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Well, mostly FI, but some RE. (FIRE standing for Financial Independence, Retire Early). Christine Benz from Morningstar recently attended a CampFI event in Spain, and wrote about her experience here.
She comments that “A lot of people have a caricatured perception of the FI community. They assume that everyone is trying to live on $10 a day in order to hang it up at age 35.” While she met some young people, she met older people as well. She concludes that she learned some valuable lessons from her fellow attendees. A recommended read.
I have redefined FIRE to mean “Financial Independence- Reimagine Everything”. For me the end goal wasn’t about escaping work, but instead having the professional freedom to pivot within my career in a way that would have been difficult had money worries still been top of mind. As we have approached our FI number, work feels like an option instead of a requirement, and we are able to deploy our income to a wide variety of enjoyable experiences and indulgences with the knowledge that our financial goals are met. For me FI is Freedom to Choose, not a mandate to quit!
Fair point. Absolutely freedom to choose is paramount. What I’ve found as I approached the FI number is that tolerance for the everyday enshittifications* around work has declined. It can reprogramme your relationship with work entirely.
FIRE is just noticing all the excess labor happening in this country and taking advantage of it. We have way more work than we need, so I’ll do some highly remunerative job for a relatively little while, and build up assets that rely on the labor of others, and then once that generates enough income I can work simply for pleasure rather than necessity. Or not work. It’s great when it works for you.
Finally tracked down the book I remembered reading way back when that could be considered an early FIRE text. Titled “Your Money or Your Life” it was originally published in 1992, and was most recently revised in 2018. So this movement has been around for a while. One of the authors died in 1997, the other is still active.