What is the Fire movement (Financial Independence Retire Early)?

FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early), for the uninitiated, is a financial movement that revolves around extreme savings and worthwhile investments with an intent to retire early and live off small withdrawals from accumulated funds.

Once you achieve your FIRE target, the amount will be good enough to provide you with an inflation-adjusted income for your lifetime.

If you are figuring out how to retire early in India, read on.

FIRE is a concept that I heard of a few years ago. I remember being in awe of the people who implemented this concept to retire early at the time.

FIRE movement India has been popular, and in this post, I will highlight one of the FIRE movement examples I know of. If you are wondering how to retire at 40 in India, read on.

One of my friends who managed to do this is Suppu (name changed to protect identity). I had done a brief mail exchange with her a few years ago with the intention of publishing a blog around this, but then I got caught up in life’s other priorities and never did it.

I remembered this again last week and thought now would be a good time to do it, hence this post.

The concept originated in the 1992 best-selling book ‘Your Money or Your Life written’ by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez which became popular among millennials in the United States.

Check out Mr. Money Mustache blog – it is one of the credible sites that helped popularize the FIRE movement. That site also has a FIRE retire early calculator. (If you know of a FIRE retire early calculator in India, please drop a comment.)

I emailed Suppu a few basic questions, to which she responded. I am reproducing them below with the hope that this would be useful for all:

[Begin Q&A with Suppu]

Q: When did you decide to plan for early retirement, and why?

A: Left to me, I would have continued working, but my husband always had this idea of retiring early. Even though I loved my work, I was not very career oriented. My husband convinced me about the advantages of FIRE and early retirement. We both wanted to travel more, spend time together, and do stuff that was more meaningful than working in the corporate world.

Q: Once you decided, how did you set your financial targets?

A: Our target was to create a corpus such that 4% of the corpus would be our annual expenses.

[Refer to this link to understand more about the 4% rule: https://www.fool.com/retirement/strategies/withdrawal/4-percent-rule/#:~:text=It%20states%20that%20you%20can,for%20at%20least%2030%20years.]

Q: Did you have to reduce your lifestyle to save more?

A: No, we didn’t have to cut back. We managed to save while keeping the same lifestyle as earlier. But this may need to be worked out differently for different people.

Q: Once you retire, what do you do/ plan to do with all the time you have?

A: I can now read 5-6 times the number of books I used to read earlier. I am into birding and bird photography. I end up travelling quite a lot for the same. My husband manages our finances, advises a few others on their portfolio, grows vegetables, does a lot of gardening and watches a lot of movies. In short, we can pursue what we want with our time.

Q: What should people in our age group (in their mid-forties) do now to implement something similar?

In our age range, people may have already missed the bus. But to take control of one’s finances, reduce unwanted expenses and find ways to invest better are some things people could do.

[End Q&A with Suppu]

Interesting, is it not? If this article has piqued your curiosity about FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early), my objective has been met. Search on the web, and you will find articles about where this has worked, where not, and considerations to be followed.

And yes, if you are someone who has managed to gain control over your time using FIRE, I would love to talk to you. Please leave a comment here, and I will get in touch.

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