Big picture, my approach to FIRE 1 has followed all the usual principles:
- Minimise spending where possible
- Maximise my earnings
- Invest wisely and aggressively
But, contrary to my expectations, the further I get, the less certain I feel.
Initially, the strategy seemed clear. Multiply your expenses by 25 and then charge towards that target as quickly as possible.
But at the same time as I worked towards that goal, life was happening. My expectations were changing. My priorities were adjusting.
At one point it was all about finding exciting work that would stretch me and position me for the next promotion. Now I have children, and I get more enjoyment from playing with them at the weekend than jetting off to a conference.
These days I’m even less sure what my target even is. But I’m still making good progress towards financial freedom.
I’ve started calling this path Laissez-FIRE.
The background
I’ll save you the long history of my childhood.
The short version: I grew up with frugal parents and grandparents. I knew my way around a savings account, and how to avoid over-spending at the supermarket.
I tested these principles in the corporate world. My first job involved finding ways to slash spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It was every bit as grim as it sounds.
On the plus side, I was fortunate enough to come across the FIRE movement in my twenties. At that point, I lived in a mortgaged flat with my girlfriend.
Fast forward a few years, and we’re married with kids. We now live in a mortgaged house – close enough to London to maintain our careers.
On paper, that’s not the set-up for a rapid advance to financial independence.
Investing the boring way
In the intervening years though, we’ve been stashing as much as we can into passive global equity funds in our ISAs.
At first, we could only afford £2,000 each year, but in recent years we’ve been able to max out the £20,000 ISA allowance.
We have both earned above-average salaries since graduating and have maintained mid-five-figure salaries over the years. And by my reckoning, we have directed more than 50% of our net earnings into either the mortgage or investments for several years now.
Perhaps I should have made it to six-figures. But I was always the one who would leave the office when the work was done, rather than get stuck into someone else’s pet project after hours.
Not too many regrets there, in all honesty.
We’ve also taken advantage of employer pension schemes of varying quality, and transferred the investments out to SIPPs whenever we got the chance, gaining more control over our investments.
FIRE in the hold
I’ve been hoovering up FIRE blogs and articles for over a decade, so it seems like this is where I’m supposed to talk about my progress.
- How many years are left until I hit my FI goal?
- What percentage of my ISA goal have I achieved?
But I actually don’t know. I haven’t set any goals yet.
It’s about the journey, not the destination
A couple of things have repeatedly caught me out over the years.
I’ve discovered I’m an awful market timer. Just ask me about the Bitcoin I sold for the price of a Big Mac before most people had even heard of it.
At least I’ve learned my lesson there. All my investments are passive now!
Another is that – despite being a habitual planner – I either can’t or don’t account for all of the things that might crop up in life.
Everyday life decisions with big ramifications
After graduating, both of us had found work in London.
Now, I wasn’t too fussed about living on the tube map. But equally, commuting from Stoke for 8am starts in the centre of London didn’t seem like the smartest move.
We knew we were buying property in an expensive suburb, but that seemed a fair trade-off. Living close to the capital helped both of us to earn decent salaries.
Eventually, I figured, we’d sell up and move to the North or the South West.
After all, property only seemed to go up in value. And once we sold up, that might give us enough to buy the next place outright.
I’d also calculated that having kids wouldn’t be financially ruinous. We were quite happy to scour charity shops and rely on hand-me-downs. Nursery would be expensive, but there were ways to mitigate that.
Sounds good so far.
Where you live can be surprisingly sticky
Suddenly though, I’ve got a young kid in an ideal school that I fought tooth and nail to get them into. If I move to another county, all that hard work goes up in smoke.
Grandparents are visiting all the time, too, and the kids love seeing them.
Additionally, I’ve unexpectedly become a carer. Proximity to relatives and specialist hospitals is not just a convenience, it’s a central part of my life right now.
The upshot?
Having kids has actually been surprisingly cheap, in terms of day-to-day costs.
But with my plan to move to a cheaper area thwarted, I need to find a suitable house for the next decade or so. In one of the most expensive parts of the country.
Oops.
Children skew house prices
What I’d once though basic features of a family home, like a driveway and a garden you can kick a football in…around here those come with properties approaching seven figures.
And if I also wanted to guarantee my kids access to a top-performing secondary school in this area? Well, catchment area house prices are the ultimate middle-class stealth tax. I’d be straight into the £1m-plus house price bracket.
The point isn’t that we deserve sympathy or a high-performing school. I’ve accepted that I’ll bleed mortgage interest to stay near grandparents, maintain my caring commitments, and give my kids a potential better future.
Rather, it’s that I’ve often been caught out by things I didn’t anticipate.
When I originally scouted out suitable suburbs for our jobs, it never occurred to me that a few years later we’d have tied ourselves to the area we chose.
In turn, I had never expected to be debating the merits of £1m houses, or contemplating mortgage terms that could end beyond my ideal retirement age.
But here we are.
So is my whole FIRE plan scuppered?
Let’s talk numbers. Remember those ISAs I mentioned?
If we followed a 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate and assume that our expenditure rises only with inflation, the ISAs could cover about 90% of expenditure – excluding the mortgage.
I don’t know if you found the 90% figure surprising, but I certainly did. I’d never actually checked until I decided to write about it.
As I said, I’ve not set any targets, or even thought about them. But plugging away and cost-averaging into index funds gathers steam over time.
Add the SIPPs on, and we’ll be in a good place in a couple of decades when we can (hopefully) access our pension cash.
The key achievement here is building resilience.
There’s enough in the ISAs to weather some time between jobs, and enough in the SIPPs for us to maintain our current spending when we reach retirement age.
