Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You?

Fisker’s 2010 book, “Early Retirement Extreme” — written mostly while he lived out of an R.V. on $7,000 a year — is one seminal text for early retirees. Two others are “Your Money or Your Life,” a 1992 personal-finance bible written by Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and the blog Mr. Money Mustache, started in 2011 by Peter Adeney, who retired from his software-engineering job in 2005 at age 30 and figured out how to shrink his family’s expenses down to just $24,000 a year. The tao of all three tomes is that minimalist spending and anti-consumption can offer the keys to better living. (Adeney has professed to be “really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet,” but his tens of thousands of monthly visitors tend to be more fixated on his other mantra: “Make you rich so you can retire early.”)

Conventional FIRE adherents are not necessarily big earners or genius mathematicians with incredible impulse control. Their superpower is their expert planning; it’s the ability to see the finish line from miles away that has allowed even some minimum-wage workers to achieve early retirement. One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number. As an example, if you bring home $150,000 a year, can save half of that and plan to spend $50,000 per year in retirement, then it will take only 16.5 years before you can kiss your job goodbye. For those who earn less or spend more, it will take longer — but for still others who can endure greater sacrifices, FIRE can be possible as early as their 30s.

From these plain origins, many offshoots of FIRE have sprouted up — some much more brazen than others. It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans; those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and “coasting” on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs).

You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world? Retirement has long been framed as a reward for a job well done — social reformers started pushing for mandatory post-work benefits in the early 20th century, and policies like Social Security later codified the tipping point between labor and leisure — but if FIRE’s incredible popularity of late (the r/Fire subreddit alone boasts nearly half a million members) is a defiant reaction to economic hardship, then it’s also a plea to re-evaluate the centrality of work to modern living. Maybe, the movement suggests, we should have always been in it for ourselves, and nobody else, from the start.

To my left was a woman who runs a phone-sex hotline; to my right, a cruise operator, a disaster-response volunteer, a kitchen-appliance entrepreneur, a public-school teacher and a former Off Broadway actor who now lives out of the back of an 18-wheeler and puts 70 percent of her weekly paycheck into index funds. It was a chilly spring weekend, and we had all flown to Cincinnati for EconoMe, an annual all-flavors-of-FIRE conference in which hundreds of people of all ages, from all over, bandy about tips on financial independence from dawn to dusk. The point of FIRE meetups — EconoMe is the largest, but others take place all over the world, some of them at a monthly clip — is only partly to give fiscal advice. Every person’s retirement plan is a highly individualized choreography, after all, so the manifold workshops and breakout groups are meant to offer only high-level ideas. The broader purpose of these get-togethers is more a sort of group therapy, geared to help people achieve their common goals and forge through their common struggles.