Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Hi all, I'm new to the community and strongly interested in FI and ERE and the things.
I'm in the process of extracting my numbers, making my plans, gathering resources and reading blogs and success stories.

One thing I usually find useful when discussing other kind of projects in life is reading as much as I can about FAILURE stories, i.e. "what can go wrong".
Although I've read dozens of blog posts where successful people answer those questions in a manner that make them seem silly questions, I've not been able to find on the internet any, ANY, true failure story. A "post mortem" on FIRE.

Did anyone fail with money after retiring early and want to share their story?
Did anyone fail and got bored? Failure with social circles? Did anyone retire and then failed due to partner misalignment? Or worse, had to break up for this?

Is there a FIRE post mortem repository somewhere?

Thanks guys!

P.S. I don't believe any answer of the kind "there'are no failure stories coz none failz bro!!"

Check out the topic FI survivorship bias in the money questions subforum. I asked the same thing recently. Make up your own mind about the answers

Is there a FIRE post mortem repository somewhere?

Yes there is.

Go to the ERE Journals sub forum>>
Click on the button that counts the number of pages of posts on the top right>>
You might have to adjust time to 'all time' posts>>
Click on the last page

These are the journals of all the people who have:

1 Stopped tracking and updating their progress on the forum- quit the forum

2 Quit on FI

Only few of them explain the reason in their last posts, so I doubt you will learn anything 'what not to do' from there.

Example: IIRC the editor of the ERE book quit ERE because (I think it was a) she wanted to have children. They made a last post mentioning that.

Depends how you define failure. Did their investments fail forcing them back to the labour market ? Or did the voluntarily go back for other reasons ?

I would say anyone who has learnt to spend money in a more efficient way has succeeded in something.

thanks, I'll take a look at your suggestions

chenda wrote:Depends how you define failure. Did their investments fail forcing them back to the labour market ? Or did the voluntarily go back for other reasons ?

I would say anyone who has learnt to spend money in a more efficient way has succeeded in something.

By failure I mean both economic failures and any other kind of inner failures like discovering that being "retired" is not the life you want.

This is a legitimate point.

Our natural human inclination (especially American) is to look for things we can DO to be successful.

Yet today each successive generation is faced with so many more perilous temptations, permissions, opportunities, and options than generations before. These freedoms force those striving to be successful from our natural action-oriented inclination to something that feels unnatural. A non-complimentary inclination. Self-control.

Not making big mistakes, it seems, has become more important over our much longer lives than generating big successes. Just as the time-value of money amplifies wealth, so too does time-damage compound early uncorrected mistakes.

Fortunately, the world is full of examples. They are everywhere. Some mistakes are more obvious than others. Look to those who flaunt conspicuous failure and you will likely also find examples of failures that are more easily obscured.

I doubt that most such "failures" are documented here, especially if they involve mistakes or faults of the retiree (as opposed to external derailing events like a spouse getting cancer). Few people are eager to disclose their mistakes to others, even anonymously. I hope that if I have to return to the workforce involuntarily, and it's my own fault, I will have the wherewithal and selflessness to document it so that everyone else has a better chance to avoid the same potholes. But I like to "save face" as much as the next person, so... I don't know.

I suspect many people find ERE while searching for a way out of a bad situation, so my guess then is that they drift away if their circumstances improve. Most people I know base their personal paradigm on their current circumstances, which therefore changes when their circumstances change. The people who tend to stick with ERE seem to be the kind who do the opposite and change their circumstances to fit their personal paradigm. For them, ERE isn't just something they adopt to cope with a bad situation but is an eye-opening revelation that changes them on a deeper level.

Sorry OT ... is not 'retiring' and/or staying retired really failing? This is the second thread I've seen recently that implies that those of us who parlay our ERE freedom into a better situation don't really count as ERE success stories. Reminds me of this thread.

I think how you judge failure is so important. I mean just say people keep working for longer - is that really failure. I mean they have saved up a lot more money that the standard approach and their position will be more robust.

I think the interesting thing on this forum is people that save up a minimal amount and really lower expenses but do not take into account things like having kids and paying for braces, computers for school, support throughout their higher education and things like medical expenses later in life. I'm not sure though that a bunch of people go through this on this forum. I'm in this situation and I can't do an ERE spending level. I think that is too risky for me and my situation.

As others noted, this really depends on how you define success/failure. IRL, I interact a good deal with people who are at, or near, something more like standard retirement age, who have accumulated large piles of assets through conventional means and retained quite reasonably good health (such as ability to bicycle 20 miles most evenings and chop large quantities of wood), but sometimes they still seem more "stuck" to me, simply due to lack of perspective.

