My parents are retired. They wake up each day and decide how many cups of tea to drink in bed before getting up for the day, whether to read a book or walk over to visit a friend, what to plan with friends in the evenings, what long vacations to arrange, whether to start a new creative project or not, and so on. They are very happy and content.
FIRE seems to be about enjoying this lifestyle from a younger age. How does that work when you have kids though? How old do they have to be before parents could live a FIRE lifestyle with any semblance to a traditional retirement? Is it once they start school, or once they are teenagers, or once they are grown up?
I am asking this in the context of how we would choose a target date to FIRE. I don't feel the attraction to FIRE at the moment because work is not an especially demanding dimension of my life compared with kids. I am wondering if other people have felt this way in the past and at what point that changed and FIRE started to represent leisure?
I don't even understand the question or it's relevance, or how it helps you, or what you intend to learn from this, or... anything about it.
Presumably you've decided to have kids either way, whether you're FIREing or not.
So it's a moot point what a FIRE'd life without them might look like, for you.
You have two options:
1) FIRE, with kids. Even if it doesn't look like "retirement" because there's a lot of childcare involved, which is a lot of work, or
2) Keep working.
FIRE with kids will feel like retirement with kids, because you aren't going to a job every day. Yes, you'll still have the kids, and all that entails. That is true whether you FIRE or not.
I'm 33. I've been FIRE'd for 3 1/2 years. I have a three year old and a one year old. My FIRE'd life doesn't look the same as someone who is 33 and FIRE'd and has no kids. Not even close.
But I made the choice to have kids, so why would I compare what my FIRE'd life looks like to theirs, or to someone who's 50+ and done with the kid-rearing phase, or whatever?
We specifically chose to wait to have kids until after FIRE, so we could both be there. It's a lot of work, and now our three year old attends a creative preschool three hours a day (9am-noon) on weekdays. And it's still a lot of work.
But we'd still prefer it to them being in childcare all day, and us working full time jobs, for sure.
Does it feel like the FIRE'd life of people without kids? Of course not. But as I started this post, I don't even understand why you'd ask about that comparison.
We wanted kids. And even though our FIRE'd life doesn't look like the childfree one, if done with the relevant comparison (to someone with two kids not yet FIRE'd), does it feel better than going to work every day? Totally! We'll never get back the years we sold for money, and we'd never get these years of our kids' lives back. That's important to us, and I just don't see how comparing to older retired folks is relevant at all.
(FWIW, having kids is
hard. I tip my hat to SAHMs or SAHDs who do it on their own. I really struggle with childcare. My wife is amazing, and I really try to do my best.)