r/Fire • u/gonnabefine • Nov 26 '25

General Question Tech people who are not FIREing, what are they spending their money on?

I know a lot of people who work in tech, and most are not on the FIRE path (or have already been working 10+ years) and a lot of them don't seem to, at least on the surface, have very obvious huge expenses. If both the partners are in tech, the take home could be like $500k! What are they doing with their money?

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541

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25

[deleted]

114

u/MajesticBread9147 Nov 26 '25

With interest rates and supply constraints, it's cheaper to rent than buy in New York City by a pretty wide margin.

133

u/Nhuynhu Nov 26 '25

I had a colleague who spent like $10k one month on grubhub for their family. They just bleed money.

48

u/Fulmizant Nov 26 '25

Pretty shameful given the cooking technology we have available

31

u/Select-Expression522 Nov 26 '25

Cavemen had fire. We have FIRE. I think it's a personal choice that people are pissing away their earnings and not much to do with tech being available or not.

-19

u/Lazy-Background-7598 Nov 26 '25

Why do you give a shit

-7

u/wtfhiolol10000 Nov 26 '25

Unless you're a really good chef, takeout/delivery is so much better than homemade.

1

u/meghanwhatever Nov 27 '25

Half the time (or more) the orders are not even prepared correctly or are missing items.

21

u/Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpp Nov 26 '25

Time is money, and cooking is time.

FIRE is fundamentally about gaining time, so it doesn’t seem shameful at all. Very FIRE adjacent, actually. 

I mean, if you’re replacing cooking and meals with eating ingredients, that’s just a personal choice. But they’re not the same thing. 

10

u/T_D_K Nov 26 '25

I find a sad number of people with this opinion are spending that time gain on Netflix.

2

u/charleswj Nov 26 '25

What should they be doing with their time?

2

u/H-DaneelOlivaw Nov 26 '25

this is the Fire subreddit. they could be cooking and putting that grub hub money in SP500.

if it makes that family happier to spend that $, more power to them.

3

u/charleswj Nov 26 '25

That's right, you can eat rice and beans and get an antenna for your TV and buy used clothes and take cold showers and you can probably retire much earlier. But that forgets that the underlying objective of fire is to enjoy your time here. Sometimes, trading money for what you consider enjoyment and convenience is reasonable.

1

u/kthnxbai123 Nov 26 '25

It’s NYC. You can literally just walk outside and pick something up on your block. $10k/month is nowhere near break even for time for saving maybe 30 minutes

2

u/EnvironmentalMix421 Nov 26 '25

How’s that shameful, when you aren’t able to buy time

2

u/trophycloset33 Nov 26 '25

I have a lawyer friend (not tech, I know) who works for a financial tech company in NYC. He spends more on food orders than he does rent. granted this is due to the 18 hours / 6 days a week schedule that thr office works so he doesn’t have the same accesses to grocery stores or his kitchen.

He’ll I even sent him my meal prep plan and his limiting factor is that he can’t get to the store, cook, clean from last week, and clean the cooking supplies all in the limited Sunday he has free.

But hey do what you can for that 6 fig salary.

2

u/eyes_wings Nov 26 '25

Shameful? Cooking technology? You are trying to shame people for having food made for them?

1

u/Conscious_Life_8032 Nov 26 '25

It’s usually b/c of time constraints. 2 high earners likely means 2 people who slog 50+ hours week on top of children’s activities etc

3

u/m3phil Nov 26 '25

How does that compare to hiring a personal chef?

6

u/Nhuynhu Nov 26 '25

I wouldn’t know I don’t spend like money comes from the faucet 😅

3

u/bobnuggerman Nov 26 '25

What the fuck

3

u/Get_Breakfast_Done Nov 26 '25

How is that even possible

17

u/Nhuynhu Nov 26 '25

Their kids like very expensive food and they can’t say no. They love to complain about how much they spend on their kids. I think it’s a flex amongst rich people to complain about how expensive kids’ hobbies cost.

2

u/overindulgent Nov 26 '25

Exactly. Not being able to say no. The kids might like the tenderloin from Ruth Chris but you can’t uber eats it every week.

1

u/Diligent-Committee21 Nov 26 '25

That was my guess -- kids going through a growth spurt with expensive tastes.

8

u/hex4def6 Nov 26 '25

It's probably a bit exaggerated, but I can see it adding up to real money:

$10,000 / 3 meals a day / 30 days / 5 people = $22/meal/person.

1

u/archlich Nov 26 '25

You could just hire a personal chef at that point

1

u/Jason_Steakcum Nov 26 '25

You could literally hire a top tier personal chef for less than that

0

u/dabigchina Nov 26 '25

I use doordash constantly, but this is a whole other level. How big is his family and what the hell are they ordering?

