Setting the ambitious on FIRE

Written by Aja Frost @ajavuu | Mar 10, 2020 4:59:48 PM 

<em>Source: Google Trends</em>

The signal: Remember when you were so rich that you could literally retire decades before you anticipated? Yeah, about that… The FIRE (financially independent, retire early) concept has been around for decades, but has recently gotten more legs as people look to get pretty damn rich, pretty damn early, without starting an MLM scheme.

The opportunity: So how do you help smart, pretty well-off people become smart, and really well-off? Here are a couple of existing routes:

  • FIRE calculators: Websites that help you determine how quickly you can retire given your current income, savings, and expenditure, assuming a 4% interest rate. A rough rule of thumb is that you need 25x of your yearly expenses. Some calculators show you how much quicker you can retire in different parts of the world. 
  • Advice and content: Sites like Millennial Money, Mad Fientist, and Playing with Fire have managed to capitalize with content by targeting fire-y keywords… with the former racking up $957k worth of organic traffic and the latter bringing in $21k, in less than 3 years.
  • Communities: At the time of writing this, the r/financialindependence subreddit has over 700k subscribers, making it one of the top 500 subreddits on the site. Other “FIRE-y” communities include r/leanfire (123k), r/fatfire (64k), r/FIRE (24.9k), r/FIREyFemmes (9k), and r/semiFI (3k)

Source: Subredditstats

Other opportunities?

Life school: There are certain things that you’re taught in school. Personal finance is not one of those things. And certainly not choosing high-return credit cards, what an ETF is, or finding decent insurance.

Source: Anvaka.github.io/sayit

Using a subreddit relational tool, we can see what related concepts FIRE-focused people care about most:

  • Entrepreneurship (i.e., making more money)
  • Personal finance, investing, and real estate (i.e., your money making money)
  • Frugality (i.e., spending less money)
  • Programming (in theory, making a decent amount of money)

There's an opportunity to create a simple “life school” that guides people through each of these areas and their subtopics, allowing them to opt into modules related to them. Other things to consider building a new-age school around: 

Location-specific FIRE: Okay, so if you want to move to Bali, FIRE is pretty straightforward. But what if you’re living in Toledo? Or Iceland? Most of the FIRE-related advice out there is general or American (at a national level).

Location-specific FIRE communities have gained traction, like r/fiaustralia (34k),r/fireUK (18k), r/EuropeFIRE (17k), r/fican (12k), and r/dutchFIRE (9k). But there still seems to be a gap for sites to target money-saving or money-earning queries like ““cheap gas in X”, “cheap car insurance in X”, “best pet insurance in X”, or “best X credit cars” in a localized way.
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