B (3:10)

I have to correct you, Scott Bengan started it and the Trinity study confirmed it.

A (3:16)

Oh, my gosh. We've interviewed Bill Bangin twice and I messed that one up. So sorry, Bill. And he continues to refine that work today, by the way. It's been a very long career for him researching retirement, and he's well past retirement age and still contributing, paradoxically to that research to the benefit of many. I think where the explosion of interest, the explosion of popularity began to tick up for this concept of financial independence, retire early was with the Mr. Money Mustache blog and the Mad Fientist and this crop of finfluencers in the early 2000 and tens, you know, riding off of the Great Recession and into. Into a really strong bull market that carried things for the 2010s and really, I think, brought this, this concept to anybody who was interested in it, I think could really explore it and get a fairly complete playbook in place. How do you think that? Is that a good history of the Fire Movement?

B (4:09)

I think that's a good history of the Fire movement. I want to mention Jacob Len Fisker and Early Retirement Extreme because he was able to retire. I don't remember how old he was, but he was able to retire very, very early by living on extreme frugality, like rice and beans for dinner, peanut butter and jelly for lunch. He was spending literally no money at all. And that's actually incorrect. That's not literal. Figuratively, he was spending no money at all, but he was living on like seven or ten thousand dollars a year. And that didn't resonate with a lot of people, but it did resonate with some. And then, you know, but by, by contrast, Mr. Money Mustache is, you know, just positively throwing money out of his pockets at his 24,000 a year. For his spending. But the the early retirement. The early fire community was preaching frugality as the way to get to fire.

A (5:06)

Yeah, and I think that another characteristic of the fire community and the most prominent people in it in the early 2010s is this concept of frugality. These are very fr. Frugal folks. These are people who prioritize not having to work over having the good life, a highly expensive life. And they were redefining what that good life meant in the context of freedom, the ability to go outside and enjoy nature, how to have many of the greatest things that are available in society for very low cost by exercising spending as a skill. A term that Mr. Money Mustache used very frequently and almost from the get go. This is nothing new. That mindset of extreme frugality and almost a distaste for people who spend a lot and thereby trap themselves in long term dependence on wage paying work. That dismissal of that generated backlash. We had terms almost from the get go in the fire movement of the early retirement police who were policing all of the people in the fire community for any source of income outside of their retirement portfolios. And spoiler, almost everybody at that point in time. And still today, many, many people have some kind of supplementary income, some kind of pension or side project or that kind of thing. It's very, very common in the community that those criticisms came out from the get go around frugality and whether folks were actually retired in a. In the sense that they were not earning any money.

B (6:37)

I think you said it best, Scott. They are prioritizing not working and they are willing to, at the time they were willing to give up all of this extras and comforts and, and not so much comforts but really just like extras. They, they didn't need to travel, they didn't need to, you know, have brand new clothes and new cars and new everything. They prioritized not working. We'll be back with more right after this short break. Autotrader is powered by Auto Intelligence, the hyper personalized way to buy a car. Autotrader's tools sync with your exact budget and preferences to tailor the online car shopping experience totally to you. Budgeting lets you input your info to see listings in your price range. Search and inventory helps zero in on your dream car. You can choose from new or pre owned, the style of the car and features like engine size, color, all the way down to whether you want a trailer hitch. Go ahead and get picky. Don't worry about scrolling endlessly. Autotrader powered by Auto Intelligence only shows you vehicles based on what you can afford and what you want and pricing shows you which listings are the best deals so you can feel like you're winning the negotiation without negotiating. You can even choose how to close the deal online at the dealership, or a little bit of both. AutoTrader powered by auto Intelligence makes the process of buying a car less of a process. Try it today. Visit autotrader.com to buy your perfect ride. You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options or let's do a little research. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com let's jump back in.

A (8:45)

All right, now that we've given a quick history lesson of the fire movement, let's get into how it's evolved. Mindy?

B (8:51)

Yeah, I think it's evolved significantly over the last year. You know, basically 25 years. However, I think the last like five years have really started to have an evolution. Scott, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen?

