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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the emergence of FIRE mostly has to do with influencers selling the idea of FIRE on social media. These people show themselves chilling with a laptop on some Thai beach and tell you that you can do the same thing if you just buy their FIRE course. These people only became FI because they sell the idea of FIRE to people who hate their jobs and possibly their life in general.

While FIRE is of course a possibility, it's a possibility for a very vocal minority. Survivorship bias is huge in the FIRE communities.

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FIRE may have started out as a reasonable discussion about retirement planning and personal finance, but the current influencer-driven FIRE world has become a pipe dream about people fantasizing about escaping jobs they hate by being extra frugal and quitting as soon as they’ve saved barely enough to coast through the remainder of their lives on a shoestring budget.

I get anxiety reading FIRE posts from people in their 30s who have saved $1 million or less and have concluded it’s sufficient to carry them for another 5-6 decades of life. The cFIREsim results might support that conclusion, but only if they assume their frugal expenses will never, ever change as they age

That’s where I wonder about the FIRE calculations, cause it assumes the S&P 500 will return a 7-8% gain YOY which, while historically true, may not necessarily be the case moving forward.

Going back on-topic, it still seems like the biggest way to build wealth is either 1) kick ass at your job as an employee, or 2) hustle when starting a new business. Entrepreneurship has been romanticized this last decade with hustle porn and Silicon Valley’s mentality, but there’s nothing wrong with being a corporate employee where they hopefully pay you perfectly well.

Each have their advantages and disadvantages, and it really comes down to personal preference.

The return calculations are a red herring for many younger FIRE people, IMO.

I think the real issue is the assumption that their spending will never change. At the extreme young end of the FIRE discussions the people in their mid-30s have barely been independent adults for 15 years yet are setting fixed budgets for the next 50+ years of their life.

Many of these budgets have obvious blind spots, like the people who paid off their cars before setting up their FIRE budgets, so they forget to include future costs of replacing that car some day. Likewise, many of the frugality stories come from people who were high spenders in the past but recently became frugal, which ignores the fact that much of their current lifestyle (furniture, clothing, electronics, tools and equipment) were funded by their pre-frugality spending and therefore not accounted for in their current budget. Things decay and must be replaced eventually.

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