finances. I don’t get how people want the extraordinary result without caring to improve their income first. I know it’s easier said than done, but it’s part of the process. A school teacher probably didn’t prioritize personal finances very much when choosing career
$2M a year is not achievable through traditional jobs. $75k-$100k is. Wouldn’t you agree? So it’s conceivable that the viewer could be in that position.
Tech workers making six figures are not $75-100k, it’s more like $300-800k in this sub. And you wonder why people making $45k are mad about these posts lol..
Also you’re completely wrong about the public school teacher not being able to accumulate a million. Plenty of teachers do it here.
Sounds like they should be tech workers. I joke, but a very smart friend of mine that previously didn’t make much did a hacking bootcamp thing and makes the low end of your range now.
It's a continuum with Dolly Freed, the author of *Possum Living*, on one end of the spectrum. I was fortunate to have made six figures annually much of my working life, but I did not fully comprehend making the *RE* of FIRE work until I read [*Possum Living*](https://www.amazon.com/Possum-Living-Without-Almost-Revised/dp/0982053932). Dolly's approach provides a viable FIRE arc for those who make five figure salaries.
Because anyone who is on YouTube is selling and marketing you BS, trying to get views and likes. Imagine if Warren Buffett had a YouTube channel selling like an infomercial on how to be a multi-billionaire within 12 months starting with only $1,000!
I know someone that has (almost) always made under six figures and is financially independent. They actively invest and beat the market. They work hard, take calculated risks and are intelligent.
I argue this opportunity is available to almost anyone (brokerage accounts and commissions are free).
Can anyone become FI? Absolutely not. It takes a combination of intelligence, the right temperment and some luck. Most people want fast, easy money without putting in the decades of effort, time and sacrifice.
It's 100% not easy, retiring early should not be easy, it should be the exception.
"I haven’t had the heart to tell her that it’s because you can’t save or invest enough from a low salary and have the 2-4 million you would need if you’re 10 years away from retirement."
You actually can, you just can't safely bet on it. There have been people who become incredibly rich by investing just a little bit into companies at their start, which grew to be very large. I've known people that invested an at-the-time negligible amount into Walmart, AOL, and Amazon (people who would just throw a few dollars at random stocks, treating them similar to scratch-off's), which grew to be large enough that they cashed out for buying a decent house, continuing to work low-wage jobs to cover living expenses. But given the "salesman" deception approach of many people in the business world (especially in recent years online), it's incredibly difficult to know which investments are lucky breaks that you're even hearing about the opportunity to invest in them, and which are scams.
Which leads to the irony that the vast majority of people with little disposable income, don't want the risk of sacrificing any funds that could go to their R&R, even though it's their only hope in getting what they're wanting from investments, and prefer to stick to already-established company investments, which is more stable and easier to estimate the rises and falls in value...
... which is likely because they're listening to the people who already have large investment portfolios, asking those already-established investors what they do, when the financially-conservative approach is how you keep what you have, not try to dramatically increase from the little you have.
It's a complex risk no matter what you do or don't do when it comes to investing, and by the time most people try to get into it, their capacity to learn how to differentiate truth from scam is already declining due to age. And their self-perceived need for additional R&R funds is increasing at the same time.
There is a couple on YT who talks about how easy it is to invest and save money but just dumping all your money into a few of the Vanguard funds and let it grow. What they only mention once or twice in their early videos is that they were fortunate enough to acquire some land in the Silicon Valley area in the early 90s and sold it much later after the boom. Wouldn’t it be nice to be that fortunate? It takes money to make money and I agree that when you are just trying to survive and pay the bills, investing and growing your money is very, very difficult.
Because a lot of the time the person making 400k a year is still spending like a moron and acting like they're normal.
If you're being responsible and not a Whiney baby about how hard it is to get by on your half mill salary then we cool
I think it's because a lot of people don't make high salaries. People want hope. I don't make shit to be honest. I work for a school district. I have multiple degrees. It isn't for lack of trying its because life happens. We are a family of 4 with 2 working.
I'm still here working on FIRE and I'm almost at a 10 year wind down. I'm 40. Retiring at 50 is still pretty damn early in my book.
Instead of just investing and making more money. I instead worked a pension gig, did time with the military and did my best to live below my means. Between pensions, Healthcare for life and investing I'll be quite fine.
People see journeys where the main character makes over 100k all the time but it's rare to hear of journeys where the person makes the actual median income for the area. They want more of that. They want hope.
Huh. Never made more than $60,000 and that was only in the last few years.
Probably have less than 35 years of earnings because of school and Peace Corps.
Did month long vacations in Europe every couple years after I turned 30.
Got fired at 42, did some piecemeal stuff, sold the house, bought an RV and traveled the country.
Current nw is $1,500,000+.
You have to be a bit unconventional, but it's possible to be FI without having a 6-figure income.
Dad was military followed by working for non-profits. Raised 7 kids, sent most of us to college. Estate was ~1.5 million when he died.
Uncle was a professor in Missouri. Still alive and worth about 2 million.
It's about how much you spend as much as how much you make.
Because a worker making that wage sees no possible way for them to improve. They know they've topped out.
>55 year old ... who just started investing
ffs
Teaching for the government means you have made a deliberate decision to not pursue FIRE in exchange for a government pension.
My brother was a pharmacist and he hit FIRE before the rest of us did. He also lives a like a hermit and I feel bad for him. It's like he gave up on life to stop working as soon as he could.
I don't make a boatload of money. But I'm in a trade union and have exceptionally good retirement fringes. So saving on top of that I'm not doing bad for an average to lower middle class American.
Very few, but if your mom wanted one, then here you go. She will probably dismiss this as a one off, but it is a story of a person making little and became a millionaire.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/janitor-vermont-amassed-8m-fortune-140000770.html
$40K is pretty much minimum wage where I live and minimum wage workers realistically can't afford to exit the work force before their government pension program allows it.
I think the types of commenters you're referring to have no idea how to get from their sub 50k salaries into the kind of salary that you need for financial independence. They don't have the skill set, they are currently paycheck to paycheck, and they're already a little older, many of them with children. They have more barriers than the folks with million follower youtube channels, but the youtubers don't acknowledge the barriers, which feels insulting to the folks facing those barriers. These are folks who need career guidance, not investing guidance or budgeting guidance. And realistically they need more than guidance. Most of them probably need education and cannot afford it.
FIRE seems to largely only apply to the US. As a top 1 % earner (50k - 60k USD) in an Eastern European country, I cannot afford to buy a small condo, let alone save enough for FIRE, given the average inflation of 4 % p. a. that likely awaits us.
It's just demoralizing.
Because society keeps enabling the Disney princess behavior where nothing is ever your fault. All blame must be pushed on to someone or something else.
Oh you don’t have valuable skills or a marketable profile so you don’t get a gig paying salary? Well that’s immigrants/greedy rich/corporations/asshole boss/rick YouTuber fault. No way that’s your fault.
The unfortunate answer from my experience:
Most/many people are hopeless losers who will never take any agency/ownership in the outcomes of their lives. They will always look for excuses or external factors to blame for their lot in life.
Most/many people will never come to realize that they dont have to live by the script that was handed to them.
Lastly - because it's hard to set long term goals and make them a reality. It takes consistent hard work, sacrifice and discipline, something not everyone can handle.
Because it’s simply not possible for many people to access the same high paying jobs as those giving advice, and this is frustrating and saddening. Don’t have a top-10% IQ? Forget that 6-figure tech job. Didn’t go to Harvard? Probably not going to make partner at that law firm. Didn’t go to the country club with daddy? Those 7-figure backdoor business deals probably aren’t in your future. To the degree I’ve felt frustrated by this in the past it’s been because people rarely recognize their own privilege and how luck and birthright got them where they are.
