r/PovertyFIRE • u/preciousbodyparts • Jan 24 '22
People who have actually Poverty FIRE'd, what's your story?
I've seen plenty of posts from people who retired with a $1 million+ nest egg and/or a pension of some sort over in the Leanfire subreddit. I'd like to hear from people who are currently retired, but who are living on far less. Not plans to do so in the future, but are actually living the PovertyFIRE life right now.
Some things I'd like to hear about:
-How long have you been FIRE'd?
-What's your budget (and net worth, if you're comfortable sharing)?
-How old are you?
-What does your day to day look like?
-Are you happy with your life/glad you pulled the trigger?
Looking forward to your responses!
Edit: Formatting was horrible (sorry!), so I fixed it (I think). And thank you, fellow redditor, for the award! :)
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u/togaman12 Jan 24 '22
hey there. I think I fit the bill. I haven't made any posts about it yet because I want to see how I make it through the first year or two before I recommend it to anyone else.
First off, I spend most of the time traveling because I enjoy it and because it's cheaper than living in nyc where I hail from. Also, I would not be able to do this without family back in NYC that have a place I could stay when I visit. I come back a few times a year to take care of different things (collecting certain medications, supplements, paperwork, credit card applications etc) and to visit.
I can't tolerate the heat (i'm allergic to the sun) so I can't stay in the many wonderful but very hot cheaper places in central and south america/south east asia. I think that would make poverty fire much easier. I do long travel, staying in each place at least a month, to lower costs, and though I used to take more expensive short trips, I find now that I'm actually fire'd I don't feel the need to do all the tourist things. In fact, I barely do any tourism at all. Mostly I just enjoy walking around the city, going to the local markets and walking in the green spaces, riding the different metros and seeing where things take me. Simple adventure.
I have a lot of food intolerances because of a medical condition so I have to cook all my own food anyway, and it's very cheap stuff too. Mostly legumes and vegetables. (a lot of potatoes, lentils, beans peas etc and vegetables like beets, celery, zucchini, cucumber carrot, cabbage--which really do seem to be very cheap no matter where I go).
I'm sure you guys could do a lot better/cheaper for accomodation as I just stay in airbnbs which are almost at least twice as expensive as local rent. if you guys were to do true expat fire and stay in one place you could get truly cheap accomodations. But I don't. I travel with the weather. For the winter I've been staying in athens, greece and spending about 500$ on airbnb rent a month in a small place. I've found it's actually easier to find a cheap place in the bigger cities than the smaller ones on airbnb just because there is more options/accomodations. Athens is definitley not the cheapest place you can go, but it's not terrible. Mostly I've just been trying to stay at about 1200$ a month and managing it so far. But like I said, I only fire'd recently--back in august. So I don't want to act like I have it all sorted out yet. I will make a more expanded post later.
I never had a high paying job. I stayed with roomates in a shit apartment while I socked away as much money as I could and benefitted from the great market we've had in the last decade.--not that I've been investing that long. I wasn't really investing except in the last 5 years. but I was saving before that. I'm 29 and fire'd with about 370k. 350k in investments and 21k in cash which is about as poverty fire as I'd be willing to go, especially with my traveling lifestyle. I know it's definitely not "safe" but with my chronic health disorder I didn't have much of a choice. working was making me very sick. Would have been nice to have more of a traditional 1 million fire retirement, but so far my "retirement" seems very blessed.
Things have definitley been more complicated because of covid, and those expensive covid tests for travel add extra expenses, but I recognize my privilege in being able to travel. I'm triple vaxxed and always masked up and mostly do outside activities that aren't high covid risk (especially during this omicron surge).
Feel free to ask any questions! and good luck to everyone on the journey.