In the last round, The Investor and The Details Man responded to The Accumulator’s gentle enquiries about their views on FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) by snatching away his life’s dream and ripping it apart before his eyes. Can he turn the tables on the bully-boy cynics and make the case for a better world? Can you tell that The Accumulator wrote this intro?

The Accumulator: Okay TI, for me, you’ve just burst through the doors of the speakeasy shouting, “Freeze, it’s the Early Retirement Police” and popped caps into anyone who’s earned money since declaring FIRE.

The problem is applying the traditional view of ‘retirement’ to the RE side of the equation.

The FIRE version of retirement is retiring from the rat race. It’s not about sitting in your pants all-day or puttering around in a golf buggy like the world is one vast retirement village.

The post FI-life discussed by most of the community is one where your precious remaining days on this Earth are spent as meaningfully as possible. As opposed to meeting targets, sitting in jams, dealing with douchebag bosses, insane deadlines, office politics and generally playing corporate Mortal Kombat.

We’re looking for a quality-of-life upgrade here. If you make some money in the pursuit of purpose then that’s just great.

For example, Jacob Fisker, of Early Retirement Extreme, the FIRE thinker who inspires me the most, spent his first RE decade variously:

• Repairing bikes for a women’s refuge.
• Learning how to build furniture.
• Racing yachts.
• Getting into top physical condition.
• Tinkering with mechanical watches.
• Executing sophisticated trading strategies (including a stint with an investment firm as a quant).
• Growing vegetables.
• Launching the ERE blog and a vibrant online community, and publishing his book.

Some of those activities earned Jacob money, most did not and that was generally beside the point. He chose to do those things because they meant something to him, unlike his previous career of writing academic papers that only five people in the world cared about.

I can only hope my RE is so varied. I’m kinda glad about the RE controversy because though it’s responsible for much confusion – and I agree the label is wrong – it forces you to think about what happens next.

FI tells you you’ve got enough to live on, but how are you actually going to live? That’s the RE bit. And if you haven’t given it enough thought by the time you get there, then you could be heading for trouble.

When looking at Jacob’s last ten years, I’m inspired by his range of interests and desire to engage with the world.

I think living life that way requires imagination and willingness to experiment. It takes some fortitude too – not to worry about whether your choices are racking up enough dollars to score you as a ‘success’.

I don’t think most humans are built to enjoy mono-maniacally ploughing a single furrow well enough to compete in a globalised economy. Doing so comes at a massive cost in lost life.

I’d rather spend more time with those I love, playing, tinkering, learning, participating in my community, taking on new challenges, and not worrying about whether that’ll earn me millions, or even anything at all.

Are you both doing jobs that you find interesting enough to sink most of your time into? Would you do those jobs for free?

TI fires his Axiomatic-47!

The Investor: You’ve made some good points about why you believe early retirement is right for you. But I feel we’re discussing the bigger picture here – what RE means for most people, and whether it’s right or useful as a goal?

I’d argue you’ve only tangentially touched on my point that most early retirees don’t retire, and nor do most financially successful people. To oversimplify, you’ve said: “Yes they keep working, but that’s not really work, because they’re FIRE.” We are in danger of running around in circles.

I don’t accept the ‘early retirement police’ label – it’s more I axiomatically reject the RE part of FIRE. What’s the point of calling it ‘early retirement’ if there’s an explicit recognition by all that one might not – likely won’t, from what I’ve seen – ‘retire’?

Just call it financial independence and be done with it!

This is more than semantics to me, because as I said in my first post if we drop the RE baggage then we get lots more options on the journey to financial independence – and potentially more options when we achieve it, too.

Continuing on that note, you’ve said you don’t feel modern work is all that. I agree for many people that’s the case. But core FIRE methodology is to put your head down, grin and bear it for 10 to 20 years while saving as much as possible and living as cheaply as possible to get out as soon as possible, where ‘soon’ is nearly always decades away, realistically. To make all this tolerable, the FIRE-ee typically bolts on a lot of extra beliefs about how most stuff and experiences that cost money aren’t worth it.

