FIRE Observations

Bloom Is Off The FIRE Flame?

When I started this blog back in 2015, the concept of FIRE – Financially Independent & Retired Early – was relatively new. Over a decade later, perhaps the bloom is off the flame.

Someone recently asked AI ChatGPT to “roast the FIRE movement” and the perceptions are pretty cutting. Since AI basically scrapes data from across the internet and presents it back in an organized form, I think we can take its response as a summary of the public’s criticisms.

In short, it says the FIRE movement glorifies extreme frugality and mislabels financial anxiety as freedom. It says FIRE followers retire early only to live like broke college students, obsessively budgeting, avoiding joy, and living a spreadsheet-driven version of life.

I know there are a lot of frugalists in the FIRE movement, but I’ve never been one of them. I can’t imagine retiring with what we had at 35 years old – even though we were doing pretty good by that age. One of the first financial planners we ever met with told us we were probably “in the top 0.5% of savers” even at that point.

We live a very comfortable life with a nice house, vacation home, international travel, and other niceties. No frugal living to our version of FIRE – which some people call “Fat FIRE” versus “Lean FIRE”.

Still, maybe that distinction is lost on people. I do know that there have always been many negative folks in the media casting shade on the FIRE movement. Although I named this site “Mr FIRE Station”, I don’t bother to explain the name much anymore.

Of course, if you ask AI what’s wrong it will always deliver what’s wrong. It will also give you what’s right if you ask that. Here it is ….

Do you ever use the FIRE term when discussing your lifestyle choices? Are people familiar with it? What reaction do you get now compared with in the past?

Image: Pixabay; Posts: Reddit r/FIRE

23 thoughts on “Bloom Is Off The FIRE Flame?”

  1. First, very impressed with using AI to build arguments and counter-arguments. I’ve never done that before, thanks for sharing. I rarely use the FIRE term. I feel like FIRE is a subset of personal finance and very few people are comfortable talking about that stuff. I have shared the concepts with my kids because I do think there is a ton of upside in building those skills.

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    1. It’s pretty amazing what AI can do. The phrase “unemployed with a spreadsheet” is a pretty clever roast, too. You are right that FIRE is a pretty small subset within personal finance, for sure.

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  2. I don’t use the term FIRE. However, when people learn that I have been retired for years and am not eating cat food they often congratulate me and/or want to find out how to get there themselves.

    Regarding the negative press on the FIRE movement, I think there are two well know FIRE bloggers who retired in 30’s. One called himself, Mr. Money Mustache. He achieved FIRE by being the ultimate penny pincher. The only problem was his wife wasn’t on board with the program and divorced him.

    Then there is the Financial Samurai, who retired at age 35 based on a combination of saving some windfall earnings and having to take an early buyout offer to retire. He continued living in San Francisco and has two children that he wants to send to expensive elite private schools. He had to go back to work to make up a $65,000 per year annual budget deficit.

    I am skeptical of AI and most media about financial management. Both are only as good as the programmers or journalists behind the material, and the vast majority of people in the USA are financially illiterate.

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    1. I’m familiar with those guys, but haven’t checked out their stuff in quite awhile. Sorry to hear that they have been beset with some challenges.

      I think the MMM guy cashed out at one point – selling his site for big bucks, didn’t he?

      The Financial Samurai guy has checked out my sight and commented here in the past (but not in awhile). He was a colorful writer and had some provocative pieces. I liked an article he wrote about splurging on an expensive car – like a Ferrari or McLaren – once in your life!

      I recall that FS wrote a lot how expensive it was to live in San Francisco. Elite private schools make it doubly expensive. I’m not sure I see the value in paying crazy tuition prices. Probably not enough to go back to work. Our son went to private, but affordable, Catholic schools. Good kids generally do well where ever they are at.

      I noticed that Elon Musk is resetting his Grok AI model in X to be based on better material scraped from the internet. I think that cleaning of data sources will be a big & ongoing job of AI going forward.

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      1. My sons went to Catholic School the entire time too. Their K through 8 was very affordable. Less than half the cost of taxpayer funded public schools with a much better outcome. My sons’ Catholic K-8 typical graduate tests at the 12th grade Reading Level.

        Catholic High Schools around here have become a different story, I think they have become too focused on athletics. My son’s brought in Derek Fisher as the basketball coach and salt the team by recruiting the best from South Central LA and giving them scholarships. Football is the same story. All this costs $$$. When my youngest son went to UCLA as a commuter, my cost was halved.

