Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

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Ego
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Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

Post by Ego »

Business Insider Article:

Forget FIRE: A man who retired at age 34 with $3 million says the coronavirus pandemic might replace the early retirement trend with a new movement

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronav ... ent-2020-3

-The economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic could see the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement slowly down, according to one early retiree.

-Sam Dogen, who retired at age 34 with $3 million, told Business Insider he thinks the trend will be replaced by what he calls the DIRE movement, which involves retiring late.

-He said "there is a lot of devastation" financially in the FIRE community due to the pandemic.

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Re: Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

Post by jacob »

That's just Financial Samurai trolling the FIRE community again. It's been his MO to drive traffic for the past 10+ years and it still works!

I was asked by someone writing for yahoo finance on Mar 9th whether I thought a bear market would kill FIRE. I guess my answer (Summary: "Not, really, perhaps it'll delay people's plans by a couple of years") was not sufficiently sensationalist for them to run with it because I never heard back.

Tyler9000
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Re: Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

Post by Tyler9000 »

jacob wrote:
Fri Mar 27, 2020 10:58 am
That's just Financial Samurai trolling the FIRE community again. It's been his MO to drive traffic for the past 10+ years and it still works!
Yep. Not much I can add to that. He lost me years ago.

I've definitely noticed an uptick in anti-FIRE sentiment since the coronavirus epidemic took off. It usually involves making fun of people who said they would never work again and assuming they're suddenly rushing to find jobs. Even beyond the woeful lack of understanding of how retirement finance actually works, that hot take comes across as especially tone deaf now that millions of people (most with no savings at all) are filing for unemployment per week. What position would you rather be in -- unemployed with decades of savings, or unemployed with nothing? I personally expect that schadenfreude-driven perspective to quickly fade as reality sets in.

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Re: Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

Post by Seppia »

Having read some of his stuff, the guy just seems angry.
I'm actually sorry for him. If you're plenty rich and can do whatever you want, and still you're grumpy, I don't know when you'll be satisfied in life.
This said, I agree with him that many overly optimistic people may be kinda panicking right now.
Some of the assumptions in the mainstream FIRE just don't make sense (being a 4% rule ayatollah sounding like the craziest to me)

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Re: Covid-19 & FIRE Replaced by DIRE?

Post by Tyler9000 »

Seppia wrote:
Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:33 pm
This said, I agree with him that many overly optimistic people may be kinda panicking right now.
Some of the assumptions in the mainstream FIRE just don't make sense
If one good things comes out of it, perhaps the young people feeling stock market pain for the first time will finally come around on leveling up a little and learning about different risk mitigation strategies. Not every retiree invests all their money in VTI and we're not all struggling financially to the same degree. Rather than tear people down in their time of fear or dwell on every failure, I prefer to be here ready to help when the curious problem solvers come looking for different ways to approach the same problem.
Last edited by Tyler9000 on Fri Mar 27, 2020 4:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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