BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Which FIRE Strategy is Best for You? (Lean to Fat FIRE)

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Join Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench on this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast as they dive into the different types of FIRE. Financial Independence, Retire Early isn't a one-size-fits-all approach - it's evolved into multiple distinct paths, each designed to meet different lifestyles, risk tolerances, and financial goals. This comprehensive exploration will help you understand which version of financial independence makes the most sense for your unique situation. From traditional FIRE to coast, lean, barista, chubby, and fat FIRE, each approach offers its own timeline, savings requirements, and lifestyle implications. Whether you're drawn to the minimalist appeal of lean FIRE or you're more interested in fat FIRE's promise of maintaining a luxurious lifestyle in retirement, understanding these distinctions is crucial for mapping out your financial future. Scott and Mindy break down the math, mindset, and practical considerations behind each path, giving you the clarity to choose your FIRE strategy and start building a personalized roadmap to financial independence. This Episode Covers: The six main types of FIRE and what makes each one unique Specific savings requirements and timelines for each FIRE path Real-world pros and cons of traditional, coast, lean, barista, chubby, and fat FIRE Which personality types tend to succeed with each strategy How to match your lifestyle and goals to the right FIRE approach The sacrifices and trade-offs involved in each path Practical steps to get started on your chosen FIRE journey And SO much more! 00:00 The 6 Types of FIRE  01:12 Traditional FIRE 04:38 Coast FIRE 09:43 Barista FIRE 13:11 Lean FIRE 18:15 Chubby FIRE 22:07 Fat FIRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not everyone needs $2 million to retire early, and not everyone can live on $30,000 a year. That's why the fire movement has evolved into multiple paths. Today, we're exploring every type of fire, from traditional to coast, to lean, to fat, and helping you discover which one fits your personality, your needs, and your sanity. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always, is my fired up co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here, as always, and to blaze into new opportunities for financial events.

We have put together a visual breakdown of all of the fire types that we're going to cover today. So I'm going to share my screen, and let's go ahead and jump right in. Okay, Scott, how many types of fire are we going to be talking about today? We're going to be talking about six. There's no official beginning or end to the types of fire, and a new acronym is invented by the hour in the fire community. But we'll talk about the six most common of these types here today. So do you want to kick things off, Mindy, with the first one? Yep. Up first, we have traditional fire. This is the kind of numbers that we originally started talking about in the Phi community 10, 15 years ago,

one to $2.5 million in net worth, which implies a middle class lifestyle. We are spending between 40 and a $120,000 a year in retirement. The timeline for this is between seven and 20 years for somebody who's earning a good upper middle class income. The biggest lever that you have to pull for your traditional fire journey is your savings rate. We talked last week with Mr. Money Mustache about his shockingly simple math to early retirement. And the savings rate, the more you can save of your income, the faster you will get to traditional fire. The pros of this are pretty easy. You can get to a comfortable and traditional retirement in a fairly short amount of time.

It's, you know, seven to 20 years, depending on how much you're making. And it can be achieved with a typical career. You don't have to be some super high earning wage earner in order for you to be able to attain this level of five. The cons are few. The numbers can see. so large that it takes decades to get to where you need to go with the people that we have been talking to in the past here, Scott. It takes about 10 years. I think 7 is a very aggressive

goal and implies a very high savings rate. Most people are in the 10, 12, 15 year range. The numbers can seem a little small for a higher-end lifestyle. This is not for somebody who wants to be able to spend as much money as they possibly can in retirement. Yeah, I think this is the bread and butter of what the folks in the fire community are our journey looking for. You're going to see the majority of people in this community looking for an outcome in this range, one to two and a half million. You're going to find a lot of commonalities among the people that are looking for this,

a prioritization of freedom over work, a prioritization of efficient living. These are not folks that are trying to live a luxurious lifestyle. They're trying to live probably what most people would equate with a typical middle class lifestyle in this. And there's a concept of enough, the goal of having enough in life to enjoy their time, their day-to-day, doing simple, reasonably priced activities is going to be a higher priority than, you know, a long and very successful career climbing the corporate ladder, building a business or otherwise accumulating that next level of way. wealth. And I think this is what the fire community is started at and will remain grounded in adjusting for inflation, of course, over the coming years and decades. I think this will be the typical goal for many people. And I would even go so far as to say, I think this has taken the place of the old American dream for an increasingly large percentage of society.

