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| Meta Title | The FIRE Movement - by Jared Dillian |
| Meta Description | Joe Millennial spends a bit too much time on Reddit and decides to try something called The FIRE Movement. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. He reads of people retiring at age 35 (or even 30!) and having scads of time to pursue their dreams, unshackled from the drudgery of their stultifying 9-to-5 jobs. |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | Joe Millennial spends a bit too much time on Reddit and decides to try something called
The FIRE Movement
. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. He reads of people retiring at age 35 (or even 30!) and having scads of time to pursue their dreams, unshackled from the drudgery of their stultifying 9-to-5 jobs.
So here is how it goes.
Joe graduates from college and gets a job in the cube farm for $80,000 a year. He gets the cheapest apartment possible, rides a bike instead of driving, and eats ramen noodles. He does this for ten years, saving up to 70% of his income, and investing it in low-cost index funds. At the end of ten years, he has a million or so saved up, more if he is lucky. At that point, he retires to play the guitar or paint happy little trees, and gradually draws down his savings over time. If the stock market keeps going up as planned, he can stay retired for 50 more years, and get really good at guitar.
The is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.
In no particular order:
1.    I am not a big fan of unstructured free time. If youâre like me, you probably know some Boomers who have retired poorly. They had visions of going to the beach, traveling, or visiting the grandkids, and instead they spend their days in the living room with the brown carpet with Fox News turned up to 11. Retirement is hard. If you donât have a plan, you will descend into loneliness and despair, with Fox News as background noise. If you retire in your thirties, you will spend a lot of time playing the ding-a-ling banjo. After a few years of such self-abuse, you will write a book that nobody reads, play songs that nobody hears, or start a blog that nobody clicks on. You will accomplish nothing. You will live a life without accomplishment or purpose. But thatâs not even the worst part.
2.    The worst part is that you will spend every waking moment hawking over the movements of the stock market. If the stock market goes up, you can stay retired. If the stock market goes down, and stays down, you will have to get a job, which will be impossible if you have a ten-year gap in your CV. If youâre financially trained, you know the periodicity of corrections and bear markets and great bear markets. Over the course of 50 years, there will be lots of ups and downs, and at least one occasion where the stock market goes down 50% or more. If that happens, you will be shitting your pants. You will be paralyzed with fear. Retiring at age 35 sounds interesting in principle, but it in practice, it would be hell. Imagine being completely idle and have nothing to do except worry about your small pile of money turning to dust.
3.    This is a fact: material things bring us happiness. It is good and right and a joyful thing to see a fancy new jacket in a store, try it on, look in the mirror, whip out your credit card, wear it out of the store, and show it off to all your friends. To deny yourself a
lifetime
of material possessions is insanity. Youâre not Gandhi. The FIRE movement is not a savings and investment movement. It is an
anti-consumption
movement, and it has its roots in environmentalism. If you donât buy something, it wonât end up in the landfill, and you will lead an entire life without any impact on the planet. These people are the cheapest of cheap fucks on the planet, because they believe that consumption is
evil
. They will agonize and obsess over a dollar. All their kids are going to end up in therapy.
4.    The FIRE people typically use very generous return assumptions on their investment portfolios. They generally think that the stock market returns 12% a year. I have seen the 15% number thrown around. The stock market does not return 12% or 15% a year. It returns a little over nine percent. So what these ding-dongs do is build a spreadsheet of their earnings and extrapolate it out 50 years, thinking that they are the first people on earth to discover compound interest. And sure, if you are compounding at 12%, the numbers look pretty good. But there is no rule that says that the stock market will return 12% a year. The conditions that led to prior returns might not be present for future returns. Itâs a belief that these 12% returns are an immutable law of nature, like gravity. Really, itâs an article of faith. Youâre betting your life and your life savings on the idea that U.S. stocks will be the most attractive destination for capital over the next 100 years. I am not so sure, certainly not sure enough to bet my life on it.
