Where are the failure-stories?

[fiby41]

IMO there's more to learn from FIRE/ERE failure-stories than success stories. As if there is one way to do it right then we will learn more by knowing a hundred ways of not doing it in way something will go haywire.

But due to survivorship bias, people who fail or go astray rarely, if ever, mention it or give a parting message and reason. They simply abandon their journals. Leave and never come back. Which can mean a lot of things, or nothing at all:

They are still on the path but just not updating their journals
They gave up (Why? Reasons?)
They found something better to do with their time
They found a better lifestyle that suits their preferences and personality more (Which? How to do the matching if something is for you or not? How to discern if it's in fact good ?)
They quit (as in gave up on the goal but kept the lifestyle...In favour of? )
They really quit (maybe lentils are not for them)


Definitions of failure?

No journal update in x years or y months
SWR rising above a% safe range
Monthly/yearly expense rising over N jacobs
Running out of all savings
Diminishing chance of getting a job again paying b amount

[simplex]

@fib41 Ha, I might be failure on your criteria 1 - 3. But I made different choices than jacob, not accumulating before ERE, but earning during ERE. Some others made this choice to. Maybe call it non-traditional ERE?

[IlliniDave]

Failure to me is pretty simple: it's to be forced back into the full-time workforce either for compelling financial reasons or because I can't maintain meaningful and fulfilling ways to occupy myself. The latter doesn't preclude me from paid employment if I find something I want to do, which is a subtle distinction I admit. Failure comes in degrees too. It's one thing to stand around saying, "Hello, welcome to Walmart!" for 15-20 hours/week for a year or two to ease worries over waning financial margin; it's another to be broke and going around hat-in-hand looking for a full-time professional gig to keep the power from being cut off.

A fair number of people pursue a sort of intermittent retirement: they scrape up some money and live off it as long as they can, then when it runs out they work for a while to scrape up another stake, and repeat. And like simplex said, some opt for continuous part-time employment which is sort of the land between the paradigms.

I dunno why journals/blogs get abandoned. Most of them seem to have a fairly short lifespan compared to the rest of a person's life. I can't say what will happen to me once I pull the plug. Once life is on autopilot and I'm just living, there won't be a whole lot to talk about, and I'll probably begin to get self-conscious about "flaunting" success since my ER was sort of gained by cheating (from the ERE context, as I'm more of a traditional FIRE guy with a sledgehammer in the toolbox).

[Stahlmann]

Well, maybe this topic could be place to store links of failure threads?

[Spartan_Warrior]

Some of your assumptions are flawed. Lack of journal updates is not really indicative of failure. Plenty of people, like myself, simply lose interest in keeping up with a journal over the 5-15 year time frame typical of the plan. Even Jacob stopped updating his blog. There are other things in my life, my job no longer weighs so heavily on me, and retiring just isn't a day-to-day concern anymore. Personally, I don't even come around the forum as much these days as I feel I've already extracted most of the useful practical information, and my ERE plan is pretty much on auto-pilot. This means the only "new" and "interesting" topics to me tend to be political, but such discussions also get tiresome, especially when one's politics diametrically oppose the majority, so participating in those threads is usually an exercise akin to swimming up a waterfall. That said, I'm certainly still on schedule with my ERE plans. Generally speaking, things are going great. I think a well-executed ERE plan will naturally fade into the background of someone's priorities--it's just the nature of it to not remain a pressing concern. In fact it almost seems to me that if you still spend a great amount of mental energy pre-occupied with ERE, then you almost certainly haven't achieved it. So, I wouldn't assume members who stopped updating journals or even posting here are "failure" cases. It's possible they are among the greatest successes.

[jacob]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

In order to define "failure", it has to be defined relative to previous declarations, which is foolish as per above, or relative to some standard (why me?!), which is also foolish because outliers don't make for great metrics.

Then there's also the issue of in-sample vs out-sample. Even those who "fail" at FIRE are likely doing much better financially than those who never tried in the first place, much like those, who didn't complete the marathon they set out for, are still in better form than those who never got off the couch in the first place. If in-sample is defined by "those who started a journal", this bias gets worse (because only a minor fraction start one---lurker to writer ratio is about 10-1).