A (9:07)

I think we've seen a splintering of the fire movement. I think we've seen a lot of people grappling with a extraordinary run in for for employees over the last 10 to 15 years. Yes, I know that people that riled some people up. But that is a fact. Employees have seen real incomes grow significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. And that coupled with an explosion in asset values, which is even outpaced. Wage growth, has had a lot of people who pursued fire become fairly wealthy over the last 10 to 15 years. Hey, guess what? Spending low income, working very hard and creating a huge gap between what you spend and what you make and then investing the difference in a reasonably aggressive asset class like all stock portfolios or levered real estate into a ten year bull market, create a lot of wealth. And I think that the challenge now for some people, people who have been early adopters of the fire movement is wow, I became wealthy. And even if I retired and started spending at the 4% rule, I found my wealth many times greater than what I was originally expecting it. And at that point, one has to ask themselves, is frugality this virtue? That has always been the case. Do I need to rewire my brain a little bit to start spending money and enjoying life? This is a problem, Mindy, that I think is acute in your life. Have you observed this in other people that you are associated with in the. In the fire community?

B (10:29)

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of people who just can't spend their money. It's more rare for me to meet someone who is comfortable spending than it is for me to meet someone who isn't.

A (10:42)

That reality has also been absorbed by people on the journey to fire in here in 2025, realizing, hmm, if I continue to pursue this goal at this level, you know, to an extreme degree, I'm going to have that problem. That's a good problem. But I could also enjoy my 30s more. Right. Your husband, Carl Mindy wrote a great article called the Death March to Fi on your blog, 1500 Days. Right. Which is about the grind of keeping that. That gap really large between income and expenses for a very prolonged period of time. You could have likely gotten to the same outcome by spending while spending significantly more on the journey to financial independence. And I think people are realizing that, learning from that, those types of experiences, and going a little less hardcore on the journey when it means lifestyle gains on the way.

B (11:37)

Yes. That is one of the biggest changes in the fire community that I have seen over the. I discovered it in 2013 as well. So over the past, what, 12 years, 13 years almost, that we've been part of this. That is the biggest shift is that it's no longer how fast can you get to Fi? It's. There's. There's a lot more people talking about, I wish I would have enjoyed my journey. I hope that when you're on the journey, you are enjoying it. Add things back in that allow yourselves to. To really have fun in life. Because what's the point of getting there as fast as you can? I got there in 10 years, but if I did it in 11, I would have had a lot more fun. Wow, great years. Or 10 sucky ones. I think I'd rather have the 11 great years.

A (12:23)

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the next kind of evolution that I will point out is. And I don't even know if this is an evolution as much as something that's always been there, but the word retirement is a very polarizing word. Right. So people think that retirement means that I'm taking myself out of the contributions to society in its entirety. I'm either not going to Earn any money or I'm not going to do valuable work. I'm going to literally sit on my bum playing video games for the next 50 years, not contributing at all, just taking and harvesting my portfolio. And this has really never been the case. Right. That's a misconception with the fire community. Right. Mr. Money Mustache, again, has added tremendous. A substantial amount more value to society, I would argue, than what he was doing as a software engineer with his blog, which started in early retirement. How many millions of lives have been touched by that work, which was not necessarily a job. Yes. And it also increased his income. Another example, Frank Vasquez. Right. Frank Vasquez is a. Is retired and he runs a great podcast called the Risk Parody Radio. Risk Parody Radio, which I've listened to many episodes on. He's been on our show 100% or he doesn't make any money off of that. He does encourage donations, however, to the soup kitchen that he volunteers at. How much more value is he adding to society with that exercise, even though it doesn't translate to income generation for him in retirement than what he was doing as a lawyer prior to his retirement.

B (13:59)

Right.

A (13:59)

Maybe he did good work as a lawyer, too. But whatever he was doing, it'd be hard to imagine more value being added than his current activity set. And I think this is a problem that people have is they don't grasp that there's more to life beyond that role at work. And so I think that that's been not an evolutionary point, but something that just has to keep getting hammered home because it's been a pushback the entire way. Some ways that the fire movement has tried to address that is by relabeling fire from financial independence, retire early to financial independence, recreational employment. But the goal is really to build a financial position capable of sustaining early retirement without the need for any additional income. Even though, paradoxically, many people in the fire community go on to continue to earn incomes or even very large incomes from very large businesses in their retirement from traditional work.