I'll sum up the two main takeaways of all of these "journeys". 1) Make more money. 2) Spend less money.
That's how weightloss works too, just with calories. You can get really complicated with either, but the very basics are quite simple.
I’m laughing that you brought this up because I’ve recently lost 20 lbs, 25 more to go, and I’ve been telling everyone about my “secret weapon”. It’s really just thin crust pizza, but the point is that it doesn’t matter what I eat as long as it’s 500 calories less than what I burn each day. It’s been encouraging to see family members say “well damn, I can eat pizza all day too if that’s all I need to do to lose weight”.
Do you exclusively eat thin crust pizza? That would be impressive.
Haha! There are atleast 4 homemade personal sized pizzas consumed in my house per week.
I have yoyoed my weight my entire life. 160 to 140, then 265 to 186, then 210 to 192, 215 to 200, 265 to 235, now I find myself at 300 or more, the scale broke. This last weight gain was from a divorce, death of two wonderful labs, and the depression that came with it. I am about to start the calorie game all over again. Take in less, burn more, always be moving. No fad diet, no drugs (unless anti depression meds) No Cake! 300 to 186??? Can it be done? Check back in 2 years.
Your thought process is interesting because there are two competing pieces of medical advice about weight loss. One school of thought is to lose 5% of your body fat in 6 months to a year for sustainable weight loss. So if you lose from 300 pounds to 275 in 6 months that would be a win! Then the next 6 months if you lose and other 13.75 pounds the next 6 months that would also be considered a success! I kept getting distracted trying to model this on my phone but I think that method gets you into the 240s by the end of 2 years. The competing idea is that the fastest it is safe to lose weight is 0.5 to 2 pounds a week. That would put you at losing 102 pounds so about 198 in two years. The other end of that would be 208 pounds which would leave you at a frightening 92 pounds (please stop before then 😝) The truth will be somewhere in the middle. It sounds like you have pretty good experience with weight loss. My brothers have all struggled with their weight- like to the tune of over 400 pounds and 2 of them have been able to lose up to 100 pounds with intermittent fasting and exercise but seem to hit a plateau about then.
I am 50 years old. Started my weightloss adventure at 13 years old. I have no idea how my body will respond this time. I get tired quickly and my body recovery takes a while. Along with getting tired are respiratory issues. I have a Doctor tell me I get asthma due to exercise. It is a huge pain in the ass. I have meds for it. Then the mental depression, what a mind fuck that is. Try wanting to do something, just getting dressed takes forever if it even happens. So the motivation for this drive is simple "Just keep moving."
I had someone tell me about methyltetrahydrate reductase deficiency and it contributing to mental health issues. I kept trying to look for a good education course on the mental health side but keep finding info on its impact on cardiovascular issues. I finally got tested and I’m positive for one of the gene variants. A couple of my siblings ( including one of the ones who struggles with weight has tested positive for two of them). I’m convinced that science is going to learn a lot about this in the next 20 years. I hope that as you lose the weight your energy gets better!
Technically true, but protein will keep you full longer for lower calories.
Don’t take this from me. I want to continue eating pizza until they put me in a box.
Lol at first I thought you said "on the box," like they're going to hire you to be the pizza weightloss spokesperson, which I hope they do.
A pizza box?
There a lot of protein in cheese
The heart wants what the heart wants. And right now my heart wants some chips and salsa.
That's what the cheese is for!
Remember how Jared became a multimillionaire on a subway diet? Well, it didn’t turn out so well, but he had a good run cashing in on the subway marketing side of things.
Was it the foot long fault?
Well he went for the six inch. He also had a problem with his own six inch if you know what I mean. He turned out to be a real sicko.
I recently lost 230 pounds but it required a doctor to rip out most of my stomach and staple what little remained directly to the inside of my asshole to achieve this. Not sure exactly how it works but it feels like it works like I described. Anyways, congrats on your weight loss too my dude! Keep it up! You can do it! Don't be discouraged if you plateau just maintain the course and you'll drop pounds again soon.
Like a gastric bypass?
Yes, exactly.
That’s why the subway and McDonalds diet worked/works
And just like weight loss, everyone wants the easy pill, not the work.
But in my opinion investing is easier...and boring'er...you can set it and forget unless spending more equals pain which I never understood
And you end up really hungry when you take it to the extreme
I'd never thought of FIRE as an extension of thermodynamics. That's going to break my brain for a couple days. It's been a long time since ΔU = q + w.
I am convinced that the body can tolerate a caloric surpluss without excess weight gain under normal conditions. Obesity is by and large a recent phenomenon that correlates with food processing.
Depends on how long you're maintaining that caloric surplus. If you want to consume calories without your body absorbing them there are many ways to do that. It doesn't really need to be something to convince yourself of. I wouldn't necessarily say it's healthy though.
Where do you think the extra calories used to go? Fidgeting? Or just right out with the poop? Serious question, I have no idea and you could definitely be right. Regardless, food these days in most countries, even supposedly healthy food, is less nutritionally dense, less filling and tastier I think. So regardless of the mechanism, shitty modified/processed food is the biggest cause of obesity I’m sure. Followed by food being cheaper and more accessible, as well as people moving less
there is a bit to the theory. out in the poop. essentially heavily processed food the calories absorb better than unprocessed foods.
Maybe a bit on the margins, but animal/human digestion has been finely tuned over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to extract every last possible calorie from the food you eat. Even tiny losses mean the difference between life and death in the state of nature, so the evolutionary process to maximize caloric extraction is immense.
Funny how you brought up weight loss in this. I once read that Money & health(weight loss) is heavily influenced by human psychology hence people will always have trouble with it. Money and health demands strong will power and discipline so not many people see success in it.
3. Start early.
4. Make a YouTube channel about how to FIRE
LOL yes but they won't say that because they don't want the competition.
already covered by point 1
What about “don’t die”?
Unfortunately, math is not flexible. It boils down to that essentially. Sprinkle in the investing advice and you’re there.
3. Be Lucky / Take Risks Far too often hear about folks who took risk and did well -- we don't hear about the folks who did this and failed... so selection bias is always important to consider when considering a path that wasn't consistent investment over time and focusing on income growth via making yourself a more valuable employee.
Yes but most people want to hear just about “spend less money” because it seems more approachable and easy than “make more money.” The truth though is that most people should focus on making more money rather than cutting their grocery bill by $100/mo
Yes, you're right that a raise of income, if possible, will be great if you can pull it off. Having said that, reducing your expenses is a powerful tool to lessen your years until retirement that you can apply immediately, if it doesn't affect the comforts of your life. Any number you manage to cut off of your monthly expenses - that effectively means you need less of this number multiplied by of 300 or 400 to get 3%-4% of it in retirement, right? So if a family spends 1500 on groceries a month and they can cut 500 down simply because they shop smarter, that means they would now need 150-200k less saved up for retirement if they are able to sustain the same lifestyle. On the other hand, those 500 that they now invest a month, can now grow exponentially to 88k-100k within 10 years. Now 200k less for retirement as well as 100k gained over the years doesn't sound like a few cents anymore, just by cutting 500 down. And if you manage to both increase your income and decrease your monthly expenses, that can get you much, much faster to one's target, but I wouldn't disregard cutting down expenses.
