> Based on the available data, the percentage of the U.S. population that can realistically achieve FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is very small, likely less than 1% to 3%. This figure represents those who can both meet the strict financial criteria and successfully execute the plan to retire decades before the traditional age.
According to Gallup polling, only 1% of Americans in their early 40s are retired, and just 6% of those in their early 50s have left the workforce. [1]
Nice if you can do it. Most of us will never be able to.
in the US, local governments (counties, cities, school districts) rely heavily on property taxes because they have limited other revenue-raising powers. In the EU, the picture is almost the opposite: property taxes are a minor funding source, and national governments raise most of the money through labour, consumption, and income taxes.
This makes quite difficult to grow old in USA in a sense that you cant just reduce your consumption and live of the savings. You need to move to cheaper area leaving all your life behind. Most important thing that you have at the end of your life. Your memories your friends and places that you are used to. So you need to keep working to be able to stay where you are.
Also, heath care costs if you don’t have insurance through an employer are a huge drag on FIRE, especially since you’ll likely need more medical care going into your 40s and 50s before you can get Medicare.
I honestly don't even understand why someone would want to retire early. You're just leaving money on the table and setting yourself up for mental health problems.
If you think working is worse for your mental health than not working, you need to pick something else to do.
Because the thing you may want to do doesn't pay the bills. Anything from playing music, making art or even building cool electronic things doesn't pay bills most of the time.
I have built many exciting things, many open source, none have brought in enough to cover my day to day.
LOL. Of course you're leaving money on the table: that is the whole point! Many people have hobbies they'd rather be doing than working. It's ok to leave money on the table. Especially so if you don't see anything meaningful to buy with the extra money.
I'll second that. I tried the trial for a few months then started paying money for it. At $100/year I've found it useful for modeling and gaming out different scenarios for retirement thresholds.
Nothing's certain, but if you like to play with data and you don't want to build the whole damn thing yourself, it's useful.
Still waiting for them to get support for options.
Don’t forget the unbounded liability of AGI: your job disappears before you can accumulate the capital you need. On the bright side, you’re retired. Really simplifies the spreadsheet.
Don't forget the unbounded liability of apocalypse: society implodes and your money is worthless.
On the bright side, you might have invested in Nuka Cola.
I swear I saw a version of this years ago on one of the popular tech blags like Coding Horror or Joel On Software. I briefly looked for it the other day and couldn't find it. Anyone happen to remember it? I think it was mainly about salaries and when stock options would vest.
If you live in New York, life will get complex without building supplementary passive income from a young age.
If people live a slow-burn lifestyle, buy revenue property one can later demolish as needed, park unused cash in index funds, and split 7% between bullion & high-risk. Most folks will be fine when things eventually go sideways.
Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes. =3
I am not Bullish on LLM firms given the -$2.50 profit per $1 revenue, or several trillion USD debt buried on page 60 of their reports. They can go be awesome without my cash, and I will cheer them on.
Note, whomever floated that home-equity loan will be happy with their won profits. They win-win even if the loan defaults. Not everyone is so lucky... =3
Joel Spolsky lived and worked in New York, so opinions were heavily influenced by the reality of east-coast economics.
My comment was advice that most people will learn the hard way, and hopefully inspire a moment of pause about their own risk exposure tolerance.
The subject is about young workers that acknowledged the very real churn part of the ephemeral tech sector, and position themselves for an early exit strategy into adjacent careers or retirement. This is not a new idea, given vertical movement in software careers has been stagnant for decades. =3
I think this would highly depend on figures for real estate and overall COL in the specific location where you intend to retire? And also major life choice possibilities like maybe selling your house and moving or choosing something smaller when theoretical children are fully grown and have moved out.
Why not both? Depending on what you make, it’s often possible to enjoy life and also spend less than you earn. You are enjoying life like someone with a lower salary would.
Yeah, but money is a hell of a drug and the advertising industry is doing everything it can to tell you how unhappy you are and keep you as a wage slave.
