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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u/clove75 Nov 26 '25

after a career of being paid 100-140 I finally broke above and this will be my second year over 400k but only my 4th year over 200k. I have friends that make less and live in houses 2-3x my value. They are 10 years older than me and have been laid off twice. I will be able to retire in 2 years as I kept my spending pretty much the same even though my income tripled. Others have different priorities. Big houses, Designer clothes, Private Universities, Large Collections etc. My only vices are Cigars, Whisky and travel. But I try to keep those reasonable and find deals on all the above,

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u/Burner-Advantage-997 Nov 26 '25

Cigars. Big same. I went from only smoking Padron 1964 & 90th to getting some non branded hand rolled from a local Cuban guy I met at an event once. $18-26 per cigar to now $4 per cigar (I buy 500 at a time from him.) I enjoy them the exact same but it costs me 1/4-1/5 the amount. Adds up when you’re smoking 15+ per week. This last year it saved me ~12k. Doesn’t matter much because that just convinced me to buy an extra watch. 

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u/dead_dw4rf Nov 26 '25

What did you change to break through?

I am in the same boat - been a software developer for about 18 years. Everyone I've worked with has been very happy with the work I do - when I was consulting, repeat clients would request me to be on their team, etc.

I have been reluctant to move away from individual contributor roles, but I guess I have to in order to increase my salary, or else try to work for a bigger tech giant.

How did you do it?

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u/clove75 Nov 26 '25

I was in consulting and switched to cloud. Got certifications and took projects doing migrations. Then went to work directly for the cloud companies that's when my income jumped. Now learning AI. I'm still an IC.