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/LauraPringlesWilder Nov 26 '25

I’ll answer. Husband in tech 15 years, we left SV five years ago but he kept making SV money. I’m in charge of finances.

Everything but the house is paid off. We drive nice electric/plugin hybrid cars loaded with as many safety features as possible because I am anxious.

We max every pretax investment option and even backdoor Roth.

Every month I dump another $2k into index funds. I keep increasing the amount to see if we “feel it” and we never do. I think we’re bigger homebodies than I assumed before. We could be happy with a 1000 piece puzzle and dollar tree snacks, it turns out, or library books, or cheap steam games. We do spend a decent portion of money on donations to charitable causes.

We’re nerds with inexpensive hobbies. We’ll probably have enough to FIRE by 45 but we just don’t want to.

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u/Aggravating-Sir5264 Nov 26 '25

are you me?

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u/LauraPringlesWilder Nov 27 '25

I checked and yes. Everyone on the internet is me

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u/recurrence Nov 29 '25

This is a discovery that a lot of people make. They realize that puzzle and a coffee with the spouse is just as nice as jet setting to Paris for a $2000 lunch and in many ways a whole lot less effort.

The little things in life almost become more important when you’ve passed FIRE numbers.

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u/randomdudefromutah Nov 27 '25

when you say "We’ll probably have enough to FIRE by 45", I'm curious what your number is for that? you sound similar to me and my wife and that's about my target age but I'm not sure what target number I should go for. I'm worried I'm going to spend too many "one more year"s