I am actually in agreement with you – if you have a high-paying job but it’s absolutely dreadful, it’s not worth your health to stick it out. I have written in a few posts that the point of life is not to quit your job, but rather to build up skills and save money so you’re always gaining more freedom over time.

I appreciate your feedback and thanks for reading through some of my posts 🙂

It’s all about tradeoffs – if you’re worried about a market downturn or having trouble finding employment after an extended break, then save more money at the outset. With anything, there are pros and cons to “Young FIRE”, the most obvious pro being more freedom over your time and the most obvious con being the possibility of running out of money. To hedge against running out of money, it helps to build a larger pile of savings before quitting your job to pursue your own work.

It’s a game of tradeoffs – the more you save, the longer it takes, but the more confident you can be that your savings will support your lifestyle. The less you save, the less time it takes, but the less confident you can be that your savings can support you. Sounds like you have identified a target savings goal that aligns with your interests 🙂

Great pints and that book “Your money or youth life” is the first early retirement book I ever read and it’s a darn good book!

https://firechecklist.net

MrFIREby2023

Thanks for the kudos Ernie. The other major concern I have is that most of the FIRE bloggers invest solely in index funds. I understand that saving on fees is very important and so is not being to active in trading.
However, Indexing and passive investing seems to be a herd mentality. All of the major index funds hold the same stocks in their top 10 holdings, lots of FAANG stocks.
When stocks have to be sold in order to meeting redemption requests (during the next BIG selloff), the index funds will all be bailing out of those same top ten “liquid” stocks at once. Katie bar the door!
I’ve shared my diversified, non-correlated portfolio on my blog recently: https://firechecklist.net

MrFIREby2023

I only learned recently that when Social Security is calculated, the 35 highest earning years are used to figure out the monthly benefit.

Truly early retirees may not be counting on Social Security (and it is fashionable to assume it won’t be around!) but I’m personally planning to self-fund an early retirement for between 5 and 10 years before I can tap my tax-deferred accounts at age 59 1/2, and then live on those until I can draw SS at either age 67 or 70, depending on how things are going.

Therefore I am very keenly aware of the 35 years of earnings rule, and will have as few years of 0 earnings as possible. I’ve even worked out at what point I’ll start replacing the very low income I made as a young adult with some serious salary jumps as a peak career adult, and how sticking around a year or so might affect the total amount of my SS payout. But I’m definitely not going to work one more year just to top off SS.

One thing I notice is that your posts seem focused on just two versions of life: high-paying job a person loathes, vs a low-paying job that the person can tolerate indefinitely. I realize it’s far easier to write by using extremes, but if a person worked a loathed job for a decade and then dropped dead, it would be a terrible tragedy, no matter how much money was in the bank, or what their next set of plans may have been.

One of the biggest gifts in my life was discovering Your Money or Your Life when I was in my early 20s and making a very low salary. I learned quickly to think of my finite lifetime when making decisions, and as I made more money and found better-fitting jobs, my emphasis was always on listening to my gut and finding jobs I could tolerate, if not love. I would definitely rather NOT work, but I’ve never worked a job I loathed, not even for one day, and I have always always lived an extracurricular life that I love. I hope to live a really long time, but if I drop dead tomorrow, I have minimal regrets (and a decent net worth!).

I really appreciate the message you’re getting out there about getting a certain amount in the bank and then embracing a more enjoyable career path, but if someone is really loathing their day job – I think that should be fixed before getting a certain amount of money in the bank. Life is way too short to hate 40+ hours per week of it!

I think you brought up good points for discussion and to think about MrFIREby2023. I have never thought about the other impacts you brought up.

For the social security benefits portion, I think it might still be “enough” if the individual still has active income during FIRE. Even if they are self employed, they’d be paying social security taxes to receive the benefit later on. And also, the hope of FIRE is that social security is the icing on the cake once retirement age is attained instead of a necessary source of income. That’s just my two cents, I may be wrong, but thanks for the food for thought.