A page about FIRE

I'm putting this here because if you're this deep into getting started, you'll probably encounter this once you start doing your reading and research. If you haven't heard about this acronym before, FIRE stands for "Financial Independence Retire Early". The idea of FIRE has been around for some time but it was popularized by this scene:

It's a Mark Wahlberg movie so don't actually watch the whole movie, but the idea is that you make enough money from your job, live within your means, and put enough of your earnings into retirement and investment portfolios until you've reached at least a million dollars such that you're getting enough passive income from your investments to live comfortably and not tied down to an employer.

FIRE is a really good goal and is realistic for a lot of people working in finance, engineering, and software development. However, it's surrounded by a really bad culture of people who are too deep into frugality for the sake of chasing FIRE. There's also a lot of smoke, mirrors, and bad advice about how to go about it, as well as piles of stories both fake and real.

It's very easy to get lost in FIRE nonsense, so I suggest just starting by looking at investment as a way to guarantee yourself some financial security.