And Scott, you just called it the bread and butter. Let's call this bread and butterfi. Yeah. Okay, what do we have next? Next up, we have just the bread, just the bread. No butter. That component of fire. So that one's probably barista fire or lean fire. But we have CoastFi here. CoastFi is really just a milestone on the fire journey. It's not, this is not a state of financial independence. What it is describing is a position where you have enough saved in your retirement accounts, where if you take any reasonable approximation of historical average returns for typical. investment portfolios and extrapolate them to the future, your retirement wealth will be fully funded. So, for example, if someone who is 25 is hoping to at 65 in 40 years have $2.5 million in inflation-adjusted wealth, so probably closer to $7 or $8 million at that point in time, then if they have $167,000 in their retirement accounts or in their portfolio, that they do not plan to spend, that number will likely, again, if we extrapolate historical returns,

compound and double every 7.2 years, and fully fund that level of well by that point. So they don't have to save any more money for retirement. For example, if you're 25 and have $167,000 saved. If you're 35, that number comes to about $328,000, $45,000, $646, and $55, $1.3 million. And if you've got that much accumulated, you're done saving for retirement. And that can be a very freeing feeling because a lot of people feel pressure to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, but if you can calculate that your coast fire, then you can ease off the gas. You can take part-time work. You can explore things like barista fire, or you can continue grinding it out to the other forms of fire, but know that you are well ahead of the game and the pressure is off. You're not behind by any sense

in terms of the financial goals that most Americans seek to achieve. And this is a much more approachable timeline for many, especially if you're younger. I think that many people in the fire community will find that they're able to actually hit this goal in the three to five year time range, between salary increases that seem to accompany the start of many fire journeys, hardcore saving, and then the investment approaches and the compounding of initial dollars. I think that you'll find many people who are able to achieve this in three to five years.

Of course, it can take much longer or even lifetimes for many people, but inside the fire community, you'll find a lot of people achieving it in a pretty short amount of time. However, if you're older, you need way more in order to achieve closed fire because you have less time for that doubling. And I think you have to be a little bit more conservative in the assumptions you have around growth rates. Because timing, you know, the returns in the next decade matter so greatly through actually achieving this. So you can compute this and see how long that will take you with the Fioners calculator, which we talk about. at length in episode 664 and actually bring them on to discuss in episode 665 here at the Vigger Pockets Money podcast. We are going to take a quick mini retirement from this conversation, and then we'll be right back. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people

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Let's jump back in. The pros of this is that you know that you are set for traditional retirement. And then you can kind of ease off the gas. You don't have to have this frantic, I have to save every dollar I can mentality. So it does allow for a little bit more spending throughout the rest of your life. It relieves a lot of pressure because saving up $1 million or $2.5 million, that's a big number. But if you're 25 and you have $167,000, you're like, oh, okay, this is the math, maths out. If you're 24 and you see that you have $50,000, you're like, oh, okay, I need to save a little bit more.

It gives you a great place to just check in where you're at. I love the Kosephi calculator from the Fionnaires. It's so much fun to play with and just throw in different scenarios. Oh, okay, if I have this much money, I'll have that much at retirement. And if I need this much, I'll have to have this much by this date. So you can really, like, play around and check it out. Like I said, there's a lot less pressure in your later years because not so much pressure to just save, save, save all the time.

