I guess. But others, regardless of their own belief sets and interests, eschew echo chambers and consider the alternatives in their viewing space as healthy.
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.
$2.0mil is 90th percentile of net worth (including home equity) and $80k is 53rd percentile for household income. That is why most here want/need to be in the top 10% of wealth bc it only translates to middle of the pack income (WR).
Your wonder why people want to have top 10% money might be a better curiosity/judgement if people here were striving for top 10% income (WR) that is $218k and at 4% WR would require $5.45mil and that would be 97the percentile of wealth.
But again most are striving for average and that just happens to require top 10% money (at least for a long retirement).
Net Worth/Income, Apples/Oranges, since most income is reported in accumulation stage, etc., is likely reduced for savings and building assets.
A better comparison with NW would use normal retirement ages, especially since the 4% WR is also gospel here for FIRE. The Top 10% of people in their 60s and 70s have an NW of about $2.5m. (And that INCLUDES a primary residence while the instructions for this thread were to EXCLUDE it.)
People here basically want to FIRE with the same NW as the Wealthiest 10% of today’s normal-aged retirees AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Just wondering where the frugal is in all this.
It's hard to say since you often have a very particular definition of frugal.
And as I've said a million times, a lot of folks here are exactly like you, high earning professionals with very little desire to retire super young.
But you often describe yourself as frugal, so I'm not understanding where the disconnect is???
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?
???
I was responding to you, but okay...
As for Giles, I don't know his definition of "frugal" but he's right that this forum was designed for frugal folks, but over the years has evolved much more to being filled with higher earning folks who are in little rush to retire, but who have fairly lofty FI goals.
So where is the frugality? It depends on your definition of frugality.
Most folks here are only relatively frugal, where they earn a lot, but spend relatively modestly compared to other folks in their income range. Which aligns with exactly what you have frequently defined as "frugal."
We have an extremely, vanishingly small population of very low spend folks and an even smaller population of very early retired folks, who are definitely the original target population for these forums, but as FIRE became more mainstream, bigger budgets and higher incomes became more the norm here.
That's why the subjects moved more towards analysis of what luxuries are really worth investing in, and how to maximize quality of life, etc.