A Christian Perspective on the FIRE Movement

Imagine you’re a 29-year-old male working for a high-tech firm. You put in 60 hours each week, sometimes more. You are well-compensated with a robust six-figure salary, but find your money disappearing quickly with rent, taxes, and all the “extras” you put on your credit cards. This was the life you once dreamed of . . . but you’re unhappy much of the time, mainly because you just don’t like your work. Yet you feel trapped by the choices you’ve made in the past and by your enjoyment of the pleasurable fruits of your labors. 

Then, one day you see an article in the New York Times with this intriguing headline: “How to Retire in Your 30s With $1 Million in the Bank.” “No way!” you think to yourself but read the article anyway. Thus, you are introduced to the FIRE Movement, which presents itself according to the Times as “a way out of soul-sucking, time-stealing work and an economy fueled by consumerism.” Soon, you’re reading blogs about FIRE and learning from the thousands of FIRE zealots who share their wisdom on Reddit. You begin to think it may be possible for you to retire in your thirties with one million dollars in the bank. What a wondrous thought! As a recent article in J.P. Morgan Wealth Management puts it, “Who doesn’t want to quit their job and retire early?” 

I will answer that question later in this article. There are ample reasons why someone, especially a Christian, might not want to quit their job and retire early. But first let me introduce the FIRE Movement and offer some reflections on its strengths and weaknesses. 

What is the FIRE Movement? 

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The FIRE Movement, which has no official center or leader, began in the 1990s, inspired by the book Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez.  They challenged readers to examine their relationship with money and discern what would really be enough. Then, by frugal living and strategic investing, financial independence could be achieved, with blessed “freedom from financial fears and fiscal failures.”

Robin and Dominguez inspired thousands, mainly professional Millennial males, to pursue financial independence. These followers created the FIRE motto: Financial Independence, Retire Early. Today FIRE adherents number in the hundreds of thousands. Time, Money Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and other media have covered the phenomenon. While FIRE has many variations, its central commitments are widely shared. They include:

• Working, living, and investing so you can retire in your 30s or 40s.
• Living very simply, aggressively cutting costs to maximize savings.
• Maximizing your income from your primary job and perhaps adding a side hustle as well. 
• Investing as much of your income as possible—ideally 70 percent—while you’re working full-time.
• Investing to minimize risks and maximize returns.
• Accurately projecting how much money you will need to retire early while still living in the way you prefer.
• Planning to withdraw no more than 4% of your investment portfolio each year of retirement. 
• Celebrating financial freedom in retirement and doing whatever you wish, whether enjoying your hobbies, working part-time, volunteering for charitable organizations, caring for your family, or devoting major amounts of time to whatever makes you happy. 

What’s Good About the FIRE Movement?

I believe the FIRE Movement has major deficiencies, which I’ll describe in a moment. But it’s important to pay attention to what’s good about FIRE. 

It’s certainly good that FIRE encourages people to examine their lifestyles, choices, and priorities. So many of us adopt the cultural narratives of consumerism and workaholism without thinking critically about how we’re living and why. Robin and Dominguez are right that we need to examine our relationship with money and decide what is truly enough. Of course, they aren’t the first to urge us to consider this relationship. Centuries ago, Jesus framed this discussion by noting the impossibility of serving God and wealth (Matt 6:24). 

It’s also beneficial that FIRE is helping younger adults save and invest a significant portion of their income rather than spending it all on fleeting pleasures in addition to necessities. FIRE challenges people to think seriously about saving money while avoiding unbridled consumerism.

In many situations, FIRE sets people free to invest their time in activities that serve others, such as parenting, caring for aging parents, volunteering, or serving in church. Though some early retirees devote their lives to playing, many give themselves to things that matter. 

What’s Not So Good About the FIRE Movement?

Obsession Not Freedom

It would be tempting to suggest that one of the good things about FIRE is the freedom it can give people from financial pressures and worries. Some FIRE devotees speak of this freedom glowingly. Peruse FIRE forums on Reddit, though, and it seems many devotees anxiously obsess over taxes and investment and draw-down tactics. Even Vicki Robin does not include herself in the FIRE tribe, in part because of such foci. “For me,” Robin writes in her blog, “FI (financial independence) has simply been the freedom to pursue a higher purpose – to grow spiritually, to learn, to create and to serve.” Among FIRE devotees, though, she mostly hears about the battle to achieve and maintain financial independence through smart, techy finance. She wishes these folks would “look past the numbers to the meaning of life.” 

A Deficient Understanding of Work

FIRE advocates desire financial freedom, but usually, this is described as freedom from work. A sub-heading of the New York Times piece on FIRE reads: “Why These Millennials Hate to Work.” Sam Dogen, one of the early FIRE boosters, writes in his influential blog, Financial Samurai, “Early Retirement/FIRE Was Born Out Of Work Misery.” No doubt, work misery is experienced by multiple millions of workers today. According to Gallup, employee engagement continues to stagnate in the U.S. News stories chronicle widespread workplace injustice. The demands of work can wear us down to the point that we echo the question, “Who doesn’t want to quit their job and retire early?”

