Setting the ambitious on FIRE

MAR 10, 2020
by Steph Smith
education Finance and Investing

The signal: Remember when you were so rich that you could literally retire decades before you anticipated? Yeah, about that… The FIRE (financially independent, retire early) concept has been around for decades, but has recently gotten more legs as people look to get pretty damn rich, pretty damn early, without starting an MLM scheme.

The opportunity: So how do you help smart, pretty well-off people become smart, and really well-off? Here are a couple of existing routes:

  • FIRE calculators: Websites that help you determine how quickly you can retire given your current income, savings, and expenditure, assuming a 4% interest rate. A rough rule of thumb is that you need 25x of your yearly expenses. Some calculators show you how much quicker you can retire in different parts of the world. 
  • Advice and content: Sites like Millennial Money, Mad Fientist, and Playing with Fire have managed to capitalize with content by targeting fire-y keywords… with the former racking up $957k worth of organic traffic and the latter bringing in $21k, in less than 3 years.
  • Communities: At the time of writing this, the r/financialindependence subreddit has over 700k subscribers, making it one of the top 500 subreddits on the site. Other “FIRE-y” communities include r/leanfire (123k), r/fatfire (64k), r/FIRE (24.9k), r/FIREyFemmes (9k), and r/semiFI (3k)

Source: Subredditstats

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