The Financial Independence and Retire Early or FIRE movement started in 1992 when authors Vicki Robins and Joe Dominguez wrote the book Your Money or Your Life. The movement became very popular amongst Millennials who wanted a quick exit from the rat race. This article goes through a few common variants of the FIRE movement so that readers can find one that suits their lifestyle.
The general idea is that even if you find an extreme approach to finance unsuitable for your life, showing a more significant concern over your investments and personal expenses can bring massive improvements in your quality of life with a consequential improvement to your mental wellness.
Basic FIRE
Basic FIRE is the concept of voluntarily reducing your consumption to build an investment portfolio that can finance your lifestyle for the rest of your existence.
The first step is to find ways to work harder and increase your earned income over the short term. This can come as a side hustle, working for multiple employers, or simply doing more overtime. The second step is to save more money to live an austere lifestyle. The savings from doing both are farmed into a portfolio of investments.
For someone who needs to spend $2,000 a month, you will need at least 300 times your monthly expenses or $600,000 in investments to live on your portfolio sustainably. This is based on the 4% safe rate of withdrawal recommended by the financial planning industry. You can invest in a portfolio of globally diversified ETFs of different asset classes or build dividends-yielding stocks to meet your objective.
The problem with this form of FIRE is that it can take more than a decade to build the $600,000, and folks who succeed in FIRE early in life tend to be highly paid-technology professionals.
Barista FIRE
Not everyone can delay gratification for decades, and many non-professionals might be stuck in toxic work environments that cannot be sustained for too long.
So, Barista FIRE was invented essentially as a shortcut. Suppose you are just trying to defray just half your expenses. Then, your target portfolio size is halved. If half your costs are just $1,000 monthly, you will require $300,000 in your investment portfolio to leave your profession.
Barista FIRE is much easier to achieve, but you can’t retire with it. You can find a more relaxing vocation, like becoming a barista.
Coast FIRE
A variant of Barista FIRE is Coast FIRE, where the aim is not to downgrade one’s vocation but to secure your retirement at a later age, much earlier in life, so that you can live without thinking about savings or retirement planning.
Singapore’s CPF system facilitates Coast FIRE quite well. The idea is that if you can find a way to reach two times your Basic Retirement Sum or Full Retirement Sum in your CPF-SA account, which will be $213,000 in 2025, you will be able to secure about $1,000+ in today’s dollars from CPF-Life from age 60 onwards. CPF-OA transfers to CPF-SA can achieve this, or you can use the Retirement Sum Top-Up scheme to reach FRS earlier in life.
After that, you can secure the other half of your expenses using a diversified portfolio of investments. This can amount to the same number as Barista FIRE, as $300,000 can generate an investment-based income of about $1,000 monthly at a 4% withdrawal rate.
Attaining these goals earlier in life will allow you to coast through the rest of your professional life as your cash flow after 65 is secured.
FAT FIRE
I believe FAT FIRE is not FIRE but an excuse to keep working and participate in the tribal conversations in the FIRE movement.
Mathematically, FAT FIRE attempts to replicate a luxurious lifestyle using investment income withdrawals. A $10,000 per month income stream can be generated with a portfolio size of $3 million.
In practice, almost everyone who qualifies for FAT FIRE is doing well at work and exercises quite a lot of autonomy in their business dealings. Typically, a person can FAT FIRE if they run a successful business and then succeed in selling it to another investor.
It is impossible mathematically to achieve FAT FIRE without successfully attaining FIRE, so the most important element of FAT FIRE is often based on a successful career that a person wishes to pursue despite being already financially independent.
Folks who are attempting FIRE will find FAT FIRE seekers quite hard to relate to because, for FAT FIRE folks, there is no rat race to escape.
How I became financially independent
Unfortunately for someone in Generation X, the FIRE movement did not exist when we started in our careers. In my mid-20s, I engaged in a personal regime of austerity because I saw IT jobs outsourced to other countries. I wanted an average of $600 a month from my dividends stocks, which I have been accustomed to living on since my undergraduate days. After attaining my goals before age 30, I realised that I should become a millionaire earlier in life as I can farm my full take-home pay into my portfolio to generate more income. I continued working until I found myself in a toxic work environment, but by then, my dividends began to exceed my take-home pay.
This led me to resign from my job at a statutory board to enter law school in SMU.
After law school, I did not pursue a conventional legal career. My closest form of FIRE movement is Barista FIRE, as I balance my monthly five-figure dividend payouts with my freelance work as a Dr Wealth trainer and an adjunct law lecturer at a polytechnic.
Readers should adopt a flexible approach to FIRE and find one that serves their needs based on their life stage.
I’ll be sharing more on how I managed to achieve Financial Independence at the age of 39 in an online webinar session. Register to find out more.