Is FIRE – Financial Independence Retire Early – the best way for most of us to change our lives for the better? Author, podcaster, and entrepreneur Rob Dix is back to suggest another approach. Please enjoy this extract from his upcoming book: Seven Myths About Money: And The Truth About Finding Financial Freedom.
MYTH – If you work hard enough today, retirement will be your reward.
REALITY – It’s more realistic, and more satisfying, to find ways to earn indefinitely – just without the hard work.
Luke Pittard was 23 when he won £1.3 million on the lottery. Enough for him to immediately quit his job at his local McDonald’s in Cardiff, and enough – if invested wisely – for him to never have to work again.
And at first that was his plan – except it didn’t turn out that way. Within a few months Luke started to find his new life of luxury a bit dull. “To be honest, there’s only so much relaxing you can do. I’m only young and a bit of hard work never did anyone any harm.”
Eventually, he went back to his old job. “I enjoy going to work and all my mates work here,’ he said. The only change? Instead of walking to and from work, he now gets a taxi.”
Luke isn’t alone. Mark Brudenell won nearly a million pounds on the lottery and initially spent three years flying around the world on luxury holidays – but then got bored and set up his own double glazing business. He says he puts “more hours into the business than I ever did working before” and doesn’t even touch the remainder of his lottery winnings.
Roy Gibney won £7.5 million and said: “I gave up work for 14 years, but I got bored. I started a sheet metal business, and I’m fitter and happier than I’ve been for years.”
All in all, a third of lottery jackpot winners set up their own business, and almost the same amount again go back to life as an employee. And it’s not because they’ve foolishly blown it all: even if they don’t need the money, it turns out that work meets a deep-seated need for meaning and social connection.
Catching FIRE
This claim would be hotly disputed by advocates of a philosophy that revolves around escaping the world of work as quickly as possible.
Catchily entitled FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early – it would go from being a fringe lifestyle to a mainstreammovement in the wake of the 2007– 2008 financial crisis.
FIREites preach that you should spend a decade or two working insanely hard and saving the majority of what you earn, build up a big pile of investments, then quit work and live off that pile for ever.
The idea is basically to speed run the normal career path: by saving at far above the normal rate (it’s not unusual for hardcore FIRE followers to save more than 50% of what they earn), you can retire closer to your fortieth birthday than your sixtieth.
The trouble, as many of those who successfully FIREd themselves discovered, wasn’t the self-denial or the performance of the financial markets. It was this: the type of person who has both the type of job (a high paying, high status one) and the motivation to put themselves in a position to retire so young isn’t also going to be the type of person who enjoys unbroken decades of endless relaxation.
As one 51-year-old FIRE ‘success story’ put it in a blog post: “Now I’m living the Early Retirement dream. Guess what? I find myself fantasising about returning to work.”
A year of dabbling with badminton, joining a local book club and volunteering at the community garden later, and he did just that.
The myth of early retirement
Don’t get me wrong: there are elements of the FIRE philosophy that I strongly agree with, not least its focus on getting out of a job you hate and bringing your financial life under your own control as soon as possible.
But its fatal flaw is that it ignores the ample academic research indicating that retirement isn’t the rose- tinted dream most of us expect it to be – and can even be disastrous for our mental wellbeing.
For example, researchers from Binghamton University in New York looked at data from rural China, which historically lacked the structured pension provision available in urban areas. In 2009, a pension scheme began to be introduced that aimed to eventually cover all rural areas. But its gradual roll- out proved to be the perfect natural experiment: suddenly, retirement became a possibility for some elderly Chinese citizens but not others.
Surely, the researchers assumed, the people who retired would be happier and healthier than those who didn’t?
Not quite. In their analysis of more than 17,000 people, the researchers found that, ten years after the introduction of pensions, the rate of cognitive decline had greatly accelerated in the areas where people had been receiving the extra support. And it wasn’t just their cognitive abilities that suffered; it was their mood too. “It looks like the negative effect on social engagement [of retirement] far outweighed the positive effect of the program on nutrition and sleep,” one of the researchers concluded.
All in all, the evidence indicates that we shouldn’t find the stories of lottery winners as surprising as we do. Retirement, The Economist recently summarised, often leads to losses “of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance.”
Right to retire?
Except none of this has made much of a dent in the popular belief that we should build our lives around the desire to retire.
In the UK and US, policies to increase the age at which you can collect retirement benefits from 65 to 67 have been met with much grumbling and resistance. In France, more than a million people took to the streets when the government tried to increase the pension age from 62 to 64 in 2023.
And while governments are trying to push retirement age back, our general perception seems to be that mid-sixties is already rather too late: a study of Millennial Americans put the ideal retirement age at 61.
For many people, early – or at least early-ish – retirement is clearly the ultimate goal. But should it be?
The trouble is, earning is the most powerful of the financial levers we have – and so wanting to retire early means less time benefiting from this power as we try to compress our earning into as short a time as possible.
If there were another way to think about earning – one that emphasised making money without the endless grind – we might realise that there are some altogether more fulfilling (and lucrative) ways to think about our working lives.
The solution isn’t to escape the world of work as early as you can, or to cross your fingers and pray for a lottery win: it’s to find a way to sustainably live a dream life that has income- generation built into it. It’s not giving up on earning, but finding ways to earn that don’t monopolise your time.
And, fortunately, there are ways to keep on making money well into your seventies and beyond – offering all the leisure and free time we now associate with retirement, plus a dollop of extra personal satisfaction and mental reward on top.
Breaking the time–money connection
On Reddit, 279,000 people are members of a community called ‘Overemployed’. Its contributors have figured out that they’re able to meet the basic requirements of their job in half of a conventional working week – so rather than scrolling social media like the rest of us, they’ve taken on a second job to fill the other half.
Some take it even further. One user racked up four jobs, then quit one – complaining of ‘too many meetings’. Another has five ‘full-time’ jobs in tech, adding up to nearly a million dollars in combined salary.
One user summed up the sentiment of the subreddit: “don’t have to be perfect, no need to be the best, just do enough . . . And coast.”
Of course, this is only possible because they’re doing it covertly. If their bosses knew how efficiently they were fulfilling their duties, they wouldn’t be delighted – they’d be horrified, and probably cut their working days (and pay) in half. That sentiment is understandable: most of us instinctively feel that sneakily holding down two jobs at once is wrong.
When you think about it, though, if they can provide enough full-time value to satisfy two (or more) companies at once, why shouldn’t they?
It’s not their fault they’re not working at capacity: if their boss is happy, why should they ask for more work or twiddle their thumbs?
Compensation culture
The reason working two jobs simultaneously feels so immoral is our deeply ingrained sense that time is money. We’re used to compensation being based either explicitly on an hourly rate, or being paid a salary on the assumption that you’ll be working a particular number of hours.
Yet why should pay be determined by the hours you work rather than the value you provide?
If your car has broken down and it takes the repair guy five minutes to fix it, you don’t calculate a ‘reasonable’ hourly rate and try to pay a twelfth of it: you’re grateful he got you back on the road so quickly and pay whatever he demands. It took Ed Sheeran less than half an hour to write Thinking Out Loud, and he’s earned millions from that song alone. Does that feel unreasonable to you? Would you tap your toe more vigorously if he’d slaved over it for weeks?
These examples hint at another way to think about work, earnings and retirement. There is a way to keep earning money easily, without having to set an arbitrary retirement goal – and it involves breaking the connection between time and money altogether.
Admittedly, they are outliers: not everyone will achieve their level of success. But nor do they need to.
After all, if you could just earn as much as you do now while enjoying what you do and without needing to work anything close to forty hours a week, would you still feel under pressure to retire by a certain date?
The three levels of financial independence
Okay, this all sounds great – but how do you do it?
Well, I think of financial independence not as a result, but a process: one that typically involves moving through three levels.
Level 1: Embrace the connection
Inevitably, for most of us time and money start off being inextricably linked. You might only be paid once you’ve punched in and the clock starts ticking, or be required to sit in an office between certain hours if you want to keep your job (and therefore your salary). If you can work from home and sneak in the odd laundry load on company time, you’re one of the lucky ones.
But employment isn’t all bad. Think of it as an apprenticeship: a period during which you’ll have certainty about when and how much you’ll be paid, and be able to build your skills and hone your craft by getting involved in big projects with talented people. It’s a step that – even if we dream of escaping it from depressingly early on – most of us benefit from.
Even if you graduated top of your class from a prestigious university, when you move on to any real-world job you’ll start out being pretty crap at it. If you lived or died by your results, you’d probably die – so having some leeway to learn while still getting paid is exactly what you need. Even beyond the early stages of your career, there’s a benefit in learning from the people around you and getting in plenty of ‘reps’ at whatever you’ve chosen as the skill or area you want to master.
Yes, I’m painting the rosiest possible picture of the world of work here. Most people don’t float through the office door on a cloud of gratitude about all the opportunities they’re exposed to: they feel under-appreciated, sick of playing politics, and resentful.
But there are ways to maximise your opportunities in Level 1 while preparing yourself to move to Level 2: to be precise, three of them.
1: Re-frame
Most people, explicitly or implicitly, see their career as something that happens ‘to’ them, based on the actions of other people.
