The Daily - How to Retire as Early as Humanly Possible

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Many Americans work their entire lives and end up retiring with nothing. But a group of frugal obsessives is challenging that.They call their approach FIRE: “financial independence, retire early.”Amy X. Wang, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times Magazine, looks at the people behind this growing movement and their bid to rethink how long we work.Guest: Amy X. Wang, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times Magazine. Background reading: Allen Wong is one of the FIRE adherents who always knew how he wanted to live life. After decades of tolerating workaholic culture as the norm, employees are tired and unafraid to show it.FIRE started in the early 2000s with a mantra of extreme saving, but the pandemic forged new followers.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Many Americans work their entire lives and retire with nothing. But a group of frugal obsessives is trying to flip that script. Today, my colleague Amy X. Wong, on the people behind this growing movement and their bold bid to rethink how long we work. It's Friday, June 14th. So Amy, you've been exploring this world of people who retire early. Tell me about that.

How did you first discover this movement? Well, I had always been, as a child, like preternaturally obsessed with money. And so I was constantly looking for coupons and blogs about how to stretch a dollar, how to invest smartly, things like that. and blogs about how to stretch a dollar, how to invest smartly, things like that. And as part of that, I would read these news stories about people who were saving or making money in a different way. So I came across maybe one or two stories 10 or 15 years ago about people who were following something called FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early. Financial Independence Retire Early. Exactly. So what is that? It's really about

strategizing to leave the workforce at an age of your own choosing. So say you plan to retire at 45 instead of 65, or there are even people who do it at 35. So it's about freedom from work and having the time to yourself. Got it. So it's less about actually kind of retirement and retirement age and more about work and freedom from it. Right, right So it's less about actually kind of retirement and retirement age and more about work and freedom from it. Right, right. It's a philosophical movement that's kind of wrapped in a bunch of financial and economic logistics. And were these just kind of different people from different walks of life? Like who were they? Yeah, I would have thought that it was people who are mostly high earners like bankers or surgeons or people who had the means to squirrel

away a lot of money. Right, exactly. But in fact, I found that or surgeons or people who had the means to squirrel away a lot of money right exactly but in fact i found that the range of people who are planning for early retirement really spans the gamut from that kind of surgeon upper middle class to the lower middle class to even people who are on minimum wage you know making like 35 000 and still being able to retire early so it was fascinating to discover all these different kind of fire people. Okay, so it's a new philosophy around work and, you know, the idea that it shouldn't be taking up so much of our lives, so much space in our lives. How did you start reporting on this? I had always been keeping an eye on fire, but I noticed that in the pandemic, it really, really took off and more and more people were joining forums. There are half a million followers in the FIRE subreddit and the Financial Independence subreddit is actually two million followers. And then you have all of these Facebook groups, all of these, you know, Twitter little enclaves and influencers on Instagram. And this whole ecosystem on social media is just millions and

millions of people that is very, very active. And I wanted to know, are these real people who are actually doing this, who are actually retiring early? Hey, Alan. Hello. Can you guys hear me? And I found someone who is really involved in the movement. Yeah. Can you just start with some basics of telling me your name and who you are? Yeah. Can you just start with some basics of telling me your name and who you are? Sure. Yeah. My name is Alan Wong. I'm in my mid-30s and I've been retired since I was 25.

His name is Alan Wong. He's one of the moderators and one of the biggest FIRE subreddits. He has retired and he's spent the last decade or so essentially coaching other people on how to fire in his way and sharing details of his story. So tell me about Alan. Can you take us back to your childhood and where you grew up? When I was growing up, I didn't really see much of my father. see much of my father. Alan grew up in New York City, in Queens, and he watched his immigrant parents essentially scrimp and save to give

them a better life. Even my father, he originally didn't even finish high school. They're from rural villages in China, and his dad in particular had a really hard life. He was like an orphan. His father had many kids and he couldn't afford to keep all the kids.

