NZZ article about the FIRE movement

Hi everyone,
Have you read today’s article about FIRE in the NZZ? Although I expected from them to be critical (NZZ readers are mostly really old-school), I am very disappointed about the article.
In my opinion, the “so-called” finance expert’s strongly underestimate our community. They claim that we do not do our calculations correctly and forget to take into account basic things like the AHV/AVS-contributions or inflation. I guess they did not read any FIRE-blogs or -forums and the only reason they disagree with FIRE is because we invest in low-cost ETF’s and the banks and other financial institutions get much less money out of it.
For me that would be an understandable argument, but please “finance experts” have the decency to say it and stop telling the world that FIRE-members do not know how to do some simple calculations.

So I had to get it out :slight_smile:
What’s your opinion about this article?

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pretty much what you already said.
The interviewees know that Fire-people are their worst clients, since they dont want to spend more than the bare minimum on financial planning/ consulting.

I think the article focuses too much on the “what if eventually” than on “what most probably is going to happen”

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I had to tweet them because they talk about the average salary. This is nonsense. Every serious journalist whithout a hidden agenda uses the median salary.

Newspaper are always the same. They need to make the reader feel good. Imagine they would say FIRE works, all the guys who did not go for FIRE will feel stupid as they go into their office every morning. Its the same with articles for airbnb business (they claim its illegal to rent your room), real estate investment (its not profitable) and so on. One of the reasons I dont read too many newspapers…

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I guess every medium caters to its audience. Be it newspaper, tv, online portal or forum. That’s why you experience polarization of opinions. You often find both sides accusing each other of deliberate manipulation, when I think it’s more likely they just publish what their audience want to hear.

just at the same time another, longer article in German ZEIT online focusing more on what motivates different people on FIRE.

I like the mentioning of the excessive osbseeion with frugalism people often start with (like me) and how it relaxes after a first period…

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The Zeit online article is very good indeed. I like the part where they explain the contradiction between the low consumerism of the FIRE people and the need that the rest of the world should continue to consume excessively so that the market continues to grow :wink:

I scanned the article to find where they mention this, but I couldn’t find it. But it’s a misconception. We’ve already dealed with it in this forum.

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The article is 3 pages long, but somehow the link only links to the third one.

Anyway, agreed with you, it is a misconception.

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