You may be thinking this is about to pivot into a smug retirement post. But that would be ignoring those key words above: excluding the mortgage.
Yes, as good as things look, I’ve got a six-figure hole in my plan.
And it will probably get worse.
What’s next?
We have some fairly big choices to make.
The main one is deciding on the next house.
I’ve drawn a fairly tight oval in Rightmove of acceptable postcodes, taking into account everything from family to hospitals to secondary school catchment areas.
But even within that boundary, there’s a vast range of properties – from terraced shoeboxes to century-old semis with generous living spaces.
A FIRE purist might say buy the cheapest house you can, and retire as early as possible.
But I’m expecting to live in my next house for at least a decade, with children growing up. Right now, they might be happy with a tiny bed in the corner of a room and a teddy, but eventually they will need their own spaces to live and study. If we’re lucky, they’ll have some friends they want to invite over.
Finding a comfortable house for all of us could mean borrowing hundreds of thousands of pounds on top of my existing mortgage – and paying potentially six figures in interest costs alone.
I’m less worried about the interest than you might think, given that inflation will reduce the value over time. But servicing it each month is still a strain.
Even with the perfect house, nothing is certain
Unless the UK magically fixes its housebuilding problems in the next ten years, when my kids reach 18, they’re unlikely to immediately rent their own properties to live in. Let alone buy.
So perhaps I’ll be moving at that point to find a place with an annexe – or as I’m told they’re now called, grad pads.
Or maybe I’ll be surprised again and find we are all so settled that even I’m opposed to relocating somewhere cheaper.
Eventually, once our children have their jobs sorted, we might be weighing up whether to raid the ISAs to see if the Bank of Mum and Dad can help with house deposits.
The only conclusion I can draw is I don’t know what life will be like in ten years, let alone 20.
Some off-the-cuff principles of laissez-FIRE
I wouldn’t want to suggest that the laissez-FIRE approach is best for everyone.
If you’ve got a solid plan that you can stick to, more power to you.
However I’ll try to boil my personal principles down to some key pointers:
- Focus your spending on a few specific things that give you happiness. You don’t know when you’ll retire, so it’s important to enjoy the journey.
- Figure out how you can earn money without driving yourself crazy. A slightly longer but happier journey will work better in the long run.
- Automate your investments and then ignore them as much as possible. As Charlie Munger once said, the big money comes from waiting.
- Measure success by experiences and life goals at least as much as financial targets. If every bit of spending is construed as a delay to your FIRE date, you risk stripping out all enjoyment.
- Projections and targets are best when they’re vague. There’s no point disappointing yourself when the goalposts inevitably move.
- Be kind to yourself! You can’t get every promotion, smash every bonus and choose the optimal financial option every time, so relax and trust the process.
What does ‘Retire Early’ look like for me?
Some people will say their only goal is to retire completely, as fast as possible.
I used to feel like that.
Thankfully, I’m not completely burned out on my career yet. If anything, I see career flexibility as part of the plan.
I’m quite happy to try out different jobs and employers, to see what works for me and my lifestyle at the time. The job that suited me ten years ago wouldn’t suit me now, and I’m sure the same will be true in the 2030s.
I want a role that pays me enough to feel worthwhile, but doesn’t excessively drain my energy and mental health. To my mind, it’s madness to run myself into the ground just to build a bigger retirement pot.
In the long run, I’d like to emulate a friend’s ‘stick it’ retirement. As he puts it, he takes on various contracts and ad-hoc pieces of work, with sufficient money in his SIPP that when he finds himself disliking the work or the people, he can tell them where to stick it.
If my ISA swells, that might give me more scope to support my kids. It could give me more flexibility over when and where I move, and give me more freedom with work.
Or maybe my ‘stick it’ threshold will have fallen so low that I’ll barely be working at all!
The one thing I know for sure is that my situation will change again before I’m ready to retire.
I have no idea what I’ll do at that point.
But thanks to my laissez-FIRE habits so far, at least I’ll have options.
- That is, Financial Independence Retire Early.[↩]
In a similar position. 44, 2 young kids, significant investment pot. In a good job, but no longer swinging for the fences.
Life is good.
Very nice article Frugalist. Good luck with your choices and FIRE journey
@Frugalist – great article.
I think it was Patton who said plans are useless but planning is essential. And I agree. Planning allows you to become familiar with the land so unexpected events are easier to deal with.
Since retiring, higher taxes on SIPP withdrawals and inflation have risen up.the risk register. And I’ve a plan to deal with it.
And I think “sticky” is also known as putting down roots.
You sound in a very similar position to me.
My ISAs are less full but I’m hoping I can stay put in my current house in zone 4 which will hopefully be paid off in 5 years. I will need another bathroom upstairs though as I’ve got two girls so that’s probably at least 100k around these parts.
I’m hoping to coast out to retire around 58 without working too hard on the meantime, but also thinking about giving the kids enough to avoid grim student loans and also housing deposits, lots to juggle!
“If I move to another county, all that hard work goes up in smoke.”
Sunk cost fallacy.
I’m a supporter of “don’t”s. Don’t smoke, don’t booze, don’t gamble, don’t buy a new car every three years, don’t buy your daughters ponies … and so on. With enough well chosen dont’s you will have room in your budget for some pleasant do’s.
Mind you, one of my don’ts is Don’t live in the Wen.
Great article – thank you. As it happens, I’m in a similar position to you. My partner and I leave in a flat in Z6 with a young daughter who’s happy with a Teddy and a bed in the corner. We could be FI pretty soon but we’re considering getting a house 50% more expensive that our flat so that she has space in the teenage years. Even though I have been an ardent FIRE enthusiast for 10+ years I’m pretty sanguine about it. At least we have options.