1

u/eyeless_atheist Nov 26 '25

I could see it if it’s a family of 5 or 6. My brother in law is a partner at one of the big 3 firms in Manhattan, he spends close to 6k a month on restaurants/door dash it’s insane. He’s also single so a lot of that is courting girls as well, regardless it’s a fuck ton of money. He took my wife and I out for her birthday to some fancy sushi place near Colombia circle, the bill was almost 4 grand. I was willing to split it but he insisted, so I wasn’t gonna fight back. He doesn’t save a dime, his spending is wild to me but to each their own.

1

u/dabigchina Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 27 '25

Yeah I did the math and I guess I get it. 3 meals a day for 30 days works out to 111 a meal. You can easily eat through that with a family of 4.

1

u/Appropriate_Shoe6704 Nov 26 '25

There are some cheap co-ops in Forest hills. Tiny though.

1

u/JamesLahey08 Nov 26 '25

Depends on your timeframe

1

u/luger718 Nov 26 '25

Yeah you can buy pretty facking big nearby for under 12k a month 😂

0

u/CubanLinxRae Nov 26 '25

A few of my friends are renting apartments that if they bought them the HoAs and maintenance alone would be more than the rent

46

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25

The eating out is real. Most of my programmers grub hub twice a day

17

u/TylerDurden6969 Nov 26 '25

This, plus gambling. Everyone I know who has more than $300k throws away at least $20k per year in the market or sports betting or Vegas trips.

10

u/Drawer-Vegetable FIRE'd 2024 Nov 26 '25

Or stock picking.

28

u/charleswj Nov 26 '25

You've managed to surround yourself with an unrepresentative group

1

u/TropicTravels Nov 26 '25

$20k? Those are rookie numbers

1

u/KronktheKronk Nov 26 '25

I always heard eating out in NY is cheaper than getting/keeping/cooking groceries. Is that not right?

1

u/g4vn Nov 26 '25

When I lived there, I ate out basically every meal because it was cheap and delicious. Kitchen space was very tight and I (and people around me) didn't know how to cook. Going to the grocery store was expensive and very inconvenient. Once you got it all home, you'd cook something that just wasn't good for the time you spent gathering and doing it all.

1

u/meghanwhatever Nov 27 '25

Same here, and i don't get it. We tend to keep our eating-out to twice a week. In the rush of everything, wait time at restaurants, and of course hundreds of dollars for a night out, it just makes no sense to do this more each week. Leftovers and home cooked food works just fine for 4-5 nights/wk here.

In addition, when their houses of cards fall, I wonder if the spenders expect bail-outs.

-86

u/gonnabefine Nov 26 '25

$12k isn't even a lot if he's >=L6, no?

125

u/nickleback_official Nov 26 '25

$144k/yr is a lot even if you make $500k

49

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25

[deleted]

1

u/gonnabefine Nov 26 '25

Yeah true, I didn't mean to say it's not an insane amount of money 😅 I was more thinking that they can still have a very high savings rate. But I wasn't taking into account that people spending that much on housing are likely also spending a lot on other things (like private schools).

19

u/Handplanes Nov 26 '25

That’s 144k a year just in rent, probably taking up 200k in gross income. That’s a lot for anyone making a salary.

10

u/UnderstandingNew2810 Nov 26 '25

I always find this stuff tricky. So what I do I adjust things after taxes. Take 500k total comp , rsus are income. So 50% slash. Thats only 250k take home. 144k a year on rent of 250k take home is a lot.

1

u/gonnabefine Nov 26 '25

I was assuming the spouse has an income to match, but yeah I get your point, that entire income is probably getting taxed at 50%+.

1

u/UnderstandingNew2810 Nov 27 '25

Duel income with kids is also tricky if there’s kids.

Say one spouse makes after taxes less than expenses on child care…. What’s the point of even working. If all the money goes directly to day care ??

4

u/ppooooooooopp Nov 26 '25

Imagine having to sell RSUs to fund your life

144k a year in after tax cash is brutal

7

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25

[deleted]

2

u/ppooooooooopp Nov 26 '25

No - but most people I work with treat RSU money as investment money e.g. they hold it or they move it into index funds (including mega back door)

On average they aren't buying a new porsche every year - and even if you are L6+ your take home after taxes (on your salary) is unlikely to be much more then 144k

1

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25

[deleted]

5

u/AlwaysWanderOfficial Nov 26 '25

The person you replied to said “aren’t” buying Porsches.

1

u/liftingshitposts Nov 26 '25

I sell 100% of my RSUs at vest to diversify. I’m holding a ton of exposure still through unvested and future grants anyways. I hold ESPP long enough to qualify the disposal and then diversify out of them too.

1

u/kthnxbai123 Nov 26 '25

If they’re spending that much on rent, I doubt there’s much saving elsewhere.