Welcome to the third iteration in my ‘Reel Freedom’ FIRE-related film series. It’s been a while since my previous ones but I'm back with a corker! Previously I explored consumerism in Fight Club and money vs meaning in A Christmas Carol. This time round I'm looking at what is probably the most obvious of FIRE-related films... ' Office Space'. This is a 90s cult classic that strangely I acutally only got round to seeing a few years ago. If you've not seen the movie I've no doubt that will have at least seen a few memes based on the film. This film tackles a number of topics associated with the FIRE movement, most notably: what would you do if you didn’t have to work for money? Peter, the main protagonist, is the relatable everyman, wrestling with that age-old exchange of time for money, especially when the money comes from a job he hates! As before, disclaimer here is that this will probably contain spoilers. All set? Let’s have a look! "It's not...
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about something that comes up occasionally in FIRE circles, but I don’t think we put nearly enough value on... the faff factor in different asset classes. We spend an awful lot of time comparing returns. Is property better than the stock market? Should you invest in individual shares, Global Index Trackers, dividend stocks or Crypto? Should you leverage yourself up with Buy-to-Lets? Obviously returns matter, and if one investment returns 3% and another returns 8%, that’s quite important! But I think there’s another cost that doesn’t appear on any of the FIRE spreadsheets: how much of your time and headspace does your investment take up? This is increasingly important to me because the older I get, the more I realise that time is the thing I’m actually trying to accumulate here, not money. Money is just the tool that hopefully allows me to get more of it. Time with my family, time with my kids while they’re still kids, time to go away during the...