Owen Raskovitch

No, they're not.

And that's probably a fair, I guess, generalization.

The people that I know that pursue this type of thing are not necessarily the people that just sit at home all day.

Most people think they're quick to palm it off as you have no pleasure in your life whatsoever just because you save a lot of money.

That's definitely not the case.

Definitely not the case, at least as far as my exposure to it has been.

That's not what I found.

But anyway, so let's just, we've got some kind of action points here we want to cover off on because these are kind of like the big picture questions that people have about the fire movement.

So Kate, I guess I'll throw it over to you first and I'll say, why has fire or just the idea of financial independence really taken off these past few years?

I think it's especially because people have started writing about it online.

It's no longer this secret thing people do in the background.

Some people are actually willing to share their stories either along the journey or actually have achieved fire.

And so newspaper outlets are picking up the stories because the headlines of I retired on a million dollars at 30 years old are pretty extreme and they get clicks.

And often they only tell sort of part of the story because you see obviously newspapers are going to pick and tell which facts they choose.

So sometimes if you've just read one newspaper article about it in The Age or whatever it is in Australia, you might have not the full picture of what it could mean.

And you might have sort of rubbed you the wrong way because it's just an example of someone who's cut every single thing off.

pleasurable from their life and they just saved money and not spent anything and you might think that's completely not for you but if you actually dive a bit deeper you can find there's so many people that are willing to talk about it online now whether podcasts in the US there's quite a few now

books blogs and they're actually willing to share their journey in a more realistic way and more thorough way towards financial independence and how it wasn't some people do it through mass frugality and you do see blogs out there about that that's probably not what I'm interested in so much I'm not gonna try and repair every single thing myself and use only sort of one type of toilet paper because it's cheaper or whatever it is but

it's really interesting the mix of different people online that you can get ideas from and for anything from increasing your income starting a side hustle reducing your expenses if someone's written about it mmm good point yeah interesting with the toilet paper example I like it I have read that one

Okay, so it's not necessarily this big movement about just cutting every cost out of your life and just saying, see you later, happiness.