5.    The one thing that all the FIRE people have in common is that they
hate work
. Like, they really, really hate their jobs. I have a theory on this. Happy people like their jobs, unhappy people donât. It doesnât matter what job they have; unhappy people will be unhappy no matter what they are doing. They talk about the âsoul-destroyingâ 40-hour work week. I donât know about you, but I like the 80-hour work week even better. I have something in common with Mike Bloombergâmy favorite time of the week is Sunday night, because I am so excited about going back to work the following morning and do shit. The Sunday Scaries are for cherries. Iâll go further and say these people are lazy pieces of shit. Can you imagine employing one of these people, plotting and scheming to do as little work as possible, counting the days until retirement, shirking and malingering, creating negative value in the process? Imagine a person whose goal is to produce nothing, consume nothing, and merely
exist
, stealing everyone elseâs oxygen in the process.
You know who is responsible for this ridiculousness? White people. More specifically, white guys in checkered shirts with ironic moustaches in Longmont, Colorado. One of the questions you have to ask about finance fads is: what if everyone did it? What if everyone retired at age 35 and played the ding-a-ling banjo? Well, GDP would go to zero and the stock market would crash. Investing only works if
other
people are working. So really, the FIRE people are the ultimate free-riders, piggybacking off the efforts of others, while contributing nothing but blog posts and Instagram reels about Van Life. The FIRE movement has no political overtones, but itâs worth pointing out that its adherents are predominantly liberal, because no self-respecting conservative would spend one second considering the possibility of dropping out of society and covering âHey Soul Sisterâ on the ukulele. The FIRE people also have a poor understanding of how capitalism worksâthe stock market is a function of corporate profits which is a function of output, which requires everyone to chip in. The stock market is not magic beans, and it is not number go up. An elegant solution to the problem of not enough money is to make more money, which never occurred to these dingbats.
The one thing you consistently hear from the FIRE folks is that they are quitting their jobs to
pursue their dreams
. I donât know about you, but I can only spend so many hours a day pursuing my dreams. Like, I canât DJ all the time. I simply could not fill the hours. You know what I can do all the time? Work. Because my vocation is my avocation; I am a writer, and writing is work, but also fun. I spend twelve hours a day doing what I love. If you donât like working in the cube farm, maybe find something you like better instead? Maybe you like making hematite rings and selling them on Etsy. Maybe you like cats and you start a cat cafĂŠ. Here is where things get interesting, though: there are a lot of people out there who think that if you are making money doing something
, it canât be fun
. It is a business, or an artistic pursuit, but it canât be both. It absolutely can be both.
My audience tends to be finance people, and most finance people think the FIRE movement is pretty dumb, so I am preaching to the converted. I donât want to consume nothing and produce nothingâI want to produce a lot and consume a lot. That is pretty much what life is all about. Live hard and leave a smoking crater. Just because we have possessions, doesnât mean our possessions own us. Stuff isnât who we areârelationships are more important. But go out and buy a new Rolex and tell me that stuff doesnât make you happy. The Rolex doesnât make you happyâit was the virtues it took to make the money that you bought it with, which is something the FIRE people will never understand.
P.S. If you like these thoughts on personal finance, there is a whole book full of them coming out in 11 days. Get it here:
http://buynoworries.com |
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# The FIRE Movement
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Joe Millennial spends a bit too much time on Reddit and decides to try something called *The FIRE Movement*. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. He reads of people retiring at age 35 (or even 30!) and having scads of time to pursue their dreams, unshackled from the drudgery of their stultifying 9-to-5 jobs.
So here is how it goes.
Joe graduates from college and gets a job in the cube farm for \$80,000 a year. He gets the cheapest apartment possible, rides a bike instead of driving, and eats ramen noodles. He does this for ten years, saving up to 70% of his income, and investing it in low-cost index funds. At the end of ten years, he has a million or so saved up, more if he is lucky. At that point, he retires to play the guitar or paint happy little trees, and gradually draws down his savings over time. If the stock market keeps going up as planned, he can stay retired for 50 more years, and get really good at guitar.
The is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.
In no particular order:
1\. I am not a big fan of unstructured free time. If youâre like me, you probably know some Boomers who have retired poorly. They had visions of going to the beach, traveling, or visiting the grandkids, and instead they spend their days in the living room with the brown carpet with Fox News turned up to 11. Retirement is hard. If you donât have a plan, you will descend into loneliness and despair, with Fox News as background noise. If you retire in your thirties, you will spend a lot of time playing the ding-a-ling banjo. After a few years of such self-abuse, you will write a book that nobody reads, play songs that nobody hears, or start a blog that nobody clicks on. You will accomplish nothing. You will live a life without accomplishment or purpose. But thatâs not even the worst part.
