FIRE - Financial Independence Retire Early
Hey indie hacker peeps!
Hope you all are having a great day.
Just curious who here is working towards FIRE?
What tools did you use to you track your progress? I would love for ya to tell me about it in the comments below.
Trending on Indie Hackers
I'm building the MCU of SaaS 💎
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
When I was working a well-playing tech job I was very interested in FIRE. Basically I wanted to know that I could leave the need to work a stressful 9-5 job as soon as I could. Part of the reason that I started working on starting my own business was the thought that I could achieve financial independence even faster that way.
As I learned more and actually started seriously trying to start my own business, I realized that I didn't want to retire early, I just wanted freedom to work on what I wanted to. I didn't have to wait till I hit a FIRE target to do that, I could instead start sculpting my life to fit what I wanted to do when I retired anyways.
I quit my full-time job last year to focus on my own projects (digital board games, writing about indie tech). The lack of steady income started to wear on me, so I started working part time at a small tech business to cover living expenses.
I am now 50% of the way towards living my dream of just working on my own projects (and living comfortably), but what's great is that I am learning about some of my misconceptions of what my "dream life" really is, so I get to refine that while I also still work towards it.
Sounds like you might be living my current dream. Working for someone 20 hours a week to cover your expenses and fund your passion projects. Not a bad deal. :)
When you were focused on FIRE, was there any specific tools you used to track your progress?
I kept it pretty simple, I just had a Google Sheet to record and track my net worth over time.
I used an online fire calculator to see what my target savings goal was.
I updated my net worth every month. It honestly helped me mentally get through working full-time, knowing that the job was at least letting me save lots!
Oh and I posted on IH a couple months ago about my part-time setup (in case you are interested): https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-i-started-working-part-time-after-8-months-of-full-time-indie-hacking-d02afe5b80
I have been working toward it since I was 20...
My plan is to retire at 50, but as things have gone recently I should be able to actually retire much earlier.
By retire I probably mean, just do what feels right.. a side project there, a small consultancy at a cool company,etc.. so I will prob still earn money for a while, but I am not counting that as a must.
What I did was find an amount of money that made me happy and get used to live with that.. all the extra surplus is either invested in multiple portfolio or is put on the side for future businesses.
Doing this has allowed me to just get used to live with an amount that I will be able to replicate when I reach my retirement. To put in prospective, now i live with just about 60% of my wage..
If you take more and more and start to get used to fast cars and huge houses, rest assured that you will not retire early..
@Zeli880 I feel like quitting cold turkey would be hard. I like your go with the flow kind of attitude.
How did you determine your "amount"? Was there a tool or something specific you used to find that number? I see there are a lot of calculators online for FIRE, but each one comes back with such a different number for myself.
Truth to be told I never actually planned it, it just happened, until recently that I set my goal...
So overall this is what I did:
Do not forget the more you save early, the less you have to save later..
Have been watching a friend pull it off. He's saved $2,000,000, keeps most of it in REITS that yield a few percent, and just plays with $100,000 of it at time trading cryptos via technical indicators only and some swingtrading of stocks using alerts from a system called levelfields I introduced him to.
He targets a 100% annual return on the 100K, which equates to a 5% annual return plus the 3-4% for the REITS gives him 166,500 in annual income, pretax income.
He's in his mid-fifties, eats out once a month, carries a mortgage of 1500/mo and has lots of free time which he uses to travel, hike, and find some paid board positions. This is from a government job - military - from age 22-50. So, IMHO he's nailed it.
I’d like to vote in the survey but you’d have to be more specific about what you mean by independence and retirement.
I have left my day job/career, have passive income, some investments and mortgage paid off. I still work on my product business but can take a few months break if I wanted to. It’s pretty much passive income so I could stop working on it. I don’t consider myself retired though. I am independent but it’s a range.
People count on the 4% rule of passive investments. I think it makes more sense to gradually spend more energy on learning investment strategies as your savings grow. E.g. doubling your investment return to 8% p.a. means that you only need half the capital. If that means only investing $1M instead of $2M, this might save you many years of savings.
I'll FIRE when my $DOGE pays off... Any day now... 😂
I see different estimates about how much is necessary to reach FIRE. I'd say right now I have roughly ~200K between all my assets and cash, but that changes depending on the price of stock and bitcoin which is quite volatile at the moment.
It'd take me several years to save this much and I'm not sure how long it'l take me to double the amount I have. But I'm optimistic that once I learn to code and get a proper career it'l be easier for me to earn money. I'll also build my own indie projects, so we'll see how things for over the next few years.
But I'd love to retire early. I had the 9-5 grind, so I'm hoping indie hacking gets me out of it, or at least gets me closer to where I want to be. But it'l take me some time to get there.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
I think it's independent from having a steady job. The idea is to have long term positive cashflow and you are out of the rat race. But yes, will be depended on something lol...
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Given covid only crashed 40%, I think stock market is pretty resilient. Also, invest in brk or index funds and not just random stock picks.
If you can live well on 4% return on those, you are golden.
Also you can look at RE if that's your cup of tea. I am more of a stock guy.
The one big issue I see with being all cash is that you loose out to inflation over time.
How does one battle that without putting some into the stock market?
yeah, don't have too much cash. but have some emergency funds
I use a mix of Excel spreadsheets, online calculators and a whole lot of self-discipline.
Our tool set is pretty close. Only exception is I am using Google Sheets instead of Excel.