I’d fully agree there’s a balance to be struck here. But for me it no more lies with the extreme early retire-er than it does the shopaholic loaded down with bags and debts and regret.

There is a viable alternative option to getting out of a soul-destroying job and that is to move into a less soul-destroying job.

I’ve done a couple of huge pivots (one of which came directly from working for free for the hell of it for several years.) Can everyone? Probably not, but I suspect most readers of this blog can – certainly those without kids who are contemplating effectively taking a pay cut of 50% by saving vast amounts towards FIRE.

Will a more amenable job be as great as being able to do anything you want on any given day? (Leaving aside the downsides of such freedoms, as TDM has already alluded to). Probably not, but it’s a compromise.

Will it mean a pay cut? Perhaps, perhaps not in the long run.

Will it be worth doing so to avoid disliking or even hating how one spends most of one’s waking hours? I think so.

You write passionately about the “massive cost in lost life” of work, but hardcore FIRE-seekers sign up to just that to achieve FIRE.

Of course, the vision you paint of spending time doing more of what you love, with those you love, is universally appealing – who wouldn’t want that? – but I feel you avoid addressing the cost of achieving that vision.

I’m wary of playing men not balls here, but just on Jacob Fisker, I am 100% certain he could have (and did) many of those things before he was FIRE, during, and afterwards. Obviously not all (some seem full-time endeavours) but various things. Similarly, I know lots of busy working people who have at least one or two interesting hobbies or passion projects going, too. I’d say ‘most’ for those who don’t have the time suck of kids.

I’ve the impression Jacob was that sort of person all his life. He didn’t burst out of a life of humdrum wage slavery, throw his briefcase away, and have an epiphany that made him into a poster-child, renaissance FIRE-ee.

Also FIRE, such as he achieved, was well below a material standard of living many would accept and on an income many would struggle with. And of course it didn’t last. I applaud him for pursuing his dreams, but for me it was more an interesting sabbatical, rather than what FIRE claims to do on the side of the tin as most lifestyle shoppers read it.

That brings me to an elephant in the room with all this RE business, but I’ll save that for my last contribution as I’m not getting paid by the word here.

TA readies his elephant gun

The Accumulator: Hmm, you’ve said “the vision you paint… is universally appealing,” and that I haven’t sufficiently addressed whether RE is a useful goal for most people. So I’m going to conclude this is a labelling problem and move on. If the terms ‘retirement’ and ‘work’ aren’t elastic enough for you then make up new terms and let’s talk about what’s possible.

I hear you when you say that a career change can make more sense than FIRE… that is if your problem is the type of work you do, and there’s a viable alternative career that would make you happy. I have a friend in their mid-40s, always worked as a high-flyer for big firms, too conventional for FIRE but no longer motivated by hitting her numbers. I’m convinced she’d be much happier working in the charity sector.

What if I’m in my 20s, perhaps only half a decade into my first career? I feel like I’ve made a terrible mistake with my life. A career change could be worth a go, and faster-acting than a decade-long slog to FIRE. But FIRE is reversible. It could be that a few years on the journey to FIRE, I turn a corner at work, get a promotion, a new sense of mission and control over my life. Now I have mastery and autonomy in my career. Giving it up is no longer necessary, in fact I’m glad I stuck with it, and I’m financially more secure to boot.

In my case neither sticking nor twisting is the answer. I don’t want to devote 8-10 hours, 5-6 days a week to any one thing for the rest of my life. I’ve done the dream job that loads of people would kill for. It grows old. So do you. It becomes time for a change.

Go part-time? Many careers and industries just don’t reward you for having a life. For all the ‘flexible working’ tokenism, things are going the other way. We’re expected to be available on demand. Our jobs bleed into our private lives. If you’re not on tap 24/7 then you’re sidelined, forgotten or cut. Maximising human wellbeing isn’t the goal for most of the economy.

I’m fine with my job, incidentally. But it’s not possible to do it four hours a day, or three days a week. The times when my job has not been fine have been out of my control. I don’t know when the next bad boss will walk into my life. Or when I’ll be deemed surplus to requirements. Or too old. Or my face doesn’t fit anymore. Or I get a diagnosis I don’t want to hear and realise I never did spend enough time with Mrs Accumulator.