2\. The worst part is that you will spend every waking moment hawking over the movements of the stock market. If the stock market goes up, you can stay retired. If the stock market goes down, and stays down, you will have to get a job, which will be impossible if you have a ten-year gap in your CV. If youâre financially trained, you know the periodicity of corrections and bear markets and great bear markets. Over the course of 50 years, there will be lots of ups and downs, and at least one occasion where the stock market goes down 50% or more. If that happens, you will be shitting your pants. You will be paralyzed with fear. Retiring at age 35 sounds interesting in principle, but it in practice, it would be hell. Imagine being completely idle and have nothing to do except worry about your small pile of money turning to dust.
3\. This is a fact: material things bring us happiness. It is good and right and a joyful thing to see a fancy new jacket in a store, try it on, look in the mirror, whip out your credit card, wear it out of the store, and show it off to all your friends. To deny yourself a *lifetime* of material possessions is insanity. Youâre not Gandhi. The FIRE movement is not a savings and investment movement. It is an *anti-consumption* movement, and it has its roots in environmentalism. If you donât buy something, it wonât end up in the landfill, and you will lead an entire life without any impact on the planet. These people are the cheapest of cheap fucks on the planet, because they believe that consumption is *evil*. They will agonize and obsess over a dollar. All their kids are going to end up in therapy.
4\. The FIRE people typically use very generous return assumptions on their investment portfolios. They generally think that the stock market returns 12% a year. I have seen the 15% number thrown around. The stock market does not return 12% or 15% a year. It returns a little over nine percent. So what these ding-dongs do is build a spreadsheet of their earnings and extrapolate it out 50 years, thinking that they are the first people on earth to discover compound interest. And sure, if you are compounding at 12%, the numbers look pretty good. But there is no rule that says that the stock market will return 12% a year. The conditions that led to prior returns might not be present for future returns. Itâs a belief that these 12% returns are an immutable law of nature, like gravity. Really, itâs an article of faith. Youâre betting your life and your life savings on the idea that U.S. stocks will be the most attractive destination for capital over the next 100 years. I am not so sure, certainly not sure enough to bet my life on it.
5\. The one thing that all the FIRE people have in common is that they *hate work*. Like, they really, really hate their jobs. I have a theory on this. Happy people like their jobs, unhappy people donât. It doesnât matter what job they have; unhappy people will be unhappy no matter what they are doing. They talk about the âsoul-destroyingâ 40-hour work week. I donât know about you, but I like the 80-hour work week even better. I have something in common with Mike Bloombergâmy favorite time of the week is Sunday night, because I am so excited about going back to work the following morning and do shit. The Sunday Scaries are for cherries. Iâll go further and say these people are lazy pieces of shit. Can you imagine employing one of these people, plotting and scheming to do as little work as possible, counting the days until retirement, shirking and malingering, creating negative value in the process? Imagine a person whose goal is to produce nothing, consume nothing, and merely *exist*, stealing everyone elseâs oxygen in the process.
You know who is responsible for this ridiculousness? White people. More specifically, white guys in checkered shirts with ironic moustaches in Longmont, Colorado. One of the questions you have to ask about finance fads is: what if everyone did it? What if everyone retired at age 35 and played the ding-a-ling banjo? Well, GDP would go to zero and the stock market would crash. Investing only works if *other* people are working. So really, the FIRE people are the ultimate free-riders, piggybacking off the efforts of others, while contributing nothing but blog posts and Instagram reels about Van Life. The FIRE movement has no political overtones, but itâs worth pointing out that its adherents are predominantly liberal, because no self-respecting conservative would spend one second considering the possibility of dropping out of society and covering âHey Soul Sisterâ on the ukulele. The FIRE people also have a poor understanding of how capitalism worksâthe stock market is a function of corporate profits which is a function of output, which requires everyone to chip in. The stock market is not magic beans, and it is not number go up. An elegant solution to the problem of not enough money is to make more money, which never occurred to these dingbats.
