Fed up with the bro-heavy archetype of the FIRE trend (“financial independence, retire early”), women are carving out their own niche in the frugal-living movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/business/fire-women-retire-early.html
Great article, fascinating blogs & concept. Thank you for sharing, @oldmom4896.
Yes, fascinating. Thanks for bringing this up. It’s exciting and inspiring to read about how much some of these women have managed to save, while being single moms, and/or helping with aging relatives and/or making more modest, smaller salaries.
Yeah, but sending your baby away because you can’t afford child care is NOT a choice most of us would make.
I have a minimalist daughter who takes her lunch to work and doesn’t have cable, but she does have a dog that costs a lot of money and she travels quite a bit. I hope she does get to retire early but don’t want her to get there and regret not having experiences
I too have a daughter with a dog who makes very little money and lives a pretty spartan life out of necessity (like her mom!). But she doesn’t spend a whole lot of money on the dog, much to my relief. No organic for her, no organic for him.
So many paths toward saving more, spending less. It’s great that more voices are out there in the internet and finding their following.
I think it’s easier to identify with a writer that seems more like the reader. If these many blogs help folks spend less and live below their means, I believe that is very healthy.
This talks of FIRE will fizzle out as soon as the stock market takes another nose dive like it did during the Dot Com Bust and the Great Recession. Lived through both of those, always worry about the next one, and teach our kids to save but stay in top employability shape. Unless one amasses enough to live happily ever after on less than half of their savings, one is not safe from a terrible market crash.
lol @damon30, I don’t think my granddog is career-ready but of course I didn’t phrase my post very well!
Sorry @oldmom4896. 
I think I’m probably getting into some kind of rut with the student advice treadmill, and it felt good to give some bad advice to break it up a little.
My kid has 2 cats; they eat fancy food ($$$) and cost as much as a large dog! Keep telling her she needs to make them work for their $$$ kibble by doin’ some bloggin’ - if Grumpy could do it… ?
Sorry, I grew up poor (not by choice). I didn’t claw my way out in order to continue living the same life.
Which is fine! Not every set of choices has to be the same for everyone.
H and I have followed a modified version of this for the last twenty-five years or so, not to retire early, but to have choices in life, and financial security. This made it possible for him to quit medicine and become a teacher instead about fifteen years ago, while other docs he knew were selling Amway on the side or getting into debt to keep up with the “lifestyle”. It made it possible for me to quit a full-time job ten years ago, and adjunct, which led to the much better job, though still moderately paying, i have now.
Living otherwise super-frugal meant we could send our kids to the schools of their choice. It was easier to pay off our mortgage because we never left the starter home. It was easy to have the funds to buy our retirement home ahead of time and use it as a second home once we paid off the first.
All that sounds like luxury, but it came from making ultra-frugal choices along the way when we could have “afforded” a “better” town and school system, newer cars, and a lot of other things we passed on.
We actually started this process by coming across the book “Your money or Your Life” which just changed the way we looked at money (as units of life, as time.)
It’s fine to not want that lifestyle. Different strokes, etc. There’s no value judgment in it; it’s just a different set of choices (for those who have choices; lots of folks have less.)
Just don’t go on the FIre blogs if you don’t like them. I never have.
But in typical NY Times fashion lets make it a race and gender issue. The white guys have a right to live and write articles too. Good lord.
Imagine a Times headline that would target a something worthy of an article as “too female or too Asian. Etc. “
It’s a big turn off. White men didn’t pick their race or gender either. And we aren’t all Satans Spawn.
I wish people would stick to individuals and criticize away for all I care. But the broad strokes. Not so much.
The article title is a bit too click-baity.
As an early retiree and a female, I have checked out some of the blogs in the past. Like anything, you take what is of personal value and interest and leave the rest. Different backgrounds will have different perspectives and cater to different audiences and that’s all good.
As far as sending my baby to relatives in another country for a year, I can’t even imagine doing that.
@privatebanker – I didn’t see it as making it sound like it’s all about race and gender, but rather that the demographic that most of the FIRE bloggers belong to is, essentially, a niche one, but often seen as a default. It’s just saying that for particular cultural/family/economic/employment reasons, this “default” may not fit the majority of people. It’s not putting it down, or saying those blogs are wrong. They’re fine. The article is pointing out that there are many that directly position themselves as having different perspectives from the dominant strand. The NYT isn’t making that up; they exist with that intention. It’s reporting on them.
The FIRE bloggers may be a bit extreme, but that is their choice and obviously other people will choose differently. I did get a sense that the article was fanning the flames of it being a kind of culture war. The comments too!
I hate when the media foments things like “the Mommy wars”. Real people are not that judgemental, and even if they are, we don’t have to give them extra air for their “grievances”.
@garland. They had me at hello.
“The fire the burns too male and too white” isn’t that a race and gender judgement? Then what is?
I’m not sure I even know that that means.
And why and what defines something as too male or too white? Are there comparable examples of things being too black or Hispanic - I cant think of any and certainly don’t think it would be received to well to throw around in a headline? Or too female?
I just think that if we want to have meaningful conversations - alienating half the human race which is male and a decent amount whom are genetically born Caucasian isn’t really the way to go about it. And would it be ok for any one else?
That’s all. I don’t care about FIRE at all. Just a bit of the hypocrisy out there.
It’s not the ending the world and I’ll survive but it’s funny how the world can comfortably attack certain people along gender and race lines, that is if you are a white male.
I just think we stop this all around. And The NY Times elite would be having their heads explode if another newspaper ran the same darn article and changed the race or gender. That’s why some people don’t trust them as we once did. Selective outrage.
Like I said I don’t think we are a monolithic constituency. It’s offensively suggest otherwise. Or that it’s some how unattractive.
NYT is at the deep end. They are in a brutal victimology competition with WaPo and others.
Just over this weekend people were oppressed by FIRE bloggers, dodgeball and dictionary.com and probably by something else.
By they way, there are white people with a large hair care budget and parents support budget. Some even shipped their baby abroad (we shipped 2 abroad to grandparents as it was the only way for both us and them to survive - we redirected child care budget to them).
Seems like some posters here are displaying their own version of a victimology competition. 