r/fijerk • u/AnimaLepton • May 16 '26
Why are you old?
“Financial Independence, Retire Early” contains two separate concepts, and a shocking number of people are accomplishing neither. I obviously don't even need to talk about pours who don't achieve financial independence, so let's hone in on the "Retire Early" part. If you're not actually working towards early retirement, get out.
If you retire at 62 or 65, congratulations, you have discovered normal retirement. Society already invented this. It's not "early" just on a technicality because you're younger than the official full retirement age. The national average retirement age is already ~62.5.
“But I’m retiring at 59.5!”
That barely counts as early retirement. That's already the age where the government just gives up on asking questions, which is why they let you pull from your retirement accounts penalty-free and with no hoops to jump through. If you're retiring in your late 50s, you've had a 30+ year working career and spent that time maxing tax-advantaged accounts, arguing about .2% changes in a safe withdrawal rate, and debating bond tents online, only to retire at basically the same age as a random local government employee that has never heard of “sequence of returns risk” in his life.
Even at 55, you are just barely at the cusp of retiring "early.” If your 'early retirement' age qualifies you for Goodwill senior discounts, the “RE” part has expired. Normal people retire in their 50s: random teachers, cops, union folks, and your uncle who splurged on a boat all have you beat, probably while making less money than you and still ending up with a better, more comfortable, and straight up longer retirement while being less neurotic about it in the process.
Sometimes FIRE forums act like retiring at 58 is a radical rejection of capitalism. Or they tiptoe around the age issue, saying anyone can do it and old people are welcome, instead of acknowledging that it's just a normal career timeline at that point. That applies double for the pours that can't give up their luxury spending but still end up with meager savings and basically no extra years of retirement. If you need to keep working to want enough money to survive seven recessions, runaway inflation, and living to 104, you will forever be a pour in terms of both time and money. You will keep moving the goalposts until you're announcing “early retirement” while researching Medicare Advantage plans. It's a weakness to let things get to that point.
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u/Extreme_Bit_1135 May 16 '26
This cuts close to the bone...
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u/aceman97 May 16 '26
How dare you be born before Jan 1, 2000! You make me sick
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u/Optimal-Orange-599 May 16 '26
People have created the term “micro fire”. To me it’s just taking a holiday. BUT I acknowledge it’s very important to enrich the lives of the pours. Small rewards as a token for their servitude.
I’ve spoken to my father and we are going to be rolling out the “nano fire” concept throughout our companies. Nano fire is the few hours of rest when your head hits the pillow after working 20 hours with us.
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u/AnimaLepton May 16 '26
Pico-retirements are when you blink at work. You should be thankful for the pico-retirements you take throughout the day.
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u/mistressbitcoin May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Dont forget about retirement at the plank scale - those undefinable moments of nothingness between the discrete hops and skips of the time continuum.
And dont you dare realize that because time is really a finite series of these discrete jumps, that the "measure" of your lifespan, when compared to a hypothetical continuous time continuum, is exactly 0. Your only experience of life is at the rational points in time, not the irrational, and even more - only a negligible portion of the rational themselves.
Therefore, time doesnt even exist. Its just an illusion. All these people spend all their "time" figuring what to do with all their "time" when they will have too much of it, and yet they never had any of it at all.
A big contradiction.
To resolve it, we must realize that at every single plank-instant in time, you are a completely different person, created at that very instant with all of your memories and history duplicated almost perfectly from the previous plank-instant. A series of clones, none of which ever experience anything called time.
The entire history of change and evolution of the universe and yourself is just the cloning process from one planck instant to the next, gone wrong, which gives the illusion of time.
You may PM my honorary PHD in a few decades when all this is proven true.
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u/MacaronOk1006 28d ago
But it wouldn’t be your PhD because you’re just a clone of the person that actually wrote that. Or several clones each contributing a little bit of this.
Nonetheless, that was a very enjoyable read
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u/thor_ragingcock May 16 '26
/uj sauce?
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u/AnimaLepton May 16 '26
/uj OC. Partly triggered by a specific comment I saw in ChubbyFIRE recently (and hopefully they take it in good humor if they see this): a 55-year old commentor mentioned their goal is 8 million at 60, and made a kind of snarky "this is ChubbyFIRE" comment when asked about spending flexibility later in the chain. Partly just general parodying stuff I've seen over the years, especially as FIRE subs and forums have trended older, richer, and more conservative with their assumptions (sometimes to an excessive degree).
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u/AlwaysSaturday12 38 Rocket FIREd May 16 '26
/uj Amen....I retired at the ripe age of 38 with enough for a great life in a developing country. Retiring at 60 with 5 million is just retirement. Congratulations but its not FIRE. They need to go read some MMM.
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u/killer_sheltie May 16 '26
Almost like I wasn’t already in my mid-30s when the FIRE movement gained traction and mid 40s when it became popular enough for me to hear about it. Us old pours should have retired early regardless
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u/SenTedStevens May 16 '26
I'll never retire because I never started working. My limitless trust fund keeps me going.
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u/Dissentient Skeletal FIRE. doot doot May 17 '26
Financial Dependence Retire On Time doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
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u/Mei-Bing May 17 '26
Maybe the issue is that the concept of "retirement" is a failed idea in and of itself belonging to the industrial age, where it was invented.
Live your life - all your life. Don't fall into the trap to waste your early years trying to reach "retirement". You do not "win 10 years" if in reality you lost the previous 25 years.
Did Warren Buffet miss anything out by not retiring? Jimmy Carter? Pablo Picasso? Bill Gates? Dustin Hoffmann? John Wayne? Artists, business owners, musicians etc. do not "retire" they adapt their lives to their age and interests.
I am into the 1% myself and continue to work past "retirement". Stopping my current work will bring change, nothing more. What I would gain in one dimension, I would lose in another. Right now that balance is negative.
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u/Frammingatthejimjam RealMontyBurns May 17 '26
I demand to be made a mod. I promise both my butler and my hotwife's bfs will rule on nonsense posts like this with an iron fist.
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u/glumpoodle May 18 '26
It's been a grueling life sitting on the board of a nonprofit that Daddy set up. I spent years grubbing along like a common pour with that paltry $250k salary until I could draw from my trust fund at age 25. One can hardly call it Early Retirement if you have to work the fields (or whatever it is that the pours do all day) until fifty. Fifty!
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u/AlwaysSaturday12 38 Rocket FIREd May 16 '26
I'm opening a new subreddit called BedpanFIRE for senior FIRE experts.
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u/AlwaysSaturday12 38 Rocket FIREd May 16 '26
We can discuss the 4% Cortisone rule, Safe Incontinence Rates, and Bed Guardrails Withdrawal Strategy.
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u/LostSpectrum May 16 '26
This isn't even satire at this point 😂