Comments on the FIRE Movement
09 Jan 2026
A lot of financial content over the last few years has been about the FIRE Movement. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The goal of FIRE is to retire early, and the means of retiring early is to save aggressively and invest strategically early in your career/life.
A quick Google search reveals several "flavors" of FIRE:
- Lean FIRE: Targeting a frugal lifestyle in retirement. This reduces the "nest egg" requirement, making early retirement more attainable.
- Fat FIRE: Aiming to retire with a more lavish lifestyle. This requires significantly higher savings and typically takes longer to achieve.
- Barista FIRE: Working a high-paying, high-stress job to save aggressively for a few years, then "retiring" into a lower-paying, low-stress part-time job (like a barista) to cover living expenses while the core investment grows.
- Coast FIRE: Aggressively saving early until your investments reach a "critical mass" where they will naturally grow to your retirement goal without any further contributions. Once you reach this point, you can stop saving and spend your entire paycheck freely.
Recently, I was researching what sort of tools and content in the realm of finance that the public is interested in or that I could help with. FIRE came up as popular and as something I could build tools around. After thinking about it, I decided that I am not really interested in FIRE.
I personally am interested in becoming wealthy, not retiring. I actually do not have an IRA or Roth. I begrudgingly contribute to my 401(k) simply because I cannot argue with my employer matching my contributions. I do not contribute to tax-advantaged accounts outside of my 401(k) because I do not want to tie my capital up until retirement age; I have plans for that money in the near future!
I also enjoy working, or at least working on something interesting. One of my goals for the next few years is to have passive income that can support me and a family so that I can focus on interesting projects, but true retirement is not anywhere on my radar.
What I am doing is likely not for everyone. My father is a serial entrepreneur, and so I grew up watching my father work really hard and take risks that resulted in wealth. He never talked about retirement accounts, just about investing, cash flow, serving people, and working hard. This has strongly influenced my perspective on life, wealth, and retirement.
In conclusion, FIRE is a great thing, but I do not see FIRE as aligning with my goals. There are some crossovers though. I am interested in aggressively saving in early life. This is necessary if you are going to be wealthy from a Balance Sheet perspective. I align with FIRE from this perspective. FIRE, from my understanding, is interested in lower risk than I am. FIRE touts the diversified stock portfolio in tax-advantaged accounts strategy, which is a great strategy. I am interested in various strategies including real estate, stocks, options, and other tools that can help me reach my financial goals. This will result in higher risk, more active investments.
These posts I am writing likely will have some FIRE-related content, but I will not make it a focus because I do not see it aligning with my goals.
You can read about the FIRE movement here: FIRE Movement