Don't you hate articles that start that way?
I see this gimmick used for everything: weight loss, sleeping better, building muscle, and, of course, making money. It's click-bait through and through and often the magical "one trick" is either actually difficult (like logging all of your calories in order to lose weight) or simplistically ineffective (like taking deep breaths to fall asleep).
However.
In the case of FIRE, there is one method that is helpful for inspiring you to save more and keeping you on track while you're saving. It helps overcome the frustration of not having as much money to spend as your peers by giving you something to look forward to. That method isn't a trick -- it's the same technique professional athletes, designers, and even military operators use to improve their performance.
It's called: visualization.
Now, I'm not talking about visualizing your money slowly stacking up in the market. As far as I know, no amount of imagining a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of cash will make it happen. I'm talking about visualizing what your future in FIRE will look like.
Fundamentally, FIRE is about being able to fund your chosen lifestyle indefinitely. When you can do that, you've achieved your FIRE goal. But since most of us have to work in order to save money, it's hard to know what that lifestyle will look like. The only thing we can guarantee is that it WON'T look like the military: frequent moves, deployments, and long hours at work. So the only way to figure out what your chosen lifestyle looks like (and will cost!) is to VISUALIZE it.
This can look like anything. Sometimes, I daydream about what FIRE living in the mountains will be like: wake up, coffee on the deck looking at stunning peaks, grabbing the dogs for a hike or hopping on the gondola to hit the slopes, returning to the library to work on a book chapter while Mr. FIRE plays around in the wood workshop, harvesting vegetables from the garden to make a nice salad, and enjoying a glass of wine staring up at the millions of stars you can't see with city lights.
I also mentally "build" our future FIRE house, something small enough to be comfortable for two humans and infinite dogs. I imagine floorplans or look at pictures on Houzz and Pinterest for the perfect fireplace. I've even picked out land on Zillow or Trulia to get a sense for what is possible.
All this daydreaming costs me nothing but does several VERY important things for our FIRE future. First, it is SO motivational. When we're feeling the pinch of saving or are debating where to go on vacation, it's so much easier to make the smart financial choice because we have a clear vision of the splurging we'll do later.... in the form of a life free from the necessity to work.
Second, it helps us "test-drive" early retirement. Many folks who retire (early OR on-time) find that they aren't as happy as they expected. They end up bored or uninterested in the activities they thought they would love. There are many reasons for this -- for example, sometimes our hobbies are only fun because they are a break from work, so instead of being ecstatic that we can do them full-time, they become tedious or work in themselves.
Visualization won't magically prevent this outcome but it does allow us to imagine what retirement will be like with real fidelity. For example, I had long been daydreaming about a house with sweeping mountain vistas. But after walking actual land in the mountains, I realized I needed trees, too.... and now my mental vision of our FIRE home is half-tucked into aspen and pine and half exposed to peak views. Mr. FIRE was worried about spending all day on the couch watching TV (because that's often how we relax after a stressful week) but now has a clear mental picture of the workshop where he wants to build furniture and the library where he wants to sit and read. By visualizing, we are "test-driving" our FIRE retirement and, while there are sure to be things we didn't expect, the more specific we can be the higher the likelihood that we'll be happy.
By the way, this also helps identify the less-fun features of your FIRE lifestyle. For example, we were visualizing our future mountain cabin and realized Amazon may not deliver to us. Gasp! How will we live?? How will we get groceries?? Well, a few clicks on the internet and I found a company that will deliver Costco to your small mountain town and even to your door. Crisis averted....and we can go into our FIRE future a little more confident that we won't be surprised by unexpected inconveniences.
Third, visualizing helps you be more accurate with your financial planning. When I first started my FIRE journey, I assumed I could buy some land in the mountains for under $200,000, build a house for another $300,000, and be all settled for less than $500k.
Ha! Those numbers are silly....or at least, they won't get us the FIRE future we've imagined. Visualization leads to doing research which, in our case, made us realize we needed either a major adjustment in expectations or budgets. Because this happened early enough in our planning, we adjusted the budget, increasing our FIRE number to account for a major cash expenditure on land+building costs and accounting for the possibility of a mortgage. Imagine if we had waited until we were ready to retire? The only options would have been dramatically lowering our expectations or continuing to work.... neither of which are pleasant when you think you've finally arrived.
So unlike charting calories or taking deep breaths, visualizing actually is one exceptional technique to help your FIRE journey -- both motivational and practical, it can help you make, stick to, and even refine your FIRE future goals!
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