HOUSTON – On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of Houstonians abandoned their normal hangout and converged on a small public library. These people usually meet at a local brewery on Sunday afternoons, but the organizers decided this particular meeting needed a clear agenda so everyone could benefit from the discussion of their shared passion: FIRE. FIRE stands for “Financial Independence: Retire Early,” and the meeting’s attendees were all looking for ways to exit the rat race.
Twenty-seven people attended the meeting: sixteen men and eleven women sat facing each other in a large circle. The group skewed young with most of the attendees in their late twenties or early thirties. The group also reflected Houston’s multiethnic, multinational population. Attendees hailed from Colombia, Brazil, Turkey, France, Germany, and China.
In some ways this Houston group reflects the character of the FIRE community as a whole. Most people involved in the movement are young professionals, with engineers seeming to have an outsized representation. The movement also has a distinct international flavor. The ChooseFI group, which is only one of many communities within the FIRE movement, claims to host regular meetups in twenty-seven countries.
At the Houston meetup, the organizer led a discussion of “best life hacks for achieving FIRE.” The discussion began with budgeting, and members offered ideas for how to track and minimize spending. Many members discussed their love of Excel, and it’s common in the FIRE community for members to share spreadsheets on their blogs. The discussion centered on frugality with a minimum of sacrifice. Members shared various free services that they had discovered, many of them offered by public institutions like the library, which helped them shave the monthly budget.
Some of the prominent voices online take more radical steps, leading lives of extreme austerity. Jacob Lund Fisker claims to have lived off of between $5,000 and $7,000 a year for the last ten years. He leads a do-it-yourself lifestyle, and he doesn’t plan to ever have children. He suggests that people who want children should wait until they’ve achieved financial independence.
The group’s discussion at the library quickly moved from budgeting to “credit card hacking.” In keeping with its international flavor, those seeking FIRE tend to value travel, but they don’t want to pay for it. Attendees compared which credit cards have the best travel rewards programs and what are the best ways to track accumulated points. Lee and Jazz von Gynz-Guethle—he’s from America and she’s from Germany—shared the story of how they took a year off from their careers to travel around the world for a fraction of what it would have cost them to live in America.
A preoccupation with credit card points might seem odd for a group of people who claim to want financial independence. Dave Ramsey built a personal-finance brand on the consistent advice to cut up the credit cards.
A few people at the FIRE meetup credited Ramsey with sparking their interest in personal finance, but they say they’ve moved past his “baby steps.” Ramsey’s plan focuses on getting people out of debt, and then helping them stay out of debt. While respecting Ramsey’s approach, most agreed that there was more to learn. The room filled with murmurs of agreement when a man wearing a nametag with “Artie” written on it said that he stopped listening to Ramsey when he realized that most of Ramsey’s advice no longer applied to him since he paid off his credit cards every month and didn’t have other debt.
Perhaps the FIRE movement’s biggest criticism of Ramsey is his advice to maintain a fifteen percent savings rate. People in the movement often trace FIRE’s rapid spread to a single blog post. Pete Adeney worked as an engineer for ten years before retiring at the age of 30 thanks to a high savings rate and a frugal lifestyle. He began blogging under the name “Mr. Money Mustache,” and in 2012 he wrote a post called “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement.” In the post he suggests that if someone can consistently save half their income, their working career doesn’t need to last more than 17 years. If someone’s only saving fifteen percent, that number jumps to 43 years.
Adeney’s blog went viral, and though many leaders in the movement have added caveats to his math based on how well one wants to live in retirement, many of FIRE’s advocates call that one post their inspiration. The rule of thumb for many in the FIRE community is that if someone has 25X their annual expenses saved in investment accounts, they should be able to retire, no matter what age they are.
At the Houston meetup Chris Stam told the group that if you’re not actively working toward a fifty-percent savings rate, you’re not really making progress. All the other “life hacks” for achieving FIRE are designed to increase the savings rate. The group accepted Stam’s assertions without question. After all, he’s the only one in the group who’s actually retired early.
At 47, Stam is the old man of the group. He decided to retire early from his career as a car salesman because he said that he wanted to be able to live life while he was still young enough to enjoy it. He struggled to articulate what he does all day, but he assured everyone that he stays busy. His first goal in retirement was to “decompress” because he hated his job so much. He felt as though he needed some “self-care.” He said that being retired is about making your own decisions. “Everyone just wants the choice,” Stam said. Now that he’s retired, he gets to choose what he does and who he does it with. The people that he formerly worked with didn’t bring him joy, but he likes these young people that he’s met at the financial-independence group.
‘These young people reject America’s social conventions that locate identity in what sort of work someone does, but some people struggle to find a community to replace the sense of belonging the American career offers.’
One of those young people is Tristan Sarremejane. He’s a 29-year-old structural engineer living in Houston. He’s from France, but his wife is from Texas. Unlike Stam, he likes his job, but he still doesn’t want to do it for the next 30 years. He was shocked after he graduated from college and discovered how little leisure time his career afforded him. He and his wife don’t have any children yet, but he says that a desire for family has prompted his interest in FIRE. He remembers his own childhood in France fondly. His parents, who were teachers, had months of vacation time each year, and Sarremajane wants to be able to spend time with the children he hopes to have some day.
The FIRE movement has its critics. Suze Orman, a notable figure in the world of personal finance, caused a stir in the community last year when she appeared on a popular FIRE podcast and denigrated the movement. “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. And let me tell you why,” said Orman, who is 67 and recently returned to working after stepping away from her media empire. Orman said those seeking to retire early are naïve and no one should think about retiring early unless they have at least five million dollars in assets: a number significantly higher than the 1.2 million that many in the community shoot for. Orman reasons that no one can predict what sort of crises might occur during a forty- or fifty-year retirement. She says that retiring early is an irresponsible goal that many will suffer for.
Some people point out that focusing on early retirement can become selfish. Should your life be squandered on doing whatever you want? Vicki Robin, who is now 73, wrote Your Money or Your Life in 1992, before FIRE existed, but many leaders in the movement cite her book as inspiring their journey. In the book, Robin advocates getting out of debt, building wealth, and walking away from corporate America. She freed herself from consumerism so she could spend more or her life focused on improving the environment and her community. In an interview on the ChooseFI podcast, Robin said that the goal of retiring early should be freeing oneself for greater service for others rather than focusing on travel or spending time doing whatever one wants. “We are not just lone wolves out there for our own personal agenda—for our own personal needs, wants, and desires. Lives shine when people discover how to be of service.”
A deep longing for community seemed to lay just below the surface at the Houston meetup. Over two dozen people from different backgrounds had gathered to spend the afternoon together in spite of barely knowing each other. Attendees talked about future meetings and suggested having small groups that would meet in homes. The meetup lasted for over three hours, and the only reason it ended was because a librarian told the participants the library was closing. Most of the group moved the conversation to the parking lot where they shivered as they continued talking about FIRE.
In seeking financial independence, these young people reject America’s social conventions that locate identity in what sort of work someone does, but some people struggle to find a community to replace the sense of belonging the American career offers, especially as family and church ties weaken. Lee von Gynz-Guethle, a 36-year-old project engineer, said he enjoyed these FIRE get-togethers because there’s “no hidden agendas.” He and his wife felt that in our consumer-driven culture it was hard to find a place to connect with others without being sold something.
