The joy of doing Financial Independence wrong
A lot of the time I feel like I’m doing financial independence wrong. Basically I don’t find it particularly hard. Not from a practical point of view anyway (the emotional side is different). From an everyday perspective financial independence is meant to be a slog right? Putting in the hours today for a better tomorrow. Grinding out savings, watching every penny, hustling, compromising, sacrificing.
Thing is, I don’t do any of that. I buy lunch at work, I go out for a coffee. If a letter comes home from my kids’ schools about a trip I don’t think twice about saying yes. A friend asks if I want to go out to dinner: Let me know where and when. Our fridge blew up a month ago. A pain, but no problem. We had a new one delivered within 48 hours and a delivery to restock it a few hours later.
Is it because I’m fabulously wealthy? No, I mean I earn more than most – to be clear though if you earn more than £28,400 (median) or £34,200 (mean) in the UK then you earn more than most households. But, I don’t work in finance or software or medicine. In fact, I spent a good chunk of my career working as a mid-ranking official in the public sector (but without a final salary pension sadly). Don’t get me wrong I don’t slack, but I’m pretty much 9 to 5. It’s not even that I make money in other ways. I don’t have any side hustles.
In summary I don’t save right, I don’t earn right, and I don’t sacrifice right. My focus is on happiness now rather than just in the future. What the heck am I doing? Am doing Financial Independence wrong?
Doing Financial Independence wrong
This has all confused me for a while. Getting to Financial Independence for me is about keeping a sensible eye on costs without clamping down, putting some things on autopilot and then getting on with living life. I describe what I do in the 7 ½ rules that I follow but I’m not a slave to them.
The idea of Financial Independence needing to be hard and requiring sacrifice is deep in the roots of the movement. There is an odd machismo that underlies much Financial Independence writing. Arguably the prototype for financial independence was in Walden by Henry Thoreau. Live a bucolic, minimalist – bordering on survivalist – lifestyle. That was what it was like back then but, when we come to modern-day Financial Independence writers, that idea of a painful, sacrificial lifestyle really takes off.
Financial Independence has got to be hard work right?
Early Retirement Extreme
I’ve just finished reading Early Retirement Extreme (ERE) by Jacob Lund Fisker. He was arguably the first of the contemporary FIRE writers to have become widely known. His book includes advice such as making food fuel not pleasure, you can wash your clothes using a bucket and plunger, suggesting not bothering with a fridge, being healthy means being able to carry or drag someone out of a burning building and being able to outrun or outfight someone who is chasing you. I paraphrase, but not much.
The problem with that is that I just can’t relate to it. Can you? I’m fascinated by everything in this space but I honestly had to force myself to finish the book. The lifestyle that ERE espouses is just so far from anything that I could imagine myself wanting to live it. The word ‘Extreme’ in the title flags up the tacit acknowledgement that this approach isn’t for everyone. But, by repeated reference to the ideal of the ‘Renaissance Man’ that can live life like that, there is also a strong suggestion that you are a weak loser if you fall in any way short of that ideal. And people like me who pretty much reject most of the ideas in both theory and practise? I’m left with the feeling that I would be dismissed with a disgusted sneer.
Mr Money Moustache
Following in his footsteps came Pete Adeney and Mr Money Moustache (MMM). While he praises ERE he has absolutely forged his own path. For many people MMM epitomises the FIRE movement. Through his blog, and beyond, he has done an incredible job in popularising the idea of Financial Independence. He is much more at the lighthearted but he is still at the more frugal end of the spectrum. I relate more to him than ERE but even with him there are things that I really struggle with.
The whole idea of the MMM ‘facepunch’ when you make poor financial decisions is obviously tongue in cheek and I understand that Pete is, in part, playing a character. This thing is, it suggests an underlying ‘bro culture’ that I struggle to want to be part of. There is a trope of the typical FIRE follower being a 20 something single, white male software engineer or banker. The face punch idea talks to that. To be clear there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those characteristics taken either individually or in any combination, but it does talk to a particular demographic that just isn’t me. My general approach to life is that, for the most part, if people screw up then you don’t humiliate or punish, you support and educate them to do better next time. I’m just a snowflake I guess.
