F.I.R.E an alternative style of early retirement

Andrew Leung
3 min readNov 4, 2024
Photo by Elena Rabkina on Unsplash

What is an alternative lifestyle? An alternative lifestyle is something that is different from the norm you see most people take. The “typical” path is start a business or find a job after going to college. Work until you are in your 60s or 70s and then retire. Start a family in your late 20s or early 30s. One of the most popular alternative lifestyles is the FIRE movement. FIRE stands for financial independence retired early. The core concept of FIRE is that you invest very heavily into the stock market to build up a FIRE number (retirement amount) that you can live off of. The goal of retiring early requires that you invest much more early on compared to the average person. This could look like investing 50–80% of your paycheck each month. As you can imagine this would very rapidly get you to the amount you need to retire, which would allow you to retire much earlier than other people. Typically most FIRE participants will be able to retire in their late 30s or early 40s.

So how do you get into FIRE? First, before you can even decide what to invest in, you need to be able to put aside enough money each month to reach your FI number, or the amount of money you need to retire early. Because you need to invest so much in a small amount of time, there are 2 main approaches people take. One is to get into a job that offers a high salary, the other is to take a…

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Andrew Leung
Andrew Leung

Written by Andrew Leung

I will be sharing the plain and honest: truths, pros and cons as well as my experiences of Personal Finance, Side Hustles, and Investing.