I'm kind of fascinated how people's lives can be changed for good or ill based on a single event. In the case of being able to have FIRE status or not, I've come up with some interesting scenarios.
In the case of marriage here are some scenarios. Single guy is fired, living modestly (say owns a couple of rentals, maybe 300 k in stocks), no dependents, age 46, all of a sudden falls in love with and marries a single woman with 4 kids under age 16. With his new family size he is no-longer FIRED and gets back into the workforce to earn addition money for his newly expanded family. Scenario two, someone who wasn't quite at FIRE, age 57, marries someone of about the same age with no dependents who is just into FIRE zone, and together they can make it work for both to be FIRED. Scenario three, easily fired person marries a spouse who has dependents and is nowhere near Fired, but because the fired person is so far into the fired zone, the new family is also fired. There must be plenty of all these types of situations happening.
Divorce scenario one, married couple with two college age kids, total assets of 1.3 million, one spouse didn't want the other (the main breadwinner) to retire yet, but after they divorce and split the assets equally, main breadwinner, now single could potenitally be fired with 650k assets maybe once kids are done with school. In this scenario a divorce leads to fire, and thus represents liberation from the wage slave treadmill. Probably much more common is a messy divorce destablizing the whole asset accumulation phase of a married couple so that instead of both being fired at a certain point, neither is, and fire is delayed many more years instead.
Death. Obvious scenario one is a significant inheritance which pushes someone who was maybe five or ten years away from FIRE to immediate FIRE status, or much much closer to it. Scenario two is the perhaps sadder, but intriguing situation where a spouses death frees the other spouse who was the only or main breadwinner to fire, since the deceased spouse had been the one insisting that the surviving one keep working, just to keep accumulating more unneeded savings. I could actually see some dark comedy movie based on this situation, tying into the reality that there must be plenty of millionaire households out there where the main breadwinner is just working because of their spouses desire for them to do so.
Anyone fall into any of these situations?