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MillennialAcademicScientist (or MAS) wrote to us when this blog was just a tiny fledging collection of articles back in 2017. What made her story stand out was her background. Like me, she had grown up in poverty, had a traumatic childhood, and as such developed a very fear-based relationship with money. We both knew that while money didn’t always buy happiness, lack of money definitely created misery. Lack of money is what traps you in abusive homes, forced to endure being chained to an abusive relationship (in my case, my mother) with no way to escape. As soon as I could afford it, I vowed, I would leave this home and never come back.
MAS had a similar situation, and like me, viewed academic achievement as her ticket to freedom. We’re kind of “poverty siblings” that way.
She excelled at school, and fortunately had supportive teachers and guidance counselors who helped her navigate the treacherous admissions pathway into college. And she made it! Not only did she get accepted and enroll at 16, she ended up getting 5 college degrees, including a PhD.
Only problem was, she now had $183,000 in student debt.
This became one of our very first reader cases, in which the mathing shit up was directed at how to manage such a huge loan, and whether it made sense to rely on debt relief programs like the Public Sector Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program or go after a private sector job to increase her income.
Since then, we’ve corresponded on and off over the years, her updating us on her FIRE journey and us cheerleading and helping her out whenever she had questions. Recently, she wrote to us with the following:
Finding your blog changed my life. I’m officially FIRE. I sold one house and used the proceeds to pay off the other. My student loans are gone and I have enough cash to pay off the place where my niece is living.
Wow. From $183,000 in student debt to FIRE, owning multiple homes, and even able to financially help out family members! There’s a lot I like about writing this blog, but being able to help people achieve FIRE and go from a place of fear and financial lacking to one of strength and abundance is the reason I keep doing this.
However, she also wrote this:
And I should be happy, but instead I feel an overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety. I’m scared the U.S. market and economy will tank or something worse. Is this normal? I realize I should probably speak to a therapist, but I’m wondering if you’ve seen other people feel this way after becoming debt free.
Short answer: Yes. All the time.
Poverty isn’t just a stage in your life that you get through and never have to think about ever again. The experience of growing up in poverty becomes a part of your identity that affects you forever. And one of those lasting consequences is anxiety around money.
It doesn’t matter if you’re FIRE, it doesn’t matter how many houses you own, it doesn’t matter how many millions you have in your bank. You will always feel that anxiety, that worry, that dread that no matter how far along you’ve come, something will happen to make it all go away.
If you feel this way, there’s nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. It’s a natural consequence of your experience with poverty, because you know what it’s like to be poor. You know what it’s like to be afraid every time the phone rings because it might be a debt collector, and having to make up excuses for why your friends can’t come over, and being trapped in an abusive relationship because you have no other choice.
You know what that’s like, and you really don’t want to go back to that.
So I wanted to talk to all my fellow anxious FIRE fans about how anxiety and FIRE go (and don’t go) together, speaking from personal experience.
It Makes You Ultra-Practical
As you can probably guess, I really like writing. So much, in fact, that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. But when it comes to choosing careers, I didn’t even look at writing, because I knew that it wouldn’t pay me enough.
A lot of people pick their careers based on something they enjoy doing, or at least find interesting. Not me. My two criteria were 1) Does it pay enough? 2) Are my marks good enough to get in?
That’s it. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered to me in my future career was that it would provide a stable paycheck so that I didn’t have to live with my mom anymore.
Our reader MAS had the same idea. She got it in her head that education was her ticket out of poverty, so with the help of some very encouraging and supportive teachers, studied her way into getting 5 college degrees.
Anxiety was the fuel that kept me going through every long, sleepless night cramming before midterms. Did it suck? Yes. Do I still have nightmares about being back in university? Possibly. But was it worth it?
Absolutely.
It’s Made Our Investments More Resilient
Another thing my anxiety did was it changed how I invested.
Most of the FIRE bloggers are pretty optimistic people. They throw everything into the S & P 500 until they hit their target FIRE number, then they quit their job without a care in the world.
That’s not how I roll.
When it’s something as important as money, an overly simplistic 4% rule is not good enough. 95% success rate is not good enough, because that means there’s still a 5%, or 1 in 20 chance of failure. I need it to be 100%.
That’s why our FIRE portfolio has multiple backup systems. The Yield Shield was designed to create a passive income not dependent on stock market swings. We added a Cash Cushion to guard against sequence of return risk. And we made our lives nomadic so that we can use geographic arbitrage to lower our living costs just in case.
Anxiety is what causes our brains to always be looking out for things that could go wrong. And if I can find ways of mitigating those risks without requiring me to save more money, I do it. And I write about it so I can teach other fellow anxious investors how to do it too.
Is it more complicated than simply putting all our money into the S&P 500? Sure. But all this extra effort has made our portfolio surprisingly resilient to economic downturns.
When we first retired in in 2015, the Saudi Arabia oil crisis caused a sudden stock market drop at the worst possible time, which is right after we both quit. But using the Cash Cushion saved the day. Similarly, when stock markets were plummeting and the economy was shutting down during the pandemic, we used geographic arbitrage to take advantage of dropping short-term rents to lower our living expenses to within our Yield Shield.
So when we open up the news and get anxious that another recession is around the corner, that’s normal. There’s always a recession coming. But the financial system that we teach people to build can handle it.
Conclusion
Anxiety is usually seen as a bad thing to have, but the truth is just like any other emotion, it’s neither fully good nor fully bad.
And when you’re forced to experience poverty, anxiety gets baked into your system whether you want it there or not.
The trick is learning how to direct that anxiety into something positive. For me, it made me obsessive about managing money, and in a way that’s become my superpower. The reason our retirement portfolio has worked out so well is because I kept obsessively coming up with ways to guard against calamities.
