HerMoney Podcast Episode 186: Lighting The Path To Savings and Security With The FIRE Movement

Trying to make the most of hermoney podcast episode 186? You are in the right place. Below we break it down in plain English, with practical tips you can actually use.

Key Takeaways

• We’re Playing With FIRE this week, with guest Scott Rieckens.  Are you ready to cozy up by the warm glow of the FIRE movement?
• The acronym stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, and it’s a topic we love covering here at HerMoney.
• Over the years we’ve broken it down with some incredible guests including Jamila Souffrant, Grant Sabatier, Jonathan Mendonsa, Brad Barrett,...

We’re Playing With FIRE this week, with guest Scott Rieckens. 

Are you ready to cozy up by the warm glow of the FIRE movement? The acronym stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, and it’s a topic we love covering here at HerMoney. Over the years we’ve broken it down with some incredible guests including Jamila Souffrant, Grant Sabatier, Jonathan Mendonsa, Brad Barrett, and Vicki Robin. 

This week, we sit down for some one-on-one time with Scott Rieckens, author of Playing With Fire, and producer of the recent documentary by the same name. Scott walks us through his journey into the FIRE movement, and how he learned to prioritize his spending and saving goals. As an Emmy-nominated film and television producer and entrepreneur, Scott was inspired to explore the FIRE movement on the big screen when he discovered there was a lack of educational videos on the topic. 

Retiring early was a goal for Scott (as it is for numerous of us) but the FIRE movement goes well beyond that , it’s about taking control of your finances once and for all, and reducing the stress that can arise when we feel like we aren’t in control of our money.

The concepts around FIRE are simple, Scott tells Jean , and you don’t have to be an investing expert (or even the biggest fan of the FIRE movement) to get something out of the basic lessons. “Whether it’s the absolute best way to go or not isn’t really the point,” he says. “To me, it was just a matter of, ‘Okay, now I have the framework on how to get started.’” Scott cites Mr. Money Mustache, and Vicki Robin as major influences on his journey, along with the book, The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. 

Scott tells Jean that he was led to explore the FIRE movement when he began to feel like he was squandering the money he was earning. “We were working so hard for our money, but we weren’t letting our money work hard for us,” he says. “We have a responsibility to our money, and I didn’t feel like I was doing my part with my daily Starbucks, or buying the latest ‘new shiny object.’ I knew these things weren’t the path to happiness, but I didn’t know any other way.” 

When they first joined the FIRE movement, Scott says he and his wife were out to see how far they could push their savings rate. Then, they decided to see what was “uncomfortable,” and that took them to the next level. “All of a sudden we realized we could live off one income, we could invest, and we had an emergency fund saved,” he says. 

In Mailbag, Jean advises a woman on credit card usage and selection, and answers a question about taking a job you’re overqualified for in order to get your foot in the door at a good company. Jean also advises a woman who’s between jobs on health insurance options, including COBRA and short-term health plans that can be purchased from the marketplace. Lastly, in Thrive, Jean dishes on why people aren’t checking their credit score as frequently as they were in years past, and why that could be a big mistake. 

Transcript

Jean Chatzky: (00:07) HerMoney is supported by Fidelity Investments. We want to inspire you to demand more from your money by first knowing what you own, what you owe and what you want from your money. We’ll help you reach your financial goals faster. At fidelity.com/demandmore. HerMoney comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, it’s Jean Chatzky. Welcome to HerMoney. If you’ve been tuning in over the past months, maybe past year, you know that we’ve done a few shows on the growing FIRE movement. Fire standing for financial independence, retire early. We’ve talked to Brad Barrett, Jonathan Mendonsa, Grant Sabatier and Jamila Souffrant. They are fascinating and today we’ve got an opportunity to sit down with a guy who chronicled his FIRE journey in a new documentary that is hitting screens all over the country. It’s an interesting topic and we’ve heard from all of you that you are looking to find a way to, if not join the FIRE movement, then incorporate pieces of it in your own day to day life. Scott Rieckens is an Emmy nominated film and video producer. He’s an entrepreneur and he’s the author of Playing with FIRE. The title of this new documentary. It’s on Vimeo. We’re also going to be talking about the journey that he went on with his wife, Taylor, who’s featured in the movie. And Scott, I’m thrilled to see you to have you here. I’m excited to be with you later today as we actually watch the movie with an audience. Thanks so much.

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Scott Rieckens: (01:59) Yeah, thanks for having me. And we’re looking forward to having you as well for the screening tonight. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Jean Chatzky: (02:04) So for people who are just being introduced to FIRE, what’s the thumbnail sketch?

Scott Rieckens: (02:12) Yeah, so I mean, FIRE is essentially a financial framework that you can apply to your life and to the degree at which you apply it, it can accelerate the time at which you have to work, where you have mandatory labor in front of you. And it’s kind of an exciting and intriguing thing to know that maybe you can cut your working life by 10, 20, 30 years and gain that time back on the back end and maybe do things that you’re passionate about other than work.

