Journal of Cultural Economy

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The financialization of anti-capitalism? The case

of the ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’
community

Nick Taylor & William Davies

To cite this article: Nick Taylor & William Davies (2021) The financialization of anti-capitalism?
The case of the ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’ community, Journal of Cultural Economy,
14:6, 694-710, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2021.1891951

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JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY
2021, VOL. 14, NO. 6, 694–710
https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2021.1891951

The financialization of anti-capitalism? The case of the ‘Financial

Independence Retire Early’ community
Nick Taylor and William Davies
Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University, London, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community consists of Received 31 July 2020
individuals each personally dedicated to reducing consumption, so as Accepted 20 January 2021
to build up financial surpluses that are eventually adequate to live off.
KEYWORDS
While it shares certain features in common with other ‘financial Financial independence; self-
independence’ ideologies and self-help communities, one thing that help; consumption;
distinguishes it is the emphasis on frugality. Freedom comes to consist investment; financialization
not only in independence from the labour market, but also from
materialism, consumerism, and consumer debt. At the same time, this
freedom is predicated on passive investment in the stock market and
reliance on financial techniques for representing the future. Using semi-
structured interviews with leading FIRE advocates and analysis of books
and blog content, this paper assesses the ambivalent moral economy of
FIRE, to understand how and why individuals seek this unusual
relationship to capitalism, that pursues the status of rentier through the
strategic rejection of materialism.

Introduction
The policy responses to the global financial crisis succeeded in avoiding a more severe collapse of
the capitalist order, but perpetuated and exacerbated many of the structural conditions that pre-
ceded it. These include rising household indebtedness; wage stagnation; deflating economic
demand, de-skilling of employment accompanied by a slump in productivity growth, and rising
asset prices. Hovering over this extended crisis is the larger existential one of global environmental
threats that could render our current model of civilisation unviable by the end of this century.
Normative justifications for this regime have been fraying. It devours the social fabric in which it is
embedded (Streeck 2017) and has come to depend on exceptional forms of state and central bank
intervention to be sustained (Davies 2013, Gane 2015). Inequality continues to rise, and status
anxieties and resentments with it (Piketty 2014, Payne 2017). The system has become morally discre-
dited, without being significantly challenged by an alternative. While populist electoral break-
throughs have some relation to economic resentments (Magni 2017), none has yet translated into
a coherent alternative economic order. The additional crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is unpre-
cedented in its social impact, but saw a repeat of exceptional interventions to prop up the financial
system, plus support for the ‘real’ economy that often went directly to shareholders (Brenner
2020). After an initial shock to asset prices in March 2020, financial markets swiftly recovered, and
it was labour markets and wages where the devastating force of the global recession was felt. The
divergence between the fate of finance and that of society was writ even larger by the events of 2020.

CONTACT Nick Taylor [email protected] @nicklaus_taylor

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
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 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 695

This post-2008 condition is characterised by escalating dissatisfaction and disillusionment with a

fragmenting system that still resists fundamental transformations. Streeck argues that ‘capital
accumulation after the end of capitalist system integration hangs on a thin thread: on the effective-
ness, as long as it lasts, of the social integration of individuals into a capitalist culture of consump-
tion and production’ (2017, p. 46). Psychological and cultural resources are required to sustain this
‘thin thread’ (Streeck identifies ‘coping,’ ‘hoping,’ ‘doping’ and ‘shopping’). These are now sup-
plemented by the surveillance architecture of ‘platform capitalism,’ which constantly evaluates
how enthusiastically and efficiently individuals engage with given tasks and products, informing
credit scores as it does so (Srnicek 2016, Feher 2018).
In this article, we examine a case of resistance to and exit from this moral-economic order at the
level of the household, which flourished in the decade following the global financial crisis. Crucially,
it exploits the one feature of the contemporary capitalist order that continued to experience growth
post-2008, namely asset markets, as a means to escape those aspects which produce feelings of
unhappiness, heteronomy, and status anxiety, namely labour markets, debt, and consumer culture.
At the same time, it rejects over-consumption and its ecological harms. The case in question is of
the self-help community known as ‘FIRE’ (Financial Independence, Retire Early), in which partici-
pants strategically reduce their household expenditure and debts, accumulate assets, and eventually
withdraw from the labour market to live off their investments.
To suggest that these individuals are engaged in ‘resistance’ (or even in ‘anti-capitalism’) does
not mean that they are not also benefiting from the status quo; on the contrary they are privileged
in terms of their cultural capital and financial literacy. Successful FIRE participants typically have
prior careers in fields such as software engineering and finance. But if, following Boltanski and
Chiapello, we treat ‘anti-capitalism’ as a moral-psychological disposition that co-exists with –
and even legitimates – capitalist practices, holding out the promise of some fairer or more authentic
existence, the ethos of FIRE can be studied as a critical and anti-capitalist disposition in its own
right (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). This paper is therefore a contribution to the ‘sociology of cri-
tique,’ that is, of how moral enthusiasm and resistance towards different aspects of a capitalist econ-
omy can be recombined (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999). It is precisely the internal tensions and
contradictions within the moral order of the FIRE community that interests us here, and which
helps distinguish FIRE from adjacent traditions of financial self-help.
We characterise FIRE in terms of the following three economic techniques and practices. Firstly,
it prioritises individual and household frugality, with the aid of tools that log income and expendi-
ture. A defining feature of this mentality is its emphasis on reducing consumption in innovative
ways, and holding oneself to account via the detailed logging, calculation, and aggregation of all
expenditure. Secondly, it generally relies on passive investment strategies, based on index funds.
FIRE adherents rely on the long-term stock market trend and show no interest in the use of active
investment managers. Thirdly, and most fundamentally, this is an economic philosophy geared
towards the practical re-appropriation of time. Value is deemed to consist in free time, which is lim-
ited by the human lifespan, then reduced by reliance on the labour market, and reduced further by
obligations to consume and to honour debts (because they entrench reliance on the labour market).
As a founding text of the FIRE mentality puts it, ‘you “pay” for money with your time’ (Robin and
Dominguez 2018, p. 53). The reduction of debt, consumption, and paid work is therefore a calcul-
able means of maximising value. With the help of accounting techniques, cost reductions can be
represented as earnings.
The goal of FIRE is therefore to attain the status of a rentier, but not in the conventional sense.
Powerful rentiers in financialized capitalism, from non-financial corporations to banks and hedge
funds, typically deploy leverage – debt – as a powerful tool to make money (Knafo and Dutta 2016,
Sgambati 2019). By contrast, individuals pursuing FIRE are deeply averse to debt and take a more
arduous path to rentiership, built on the tactic of extreme saving. Further, in comparison to classic
rentier figures of the ‘leisure class’ who flaunt their wealth as a mark of status, FIRE advocates, in
their public displays of frugality and rejection of consumerism through online blogs and other
696 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

