What is FIRE?
The FIRE movement has been burning up (pun fully-intended) the headlines lately and if you aren’t familiar with the concept or the community at-large, you might be wondering how to climb out from beneath that rock.
Here is a quick tutorial: FIRE stands for Financially-Independent, Retired Early, and on the surface it certainly might seem like a far-fetched dream for most people. But the basic premise is perfectly reasonable; reduce your expenses, increase your savings, and the time it takes to achieve financial independence (aka retirement) will shorten.
There are two foundational tenets to making it work:
- When you reduce your expenses you are not doing so just to save more now, but you actually commit to living within these means for the rest of your FIRE life. It’s not a temporary diet to increase your savings but a permanent one to adapt to spending and budgeting more deliberately
- That you not only save but also invest those savings wisely. Saving is like stockpiling seeds for another day, while investing is actually planting those seeds, allowing them to grow, propagate and turn one seedling into 100 more seeds many years from now.
FIRE comes in many shapes and sizes and there are other factors that can play a role in your early retirement plan. Developing passive income streams, “retiring” to part-time work, and other forms of supplementary income both pre and post retirement offer alternative ways to buffer your reliance on savings and investments. But ultimately, FIRE is really a mindset. It is not always about retiring early, nor necessarily defined by total financial independence. Simply, FIRE is about flexibility and freedom.
For several years, my wife Kelly and I have considered ourselves “FIREwalkers”, and we are best described on the very lean side of FIRE. In other words, we can survive without working and still have basic food and shelter for our family. Is that the type of lifestyle we would want to live? Not at all, especially with two young kids for whom we hope to provide a world of opportunities. That is why we are both still working (quite a lot at times). But it has allowed us to choose what work we want to do, and also when and where we want to do it. We can afford to pursue our passions and design the life that we want. For my wife, that meant becoming a math teacher and math coach, then a business and life coach, and now an angel investor and Venture Capitalist.
For me, well, it is everything you see on this website. While I do have a lot of freedom these days, I also have so many dreams and goals to accomplish that I feel like I am already running out of time. My various content channels serve as my diary, my hourglass and a window into my mind. You (dear reader) are as much my accountability partner as my audience. Please join me on my FIREwalking journey.
