Review: Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom?

Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? by Scott Rieckens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reading a book on Financial Independence nowadays is a combination of pleasure and pain to me. It happens the same way with many of these recent crop of FIRE (financial independence, retire early) books. I start reading and have an immediate negative reaction. Why? I’ve been on this path for roughly 30 years, and I haven’t hit the finish line yet. It’s because I tend to the conservative in investing, and it’s because I have lived life and found that my wants and needs are constantly evolving, and I’ve experienced the occasional unexpected setback. I’ve found these FIRE books to mostly ignore hedonistic adaptation, or increases in standard of living. They also tend to ignore some of the inflation to things you buy or will be buying in the future, which sometimes isn’t reflected in official numbers. And I’ve not run into one that handles risks in a thorough manner. In this case, life insurance isn’t mentioned, making me wonder if they’ve thought through any future scenarios including children. Disability isn’t mentioned. Atrophying of job skills, which makes the option of returning to well-compensated work difficult, isn’t taken into account. And the possibility of an inheritance, which is like a kind of insurance on FIRE, isn’t mentioned, and you can’t tell if it has been taken into account. When you’ve considered, or analyzed FIRE for any length of time, you hope to see these topics discussed in FIRE books as a validation of thoroughness. They had only been at it for less than a year when the book was being written, so you get limited reflection. I’d have to give this an “incomplete”. These books, with this one as a good example of the genre, drive me nuts when I start to read them.

If I can get over my initial disbelief that the authors didn’t take what I consider common issues into account, I often get to where I enjoy the story. This happened with this book. As long as I totally disregarded the “how-to” aspects of the book, and instead regard the book as documenting someone learning from scratch, I can enjoy it. Here, I was able to enjoy the journey. Part of that enjoyment is that the author is making a documentary of his family’s journey, and I enjoyed the description of his research and the process. If you are farther along in thinking about FIRE, I don’t think you’ll learn much with this book, but if you are new to the concept, this explains the basics and provides an example of a path, but makes it look a bit too simple.


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