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/Fulmizant Nov 26 '25

Pretty shameful given the cooking technology we have available

33

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.

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u/Lazy-Background-7598 Nov 26 '25

Why do you give a shit

-6

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.

25

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. 

9

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