B (14:53)

Yeah, I think that's a great point, Scott. I. And, you know, tagging off of that, there's now more of a focus on happiness. And I know a lot of people who have reached financial independence, they have retired from the job that they didn't like, and they took some time off and then went back to work doing something that brought them a lot of joy, even if it didn't bring them a lot of money. They are increasing their happiness. So it doesn't really matter that they are spending time doing a thing. They're doing a thing that they love.

A (15:24)

What are some ways that you've observed? Right, Those are two of the top ones for me.

B (15:28)

One thing that we were starting our journey was based on the 4% rule from Bill Benken. SCOTT I'm not seeing a lot of people withdrawing at the 4% rate. I'm seeing a lot of discussion on, you know, Carsten says 3.5 or 3.25% because it has to last longer. Bill Bangin study was only about a 30 year portfolio, but I'm seeing other people like Frank Vasquez says, nope, you can do it at a 5% withdrawal rate if you set up your portfolio a little bit differently. Bill Ben was 60% stocks, 40% bonds. Frank Vasquez throws gold in there. He throws international stocks in there. We have a great episode where he walks me through how to set up a risk parity portfolio. I've been withdrawing 5%, Scott, since July, so it's, you know, only been three months. But I'm up $700 after withdrawing my 5% monthly. 5, 5% annually divided by 12. So I've got a monthly withdrawal rate, but it, you know, it keeps going up. That's supposed to be one of those that sustains me for what, 30 years at 5% withdrawal rate.

A (16:45)

You know, five, 10 years ago, we were really seeing a lot of people. There certainly was a small segment, of course, doing this, but we weren't seeing a lot of people building retirement portfolios. Right? There was this, there's this concept of the Boglehead philosophy. Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard right and Low Fee Index, broad based indexman investing to drive large returns. And people would just stockpile their wealth in pretty aggressive stock market portfolios hit their fire number and then the market carried them so far past their goal that traditional retirement planning advice was unnecessary. There's no reason to withdraw at 4% if you're spending 100 grand and you have $10 million. Right. It's just so it's kind of a silly proposition to do that. And because folks were not big spenders, they had just a vast surplus in their lives. And I think this is again, reflective of your portfolio, Mindy, you and Carl's. And I think that nowadays people are getting a little bit more sophisticated. There's a greater emphasis and interest in. No, no, no. Let's actually take a look at different types of portfolio construction and actually design retirement portfolios that sustain this so I can get more precise with how long I'm working and not blow past that number working unnecessarily. Again, I'll call out Frank Vasquez and the research he's doing, Paul Merriman and other resources that are growing in popularity with these more diversified and balanced portfolios. And I think that's both a function of maturity in the fire movement and a function of a pretty long bull market that's beginning to give some people like me a little bit of the jitters about the old fashioned broad based index fund investing. As with 100% of your financial assets, for example.

B (18:26)

Okay, I think that's a good way to say it. I still think that people aren't withdrawing 4% though. I mean, who have we talked to that withdraws 4% and spends on it?

A (18:35)

After I made a particularly large stink about this, perhaps a little unprofessionally a few months ago, we did start to a couple of see a couple of people begin to come out of the woodwork. So I no longer can say, oh, I have yet to meet five people doing this. But it is still a very tiny fraction of the fire community that is truly withdrawing at something very close to the 4% rule from a traditional stock bond portfolio. There's a reluctance and this is nothing new. This is nothing new in the retirement, the traditional retirement planning world where I think was like 80%, some, some 80% of retire. Traditional retirees never spend the principal from their investment positions in there. So the fire community is very similar, if not even more skewed. I don't have hard data on that, but in my anecdotal experience, ACROSS all the 10 years we've been doing, you know, the eight or nine years we've been doing bigger pockets money. I've met very few people that are actually doing that. Almost everybody has some source of, of income or cash flow well in excess of their spending in their early retirement. And that seems to be a theme there. But again, an evolution that's beginning to get underway in the fire community. All right, this conversation is also not dead, but we're going to be back after a short ad break.