The one thing you consistently hear from the FIRE folks is that they are quitting their jobs to *pursue their dreams*. I donât know about you, but I can only spend so many hours a day pursuing my dreams. Like, I canât DJ all the time. I simply could not fill the hours. You know what I can do all the time? Work. Because my vocation is my avocation; I am a writer, and writing is work, but also fun. I spend twelve hours a day doing what I love. If you donât like working in the cube farm, maybe find something you like better instead? Maybe you like making hematite rings and selling them on Etsy. Maybe you like cats and you start a cat cafĂŠ. Here is where things get interesting, though: there are a lot of people out there who think that if you are making money doing something*, it canât be fun*. It is a business, or an artistic pursuit, but it canât be both. It absolutely can be both.
My audience tends to be finance people, and most finance people think the FIRE movement is pretty dumb, so I am preaching to the converted. I donât want to consume nothing and produce nothingâI want to produce a lot and consume a lot. That is pretty much what life is all about. Live hard and leave a smoking crater. Just because we have possessions, doesnât mean our possessions own us. Stuff isnât who we areârelationships are more important. But go out and buy a new Rolex and tell me that stuff doesnât make you happy. The Rolex doesnât make you happyâit was the virtues it took to make the money that you bought it with, which is something the FIRE people will never understand.
P.S. If you like these thoughts on personal finance, there is a whole book full of them coming out in 11 days. Get it here:
http://buynoworries.com
***
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[Leif](https://substack.com/profile/208495988-leif?utm_source=substack-feed-item)
[Feb 19, 2024](https://wggtb.substack.com/p/the-fire-movement/comment/49857526 "Feb 19, 2024, 2:20 AM")
Strawman defeated\!
I opted for "fatFIRE," retiring early from a rewarding but sometimes stressful career with millions invested and a six-figure annual spend. I don't pay close attention to the stock market, and another big drawdown wouldn't phase me. Spending well under 2% of our nest egg annually, it's more likely that we'll end up with a 9-figure net worth than zero.
In the 4+ years since I wound down my primary career, we've been able to travel all over the world for weeks and sometimes months at a time, "worldschooling" our boys while visiting amazing and historic places before they reached high school. They've seen glaciers in New Zealand, volcanoes in Hawaii, geysers in Iceland, and pyramids in Mexico. They've set foot in the Parthenon in Athens, the Pantheon in Rome, and saw the purported Holy Grail in Valencia, a city we got to know well over the course of a month. They've toured Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, Schindler's Factory in Krakow, the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and Auschwitz / Birkenau in rural Poland.
Reaching FI and choosing RE made all of this and more possible, and my boys are now thriving in a traditional school setting.
There's so much more. My wife and I have both run our first marathons in the last two years. I took up skiing after a 30-year break, and my kids and I skied 30+ days together last season. I have a 1500+ day streak with the Duolingo language learning app, and I've got a similar streak with a daily body-weight exercise routine.
I get that FIRE isn't for everyone, and when you describe it as leanFIRE for the hopeless, it's obviously not appealing.
I don't know that I'm retired for good. I retired from medicine in 2019 and from blogging in 2023. I love the blank slate that I've got in front of me, and I'm curious to discover what I might retire from next. But in the meantime, I am forever grateful for the freedom I had to explore the world with my family while our kids were young enough to enjoy our company and old enough to appreciate the experiences we were able to give them.
For a very different take on FIRE from what you've apparently been exposed to, you can check out my writings at Physician on FIRE where I explored FI and RE during the finaly years of my physician career and the first few years after. In my projections, I used returns of 0% to 6% real, by the way, not 12% to 15%. I don't know anyone not Dave Ramsey who does this.
Cheers\!
Leif
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[Lee](https://substack.com/profile/34078519-lee?utm_source=substack-feed-item)
[Jan 13, 2024](https://wggtb.substack.com/p/the-fire-movement/comment/47228199 "Jan 13, 2024, 4:11 PM")
I have read a lot of the MMM (and other) FIRE stuff. It's interesting, and I enjoy reading your well reasoned counterpoint JD. But I think you are missing the part about using the post-early-retirement time to do productive, life-enhancing things. The guy you're talking about, Pete, took up carpentry (for himself and as a job for clients) , started a coworking business, blogs, plays music, etc.
