Instead of embracing the FIRE movement for those seeking financial independence, it may be better to embrace the DIRE movement after such a massive bull run since 2009. For the millions of unemployed Americans thanks to the pandemic, the DIRE movement is real.
When I first started writing about achieving financial independence early in 2009, I never thought the FIRE movement would reach such a huge level of interest a decade later. After all, only misfits decide to aggressively forgo material pleasures, save 50% or more of their incomes, and retire from well-paying jobs in their 30s and 40s.
Back in 2009, the “lifestyle design” movement was all the rage because people were getting blown out of their jobs left and right. Some people went back to graduate school to save face. Others decided to start lifestyle businesses after getting laid off. I figured there was a good chance my head would also roll, which is one reason why I started Financial Samurai that summer.
Thanks to a raging bull market that ensued, life turned out fine and the FIRE movement picked up steam. In 2022, we are at peak FIRE, as some folks try and retire early with less than $1 million to live a spartan life with no kids, no expectations for health setbacks, and no sense of duty to take care of their parents or other loved ones.
Unfortunately, when you’re at the peak, there’s usually nowhere to go but down.
Growing Angst Against Financial Independence
You know we’re at peak FIRE because not a day goes by where there isn’t a new story about someone leaving a job early and how they did it. Less than 5% of my posts are about early retirement since once you achieve FIRE, you don’t incessantly talk about FIRE. However, my FIRE posts are some of the most searched online.
As an investor, we know that by the time the news is in print, it’s often too late to invest. Rather, it’s likely a more opportune time to sell. Just think about Uber and Lyft finally filing to IPO in 2019. After all the easy money has been made as private companies, they cashed out to retail investors who are now down more than 30% if they invested on IPO day.
My job as an investor and as a personal finance writer is to do my best to forecast the future. Writing about what may happen is infinitely more interesting (and risky) than writing about the past. Forecasting the future challenges your mind and could make you a rich hero or a broke fool with egg on your face.
But as with everything in life, no risk, no reward. Today, my crystal ball is saying the FIRE movement is in for a rude awakening.
On the one hand, there is growing disdain against the FIRE movement from the majority of Americans who will never reach financial independence. With the median household income going nowhere over the past 10 years, it’s been hard for middle-class Americans to get ahead. Further, the average American has a pitiful amount saved in their retirement accounts.
When you’ve been spinning your wheels for so long, all this brouhaha about people retiring early to live fabulous lives while posting fake Instagram pictures about their amazing travels starts to get mighty annoying after a while. There are people who constantly brag about how much money they’ve made each month and how their net worth has gone up without working.
Annoyance turns into rage and a new movement is born.
On the other side are FIRE practitioners who are finding out that not all is sunshine and rainbows once they’ve quit a stable job with wonderful benefits.
The DIRE Movement Is Created
Thanks to another downturn in 2022, it’s an inevitability that some FIRE followers will be forced to go back to work and earn their retirements the old-fashioned way. Some might even say FIRE during a recession stands for Foolish Idealist Returns to Employer.
However, as long as we keep the FIRE acronym alive, we give hope to its original meaning. But when all is lost, false hope only gets people into further trouble. Therefore, let’s eliminate FIRE entirely from our vocabulary so that we can finally make a change!
Let me introduce the newest retirement movement to the world: DIRE. It stands for Delay, Inherit, Retire, Expire.
As a realist who sees the future, it is all but a certainty the DIRE movement will supplant the FIRE movement as the retirement path of choice. This is what DIRE in DIRE movement stands for.
D Is For Delay
For most people, delaying retirement due to the rapid rise in costs for housing, healthcare, and education is the only way to survive.
Given the median household income has stayed stagnant at around $61,000 for the past decade while the median house price in America has risen from $177,000 to $222,000 during the same period (26% increase), housing has become less affordable. In some cities, real estate prices have appreciated so quickly that most residents have no hope of ever owning.
Healthcare costs are out of control, especially if you plan to carry the entire monthly premium burden yourself. The average total healthcare cost is now almost $20,000 a year, subsidized mostly by the employer.
Once you’re out of a job, the entire $20,000 cost falls upon you unless you have a low enough income to qualify for subsidies. For my family of three four, I pay $1,760 $2,380 a month, or $21,120 $28,560 a year for a platinum plan in 2020. None of us are overweight or have any serious chronic illnesses either.
Granted, many FIRE folk try to take advantage of subsidized healthcare because their incomes are under 400% of the Federal Poverty Limit once they retire. But seriously, who wants to live near poverty-level incomes in retirement when you can find a more pleasant job and live a better life?