B (19:45)

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A (22:44)

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B (23:15)

Another evolution, Scott, is the different types of fi that you can pursue. It's no longer just fire. There's barista Phi, Lean Phi Coast Phi, Chubby Phi, Fat Fi. We did an episode detailing all of those episodes677, just a few weeks ago. But there's all these different ways that you can still be financially independent. You don't have to amass a giant amount. You can still have a small job. Barista fy. You can embrace the extreme frugality of the beginning of the fire movement and go really, really lean. You can have a traditional fire life where you are having, you know, you know how much you're spending. That's what you're focused on. You can just coast. That, I think is one of my favorites, the coast fire, where you. You decide I've got. And you. You do the math and discover that you have enough money for traditional retirement age and you never have to save. So if you do save more, then you just kind of kick back your. You like, pull back your retirement age a little bit, but it gives you a different amount that you're focused on instead of, oh, I have to save up a million dollars or I have to have a million dollars in investments now it's like 125,000 depending on your age. There's so many different ways that people who were initially turned off by the extreme frugality or turned off by the million dollar portfolio is the one that is bandied about most often. But, you know, oh, I spend more than that. Okay, then just adjust your numbers. Oh, I can still be financially independent. Even if I have a $10 million portfolio. I can still call myself fire. Great, now I'm fat Fire. So I think just all the different types is a real boon to the fire community because now it's not just one person's definition.

A (25:11)

I love those. A bunch of these new ones. I know some. Some people find a couple of them silly. You know, we get some comments every once in a while. Hey, barista fi or coast fire is not really Fire. What are you talking about with this? And I get that sentiment. I still believe in and support and am completely of the mindset that true financial independence, early retirement with a median middle to upper middle class income and is a great aspiration for many, many, many people in this country and the American dream here in 2025. I think, in many ways, and I think it's worth the sacrifice and the hustle and the grind to get there early in life because of the explosion of opportunity and optionality that comes out in it. And I'm also glad that as people are pursuing that, they're discovering these other variants and are using that optionality to design the life that's best for them, whether that's beginning to take advantage of some of that freedom in their 20s or 30s with a version of Barista Phi, or buying the house and making the family memories in their 30s, knowing that they're going to be Coastfi and taking the pressure off of themselves to attempt to grind to financial independence at the expense of family happiness, for example, at that point in life. But I also believe that this is all grounded in the concept of, for millions and millions of people who are wired like me, wired like you, wired like many of our friends and family, that ability to be independent and truly have that freedom to pursue your passions the way that you want and direct 100% of your day's activities the way you want is the gold standard. And everything is derived from that. And that is what has not changed in the fire community.

B (26:54)

It sounds like you agree with me that these are all positive changes for the community.

A (26:59)

They're all evolutions. Yes. You know, evolution by definition gets rid of, generally speaking, the, the worst, the things that are unhealthy and not productive and replaces them with things that are. And that's what evolution does here. And the fire movement has evolved and it's evolved to the benefit of millions and millions of people.

B (27:16)

Yep, absolutely. I completely agree. I think this is a great change. And because it's more inclusive now, I don't want to be frugal, so therefore I'm not even going to bother. I want people to be financially independent, financially free. You use the word freedom just a moment ago, Scott. It gives you freedom to do what you want instead of I have to go to work and I have to show up every day even though I hate my job because it's the only way I'm putting food on the table. Now you've got options. And options make life so much better.

A (27:51)

So Mindy, is, is Fire dead?

B (27:53)

No, Scott, but one size fits all. Fire I think is dying.

