What are your leanFIRE, FIRE, and fatFIRE numbers?

[GilesMM]

I guess to answer that you’d have to actually read the posts, like the one I was responding to:

…the point of this particular web site and forum is being extremely frugal and retiring very early/young.

You and I are both addressing GilesMM’s position but you choose to ignore him while I respond directly. Why is that?

It is becoming increasingly common on this forum to redirect responses toward the poster, specifically, rather than the issue at hand. Not sure why.

[wenchsenior]

Of course, but we have heaps on people on this thread saying they can't make do unless they have millions..

I'm sorry, who said that???

What I see is a lot of people saying their preferred lifestyle requires millions, that's a very different statement than "can't make do."

I can "make do" on very little, I just wouldn't prefer to not work to only "make do" on 500K.

And as dandarc already explained, Pete retired a long time ago on more than just 500K.

Yea, I use calculations for 65k a year without a paid off house. That means that I will hit the 1.6mil needed for that in 4 years. Unfortunately, at 3% inflation I will have to wait 6 years and be closer to 2 mil to match the true lifestyle match. It's a small thing and honestly not the biggest unknown in the formulas but trying to make a 1:1 comparison to numbers from 20 years ago is the way to madness.

It's mostly the need to buy a bigger, more expensive house in a more expensive location that is making all the difference in our FIRE number needing to be well over a million. About 300-500K of that is needed for housing and/or to support a new mortgage in retirement.

We could quit today if we were willing to stay in this location (and live very comfortably). But for sanity, we would prefer not to. As it is, we'll have been here >27 years at the earliest point we can bail.

I feel this, same! If we wanted to stay in our current LCOL location we'd be fine pulling the trigger now too. It's maddening. Especially looking at houses increases in the hcol place we want to move. But I'm still grateful we'll be able to get out of here at some point (hopefully soon), many people around the globe have much bigger issues so our complaint are just #FIREpeopleproblems

I don’t see anything wrong with your choices.

We got travelling out of our system long ago, don’t like to eat out much, and mostly spend our time on things that don’t require money. We look average, no better or worse. But we like to live in nice areas in nice housing, drive nice cars, and give $$ to family. In other words, we prioritize basics that happen to be expensive.

We’re also lifelong believers in very robust FI, in which we merely hope to break even with inflation in the long run and would likely never need to sell stocks at a loss to live.  We intend to die with a valuable estate for family. Family is more important to us than something like RE.

This requires a sizable nest egg and, for me, working longer than 25/30 X spend. That’s just comes with the plan.  I don’t hold out my life choices as particularly valuable to anyone and I could care less what others think I “should” do with my life or my money. People have to do their own thing. Judging or following others is a loser’s game.

Some of us will leave our estate to charity, other find that leaving your family generational wealth is doing them a disservice.

Different strokes for different folks

Absolutely! It all depends on the character of the beneficiaries.

Charitable giving can be ongoing, but highly selective, always looking for bang-for-buck.

The point is to live and save with a good dose of selflessness and avoid the all-about-me mentality to retire after hitting a number designed to fund your own lifestyle, aka spend-your-last-dollar-on-the-undertaker.

But yeah, different strokes.

All true, but the point of this particular web site and forum is being extremely frugal and retiring very early/young.  There are some frequent posters on here who are not on board with that so I'm not sure why they hang around other than to give advice on other topics as a way of passing the time.

My personal experience (likely shared by at least some others) is that I first started hanging out here when I was (much) younger, even more frugal than I am now, and trying to stay motivated and on track to not allow too much lifestyle creep and meet savings goals.

My husband and I were never going to retire super early b/c we didn't even start adulting until he was almost 40 and I was almost 30, so we have been in frantic 'catch up' mode the entire past 20+ years, many of which I've hung out here.

So now my husband is looking at trying to retire at typical retirement age and I'll work part time (so partial retirement 'earlier than normal' but not early by FIRE standards).

I hang out here b/c I'm familiar with the community and I assume that my advanced age doesn't make me ineligible to participate in either the mindset or the forum.

