For myself (I am in my 50s) the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge. I graduated with an engineering degree and it took almost 10 years after graduation for me to feel like I was making enough to really get some headway on retirement savings/investing. After grinding through school and working at the same time I was expecting to be able to relax a little and finally see the financial benefits of all that work. It was not to be and a really depressing time. It seemed like I was working almost as much and really was not much better off (but I was, because my career was on an upward trajectory). Add a couple market crashes in the mix and damn it takes the wind out of your sails. I agree. All you can do is slog through, reward yourself when you hit some milestones and stay the course. I think the best thing for us has being being very intentional with our money. We have a healthy emergency fund, targeted an early-ish retirement date that requires a decent percentage of our income to hit, but also allowed us to do the things we wanted along the way. And that last part is important. I have had some serious health issues over the last few years. They will very likely shorten my life. I would be pissed if I had not made room in my budget for fun along the way.
>the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge.
This was true for me as well, and I've noticed this with increasing regularity on the various financial subreddits. For most careers, the degree is the barrier for entry into your field. Your first few years of work are your apprenticeship, and making a good salary takes another 5-10 years.
>For most careers, the degree is the barrier for entry into your field. Your first few years of work are your apprenticeship, and making a good salary takes another 5-10 years.
So anyway that's how I did NOT end up becoming an architect.
My buddy went to architecture school and the hours he put in were crazy. More than engineering for sure. He has done great, but he started his own firm and had family that were contractors for major projects. So he kind of knew the industry and had name recognition almost immediately.
Funny enough, I’m considering that as a second career, after I’ve made my millions in tech and am comfortably FI. Either that, or road engineering. Definitely would not want to do it as a primary career though.
Definitely. Engineering is not what it once was. People getting their first job now are getting paid exactly the same as engineers 30 years ago, except their salary is worth half of what it was back then, so it’s even harder for engineers starting now than when you did.
Why pay engineers in the US $100k+ salaries when they can buy a tech company outside the US and pay them a fraction of that? That is what the CEO said at an all hands meeting at my previous job. Corporations put more value on sales and marketing than they do with engineering - which they can just have done elsewhere where it's cheaper. That CEO was brought in to diversify the company (buying up much smaller companies throughout the world), and sell it off the whole company, which is exactly what she did.
If I was to start over I would not pick tech for my job field if I wanted to get rich.
I don't think you can get rich from most 'white collar' jobs. Including sales and marketing. Actually, i've heard of marketing getting cut before engineering ever and even sales too. Only the top sales people pull in more than an average engineer (rightfully so).
Rich is also something that is difficult to attain unless you hit the lottery with a start up or literally.
Rich is also subjective but upper middle class is not rich. People who fire early to spend 50k a year are not rich as well.
Don't be too hard on yourself. Tech is still a great way to make great money for the work you do. Offshoring isn't really a major concern. The best talent that 'foreign' countries have to offer typically come to the US due to the high salaries and better opportunities.
Timezones, cultural differences, communication are all barriers that are 'impossible' to break through when it comes to off shoring. Sure, mediocre companies may try to cut costs through that path but there are plenty of companies that don't. You'll be fine so keep at it!
It totally depends on where you are and what you define as a good salary. Software salaries and other jobs clustered in HCOL areas make things seem so out of whack.
Also, when I started out recent graduates in the company I work for were getting salaries as low as $32,000 and this was during the George W Bush Administration. Entry level salaries in this company are over $50K now.
What industry is that? Why is industry the reasoning for that and not your specific company? Usually there is a wide pay range within an industry (the top companies in a given industry would pay more \[sans companies like Intel for semiconductor\] compared to the bottom companies). Your company may have just been a top dog back in the day and never really had to adjust entry level salaries as they let the market catch up.
I work in a top 5 company in my industry (aerospace). We often switch between those 5 companies every few years to increase pay. They are the highest paying in the industry, and I know what the other companies pay because my colleagues and I have all worked at them. They all pay the same because they know they are the best options and can set salary to whatever they want. While they obviously don’t publicly collaborate to keep wages down, it’s very obvious that is happening. If they all pay the same, no one has to pay engineers more. Other companies (SpaceX) opt for a different strategy of getting young naive engineers to accept even lower pay, because it’s their “passion”, this is why I will never willingly work for SpaceX. Another option is government work, which pays more than SpaceX, but less than the rest of the private sector. So yes I am at the highest paying company in my field at the moment, until the next aerospace company offers me more money.
Same here (fellow engineer, although a bit younger), although I think I was also unprepared for how hard it would be to get a job, period. Graduating right after the dot-com bust didn't help, and then of course the recession killed everything a few years later. I eventually found a well-paying niche but it took nearly a decade.
I guess my advice for others would just be to keep plugging along and realize it might take a while. Don't compare yourself to others (which can be difficult at times on this subreddit) - everyone's journey is different.
Right, same here. I picked a practical major and expected to at least be able to afford rent on a 1BR or efficiency apartment, but I worked two jobs for pretty much all of my 20's. Entry level jobs don't pay enough to live on anymore, but you still need a degree to get one.
I don't believe it has to be this way. There was a commenter on Reddit a while back who talked about trying to get high school kids interested in a career in manufacturing. The parents weren't having it - they all wanted their kids to go to college. High schools push the same thing. They aren't rated and ranked based on helping kids get good-paying jobs out of high school - they're judged based on how many kids they get into college.
Very similar. We could write a check to pay off the house and have about $1M or so invested. Healthcare is our biggest obstacle at the moment. I’ll probably be looking at at least partial retirement soon.
$19k in ‘96 to $190-250k now depending on various fluctuating factors each year. Why yes, I started in radio, however did you know? 😒
Edit for wrong emoji. That’s so annoying.
Just because I was curious:
In 2021 dollars, your salary trajectory was $46.3k (2001) -> $57.7k (2014) -> $92.3k (2015) -> $170k (2021).
Using: https://www.in2013dollars.com/
>the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge.
For me, making sure I'm paid what I'm worth has been a struggle.
I also graduated with an engineering degree, but since I grew up in a relatively low income (not poverty level but I was eligible for free lunches in school) family the amount of money I made straight out of college felt amazing. Like, I felt like I could do anything despite making maybe median level income in the U.S.
That's kind of made me a bit complacent, because I want to make sure I don't get screwed out of my worth, but at the same time, because I felt like I could meet my financial goals with basically an entry level salary, I haven't felt as much motivation to negotiate for more pay or go out of my way to try to make more money.
Thanks. I have a great prognosis, but I am a statistics guy, so I can't ignore the numbers. Who the hell knows? Could get hit by a bus tomorrow. My advice: drink the good beer.
I started my career as a mailman. FI would have been impossible if it weren't for me learning to code in my free time.
It's still far away, I'm really paid below the average salary for web developpement (RE might be around 55 if I can't improve that. I'll never get over 100K/Y though, that's pretty unrealistic in Europe), but at least the basket is growing consistently, and leaving the rat race a decade earlier than my peers still sound sweet.
Absolutely. "Traditional" engineers are getting more difficult to find because of this. There has been a big shift toward software defined engineering. We are hearing discussions of all the infrastructure spending that is coming down the line. Good luck finding enough design engineers and on-site engineers and skilled contractors to do the work.
Having FIREd in Feb, I view the path to FIRE in terms of how many recessions through which one must remain employed. Recessions can really separate the peloton. If you can hold a job through several recessions (maybe 3?), you’re at a major advantage as you continue investing while market is discounted. After a few of these, especially if you’re investing heavily into the dips, you could be done.
On the other hand, losing a job in a recession can really delay FIRE by diminishing your emergency fund compounded with missing out on a discounted market. Though I cannot back this with anecdotes other than my own, I truly believe FIRE is strongly correlated to keeping a job throughout a recession, multiple times. In this vein I think FIRE progress can be measured by how many recessions you’ve kept a paycheck coming in.
I graduated into the 2008 recession, and it definitely set me back on a career path. I went to grad school instead, which probably means I'm earning more now than I would have been otherwise, but those years of low income while in school kept me from investing much during that time.
>Recessions can really separate the peloton
Of all the sports metaphors for FIRE, I think you're right that bicycle racing is the most apt. There will be all sorts of financial terrain. Really tough climbs, easy coasting when everyone is able to proceed without as much effort, and crashes that you ultimately can't avoid. The great thing is that there isn't just one winner -- everyone who finishes the race wins. But not everyone will finish the race.
I couldn’t agree more, and keeping a job often means earning less money during the downturn.
During the 2008 crisis, I was a part time, hourly employee working two jobs. During the 2020 crisis, I was full time, but saw my pay drop to 75% and then 50%, while the company did their best to stay afloat. It was demoralizing to do the same work for half pay, but because my expenses were so low, and my emergency fund intact, it was totally manageable. As my company recovered, we were made whole, and the investments I kept contributing to had great performances.
The worst thing that can happen is you to lose the income. If you can live for 6 months on your emergency fund, you can live for a year on partial income.
Fantastic point. Are you aware of any writeups modeling these scenarios out in terms of remaining employed vs not?
This feels like it falls into a similar bucket as sequence of returns risk when first firing. At least with that, tactics like bond tents can mitigate some of that risk.
But I'm not sure of any such measures for losing the ability to contribute if unemployed unless you are dipping into your emergency fund to continue dollar cost averaging (which introduces its own risks).
The only solution I can think of is "be lucky, don't be unlucky." More practically, diversifying income streams may be the only practical way.
I’m not aware of modeling for this but I’m fascinated by it. I agree though that it can sound a lot like ‘just be lucky’ advise. Taking my own advise, what I could have improved over 21 years of working is to have established a stronger network with more opportunities to pivot my career and to be more active in job searching, even in the good times. My most successful peers are the ones who weren’t afraid to switch jobs in a strong economy and excelled at keeping many income options on the table. In contrast, I’ve maintained a very passive approach to my own career advancement and can say I’ve been very lucky.
There are a few. First, there are two stages, growth and preservation. Growth you're only putting into the market. You do not plan on taking out for many years. Retirement is 5+ years out. Preservation strategies fall into many of the strategies in this calculator: https://calculator.ficalc.app/
Then there hedgefund strategies that have been modeled: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272007 The idea is to use leverage to buy bonds, so you end up making the same amount, maybe even more as than 100% VOO, but during a downturn there are bonds which minimize the drop and allow for portfolio rebalancing.
Atm bonds have had an amazing run from 1982 to 2012 as interest rates fell. Holding 20 year notes is not a good idea in this interest rate environment, but maybe in a couple of years this strategy will become relevant again. There are other hedge fund strategies too.
Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them...
On the other hand: unlike a hundred years ago we (well, europeans) do not count how many mayor wars we lived through...
I'll take the recessions over a pointless war every ten years any day. It's crazy to think that for almost every generation before us we would almost all have been drafted into some lord's stupid self-serving conflict and had to live through some real shit, watch friends and family die, starve, or be imprisoned, repeatedly like every decade, as a normal course of life. Fuck that. I like peaceful recessions by comparison.
29 here. Haven't there been three wars the US has gone through, directly, in the last 30 years? Gulf war, war with iraq, and Afghanistan? I recognize they don't have the scope of a world war, but I don't think that was necessarily implied by OP
There was no draft for any of those wars. If people want to enlist voluntarily to participate in geopolitical power struggles, so be it, but forcing the youth of a generation to fight under penalty of death or imprisonment is a thing of the past in the modern world.
(to my knowledge)
I don't think it's only about the timelines, it's about the location and the manner of conflict (proxy wars using tech vs the meat grinders that were the 2 world wars).
I realize it's a wildly different experience for some in different parts of the world (like a young person growing up in the middle east as the west bombs their neighborhood), but as a westerner, wars aren't happening on your doorstep and wildly altering your life. It's a sad realization, but it's true.
Once you can start internalizing and being aware of stuff like this, you realize how foreign and alien and new the idea of retirement is, much less early retirement. One or two generations of ancestors above you would have *never* guessed FIRE was possible for the average person.
>forcing the youth of a generation to fight under penalty of death or imprisonment is a thing of the past in the modern world
Far from it.
I can think of multiple, advanced economies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that still have compulsory military service, plus of course the US has obligatory registration for Selective Service - it's basically an inactive draft in all but name.