Education costs, specifically college tuition has grown unbearable with annual tuition increases averaging 5% – 7%, regardless of a recession or not. That’s a doubling of tuition every 10 – 15 years. Good luck retiring early if you’ve got to pay $50,000 – $100,000 a year for four or five years for even just a single child.
For parents with kids, retiring early will be all but a pipe dream. There will always be at least one parent working full-time to earn a steady income and have subsidized health care. The non-working parent can shout they are FIRE as loud as they want, but nobody will buy it.
Being a stay at home dad or mom is nothing to be ashamed about. It’s a damn hard full-time job! Yet for the man especially, he can’t seem to accept his new reality of living off his wife’s income.
But I have to admit, having kids is the best thing in the world. I would never trade kids for early retirement now that I know what I know.
I Is For Inherit
With no hope of retiring early, many Americans are counting on an inheritance as their retirement strategy. With 25 as the median age when parents had kids in 1970 and the median life expectancy currently hovering around 80, the average American will likely have to wait until around 55 to inherit anything.
Today, the average age when women start to have children is 28. The delay is due to the desire for more women to rightly pursue their careers and a couple’s need for more money. Therefore, future generations will likely have to wait even longer to inherit anything, especially as we’re all living longer and longer.
Not all is bad news on the inheritance front, however. With the average net worth in America rising to almost $700,000, parents are doing more than ever before to help their adult children thrive in adulthood. After all, Baby Boomers have benefitted the most from the longest bull market in history.
Every single one of my immediate neighbors in San Francisco has parents who either bought them their house or are letting them live in one of their multiple properties rent free. When I first moved into my house in 2014, I met my neighbor’s son who at the time was a 24-year-old senior at UC Davis. When he graduated in 2015, he returned home and still hasn’t left! Curse him and his noisy motorcycle.
Inheritance Is Not A Retirement Strategy
Can you imagine relying on an inheritance as a retirement strategy? You might never be able to start a family, create your own sense of independence, and make your great contribution to society. Clearly, one side effect of DIRE is a surge in depression.
R is for Retire
Forget about retiring in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or even 60s. With DIRE, we’re talking nowadays about the majority retiring in our 70s or older, baby! We’re living longer. This means we’ve got to work longer to support ourselves. Once upon a time, people would retire at age 65 and die within five years. We are returning to the phenomena of that bygone era.
The earliest one can collect Social Security will rise from 62 to at least 65 if the government wants to make the program whole. After all, the government runs a massive budget deficit each year. With little-to-no social safety, achieving a comfortable retirement life will all depend on you. Thankfully, there are now free financial tools to help manage your finances.
With the trend towards retiring in our 70s or older, retirement life won’t be as fun. It’ll be much harder to play leisurely sports like golf or tennis when your back is always in pain. There’ll be no way to ever climb the stairs of Santorini when your knees don’t have cartilage. Donkey ride it is!
The only thing left you can do in this new world of retirement is watch tons of TV and surf the internet. At least with the popularity of food delivery apps, you will no longer have to go out of the house to eat a nice rubber chicken dinner. Staying glued to a lounge chair is what the new retirement reality will be like. Hence, the ideal retirement age to minimize regret and maximize happiness is closer to your mid-40s.
E is for Expire
Here is where the DIRE movement will be at its saddest. After a long life of working because you had to, not because you wanted to, reluctant DIRE followers will look back on their lives with regret. They will curse the day they ever heard about FIRE because otherwise they would never have taken the leap of faith at the top of the market and fallen splat on their faces.
Instead of being the hare, they would have won the race as the tortoise – steadily saving and investing their income during their highest income earning years with much less stress and worry.
They wouldn’t have had to embarrassingly gone back to work with their tails between their legs and watched old colleagues now become their bosses.
They wouldn’t have needed to go through multiple mental breakdowns and countless nights of self-doubt because they couldn’t replace their day job income with freelance income or entrepreneurial income to take care of their families.
Contrast reluctant DIRE followers with DIRE enthusiasts. DIRE enthusiasts see the FIRE movement is in trouble and decide to stay the course.
The DIRE Enthusiast Is Different
Instead of retiring in their 30s or 40s, the DIRE enthusiast decided to maximize their highest income earning years and retire with multi-millions in their 50s. Given everyone is living longer, retiring in your 50s is like retiring in your 40s of yesteryear.
Of course, they also don’t just stay miserable at their jobs. DIRE enthusiasts proactively search for better opportunities in order to keep on working.
A DIRE enthusiast doesn’t scoff at families who believe they need $5 million in an after-tax portfolio to retire early. DIRE enthusiasts understand that runaway inflation, globalization, and structurally lower investment returns in the future will wreak havoc on living the early retirement dream.