media, perform a kind of ‘conspicuous non-consumption’ (Brisman 2009, emphasis added). Posses-
sing advantages with respect to human and cultural capital eases this pathway towards rentier sta-
tus. In addition to often starting out from a position of relative privilege in terms of income, they are
able to exploit existing financial and calculative knowledge to manage their path to financial
independence.
Unlike previous cases of household financialization and financial self-help (Martin 2002, Frid-
man 2016), FIRE represents a highly unusual combination of different moral and technical orders
of worth. On the one hand, it is resolutely critical of the capitalist status quo and its implications for
households. Central to the FIRE community are aspirations to individual autonomy in the spheres
of production and consumption, and resistance to exploitative employment, advertising, and con-
sumer credit practices. Participants are motivated by ideals of uncommodified, unexploited life –
psychological flourishing, family cohesion, engagement with nature, creative work, spiritual
exploration. To a greater or lesser extent, they also see FIRE as a way of reducing their environ-
mental footprint, through reduced consumption and travel.
On the other hand, FIRE is premised on the logic of financial accounting and wholly dependent
on the perpetual growth of the stock market. Participants account for their expenditure as both a
moral and a technical way of pursuing ‘frugality’ and rely on devices of financial calculation to
establish when they have saved enough to retire. The long-term trend of the stock market is
assumed to be permanent, and freedom is equated with living off assets. This represents a peculiar
co-optation of the ideal of ‘financial inclusion,’ which had once promised to ameliorate wage stag-
nation with capital ownership (Froud et al. 2010). Alienation from consumer capitalism, consumer
credit and over-work spawns a distinctive ‘spirit’ of financial capitalism, that sees investment and
accounting as a path towards an unalienated and uncommodified existence.
One way of understanding this is in terms of ‘assetization’ (Birch and Muniesa 2020) as a means
of criticising and withdrawing from markets. All private choices are judged in terms of future return
on investment, but this apparently neoliberal principle is applied as much against consumption and
materialism as it is in favour of investing. This represents a new moral-economic order of worth,
that revives aspects of the ‘protestant ethic’ (frugality, saving, stoicism) by deploying accounting
tools as modes of confessional, through which individuals subject their own behaviour to moral
and economic evaluation, often to be shared online. Value becomes equivalent to free time, that
is deemed to be stolen from the individual by an alliance of advertising, paid work, and debt,
and must be seized back by viewing it through the lens of capital. The ultimate financial horizon
of FIRE adherents is existential – a human lifespan – and their aim is to seize control of what
Adkins, Cooper, and Konings have termed the ‘asset-driven lifetime’ (Adkins et al. 2020, p. 69).
The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we position FIRE in relation to adjacent
communities, and our paper in relation to literatures on financial self-help, financialization, frug-
ality, ethical consumption, anti-consumerism, and counter-culture. We then set out the key charac-
teristics of FIRE, including its focus on frugality, index investing, motivational techniques, and
calculative devices which expose unnecessary costs, blogs (for sharing tips), and key ‘gurus.’ We
detail the history of this community, which originates in niche self-help advocacy of the 1980s,
but has blossomed since 2011 via the influence of one blogger in particular, ‘Mr Money Mustache.’
We then turn to the moral justifications and interpretations of FIRE provided by its adherents. In
conclusion, we consider how FIRE may reflect on the contemporary ‘spirit’ of capitalism.
The research draws on a combination of methods. Firstly, we have studied blogs and message
boards, which are the main means by which the FIRE community shares tips and advice and encou-
rage one another.1 Message boards provide an increasingly valuable source of data, for understand-
ing everyday financial practice and innovation (Stanley et al. 2016). Leading bloggers in this field
have gone on to write books, which we have used as sources to understand the internal modes
of justification at work within the FIRE community. Secondly, we conducted semi-structured inter-
views with ten leading FIRE practitioners, all of whom are noted for successfully achieving early
retirement through financial independence and frugality, and now share advice with others. The
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 697

interviews were split evenly between American and British respondents, and anonymised with the
exception of Peter Adeney who (as we detail below) is a pivotal figure in the development of FIRE.
They were conducted over Skype and transcribed. By focusing upon the public narratives, leading
advocates, and ‘gurus’ of FIRE, plus success stories, our methods inevitably reveal far more about
the self-understanding and ideology at hand, than about behaviours and outcomes. This is a study
of justification, and of how critique is deployed within and against a particular political-economic
regime, in the service of some (possibly utopian) ideal of autonomy and self-realisation.

Positioning FIRE
The FIRE community has a number of antecedents and commonalities with other traditions of self-
help, financial independence, ‘voluntary simplicity,’ ethical consumerism, and anti-consumerism. It
realises long-standing neoliberal ideals of family responsibility, enterprise, and ‘financial inclusion’
(Cooper 2017), but as a means of withdrawing from dependence on markets, other than the stock
market. For reasons that we will explore, it takes elements of all of these antecedents and assembles
them in an original and distinctive way, to forge a new critical perspective and set of practices. We
therefore begin by reviewing literatures that have touched on some of the elements that make up
FIRE.
The ideal of ‘financial independence,’ as something that working people can attain within a few
years, emerged during the 1990s, at the same time as neoliberal ideals of ‘shareholder democracy,’
the ‘ownership society’, and ‘democratisation of finance’ were emerging (Frank 2010, Fridman
2016). The term ‘financial independence’ refers very simply to a state in which an individual no
longer has to work to cover the cost of their lifestyle, though they may continue to choose to (Per-
rone et al. 2015). As Fridman stresses in his study of the movement, while participants may be
motivated by becoming rich, the ultimate goal is an ethical one, namely freedom from necessity.
Looking particularly at the influence of the 1997 self-help book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and the net-
works that sprung up around it, Fridman notes that the movement is a combination of ethical com-
mitment, calculative prowess, and an effort to theorise contemporary capitalism, so as to prosper
within it (Fridman 2016).
Financial independence therefore shares certain elements with dominant traditions of self-help,
which exhort individuals to work upon themselves, take charge of their lives, and become free. The
injunctions of books such as Rich Dad, Poor Dad provide:
a sort of therapy to turn individuals from subjects determined by dependency (both internal and external) into
entrepreneurial subjects who can call themselves free and autonomous. Financial self-help exhorts users to
examine the parts of themselves that involve dependency and to work on correcting them.