I like your ‘stick it’ approach to working. It might not be possible for every field but it maximises agency whilst working.
Good luck!
Thought provoking article, thank you. So much FI material is about pedal to the metal and endless spreadsheets and goals. Sounds like you’re enjoying life, living well and wisely. Already winning!
The key is finding a way to earn money in a way that doesn’t drive you crazy
Hmm not got that one sorted . I’m in a good 100k a year job that I absolutely loathe. I’m comfortable spending on one off splurges like holidays but I’ve been thinking of moving like you to a ‘forever home’for about five years and can’t bring myself to do it as it would mean I’m absolutely trapped in a career I loathe (I feel the next step up from where we are now is probably 800k to a million to make it worthwhile moving)
Fortunately we’re outside of London so have a nice 4 bed 1 bathroom house which is more than sufficient for our family of 3 and hopefully by the time I need to consider upsizing (if I ever do) I can buy outright or with a smaller mortgage than currently but I’m just not prepared to sacrifice security and flexibility for a larger house I don’t really ‘need’
While i could switch to a lower paid less stressful job i find theres tension in me now I have a child that at the moment I don’t want to give up the benefit of that kind of salary so I’m currently gung ho for the exit. Our pensions more than sorted i think and we have about 450k in isas (age 45 and a half) with a manageable interest only 260k mortgage.
I’m hoping with growth I can ‘retire’ (read switch jobs) with a good 60k a year buffer in investments in a couple of years and coast to retirement and pay the mortgage off with tax free cash. That’s the plan anyway
Lots of thoughts almost daily of quitting/going part time but it’s a sales job and customer facing so very difficult to do go truly part time. I worry I’ll end up simply doing full time for less money
Great article. A triumph of realism over idealism. I worry that many hardcore FIRE fans are delaying the enjoyment of life to be able to give up work and then… what next? Boredom, lack of purpose, structure. Sometimes a job you enjoy and can scale down when the time comes is more healthy. And if it all goes tits up in later retirement when the unexpected happens, there’s always equity release from that £1m house which has become £1.99m (but no more, to avoid the wealth tax, which’ll probably never be updated!)
Great read. I found similarities: house in London Z5; kid;
Would be great to have an article to how to change job, or “a role that pays me enough to feel worthwhile, but doesn’t excessively drain my energy and mental health.” I have a job that pays well but ask myself every morning of why do I go to work.
Thanks.
@CT – “I worry that many hardcore FIRE fans are delaying the enjoyment of life to be able to give up work and then… what next? Boredom, lack of purpose, structure.”
This is a very fair point. I was thinking about this from an expectation management perspective. So rather than thinking retirement is going to be great, I was going to frame it as being a real challenge, hard work etc. For exactly the reasons you mention. Maybe doing that will perversely make it easier, increase chances of success?
@CT #10 > to be able to give up work and then… what next? Boredom, lack of purpose, structure.
It really, really, doesn’t have to be that way. Owning your own time never gets old. But yes, perhaps people need to start having a life outside work while they are still at work. How on earth did we ever dig ourselves into the hole that work is the be-all and end-all of life? They had clocked it in the 17th century with all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
Hinterland. If you ain’t got any by 40 go get some 😉
Very enjoyable piece. It makes me think how much it’s all about the FI, much less the RE.
The RE being a source of motivation that makes the push to FI feel worthwhile. RE supplies a vision of the good life.
What you do with the RE once you get there may not look like you imagined. Or only partially so. I’m not sure it matters so long as a person has meaning in their life. Sounds like you have plenty.
In a sense, the article is expressing your ongoing attempt to balance different sources of meaning in your life: personal independence, kids, parents.
The proverbial good problem to have 🙂
On a more personal note, Mrs TA and I have come to realise how much we love options and hate traps.
@Ermine – “Owning your own time never gets old.”
Love it.
@ermine
I know we’ve (I’ve) been round the buoy a few times on this already, but sometimes repetition is good (xxd09?).
So where you say ‘It really, really, doesn’t have to be that way’, you’re absolutely right, but its akin saying fat people don’t have to be fat – its correct, but at the same time, loads of people still are.
So in the same way you have a process for FI like:
Minimise spending where possible
Maximise my earnings
Invest wisely and aggressively
Many may also need a process to help make the culture shift from ‘I am work’ to ‘I am’. Could that be broken down into a similar set of pithy bullets? I’m not sure? But you could envisage a whole bunch of articles on that subject to support the pre-requisite FI piece.
Maybe I’m being a bit myopic here and there are already a bunch of MV articles on exactly this?
Like I say, I’m gearing myself up with the expectation its going to be something hard/unpleasant but at same time well worth working through to pop out the other side with a different perspective on life. Strikes me that thinking its going to be all rainbows from day 1 is possibly where many come unstuck?
I’ve had two micro-retirements already, and they were a right old mixed bag, anything but pure enjoyment. They were both enforced, rather than chosen though. Maybe that had a bearing?
Although you are a clearly a natural at the RE bit, potentially even you had a few stormy nights at sea en route to paradise island?
On “Hinterland. If you ain’t got any by 40 go get some” – ok, but any chance someone could hold my hand on this as its actually a big ask..
@all thanks for the kind words, glad it struck a chord with some of you. I’m not sure I have all of the answers yet on how to balance income and stress, but I’m still working on it. I do think a key component is that if you’re continually chasing (or having to chase) higher pay, it’s very difficult to balance the other aspects of work – and in that regard progress towards FI creates options.