[Ron Scott]

I guess to answer that you’d have to actually read the posts, like the one I was responding to:

…the point of this particular web site and forum is being extremely frugal and retiring very early/young.

You and I are both addressing GilesMM’s position but you choose to ignore him while I respond directly. Why is that?

It is becoming increasingly common on this forum to redirect responses toward the poster, specifically, rather than the issue at hand. Not sure why.

Attacking the individual instead of arguing a point of view and engaging the issue is becoming the American way. It is trite, lowbrow, and petty. But here we are.

[Zikoris]

our 30K annual spending. We're a little over that now. No home equity as we're renters.

Rent is lower in Vancouver than I thought!

Every major city has a range of price points for rent, from $0 to $Insane. People often like to pretend the lower end doesn't exist, I would assume because admitting it exists means admitting their high housing costs are due to lifestyle preferences. Vancouver is expensive if you only want to live in these neighbourhoods, need these amenities, need this square footage, want a nice/new building, etc. But you can also just not require any of those things.

[eyesonthehorizon]

... the point of this particular web site and forum is being extremely frugal and retiring very early/young.  There are some frequent posters on here who are not on board with that so I'm not sure why they hang around other than to give advice on other topics as a way of passing the time.

My personal experience (likely shared by at least some others) is that I first started hanging out here when I was (much) younger, even more frugal than I am now, and trying to stay motivated and on track to not allow too much lifestyle creep and meet savings goals.

My husband and I were never going to retire super early b/c we didn't even start adulting until he was almost 40 and I was almost 30, so we have been in frantic 'catch up' mode the entire past 20+ years, many of which I've hung out here.

So now my husband is looking at trying to retire at typical retirement age and I'll work part time (so partial retirement 'earlier than normal' but not early by FIRE standards).

I hang out here b/c I'm familiar with the community and I assume that my advanced age doesn't make me ineligible to participate in either the mindset or the forum.

Sounds like you’re on board with mustachianism to me! Somehow I don’t think you or other “later-life” converts to the ways of badassity were who Giles was talking about. (C’mon - you were “almost 30”? Sure, that’s not the day you turned eighteen, but it’s still way ahead of the curve, give yourself credit!)

Imo, MMM’s hope was to catch as many young folks as possible before a lifetime of hedonic adaptation could snowball, but it takes even more resolve to pull yourself away from the brink as you or your partner are reaching midlife with engrained habits. Plus you can advise from experience with regard to things you look back on as not worth the life-energy of wages you put into them, which I’ve always appreciated. (Your username always made me think we might have run in the same circles once.)

I was frugal by nature & found the blog in my 20s, & MMM’s “secret” environmental aims weren’t lost on me despite the glittering golden carrot of early retirement, aka financially-independent self-determination at a youthful age. I more or less followed the same plan (not enough bikes, plenty of barbells, an exultation of salads) & arrived before my 30s were out, so I am in some ways the stereotype, though I started later than MMM, in deep debt, & earned below & spend way below this community’s average - including my partner, we have lifestyle spending on par with what MMM used to, just with an extra ten grand toward housing (his was paid off) because neither of us are carpenters or software engineers.

As a subculture we get plenty of alternative attitudes & examples from the entire rest of the known universe, so it’s beneficial to have a congregating space that actually shares those frugal-by-choice values. It’s good to see others on this board who haven’t gone totally soft - choosing soft is fine, but it’s so overwhelmingly popular as the default & so loudly proclaimed by its adherents that it makes it hard to find others making those different self-challenging choices, even here.

[swashbucklinstache]

Numbers for one.

Lean FIRE: 900k
Average spend the last ten years plus a small annual buffer, @ 3.25%. I rent in MCOL and now HCOL but not VHCOL.

