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Comment by revel | Hacker News Reader

Just a warning to those planning to do this: you are taking an incredible risk with your future that I think is undervalued. Circumstances beyond your control can make your plans financially unviable and by retiring so early you have absolutely no room for error. All it takes is one change in health or a regulation for your whole plan to be instantly invalidated.

For those that have the ability and the desire to retire: congratulations! Please be careful!

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Critics of FIRE really like to hone in on the "RE" part, but most people I know who are aspiring toward the goal are much more focused on the "FI" part.

It's not so much that you can retire to sitting on your ass at 35, but it's that you've made your millions and can quit the grinding corporate job and do something less stressful and/or more meaningful, and quite likely less lucrative, without taking a big lifestyle hit. It's about having the ability to build the lifestyle you want. Having that big bank account gives you options and freedom.

Few people I know working toward FIRE are aspiring toward doing nothing in "retirement".

Also, whatever you do after the "RE" part could very well end up being much more lucrative than being a well-paid wage earner could have ever been.

When you take a smart person, make their life boring, and throw them enough capital that they can afford to do anything they want, the end result is often innovation.

I don’t know enough about the capital-FIRE group, but any techies around me who want to “retire” early in reality want to go back to just treating tech as a hobby. I think there’s a subtly different “financial independence so I can quit working for the big guy” mentality that gets lumped into the FIRE acronym, even though in this version people are likely to retain skills and connections that should in theory give them some edge if they ever need/want to go back.

But yes: risk is always a part of the game.

You do have the option of going back to work if shit hits the fan. Maybe it'll be harder to find a job, or to find one that pays as well as before, but that's pretty heavily tempered by the fat nest egg you have. It's a pretty big misconception that by "retiring" you're permanently cutting off all abilities to produce income ever again.

It's easy to see "oh if a wealth tax is introduced, you'll run out of money by 50" as if it's a huge hole in the plan, but if you're 30 that gives you 20 years of draw down time. A change in the market or legislation won't sneak up on you and suddenly drain you of all your cash - if it does, it's probably something affecting the entire population. You'll likely have a year or two of drawing down more cash than you should before you pivot your plans.

The most vulnerable time during FIRE is the first few years of early retirement (where a market crash could wreck you), but is simultaneously the point where you're still at your most employable (plenty of relevant contacts, skills that aren't out of date, and a relatively small gap on your resume).

As browsing any discussion on recruiting and interviewing with illustrate, hiring is already fucked up, and adding age plus a multi year gap would make getting a new job quite hard, let alone one that matches the compensation one has today.

If you stayed active in relevant circles, perhaps doable given personal contacts.

But I agree in general. If someone retires at 40 and realizes 5-10 years later this isn't working out, that's a pretty big uphill climb for conventional professional employment.

This is a risk I think that people don't give enough consideration.

I know a guy who FIREd a while ago, long before we called it FIRE, and he's had a heck of a time landing another corporate job. He had a very successful business development firm and took a buyout from partners so he could move away from NYC and spend time with his kids. His kids are all grown up now and he's been looking for jobs and...crickets.

Sure, landing the same tech job may not be feasible. As I mentioned, the big nest egg should ease that blow. You can instead get a lower paying tech job you're plenty qualified for. You can also get a job doing something unrelated to tech, like Uber/gig work, secretary, waiter, creating on Etsy, or really anything. A disruption to early retirement isn't going to be so dramatic that you need to get your same 6 figure income as before in order to stay afloat. It's something where an extra $15k a year coupled with some cost cutting will get you through a recession with minimal damages (cost of living dependent of course, but I'm assuming a conservative ~$60k/yr expenses). Landing something more lucrative creates a noticeable surplus.

Typically the "RE" part does not mean "sit on a beach and do nothing"

For most people FIRE simply means being in a "position of Fuck You", which is very empowering and provides you with more options to seek out income opportunities that make you truly happy with out having to worry about paying the mortgage or putting food on the table

It doesn't even need to be about an antagonistic situation. It's like any other negotiation situation. If you're in a position to and not really too unhappy with just walking away if you don't like your work, your team, your salary/benefits, an organizational change, etc. it makes discussions much more relaxing.

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