This weekend, I will attempt to think deeply about FATFIRE, as I suspect that over the years, many millennials have reached their 40s and are well past their FIRE objectives. I am now trying to figure out what life goals to pursue next. As most of the folks who will play with early retirement are INTJ strategists, there is a range of other MBTI types like ENTJs ( which I am borderline ).
The aim is to go beyond a goal-shifting exercise like ENTJs are prone to. Also, I want to acknowledge that I enjoy non-toxic work and interacting with younger people and investors.
As I've alluded to in my latest YouTube video, financial independence is resetting your working life and trading off leisure time for work to maximise personal satisfaction. The point at which the marginal tradeoff of an hour of leisure to an hour of work produces zero increase in life satisfaction differs from individual to individual. Additionally, I suspect extroverts have a much larger point of equilibrium where marginal work = marginal leisure. I'm at about 15 hours a week on average and have a capacity of perhaps up to 21 hours - but getting back to conventional employment is impractical for me these days. I wonder if INTJs have the energy to work 20+ hours a week if they never have to work. Hence, there is a tendency for more ENTJs to go after FATFIRE.
Okay, once we've established my mental model, which is familiar to many economics majors, let's discuss how FATFIRE can redefine a new financial metric more creatively than simply the safe withdrawal rate.
a) Safe rate of withdrawal
The conventional approach is to declare a comfortable lifestyle for yourself. If this is $10,000 a month, then a safe 4% withdrawal rate can be attained at a net worth of $3,000,000. It's easy, elegant, and quite suitable for singles. Critics can argue that this was tested to last about 35 years, but in practice, you can just lower your expenditure when things become non-ideal later.
You are still retiring with a lot.
b) Sustainable, safe rate of withdrawal
For folks uncomfortable with ratcheting up the drawdown based on inflation, my models suggest applying a safe withdrawal rate of about 2.6% every year based on the prevailing portfolio size at the year of retrieval. The caveat is that you need a balanced ETF asset mix for this to work.
The advantage is you never have to worry about hitting zero, as portfolio losses will lead to lower withdrawals on a bad year. However, this number also maximises your utility over time as withdrawals increase faster than the inflation rate, and your portfolio tends to grow faster.
Therefore, a portfolio of $3,000,000 will generate $78,000 a year, but it can potentially grow faster than the rate of inflation.
The disadvantage is that you will always have money, so this is best for folks with children who can pass on a nice lump sum that will sustain them in the future.
I don't see any point in making your nieces and nephews multimillionaires after you die.
c) Every family member can FIRE
Another way to stretch the goalposts for folks with families is to enable FIRE for every family member. For a single person to FIRE at $2,000 per month, you need $600,000. A four-person family would need $2,400,000.
The benchmark may be lower than other forms of FATFIRE, but some may question whether it is wise to gift FIRE to your kids before they can earn a single cent in the industry. There's a lot of hypocrisy here, as many parents think spending thousands on tuition is justified to delay their retirement goals.
d) Work until every family member is a millionaire
Finally, I want to share my new financial goals. Given that I do some work and am pretty happy with my life, reinvesting substantial amounts into my real estate portfolios, a simple and relatively visceral goal is to ensure that everyone in the household can be a millionaire.
The resulting lifestyle is manageable, and there are plenty of things to do and accomplishments for the next generation.
It is slightly more ambitious than (c) and provides me time to create a balanced mix of work and play without resorting to crass materialism in Singapore society.
e) Become my definition of wealthy
Finally, I want to state my definition of a rich person.
A rich person can live with dividends arising from dividends earned in the previous year.
To live, do that with $2000 a month. A rich person would need about $600,000 of dividends in the previous year. At 5% dividends, his portfolio needs to be $12,000,000.
I'm nowhere close, but some folks in the social media space are there. At this stage, it's safe to assume that someone is finally considered wealthy. There's no real need to pontificate about safe rates of withdrawal or career choices at this level.
Maybe one day, I can philosophize about being rich.
To summarise, I've never thought very highly about FATFIRE or the folks who keep harping about them. As an ENTJ, I know it's some sad excuse to postpone retirement or create some kind of barrier to convince INTJs that what they aim for is inadequate. At its base, it's just the simple idea that retirement is meaningless if you get more life satisfaction by trading off some of your leisure time with work.
Happiness always contains a bit of entering flow from deep, meaningful work or personal accomplishments; I totally get that. However, financial independence is the essential ingredient for even realising that such tradeoffs are possible by leaving a toxic workplace and creating a career that suits your inclinations and investment of time.
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