And you can pivot in your career without worrying about your retirement savings. You can take that job that's a little more risk, more reward, or less stress if you're just kind of burnt out. Less stress, less pay. The cons are that it still requires working until traditional retirement age. So it's not really the RE part of fire. It assumes consistent market returns for 20, 30, 40 years. and past performance is not indicative of future gains, as they say in every single ad for any sort of investment property.

It could leave to lifestyle inflation once you have pulled your foot off the gas pedal with regards to saving. And it doesn't provide the ultimate freedom to completely leave your job that other levels of FI does. Tell us about that one of the next types of fire, Mindy? So we ordered these in the amount. of money you would have to save up. So the next up is barista fire. And this is when your traditional retirement is fully funded, like in Coast Phi, and you can distribute income from your asset base to partially cover your expenses, but you wouldn't have enough money saved to be able to live off of it fully. So it's like, FI with a job, but a job that is traditionally less stressful. Like a

barista, when they go into the coffee shop, they are making coffee. And then when it is done with when they're done with their day, they just walk away. They're not worried about what's going on at work. And if you've ever had a very stressful job that you bring home, either like to do work or to actually just sitting on your shoulders, worrying about it, this can be a really desirable opportunity. So your phi number in barista fai is between $250 and $750,000. $750,000. we're not even hitting the million dollar mark right now. You have partial financial independence with 15 to 20 times your annual expenses instead of the traditional 25. Your timeline can be three to seven years. So it's a much shorter timeline. And you typically reach this five to 10

years sooner than traditional fire. The pros are the flexibility and the lower savings amounts that are required for it. The cons are that many people in the middle, or up in middle class will have a difficult time stepping back from this, you know, more prestigious job. And I say that in air quotes because I think that baristas are awesome. They make me my fabulous coffee drinks all the time. Having a less stressful job is a really great trade-off. Let me tell you, as somebody who had a stressful job and now no longer has a stressful job, it's a great trade-off. But you do really need to have part-time work for a considerable portion of the year. part-time work might be harder to find.

This really, I think, it takes a different kind of mindset than one that I'm frankly wired with, where you're comfortable with, you know, living at a very low cost, actually beginning to distribute partially from a portfolio. Imagine, you know, we talk about the 4% rule. So if you have a million bucks that allow you to distribute about $40,000 a year, a $500,000 would then allow you to distribute $20,000 a year. And if you needed $40,000 a year to live, generating $20,000. $20,000 in income part-time is not something that many people find to be too challenging,

especially if they're willing to be reasonably flexible with those hours. Like for example, tending bar at the busy time during the weekend and having off much of the rest of the week. So this is a very, this is a kind of niche or niche, depending on where you're from, approach to do living, again that I think few in our community are truly pursuing, in the bigger pockets money community more precisely are pursuing. but I think these folks may actually get the maximum amount of life force out of their time on this planet by approaching something like this. It just takes a little bit of a different brain wiring to really wrap your head around this and go and live out your life as a bruce to fire.

Yep. And honestly, those cons really aren't that bad. I think that part-time work would be fairly easy to find, especially if you're just needing to cover your expenses. You're not needing to cover your expenses plus save for retirement. All right, Scott, what's next? Next up, we got LeanFi. So I'm going to call this in that, you know, 600 to $1 million. Maybe even there's no hard lines here. So you could even go up to like 1.25 potentially in some places and call this, or even 1.5 and call that Lean Phi if you're on like the West Coast, for example.

But this is going to be that lower end of Phi. This is where you're living a lower middle class is how I'll describe it type of lifestyle off of one's portfolio. And the advantage here, of course, is that it's an even more achievable target than traditional fire. It can be achieved faster or on a lower income level. And it can be done with basically no deviation whatsoever from the traditional fire formula. You don't have to earn a super high income. You don't have to do real estate if you don't want to. You don't have to do have a business or side hustles or alternative investments. You can just take a normal job, even like a government type type job or something that is relatively attainable from a career