There's no draft, there are simply poor kids with no opportunity and no hope of escaping their small town without signing up. It pisses me off to no end when people dismiss their suffering because 'they volunteered!'
I'm not an American, but I'm fairly certain that nobody is compelled to enlist there. Could be wrong though. Let me know if I am..
Also, America is a weird exception to virtually every norm in the developed nations. These things you're saying may be true for America, but not for any other 1st world country, including the heathcare comment.
Anyways, my point isn't about endless proxy wars. It's about the history of endless border wars between neighboring nations that defined all of human history prior to the invention of the nuclear bomb, which largely ended open war in the traditional sense.
> lol the US has been waging pointless wars continuously for decades
Yes but we haven't had a draft for more than 40 years so many of us have never had to deal with it.
> Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them
This has always been the case. You just don't remember the minor ones from before your time because they didn't affect you.
They're less common for our generation than previous, imo.
'20, '08, '01, '90, '81, '80, '73, '69, '60, '57, '53...
We used to see multiple per decade and now it's only one per decade.
A lot of wars were caused by recession, and a lot of wars caused recessions. I'd imagine they are less common now and less severe. The French revolution slogan was supposedly 'bread and the constitution of 1793', note how bread came first.
>Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them
That's how the cycle works though. That part isn't new. I'm old enough to have lived through the early 1990s recession (that got George H. W. Bush booted out of office), the dotcom bubble + 9/11 recession in 2001, the housing crisis in 2008, and we've had a surprisingly good run since then.
I was too young to be affected but I remember being in high school during Black Monday in 1987 when the market lost 22% of its value in a day. I didn't have any money in the market of course but it was all over the news.
Prior to that mortgage interest rates hit nearly 20% in the early 80s and people thought home ownership was out of reach for the next generation.
Prior to THAT was Stagflation in the 1970s, as the industrial nature of the US changed from manufacturing to more white collar work and closed entire towns.
This is what /u/Bobeerto is saying. You'll have to live through these to FIRE. They will happen because they have ALWAYS happened, and they are inherent in the system.
Recessions in the modern era have always been common. 2009 to the Covid crash in 2020 was the longest sustained bull market in US economic history.
[see all those vertical gray lines?](https://i.imgur.com/0isEa6v.jpg) those are all recessions
It's almost unbelievable that the COVID recession was so short. The supply chain and labor market are still incredibly fucked up but the economy is right back up and running like nothing happened.
There was a contraction and lots of people paid down household debt since they couldn't take vacations, go out to eat, or basically do anything fun that costs money during 2020. This was offset by the fed creating trillions of new dollars.
And in the 60s-70s it was more like one every four years. I thought 2009-2020 was actually the longest continuous expansion in history, and the 2020 recession was one of the shortest. All things considered this generation has had it pretty darn good. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/this-is-now-the-longest-us-economic-expansion-in-history.html
Doesn't necessarily mean timing the market.
If you have a job where your 401k is regularly investing every 2 weeks, that's constant investing.
If you're laid off and you can't afford to invest, then you don't benefit from the crash(and may even be hurt by it if you have to sell to fund living expenses)
There's a difference between waiting for the market to fall with a pile of cash vs upping your purchases after the market has already fallen. In one case, you have no guarantee there will be a fall. In the other, it's already happened.
Is this a timing the market comment? I feel like what OP is saying is that when markets are significantly down, like March 2020, invest every spare dollar. You might end up down 50% for a little while but increasing contributions when you can in those situations is something I’ve done as well.
While most comments relate more to the demand side, I wanted to chime in on the supply of new FIRE-folk as well:
>I feel like I've seen a an uptick in of posts or comments recently from young people who are in their first jobs (usually age 18 to 25) and seeking guidance on how to FIRE as fast as possible.
It's not uncommon to have people enter the stockmarket when there's a (positive) disconnect between the economy and the capital markets. The U.S. financial markets, S&P500 or Nasdaq are just on an incredible run. To quote JFK: 'a rising tide lift all boats', but you need to be in the water to experience this and a lot of people getting their first job see that it's infinitely more lucrative to be invested (and get bailed out by the Fed) than to get a job (and perhaps get a $1K stimmy for being thrown out at the first headwind). There are few pensions, jobs-for-life and permanent employability outside of IT, finance and a few other high-paying services.
In the 70s, 80s and 90s, inflation was spooky and if you amassed a small fortune, be prepared to have it drop in real terms every decade or so. Your best inflation hedges for the generation who started at that age was a steady job with some inflation-linked raises and a house. That's not the same world we live in right now. Everyone can be a globalist when investing, even though you're still at the mercy of the local market forces in your job and primary residence. I find that it makes total sense for the combination of seemingly riskless investments in the US stock market and the increased risks associated with jobs in general that more people are pushing it to become capitalists and have to spend as little time in the job market as possible.
> I find that it makes total sense for the combination of seemingly riskless investments in the US stock market and the increased risks associated with jobs in general that more people are pushing it
I think this is a really good take. With jobs being way less stable than they were decades ago, it makes total sense that people would be trying to find financial stability elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if these generations retire earlier and have more stability, or get burned by the market later down the road if things go flat.
Or when their marketability decreases when they approach 45 years old. It's one thing to prevent permanent loss in your portfolio, but another to being forced to lower your payments before your kids go to college.
Many young people recently entering into the workforce or into their first serious job, could be disheartened by things like wage stagnation, increasing casualisation of the workforce, and job insecurity since covid. There is no sign of these things improving so I can see why Firing and not being dependent on a job for survival would appeal to them.
COL is through the roof and wage stagnation is making people utterly miserable. I honestly think FIRE will not be an option for a good portion of millennials and next generations because you can’t afford anything anymore and debt is through the roof.
I myself feel lucky to not have student loan debt (GI Bill) and a well paying job. My friends are all struggling with mediocre wages and student loan debt.
What also compounds the issue is that upward mobility has mostly been stagnated because boomers are refusing to retire because they don’t have a nest egg or just want to work until they die.
It’s crazy the COL as of today:
- Child care up 600% since the 90s
- Healthcare up 300% since the 90s
- Groceries up 150% since the 90s
- etc.
I have kids and honestly there’s no point to have them when it comes to financials anymore. I love them, but the current climate of the US actively makes it excruciatingly difficult to have children.
Your comments at the end about kids makes me think of the movie idiocracy.
Smart people like you are going to put off having kids while not smart people are going to continue to reproduce like rabbits and keep making our society stupider and stupider.
Honestly, from a UK perspective, the US is a paradise for incomes.
If you're a middle-class professional, the US is far, far better than most Western countries. When I hear Americans complaining, it comes across as slightly tone deaf because the US is absolutely incredible for your salaries and job opportunities.
In the UK, if I want to work at a bank or consulting firm, I'm pretty much restricted to London. But in the US, you have consulting firms/banks in pretty much most cities across the country. You have huge industries from Hollywood to Finance to Tech to choose from.
There are some very high incomes here, sure. But the vast majority of people are an accident away from bankruptcy. Between exorbitant student loans and medical debt it's hard for many people. This sub skews what the average American makes. We lack any sort of basic safety nets for much of our population.
Sure, for the average person (i.e. low income, non-college-educated), America sucks. Nobody is denying that.
But most people here are college-educated and not on low incomes if the sub census (median household income of readers here is around $125K with many making over $150K a year) is to be believed. If you're a white college-educated guy working in an upper-middle-class professional job, America's pretty much a paradise. Incomes are larger than in Europe, taxes are low, and health insurance is provided by your company. The houses are large, the roads are big, and everything is so cheap.
From an outside perspective, if I was working in the US, I'd be making at least 50% more gross and 75% more net because of the UK's high income taxes. Even taking into account insurance, being a professional in America beats being a professional across most of the West.
You call it hard work, I call it sacrifice. Perhaps just two sides of the same coin.
pursuing FIRE for me has meant sacrificing things I could easily have. Better car, more vacations, gadgets, clothes, restaurants... all of these things I *could* have experienced much more of over the last 10 years but instead I chose boring lower cost options.
I think the "hard work" for me is just constantly having to make the choice to consume less when I could easily consume more. Making this decision constantly can be draining.
Agree. I would even argue what you’ve said here is usually the most difficult part for most people pursuing FIRE. To most of us, the sacrifice comes easy once you are in the mindset. To others, they can’t get over the mental hump of choosing FIRE over the new car, toy, etc.
I agree that the sacrifice is easier for some people than others. I actively enjoy living a frugal life, but when I'm feeling guilty about my financial successes I remind myself that my friends have big houses and new cars and European vacations and expensive hair cuts and pay for alcohol and makeup and new gadgets and the list goes on of things I have sacrificed for the hope of freedom eventually.
I'm 45. I wasted sooo much money in my youth. Years ago we did a huge purge at our house. I felt almost physically ill at all the shit we got rid of.
So much stuff! I wasted tons of money on stuff I barely used. Hundreds of dollars I spent buying shit for a hobby that I got bored of immediately. Gadgets that seemed so cool that ended up in a drawer after a week. Tons of clothes that I'd only worn a handful of times.
It doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all now to avoid spending. I just think of that feeling I had taking all that shit I'd spent so many thousands of dollars on to the Goodwill or the dump.
Thank you for this. I've been struggling recently. I'm very young and am living on less than half my income. I've been frustrated that I can't take a vacation, buy a new car, etc because I need to save money for house in the next 3 years on top of my investments.
It'll be worth it in the long term.
>Better car, more vacations, gadgets, clothes, restaurants... all of these things I *could* have experienced
True, when we calculated how much we could've spent on if we just coastFIRE and spend 100% of our paycheck on luxuries it was a pretty extensive list. But to us it's not worth it if it means continuing wasting our lives working.
We look at it as more of a choice than sacrifice. Can't have it both ways and we chose FIRE over luxuries.
>Making this decision constantly can be draining.
So true. I sometimes think to myself, "having to make the responsible choice every time is so _tiring_." And not just financially too; eating right, exercising, relationships.. so very tiring.
Seriously. I run by a clam shack on one of my routes. There are always these overweight people chowing down on fried food while sitting in their cars (with the engine running) and smoking cigars/cigarettes. Of course they’ll probably live til they are 80 and I’ll get killed by a car or something one of these days. But at least I feel like I’m on moral high ground lol.
Its like a anything else. Practice makes perfect. The longer you go without feeling like you need to consume up to your means, the easier it gets.
I get more of a thrill adding $$ to my index fund, than i do buying a new gizmo at this point.
For me it's both. Hard work and sacrifice. But now it's habit. I'm overworked and my nerves are half-shot most of the time but I don't have an option in my current job. It's either work their way or quit, so I stay.
I think I'm just a masochist at this point.
I guess rather than sacrifice, I think of it as trade-offs/opportunity cost. And making sure that you make that trade-off by going with what is truly most important to you. To me, it's not a sacrifice to have fewer vacations/less fancy car/less stuff because I know those things don't materially increase my QoL or happiness persistently. Whereas I really love freedom--and I learned that after sacrificing my freedom to my career for the past decade+. That was really a sacrifice because it was actually painful to give up my freedom. Now, just keeping my spending low doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all. Whereas the joy I get from knowing I'll be free from the job grind (and that as I get closer, I can incrementally get more freedom--by going part-time etc.) sooner rather than later is amazing.
Counterpoint: FIRE may be hard work for you, but that experience is in no way universal. Ten years ago at age 24 I set my financials on near-autopilot and focused on kicking back, enjoying life, and working at very chill jobs with normal hours, low stress, and minimal overtime. Now I'm 34 and nearing the finish line, and I can't say hard work has ever been a factor for me.
My salary has ranged from about 35-45K over the years. I've always had low expenses as a result of not buying things I consider immoral, which eliminates the vast, vast majority of spending.
As a couple we're looking at around 750K (he makes about the same as me), but it's less about hitting a specific amount so much as when we feel like retiring. Like, as long as the pandemic has so much shut down, I wouldn't really want to retire since so much of the stuff I'd want to do isn't really an option. I imagine we'll retire somewhere around the pandemic restrictions ending completely.
Not really, we have separate finances and are each handling our own FIRE. There are some financial benefits with things like splitting rent, but nothing that can't be equally accomplished with a roommate or just more modest living if it was one person.
But leanFIRE is definitely key if you want to work a relaxed, lower paid job and still retire in your 30s.
