The cool thing about FIRE is that everyone's path looks a little bit different. Some of us pursuing fi are teachers from the east coast and others are factory workers from the midwest. This community has people from all walks off life that are striving for a common goal, financial independence. The beautiful thing is that the road there is going to be different for every single one of us and no one way is "right".

I recently noticed that the financial independence subreddit conducted a survey of people who are pursuing FIRE. The spreadsheet is publicly available and has a ton of interesting information on it. As I was checking out some of the various answers I became interested in one particular column, describe your most recent occupation. I know the FIRE movement gets a lot of flack for being made up of mostly high income medical or technology professionals, so I thought I would use this data to see if that stereotype was true.

My Method

Getting the data into the format I wanted wasn't particularly difficult. Huge spreadsheets like these have a lot of "fuzzy" data where data is missing or the same answer may be typed 5 different ways so your count will be off. I did my best to get things as accurate as possible.

The main thing I did was try to filter out non-answers and then group by the industry that the community had put in their answers. I did a bit of checking on my own to make sure that there weren't any jobs that were similar. If they were similar, I merged them together and counted them.