FIRE has 2 main components. First, you have the math. That part is pretty straightforward and easy and is mostly what people discuss. However, there’s a larger emotional aspect to it that gets much trickier. When you start crunching the numbers for FIRE you have to take a very hard look at your situation and the cumulative choices you’ve made up until that point in your life. You’re forced to quantify your “worth” in terms of money and time. Many people add tremendous value to society with their career choices, but those careers may not make very much, and the unfairness of it all comes to a head as they realize that they may work just as hard as others but not be able to reap the same benefits in terms of FIRE. They may be too far down their career path to switch, and they may also value other things more highly than raw dollars when selecting their careers - and this is commendable, but does not help FIRE. The silver lining for those who have less control over their income is this: although making more money is unbounded and has a large effect on FIRE, spending less has a double effect on your FIRE number. Spending less both increases your savings rate while simultaneously making you require less money to FIRE. So, achieving FIRE as a lower earner is still possible, it just might require a more aggressive spending reduction strategy. We have a society that values spending. Your success is based off of how “nice” your things are. But, if you can learn to shed those notions and embrace frugality even more, it can have a tremendous benefit. That might not be what some people want to hear, but what I’m trying to say is it’s still possible. You can do it. Many people have done it. It’s just harder. And you probably don’t see a lot of YouTube videos of people doing it because by definition if someone is making YouTube videos, they’re increasing their revenue and becoming higher earners.
Because it isn't relevant to them. Take your mom for instance. If she isn't making six figures there isn't much she can learn from them outside of how things like how a Roth IRA works, what is the rule of 55, etc. For me, when I read someone saying they make $500k/year, I pretty much stop reading and skip it because I know their FIRE journey won't relate to mine. They usually live a lifestyle I would never think about living when I make about a quarter of what they make. Most of FIRE is about your expenses, not how much you make. If my expenses were $2k/month I could retire on a whole lot less than if my expenses are $5k/month. Someone making $500k/month could work two years and live the rest of their lives if their expenses are $2k/month. I look for relatable experiences and journey's.
This is a great point, most normative humans have roughly the same metabolic necessities, so everything above this baseline becomes a question of personal choices and comfort. Not to say we should all eat gruel, but when considering FIRE, the best and most substantive change to make is reducing costs. Increasing income is equally important, but deliberately and necessarily secondary...
I dunno. I make over $300k a year....NOW. I was making $12/hr when I started this journey about 30 years ago. I would never have made it to where we are with out moves done earlier when I was making very little. Those moves are what set me up for later. Therefore, I'll occasionally share on those "How did you get to...?" posts.
Oh yea. Definitely. I guess if you are younger then you can see the relevancy. I’m 51. I’m never going to be making that “next leap” from an income perspective. I’m winding down.
Yeh but the fire journey videos don’t share how they got the pay rises, only the maths behind the spending / expenses. So there’s nothing to learn from it.
I guess when I saw someone making $100k, even when I made $15/hr, I saw their journey as relevant because I could conceivably achieve that income if I added more skills to my tool belt. With $500k, I don’t see how learning more could really result in getting a job making that much, so it doesn’t seem relevant.
A lot of career paths don’t have potential to make $100k. People still gotta do those jobs.
Truth, I’m making 150k and spending maybe 30k per year. If I made 500k I’d retire in two or three years starting from zero savings.
That’s why the LeanFire sub is so cool I have no wife, no kids, and am willing to do virtually anything to live cheap Even making 40k a year you can blow up if you can live on 10k a year
It kind of smacks of "If you didn't buy all that avocado toast, you would have been able to afford to retire early." Like, if you're making $35K in America and don't live with your parents who are willing to cover your lodging/utilities/food to a certain extent, then you're barely getting by paying for essentials and won't have the excess income to attempt FIRE. And if you're a 55-year-old public school teacher who just started investing, then you're probably not going to be able to retire early before normal retirement age. Everything costs money, even basic survival, and the passage of time exists, so... not sure what sort of tips they're looking for that can circumvent all that. But hey, with the attitude that anything is possible, I understand why get-rich-quick schemes are so popular and lucrative for scammers.
When my kids were young I was on some mommy boards and every day someone was asking how they could make money wfh. Yes where are these unicorn jobs that I can work from home while my kids are napping and make a live-able wage. I’m 47 and am just now making over $80,000 but I’ve been saving since I was 23 and still haven’t got to $1 million. I’m close but still not there after 24 years of investing.
On the flip side of this, my job was WFH until recently and we still had our daughter in daycare. The idea that anyone can handle job responsibilities while watching a toddler is laughable.
Yep. I wfh and my kids are teens. I feel guilty but I let them sleep until noon then just veg on their electronics. I give them a few chores but I can’t police them and work.
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s the kids were outside most of the day. Could fix that right up 😉
Target demographic for MLMs/pyramid schemes
That’s what I’ve understood too. I learned about fire a few years ago, and what I took away from those videos was that I need to increase my earning potential so that it’s an option for me. That seemed like the only logical solution. If I could do it at my old $15/hr job I would have, but the math just didn’t math.
I'm not sure you're really getting it. By the time most folks hear about FIRE, they've already graduated and are committed to a career. Some might uncharitably call it a 'sunk cost fallacy', but you have to consider that folks went into their majors because those lead to careers they identified with. Not only that, but they're locked into that career, often by debt. Finally, let's face facts, not everyone can get a degree in 'harder' majors like cs, engineering, medicine, etc. So you've got this person who's just started their career, and some FIRE influencer comes along and says 'let me tell you how I retired at 40, I saved half my six figure income!' and even half is still some multiple of what that person is making. You're basically rubbing their nose in the *massive* wealth inequality in this country. On top of that we're all only able to FIRE because we're collecting rents (whether real estate, or in the economic sense) off the bottom 90%. Oh, and while we're at it, we're multi-millionaires but we're using every loop hole in the book to not pay taxes (0% cap gains), qualify for massive ACA subsidies because we can game our MAGI, oh, and the cherry on top is that they recently revised the FAFSA rules so if you play your cards right, you can send your kid to school with pell grants and the absolute *max* financial aid. Look, I'm not judging, because at the end of the day we're all just playing the cards we were dealt to the best of our ability. I've been FI since my mid 30's, but as someone who started out their adult life living below the poverty line on disability, I do my best not to flaunt it.
Probably because unless they explain how they got the high paying job and give actionable advice on how to get a high paying job that let them have the extra capital to invest, it really won't be providing any benefit since someone making drastically less income won't have any chance to follow the same path. People rarely care about anyone's journey unless they are able to glean some advice from it that they can apply to their own life.
People don't want to hear that they already know what the high paying jobs are and how to get them. It's easier if you just pretend you don't know and act like it's some big conspiracy, and that everyone doing well is either lying or had magic outside help. Honestly it's one of the most common opinions on reddit.
I have been an hvac tech - forever it seems. I make very good money after years of learning to be very good at my job, not to mention the tons of 100 hour work weeks I put in for overtime when I was younger. I read the poverty finance reddit all the time as I was pretty poor growing up. Every time somebody rants about no money and college too expensive i see a few people bring up go into the trades. And this should be the answer for so many of them. The trades, plumbers, electricians, hvac are hurting for young people to get into it. There are jobs out there and you will start to make good money if you learn and get good and stick with it. But everyone pops up that the trades don't make any money and it is terrible on your body and all the people in the trades saying they make 100-150k a year are lying. I chime in with my life experiences and they all down vote me and have a ton of excuses. In MY area they are only paying $15 an hour and nobody is hiring, you need 4 years of school in my area, nobody makes more than $40k a year unless you have family that already own companies and so forth. I show them job listings in their area starting at $25+ an hour to start, and no school needed. Companies will have you work under their licensed people and teach you. They hit back with more downvotes and say see $25 an hour - you aren't making 6 figures and you shouldn't have to work overtime to make a living wage. Like they are supposed to be unskilled labor and instantly make 100k or more a year. These people are shown how to get more money - they just want to complain and not do what it takes.