(Fridman 2016, p. 60).

However, what distinguishes financial independence from purely spiritual and existential forms of
self-help is that it also emphasises the need to master techniques of financial calculation and become
financially literate. It provides a practical, though difficult, route to achieving financial indepen-
dence, which individuals must become masters of in a technical sense. Furthermore, it provides
what Fridman terms ‘social theories people live by’, such as that work is in general stressful, tedious
and constrictive, and careers are unrewarding (Fridman 2016, p. 37). Notably, in contrast to FIRE,
Rich Dad, Poor Dad dismisses frugality as a viable route to financial independence, because ‘cheap-
ness’ is just another trap that needs to be escaped in pursuit of freedom.
Financial independence therefore channels existing trends in neoliberal societies, and amplifies
them. Firstly, it exemplifies the rise of what McGee terms a ‘belabored subject’, who must constantly
work on herself to become adequate and adapted to a constantly changing economic context
(McGee 2005). This involves a type of Weberian ‘calling,’ that is metaphysical in nature, and shifts
over time in response to changing structures of capitalism. McGee notes that the shift to post-
698 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

Fordism after the crisis of the early 1970s led to a reorientation and rapid expansion of self-help
literatures, which exhorted individuals to transform themselves sufficiently that they were desirable
in the marketplace. Ethically and psychologically, this has a punitive ingredient, which guarantees
demand for more self-help:
The literature of self-improvement defines its readers as insufficient, as lacking some essential feature of ade-
quacy - be it beauty, health, wealth, employment options, sexual partners, marital happiness, or specialised
technical knowledge - and then offers itself as the solution. The resulting contagion of insufficiency constitutes
the self-improvement industry as both self-perpetuating and self-serving. (McGee 2005, p. 18)

Where self-help in the 1950s was oriented towards lifelong employment choices, and self-help in the
1960s and 70s implied mutual aid and co-operation, self-help in the 1990s had become wholly pre-
mised on a flexible, self-reliant individual.
The literature of post-Fordist self-help typically emphasised work as a route to both wealth and
fulfilment. McGee notes a series of titles over the late 1980s and early 1990s which emphasise com-
mitting to a career with passion, creativity, and love, such that the reader makes a positive
impression on potential employers, the assumption being that work is more precarious and
short-term. As economic security declines, so an injunction to be creative and flexible rises. She
notes that the ‘artistic mentalite provided an ideal vehicle for motivating a demoralized, downsized
and otherwise dissatisfied labor force’ (McGee 2005, p. 128). This closely echoes the claims of Bol-
tanski and Chiapello, that a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ took hold in workplaces at this time, which
harnessed the ‘artistic critique’ of repetitive bureaucratic work, as a way to inspire workers and legit-
imate management (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Tedious, repetitive work is denounced, so as to
valorise contingent and unpredictable work, and the types of subjects that it produces and requires.
Secondly, financial independence is a pronounced case of heightened financial literacy, lay
investing, and the financialization of everyday life (Martin 2002). This has been studied in the con-
text of investment clubs and ‘stock market populism’ (Harrington 2008), the everyday problems of
household debt management (Stanley et al. 2016), the governmentality of private pension investors
(Langley 2006, Langley and Leaver 2012), and the formation of financial subjectivities with respect
to consumption, consumer credit, and mortgage-lending (Langley 2008, Watson 2010). Individuals
face a constant challenge and struggle in acquiring sufficient understanding and technical prowess
in dealing with the risks and calculations for which they are increasingly responsible (Clarke 2015),
a problem that is dressed up in policy rhetoric as ‘financial literacy.’
These manifestations of everyday financialization are located in the broader political-economic
context, in which individuals and families are expected and required to take on greater responsibil-
ity for risks and future income (Cooper 2017). The neoliberal ideal is of a population no longer
wholly dependent on the labour market, generating morally independent (or ‘de-proletarianised’)
subjects, who participate in capitalism as owner-investors as much as employees (Foucault 2008).
Those who lack money to invest are invited to treat their free time as a resource (to be invested in
childcare or social capital, for example) or to leverage themselves as human capital, exploiting the
widening access to credit to take on debt (for purposes of education, training, and enterprise) with a
view to future returns.
Where this model succeeds, it serves both to ameliorate and to justify the broader financializa-
tion of the economy, which sees a rising share of surpluses distributed to shareholders and senior
managers, and a diminishing share to labour (Krippner 2011, Piketty 2014). Complete dependence
on labour is morally, politically, and economically discredited. Yet in reality, this model has trans-
lated into rising private indebtedness and wage stagnation, without widespread increases in own-
ership or enterprise (Crouch 2009). Moreover, the credit crunch of 2007, followed by the global
financial crisis, led to widespread critical and political attacks on its failure and implausibility
(Froud et al. 2010). The utopia of a ‘de-proletarianised,’ enterprising society led in actuality to
an increasingly indebted one, where credit scores become tools of moral discipline (Feher 2018).
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 699

The same political and cultural conditions can also produce very different ethical orientations,
which seek freedom from consumption as much as from labour. The United States has a long his-
tory of ‘frugality’ discourses, which have constantly pushed back against the rising tide of consu-
merism and consumer credit (Witkowski 2010). Inspired by Thoreau and Emerson, these have
privileged ‘simplicity’ and romantic ideals of nature, as an alternative to the lies and distractions
of consumer culture. In the 1990s, coinciding with the surge of post-Fordist self-help literature,
a new wave of ‘simplicity’ advocacy developed, emphasising ‘downshifting’ of lifestyle, ‘culture-jam-
ming’ (which resists advertising), and anti-consumption (Cherrier 2009, Witkowski 2010, Kennedy
et al. 2013, Lee and Ahn 2016). This overlaps with frugality and ethical consumption, which are less
antagonistic to consumerism as such, and more concerned with minimising its environmental and
social impact elsewhere (Pepper et al. 2009).
The development of these lifestyles and movements from the 1990s onwards has been antitheti-
cal to capitalist consumerism, especially the ‘hedonic treadmill’ inculcated by advertising. Narra-
tives of ‘overwork’ during this period, and the struggles faced by women in balancing paid and
unpaid work, provoked a post-feminist revaluation of domestic and unpaid labour, as sources of
identity, security, and flourishing (Schor 1991, Kennedy et al. 2013). However it has typically
remained within the orbit of makeover culture, self-help, and peer-to-peer advice. That is, it
mobilises a similarly flexible, entrepreneurial subject as that which (in other traditions of self-
help) is exhorted to work more passionately and invest more smartly. ‘Down-shifting’ and ‘volun-
tary simplicity’ are arguably alternative projects and identities for the ‘belaboured subject’ (Cherrier
2009). Witkowski spells this out:
Unlike the working poor, who are saddled with involuntary simplicity, simplifiers have had enough control
over their economic lives to rearrange work schedules or, if need be, change jobs. For many of its proponents,
voluntary simplicity has had as much to do with the time pressures and pace of life dictated by a highly com-
petitive and marketized economy as it has with overconsumption of material things. (Witkowski 2010, p. 249)

