Maybe it’s OK to play with fire sometimes.
An upcoming documentary called “Playing with FIRE” follows a couple in their 30s who are starting their journey in the “financial independence, retire early” movement. After Scott Rieckens hears about this lifestyle on a podcast, he asks his wife, Taylor, to try and join him in a switch to frugality, leaving behind their fancy lifestyle in a San Diego suburb with luxury cars and high-end restaurants. The switch comes with challenges — they move into Scott’s parents’ basement and opt for a $5,000 car to share between the two of them — but they also increase their savings rate substantially.
This couple’s story highlights the many people struggling to decide how to make the most of their lives and their money. FIRE isn’t an easy lifestyle, and the people who choose it make serious sacrifices to rid themselves of a 9-to-5 job while they’re still young. The Rieckens’s motivation was to spend more time with their daughter.
“I hope the documentary gives people the starting point to begin a broader conversation,” said Travis Shakespeare, director and executive producer of “Playing with FIRE.” “We are getting to the point where nobody knows how to do money.”
The documentary also includes commentary from some of the original members of the FIRE movement, such as Mr. Money Mustache and Brandon, the writer behind Mad Fientist.
See: Why does the early-retirement movement have so many haters?
Shakespeare spoke with MarketWatch about the documentary, which will be released later this summer, and the ways to accomplish financial independence:
MarketWatch: Why did you create this documentary?
Travis Shakespeare: When I turned 40 years old, my father passed away. He was a school teacher and not a wealthy person, but I inherited $75,000. I didn’t have much of a good baseline with financial literacy and was still $40,000 in student loan debt and had $10,000 in consumer credit card debt. After I paid all of that off, I was in the black financially. I panicked because I ran some retirement calculations and I was like “oh no, I’m going to be eating cat food in my old age if I don’t get my s—- together.” So I started doing research and came across Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme. I was a struggling artist up until that point and I was good at getting by on less. So the tools of FIRE really spoke to me. If I could just increase my salary and keep my standard of living where I was I could gain some headway. A while later I went on a retreat with some FIRE bloggers and was so impressed with their generosity and spirit. They were educating anyone who was interested and they didn’t charge, they gave this information away for free. I wanted to give back, and I was a television producer by trade, so I decided to make a documentary about the movement.
MarketWatch: What do you hope for the viewers to get out of it?
Shakespeare: I truly am hoping we spark a revolution on financial literacy in our country. That’s what I want people to get from this. On a very personal level, I want people to understand that we live in a society that tells us consumerism and consumption are the most important things in our lives and that’s not true. Time is most important in our lives and the genius of the financial independence movement is that they force you to question how you’re spending your money. The standard narrative is we work to earn money, which is meant to be spent on consumable items, and that should last a lifetime. If you do that you lock in a plan where you work 40-plus years to pay for all the stuff you acquire in your life. And when you die you don’t take any of this with you, and in exchange you’re selling all of your time.
The documentary asks viewers to take a deep look at what they value and what the value of their time is. Time is finite. So in the film Scott and Taylor Rieckens have a first born child and they realize very quickly that they are mortgaging all of their time with her to live the Instagram FB life in an expensive part of Southern California. When they have this realization, they’re like wait, something is wrong — we can put as much sushi in our mouths as we want but not have enough time with our child.
MarketWatch: How would you define FIRE?
Shakespeare: The path is very simple: earn more, spend less and save and invest early and often in order to buy back your time.
MarketWatch: There are many critics who say this lifestyle is not feasible. What do you say to that?
Shakespeare: Part of the problem is the acronym itself — financial independence, retire early — and that the tools are only valid if you reach the ultimate goal of early retirement. But if you use the tools, anybody with disposable income can choose to use their disposable income differently than just through consumption. Every time you have an extra $10, you can decide between buying avocado toast or investing in an index fund. What critics miss is that if you simply save or pay off debt, you’re gaining your freedom anyway. You don’t need to be completely financially independent. What happens when you save one month of expenses, how much does that liberate you emotionally in the event your car breaks down? What happens if you have a year of your income saved? You can take a sabbatical, travel the world or you can leverage that security for a better job or asking for a raise. There are a lot of steps to financial independence that will benefit a person’s life if they employ them.