The actual list of things you need is quite small: water, food, shelter, clothes, company. But if you talk to your average wage slave the list of things is huge: massive house, smart dishwasher, new car, all-inclusive holidays, dog etc. And this is before you even get to things you want!
It's very hard to resist the hedonic treadmill. Ad blocking is a key, and that includes any media with subtle advertising in it like car and tech channels etc. If you can avoid this stuff, you can definitely be happy with a fraction of what a lot of people think they can't live without.
Yeah but that's just what most people do. FIRE extends into visions of grandeur and too much focus on the money. The hobby becomes getting to FIRE. And then what?
There are people who don’t save money at all and people who save a lot more than average, which is a whole lot easier with a high income. With the right mindset, it’s not much of a hardship.
Well, FIRE is about retiring before you're old. But really this is an idea for people with insanely high salaries that you commonly see in the US. It's for when you're earning several multiples more than you need to "be happy". All it's really saying is if you resist lifestyle inflation and the hedonic treadmill you can still be happy your whole life but be financially independent much earlier. It's not really about people earning close to median and living in poverty their whole life so they can retire.
Personally, programming computers is one of my favorite things to do, so I'm with you on wanting to keep doing it.
It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.
I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.
Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.
With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.
I retired at 59 about 2 years ago. My career was coding and product development, I put together some ideas about what I’d code after I left the workplace.
To my surprise, I haven’t missed it at all. Playing music, reading for pleasure and language studies ( to help with a part time volunteer gig ) have totally met my needs. You never know.
Retirement doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't have to. It means you can work for yourself on your own interests instead of for some other boss who tells you what to do.
Why not find a career and job that's enjoyable now without even having to defer all of this for later? Not just in software, but you could be flying planes, be in a travelling circus, learn to be a chef, etc.
If the answer is you have too many commitments keeping you tied to your current job, then I'd argue that we should be optimising for that optionality rather than some arbitrary day to end the nightmare 40 years from now
I don't want to fly planes, be in a traveling circus, or be a chef. There are things I want to do, but the money spigots of our society aren't lining up to pay me to do them. I'm all for obtaining optionality through universal income. But optionality means also the optionality to retire (today, not decades from now).
Honestly, I can't pick a better job for myself than the one I have now; my bills get paid, I help my community, the day-to-day is interesting and rewarding. But I'd rather have 100% of my time to myself. I can claim my pension from the state at 55, and I fully intend to.
The point being a pilot or chef pays back enough to e.g. raise kids and pay for all your debt getting there is years out. You may need to FIRE first to get to do alternative careers.
If you have no dependents then yeah do anything even just travel the world and do but of work here and there to keep going.
Used to think the same when joining the field and now I despise every minute I have to work on software I don't care about. AI even made it worse as I joined the field due to liking the coding part, not the results. Well, there isn't really an alternative for me either as there are basically no jobs I could learn that pay equally well...
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
I am constantly thinking about it, trust me. The issue is I already earn below median wage, but just enough to live comfortably. Other jobs would likely make me go back into poverty or make me hate my life even more.
For those serious about retirement preparation, I heartily recommend the Bogleheads community. They offer free, simple, proven ideas that can be life changers.
Source: personal experience. Retired a bit early 2 years ago, much credit to Bogleheads.
Given the national debt (and the state debts in many cases), I do not feel comfortable assuming that tax rates will not change drastically. I wouldn't be surprised if Roth IRAs became taxable, at least for certain people. And there could be straight-up wealth taxes on "the millionaires" (which you pretty much have to be in order to FIRE.
I would love to see sales taxes removed and a wealth tax to replace it. Would obviously have to be a graduated roll out. We (USA) need a big changes in these rules; hope we don't need (another) cival war for it.
I have been in the lucky situation where very little work was more than enough.
You start to do things just because you can. I did wood work, house renovation, gardening, rebuild a motorcycle, a caravan and later a car. Started to DJ, music production got into 3d printing and engineering, ...
Not working on the car after work for months or years. But turning my life upside down and do nothing else for 1 month.