Your boss won’t give you a raise. You’re stuck on a dead-end project. Your ideas are always overlooked. If a better opportunity comes along, it’s pure luck.
The first step is to re-frame your career as something you’re in control of, and approach it strategically. You’re giving up a large proportion of your waking hours: what are you getting in return? If the answer is ‘not enough’, then you need to honestly assess whether you’re worth enough or whether you’re currently in the wrong place. Remember, your time in employment is your apprenticeship – and it falls upon you to get the most out of it.
What would you be doing differently if you were taking absolute responsibility for acquiring the skills you need to escape?
In the academic literature this sense of personal responsibility is known as ‘career self-efficacy’,
and research from around the world has demonstrated its powerful effects.
In one study, academics in Germany followed more than 700 people from the point of graduation, and found that high self-efficacy translated into better pay and higher work satisfaction seven years later.
This is not the same as deluding yourself that everything about your job is within your control: in reality, other people do have an influence and some things will affect you unfairly. You will, sometimes, be overlooked for a promotion because someone else has bonded with the boss over drinks after work, for example.
You don’t need to stare at yourself in the mirror and repeat ‘I am the prize!’ every morning, but merely acting as if everything is within your control will improve your results.
2: Keep learning
Your ability to break the time–money connection will rest upon the value of the skills you have developed. Some of these will come naturally from experience – but there are a few specific areas you can focus on to speed you towards Level 2, and give your earnings an immediate boost too.
One of these is to learn specialist skills that can lead you into particularly well-paying areas of your field. For example, according to a global report on the link between skills and earnings, IT professionals who earn a new certification can increase their salary by $12,000 or more. That’s one heck of a premium for taking some training courses or doing some self-study.
Similarly, a report from The Project Management Institute (who, I admit, may not be a wholly disinterested party) found that those with a project management qualification earn 22 per cent more than those who lack one. Whichever line of work you’re in, there will likely be an equivalent.
You can also develop ‘soft skills’ that transfer across roles and industries – and will also stand you in good stead if you strike out on your own when we move on to Level 2.
For example, a study from the University of California found that people who demonstrated leadership skills earlier in life earned up to 33% more as adults, even after controlling for differences in intelligence and other traits. Separately, a study of more than 42,000 people by TalentSmart found that employees with high emotional intelligence (EQ) earned an average of $29,000 more per year than those with low EQ.
How do you develop these skills? While there are formal courses and qualifications out there, the most effective way of learning is a mix of deliberate self-study (like reading books or listening to podcasts) and seizing opportunities to learn on the job.
This is why re-framing is a critical first step: by mentally taking ownership of your career, you’ll spot development opportunities that otherwise would have passed you by.
With minimal extra learning, you might even be able to take a strategic side- step.
For example, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that journalists earn a median wage of $49,300, whereas for public relations specialists it’s $66,750. The skills involved? Very similar – I used to work in public relations, and journalists would move across to join us on ‘the dark side’ all the time, relying on their existing knowledge and networks.
3: Forget loyalty
An analysis of 18 million employment records by Yahoo Money found that job switchers routinely increased their pay by significantly more than those who stayed put.
The reason doesn’t take much figuring out.
When a company is hiring a new employee, they have no choice but to pay the market rate for someone with their desired level of skills and experience. Yet when they want to retain an existing employee, they can rely on inertia.
If someone enjoys their job and earns some kind of pay rise, are they really going to look around? Do they even know they’d earn more if they were newly hired into their current role?
Of course, happiness is important: if you like where you work, you might not want to take the risk of leaving for a role you end up hating. But you don’t need to leave; you just need to keep looking around.
For a start, actively looking will give you a sense of what you could or should be earning in your current role: if your company was hiring a replacement for you, how much would they pay? If you’re not being rewarded with the pay rises you think you should be, you can then take it a step further: be offered a role elsewhere, then ask your employer to match it if they want you to stay.
Put starkly, the key to higher earnings is to put yourself in a position where your employer needs you more than you need them. In every company there are a few people who by handing in their resignation could cause the CEO to cancel their plans for the day and throw everything at getting them to change their mind. Your aim is to be this person.
This largely comes down to solving problems that other people can’t (or won’t), and being a ‘safe pair of hands’.
The person in my company who’s risen through the ranks the fastest got there because she got the job done every single time – without drama or complaint. Every time a new area of responsibility came along it ended up with her, because we knew for sure it’d be done well. Sometimes that meant her working late, or scrambling to figure something out that she’d never done before – but it was worth it, because she made herself irreplaceable.
Making these three changes will shift the impact equation in your favour: you’ll be adding more value, and capturing more of it for yourself. The difference this makes to your earning power in the next three to five years could be enormous.
Earning is by far the most powerful lever you have – so taking a deliberate approach to your career can have a bigger impact than decades of disciplined saving or any amount of effort to transform yourself into an investing genius.
It might be that taking these steps is enough for you: you’ll be earning more, and be in a position to call the shots. This transformed power dynamic and a newly padded payslip may keep you happily clocking in all the way to the typical retirement age and beyond.
But if you do want to go further, the skills you’ve developed have set you up perfectly for Level 2.
Level 2: Loosen the connection
When Steve Jobs left Apple to start his new company, NeXT, he needed a logo. Being Steve Jobs, he wanted the best – so he approached legendary designer Paul Rand.
Rand knew his value: he demanded a fee of $100,000. There would be no consultation, and no revisions: he’d receive $100,000, deliver what he thought was the best visual concept, and that would be it. Jobs agreed – and Rand received $100,000 for two weeks’ work. (If you ask me, the logo was pretty awful, but that’s by the by.)
This is an extreme example of loosening the connection between time and money. Rand did, at some point, have to sit down and do the work. He did need to deliver by a particular deadline. But he didn’t send Steve Jobs an invoice listing the number of hours he’d worked: he was selling the result rather than selling his time.
A less extreme example of someone operating at Level 2 is my friend Richard. After twenty years working in finance roles at major banks, he struck out on his own as a consultant. He still sells his time – but as a consultant he sells it by the day, not as part of a salary. And because he’s proven himself to be able to deliver a certain result during that time, his day rate is what he likes to call ‘reassuringly expensive’. At the moment, he consults for a couple of different companies for a total of three days per week.
Every weekend is a long one, which – along with breaks between contracts – allows him to routinely rack up the type of unforgettable experiences that would normally have to wait until ‘retirement’. If his travel plans require more cash, he can take on more work for a bit – yet when he wanted to take the whole summer off and live on a Greek island, he did.
As anyone at Level 1 can attest, it’s rare to be able to achieve this level of flexibility from the outset of your career: when what you’re primarily selling is a result, you need to have demonstrated beyond doubt your ability to deliver that result on someone else’s terms before you get to do it on your own.
Trading certainty for money and freedom
Operating independently doesn’t just bring more flexibility – consultants tend to be paid at least 20% more than an employee in an equivalent position, and sometimes more than 50%.
Some of this difference disappears due to taxes and costs that would otherwise fall on the employer, but even so – operating at Level 2 gives you the potential to earn a lot more.
The trade-off is a lack of certainty, which is a big reason for why the pay differential exists in the first place. After all, you need to charge enough to compensate for vacations and time off sick (which you won’t be paid for), and to cover times when you can’t find work.
If you want to make the move to Level 2, you’ll need to plan ahead to make sure you have experience in the type of role that’s suited to being done as a contractor. Not all roles are.
In the corporate world there are a lot of jobs that exist in the context of a particular company because of the way they operate, but not anywhere else – so you could be phenomenal at it, but struggle to find other clients. There are also sectors, like investment banking or sensitive government roles, where you’ll have access to the kind of proprietary information that means an employer wouldn’t be happy to have you working elsewhere simultaneously or soon afterwards.
All this means that the roles most suited to Level 2 are those where you’re selling a distinct result or providing a widely understood and in-demand service.
Project-based work is perfect, because the defined end point means it often won’t make sense to hire someone in- house.
This is common in design, IT and marketing, as well as other fields. And although it might not seem like it, the more specific your area of expertise, the better – because you’ll be one of very few people who can be hired to solve a specific problem.
For example, my friend Mark is one of about five people in the country who understands an ancient programming language that major banks (worryingly) still rely on. This means he can pretty much name his price – whereas if he looked for work as a generalist IT contractor, he’d be competing in a deeper labour market with clearer norms around pay.
Moving on up
Once you’re in a role that lends itself to consulting, the easiest way of getting started – and an extremely common one – is to get hired as a consultant by the company you already work for.
But beyond that first role, you’ll need to put yourself out there. This takes you into the unavoidable and often uncomfortable world of ‘business development’: speaking to other people in the industry, showcasing your expertise, and letting it be known that you’re available.
For most roles there are agencies and recruiters who can help find you work, but this isn’t something you want to rely on. As time goes on, finding new roles becomes easier because you build a larger pool of colleagues you’ve worked alongside who can mention your name when something comes up: among the many consultants I know, word-of-mouth is by far the most common way to find work. This may sound extreme, but you might even need to start using LinkedIn…
I hope I haven’t made this transition sound straightforward, because it’s anything but: it’s scary to voluntarily give up a secure income stream and not know when you’ll get paid again. But once you’ve established yourself, Level 2 is a pretty great place to be.
