FIRE Movement

FIRE – Financially Independent and Retire Early is a lifestyle movement that’s gaining much significance among the Millenials in western countries. Indian’s are still pretty new to this concept.

FIRE is achieved by aggressive savings. You cut back on your life and try to control your expenditures as much as possible to save the max and at the same time invest it properly to give you enough returns for your entire life. The main motivation here is to get out of corporate life as fast as possible to pursue one’s hobbies like painting, cooking travelling dancing etc. These may be the hobbies which you were not able to pursue further because of lack of enough finances or even a situation like in India where these are not considered as a probable career choice even and you have to give up because of peer pressure.

By retiring early I’m not speaking about 45 or 50 instead of 60. It has to be much earlier. Like before 30-35. Even 40 is too late for FIRE. By joining this FIRE movement now you can do everything which wasn’t possible to do earlier. Let’s see some of the PROs and Cons and how to achieve FIRE.

PROs:

• You can get out of the corporate life ASAP rather than waiting for your normal retirement till 60 in the job that you don’t like.
• You can pursue your hobbies and make a career out of it and earn money.
• You would be looking forward to Mondays.

CONs:

• You need to save more than 70-80% of your income.
• You need to be in a high paying job. Saving 80% when you are earning just 10k won’t do.
• Striving for FIRE means you will be working really hard to make that extra money which means you will need to make sacrifices. No fancy parties or luxuries.

How to Achieve?

This is the most difficult part. As you may have already read PROs and CONs you might see the PROs as for the life post FIRE and CONs for the part of life when trying to achieve FIRE.

Suppose you are able to save 50% of your salary, then by working for 1 year will help you save enough for the next year.
Suppose you are able to save 75% of your salary, then by working for 1 year will help you save enough for the next 3 years.

So you see where am going with this. You need to work for 10years and save at a 75% rate to have enough savings for the next 30 years. Yes, I know the saved amount will generate returns. But at the same time, we do have to consider inflation also.

Saving 75% means a bit too much sacrifice. You need to cut back on a lot of stuff to actually to save 75%. But 75% is the minimum criteria to achieve FIRE and retire early. You need to try harder to reach 80-85% to make it achievable. You will have to cut on all your luxuries.

Risks Involved

You should plan to invest your savings every month in suitable schemes to generate a maximum return with minimal risk. A wrong investment may cost you dearly on your sacrifices made.

Imagine a case that you retired at 40 when you were healthy and by 70 you spent your entire savings and now you don’t have any money. You might need to go back to work but you are not healthy or lack the skills for the new age. You should be completely sure that the invested money will generate a safe monthly income to last the entire life. You should also have proper insurance cover from any illness or uncertainties.

You should also have a proper plan post-retirement when you are having a lot of free time. Just sitting and sleeping is going to kill you faster than the corporate life did.

If you are not ready or planned just stay away from this FIRE movement and enjoy life. You can live in the present and be happy too.