So he just like gave them up. So he ended up working in like a farm that was like run by the government in China. And he did not like that. He didn't want to spend his entire life working in a farm. And his dad at one point actually just so desperately wanted to flee his circumstances that he escaped from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. So he legally swam to Hong Kong. By crossing the river illegally because it was an international border. And then from there was able to buy a plane ticket to New York City. And eventually he started life in Chinatown. Started his life over and like

escaped the trappings of poverty from where he was from. Amazing. If there's someone that I would say I look up to, it would probably be my father because he wanted to do anything possible to make sure that I had a good life. Like I wasn't even born yet, but he wanted to make sure that his kids had a good life. That's why he swam to Hong Kong. That's why he moved to New York and all this stuff. It wasn't for himself. So Alan, you know, grows up with this in mind, right? His father has done all these extraordinary things to like wrench the family, an entire ocean away, plant them in a different sphere and try and start again in a more lucrative, like chasing the American dream way. He's like the type that really, really works very hard.

His father is going to work. He sells medicinal herbs in Chinatown. He's going to work every day, dawn to dusk. I never really saw him. You know, like he would work from the morning. So I would go to school and, sorry, this is, I'm sorry. Um, he would go to work in the morning and I would go to school. And when I come back from school, I still would not see him because he doesn't get off work until 9pm. So by the time he actually gets back home, I'm already like ready to go sleep and stuff like that. he actually gets back home, I'm already like ready to go sleep and stuff like that. His mother as well, she would also come home exhausted from manual labor. He was a kid growing up essentially kind of on his own in New York City and seeing how tired work made his parents.

I felt that I didn't want to have a life like that. Like I understand the hustle. I understand trying to make as much money as possible for your family. But I also believe that if you make so much money, but you're not happy, you know, you're not with your family, then what is the point of making so much money? And then when he went to college, actually, his father was ousted from his business and it really drove him into this spiral. And it really drove him into this spiral. And so when he got fired, he spiraled into this major depression. And he went to see therapists and they gave him Prozac and stuff. But it wasn't really working.

And Alan told me that his father actually committed suicide because of this. So that was really hard on me because I thought, like, you're supposed to work really hard and then be able to retire. And then, you know, when you retire, you're, like, happy. But that wasn't the case for him. In the end, he ended up being this really depressed, like, husk of a person. And I just vowed to not end up like that. So he's in New York City trying to work his first entry-level job. I believe he was coding for a tech company.

And his mother, because of everything going on, started having psychotic episodes. So he had to figure out how he could possibly take care of his mom. And that's when I discovered creating apps. So he resolved to get out of the situation. And the app store was kind of just coming up, so he was like, why don't I just take a moonshot and make something, and it's going to take off,

and I'm going to get my family out of this situation. So yeah, so I spent all of my free time, every possible free hour I had, I would just try to learn and code new apps. So he very resolutely, essentially started coding around the clock. He was working his job. He would come home and in the evenings, on the weekends.

Well, these apps don't exist anymore, but I made one. You just code away at different projects. Like a news app. So he had a couple that. Like a dog whistle or something like that. Didn't take off. It allowed you to like scroll the website by just tilting your phone.

That were kind of duds, as he told me. Just really like gimmicky kind of apps like that. And so the police scanner idea. And then he made this one app that was a police scanner. So it lets you tune into police radios around the world. And it proved really, really useful. I kept refreshing the app store to see where it was going. You know, like, is it higher now? Is it higher now?

And I just kept watching it and watching it. So Alan got so many downloads of his police scanner app and there was all this advertising revenue and subscription revenue coming in that at one point he was pulling in $350,000 per month. Oh my god. Like life-changing money. Life-changing money, exactly. And he started thinking, you know, this is it, right? Like I've done it. I have done the thing that I set out to do. I can take care of my mom. I can hire people to help her. I can buy her a house, that kind of thing. So Alan told me that he had been thinking about his, you know, like, rich person ideal purchase for a while. Like, what would he buy if he suddenly struck it rich?

