Does anyone here follow the FIRE movement? How do you balance FIRE and Indie Hacking?

I believe the goals of both IndieHacking and FIRE are nicely aligned. Here are three reasons:

The core idea in both is to spend less and achieve more. As IndieHacker you should aim towards early profitability without heavy investing. This way you can generate some extra income and save faster. FIRE teaches you to spend less, which gives you an option to invest some saved money into your business.

I don't think FIRE requires you to earn a big stash of cash. Instead, I am focused on healthy cash flow that won't require me to sell my time anymore. This can be achieved with your own indie business even faster than in employment.

Why are you drawn to early retirement and what will you do with your time then? It is mostly about dissatisfaction at my job. I know I won't stop working after retiring. How about working on something you enjoy right away? Something that will make you stop thinking about retirement altogether. Even for less money.

I'm glad to see some discussion popping up around the overlap between FIRE and indie hacking. I think they compliment really well.

The way I see it, the FIRE movement seeks to minimize expenses. The "side hustle" movement seems to maximize revenue. I think there's a balance and doing both can be a great way to set yourself up for a really great future.

The way I manage things, I try to save a specific % of my net income and invest the rest. But with one caveat. I consider my indie hacking to be in the investment category. So if I need to put $1000 into my business bank account to purchase hosting, domain, SaaS products, courses, etc I don't consider that to be something I need to "budget for". To me it's no different than putting $1000 into stocks.

I've found that helped my mindset a lot. Before I would try to minimize everything, including business expenses, but the issue is then you need to sacrifice immense amounts of time.

Can I develop a landing page for free? Yes. Will it take a week? Probably. Or I can throw $10/month and an hour of setup at webflow and get that time back. Well worth it imo.

I follow the regret minimization framework.

" The idea is to project yourself into the future and look back on your decision from that perspective. For Jeff Bezos, he thought of when he would be 80 and if he would regret not trying to start this company."

For me I hated working for a large company and startups wouldn't give me a chance (i was a new dev, but i had skills)

I saved money quit my job and did some freelance. Clients are hard work so I quit that as well and started bootstrapping a SaaS.

If you take enough swings with SaaS and use them learnings you can earn more than a job plus it is more enjoyable (but the ups and downs are much larger).

In hindsight I would have looked into productised services but they weren't as big back then. Using the cashflow to fund the SaaS.

FIRE is great for employees not so much IHs. Spending your savings to pay for your life while bootstrapping seems to go against FIRE.

They are both the same goal.

I like to follow the motto of doing more with less. If I can make $100 for $15 and an hour of my time, I see it as a win. If I can build products that are evergreen and sell enough to cover a lunch or buy some new gear each month, that's supplementing my savings goals.

I'm about sustainable growth personally. I went from never making a dollar in my life with my side projects in my twenties to being able to launch products and make a few thousand bucks with work that I'm genuinely interested in doing and people are finding helpful.

Although I qualify for FIRE today, I have no need to retire. I'm young, I have a family I'd like to sustain my lifestyle with as we grow, and I have a career that makes me happy while doing side projects that I love. One day I will focus on a new venture, but for now I'll stay small and continue pushing value into the world.

Time is definitely the most important asset we have, but even if I had 40 hours back each week, I'm not sure I would use them productively right now nor gain the skills I am currently learning in Big Tech. These skills aren't something you can get from a course or book as it's learned through experience.

I find the idea of FIRE intriguing. But I think that many people in the community take it way to way too extreme levels. Some absolutely overwork themselves and don't indulge in anything for 10-15 years just to retire early. That's not for me.

Could I get a high paying software developer job at a large company, climb the ranks, save 75% of my income and retire in 10-15 years? Probably.

However, I'd be pretty miserable. I don't want to spend some of the most formative years of my life (20s and early 30s) working towards that one goal while depriving myself of almost everything else. I also want to enjoy the journey.

So what is my plan? I build my ideal lifestyle now and do what I need to to make it sustainable. Currently that's freelancing for a reduced number of hours. This gives me flexible working hours, location independence and the opportunity to take longer breaks for travel. Even more importantly, it gives me time for indie hacking.

So in short, I try to build a life for myself where I can be happy from the get go. That way, there's no need for me to retire at 40 because I will hopefully still love what I do then.

I still invest some money every month and will hopefully become financially independent at some point. Probably not as early as a software engineer earning 500k. But maybe I do because I launch an indie business that takes off. Who knows.

Being an Indie Hacker is a huge advantage if you’re trying to achieve Financial Independence. It means that you don’t have to reach a high enough net worth to cover all your expenses, you only have to reach a high enough net worth to cover the difference between your expenses and your side project income. That means you can quit your day job a lot earlier.

And vice versa: being close to Financial Independence is a huge advantage if you’re trying to be a full-time Indie Hacker. It means that your Indie Hacker income can be much lower and you can still afford to quit your day job.

Anyone out there who’s both an Indie Hacker and into FIRE, I’d love to talk to you for The Quit Work Podcast! Let me know!

I was on the FIRE path for about 10 years before becoming an indie hacker. This has allowed me to not need employment very much and can focus on my project. As a parent I've tried doing projects on the side before, but there's just not enough time for it without quickly burning out. I need to be able to focus full time. Having a large stash (and a working wife) takes most of the financial stress out of the process.

That said, if you're inclined to be an indie hacker I'm not sure I'd recommend working a job you don't like for 10 years before doing it. When you're young you have so much time and energy to spend it's crazy, so there's some truth to the advice to do a startup/business right out of college.

I've been saving/investing towards FIRE for a few years now and managed to achieve 25% of my goal number.

But recently I realized that many FIRE people are aiming towards doing nothing after retirement which isn't my goal at all. My goals are to work on my personal projects and do things I love.

So I decided to take a leap of faith of starting an early-early retirement. I'm going to spend the next few years making products and trying to make them profitable.

I have a big chunk of my money invested but I still have a lot of cash so I'll use it for paying bills for the upcoming years.
I will for sure decrease my net worth at first. But if I manage to achieve ramen profitability I will no longer care about achieving FIRE number.

Thank you, i didn't know about the FIRE movement, interesting

I see FIRE in the next ways:

1. You can fully work on the project for a few years, grow it to say $20k MRR and then sell for half a million. This way you can invest those money into stocks or alternative assets to get "passive income".

2. Build your own portfolio of micro-SaaS and then sell a few to reinvest money into stocks, alternative assets or your next SaaS.

In both ways you should have some income flow to pay for your Indie Hacking journey.