FIRE Archives - Page 9 of 11

Early retirement for Dummies

If you dream of early retirement so that you can live comfortably, go on vacation when the mood strikes, and spend more and more time with your loved ones without stress, I admire your courage and creativity. If these traits weren’t present, you wouldn’t be reading “Early Retirement for Dummies”. Without insightful guidance, unlimited encouragement, and just a little bit of courage, you could never achieve the life you desire to live.

I myself also took early retirement to fulfill those desires that I discussed above, so I can understand what you are feeling now. But early retirement is not for all. Some who retire early are proud of their decision, while others struggle and face challenges. In this article, “Early Retirement for Dummies”, I will share some tips for early retirement from my personal experience.

But before I dig in on the tips for retiring early, I want to let you know what early retirement means, who it is for, or who it is not for.

Early retirement groupthink

I keep noticing a very annoyingly condescending attitude in the FIRE (financial independence/retire early) “community” towards people outside of it, the “normal” people. I think this is the consequence of early retirement groupthink.

What am I talking about?

Some of the symptoms of this problem are: mocking people that work full time, policing FIRE people that work on gigs or part-time projects, and idolizing people that reached FIRE. Ironically, those gig-and-part-time folks are often practicing what now has a name — Barista FIRE, and its quieter cousin Coast FIRE.

Easterlin Paradox and Early Retirement

Throughout this post, I discuss the relationship between two concepts from the field of Economics(?): the Easterlin paradox and early retirement.

Early retirement is a controversial issue in economics and personal finance. I have written about it in an earlier post. Many Americans consider early retirement more than just a chance to have the most relaxing time of their lives. They can either succeed or drown at a crucial point in their lives from this point.

Easterlin paradox, on the other hand (or coincidently?), explores the relationship between income and happiness, or lack thereof.

Sell tradelines to earn money: what it actually looks like

I found out you could sell tradelines to earn money the same way most people do — by accident. I was digging around the Mr. Money Mustache forum, looking for something more useful to do with my credit cards, and someone mentioned authorized user tradelines. (I remember thinking it sounded almost too passive to be real. I still think that sometimes.)

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The Simple Path to Wealth (book review)

“The Simple Path to Wealth” is the book by Jim Collins, that compiles and re-organizes everything in his Stock Series posts from the blog he started a few years ago to teach his daughter about finances.

The Simple Path to Wealth I read his blog from beginning to end once and then just his Stock Series a second time. And then when I read the book I didn’t get much new (it was my third time reading the material after all) but the book is better organized (obviously) and is a bit more succinct (Collins tends to be a bit verbose in his blog), so if you read a few of his posts and they “click” then you may want to try and read the book. Also, having the book makes it easier to share with friends that could benefit from the knowledge (kind of part of my idea when I bought it).

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