Financial Samurai
To take another example from one of the earlier breakout FI bloggers, Sam Dogen at Financial Samurai takes the position that unless you’re saving so much that hurts a bit then you aren’t trying hard enough. To be clear I’m not saying that I endorse him or his opinions but no one can deny that his blog is amongst the more popular in the FI space.
The thing for me though is that I don’t subscribe to the no-pain, no-gain school of thought. The way I see it no-pain means, well, you don’t have any pain. I don’t understand those who make a fetish of being in pain. No pain is a good thing right?
Not being perverse
OK, OK I get it. MMM and ERE in particular are trying to get us all to look at the world differently. In the west the average consumer consumes and wastes an awful lot. Our culture has infantilised us to the extent that many of us don’t know how to replace a car tyre if we got a puncture (and I include myself in that). We have developed a throwaway culture where the default is to replace not repair. We get thirsty so we drive to the supermarket to buy water in plastic bottles that we put in plastic bags as we drive home sipping coffee in disposable single-use cups. That is clearly wrong in so many ways.
So, I understand what MMM and ERE are railing against. More than that I applaud it. As individuals and as society we need to be more like them. But, I wonder if the approach that the godfathers (and they are men) of Financial Independence have espoused ends up being counter-productive? Imagine you’re dipping your toe into the Financial Independence space. What you hear is that in order to become financially independent you need to wash your clothes in a bucket, save until you feel the pinch, and if you don’t then you’ll get a ‘face-punch’. I think that for a lot of people the reaction to that is going to be negative.
If it doesn’t hurt you’re not doing it right
While there have been multiple takes on the movement ever since those early pioneers, this sense that “if it’s not hurting you’re doing Financial Independence wrong” seems to pervade a lot of the writing in this space. Many people have countdowns to when they can quit jobs they hate. Others write about ERE style changes that they have made to their life.
Even very recently I watched the “Playing with FIRE” documentary and found it left me drained. I realise that it’s heresy to say this but I look at the life and friends that the family in the film left behind and I struggle to understand the logic. They could have made modest tweaks to their lifestyle. This would have allowed them to keep more of the thing they valued with almost all of the benefits. To blow everything up and move away to pursue a slightly faster FI date seemed to me to be masochistic and pointless.
Most painful to watch were the times when the mother was upset when she realised that she wasn’t getting to spend enough time with her child as she was working so hard. That’s a trade-off that I don’t understand. Even by the end I wasn’t convinced that the sacrifice had been worth it for them – and they were just at the start of a very long haul.
When I look back I realise that there are multiple reasons why I didn’t start blogging sooner but one of those reasons was that I didn’t feel like I fitted in. I didn’t fit in with a world view that felt like it saw living a harsh life as a good thing.
If it doesn’t hurt are you doing it right?
Is there an alternative?
This is changing. As the Financial Independence movement gets more mature it becomes more nuanced. There are a small, but growing number of bloggers, like the Fioneers, who talk about the importance of being happy and enjoying the journey more. As the Fioneers put it “I am no longer living my life according to the expectations of other people. I am going to live my life according to my own definition of success – what I value and want out of life.” For those writers delaying Financial Independence, even for years, to be happier now is seen as positive. Tread Lightly, Retire Early and others are doing great work to break down some of the clichés of what a typical striver towards financial independence looks like.
Similarly the purity of achieving financial independence is seen as less important. The hegemony of the idea that you must have a passive income stream that covers all of your expenses is waning. Instead we have the idea or Barista FIRE or Coast FI. These are essentially variations of the idea that you have enough to retire at a ‘normal’ retirement age so just need to earn enough to cover your living expenses between now and then. You have the approach that Zach at Four Pillar Freedom is taking. He has worked his side hustles to the point where they can become his main hustles. That means he has stepped back from his corporate job to do that full time instead (and is happier for it). This is in explicit contrast to those who hit their Financial Independence number and then realised that their side hustles largely sustain them anyway.