FIRE: 1.5m liquid, 2-2.5 NW
This would be after buying a normal sized house in an expensive place, like a lake house near a city or in an inner loop. Bigger buffer for less anxiety on the expense side or an end to American exceptionalism on the return side. If I have a nice house I want a 80-90% of local median income minus income taxes and retirement savings at 4%. Room for a little uncontrollable increase in expenditure (ACA subsidies going away, capital gains tax returning to previous levels or higher, property tax increases, non-insurable indirect health-caused costs, climate impacts), 1-3 kids, or decline in my money skills without definite necessity of cutting back. Can't cover all of that but could absorb a few before cutting lifestyle. Baseline average 50k spend in this situation so probably 75% of having > double at social security age 25 years later.
If no expensive house this is easily fatfire.

Fat FIRE: 2m liquid, 3m NW
The above plus no real money anxiety ever plus giving the gift of eventual retirement to some hard working people who won't get it otherwise. Could be worth part time OMYing for but we'll see. Beyond this, exclusive of giving, working longer to earn more money is obviously not the best way to lower downside nor raise upside for my situation.

900K -> 2.5 net worth models to 6 years for me. Life, for happy reasons, means getting here from Lean is sort of a default outcome. Also, insures us against divorce without too much lifestyle impact (we're not even married yet =). 2.5 for me models to about 3.5 for us. In the meantime we're unsure about future expenses so spending effort thinking about those. Much more likely to lower the FIRE number than increase it. At 1.4 now.

[Tass]

Regarding “very frugal” I’m still scratching my head at the average numbers here. Why do very frugal people with a MMM FIRE mentality need to hit Top 10%er wealth before retiring? The common religion also seems to worship 4% SWRs, so with $2.5m in invested assets it looks like a $100k annual spend is very frugal? OK.

I think you're cherrypicking numbers here. $2.5M is the median FatFIRE number in this thread, which is by definition not considered very frugal around here. Not everyone even wants to reach their fatFIRE number; the thread just asked what we each consider enough for fatFIRE.

The median FIRE number is $1.6M, which yields $64,000 under the 4% rule. I wouldn't call that "very frugal" for a single person who already has a paid off house, but it certainly could be pretty frugal for a bigger family of renters and/or a HCOL area, which describes many of the participants in this thread. Meanwhile the LeanFIRE column, where people actually share the numbers they consider to be very frugal, has a median value of $1.2M, or $48k/year, with all the same situational variations.

I still just don't understand the comparison of NW percentile with frugality. Yeah, $1M is a lot of money for a 30yo to have, much more than most do. It's not that much money--adequate, but not tons--to live on for 60 years. Both these things are true. You need a lot more money than most people have if you want to quit working for many decades. You still need a lot, but not quite as much, if you're frugal with it.

Updated numbers:

	LeanFIRE	FIRE	FatFIRE
MIN	$   554,000	$   800,000	$1,350,000
MED	$1,200,000	$1,600,000	$2,500,000
MAX	$2,000,000	$5,000,000	$10,000,000

As before, the family size graph shows jittered data to prevent all the points from being on top of each other, so everything plotted ~near~ 1 is for family size 1, etc. The equations and R² values are for the fits to the actual, non-jittered data.

R² is a measure of how good the linear fit is. It ranges from 0 to 1. The fits for FIRE (orange) and fatFIRE (green) are quite bad; the fit for leanFIRE (blue) is okay.

[bananas]

I'm late to this party, but wanted to toss out some numbers for myself (for two married adults, no kids):

Lean FIRE:  <1.5 TNW
FIRE: 1.5 - 2.5 TNW
Fat FIRE:  >2.5 TNW

[Turtle]

I'm late to this party, but wanted to toss out some numbers for myself (for two married adults, no kids):

Lean FIRE:  <1.5 TNW
FIRE: 1.5 - 2.5 TNW
Fat FIRE:  >2.5 TNW

Your numbers are exactly what ours were 5 years ago.  My numbers actually went up and not down when my spouse passed away.  Less income, more taxes, same house, different travel goals.

[Fomerly known as something]

Lean Fire:  $1 million with paid off home
FIRE:  $1.5 million with paid off home
FATFIRE:  any the Above with my Pension, or $3 million with a paid off home.