Financial Independence Retire Early or FIRE has been gaining a lot of traction in the last couple of years. It has been primarily a movement centered around millennial tech workers but is gaining acceptance across all demographics. There are tons of blogs, podcast, youtube channels, books, facebook groups and even a movie dedicated to this movement.
The FIRE movement is really pretty basic: save as much of your income as fast as possible and retire early. Sounds pretty basic right? At its core, FIRE is straight forward. However, for most of America, it requires us to change the way that we think and what we value. The truly hardcore FIRE disciples try to save/invest up towards 50% of their yearly income and invest it either in the stock market or real estate to create passive income and retire early (usually in your 40’s but some retire much earlier). This is a tall order for most of America because our savings rate is dismal and we don’t believe in delayed gratification.
I have been a convert of this movement before FIRE was a thing. As soon as I joined the Military, I started investing. I didn’t actually know very much about investing but I started putting money into a mutual fund. This was around 2000 and the tech bubble burst soon after and my $10K went down dramatically. Then 9/11 happened and it went down even further. I was blessed by a good financial advisor and Military Leadership who told me that its only a “paper loss.” I kept the money in mutual funds and continued to do my monthly contributions. Once the military opened up the Thrift Savings Plan (403B) to all members, I started investing in that for retirement. At this point, we have IRA’s, TSP, 401K’s, 529’s, and taxable accounts. We’ve been blessed. My ultimate goal was always to retire from the military and go back to our farm. We are now 2 years away from making that a reality!
I’ll try to do more post on this topic in the future.