So if you’re one of the many anxious FIRE fans out there, don’t think your anxiety makes you weak, or that it’s holding you back.
It just might be your superpower too.
We recently popped up on our friend Justin’s podcast Fit Rich Life to chat about life, FIRE, money, and everything in between. Check it out here!
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
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This is me! I have just over $1,000,000 in investments at 47 and I have this fear that it’s going to all go away – that I still can’t safely spend any of it because I need to keep working and saving. And that there will be some big catastrophe to wipe it out. It is nice to know I am not alone.
You are definitely not alone! What you wrote is exactly how I feel.
First of all…if you are living through this period in the history of the United States and you AREN’T anxious you probably aren’t paying attention. I am old and have been through (and weathered) more periods of financial insecurity than many others in the FIRE community. This time is very, very different in so many ways and I think more perilous.
I think the idea of the Yield Shield and a significant cash cushion are really important. And if you are in a place to be debt free do it. Obviously geo-arbitrage is still theoretically useful but US citizens probably need to come to grips with the hard truth that there may soon be countries where we are not welcome. I live most of the year out of the country and my feeling of being welcome is changing.
I meditate and do nidra yoga to keep grounded and try to stay in the moment. Supportive friends are a treasure. Good luck to us all.
“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.'”
– legendary investor Sir John Templeton
thank you for this post.
so many people think once you’ve hit that ‘number,’ all your worries go away, but it’s not always so.
i am retiring from u.s. fed service next summer, and having already reached F.I. the economy still concerns me.
i am fortunate to have 2 pensions as well, but the anxiety about financial loss is still present.
thank you for your instruction, especially the Yield Shield and Cash Cushion. Cheers! 😎
It’s not just people who grew up poor who have this scarcity mindset, it’s also many people whose parents grew up poor, like me.
Feel free to tell me that this is none of my business, but I’m curious whether you intend to raise Little Matchstick with a scarcity mindset? It has advantages and disadvantages, as you say.
If I hadn’t been raised that way, I probably wouldn’t be FI now (albeit still working because I haven’t found the courage to quit yet, in part because I’m so worried about the world economy now!), but I think I’d be a happier person, so I wish I’d been raised with an abundance mindset
So good that I am copying / pasting and saving in my doc to refer to whenever I need to.
Such a great way to answer to the annoying and hypocritical statement that money doesn’t buy happiness.
Its natural for the human primate brain to feel anxiety, its a survival instinct. Too bad she didn’t also mention trying some Mindfulness practice, calming exercises, self-acceptance.
Also burying 10 million in Bitcoin in the backyard bunker with a 5 tons of rice and bullets also helps.
I agree with Yield Shield as one of the tools/strategies.
Not FIRE since retired @64. Am a late investor..only in past 15 yrs. have intentionally done things. Before it was paying of home mortgage and sloughing money into RRSP, whatever money was even left.
I remember what my father whispered to me when I leaned in to say goodbye to him in pallative care (he had cancer) for last time before he died 3 wks. later: “Take care of yourself”.
It’s always like that, the more you have the more you have to loose and anxiety only grows.
I think we all should learn to be content with life and stop pursuing money at all cost. Easier said that done for sure but I know people who barely make for living and they are way way happier than I am
What I find is that anxiety does not go away as net worth goes up. I should be hitting 8 figures in the next handful of years based on market returns but the more I have, the more anxious I get. The last 12 months has been incredible for me with increases in the 7 figures. I keep thinking that the good times cannot continue so I wake up at 3am each day to check out the futures. I know that a market decline does not have a big impact because my dividends more than cover all of my living expenses, but it doesn’t matter, I still get anxious.
Look, dealing with anxiety and financial stress is brutal. It’s wild how that fear shapes every decision you make. Feeling trapped by money is a nightmare, but using it to fuel progress? That’s a game changer. Check this out for some inspiration on making every dollar work for you—seriously, it helps: cowboy safari
I always looked for a job that would make decent money. When I went back to school part-time, I took classes in a degree that would pay a decent income. Not liking debt I was on a pay as you go plan for school. I never thought of a job as being a career. It was just something I did to make money so we could live. I keep track of income/expenses and assets/liabilities in order to feel secure. I like to know exactly what we’re spending our money on to make sure it aligns with our spending plan. Some people call it a budget but that sounds too punitive to me. We’re retired now but a lot of our friends can’t retire because they didn’t have or follow a spending plan. They spend everything they make.
This statement: “You will always feel that anxiety” is a nocebo. It doesn’t have to be true, and should not be accepted as immutable. That way of feeling can be changed, safety can be found. When I figure out how, I’ll let you know.
On a related topic, when I told my mother I had FIRE-ed, her first reaction was jealousy. She always did say I didn’t deserve the many good things I got, but fortunately I rarely listened to her.
When I told a couple aunts with whom I’d been close I had FIRE-ed, their first reaction was disbelief. When they realized I wasn’t lying, a song played in their minds that went like this: “I’ve got a golden ticket, I’ve got a golden ticket-in-my-haands!” – the song Charlie’s grandpa sang in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Then came rage that their golden tickets to retirement went up in smoke, since I didn’t plan for FIRE-ing to include paying the retirements of other people.
Anyone else experience this kind of thing?
I told my sister and my partner. I imagine the rest of my family would react like yours. So, I’m not telling them anything.
Anxiety is a survival trait that comes naturally to the human primate brain. Unfortunately, she neglected to suggest practicing self-acceptance, mindfulness, and relaxation techniques.
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This article offers a powerful perspective on the emotional side of pursuing financial independence roller baller.
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