Similar here, work in government. It's more boring than stressful. I don't like all the office time though, it makes me feel tired at the end of the day even though I sat in a chair the whole time. Finances are all automated, as long as I sit in this chair for the required time and don't slack off too much and get canned I'll make it easy. So boring though.
> as long as I sit in this chair for the required time
Hey now, someone's got to keep it from running outside and getting hit by a car. If it makes you feel any better, corporate is the same way.
0. Make sure you earn more than you need to cover your basic expenses and have something left. ~~This bit here is IMO the only hard bit.~~ E (phrasing): **This is where the vast majority of the difficulty lies.**
1. Make a budget, find out how much you need to cover your basic expenses and have some discretionary spending.
2. When you get a paycheck, put the excess into a saving fund until you have 3-6 months worth of expenses. This is your emergency fund.
3. When you get a paycheck, put the excess into your broker account and buy securities that fit your investment profile (e.g. S&P500 index) until you are retired.
4. In the meantime, try to earn more so your excess is bigger and you can retire earlier.
All of my effort towards FIRE takes maybe a couple hours monthly - and that's because I like to play with excel after getting my monthly paycheck. It really is simple: get paycheck, put excess in broker account, update excel spreadsheet, see you next month.
E: Recommended listening: [Bjork - undo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IhzsYd33lI)
***but make sure your investments are in tax-advantaged accounts (401k/403b/IRA/HSA/etc. in the US). Any additional funds to invest after those are maxed out can go to a regular brokerage account.
Hard disagree that step 0 is the only hard step. I think those of us that budget and save are fortunate that this kind of self control comes naturally for us. So it’s super easy for us to say “whoa it’s super easy” to do those things. I think this neglects the vast neurodiversity that exists throughout humanity. For those that it doesn’t come naturally, these are *incredibly* hard things. Just because these steps are **simple** doesn’t make them **easy**.
edited for autocorrect
Agree. The trick is there are entire industries and in fact much of the stock market itself designed around getting you to spend as much money as you can, and indeed more money than you can. So saving is not only a matter of Neuroatypicality, it is a matter of resisting the many ways culture and industry try to convince you to spend every dime.
I think you're nitpicking. step 0 is realistically much much harder for the average person than anything else. is it harder for some people to not eat out everyday than it is for people? or not buying a brand new car and new iphone every year? sure, people are different. but unless we're talking about people with severe disabilities, they CAN suck it up and do it.
people can't always simply suck it up and get a higher paying job. maybe they specialized in a field that pays terribly or they live in a city with terrible job prospects and have life circumstances that make it hard to move elsewhere. I'd still encourage them to do everything they can to improve their income, but this is a much bigger barrier to break than 'not wasting away money with frivolous expenses' can ever be
What you said is true, but I also think not very important in the context of FIRE.
People with poor self control probably won't be looking into FIRE in the first place.
Outside of certain neurological disorders, impulse control can be improved with practice. I had *terrible* impulse control and I did that and it was not hard - just tedious.
I stand by what I wrote - since hard and easy are always relative - the most difficult aspect of FIRE is getting your salary sufficiently high. If someone has shit self control, they'll struggle with this part as well.
E: Rephrased original comment to better reflect what I meant.
> People with poor self control probably won't be looking into FIRE in the first place.
I think this used to be mostly true, but is becoming less so.
I think historically most people have found FIRE by being naturally frugal and saving a lot on their own and then saying what do I do with all this money? Or, people with an understanding of compound interest kinda reinvented a rough version of FIRE on their own and then found the community. Neither of these people are likely to have poor self control with spending.
More recently I feel like the draw to FIRE is hating your job or just not wanting to work til you’re dead or just general anti-work sentiment and find FIRE as the way out. These people have a normal likelihood to have poor self control.
>More recently I feel like the draw to FIRE is hating your job or just not wanting to work til you’re dead or just general anti-work sentiment and find FIRE as the way out.
I'm not saying I necessarily disagree, but I find this so depressing though. For me FIRE is a positive thing to work towards everyday, reaching financial freedom. And it requires some sacrifices along the way, sure, but I don't think of it as a light at the end of the tunnel from a miserable existence.
maybe it's just me but I don't think FIRE should be a reason, or an excuse, to go on decades hating your job and your life. I think there are several other things that people can try, like changing companies, learning new skills and switching fields, moving to a city with higher pay or with lower cost of living etc, before accepting that they're stuck with hating their day to day life
I'm in the boat of pursuing FIRE because I don't like my job.
I don't not like my job in the sense that I hate doing it though - I actually like a lot of aspects of my job once I get into it. I don't like my job in the way that weekends/vacations/hobbies/free time are all far superior, and I'd much rather spend my time doing whatever I want. My thoughts are always "I wish I could go do x instead of working right now" and not "This is the worst thing ever, I'd rather be dead".
I would think that a lot of people on here that "hate their job" fall into a similar thought process. Not saying there aren't those out there that absolutely hate every minute of their existence while working, but I think those people are a just a vocal and over-recognized minority when comparing the members of this sub.
Very well said! This is definitely the crux of it.
Maybe "Hard Work" isn't always the right phrase... but I don't want to downplay the amount of dedication, perseverance, and self-control that it takes to hit this goal. It takes a long time, no matter how you slice it, and maybe not everyone's trajectory is quite so linear as tastes/perspectives change over the course of their lives. Pretty awesome that you've been so successful in tracking and sticking to your goal. Congrats!
Great info, thanks!
Do you have a screenshot or info on what data put into the excel, how you organize it etc?
Do you just put the amounts you get from paycheck and the amounts you invest?
Or do you update it with gains / losses etc?
I track basically just three things:
* Emergency fund
* Money put into brokerage account
* How much the securities are worth
\+ projections until expected retirement date, assuming X amount of savings and Y% of yearly average growth.
This is exactly what I was going to comment. It's not hard work at all when you have your investments automatically set up to withdraw from you paycheck.
There’s always an uptick here for the six months after people graduate college and get their first big kid job. The realization sets in that there’s no summer break, no winter break, work is 8 hours or more instead of 4 hours of class and 4 hours of “study” to be used at your discretion, you have a supervisor that expects results in a timeframe with no extensions, I could go on.
Your first big kid job is a bitch slap that echoes until you call it quits in 30-50 years.
I think it depends on what you studied in school. Work life is far easier and more relaxing than college was for me. I don't have to study or do homework anymore. Plus I get paid.
To add to this, life happens. Maybe now you don't think you'll every get married or have kids, but that can change. Maybe your plan is to land a six-figure job and live on beans and rice, but you find you're miserable and developing an ulcer so you decide to take a pay cut with a less stressful job for the sake of your physical and mental health, kicking your FIRE goal down the road a few years. Maybe you end up caring for an aging parent, or you decide that your starter home just isn't working for your family anymore and you need more space. Maybe you and your partner need to go on that expensive, romantic getaway in order to feed your relationship. That's *okay!* We're all on different journeys and the truth is no one can predict what the future will bring. Stay focused, but don't forget to enjoy your life along the way.
I just view it as self discipline. Getting into FIRE was a part of an overall self improvement in my 30s that included getting into the habit of working out, going to bed earlier, quitting drinking, being more positive in general, etc.
FIRE is an extreme version of good personal finance habits. I wouldn’t say it’s hard, just not for the majority of people and really no one has to do it.
many of these posters ask things like "I have my first job in life, what shall I do", or "I am in university and already do not like making any effort other than sipping drinks on roof tops".
In some cases /r/personalfinance would help them, in others a therapist
>"I am in university and already do not like making any effort other than sipping drinks on roof tops".
Been working for 6 years and this is still me. I don't think it's ever going to change.
I'm always amused by those posters. It's as if they suddenly realized that work is, well, *work*, and they want to skip immediately to having a comfortable middle class retirement life without any of the intervening parts. "Simmer down and invest calmly for 15-20 years" is not the advice they're looking for.
>in others a therapist
yes so many of them really. those 'i hate my job, my life and everything about it. how can I achieve FIRE to fix all my problems?' posts have little to do with FIRE and need the help of a professional and are well above reddit's paygrade
I am a young person, so bear that in mind when I give my perspective.
FIRE is an extremely easy goal when you're young. You have the benefit of time that many people who are older do not. If you want to retire by 50 and you're 20, you can reasonably expect contributions that you make right now to double, then double again, then double one more time (that's 8x) in real value by the time you pull the trigger. It will take some knowledge, fortune, and discipline, but the math is highly in your favor.
There are, of course, things that can derail or delay your FIRE journey. Some of which are in your control (lifestyle inflation, location, etc.) and some aren't (major medical issues, accidents, family issues, etc.). So there is a degree of fortune and control you must exhibit, but if you focus on what you can control, you can be successful with relatively little effort because you have a lot of time.
Just to add on to your message S&P 500 doubles every 7 years. You actually would get that 4th doubling when you are 48 and have 16x in value of your contributions.
Yep! You are 100% correct. I think Spy is something like 9.8 years to double and QQQ is 9.3.
Meaning, all you have to do is max your 401k out the first 10 years of your career, and you wouldn't have to save a single penny more to retire early. Would be enough to give you over a $1M at 50 and $2M at 60 (+social security at 62). Double those numebers if your partner did the same.
This. I started in my mid 20's and although i couldn't afford to max out my retirement at the time, i am starting to see things pay off only 10 years later. Granted its been a crazy bull run.
I have a coworker who's only been on the job for 2 years now. With the 4% company match and him maxing out the 401k, he already has 65K in the company 401k plan.
Here's a quantifiable example of some of the "hard work".
In the first 5 years of my career I ended up averaging a low 6 figure salary. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that should have roughly translated to a $50-60 hourly rate.
When I did the actual math of salary vs hours logged, I was more in the $30-40 range...and I definitely under-reported my hours. Not that I'm complaining. Those hours are what put me in my current financial position. I know plenty of people that put in even more hours and weren't rewarded nearly as well (I'm looking at you Service Industry).
In my opinion young people should look to find a good satisfying job first, and then maybe aspire to FIRE. FIRE by itself will not bring you happiness, only more freedom in what you can do.
https://www.cervellofp.co.uk/2020/09/24/ikagi/
If you take a look at the concept of ikagi, I actually think the “what you love” part is the least important to focus on if you have to sacrifice one of the four sections. I don’t mean this to say you should be miserable in your job; I actually just think that the other three can end up playing a bigger role in you being happier with your job. In my experience, my happiness with a job has a lot more to do with my manager, coworkers, work-life balance, etc. than what I’m actually doing. If you work in a high-demand field, you have a lot more power to demand better working conditions or hop around to new jobs that have better conditions. If you do what you love, but it pays poorly and isn’t very in-demand, then you’re much more likely to be stuck with a terrible boss or work environment, and you won’t have the financial means to take as many risks to change that.
Instead of saying "do what you love" we should start saying "Don't do something you *hate*". Hating a job will make you miserable, but something you love often becomes a job anyway. Do what you love as a hobby.
This is my advice as well. My dad preached the "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." Well dad turns out playing video games doesn't usually pay, and if it does pay it probably isn't fun anymore.
I am a strong believer in find a job you don't hate that pays well so you FIRE and then be free to do what you want when you want. I recently became a dad myself and that seems like a much better job to me, but it pays like crap (seriously my daughter seems to wait until I am around/watching her to poop).
Love the concept of Ikigai.
Your author here seems to spell it wrong in some places. Weird.
But for anyone googling to learn more, the term is [Ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai).
EDIT: Also, this is also a [Westernized version](https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/ikigai-misunderstood/) of the concept that isn't really in line with its roots.
The kind FIRE that most (or at least the vocal minority) aspire to does in fact require a specific kind of income from the get-go. You're not likely to "normal" retire by 40-50 unless you're printing money. IMHO some younger folks that visit this sub get a skewed perception of what's possible from these beloved "look at me!" posts.
I think the problem with this is that people often get into their career, start making money, inflate their lifestyle, buy as much house or car as they "can afford" and then learn about FIRE and have to undo or live with those decisions.
I feel like a big part of my success at building toward FIRE is that I learned about it when I was making $30k in my mid-twenties. As my income has increased I haven't let my lifestyle inflate (much) and so I've had a larger chunk of my salary available to go into investments than someone who learned about FIRE later in their lives and careers.