A (27:59)

Yeah. You are crazy. You are out of your mind if you think that people are going to reject this concept of fire. You think that poo, pooing it on the Internet, you know who you are, finflancers, is going to get you anywhere. Because everybody wants financial independence of some sort. Not everybody wants to stop working in perpetuity, but everybody should and will eventually want the option to stop working early in life and now more than ever, this is more accessible than ever to more people than ever and it's only going to continue. That's, that's the correct bet here. AI technological improvements, the collected efforts of a capitalist society across 8 billion people is going to make things cheaper and easier, make housing larger and more accessible over time. Will not happen overnight, but every year that engine will progress and those automations and benefits will result in more leisure time and more ability to direct one's daily activities for a greater and greater percentage of the population. And those benefits will first and foremost impact people in the fire community. That's who will benefit first from those changes and that progress. And that's what people want. Right? And you're just missing the point if you're saying that fire is for this small group of fringe weirdos that are obsessed with frugality. That may have been more true, slightly true 10, 15 years ago, but it's not true in 2025. And this concept of financial independence, the financial independence movement only going to swell and get bigger and bigger because the benefits are so obvious to so many people and the flaws are being worked on, refined and removed from the philosophies here. So I think it's a fantastic goal. We're going to continue to try to help people get there faster and faster, learn slightly better tactics along the way to speed things up and keep it healthy.

B (30:10)

Scott, as you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, oh, you know, I met a couple a few months ago and they were describing their spending habits and I say spending with air quotes because they were focused on frugality, like really extreme frugality to the point that I thought wow, that's really weird. And as you're saying all of this, I'm like, oh, that was me 15 years ago and now I have evolved too. And I think that you, it's, you know, these, these influences are saying that fire movement is dead, are not part, they're either not part of the fire community or they are and they're just looking for clicks and they Love to.

A (30:53)

Cherry pick like the particular extreme weirdo cases out there. Right. Like, like this person that's like worth 30 million bucks and can't spend a dime of it. Right? Sure, sure, you can find that person. You can also find tens of millions of households that are in debt, that don't keep a budget and that fight about money all day long and aren't getting ahead. That's even more unhealthy. Right. Like most of the fire community is getting this and growing together and moving in the right direction towards financial independence and then learning to live their best life from a position of absolute financial strength and optionality. Right. You can find examples of hardcore frugal people who need to have their mind expanded and built out. You can also find examples in the general population who are not pursuing fire, of people who are totally trapped in horrible work environments who thought that they wanted to work forever and then their boss changed or the company sold or the situation changed or the industry began to work against them and now they're in hell and they can't get out. Right. And like that's the challenge here. Yeah, you can cherry pick weirdo examples in any of these situations. By and large you're going to find that people who pursue fire, we have data on this. Are much more likely to be happier and to say that they're much happier after they've discovered and begun pursuing fire than before it. You will find one eighth of respondents to polls in the fire community who say that they are less happy along the journey to fire. Right. So it's not a guarantee, but it is a pretty, we have pretty powerful data to suggest that it does translate to general happiness and well being. And Mindy, do you know a lot of fired folks? What would you say that the, the folks that you know who are financially independent tend to be in better or worse shape than their full time working peers?

B (32:38)

Oh, physical shape, they're in much better shape. That's one of the biggest, most common goals is I have quit my job and now I am going to the gym, I am going to work out, I'm going to. I will have time to work out, I will have time to eat healthy, I will have time to make healthy foods, I will have time to focus on my health. And is everybody who retires early healthy? No, but that is a huge goal that I see many of the people in my community working towards.

A (33:10)

The people who pursue fire are wealthier, healthier, happier and travel more.

B (33:16)

Yep, the fire movement's dead.

A (33:17)

Somebody a data set that proves me wrong. I promise you it doesn't exist in a large, large scale, large, large scale sampling. It's, it's just an obvious benefit and more and more people are going to pursue it. So with that, Mindy, what do you see? Evolve. What do you see as the next phase of evolution for the FIRE movement over the next 10 to 20 years? Wow.

B (33:35)

I'm not very good prognosticator, Scott. I'm gonna say it keeps going with this focus on happiness, less focus on retire early and more focus on getting your finances in order to getting them figured out, figuring out what your life feels good at. The cadence of work, the cadence of working out, the cadence of vacations, the cadence of spending time with your kids. Whatever works for you, that's what people are going to be focusing more on. I want to be happy and I'm going to let my money, I'm going to use my money to help me be happy. How about you, Scott?