There’s nothing to stop you from hanging out at this level for ever, with no need to think about retirement as a one- off ‘event’ because you’re free to scale your volume of work up and down to match your energy levels and fit in with whatever else you want to do.
But if you’re up for taking another leap, you can graduate to Level 3: breaking the link between time and money altogether.
Level 3: Break the connection
The core requirement to reach Level 3 is to be able to deliver a result in a form that’s completely independent of your own time.
For example, if you’re a physical therapist specialising in shoulder pain, there’s only so much you can get paid for a session of digging your thumbs into someone’s trapezius – and only so many sessions you can do per day before you develop serious RSI.
But what if you could take your knowledge and package it up into a book that allowed someone to get the same relief at home by using some simple tools and following the steps you’d take?
By doing so, you’ve largely broken the link between time and money: you may still need to promote it or be involved in its distribution, but you could take weeks or months off without your income being affected. You could even formalise your unique ‘method’ and teach it to other therapists – requiring them to pay training and licensing fees. Eventually you could end up with multiple divisions and product lines, and hire dedicated teams to help with marketing, distribution, operations and finance.
There’s a limit – albeit a high one – to how much even the most sought-after professional (such as Paul Rand and his logo design) can earn in a year, and only so many years they can consistently deliver for.
But once you’re selling a product that doesn’t require your personal input, there are no such constraints. You build it once, then sell it countless times.
When time does not equal money
There are ways to break the time–money connection in almost every sector.
For example, Rachel Karten worked in social media at some of the most popular food and recipe websites. Then she made her move to Level 2 – transitioning to independent social media consulting, helping other companies to achieve the same results that she’d previously generated in-house and passing on her knowledge so they could continue doing it even after she’d moved on. Finally, she started Link In Bio – a paid newsletter and private community that teaches those same techniques at scale without Rachel needing to show up and do it one-on-one by the hour.
That’s Level 3. Rachel is now estimated to be making more than $200,000 per year, and if she wants to earn more it won’t necessarily require any more of her time.
Or take Ben Collins, a former forensic accountant. I don’t know much about accounting, but I know it involves a lot of spreadsheets – and after quitting his job he started picking up consulting work showing companies how to build performance-tracking dashboards in Google Sheets. Two years later, he packaged up this knowledge into a course that people can buy online, meaning Ben gets paid at all hours of the day and night, even when he’s out hiking with his family. Even if Ben never creates another course or takes on another consulting gig, he’ll keep on getting paid.
In each case the skill involved and delivery mechanism is different but the core principle is the same: identifying a result you know how to achieve and other people want, then packaging it up in a way that doesn’t involve your time every time.
That doesn’t mean once you’ve created something you’ll never work again: especially in the early days, most people find themselves working harder than ever to grow and stabilise a business of this kind.
But there are two important differences compared to working equally hard at Level 1 and Level 2.
Scale on your schedule
The first is that the financial return on your time can be dramatically higher: if you slave away late into the night on a marketing initiative that improves sales by 10%, you’ll continue to reap the rewards of that 10 per cent increase for years to come. Potentially, you can end up earning thousands of pounds for one hour of work.
The second important difference is you can do all this entirely on your schedule: not only can Ben and Rachel work on any days and times that suit them, they can also take extended blocks of time off without foregoing any income or asking anyone’s permission
Say that you build a tiny one-person business that brings in £1,000 per month (£12,000 per year). That probably doesn’t sound life- changing. But if you assume that a financial investment in real estate or the stock market would pay you an annual return of 5 per cent, your £1,000 in monthly income is equivalent to having £240,000 saved up and invested.
Is it going to be quicker and easier to package up a result and generate £1,000 per month or to build up nearly a quarter of a million pounds in savings?
Personally, I think it’s the former – and it also gives you a far higher level of control
With that money coming in independently of your time, who cares if the markets don’t perform so well or your house doesn’t go up in value as much as you’d hoped?
Work less, earn more
For the purposes of getting the concept across, I’ve made the process of breaking the link between time and money sound like a simple, predictable progression.
In reality, it’s no such thing. Whatever you try first probably won’t succeed. If you plug away for years at something – or skip between multiple ideas – without gaining any traction, that’s entirely normal.
But this isn’t a case of either/or: once you have the ability to provide a result that people want, you can work on your Level 3 solution simultaneously with Levels 1 and 2.
Because it will inevitably take time to figure out, the earlier you start the better – even if that just means spending a few hours per week learning new skills, researching the market and taking your first steps. And even if the worst happens, and you never succeed at all? You still haven’t really lost: the skills you’ll learn from trying will make you more valuable in your career and so you’ll position yourself for a boost in pay compared to your less enterprising colleagues anyway.
By progressively weakening the connection between time and money – and perhaps eventually breaking it completely – all concerns about retirement become irrelevant.
There’s no need to scrimp and save to extreme levels. No worries about your investments failing to perform. And no need to step off the career ladder only to suffer the mental downsides of a retirement that wasn’t, in fact, quite as rewarding as you’d expected.
Thanks to Rob for presenting us with some very actionable food for thought. For more of his myth-busting, pre-order a copy of Seven Myths About Money over at Amazon.
I am going to be the cynical scumbag that calls bluff on this one. You know the xkcd sketch about buying lottery tickets? Same thing here, reel off a list of success stories, just go do that, simples. I’ve seen more than enough people try and swing these games from my Dad trying to arbitrage cars between countries to myself to many other people. Many, many fall by the wayside. The odds of small biz failure are high, and even if you make it the rate of change means endless reinvention. If that floats your boat, sure, knock yourself out.
As for all these miserable gits who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their allotted time on Earth than working, FFS where’s the hinterland? The world is a fascinating place and the number of things you can poke a snout in increases massively when you decouple this from it having to make money.
I saw in a 30 minute meeting with a boss the rotten power structure if you need to earn money to maintain your lifestyle. The term wage slavery was coined for a reason. That doesn’t change if it’s successive contracts – you’re still owned.
Sure, everyone’s different and I take the point in the post that people driven enough to earn shedloads of money are so driven and it’s all-encompassing so perhaps they don’t widen the backstory of their life, and everyone has to determine the answer to what does it mean to live well for themselves. If this story fits you, great. But I’m sick and tired of high-flyers gaslighting the rest of us. I’ve been early retired 12 years and I haven’t found it boring at all.
I’m not saying that if you want to work till you drop boiling oceans and doing God’s work in the words of Lloyd Blankfein there’s anything wrong with that, and of course we hear all about about these successes because: survivorship bias. But for those of us for whom the attraction of the rat race palled after a few decades of it, there is another way. Don’t race with rats.
Current valuations may mean that only the high-flyers will make it to FI starting now anyway, and if you can use these clever wheezes great. But the next market crash will come, and it may be easier for other people to do it the old post GFC way, using frugality and then slowly pulling themselves out of the rat-race.
Perhaps I was one of these less enterprising gits, which is why a life on the old hamster wheel didn’t appeal. After I retired I recall a small biz networking meeting, and the people with dead eyes searching for what I could do for them. And I thought nah, I’m done with this bullshit. A life of freedom from the treadmill is sweet, indeed. I can get up in the morning and decide what the hell I want to learn, design, build, or who I want to drink beer with. Free time- it’s the ultimate consumer good, and they ain’t making any more of it for you.
For the counterweight to this post google the story of the Mexican fisherman and the American banker 😉
Another thing is once FI you can just enjoy your employed job more, and say no much more easily.
Because of the massive tax cliff in Scotland between 100 – 125k (where you take home just over 30% of gross income), I also just work less to keep my income at 100k these days. If I do any extra work I charge my employer triple time off in lieu instead.
I take unpaid parental leave as well. The less I work the more I enjoy my job and working till 55 seems like a better target than 50. I’m not going to go crazy and retire at 60, I’ve seen too many colleagues die in their 60s without retiring.
It isn’t often that I regret spending time on reading a Monevator article, but today was one of those days.
I’m with Ermine on this. There are more options in life than working in McDonalds, relaxing, luxury holidays, sheet metalworking, dabbling with badminton, book clubs and gardening.
@ermine, “where’s the hinterland?” ….
Thank you for your powerful rebuttal!
The author’s diagnosis and solution was horrifyingly pathetic …
Since it’s turning into a discussion point, I think the “where’s the hinterland?” comment is a bit harsh.
It may depend on age. I’m in my mid-40s, and after a couple of years of early retirement am starting to feel the gap from not producing anything or contributing anything.
Most studies of what makes people happy include having some kind of purpose or helping others as an important component (in general). Obviously that might not be conventional paid work.
If you break any connection then I’d suggest breaking the mental connection between work and retirement.
I consider retirement to be the absence of the need to work, not the absence of work.
I’m “retired” and still work. But I now only do work that I now enjoy and for people who I like.
It’s the other side of the coin from the adage that if you find something you love then it’s not work. Unfortunately, all too many of us never find that thing we love. But I now have the ability to do what I do in a way that brings me enjoyment and happiness.
I wouldn’t dream of raining on your parade, Rob… perhaps just a light drizzle for consideration. May I humbly suggest a rethink on your choice of example?
“A year of dabbling with badminton, joining a local book club and volunteering at the community garden later, and he did just that.”