Jean Chatzky: (02:38) And it has some very distinct math. Right? I mean, it basically says if you can save 25 times your expenses, then you can choose what you want to do with your day.

Scott Rieckens: (02:51) That’s correct. Yeah. The 25X rule, it’s based off of this Trinity study, which basically says that if you sip off of your investments at 4%, you can essentially sip off of those dividends in perpetuity and never draw down on the principal. And there’s some arguments on whether that’s 3%, three and a half. Yeah. All that. But, that’s getting into the weeds in my mind, because by the time you’re on that path and you’re getting close to making that decision, you know, you’re in a completely different frame of mind than living paycheck to paycheck. So, I think, you know, to describe the FIRE movement, it’s essentially a financial framework you can apply to your life and there’s this incredible community of people that you can find online that you can find at meetups all over the country and really all over the world who are there to support you. And I think that’s a big piece of it is that you know, you’re doing wonderful work here and there are people out there doing that type of work, but it’s sort of far and few between. In some cases you kind of have to go searching for it to find it. And I think a lot of people feel alone in their financial journey. And so that was something that we recognized immediately is that the FIRE movement, literally, it created a physical, real mentorship around, you know, how to do this, how to apply it, what are the pitfalls, all the things you’d want to know as you get into it.

Jean Chatzky: (04:04) In terms of the size of this community, do you have any sense for how big it’s gotten?

Scott Rieckens: (04:10) Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to nail down, but you know, we have seen the type of traffic that some of the major bloggers in the space get. We’ve seen, you know, certain Facebook groups, like the ChooseFi Facebook group is really active. I think they’re pushing something like 30,000. You know, some of the major blogs have millions of page views a month. So there’s definitely a lot of interest out there and these meetups that are happening, I think there’s something like 15 CampFis happening around the country. There’s Camp Mustaches popping up. There’s an event called the Chautauqua that’s an international event, and you see, you know, thousands of people going through these. So there’s definitely a sizeable community, you know, I don’t know if I had to guess, maybe 100,000, active and maybe another 400,000 sort of passive…

Jean Chatzky: (04:57) Thinking about it.

Scott Rieckens: (04:57) Passively interested. Yeah.

Jean Chatzky: (05:00) Thinking about it. What do you say to people who say, Oh my gosh, I could never save half of my income?

Scott Rieckens: (05:07) Yeah. I’d say don’t let that stop you from learning all the tenants of this framework. Because you never know what you’re capable of. I’m pretty confident that whoever’s saying that to themselves, they are capable of this. But what’s more key is to ask yourself, you know, how far would you go? And you’re not going to know that until you really push yourself. And I am here to say on the back end of doing that myself, that it was well, well worth it. That we are so much better off than before because we have a different relationship with money. It’s an improved and healthy relationship with money and we see money as a tool and we know how to use it now, which is just a far cry from where I was two years ago.

Jean Chatzky: (05:51) Tell me a little bit about where this journey started for you.

Scott Rieckens: (05:55) Sure. I was an avid listener of the Tim Ferriss podcast and he had Mr. Money Mustache on as a guest and as an avid listener, he introduced Pete as one of the most requested guests ever and he was like, Oh, you know, I’m so glad to have you on the show. I can’t believe it’s taken so long. And I was like, I feel like I would recognize that name if I’d heard it before.

Jean Chatzky: (06:19) Mr. Money Mustache?

Scott Rieckens: (06:19) Yeah, it’s pretty wild. So it was really intrigued by that. But man getting into that episode, everything that they were talking about seemed to be sort of this antidote that I had been searched for it, but didn’t know it.

Jean Chatzky: (06:32) In what way?

Scott Rieckens: (06:33) It was this ideal life that Pete was describing where the things that he cared about, the things that he spent his time on, how money wasn’t really a driving factor in all of that. It really spoke to me because I was feeling so much stress around money. We were living in a high cost of living area. We had sort of maybe accidentally let the, you know, keeping up with the Jones’s takeover. We were keeping up, maybe not even noticing. And it just felt like we weren’t getting ahead and we were working so hard and not getting ahead and it just felt like this hamster wheel.

Jean Chatzky: (07:06) What were you doing at the time?

Scott Rieckens: (07:08) I was a creative director at a small agency, a creative agency in San Diego, and I liked the work. But it’s the commute. It’s the time away from family. It’s all the other things. And so I just felt like there needed to be a change. Like, this isn’t what it’s all about. And when I heard that interview, it felt like the beginning of the answers that I was searching for. And so I dove in deep, went headfirst into this world that I didn’t know was FIRE at the time. It just sounded like a cool lifestyle with some answers to, like, investment questions that I’ve always had. I never had those types of advisors and mentors in my life. And after really going through the rabbit hole of his blog, numerous other podcasts, big podcast fan as I mentioned, I suddenly realized how simple it really all is. But that doesn’t make it simple. And that was compelling. And I’ve been in video production for, uh,

Final Thoughts

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Originally published at savingswitch.com.