I think people might hate me for saying it, but it was a bright lime green Lamborghini that I bought. This shimmery Lamborghini. I was in my early 20s at the time, too. It's like a trophy, right? Like, this is my thing. I'm rich now. Yes, exactly. He's putting down a mark. Exactly. The reason why I bought that is because I felt like I needed some reward for what I did. You know, like I called it my fortress of solitude because it allowed me to kind of

insulate myself from all the bad stuff that was going on in my life for a while, just to be in the car for a little bit to kind of like enjoy the moment. And then he thought, what do I do about work? Like, what do I do about my job that I'm still clocking in and out of, my nine to five job, right? And it didn't really make sense for him to stay at work after all of that. Right. I mean, he doesn't effectively need to work, right? I mean, $350,000 a month is a lot as we've established. So what does he do? So I just had to quit. So Alan quit his job forever because he could, right? He was a multimillionaire at the age of 25, which is a decision that most of us would not even dream about making. And the reason why I quit, I was always worried about my mother. I knew that she couldn't really

take care of herself that much. So I need to physically be at home. And I knew that if I just kept working, I can't do that. So Alan retired at 25, which was about a decade ago. He's been taking care of his mom ever since. She's doing a lot better now, and he has really settled into his own retirement. He lives in Florida, the land of retirees. He plays pickleball all day long. He owns a huge lavish home filled with video games and trinkets galore, and he bought a second Lamborghini. He's really achieved this childhood dream life. So we're talking in the context of this fire movement. Alan's story is really interesting and seems to kind of show that he achieved the FIRE movement's objectives.

But did he understand that he had? What is his connection to the movement? Alan essentially achieved FIRE on his own without knowing that he'd achieved FIRE. He had done it. He had achieved financial independence. He had retired early. So as part of that, he began spending a lot of time online, kind of just browsing or finding opportunities to chat with people. And somebody on a Reddit forum, it was not even a FIRE forum, it was like a random entrepreneurship forum, asked him a question that was something like, what's it like to be rich? And he said he wrote out this essay of a comment, expecting no one would read it except for this one guy who would ask the question. And the comment went viral. And then all these people reached out to him on Reddit and said, you should join these FIRE subreddits. You would be great here. And people would really love your mentorship and your insights. And that's how Alan Wong found himself kind of embraced by all these FIRE people. And he virtually looked around and he said,

wow, these are my people. These are the people who I've always been waiting for. These are the friends that I never knew that I wanted. So Amy, this is absolutely fascinating, Alan's story. But it does strike me as pretty unique. I mean, here's a guy who kind of struck it rich with this app. But I have to imagine most people are not in his camp. So is this replicable?

You're absolutely right. Alan's story is incredibly rare. It's really, really tough to make a best-selling app and suddenly launch yourself into multimillionaire territory. I decided I was going to win the lottery, and I did. For those who are listening to this thinking of it, sorry to dash your dreams, but it's really, really tough. And so Alan almost got to FIRE as a fluke, right? Like,

this is not the kind of thing you can plan for. Actually, the majority of people in the FIRE movement are planning, but they're doing it in a very, very different way. It's about the nitty gritty of personal finance. It's about strategizing the numbers that make sense for you. And this goes back, actually, to the origin of the FIRE movement. The FIRE movement began in the early 2000s not as anything about getting rich. It was about anti-consumerism. It was about not spending money because you didn't want to spend money. It was about reducing your footprint on the planet, about being a sort of ethical, responsible human being.

And that was how FIRE really began. People were like, I don't want to work anymore because I don't want to be beholden to this system. I don't want a paycheck. I just want to figure out enough money for myself so that I can retire and leave this system system, like unplug. A lot of people talked about taking the red pill and stepping out of the matrix. So it was freedom from work, but also kind of an ethos and a philosophy of living light and not buying stuff and just having kind of freedom from, you know, the consumerist world. Exactly. You could get by living off a can of beans, so why bother paying for the Michelin star meal, you know? So that sounds very, very different from what Alan did.

