The media love to find the chinks in the armour of anything, and one way in which they like to criticise the FIRE movement is to attack the premise of someone wanting to retire early.
They’ll typically characterise this as someone behaving as though they are old before their time; giving up on life and spending their days sitting by the fire watching re-runs of old sitcoms on tv.
They deliberately miss the point in two major ways.
You don’t have to retire if you’re having fun
Firstly, there’s no need to retire. If your work brings you fulfilment and is the best way to spend your days to give you a happy life, then absolutely there is no need to retire. Some of us do have worthwhile and enjoyable careers.
To be fair, a lot more of us have jobs where we reluctantly turn in on a Monday morning, with not much joy from the job itself, although we may quite like the people.
The critical thing which FIRE offers is freedom. Freedom to make a conscious choice about how you enjoy spending your days. It means that if work ceases to be enjoyable - say your lovely manager leaves and you are no longer shielded from the grouch that your boss reported to - you’ll have the means to tell them where to stick it. Or that you have the freedom to get the balance right - by going part-time or buying extra leave, to still keep the work enjoyable whilst also getting to do the things you want to do outside of work.
Even before you reach your FI milestone and you simply have a good chunk of funds invested, you’ll find that it gives you a sense of freedom and confidence. The prospect of redundancy is no longer daunting when you have ten years of living costs under your belt. You can leave a job which turns sour, with the certainty that, if it takes you a year or two to find another job that you like, you won’t run out of money.
A different retirement
The second way in which the critical media miss the point is in the way they portray retirement. It’s true that in traditional retirement a lot of people are exhausted from a lifetime of work, they are older and so have health problems, and lack the fitness and energy to set about ticking items off an extensive bucket list.
What FIRE offers, then, is particularly special. We’re talking about getting some extra years of freedom before all of that happens. A more youthful retirement when the prospect of long-haul flights is not so daunting. This retirement can mean going backpacking across Asia, seeing the sights of the high Arctic, or trekking to see the lost cities of the Incas.
The media also like to play on our fears. For many people their job is a useful anchor in their life, it sets a routine of the days and for as long as they can remember it has been there making the decision for them of what to do today. For other people it brings status - an automatic understanding of where they stand in the pecking order of their personal world. We are tribal animals, and giving up our work tribe feels traumatic to some people.
It’s true that when you retire, you’ll lose some of your tribe. Small interactions with former colleagues will be missing from your day, and for your mental health you should have a plan for how you want to fill your days.
Pursuit of FI is a goal I’d recommend to anyone. It puts you in a position of strength and security. But before you actually make the decision to retire, I’d make some plans for what you want to achieve and how you will put this bonus time to good use.
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