For me it's the belief that you can always go back to work or find a part-time job.
If you're retirering super early, good luck finding a new job after 10 years. Ask any woman who raised her kids at home for years. Is it possible? Probably, depending on your skills. Is it going to be easy? No. Are you going to replace your old job and income? Probably not.
If you're retirering at 45 or 50, yeah, not happening.
Most of the part-time jobs that you can find mid- or late-career after a multi-year "pause" aren't what they're cracked up to be in the FIRE community. They're not fun, they're not fulfilling, and they don't pay well.
But the key thing is, as an early retiree if you decide to go back to work you wouldn't NEED to make anywhere close to the income you did pre-retirement. For example, my half of expenses falls somewhere between 12-16K/year. If I somehow burned through all my investments, that's the maximum amount I'd need to earn to maintain my current lifestyle, even including European vacations, etc. There are TONS of easy part time jobs that pay 12-16K/year - and you can't seriously tell me any FIRE person would have tremendous difficulty finding a 12K/year job.
Hopefully, current trends on employment hold out.
Men were roaming around during the great depression trying to find anything to do for money, with very little that ever came up for them. They were going through neighborhoods knocking on doors to do anything for a dime. My grandmother didn't have any money to pay them, but would serve them a plate of food on the porch which they were very grateful for, and then they would move on trying to find anything to do for that dime. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1930?amount=0.10
tells me that is less than $2 today.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/v2jf46/men_waiting_in_a_line_for_the_possibility_of_a/
But again, FIRE folks aren't poor people desperate for just any job.
We usually have the ability to wait out bad years, invest money in upskilling during that time, target markets that are in more demand or more profitable.
Had I needed "a job" a few years ago, I would have struggled. Being as disabled as I am, needing huge chunks of time off for surgeries, it would have been a nightmare for me to "find a job."
Instead I spent about 40K and a few years learning cool new shit while stuck in my bed and while relearning how to walk, and then voila, new career.
Times of brutal economies also tend to be incredible times to buy equipment and supplies for new businesses, to hire staff, etc.
I cannot overstate how radically different the world of looking for a new job/business is when you have time and money vs when you need money urgently.
It's like comparing apples to monster trucks. It's just nowhere near the same thing, and comparing the two is actually really insulting to folks who desperately need to find work urgently.
Even in my retraining. My program is designed for people who work full time. Virtually all of my classmates work full time and it's very expensive and not eligible for full student loans, so they're cash flowing 5-10K every few months and doing full time school in their free time on top of full time jobs.
It's brutal for them. They stress every time a new fee increase happens, I've seen meltdowns about not knowing about licensing fees. Burnout is extremely common.
I just had a really nice time reading cool books and writing interesting papers when I didn't feel like doing anything else. I didn't even blink at the tuition and just thought it was a really good value.
When I was looking at extremely competitive practicums, some were asking students to take additional 4 figure courses as part of the internship, and I was like "yeah sure, no problem."
My reality in this process of building a whole new career for myself is nothing, and I mean NOTHING like the experience of my classmates. It would be utterly disrespectful of me to even compare my experience to theirs. They've suffered enormously to make this career change, I literally primarily chose to do it so that I would have something to do while recovering from surgeries.
The level of privilege I bring to the experience compared to my classmates is astronomical.
So I consider comparing the situation of a FIREd person who decides that they could use more money in the nearish future to someone who urgently needs a job to survive is just low-key offensive.
ETA: I want to make this ridiculously clear.
I retired from an extremely specific career with no option to return and not a ton of transferrable skills. I am profoundly disabled and need to unpredictability take time off to recover for multiple surgeries.
I cannot work full time, I cannot work a job that requires me to stand, I also cannot work a job that requires me to sit in a chair, I also cannot work a job that requires me to type too much on a computer. Almost all employment is out for me.
And yet, it was easy for me to build an entirely new, disability-friendly career that pays very well because I had the time and resources to retrain in exactly the industry that would work for me.
It's easier for me, the mangled gymp who can't do most jobs to find lucrative work than the average educated, able-bodied person if they need a job urgently and don't have financial resources.
Time and money is
that powerful.
