I've thought of starting a FIRE blog with an angle that's outside the traditional FIRE topics that have been covered over and over already. But, as others have said, blogs are dying. I'm FI but still working, so I don't want to put energy into something that no one reads. I've considered making YouTube videos instead, but that's also time consuming and could also go nowhere. I'm just very cautious about how I spend my free time.
What's needed is a blog with multiple contributors. In addition to spreading the workload, such a thing could generate content frequently enough to capture people's attention, have an interesting back-and-forth on areas of controversy, appeal to different personalities and therefore be recommended by everyone, and cover fat/lean/coast/expat/ERE/post and other goals instead of just one. Only place ads on individual contributors' work and distribute revenue accordingly. Think SeekingAlpha for FIRE, with a different revenue model because FIRE-interested people hate subscriptions.
Then you have voice-talent podcastify the thing for another cut of ad revenue.
Someone needs to approach MMM with this proposal to transform his blog, since he has the best legacy brand name.
Didn't ChooseFI do almost exactly this, but in podcast form??
Of cousre they did. FI was linked with frugality before they came along. And they blew up like crazy because of it. Most people don't want to be frugal.
There are much higher returns from increasing earnings than increasing frugality. You can only decrease spending up to a point, whereas you can increase your income infinitely. However, frugality tips are universal, whereas each person's path to higher income is individual and very context-dependent. Plus, some of the best tips for earning more are highly situational, non-replicable or both.
This is probably true to an extent, but every dollar saved is actually worth more than a dollar earned because dollars that are not spent are post tax, while dollars earned are pre-tax. So a dollar not spent is worth something like 1.2 dollars earned for most of us.
I also think that it's easy to assume the typical mindset that annual income is everything, and so you chase higher and higher earnings without considering quality of life, or what cost of living changes might occur if you're job hopping between cities, etc. It's why you hear/read claims from people in VHCOL locations claiming that they couldn't possibly move to a LCOL and survive on "only" $75k/yr or whatever. We must always consider both income and expenses. FIRE is easier when that ratio is in balance, regardless of what one's annual income may be.
Also, MMM has covered this really well already.
While the upside of income is almost unlimited, so is the upside of spending, and just like you can't outrun a bad diet, you can't out earn consumerism.
This is why frugality is always the key to saving, regardless of what you make. But frugality is really quite relative.
Also, social pressure already exists to earn more. Pretty much no one needs to be told to focus on earning more, but a hell of a lot of people burn out in the attempt to do so, so giving them more financial stability through frugality in the meantime is a great way to feel safer and less pressured to work yourself into the ground.
The message has never been that frugality is the only thing that matters and that earning doesn't. Frugality has just been the primary focus because it's what goes against the existing social messaging, which is "earn more so that you can spend more."
You can't take the messaging and analyze it as if it exists in a vacuum. It exists in response to the dominant discourse.
And yeah, a dollar saved is simply worth more than a dollar earned. In my former profession, I remember carefully calculating out the exact number of hours of work that was optimal. I settled on three 10 hour days a week because adding a fourth day meant adding income in the highest tax bracket.
The fourth day was always the most physically gruelling, and I was making only 50c on the dollar, so it was bad value for my time and energy.
The upside on earning is essentially limitless, but it comes at a time, energy, and stress cost, which have their own value.
At the end of the day though, if a person doesn't get their consumerism under control, then they will be stuck on the hamster wheel of perpetually pushing their earnings to cover their spending.
That's why frugality comes first. That's why frugality is the far more impactful side of the equation, because your earnings mean shit if you inflate your spending to match or exceed them, which is exactly what is promoted in our society.
I've spent my entire career around high earning folks, and plenty of them are in horrible financial health because they never figured out the frugality side. I can't tell you how many folks I know who make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are stuck working into their 70s doing extremely stressful, extremely demanding work, because they can't get their shit together to stop buying crap like helicopters or pay-for-play dinners with billionaires.
We folks who are in this community take it for granted that a solid savings rate is just common sense, but it's not actually that common.
The average person doesn't need to be told to try and earn more. They need to be told to stop buying shit that doesn't make them any happier.
