To my surprise, a sizable portion of the FIRE crowd at EconoMe was older. This wasn’t so surprising to Bill Yount, a 58-year-old retired physician who recently started up a podcast with Koski and another friend, Becky Heptig, that speaks to older demographics. “The average American is a late starter,” Yount told me. “That’s just who we are, living in this consumption society and not having the mentality of saving often or early.” And things are no longer “9-to-5, 40 years and a gold watch” the way they were for his parents’ generation: “I’m not in the gold-watch generation. Gen X got lost, got forgotten.”
Heptig, who is 68, found herself in dire financial straits in her 50s, when her husband’s small business faltered. “I got really scared, thinking we will never get out of this debt and we will never retire,” she says. They took a course from the financial-advice radio host Dave Ramsey, and her husband signed up for a W-2 job. After that, they started saving madly. “We were net-worth zero at 50 years old, and he retired at 63 — so for us, where we started from, we consider ourselves retiring early,” Heptig says. She had made the same wild discovery that everyone in FIRE does: that it can really take as little as a decade to hit early retirement, from the moment you learn about it and start planning. But as Yount put it to me: “You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know to go looking for it.”
Maybe it’s because I know too much about looking for money that I found myself, while reporting this article, especially drawn to the subculture of FatFIRE — and to the lavish, unapologetic, in-your-face money philosophy that Allen Wong and others of his ilk prefer. FatFIRE flies in the face of all the other variants of FIRE. It is anti-anticonsumption. Its typical benchmark is to accumulate enough wealth that you can comfortably spend at least $100,000 a year in retirement, but some highfliers aim for much, much bigger sums. It espouses an unbridled maximalism, a have-it-all abundance.
While most other FIRE communities steer toward the friendly and pragmatic, FatFIRE’s adherents tend to be jaded, brusque, laser-focused. They hunt for the “exit,” in the tech-world manner of speaking: a fast, lucrative way out. On the r/FatFIRE subreddit, aspirants ogle severance packages, geo-arbitrage, REIT, tax loopholes, high-risk options straddles and potential business moonshots. Successful FatFIRErs applaud one another for hitting double-digit-millions net worth, debate the merits of private jets versus second homes and agonize over how large a trust fund is ethical to set up for their kids. And just as Fisker and Adeney were beacons to early-era FIRE devotees, Allen Wong is FatFIRE’s mythic hero.
Wong is quiet and unassuming in person. When I finally met him this spring — three years after we first began chatting online — near his childhood home in Queens, he wore jeans, Asics and a wary self-consciousness. Now in his mid-30s, he has comfortably enjoyed nearly a decade of leisure; he spends the bulk of his days playing pickleball and counseling strangers online on how to follow in his footsteps. He’s not particularly interested in fame, so he posts, as the senior moderator of r/FatFIRE, under his app company’s name. For someone who is a living talisman against the tenets of conventional living, he speaks with a surprising calm — though his eyes flashed with a certain pride whenever we talked about his childhood or his father. Even though it sprouted up only seven years ago, r/FatFIRE is on the verge of overtaking r/FIRE in size, Wong told me. Membership doubled during the pandemic despite moderators’ intentionally hiding the forum from Reddit’s homepage, he said, showing me a graph, and he added that most of its members seem to be “early-career American men.”