Or maybe you want to tread more lightly on the planet, or you take the red pill and suddenly find that climbing the corporate/consumerist ladder really doesn’t do it for you anymore. Or you want to spend more time with your kids.

Sure, you don’t need to FIRE to do any of these things, or to protect yourself from the litany of misfortunes I’ve mentioned. And it’s not a panacea. All true. But it is a good way of dealing with these issues collectively and making you think about how you really want to spend your time.

I didn’t even know that much freedom was within my power until some of the early FIRE pioneers published the recipe.

Sidenote: Re: Jacob. I’m sure you’re right. FIRE didn’t hit him like a lightning bolt and turn him from Saul to Paul. But rather than fitting a couple of passion projects around his work life, he jettisoned the work life and made his entire life a passion project. He’s written about it. He’s never looked back.

You don’t have to accept Jacob’s standard of living. That suited him partly because of his beliefs about what we’re doing to the planet. Partly because he’s hardcore. Jacob’s method was to show you his principles, not to hold himself up as the Holy Template.

Now there’s ‘leanFIRE’ and ‘FatFIRE’ and every degree of FIRE you could possibly want. You strike me as more of a MMM man.

BTW, Jacob is still FIRE. It did work out. I guess you think it didn’t because he took up a job as a quant with a Chicago investment firm. He took that job because, as he said, that was his equivalent of being allowed to fly fighter jets. In other words, he’d do it for free, but if someone wanted to pay him for it, then why the hell not?

But he stuck to his FIRE budget during those four years and he left the job once he’d had enough. He bailed in 2015. He didn’t need it. He wasn’t doing it for the money.

Sidenote 2: TDM, you said that your railing at the corporate world was replaced by railing at other things. To me, this is the human condition. Solve one set of problems and we find something else to worry about. It’s a blessing and a curse. We’re obsessed with improving our world but we’re always unhappy about something.

I don’t think the performance reviews or the delayed trains are really the problem… it’s you. Or me. It’s us. It’s humans. We’re infinite worry-machines. And we carry our baggage everywhere for so long as we don’t recognise that we’re carrying our baggage. That we can put it down. Have you come across David Foster Wallace’s commencement address on this?

Does your return to the corporate world in search of new challenges mean you’re no longer seeking FIRE? Is the corporate world the only place where you can find meaningful challenge?

What’s happened to The Details Man? Has he left the table like an embarrassed house guest caught in the middle of a family row? Is The Investor about to unleash his elephant? Find out in Round 3 – the elephant’s revenge! Comments are turned off until the final post. 

Welcome one and all to our finest seasonal tradition: the Monevator Christmas debate.

If you’re wondering why you’ve not experienced this wonderful institution before, it’s because we only hold it once every – ahem – six years!

But never mind that now… it’s time for us to make Christmas great again by painting ourselves with tribal colours and defending our positions to the death against people who are very similar to us, whose beliefs differ only marginally, which makes us want to destroy them all the more.

Sounds fun, no?

This year’s battleground is FIRE – the Financial Independence Retire Early movement, which shows the brave and willing how they can escape work years before the normies.

The debate will be a three-way:

• In the red corner sits I, The Accumulator – true FIRE believer who’s been on the path for over a decade now.

• In the blue corner sits The Investor – the FIRE sceptic and arch-contrarian who seems to doubt every cause his own blog espouses.

• And in the purple corner sits The Details Man – the only one of us to have actually tasted FIRE.

Ground rules are few: no gouging, no biting, though biting sarcasm is allowed.

In short, we’re looking for a spirited debate in the best Monevator tradition.

We’d like to hear from Monevator’s readers, too. We know that many of you are on the FIRE journey, while others have made it already. Yet more shun it as the devil’s work.

Once we’ve finished our multi-post ding-dong we’ll open up the comments for a general free-for-all that’ll hopefully spill out into the virtual pub car park.

Let’s go!

Ding-dong merrily on FIRE

The Accumulator: I’ll start by characterising (or possibly mischaracterising) our respective positions on FIRE.

