The FIRE movement: making sensible spending sound sexy

FIRE: much less dangerous than actual fire.

FIRE stands for financial independence, retire early. It’s a way of making frugal living and sensible investing sound sexy, like a marketing exercise for personal restraint and minimalism. It’s like a new diet plan – all the same principles you know and love, made to sound exciting again. Budgeting and minimalism have been a hard sell for years, so why not make them sound fun and new? 

What I particularly love is that there are movements within FIRE, including FatFIRE, baristaFIRE and leanFIRE – which can be summarised as ‘Spendier Savers’, ‘Get a Side Hustle’ and ‘I Love Being a Miser’ respectively. This is a good article that explains a lot of the detail behind the FIRE movement, which mainly lives on Reddit.

You will notice early on that the majority of FIRE adherents don’t have kids. That’s a similar trend to the one you’ll see in the tiny house and minimalism movements. These concepts are extremely hard to carry out with children in tow. It’s one thing to leave yourself with only 15 possessions, or some other random number, but if you have a baby you can’t even leave the house without 15 possessions.

So: to FIRE or not to FIRE? Well, you should probably try to spend less. That would be helpful. You might like to try taking your focus away from material possessions and onto intangible sources of happiness. So far, so obvious.

If it worked, though, and you could retire at 45, what the hell would you do? First, you can’t spend more than you were spending before you retired, so you can’t go haring off overseas or buy a boat or anything fun like that. Second, you might be surprised at how much more your job does for you than you might imagine. You might think you want to live in Bali and spend all day at the beach, but I think after a year or two of doing that seven days a week you’d be bored rigid.

I’m all for financial independence. It’s a wonderful goal. But sod retiring early. I want to work until I can’t work any longer.