No one true path
To be clear there is no one right way to achieve Financial Independence. To say that someone is doing Financial Independence wrong is becoming a meaningless phrase. Indeed, trying to achieve Financial Independence isn’t even going to be the path to happiness for everyone. It may well be right for some people, some of the time to sacrifice elements of their life and happiness to achieve their dream. There are plenty of examples across multiple sectors where people have made sacrifices get to where there want to be. I’m not going to judge other people’s choices. How you get to the destination will depend of multiple factors to do with your personality, your reason for shooting for it, your personal family/stage of life circumstances and more.
Given that I am trying to achieve my goal though I need to find a way that works for me. To put in the the vernacular of our time: You gotta do you.
Financial independence without the sacrifice
The newer, gentler, Financial Independence philosophy is one that I can get behind. Save for tomorrow but don’t forget to live life today. Have a clear destination that is financial independence but also take time to smell the roses along the way. Maybe even decide to step off the path for a while so that I can return to the journey refreshed and reenergised. Absolutely get out of debt and don’t spend thoughtlessly. But, I have a handle on my outgoings and my spending is under control, so I’m not going to beat myself up if I take the kids to the cinema once in a while.
What I am shooting for is to be present in the present. I leave work at the reasonable time every day and work from home when I can. Given how comfortable I am where I’m at I haven’t looked for another job for years. Might that mean I miss out on a promotion or on a larger pay rise? Yes. In fact that’s likely to have already happened. I’m OK with that.
Consequences – but so what?
All of these things will almost certainly push out the date that I will be financially independent. I’ve not run the numbers but it won’t be much. If I had to guess I would say that the difference is maybe 3-6 months, possibly not even that. But in return for that additional time working I’m getting years of additional happiness. Years of memories that I’m building with my children by being at home after school, years of not having to wash my clothes in a bucket and seeing the taste of food as being equally important to its role as fuel. Years of not artificially feeling the pinch or guilty about spending.
Financial independence is a great thing to try to achieve, but I am not prepared to sacrifice my happiness for it. I’m going to put aside my fraudulent feeling and do my journey my own way. If it means I’m doing Financial Independence wrong I’m OK with that.
Thoughts?
Am I being unfair to the early Financial Independence movement? Am I the one doing Financial Independence wrong?
Where do you stand in terms of balancing the destination of financial independence against enjoying the journey?
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My wife introduced me to MMM and his “we live off $26k/yr” and I was a flat no. Just a huge turnoff to get out of school, start making nice money and be suggested we quit to live like paupers. 🤣😆🤣😆🤣 No.
I got on board to our own fire plan about 4 yrs later, and amazingly, 2 yrs after that my decided she didn’t really want to retire. She just wanted a different lifestyle and wanted to teach. So we coined the Fully Funded Lifestyle Change FFLC and followed that. Last year I quit my job for SAHD mode and she started a tenure track position at a nice university. We’re ~91% to true FI but with her job and 20 yrs for our investments to mature…. We’re doing ok. 😁
Like you, I say find your own path and why make it painful, or anything but easy and fitting for you and your family/situation. Life’s too short to intentionally do something that sucks, even for a “short” period of time.
Nice article!
Thanks Mr SSC.
I almost wonder if most people needs to spend at least some time outside of the FIRE mindset to work out what it is that they really want. I’ve been loving reading about your transition (with both the ups and the downs). You and your family are another one of those that have been forging your own path. You guys have been doing exactly what we are thinking about as a family. Getting finances to a point where you can have a SAHD or SAHM is a fantastic place to be.
Great read, Caveman – there’s no right or wrong way to do it of course!
I can’t say that I’ve felt any pain on my journey to FIRE as I’m not making any sacrifices, but with not a huge amount of capital at my disposal, I find that keeping to my plan does take effort and focus. I can’t afford to spend without thinking. I also can’t afford to take my eye off my expenses, can’t afford to be lazy. Over time, some of that focus has become habit but there are occasions when there’s a lot going on that I wish that I didn’t have to worry or think about it all.