Practices of ‘culture jamming,’ led by pioneers such as Adbusters, seek to expose the lies and manip-
ulations of marketing, in the name of individual autonomy. Reduced consumption or ‘lifestyle
minimalism’ become a source of identity and a life project, though one that sits comfortably in a
neoliberal culture of enterprise and responsibility (Meissner 2019). Ethical consumption seeks to
account for the negative externalities of capitalism and to channel the power of consumer activism
towards different modes of production. But in doing so it validates consumerism as a mode of pol-
itical expression and participation.

History and techniques of FIRE

The FIRE community pursues financial independence, via self-help, frugality, financial literacy, and
the informal capitalisation of everyday possessions and activities. In that respect, it represents a con-
tinuation of the traditions outlined above, and a harnessing of an enterprising, responsible, ‘bela-
boured’ subject, working on a life project. However, in its recombination of these strands and its
historical context, we can witness a distinctive and illuminating moral-economic order of worth
that resists work, consumption, and debt by seizing control of financial instruments.
FIRE began to crystallise through a series of blogs, the earliest of which were begun around 2005,
advocating particular frugality and saving strategies, investment tools, and metrics. Several now
high-profile FIRE bloggers established themselves in the 2005–10 period. A major turning point
in the consolidation of FIRE as an online community came with the launch of the ‘Mr Money Mus-
tache’ blog in 2011. Peter Adeney, the blog’s author, quit his job as a software developer in 2005 and
retired early at 30 years-old. His blog promotes the lifestyle of financial independence and early
retirement, focusing on strategies for frugality, healthy living, DIY, and self-sufficiency, and veils
an environmentalist advocacy within financial and lifestyle advice. Adeney confirmed to us in
our interview that he has deliberately concealed his environmental agenda within a logic of financial
self-help, on the assumption that this would attract more take-up, especially from wealthy
700 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

individuals whose consumption has the potential to fall furthest.2 We suggest that FIRE best be
understood as a distinctly post-financial crisis development, marked significantly by the promi-
nence of its blogging advocates in the post-2011 period and their brand of asset-based resistance
to work, consumption, and debt.
Adeney’s website offers a wide-ranging critique of the psychological and financial traps set by
American capitalism. It elaborates on the tricks of advertising and the tyranny of consumer debt,
with special condemnation for the financial deception built into auto loans, a type of household
debt that more than a third of Americans now hold (Coppola 2019). This critique of structural,
predatory facets of the economy is mixed with an invocation to individual responsibility, to extract
oneself from the lure of participation in irrational consumerism. Adeney makes an appeal to ‘bold
determination and persistence in the face of difficulty’, what he dubs his philosophy of ‘Badassity,’
to resist ‘the marketing engine [that] work[s] ceaselessly to program this toughness out of us, and
offer us pampering instead’ (Mr Money Mustache 2014). The project, he notes, is a personal trans-
formation, ‘a human psychology problem as much as it is a financial or technical or political one’
(Mr Money Mustache 2016b).
As well as invocations of autonomous ethical life, a number of the most popular posts on the Mr
Money Mustache blog cite the various technical principles of early retirement. This includes ‘The
Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement,’ which shows that how early you can retire
depends on your ‘savings rate’ as a proportion of your net income, with an implicit suggestion
that individuals need a 50% savings rate or greater to retire within a reasonable number of years.
If a 75% savings rate can be achieved, one need only work for seven years before retiring early
(Mr Money Mustache 2012a). The seminal feature of Adeney’s advocacy (and a defining normative
principle of FIRE) is that readers should increase their savings rate by reducing expenditure, as
opposed to increasing income or taking entrepreneurial risks. Owning a bicycle or a coffee
maker (as opposed to a car or buying takeaway coffees) is therefore an investment strategy; repair-
ing one’s own home can register as income. What is saved can be invested in index funds to develop
a passive income that pays out for retirement indefinitely. The basic FIRE formula is presented ubi-
quitously as common sense and simple, as another prominent blogger puts it: ‘spend less than you
earn – invest the surplus – avoid debt’ (Collins 2012). The savings rate is a key FIRE metric, and
across many FIRE websites ‘calculators’ of various kinds are to be found which provide, based
on income and savings rate, one’s expected date of retirement (e.g. Mad Fientist 2014).
The Mr Money Mustache blog has fostered a FIRE community that regularly meets in person at
camps and workshops across North America. In 2013, two years after the blog began, Adeney
attempted to survey his readers, and what kind of work they do, or used to do. The poll remains
open, and numbers as of July 2019 show that 19% (9273 votes) are engaged in ‘Other Engineering
or High Tech Job[s],’ 15% (7355 votes) in ‘Software Engineering/Development/Programming’ and
10% (5093 votes) in the ‘Financial Industry,’ with just 2% (1115 votes) in ‘Trades (carpentry, house
building, plumber, etc.)’ (Mr Money Mustache 2013).
This gives some indication as to the type of career background that FIRE attracts, with an
obvious emphasis on those in high tech industries and finance. The Mr Money Mustache website
has received widespread attention, however, with around 33 million unique users over its lifetime
(April 2011 – April 2019), and it currently has more than 1.5 million visitors every month (Mr
Money Mustache 2019, Pantheon 2019). Adeney has become a figurehead of FIRE, and authored
the preface to two recent books on financial independence (Collins and Mustache 2016, Robin
and Dominguez 2018). He was cited by many of our interviewees as a starting influence on their
journey to financial independence.
Since 2011, the number of FIRE blogs and online forums has significantly multiplied, as has
FIRE’s international media presence, and it is this period in which we can identify the consolidation
of a FIRE ‘community.’ A site that collates information on FIRE across Europe now lists 43 blogs
hosted in the UK and 174 across the continent (FIREHub.EU 2019). Many FIRE advocates have
been featured in international TV and print media, such as CNN, The New York Times, The
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 701