@dearieme – absolutely, trying to quantify the truth of sunk cost vs the psychological load of sunk cost (and therefore whether it’s a fallacy) is tricky. I wouldn’t go into detail of my kids here, but suffice to say it was an extremely tough process – so the combo of me not wanting to go through it myself, and the fear of setting back their development are very strong influences. Unfortunately it’s not something where you can easily AB test or model the probabilities, it’s more of a “take a punt and see what happens” situation.
@TA yes balance is probably the thing that we discuss most at the moment! We can’t have it all, so it’s about picking and choosing where to compromise. The older I get, the more I value the time I can spend and enjoy with other people.
@Rhino — Perhaps (no, definitely 😉 ) this isn’t what @ermine is thinking of, but you must have been commenting on Monevator for over a decade now.
To me that smacks of a passion as much as an interest/fact finding exercise. You’re clearly very interested in personal finance / investing / life-questions about money and so on.
I think that does count as a hinterland. It’s not wanting to be the next W.B. Yeats or whatnot maybe, but it is interest in the world beyond just the 9-5. I’m sure there are others. 🙂
Also this particular passion doesn’t have to go away just because you retire. I wouldn’t make it your only passion/hinterland but investing is for life, look at Warren Buffett et al!
The mini retirement I had was semi-enforced and it changed my views about the desirability of that forever, forever. However I was mid-30s at the time, and I wasn’t yet financially independent. I don’t know, maybe I was just antsy.
My ‘not being retired’ these days mostly consists of keeping Monevator on the road and writing for it too. That is a c.40 hours a week job believe or not (it’d be a lot less if I gave up on certain non-writing related aspects) but there’s immense freedom, and as I’ve said before I’ve never had the steady stream of positive feedback comments/emails that I get with doing this site. I enjoy and am engaged with it, and with the stuff our other writers are producing, especially of course @TA.
So maybe I’m fortunate that I found a thing that (my somewhat mercurial character blowing it up on a whim aside) I can do for the distance. Though to @ermine’s point, I’d like to reduce the 40 hours to maybe 20 hours in time, by getting a bit of admin help in somewhere.
Good luck, we’ll be here for you to check in with!
@Frugalist – Thanks for the great article.
@TA and @ermine – Couldn’t agree more! ‘Owning your own time never gets old.’
But the corollary is: Once you find a job that you really enjoy, you can delay RE as long as you wish. You can tap dance to work and your own your time just as RE.
That is what happened to me after Covid. I was considering RE but now see no pressing need for it. I found then a proper physicist job (not finance) that is both intellectually fulfilling for me and beneficial to society. It is never advisable to count on luck but sometimes people do get lucky. Never discard this possibility completely but do not count on it and lower your expectations. Just do not lower them so much that when you spot a £50 note on the pavement, you ignore it and walk away because you are so sure there is no free lunch!
If this ‘Goldilocks’ job ends or changes for the worst in the future, I am still ready to pull the plug anytime with a safe floor and a withdrawal rate between 1% and 2% (depending on market performance and discretionary wishes).
Enjoying the comments here. @Rhino what you are saying really echoes with me. I’ve also had incredulous responses (what do you mean you wouldn’t know what to do without work!) which isn’t exactly helpful. It’s such an ingrained part of life – the first things people ask when they meet you are your name and what do you “do”, after all….
I don’t crawl into a box once work ends and I’m sure Rhino doesn’t either… But I can identify with the concern around feeling purposeless or without structure. Even if ironically my job is fairly purposeless and chaotic!!!
As I’ve opined many times in these discussions (including in our debate on the topic) the way society is set-up — the society we all grow up in, and take our cues from whatever we choose to do them — paid work delivers more than money.
We can rail against whether that’s right or wrong, and of course have our own views and experience on what it does for *us*, but that’s how it is.
And to be honest it’s not really surprising. We’re very social creatures. We are biologically programmed to want to fit in and to be seen to pulling our weight for the group. I am about as much of a self-directed INTJ as you will ever meet (or more likely not meet! 😉 ) and even I have felt this contrast in my life when I was on that mini sabbatical and so on.
I saw this interesting Reddit post the other day (via Nick Maggiulli, link in Weekend Reading tomorrow on Reddit):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/comments/1hg1kyy/my_fire_journey_wife_called_me_loser/
Huband’s FIRE-D wife doesn’t find him so attractive now he’s not working, even though he’s still generating an income off his stash:
Of course I suspect a few things are going on here. Some perhaps wouldn’t describe playing video games as a ‘hinterland’ though at least one of our most prominent and successful commenters here has said he aspires to retire to do just that.
For the record, I see no problem with how he is choosing to spend his time, especially as he’s doing chores and also this might just be a decompression phase after a lot of work.
But it shows again — and from another angle — how money really isn’t everything.
Really enjoyed this one. Sounds as if you have a great life, and I completely empathise with the children’s schooling dilemma. We nearly moved to a new area but ended up moving schools close by (slightly different to your situation but similar to your thoughts). We just couldn’t risk uprooting them from sports clubs as well as school. It’s worked far better than we ever imagined.
Moving house to such a large mortgage will test your FIRE Frugalist ways, but I imagine the quality of life gain will far outweigh this. We moved in May 2020 (fighting solicitors to enable the move to go through) and managed to secure a property with enough space for us to live in for the long-term, but not overly big where it feels like a maintenance trap. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t comment on the happiness in the house, particularly with the huge increase in prices in our area.
One thing I wanted to question was the subject of withdrawal rate, and perhaps this may open a can of worms further. Should the ‘bridge’ (ISA, GIA etc) adhere to the 4% rule or should that be a higher withdrawal rate? Because surely the idea of the bridge is that it ‘tides’ you over until you can access your SIPP/DC/DB pensions, and that it should be spent down?