FIRE is not a solution for systematic problems like poverty. It is true that the more you make, the faster you can get to financial independence. It is true that student loan debt is also a crisis and that can’t be solved by the FIRE movement.
MarketWatch: What about the people who live paycheck to paycheck?
Shakespeare: I lived paycheck to paycheck the bulk of my life. I am sympathetic to someone who is in that situation. For those, it comes down to increasing your earning power and I know that sounds flippant — ‘just make more money, you’ll be fine!’ — and that isn’t necessarily easy, but maybe for someone like that, the investment is in education or using some of their free time on the time on learning more skills and getting a side hustle to increase income. The other thing, I know people in their 20s — like I did — looked at their checking accounts and were like, ‘oh I’m never going to have money in my life,’ but as you gain skills and experience, you do tend to make more money in whatever arena you work in. So I would guess self-education and a little bit of a hustle will help people dig out of that paycheck-to-paycheck scenario.
MarketWatch: I know some of the tools include earning more, like through side hustles, and frugality, but are there any other tools to reach FIRE?
Shakespeare: In terms of investing, invest early and often because every 10 years your money basically doubles but every 10 years you wait, you have to save twice as much money to get there. And for side hustling, there was a couple in a documentary that had student loan debt and they were school teachers and they retired in their 40s. There are examples in the film and in the wider community of people who earn much less than a lot of people would assume, but through side hustles, tutoring and coaching, they did everything they could to maximize their income, and they were also extremely frugal as well. So it is possible. I have seen first-hand a lot of great success stories.
MarketWatch: Aside from the fact they were on the path to FIRE, were there any patterns or similarities you found in the people in the documentary?
Also see: Here’s why you shouldn’t retire super early — even if you can
Shakespeare: On an emotional level. Money is taboo, people do not want to talk about their own personal finance situations. It feels risky. There is this idea, like gee, what if I am doing this wrong? And because there is so little good education around personal financial literacy, it is exacerbated. One of the qualities the FIRE followers share is the courage around facing the truth of their own financial situations. And there’s also a willingness to share their information. So when you attend an event where people gather together you will find them laying bare their financial situation and comparing notes. I think laying bare is a great term because it is like undressing yourself in front of a stranger. Everyone is facing the same problems and together you can solve them better than on your own in hiding.
MarketWatch: Some FIRE people seem invincible and strong — they go to extreme measures to accomplish these big goals. But have you noticed with your own journey or others any challenges, or moments of temptation, that could derail it all?
Shakespeare: It is an emotional journey. In the documentary the couple is trying to find their tolerance level around these things. FIRE bloggers like Mr. Money Mustache, they’re outliers, they’re pioneers who are not afraid to take really big risks — from other people’s perspectives, I don’t think they think it is risky, they think it is smart. But it is very natural for people who are getting going on this path to have to find their own temperature where they’re comfortable. Brandon from Mad Fientist, he became so frugal in his journey that he and his wife moved to this rural area of Vermont and tried to spend no money at all that they made themselves miserable. He didn’t want to go to the bar because a beer was a waste of money, but after a year of doing that he got depressed. In the documentary there is a great moment were Taylor and Scott are trying to figure out how they should live in terms of housing and they fall in love with an incredibly beautiful house, which creates a crisis because they can buy a house they can barely afford or dial it back and make sacrifices but buy back time with their child.
It is finding that sweet spot, and that is a process. For most progressive people, 10 years is as fast as they will get there in extreme examples, but 10 to 15 years is the average and if it takes you 20, you’re still cutting your work life in half. That is a big deal. But how do you spend those 20 years? This is a complex conversation and you can come at it in different ways. Some spend more money, some are naturally frugal. You have to find your own path.