Washington Post, The Guardian, the BBC and The Times. From 2016 onwards, several books expli-
citly dedicated to financial independence were published or reissued (Collins and Mustache 2016,
Robin and Dominguez 2018, Thames 2019, Shen and Leung 2019). A popular podcast series entitled
‘Choose FI,’ since downloaded more than three million times, emerged in early 2017 and in Sum-
mer 2019 a documentary film, ‘Playing with FIRE,’ was released.
While the FIRE community consolidated online during the first two decades of the twenty-first
century its genealogy can be traced to North American self-help literature of the 1990s. The book
that is retrospectively considered foundational to FIRE, Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin
and Joe Dominguez, has been in print on-and-off for over 25 years (1992 first ed., 2008 revised
ed., 2018 second revised ed.). Dominguez was a Wall Street financial analyst turned early retiree
at the age of 31 in 1969. He and Robin met shortly after and began living off investment income
drawn from his savings of around $100,000 and Robin from a lump-sum inheritance of $20,000
she had received. The pair focused on non-profit work and continued to pursue simplicity and frug-
ality. In the 1980s, they began delivering financial education seminars to the curious, eventually
recording their advice on cassette to produce a course on financial independence that sold over
30,000 tapes between 1986 and 1992 (Robin and Dominguez 1992, p. xi).
When Dominguez died in 1997, Your Money or your Life had sold 600,000 copies and spent five
years on the Businessweek Bestseller list (Goldberg 1997). By the time of the second revised edition
in 2018 it had become a New York Times Bestseller and sold over one million copies in ten
languages (León 2018). Robin, and the book which she first co-authored in 1992, have become
foundational to many of those drawn into the FIRE community through the Internet (Money
2018). On the popular forum site, Reddit, a community dedicated to financial independence
which boasts, at the time of writing, 620,000 members, cites Robin and Dominguez’s book as a
key text.
Your Money or Your Life is unusual for straddling genres of financial self-help and frugality (or
‘simplicity’) literature. At its heart is a theory of value consisting in ‘life energy,’ equivalent to the
number of hours one has available to allocate to different activities. Money should be used in the
service of ‘life energy,’ and not vice versa: ‘[t]he only real asset you have is your time. The hours
of your life’ (Robin and Dominguez 2018, p. 48). Robin and Dominguez urge the reader to renounce
the trappings of consumerism, consumer credit and careers, and engage in existential reflection on
what happiness might consist of instead. Only the final chapter provides strategies for investing sav-
ings, advice that in the original text amounts to a recommendation to buy US Treasury bonds (1992,
pp. 308–9). This strategy, Robin notes in the latest edition, worked due to the 30-year-long ‘halycon
days of high interest rates’ and has now been replaced by a recommendation to invest in index funds
and real estate (Robin and Dominguez 2018, p. 284, 288, 294).
As the FIRE community has developed, it has coalesced around specific metrics and tools for
saving and investment approaches. These, in part, demonstrate the increasingly financialised strat-
egies of its advocates. In 1998, an academic study (Cooley et al. 1998) was published that underpins
a key financial metric for FIRE participants. Known popularly as the ‘Trinity Study,’ it explored the
question of what constitutes a sustainable or safe ‘withdrawal rate’ for retirees seeking to plan how
much they take from their investment portfolio annually, so as to deliver a decent pension without
running down the pot too quickly. The Trinity Study took into account historical investment
returns and inflation to recommend a withdrawal rate of between 3 and 4% for stock-dominated
portfolios held over long periods. Another, earlier study using similar methods advocated for a
4% withdrawal rate that would likely ensure a portfolio would not be exhausted within 30 years
(Bengen 1994). Focus on these studies exemplifies the fixation on a ‘formula’ for many pursuing
financial independence, composed of specific metrics and targets to reach for crossing the threshold
to early retirement. In this case, what FIRE advocates have come to call the ‘4% rule’ (Mr Money
Mustache 2012b).
More creatively, leading FIRE bloggers and advocates have come up with new calculative devices
aimed at highlighting how much time (or ‘life energy’) is indirectly taken from the individual,
702 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

thanks to their entanglement in debt-led, consumer capitalism. One such calculator allows anyone
to ‘approximate [their] Real Hourly Wage’ (Money Life LLC 2018). The Life Energy calculator con-
siders income and hours of work and then incorporates time and money spent commuting to and
‘recovering’ from work to give one’s Real Hourly Wage. It then shows how much of your ‘life
energy’ it ‘costs,’ in minutes, to make various purchases from a cup of coffee to a car or a house.
Pursuing extreme saving is one part of the basic formulae for achieving FIRE; investing the
resulting surpluses is the other key element. A prominent feature of FIRE advice is to invest for
one’s early retirement in index funds, which track financial market indexes such as the S&P500
or FTSE100, delivering the average return of an aggregate index. Index investing – sometimes
framed as ‘passive management’ – is considered a safe and viable means to develop a ‘passive
income’ by most FIRE practitioners.3 The lack of high barriers such as prohibitive administrative
fees or a need for knowledge of the stock market is considered ideal, and the absence of ‘middle
men’ is a match for the hostility within FIRE towards active management and financial intermedi-
aries generally. Index investing expresses the power of the stock market to work for the ‘passive
investor’ (Braun 2016), a statement supported by the fact that the earliest index fund pioneer,
The Vanguard Group, is now the world’s largest investment manager, overseeing more than $5 tril-
lion on behalf of 20 million clients (Bogle 2019, p. 5). Through index investing, FIRE has ridden this
wave of ‘mass investment culture’ (Harmes 2001), bonding itself to the broad interests of finance
capital. At the same time, the passive nature of index investing (the fact that it doesn’t require
any work), together with its long-term orientation (being concerned with general trends, not fluctu-
ations) fits with FIRE’s central commitment to maximising free time over the human lifespan.
The huge financial shock that accompanied the spread of Covid-19 in early 2020 initially regis-
tered as a major threat to the FIRE mentality, which assumed that stock market growth was guar-
anteed over the long-term. Mr Money Mustache wrote two blogposts during the stock market crash,
aimed at reassuring FIRE practitioners not to lose their nerve, stressing the positive nature of finan-
cial trends over the very long-term. As he had written in 2018, ‘a good investment portfolio just
depends on the world economy in general continuing to exist.’ (Mr Money Mustache 2018). By
July 2020, with the US stock market having made up its losses – but amidst carnage in the labour
market – the case for keeping faith in financial assets had rarely looked stronger. The division
between rentiers, who could earn income regardless of work, and the rest of society was deepened
by the pandemic. If anything, the logic of FIRE was rendered more compelling, not less.