perspective, grind it out for maybe 10 or so years, and likely be at or close to this objective if you keep your expenses low and embrace the frugality component of the fire journey. And so I think that's the key advantage. I think the disadvantage is that a very large portion of the fire community seems not to be content with the relative frugality required to live this lifestyle for the duration of one's life. And it's not really a desirable lifestyle in particular, I think, in the higher cost of living areas, which is, you know, I think a growing portion of the United States. And then you really have very little room for emergencies, lifestyle inflation, giving,

or, you know, maybe being more of a leader in your social circle or your family setting with this level of wealth, although it's still substantial. But I think those are the pros and cons of this. And again, I would say, you know, about a 15% or so of the bigger pockets money community is looking for this outcome as a stated goal. Yeah. You said something, Scott. I thought it was very, very perfect for this. You have to embrace the frugal lifestyle. If frugality is not your natural setting, lean five might be more difficult for you. But I think that you can always combine these with, you know, barista fie and get a job for a few years or get a less stressed job for a few months out of the year. You said you don't have to do real estate if you don't want to.

You never have to do real estate if you don't want to. But renting out a room while you're traveling or, you know, otherwise covering some expenses so that you can have a more robust yet still lean-fi lifestyle. I think it comes down to creativity. But yeah, this is the frugal phi. Yeah. And I also think that, you know, there's a little bit of a timeline or sliding scale here. And I think many whose goal starts out as lean fi, like, for example, myself, maybe Mindy you're in this camp as well.

I don't know. But, you know, you start out with this goal. This is the goal. And you achieve it. And it is freeing. You now really do have all these options in life. And you can live this lifestyle. And you can choose to work on one of the.

larger fire numbers under much more agreeable circumstances, either with a job with much more pay or something with much more flexibility or you can begin a business. This is when you really get to have that control over your life. If you're able to keep your expenses low enough during the journey to fire, where you can live on a lean-fi item, it's fine to get here, declare and have that freedom, and then continue building on top of that to layer in the lifestyle that you really want, which may be at the upper end's there. So I wonder if that's where some of the folks who say, I want Leanfire, maybe what they mean is I want that freedom and that's my goal.

But I am also going to continue to upon myself after that because that's not really the total end destination. It's just the beginning of the end where I will begin to exert my freedom and say no to work that I don't like. And yes, too, the things that I do like, even if that comes at the expense of base salary, for example. Yeah, I think LeanFi can open up the doors to sabbaticals and new work opportunities that are potentially high risk, high reward with like a startup

or even just leaving that job that you hate that got you typing onto Google anyway. How do I quit my job early? So LeanFi gives you, it opens up a lot of options. Okay, this will be our final ad break and we'll be right back after this. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going, and more importantly, where your taxed refund can make the biggest impact. Because the

goal isn't just to look backward, it's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, including budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware, and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with the code Pockets. What I personally like is that Monarch keeps you focused on achieving,

not just tracking. You can see your budgets, debt payoff, savings goals, and net worth all in one place. So every decision actually moves in Edle. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all in one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code Pockets at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50%

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Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. Up next, Scott, because we're doing this in order of like how much money you need, we've got traditional fire in the order, but we've already decided. that because I think it's a great to, I thought it was great to give a baseline for where we were starting. So again, this is a one to two million dollar net worth spending between $40 and $120,000. So let's move on to the next one, Chubby Fire. I don't know why this makes me laugh so much,

but it does. The portfolio that you have is two and a half to six million. I think six million might be squeaking into fat-fi territory. Yeah, I had a really hard time pig in that number, right? These are not like, like, there's no like, oh, there's a clear cutoff here. It's just that some people say that fatfire begins at seven and a half million, and some people say it begins at five. So I called it six to be in the middle there. So this, you know, if you have a problem with that, you can email, Mindy has the email address

