Gen Z wants to retire early. They're off to a good start • Hacker News Board

Re: Gen Z wants to retire early. They're off to a good start

#91

Post by I_Am_Nous » Tue, Nov 07, 2023, 8:33 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #82

I_Am_Nous wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 com…

> 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. Again, if you replace FIRE with wealth, I don't see much of a difference. Perhaps you have bought into some wealthy ubermensch-like mythos of the rich as the "job creators", but I assure you that they're capable of as much lazi…

I agree with you again. My original question was asking "how many FIRE people can there be before it negatively affects society" so my thoughts and comments are scoped at that level -- how many FIRE people/families/descendents would it take to affect society in a meaningful way.

I haven't done a good job of making that clear at all, and I apologize. There are surely a lot of people trying to reach FIRE goals and if that were to be a meaningful 15% of the population, how would we be affected as a society?

One thing that's interesting in all this is that a common FIRE tactic is to live very frugally your whole lives to achieve and then maintain FIRE. If a meaningful percentage of Americans stopped spending as much money, the economy would feel it at a certain point.

These are the kinds of society-level thoughts I have been aiming to discuss. FIRE makes for some interesting futurism if it becomes the dominant American household financial strategy.

Re: Gen Z wants to retire early. They're off to a good start

#92

Post by hotpotamus » Tue, Nov 07, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

I_Am_Nous wrote: post #91

hotpotamus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Again, if you replace FIRE with wealth, I don't see much of a difference. Perhaps you have bought into some wealthy ubermensch-like mythos of the rich as the "job creators", but I assure you that they're capable of as much lazi…

I agree with you again. My original question was asking "how many FIRE people can there be before it negatively affects society" so my thoughts and comments are scoped at that level -- how many FIRE people/families/descendents would it take to affect society in a meaningful way. I haven't done a good job of making that clear at all, and I apologize. There are surely a lot of people trying to reach FIRE goals and if t…

I suppose the whole concept of FIRE is a bit hard to pin down. I believe most peoples' goal is indeed to retire eventually, so who's to say when the appropriate age for them is? If someone takes 50 years to generate enough value to live out their remaining days while someone else only takes 5, then isn't that determined by the labor market and their desired lifestyle? I'm all for a more collectivist "we're all in it together" type of society where retirement is a bit more of a managed concept (I get the impression France is like that where private retirements are rare and that's why Macron raising the retirement age was such a bitter pill), but that is not exactly the way that the US works.

Re: Gen Z wants to retire early. They're off to a good start

#93

Post by woodruffw » Tue, Nov 07, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #83

woodruffw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than 2008, you mean?

> Other than 2008, you mean? To state the obvious, 2008 was 15 years ago. So someone who was a senior in high school at 18 in 2008, is over 30 today. So it is true that there's a generation that includes everyone in their 20s and those in their early 30s that have never experienced a significant market crash.

This is a pretty myopic definition of “experienced.” I was in middle and high school through the GFC, and watched my friends and family lose their jobs and worry about their livelihoods.

Re: Gen Z wants to retire early. They're off to a good start

#94

Post by jjav » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 12:57 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #93

jjav wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other than 2008, you mean? To state the obvious, 2008 was 15 years ago. So someone who was a senior in high school at 18 in 2008, is over 30 today. So it is true that there's a generation that includes everyone in their 20s and those in their early 30s that have never experienced a significant market crash.

This is a pretty myopic definition of “experienced.” I was in middle and high school through the GFC, and watched my friends and family lose their jobs and worry about their livelihoods.

The topic is stock market investment expectations which is not the same. The market can be going up even as unemployment rages.

The vast majority of middle schoolers were not trading stocks in 2008.

To have experienced one downturn, a trader must've been trading back in 2007/early 2008. It is safe to say most traders in their 20s today were not active traders back in 2007. I'm sure exceptions exist.