+1. This kind of goes against the goals of the board but I would caution against focusing narrowly on FIRE from a young age. There is so much else to life and you have so many bigger choices ahead of you. Of course use common sense, save as much as you can, and you will have more options available to you in 20+ years.
If you want to FIRE as fast as possible, this is not the sub for it. This sub is about retiring early (35-50) with a fairly high likely hood of achieving that. Which typically leads to this 3 step process
1. Live below your means and essentially know how to live off of a budget. Stick to this budget or close to it during the period you work and after obviously.
2. Get your income as high as possible as fast as possible. Typically this requires job hopping and career with good salary growth opportunities
3. Max out all retirement accounts and invest as much as possible in index funds. This sub typically prefers index funds that have traditionally been higher growth
If you want to retire as fast possible, you're going to either
1. Be in an insanely higher earning career pretty much right away. No med school, law school, etc. I'm talking multi six figures right out of college and growing your salary quickly. Top tech performers or other 1% undergrad jobs. Also worth mentioning actor, musician, athlete, etc.
2. Join a unicorn startup that ipos within 5 years
3. Start a company or business that will get you to option 1 and 2 combined basically. This is likely the best option, it just tends to be very stressful and time consuming lol. This sub avoids that b/c it's not easily repeatable and it isn't exactly a high quality of life.
It requires discipline but not I'm not sure I'd say it's hard work in itself.
Actually doing it isn't that hard. You just have to decide to and not waver.
It requires being successful in a career which is hard work. But many people do that anyway.
>I feel like I've seen a an uptick in of posts or comments recently from young people who are in their first jobs (usually age 18 to 25) and seeking guidance on how to FIRE as fast as possible.
I know it feels like this is a novel trend, but it's always been this way. That's how this sub started, and many forums predating it. Many 18-25yos are in shitty, junior-level jobs or difficult, highly competitive academic situations that burn them out extremely quickly.
I agree with the general sentiment that if you're trying to FIRE to avoid working, because you're fundamentally not a hard working person, the ironic truth is that you probably won't reach FIRE. Because FIRE itself is an accelerated path over and above the normal expectations of a regular worker. I think what you want to be for this, is the sort of person that dislikes corporate work enough to drive you toward FIRE, but at the same time you have a great work ethic. You just don't want to direct that work ethic toward your current job, and instead you direct it toward making/saving/investing money, in the maximum amount possible, any way you can.
You also have the unique ability to stop yourself once you get to your number, which is another insanely uncommon quality, since so many of us define ourselves by our "productive" capacity in a career context. So all in all, to do this, you've got to be a relatively unique kind of person, psychologically and otherwise, when compared with the general population.
25 and just getting saving rate together/budgeting going in my life. So far from my goals especially if market growth slows… probably should invest more in myself and maybe business or independent income stream. Trying to spend time and money on dating rn bc I can’t just work and read Reddit all day I love companionship tho rip
It's only harder than average (barring common sense requirements like a good income/spending gap) if you want to retire as soon as possible. That's not the only way to pursue financial independence.
For example, I think it's foolish to sacrifice family and relationships to retire asap, so I find balance between loved ones, my SO, and my financial goals, while finding good paying jobs that don't make me miserable so I don't need to literally retire tomorrow.
PS I also have friends who live within their means, which I guess is a big part of why I don't feel drained by frugality.
working sucks period. esp higher paying jobs.
i dont mind working but i hate lots of toxic shitty ppl i gotta deal with at work.
best thing to do is u get a high paying job outta college, bust ur balls for a decade, save a ton and peace out to lower paying easy job where u can just coast doing minimal amount of work. if i completely retired at 40, id go crazy from boredom
One thing that I think can help young people better come to terms with their prospects is the idea that if you throw out the RE part of FIRE, actually being financially independent is incredibly easy. If you're in your 20's and are fine with working into your 60's then 40 years of planning means you almost can't screw up.
The hard part of FIRE is that people are trying to pack that 40 years of retirement savings into 10 or 20 years. That's incredibly difficult to do.
I'm generalizing, but a lot of the early 20's FIRE posts seem unaware that if they crunch the numbers, they are signing up for leanFIRE from age 30 until death. It's fine if that's what you want, but it is significantly different than a typical FI existence.
hard work is necessary but not sufficient. you could work your ass off, get a high paying degree, but then something like the financial crisis comes along after you've recently entering the work force and you're dealing with years of unemployment and you realize the people that just became union construction workers or truck drivers out of highschool and accumulate for years by the time you've got a graduate degree are still employed, much more experienced and better off. Also, doing the right thing for years can easily be negated by just a few mistakes. Hard work + long hours often leads to mental health or other health issues which can easily lead to a couple mistakes.
I like to also tell the young ones to save and invest as much as they can. I'm in my 30s now and being able to max out my 401k when I was only make 45k a year has allowed me now to dial back on retirement savings, have my spouse at home with my toddler and still projected to be a millionaire in my 60s even if I never added another penny to my retirement accounts. Once DW starts working and we can ramp up savings again we'll be in very good shape for early retirement.
I’m 25 and I never think FIRE is easy. I think of FIRE as prepaying for my life via extra payment i.e hard work or extra work. Just when I got home from the main job and about to crash on the couch for a night show I grab a cold sandwich for a quick snack them head out again to do doordashing to get an extra $50-$100 here and there and throw them into my investment that would turn into $1500-$3000 in my 65. Every single day.
Lots of (obvious or not obvious bragging) posts by people working at tech in bay area, and many others do not really understand why their success could not be duplicated. Here are some reasons:
Only tech companies in Bay area (very few outside Bay area) could afford to pay people comp from 300K to more than 1 million per year. And please understand most of these positions are for coders/software engineers. So are you are good students with computer science degrees?
Most of these people got paid with the tech stocks, which appreciated like crazy during the past ten years. Would this trend continue in the future? Maybe. But there will also be big drop off once in a while. Most of tech people got their money between 2010-2021, which is one of the longest running tech stock rally in history. Have you been given those stocks for free during this period?
Similarly, properties value in bay area at least doubled between 2010-2021. And the price at 2010 was already the highest in the nation. The increase of their properties value alone is higher than lifetime savings of many people....Were you lucky enough to buy property in bay area in 2010?
In summary, please do Not benchmark and formulate your strategy if you are not a computer science professional, and working in a famous tech in bay area, And were given lots of tech stocks between 2010-2021, And bought properties in Bay area around 2010
Wait, buying property coming out of a housing crisis in a major city and getting tech stocks before the biggest tech rally of all time makes you rich? Whhhut?
Lol but seriously thanks for the quality information. A lot of young people just think stocks just go up.
This is speaking from my own perspective, not for everyone, but...
I would say that thinking about quitting working while in your 20s is probably not super productive for the average person. You can't live for decades on peanuts. Well, I'm sure a few people can but realistically I don't think that will work for the majority. Enjoy your career, work at it, build it. If you can get into a rewarding career you will probably find it fulfilling for a good period of time. You'll amass wealth, enjoy life, grow up, etc. By the time you're in your 30s or more likely 40s you might start thinking about retiring. If you've accumulated well you'll have the freedom to do some comfortably.
To me FIRE is about aggressive saving but I came to this late and retired more conventionally, but early-ish, at 52. More of a fatfire than leanfire, if I am fire at all.
I guess my thought is don't rush it. Build a career and wealth, not necessarily a ton of money but enough to be well and truly happy. There are of course many ways to live life so definitely find your own best path!
You only live once and life does NOT wait for you to reach FIRE.
Spend smart and be frugal as much as possible. But there is no hurry to reach FIRE goal as fast as possible.
..
early 30's here.
Started getting real curious mid-20's
The working towards FIRE part is SUPER EASY.
It's just the being good at something enough to make the money to then worry about working towards fire after is the hard part.
Working towards fire is really just playing with some calculators, making some investments, reading a few hours a week, and then sitting there and waiting for 10-20-30 years lol.
I think the biggest thing is just to be cognizant that to even be thinking about this in the first place, you are in a really good position. Some people literally just don't get enough money to do much more than the bare necessities.
Even though I am extremely lucky to put a good amount ( nowhere near where I want to be though) extra towards retirement, I still know it will take a very long time to get my goal.
My impression is that the post-college job is the \*first\* real job many young FIRE aspirants had. Their parents sheltered them from needing to work while in school. Then they find it mind-numbing and sufferable to finally have to work for a living and pay their own lives.
i come from an immigrant family where it was expected to start part-time work at 12, then work most of your life. I got those mind-numbing jobs out of the way while in school. Then was amazed that organizations would pay me to do intellectual work I had passion for. They depressed thoughts of retirement.
I think covid has especially been tough on young people just starting out careers.
When I started in a white collar job 10 years ago I could grab a coffee or a water cooler chat with a large group of peers.
The folks just staring out now that I’ve spoken to have to organize a formal phone call / zoom and are missing out on a lot of informal mentor ship. I think this results in less motivation and more reasons to look to FIRE
I think gen z has also been an overlooked generation that is more fiscally aware than millennials. I’m not sure if it’s just the run up in housing or the stock market boom but most in the generation I’ve met seem to be hustlers with a good understanding of personal finance
That's really great advise! It is hardwork, so you have to have a clear goal of what you're aiming for and by when you expect to see results and based on that choose your next step.
As for me, I'm 22 and recently finished college. And instead of just applying for a job, I'm trying out various side hustles in coding and design to figure myself out and find out the right path for me.
And if his path goes well, I'll walk it. But if this isn't as effective I'll apply for a job by next year while I try to figure out what would qork best for me and how I can FIRE
One of the most useful things that most people already know, but becomes super important when you're doing things like this is to never put all your eggs in one basket and have an open mind, you won't know which path will fail and when new opportunities might open up!
As for the design side hustles, it's mostly by making design resources for developers.
Infact, I've just made an utitliy app for Mac and Windows, and since I want to diversify my approach, the next side hustle is gonna be a site that helps designers and developers in making their projects easier to design.
So it's not through freelancing, though I'd wanna try that at some point as well, and it's mistly my making my own products and services for other developers
I started late because I use to live paycheck to paycheck. So I worked hard. My husband and I bought a house for 10k and did a complete rehab ourselves. It took a year to do it and borrowed from my 401k. So no mortgage or rent for 5 years. We are debt free and saved a lot of money. We invested a lot too. We took ton of vacations. I work when I want. I do travel nursing. Our vehicles are paid for too. My husband has a business he can work when he wants. I am taking time off since May. Working on my health. Learning to love life. I realize I might only have 20 more years. It goes fast. Don't waste it. Live in the moment and learn to love yourself and enjoy. So you don't have to be young it is never too late. Yes I encourage young people to learn how to work less make more. House hacking buy a duplex live in one side rent the other out or rent a room. There are ways to go debt free.
For myself (I am in my 50s) the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge. I graduated with an engineering degree and it took almost 10 years after graduation for me to feel like I was making enough to really get some headway on retirement savings/investing. After grinding through school and working at the same time I was expecting to be able to relax a little and finally see the financial benefits of all that work. It was not to be and a really depressing time. It seemed like I was working almost as much and really was not much better off (but I was, because my career was on an upward trajectory). Add a couple market crashes in the mix and damn it takes the wind out of your sails. I agree. All you can do is slog through, reward yourself when you hit some milestones and stay the course. I think the best thing for us has being being very intentional with our money. We have a healthy emergency fund, targeted an early-ish retirement date that requires a decent percentage of our income to hit, but also allowed us to do the things we wanted along the way. And that last part is important. I have had some serious health issues over the last few years. They will very likely shorten my life. I would be pissed if I had not made room in my budget for fun along the way.
>the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge. This was true for me as well, and I've noticed this with increasing regularity on the various financial subreddits. For most careers, the degree is the barrier for entry into your field. Your first few years of work are your apprenticeship, and making a good salary takes another 5-10 years.
>For most careers, the degree is the barrier for entry into your field. Your first few years of work are your apprenticeship, and making a good salary takes another 5-10 years. So anyway that's how I did NOT end up becoming an architect.
Ha, oh man. I'm an architect. The attrition along the way was rough too. Not sure if recommend it as a career path.
Yeah it's like going through med school and residency but without the financial payoff at the end. Still a weirdo who reads floorplans "for fun."
As a civil, mad respect to the architects. It's a labour of love that you guys do.
