To my surprise, a significant slice of the FIRE crowd at EconoMe was older. That wasn’t much of a surprise to Bill Yount, a 58-year-old retired doctor who recently began a podcast aimed toward older individuals with Koski and one other friend, Becky Heptig. “The average American is a late starter,” Yount told me. “That’s just who we are, we live in this consumer society and don’t have the mentality to save often or early.” And “9-to-5, 40 years and a gold watch” not applies because it did to his generation Parents: “I don’t belong to the gold watch generation. Generation X was lost, forgotten.”
Heptig, 68, found herself in dire financial straits in her 50s when her husband’s small business began to fail. “I was very scared because I thought we would never get out of this debt and never retire,” she says. They took a category from financial advice radio host Dave Ramsey, and her husband signed up for a W-2 job. After that, they began saving madly. “We had no net worth at age 50, and he retired at age 63, so for us, where we started, we’re looking at retiring early,” Heptig says. She had made the identical wild discovery as everyone at FIRE: that reaching early retirement can actually take only a decade from the moment you discover out about it and begin planning. But as Yount put it to me, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” You don’t even know to search for it.”
Maybe it’s because I do know to While reporting on this text, I used to be particularly drawn to the FatFIRE subculture—and to the wasteful, no-holds-barred, no-holds-barred money philosophy favored by Allen Wong and others like him. FatFIRE contradicts all other variants of FIRE. It is Anti-Anti-consumption. The typical benchmark is to build up enough wealth to comfortably spend at the least $100,000 a 12 months in retirement, but some high achievers aim for much, much larger sums. It represents an unbridled maximalism, a having-it-all abundance.
While most other FIRE communities are likely to be friendly and pragmatic, FatFIRE followers are likely to be jaded, harsh, and single-minded. They are in search of the “exit,” as they are saying within the tech world: a fast, lucrative way out. In the r/FatFIRE subreddit, aspirants eye severance packages, geo-arbitrage, REITs, tax loopholes, high-risk options straddles, and potential business moonshots. Successful FatFIRE members applaud one another for reaching net worths within the tens of tens of millions, debate the merits of personal jets versus second homes, and agonize over how large a trust fund is moral to establish for his or her children. And just as Fisker and Adeney were role models for early-era FIRE followers, Allen Wong is the mythical hero of FatFIRE.
Wong is quiet and modest in person. When I finally met him near his childhood home in Queens this spring, three years after we first chatted online, he was wearing jeans, Asics, and a cautious confidence. He is now in his mid-30s and has enjoyed almost a decade of free time to the fullest; He spends most of his days playing pickleball and giving advice to strangers online about how they’ll follow in his footsteps. Since he is not particularly fascinated with fame, he posts under his app company’s name because the lead moderator of r/FatFIRE. For someone who’s a living talisman against the teachings of conventional life, he speaks with surprising calm – although his eyes flashed with a certain pride after we talked about his childhood or his father. Although r/FatFIRE only popped up seven years ago, it’s on the verge of overtaking r/FIRE in size, Wong told me. Membership has doubled throughout the pandemic despite moderators intentionally hiding the forum on Reddit’s homepage, he said, showing me a graphic. He added that almost all of its members gave the impression to be “American men early in their careers.”
