FIRE Archives - Page 9 of 11

“Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins: Book Report (haha)

The premise of “Die with Zero” sounds provocative: Bill Perkins argues you should plan to spend all your money before you die, optimizing for maximum life experiences rather than maximum wealth at death. Not “die debt-free” — that’s a different book. Perkins is talking about people who will almost certainly die with millions in unspent savings because they never gave themselves permission to spend it on things that actually mattered while they were healthy enough to enjoy them. The title is deliberately extreme. The actual argument is more nuanced than it sounds.

I picked it up because I’m interested in the other end of the FIRE question — not just how to achieve financial independence, but what to actually do with it.

Early Retirement Extreme: What I Actually Think

Early retirement extreme is the name of both a book and a philosophy — Jacob Lund Fisker’s take on FIRE, built around a savings rate so aggressive it makes the rest of the FIRE community look relaxed by comparison. The core pitch: cut spending down to something close to a student budget, save the rest, and you can be done working in roughly five to seven years instead of the standard four decades. I retired early myself, on a much less extreme version of this math, and I’ve got genuinely mixed feelings about ERE — some of it I think is the most useful idea in the whole FIRE space, and some of it I think oversells how many people can actually live it.

Continue reading “Early Retirement Extreme: What I Actually Think”

The business of busyness

Let’s face it, we live in a culture that glorifies busyness. The business of busyness. It’s as if being busy is a badge of honor that we wear with pride. We fill our schedules to the brim with meetings, appointments, and endless to-do lists. But why? Are we really accomplishing anything or are we just spinning our wheels?

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.