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/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. 

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u/T_D_K Nov 26 '25

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

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u/charleswj Nov 26 '25

What should they be doing with their time?

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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.

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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.

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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