I love doing things in weekdays instead of weekends.
At this point I can't even start to comprehend how people can do anything for them next to a 40 hour week job.
It's boring in the same way as a fridge that works flawlessly for 100 years is boring. Sometimes that's all you really want. Remember, stress is the worst thing you can do to your body. Also remember, being able to retire doesn't mean you have to.
> Based on the available data, the percentage of the U.S. population that can realistically achieve FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is very small, likely less than 1% to 3%. This figure represents those who can both meet the strict financial criteria and successfully execute the plan to retire decades before the traditional age.
According to Gallup polling, only 1% of Americans in their early 40s are retired, and just 6% of those in their early 50s have left the workforce. [1]
Nice if you can do it. Most of us will never be able to.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/what-percentage-of-people-achie...
"Only"? I think that's quite a lot.
in the US, local governments (counties, cities, school districts) rely heavily on property taxes because they have limited other revenue-raising powers. In the EU, the picture is almost the opposite: property taxes are a minor funding source, and national governments raise most of the money through labour, consumption, and income taxes. This makes quite difficult to grow old in USA in a sense that you cant just reduce your consumption and live of the savings. You need to move to cheaper area leaving all your life behind. Most important thing that you have at the end of your life. Your memories your friends and places that you are used to. So you need to keep working to be able to stay where you are.
Also, heath care costs if you don’t have insurance through an employer are a huge drag on FIRE, especially since you’ll likely need more medical care going into your 40s and 50s before you can get Medicare.
You can look to Canada for high income taxes, high property taxes, and high sales tax. We also have high usage fees and parking fees.
I honestly don't even understand why someone would want to retire early. You're just leaving money on the table and setting yourself up for mental health problems.
If you think working is worse for your mental health than not working, you need to pick something else to do.
Because the thing you may want to do doesn't pay the bills. Anything from playing music, making art or even building cool electronic things doesn't pay bills most of the time.
I have built many exciting things, many open source, none have brought in enough to cover my day to day.
> You're just leaving money on the table
LOL. Of course you're leaving money on the table: that is the whole point! Many people have hobbies they'd rather be doing than working. It's ok to leave money on the table. Especially so if you don't see anything meaningful to buy with the extra money.
If you like this, I highly recommend https://projectionlab.com/ for scenario-modeling your future income and retirement.
It's been discussed here a number of times and I've been a happy customer for years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173
I'll second that. I tried the trial for a few months then started paying money for it. At $100/year I've found it useful for modeling and gaming out different scenarios for retirement thresholds.
Nothing's certain, but if you like to play with data and you don't want to build the whole damn thing yourself, it's useful.
Still waiting for them to get support for options.
"How long do i have to work, until i can force others to work for me"
or alternative "... until i have saved up enough to last me till death"
But most of the time usually its the first option because no one wants to downgrade their ways of live when getting old.
And the problem with the first one is that as more and more people want to do that, who is going to work for them? the opressed youth :)
> And the problem with the first one is that as more and more people want to do that, who is going to work for them? the opressed youth :)
If only youth unemployment isn't a serious issue in modern societies.
In reality, maybe AI robots.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
For those who don't want to run random python scripts locally https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/
Is this the same project, or a different project that does the same thing. I took a quick glance at both and the descriptions are very similar
Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the US healthcare system!
Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the human condition!
Don’t forget the unbounded liability of AGI: your job disappears before you can accumulate the capital you need. On the bright side, you’re retired. Really simplifies the spreadsheet.
Don't forget the unbounded liability of apocalypse: society implodes and your money is worthless. On the bright side, you might have invested in Nuka Cola.
but the upsides of AGI could counter the unbounded liability - you will need to actively utilize the AGI to help you retire.
Which is identical everywhere in the modern world, while only in the US it's easy to become bankrupt from having to rely on the health care system.
I used to think about this and used https://ficalc.app/ but given all the updated models and this report https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...
It doesn't seem strategies like this will work in the future. Even the least extreme predictions point to world economy contraction.
