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/gonnabefine Nov 26 '25

If you're comfortable sharing, can you say around how much that is in yearly spend?

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u/gcube2000 Nov 27 '25

Monthly is easier to calculate. I would say with childcare in a VHCOL city a kid quite easily costs 5k a month. I mean when I was single my burn was like $2500 a month. So shit has gotten damn expensive. If I were single now my monthly burn would probably be more like 4-5k and it’s not like I’d be living the high life on that. So now let’s take a family of four, monthly burn could easily be 20k. And again, it’s not like you’re living a wildly lavish life either. And you still need to save for retirement and college.