FIRE Location
Mis-FIRE Advice that works in a vacuum
Welcome back Anons.
There is a much anticipated post on Trump accounts in the works. With the newest lil F’er coming into the world over the 4th of July weekend, setting up a Trump account to get the free money is officially on the to-do list. And I will chronicle the process of setting up the account for you along with the info about the pros & cons on the new account.
This week I stumbled across a post that, on the surface, sounds really solid.
The author clearly has a good grasp on some basic financial stuff and nothing that he wrote is demonstrably incorrect as far as the numbers go.
But, like many of the FIRE folk, it takes all of life and turns it into a myopic, singular-focused measure…being able to retire a little earlier.
For some people, this may work. Take DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids…the aptly cringey-est acronym for the type who loves to brag about how no kids lets them drink white claws at 11 AM on a Tuesday), who base their entire existence on short-term self pleasure.
But for the vast majority of people, this kind of math is a fool’s errand when you consider what the opportunity cost of it is.
If you search ‘FIRE’ in the search, you will see a lot of posts mentioning the whole froogal movement and the issues with their obsession on spreadsheet math and reaching some arbitrary bare minimum financial target to retire and continue a froogal existence.
Retirement Planning With The 'Tism - Part 2: The 4% Rule & Retirement Targets
Welcome back for Part 2 of Retirement Planning with the ‘Tism. The series where we go through and actually show some of these retirement heuristics and how they perform.
And the general theme and issue I have with FIRE is the huge blindspot for real life coming in and laying waste to plans that work in excel.
Or, as a great philosophizer once posited - “Everyone has a plan till [Life] punches them in the mouth”
“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”
-Michael Gerard Tyson
I think these posts are important because I will often talk to people who build some retirement ‘strategy’ but it is so far removed from their lived reality that it leads them to making many misguided decisions.
Having a strategy and plan is great.
It is important.
And sticking to a strategy and plan is also great.
It is also very important.
But no one wants to spend a lifetime taking actions to get to their end goal, only to find out it was completely wrong in the end. It is arguably the worst outcome. All that time spent only to be in retirement and eating cat food because your plan to ‘spend $420.69 per week exactly with 9% returns means you never run out of money through age 100’ only to find that all your assumptions were wrong…and after a lifetime of scrimping, you actually want to enjoy the occasional nicety now at 70 that you didn’t put into your plan.
Specific to the post we are going to breakdown today, it is all about minimizing your retirement spend through location selection.
Read this because life is silently standing there during the stare down getting ready to have your plans quickly meet the punch of reality.