The moral economy of FIRE

In practical and technical terms, FIRE represents a new critical orientation towards capitalism, sim-
ultaneously hostile to consumerism and embracing of investing and asset ownership. This is a novel
entangling of capitalism and anti-capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). However, as McGee
notes in relation to self-help more broadly, it places great demands on the psychology and ethical
commitment of individuals, who are required to draw on inner determination to break Streeck’s
‘thin thread … of social integration of individuals into a capitalist culture of consumption and pro-
duction’ (Streeck 2017, p. 46). FIRE offers a type of critical capacity, through which the individual is
enabled to see ‘beneath’ the veneer of consumerism and career ambition (Boltanski and Thévenot
1999). There is a type of ‘calling’ at work, that sits within a distinctive order of worth and justification.
What is crucial here is that the mentality of investment and calculation is turned against an alleg-
edly exploitative and mendacious system of capitalism, and put in the service of a more honest, de-
commodified existence. Meanwhile, the tricks allegedly performed by the marketing and consumer
credit industries (which help to trap people in debt, consumerism, and careers) are to be reversed,
drawing on behavioural economics and consumer psychology to help individuals consciously trans-
form their behaviour. The mode of critique is psychological and individualistic, seeking to expose
the hidden psychological logic of capitalism, and to construct a different moral-psychological
regime, within the personal and domestic sphere. We explored this critique in our interviews
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 703

and identify three key dimensions to it as a moral order: the valorisation of autonomy, the privile-
ging of the domestic sphere, and the ethic of the quantified life.

Autonomy and security

One of the highest moral goods that FIRE practitioners exalt is freedom as autonomy, which is
minimised by labour markets, consumer culture, and household debt. FIRE advocates express a
kind of ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007) that, under conditions of obligatory
work, indebtedness, and endless consumption, true individual action and expression are stifled.
Among several prominent bloggers, this has been explained via reference to Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs, whereby financial independence unlocks the potential for ‘self-actualization’ (e.g. Mr
Money Mustache 2016a, Mad Fientist 2018). ‘The key to FIRE is really flexibility’, noted one inter-
viewee, ‘[i]t’s the ultimate ability to design your life and the ability to have freedom to choose what
you want to do.’ Another stated that ‘[I]t was just about getting my time back, to be able to work on
what I wanted to work on’. The value of time re-appropriated was set against a life of dependency on
obligatory work, debt and consumption for consumption’s sake. For many FIRE participants, this is
framed as a simple, rational choice to prioritise time over consumption. As one blogger states ‘most
people have a choice: you can trade time for money and money for things, or you can trade time for
money and then use that money as a tool to buy back time’ (Reining 2018)
Such freedom through flexibility was what the post-industrial economy had ostensibly offered to
respondents, but never delivered. One former computer engineer stated that ‘the whole impetus for
our journey through this is our perceived lack of stability in the workforce’. Describing a colleague
collapsing at his desk from over-work as a ‘wake-up call moment’, they expressed the fear that ‘if I
try to go for that normal path of working until you’re 65, I may not make it.’ A former investment
manager told of how ‘you almost feel like an athlete, where you know you have only a shelf life, if
you’re lucky, of ten years, if you’re not so lucky of five years.’ Taking such justifications for FIRE
practitioners’ critique of ‘mandatory work’ in good faith suggests the community is not simply
about the promotion of neoliberal dictums concerning freedom as autonomous and responsible
individual subjects. Instead it justifies itself through a critique of heteronomy, of work under certain
conditions and to certain ends. Financial investment becomes an act of awakened resistance that
draws on such critiques, and FIRE massages these feelings of exploitation and indignation as
part of its affective draw (Kim 2017).
Mr Money Mustache, and FIRE blogs generally, are not anti-work. Rather, the aim of financial
independence and early retirement is to divorce oneself from obligatory work, that has to be done
for money in order to cover household expenditure. In a tradition that stretches back to Benjamin
Franklin, some frame this as being about ‘creating sufficient wealth that one might be one’s own
master and [serve] the community by leading a life of civic virtue’ (McGee 2005, p. 31).
Early retirement … does not mean quitting work, even while it may well mean quitting your job. It means
opting out of the bullshit portion of your work. The commuting, the politics, the production of inferior pro-
ducts just because your boss has found a profitable niche to exploit. When used correctly, a sizeable ‘stash can
help you become a more ethical person. (Mr Money Mustache 2015)

Some of our interviewees framed their blog writing in civic terms, as ‘a way to give back … to the
world at large’. Others thought that they were ‘shining a light on the problems of corporatism …
[for those] just meekly expecting your corporation will take care of you’. A substantial contribution
of the Mr Money Mustache blog is in service to liberation from the irrational complexity of
indebted, consumer lifestyles and the ‘psychological tricks’ of the marketing industry seeking to
dupe everyone. One interviewee was particularly bold, claiming that ‘FIRE tries to fix [wealth
inequality] from an education/grass roots level … [tries] to teach people how to do it themselves.
Don’t rely on the government to give you a universal basic income, here is how you create your
own pension, here is how you create your own universal basic income.’ FIRE thus propounds a
704 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

claim for autonomy through financial independence as the best and most rational form of security,
against corporate (or government) welfare promises and the lure of consumption and debt.

