Retired Money: The trouble with playing with FIRE

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the trouble with playing with FIRE. Click on the highlighted headline to retrieve the full column: Is Early Retirement a realistic goal for most people?

FIRE is of course an acronym for Financial Independence Retire Early. It turns out that Canadian financial bloggers are a tad more cynical about the term than their American counterparts, some of whom make a very good living evangelizing FIRE through blogs, books and public speaking.

The Hub has periodically republished some of these FIRE critiques from regular contributors Mark Seed, Michael James, Dale Roberts, Robb Engen and a few others, including one prominent American blogger, Fritz Gilbert (of Retirement Manifesto).

No one objects to the FI part of the acronym: Financial Independence. We’re just not so enthusiastic about the RE part: Retire Early. For many FIRE evangelists, “Retire” is hardly an accurate description of what they are doing. If by Retire, they mean the classic full-stop retirement that involves endless rounds of golf and daytime television, then practically no successful FIRE blogger is actually doing this in their 30s, even if through frugal saving and shrewd investing they have generated enough dividend income to actually do nothing if they so chose.

What the FIRE crowd really is doing is shifting from salaried employment or wage slavery to self-employment and entrepreneurship. Most of them launch a FIRE blog that accepts advertising, and publish or self-publish books meant to generate revenue, and/or launch speaking careers with paid gigs that tell everyone else how they “retired” so early in life.

How about FIE or FIWOOT or Findependence?

Some of us don’t consider such a lifestyle to be truly retired in the classic sense of the word.

Almost a year ago, Michel Wiener sensibly posed the question “Is FIRE impossible for reasonable people?” Robb Engen wrote this blog arguing a more honest term might be FIE, for Financially Independent Entrepreneur. And Mark Seed suggests FIWOOT, which stands for Financially Independent Working on own Terms. (My memory aid for that one is “Getting off on the right FIWOOT.”)

I myself, for obvious reasons, prefer the term Findependence, a contraction of Financial Independence, with the day you achieve it being Findependence Day (also the title of my financial novel). Note that even at age 66 (another birthday is coming in April), I still don’t consider myself “Retired.”  I certainly have reached Findependence. As I’ve said before, you can be Findependent but not Retired, but it’s pretty hard to be Retired if you’re not Findependent.

Like the other bloggers, I’m all for Findependence but not for Early Retirement. For me, it’s about semi-Retirement, or the Victory Lap lifestyle described by me and my coauthor Michael Drak in Victory Lap Retirement. Conceptually, I live by the guideline Semi-Retirement, Work Optional, which is one of the related articles you can click on at the bottom here.

Sadly, contort the letters as much as i can, neither SRWO or WOSR makes for a memorable acronym. (WOSR for Hosers, anyone?)

Realistically, those terms won’t catch on:  FIRE is short and snappy and is also a more memorable acronym than FIE or FIWOOT. So I’m afraid we’re probably stuck with FIRE as a short-hand term for Early Retirement.

Although after this week’s market crash, I’m not sure even the FIRE bloggers who claim to be “retired” in their 30s will be able to claim they’re even financially independent, let alone “retired,” for very much longer.