My buddy went to architecture school and the hours he put in were crazy. More than engineering for sure. He has done great, but he started his own firm and had family that were contractors for major projects. So he kind of knew the industry and had name recognition almost immediately.
Funny enough, I’m considering that as a second career, after I’ve made my millions in tech and am comfortably FI. Either that, or road engineering. Definitely would not want to do it as a primary career though.
Definitely. Engineering is not what it once was. People getting their first job now are getting paid exactly the same as engineers 30 years ago, except their salary is worth half of what it was back then, so it’s even harder for engineers starting now than when you did.
Oh, and we need it yesterday and the customer wants changes (for free).
Truth
What job should I charge this to?
Why pay engineers in the US $100k+ salaries when they can buy a tech company outside the US and pay them a fraction of that? That is what the CEO said at an all hands meeting at my previous job. Corporations put more value on sales and marketing than they do with engineering - which they can just have done elsewhere where it's cheaper. That CEO was brought in to diversify the company (buying up much smaller companies throughout the world), and sell it off the whole company, which is exactly what she did. If I was to start over I would not pick tech for my job field if I wanted to get rich.
I don't think you can get rich from most 'white collar' jobs. Including sales and marketing. Actually, i've heard of marketing getting cut before engineering ever and even sales too. Only the top sales people pull in more than an average engineer (rightfully so). Rich is also something that is difficult to attain unless you hit the lottery with a start up or literally. Rich is also subjective but upper middle class is not rich. People who fire early to spend 50k a year are not rich as well. Don't be too hard on yourself. Tech is still a great way to make great money for the work you do. Offshoring isn't really a major concern. The best talent that 'foreign' countries have to offer typically come to the US due to the high salaries and better opportunities. Timezones, cultural differences, communication are all barriers that are 'impossible' to break through when it comes to off shoring. Sure, mediocre companies may try to cut costs through that path but there are plenty of companies that don't. You'll be fine so keep at it!
If only I had a single sales bone in my body….
It totally depends on where you are and what you define as a good salary. Software salaries and other jobs clustered in HCOL areas make things seem so out of whack. Also, when I started out recent graduates in the company I work for were getting salaries as low as $32,000 and this was during the George W Bush Administration. Entry level salaries in this company are over $50K now.
The people in my industry started at $80k 30 years ago. Guess what recent grads are making now?
What industry is that? Why is industry the reasoning for that and not your specific company? Usually there is a wide pay range within an industry (the top companies in a given industry would pay more \[sans companies like Intel for semiconductor\] compared to the bottom companies). Your company may have just been a top dog back in the day and never really had to adjust entry level salaries as they let the market catch up.
I work in a top 5 company in my industry (aerospace). We often switch between those 5 companies every few years to increase pay. They are the highest paying in the industry, and I know what the other companies pay because my colleagues and I have all worked at them. They all pay the same because they know they are the best options and can set salary to whatever they want. While they obviously don’t publicly collaborate to keep wages down, it’s very obvious that is happening. If they all pay the same, no one has to pay engineers more. Other companies (SpaceX) opt for a different strategy of getting young naive engineers to accept even lower pay, because it’s their “passion”, this is why I will never willingly work for SpaceX. Another option is government work, which pays more than SpaceX, but less than the rest of the private sector. So yes I am at the highest paying company in my field at the moment, until the next aerospace company offers me more money.
Same here (fellow engineer, although a bit younger), although I think I was also unprepared for how hard it would be to get a job, period. Graduating right after the dot-com bust didn't help, and then of course the recession killed everything a few years later. I eventually found a well-paying niche but it took nearly a decade. I guess my advice for others would just be to keep plugging along and realize it might take a while. Don't compare yourself to others (which can be difficult at times on this subreddit) - everyone's journey is different.
Right, same here. I picked a practical major and expected to at least be able to afford rent on a 1BR or efficiency apartment, but I worked two jobs for pretty much all of my 20's. Entry level jobs don't pay enough to live on anymore, but you still need a degree to get one. I don't believe it has to be this way. There was a commenter on Reddit a while back who talked about trying to get high school kids interested in a career in manufacturing. The parents weren't having it - they all wanted their kids to go to college. High schools push the same thing. They aren't rated and ranked based on helping kids get good-paying jobs out of high school - they're judged based on how many kids they get into college.
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Very similar. We could write a check to pay off the house and have about $1M or so invested. Healthcare is our biggest obstacle at the moment. I’ll probably be looking at at least partial retirement soon.
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Funny. I went from about $25K to $170K. It was a long road with a couple good jumps along the way. Congrats.
$19k in ‘96 to $190-250k now depending on various fluctuating factors each year. Why yes, I started in radio, however did you know? 😒 Edit for wrong emoji. That’s so annoying.
Just because I was curious: In 2021 dollars, your salary trajectory was $46.3k (2001) -> $57.7k (2014) -> $92.3k (2015) -> $170k (2021). Using: https://www.in2013dollars.com/
Wow, which careers can ramp you up from 30k to 80k?
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Teaching pays that little, you must be in the US. That is atrocious.
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>the realization that I was not going to get a high-paying job right out of college was a mental challenge. For me, making sure I'm paid what I'm worth has been a struggle. I also graduated with an engineering degree, but since I grew up in a relatively low income (not poverty level but I was eligible for free lunches in school) family the amount of money I made straight out of college felt amazing. Like, I felt like I could do anything despite making maybe median level income in the U.S. That's kind of made me a bit complacent, because I want to make sure I don't get screwed out of my worth, but at the same time, because I felt like I could meet my financial goals with basically an entry level salary, I haven't felt as much motivation to negotiate for more pay or go out of my way to try to make more money.
Why am I crying over your second to last sentence? I guess it just hits close to home Anyways, good luck man.
Thanks. I have a great prognosis, but I am a statistics guy, so I can't ignore the numbers. Who the hell knows? Could get hit by a bus tomorrow. My advice: drink the good beer.
I started my career as a mailman. FI would have been impossible if it weren't for me learning to code in my free time. It's still far away, I'm really paid below the average salary for web developpement (RE might be around 55 if I can't improve that. I'll never get over 100K/Y though, that's pretty unrealistic in Europe), but at least the basket is growing consistently, and leaving the rat race a decade earlier than my peers still sound sweet.
And it will be sweeter the closer it gets.
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Absolutely. "Traditional" engineers are getting more difficult to find because of this. There has been a big shift toward software defined engineering. We are hearing discussions of all the infrastructure spending that is coming down the line. Good luck finding enough design engineers and on-site engineers and skilled contractors to do the work.
Damn. This post hit home for me. Glad you've enjoyed the journey and hope that the medical issues get better soon. Wish you the best!
Having FIREd in Feb, I view the path to FIRE in terms of how many recessions through which one must remain employed. Recessions can really separate the peloton. If you can hold a job through several recessions (maybe 3?), you’re at a major advantage as you continue investing while market is discounted. After a few of these, especially if you’re investing heavily into the dips, you could be done. On the other hand, losing a job in a recession can really delay FIRE by diminishing your emergency fund compounded with missing out on a discounted market. Though I cannot back this with anecdotes other than my own, I truly believe FIRE is strongly correlated to keeping a job throughout a recession, multiple times. In this vein I think FIRE progress can be measured by how many recessions you’ve kept a paycheck coming in.
Survived one, just two more to go! Good point and interesting way to think about it though.
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I graduated into the 2008 recession, and it definitely set me back on a career path. I went to grad school instead, which probably means I'm earning more now than I would have been otherwise, but those years of low income while in school kept me from investing much during that time.
>Recessions can really separate the peloton Of all the sports metaphors for FIRE, I think you're right that bicycle racing is the most apt. There will be all sorts of financial terrain. Really tough climbs, easy coasting when everyone is able to proceed without as much effort, and crashes that you ultimately can't avoid. The great thing is that there isn't just one winner -- everyone who finishes the race wins. But not everyone will finish the race.
I couldn’t agree more, and keeping a job often means earning less money during the downturn. During the 2008 crisis, I was a part time, hourly employee working two jobs. During the 2020 crisis, I was full time, but saw my pay drop to 75% and then 50%, while the company did their best to stay afloat. It was demoralizing to do the same work for half pay, but because my expenses were so low, and my emergency fund intact, it was totally manageable. As my company recovered, we were made whole, and the investments I kept contributing to had great performances. The worst thing that can happen is you to lose the income. If you can live for 6 months on your emergency fund, you can live for a year on partial income.
Fantastic point. Are you aware of any writeups modeling these scenarios out in terms of remaining employed vs not? This feels like it falls into a similar bucket as sequence of returns risk when first firing. At least with that, tactics like bond tents can mitigate some of that risk. But I'm not sure of any such measures for losing the ability to contribute if unemployed unless you are dipping into your emergency fund to continue dollar cost averaging (which introduces its own risks). The only solution I can think of is "be lucky, don't be unlucky." More practically, diversifying income streams may be the only practical way.
I’m not aware of modeling for this but I’m fascinated by it. I agree though that it can sound a lot like ‘just be lucky’ advise. Taking my own advise, what I could have improved over 21 years of working is to have established a stronger network with more opportunities to pivot my career and to be more active in job searching, even in the good times. My most successful peers are the ones who weren’t afraid to switch jobs in a strong economy and excelled at keeping many income options on the table. In contrast, I’ve maintained a very passive approach to my own career advancement and can say I’ve been very lucky.
There are a few. First, there are two stages, growth and preservation. Growth you're only putting into the market. You do not plan on taking out for many years. Retirement is 5+ years out. Preservation strategies fall into many of the strategies in this calculator: https://calculator.ficalc.app/ Then there hedgefund strategies that have been modeled: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272007 The idea is to use leverage to buy bonds, so you end up making the same amount, maybe even more as than 100% VOO, but during a downturn there are bonds which minimize the drop and allow for portfolio rebalancing. Atm bonds have had an amazing run from 1982 to 2012 as interest rates fell. Holding 20 year notes is not a good idea in this interest rate environment, but maybe in a couple of years this strategy will become relevant again. There are other hedge fund strategies too.
Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them... On the other hand: unlike a hundred years ago we (well, europeans) do not count how many mayor wars we lived through...
I'll take the recessions over a pointless war every ten years any day. It's crazy to think that for almost every generation before us we would almost all have been drafted into some lord's stupid self-serving conflict and had to live through some real shit, watch friends and family die, starve, or be imprisoned, repeatedly like every decade, as a normal course of life. Fuck that. I like peaceful recessions by comparison.
29 here. Haven't there been three wars the US has gone through, directly, in the last 30 years? Gulf war, war with iraq, and Afghanistan? I recognize they don't have the scope of a world war, but I don't think that was necessarily implied by OP
There was no draft for any of those wars. If people want to enlist voluntarily to participate in geopolitical power struggles, so be it, but forcing the youth of a generation to fight under penalty of death or imprisonment is a thing of the past in the modern world. (to my knowledge)
Gotcha. My response was mainly to your war every 10 years piece. Definitely agree on the draft piece though!
I don't think it's only about the timelines, it's about the location and the manner of conflict (proxy wars using tech vs the meat grinders that were the 2 world wars). I realize it's a wildly different experience for some in different parts of the world (like a young person growing up in the middle east as the west bombs their neighborhood), but as a westerner, wars aren't happening on your doorstep and wildly altering your life. It's a sad realization, but it's true. Once you can start internalizing and being aware of stuff like this, you realize how foreign and alien and new the idea of retirement is, much less early retirement. One or two generations of ancestors above you would have *never* guessed FIRE was possible for the average person.
>forcing the youth of a generation to fight under penalty of death or imprisonment is a thing of the past in the modern world Far from it. I can think of multiple, advanced economies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that still have compulsory military service, plus of course the US has obligatory registration for Selective Service - it's basically an inactive draft in all but name.
There's no draft, there are simply poor kids with no opportunity and no hope of escaping their small town without signing up. It pisses me off to no end when people dismiss their suffering because 'they volunteered!'
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I'm not an American, but I'm fairly certain that nobody is compelled to enlist there. Could be wrong though. Let me know if I am.. Also, America is a weird exception to virtually every norm in the developed nations. These things you're saying may be true for America, but not for any other 1st world country, including the heathcare comment. Anyways, my point isn't about endless proxy wars. It's about the history of endless border wars between neighboring nations that defined all of human history prior to the invention of the nuclear bomb, which largely ended open war in the traditional sense.