In terms of keeping up with the writing over many years or decades, I'm reminded of how running one marathon and running multiple marathons demonstrate completely different things. The first one proves that it's possible. The second one does nothing of the kind: The second one proves the capacity to repeat oneself(*). I think the latter is rarer than the former. As SW also noted; we can take my own blogging efforts as an illustrative case. Without being too conceited about it, I still don't think there's been much if any new original development in the field since I stopped. (Yes, blogs are now much better written, much better designed, and include more details. What I mean is that in terms of new ideas, I haven't really come across much new since 2010. Van-living is really the only development I can think of that wasn't already present in 2010. Maybe I'm just out of touch...) So at that point, and the reason I stopped blogging, was that I could either prove to the world that I was capable of repeating myself---in fact several bloggers were of the strong opinion that rather than seeking new outlets like getting a fulltime job in finance I should focus on figuring out new ways to talk about the 4% rule or new recipes for DIY detergent---or; I could turn the blog into a diary-type blog (much like most journals here), which I had no interest in. (I actually have 2 journals here on the forum which I haven't updated for years IRRC); or, I could rewrite the whole deal in complete and authoritative 3000 word essays (which is the new style) rather than the 400-800 word blurbs which were the de-facto standard in pre-2010. But none of these three options held any interest to me. So I stopped blogging. Does this mean I failed?

(*) Something that INTJs in particular seem less good at.

If I had to bet, I'd put my money on the biggest reason people abandoning their journals or blogs is the the either have nothing more to say or that they initially figured they had more to say than they actually did. As a runner-up, I've noticed that some journals get a lot of responses after the first post and others get almost none. Insofar feedback is important to the journal-writer, this is also a factor. It seems entirely random to me which journals will be be subject to the initial response factor and which will eventually become popular. There's definitely some X-factor here.

In terms of failures we can learn from, I find it more enlightening to hear about the stories of "other people" in people's journals, that is, those who do not pursue FIRE by financial means or those who do not pursue ERE in the non-financial sense. However, these stories have to be picked up from here and there. Why do I find those interesting? Because they're useful for developing Wheaton tables.

I doubt quantitative empirical research is the way to go. There's simply too much to summarize in a simple success/failure metric.

You're walking a tightrope between:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slothful_induction

As for making a list of journals that "failed"? What could possibly go wrong?

[Dragline]

Did somebody just say "foolish consistency"? +1

Yes, the problem with measuring failure is that it will vary from person to person depending upon goals, and should also vary for the same person at various points in their lifetime if they wish to avoid Emerson's consistency trap from "Self Reliance." So you may never get past the definitions.

And the proper metric is probably not comparing results versus initial goals, but results versus a counter-factual where the individual projects what they "would have done" had they not gone down an ERE or FI path for some period of time. This is often difficult to do and is highly individualized.

BTW, some of us simply maintain private journals, too.

[GandK]

Would you like us to list our microfailures? I have plenty of those. We're still on our ER path in spite of them, though, so not sure how instructive they'll be if your goal is big picture failure.

Also: isn't giving up the only real failure? Edison's light bulb and all that?

[jacob]

@Dragline - Yeah, in fact, I got that from you in a blog comment back in 2011, so thank you for that! It's so true, but at that time I had been clinging to consistency for quite some time (as explained in the Thanks for all the fish post.)

[Dragline]

Wow, six years have gone by pretty fast!

OTOH, the net worth has doubled even if I'm still working at the same job.

[blackbird]

Interesting post. I believe that based on the OP, I probably qualify as a failure in the sense that I a.) No longer update my journal and b.) Have largely abandoned the concept of retiring in the next five or 10 years.

In the first case, putting together a write up requires an extra bit of effort for me as I use a variety of accommodations since I cannot type without severe pain. After a few journals, I realized I was making choices between posting here and posting at everything2.com (where I have been posting for 16 years) and frankly, those people benefit a lot more from anything I have to say than any of you would. If it is really possible in a digital age, I have closer personal connections to the users there than here, and the encouragement I receive when I am in a difficult time there, combined with what I consider a greater ability to interact with others, has almost always made me choose that place over this one. That is not to say this place has no value for me, but quite the opposite, reading the thoughts and arguments here was largely responsible for one of the greatest changes in my life as I chose the less consumer – ish, smaller scale life that we now lead over the giant houses and new cars than most of my peers are now saddled with for eternity.

In the second case, I have wrestled with significant medical issues for much of my adult life. When I first became introduced to the concept of ERE, I hoped to reach that goal within five years, and absolutely no later than 10 years. While I have continued to record my progress and push our savings envelope higher (we are hovering around 64% at the moment), I have also come to grips with a few realities. One of those is that health care costs are always going to be an issue for me, and especially in the current political climate, I cannot foresee a time when I will not need significant health insurance benefits from working at a job. Another is that as my daughter moved from being a toddler to preschool to elementary school, we as a family made the decision that my wife would stay home. Nominally this was to be a "room mom" in kindergarten, one of the essentially unpaid assistants from which elementary teachers benefit. In reality, this has become a chance for her to be extremely active in our PTA, and provide full-time hands-on support for our daughter (either directly by taking the teachers lunch duty so that she can have lunch on her own while the PTA moms watch the kids, or indirectly, by being in the school supporting other teachers not necessarily around our daughter but always as a presence in the background). Even when our daughter reaches middle school and there isn't the same kind of parent involvement that our elementary school encourages, I do not foresee her going back to work. So, our plan is to maintain our current savings regimen and just take comfort in the fact that if something happened to my job we would have a significant safety net, and if nothing happens to the job then when I finally do retire, money is not an issue.