An entire year of badminton, book club, and community gardening? It’s hardly surprising our protagonist bolted back to the office. Honestly, I’m rather impressed he lasted that long.
The real lesson here, I think, isn’t that retirement leads to boredom. In this case at least, the problem doesn’t seem to lie with retiring; it’s with the man’s imagination. If this was the full extent of his retirement repertoire, the poor chap didn’t need to return to work, he needed to find better hobbies.
I suspect your readers might draw a rather different moral from this story. Retirement itself isn’t the issue; it’s what you do with it that counts. And if badminton and book clubs are the pinnacle of one’s post-work aspirations, I’d suggest not so much returning to work as getting a life.
Thank god for the Monevator collective – I was reading the article and getting increasingly depressed, thinking is this constant hustle something to look forward to? Agree with the need to feel productive for me at least but that might be making furniture (that I do or dont sell), art, growing things, learning something new…
Hinterland
There is a very common theme with FIRE critiques that they pick very odd strawman arguments, and this for me falls somewhat into that bucket. Of course someone in their early twenties would struggle with no path in life, but most people who’ve worked their way to FIRE will be much older, and have more to focus on.
Personally, I want to put far more energy into bringing up my children, but that’s difficult when my job requires me 5 days per week.
And then we have the premise that “FIREites preach that you should spend a decade or two working insanely hard”. Do they? I don’t! Certainly it’s wrong to pitch that as such an absolute. And it then becomes very easy to argue against this insane work, and suggest that some more balance would be pragmatic.
I think fundamentally a lot of the core concepts of FIRE, i.e. saving for the future, focusing on what genuinely makes you happy rather than spending because the zeitgeist says we must, and finding a balance between many moving parts are almost impossible to argue against. And so it’s a lot easier to create an extreme strawman and then argue against that.
There are some absolutely valid and great points in here, particularly around how part-time work that you enjoy may be more satisfying than an awful work experience followed by nothing, but I don’t think it needs that wrapper of FIRE being wrong placed around it.
For me, FIRE is less about the RE, and more about the FI.
The author’s post started off quite well, in my opinion. I do think “quitting work” is a red herring – not working might be a lot less fun than it sounds. The problem is that he then went on to prescribe a very specific alternative, which lets face it – for most people is very far fetched and unrealistic.
Maybe the approach needs to be to reach a place where the actual planned retirement (at a reasonable, not extremely early age) is “sorted”, with enough savings put aside already. This then frees one up to work purely for day to day spending, and not try to maximise savings to fund a good retirement. This can mean being able to get a low-stress job, or starting a bootstrapped business with a nice safety net on the side, or indeed working as a contractor, as the author suggested.
I am very happy for people who find work they love, especially if that work genuinely benefits others (a pretty high bar to cross in these days of bullshit jobs.) Most, I fear, don’t. There is a reason, after all, why they have to pay us to do it. Retiring a bit early gives us a chance to live a little on our own terms before we die, perhaps to see if we can fashion some purpose for ourselves rather than allowing a boss or corporation or social expectation to do it for us. Not too much to ask, surely.
I retired at the age of 47 and 3 years on I couldn’t be happier or more content. As with any life change it’s wise to think about what you will do first. Some people will feel better with more structure than others, especially if you have been institutionalised for many years. If you feel the need, create this structure yourself. Work does not need to be your provider of this. If you have been disciplined and motivated enough to FIRE, you can do that.
Having control of your own time is, for me, absolutely invaluable and life changing.
Right, I’m off to a gig tonight and then to watch the Packers through the night as don’t need to get up in the morning!
There are some good points here, unfortunately framed with an ignorant attitude towards FIRE. @ermine and others have already said it well. The ridiculous strawmen. The workism. Are we supposed to take inspiration from people who (if these anecdotes are true) know nothing better to do with their life than a conventional job of some sort? It’s important to look for purpose or meaning, but most jobs can’t provide this if we are honest, and neither does buying more “stuff”.
Breaking the time–money connection is a good idea that we should take to its logical end point. Remove the need to make money, so we can do what we want with our time.
That’s FIRE.
Just to comment on one particular aspect of this article, I’m seriously sceptical of the benefit to wider society of constant “job switching” to increase your salary.
I can see the benefit to the individual and I’m not disputing that it “works”, but in my opinion this sort of process is at least in part responsible for the wave of incompetence that seems to have infected previously solid organisations, and it’s easy to see why.
Are you going to be properly invested in the success of your employer if you know you’re likely to move on in 18 months?
Add to that my suspicion that these pay jumps fuel wage inflation that in turn lead to price inflation.
Just doesn’t sit right with me I’m afraid.
@hosimpson … Haha (I also highly rate your cutting riposte).
May I please add that lottery winners are not a useful sample population.
I’m interested in how action-oriented or high functioning people solve for ‘life’ with/without the crutch of work …
@all — Thanks for sharing the reactions and comments, some good points made. 🙂
However I do think the overall tone is a bit harsh. So perhaps not surprisingly — given I selected this extract for publication — I’m going to come to Rob’s defence.
Firstly, the line between ‘strawman’ and ‘advancing an argument’ is a bit blurry. But anyway Rob’s making the case for considering an alternative to early retirement — i.e. not working anymore.
In constructing that position, he’s going to marshal the facts that support it, no? We can then judge the proposal on its own merits, relevant to our circumstances.
I don’t think he should also be expected to make the case for the other side. The piece is already 5,000-odd words long. 🙂
Nevertheless FWIW he still states: “Don’t get me wrong: there are elements of the FIRE philosophy that I strongly agree with, not least its focus on getting out of a job you hate and bringing your financial life under your own control as soon as possible.”
The academic research is what it is. If you don’t agree with it or find it relevant to your own life fair enough, but I don’t think the messenger should be shot for flagging it.
This isn’t a one-school-fits-all blog. 🙂
Personally I’ve written before that I’ve done a 180-degree turn on ‘proper full-on no work no earning money’ retirement for various reasons over the past 15 years. So views can change, when subjected to disconfirming evidence.
But anyway, what about Rob’s central proposal that one should try to build a flexible and sustainable work-life rather than massively reducing spending for 10-30 years to save a sufficient pot of money to live modestly without working?
Well, yes, I think there’s a good case for Rob’s approach myself, as I wrote in my own article You don’t have to go nuclear on working for a living.
Besides the research suggesting — and the observable fact — that ‘no work’ retirement seems to make at least some people pretty unhappy, what about (anecdotal) evidence closer to home about early retirement? Is it sunlit uplands?
Well, with one exception everyone I know in real-life who had earned and saved the means to retire early (admittedly not a huge pool!) either didn’t retire when they got there, or else they did and then went back to doing some work (/starting a business).
The one exception essentially transmogrified inherited family wealth through a couple of so-so business ventures that she later closed down. I’m not sure that counts, but for what it’s worth every time we’ve met up for the past 4-5 years she’s talked about start-up ideas, a couple of which she’s semi-advanced.
As for the early retirement community (/blogosphere) the *standard* thing among its ‘spokespeople’ is that people go back to doing at least some work / earning money.
One of the pioneers, Jacob of ERE, fully went back to work. Mr Money Mustache, easily the most quoted ‘FIRE’ voice out there, never actually stopped working or earning six-figure sums (and more power to him AFAIC 🙂 ). He just did/does it differently to a 9-5, and very much along the lines Rob is suggesting.
Even our own TA has ended up going back to work (for a while) and he did paid work anyway before that post-FIRE (wisely IMHO) rather than the full ‘do nothing’ retirement he’d initially been working towards.
‘Unsubscribes’ on our email newsletter spiked when TA candidly posted his confession that he was essentially working again, at least for a stint. I guess these people either felt let down or else they didn’t want to think very hard about any lessons that TA’s path had to impart hitherto or in the future.
I think it’s better to take in new data but each to their own. 🙂
So, (a) we know that most proper early retirees end up doing paid work in the future, albeit different to how they did before their FIRE date. Sure they then call it FI and feel better about it (guilty as charged!) but it is what it is. Doing stuff for money.
(b) We also know that most people find it impossible to save the sorts of sums required to retire early in their late 30s and 40s, let alone any earlier. They just cannot do the combination of earning enough, under-spending, and saving enough to do so. This is demonstrably obvious by the fact we’re not falling over FIRE-ees all over the place.
Finally, (c) there’s at least some evidence that lots of people eventually find true ‘do no work’ retirement disappointing at best, if not unhealthy or worse.
Is it really so off then…
— given the risk of disappointment or worse with retirement (c)
— and given that for many/most people saving enough will prove impossible anyway (b)
— whilst we can see that a lot of early retirees do keep working (a)
…to suggest dialling back the whole ‘amass £1m in a pot that you don’t touch by the time you’re 40’ as a goal, and instead working towards the (a)-state that so many capable FIRE-ees end up in anyway?
Well I don’t think so. It seems a reasonable proposal to me.
It doesn’t mean you have to do it, or that someone hasn’t successfully taken another path. (Hi @ermine!)
But I don’t feel it’s a waste of time to raise these points, or that it won’t be food for thought for some people.
I also don’t think it should make one cross to be confronted with a challenging counter-view. 🙂
Finally, I’ll note I’m talking about proper early retirement here. If someone wants to retire at 58 and call it early retirement fair enough, but that’s not really what’s in the dock I’d say.