We are in a situation where we are what you would say ‘semi-retired’ after selling our online business in 2021. I have a few consultancy clients, projects of my own, and my wife occasionally does supply teaching, but from all my calculations, we have enough of a bridge to cover us until pension age. But our withdrawal rate will be just above the 4% rule, as based upon a 3/5/7% return, the calculations still check out.
Lastly, for those who worry about boredom in retirement, I feel as though they need to start thinking about what they will do once they retire. We have primary age children, so perhaps different, but with a small bit of consultancy work, individual projects, health, fitness & friends, I can’t imagine how anyone manages a full-time job, let alone worrying about boredom. There’s not a single day I feel bored. Sometimes I wish I had more time.
For further reading on this, I highly recommend the book 4 thousands weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
Thanks again for writing!
Rhino, old chap, I feel your pain.
The prospect of leisure must be difficult to contemplate. Days without meetings, no emails marked “urgent” that turn out not to be, a complete and utter absence of orders issued by idiots, entire afternoons left … err… unstructured….
But there may be a way out.
Instead of retiring in April 2027 and confronting the difficult questions of purpose, structure and meaning, you could simply send me a portion of your capital and continue working. I’ll forward my bank details separately.
This way both of us get what we want. I assume the burden of idleness, and you retain the dignity and purpose that only gainful employment can provide … a rare alignment of interests.
Haha, a portion of my income wouldn’t get you very far.
What happened with the blog? You rocketed off into the stratosphere but then burnt out just as quickly!
You’re bang on the money on the date, and I think that’s half the problem. Getting dangerously close, almost time to feel the fibre of my fabric. Have I got the cajones to pull the plug?
My job would probably be considered towards the more interesting end of the spectrum and I’m four days a week, so not exactly all encompassing and I haven’t got a huge amount to complain about. Most of the people are super smart and great fun to work with. I have quite a lot of freedom to spend quite a lot of R&D budget. The subject matter being the absolute flavour of the moment. But it still does my head in, which I think says more about me than the job.
I couldn’t agree more with you that the challenge of being solely responsible for purpose, structure and meaning is almost certainly going to be harder than I’d like it to be.
You still working?
@Fatbritabroad – if you have a four bedroom house for a family of three, why would you ever need to upsize?!? Unless you’re planning three or four more children? Granted, another bathroom might be nice-to-have. Convert one of the unused bedrooms, to an en-suite if possible.
@ColinThames – a £1m house becoming £1.99m? Housing is a terrible investment. Done nothing in real terms since 2002.
What is it with the Brits and houses? Illiquid, require expensive maintenance, multi-decade commitments, hard to hide from the taxman, extremely concentrated risk (normally only 1!) The bigger your housing commitment, the longer FI will take. Housing is shelter, stability and a bet on longevity.
Sorry!!! I’ve been triggered. Rant over. As you were.
Myers Briggs is very early 2000’s TI! Since MB was debunked it has all been about the Big Five (aka OCEAN) these days. And yes, avoiding those kinds of pseudo-scientific fads, as opposed to useful skills based training, is one motivation for FIRE.
Perhaps some words of encouragement and warning from an ancient Monevator in the end game
Retirement of 23 yrs-so far has been good -both wife and I were in quite stressful jobs -veterinarian and teacher
Publicly demanding roles -we don’t miss the public’s constant requests
Filled our time with exercise (now had time to do it regularly) ,some volunteering (wife) ,reading (me) and world travelling etc
3 married kids and 8 grand kids got a lot more visits and attention
Re warning-both now 80 and my wife has had a knee operation (private £14000+) last year and a slipped disc this year so we will be slowing down a lot
My main point is to remember that retirement is finite-we luckily got 23 clear years before heath issues started to kick in and cramped our style
xxd09
“a friend’s ‘stick it’ retirement”: it used to be called a “get stuffed” fund. We had one and then along came supersprog. It took a while to accumulate another. I suppose that quite a few people aged 40 to 50 must inherit enough for a “get stuffed” fund unless the idiots spend it on cars and extravagant holidays.
@Tom-BDW – Absolutely. If you love what you do then that’s the dream.
@Rhino – This is huge. I can think of a fair few members of the FIRE community who went back to work due to loss of identity, structure, social connection. But then, that’s okay? Like moving to a new job only for it not to work out.
I have a feeling that enforced “retirements” are an entirely different proposition. Someone very close to me has gone through this over the course of the past year. They had a torrid time. Then again, they weren’t ready for the “time off” and they didn’t choose it. Rejection was a huge part of it. They’d been planning to be made redundant anyway. But found it very hard to accept when the other side instigated it.
Are you in that place yet where you’ve hit your number, feel like you could walk away anytime, but haven’t yet? That often changes how people feel about work strife. Much easier to float above it when you can say “no” without fear.
I wrote one piece about my fear that FIRE wouldn’t work and my countermeasures:
https://monevator.com/fire-fears/
A good discussion on the merits of work vs FIRE here:
https://monevator.com/debating-fire-the-believer-vs-the-sceptic-vs-the-drop-out-round-1/
@hosimpson – Hilarious 🙂 I am moved to tears by your selfless offer.
I know, you mentioned April 2027 when I was still thinking December 2027. But then I thought: if some windsurfer can do it, why not me? So I’m now targeting April too.
I may even declare it Liberation Day. On the appointed morning I’ll arrive carrying a large board displaying a detailed table of grievances. “The Operations Department has been treating us very unfairly. Many people are saying this. The number of issues is tremendous. Nobody has seen numbers like these before.”
