At it's heart, FIRE is a reaction to how tenuous, unsustainable and unstable the job market has become in recent years. I don't particularly want to sit on the couch and binge Netflix, but I have such low faith that I'll be able to maintain decent employment that won't destroy my physical and mental health till the age of 67 that FIRE is a completely reasonable thing to aim for. The only unreasonable thing is the core assumption that past performance is a guarantee of future results. Oh well.
Yep, my wife and I are growing into this mindset. We both generally enjoy our careers and doing something meaningful, but we're focused on getting to the point where working is only for the "fun" things in life.
Kids or dinks? Huge difference in how the cash flows.
In my case, dinks. And aside from the basics of budgeting, I think there's a huge difference in mindset that would make it difficult to FIRE with kids. You are making a decision to reduce your children's opportunities because you don't want to keep struggling. It's much easier to decide for yourself when enough lifestyle is enough, but much harder to decide that music lessons or language exchange trips or a college fund or a generous baby shower gift are not needed for the kiddo.
This exactly, after looking for my first job I feel like I'm always going to need a backup pan that can be Sustainable with very long periods of no income. The upside to having that in place means the minimum I need to retire is very low. I'm pretty pissed that everything seems to be blowing up this year because my 401k is just about there.
Won't work if everyone does it. I wonder what the critical mass is.
r/financialindependence has almost 1,000,000 followers.
1,000,000 follows, of which less than 10% will probably actually retire meaningfully early enough to have an economic impact.