I read FIRE subreddits a lot and see a little too much optimism and unreasonable expectations. They are ready to retire with just another decade of incredible stock market returns. It’s rarely that easy. All signs point to another lost decade coming, like after 1968 and 2000, that is going to break a lot of hearts I’m afraid. Unless they plan for it appropriately and have reasonable expectations.
I couldn’t stand being around anything FIRE related mid way into The Fed’s free for all near 0% interest rate decade. The influencers were the ones making money by spreading lies and shame and everyone else seemed to be scrambling to be another influencer. A lot of those influencers came from money and had inheritance already, and/or had very high paying tech jobs, but hid that well to give hope to their readers.
The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate?
Someone retiring "normally" around 60-70 has traded their labor for money, usually in ways that can benefit other people in some fashion. When they retire, there are multiple benefits -- their previous position opens up, hopefully allowing the next generation to be promoted. Their years of experience help shape the way the next generation runs the business, hopefully because they know why things are the way they are (Chesterton's Fence) and can pass that information along. This is pending the retiree not being a serial job changer of course, institutional knowledge requires people staying to learn it.
Compare that with someone who worked as little as they had to, achieved FIRE and retired early at 30. They didn't "pay into" an organization, they just extracted value and retired. They didn't help lead anything. They didn't shape the culture for the next generation. And at the risk of stereotyping, I imagine "succeeding" in FIRE would inflate one's ego in very unhealthy ways.
I don't want to say "FIRE is evil" but SOMEONE has to create the value they are extracting, and if it reaches a tipping point where more are extracting than creating, it will make for a novel problem. Replacing workers with AI is an obvious stopgap, but that just perpetuates the current, weird monetary system we have and that profit would have to be redistributed as UBI or something for it to replace workers in a way that they don't just starve.
Society is changing and it's gonna change even more so it will be interesting to see where we end up.
>The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate?
I wonder how many of these people are even factoring changing demographics. As the population continues to age, retirement is going to get even more expensive because labor will continue to cost more and more
Especially as people are deferring starting a family as long as they can, with some just giving up entirely. Lots of countries are struggling with replacement birth rate and our economy is based on endless growth, so something's gotta give.
It could get even worse - imaging that they have so much wealth that they pass it onto their children who don't even have to work till 30. You could imagine a growing class of people who don't work and merely live off their inherited wealth. Of course, that already exists; they're called wealthy people.
Sure, but the mindset of the FIRE Zoomer is much different than wealthy people in the past. An easy example would be Fred Trump, whose "winners and losers" mindset was taught to Donald in a way that Donald went to college, started businesses, and maximized his "wins". He taught this mindset to his children and they went to college, even if it was just for networking.
What would a FIRE Zoomer teach their children, especially if they invested in crypto early and got lucky? Why work hard if mom and dad "don't" work at all? Why go to college if the point of college is training for a career? How will those children be shown by example how to be a helpful member of society?
I suppose a lot of FIRE people likely intersect with the Child Free crowd where they are achieving financial independence by not having any expensive dependents they need to care for. That does reduce the amount you must spend by quite a lot, but if enough people do it the economy will have issues finding workers at all as more people voluntarily check out of the system and leave no descendants to continue in the future.
Well, there's a few things there I'm not really interested in touching, but perhaps if a society is interested in perpetuating itself, it should try and make people happy to live in it and reproduce?
>perhaps if a society is interested in perpetuating itself, it should try and make people happy to live in it and reproduce?
I agree with you. Currently at odds with the goal of having a society of happy people is the society-wide tendency to attempt to extract value from others. This can make for a lot of very unhappy people who have no resources to reproduce.
Regardless, society is made up of people, and people come from families. The tendencies those families normalize are likely passed down. There are negative tendencies that damage society, and positive tendencies that support society. Working for and with each other is one of those supportive tendencies, and while it can be learned at work or school, kids imprint and learn from their parents the most.
My main point is that if a FIRE couple ends up raising a family but don't have to work for a living, the kids may be missing out on a fundamental aspect of society in their day to day lives. Obviously entitlement is an issue with humans in general, but at a societal level FIRE feels a lot like a selfish "FU, I got mine" and that's not a great tendency to pass down to kids.
I agree completely with everything you are saying. I always ask my brother- if everyone is retiring and the population is aging, who are you selling your stocks to when you want to retire?
Looking at it from a "retiring now-to-soon" perspective, FIRE is great! Keep buying everything I have to sell! There will definitely be someone around to buy them off you when you need to sell ;)
> For Gen Zs, there seems to be a correlation between gambling and investing—particularly, high-risk investing. In the United States, 61% of surveyed Gen Z investors said they gamble online or in person, compared with 29% of non-investors surveyed. Their propensity for gambling is also associated with riskier investments; 70% of US Gen Z investors who gamble frequently invest in crypto, and 38% invest in non-fungible tokens.
Well, there haven't been real big, bad crashes in the living memory. And anyway, this isn't what investors are worried about - they are worried about protracted bear markets.
I was a freshman in college the week that crash happened. Called my dad and asked him how he was faring and he offhandedly mentioned losing $250k in 3 days. He wasn't concerned because he was 10+ years from retirement and confident he'd make it all back with a bit of work, but it was still eye opening and it definitely affected how I chose to invest my own money as I got older. I'm much more conservative and hands-off with it than he ever was. I'm still doing well compared to my peers, but I'm behind where thinks I should be.