Okay that’s my bit for now. Not trying to single out any particular comment, just some points of defence for the other side. 🙂
p.s. Forgot to say that ‘true’ FIRE and then no-work people clearly do exist, we have them amongst us and I’ve been enjoying interviewing some of them for the past 18 months.
So I’m not saying it can’t be done with a happy outcome, obviously it can. 🙂
I think the problem is it starts well, with the lure of some nice psychological insights into the benefits of working but then fizzles into a three step graft, consult, self-employ which isn’t hugely insightful or helpful, we all kind of know that’s not going to work for most as its bloody difficult – 80% need not apply. Then you look back and see that the book title is a listicle with the no. 7 in it.
Reading the article I was compelled to comment to provide a counterfactual, then I read all the comments and was heartened to see I’m not alone!
I always find it interesting that all the FIRE articles written to say don’t retire, stay in work are written by people who haven’t retired and have stayed in work. Self-justification?
I have been retired almost five years (I was 48 when I retired) and have never, ever, been bored or felt I lacked purpose in life. The studies that show people struggle after retirement are studying the same population that coast through life and don’t plan their finances. The FIRE community is different – we live intentionally (that’s how we get to FIRE) and we can live intentionally in retirement too.
I apply the same thought and discipline to designing my post-retired life as I did acheiving my FIRE goal, and all is good. Work is hugely over-rated, there are SO many other fantastic ways to spend your time and creative energy.
[But I bow to The Investor’s wise words about allowing the opinion of others to challenge one’s mindset. 🙂 ]
I think it’s the style and tone as much as the content which provokes me a little. Absolutely no problem with the basic message – though I am tired of hearing FIRE misrepresented as some sort of exceptionally extreme way of life, when to me it’s just common sense and a degree of restraint – but it does feel rather like an example of the sort of attempt to professionalise and monetise FIRE precepts which have diminished the space for years. It used to be that FIRE blogs etc were wonderfully amateurish, authentic records of people struggling to achieve some sort of independence. In that vein, I absolutely love the stories featured on Fireside Chats because they are similarly relatable and they feel like accounts of real people living real lives. This piece, while often interesting, not so much. Reading it feels a little like having a Perfomance Management meeting, possibly with an AI consultant. Still, obviously it will be valuable for other people and it certainly offers some alternative views, and that can’t be a bad thing.
I’d add I’m pretty open to the idea of work as an important part of dealing with the human condition – the older I get the more I agree with TI’s view and the more dangerous I think the cliff-edge no-work option is.
I’m interested in the motivations for it, like public-service and believing in something bigger than the self, all of which can be pretty helpful in terms of staying happy.
We live in increasingly secular times, but a lot of this is filling gaps where religion left off. I have blind-faith in my atheism but at the same time I see an analogy with the church and working 9-5. In the same way that a 9-5 makes work possible for those without the beans to consult or start a business, the church made philosophy consumable for those without the beans to try and work these questions out on their own. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, but people just often need a helping hand – these things are hard.
I think part of it is widening the concept of ‘work’ to make it more inclusive to those who don’t really fit into the narrower corporate definition of the word. This article starts wide, but then gets narrow and corporate. Possibly then ‘work’ just becomes a semantic argument?
I think deep-down everyone loves learning but when its couched in terms of certified project management courses, ROIs and linkedin engagement it loses its allure for many?
The issue I think is the author’s mistaken premise that FIRE advocates: “unbroken decades of endless relaxation.”
The implication being that the goal of FIRE-ees is to never left a finger again while winding down their years ambling around a golf course.
I think most of us here know that the best FIRE advocates, including the most famous of them all, were/are paragons of industry. Forever converting houses, writing books and blogs, learning how to fix bikes, lending their expertise to people who need it.
The whole point of FIRE is to live life on your own terms. Spend your hours fulfilling your own purpose instead of other people’s. That may or may not mean continuing to earn money! That may or may not mean running your own business. I don’t think FIRE has any laws against that.
I love everyone on here who has mentioned that making the most of FIRE takes imagination. It really does.
@Rhino – love that comment
Exactly, with great power comes great responsibility – and great responsibility requires an active imagination.
The danger with any discussion like this is the tendency to absolutism – “retiring early means your 40s and not your 50s”, “retirement = not working”.
For me, this is all about what you want as an individual – both in getting to the inflection point between the compulsion to work and the not needing to.
If frugal works for you then full power to you.
I’m more of a Maldives kinda person.
There are many routes to the inflection point. None of them right and none of them wrong.
And there are many paths after it. Again, none right, none wrong.
The thing that wrankles from the article, for me, is the use of lottery winners as the basis of examples.
For most of us, “wealth” arrives slowly through diligent application and focus. Not quickly as a windfall from a lottery or inheritance.
As a result, what we do with that wealth and the time it affords us is preconditioned by how we accumulated it.
I’d argue that people who act with the self-discipline and purpose to slowly and steadily accumulate wealth will almost certainly redirect their self-discipline and purpose to what they do whilst they’re decumulating it.
@Rhino — To echo @TA, that’s a wonderful comment, especially this:
Really interesting way to put it — a sort of scaffolding for purpose. Genuine philosophical innovation (okay, by my own humble lights) as I moderate the Monevator comments, great stuff.
@Earl — Yes, perhaps it’s the nature of it being an extract from a book I suppose. A blog cultivates an audience and discusses and evolves over time. Whereas someone buying a book would likely feel short-changed without a stab at answers. And I’d wager almost all answers are lacking, not just in FIRE but in pretty much everything outside of maths! That’s the nature of answers — they’re reductive. 🙂
@Mark — Congrats on making it work at 48! Maybe we should get you in the snug for a FIRE-side chat? 🙂
@Thesanopsis — Agreed, the lottery winners are clearly not a straight comparison. I’d say it’s telling us ‘something’ about the human condition — and I found the examples interesting in their own right — but they’re not much of a read across to the likes of many of us, who save(d) 20-50%+ of our incomes for decades.
Reinforcing that — but also I’d argue perhaps illustrating there’s lots to think about around this subject beyond the equally-simplistic FIRE bullet points — is the fact that so many proficient accumulators find it so difficult to de-accumulate. (See the countless articles I’ve linked to over the years for more).
I’m sceptical of the ‘save up to X, withdraw Y, and die with Z where Z is near to 0’ FIRE instruction set. It’s a very useful way to frame/outline the scope of what’s required and what’s possible, but I’m sure the number of people who do it is near-to-none.
Of course many of us understand that too, and talk of flexibility and variable withdrawal rates and so on has exploded in recent years. But it’s perhaps telling that tilting at that tenet isn’t half so risky as suggesting someone might plan to do a bit of work on the side, from a hot button point of view. 🙂
(BTW: Your comment went into spam where I pulled it from, hence the separate reply. I guess the spam-bot is triggered by ‘Maldives’ 😉 ).
I’m surprised at the overwhelmingly negative response to this piece. Some of the comments seem overly rude to me! At the very least, don’t we want a range of views, and for people to feel comfortable contributing articles? (subject to acceptance by the owners, who I’m sure are selective!)
I thought the 3 levels model to be at least worth mentioning as a framework. My own view is its difficulty shouldn’t be underestimated though! It doesn’t seem to me that the levels naturally lead to each other. In particular, I assume level 3, selling content, is largely about marketing and building up an online following. And in practice new competition will be emerging all the time, so doing something once and then drawing a constant perpetual income from it probably isn’t realistic. (I see @ermine wrote a piece about that on his blog a while back.)
Glad I read the comments before wading in with the counter argument, most here have put my thoughts down already. I retired, if you wish to call it that with more than 10 years until the state pension to go and have been at it for over 2 years now. Going back to work, for me, would be like a convict re-offending to re-enter the prison system.
From reading the comments, and looking at the statistics in the article, I get the feeling that this is the wrong audience – we are made up of the outliers in the research.
I have never had a dull moment in retirement, have more meaningful and varied social connections, have made many new friends, traveled widely, taken on social roles in clubs and explored my creative side. I find little time these days being so busy to read and reply to Monevator . Fortunately I need worry less about my financial future mainly because of years of reading this column .(Thanks @TI, TA)
Great not to feel alone about these articles, my tribe may be outliers but we are who we are.
JimJim
First of all, congrats on the author’s book. It takes balls to put something out there and spread your message. He’s getting some constructive feedback.
However, I share @Ermines philosophy on wage slavery and employers squeezing every ounce of life out of you. I was a contractor for 14 years in the Life Science industry and enjoyed what I was doing for many years—especially the travel part. But towards the end, I felt washed up. Used. Even though I was doing all the right things from a personal finance point of view (albeit with some stupid mistakes in the beginning), I discovered FIRE later on, fast-tracked the process and became FI at 42 (work is optional now).
It was my dream to contract for a few months, take the rest of the year off, and maybe travel a bit. This worked for a while after I reached FI, but the sense of purpose started fading over time. The reason I pursued FI in the first place was to escape the relentless demands of contract work—so why would I keep revisiting that cycle? (Cue self-frustration.) Part-time roles in my industry are nearly nonexistent, and even now, I’m unsure I’d entertain them. This challenges the author’s ‘Level 2,’ though I admit my experience might be biased, and I haven’t read the book.
