71–80 of 94 posts
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I agree completely with everything you are saying. I always ask my brother- if everyone is retiring and the population is aging, who are you selling your stocks to when you want to retire?
Why would you need to sell them? Many companies pay dividends.
But the question still stands, where will the dividends come from if the companies are underperforming and everyone is retired/dead?
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Counter to the other comment, I was in the middle of college and somehow didn't know about that until years later. After I started working in 2011 at least.
How did you miss it? I graduated in 2009 and it was the only thing people were really talking about after the 08 election wrapped up. It took a lot of people I knew over a year to find work.
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The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate? Someone retiring "normally" around 60-70 has traded their labor for money, usually in ways that can benefit other people in some fashion. When they retire, there are multiple benefits -…
It could get even worse - imaging that they have so much wealth that they pass it onto their children who don't even have to work till 30. You could imagine a growing class of people who don't work and merely live off their inherited wealth. Of course, that already exists; they're called wealthy people.
What would a FIRE Zoomer teach their children, especially if they invested in crypto early and got lucky? Why work hard if mom and dad "don't" work at all? Why go to college if the point of college is training for a career? How will those children be shown by example how to be a helpful member of society?
I suppose a lot of FIRE people likely intersect with the Child Free crowd where they are achieving financial independence by not having any expensive dependents they need to care for. That does reduce the amount you must spend by quite a lot, but if enough people do it the economy will have issues finding workers at all as more people voluntarily check out of the system and leave no descendants to continue in the future.
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The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate? Someone retiring "normally" around 60-70 has traded their labor for money, usually in ways that can benefit other people in some fashion. When they retire, there are multiple benefits -…
>The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate? I wonder how many of these people are even factoring changing demographics. As the population continues to age, retirement is going to get even more expensive because labor will contin…
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Counter to the other comment, I was in the middle of college and somehow didn't know about that until years later. After I started working in 2011 at least.
How did you miss it? I graduated in 2009 and it was the only thing people were really talking about after the 08 election wrapped up. It took a lot of people I knew over a year to find work.
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Why would you need to sell them? Many companies pay dividends.
https://www.physicianonfire.com/selling-shares-beats-collect... But the question still stands, where will the dividends come from if the companies are underperforming and everyone is retired/dead?
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It could get even worse - imaging that they have so much wealth that they pass it onto their children who don't even have to work till 30. You could imagine a growing class of people who don't work and merely live off their inherited wealth. Of course, that already exists; they're called wealthy people.
Sure, but the mindset of the FIRE Zoomer is much different than wealthy people in the past. An easy example would be Fred Trump, whose "winners and losers" mindset was taught to Donald in a way that Donald went to college, started businesses, and maximized his "wins". He taught this mindset to his children and they went to college, even if it was just for networking. What would a FIRE Zoomer teach their children, esp…
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People shouldn't pay any attention to these articles. I retired early years ago. It isn't the annual budget that one has to plan for, but the unforeseen expenses. I took care of my mom and dad for a while. He had top notch medical insurance, but no one covers mental health problems. The total for 4 years of that was just into 7 figures. Also how about that medical insurance for yourself and your family? Unless people…
$40k for dentures? She got fleeced. $3M for retirement right now is plenty, but you have to live like an actually middle class person.
> Gen Z started saving for retirement at the median age of 19, earlier than any other generation ? Median? These numbers seem unrealistic for anyone I know who went to college, and those who didn't are in low pay jobs with no retirement plan
Also median of 19. Meaning quite good bit would have started saving before age of 18 right? That sounds off... Considering what type of jobs they would have had.
Not necessarily. It is quite possible for the median to be 19 even with nobody saving before the age of 19.
Consider a case of 10 people. 6 started saving at the age of 19. 4 started after the age of 19. 0 started saving before the age of 19. The median age is: 19.
> That sounds off... Considering what type of jobs they would have had.
Why?
1. Jobs aren't the only way to get money.
2. Typically parents cover living expenses at that age, so job income is pure profit.
3. You don't need huge sums of money to invest.
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Sure, but the mindset of the FIRE Zoomer is much different than wealthy people in the past. An easy example would be Fred Trump, whose "winners and losers" mindset was taught to Donald in a way that Donald went to college, started businesses, and maximized his "wins". He taught this mindset to his children and they went to college, even if it was just for networking. What would a FIRE Zoomer teach their children, esp…
Well, there's a few things there I'm not really interested in touching, but perhaps if a society is interested in perpetuating itself, it should try and make people happy to live in it and reproduce?
I agree with you. Currently at odds with the goal of having a society of happy people is the society-wide tendency to attempt to extract value from others. This can make for a lot of very unhappy people who have no resources to reproduce.
Regardless, society is made up of people, and people come from families. The tendencies those families normalize are likely passed down. There are negative tendencies that damage society, and positive tendencies that support society. Working for and with each other is one of those supportive tendencies, and while it can be learned at work or school, kids imprint and learn from their parents the most.
My main point is that if a FIRE couple ends up raising a family but don't have to work for a living, the kids may be missing out on a fundamental aspect of society in their day to day lives. Obviously entitlement is an issue with humans in general, but at a societal level FIRE feels a lot like a selfish "FU, I got mine" and that's not a great tendency to pass down to kids.