        The book, “The Millionaire Next Door” studied education and agrees with your assessment of getting an affordable education. The authors are big proponents of learning a trade via an apprenticeship where you earn while you learn. Last time I checked, The University of Wisconsin was tied with Harvard for having the most CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, and I would assert that the typical UW student was not born on third base. The cream will still rise to the top.

        I benchmark my expenses against FS. Having been in my house since 1989 really helps.

        Here is a caveat about AI. I think of AI as providing a summary or abridged version of information. AI lists references that the information was scraped from. If you drill down on the referenced material, you find that AI abridged version does not accurately summarize the referenced materials and may actually mean the opposite.

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      2. Sports has become a big strategic lever for schools to attract donations. It’s been that way at the university level for awhile. Now it’s happening in high schools.

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  3. FIRE is nothing new. My father grew up in the depression and my mother in Montreal during the war, remember for Canada WWII began in 1939. They were frugal by necessity.

    Growing up in the 60’s and 60’s meant hand me down clothes, no fancy vacations and eating out was a treat. We supplemented oil heat with wood and grew a large garden. I had no sense of depravity and lacked for nothing, but then again my father worked overseas in the 50’s building air bases as a contractor and paid cash for his house which was finished off over the years.

    I am not much different but I spend money on experiences. I don’t consider myself to be a FIRE person having started retirement at age 57 but still consult at 62 as it is fun and I like sending extra money to the US Treasury (NOT).

    I always lived within my means and for my kids that meant vacations at their grandparents house and Scout Camp.

    Asking questions on Chat GPT? a fellow HOA Board member who is a rocket scientist PhD Caltech will ask Chat a question during a board meeting and generally speaking the answer is a lightweight answer which doesn’t consider variables unique to our situation. We are installing solar on our building’s roof and decided to install a new roof at the same time. He asked a question about roof material and Chat said to go with the material that is more susceptible to wear and tear but is a “cool” roof. Given that the roof will be shaded the “cool” roof characteristics were not needed. That is my example of an incomplete answer. Like many things, personal needs are just that, personal and unique

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    1. You are certainly right that yesterday’s “normal” seems like today’s “minimal”! My son would be shocked to see how we lived in the 1970s, just as I would be shocked to see how my parents lived in the 1940s.

      I’m very positive on AI and have certainly switched a good deal of my Google searches over to ChatGPT. It’s not perfect, but it is definitely a step up in power and granularity of searches. If I get an incomplete answer from it, I follow up with added questions & context. It’s terrific about refining answers with added information.

      In a few years, it will be integrated into a lot that we do.

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      1. We binge watched “That 70s Show” with our youngest sons during the Covid-19 lockdowns. My wife and I thought they did a fairly accurate job portraying life in small town Wisconsin during the 1970s. We explained that the modest house size, teens using an unfinished basement as a rec room, the awful burnt orange colored refrigerators, clothes and cars were accurate. The main part of the show that was fake is that it acted like teenagers getting beer in Wisconsin was a big deal and hard to get. This is where the California based writers didn’t realize that the legal drinking age for Wisconsin was 18 at the time, which meant 18 YO high school seniors carried out for the rest of the school.

        Ending on a humorous note, my son recently went a car show and showed me photo he took of a “pimped” out car. I immediately recognized the car as being a 1970 Plum Crazy colored Hemi Cuda. “Son, that was factory color back then. Mopars also came in Vitamin C, Sublime, Hemi Red and Panther Pink. The value of that Cuda was probably north of $200,000. People who couldn’t afford that car when they were in high school are willing to pay big bucks for these now. It is a chance to be the teenager you couldn’t afford to be.”

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      2. I had a 1970 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon exactly like the one on “That 1970s Show”. They DID do a great job of capturing the 1970s teen lifestyle, didn’t they?

        Jeep has carried forward the fun color selections for Wranglers: Firecracker Red, Nacho (Orange), Gecko (Bright Green), Sarge (Military Green), Sting-Gray (Matte Gray), Punk’n (Orange), Tuscadero (Pink), Hella Yella (Yellow), and Purple Reign (perfect for Minnesota).

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    2. You just described my Grandfather perfectly. He had a garden, vineyard and apple orchard on his property. My Grandmother did a lot of canning. He told me about how he starting growing food during WW II. Pop Pop taught me about investing in dividend paying stocks, taking advantage of DRIP programs because broker fees used to be high, and he bought stocks primarily located in the Pittsburgh area because information was not as available before the internet. He retired at age 50! I remember him having me go out to the mailbox to look for dividend checks. He said, “The only thing better that get a check in the mail and getting a bigger check next year when the company increases the dividend.”