Answer: Those who understand work from a biblical perspective. Oh, we may at times dream of quitting work and retiring early, but if we believe that God created human beings to work (Gen 1:28; 2:15), then we won’t act impulsively on those dreams. Rather, we’ll understand that our experience of work has been corrupted by sin (Gen 3:16-19). But the God who redeems and restores all things through Christ will help us, not only to think rightly about work but also to discover how work can be more just and life-giving even in a fallen world (Eph 1:10; 2:10; 4:28; Col 3:17, 24). Followers of Jesus see the reality of “work misery” not as a reason to escape from the world of work but rather as a calling to partner with God in its redemption. 

A Deficient Understanding of Retirement

A deficient understanding of work leads to a deficient understanding of retirement. Many FIRE advocates have adopted the common cultural view of retirement in which retirement is “about you,” a time for unbridled play and pleasure. Yet this narrative is seriously out-of-sync with the biblical vision of life, work, and rest. As Jeff Haanen writes in A Biblical Perspective on Retirement, “Rather than seeing retirement as a never-ending vacation, the Bible paints a picture of our later years as a laying down of past work-identities and entering a new season of rest, renewal, and reengagement as elders filled with wisdom and blessing for the coming generation(s).” 

Some younger retirees do embrace retirement as Haanen describes it. For example, my friend Chris retired earlier than he had envisioned because of COVID-related issues. He and his wife decided that they could live on her salary alone if they were very thrifty. This has enabled Chris to volunteer his time to various ministries in Mexico that did not have the financial resources to pay him. Yes, Chris is “retired” in a way, but he continues to work hard in service to others. This work gives him joy though not income. 

FIRE advocates do at times mention the possibility of early retirees working to contribute to the common good. But the standard refrain in blogs, books, and forums focuses on freedom from work and a “whatever you choose to do is just fine” posture concerning retirement life. It seems that negativity about work is essential to FIRE DNA.

A Deficient Understanding of Investing

If you’re going to retire in your 30s or 40s and be financially independent, unless you have inherited wealth, you’ll need to make serious money from your investments. FIRE devotees pursue various investment strategies to maximize gain and minimize risk. Yet they are often so focused on the financial side of investing that they miss the vital ways investing is meant to contribute to human flourishing. Folks in the FIRE movement are not usually social impact investors or people who exercise biblical faithfulness in their investing. In my view, FIRE’s narrow focus on vigorous investing for retirement falls short of the biblical vision of life. As Haanen has argued, “The task of stockpiling assets to last for decades in retirement often then obscures seeing investing as God intends — as a means of providing capital to businesses to enlarge human flourishing.” This obscuration is even more extreme if your “decades in retirement” could be five or more. 

A Deficient Understanding of Happiness

Those dedicated to FIRE believe that it will enable them to be truly happy. They imagine how they’ll feel when finally set free from the “bondage” of paid work. I expect that some who retire early do experience a kind of happiness, at least for a season. But, increasingly, FIRE as the road to happiness seems to be a dead end. 

Professors from INSEAD, an international business school, have been studying the FIRE Movement and its practitioners. A recent article in Fortune revealed some of their findings, which are summarized in the article’s title, “The FIRE movement is soaring in popularity–but early retirees report feeling lost and unfulfilled.” Some of those they studied, however, were flourishing after early retirement. These FIRE participants “deliberately chose to keep doing work that invigorates them once they were financially independent.” 

Since work is part of God’s “very good” world in Genesis 1-2, it makes sense that work, whether paid or not, is an essential element of wellbeing.

Living fruitfully through work gives us joy even as it glorifies God (John 15:8-11). Scripture also testifies to the pain that comes with working in a world polluted by sin (Gen 3:16-19). So we should not be surprised that work can at times be “soul-sucking” and “time-stealing.” Yet, as God’s partners in the work of creation and redemption, our fulfillment and, indeed, our happiness come, not from a life of limitless leisure, but rather from flourishing throughout our lives, producing fruit that adds to the common good and bears witness to God’s righteousness (Psalm 92:12-15).  Moreover, our investing can be viewed as an extension of our own work, as we put capital to productive use in businesses whose products and practices enhance the beauty and goodness of God’s world. 

The FIRE movement proposes a strategy for optimizing life. One notion within it turns out to be familiar to Christ-followers; namely, accepting limitation in one aspect of life for the promise of greater enjoyment in other parts of life. One of the surprises of the biblical story is that flourishing happens within the context of limitation. We willingly bow the knee to our very good Creator-King, acknowledging his superior wisdom in defining both what the good life is and the narrow path to it. Yet, I believe FIRE’s insight about sacrificing now for more abundant life later falls short, because it ignores or denies the goodness of work. It is stuck in a Genesis 3 view of labor—and thus wants simply to break free of the workaday world. The scriptures offer us a truer vision of happiness, where our work today (though admittedly difficult) is shot through with meaning and the opportunity for communing with our loving God—and our work tomorrow, in the New Heavens and Earth, will offer a glorious joy beyond our wildest imaginings.