I’ve been doing some constructive non-work endeavours with my time for the last few years, filling my cup. It’s maintaining these purposeful endeavours. So, I kind of agree with @Rhino with his philosophy, “I think part of it is widening the concept of ‘work’ to make it more inclusive to those who don’t really fit into the narrower corporate definition of the word.” Perhaps some big community project that contributes to the greater good? Whatever that may look like…
@TI – You make a compelling case for welcoming different points of view, and no one could accuse your site of being an echo chamber. That said, when it comes to this particular article, I’m not entirely sold on the diagnosis or the cure. Or perhaps it’s just the word “myth” that set me off — I’m a bit of a snowflake that way. 😉
Remember those Covid breakups we couldn’t stop hearing about? Couples forced to spend time together without the buffers of work and friends, only to discover they couldn’t stand each other? I wonder if the examples of retirees rushing back to work cited by Rob isn’t a similar phenomenon. Escaping your own company by selling your time and attention when you don’t need to? That’s… bleak.
I’ve worked with people like that—mid-40s, City jobs, weekdays filled with work and commutes, weekends spent watching sport on TV or chauffeuring kids to endless activities. It all feels like a bit like an attempt to avoid sitting still long enough to think about life, or confront their own discomfort. With themselves, their children, or perhaps their sneaking suspicion that they lack the confidence (or patience) to teach their anything meaningful, and so it’s easier to spend the time ferrying them from piano to swimming to football.
If the retirees in Rob’s book are returning to work for the same reasons people divorced during Covid, it says far more about how we’ve been conditioned to live than it does about retirement itself. As far as myths go, I’d say the shoe’s on the other foot here.
And if @Rhino is right, and work, like religion, is effectively a crutch if not opium for the masses, then is more of it really the right remedy?
To be receptive to FIRE is to be receptive to different points of view.
It’s not exactly mainstream thinking. You have to have an open mind to even consider it.
Thesanopsis sums it up by noting that the claim “retirement = not working” condemns us to talk past each other.
Work seems fundamental to the human condition. Doing a bullshit job is not.
He’s probably just another Xmas “book-plugger”, dutifully following his publisher’s instructions. Take the bait if you wish but there is no way that I would voluntarily return to the world of the BMSB (big mouth small brain) brigade that I had to put up with during my 40 plus years of corporate “slavery”.
Now, I do what I want to do when I want to do it, and for me that is heaven!
I’m with Ermine and others (disclosure, I’m FIRE)
This line from the author “And, fortunately, there are ways to keep on making money well into your seventies and beyond…” says it all for me. He comes across as money-obsessed. If you have enough in your 40s or 50s, why on earth continue trading your time to collect more money that you don’t need?
I really hope this book fails miserably as from what I’ve read above it’s giving bullsh*t ‘advice’
The people who hate FIRE are just losers who have no life. The idea of being a permanent wage-slave, in a faceless corporation, surrounded by zombies is their idea of a good time. Maybe go see a psychologist and/or learn a few hobbies, rather than running away from life by hiding in your pathetic job? Just a thought.
Good comments all. I think for me the secret was to maintain a side job that is really enjoyable, intellectually rewarding and easy to manage. Its completely unrelated to what I did while I was working full time.
The prospect of going back to my main job as a consultant would fill me with horror. Even for practical reasons, I would have to renew professional subscriptions and take out PI insurance, buy/ lease software etc. I would be out a small five figure sum just to get to the starting point of being able to earn anything. It wouldn’t be an attractive proposition.
I hear from , and agree with, many of my cohort that jobs and working conditions in many professional fields have got worse over time. Thats why after 30 odd years we’re moving on (those who can at least) to focus on our interests. We don’t want to go back to those jobs, or even worse, ‘market ‘ ourselves.
Interesting comments, and I kept thinking: have a ‘like’ when I read something that I wish I had been able to write.
I am assuming TI and TA have thought about this functionality in the Comments and decided against, so: ermine (#1), Sparschwein (#13) and Mark (#19), and others, consider yourself ‘liked’.
@The Slow Hare — Well, I do have mixed feelings about like buttons and similar.
On the one hand they enable readers to show appreciation, you can do interesting things like aggregate tallies to find the most-liked readers, and they can encourage a bit more participation by ‘gamifying’ posting, for those so motivated.
Also, they do help stop ‘+1 / agreed! / yes post #34’ type stuff, which can clutter up discussion threads, or even more thoughtful versions like yours. (No hard feelings, you’ve given me a chance to expand here on this after all!)
On the other hand, I’m not sure that gamifying is helpful, and it certainly can change the tone. You can end up with grandstanding, ‘like farming’ and so on. (See the functional demise of Twitter/X for details…)
Also, Monevator is hard to add features to nowadays, which is also what has curbed the white heat of innovation here to a slow heat death setting.
Doing the smallest tweak tends to break something and required twice as long to fix. The site is basically held together by the code equivalent of sellotape! 😉
I think it boils down to our culture that is short of wisdom and lacks good guidance of what makes a fulfilling life. Conventional corporate “work life” is counterproductive. People are so busy that there is hardly any time for other interests or for deeper reflection (“busy-ness” even seems a badge of honour somehow.) Work may serve as a distraction from an unsatisfactory life; or it may be a crutch for an insecure ego. Remove the distraction or crutch, and some temporary discomfort ensures.
The solution isn’t to create a new distraction/crutch but to slow down, read, reflect and notice what’s going on. In my experience, it takes several months after a stressful job to get back to a sane, calm state. Meditation is hugely helpful with this. Some may benefit from therapy to help uncover the subconscious programming that stops them from enjoying their freedom.
A clearer mind can then see better, more fulfilling options.
This is a big, rarely mentioned benefit of the FIRE path. We get to step out of the rat race early and look for a better way, which may lead to something deeper with hopefully some more time left than through conventional retirement.
The ideas proposed by Rob may work for some, ie those seeking to maximise their income and who have a yearning to be their own boss.
The philosophy of FIRE is a broad spectrum – popular press and naysayers like to focus on the extreme end, but most who follow it in a long sustainable way are on the other end of the spectrum.
Oh, hello Rob Dix! Just this week I’ve bought your book about being a landlord (I don’t really want to be a landlord but am lumbered with a flat I don’t want to sell until Labour do as they’ve promised with leasehold law). I’m pleased to see it’s written with the same humour as your price of money book which I also enjoyed.
Having taken a couple of months off between jobs recently, I’m convinced that I’d be more than happy to retire permanently tomorrow if I had enough FU money. Having said that, I do have fantasies about starting a flower farm so maybe you have a good point after all…
XD
Christ, the facilities on this comment thread are so 1990s!
Also that emoticon is really hamstrung by a serif font.
Well said, Weenie.
So, FIRE might not be that great because you might miss working, so you should aim to work hard to reach Level 3…where you just have passive income and don’t need to work if you don’t what to??? Alrighty then.
Wow! I don’t think I’ve seen such a disagreement about a guest article on MV. (Outside of rabid Brexiter posts arguing the facts of life back along).
But I do agree with the start of the article about the mental benefits of having a purpose provided by a job.
It’s hard to find something that encourages focus and hard to focus at home. I don’t regret retirement. But there are occasions when I would like to be able to disappear off at 7am and not return until 6pm to do things I want without having to make up an excuse,so the wife doesn’t feel I’m shirking the chores.
Working provided that.
I agree a lot with the feeling that FIRE really does take a big strawman beating whenever anyone takes the negative against it. Of course, you can see in these comments the strawman on the other side, the FIRE group promoting the concept of wage slavery and mindless drone-ism, so there’s no innocent parties here.
But the philosophy and mentality of FIRE that I’ve developed from reading and practicing over the years has really been quite simple, and I see pieces of it throughout the comments I largely agree with. The goal is to accrue enough money to never need to earn money again.
It’s not about never working. I’d be surprised to hear any FIRE advocate who truly thinks they want to do nothing for the entire retirement. It sounds quite empty to me, but also, who cares, let them do it if they like. I feel that all people I know in this place just want to make their own decisions independently and freely.
The gaining and saving of money, I don’t think it’s intended to be through intense pain and difficulty and sacrifice, but through analysis of your values, your wants, and needs, and realising that putting money to what matters to you and saving the rest really frees you up for a simpler life that brings you joy. To look inside your immediate reactions and see where the social conditioning got to you, where you equated buying X with happiness. Sometimes you’ll realise that you really do value X. Then go for it, enjoy. But if you look enough and try to assert priorities where you can, that’s where the savings come, from the alignment.
Over the years I’ve fallen less in love with a lot of Mr Money Mustache’s writings. I’ve found a lot of assumptions about how everyone can do it if they just pull up their bootstraps, and not as much compassion as I’d like for those in hard places. But the deeper philosophies I still appreciate, and while I don’t think you can paint the whole FIRE community with the same brush, I think he’s been quite clear on work being good, but relying on earning not being the focus.
And that’s where this article really pushed against me (and I think many of us). It comes from an assumption that more money is inherently good. That we’re wasting our time to try to care about what matters to us, but we should sell. Grow. Be bigger and sell more by letting others take over your work. Grow grow grow.