It absolutely is completely different. And in fact, the fire movement has grown so big and so diverse that there are essentially splinterings within the community of different ways people are approaching fire. So the traditional route that we were just talking about, the anti-consumerism, the whole ethics of it, is now known as lean fire. And that stands in opposition to what Alan is, which is fat fire. Stands to reason. Yeah, so it's kind of self-explanatory, lean fire and fat fire. You have one camp that's all about like minimalist, cutting it down to the bone, being happy with where you are, and fat fire, which is all about like blowing that all up, getting as rich as possible, having your cake and eating it too, being able to retire, but doing it in the lap of luxury.

But how does the mainstream of the fire movement, I mean, not the Allens, but everybody else, how do they actually do it? I mean, how do you retire at 30 if you don't make a best-selling app? So the great trick of FIRE is planning. And that sounds really silly, but that's how people get there. A lot of things that the FIRE people recommend are actually things that financially savvy people are doing already, like maxing out your 401k, investing in index funds. The real fundamental difference between that and what the FIRE people are doing, though, is the amount and the kind of aggressiveness that you're pursuing it with. So the average person is putting in 10 to 20% of their paycheck into these instruments like 401ks. What the FIRE people recommend is 50 to 70% of your paycheck. 70% of your paycheck. 70% of your paycheck. And of course, you don't have to do it that way. You don't have to live off of only 30% of your income. But the idea is if you do that,

you'll get there faster, right? So it's kind of about a personal trade your income. But the idea is if you do that, then you'll get there faster, right? So it's kind of about a personal trade-off. Like say you don't want to be living so frugally and you'd rather enjoy yourself a little bit more, then you can save, let's say, 50%. And it would just take you a little bit longer to get to retirement. The idea of FIRE is calculating first the amount that you'll need. Start with the age that you want to retire and then work backwards from there to determine how aggressive you need to be about saving. So Amy, this is kind of baffling because I guess I'm thinking, you know, regular American household barely has enough to pay the bills, pay the rent and everything. How are they saving 70% of their paycheck? I had the exact same question.

I kept thinking, there has to be something else. There has to be a secret behind the secret. I'm missing something. It can't just be saving money in this ferocious way. Like, who can do that? You have to be a surgeon, a top-tier lawyer, that kind of person, to be able to afford to save this much money. So I realized that to understand whether fire can really work for everyone, I needed to

look for some everyday people who had actually managed to pull this off. We'll be right back. So, Amy, you said you set out to find ordinary people who had done fire. How did you start that? Where'd you go? I went and found the biggest fire conference in the country. It's something called Econome, E-con-o-N-O-M-E, I get the pun. Okay.

And it is the largest gathering of fire people on an annual basis. I believe this is its third or fourth year of people who have either made it already into early retirement or are close or maybe just are stepping their toes in. Okay, so describe the scene. You go to this economy conference. What does it look like? Who's there? I was expecting either a crowd of retired millionaires or a crowd of like really young people who were just graduating from college and frustrated.

But it was a huge, huge diverse mix. There were millennials, there were the retirees and the people who had made it, who were kind of just there sitting back being like, let me show you the way. But there were also all of these pretty everyday people. There were people who worked on cruises, there were public school teachers, off-Broadway actors, dentists, plumbers, all sorts of people of different ages, too, who had flown from different parts of the country and even the world to come here to be with other people who were like-minded. And what was the vibe like? Like, what was it like sitting in the room and listening to people? It was kind of like being in a secret lair of some sort

or like underground world in which things were topsy-turvy and it was not the status quo that was the case above ground. What I mean by that is everyone talked openly about money and their money. They would share with each other how much money they had in their bank accounts or what their salary was, the raise they had gotten last year, the number of figures of debt they were in. Like, oh, I'm in five-figure debt. I have a million dollars in debt. Okay. That is topsy-turvy. Right. They would say this openly. And it was like an embrace of money that is so, so

oppositional to what we normally have in Western society, right? That it was really, really odd and culture-shocky. But at the end of it, I was like, I want this to be the default of the, I want to go around sharing my net worth and my student debt and all of this with other people, and I want them to share it back with me. So Amy, who did you meet? Bring us into the room with you. Tell me about the people you met. A couple of people really stood out to me. There were some people who had discovered FIRE young. Is this your first time here?