Family values
In a statement representative of the freedom FIRE bloggers envisaged, one interviewee claimed that
financial independence ‘allow[s] people to get to the point where they choose what work they want
to do, what type of work, the number of hours of work, the conditions of work.’ Many extolled the
benefits of remote work and self-employment, but a common justification for the reappropriation
of time was to spend it with family. FIRE bloggers and forum members saw family as a motivating
factor in terms of wanting to be present for raising children – ‘[c]hildren … provide a rationale for
financial independence’, as one blogger put it – and wanting to provide financially for family. Many
FIRE forum posts also addressed questions of the transmission of family wealth, whether it was
inheriting it to start one’s FIRE journey or bequeathing it to children. The role of the family as a
moral and economic institution for FIRE chimes more broadly, then, with the centrality of the
inheritance of ever-appreciating asset-based wealth in the neoliberal era (Cooper 2017).
The timing of individual FIRE participants’ discovery of the community was significant in
regard to family. One interviewee noted that ‘a lot of people stumble across [FIRE] … when
they’re maybe about thirty, something like that, late twenties, early thirties, and often it
coincides with, you know, children arriving or the expectation of children arriving.’ Children
encouraged the (predominantly male) FIRE adherents to think about time they could spend
at home. One interviewee framed how they allocated time to family in economic terms, consid-
ering how they used their scarce time most efficiently: ‘I’m thinking about it in terms of oppor-
tunity costs, that you give up so much time away from home.’ There was also some sense in
which not working might alter gender roles, in terms of balancing the burden of socially repro-
ductive labour. One female interviewee noted the potential change in traditional gender roles,
and that ‘FIRE absolutely breaks … apart’ the idea that ‘the man is the traditional breadwinner
and then the woman is the nester.’ It remains the case, though, that men are predominant in the
FIRE community, and make up the majority of FIRE bloggers, including among our intervie-
wees. The traditionally gendered model of the male family wage resurfaced through the male
as provider of the family portfolio, rather than as ‘bread-winner.’
Several FIRE participants had stories relating to family life that they deemed influential for their
involvement in the community, such as one interviewee who told us ‘my dad … bought a share of
Wrigley stock for me, when I was ten. And I got really interested in … the stock market.’ Others had
‘origin’ stories about family indebtedness that had led to forced frugality, or they expressed frustra-
tion at family members currently struggling with work and debt. One interviewee said that ‘[p]rob-
ably the biggest stress in my life is my family’:
So, it’s not like, oh, I’ve achieved financial freedom, I’m free, wahey, you know, I’ve got, like, my mum and dad
maybe repossessed in a couple of years, I’ve got my sister on benefits struggling by … There’s a drive, like I
want to be earning £1 million a year, so that I can sort them all out, but where am I going to start?

Another echoed these frustrations: ‘it’s very difficult speaking to family members about money, try-
ing to convince them that the path that they’re going down is possibly not the right path’. FIRE
draws on the sense that waged work does not adequately provide for family time or financial secur-
ity and that consumption drains both of these valuable goods. But it reworks the traditional wage-
led family provider model into one based on an asset-led, frugal lifestyle, producing frustrations and
concerns about family members not already bought into FIRE.

The ethic of the quantified life

Essential to the FIRE community is the logging of income and expenditure as a means to establish
(self-) accountability, and a way of testing practitioners’ dedication to frugality over time. It is the
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 705

basis for FIRE practitioners to engage in the punishing spirit of self-evaluation they see as necessary
to escape consumer society and develop the personal resources to live independently. Several inter-
viewees referenced stoicism as a supporting philosophy for this element of their FIRE journey. As
one respondent put it, stoicism in this context meant ‘that, kind of, working hard, being disciplined,
living with less and testing yourself for the future, not falling for some of the modern traps, adver-
tising … ’. Simply recording everything in a ledger is touted as a means ‘to lighten the physical and
emotional loads’ previously borne and manage the reality that ‘[w]e are awash in financial trans-
actions every day’ (Robin and Dominguez 2018, p. 41, 44). This had to be given purpose through
a FIRE lens that encourages its advocates to survey their whole lives or lifespan more abstractly,
because, ‘it’s very difficult to start … [to] get rid of Sky, get rid of your car, if there’s no meaning
behind it.’ From this lifespan perspective, and with the assistance of explicit quantification, it
becomes easier to give meaning to frugality.
A number of interviewees described how the process of budgeting and saving was not
merely functional, but one that revealed meaning about what they valued, how they valued
it and some truth about themselves. Personal or family accounts are often made public by
FIRE bloggers, in an effort to motivate or discipline themselves. One interviewee spoke of
the potential to ‘gamify’ the ledger, pulling on ‘lever[s]’ to increase your income or decrease
your expenses. Beyond its functional aspects, though, the budget spreadsheet takes on an ethi-
cal form, which revives the moral and theological aspects of accounting that had once made
book-keeping a means of demonstrating honesty to God (Carruthers and Espeland 1991). As
one interviewee who made their figures public put it, ‘the monthly spending is … a constant
check on your values, am I spending in service of my values … Am I being conscious
about my health, about the food I’m eating, about the choices I’m making.’ Yet another inter-
viewee spoke of how financial independence ‘forces you to evaluate all aspects of your life and
your life choices. And, makes you price those choices up and think about what they mean for
your money, as well as for your values and your principles.’ It is via an accounting framework
that short-term decisions (that are manipulated by advertising and consumer credit services)
are judgeable in terms of long-term outcomes.
It was commonly voiced among interviewees that this accounting approach could be taken
for all the objects, goods, and services one had brought into one’s life. FIRE practitioners
report how they begin to see things in their life as assets or liabilities: ‘the coffee machine
is an asset if you use it every day, and it’s an asset if that’s replacing your Starbucks habit’.
Once future costs and returns are formally taken into account, a net present value of any
object can be calculated and it can be represented as ‘capital’ (Muniesa et al. 2017). Assigning
both an accounting value and moral value to (anti-)consumption allows those pursuing FIRE
to purge the liabilities which – echoing Robin and Dominguez’s (2018) time-as-value measure
– carry a ‘burden’ or a ‘cost in terms of life energy that you had to spend at work in order,
not only to buy it in the first place, but then to … continue to service … [store] or maintain’.
Rather than a frugal existence, several interviewees framed the end result of this process as an
‘optimised’ life. In the words of one: ‘As soon as you’re doing something for a second time,
it’s time to question yourself, like, okay, why am I doing this a second time, and can this be
optimised out.’ One participant described how managing such extreme saving and countering
the tendency to conspicuous consumption or ‘lifestyle inflation’ could be done by imagining
‘you’re a CFO of a private company, you’re trying to get income up and costs down and maxi-
mise the difference, and then pay the difference to the shareholders.’ Accounting approaches
and rhetoric are thus employed as personal or even public confessionals.
Given that software engineers make up the dominant group of FIRE followers there are
parallels between the mathematical precision of computer code and moral precision of quan-
tified frugality. Berry describes how ‘thinking in terms of computational processes, as proces-
sual streams, is the everyday experience of the programmer’, and becomes ‘inscribed on the
programmer’s mind and body’ (Berry 2016, p. 149). Such thinking, and the embodied action
706 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

