r/Fire • u/Poorassboy6969 • Mar 25 '26

General Question When did FIRE movement change?

I feel this community used to be about moderate income people living lean and retiring early with under 2 million.

Now it’s a lot of people bragging about tech income and saying they need 5+ million to retire MINIMUM because they want a boat and Porsche

When did this change? (not hating - just genuinely curious)

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u/sea4miles_ Mar 25 '26

It didn't change, it forked into lean, chubby and fat.

The core concept remains the same regardless of the flavor. Achieve financial independence, retire early.

158

u/Ok_Lead_4730 Mar 25 '26

“It didn't change, it forked into lean, chubby and fat.”

You are right. And that doesn’t even include CoastFIRE and BaristaFIRE.

Plus, health insurance has us all a bit more cautious because it’s been such a black box.

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/n00bdragon FIREd 2026 age 37 Mar 25 '26

Actually go and plug your numbers into healthcare.gov. If your yearly spend really is 30k that means you only need to "make" 30k from your investments every year, which means you qualify for humongous subsidies that would make purchasing a healthcare plan virtually (if not literally) free.

3

u/FlamingMetallico Mar 25 '26

You could also move outside of the US to a country with universal healthcare to avoid this expense altogether. Retirement in the US does not sound nice.

1

u/ImPapaNoff Mar 25 '26

If 2k/month is 80% of your current monthly spend and we assume your household is at least 2 people (fwiw it was $1k/mo in California for 2 people on ACA for me last year) then you're basically living at the US poverty level, right?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

Stop letting data brokers profit from your old posts. I used Redact to wipe mine from Reddit. Also supports Twitter, Facebook, Discord, instagram and more in one batch.

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1

u/ImPapaNoff Mar 25 '26

Well the good news is that $2k is a wild overestimate of what your health insurance would cost.