Money, Philosophy
My philosophy is really simple, really. What I value above almost all else is time. Time that feels completely wasteable, time where I feel welcome to read in a hammock or stay up until all hours on a random sewing project or daydream for an afternoon about a book I’ll never end up writing or spend a week hiking through the woods and not feel like I should be doing something else. Specifically I’m trying to escape the feeling (and also the very real economic pressure) that I should be grinding so I can pay my rent and the pressure to monetize everything I do. Like adding amazon buy buttons to my book reviews. It makes me barf inside my mouth a little that it even crossed my mind.
The anxiety of feeling like I should be doing something isn’t something I can buy myself out of (though I’m trying to train it out of me, slowly, as my life becomes less fraught—more on that later.) But time is something you can buy, as paradoxically as that sounds.
We’re all very familiar with retirement—you work all the livelong day for forty years so you can retire at 62 with a tiny social security check and hopefully some savings to tide you through the next 6 months to 30 years before you expire. Hopefully you get that 30 years, but we’ve all heard stories about that one company man who retired and then croaked a few months later. The reality is that none of us know when that day will come, but we’re all hoping that we get a few years of bliss in a retirement community in Florida before the Reaper comes calling. That’s what your retirement savings buy—years to just live and be a human being without a full time job taking up most of your time.
I got interested in the FIRE (Financial Independence-Retire Early) community back in 2016. I had just graduated from college and was feeling disillusioned about education, careers, and modern life. (At such a young age!) Staring down the barrel of 30+ years of work is incredibly daunting. Is this what fish had crawled onto land and grown opposable thumbs for? Writing marketing emails?
The idea behind FIRE is to figure out how much it costs you to live, then save up enough money until you can live off your investments indefinitely withdrawing that amount each year to live on.
It’s basically a big math equation called the 4% Rule. If $40,000 per year is how much I need to cover my housing, utilities, travel expenses, food, etc, then I would need $1,000,000 invested in the stock market to be able to retire, even if I were only 22. If you’re intrigued, here’s way more in-depth and mathy stuff about it.
The movement was a math equation at its heart, but also a money philosophy and ethic, especially in the early days of FIRE. I gobbled up the Mr. Money Moustache blog whose emphasis was on using frugality as a super power to get you to your goal sooner and make the planet a better place too. He encouraged readers to ditch their expensive gas-guzzling cars for muscle-powered bike trips when they could (and move closer to work while you’re at it), reduce use of utilities to save money, shop second-hand, live in the smallest space that felt comfortable, fix things yourself instead of tossing it and buying new. Reducing your yearly expenses by being frugal meant you could save more and get there faster, and it also meant you needed less money to retire on in the first place.
All of these beliefs aligned with mine. Living a frugal, anti-consumption, muscle-powered lifestyle is good for your body, the earth, and your pocketbook. Win-win-win. There was a path to buying my time back—retiring early. I could grind for some number of years and then be free.
A lot of things have changed since I first learned about FIRE. My life went topsy-turvy. The FIRE community got crowded with tech bros asking Reddit if they could retire at 27 with $3.6 million. FIRE became all about maximizing earning potential with little thought into the frugal lifestyle.
I will admit I have a pull toward asceticism. Probably on the extreme end of the spectrum, which I’m sure there’s more to say about. I was raised frugally. It’s a bone I can’t remove from my body. I miss people sharing in their FIRE blogs about the ways they saved $40 per month by creating their own bubbly water machine, using ingenuity, second-hand couches from Craigslist, and self-sacrifice to reach their goal. I liked when planet, pocket-book, and health felt so perfectly aligned, at least for one small moment.