To state the obvious, 2008 was 15 years ago. So someone who was a senior in high school at 18 in 2008, is over 30 today.
So it is true that there's a generation that includes everyone in their 20s and those in their early 30s that have never experienced a significant market crash.
This is a pretty myopic definition of “experienced.” I was in middle and high school through the GFC, and watched my friends and family lose their jobs and worry about their livelihoods.
Counter to the other comment, I was in the middle of college and somehow didn't know about that until years later. After I started working in 2011 at least.
How did you miss it? I graduated in 2009 and it was the only thing people were really talking about after the 08 election wrapped up. It took a lot of people I knew over a year to find work.
Their increased appetite for risk has to do with the world they were handed. Homes are unaffordable, payroll has not kept up with inflation, politics seems hell bent on ending any and all aid programs, to provide funding for tax cuts to people that pay less than I do in taxes already, while making many, many more 0s.
People shouldn't pay any attention to these articles.
I retired early years ago. It isn't the annual budget that one has to plan for, but the unforeseen expenses. I took care of my mom and dad for a while. He had top notch medical insurance, but no one covers mental health problems. The total for 4 years of that was just into 7 figures.
Also how about that medical insurance for yourself and your family? Unless people plan on dying young, medical insurance is a huge expense. And that's just insurance, which doesn't cover all eventualities. Ambulance ride? Not covered. A quick whistle to the ER can leave you $50k lighter without trying hard. And then there's the piles of medications, many of which aren't covered.
My friend's grandmother got upper and lower dentures. $40k. Dentures, mind you, not implants.
Also, there's the every increasing cost of everything. Houses, cars, food, all types of insurance are seeing vast annual increases.
$3 million total for a retirement is a bit of a laugh, unless that person plans on keeling over at 65.
If you are living like the middle class (i.e. income comes both from capital ownership and labour) then you can't possibly be retired. Retirees are those who have transitioned into the upper class (i.e. income comes from capital ownership alone).
They'll need the equivalent of today's $3 million in inflation-adjusted dollars for the time they retire.
What you're saying amounts to a Zimbabwean being able to retire with his lunch money AFTER the country got 1000x inflation and everybody had trillions in their pockets just to get some food for the day - based on the purchasing power of that amount before the inflation.
If we assume they have three million now, in 40 years when they have 20 years of retirement left, assuming it sees a 5% annual rate of return, they will have $21 million.
Are you suggesting that they actually need ~$21 million for a 20 year retirement?
Yes, that's right. Assuming a typical lifespan, they will have 20 years left in ~40 years. Assuming a 2% inflation rate, $3 million in 40 years is equivalent to ~$600,000 today. A 60 year old holding $600,000 today does not seem like that high of a bar.
Could be, but a higher rate of inflation will make attaining $3 million even easier. If inflation is 5%, they will only need ~$400,000 in today's dollars.
Gen Xer here. I also want to retire early, but... not off to a good... middle? That's in large part my own fault - it wasn't even a consideration or on my radar for a very long time.
I came from a blue collar background, hand-to-mouth background. We were, as John Scalzi would say, "broke" but not quite "poor." My parents didn't retire so much as age out of the workforce and scrape by.
Same, but broke millenial here. Will be working until day I die, likely. Sucks. Never had the momentum to accumulate wealth, and now I have no idea what to do.
"Gen Z... in the survey pool". It's a good study, and used solid methodology for finding participants (Harris poll). But the pool of people who will self-select to do a 30+ minute personal finance survey in exchange for points that can be exchanged for gift cards is inherently going to skew towards the kind of people with the aptitude (and, for the young, parental influence) to start saving early.
Still a useful stat in the relative sense to compare inter-generationally, or to previous surveys.
That's because it's not investing, it's speculating at best, and usually just gambling. Investing is just another word we've lost in recent years from people trying to justify to themselves that they aren't acting like fucking idiots.
Reminds me of Carlin's bit about the softening of language.
Also median of 19. Meaning quite good bit would have started saving before age of 18 right? That sounds off... Considering what type of jobs they would have had.
> Meaning quite good bit would have started saving before age of 18 right?
Not necessarily. It is quite possible for the median to be 19 even with nobody saving before the age of 19.
Consider a case of 10 people. 6 started saving at the age of 19. 4 started after the age of 19. 0 started saving before the age of 19. The median age is: 19.
> That sounds off... Considering what type of jobs they would have had.
Why?
1. Jobs aren't the only way to get money.
2. Typically parents cover living expenses at that age, so job income is pure profit.
1. Does all of this just rely on surveys instead of real data?
2. Investing for old age retirement is seen a necessity, since many people in my generation (Germany, 1989) don't believe they'll get pensions above what everyone gets as social safety net anyway.
3. Since nothing relies on actual numbers, it's hard to tell whether GenZ is just more savings-conscious, as compared to really saving more. A boomer that bought a house on credit in the 70s invested more than a comparable GenZ who invests in an ETF what little money they have left after paying rent.
4. With most GenZ working safe desk jobs - which goes easy on their health and is also easier to do in old age - I doubt they will have to retire as early (let alone even earlier!) as the generations before them.
I don't know that I would put youtubers in that category, there are a lot of youtubers who put a ton of effort into their channel and make it a business. Tik Tokers could qualify, guess it depends, but influencers can easily be either or. Making yourself into a brand takes effort but I would argue that most of the time it isn't effort that makes other people's lives better.
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