Therefore, what "feels" like success to me, for myself, and others, can't really be expressed by a simple measure such as SWR. For instance, do I have the skills to survive if I was dropped into the Northern woods with just a knife and a sleeping bag? Highly doubtful. So, I would admire or consider-to-be-capable-of-success somebody who did have this skill set. Do I have the financial assets to support myself and two children in a middle-class suburban lifestyle for 3 years if I suffered a closed head injury and two broken legs? No, I do not. So, I would admire or consider-to-be-less-likely-to-fail somebody who did have the skill/wisdom to accumulate this asset base. Could I hustle and trade well enough to survive if I was dropped into a strange city-scape with no social contacts and only $100 in my pocket? Maybe, and I like the idea of this challenge well enough that I would sign up for the reality show if it existed, and I admire people I meet who I deem more likely to succeed in this scenario than me. What if I was dropped into a primitive village environment? Could I make myself useful enough to earn my keep? Highly likely, because I know how to cook a variety of foods, possess some primitive crafts and agricultural skills, am experienced in caring for children, and some aging hunter would probably still bring me some meat in exchange for sex and a cuddle. How about the futurescape where the robots have taken control and are only willing to provide tubes full of soylent to the flesh-based-types who possess technological skills that render them worthy to be kept as slaves? My survival would be highly dependent on whether they would accept my GRE scores in lieu of actual skills. Etc,etc,etc.

My point here being not that these, or the million other scenarios I could invent, would be likely. Much more like what is important is to recognize that ALL of these scenarios ALREADY exist, but most people only consider themselves to be living in one or two of these worlds. IOW, they greatly limit their optionality simply by either not using their imagination OR rejecting the imagination of others with rigid "Green eggs and ham" type emotional reactions hidden behind walls of current-convention-as-wisdom. Any person on this forum could choose to wake up tomorrow morning and try to survive by the means of a 15th century French fur trapper, and then, perhaps, fail by noon the next day. Anyways, I am determined to hang out on this forum until I achieve success as defined by SWR, but I am already a success by other measures or perspectives, and I am certain I will still be a failure in other realms of possibility even if/when I do SWR succeed.

Boom! +1

Excellent post!

The wood chopping and bicycle riding thing.... is that a euphemism or do you mean it literally? I want to be sure I am agree with what I think I'm agreeing with. Also, I could leave out the meat for sex from an aging hunter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj3VphK9AMk

If we are talking strictly monetary ERE takes time. There's the transition, growth and decay. Since we are talking of nest eggs to last the rest of our lives its perfectly natural to assume any course "correcting" or "failure" will be some years later. Come back later.

Interesting. All of the above is fine but I really don't know even if you could find a significant number of people who FIRED and then HAD TO go back work to eat (that's the only definition of a FIRE failure I would accept), if it would tell you anything. I mean you have to be looking for examples of things you aren't already able to see from where you are.

If your investment strategy fails is an obvious reason for failure. No problem seeing that possibility from where you are now. I really don't know if there could be any real reason to fail that you can't already see as a possibility.

You do mention, " Did anyone retire and then failed due to partner misalignment? Or worse, had to break up for this?" I can actually answer yes to the last part of that. I got a divorce after FIREing because my wife was unwilling/unable to give up the lifestyle she had become accustomed to. But that was not a failure of FIRE. I continued to be FIREd. I think you have to separate that kind of thing from a FIRE failure.

While failure to remain FIREd is something you could find stories about if anyone was willing to write them, what you really CANNOT find is stories about a successful FIREing. There is only one time when someone can say they have succeeded at FIREing, on their deathbed. Up until then you can still FAIL. I'm at 26 years FIREd and OK so far.

Ego said: The wood chopping and bicycle riding thing.... is that a euphemism or do you mean it literally? I want to be sure I am agree with what I think I'm agreeing with. Also, I could leave out the meat for sex from an aging hunter.

Unfortunately, I must admit that I'm such a terrible "foodie" and so frugal/cheap, I even meant the "meat for sex" almost literally. Pretty much a given that if somebody I've already accepted into my polyamorous circle texts me something like "Honey-seared watermelon martinis and brine-soaked steaks on the wood-fire. Can you come over?" , my response will be "Yup : )" As for the bike-riding, one of my current lovers who is 61 bikes between 15 and 20 miles home every night to the suburbs from his job in the city, and one of my recent lovers who was semi-early retired at 56 biked about the same distance most evenings for fun/exercise. My oldest-ever BF chopped enough wood from his lot to heat his large home in the winter, even though he was 70 and only had one arm (shot off in bad-boy altercation when he was 19) and grew much of his own produce, but also drove a Lexus convertible and was always betting on horse-races even though he expected to lose in the long run. All of these men, and other older Mom-friend females and couples I know, own so much stuff and have such giant projects associated with all their stuff all the time, and I am frequently baffled by the "Why?" of it. And these are people I find attractive or like-able or admirable for a variety of reasons (and vice-versa), so definitely not anything remotely like the bottom of the Wheaton-range in this regard. Sad, but true, story is that the one man I dated (not mated!) because I empathized with some of his dealing-with-young-adult-kid issues, who most matched the stereotypical description of fat-rich-guy-driving-red-sportscar, died a few years later while still in his late 50s due to largely self-induced health issues. Did this answer your question? Do you still agree? -lol