My name is Charlie and I am a recovering "Financial Independence Retiring Early" addict

But maybe not for the reasons you think

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I truly thought it was what I wanted. To save enough money that I would never have to work again unless I wanted to. To be “free.”

That’s what the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement promises, with shiny poster people living shiny lives to prove it’s possible.

I was hooked within moments of discovering FIRE. Worked out what I could do to get there. Working 60-70 hours a week in my wine store and bar for over seven years with no break was taking its toll. I was exhausted, I wanted a way out. I wanted freedom.

FIRE seemed like a solution.

I was part of the movement for around seven years. Now, not so much.

There are plenty of critics of FIRE. People say the math isn’t right and that the money will run out. That you can’t possibly know how much money you need to live as you age. That you’ll be bored with all your free time.

That’s not what bothered me. What bothered me is that I had failed to ask myself the most important — but arguably least asked—question in personal finance.

Does FIRE — or any personal finance strategy — align with your values?

The main reason I am no longer a FIRE advocate — aside from the fact that it was an impossible financial goal anyway— is that the modern iteration does not fit my personal values, or work hard enough to create a world I want to inhabit.

Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the main, old-school principles of FIRE. But I don’t love what it’s become.

Whether your principles align with your financial strategies — be that your pensions, savings, investments, or even the way you spend your money — is something that we all need to talk more about.

I say the modern iteration of FIRE here because, interestingly, old-school FIRE is a different beast.

Many people attribute the movement to a book called Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and the late Joe Dominguez. This book advocates living a less consumerist lifestyle, which requires less money to maintain, thus freeing yourself up to do more good in the world.

All good stuff, IMO.

What it doesn’t encourage is what many people consider a stereotypical FIRE lifestyle — a well-paid, white collar worker retiring at 30 to sit on a beach for the rest of their life.

Your Money or Your Life was my gateway to FIRE and encompassed the way I wanted to approach it. Consume less and use that extra money to help other people and the planet. It sounded right up my street.

I still love many of Vicki Robin’s original philosophies. But as tends to happen, the movement has been co-opted.

The deeper you dive, the more you find people who lean towards that common perception of FIRE: the privileged 30-something retiring after a few years working in a well-paid company. People who will do anything they can to get there, investing in whatever makes them the most money, principles be damned.

Vicki has said this herself, suggesting there are two subcultures of FIRE, which she defines as Libertarians and Social Democrats:

Libertarians believe in personal responsibility and freedom. Social democrats believe in society’s responsibility to its members to create fairness and cohesion…

Libertarians believe the money they make is theirs to keep because it was their genius and hard work that earned it. Taxes are stealing from the job and wealth creators.

Social democrats believe that society’s investment in infrastructure (from roads to scientific advances to the internet) and education of workers and orderly markets undergirds everyone’s ability to prosper.

We talk all the time about how to “make it” monetarily. How to invest. How to gain personal wealth. What we talk less about is how we make and invest that money and whether those methods align with our values.

FIRE was a perfect example of this for me.

Take a big FIRE principle — using index funds as your main investment vehicle.

Index funds bundle up stocks from multiple companies, removing the need to pick individual stocks. This means people who invest in index funds will often have their money invested in big stock market names like every tech, retail and medical giant you can think of.

But what if you have issues with these companies? What if you believe they are bad for their workers, for society, or for you? What if they are not part of the world you want to inhabit?

Does that not count for something?

I think it does. And it’s something I’ve thought about more and more as the years have gone on, partly because it feels like big-name publicly traded companies are getting even more extreme in the way they operate.

Yes, stock market giants have always been there, and many of them have been under ethical scrutiny.

But now, we have tech companies keeping us addicted to our phones. We have retail companies with notoriously terrible working conditions. And who can forget the car company whose leader had a stiff right arm and who was in bed with the US government unitl just very recently?

If you don’t feel comfortable with some of the companies your money funds, you should be able to take that discomfort into account and act accordingly.

Even if that’s not what we’re taught.

I’ve read scores of personal finance books and articles and listened to many more podcasts to figure out this problem. How can I feel more comfortable with my personal finance strategy?

Some of them talk about using socially responsible index funds (SRIs), which do not include companies in ethically sketchy industries like gambling, pornography, weapons, tobacco, fossil fuels, or companies with less-than-stellar environmental practices.

SRIs have their critics, partly because some people think they don’t go far enough. More concerning is the criticism — especially from big-name finance gurus — that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with ethical investing (especially because it’s flawed) when there is more money to be made elsewhere.

Like Warren Buffett, who, according to the synopsis of this YouTube clip considers ethical investing “a distraction from real profits and a poor strategy for serious investors.”

Or when Dave Ramsey says when you buy mutual funds that may include companies you find immoral, you’re buying them from another investor who is the one who directly profits from the sale, not the company itself.

Or as he puts it:

It’s like saying ‘I won’t buy a used Chevrolet from you because I’m mad at Chevrolet.’

(Hard disagree, Dave — if I don’t like a car manufacturer’s principles, I won’t buy a car of theirs used or new.)

So much financial advice aligns more with “don’t worry too much about the systems behind this, just make money” than “do you feel comfortable with the way you are making and investing your cash?”

And we wonder why some studies show only 33% of investors polled have even heard of ethical investing.

Some say it’s impossible to be completely ethical. You could, for instance, stop buying from or investing in Amazon because you disagree with their practices, but who’s to say the company you replace them with is significantly better?

I think about that every single day. Spending, saving and investing ethically is hard work. In FIRE, it felt almost impossible because the very nature of the movement is to live off the profits from big-name companies doing things I disagree with.

But I don’t want to throw my hands up in the air and say if I can’t win, I won’t try.

As they say, don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. That goes for financial strategies as much as it does for anything else.

Some say FIRE doesn’t work because you don’t know what the future will hold and can’t account for all eventualities.

But what happens when the thing to change isn’t so much your financial situation, but you?

I’ve always leaned towards social responsibility, but as I age, that has become even more important to me. I want my money to reflect that part of me because I believe that money — like all parts of life — should at least try to align with your values, whatever they may be.

I’m aware how privileged I am to have investments in the first place. Not everyone does. I believe that having this privilege makes it even more important to save, invest, and spend in a way that does good for the world, not just good for me.

Modern-day FIRE felt like it focused too much on the latter. I want my future to focus on the former because that is what is important to me.

This isn’t about giving financial advice. This isn’t even about saying FIRE is bad —like I say, the movement is based on some great principles.

No, this is saying that you should at least try to align your personal finances with your personal values, however that looks to you.

So yes, I’m a recovering FIRE addict. And I feel all the better for it.