He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off. Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.
One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number.
The first quote sounds like religion: sacrifice everything in the here and now and you may enter heaven. The second quote just describes “passive income” schemes that depend on paying less taxes and the stock market, which is highly speculative and relies on actual labourers to do the work that makes these companies so valuable as they claim.
The article mentions three “tomes” of the FIRE movement: one by a former astrophysicist, another one by a software developer. Jobs paying above $100,000 are most common, which is just 6 percent of the US population.
My interpretation of the FIRE movement is that it is an attempt to revive the “American Dream” by telling you to live an ultra-minimalist lifestyle and “hustle” for in most cases more than a decade, and relying on the stock market and tax breaks instead of actually producing things with your own labour. It feels like an ultra-charged version of the capitalist mindset, realising the boot on workers but only caring about saving yourself. It’s the ending to ‘Ready, Player, One’.
Also, the author mostly writes about fashion and other frivolous stuff that rich people are interested in. No wonder that people living paycheck-to-paycheck weren’t mentioned at all.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having healthy financial strategies, sometimes to the point of obsession, and aiming for FIRE especially given our fucked up government who doesn’t care about us, as the author herself says
But every single person I’ve met who does this is a reactionary neoliberal
Almost impossible, some sort of base super structure theory going on here?
Anyways I kind of did that except I didn’t penny pinch, just tried to min max financial strategies (credit cards, options trading, interest rates, etc.) but like, maybe 60% of the extent of what FIRE guys do. Still way more than the average person
And tbh, yea, I did end up becoming somebody who’s weird with money and wealth despite intellectually being radicalized and now I’m still trying to unlearn all of that
I was never reactionary or a neoliberal even before radicalization, I was just thinking about money far too much
Allen Wong in his primary residence in Celebration, Fla.
Ewww, that sketchy gated community in Disneyworld? Jesus, Disney adults shouldn’t be allowed to have their own money. They would be much better off attending 90s kid daycare where they can watch The Lion King 1/2 on cassette tape and eat Dunkaroos.
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