Menu
FIRE is a lifestyle movement that has recently taken off and has seen explosive growth in the past few years, especially among millennials. However, people of all ages worldwide have started to take a hard look at their lives, realizing that working until age 65 or later is not at all appealing. Being caught in the rat race and keeping up with the proverbial Joneses is not the kind of life people want to live. FIRE means having Financial Independence Retire Early. People seeking to attain FIRE will maximize their savings as well as investments and find creative ways to increase their income and decrease expenses.
The goal of FIRE is to maximize your lifestyle and begin living the life that brings you fulfillment, happiness, and excitement while you’re young and able to enjoy it.
It is being free to do what you want and having the time to spend it how you want—experiencing different cultures, traveling, learning new things, and being fully alive.
Financially speaking, the goal of FIRE is to save, invest and accumulate enough assets and investments that your passive income from assets provides you the ability to cover all of your living expenses. Once you reach this milestone, you have effectively achieved FIRE. This culmination is what we call the FIRELife Pinnacle Point, the point at which your assets and investments generate enough passive income to replace the revenue from your current job. The point where you don’t have to work if you don’t want to. That is freedom; that is FIRE.
The FIRE concept is simple, but to reach FIRE and live a FIRELife, you need to understand what FIRE means for you. Maybe just replacing your income is not enough. Perhaps you want to increase your retirement lifestyle, or maybe minimize it to live a simple, modest life. FIRE is specific to the individual, and reaching FIRE means something different for everyone. Everybody has their own FIRE journey to travel.
The goal of FIRE is to save and invest very aggressively—somewhere between 50–75% of your income—so you can retire sometime in your 30’s or 40’s. Regardless of your age, if you save and invest 50-75% of your income, you could effectively retire within 7 to 17 years.
The path to Financial Independence Retire Early is simple. It is so simple and summed up in just two sentences.
1) Spend less than you make and invest the difference wisely.
2) Have a clear goal and plan, then implement it with consistent action until you reach your goals.
Living a FIRE life is a journey that will take years of sacrifice but will be extremely rewarding along the way. When you begin to take decisive action to reduce your lifestyle and embrace the concepts of minimalism, frugality, and contentment, you begin to experience life in a whole new way.
The same old societal pressures and habits begin to stand out and learn to avoid consumerism’s demands. Learning to live on a budget and cutting your expenses to increase your savings becomes almost an obsession. When you realize how much sooner you can retire, every dollar saved and invested is infectious.
Cutting expenses and minimizing your lifestyle is a compelling effort when you’re first getting started on your FIRE journey. For example, cutting out $100 of monthly expenses lowers the amount you’ll need to reach financial independence by $30,000. If you permanently cut those expenses, you can live on less today and in the future, reducing the amount of money you’ll need in investments to generate the income you need to be financially free. Just think about this, If you can cut $1,000 in monthly expenses, that will decrease your FIRE Number by $300,000. Now that is how you live a FIRE life.
Many FIRE followers choose a different way of life, moving out of big cities, buying tiny houses, living in trailers and RVs, and generally living very thriving and fulfilling lives because they are no longer in the rat race, trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Another aspect of FIRE is maximizing your income. Many FIRE adherents are starting online businesses that can run remotely from anywhere. From dropshipping to creating online courses to writing and blogging, anything to create passive income streams.
The thought is simple: increase the income as much as possible, then save and invest it, speeding up the FIRE journey.
So why FIRE? Because we owe it to ourselves to live life to the fullest. Life is short, and it does us no good to be slaves to a job until age 65. We should be out there living our lives on our terms, serving the world, and being free to make a difference in our lives and the lives of others. I’m sure many ideas and thoughts are running through your mind about what you could do with your life if you didn’t have to go to work every day. Imagine the possibilities.
“If FIRE is so amazing, why isn’t it being taught in schools?” We reply, “Because our system breeds consumers and sheeple. The current education system is created for factory workers. Creativity and entrepreneurship are a challenge to that system, and we need to do that for ourselves and our families, or our children will be just more mindless drones who think stuff is the key to happiness, and working a 9-5 job is the only path.”
If you’re tired of living a dull and mundane life or you’re just sick and tired of being sick and tired from working like a dog for the rest of your life, then maybe it’s time to learn all about FIRE and make a decision to change your life for the better. Our FIRELife Financial Coaching programs help you accomplish just that.
For more information, please check out our Financial Coaching page:
Our number one goal is to empower our clients with the knowledge, guidance, and resources needed to accomplish their goals and dreams.