Given my notice is 6 months and succession planning is a thing, actual departure could be anywhere between April and October 2027, perhaps depending on how the grievance matrix is received. Maybe they’ll march me out on the spot and put me on garden leave. One can only hope.
But the plug itself will be pulled in April, or May at the absolute latest. After that, the remaining months are just settlement mechanics.
So yes, still working. But as you said, the date now looks less like a mirage and more like a large concrete object on the horizon.
@Rhino (15), I too am endlessly interested in hearing how others extend/build their hinterland post-work. It’s like having my own hand held while I do the same.
I have commenced year 3 of retirement, and have transitioned through at least 3 iterations of personal development or rebranding if you will.
The first encompassed 6 months of hibernating/reading/nesting. The next 6 months were sun-filled, waves and uniquely feminine in the sense that I changed my hairstyle, make-up and clothes. In the second year, I focused on exercise. I lost both parents, so experienced wracking grief. I also learned immeasurable life-filled lessons.
This year is like emerging from a cocoon. I feel like my fragile wings are ready to unfurl. I’m moving to a new dog-oriented inner city suburb. And for the first time, I’m totally interested in exploring nature and trips.
I expect to consistently change … I have been surprised by how many deep friendships I’ve managed to nurture since leaving work. I’m far more emotionally available. And emotionally richer?
My former role was killing me even though I appeared to be a ‘golden’ case. It’s taken two years to disengage and allow the poison to drain away. I’m glad it was so awful because it meant my only path was forward … that’s been helpful.
A small aside (violin please), I think having a tight FIRE budget can be an emotional ballast, because the edge is exciting. I enjoyed having to pay attention to deaccumulating in year 1, whereas now it’s a cerebral exercise, but completely risk free.
I think a key lesson is that life is still up and down post work. Spending is not stagnant. I was shocked at how little I spent in the first year. I can see that future spending will bounce around like a yo yo. I’m glad I developed my own deaccumulation model that accounts for this …
All the best to everyone pulling the rip cord in 2027. Keep the stories coming ….
@LondonALongTimeAgo thanks for such an honest, heartfelt comment. Poked my little brain cells, thank you.
This one resonates a lot – really resembles our approach. I’ve stuck to the basic FIRE principles of frugal/intentional spending (not deprivation, but not waste) and automated savings/investment for nearly 20 years now, starting even before I knew what FIRE was. But the biggest outcome of that isn’t an early retirement, but flexibility and options.
That journey has involved a major career change, marriage, kids, an international move, three house purchases in two countries (none of them in cheap areas!), and the latest wrinkle is independent school fees to support autistic children. None of that was something I would have foreseen when I started my career and decided to take advantage of my pension and invest a bit on the side, but a lot of it has been enabled, or at least supported, by the flexibility that having financial security provides.
I like the Laissez-FIRE idea – we’d be coast-FIRE if it weren’t for the school fees, no ambition to get to FatFIRE, no desire to be a super lean FIRE. But I know that if we follow the basic principles, we’ll have options for whatever comes up next, whether that’s another big personal/financial change, or eventually some form of early/semi retirement.
Firstly many thanks @Frugalist fascinating article.
@The Accumulator I agree very much with this – ‘you’ve hit your number, feel like you could walk away anytime, but haven’t yet? That often changes how people feel about work strife. Much easier to float above it when you can say “no” without fear.’
When I signed up to my latest contract I did say no to 4 days a week in the office, they backed down and I do 3. I enjoy the work but not the commute.
For me this is helped a lot by being a contractor which really avoids a huge amount of corporate bullsh*t and having spells of 3 – 6 months not working.
I’ve always thought FI is what I need for peace of mind, RE has never appealed to me – working isn’t stopping me from doing things I want to do. I’ve been lucky to find work that I find interesting.
@PC – slightly different experience for me.
1. Although you could argue I’ve ‘hit my number’, I didn’t get any feeling of having done so, for me it just feels like a big grey area, a confidence interval, say, to use a statistical term. So there was no ‘great I’ve made it’ moment.
2. As a result, I’ve had no sensation at work that you outline. Hitting a number hasn’t reduced the discomfort work induces for me. I think my anxiety probably stems from the Peter/Gervais principle, i.e. operating right at the edge, or exceeding my competence, mixed in with a bit of imposter syndrome.
@T #32 School fees will absolutely torpedo pretty much any financial plan. Our run off the mill local private school now £25k / yr, thats before the mandatory Apple iPads, £10 lunches and pseudo- mandatory £5k trips to Ghana to build a loo. Neighbour has 3 on the go! £75k from your discretionary before you do anything else. Absolute scenes.. I’m a governor at the local comp, and in many ways, I genuinely think it’s a better prospect. More than happy with my choices on that one.
@Rhino (15), I’ve come back to this post after a while. I can’t say what’s right for you, I can hint at what worked for me. I have admiration for a fellow who has repeatedly stated he’s not ever stopping work @TI at #17 managed a number of decent pointers/ summary, I do wonder if he is mellowing with age. I also take note of his #20 which can be a thing for early retirees – my mother, for instance, totally despised my choice to give up work, once asking Mrs Ermine how do you feel about being with an unemployed man. Bless her, she had been a SAHM (and seriously disabled through low vision) so I could easily forgive her, she had no idea how bad work could become all of a sudden 😉
I should make the rider that my experience may not be generalisable to people here. I started work in 1981, the past is a different country and all that. I am child-free, which is another all-encompassing project that tends to drive out hinterland. It should also be said that I have a working-class background, the I am defined by work seems to be much more intense for the professional and managerial class, while I had a PMC job most of the time, it is possible that growing up in a PMC environment makes people valorise work much more. I hear some PMC parents talk about what they really want for their kids and there’s quite a bit of replicating their values in it. I would have thought being happy and playing to their strengths would be the obvious answer to what do you want for your kids, but no, having a good job, nice house, a good car, kids seems to be the main desiderata, a heavy expectation to carry at 18. As Carl Jung once said, the heaviest burden a child has to carry is the unlived life of the parents.