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      1. Your grandfather, to quote the performance of Barbara Mandrell and George Jones (missing writer) “I was FIRE before FIRE was cool”.

        The “insert name of perceived stunted minority group” I have no generational wealth group misses that what you learned from grandpa and I from Dad and Mum was value, thrift and hard work, but most of all, delayed gratification until we could afford it.

        I remember my father when I was in my late teens mentioning that he earned more from the returns of his profit sharing account than from wages at that time. The firm he was employed at provided aggregate and concrete to build interstate highways and nuclear plants in the 50’s-70% and they had a profit sharing deferred compensation plan. When he died that went to Northeastern U to fund scholarships

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      2. I was fortunate that my Grandfather passed these same lessons on to me. Somehow it skipped a generation and missed my Mom. My father had the frugal part down pat, but missed out on his investment advice.

        My Grandfather was Scottish descent, which was listed as the group that had the second highest incidence of millionaires as a percentage in “The Millionaire Next Door”. Scottish descent achieves this despite not having the highest earnings and does better in passing on the knowledge to their descendants.

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      3. There is a good book called “How The Scots Invented The Modern World”. It talks about how David Hume, Adam Smith, John Knox, and other Scots set up our thinking on education, democracy, and economics. John Knox why did everybody to be able to read the Bible, so they started public schools on a widespread basis about 100 years before other European countries. I believe that more than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Scottish.

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      5. In my case it was during the 5th Grade. My son’s Catholic K-8 had a very successful businessman who taught 5th grade Math as a second career. He used to have the kids pick and track stocks as a contest. They were really into it. He even had the kids stand up and give a explanation about why they picked a particular stock and what the underlying company did. Never too early to start teaching kids about investing.

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  4. Looks like a good read! Amazing how good things happen when people can read well.

    It is shameful that US education was dumbed down by John Dewey. Reading skills have really degraded and hinders many in the working world who have really bad reading comprehension.

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      1. Similar statistics were cited in Tulsa Gabbard’s “For Love of Country, Leave the Democrat Party” which I finished reading today. She wants to fund the children through vouchers instead of education bureaucracies. She also listed Public Education Union Leaders who sent their children to private schools.

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      2. My 10th grade history teacher – who had us watch Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” in class – used to have a bumper sticker promoting K-12 “Tuition Tax Credits” on the front of his desk. Vouchers are even better because the parent has the $ upfront. More and more states have them now and there is becoming an obvious gap between red & blue states in the US News annual education rankings.

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      3. We were both fortunate to attend public school in small towns in the Midwest that hadn’t been ruined by top down central planning and teachers’ unions yet. If a teacher had tried something crazy it would be known throughout town instantly and people would call for the teachers firing and the firing would have happened.

        Your 10th grade history teacher wouldn’t be able to pull off what he did in Madison or Chicago. The unions would never have allowed an apostate who didn’t fear competition and instead cared about the education he was providing. Your history teacher sounds like a real difference maker who exposed you to materials based on Milton Friedman’s college classes. He was exposing you to college level materials from one of the best university professors ever in small town Wisconsin High School. Who couldn’t love that? Top down centralized planning wouldn’t allow him to design a course that features Milton Friedman teaching economics.

        One of the thoughts I had reading Tulsi Gabbard’s book was that she would have benefitted from my two youngest sons’ Catholic High School History Teacher. He was Japanese American. He told the story about his Grandfather being the mayor of Little Tokyo in downtown LA and how he was interned shortly after Pearl Harbor by the FDR (Democrat) Administration for the crime of being Japanese American. She also would have known why the Republican Party was formed in Ripon, WI for the specific purpose of emancipation, which party represented and fought on behalf of slaveholders in the South, which one was behind the Jim Crow South, which one fought against Civil Rights and then acted like they were behind it when it finally passed. Even though she cited Eisenhower’s “beware the Military Industrial Complex” warning when leaving office, she did process that he was a Republican.

        Those who don’t study history are doomed to make the same mistakes as the past. It is much cheaper to learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making them yourself, then having to learn from firsthand experience.

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      4. I went to a Catholic High School, as well. We’re not Catholic, but they do a pretty good job. I’m sure even in the early 1980s, Milton Friedman would not have been Teachers Union approved. Although that series was originally aired on PBS.

        My son graduated from “my” Catholic high school 32 years after I did!

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      5. Catholic High School explains a lot. The Irish born Monsignor at our sons’ basically said the same thing as your excellent history teacher’s bumper sticker. “Religious people being forced to pay for secular schools they don’t use discriminates against them.”

        I saw Milton Friedman series on PBS as an adult and it was high level material for a High School Sophomore.

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