I swear I saw a version of this years ago on one of the popular tech blags like Coding Horror or Joel On Software. I briefly looked for it the other day and couldn't find it. Anyone happen to remember it? I think it was mainly about salaries and when stock options would vest.
If you live in New York, life will get complex without building supplementary passive income from a young age.
If people live a slow-burn lifestyle, buy revenue property one can later demolish as needed, park unused cash in index funds, and split 7% between bullion & high-risk. Most folks will be fine when things eventually go sideways.
Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes. =3
> Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes
I just saw a cnn headline in the lobby about people who are looking to sell their family home to buy ai stock
They sure talk about mistakes before they happen
> people who are looking to sell their family home to buy ai stock
How nice of them. I'll have cheap tokens for a little longer.
Inference is pretty cheap, and easy to deploy while open models exist.
I am not Bullish on LLM firms given the -$2.50 profit per $1 revenue, or several trillion USD debt buried on page 60 of their reports. They can go be awesome without my cash, and I will cheer them on.
Note, whomever floated that home-equity loan will be happy with their won profits. They win-win even if the loan defaults. Not everyone is so lucky... =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE75WvOtcu8
Uh... What? I don't live in New York and this doesn't respond to anything in my comment.
Joel Spolsky lived and worked in New York, so opinions were heavily influenced by the reality of east-coast economics.
My comment was advice that most people will learn the hard way, and hopefully inspire a moment of pause about their own risk exposure tolerance.
The subject is about young workers that acknowledged the very real churn part of the ephemeral tech sector, and position themselves for an early exit strategy into adjacent careers or retirement. This is not a new idea, given vertical movement in software careers has been stagnant for decades. =3
I think this would highly depend on figures for real estate and overall COL in the specific location where you intend to retire? And also major life choice possibilities like maybe selling your house and moving or choosing something smaller when theoretical children are fully grown and have moved out.
How much money do you need to allow yourself to be happy and start experiencing life?
How can people not see FIRE is just a way to make you postpone what you want to do? Who cares what you can do when you're old and full of pains?
Why not both? Depending on what you make, it’s often possible to enjoy life and also spend less than you earn. You are enjoying life like someone with a lower salary would.
Yeah, but money is a hell of a drug and the advertising industry is doing everything it can to tell you how unhappy you are and keep you as a wage slave.
The actual list of things you need is quite small: water, food, shelter, clothes, company. But if you talk to your average wage slave the list of things is huge: massive house, smart dishwasher, new car, all-inclusive holidays, dog etc. And this is before you even get to things you want!
It's very hard to resist the hedonic treadmill. Ad blocking is a key, and that includes any media with subtle advertising in it like car and tech channels etc. If you can avoid this stuff, you can definitely be happy with a fraction of what a lot of people think they can't live without.
Yeah but that's just what most people do. FIRE extends into visions of grandeur and too much focus on the money. The hobby becomes getting to FIRE. And then what?
There are people who don’t save money at all and people who save a lot more than average, which is a whole lot easier with a high income. With the right mindset, it’s not much of a hardship.
Well, FIRE is about retiring before you're old. But really this is an idea for people with insanely high salaries that you commonly see in the US. It's for when you're earning several multiples more than you need to "be happy". All it's really saying is if you resist lifestyle inflation and the hedonic treadmill you can still be happy your whole life but be financially independent much earlier. It's not really about people earning close to median and living in poverty their whole life so they can retire.
This is cool, but I for one hope to be able to continue to work until my last dying day.
The idea here is you get to work, but you don't have to work.
Personally, programming computers is one of my favorite things to do, so I'm with you on wanting to keep doing it.
It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.
I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.
Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.
With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.
I retired at 59 about 2 years ago. My career was coding and product development, I put together some ideas about what I’d code after I left the workplace.
To my surprise, I haven’t missed it at all. Playing music, reading for pleasure and language studies ( to help with a part time volunteer gig ) have totally met my needs. You never know.