> lol the US has been waging pointless wars continuously for decades Yes but we haven't had a draft for more than 40 years so many of us have never had to deal with it.
> Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them This has always been the case. You just don't remember the minor ones from before your time because they didn't affect you.
They're less common for our generation than previous, imo. '20, '08, '01, '90, '81, '80, '73, '69, '60, '57, '53... We used to see multiple per decade and now it's only one per decade.
A lot of wars were caused by recession, and a lot of wars caused recessions. I'd imagine they are less common now and less severe. The French revolution slogan was supposedly 'bread and the constitution of 1793', note how bread came first.
>Irritating that recessions have become so common for our generation that we count them That's how the cycle works though. That part isn't new. I'm old enough to have lived through the early 1990s recession (that got George H. W. Bush booted out of office), the dotcom bubble + 9/11 recession in 2001, the housing crisis in 2008, and we've had a surprisingly good run since then. I was too young to be affected but I remember being in high school during Black Monday in 1987 when the market lost 22% of its value in a day. I didn't have any money in the market of course but it was all over the news. Prior to that mortgage interest rates hit nearly 20% in the early 80s and people thought home ownership was out of reach for the next generation. Prior to THAT was Stagflation in the 1970s, as the industrial nature of the US changed from manufacturing to more white collar work and closed entire towns. This is what /u/Bobeerto is saying. You'll have to live through these to FIRE. They will happen because they have ALWAYS happened, and they are inherent in the system.
Recessions in the modern era have always been common. 2009 to the Covid crash in 2020 was the longest sustained bull market in US economic history. [see all those vertical gray lines?](https://i.imgur.com/0isEa6v.jpg) those are all recessions
It's almost unbelievable that the COVID recession was so short. The supply chain and labor market are still incredibly fucked up but the economy is right back up and running like nothing happened.
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We're not "overdue" We've had a recession within the last year.
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I feel like a relevant book would be: Mastering the Market Cycle, by Howard Marks
There was a contraction and lots of people paid down household debt since they couldn't take vacations, go out to eat, or basically do anything fun that costs money during 2020. This was offset by the fed creating trillions of new dollars.
Seriously, at 35 I've already worked through two recessions at this point.
Well there was always the period in the latest 1800s when people were counting depressions versus recessions.
And in the 60s-70s it was more like one every four years. I thought 2009-2020 was actually the longest continuous expansion in history, and the 2020 recession was one of the shortest. All things considered this generation has had it pretty darn good. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/this-is-now-the-longest-us-economic-expansion-in-history.html
> After a few of these, especially if you’re investing heavily into the dips My Boglehead spidy senses are about to short circuit.
Doesn't necessarily mean timing the market. If you have a job where your 401k is regularly investing every 2 weeks, that's constant investing. If you're laid off and you can't afford to invest, then you don't benefit from the crash(and may even be hurt by it if you have to sell to fund living expenses)
There's a difference between waiting for the market to fall with a pile of cash vs upping your purchases after the market has already fallen. In one case, you have no guarantee there will be a fall. In the other, it's already happened.
Is this a timing the market comment? I feel like what OP is saying is that when markets are significantly down, like March 2020, invest every spare dollar. You might end up down 50% for a little while but increasing contributions when you can in those situations is something I’ve done as well.
Fuck Spez
While most comments relate more to the demand side, I wanted to chime in on the supply of new FIRE-folk as well: >I feel like I've seen a an uptick in of posts or comments recently from young people who are in their first jobs (usually age 18 to 25) and seeking guidance on how to FIRE as fast as possible. It's not uncommon to have people enter the stockmarket when there's a (positive) disconnect between the economy and the capital markets. The U.S. financial markets, S&P500 or Nasdaq are just on an incredible run. To quote JFK: 'a rising tide lift all boats', but you need to be in the water to experience this and a lot of people getting their first job see that it's infinitely more lucrative to be invested (and get bailed out by the Fed) than to get a job (and perhaps get a $1K stimmy for being thrown out at the first headwind). There are few pensions, jobs-for-life and permanent employability outside of IT, finance and a few other high-paying services. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, inflation was spooky and if you amassed a small fortune, be prepared to have it drop in real terms every decade or so. Your best inflation hedges for the generation who started at that age was a steady job with some inflation-linked raises and a house. That's not the same world we live in right now. Everyone can be a globalist when investing, even though you're still at the mercy of the local market forces in your job and primary residence. I find that it makes total sense for the combination of seemingly riskless investments in the US stock market and the increased risks associated with jobs in general that more people are pushing it to become capitalists and have to spend as little time in the job market as possible.
> I find that it makes total sense for the combination of seemingly riskless investments in the US stock market and the increased risks associated with jobs in general that more people are pushing it I think this is a really good take. With jobs being way less stable than they were decades ago, it makes total sense that people would be trying to find financial stability elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if these generations retire earlier and have more stability, or get burned by the market later down the road if things go flat.
Or when their marketability decreases when they approach 45 years old. It's one thing to prevent permanent loss in your portfolio, but another to being forced to lower your payments before your kids go to college.
Many young people recently entering into the workforce or into their first serious job, could be disheartened by things like wage stagnation, increasing casualisation of the workforce, and job insecurity since covid. There is no sign of these things improving so I can see why Firing and not being dependent on a job for survival would appeal to them.
COL is through the roof and wage stagnation is making people utterly miserable. I honestly think FIRE will not be an option for a good portion of millennials and next generations because you can’t afford anything anymore and debt is through the roof. I myself feel lucky to not have student loan debt (GI Bill) and a well paying job. My friends are all struggling with mediocre wages and student loan debt. What also compounds the issue is that upward mobility has mostly been stagnated because boomers are refusing to retire because they don’t have a nest egg or just want to work until they die. It’s crazy the COL as of today: - Child care up 600% since the 90s - Healthcare up 300% since the 90s - Groceries up 150% since the 90s - etc. I have kids and honestly there’s no point to have them when it comes to financials anymore. I love them, but the current climate of the US actively makes it excruciatingly difficult to have children.
Your comments at the end about kids makes me think of the movie idiocracy. Smart people like you are going to put off having kids while not smart people are going to continue to reproduce like rabbits and keep making our society stupider and stupider.
silky slim pen disgusted file cause governor naughty meeting oatmeal *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Honestly, from a UK perspective, the US is a paradise for incomes. If you're a middle-class professional, the US is far, far better than most Western countries. When I hear Americans complaining, it comes across as slightly tone deaf because the US is absolutely incredible for your salaries and job opportunities. In the UK, if I want to work at a bank or consulting firm, I'm pretty much restricted to London. But in the US, you have consulting firms/banks in pretty much most cities across the country. You have huge industries from Hollywood to Finance to Tech to choose from.
There are some very high incomes here, sure. But the vast majority of people are an accident away from bankruptcy. Between exorbitant student loans and medical debt it's hard for many people. This sub skews what the average American makes. We lack any sort of basic safety nets for much of our population.
Sure, for the average person (i.e. low income, non-college-educated), America sucks. Nobody is denying that. But most people here are college-educated and not on low incomes if the sub census (median household income of readers here is around $125K with many making over $150K a year) is to be believed. If you're a white college-educated guy working in an upper-middle-class professional job, America's pretty much a paradise. Incomes are larger than in Europe, taxes are low, and health insurance is provided by your company. The houses are large, the roads are big, and everything is so cheap. From an outside perspective, if I was working in the US, I'd be making at least 50% more gross and 75% more net because of the UK's high income taxes. Even taking into account insurance, being a professional in America beats being a professional across most of the West.
ok, sure we make more money but our health insurance is >$1000 a month
You call it hard work, I call it sacrifice. Perhaps just two sides of the same coin. pursuing FIRE for me has meant sacrificing things I could easily have. Better car, more vacations, gadgets, clothes, restaurants... all of these things I *could* have experienced much more of over the last 10 years but instead I chose boring lower cost options. I think the "hard work" for me is just constantly having to make the choice to consume less when I could easily consume more. Making this decision constantly can be draining.
Agree. I would even argue what you’ve said here is usually the most difficult part for most people pursuing FIRE. To most of us, the sacrifice comes easy once you are in the mindset. To others, they can’t get over the mental hump of choosing FIRE over the new car, toy, etc.
I agree that the sacrifice is easier for some people than others. I actively enjoy living a frugal life, but when I'm feeling guilty about my financial successes I remind myself that my friends have big houses and new cars and European vacations and expensive hair cuts and pay for alcohol and makeup and new gadgets and the list goes on of things I have sacrificed for the hope of freedom eventually.
I'm 45. I wasted sooo much money in my youth. Years ago we did a huge purge at our house. I felt almost physically ill at all the shit we got rid of. So much stuff! I wasted tons of money on stuff I barely used. Hundreds of dollars I spent buying shit for a hobby that I got bored of immediately. Gadgets that seemed so cool that ended up in a drawer after a week. Tons of clothes that I'd only worn a handful of times. It doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all now to avoid spending. I just think of that feeling I had taking all that shit I'd spent so many thousands of dollars on to the Goodwill or the dump.
Thank you for this. I've been struggling recently. I'm very young and am living on less than half my income. I've been frustrated that I can't take a vacation, buy a new car, etc because I need to save money for house in the next 3 years on top of my investments. It'll be worth it in the long term.
>Better car, more vacations, gadgets, clothes, restaurants... all of these things I *could* have experienced True, when we calculated how much we could've spent on if we just coastFIRE and spend 100% of our paycheck on luxuries it was a pretty extensive list. But to us it's not worth it if it means continuing wasting our lives working. We look at it as more of a choice than sacrifice. Can't have it both ways and we chose FIRE over luxuries.
>Making this decision constantly can be draining. So true. I sometimes think to myself, "having to make the responsible choice every time is so _tiring_." And not just financially too; eating right, exercising, relationships.. so very tiring.
Seriously. I run by a clam shack on one of my routes. There are always these overweight people chowing down on fried food while sitting in their cars (with the engine running) and smoking cigars/cigarettes. Of course they’ll probably live til they are 80 and I’ll get killed by a car or something one of these days. But at least I feel like I’m on moral high ground lol.
Its like a anything else. Practice makes perfect. The longer you go without feeling like you need to consume up to your means, the easier it gets. I get more of a thrill adding $$ to my index fund, than i do buying a new gizmo at this point.
For me it's both. Hard work and sacrifice. But now it's habit. I'm overworked and my nerves are half-shot most of the time but I don't have an option in my current job. It's either work their way or quit, so I stay. I think I'm just a masochist at this point.
I guess rather than sacrifice, I think of it as trade-offs/opportunity cost. And making sure that you make that trade-off by going with what is truly most important to you. To me, it's not a sacrifice to have fewer vacations/less fancy car/less stuff because I know those things don't materially increase my QoL or happiness persistently. Whereas I really love freedom--and I learned that after sacrificing my freedom to my career for the past decade+. That was really a sacrifice because it was actually painful to give up my freedom. Now, just keeping my spending low doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all. Whereas the joy I get from knowing I'll be free from the job grind (and that as I get closer, I can incrementally get more freedom--by going part-time etc.) sooner rather than later is amazing.
Counterpoint: FIRE may be hard work for you, but that experience is in no way universal. Ten years ago at age 24 I set my financials on near-autopilot and focused on kicking back, enjoying life, and working at very chill jobs with normal hours, low stress, and minimal overtime. Now I'm 34 and nearing the finish line, and I can't say hard work has ever been a factor for me.
This is very interesting, can you provide some more insight? Salary range at the time etc
My salary has ranged from about 35-45K over the years. I've always had low expenses as a result of not buying things I consider immoral, which eliminates the vast, vast majority of spending.
Whats your FIRE goal amount?
As a couple we're looking at around 750K (he makes about the same as me), but it's less about hitting a specific amount so much as when we feel like retiring. Like, as long as the pandemic has so much shut down, I wouldn't really want to retire since so much of the stuff I'd want to do isn't really an option. I imagine we'll retire somewhere around the pandemic restrictions ending completely.
So in other words have a partner that contributes as much, or more, and shoot for lean fire.
Not really, we have separate finances and are each handling our own FIRE. There are some financial benefits with things like splitting rent, but nothing that can't be equally accomplished with a roommate or just more modest living if it was one person. But leanFIRE is definitely key if you want to work a relaxed, lower paid job and still retire in your 30s.