I’m hanging my hat on FIRE being a massive inflection point in my life. Kinda like the giant asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I’m hurtling towards my date with destiny and I want my life afterwards to be very different from the days I spend now, fighting for survival in the corporate jungle.

I don’t expect FIRE to solve all my problems but, if I get it right, I do expect to be a lot happier in the new world.

TI, I think of you as a FIRE cynic. I think you’re down with the FI component but down on the RE. You may have even declared FI (kind of a soft launch) but you’ve also said you’ll work for the rest of your life. I understand why you might want to, but for me, the RE bit doesn’t mean you spend the rest of your life on the beach. You can still work but it should be intrinsically meaningful – the kind of work you’d do even if not paid. And that lies at the heart of my uncertainty about your position. Are you doing work you find meaningful? Is that even a goal for you? What is your endgame?

TDM, you’ve actually FIRE’d. You jacked in work. You explored other interests and blogged about your adventures. Then, one day, you ran back into the arms of The Man! From what I can tell, you didn’t find FIRE fulfilling and went back to the same kind of work you did when you had to earn a crust.

Why man, why? This is my nightmare scenario.

The Details Man: I think it’s important to separate out the Financial Independence and Retire Early parts of FIRE.

I feel that the ‘Financial Independence’ bit is about having the freedom to do what you want without a financial constraint. The ‘Retire Early’ bit is what follows for most people. Whether that’s escaping the physical toll of a manual labour job, or the lack of dignity in, and the soul-destroying nature of, much modern knowledge work.

For me, when I left my job several years ago, it was because I had been worn down by the ancillary aspects to what I did (valuing companies). Things like the annual appraisal, office politics, networking… I had the freedom to opt-out (at that point temporarily).

So I did, without much planning behind it.

Ultimately, I missed the ‘work’ bit of my job. It’s interesting, challenging, and rewarding. So I set about designing a way to try and keep the fun bits of my job and not the bits I didn’t like. Easier said than done, but at the moment I’m contracting part-time and it’s working.

The Investor comes out swinging

The Investor: I’d like to be permitted one strong opening statement: I really don’t claim to know what everyone should do, and I’m certainly not arguing against early retirement for anyone who really wants it.

What I take issue with is the implication – enshrined in the FIRE acronym – that everyone should want it or pursue it.

Financial Independence? Knock your heart out. I’d still caution against the blind pursuit at the expense of all else (I gave up perhaps more than I should have in the cause), but I see few downsides in achieving it. There’s no nobility in slavery, let alone poverty. Having the freedom to rewrite your script or just to turn your role into a walk-off part – if you need to – is almost priceless.

Financial independence for the win!

Early retirement is a different kettle of fish. For a start, I’d observe that few who can do it, actually do ‘retire’ early. We’ve abundant evidence from the blogosphere over the past few years that driven people who can achieve FIRE (a term I don’t like but will use here) seldom really retire.

I’m not coming at this from the ‘retirement police’ angle for the sake of it, but rather saying let’s call it what it is and learn from it.

If most of these financially independent, work-optional types create new businesses or entrepreneurial enterprises, or go back to work when they needn’t… well, they only have an awful lot in common with almost all the financially successful people I know – none of whom have hankered to quit work at 40, say. Let alone the evidence from the business world, of serial entrepreneurs and millionaires pursuing additional millions by way of new challenges.

It’s traditional in our realm to sneer at these people as hamsters on the hedonic treadmill but I’m not convinced. I think that better describes the financially un-free 40-something, wage slave.

I believe the people who could FIRE – and don’t – are telling us something about the nature of living a fulfilling, interesting, and socially comfortable life in 2019.

We might try to listen more!

After all it has implications. If smart, successful people don’t FIRE, and if many of those who achieve FIRE don’t FIRE, then maybe it would be better if we didn’t spend so much time talking – and planning – towards FIRE?

To give just one example, if you know you’re not going to ‘retire’, then maybe you can spend a few years manoeuvring into having skills and connections that might make you perhaps a quarter of your current salary on a couple of days a week work.