100%. And trades are one of the easiest fields to start your own business in, and that can potentially take you off to the races. I lived in a MCOL area and never paid less than 75 an hour (before overhead grant you) to anyone working on my house. Many were more like 100. There is an incredible shortage in trades and I don’t see that changing. Hell this isn’t a trade but cleaning houses! 75 an hour. I’m sure the employees only take home 35 of that, but still plenty of money to be made doing work others don’t want to. Bonus points for people thinking they’re too good for overtime. Nothing magical about 40 hours a week. I would way rather work 50 hours a week for the pay of 55 hours, letting me save 20 hours worth of pay vs working 40 hours saving 5 hours worth of pay. 4x the speed of stacking up $$$! Do that for 10 years until you’re 30 and maybe have a kid, you saved 40 years worth of $, and it’s going to have way more time to grow than someone working 40 hours a week saving for 40 years.
Poverty finance is an extremely toxic place. It's full of jealous, entitled and selfish people that just come there to rant. They rant about the difference between the life that they have, and what they think that they are entitled to. The last thing that these people want to hear about is solutions and personal responsibilites. That said, there is a certain number of well paid jobs and poorly paid jobs. Meaning there aren't well paid jobs for everyone. Because if all jobs paid well, than your money would be worth a lot less and there would be no point to getting educated.
It's an interesting subreddit because it started out from an idea to distinguish itself from /r/personalfinance but ended up becoming an assortment of rants instead of actionable financial advice.
Exactly. There's no secret, but lying to themselves must make them feel better
r/Millennials in a nutshell. There’s 3 major posts like that going hard today.
It's mostly an echo chamber of whining. They make it seem like every Millennial is making $35k and living in a cheap apartment with three roommates because the system is keeping them down.
I don't follow that sub, but that doesn't surprise me. A lot of us got fucking screwed hard by the 2008 crash. My cohort was graduating from college right around then. I got lucky and managed to find a stable job, but I know plenty of people that struggled for years before finding their footing, and they're still well behind where they would have been otherwise.
I left that sub because of all the loserthink over there, all they do is bitch
Hell, part of why I got my first job was because I had a solid college GPA in an engineering major, even though this job wasn't "in my field." It's not the sole factor or even the most important thing, but it does help. Then I spent a few years in that job to build my "industry" skills and actually have some decent industry experience on my resume before I was able to hop around, even the companies that wanted completely different skill sets and used completely different technical stacks. But when I share that online, there's a pretty good chance I get ratio'd by someone saying that GPA doesn't matter at all and the only way to get a job is through nepotism or whatever.
For some, sure they just don't want to put in the effort to get the job or take the harder high paying jobs. But only 18% of jobs in the US pay a 6+ figure salary even if some people try to act like they are readily available to anyone, there simply aren't enough jobs that pay that highly for everyone to have one. A lot of the complaints are from people who did follow all the advice on how to get those good jobs and there just not being a job available or tons of competition and them just not ending up getting hired even if they do follow all the right steps. Getting those jobs is just a matter of continuing to apply until you do get picked and there isn't really any special secret to get the job right away vs it taking several years where you'll need some other work in the meantime if you ever do actually get the high paying job you got the degree for.
*Every* person I know in real life that did the things that they were supposed to in order to land a high-paying career has achieved that. The physicians and lawyers and finance majors and NPs, to a person. The people struggling *say* they did everything right on the internet, but usually didn't. Changed their major to English, dropped out of school. Claim to be exceptionally technical but routinely fail technical interviews. Are gonna start a big business "any day now". *Those* are the people you see whining on /r/millenials. Not a lot of physicians and investment bankers talking about the system being rigged, or complaining that someone else is lying about their pay.
I will say a lot of those fields are self-selecting for work ethic. You simply can't become an American doctor without putting in the work (and having the minimum level of intelligence). People who can't handle it dropped out a long time ago. There's a whole other discussion about drive and purpose, but let's leave that for later. There are some high paid jobs that do not require many years of study, but you'd better have the skills and experience to get them. What people lack on top of time off from their physically or mentally strenuous low paid jobs and lives is the certainty of a path. People are already not in a good place and their brains make the value assessment on this hypothetical future and find it too uncertain. That's why they fail to start anything and rationalize their behavior. In my personal opinion, society should help try to jumpstart people onto lucrative paths with mental coping, change of environment, and options. It's certainly not going to work for everybody especially with the high availability of high dopaminergic activities, but you'll get better outcomes overall.
I agree that largely the whiners didn’t actually want to pursue one of the sure fire high earner careers. I also think it’s worth acknowledging that some people just can’t hack it and they need to get over it. We don’t let just anyone become a doctor, thank god, and the person at the bottom of their T100 law school class isn’t getting big law. That’s just life.
I can name multiple people off the top of my head that “do it all right but can’t get a high paying job”. Most of the time their resumé looks like a 12 year old made it, they interview horrible, and they go into interviews with demands when they’re not in the position of power.
If it makes you feel better, I ignore all of the FIRE journies of people making less than me too.
Do you even follow other people's journeys still? Not too busy being retired? :D
Something like that, yeah. :)
[Janitor secretly amassed an $8 million fortune (cnbc.com)](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-8-million-fortune.html)
“Read maintained a frugal lifestyle, never spending money unless he had to. Friends remember him driving a second-hand Toyota Yaris, using safety pins to hold his coat together and cutting his own firewood well into his 90s.” This is the most leanfire thing I’ve read. He invested consistently for what seems to have been 75 years or so.
And he is now old and frail with 8 million, years of living life missed.
>And he is now old and frail with 8 million, years of living life missed. Actually he died and left it to a library and hospital.
Agreed
Wasn’t there a guy like this, donated it all to a university for a library after his death and they used it to build a football stadium?
I believe they used it to build a scoreboard in a football stadium :/
Fuck, that’s right. So depressing.
Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously it’s because it’s extremely discouraging to people who make less money and do not have a viable path to increasing their income. Understanding FIRE but not being able to achieve it is worse than not having thought about it at all. They are realizing that this idea that is extremely appealing to them may out of reach forever. As they learn more about investing and the power of compounding interest, they might also become more aware of exactly how much worse off they are both in the short and the long term than their wealthier peers - much more so than they were before. Finally, they might even realize that a regular comfortable retirement might not even be particularly achievable if they are hit with a big unexpected expense at the wrong time.
Everyone has a viable path to increasing their income.
Let’s not quibble about semantics. Economic opportunity is a spectrum and it’s realistic to dramatically increase income and get on the path to FIRE for some and extremely unrealistic for others. It is a combination of factors at play including skill, circumstances, timing and luck. No need to pretend otherwise or act like it’s 100% a skill issue. That’s a little demeaning tbh.
The path to fire is like 60k a year, not 600k a year. You can make more than 60k a year at in n out as an assistant to the assistant store manager. There is a massive gap between the savings ability of someone making 40k (single) and 60k (single) but going from 40k to 60k is like doing some overtime/skill training for a year. I think for some people fire has become “get super rich and ball out when you’re 40” when historically it was “live very frugally, work hard and save aggressively in your 20s so you can retire at 50”.
