What FIRE gets wrong.

Again, sometimes less is just less.

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Last week, I wrote a post on “minimalism” and some problems with it that I think go under-discussed.

Today, I want to cover a lifestyle that has problems I think are even more under-discussed: FIRE, or ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’, which is a lifestyle oriented around… financial independence and early retirement.

To put it in layman’s terms, FIRE is a lifestyle where you try to grow an investment portfolio large enough that you can live off of it on an accelerated timeline. It’s really not fundamentally different from how regular retirement works, besides the fact that to get there you need to save much more aggressively. The sort of holy book of FIRE is J.L. Collins’ The Simple Path to Wealth, which ironically I am only just reading now in 2025 (I actually appreciate how Collins seems less ideological than some proponents — talking about retiring, un-retiring, etc.).

I got my intro to FIRE through my first tech job, where a nice guy who I didn’t even directly work with put me onto Mr. Money Moustache, which I spent way too much time reading over the next few years. Mr. Money Moustache is great reading even if you’re not interested in FIRE, because he (Pete) talks a lot about living frugally, fulfillment, and silly things that almost everyone does in a very charismatic way — it also probably didn’t hurt that Pete is a big bike guy, as you can tell from the post Get Rich with... Bikes. Over the years, I’ve also read the Millennial Revolution blog (on the nose I know, it’s also a surprisingly poor website from two former tech people) which is run by a Canadian couple (with a kid!) — the creators have appeared in Canadian media, and also have a book called Quit Like a Millionaire. Having an example of how this might work in your country is valuable I’d say.

Now, I want to make two things clear — one, I don’t secretly have a massive portfolio that puts me on the brink of early retirement; and two, I like a lot of what the FIRE folks have to say — and they seem like really nice people, but I feel like there are credible criticisms that most of them don’t really address, as well as some general hangups I have.

One thing that stands out is the embellishment. This obviously varies from person to person, but reading the “budgets” that are posted, I often feel like they are a little too clean, with few surprise expenses and the like. Having read the same people describe their “journey” multiple times over the years, I’ve also heard the story change, and people say things like “I was wasting so much money after college!” when the savings rates suggest they really were not. Probably where this is the most annoying is in the modern Canadian context, where I see budgets that seem nigh-impossible to actually live on with the way the costs of various things have increased. (I assume things like windfall earnings — easier to come by when you’re a micro-celebrity, and an oddly good housing deal are what make things possible) To be clear, I’m not suggesting the budgets or numbers are not real, but they do feel embellished. They make things seem easier, and the authors’ decisions seem smarter than seems likely over such extended periods of time — but also make FIRE seem like a better idea.

The next thing, which is sort of unspoken but obvious, is that you need to make a pretty good living. Sure, some people make loads of money and blow it all on luxury good and the like, but a lot of people really can’t. A lot of the FIRE blogs take on this “if only you lived a less excessive lifestyle” tone, which makes sense if a couple is living in a huge mansion with two expensive financed cars, but which falls flat if you went to university and got a good job and are now sharing a small apartment at crazy rent in Toronto.

There are also a lot of add-ons you’ll see with FIRE. I’m not suggesting these are bad, but they might be dubious or hard to replicate (or have other costs that go unmentioned). One example (oriented towards Americans) is moving to a sort of small trendy town near a major city, something which has gotten harder and more expensive to do. Another is the idea of “geoarbitrage”, or earning in one geography and spending in another — it’s an interesting idea, but it can be really bad for locals, and is logistically very difficult.

Probably the biggest add-on of all is a sort of extreme frugality, which becomes a sort of measure of man for a lot of these people. Of course, like all things, frugality makes sense in moderation, but sometimes you question how the people suggesting some of these things think anyone will want to do these things. The other point that really stands out is that some of the “frugal” measures don’t stand up, especially for people who are not retired and don’t have tons of time on their hands — such as people trading an expensive thing for a slow thing. Of course, all of it also overlaps with the embellishment. If you actually aren’t quite so extreme in your frugality, but you have some additional income sources you don’t talk about — you can pretend you are extreme without having to live that way. The thing about the frugality is that it probably should be more central to the FIRE conversation, because if you want to retire early, you’re going to want to minimize your expenses — so in some ways it’s more like FI-Live Frugally-RE. This is fine, but it may mean committing yourself to a pretty basic lifestyle in perpetuity (you could start working a casual job of course...). All in all, frugality can be good, but I also love going out for meals with friends and all other kinds of things that cost money, and I’m not fully invested in the idea that I should give these things up so I don’t need to work.

