If you poke at the FIRE people with these criticisms, such as your standard of living will drop during retirement, they will typically respond that it is possible to have a high standard of living under these constraints, but it just isn't true. I know how to operate Microsoft Excel just as well as they do and the numbers don't add up. Life is full of trade-offs. If you don't want to work a full career, you will generally have to consume less. If consumption is somehow tied to happiness, then you will not have much happiness. Of course, the core of the FIRE movement (and the tiny house movement) is that consumption is not tied to happiness, but that doesn't exactly jibe with the historical record.

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The biggest issue with the FIRE movement is that it's the ultimate bull market phenomenon. FIRE seems to work because the stock market has gone straight up. A bear market will change that. Even if stocks do return 8 per cent to 12 per cent over time, it's not going to be any fun living on a shoestring budget and watching your nest egg decline in value by 30 per cent to 50 per cent. That will be the point in time in which most FIRE adherents get online and start looking at job ads. Of course, after a decade or more of being on the sidelines, they aren't going to be very employable.

Personal finance guru Suze Orman was criticised as being elitist and out-of-touch for suggesting that you might need $US5 million ($7 million) to $US10 million ($13.9 million) to retire at 35. But she's not wrong under her framework, which is that in retirement, you want to live well, not poorly. If you don't have the ability to fly first class once in a while, you have probably done something wrong.

There are positive aspects to the FIRE movement. It has got people thinking about saving and long-term investing in a productive, positive way. That definitely is not a bad thing, but saving and investing should be for the purpose of future consumption or for charitable contributions, not so you don't have to set your alarm clock.