actually. It's called I don't care at go bother somebody else.com. And you can quibble with the exact cutoff. for chubby and fat fire chubby the answer is chubby fire generates an upper middle class lifestyle this is somebody who can live in a nice home in a nice part of town that has really good schools maybe even send a kid to private school this is somebody who can afford to take pretty reasonable upscale vacations maybe even travel the occasional trip first class and has no trouble funding kids college accounts, those types of things. But this is not somebody who is, you know, driving a $100,000 sports

car or is comfortable driving a, driving $100,000 sports car. This is not somebody who's flying private. This is not somebody who is frequently traveling first class. This is not somebody who's eating out at Michigan, Michelin Star restaurants. This is an upper middle class lifestyle, and there's a good trappings that come with it, but this is not an ultra lavish, you know, elite lifestyle that I think that the fat fire term better signifies. Yeah, you're spending, between $100,000 and $240,000 a year. So you're not saying no to a lot of stuff, but you're not saying yes to everything yet. So a couple of distinctions here. This is going to take most people at least 10 to 20 years. Typically, this is going to be, the folks who achieve this are going to

have a very ultra high income, especially towards the back part of the journey, the end part of the journey here. Or they're going to be a business owner and selling or building. a pretty large business here. These are folks that are probably going to be touching or grazing the top 1% in terms of income generation, at least for portions of their career. And this is going to take a while even with that level of diligence here. I think that the pros are you can really live a good lifestyle here. You can live a lifestyle of someone who's climbed the corporate ladder or is that, you know, as an executive or expert in their field. But it's also not so far out of reach that it's unattainable, but for all but the truly elite, you know,

superstars of the business and entertainment world, for example. The cons are, this is, this is really unattainable for those without a high, super high income or those willing to basically dedicate the entirety of their adult lives to the accumulation of wealth and and controlled spending. It will still require folks in this, in this category, to be reasonably disciplined with their saving and to control their costs to some degree. They're There is a budget that is going to be required for someone in this category to control their lifestyle expenses. And I think that that's pretty much the overview of chubby fire here. I think this is increasingly, there's a swelling trend in the bigger pockets money community to this level of wealth,

a portfolio in this range in this probably two and a half to six million dollar range. I imagine that an increasing number of folks, this will be the most. popular range within the next two years, I believe, in our community. Yeah, I think that's fair to state, followed very closely by traditional fire. Mindy, what do we got after Chubby Fy here? We have Fat FIRE. This is not a state of body, but a state of your bank account. We are starting fat FI at about $6 million in net worth. This supports annual spending easily in the 300,000-plus range and you are upper middle class or even what's after middle class upper class upper class upper class your upper middle class or upper class you're you're part of the absolute elite

in America top 1% in terms of wealth almost certainly in your age bracket if you attain anything close to fat fire in your lifetime the timeline for this one can be quite a while depending on what sort of income you have. And I do want to encourage people who are like, yeah, I want $6 million. Is that a realistic goal with your income? If you have fatfire goals or if $6 million is a fairly easily attainable goal, then you are looking at an income of $2,000 to $500,000. You are a business owner or a doctor or an attorney or somebody who's just making a lot of money and not spending all of it. You are getting really great investment returns.

Now, I find myself in the Fat Fire category, not because that was what my goal was, but because Carl and I saved and he retired and I kept working, and I continued to generate income to cover our expenses and more that we could put towards more retirement savings. So we continued to save and invest even after we reached FI. And we did some risky isn't the right word. Well, it's kind of the right word. Some non-traditional investments that really boosted our portfolio.

The pros of this is that you are really able to spend almost as much as you want. You don't really have to look into your budget very much. You just have to kind of keep an eye on the spending like, oh, it's, It's June and we already spent $200,000. I guess we only have $100,000 for the last six months of the year. Or recognize, yeah, I'm spending a lot this year and next year maybe we'll just pull it back a little bit. Or keep spending because you've got so much money and it doesn't matter.

