Why FIRE Isn't Realistic for Most People

You read FIRE success stories and think “I could do that.” They saved 60% of their income for ten years and retired at 35. Just cut expenses, live frugally, invest the difference. Simple math.

Then you actually calculate your numbers. Your salary barely covers necessary expenses. Healthcare for a family costs more than FIRE bloggers claim to spend total. Your student loans equal what they say to save annually. Your aging parents might need support.

FIRE isn’t unrealistic because the math is wrong. It’s unrealistic because the math assumes circumstances most people don’t have and can’t create.

The Problem

The FIRE movement presents early retirement as accessible through discipline and smart choices. The formula is straightforward: save 50-70% of your income, invest in index funds, retire when your portfolio reaches 25x your annual expenses. Work backwards from desired retirement age and that’s your savings plan.

This works perfectly if you’re a high earner without dependents, student loans, medical costs, family obligations, or geographic constraints. It falls apart when you introduce the variables most people actually deal with.

The median household income in the US is around $75,000. After taxes, that’s roughly $60,000. Saving 60% of income means living on $24,000 annually while saving $36,000. For a single person in a low cost-of-living area with no debt and good health, this might be possible. For a family of four anywhere, it’s not realistic without severe quality-of-life compromises.

Research on FIRE achievement shows it’s heavily concentrated among high-earning professionals in tech, finance, and similar fields. The typical FIRE success story involves someone who earned $100,000+ in their 20s and 30s, often with stock compensation, in low-tax states. Their achievement is real but their circumstances aren’t generalizable.

The narrative becomes harmful when it suggests that anyone who doesn’t achieve FIRE simply isn’t disciplined enough. You’re told you’re spending too much on housing, food, entertainment—just cut more. But many people have already cut everything cuttable. They’re not failing at FIRE through lack of discipline. They’re failing because FIRE requires resources they don’t have access to.

Why FIRE advice systematically excludes most people’s realities

FIRE content is created primarily by people who achieved it. This creates selection bias in what gets emphasized and what gets ignored. Someone who earned $150,000 annually with no dependents can genuinely believe their success came from discipline rather than from earning triple the median income.

Their advice reflects their experience: cut the subscriptions you don’t need, stop eating out, drive an older car. These suggestions make sense for someone who has substantial discretionary spending to cut. They’re insulting to someone who’s already doing all of that and still can’t save meaningful amounts.

Many FIRE narratives gloss over privilege that enabled their success. They mention earning a “decent salary” without specifying it was $180,000. They talk about “cutting expenses” without mentioning they lived with parents rent-free for two years. They emphasize their 60% savings rate without acknowledging their employer paid 100% of their health insurance.

The systematic exclusions in FIRE advice include: family care obligations that prevent dual high incomes, medical costs beyond routine preventive care, student loan debt at levels that consume significant income percentages, geographic constraints that prevent moving to low cost-of-living areas, careers that don’t offer six-figure salaries regardless of skill or effort.

Each of these factors alone can make FIRE unachievable. Multiple factors simultaneously—a realistic situation for many people—make it impossible without sacrifices that most would consider unreasonable.

Knowledge workers often exist in a middle zone. You earn enough that FIRE content seems potentially relevant. You don’t earn enough that the aggressive savings rates are actually achievable without compromising core quality of life or family obligations. You’re in the awkward position of being able to save more than most people but not enough to achieve FIRE in the timeframes the movement discusses.

What Most People Try

The standard response to recognizing FIRE isn’t achievable is modified FIRE. You can’t retire at 35, but maybe you could retire at 50. You can’t save 60% but maybe you could save 30%. You can’t hit full financial independence but maybe you could hit semi-retirement.

This creates a watered-down version of FIRE that loses the compelling narrative. The appeal of FIRE is escaping corporate work decades early. Retiring at 50 instead of 65 is nice but doesn’t have the same psychological pull. Saving 30% is financially responsible but doesn’t feel revolutionary.

Modified FIRE also inherits all the problems of regular FIRE at smaller scale. You’re still sacrificing current quality of life for distant future freedom. You’re still measuring success by withdrawal from current life rather than engagement with it. You’re just doing it less extremely.

Some try to make FIRE work through extreme measures. Move to the cheapest possible location. Live in an RV or house hack. Work multiple jobs. Eliminate every possible expense. These approaches can work but require trade-offs many people aren’t willing to make.

Living in the cheapest area might mean isolation from family and friends. Working multiple jobs to maximize income might mean no time for relationships or health. Extreme frugality might create friction in marriages where partners have different values around money and lifestyle.

Others pursue geographic arbitrage as a path to FIRE. Work in high-income areas, retire to low-cost-of-living countries where your dollars stretch further. This requires being willing to leave your home country, navigate healthcare in other systems, potentially deal with visa complications, and accept being far from family.

Geographic arbitrage works for some people. It’s not realistic for others who have family obligations, don’t want to leave their community, have medical needs requiring specific healthcare access, or simply don’t want to relocate to a different country.

What Actually Helps

1. Optimize for financial resilience instead of financial independence

The FIRE goal is accumulating enough to never need earned income again. For most people, a more achievable and valuable goal is building enough financial resilience to handle disruptions and make choices without crisis.

Financial resilience means having enough saved to: cover 6-12 months expenses if you lose income, take a lower-paying job if it’s better fit, relocate if needed for family or opportunity, handle medical emergencies without debt, support family members in crisis, recover from setbacks without financial ruin.