Having said that, #1 try not to lose your range of non-work interests as you start work. Sure, work drives out a large part of the general inquisitive freedom you had as a child, but stay curious, read widely about things you have no preceding interest in, sometimes they match up in bizarre ways and help you get an angle on new things you couldn’t get any other way. That doesn’t mean your fifties self still has the same passions your 18 yo self had, but the range should still be there. If it ain’t, amp up that curiosity thing.
Something I’d newly add to this is minimise negative things and people, don’t doomscroll. Huge amounts of crap happen in the world, and it sucks the life energy out of you because you can’t start to fix one percent of them. Most of our mental makeup evolved in human bands of a few hundred at most, having the issues of the whole world funneled into your psyche works against this nature. By all means try and avoid being part of the problem, if your concern is climate change maybe don’t have four city breaks every year. Donald Trump is a twat, expressing some very dark aspects of the human condition that elected him. But there’s nothing that you can do about him. The stupidity of his latest fight has probably cost me over fifty thousand pounds indirectly, but what will be will be. Minimise engagement with intractable crap. It raises your blood pressure needlessly and it’s generally not actionable. In the same vein, respect what’s special in your life in action not just words. Put your phone down when talking to people IRL, particularly children, and delete social media, just don’t engage with it.
Widen your world wherever you can. Too often PMC folk are raised to be the best at everything. That creates narrowness in interests, obviously it’s A Good Thing for your work because this is what they pay you for, but in the rest of life there’s a balance between the breadth and depth. IMO favour breadth. It rather goes against the xyz-maxxing and quantified life trends, but build some downtime and space into your life, arguably more time is the biggest RE win. They ain’t making any more of it for you. You need this to assimilate experiences and information and turn it into an integrated whole.
Hinterland was easier in the past, particularly for men, because of a different social contract. We then wondered what shall we do with all the extra money we made with both partners going out to work. Broadly the answer was that we would spaff the extra money on jacking up the price of housing, rather than, say, taking more holidays or anything else more fun, but that’s competitive capitalism for you. Lenders gonna lend, particularly after Thatcher iced lending targets/restrictions in the 1980s, though this was not the only problem there. Mr Money Mustache made spending more time with his kid a specific win of FI/RE, but it runs against the historical trend.
@LALTA #30 > I too am endlessly interested in hearing how others extend/build their hinterland post-work.
I am sad to make this observation, because it’s not terribly actionable, but hinterland is a precious flame, it needs nourishment to keep alive, and restarting it once extinguished seems to be hard. This may be the key thing why I struggle to relate to what seems a common worry. This flame flickered but never failed for me in my 30 years of working. When you left school, were you of the opinion that the one thing you really wanted to do was work to the exclusion of all else? And yet it so easily ends up that way. There are other all-consuming projects that can have the same effect – the empty nest syndrome is another example of a suckout, though at least you have something to show for it, rather than just decades of foregone life experience flushed down to work.
One thing you really should attend to while you are still at work is your social connections. If work forms a large part of this then have a view of what you will replace it with, and start to develop it. Early retirees are at some disadvantage here because retiring early is a minority sport, so the people you knew at work will be less available – because they’re still at work!
In summary, balance in all things, try and range across the poles of talent in your makeup. Even a tiny bit. Heinlein’s specialisation is for insects has some ring of truth, humans scored by having a generalised intelligence, there’s nothing about our physical aspect than many animals can’t beat. But it needs to be exercised to develop, to individuate by integrating the experiences of a well-lived life in many aspects. Unused creativity and innate talents are not neutral. These inner forces back up where they don’t find a way out, and they lead to curious unexplained actions and attitudes where they don’t find expression.
I will acknowledge that this all encompassing nature of work, and apparently parenting though that’s not my area of expertise, seems to be very much a 21C capitalism sort of thing in the west. There are many forces that act towards specialisation in our highly unbalanced Western society. We have achieved a lot of great things by that laserlike focus, but balance with our natural environment and a widespread happiness in the art of being human, I am not so sure.
There’s no general answer, and while when I retired early I couldn’t believe it that people would have problems retiring, I have softened the position somewhat. There are some people that probably should never retire.
@Rhino #34 – agreed on the school fees – putting two through school, with reasonable assumptions on inflation, is unlikely to leave much change from £1 million (and that’s not even counting boarding, which we have no intention of doing). Not a decision we made lightly, but we really tried state school and it was a disaster for my specific kids and their needs. We’ve gone from dragging our eldest into school in tears and complaints about “worried tummy”, to both of them sometimes literally skipping into school with a grin on their face.
Not a decision I push on anybody else, but for us, it was ultimately a decision about prioritizing money or happiness, and I think it’s exactly the point of the post that having money accumulated through frugality and diligent savings means you can choose happiness instead of more money.
@ermine @laissez-FI, your strategies are optimal, when feasible. My second career broke my heart.
Some work scenarios do not offer mental or emotional guard rails. The moral hazards follow you home. They steal into the shadows and eat away at your core.
I think some people are not suited to modern employment. I emphasise with @Rhino’s perspective. Even in happy times, I was chewing my arm to free myself from the (chiefly metaphorical) ties keeping me separated from total freedom.