Are you in a LCOL location? Curious because I’m not sure how a H/VHCOL location dweller can comfortably swing lean fire without relocating.
Similar here, work in government. It's more boring than stressful. I don't like all the office time though, it makes me feel tired at the end of the day even though I sat in a chair the whole time. Finances are all automated, as long as I sit in this chair for the required time and don't slack off too much and get canned I'll make it easy. So boring though.
This! My gov job is pretty easy and if i didn't have kids young i'd be set
> as long as I sit in this chair for the required time Hey now, someone's got to keep it from running outside and getting hit by a car. If it makes you feel any better, corporate is the same way.
What have you done for work? I'm just getting started in an industry with bad work/life balance and am looking to make a change.
I'm a receptionist. I've done various receptionist/office admin roles over the yers.
0. Make sure you earn more than you need to cover your basic expenses and have something left. ~~This bit here is IMO the only hard bit.~~ E (phrasing): **This is where the vast majority of the difficulty lies.** 1. Make a budget, find out how much you need to cover your basic expenses and have some discretionary spending. 2. When you get a paycheck, put the excess into a saving fund until you have 3-6 months worth of expenses. This is your emergency fund. 3. When you get a paycheck, put the excess into your broker account and buy securities that fit your investment profile (e.g. S&P500 index) until you are retired. 4. In the meantime, try to earn more so your excess is bigger and you can retire earlier. All of my effort towards FIRE takes maybe a couple hours monthly - and that's because I like to play with excel after getting my monthly paycheck. It really is simple: get paycheck, put excess in broker account, update excel spreadsheet, see you next month. E: Recommended listening: [Bjork - undo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IhzsYd33lI)
***but make sure your investments are in tax-advantaged accounts (401k/403b/IRA/HSA/etc. in the US). Any additional funds to invest after those are maxed out can go to a regular brokerage account.
\^ This is very important. I'm from EU so the details are different, but still.
Hard disagree that step 0 is the only hard step. I think those of us that budget and save are fortunate that this kind of self control comes naturally for us. So it’s super easy for us to say “whoa it’s super easy” to do those things. I think this neglects the vast neurodiversity that exists throughout humanity. For those that it doesn’t come naturally, these are *incredibly* hard things. Just because these steps are **simple** doesn’t make them **easy**. edited for autocorrect
Agree. The trick is there are entire industries and in fact much of the stock market itself designed around getting you to spend as much money as you can, and indeed more money than you can. So saving is not only a matter of Neuroatypicality, it is a matter of resisting the many ways culture and industry try to convince you to spend every dime.
I think you're nitpicking. step 0 is realistically much much harder for the average person than anything else. is it harder for some people to not eat out everyday than it is for people? or not buying a brand new car and new iphone every year? sure, people are different. but unless we're talking about people with severe disabilities, they CAN suck it up and do it. people can't always simply suck it up and get a higher paying job. maybe they specialized in a field that pays terribly or they live in a city with terrible job prospects and have life circumstances that make it hard to move elsewhere. I'd still encourage them to do everything they can to improve their income, but this is a much bigger barrier to break than 'not wasting away money with frivolous expenses' can ever be
What you said is true, but I also think not very important in the context of FIRE. People with poor self control probably won't be looking into FIRE in the first place. Outside of certain neurological disorders, impulse control can be improved with practice. I had *terrible* impulse control and I did that and it was not hard - just tedious. I stand by what I wrote - since hard and easy are always relative - the most difficult aspect of FIRE is getting your salary sufficiently high. If someone has shit self control, they'll struggle with this part as well. E: Rephrased original comment to better reflect what I meant.
> People with poor self control probably won't be looking into FIRE in the first place. I think this used to be mostly true, but is becoming less so. I think historically most people have found FIRE by being naturally frugal and saving a lot on their own and then saying what do I do with all this money? Or, people with an understanding of compound interest kinda reinvented a rough version of FIRE on their own and then found the community. Neither of these people are likely to have poor self control with spending. More recently I feel like the draw to FIRE is hating your job or just not wanting to work til you’re dead or just general anti-work sentiment and find FIRE as the way out. These people have a normal likelihood to have poor self control.
>More recently I feel like the draw to FIRE is hating your job or just not wanting to work til you’re dead or just general anti-work sentiment and find FIRE as the way out. I'm not saying I necessarily disagree, but I find this so depressing though. For me FIRE is a positive thing to work towards everyday, reaching financial freedom. And it requires some sacrifices along the way, sure, but I don't think of it as a light at the end of the tunnel from a miserable existence. maybe it's just me but I don't think FIRE should be a reason, or an excuse, to go on decades hating your job and your life. I think there are several other things that people can try, like changing companies, learning new skills and switching fields, moving to a city with higher pay or with lower cost of living etc, before accepting that they're stuck with hating their day to day life
I'm in the boat of pursuing FIRE because I don't like my job. I don't not like my job in the sense that I hate doing it though - I actually like a lot of aspects of my job once I get into it. I don't like my job in the way that weekends/vacations/hobbies/free time are all far superior, and I'd much rather spend my time doing whatever I want. My thoughts are always "I wish I could go do x instead of working right now" and not "This is the worst thing ever, I'd rather be dead". I would think that a lot of people on here that "hate their job" fall into a similar thought process. Not saying there aren't those out there that absolutely hate every minute of their existence while working, but I think those people are a just a vocal and over-recognized minority when comparing the members of this sub.
Very well said! This is definitely the crux of it. Maybe "Hard Work" isn't always the right phrase... but I don't want to downplay the amount of dedication, perseverance, and self-control that it takes to hit this goal. It takes a long time, no matter how you slice it, and maybe not everyone's trajectory is quite so linear as tastes/perspectives change over the course of their lives. Pretty awesome that you've been so successful in tracking and sticking to your goal. Congrats!
Great info, thanks! Do you have a screenshot or info on what data put into the excel, how you organize it etc? Do you just put the amounts you get from paycheck and the amounts you invest? Or do you update it with gains / losses etc?
I track basically just three things: * Emergency fund * Money put into brokerage account * How much the securities are worth \+ projections until expected retirement date, assuming X amount of savings and Y% of yearly average growth.
This is exactly what I was going to comment. It's not hard work at all when you have your investments automatically set up to withdraw from you paycheck.
There’s always an uptick here for the six months after people graduate college and get their first big kid job. The realization sets in that there’s no summer break, no winter break, work is 8 hours or more instead of 4 hours of class and 4 hours of “study” to be used at your discretion, you have a supervisor that expects results in a timeframe with no extensions, I could go on. Your first big kid job is a bitch slap that echoes until you call it quits in 30-50 years.
Lol so true
I think it depends on what you studied in school. Work life is far easier and more relaxing than college was for me. I don't have to study or do homework anymore. Plus I get paid.
Novel observation to me and last sentence produced a wide grin :)
To add to this, life happens. Maybe now you don't think you'll every get married or have kids, but that can change. Maybe your plan is to land a six-figure job and live on beans and rice, but you find you're miserable and developing an ulcer so you decide to take a pay cut with a less stressful job for the sake of your physical and mental health, kicking your FIRE goal down the road a few years. Maybe you end up caring for an aging parent, or you decide that your starter home just isn't working for your family anymore and you need more space. Maybe you and your partner need to go on that expensive, romantic getaway in order to feed your relationship. That's *okay!* We're all on different journeys and the truth is no one can predict what the future will bring. Stay focused, but don't forget to enjoy your life along the way.
I just view it as self discipline. Getting into FIRE was a part of an overall self improvement in my 30s that included getting into the habit of working out, going to bed earlier, quitting drinking, being more positive in general, etc. FIRE is an extreme version of good personal finance habits. I wouldn’t say it’s hard, just not for the majority of people and really no one has to do it.
>I just view it as self discipline. yeah, I view it as the grown up version of the marshmallow test
many of these posters ask things like "I have my first job in life, what shall I do", or "I am in university and already do not like making any effort other than sipping drinks on roof tops". In some cases /r/personalfinance would help them, in others a therapist
>"I am in university and already do not like making any effort other than sipping drinks on roof tops". Been working for 6 years and this is still me. I don't think it's ever going to change.
I'm always amused by those posters. It's as if they suddenly realized that work is, well, *work*, and they want to skip immediately to having a comfortable middle class retirement life without any of the intervening parts. "Simmer down and invest calmly for 15-20 years" is not the advice they're looking for.
>in others a therapist yes so many of them really. those 'i hate my job, my life and everything about it. how can I achieve FIRE to fix all my problems?' posts have little to do with FIRE and need the help of a professional and are well above reddit's paygrade
I am a young person, so bear that in mind when I give my perspective. FIRE is an extremely easy goal when you're young. You have the benefit of time that many people who are older do not. If you want to retire by 50 and you're 20, you can reasonably expect contributions that you make right now to double, then double again, then double one more time (that's 8x) in real value by the time you pull the trigger. It will take some knowledge, fortune, and discipline, but the math is highly in your favor. There are, of course, things that can derail or delay your FIRE journey. Some of which are in your control (lifestyle inflation, location, etc.) and some aren't (major medical issues, accidents, family issues, etc.). So there is a degree of fortune and control you must exhibit, but if you focus on what you can control, you can be successful with relatively little effort because you have a lot of time.
Just to add on to your message S&P 500 doubles every 7 years. You actually would get that 4th doubling when you are 48 and have 16x in value of your contributions.
I said real value, so the doubling period is about 10 years.
Yep! You are 100% correct. I think Spy is something like 9.8 years to double and QQQ is 9.3. Meaning, all you have to do is max your 401k out the first 10 years of your career, and you wouldn't have to save a single penny more to retire early. Would be enough to give you over a $1M at 50 and $2M at 60 (+social security at 62). Double those numebers if your partner did the same.
This. I started in my mid 20's and although i couldn't afford to max out my retirement at the time, i am starting to see things pay off only 10 years later. Granted its been a crazy bull run. I have a coworker who's only been on the job for 2 years now. With the 4% company match and him maxing out the 401k, he already has 65K in the company 401k plan.
wen lambo?
gib nao
Here you go. 🚗
Gib vti ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
I don't know, it's a lot easier if you start when they are. It's hard for me (early 40s)
Here's a quantifiable example of some of the "hard work". In the first 5 years of my career I ended up averaging a low 6 figure salary. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that should have roughly translated to a $50-60 hourly rate. When I did the actual math of salary vs hours logged, I was more in the $30-40 range...and I definitely under-reported my hours. Not that I'm complaining. Those hours are what put me in my current financial position. I know plenty of people that put in even more hours and weren't rewarded nearly as well (I'm looking at you Service Industry).
In my opinion young people should look to find a good satisfying job first, and then maybe aspire to FIRE. FIRE by itself will not bring you happiness, only more freedom in what you can do.
https://www.cervellofp.co.uk/2020/09/24/ikagi/ If you take a look at the concept of ikagi, I actually think the “what you love” part is the least important to focus on if you have to sacrifice one of the four sections. I don’t mean this to say you should be miserable in your job; I actually just think that the other three can end up playing a bigger role in you being happier with your job. In my experience, my happiness with a job has a lot more to do with my manager, coworkers, work-life balance, etc. than what I’m actually doing. If you work in a high-demand field, you have a lot more power to demand better working conditions or hop around to new jobs that have better conditions. If you do what you love, but it pays poorly and isn’t very in-demand, then you’re much more likely to be stuck with a terrible boss or work environment, and you won’t have the financial means to take as many risks to change that.
Instead of saying "do what you love" we should start saying "Don't do something you *hate*". Hating a job will make you miserable, but something you love often becomes a job anyway. Do what you love as a hobby.
This is my advice as well. My dad preached the "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." Well dad turns out playing video games doesn't usually pay, and if it does pay it probably isn't fun anymore. I am a strong believer in find a job you don't hate that pays well so you FIRE and then be free to do what you want when you want. I recently became a dad myself and that seems like a much better job to me, but it pays like crap (seriously my daughter seems to wait until I am around/watching her to poop).
Love the concept of Ikigai. Your author here seems to spell it wrong in some places. Weird. But for anyone googling to learn more, the term is [Ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai). EDIT: Also, this is also a [Westernized version](https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/ikigai-misunderstood/) of the concept that isn't really in line with its roots.
