Achieve your Financial Independence and Early Retire (The F.I.R.E movement).

Dimitrios Gourtzilidis
The Dark Side
Published in
6 min readNov 1, 2020

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As generations come and go, it becomes clearer that newer generations want more out of their life and career. Baby boomers could work in a single company for their whole life. Since then, more and more people imagine their life like that. In recent years, a new movement has emerged out of this trend. The F.I.R.E. movement, which stands for Financial Independence Retire Early, came out of this need.

Although these ideas were discussed for centuries, the modern version that I’m referring to started in 1992, with the book “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. In there, the authors gave nine steps with which one can change his or her financial life. Step included like eliminate debt or change one's habits on spending and saving. Next, in the late 2000s, the book “Early Retirement Extreme” came to be and added the RE part of the FIRE movement. But where it really took off was when Peter Adeney started his blog “MrMoneyMustache.com”, or MMM for short. This is where the term “Mustacianism” was created.

The FIRE movement contains elements of personal finance, investing, frugalism, minimalism, entrepreneurship, stoicism, and more. There are countless versions of what financial independence and early retirement mean to everybody and thus there is countless differentiation of the same thing.

Types of F.I.R.E

Lean FIRE

Living below one’s means, frugalism, and more than a 70% saving rate, this type of FIRE requires much more discipline than its counterparties. LeanFIRE requires spending as little as possible in order to gather a saving amount that, in combination with investing and compound interest, will lead one to retire with less.

Fat FIRE

The followers of Fat FIRE are willing to either retire a little earlier than their Lean FIRE counterparties, or they are more privileged by having greater income and/or fewer expenses. The followers of fatFIRE usually practice minimalism, which I will describe further below.

Early Retirement Extreme (ERE)

This type of FIRE is for those who want to take things to the extreme. This type of FIRE comes hand…

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Dimitrios Gourtzilidis
The Dark Side

I write about trading the markets and finance in general. https://linktr.ee/DimitriosOnline