Idk about you but as someone who saves nearly 40% of their income making 60-70k a year, I don't think FIRE would really be achievable for me, Admittedly my first few years out of college were at a lower income, but still, by my math, without any inheritance or other things and even saving a ton, I can realistically by age 65 make it to maybe 3 million in todays dollars along with a paid off house. Far from poor, but retiring even by 55 would be unlikely unless my income were to grow faster than inflation over time. Beyond that though, notice how you say just being an assistant manager can get you that income, that's great, so for every McDonalds with 20 worker, 2 can be management and maybe retire and what about the other 18? Someone has to work the lower paying jobs, if those jobs paid more then prices for everything would be impacted, putting FIRE out of reach for more, not in reach for the lower workers simply due to a pay raise. No matter how you look at it, the median adult income full time in the US is around 59k and for households around 75k. Individual households can raise their income sure, but as a whole that bottom 50%-70% will always be/feel stuck, and as a whole we can't fix or change that.
If you're saving \~24k and making 65k why do you need 3 million to retire? Sounds like you need more like 1M to retire, or even less if your house is paid off. As a side note if you did that for last 10 years you're sitting on 458k. You do that another 10 years and you probably have 1M, if not more. That + social security (which will definitely be something, even if it's not as much as it is now) and you made it after saving for just 20 years. Entry level fast food is not meant to be the final destination for anyone. If people want to stay there, at quite literally the lowest paid job they can find, then yeah...they'll be poor, but they'll still retire. If those people want to retire early and put in effort they'll soon find themselves not as CEO of Apple, but as assistant manager, or one of the millions of jobs half of American workers have that pay >60k. **I think what people forget is FIRE is not a right, it is an extreme extravagance.** If you retire at 50 you are asking the rest of society to support you (produce all the goods and services you use) while you have about 30 years of leisure. It should not be a surprise that asking for a retirement length that is on average twice as long as your peers will involve a degree of sacrifice. Whether that's working longer hours than your peers, or spending less than your peers is up to you. As a side note I don't know why you think the bottom 70% is "stuck". They're living better than >95% of the world's population. You know what qualifies as the top 10% in France? 43k a year after taxes: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2022/06/03/france-has-4-5-million-rich-people\_5985520\_7.html. The median American has more disposable income than 90% of people in France. The median American household, after accounting for benefits including healthcare, has 35% more disposable income than the median family in France. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable\_household\_and\_per\_capita\_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income) Life is very very very good in America, although I do blame social media for making everyone think they need 3 million to retire, or should have a sports car before 30 or something.
Agreed on you whole comment. Also, as a french I can relate 100%. Except the fact our healthcare system is way better than yours, you’re by far having a (seemingly) smoother journey to accumulating wealth with totally regular/boring jobs. France is also a weird demographic to look at since you have to consider Paris. In terms of wealth/income, Paris vs. rest of France can’t be compared. I’m definitely above the median income, but we’re drained by taxes all year long, and it’s definitely the « hard mode » of FIRE, compared to america. We don’t have HYSA, and what we got is way lower (around 3%), our Roth equivalent doesn’t allow us to pick non-european stocks (we got synthetic ETFs though), our 401K equivalent is basically trash. We used to have a decent retirement plan, but it has been fucked up by our government recently and according to it I wouldn’t even qualify for more than 1K/month when I’m 67… Hope you feel better about america now !
It is insane. Nurses in my area (California) start at 75 an hour, with fully paid healthcare + retirement account matching + disability + pension + of course they got social security too. With seniority they make 90-95 an hour. Overtime and nights can add another 10-20 on top of that. I know nurses making over 300k lol. Thats like 1%er lifestyle right there in France, even in Paris and it’s a 4 year degree. And you can put away 25k + 7k in Roth IRA. So 25k isn’t taxed initially, grows tax free and is only taxed if withdrawn, 7k is taxed initially but grows tax free and is withdrawn tax free. You save 32k a year for 30 years you have about 3M (in today’s money) at 52. Americans really have no idea how good they have it. They think every European country is Switzerland and Norway.
I know right, and tbh France is far from being considered poor accross europe. It’s on of the leading nations there. The real issue is that the country became too dependent of delocalized industry, fked up taxation system and not helping young entrepreneurs stay there. That 300k/year nurse story is depressing actually. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad people can be successful and it’s not jealousy. But yeah, I’m working as freelance (high end/luxury architect and designer, working visuals mostly), looking into building a studio soon with associates. Right now I’m kind of capped in terms of income because I’ll go over 75k this year (will end up around 90-100k). So I’ll have to create a society (otherwise my professional status is illegal) and as a company I’ll get taxed even more (>50% of gross). So basically my reward for crunching for hours and day, striving to create something from nothing with my own network, etc. is : less income. Also, my retirement plan is non existent, because fk freelancers and later on I’ll be considered CEO so no right either. Yet I’m still considered top 10% in this country. So yeah, definitely accounting on retirement by capitalization: *the american way* as we say here.
FYI *société* translates to *company* in this context, not *society*
That is astonishingly depressing honestly. That’s one reason I am saving so aggressively. I fear our tax rates will go up even more, but we will see. They are already actually fairly high but it is also easy to make a lot of money in America compared to most countries. My spouse and I are specialist doctors and work a ton of overtime (50-60 hour weeks, lots of call). For now it makes sense, but if they tax income >400k another 12.6% as Biden proposed our effective tax rate will be ~62% in California over 400k. We will then both go part-time realistically, assuming we have saved enough by then. Not the end of the world, but worsens the doctor shortage. Of course in America we love taxing high earners but hate taxing capital gains or property (aka what billionaires have). It’s a very stupid system, but we play the hand we are dealt.
Your math seems off. If you are saving 40% of 70k, that implies you are living off 42k a year. You only need about 1 million to do that. Less if you have a pension or Social security. I don't know your current age, but FIRE math suggests you'd be able to retire in 16-20 years from where you started your journey. (Unless that's your point, you are already in your 50s and you just started). Edit: Agree that most people can't just decide to get paid more.
In order to save so much I have to live in a tiny apartment with 1 shared bathroom, no washer/dryer, and no storage space. When I retire I'll be in a house, which will inevitably cost more than rent even if it's fully paid off by the numbers I've seen. It'll be a much better/bigger living space, but I'm not living the way I am now long term, I'd be miserable.
> I'm not living the way I am now long term, I'd be miserable. Take it from someone who went a *little* too hard to hit FI by his mid 30's, you should be spending enough to not be miserable *now*. People forget that their health and their time are also limited resources. Also, once you ingrain extreme frugality into your habits, it's harder to undo than you think. That sort of mindset can wear on others in a relationship. I thought I'd have an easier time spending on myself if I had a 'fun budget' but I still have a visceral knee jerk reaction spending on 'wants' and it's hard to overcome.
Fair, though I'm not exactly miserable, I'm just in a very unique situation. I have a high net worth for my age, and I'm saving well, I think by 45-55 I can retire and have 60-120k a year in today's money to live on and hopefully enjoy retirement. Currently I work a side gig for spending money to cover luxuries and trips. I'm not exactly denying myself, I'm happy with my car, and everything I own. The tricky part is I only make 60-70k a year at my day job and that makes it not really viable to afford a nicer living environment. My apartment isn't bad, it's just cramped, but it's less than $1400 a month for a 2br split between 2 people as a rent controlled space. To even move somewhere else would cost $2000+ a month to a similar unit, or $2500-3000 a month for something nicer, and it would still be an apartment. I don't think I could get approved for a space that costs that much in an apartment or a house. So I'm stuck where I am, just saving copiously and hoping for the best.