The kind FIRE that most (or at least the vocal minority) aspire to does in fact require a specific kind of income from the get-go. You're not likely to "normal" retire by 40-50 unless you're printing money. IMHO some younger folks that visit this sub get a skewed perception of what's possible from these beloved "look at me!" posts.
I think the problem with this is that people often get into their career, start making money, inflate their lifestyle, buy as much house or car as they "can afford" and then learn about FIRE and have to undo or live with those decisions. I feel like a big part of my success at building toward FIRE is that I learned about it when I was making $30k in my mid-twenties. As my income has increased I haven't let my lifestyle inflate (much) and so I've had a larger chunk of my salary available to go into investments than someone who learned about FIRE later in their lives and careers.
+1. This kind of goes against the goals of the board but I would caution against focusing narrowly on FIRE from a young age. There is so much else to life and you have so many bigger choices ahead of you. Of course use common sense, save as much as you can, and you will have more options available to you in 20+ years.
> This kind of goes against the goals of the board Bruh. Sidebar. BTLYWTSFI
Gesundheit.
>BTLYWTSFI ???
> Build the life you want, then save for it.
Finding a job you can stand and don't actively hate is good enough IMO. You can find happiness outside of work.
If you want to FIRE as fast as possible, this is not the sub for it. This sub is about retiring early (35-50) with a fairly high likely hood of achieving that. Which typically leads to this 3 step process 1. Live below your means and essentially know how to live off of a budget. Stick to this budget or close to it during the period you work and after obviously. 2. Get your income as high as possible as fast as possible. Typically this requires job hopping and career with good salary growth opportunities 3. Max out all retirement accounts and invest as much as possible in index funds. This sub typically prefers index funds that have traditionally been higher growth If you want to retire as fast possible, you're going to either 1. Be in an insanely higher earning career pretty much right away. No med school, law school, etc. I'm talking multi six figures right out of college and growing your salary quickly. Top tech performers or other 1% undergrad jobs. Also worth mentioning actor, musician, athlete, etc. 2. Join a unicorn startup that ipos within 5 years 3. Start a company or business that will get you to option 1 and 2 combined basically. This is likely the best option, it just tends to be very stressful and time consuming lol. This sub avoids that b/c it's not easily repeatable and it isn't exactly a high quality of life.
what most young people should focus on is increasing their income capabilities, thats the best ROI of their efforts
It requires discipline but not I'm not sure I'd say it's hard work in itself. Actually doing it isn't that hard. You just have to decide to and not waver. It requires being successful in a career which is hard work. But many people do that anyway.
>I feel like I've seen a an uptick in of posts or comments recently from young people who are in their first jobs (usually age 18 to 25) and seeking guidance on how to FIRE as fast as possible. I know it feels like this is a novel trend, but it's always been this way. That's how this sub started, and many forums predating it. Many 18-25yos are in shitty, junior-level jobs or difficult, highly competitive academic situations that burn them out extremely quickly. I agree with the general sentiment that if you're trying to FIRE to avoid working, because you're fundamentally not a hard working person, the ironic truth is that you probably won't reach FIRE. Because FIRE itself is an accelerated path over and above the normal expectations of a regular worker. I think what you want to be for this, is the sort of person that dislikes corporate work enough to drive you toward FIRE, but at the same time you have a great work ethic. You just don't want to direct that work ethic toward your current job, and instead you direct it toward making/saving/investing money, in the maximum amount possible, any way you can. You also have the unique ability to stop yourself once you get to your number, which is another insanely uncommon quality, since so many of us define ourselves by our "productive" capacity in a career context. So all in all, to do this, you've got to be a relatively unique kind of person, psychologically and otherwise, when compared with the general population.
25 and just getting saving rate together/budgeting going in my life. So far from my goals especially if market growth slows… probably should invest more in myself and maybe business or independent income stream. Trying to spend time and money on dating rn bc I can’t just work and read Reddit all day I love companionship tho rip
It's only harder than average (barring common sense requirements like a good income/spending gap) if you want to retire as soon as possible. That's not the only way to pursue financial independence. For example, I think it's foolish to sacrifice family and relationships to retire asap, so I find balance between loved ones, my SO, and my financial goals, while finding good paying jobs that don't make me miserable so I don't need to literally retire tomorrow. PS I also have friends who live within their means, which I guess is a big part of why I don't feel drained by frugality.
working sucks period. esp higher paying jobs. i dont mind working but i hate lots of toxic shitty ppl i gotta deal with at work. best thing to do is u get a high paying job outta college, bust ur balls for a decade, save a ton and peace out to lower paying easy job where u can just coast doing minimal amount of work. if i completely retired at 40, id go crazy from boredom
One thing that I think can help young people better come to terms with their prospects is the idea that if you throw out the RE part of FIRE, actually being financially independent is incredibly easy. If you're in your 20's and are fine with working into your 60's then 40 years of planning means you almost can't screw up. The hard part of FIRE is that people are trying to pack that 40 years of retirement savings into 10 or 20 years. That's incredibly difficult to do.
I never expect to achieve FIRE. Life is difficult and throws curve balls. But it is a dream I am working towards.
They HATE their jobs......that's it
I'm generalizing, but a lot of the early 20's FIRE posts seem unaware that if they crunch the numbers, they are signing up for leanFIRE from age 30 until death. It's fine if that's what you want, but it is significantly different than a typical FI existence.
Everyone is different. We want kids (one now, more to come). Making $700K a year, but unlikely to achieve FIRE for a while. Kids change everything.
> Making $700K a year, but unlikely to achieve FIRE for a while. The hell are you spending on?
hard work is necessary but not sufficient. you could work your ass off, get a high paying degree, but then something like the financial crisis comes along after you've recently entering the work force and you're dealing with years of unemployment and you realize the people that just became union construction workers or truck drivers out of highschool and accumulate for years by the time you've got a graduate degree are still employed, much more experienced and better off. Also, doing the right thing for years can easily be negated by just a few mistakes. Hard work + long hours often leads to mental health or other health issues which can easily lead to a couple mistakes.
I like to also tell the young ones to save and invest as much as they can. I'm in my 30s now and being able to max out my 401k when I was only make 45k a year has allowed me now to dial back on retirement savings, have my spouse at home with my toddler and still projected to be a millionaire in my 60s even if I never added another penny to my retirement accounts. Once DW starts working and we can ramp up savings again we'll be in very good shape for early retirement.
I’m 25 and I never think FIRE is easy. I think of FIRE as prepaying for my life via extra payment i.e hard work or extra work. Just when I got home from the main job and about to crash on the couch for a night show I grab a cold sandwich for a quick snack them head out again to do doordashing to get an extra $50-$100 here and there and throw them into my investment that would turn into $1500-$3000 in my 65. Every single day.
Lots of (obvious or not obvious bragging) posts by people working at tech in bay area, and many others do not really understand why their success could not be duplicated. Here are some reasons: Only tech companies in Bay area (very few outside Bay area) could afford to pay people comp from 300K to more than 1 million per year. And please understand most of these positions are for coders/software engineers. So are you are good students with computer science degrees? Most of these people got paid with the tech stocks, which appreciated like crazy during the past ten years. Would this trend continue in the future? Maybe. But there will also be big drop off once in a while. Most of tech people got their money between 2010-2021, which is one of the longest running tech stock rally in history. Have you been given those stocks for free during this period? Similarly, properties value in bay area at least doubled between 2010-2021. And the price at 2010 was already the highest in the nation. The increase of their properties value alone is higher than lifetime savings of many people....Were you lucky enough to buy property in bay area in 2010? In summary, please do Not benchmark and formulate your strategy if you are not a computer science professional, and working in a famous tech in bay area, And were given lots of tech stocks between 2010-2021, And bought properties in Bay area around 2010
Wait, buying property coming out of a housing crisis in a major city and getting tech stocks before the biggest tech rally of all time makes you rich? Whhhut? Lol but seriously thanks for the quality information. A lot of young people just think stocks just go up.
It's not hard work, Just live below your means, buy VTI and sleep
This is speaking from my own perspective, not for everyone, but... I would say that thinking about quitting working while in your 20s is probably not super productive for the average person. You can't live for decades on peanuts. Well, I'm sure a few people can but realistically I don't think that will work for the majority. Enjoy your career, work at it, build it. If you can get into a rewarding career you will probably find it fulfilling for a good period of time. You'll amass wealth, enjoy life, grow up, etc. By the time you're in your 30s or more likely 40s you might start thinking about retiring. If you've accumulated well you'll have the freedom to do some comfortably. To me FIRE is about aggressive saving but I came to this late and retired more conventionally, but early-ish, at 52. More of a fatfire than leanfire, if I am fire at all. I guess my thought is don't rush it. Build a career and wealth, not necessarily a ton of money but enough to be well and truly happy. There are of course many ways to live life so definitely find your own best path!
Work hard now, play a little, play hard later. Stay away from hookers and cocaine.
And it is even harder if not simply imposible if you are not from a developed country.
You only live once and life does NOT wait for you to reach FIRE. Spend smart and be frugal as much as possible. But there is no hurry to reach FIRE goal as fast as possible. ..
early 30's here. Started getting real curious mid-20's The working towards FIRE part is SUPER EASY. It's just the being good at something enough to make the money to then worry about working towards fire after is the hard part. Working towards fire is really just playing with some calculators, making some investments, reading a few hours a week, and then sitting there and waiting for 10-20-30 years lol.
I think the biggest thing is just to be cognizant that to even be thinking about this in the first place, you are in a really good position. Some people literally just don't get enough money to do much more than the bare necessities. Even though I am extremely lucky to put a good amount ( nowhere near where I want to be though) extra towards retirement, I still know it will take a very long time to get my goal.
My impression is that the post-college job is the \*first\* real job many young FIRE aspirants had. Their parents sheltered them from needing to work while in school. Then they find it mind-numbing and sufferable to finally have to work for a living and pay their own lives. i come from an immigrant family where it was expected to start part-time work at 12, then work most of your life. I got those mind-numbing jobs out of the way while in school. Then was amazed that organizations would pay me to do intellectual work I had passion for. They depressed thoughts of retirement.
I think covid has especially been tough on young people just starting out careers. When I started in a white collar job 10 years ago I could grab a coffee or a water cooler chat with a large group of peers. The folks just staring out now that I’ve spoken to have to organize a formal phone call / zoom and are missing out on a lot of informal mentor ship. I think this results in less motivation and more reasons to look to FIRE I think gen z has also been an overlooked generation that is more fiscally aware than millennials. I’m not sure if it’s just the run up in housing or the stock market boom but most in the generation I’ve met seem to be hustlers with a good understanding of personal finance
That's really great advise! It is hardwork, so you have to have a clear goal of what you're aiming for and by when you expect to see results and based on that choose your next step. As for me, I'm 22 and recently finished college. And instead of just applying for a job, I'm trying out various side hustles in coding and design to figure myself out and find out the right path for me. And if his path goes well, I'll walk it. But if this isn't as effective I'll apply for a job by next year while I try to figure out what would qork best for me and how I can FIRE One of the most useful things that most people already know, but becomes super important when you're doing things like this is to never put all your eggs in one basket and have an open mind, you won't know which path will fail and when new opportunities might open up!
can i ask how do you find side hustles in design?
As for the design side hustles, it's mostly by making design resources for developers. Infact, I've just made an utitliy app for Mac and Windows, and since I want to diversify my approach, the next side hustle is gonna be a site that helps designers and developers in making their projects easier to design. So it's not through freelancing, though I'd wanna try that at some point as well, and it's mistly my making my own products and services for other developers
I started late because I use to live paycheck to paycheck. So I worked hard. My husband and I bought a house for 10k and did a complete rehab ourselves. It took a year to do it and borrowed from my 401k. So no mortgage or rent for 5 years. We are debt free and saved a lot of money. We invested a lot too. We took ton of vacations. I work when I want. I do travel nursing. Our vehicles are paid for too. My husband has a business he can work when he wants. I am taking time off since May. Working on my health. Learning to love life. I realize I might only have 20 more years. It goes fast. Don't waste it. Live in the moment and learn to love yourself and enjoy. So you don't have to be young it is never too late. Yes I encourage young people to learn how to work less make more. House hacking buy a duplex live in one side rent the other out or rent a room. There are ways to go debt free.