The idea of retiring by age 30 or 40 is a bold move. I’m always amazed when I hear stories of people like Mr. Money Mustache who put away around 70% of their salary and retire super early. When I first heard of this concept, I was a young father and making less than $50K a year. I wasn’t in a spot to try for an early retirement, but I liked a lot of the concepts from the movement. Breaking away from the standard American spending patterns helped my wife and I to move towards a higher margin life.
Freedom is Better than Status
This is the core principal that has always impressed me with folks that pursue a more hardcore financial path. The focus stays clearly on moving towards a life with freedom to spend time as they desire to and not feeling trapped. In the US, it seems like people often feel trapped by their jobs and commitments, but the reality is that the are trapped by the status that they want to maintain.
Whenever I read about people in the FIRE movement, they have just removed this piece of the equation. Their focus is on simple logistics of what it will take to live a life they enjoy on a budget that will allow them to be free of work as early as possible. It is a drastic reorienting from the standard life in for people in the US. This is the type of focus that I think non-FIRE people can benefit from the most.
For the less financially hardcore, this focus on freedom may lead to more spending at local restaurants or vacations in the short term. However, it can help us avoid letting lifestyle creep set in if we know our current career isn’t life giving and we need to think about a change. Here are some ways that focusing on freedom over status could help:
- Not sizing up the house and losing a good mortgage rate.
- Avoiding a big car payment to allow for more investing.
- Reduced stress at work not pushing for that next promotion.
- Finding ways to reduce overall hours worked in a week.
- Pursuing enjoyable, but unflashy vacations.
The Things that Feed the Soul are Cheap
Going for walks with your family, reading a book and working with your hands all feed the soul. There is a consistent connection between these simple pleasures and a deep feeling of contentment. This comes into focus when someone targets extreme frugality since that comes with eliminating a lot of the consumer pleasures in life.
The norm in the US is ample consumer options which makes it easy to lose the simple pleasures. This is the biggest battle I see with raising teens, like my wife and I are, in the modern world. So much is available that the simple joys get crowded out for our kids, but also for us. For those of us that aren’t targeting retirement before out kids get out of the home, it means we have to be more intentional in this area.
A big part of this is linking these activities that feed the soul with the “cotton candy” that surrounds us. It means going for a walk with the dog or spending time in the garden before the watching a show. For my kids, it means putting reading and drawing out as the gateway to any time on screens. Pretty much every time I’ve put some limit in place to benefit my kids in this area, I’ve seen quickly that I need to do something similar.
One major reason I took over this blog is that it created a major push for me to focus on writing. I’ve always loved to write and spend time pondering life, but its generally lost out to the hustle of life. Having the blog helps me do something that I know feeds my soul and keeps it top of the priority list.
Keep Investing Simple
I’m not sure if this is universally true of people in the FIRE movement, but I’ve almost always heard folks focus more on lifestyle and savings. The goal is to get money moving into Index Funds linked to the S&P 500 and let compounding interest do the heavy lifting. The primary reason for this is that most people targeting early retirement are not investment experts and are humble enough to acknowledge that.
This seems very important in 2025 where uncertainty is at an all time high with the markets and it would be easy to try to dive into alternatives. This is a prime situation where the best option is probably to do nothing other than ride the market out. 2025 feels very shaky, but we can still look back and see that there is plenty of wild, unpredictable stuff that has happened over the past 50 years.
This principle could also be summarized as “Do what you know well and keep the rest simple.” For my wife and I, real estate is something we know since she is a realtor. For us this is an area we focus on, but when it comes to our retirement savings, the focus is to keep it simple and put it into the simple S&P Index Funds.
I have always been intrigued by investing and would love to have more expertise in the market, but I also know that I’ll never put that much time in become an expert. If people who were able to retire by 35 were able to do it with a simple market strategy, then I can stick with that.
Let the FIRE Movement Be Encouraging
The biggest thing that I take from the FIRE movement is the encouraging thought that there are relatively normal people out there who were able to commit to super high savings rates, focus on a simple life and grew enough wealth to stop working before they turned 40.
If those people can do something that extreme, then my wife and I can definitely find a way to stash money away for our kid’s school, save enough to retire in our 60s and find joy in our working life.
I’ll never be that hardcore, but I can glean from the mindset to help my family continue to grow our margin. In an increasingly uncertain world, growing margin and enjoying life is my biggest goal. The FIRE movement provides great insights to make this a reality.