to spurn consumption it encourages, seems to underpin the centrality of the ledger and other
calculative methods among many FIRE advocates. Similarly, we can see resonances between the
ethos and tactics of FIRE participants and those of the ‘quantified self’ movement, which
emerged concurrently with it (Lupton 2016). Both share a relationship to numbers as provid-
ing a grid of personal and ethical intelligibility. Quantification becomes a marker of honesty
and self-discipline, which restrains the desire to stray from the long-term life-course. It is
revealing that FIRE message boards don’t only focus on matters of frugality and investment
strategies, but also stray into neighbouring issues of self-discipline such as weight-loss and
debt reduction. In every case, self-scrutiny and numerical accountability are viewed as paths
towards a more autonomous existence.

Conclusion: finance against capitalism

If by the 1990s, American self-help literature was centred around the injunction to identify fully and
passionately with one’s work and career (McGee 2005), FIRE suggests the emergence of a new phase
which is acutely suspicious of consumer capitalism and its tools of psychological control. In fusing
the pursuit of ‘financial independence’ with that of ‘frugality,’ FIRE finds freedom in abstinence and
the maximisation of time rather than money. It potentially also expresses an environmental critique
of consumerism. At the same time, it represents a novel adaptation of neoliberal subjectivity that
diverts the entrepreneurial self away from consumerism, debt, and the labour market, and towards
existential goals of autonomy and authenticity, built upon financial surpluses and rents. A dynamic
relationship between capitalism and anti-capitalism, whereby advertising and management deploy
anti-capitalist tropes to inculcate enthusiasm and commitment, has long been recognised (Frank
1997, Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). However, FIRE goes well beyond the rhetoric or affect of
anti-capitalism, to support major lifestyle changes with drastically reduced consumption, lower car-
bon footprint, and disengagement from manipulative tactics of credit provision, marketing, and
employment. Alongside other recent cases of anti-materialist self-help, notably Marie Kondo’s
‘de-cluttering’ discourse (Meissner 2019), FIRE may be seen as a symptom of the shifting moral
economy of consumer capitalism. In this, it bears some resemblance to patterns of behaviour
noted amongst the super-rich, who have been found to exploit their status as asset-owners (along-
side the affordances of broadband internet) to seek de-commodified if lavish existences in wilder-
ness, where they can manage their portfolios and engage with ‘nature’ (Farrell 2020). If one effect of
Covid-19 is to drive wealthy families out of metropolitan centres (especially those who already
owned second homes), then FIRE gives a glimpse of a latent possibility in the structures of finan-
cialised, digital capitalism, that is now being exploited more generally.
This case therefore speaks to recent work on the ‘assetization’ of everyday possessions and
activities, such that rentiership becomes normalised (Birch and Muniesa 2020). It also show-
cases how the logic of the balance sheet comes to structure the temporality of the household
(Adkins et al. 2020). An asset is anything that can be owned and which involves an up-front
investment, which yields a return into the future, however calculated. The mentality of the
FIRE participant is one that judges short-term activities and expenditure in terms of long-
term returns, using book-keeping and calculative tools to avoid being deceived by the psycho-
logical tricks of advertising and consumer credit. Frugality is represented as the generation of
future surpluses; purchases are represented as investments. The harm of consumer capitalism
(which urges over-consumption today) is in inculcating an excessive discount rate, in the esti-
mation of future costs and benefits. FIRE is a financially-enabled project in delayed gratifica-
tion and hedonic valuation.
The condition of post-2008 capitalism has been one in which the rescue and defence of the finan-
cial system has been politically privileged above the revival or ‘normal’ capitalism. If capitalism, as a
system, has historically been built upon entrepreneurial risk-taking, productivity enhancement, the
extraction of surpluses from productive labour, and constant growth, this is no longer the dominant
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 707

condition we find ourselves in. A super-rich class of rent-seekers and asset-holders expects constant
returns, without engaging in the productive economy; austerity-oriented states expect growth, but
without the deficit-spending that could initiate it; cash-rich corporations expect rising consumer
demand, but without raising wages to an extent that might enable it. At a certain point, financia-
lization turns against capitalism, in which the expectation is that growth, debt, innovation, and
risk will go on elsewhere.
FIRE demonstrates what happens when this same ‘spirit of capitalism’ is adopted by the individ-
ual as a ‘calling’ or ethos of self-help. It is a mentality of exit from the status quo, of resistance to
materialism, over-consumption and over-work – a mentality that is likely to become more com-
monplace, as the circumstances unleashed by Covid 19 render the labour market even more pre-
carious, and the lure of ‘nature’ greater. But – as our interviewees were all aware – in its reliance
on index fund investing and adoption of a financial mentality, it seeks to isolate a certain dimension
of financialised capitalism and to make it work for the individual and their family. If everybody
withdrew in this way, the whole system would come crumbling down. As the paradox of thrift
states, frugality, and surplus are only economically sustainable in a capitalist market economy if
others are not engaging in them.

Notes
1. FIRE message boards are Reddit r/financial independence, Mr Money Mustache Forum FireHub EU, Early-
retirement.org, Early Retirement Extreme Forums.
2. As Adeney told us, the Mr Money Mustache project is ‘designed to try to reduce the consumption of fellow
rich people. So, it’s really an environmental blog, a giant social experiment that’s disguised as an early retire-
ment blog … [l]owering your consumption of everything is really the way to get wealthy anyway.’
3. Of thirteen major US and UK-based FIRE blogs surveyed, eleven actively advocated for index investing and
two expressed some criticism that this should be seen as the best route to financial independence.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to feedback from Goldsmiths colleagues at the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) ‘Research
in Progress’ seminar. This research formed part of a research stream on the ‘meanings and moral framings of the
good life’ for the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) and we would like to acknowledge
institutional and collegial support from CUSP.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/M010163/1].

Notes on contributors
Nick Taylor is Lecturer in Political Economy and Deputy Director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Gold-
smiths, University of London.
William Davies is Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Gold-
smiths, University of London. He is author most recently of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
(Verso, 2020).

ORCID
Nick Taylor http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3195-1020
708 N. TAYLOR AND W. DAVIES

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