It might just represent disagreement with the FIRE philosophy, and that’s fine, but I feel more like it’s a misunderstanding of what most of us think and aim for, and that’s why it’s frustrating to so often be represented this way.
A thought provoking post and comments. Happily retired 3 years, 9 months and some days now. I did it 10 years before state pension age, so early in some sense but maybe not as early as the author is writing about. Some Monday mornings I wake up remembering that slog to get to work and pinch myself to check I’m not dreaming that I made it. I could have retired at 50 but some stuff came up where I needed to use the company private meds scheme recovering from an unlucky accident and I did some OMY and worked part time a bit.
I’ve come to the conclusion some people need a job to give them structure and direction in life and so early retirement could be a problem, but I’m not one of ’em and lean more towards @ermine at #1. Neither of my parents lived long enough to draw a state pension – it focuses the mind on how much time you may have exploring this planet and finding stuff out and doing whatever you want without management oversight.
I worked a long career in software / tech mostly at the same place and enjoyed it but in the end the middle management / execs and corporate environment got a bit rubbish and unbearable. When you’ve got FU money you can safely ask the management the questions they don’t want to hear about what they’re doing and why but they don’t always like it from the ranks of senior tech people. So I found it best to get out – kicking back on management was handy for getting on the black list for the redundancies pre-retirement, actual advice I got from HR at the time 🙂
The article makes a comment about volunteering in a negative sort of sense, but doesn’t really cover it well or mention any benefits of this – maybe because it’s focused on continued income generation. Volunteering for an organisation doing something you enjoy can replace some of the social aspects of paid work and provide a sense of purpose if that is needed. I do some occasional volunteer work for a large nature conservation charity and as an introvert find it can help with the mental wellbeing side of things connecting with people with similar interests.
I hardly ever comment as people more intelligent and eloquent than me, cover the points I want to make in a, well more intelligent and eloquent way. Can I just say thanks to everyone for their comments as I thought I was losing my mind when reading the article.
Loved the discussion. I retired, aged 58, 11 years ago and have never regretted it. I was offered a part-time consultancy role early on, but rejected it as I wanted to live my own life.
I think successful retirement needs you to fulfill 5 needs, besides financial freedom:
1. Health. Find something that exercises your body, whether that be walking, playing sport or high wire acrobatics. I walk, swim and cycle.
2. Brain. Exercise your mind. This could be anything that stretches your brain, whether that be solving puzzles or playing chess. I play bridge and volunteered for a medical research ethics committee as a lay member.
3. Friends. You need to be social. Your old work colleagues may well become history, so you will need to make new friends. If you retire early, many people in daytime social groups could well be much older than you, but don’t let this put you off joining clubs or groups. I joined a choir, and am now secretary of such.
4. Self-esteem. You need to do something that makes you proud of yourself and makes you feel like you are contributing to society. Volunteering is a great way to meet this need. I volunteered for the local Air Ambulance as a speaker and the medical ethics committee.
5. Education. Life should be a continuous learning experience. You can sign up at college, or many other routes to learning new skills. I have learnt bridge, new DIY skills and music sight reading just to name a few.
I have never once considered working to earn any money.
Firstly, thanks @TI for posting. It might not be quite everyone’s cup of tea but well chosen as it’s prompted some wonderful commentary. I mostly enjoyed RD’s piece although I got a bit bored half way through and started skip-reading, but the comments are far more insightful and inspiring!
A couple of times during my career I have considered moving up ‘the levels’. In my industry it is possible but unusual and have been dissuaded by the additional marketing and promotional skills required over and above task capabilities. In those I have seen succeed, level 2s (contractor) tend to be very high functioning, whilst one of very few level 3s (employs contractors) had some very good people, whilst himself being completely useless – clearly a different skill set!
For me at least now moot as FI fairly close. Would only be a viable retirement hustle/hobby if pre-factored into the plan as re-entry barriers go up on exit.
Can only echo what many others have said. Rob’s post is a good framework for those probably in the early stage of life – but there’s little that’s fresh for old lags like ourselves.
If you are bored in early retirement, you lack imagination – or perhaps more likely are too constrained by societal expectations for your age etc. One difficulty, however, is finding people to do stuff with during the day. Friends & family are often working.
Another is that some of the most personally fulfilling activities are also paid ones. For example, I’ve both volunteered and done paid work – and there tends to be a ceiling on the kinds of volunteering work you get offered. Much of it falls into the category of dogsbody stuff that paid staff do not want to do or involves sitting in the kinds of dull meetings you wanted to escape. Good luck persuading many places to let you just do the interesting bits of a rewarding job like scientific research, or becoming an astronaut etc while being a volunteer. It can be done as a hobby, especially if one is rich enough to afford their own facilities/tools etc, but easier to do within the frame work of a job.
Became FI a while ago, and now work part-time across two jobs. Job one affords me the opportunity for lots of mischief, does some good and is somewhat intellectually stimulating. Job two keeps me fit, gives me a community and engaged in a hobby while being paid for it. I admit I would currently find it difficult to find a hobby as fulfilling as job one, as I have largely binned the less appealing elements of it. Job two started out as a hobby.
I returned to this website after a few years to look for an article on bonds and ended up reading this throughly depressing article.
So glad the majority of the comments gel with my own thoughts. 100% agree with @ermine.
The article I think only appeals to those individuals who will retire and drop dead within a few months because of the loss of work in their lives.
All my school reports said inherently lazy and nothing has changed so am looking forward to my retirement. Wife, kids, dogs, house and garden will keep me occupied. Two really good hobbies to keep me sane and if I want purpose then I am happy to volunteer.
Can’t come quick enough, 51 now, hoping for 58.
@billd thanks for the tip on blacklist, will keep that one squirrelled away!
Fantastic comments, thankfully reinforcing my own experience that retiring early was the right thing to do. Nigel’s 5 elements of making the most of retirement echo my own. In fact I always regarded my work, however fulfilling or not was my role at the time, as the gateway to my real life. I realised long before my retirement that time was running out to read all my unread books, listen to all the unlistened music, produce at least one more garden, before my time was up. I set myself a few minor targets to start with. Reading the Rougon-McQuart novels of Emile Zola, listening to Composer of the Week every week, taking up rambling and moving house, which was more “down financing” than downsizing. Twelve years on, I’ve listened to every Composer, long finished with Emile Zola but still got more unread books than read, and we now have our garden open to the public for the benefit of charity. I’ve walked a few thousand miles too, tried to be a decent birdwatcher and set up a local music group. And I started to taking investing more seriously too, with a solid base of index investments and a more interesting collection of actives on top. How I ever got the time to work I don’t know, but it did give me a decent and reliable pension to rely on for the future. As for Rob, I don’t think he’s really interested in retiring at all, but I hope his book sells well. It’s not on my Christmas list however.
Well I thought it was a very good and thought provoking article with a lot of truths in it. However it seems that some FIRE people are a touchy lot…. Some of the comments read like true believers having their faith challenged. Yes disagree with points (and I do too) but labelling those who like working as ‘losers’, ‘wage slaves’, ‘zombies’, and the author as a ‘book-plugger’?
Setting aside the straw men Rob Dix has a perfectly valid point of view that will attract some people. I do not think that he deserves the opprobrium that some commentators are heaping on him. Many folk don’t have Ermine’s hinterland. Ask neighbours what they do in their spare time and while some will happily expound on hobbies others will look at their feet and change subject.
As said above, the key is taking control of your financial situation. Once you have that then it is almost no one’s business* how you pass your time.
* – I only say almost because it pains me how many people cling on to roles and refuse to make room for people with fresh ideas etc.
@Snowcat
Not sure about FIRE being analogous to religion – perhaps it’s more that those who are interested in FIRE, and willing to make the effort to make it happen, are also the sort of people who are very confident that they would be very happy being retired.
Personally I’ve never had a problem filling my spare time. I have no fear that my brain would rot in retirement as I haven’t lost my thirst for knowledge or my desire to create things. I’m also an introvert and have little need to have other human beings around to entertain me. I do wonder if introversion is the biggest common personality trait among those who seriously wish to retire ASAP. No doubt there are others.
Would be interesting to know more about those lottery winners who gave up work immediately and never looked back.
Read this article when it was published and found it really refreshing. I’m on the same wavelength.
Came back a few days later to find all the comments baffling .. I guess we’re all different and one great thing about Monevator is that we can agree to disagree.
@GCS (#51):
Re “@billd thanks for the tip on blacklist, will keep that one squirrelled away!”
A good redundancy package could be the cherry on the top of the cake – but do take care, as it could all end other ways too!
FWIW, I recall several US PF sites having discussions/posts about engineering a redundancy – albeit my recollection must be at least a decade old now.
I think the cause for the negativity is the identification of early retirement as a “myth”. Clearly the majority of responses indicate that the joys of early retirement are no myth, just something that is unwelcome or anathema to some.
We were not made to lie on a lounger in the sun being fanned and fed grapes. You have to find your cross to bear and struggle uphill.
To the extent people feel dissatisfied on retiring it is to the extent they have not replaced the sense of responsibility and meaning that work provided them with another cause.
There can be a snobbishness among the FIRE community that work can ever provide a sense of responsibility and meaning. But it can and does for some people and there’s little to be gained in becoming exercised about someone else’s value judgements which don’t impact you.