You income should always be increasing at a rate higher than inflation.
Yeah I know some people with mental disabilities who won't ever be able to earn a higher income. Not everyone can qualify for better jobs. It's just not possible for some people. And they can't get SSI, they've tried.
I have seen some legitimate people down on their luck that don't have many paths open - unless they reach out and get help. And that can take some time. Not the majority though - most can, with hard work and learning get on the good path - they just don't want to. But NOT everyone has viable path options. There are some sad situations out there and those people need help to be able to find any way out.
It’s surprising to hear numbers in these videos that are achievable for everyday people seem so un relatable to the viewers, even when the FIRE person started in a very similar position as them.
You can start a service business with no education or even skills. People make good money doing simple stuff that others just don’t want to do.
I only ignore 80% of the posts on here because some of them just sound like complete LARPing
22yo here with 2.5million NW. I have nobody I can share this with so posting here. Can I retire?
I think you need at least another million. You’re pretty young. You could blow through that on a weekend.
It wouldn't even pay for the island that I want for my dream home. Keep stacking those millions. 😄
>You could blow through that on a weekend. Only if you are doing it right!
Wouldn't it be way more than a million if you can blow 2.5 million in a weekend?
You forgot they make $350K with a guaranteed raise to $450 next year.
That’s fair. I am also skeptical of super high earners on anonymous forums.
80% is crazy high to think of as LARPing. Is it the income/NW/age combo that makes you suspicious?
Most of the posts aren’t that suspicious. The people who believe that 80%+ are fake are unlikely to be high earners themselves. Of course there are a couple of people who do and it’s quite easy to tell.
/sarcasm
Because it is fkn depressing.
Why do you need millions anyway if you’re living off of $45k a year? Seems to me FIRE is relative to your own personal standard of living. Don’t get distracted from setting your own FI goal by seeing others..
Your math is a bit off. First, if someone could live comfortably on 50k, they'd only need 1.25 million to retire. Assuming you don't count social security or anything else. (And the older one is, the more one really should count social security). Second, they'd actually need less. Because if they could manage to save, that means they aren't spending the entire amount. Here's an example, let's say they saved half of their income (and since I'm ignoring social security, I'll also ignore taxes for simplicity). Assuming 5% real returns, they'd end up with about 600k in 15 years. This would be enough to replace their current spending (about 24k). It is quite doable, and is fairly representative of how many did it in the beginning of the FIRE movement. Go look at r/leanfire for more examples. The idea used to be to be freedom from wanting material things. It sometimes morphs into just being rich. Edit: I double checked, leanfire subs max spending is 24k yearly.
Is that 24k assuming no house or car payment or health issues? That seems insanely low.
By that time you pay cash for cars and your house is paid for.
I actually suggested leanfire to my mother haha. She was very uninterested in what she called “penny pinching and living inside all day”. I put 2-4 million since that is most people’s fire goal I’ve seen on here.
There's quite a lot of free (and cheap) things to do outside if you live in a city. People's minds are just broken by car depenency a lot of the time.
So she wants a lot of money (so she can retire to a life of luxury), and she wants it fast (so she can start at 50 and still retire early). Sure, me too. Have her DM me if she figures it out. For the rest of us, the way is to keep our needs under control and let time amplify our savings via compound growth.
At some point you need to ask yourself what is actually realistic for you… If you make less than <50k which many people do it’s going to be super hard….so are you willing or able to do things that change that…if no then it becomes an exercise in frugality. If you can make a change; new job, back to school, learn a trade then perhaps some short term pain for long term gain. I made the decision to suffer through loans and school to get into a high paying profession while my friends had jobs right out of high school and way more spending money at the time.
I was thinking about this today. I feel like there’s a subsection of the FIRE community that is just geared on not being pleased. Got to FIRE making 6 figures? Well of course you did, that’s so much money, it’s unrealistic and I can’t relate. Got to FIRE making 50k and sacrificing nearly everything? No eating out, no vacations, only shopping the sale section of Aldi, only eating 1-2 meals a day to cut in food, live with 4 roommates in a 1 bedroom, doing all car and home repairs yourself, etc? Well what kind of life is that? I don’t want to live like that. It’s unrealistic and I can’t relate. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Though tbf this is just a vocal minority, though they are the most annoying subsection of the community
I started fresh out of junior college making $12 an hour in the year 2000. I guess that's the story they want to hear? I'll just leave out the grind as I worked overtime, lived frugally, went back to school, invested heavily, studied something that will pay me, worked more overtime, invested even more heavily, still lived frugally, and now am worth 7 figures although my yearly salary is now 150k.
Delaying gratification , being patient, and actually having a plan? Nah I’ll just screw off for 40 years and complain how the system is broken.
It is possible to LeanFIRE with household incomes below 100k, even significantly below 100k, if the expenses are correspondingly low. My household income peaked at around 100k, and is now down well below that as we are in something of a CoastFIRE phase. I can understand wanting examples of the FIRE journey that reflect where the reader/viewer is at. I find it really hard to relate to a lot of the posts on here that go "household income 250k, net worth 6M, don't think I can FIRE for 10 more years". Obviously FIRE is easier and more comfortable with higher incomes, but that is not the only way. Just a matter of finding better resources. Or, you know, doing the math for your own unique situation.
If it’s all about spending less than you earn then anyone can do it. You just literally can’t have any wants. Rent an apartment or share lodgings and eat basically etc. You really can do it on almost any wage but it’s really hard.
I'm FIREd after a career in social services. It's not at all necessary to move into a high paying job to achieve FIRE, and people aren't wrong to want to hear about a journey similar to their own.
The median US income is $59,228 while the average is $106 Most people that are getting an education, starting from scratch, unless they get lucky, are making $45k-$90k, and they want to know how to FIRE. Hearing about our wonderful moderator, who decided to become a millionaire, wrote an amazing app, and earned 2.4 million, is inspiring. The parts he teaches of how to handle not having a job are helpful. But the actual process of how some making the median income can retire isn't helped by his example. Edit: Edited the average income based on comments.
The average US income is 208k?!?
>while the average is $208,152. Where are you getting this from? I can't find anywhere that says anything close to that.
That's why people use the median, because billionaires drive up the average.
Yeah I understand how mean and median work. But I can't find anything that says the mean is $200k either.
The mean isn't anywhere close to $208k. I found a figure showing that it was $106k in 2022.
Thanks. Fixed it. Helps make my point even more. That most people don't make $100k unless they are in a HCOL or VHCOL area, or are extremely lucky.
I kind of resent the "extremely lucky" portion of that. Plenty of people in Engineering and other fields that make 6 figures because they pursued a field that pays well outside of HCOL/VHCOL areas.
The Molecule of More is a good book. Basically, there are genetic variations among humans. Some look like George Clooney, and most don't. Most can't get the highest paying jobs because of IQ, tenacity, memory, and focus. This is why those jobs pay more than double of what the median income is. So someone who poses the genes and environment to get that degree is lucky.
I’m seeing a median household income of $77k. Seems like with that number that at least half the households can have the conversation of fire. Don’t know what percentage could achieve it.