My blog and documenting my journey is what keeps me going, I guess.
One blogger you haven’t mentioned but one whose story I preferred to both MMM and ERE (although of course, I took tips/hints from both) was Jason Fieber. Selling his successful website (Dividend Mantra) partly enabled him to quit his job at aged 33 as a used car salesman and he’s now a ‘dividend expat’ in Thailand.. I really liked his story and that he was trying to invest his way to FI/Freedom. He was one of the reasons why I decided myself that I wanted somm dividend income investments in my portfolio. He currently blogs at Mr Free at 33.
Thanks Weenie.
That tracking point with a blog has been a big one for me. Just taking the time to write and reflect on what I want has been eye opening and it’s making it easier for me to work out where I want to go. No pain is just one part of that.
I’m like you on habit. When I say I can spend money on what I want that is mostly as I don’t have many things I want so when, occasionally, something comes along I get it.
I’ve not come across Jason…another one to add to my reading list!
Gold, Caveman. I really need to take in your points myself.
The approach I’m taking is a multi-tiered one.
I’m going down the full-throttle “no-pain, no-gain” route to begin with, whilst I have relatively few commitments (no kids), and whilst I’ll gain the most (saving earlier), to then ease off as I grow older and wiser.
I really think that it’s much easier to add luxuries in from nothing (when you know what truly matters) than to try to take them out. That’s one of the reasons I think younger FIRE adoptees have it way easier – they can just continue to live a ‘student lifestyle’, simpler than cutting back (I imagine).
The only problem for me is making sure that I start to live my ‘fullest life’ and don’t just defer it forever. That and maybe I’m wasting all my free time now, as when I have kids, etc, I won’t have any? 😀
Firstly, and most importantly. Dude. Why are you checking blogs on honeymoon!?!?!?! Does Mrs SavingNinja know? Having met her I can just imagine the look you’re going to get if she finds out!
Anyway.
I’ve got to be a little careful of rewriting history with what I say. Before I even thought about FIRE or what I wanted in life I absolutely put work ahead of almost everything else. I didn’t think of it as ‘no-pain, no-gain’ at the time but that’s how I behaved. It was great for my career and earnings but awful for friendships and family. The other side is that because I was working so hard I had almost no time to spend the money so my lifestyle didn’t inflate very much. While I’m much better now I am definitely reaping the rewards from the effort that I put in back in the day.
I suppose that the only thing I would say about continuing to live a student lifestyle is to think about whether it’s definitely what you want forever. I loved living with four friends and eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for every meal back in the day…I’m not sure I would want it now though!
You do you Caveman! I think I might be on the other end of the scale. I’ve always been interested in more extreme and alternative lifestyles I think due to my natural non-confirmist and environmental streaks. I was interested in no-money, no-impact, off-grid and zero waste stories before I found FIRE, and I think it’s the Extreme in ERE that first drew me to the FIRE concept. That’s not to say I’m able to follow those extreme tactics; I quite like my frequent indulgences in travel and eating out. But I also occasionally do short no/low-spend challenges and enjoy them immensely!
Thanks Mindy,
Actually I’m still very attracted to the zero impact/off grid side of things. I spend a lot of time looking at solar panels, heat pumps and I’ve even thought about digging a well. For me that’s just the right thing to do to tread lightly on this planet.
For me though that doesn’t have to be done in quite as extreme a way as Jacob suggests. It doesn’t have to be painful or unenjoyable. But this important thing is that everyone finds their own way in. The great thing about any FIRE lifestyle is that is should have less impact on the planet that if that same individual wasn’t following a FIRE lifestyle.
I’m not even pursuing FI, but I definitely sometimes feel like I’m not in enough pain to be doing it right. I spend more than I “should” (even though my savings rate is healthy), and I struggle with guilt over that. I’m working on it, because I do want to enjoy the present and not just live for the future. It’s a tough balance.
And yes, the bro culture has been strong with FI for quite a while, and I think it’s led to some problematic austerity. It’s getting better thanks to some of the (maybe not coincidentally?) female writers you cited.
