Who here on the MMM forums has been FIREd for say 10 years or longer? Anyone close to that? If not, who has gone the longest?
I frequently read about forum members being FIREd for a few years, but I can't recall reading about anyone who's been FIRED for a much longer time.
My spouse and I reached FI in 1999 (in retrospect) and I retired from active duty 16 years ago in 2002.
Is it just natural that more people will have been FIREd for a shorter time?
I sure hope so. That means we authors, bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers are doing our job to spread the word and help show more people how to reach FI.
Do the long-timers exist and I just haven't seen them post yet? Do they not join the MMM forums or simply stop participating after a few years?
Yes. Many of my FI readers don’t want to discuss it publicly, for various reasons like remaining The Millionaire Next Door or “stealth FI”.
Do many of them wind up going back to full-time work, or simply fall off the map in other ways (hopefully good)?
Um.
Jacob Lund Fisker declared FI on an extremely high savings rate (and extremely low expenses) yet opted to go back to work for the intellectual challenge. I can’t decide whether he was truly FI or else decided to take a tactful exit. He was never so much about FI as he was about sustainable lifestyle. I think he actually passed the torch to MMM in 2011.
One of my in-laws achieved FI in the early 1990s but then shorted the Internet stock market so hard and for so long that he ended up right back in the workforce by 1998. (He’s the poster child for the truism “The stock market can remain irrationally exuberant for longer than you can remain solvent.”) He reached a sustainable FI in 2004 and has been fine since then.
In the early 2000s another poster on E-R.org declared his FI and then freaked out over (1) portfolio volatility and (2) watching his cash account balance drop as he made withdrawals per the 4% SWR. At some point he declined into a pernicious troll with possible bipolar health issues. He never seemed to go back to work but rather bounced across the U.S. in a series of ever-cheaper apartments, seeking a lower cost of living. He caused quite a bit of trouble for the E-R.org moderators.
Dixonge on Early-Retirement.org posted about accelerating his FI with his options-trading tactics. He understood the risk and did quite well for over a year until market volatility blew him up almost overnight. To his credit, he and his spouse bounced back, spent a few years vagabonding in a trailer while freelancing, and today are either FI or very close to it.
In 2008 another E-R.org FI poster had a portfolio heavily concentrated in Bank of America’s dividends. As the stock began to sink, he kept backing up the truck to buy the dips. When BofA cut their dividend to a penny, he was un-FI overnight. I’m pretty sure he hung on to the stock and I think he returned to some sort of employment until the rest of his portfolio recovered. Today he’s FI again.
I realize that the long-timers may have FIREd before the MMM forums even existed, or even before the term was invented.
John Greaney (intercst) retired in 1994 at age 38. He's the person responsible for www.retireearlyhomepage.com, one of the earliest websites about FIRE.
There are a lot more long-time retired people over at www.early-retirement.org. That forum has been around longer and seems to be on average an older and wealthier group of folks.
Yep.
There’s also Billy & Akaisha Kaderli (since 1991 in their late 30s) at RetireEarlyLifestyle, and Paul & Vicki Terhorst (since 1984, also late 30s). The poster Jarhead on Early-Retirement.org claims that he reached FI in the 1980s (in his 40s? 50s?) but he no longer posts and we fear that he’s passed away. I think that poster Haha on E-R.org reached FI in the 1980s also.
I’m not sure when Vicki Robin declared her FI but Joe Dominguez reached it in 1969. He passed away from cancer in 1997.
I believe that Amy Dacyczyn reached FI in the 1980s (her spouse is a retired Navy E-6) but the Internet Retirement Police would’ve been pretty unhappy with her subsequent revenue from her Tightwad Gazette newsletters & books. A couple of bloggers & podcasters tracked down Amy a few years ago but she’s firmly declined all interview offers and says she’s really retired now.
My interest and participation in the forums are waning. I have already read through and decided most of the questions about FIRE as they apply to my life - whether to pay off the mortgage, when to take SS, how to invest, how to live off my portfolio, taxes, etc. Many of the threads here are, for me and other long-timers, rehashing old topics and do not provide any new information.
I’m still developing better answers to the usual questions. I’m interested in new twists to the classic perpetual debates, but you can only slice a salami so thin.
I’m also “spreading out” rather than focusing on individual forums. The most military readers seem to be on the Military Finance subreddit (
https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryFinance/) and a half-dozen Facebook groups.
I stopped reading every post here years ago and now only check in weekly or when I’m tagged. (Thanks,
@spartana!)
@austin944, if you're wondering whether the 4% SWR really works or whether FI people get bored and go back to paid employment, then the answers are "almost always" and "I know of a few". I also know several FI bloggers who are still bloggers and still building online businesses and seem unlikely to ever stop.