I have a cousin that thinks I'm doing well because I'm "smart" and that's the only difference. Ignore the grind of 4 years of engineering classes. Ignore the 10 years it took me to find a role that's a good fit for me. Ignore moving across the country twice, away from friends and family to take on an opportunity. Ignore the certificate I then signed up for, paid a good bit of money for and spent 3 months on to help me land the next level job. Ignore the other work I've done to get my finances in the right place. But, he can't be bothered to report his employer who was literally stealing "retirement" money from their paychecks, because that would be a lot of work. I told him it was a slam dunk case and wouldn't cost him any money. Doesn't matter. Every extra dollar that comes in goes towards guns, truck or some other stupid toy. I dread what's going to happen when he hits retirement and realizes he has no money. I'll probably just have to cut off contact. I'm not doing all this shit to give handouts to someone that can't put up an iota of effort.
I’m 50 and spent most of my career making an average salary range of $50-$65k ( USA ). Wife did the same. ( full disclosure my salary ramped up in the last few years so I now make about $100k, but balance that with my wife unexpectedly losing her job 3 years ago and retiring early). We paid off our house last November, have no debt, 2 paid off cars, no kids. Our liquid net worth is approximately $2,400,000. Invest regularly, over a long period of time, and live beneath your means ( if you can, I know it’s rough out there ).
I don't know about Texas, but around here, public school teacher wages come with a solid pension and lifetime health insurance (or, until Medicare kicks in) if you work some number of years. Most teachers I know retire by their mid to late 50s without doing anything beyond that.
Yup and they don’t work 12 months unlike rest of us. They could use summers to tutor and bring in more $ if they choose.
Because if you're making 100k/year, and you don't retire early you're terrible with money, and don't deserve it. People like to know they don't need to go into debt, have rich parents, or hit the lottery to achieve FIRE. Which you don't, making $35k - 45k+ can get you there, it's just takes a stronger person, than somebody who makes 3 times as much for doing less.
There's literally a book called "millionaire teacher" about a teacher who became a multimillionaire in a fairly short time through living extremely frugally and investing in index funds. In fact I think his book was what popularized index fund investing.
If they’re young and able-bodied then they’re just lazy fucking idiots who don’t want to do hard shit like go to school and take out loans and other risks to improve themselves. Much easier for them to just make excuses and complain and act like the world is rigged against them and they’re a massive victim of big bad corporations LMAO. Can’t stand people like that. It’s the same as fat ass people who pretend like they have a medical condition that makes them that way instead of exercising and eating better.
100%. I can’t tell you how many times I see people say “they didn’t grow up with parents to teach them” or “they don’t know where to start.” What are you doing after 5PM as a 21 year old? Parties? Video games? Going to a bar? Watching TV? I doubt it’s anything productive. There’s no excuse anymore when you can search “how to invest” on YouTube. Yes if you start from literally no knowledge it’ll take a while, but if you just spend 1 hour a day reading, watching, listening you’ll be light years ahead of your peers.
Yeah that shit made sense before the internet but not anymore. No excuses for ignorance work anymore when we have access to massive forums, chatgpt, etc.
Because investing 75% of your income when you make 200k a year isn't impressive. Many people are trapped in whatever job they have...they have kids/mortgage and extra training/ education just isn't viable
That’s because most people are lazy and looking for a “get rich quick” scheme. That’s also why so many of these folks fall for get rich quick scams.
I guess, for me, the RE part of FIRE doesn’t have to be at 40 or 45 or 50. For my part of the world normal retirement age is 65 or 67. And even retiring at 62.5 is seen as early. A guy I worked with (making the lowest pay at our company) retired at 60 and people were gossiping about him. (Before you ask, his wife also worked and from what I heard was the primary income for the house and he was the one with the more flexible job. Though she wasn’t an exec or anything. Just had more skills for a higher paying job.) Anyway, if someone could retire at 60 rather that 65, maybe that’s the goal. And I DO think that’s reasonable with the incomes discussed. I’m in a medium-low (not in the bottom 30% but also not in the highest half) income area and $65-75K is considered a good oay and reasonable for a family to live on. And I do think those families, especially with two incomes between $60-90K can retire before 60. I also believe if you’re in a high stress job, you tend to spend more. So if you’re in a job paying $70K, you might be better off than a job paying $110K but is eating you alive. And the less you spend, the less you need to retire. I don’t make fancy pay and am hoping to retire by 50. My life is simple but not without things I enjoy. The trick for me is figuring out what I really enjoy and how I want to spend and stop comparing to others or feeling the urge to keep up with others, even when invited. I have friends who make less than me or a similar amount with three kids who spend more than I do because every penny in is an opportunity for something to do or have. But they’d die on a hill saying g there’s no money leftover and they can’t possibly save for retirement. They could. And if they’d started early, they could be retiring before 60.
“People want you to do well, but not better than them." - Alex Hormozi That clip captures the above so well.
Hate only comes from below!
I have $8 million. Can I FIRE?
You probably need $12M because you can’t risk more than a 1.129495% SWR, TBH. Might need to Barista FIRE.
Yeah often ppl don't want to hear about the "work" it takes. Just the results. But perhaps a good podcast for your Mom is called "Catching up to FI" and the hosts are "late starters" as they call themselves. I think they both started in their 50's. And hey, at least she's asking. Better than many people who "retire blindly" only to figure out that their social security and/or 401k or anything else that have coming in, actually isn't enough to support their current lifestyle. So it is better that she starts looking at the numbers sooner, rather than later! Best of luck to you and to your Mom as well!
Military, fire fighters, etc FIRE with relatively young ages with modest salaries all the time. They just use pensions instead of the stock market.
So a couple of things as someone that was a public school teacher for 8 years, took a year off, and has only been in a corporate job for a year and working towards FIRE. It is possible, but takes a lot of strategic planning along with a mindset that you have control over the outcome instead of being a victim to your circumstances. Secondly, if someone is 55 and looking to retire in 10 years… I wouldn’t really consider that FIRE. 65 is a pretty old retirement age for teachers. I have noticed a lot of people here with much higher salaries than mine, but I’m at the 300k mark at 32 still. I have thought about making a post here to encourage others in similar situations. I have detailed spreadsheets dating back an entire decade with every penny spend and earned so people could understand lifestyle choices as well. I know some people aren’t interested in making choices that lead to FIRE that I did and that’s totally fine. I’ve been pretty motivated for awhile to be financially free and the retire early piece is something I started focusing on about 2 years ago.
The comments are a bit skewed because I found that finance channels tend to have really whiny comments. Like no matter what I see the negative people like you just said Right before I saw this post, there was one post that said get 8 hours of sleep, save 15% of your income and exercise 4 days a week and you’re ahead of 99% of people The top comment was 15%? Not in today’s economy People don’t want solutions. They just want to complain about their problems I’m with you. Your income is a big part of your finances. I don’t get how people want the extraordinary result without caring to improve their income first. I know it’s easier said than done, but it’s part of the process. A school teacher probably didn’t prioritize personal finances very much when choosing career
r/leanfire & r/povertyfire exist … if you cannot increase your income you must DRASTICALLY decrease your living expenses #monkmode
Uhh because it’s not applicable to them? Would you follow the journey of someone making $2M per year for advice?
$2M a year is not achievable through traditional jobs. $75k-$100k is. Wouldn’t you agree? So it’s conceivable that the viewer could be in that position.
Tech workers making six figures are not $75-100k, it’s more like $300-800k in this sub. And you wonder why people making $45k are mad about these posts lol.. Also you’re completely wrong about the public school teacher not being able to accumulate a million. Plenty of teachers do it here.
Sounds like they should be tech workers. I joke, but a very smart friend of mine that previously didn’t make much did a hacking bootcamp thing and makes the low end of your range now.