No, right? You've been here for years. This is my third economy. It's probably like my 20th, 5th. Gwen Merz discovered FIRE when she was in her early 20s. And she grew up, similar to what we're talking about with Alan, in a kind of financially stressful situation. So I grew up, like, really poor. We were living way below the federal poverty line.

And so, like, we never had money. And I was like, I want money so I can have things and, like, say yes to things and, like, not have to be, like, bullied because I don't have the right clothes. I wanted to just not stick out because we didn't have money. So she always had this message that she wanted money for herself so that she could be happy and live freely and not be judged. Do you remember the website StumbleUpon? Yeah, RIP. I know, right? I put in personal finance as one of my interests,

and I was like, you're telling me that all I have to do is follow these easy steps, these simple steps, maybe not so easy for some people, and I'll be able to quit working early and I'll have lots of money, like, sign me up. Yeah, yeah. And she embarked on a journey when she was in her early 20s, and she's now at the point where she could quit her job if she wanted to, or she could keep going, and she hasn't really decided yet. When I started out, I had $10,000 in the bank,

and people were like, yeah, what do you know, you're 22, right? Now I'm 33, I have half a million dollar net worth, and people are like, oh, actually, wow, you've done a lot in 10 years. Like, maybe there's something to this. There were other people I met who were older, actually, and just discovering FIRE. I've been an actor since I was 15 years old. I'm 48 now. For instance, I met one woman who goes by the name Essence Revealed, who was actually an actor her entire life,

and she told me she never really thought about retirement. Acting is not like, you know, being a ballet dancer or a football player or something where your body's like, we can't do this anymore. You know, I can pretty much act until I die. She knew about FIRE, but it seemed completely out of the realm of possibility for her. But then when the pandemic happened, all of the things that I did for money were gone. And so I just ended up unemployed. But when the pandemic hit, she had this realization that she needed to have a financial plan of some sort.

She couldn't just rely on paychecks. So she read more about FIRE. She learned about investing. And then she decided to completely upend her life, and she became a truck driver. A truck driver. Right. I had actually called my godbrother to borrow a month's rent. And he's like, have you ever thought about driving a truck?

And I said said absolutely not. She heard about trucking as a job from someone she knew and she thought you know it doesn't sound like such a bad gig. I can live in a truck, have money to save and see the country at the same time. So in the back I have like a bed, I have a microwave, I have a plug-in griddle and an instant pot. And there's cabinets for clothes and things. Very small, but... It's a whole New York City apartment. I was just about to say, but I've been living in a New York City studio. So she did it. She lived in an 18-wheeler truck that was also her job, driving around the country,

which was, of course, a little tight, but she quickly went from saving very little money to saving 70% of her paycheck every single week. So then I was like, now I think I can do this fire thing. I haven't actually sat down and done the math. Like, times how many years will I actually get there? But I feel like I can get there. Okay, so you were actually finding normal, not fabulously wealthy people that were doing fire, saving really aggressively. And according to them, it's working. This is real for the people you were talking to.

It is real. It is very, very real. Which, Amy, leads to my next question, which is once a person does achieve fire, you know, managed to retire at 40 years old or even at 30 years old for that matter, what do you do with the rest of your life? Yeah, it's unimaginable for many people. And so many people don't think about it. But when you do FIRE, you have to think about it. And you often don't have a grand plan. The first few years of retirement were actually really hard for me because I really didn't know what to do afterwards. Alan, Alan Wong, who we were just talking about,

went through this himself. It was as if like I finished a movie really quickly and everyone else was still watching that movie. You know, it's like I'm like already watching the end credits and everyone's still like on the first act. He had a period of many years of kind of soul searching. I traveled the world and I tried to do every possible fun thing

I could do to see if maybe that would make me happy. He had his YouTube account where he was showing off his car. That didn't really make him happy. He bought all these things

that didn't really make him happy. So I started volunteering and helping people that are less fortunate. And I felt better. I felt like I wasn't just moping around in life. What he found was he really liked giving back and kind of establishing relationships. I was used to it. I was used to taking care of my mother and helping her. But I realized that I had a skill set to help others as well, besides my own family. And then, of course, he spends a huge amount of his time being the moderator of the Fatfire

subreddit, which is where I found him, actually, and how I came across him, because he posts there all the time. But Alan, after all these years of soul-searching, realized that what he was really after, too, was not just the question of what makes me happy but who am I without work and that's such a resonant question for all of us who are we all without work how does he answer it people keep trying to ask me like what I do because they want to know who I am what I'm like stuff like that. And I don't even know myself because I don't really have an identity, I don't think. And I'm okay with that.