Let’s say this is £10,000 a year for you. That’s perhaps £250,000 worth of capital that you don’t have to save, to achieve a more flexible and less work-heavy lifestyle, much sooner. Or maybe you hit your FIRE number anyway but you now have £10,000 a year above the FIRE plan. You learn to sail instead of playing with model sailboats. You can holiday in Bermuda instead of Blackpool. The list goes on.

Alternatively, maybe you kick your financial independence date further out a few years and try to shift into paid work that you don’t hate doing for those few extra years.

Again, our community has a lot to say about not wasting your life in work, but it seems recklessly happy to front-load a lot of certain and often unpleasant work – and years – to get there.

TDM piles on

The Details Man: The ‘blind pursuit’ resonates. I don’t think that early retirement is a panacea. Generally speaking, pursuing a cause for a positive reason is far better than for a negative one.

For example, seeking FIRE to escape workplace miseries. You reach your FI number and escape. Those negative things go away. But soon enough they’ll be replaced with new ones.

I found this a few years after quitting. My railing against the corporate world was slowly replaced with annoyance at other things: delayed trains, people who walk too slowly, slow service in shops. You become grumpy very quickly. There’s a reason for the grumpy old man stereotype. 

I realised you need, or at least I need, a little bit of challenge, and some things more under my control to get annoyed about. 

Circling back, FI is beautifully simple: save more than you spend, invest it in a simple way and focus instead on what you want to achieve.

Is this the end for The Accumulator’s FIRE dream? Has he disappeared under the sheer weight of TDM’s and TI’s tag-team piledrivers?  Find out tomorrow in Round 2: the struggle for the soul of FIRE! Remember, comments are turned off until the final post.

What caught my eye this week.

Let’s end the year with a smile, or at least an ironic smirk. Here’s a bunch of things to put in your stocking or perhaps that of a significant other. (Mind out of the gutter…)

The Man Who Solved the Market
How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

I don’t think it’s been a banner year for great investing books, or perhaps I just missed them what with all the exciting politics. Either way, it’d be hard to beat the best I read – Gregory Zuckerman’s The Man Who Solved The Market. If you’re an active investor, you can delude yourself that it could be you. If you’re a passive investor weighing up the competition from Simons and genius crew, you’ll be glad you’re not so deluded…

Quacks of Quedlinburg

I’ve written about what I’ve learned from my love of board games on Monevator before. The game featured in that article – Dominion – is still a favourite, not least thanks to a dozen or so mostly excellent expansions. But diversification isn’t just for our portfolios. This year I’ve also been playing the award-winning Quacks of Quedlinburg. It’s very accessible, though like all these games it hides its simplicity under a daunting rule set. This is a game about probabilities. Learn to think fuzzy!

Get a free share from Freetrade

This neat deal is still running. Sign up to Freetrade via this link, fund your account with £1, and we’ll both get a free share in our Freetrade accounts. Lots of Monevator readers have reported what free share they got in the comments on my original article, which also contains more details about the offer. The giveaway shares are typically around £5, but potentially much more. Which you can get for free!

Harriman House discount code

Thanks to John Kingham – aka UK Value Investor – for flagging up this one on Twitter. Financial book publisher Harriman House is running a special offer, where you can get 25% off its books until the end of January with the discount code FESTIVE25.

Investor Island: A free mobile game from The Motley Fool

This computer game is pretty bonkers, like a mash-up between a dozen of those infuriating free-to-play mobile games we’ve all had a spell of playing at 3am for three nights on the trot and, well, CNBC and The Motley Fool. It’s US, but relevant. Sort of. Heck, it’s free! A time sink, but less damaging than day-trading. (I’m not sure how to link to it, but search for Investor Island on the iOS app store).

Well there you have it, a very random assortment of fun in the best tradition of Secret Santa.

At least you didn’t get socks.

No more Weekend Readings until 2020, but do look out for the return of our Christmas debates next week!

Our last one, in – ahem – 2011 – was all about active investing. In this latest round, me, The Accumulator, and The Details Man turn our attention and rhetorical weapons on FIRE.

You won’t want to miss this. Particularly if the alternative is the Queen’s Speech.

Have a great Christmas and I hope a happy 2020.

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