A (34:14)

Folks who fire are going to at some point, maybe soon, I don't know, maybe, maybe later, experience a real system shock with financial markets, right? I mean, maybe things just boom forever on here or maybe there's a big pullback from historically expensive stock market valuations, really tough to find cash flow opportunities, and higher interest rates in the housing market, right? Is bitcoin going to go to the moon or is that going to pull back at some point? At some point there's going to be the crash that we all know is coming a couple of times a generation in financial asset classes. And that will test the fortitude, I think, of a lot of people's portfolios, especially those who are essentially 100% concentrated and highly aggressive investments that do have that volatility again a couple of times a generation. I think that will be a really interesting test for the fire movement. My prediction is that in the context of that test, it's going to be just fine for folks. People are going to hold through that drop and recover whether it takes five, 10, one or 20 years in there. And I think that they're going to come out much better off than their peers who have not amassed substantial assets and are still working, paradoxically, because they have the option to go back and get a job, part time work or whatever. All the flexibility options that we've discussed at length around fire here on the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. So I think that's going to come through as there's going to be that event that everyone, for everyone foretells and FIRE folks are going to have obviously a much stronger position than people who don't have substantial wealth early in life. I think that there's going to continue to be more evolutions of financial importance portfolio theory. And I think we're going to see a shift from folks pursuing the most aggressive option to more balanced options that give similar levels of return with much lower risk. Risk is defined as volatility in one's portfolio. I think that the tendency for society over the next 10 to 20 years is going to be like it was for the last 10 to 20 years of just explosion of optionality for experiences, lower real costs of goods in many areas that are most important to people in the fire community, like high quality foods, more affordable travel, better housing options, those types of things. So I think that's going to be. I think people are going to be surprised at how much better life can get from here for folks in the fire community. And they'll be the first and the first to benefit from that. And they'll get the maximum benefit from that progress out of other folks in society, which I think will only swell the interest in this. I think that there will be several new. I think that people will reinvent the term fire in exactly the same concept and call it something different. So you'll have like some new name emerge from this. Gen Z will have to rename it something new and so will Gen A as they become adults and go in there. So I think that that will happen. But those would be the, the top predictions. I don't know any, any that those, any of those spur any ideas from you.

B (37:02)

Mindy, should we get that economic downturn that you think might happen? I think that there will be some negative commentary about the fire sway some of the people that are in the fire community. Oh, maybe I shouldn't do this and I would encourage those people to stay the course. Just because the market goes down doesn't mean that you've lost money. That means that your portfolio doesn't have the same amount of money in it. But you only lose money when you sell. If you're holding for the longer term, if you're, you know, two, three, five years into your 10, 15 year retirement journey, fire journey, then you don't need to worry about the market going down in, you know, year two, three, five, it will almost assuredly bounce back up. You look at the historic returns of the stock market and the market goes up more than it goes down. So I can see some. I do have a crystal ball, Scott. If that economic downturn happens, I could see a whole lot of smack talk about the fire community.

A (38:03)

Oh, yeah, you'll hear a bunch of smack talk, but by and large, you'll find that people, the fire community, are so conservative with so many aces in the hole on average, that the folks will be relatively unaffected or much less affected than their peers who get laid off and can't cash flow their lives.

B (38:20)

Yeah.

A (38:20)

Without tapping into much lower basis asset asset portfolios. So I think that that will be the true story, but the headlines will scream something different.

B (38:29)

Yeah, absolutely. That is not always the case. The true story is this, but the headlines say something else. All right, Scott, this was a super fun conversation. First we talked about the original fire movement. Then we move to how the fire movement has evolved. Finally, we talked about what's next for the fire movement. I really enjoyed this conversation with you, Scott. And I want to know from my listeners and my viewers, did you enjoy this conversation? Did you have something that you wanted to argue with us about? Let us know in the comments below. Scott, should we get out of here?

A (39:01)

Let's do it.

B (39:02)

That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying retire fire.