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Thread: FIRE

  1. #1
    Yppej
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    FIRE

    I saw a piece on ABC World News Tonight about this program called Financial Independence and Retire Early. To get to the needed savings I would have to put aside an amount in excess of my take home pay. It's the same idea as Your Money or Your Life but not doable unless you start young and/or earn a lot.

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    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yppej View Post
    It's the same idea as Your Money or Your Life but not doable unless you start young and/or earn a lot.
    I see YMOYL and FIRE as different things.

    My primary takeaway from YMOYL was the idea of justifying what you spend your money on by making the link between work effort and result more tangible. Want the shiny new car instead of the late-model used one? Okay. Still want it if it means working for an entire year's income just to pay the difference in the cost? Fine. But at least you know where those 250 days of work are going and that you're alright with passing up other items/events to get it.

    FIRE is arranging your income (from wherever) so it covers your expenses. For example, DW is worried that we'll still have a mortgage payment when she retires. There's no practical way for us to pay it off in a year and a half. But we have sufficient income to cover the mortgage as part of our retirement income flow. Will it be nice when it goes away? Sure. But we're covered.

    There is overlap between the concepts, but I don't see them as very similar except that both make you think about what you spend your money on.

    DW and I were talking the other day. She's eyeing retirement at the end of 2019. She's mentioned more than once lately, though, that she'd be OK working another couple of months so we could go on a cruise somewhere. Or to take the grandkids on a trip by air. At one point I mentioned that making work/income tangible was the idea behind YMOYL. She'd never heard of the book but liked the concept and now is lining up things (actually, mostly experiences) she'd like to have if she works another couple of months/another year/whatever. She may change her mind at any point. But at least she now sees why she might want to work longer rather than stop next year and go without items we do not have in our long-term budget.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  3. #3
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yppej View Post
    I saw a piece on ABC World News Tonight about this program called Financial Independence and Retire Early. To get to the needed savings I would have to put aside an amount in excess of my take home pay. It's the same idea as Your Money or Your Life but not doable unless you start young and/or earn a lot.
    I didnt know how to take this post because it seems to me that’s what we do here, work toward FIRE. Are we NOT doing that? Isnt that our basic premise here? Hmmm, maybe not. But its gotta be at least ONE of a very few basic ideas here on this site. That is what YMOYLis about. I almost thought the OP was being sarcastic.

    But now I see that Steve has a different take on the original post. Now I feel as though I have been living happily in the wrong country for years.

  4. #4
    Yppej
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    I was reading more last night and standard retirement calculators give 10 times your annual salary at retirement which could be less than 25 times your annual expenditures recommended by FIRE. Both are daunting to me, as is the idea that one needs $100,000.00 per person for post-retirement medical costs. There is a lot the premium-free portion of Medicare does not cover.

  5. #5
    Senior Member rosarugosa's Avatar
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    Yppej: I think those "rules" saying you need x dollars in order to be able to retire are not taking into account income streams like pensions and SS.

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    I think a lot of terms and systems are created to describe and work toward basically one simple condition. Strip away all the jargon, acronyms and formulas, and it's basically just about obtaining an income independent of employment. It's been compared to losing weight. We know what we need to do: it's simple but difficult. Eat less and exercise to weigh less. Spend less and invest to have more.

  7. #7
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    But now I see that Steve has a different take on the original post. Now I feel as though I have been living happily in the wrong country for years.
    Maybe not... You've been on this forum far longer than I have and what I've read over the years here suggests that the initial "ownership" of the forum pointed far more in the direction of financial planning than the forum does now.

    When I found this forum and joined back in 2012 (wow...), I saw a like-minded group trying to live life simply, without defining it purely in income/expense terms or with an ascetic approach. I think the forum now has moved further away from even that norm. Participants have come and gone as a result, just as they did the first time the site morphed.

    For the sake of not drifting too far off-topic, I will reiterate that I see YMOYL and FIRE as overlapping ideas. One can recognize even at 55 or 60 that they are spending too long each week at a job they dislike for stuff they haven't thought about consuming (YMOYL) and they can take YMOYL principles to heart without being anywhere near true FIRE status. Similarly, there are people (not many here, I don't think) who are all about the FIRE and who will do whatever it takes to get there because that's more of a motivator to them than what job they do or where they live or what their livs are like on weekends. Saves yer money, takes yer choice.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

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    Quote Originally Posted by SteveinMN View Post
    Maybe not... You've been on this forum far longer than I have and what I've read over the years here suggests that the initial "ownership" of the forum pointed far more in the direction of financial planning than the forum does now.

    When I found this forum and joined back in 2012 (wow...), I saw a like-minded group trying to live life simply, without defining it purely in income/expense terms or with an ascetic approach. I think the forum now has moved further away from even that norm. Participants have come and gone as a result, just as they did the first time the site morphed.

    For the sake of not drifting too far off-topic, I will reiterate that I see YMOYL and FIRE as overlapping ideas. One can recognize even at 55 or 60 that they are spending too long each week at a job they dislike for stuff they haven't thought about consuming (YMOYL) and they can take YMOYL principles to heart without being anywhere near true FIRE status. Similarly, there are people (not many here, I don't think) who are all about the FIRE and who will do whatever it takes to get there because that's more of a motivator to them than what job they do or where they live or what their livs are like on weekends. Saves yer money, takes yer choice.
    I think too that FI was a big part of YMOYL, that "crossover point" on the graph where the income (I think it was passive income, basically, although you can definitely define that different ways) exceeded the expenses each year, so you worked at getting the expenses down, or you worked at getting the job income up long enough to transition to that FI state--remember the story about the waitress who achieved FI in 18 months, by being super waitress?

    I have read MMM forums and Early Retirement (which uses the FIRE acronym) and prefer ours, because accumulation of wealth seems most important on those, with a lot of aggressive show-off ness about accumulation of wealth and putting down others without so much accumulated. But obviously, YMMV on any forum!

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    so you worked at getting the expenses down, or you worked at getting the job income up long enough to transition to that FI state--remember the story about the waitress who achieved FI in 18 months, by being super waitress?
    good for the waitress, and getting expenses down is the easy part as I don't care about things all that much, but as for income - I've been in the running for jobs paying 6 figures and jobs paying half that, such a wide range really, and I have come to realize that though beggars can't be choosers, immediate pay is so low down on the list of what matters to me in a job, way below if I think it uses my talents/strengths well, if it 's a dead end or opens up opportunities, commute, hours, etc.. Of course I don't turn down raises either But it all amounts to a visceral feel, how do I feel about this job?
    Trees don't grow on money

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    Good point, APN, about the range of conditions that make up the job and the job experience and the net drain or net contribution to our health.

    The waitress was a specific story in the book--who knows, maybe the waitress was Suze Orman, at the Buttercup Bakery.

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