Retirement doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't have to. It means you can work for yourself on your own interests instead of for some other boss who tells you what to do.
Why not find a career and job that's enjoyable now without even having to defer all of this for later? Not just in software, but you could be flying planes, be in a travelling circus, learn to be a chef, etc. If the answer is you have too many commitments keeping you tied to your current job, then I'd argue that we should be optimising for that optionality rather than some arbitrary day to end the nightmare 40 years from now
I don't want to fly planes, be in a traveling circus, or be a chef. There are things I want to do, but the money spigots of our society aren't lining up to pay me to do them. I'm all for obtaining optionality through universal income. But optionality means also the optionality to retire (today, not decades from now).
Honestly, I can't pick a better job for myself than the one I have now; my bills get paid, I help my community, the day-to-day is interesting and rewarding. But I'd rather have 100% of my time to myself. I can claim my pension from the state at 55, and I fully intend to.
The point being a pilot or chef pays back enough to e.g. raise kids and pay for all your debt getting there is years out. You may need to FIRE first to get to do alternative careers.
If you have no dependents then yeah do anything even just travel the world and do but of work here and there to keep going.
That worked out great for those of us who found software enjoyable...
Used to think the same when joining the field and now I despise every minute I have to work on software I don't care about. AI even made it worse as I joined the field due to liking the coding part, not the results. Well, there isn't really an alternative for me either as there are basically no jobs I could learn that pay equally well...
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
Gas as in petrol?
It’s up 48% in 15 years, and until the Us-Iran war it was only up 14%
https://fuelwide.com/fuel-prices/netherlands/history
Grocery inflation is 45% over the same period but I suspect you’ll claim CPI figures are nonsense.
Gas for heating has indeed about doubled, unsurprising with both Ukraine and Iran.
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
Then get a job that doesn't pay equally well. It'll probably be an upgrade.
I am constantly thinking about it, trust me. The issue is I already earn below median wage, but just enough to live comfortably. Other jobs would likely make me go back into poverty or make me hate my life even more.
How much coding are you doing nowadays vs. AI doing it for you and you reviewing/pushing it into the repo?
Id say 90% AI, I just review it now
Then your life is completely meaningless. You've rationalized yourself into wasting the one and only life you have.
For those serious about retirement preparation, I heartily recommend the Bogleheads community. They offer free, simple, proven ideas that can be life changers.
Source: personal experience. Retired a bit early 2 years ago, much credit to Bogleheads.
Given the national debt (and the state debts in many cases), I do not feel comfortable assuming that tax rates will not change drastically. I wouldn't be surprised if Roth IRAs became taxable, at least for certain people. And there could be straight-up wealth taxes on "the millionaires" (which you pretty much have to be in order to FIRE.
You mean retire at all. I think this would cause a civil war if govt pulled this.
I would love to see sales taxes removed and a wealth tax to replace it. Would obviously have to be a graduated roll out. We (USA) need a big changes in these rules; hope we don't need (another) cival war for it.
> a $60k wedding
:/
If you'd written it in Javascript you could have hosted it on Github Pages.
You can use Pyodide for that, no need to stoop to JS.
Retiring early sounds utterly boring.
I have been in the lucky situation where very little work was more than enough.
You start to do things just because you can. I did wood work, house renovation, gardening, rebuild a motorcycle, a caravan and later a car. Started to DJ, music production got into 3d printing and engineering, ...
Not working on the car after work for months or years. But turning my life upside down and do nothing else for 1 month.
I love doing things in weekdays instead of weekends.
At this point I can't even start to comprehend how people can do anything for them next to a 40 hour week job.
I don't think I'll ever retire, but I'll take jobs knowing that the salary won't matter for me which unlocks a lot of options for me again
Retiring is to stop doing what other people tell you to do for money.
There is plenty of room for intellectual and social engagement outside of paid work.
It's boring in the same way as a fridge that works flawlessly for 100 years is boring. Sometimes that's all you really want. Remember, stress is the worst thing you can do to your body. Also remember, being able to retire doesn't mean you have to.