Guilt is another big thing in this space. You’re right, it sits alongside the pain angle. I don’t think that any of us should feel bad about being happy or even just content, today. It’s not about having a ‘You only live once’/FOMO attitude. It’s about sensible balance.
Also I totally agree that it’s probably not a coincidence that female writers are the ones helping to change the culture!
Also, I forgot to mention that you must be the first person in the FIRE community to not be waxing lyrical about the documentary. I still want to see it though.
Aussie Firebug did a podcast about the movie after seeing it in London and he wasn’t 100% raving about it.
I get to see it in a couple of weeks when it debuts in Melbourne.
Hope you enjoy it. I’ll be interested to see what you think.
I’ll check out that podcast as well. Thanks for flagging it up!
Oh definitely go to see if you can.
I actually wrote a whole post reviewing Playing With Fire after I went to see it. But, I’m not going to put it up as I don’t want to knock it down. Just because it didn’t press my buttons doesn’t mean that it won’t be very effective for a lot of others!
Love this post. The approach of doing it in the way that works for you, while maintaining a reasonable level of happiness in the present will get far more people engaged. More importantly, it will increase the odds that people will actually persist to true financial independence. The alternative is pushing really hard to get there, being miserable, and then either failing entirely or reaching the goal and realizing you’ve missed out on lots.
For some, that can be an extreme frugal path where the struggle is part of the point. For others, they can take charge of their lives without needed to create artificial struggle. It sounds like you’ve got that down – I appluad you! I think we’ve found a nice balance of the same – we’ll get there without suffering along the way. Thanks for this.
That point about keeping on going for the long haul is so important. Most people can put up with a level of deprivation for a period of weeks or even months. When it gets to years though I’m not sure how many people can stay the course. As I said in the post I can add back in a few, modest, things and even though it adds a few months, it makes the intervening years much more pleasant.
I hadn’t thought about the point that for some people the struggle is part of the point…it does talk that bro culture again to me…the sort of person who just quotes the Stoics on twitter. But to each their own.
So glad that you’re found a balance that works for you as well!
This is perfect. I am 100% on board with this post. We do what we want, when we want(vacation time permitting), but we also are trying to build wealth for the future. I’m doing it wrong with you!
Yay! Here’s to all of us doing it wrong together! My goal has always been happiness. FIRE for me is a tool towards that, not a goal in itself.
I think youve hit the nail on the head. There is no prescribed ‘right way’ to become FI. Its horses for courses. I would rather take a couple of extra years to reach FI and enjoy the journey, than live on soup for 10 years, just to be able to stop working. I hope to continue working part time after FI because I enjoy it. When I find other hobbies etc that I enjoy more Ill stop but having any form of income producing endeavour seems to be an anathema to die hard FIRE practitioners! For me its about freedom to choose, not a prescribed path.
Yup, that’s where I’ve got to. Take more time and enjoy the journey.
I’m also thinking about part time, but possibly even before I hit FI. I don’t get the snobbery around the ‘RE’ bit of FIRE either! My thinking is that I can get the best of both worlds but much sooner. I’m lucky that I quite enjoy my job so I’m not running away from work, but rather running toward the things I can do if I didn’t have to go to work.
Thank you – it is refreshing to read about your journey, with not many sacrifices and happily buying a coffee and enjoying a meal out with friends. I too cannot relate to extreme frugality and feel guilty that I’m not pursuing FI harder. Love my food! I’m watching Playing with Fire this coming Monday – will be interesting to see if our views align!
Hi! How are tou getting to watch it? The comments have got me intrigued! (Fantastic post, Caveman!)
3-6 months is doable for delaying your FIRE date if it’s improving your quality of life. Some things are worth working for.
It’s discouraging when folks read the extreme FIRE stories and disregard the whole community. I think every household has something “extreme” going on in it, we just don’t all write about it. Maybe it’s extreme how mom spends $500/month on skin care, or how dad rides his bike 30 miles round trip to work each day. Putting a spotlight on anyone’s lifestyle would draw criticism.