I guess the best way to say it is by parroting a little Jack Bogle and "staying the course" but maintaining some flexibility and slack in our system so that if our situation changes significantly we can change with it appropriately.

So yeah, we are "failing", but we're doing it on our own terms.

[cmonkey]

Also: isn't giving up the only real failure? Edison's light bulb and all that?

In that case we've all failed our careers.

[Dragline]

@blackbird Nice response. +1

DW "retired" when our first one hit elementary school and we haven't looked back since. They are only around for so long and the time goes by quick.

[Scott 2]

I'm a failure of sorts. My most conservative threshold for retirement came and went, yet I'm still working.

The opportunity cost of stopping is too high - I like my job and am saving more than I ever have. The uncertain political climate provides added incentive to hang on to a good thing. I'm buying time and luxuries I never would have considered 5 years ago. Some are hardly frugal by ERE standards, though my life is spartan compared to coworkers.

IMO my initial goals were fueled by an overly simplistic perspective, fueled by a dislike for being locked into to circumstances I did not control. Over time I've gained a more objective view, and decided my circumstances were pretty great. Knowing I can stop makes it easy to continue.

[Did]

Failure is a terrible word in this context. ERE is a set of tools that you can apply to improve your lot if it suits. Do I want to be Jacob? No. Nor would he want to be me. The thing about efficient/systems living and investing the difference is that it can't really fail, I don't think. It will help you out and make you feel better regardless.

There is a blog out there somewhere about a Tim Ferriss wannabe who 'failed' and apologised and went back to work. His blog before the apology consisted of a bunch of sanctimonious Ferriss rip off lectures. It has been pointed out before that for many it's harder to implement a lifestyle business than to implement an ERE strategy.

But I've failed at lots of things. When I was 28 I went part time with an aim of escaping the law through entrepreneurial software activities. At 30 I went back to work full time exhausted. At 38 I quit, possibly even more exhausted, but with enough cash there to semi-retire with a few bob coming in here and there. Is this failure? I don't think of myself this way. But we would have to live more as Jacob does to survive off investments.

Like someone above I think I would feel like I'm moving in the wrong direction if I went back into an office. I've been out almost 4 years now, and the thought is rather abhorrent. In time I think office living will be seen more as a coal mine/prison. No thank you.

So maybe that would be my personal failure definition.

[vexed87]

I often struggle with feelings of failure and hypocrisy when I don't quite live up to my own standards, or do something not quite by the (ERE) book. I recently read this line in Lean Logic which is quite comforting, particulary when considering one's own actions to be 'failures';

If an argument is a good one, dissonant deeds do nothing to contradict it. In fact, the hypocrite may have something to be said for him; it would be worrying if his ideals were not better than the way he lives.

Ponder on that for a while.

[Dragline]

Yes, there's something to be said for the idea that you are not failing if you have formed some positive intentions and are moving in that direction, even if you are not making much progress. You might just say you are succeeding "very slowly".

Another anomaly of perception is that we feel time pass linearly, but the actual events in our lives often happen in jerks or exponentially, or both. For example, due to the nature of compounding returns, you will get rich very slowly, then suddenly be rich. It will seem that the whole thing happened near the end of the process. OTOH, your health follows the pattern in reverse -- for most, it declines imperceptibly slowly for a long time, then suddenly something breaks or stops working and you have a health crisis.

[Stahlmann]

I will probably lose in terms of comprehension of difficult ideas as a response to this post...
(I write it anyway)

But I meant in the last one:
- there was guy who lost his money in P2P lending (being too focues of short-term gain)
- next one invested in Ponzi scheme (not being very cautious about investments - OK, it is easy to speak after an event)
- somebody decided to spend more time in work to achieve better standard of living for a big family
etc.

I wanted to share/find general lessons of other ERE apprentices as an opportunity to learn (hence word ,,failure" must be used in very layman sense).

[stayhigh]

Probably people just:
- get bored writing journals
- have nothing new to say
- decided to do other things in life/realised that FIRE is not their cup of tea
- once retired, they are not interested in ER stuff anymore
- they are too busy doing other stuff than sharing their life online

[Toska2]

I failed ERE in multiple ways.
1. Job that constricts my future
2. Job that doesn't allow me to learn useful skills
3. Restricting my goals
4. Lowering expectations of stated goals outside monetary ones
5. Haven't found a reason to run towards something (it's always been away from)
6. All my hobbies are negative net flow


I didn't give up. I also didn't need ERE to save. It's a part of me. I saved to survive. Now it's time to thrive.