Obviously some people hate their jobs and have miserable jobs, but FIRE people tend to come off as way over-indexed on people in this situation. It is absolutely the case that many people enjoy and find fulfillment in their jobs, or might legitimately just feel bored in retirement — even if they are travelling and doing hobbies.

A big barrier to FIRE that does get attention is having kids. Now, as I already mentioned above, some people who have retired early do have kids. But, I don’t think nearly enough attention is paid to how expensive raising a kid is, not solely (or even primarily) in a financial sense, but in a time sense — which could really put the brakes on accumulating a portfolio. It seems like many FIRE folks who do have kids have had them once they are retired, but not everyone can do that.

Some of the problems I have with FIRE are broader than the actions of one blogger or another. A big one is how pessimistic or even zero-sum the whole thing feels. I don’t disagree that saving and the like are valuable, but I think a lot of people could find greater financial returns in spending their energy on their career, or starting a business. In some ways, it feels like the whole movement ignores the valuable ideas around pie, that is that you sometimes don’t need to try and get a bigger slice, you could just make a bigger pie. Obviously, some cynicism about jobs and income growth is justified, but I think it often goes over the top. Another problem is the sort of isolationist attitudes you see. FIRE folks often decry people taking on big mortgages, and talk about how those people are setting themselves up for a huge risk — but this ignores the fact that we live in a society. When things go bad for people financially, governments do step in; maybe we don’t like that (though I think it’s clearly a positive thing), but it’s reality, and to some extent you are leaving something on the table if you are trying to be or act like a totally independent entity in a decidedly interconnected world. It often just feels like FIRE is not an abundance mindset — even though that’s often a very healthy mindset to have!

I do also think there is danger in taking a niche approach to your finances. That’s not to say that people with multi-million dollar portfolios in their 30s should be worried, but when you’re in a small minority of the population, it’s easy for a populist policy swing to hit you hard. Government policy as I mentioned above tends to favour the common path! You can imagine how policies around something like retirement accounts could change if governments decide that they don’t mind pissing off old people, or if voting patterns change, and your whole “strategy” gets thrown into the wind.

The main tool of FIRE investment is the index fund, and on this point I must confess I am sort of flying blind (I consider myself economically literate and mathematically adept, but my feelings here are going on more vibes than usual), but I do think index funds probably aren’t as amazing as people think. To be sure, they appear to be a fine investment, but they also have some obvious problems which seem solvable. For example, right now enormous amounts of money are sitting in NVIDIA stock when compared to say Siemens — NVIDIA makes GPUs while Siemens builds much of the industrial and electrical equipment that makes the modern world go round (to be fair, some might argue 3D graphics and AI will or do make the world go round, but c’mon, these things are not electricity). This is clearly irrational, and obviously the markets being irrational is built into these strategies — but sometimes it feels … avoidable. The other and probably bigger concern I have is that 1) index funds have grown massively, which seems likely to have some unintended consequences; and 2) if everyone thinks something is a great idea, surely it can’t keep being the best idea — an index strategy makes sense when the masses are gambling on individual stocks, but it’s hard not to see how the default being a more passive or programmatic approach wouldn’t turn the tables.

I’ve been having a lot of these thoughts for a very long time, which made it serendipitous when I came across the book “Die With Zero” by Bill Perkins over the Christmas holidays. In many ways, this book feels anti-FIRE, but I think it really is just common sense and thoughtful human thinking.

In the book, Perkins mentions the obvious but under-discussed case of someone who has a terminal illness when they are young. You can imagine how denying yourself all kinds of basic everyday pleasures in the quest to... keep doing that, but without working, would really feel like a painful mistake if you found out you basically were not going to get to capitalize on that. Mr. Money Moustache would suggest that the stoic frugal mindset you build would make you plenty happy, but again so do ski trips, nice meals out, and other everyday “luxuries”. The other great think that Perkins mentions is the idea of memories accumulating interest over time. I do think that might be a little over the top, but I absolutely think a great memory can age like fine wine (especially if you have lots of pictures). And at the same time, doing novel things that make memories helps slow our perception of time and sort of pin moments in our life in our memory. I think ultimately I just appreciated Perkins’ attitude, which is sort of “don’t be an idiot with your finances, but enjoy yourself along the way, and expect things to work out”.

And I think that summarizes what I feel FIRE gets wrong. It’s not that the ideas that constitute this lifestyle aren’t good, it’s that they can easily be taken too far.

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I hope these posts haven’t come off as too harsh. I think it’s fun to take a popular idea and question whether it is as good as proponents would lead you to believe. Make sure to subscribe because I’m sure that in future posts I’ll talk about the good sides of both Minimalism and FIRE.