ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

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GandK
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ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by GandK »

Article yesterday:

The Secret World Of The 'FIREd'

Much more ER-positive than anything I've read in a mainstream mag before. Cool that it's in Forbes, too.

BRUTE
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by BRUTE »

nice overview. is FIRE getting more mainstream?

cmonkey
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by cmonkey »

It is becoming more popular but far from 'mainstream'. If it became 'mainstream' it wouldn't be a secret after all. ;) Likely we will never see that.

Dragline
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by Dragline »

Shhhhh. :lol:

Forbes, at least online, has sought to broaden its appeal in the past couple years and does pick up things outside the mainstream.

jacob
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by jacob »

@cmonkey - Never say never. Seven years ago, the ERE blog was practically the only FIRE blog(*) around (or at least the post count was higher than everybody else combined).

(*) That was before the concept of FIRE bloggers existed as a thing. When people came up with blog-awards for ERE, they could not figure out what category to run it in (best entrepreneur blog, best pension blog,...).

In 2009 most of the concepts (the primacy of the savings rates over simply $1M, spending less over increasing income, the focus on housing, transport, and food over DIY detergent and other frugality tips) that practically define the FIRE-canon today were novel ideas that were heavily resisted by most of the rest of the pf-world when I blogged about them. A lot of time was spent discussing why "retirement" didn't necessarily have a "Must be at least 55 yo and have at least $1M saved" bar to get into the club; indeed, simply convincing people to go over the math to prove that a high savings rate was THE key was an exercise in frustration.

Now you no longer have to fiddle with equations to prove the importance of the savings rate; now there's an App for that ... and you can find blog posts with lists of the top 20 best financial independence blogs or interviews with 25 bloggers on their extreme early retirement plans. Even the old guard bloggers are coming around.

On the greater media scene, back in 2010, I was interviewed by a major news paper (NYT) and a big podcast, but they decided not to run with it because their "expert" evaluation was that ERE sounded too unrealistic. Now, even MSM acknowledges it at least as a possibility. And articles get more than a couple of quotes.

So yeah, people are definitely coming around. Maybe give it seven more years, and FIRE could be standard practice or at least offered as a serious option by CFPs.

cmonkey
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by cmonkey »

Well for FIRE to exist, there needs to exist a class that does not know about it/provide an investment vehicle for the FIRE group...and that class needs to be the majority? If it somehow flipped the other way around, you'd be looking at a different economic model, no? I guess if the FIRE group got big enough and it all functioned fine, people could eventually choose between two accepted mainstreams.

In any event, I enjoy being part of a 'secret group' so I hope it doesn't get too popular. :P

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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by jacob »

@cmonkey - Not really. Nor ERE nor FIRE is contingent on maintaining ignorance. Imagine if social security taxes were bumped to 80% while the time horizon for taking payouts was reduced to age 28. Then you'd have FIRE for everyone at a level of about $5000--10000/year year (I didn't verify the math, so probably a bit more than that). The main difference between now and this is that instead of having unemployed young people and working old people, it'd be the other way around.


TopHatFox
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by TopHatFox »

No, ERE is OUR secret. lol ):

I doubt too many humans would take it up in practice tbh, even if they might agree with it theoretically; and even then, these articles are mostly praising MMM style of FIRE. It is an interesting idea, though -- if more (well, most) people did it, there'd be too many capitalists and not enough consumers, meaning capitalism would change as we know it. To what, I don't know.

RealPerson
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by RealPerson »

Olaz wrote:It is an interesting idea, though -- if more (well, most) people did it, there'd be too many capitalists and not enough consumers, meaning capitalism would change as we know it. To what, I don't know.
Probably mostly theoretical, unless forced by changes in the environment. But still, if most people adopted an ERE lifestyle, I imagine the reduction of consumption would have a huge impact on the stock market, real estate, etc. The 4% rule may become the 1% rule! You can easily see why Jacob stresses the Renaissance concept more than an x% rule. I think he is right. Setting up your life to minimize a dependence on cash will give you the robustness you will need to live in a drastically different economic environment.

JL13
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Re: ERE shout-out in Forbes magazine

Post by JL13 »

I don't think we necessarily need non-fire people to support fire people. I think the Pareto principle applies: Society at large can produce 80% of what it does now with only 20% of the currently used resources. But it might be true that the investment experience would suffer. Most of the really profitable companies' products are not purchased by EREers: Apple, Hershey's, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo etc. We mainly buy commodities, which are pretty unprofitable.

But then again, the US is still predominately consumption based, and yet interest rates are nearly 0%. Maybe the correlation between consumption/savings and interest rates isn't as strong as we're assuming?

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