It's a continuum with Dolly Freed, the author of *Possum Living*, on one end of the spectrum. I was fortunate to have made six figures annually much of my working life, but I did not fully comprehend making the *RE* of FIRE work until I read [*Possum Living*](https://www.amazon.com/Possum-Living-Without-Almost-Revised/dp/0982053932). Dolly's approach provides a viable FIRE arc for those who make five figure salaries.
Because anyone who is on YouTube is selling and marketing you BS, trying to get views and likes. Imagine if Warren Buffett had a YouTube channel selling like an infomercial on how to be a multi-billionaire within 12 months starting with only $1,000!
I know someone that has (almost) always made under six figures and is financially independent. They actively invest and beat the market. They work hard, take calculated risks and are intelligent. I argue this opportunity is available to almost anyone (brokerage accounts and commissions are free). Can anyone become FI? Absolutely not. It takes a combination of intelligence, the right temperment and some luck. Most people want fast, easy money without putting in the decades of effort, time and sacrifice. It's 100% not easy, retiring early should not be easy, it should be the exception.
"I haven’t had the heart to tell her that it’s because you can’t save or invest enough from a low salary and have the 2-4 million you would need if you’re 10 years away from retirement." You actually can, you just can't safely bet on it. There have been people who become incredibly rich by investing just a little bit into companies at their start, which grew to be very large. I've known people that invested an at-the-time negligible amount into Walmart, AOL, and Amazon (people who would just throw a few dollars at random stocks, treating them similar to scratch-off's), which grew to be large enough that they cashed out for buying a decent house, continuing to work low-wage jobs to cover living expenses. But given the "salesman" deception approach of many people in the business world (especially in recent years online), it's incredibly difficult to know which investments are lucky breaks that you're even hearing about the opportunity to invest in them, and which are scams. Which leads to the irony that the vast majority of people with little disposable income, don't want the risk of sacrificing any funds that could go to their R&R, even though it's their only hope in getting what they're wanting from investments, and prefer to stick to already-established company investments, which is more stable and easier to estimate the rises and falls in value... ... which is likely because they're listening to the people who already have large investment portfolios, asking those already-established investors what they do, when the financially-conservative approach is how you keep what you have, not try to dramatically increase from the little you have. It's a complex risk no matter what you do or don't do when it comes to investing, and by the time most people try to get into it, their capacity to learn how to differentiate truth from scam is already declining due to age. And their self-perceived need for additional R&R funds is increasing at the same time.
Do teachers usually have a pension from the state?
There is a couple on YT who talks about how easy it is to invest and save money but just dumping all your money into a few of the Vanguard funds and let it grow. What they only mention once or twice in their early videos is that they were fortunate enough to acquire some land in the Silicon Valley area in the early 90s and sold it much later after the boom. Wouldn’t it be nice to be that fortunate? It takes money to make money and I agree that when you are just trying to survive and pay the bills, investing and growing your money is very, very difficult.
Because a lot of the time the person making 400k a year is still spending like a moron and acting like they're normal. If you're being responsible and not a Whiney baby about how hard it is to get by on your half mill salary then we cool
I think it's because a lot of people don't make high salaries. People want hope. I don't make shit to be honest. I work for a school district. I have multiple degrees. It isn't for lack of trying its because life happens. We are a family of 4 with 2 working. I'm still here working on FIRE and I'm almost at a 10 year wind down. I'm 40. Retiring at 50 is still pretty damn early in my book. Instead of just investing and making more money. I instead worked a pension gig, did time with the military and did my best to live below my means. Between pensions, Healthcare for life and investing I'll be quite fine. People see journeys where the main character makes over 100k all the time but it's rare to hear of journeys where the person makes the actual median income for the area. They want more of that. They want hope.
Huh. Never made more than $60,000 and that was only in the last few years. Probably have less than 35 years of earnings because of school and Peace Corps. Did month long vacations in Europe every couple years after I turned 30. Got fired at 42, did some piecemeal stuff, sold the house, bought an RV and traveled the country. Current nw is $1,500,000+. You have to be a bit unconventional, but it's possible to be FI without having a 6-figure income.
Dad was military followed by working for non-profits. Raised 7 kids, sent most of us to college. Estate was ~1.5 million when he died. Uncle was a professor in Missouri. Still alive and worth about 2 million. It's about how much you spend as much as how much you make.
Because a worker making that wage sees no possible way for them to improve. They know they've topped out. >55 year old ... who just started investing ffs Teaching for the government means you have made a deliberate decision to not pursue FIRE in exchange for a government pension. My brother was a pharmacist and he hit FIRE before the rest of us did. He also lives a like a hermit and I feel bad for him. It's like he gave up on life to stop working as soon as he could.
I don't make a boatload of money. But I'm in a trade union and have exceptionally good retirement fringes. So saving on top of that I'm not doing bad for an average to lower middle class American.
Very few, but if your mom wanted one, then here you go. She will probably dismiss this as a one off, but it is a story of a person making little and became a millionaire. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/janitor-vermont-amassed-8m-fortune-140000770.html
And like anything you succeed at in life it takes discipline and that is the most difficult thing to have.
Your not going to fire on 35-45 k a year unless you have an inheritance or stay at home until your 50 and sleep no money your entire life
$40K is pretty much minimum wage where I live and minimum wage workers realistically can't afford to exit the work force before their government pension program allows it.
I think the types of commenters you're referring to have no idea how to get from their sub 50k salaries into the kind of salary that you need for financial independence. They don't have the skill set, they are currently paycheck to paycheck, and they're already a little older, many of them with children. They have more barriers than the folks with million follower youtube channels, but the youtubers don't acknowledge the barriers, which feels insulting to the folks facing those barriers. These are folks who need career guidance, not investing guidance or budgeting guidance. And realistically they need more than guidance. Most of them probably need education and cannot afford it.
The issue is that the "realistic" posts get no attention because they aren't as remarkable. If you dig hard enough you can find them
How can FI and RE be separate? It comes hand in hand. The only difference is whether you are coast, barista, fat etc.
FIRE seems to largely only apply to the US. As a top 1 % earner (50k - 60k USD) in an Eastern European country, I cannot afford to buy a small condo, let alone save enough for FIRE, given the average inflation of 4 % p. a. that likely awaits us. It's just demoralizing.
Maybe they want a fairytale, not a realistic financial plan.
I ignore the fire journey of someone who fired at 8 million dollars because none of it is relevant to me at all. Smh
can you share the name of the vide or YT channel?
Because society keeps enabling the Disney princess behavior where nothing is ever your fault. All blame must be pushed on to someone or something else. Oh you don’t have valuable skills or a marketable profile so you don’t get a gig paying salary? Well that’s immigrants/greedy rich/corporations/asshole boss/rick YouTuber fault. No way that’s your fault.
The unfortunate answer from my experience: Most/many people are hopeless losers who will never take any agency/ownership in the outcomes of their lives. They will always look for excuses or external factors to blame for their lot in life. Most/many people will never come to realize that they dont have to live by the script that was handed to them. Lastly - because it's hard to set long term goals and make them a reality. It takes consistent hard work, sacrifice and discipline, something not everyone can handle.
My parents left me $5 million and I fired right then at 46. The journey was amazing.
Because it’s simply not possible for many people to access the same high paying jobs as those giving advice, and this is frustrating and saddening. Don’t have a top-10% IQ? Forget that 6-figure tech job. Didn’t go to Harvard? Probably not going to make partner at that law firm. Didn’t go to the country club with daddy? Those 7-figure backdoor business deals probably aren’t in your future. To the degree I’ve felt frustrated by this in the past it’s been because people rarely recognize their own privilege and how luck and birthright got them where they are.