He was telling me that he doesn't really have an identity and he's working towards being proud of that. He's rebelling against the idea that you have to be one thing. You have to be a noun or two nouns or different things that you do and he is almost kind of defiantly saying he's nothing he's not any of these things he doesn't want to be i thought that was really interesting because a lot of other people in the fire movement also feel this way too when they retire like they don't want to define themselves. And the whole idea is very subversive, right?

Like the overarching credo of FIRE is that you don't belong to work. You belong to yourself. So you don't need work to define yourself. You're not a former software engineer who is now a gardener or whatever it is. You're just you. You're a good person who has interests and relationships and is beloved and loves. I don't believe that I need to have any identity. I don't need to be known for anything. I don't feel like one thing should describe a person. I feel like

they're made up of all their actions, not just one thing that they do. So, Amy, I'm curious what you make of the fact that fire is really kind of surging now. Why now? Why this timing? Well, I think fundamentally, we're just in a completely different world. We're in a different era and a different world to what our parents grew up in. There is very little job security out there in the way that there used to be. You know, it was very straightforward. You graduated college, you got a job, you stayed in it for like 40 plus years, gold watch at the end,

big retirement party, great pension, retirement, like done deal, like a very straightforward way of living. And now all of that is just blown completely up. We're in this time of economic unknown and the cards are so stacked against people. It's so difficult for millennials to even comprehend buying a house the way that the boomer parents did, right, as one example, that you just can't plan for this sort of thing. So people are detaching from it. They're like leaving this vision and stepping out of themselves and saying, wait a minute, there has to be an alternative. And what FIRE really provides is not necessarily a straightforward answer. It's not like a just take this instead kind of alternative. It's more like a fill in the blank like question mark that allows people to figure it out themselves. It's like here's an alternative path. Take it, see where it leads you and figure out maybe if you might find your way to a different kind of American dream. People are searching and this is helping them provide some answers.

It's giving them the agency to take back control. It's giving them the kind of empowerment, the way that like a support group would to tell people it's okay to think differently. Like try to think out of the box. Actually, thinking out of the box is the whole idea of FIRE. It's being subversive, being a little cheeky about it and saying, I don't want to do things the way that the system does. I want to design my own version of a happy life. Amy, thank you very much. Thank you.

We'll be right back. to a widely available abortion pill, rejecting a bid from anti-abortion organizations to restrict the pill because they lacked the right to sue. The ruling on the drug, mifepristone, was unanimous. The justices sidestepped the questions of safety and morality and focused entirely on the issue of standing, the doctrine that requires plaintiffs to show that they have suffered direct and concrete injuries in order to bring their complaint to court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the decision that the doctors and the organizations who brought the suit

had not suffered those injuries and thus had no grounds to sue. And at a meeting in Italy, the G7, the West's seven largest economic powers, agreed to give Ukraine a $50 billion loan to help it in its war against Russia. The loan will be repaid from interest earned on Russian assets that were frozen in European banks when Russia invaded Ukraine. Western countries have debated what to do with the approximately $300 billion in Russian assets, asking in particular whether they could legally turn those assets over to the government of Ukraine. The move on Thursday represented a compromise. A quick reminder to catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow.

This week, David Marchese speaks with Serena Williams about life after tennis. That had been my life for over 40 years. And so it was like, you don't go from literally a 40-year career to just going, okay, what do you do today? Nothing. to just going, okay, what do you do today? Nothing. Tame's original music by Diane Wong, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Alicia Baitu, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.