> Based on the available data, the percentage of the U.S. population that can realistically achieve FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is very small, likely less than 1% to 3%. This figure represents those who can both meet the strict financial criteria and successfully execute the plan to retire decades before the traditional age.
According to Gallup polling, only 1% of Americans in their early 40s are retired, and just 6% of those in their early 50s have left the workforce. [1]
Nice if you can do it. Most of us will never be able to.
I'll second that. I tried the trial for a few months then started paying money for it. At $100/year I've found it useful for modeling and gaming out different scenarios for retirement thresholds.
Nothing's certain, but if you like to play with data and you don't want to build the whole damn thing yourself, it's useful.
Still waiting for them to get support for options.
Don’t forget the unbounded liability of AGI: your job disappears before you can accumulate the capital you need. On the bright side, you’re retired. Really simplifies the spreadsheet.
Don't forget the unbounded liability of apocalypse: society implodes and your money is worthless.
On the bright side, you might have invested in Nuka Cola.
I swear I saw a version of this years ago on one of the popular tech blags like Coding Horror or Joel On Software. I briefly looked for it the other day and couldn't find it. Anyone happen to remember it? I think it was mainly about salaries and when stock options would vest.
If you live in New York, life will get complex without building supplementary passive income from a young age.
If people live a slow-burn lifestyle, buy revenue property one can later demolish as needed, park unused cash in index funds, and split 7% between bullion & high-risk. Most folks will be fine when things eventually go sideways.
Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes. =3
I am not Bullish on LLM firms given the -$2.50 profit per $1 revenue, or several trillion USD debt buried on page 60 of their reports. They can go be awesome without my cash, and I will cheer them on.
Note, whomever floated that home-equity loan will be happy with their won profits. They win-win even if the loan defaults. Not everyone is so lucky... =3
I think this would highly depend on figures for real estate and overall COL in the specific location where you intend to retire? And also major life choice possibilities like maybe selling your house and moving or choosing something smaller when theoretical children are fully grown and have moved out.
Given the national debt (and the state debts in many cases), I do not feel comfortable assuming that tax rates will not change drastically. I wouldn't be surprised if Roth IRAs became taxable, at least for certain people. And there could be straight-up wealth taxes on "the millionaires" (which you pretty much have to be in order to FIRE.
I would love to see sales taxes removed and a wealth tax to replace it. Would obviously have to be a graduated roll out. We (USA) need a big changes in these rules; hope we don't need (another) cival war for it.
Why not both? Depending on what you make, it’s often possible to enjoy life and also spend less than you earn. You are enjoying life like someone with a lower salary would.
Well, FIRE is about retiring before you're old. But really this is an idea for people with insanely high salaries that you commonly see in the US. It's for when you're earning several multiples more than you need to "be happy". All it's really saying is if you resist lifestyle inflation and the hedonic treadmill you can still be happy your whole life but be financially independent much earlier. It's not really about people earning close to median and living in poverty their whole life so they can retire.
Personally, programming computers is one of my favorite things to do, so I'm with you on wanting to keep doing it.
It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.
I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.
Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.
With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.
Retirement doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't have to. It means you can work for yourself on your own interests instead of for some other boss who tells you what to do.
Why not find a career and job that's enjoyable now without even having to defer all of this for later? Not just in software, but you could be flying planes, be in a travelling circus, learn to be a chef, etc.
If the answer is you have too many commitments keeping you tied to your current job, then I'd argue that we should be optimising for that optionality rather than some arbitrary day to end the nightmare 40 years from now
I don't want to fly planes, be in a traveling circus, or be a chef. There are things I want to do, but the money spigots of our society aren't lining up to pay me to do them. I'm all for obtaining optionality through universal income. But optionality means also the optionality to retire (today, not decades from now).
Used to think the same when joining the field and now I despise every minute I have to work on software I don't care about. AI even made it worse as I joined the field due to liking the coding part, not the results. Well, there isn't really an alternative for me either as there are basically no jobs I could learn that pay equally well...
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
It's boring in the same way as a fridge that works flawlessly for 100 years is boring. Sometimes that's all you really want. Remember, stress is the worst thing you can do to your body. Also remember, being able to retire doesn't mean you have to.
According to Gallup polling, only 1% of Americans in their early 40s are retired, and just 6% of those in their early 50s have left the workforce. [1]
Nice if you can do it. Most of us will never be able to.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/what-percentage-of-people-achie...
It's been discussed here a number of times and I've been a happy customer for years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173
Nothing's certain, but if you like to play with data and you don't want to build the whole damn thing yourself, it's useful.
Still waiting for them to get support for options.
or alternative "... until i have saved up enough to last me till death"
But most of the time usually its the first option because no one wants to downgrade their ways of live when getting old.
And the problem with the first one is that as more and more people want to do that, who is going to work for them? the opressed youth :)
If only youth unemployment isn't a serious issue in modern societies.
In reality, maybe AI robots.
If people live a slow-burn lifestyle, buy revenue property one can later demolish as needed, park unused cash in index funds, and split 7% between bullion & high-risk. Most folks will be fine when things eventually go sideways.
Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes. =3
I just saw a cnn headline in the lobby about people who are looking to sell their family home to buy ai stock
They sure talk about mistakes before they happen
Note, whomever floated that home-equity loan will be happy with their won profits. They win-win even if the loan defaults. Not everyone is so lucky... =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE75WvOtcu8
How can people not see FIRE is just a way to make you postpone what you want to do? Who cares what you can do when you're old and full of pains?
It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.
I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.
Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.
With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
It’s up 48% in 15 years, and until the Us-Iran war it was only up 14%
https://fuelwide.com/fuel-prices/netherlands/history
Grocery inflation is 45% over the same period but I suspect you’ll claim CPI figures are nonsense.
Gas for heating has indeed about doubled, unsurprising with both Ukraine and Iran.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!