I think there's just nothing more to say about FIRE. Cut costs, pay your debt off and invest in index funds. When you hit 25x your expenses you can quit your job.
It's been written a thousand ways and gets boring.
What was fun about MMM was the humor and badassidy writing style that kept you reading. It's hard to recreate that once it's been done.
I agree though, I'd like to hear more from folks who are FIRE and what they are doing now.
Personally, I'm still working and trying to figure out if I'm actually at 25x or if my spending needs are higher than they seem. Not sure when I'll pull the plug on working, but I'm thinking about it.
I think there's still a lot to say about the FIRE lifestyle (good, bad and ugly) and personal.issues people deal with when they are trying to get to FIRE or already there. I see a lot of those topics here on the forums but yeah the actual money stuff is pretty well covered 1000 times over.
I like to read about struggles and successes people have in various situations, and how they dealt with things. How they dealt with unexpected things that came up. Relationship challenges caused by FIREing. How they deal with social pressures to conform to traditional work until old ideals. The YOLO crowd telling you how you're missing out. Dating as a single FIREee. Divorce. Etc. As well as their choosen lifestyle once they FIRE. Living the dream or it sucks? Exciting or full of sloth? Lots of non-money/investment topics I can think of. But that generally comes from the already FIREd crowd.
I agree there's still lots to say about FIRE, and not just the post-FIRE lifestyle.
The issue is that the quest for FIRE is kinda like marketing a gym. Maybe 10,000 people in your town are "interested" in your gym, and maybe 1,000 of these are interested enough to engage in content. Of these, perhaps 100 will buy a gym membership sometime this year, but only 10 of these will manage to maintain at least a weekly gym schedule for 12 months. Of those 10 who show up at least weekly, maybe 5 will be satisfied with their results. Only 0.05% will engage and receive the results you are trying to talk them into.
The FIRE parallel is 10,000 people "interested" in your blog, 1,000 willing to read it, 100 willing to make any lifestyle change at all, 10 making enough of a lifestyle change to be on the road to early retirement, and 5 who actually make it despite life's pitfalls and their own mistakes.
So should your fitness/financial fitness messaging only target the last 5-10 people with advanced concepts, since they are the only ones to receive a major benefit from what you do? Or does that turn off the more casual 10,000 people who need a message as simple as "you can do it" or "prioritize these 3 things to see major and immediate improvements"?
So why recycle what is essentially 10-15 year old content in terms of blogs, or 30-year old content in terms of Your Money or Your Life or the Trinity study? Napoleon Hill was writing about some of this stuff 90 years ago. Doesn't every content creator wish to have something creative to contribute?
First, people are skeptical that any content over a few weeks/months old could possibly be relevant to their future plans. This is certainly unfair, because ideas should stand on their own merit rather than being arbitrarily discounted.
However, the fact remains that when old content talks about your pension at work, people do not translate that into their 401k or 403b. When it talks about cancelling the cable subscription, people do not translate that into streaming services. When The Millionaire Next Door talks about large American-made sedans being the most common car for people with stealth wealth, they are talking about a product that with is not manufactured any more. When it talks about the value of home ownership, it comes from an era when houses cost 3-5x median income instead of 8x, with HOA fees on top. Finally, almost all the old content is oriented to the life circumstances of married cisgender white males, and has little to say about overcoming discrimination, discouragement, negative beliefs about the self that come from society, or health issues specific to women or trans people. Even for heteros, there is little fresh advice about navigating disparities in income, spending preferences, retirement preferences, or health.
Second, I think the rules have changed. Owning one's own house now costs more in many cities than living on permanent vacation like the bloggers at millennial-revolution.com. Now the average car now costs $50k and is an absolute albatross to insure. Now it is possible to minimize commuting costs by joining the 12.7% of workers who WFH or the 28.2% doing a hybrid model. Now it is possible for regular people to insure their portfolios like a hedge fund, and there are dozens of new investment categories to understand. Now we literally have publicly traded decentralized ponzi scheme investments like meme stocks and crypto. Now, the CAPE ratio of the S&P 500 is nearly twice its long-term average! Healthcare is a bigger chunk of spending than ever, and yet people in some states have access to an efficient online marketplace.
I think a lot of people are looking for smart, reasoned financial guidance, particularly young people with minimal assets and no solid plan. They aren't going to dust off 30 year old library books, and if they see a MMM blog post from 2013 they will assume it is irrelevant because that was half a lifetime ago. I think they'd be happy with cultural criticism and the delivery of facepunches, based on the fact that literal face punches are a major component of their social media diet, but 90% of the content they find is insider lingo and dry numbers oriented more to CFAs than people with mortgage-sized student loans.
Plus, such people will never find your content with google searches. They'll only find it if you run social media channels to funnel them into your substack or whatever. Good luck doing all that as a casual hobby.