The DIRE movement believes the 4% Rule is outdated because interested rates started collapsing in 2019. It now takes a tremendous amount more capital to retire on a previous target retirement income. Following a safe withdrawal rate that was developed in the 1990s is foolish.
Therefore, instead of getting into a rage about why the world’s round peg doesn’t fit into their square hole, they simply adapt and work longer.
The DIRE Movement’s Future
Unless you’re willing to work more than 40 hours a week, build some side hustle income, generate some stable passive income, save aggressively, and continuously make shrewd investments for the long term, you have no chance of FIRE. And if you don’t do all these things and still decide to retire early, you will likely be screwed and join the reluctant DIRE camp.
Yes, some of you will decide to live like paupers and either delay or not have kids to keep expenses to a minimum to hold onto your FIRE dreams. However, for the majority who want to live more conventional lifestyles, it’s more important than ever to follow some key financial principles to increase your chances for financial independence.
If you are wise, you will embrace the realities of DIRE as it becomes more difficult to achieve financial independence. Giving priority to caring for your family and delaying a super early retirement is the responsible thing to do. Don’t let FIRE FOMO foster irrational decision making.
Yes, if the economy gets really bad, there will be more face-saving by folks who say they are FIRE instead of admitting they got laid off and are drowning in a sea of despair.
Just recognize not all is what it seems as people put on brave faces. If your passive income cannot comfortably cover your best life’s living expenses, you are not FIRE and only fooling yourself.
Thankfully, we’re back to bull markets. Just know that bad times will eventually return once more. And when they do, it will be time for the DIRE movement to rise up!
Related posts on FIRE and DIRE:
The Negatives Of Early Retirement Nobody Likes Talking About
Why I Failed At Early Retirement: A Love Story
The Proper Safe Withdrawal Rate Makes FIRE Harder
FIRE Confessionals I: Surviving A Bear Market
FIRE Confessionals II: Flourishing In A Bull Market
Financial Independence Movement Thoughts Overall
As one of the pioneers of the modern-day FIRE movement since 2009, I’m proud to see what has developed. With so many different FIRE acronyms, like Coast FIRE and Lean FIRE, people are deciding to make labels conform to their current financial situation. It’s nice to create labels to make you feel better about your progress. After all, FIRE is a long journey.
However, I encourage you to recognize the true definition of FIRE. Attaining FIRE is when your passive investment income streams can cover your desired living expenses. Once this financial attainment is achieved, there is no longer a reason to have to ever work for money.
FIRE is also a moving target. Thanks to inflation, the need to earn more to pay for more expensive goods increase. Further, if your family grows, you will likely need and want more money as well. For more great reading about achieving FIRE, pick up a copy of my book, Buy This, Not That: How to Spend Your Way To Wealth And Freedom.
I sense sarcasm and satire in this post. Good stuff!
Nonetheless, there are some really good–and serious–points.
It’s wise to consider bad-case scenarios; you just never know what’s around the corner. That’s why I’m continuing to learn economics and finance, even though I have a pretty good idea about asset allocation, savings rates, withdrawal rates, and so on.
My retirement planning OVERestimates my spending, UNDERestimates returns [vs. long-range historical data], and UNDERestimates my current and future income. And even with all those extra-cautious assumptions, I’m still on pace to retire in about 15 years.
Life has a way of throwing curveballs. That’s why I’m not planning to retire as soon as I can–there’s just too much that can go wrong. I sure hope those curveballs don’t come my way, but if they do, I’d better be prepared to hit them into left field…
For F.I.R.E. wannabies, there is a simple calculation that would give them a pretty accurate idea of how they would fare if things go really bad supposing they want to fund their retirement being 100% invested in the stock market.
You can run a simulation by “investing” 100% of your nest egg in the Nikkei 225 at it’s peak in 1989 and see the effect of one of the worst secular bear markets in history on your retirement. As that markets goes steadily down for about 12 years, don’t forget to take into account that dividends would also be slashed by 50% or more or even completely eliminated as well.
If during the whole period (1990-2018), you are able to withdraw the
$ 30,000 or so you need, year after year, without running out of money at some point, then you know that your plan will probably work in most market downturns…
Doing that math is a very humbling experience, a dream-shattering reality check, but very necessary in my opinion to stress-test you retirement financial strategy.
I used a 100% allocation to the S&P 500 (with dividends reinvested) on Dec. 31, 1929. The initial annual withdrawal was 3% of the original investment and used a 3% COLA for subsequent annual withdrawals. The money lasted about 27 years.