@ThisDinosaur - No, the ERE blog/book wasn't really designed to answer that question. If anything, it was an intellectual exploration of what the actual questions in the field of personal finance and lifestyle design were in the first place. Remember, it was written at a time (in the twenty-zeroes) when financial independence generally meant/required having a million dollars and early retirement was something only a few high income people achieved in their mid-forties at the very earliest. It was a time when the way to grow networth was through compound interest and regular monthly contributions over a couple of decades of career work speeding it up with recreational coupon clipping, solid budgeting, and a perverse interest in knowing a thousand ways to save a dollar here and a dollar there. It was before FIRE blogging was even a thing.
90%+ of the blog was written between 2007 and early 2010. Same for the book. Compared to this list or compare to the dozens of FIRE blogs that exist today.
http://rockstarfinance.com/best-early-retirement-blogs/ ERE effectively began and finished up before every other blog on this list even existed.
Much of the standard advice wrt FIRE today was first presented on ERE: That savings rate was the variable that mattered. That one should focus on the big three, namely, housing, transport, and food when it came to expenses instead dozens or hundreds of small ones like cellphone bills, ziploc bags, and DIY detergent. And to a large degree that FI is possible at any level of expenses. While the last one is really an YMOYL idea, ERE was the first to make a specific/heavy point of it on the internet. (Also, consider that the "1 jacob" budget is below the inflation-adjusted Joe Dominguez budget ($6k in 1998 money) ... this is likely due to the systems-theory difference.)
Now everybody takes those ideas for granted to such a degree that most people have no idea where they first came from. There's even an App to illustrate how savings-rate relates to years in the work force. No need to do the math in detail (like I did in the book) or hack an approximation with a spreadsheet which is how other bloggers used to do confirm my graphs (save from a few fellow nerds who actually replicated my derivations in detail).
Many readers back then (2007-2010) told me they came and stuck with ERE because the ideas were new and interesting and that they had learned all they needed on other blogs about how to budget, open IRAs, negotiate fees away, and that long lists tips and tricks weren't that inspiring anymore. Basically, it was an advanced crowd who had all the basics down. I wrote the blog with that audience in mind and I wrote the book for those core readers never expecting it to take off like it subsequently did.
Essentially, the book was way-waaaayyy ahead of its time (and it still is). Also, the blog was written for "the advanced reader" because back in 2010, those few were the only ones really interested in FIRE. By advanced reader, I mean those who had already learned everything there was to learn about how to make a budget, how to make a savings plan, and how to perform 500 different frugal tips and tricks, ... People who were already post-scarcity but wondered if that was all there was to personal finance.
So THAT's the audience that the blog/book was originally designed for.
Now, FIRE has subsequently become pretty common in the personal finance space. You can even win a blogging award in it without having to compete in "best new entrepreneur blog", "best retirement/geriatric care blog", or some equally ridiculously inappropriate category. I largely credit MMM for popularizing FIRE. I'm only vaguely familiar with nerd-lore, but maybe in terms of analogies in the pf-space, I'm Wozniak and he's Jobs. Okay, maybe I'm pushing too far/close to computational godliness, but I don't think I'd be offending much of any people who's been around for the past 10 years if I say that ERE was the dominant FIRE blog in the first generation (where the focus was on technical innovation), and MMM has been the dominant FIRE blog in the second generation (where the focus has been on design and user-friendliness). When I wrote my final blog post (save for a handful of later diary updates) in 2011, MMM had about 500 RSS subscribers (how one kept track in those days). I had about 5000. I suggested my readers move on to MMM and bumped him to 2000 over night. After that he really--really kicked ass and figured out how to sell it and his current readership is much much higher than mine ever was (I figure more than 10x of my peak). I never really cared that deeply about selling it. I did try for a while but quickly realized that my clown-tolerance is relatively small as these things go.
I think MMM does a superb job at getting people out of the scarcity mindset. (Maybe because he's within a couple of Wheaton levels of the white belt practitioners, see much lamented
table in other thread 
) As does a few other bloggers when they talk about a mindset of abundance (a meme that's started happening over the past few years). I never really cared about writing about this stuff because I was already much past post-scarcity as was my readers when I was still writing. Now, we have the ERE forums which can be of some help for beginners, but for historical reasons you'll find very little of that stuff developed on the blog or in the book. This is where Wheaton levels become important. MMM is close enough for those who figured out the basics to hook up. The gap to the ERE book/blog is still too large.
Interestingly what has happened since 2010ish given the present growth in popularity of the subject is that ERE gets to deal with questions/comments like either being told that applied systems-theory is absurd or useless; and if not, that I should use my "intelligence" to figure out a way to communicate all the thousands of hours of
experiental knowledge within a short paragraph so the average reader can become an expert in three easy steps; while Pete gets to deal with people who want to know about "the Mustachian way to find a good housekeeper" or which is the "Most Mustachian Tesla Model"?
Phew! That got much longer than the few lines I initially wanted to spend on it, but I figured that some historical perspective would be in order. What you see on the ERE blog is essentially grad school research notes on what at the time was an entirely new field. What you see in the ERE book is the resulting dissertation.
Whereas what you see in FIRE blogging today are "entrepreneurial" popularizations (but vastly better than what I ever did) of a few of the core ideas presented in that dissertation.
(A few key people in the [FIRE] blogging crowd have publicly (Trent Hamm, Go Curry Cracker, and MadFIentist) or privately (can't say, but even bigger) admitted that the ERE book has served or still serves as a key inspiration for personal strategy and/or blogging ideas to them. This is good, because that's what was part of my intention for writing it. It was never really intended to serve as a beginner's book. I'm glad but also surprised when it does work in that capacity but I'm not surprised when it doesn't. I did briefly attempt to write such a [101] book in 2011 but the effort faltered because I never really felt all that qualified at that point because of
this problem.)