You can buy that second home that you don't necessarily have to rent out. You can have that dream car, that 1987 Toyota MR2 that is your dream car or, you know, a nicer one. You can drive a Maybach. What are some other nice ones? Scott. I'm not really a car guy, so I have my 10th, I'm thrilled with it. And I'm like, this is the fanciest thing ever since I drove a

Corolla for 10 years prior to that. It is a really fancy car. You can travel almost whenever you want, go wherever you want, sit in the first class seats. Don't even bat an eye at buying business class seats on those longer flights.

Stay in the nicer hotels. No more Motel 6 for you. You can upgrade to the Hampton or beyond. You can really just live the life that you want almost with no regard to how much it costs. The cons, of course, are you are acquiring millions of dollars before you retire, and that requires a high income. So if you don't have a high, a super high income, this is probably not going to be attainable

unless you're going to continue to work past traditional phi number, your chubby fine number. Honestly, I don't think this is going to be attainable for much of the population simply because spending is preventing you. Your day-to-day spending prevents you from saving enough to achieve fat fire. I think that's a really interesting point around your spending is going to make it hard to attain fat fire because what I think, I think there's like two types of fat fire that people don't really break apart in their minds when they think about this part of the community. right. One is this person who's living this very lavish lifestyle and spending $300,000 per year, $25,000 a month, really doing high-end vacations, driving fancy cars, living fancy neighborhoods, eating out a ton, those kinds of things. And then there's the person who has $6 to $10 million, but only spends $80,000 to $120,000 a year, spends like the other five categories. And it's just that

their portfolio ran away over the last 10 years. And you're in that category, Mindy. Would you, would you agree? I would absolutely agree. Yeah. And I spend, I'm also in this category, but I spend, I spend more than you, but I don't spend like this, like, within close to this level on an annualized basis. You know, I, you know, I'm probably getting up there, you know, getting up there with the two kids in daycare at this point in my life. But I'm not, I'm not in this ballpark. I think that those are their two distinctions to me, right? If you want to spend 300,000, thousand dollars a year all the way through achievement and past fat fire, you're probably going to be somebody who is absolutely elite in your field, an athlete, an entertainer, a rock star, an executive,

somebody in private equity or in Wall Street, somebody who builds or joins a business early in the trajectory that just absolutely explodes. But many people, I think, in the fire community, will be in this category. And it wasn't even their goal. They just, hey, well, you know, I fired with two and a half million, made some part-time income. That covered my expenses. And then the last 10 years been pretty good. So now I got $6 million. I think that's a good point, Scott. I think people will find themselves sliding into Chubby and Fat Fai, even though that wasn't their goal, simply because they are saving too much money. They are, you know, one more year syndrome is a real thing. And I had it.

My husband had it. Everybody has it. Being able to leave and still trusting the math is a superpower in the Phi community. So I think you're right. I think a lot of people will see themselves sliding from lean to traditional, from traditional to chubby and from chubby to fat. Just how the market shakes out. So, you know, we say this will be unattainable for all but a tiny fraction of population early in life. but I imagine that a large percentage of the people who achieve fire will later in life

potentially find themselves in the fat fire territory because what gets you to these other versions of fire, frugality, excellent income generation capability, the ability to understand and manage investments, a very long-term outlook will likely by default in future decades continue to result in wealth, snowballing, and continuing to build. And so I wonder if a lot of folks in the community will be in this category, even if they never spend like they're in the fat fire. Without building a house, I would never spend in the fat fire territory. All right, Scott, I thought that was a very succinct wrap up of the different flavors of fie. Thank you for making that slide deck.

I think it's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. And shout out to Blake. I just put some notes in a piece of word document. And Blake, our producer, put together this beautiful deck. So thank you, Blake, for all you do for Bigger Pockets money.

Oh, well, yes. Let me rephrase. Thank you, Blake, for making this beautiful. This was a great slide deck. Yes, and agreed. Thank you for everything you do. Scott and I just talk. Blake makes all the magic happen. All right, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I am Minnie Jensen. He is Scott Trench. And behind the scenes is Blake's style the best. And we are saying, until next time, Lyme.