A more charitable interpretation is that the FIRE community wants to enlighten those who have become trapped in the traditional work dogma, to encourage them to look outside that realm for other sources of responsibility and meaning.
There is some truth to that, but then you get into debates about the definition of ‘work’. “Anything for which you’re paid money” is very low resolution and I think arises as a consequence of linking ‘salary’ with ‘servitude’. But this link can be broken, and all power to those who break it.
An interesting read, including the comments.
I’m going to be less harsh than others as I think it’s good to talk about the different paths available, perhaps the one discussed here isn’t for the average Joe though and for the sort of over achiever?
I’m a few years out from being able to totally FIRE but I’m close enough now that some of these latter stages are worth thinking about.
I’ve been in my current company over a decade, I’m pushing for changes in the company and my role and dropping my hours. The next 6-12 months I’ll see how that goes and whether I’ll pivot and try something or somewhere new, even if they possibly means working a few years longer it might be a more enjoyable time.
FI is really the initial goal and the RE could just be breaks in employment and ability to worry less about trying new options.
Bravo Rob Dix (and commenters).
This is a great blueprint for career planning to increase your income / savings rate / speed to FI. I wish I had it 22 years ago.
Different strokes for different folks but you wont know the stroke for you if you dont experience a few different ones. How can it be worng to find something(s) you love, renumerated at a rate you love with hours (if any) you love. FI is a meaningful pursuit to help you take risks in your career / life that may or may not work out. This can include retiring into a life of badminton and gardening, or constant cruising, or 100% GB news and twitter, or 100hrs a week of finding the cure for cancer, or managing people, or solving big, or small, problems. If you dont try it, how do you know if its for you or not?
P.s. perhaps there is a level 3 project in how to maximise the use of your imagination to fill your time when you are FIRE…..
Not going to lie, I got to the end of the article and was glad to be reminded that this was a guest post.
The point at which Rob defended the concept of being “overemployed”, culminating in, “It’s not their fault they’re not working at capacity: if their boss is happy, why should they ask for more work or twiddle their thumbs?”; was where you lost me. I call BS on this.
As per the rhetoric you followed up with, this is a level 1 job. Your boss *is* paying for your time, and if you’re not giving it to him/her then this is some sort of fraud. And if you’re working a second job with those same hours, then you’re double accounting.
On the whole I find Monevator articles interesting. And for the ones I disagree with, well, I can keep scrolling. But this one? This one made me angry. As far as I’m concerned this kind of double accounting is illegal, and not what I’m here for. Had this been a regular contributor, I would have been unsubscribing.
I felt the same as Laura@62 when reading the “overemployed” section. The author seems to admire people getting away with only working half the time they’re paid for, while giving dubious justifications for their lack of honesty (e.g. a boss can’t normally “cut working days (and pay)” for a “full-time job in tech”). It also seems a double standard: is he happy for doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, police, lorry drivers, refuse collectors etc. to start spending half their hours “scrolling social media like the rest of us”, with all the problems that would cause, or is it just a perk for office workers?
Loving this thread, the various views, and the thoughtful responses.
Re: the comments about people being touchy when their views are challenged. I don’t think that’s why the majority are pushing back.
Most people don’t like having their views misrepresented. They take exception to being told “you’ve got X all wrong” when in fact they didn’t believe “X” at all.
Rob’s issue with FIRE is that apparently we think retirement is the solution to all our problems. That we’re flying in the face of the evidence that humans need purpose and to feel like they’re making a worthwhile contribution.
But you only need to read these comments to see all the many different ways which people have found to find a life worth living.
I think if you’re going to tell people where they’re going wrong then at least make sure your diagnosis is accurate.
Also, hands up everyone who’s in favour of taking old age pensions away on the basis of that paper from Binghamton University in New York.
Hi! Rob here, the author of this extract. I know I won’t change any minds with this comment, but as a Monevator reader since the early days I wanted to give some context to justify why I thought allowing TI to publish this extract might be a useful contribution.
I’ve always enjoyed reading FIRE blogs, and considered myself a devotee for a long time. In many ways I still do, even though the “RE” part isn’t an aim of mine.
But it’s not for everyone, and I wanted to offer an alternative that might better suit some target readers of this book – which includes those for whom the “FI” part feels (or is) impossible. That might be because they don’t have the ability or willingness to save enough, or don’t have many years, or for whom the concept just leaves them cold while it lights others up.
When writing I was thinking a lot about examples like Retirement Investing Today (to whom I’m very grateful for continuing to share his post-FIRE experience). Many here will remember his “one more year” decisions and detailed analysis of SWRs… all of which turned out to be less relevant than he thought, because he’s still earning extremely well with all the flexibility and balance he wants.
What I’m sketching out in this extract is a way of ending up in that same enviable place by focusing more on the career side than the saving/investing side. This is the only chapter of the book that takes this angle, while the rest is about saving and investing: TI chose this section to publish because it’s a provocative alternative to present to readers of this particular blog, and therefore more interesting than the parts that would just reinforce existing views.
I can’t deny that the route I present is necessarily simplistic. Whereas “save and invest X% of what you earn” is mathematically guaranteed to work for everyone in the end, anything that relies on individual skills and attitudes isn’t something you can be overly prescriptive about. The best I can hope to do is spark some ideas rather than provide a roadmap.
Ultimately, for me the best plan is the one you believe in enough that you stick to it for the many years it takes to see results. For many here, that’s FIRE – which is great, because you’ve found your thing and it works for you. Even those who’ve struggled with full-on retirement and gone back to work in some capacity, I’d still consider success stories – because it was their belief in FIRE that drove them to a point where they had more and better choices.
But like I said, the concept just won’t resonate with everyone – and given how grim the default path of working until at least your mid-60s (with limited control and options) is, it felt worth putting forward an alternative option.
Nevertheless, I’m very sorry to everyone who feels like they’ve had their time wasted, and wish you all the best with your plans — whatever they are.
@Rob – you and TI chose the section well 🙂 It’s been a great thread. Personally I’ve got nothing against the strategy you sketch out. It’s smart advice that I’m sure will prove to be a lightbulb moment for some. I can imagine a younger version of me digging deeper into it and wondering if that’s the way through.
The older version of me only has a problem with the hook. I think you could have sold your ideas as a way of undergirding a career with the “personal sense of mission” that many people hope for from their workplace – only to become disillusioned once they discover how the sausage is made. Or discover that they are the sausage.
As it is, I find the pension claim as spurious as the FIRE hook. It’s reasonable to suggest that not all pensioners make a success of retirement. It’s another thing entirely to imply that pension provision is therefore probably a mistake.
I think most people would agree with you that social connection and a purposeful life are essential. And that different people are attracted to different life strategies and no option suits everyone. I’m also glad you’re putting your ideas out there in so digestible a form. But I think you’re wrong to characterise FIRE as fatally flawed.
(I quit work at 52 and am nearly three years in).
It occurs to me that there is more than one way to get there. Some people achieve FIRE by cranking up earnings… but there is also a path of frugality.
I strongly suspect that those of us who enjoyed saving money, doing things ourselves, and regulating our consumption, are the kind of people who enjoy a life of thoughtful tasks, useful pottering, and staying busy with small as well as big things. And so life after standard employment is probably going to be more activity, more fulfilment, and not daiquiris on a warm beach. That is certainly my experience. The last thing I want to do is run a business, or own one in any form other than a publicly trade share. So this is why advice to build an income stream from franchising your former employment skills falls completely flat for me. (I think there’s also the issue that for example I might be a great programmer, but a lousy business owner, and so simply fail to turn my great ability in one field into a “level 3” endeavour).
What I want to do is pursue my own interests. As part of that, inevitably opportunities to earn income come up. I now have what could be considered a part time job as a director of a not-for-profit which covers the groceries and the utility bills nicely.
Anyway, I don’t think this is bad advice exactly, but it is based on a kind of striving outlook that so many of us want to walk away from.
Thanks @Rob and @TI for sharing this – as @TA says it was a well chosen extract as the lively comments demonstrate. The discussion reminded me of the “Are you a stock or a bond?” book –
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Are-You-Stock-Bond-Financial/dp/0133115291
It does an ok job of looking at where one might be in the “hinterland”. As @TA has often said a lot of this is about discovering your own personal path.
I can see both sides of this debate, and I don’t see it as an “either or” argument. Personally I can certainly see the attraction of a so called “hustle” type job, which is the breaking the link between time and money that Rob describes. There is also nothing wrong with going back to some kind of work to provide focus, camaraderie and human contact.
I have “retired” 3 times so far. The first at 51, and I lasted a month before returning to a consultancy role with my own limited company (before this I was working a corporate job that did not provide any fulfillment)
The next retirement was at the age of 56, this time I saw the benefit of a gradual retirement runway and still worked as a consultant for 3 days a week. This worked for me until my current age of 63 and I’ve retired again. I suspect this time its for real – 3 recent instances of cancer in close family members (one of them terminal )has forced me to rethink life options.
Great that Rob D has shown up and taken the comments constructively, chapeau to him. I think he’s right that it’s more a young person’s game.
Really like the reminder of whether your career is an equity or a bond. It’s an important consideration in terms of portfolio asset allocation. I’m a very short dated gilt
8-month indexation lag linker here!