As the Anonymous commenter below started, whether you retire at 35 or 65 you better have something to give you purpose or you're going to spiral down the toilet, wasting your life. I think MMM has found his purpose - and writes about it - but everyone gets so caught up in the excitement of getting to the retirement finish line, they don't pay much attention to the post-retirement time.
I have done well in my career, now early 50's. I am thinking about retiring in the next 2 years - but haven't figured out a post-retirement plan yet. Until I do I won't be retiring. Is 55 'early'? Not by the FIRE standards, but I hope it's still early in my life.
I am much closer to your opinion on the materialism aspect of all this than the FIRE people - but having grown up in New England I have some deep seated thriftyness in me too. I wouldn't want to spend my retired years a) worrying about money, or b) stressing over watching the market. Part of me things the FIRE thing was born out of a low interest rate bubble. I never heard anyone talking about early retirement when mortgage rates were 8%+.
One last thought - what you do JD might be considered "retirement" by a lot of people, maybe including your former Wall Street coworkers. You created your own business, have no employees (except maybe an intern?) to worry about, live in a nice low-cost-of-living part of the country, can set your own schedule, work wherever you prefer to, etc. As a business owner with lots of employees and responsibilities, the life you've built seems like a nice way to downshift to me. :-)
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| Readable Markdown | Joe Millennial spends a bit too much time on Reddit and decides to try something called *The FIRE Movement*. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. He reads of people retiring at age 35 (or even 30!) and having scads of time to pursue their dreams, unshackled from the drudgery of their stultifying 9-to-5 jobs.
So here is how it goes.
Joe graduates from college and gets a job in the cube farm for \$80,000 a year. He gets the cheapest apartment possible, rides a bike instead of driving, and eats ramen noodles. He does this for ten years, saving up to 70% of his income, and investing it in low-cost index funds. At the end of ten years, he has a million or so saved up, more if he is lucky. At that point, he retires to play the guitar or paint happy little trees, and gradually draws down his savings over time. If the stock market keeps going up as planned, he can stay retired for 50 more years, and get really good at guitar.
The is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.
In no particular order:
1\. I am not a big fan of unstructured free time. If youâre like me, you probably know some Boomers who have retired poorly. They had visions of going to the beach, traveling, or visiting the grandkids, and instead they spend their days in the living room with the brown carpet with Fox News turned up to 11. Retirement is hard. If you donât have a plan, you will descend into loneliness and despair, with Fox News as background noise. If you retire in your thirties, you will spend a lot of time playing the ding-a-ling banjo. After a few years of such self-abuse, you will write a book that nobody reads, play songs that nobody hears, or start a blog that nobody clicks on. You will accomplish nothing. You will live a life without accomplishment or purpose. But thatâs not even the worst part.
2\. The worst part is that you will spend every waking moment hawking over the movements of the stock market. If the stock market goes up, you can stay retired. If the stock market goes down, and stays down, you will have to get a job, which will be impossible if you have a ten-year gap in your CV. If youâre financially trained, you know the periodicity of corrections and bear markets and great bear markets. Over the course of 50 years, there will be lots of ups and downs, and at least one occasion where the stock market goes down 50% or more. If that happens, you will be shitting your pants. You will be paralyzed with fear. Retiring at age 35 sounds interesting in principle, but it in practice, it would be hell. Imagine being completely idle and have nothing to do except worry about your small pile of money turning to dust.
3\. This is a fact: material things bring us happiness. It is good and right and a joyful thing to see a fancy new jacket in a store, try it on, look in the mirror, whip out your credit card, wear it out of the store, and show it off to all your friends. To deny yourself a *lifetime* of material possessions is insanity. Youâre not Gandhi. The FIRE movement is not a savings and investment movement. It is an *anti-consumption* movement, and it has its roots in environmentalism. If you donât buy something, it wonât end up in the landfill, and you will lead an entire life without any impact on the planet. These people are the cheapest of cheap fucks on the planet, because they believe that consumption is *evil*. They will agonize and obsess over a dollar. All their kids are going to end up in therapy.