We’re all different. My sacrifices were worth the prize.
Wow, some epic support in these comments, and also in the MV links TA reminded about.
I think this hinterland idea has legs, so what does it need? Merch obviously… https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a2494565090819190786ea568170d78
Really enjoyed this piece.
One thing FIRE has given me isn’t so much a specific retirement date as the freedom to choose. Reading your piece, I kept thinking of Morgan Housel’s idea that the ultimate goal is “freedom and purpose”. The financial cushion doesn’t necessarily allow you to execute a perfectly crafted 20-year plan, but it does give you the ability to pivot when life inevitably changes the script. That’s the true of value of pursuing FIRE for me, and if imagine most other followers.
In that sense, I’d argue your FIRE journey has been a success regardless of whether it followed the original route map. You’ve built optionality. That’s incredibly valuable when priorities shift, circumstances change, or opportunities arise that you couldn’t have predicted a decade earlier.
One thing I was surprised not to see mentioned was having the option of Unpaid Parental Leave in your pocket, if future mortgage plans allow. Given the article’s theme of family priorities reshaping plans, it strikes me as exactly the sort of option that a strong balance sheet unlocks. FIRE doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing leap into retirement. Sometimes it’s simply about having the means to take advantage of opportunities that become important as family circumstances evolve, whether that’s time with children, supporting relatives, or just creating a bit more breathing room when you need it.
To me that’s one of the most compelling arguments for FIRE, not escaping work entirely, but having the means to reclaim your time when life gives you a reason to.
@ryan TA wrote a good series around SWRs for ISA vs Pension https://monevator.com/how-to-choose-an-swr-for-your-isa-and-your-pension-to-hit-financial-independence-fast/ – suffice to say, aligned to the principles in the article, I haven’t considered what SWR I might use in depth (not least because I don’t know how long a period I’ll need to bridge), but I am confident that I’d happily risk higher than 4%
@dad on fire – good point. We have used it to some degree, mostly to cover emergencies like kids being ill, nursery being closed etc, but I think the “user experience” can probably vary between different employers. Thankfully ours have been fine with it. One of our employers doesn’t even bother to track it, effectively their view is that if your boss is happy with your output and they’re not paying you, they don’t care how much leave you take. One thing we’ve considered is using sabbaticals when we’re closer to RE, say for 6 months over the spring / summer, and see how that feels.
Great to see unpaid / parental leave get a mention. I was going to raise it myself. I work in a profession and specific role where reducing hours or days per week would be very difficult, however reducing working weeks per year would be much more acceptable. It also comes with the added benefit that the employment contract remains at full value so benefits such as death in service etc are not reduced.
@Frugalist
I think you might be confusing Unpaid Parental Leave with something else (time off for dependents / emergency family leave?). UPL is taken off for a week at a time and requires 21 days notice, so not ideal for child illness/nursery being closed. Employers also can’t refuse the request.
If you’re after a sabbatical in the summer then this is your golden ticket! Not sure how many kids you have but you mention children, so that’s 8 weeks you can have off a year + your full annual leave allowance. Basically all of the school holidays!
You’ll get to keep your full allowance of annual leave (not pro ratat’d down) and most employers will continue paying full employer pension contributions.
@Rosario
Thanks, I completely agree! So many good benefits of UPL for people with a young family pursuing FIRE, I’m amazed it isn’t mentioned more within these circles as an option, especially if people are pursuing FIRE to spend more time with their kids/family (my main rationale). With part time you run the risk of doing a full week just condensed within 4 or even 3 days, whereas if you take weeks off at a time this is completely negated.
I’ve basically taken 8 weeks a year off – so all the school holidays – for the past couple of years, and planning on doing so for the next 3/4 (or until I run out!). I’m treating it as dipping my toe into less work, rather than a cliff edge ‘stop work’.
@DoF
That’s exactly how I see it. There lots to like about my job, using parental or unpaid leave allows me to reduce some of the things I don’t like so much.
I’m not ready to give up employment just yet and I think this gives me (and would many others) the best balance for now as well as maintaining maximum optionality for future.
@DoF, good point. In practice neither of our employers apply those criteria / minima, so the formal process for UPL / emergency leave etc is all the same, and I had forgotten about all of those restrictions. I think it’s one of those where in the private sector it can be easier to create a universal policy than to accommodate all of the niche scenarios. It is a good reminder for me though, occasionally when I’m looking at other jobs etc I forget about how many things are waved through that might not necessarily be elsewhere! But yes it would also work well for a summer sabbatical – as you say things like pension and so on keep going which is a massive boon.
Great article, thanks for that @Frugalist! And loved all the comments too!
I love reading other people’s take on FIRE and it seems like you have a great balance in living your life/enjoying comforts whilst saving for the future. Whilst you can’t plan for uncertainties, the fact that you are aware of such uncertainties puts you ahead of the curve.
For me RE will 100% follow FI. I can just about see my finish line in the far distance and I am steadily making my way there, bar anything spectacularly detrimental happening to the stock markets. Or even despite that happening.
I get what @Rhino is saying about purpose in life and what to do in retirement but I already have hobbies and interests and a whole list of other things I want to pick up again or new things to try. Videogaming is also high up on the list, quite liked that idea of that Reddit bloke spending the day gaming, that would be my dark winter days sorted!
I only need to give one month notice in my contract (HR forgot to amend it…) but as a courtesy, I will probably give them 3 months. Plug-pull day will likely be August/September 2027, once all bonuses/awards I may get have been received!
Wow! Congratulations, Weenie. What a journey you’ve been on. You’re on the home straight now. The time will just fly by!