This requires significantly less accumulated wealth than FIRE. Instead of needing 25x annual expenses (potentially $1-2 million), you need 1-2 years of expenses in accessible accounts (potentially $50,000-100,000) plus continuing to save for eventual retirement through normal channels.

Many people find that financial resilience provides most of the psychological benefits of FIRE without requiring the same extreme sacrifice. Knowing you could survive a job loss or make a career change reduces stress even if you’re not retiring early. Having options creates freedom even if you don’t exercise them.

Practical implementation: prioritize building accessible savings before maximizing retirement contributions. Many people do the opposite—they max out 401(k)s while carrying credit card debt and having no emergency fund. This optimizes for distant financial independence while maintaining current financial fragility.

A better approach for most people is: build emergency fund, eliminate high-interest debt, save toward short-term flexibility, then maximize retirement accounts with what remains. This creates resilience first, distant independence second.

The resilience approach also acknowledges that most people will work until something approximating traditional retirement age. That’s not failure. It’s reality for most income levels and life circumstances. Building resilience makes those working years less stressful and more flexible.

2. Focus on income growth as much as expense cutting

FIRE advice heavily emphasizes expense reduction because it feels controllable. You can’t necessarily increase your income, but you can definitely cut your spending. Just cancel subscriptions, cook at home, buy used instead of new.

This overemphasizes expense side while underemphasizing income side. For people with low-to-moderate incomes, expense cutting has strict limits. You can’t cut necessary housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and childcare beyond a certain point. Once you’ve cut discretionary spending, there’s nowhere left to cut.

Income growth has much higher ceiling. Moving from $50,000 to $75,000 annually creates $25,000 more saving capacity—far more than you could achieve through frugality at $50,000. Income growth also compounds because higher income opens access to roles with even higher earning potential.

Research on wealth building shows that income increases are stronger predictors of wealth accumulation than spending decreases, especially at moderate income levels. Extremely frugal living on $50,000 might enable saving $15,000 annually. Moderate spending on $100,000 might enable saving $40,000 annually.

Many people resist focusing on income because it feels less controllable than expenses. You can cancel Netflix today. You can’t get a $30,000 raise today. But you can invest in skills, credentials, networking, and career moves that produce income increases over months and years.

Practical implementation: dedicate time and money to income growth even if it temporarily reduces savings rate. Taking a course that costs $2,000 and reduces your savings this year might enable a $10,000 raise next year. That’s dramatically better return than saving the $2,000.

This also means being willing to change employers, industries, or roles in pursuit of higher compensation. Many people stay in comfortable but low-paying positions for years because moving feels risky. But the compound effect of earning more throughout your career exceeds the compound effect of aggressive saving on lower income.

3. Design your life around sustainable satisfaction rather than deferred freedom

The FIRE framework creates a two-phase life: sacrifice phase where you live minimally to save maximally, followed by freedom phase where you finally live how you want. This deferral can last 10-20 years.

The problem with extreme deferral is that life happens during the sacrifice phase. You’re potentially missing important experiences with young children, aging parents, peak health and energy years. You’re also building habits and identity around deprivation that might not reverse when you finally “achieve freedom.”

Many people who’ve pursued FIRE discover they struggled to increase spending even after achieving their number. Twenty years of extreme frugality becomes internalized. They have money but can’t stop optimizing every purchase. They’ve won the game but can’t stop playing.

A better approach for most people is designing sustainable satisfaction—a life that feels good now while still building toward future security. This means spending money on things that genuinely matter to you now while cutting things that don’t, rather than cutting everything to maximize savings.

Sustainable satisfaction requires identifying what actually contributes to your life satisfaction versus what you spend on out of habit or social pressure. Many people discover they can cut significant spending without affecting satisfaction by eliminating things they didn’t really value. They can also discover that some spending they feel guilty about is actually central to their wellbeing.

Practical implementation: track spending for a month and rate each expense on how much it contributed to your satisfaction. Some expensive things might rate high—they’re worth the cost. Some cheap things might rate low—they’re wasting money despite low cost. Many expensive things will rate low—obvious cutting targets.

Design your baseline spending around things that consistently rate high. Cut things that rate low. This might result in spending that looks unusual—expensive in some categories, minimal in others. But it’s optimized for your actual satisfaction rather than matching some external frugality standard.

This approach recognizes that you have one life. Sacrificing 15 years of it to achieve financial independence at 40 might not be worth it, especially if there’s meaningful risk you won’t make it to 40, or if the habits formed during sacrifice persist and prevent you from enjoying the freedom you’ve built.

The Takeaway

FIRE isn’t realistic for most people not because they lack discipline but because it requires circumstances most people don’t have: high income, low obligations, minimal debt, affordable healthcare access, and geographic flexibility. The math works perfectly for people who have these advantages. It doesn’t work for everyone else.

Rather than pursuing unachievable FIRE through extreme sacrifice, optimize for financial resilience that provides flexibility without requiring permanent lifestyle deprivation, focus as much on income growth as expense reduction since income has higher ceiling at moderate earnings levels, and design sustainable satisfaction that feels good now while building future security rather than deferring all satisfaction until distant financial independence. You might not retire at 35, but you’ll build a financially stable life that doesn’t require escaping.