4\. The FIRE people typically use very generous return assumptions on their investment portfolios. They generally think that the stock market returns 12% a year. I have seen the 15% number thrown around. The stock market does not return 12% or 15% a year. It returns a little over nine percent. So what these ding-dongs do is build a spreadsheet of their earnings and extrapolate it out 50 years, thinking that they are the first people on earth to discover compound interest. And sure, if you are compounding at 12%, the numbers look pretty good. But there is no rule that says that the stock market will return 12% a year. The conditions that led to prior returns might not be present for future returns. Itâs a belief that these 12% returns are an immutable law of nature, like gravity. Really, itâs an article of faith. Youâre betting your life and your life savings on the idea that U.S. stocks will be the most attractive destination for capital over the next 100 years. I am not so sure, certainly not sure enough to bet my life on it.
5\. The one thing that all the FIRE people have in common is that they *hate work*. Like, they really, really hate their jobs. I have a theory on this. Happy people like their jobs, unhappy people donât. It doesnât matter what job they have; unhappy people will be unhappy no matter what they are doing. They talk about the âsoul-destroyingâ 40-hour work week. I donât know about you, but I like the 80-hour work week even better. I have something in common with Mike Bloombergâmy favorite time of the week is Sunday night, because I am so excited about going back to work the following morning and do shit. The Sunday Scaries are for cherries. Iâll go further and say these people are lazy pieces of shit. Can you imagine employing one of these people, plotting and scheming to do as little work as possible, counting the days until retirement, shirking and malingering, creating negative value in the process? Imagine a person whose goal is to produce nothing, consume nothing, and merely *exist*, stealing everyone elseâs oxygen in the process.
You know who is responsible for this ridiculousness? White people. More specifically, white guys in checkered shirts with ironic moustaches in Longmont, Colorado. One of the questions you have to ask about finance fads is: what if everyone did it? What if everyone retired at age 35 and played the ding-a-ling banjo? Well, GDP would go to zero and the stock market would crash. Investing only works if *other* people are working. So really, the FIRE people are the ultimate free-riders, piggybacking off the efforts of others, while contributing nothing but blog posts and Instagram reels about Van Life. The FIRE movement has no political overtones, but itâs worth pointing out that its adherents are predominantly liberal, because no self-respecting conservative would spend one second considering the possibility of dropping out of society and covering âHey Soul Sisterâ on the ukulele. The FIRE people also have a poor understanding of how capitalism worksâthe stock market is a function of corporate profits which is a function of output, which requires everyone to chip in. The stock market is not magic beans, and it is not number go up. An elegant solution to the problem of not enough money is to make more money, which never occurred to these dingbats.
The one thing you consistently hear from the FIRE folks is that they are quitting their jobs to *pursue their dreams*. I donât know about you, but I can only spend so many hours a day pursuing my dreams. Like, I canât DJ all the time. I simply could not fill the hours. You know what I can do all the time? Work. Because my vocation is my avocation; I am a writer, and writing is work, but also fun. I spend twelve hours a day doing what I love. If you donât like working in the cube farm, maybe find something you like better instead? Maybe you like making hematite rings and selling them on Etsy. Maybe you like cats and you start a cat cafĂŠ. Here is where things get interesting, though: there are a lot of people out there who think that if you are making money doing something*, it canât be fun*. It is a business, or an artistic pursuit, but it canât be both. It absolutely can be both.
My audience tends to be finance people, and most finance people think the FIRE movement is pretty dumb, so I am preaching to the converted. I donât want to consume nothing and produce nothingâI want to produce a lot and consume a lot. That is pretty much what life is all about. Live hard and leave a smoking crater. Just because we have possessions, doesnât mean our possessions own us. Stuff isnât who we areârelationships are more important. But go out and buy a new Rolex and tell me that stuff doesnât make you happy. The Rolex doesnât make you happyâit was the virtues it took to make the money that you bought it with, which is something the FIRE people will never understand.
P.S. If you like these thoughts on personal finance, there is a whole book full of them coming out in 11 days. Get it here:
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