Ozu cuts away from the scene mid-ceremony and, with a few establishing shots of the bucolic Japanese countryside, cuts to his other BFF, Chishu Ryu, playing Professor Shukichi Somiya. The camera frames a home interior that is itself framed in shoji rectangles. In the foreground Somiya sits cross-legged on his living room floor leaning over a low table where he works on a manuscript. He casually chats with his assistant, confirming that Friedrich List (the economist) is not in fact spelled with a “z” like the more well-known composer. Off camera, a man calls out in salutation. Electric company. Meter check. Without getting up, Somiya tells the man to go ahead. In Ozu’s camera, the telescoping entrances in the partitioned Japanese house partially obscure the figure of the worker as he takes his reading in the other room while Somiya and his assistant go about their business.

As the conversation turns to a recent mahjong game, Noriko, returning from the tea ceremony, enters, all genki smiles. Her father barely looks up from his work. His speech to her consists of brusque, functionary statements. Where’s your aunt? Make us some tea. So this is post-war Japanese family dynamics, you say to yourself. Heavy on the patriarchy and all the rest. But when Somiya, mind on mahjong, suggests they stop to play a round, it is his daughter who inside her billboard smile asserts that there will be no game until the work is done. In a huff that is understood by everyone present to be nothing more than bluster, Somiya can only retort, Hey! Where’s that tea?

So begins Yazujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (晩春, Banshun, 1949).

When I used to recommend to folks the films of Yazujiro Ozu I used to quote a quip I’d read somewhere by some trying-to-be-witty critic who said watching an Ozu film was akin to watching paint dry.¹ Saying this was at best my attempt at expectation-setting, at worst a kind of apology for that something in Ozu films I really, really like that most people probably really, really don’t like.²

Take the scene where Somiya and Noriko watch a Noh performance. The camera, stationary, as it is in most of Ozu’s shots, sits seiza watching the slow, esoteric moves of the Noh performer. Ozu dares the audience to a staring contest. It turns out that the scene does contribute to the plot – Hara sees her father’s to-be second bride in the audience and we watch her struggle with a future reality she doesn’t want to accept – but that plot point could very well have been done somewhere other than a lugubrious Noh show.

There is nothing plot-wise that justifies the amount of time – minutes, which in movie time feels like hours – Ozu lingers on the actual Noh performance. Which is just what he’d done in that opening tea ceremony. So, being brought up on the whole Cleanth Brooks/I.A.Richards/John Crowe Ransom way of treating a work of art as a hermetically-sealed Thing whose exegesis starts from an axiom – and whether the axiom is true or not doesn’t really matter – that everything in the work of art is there for a reason and contributes to its meaning and effect, I’m left thinking there’s something else going on here, folks.

Yep, I have the sense – and have some recollection of having read this, too – that Ozu was intentionally leaning into creating a pastoral vision of post-war Japan. Most of the homes in the film are of traditional Japanese design, including wall to wall shoji, a life slowly and deliberately lived. He was crafting a reality that really didn’t exist, not even way back in the Japanese mid 20th century.

But in Late Spring Ozu also draws his, yeah, I know, romanticized-and-nonexistent-vision-of pastoral Japanese life with fault lines. The character Aya has divorced her husband and taken a job as a stenographer because she can’t stomach the idea of moving back in with her parents and lives in an apartment starkly different from the rest of Ozu’s home settings: hinged doors, big Western style chairs, and in a moment that in Ozu’s subtle hands gently echoes the opening tea ceremony, she serves coffee to Hara, pouring, creaming, and sugaring with a mindlessness that had to be intentional direction on the part of Ozu. The scene is saying: look at America. Look at what’s changing.

Or the scenes at the sake bar where the stark wooden shelving behind the bartender is conveying more than any line of dialogue could. Or the off-handed mention of the ravages of the war, seeded subtly in conversations about other things. The framing of the bicycle ride along the beach, with the “Drink Coca Cola” sign heavy in the foreground.

Ozu has just got to be thinking about Japan in the wake of World War II.

And how could he not?

But it’s not just that. The scenes and details are so resistantly unstraightforward, so comfortaby nestled in the ineluctable blergh that is the domain of the evocative. What the film is saying – asking? – just can’t be summed up in some nice tidy thesis about confronting change in post-war Japan.

Read the climactic scene, where father and aunt gaze at Noriko in her bridal kimono, all three of them sitting seiza.

Aunt: Nori-chan, you have your fan, right?

Noriko: Yes.

Aunt: Such a beautiful bride. I wish your mother could see you. [weeps]

Somiya: Well, shall we be going? We don’t want to be rushed.

Aunt: Anything to say to her?

Somiya: No, I’ve nothing more to say.

Aunt: Are you sure? Then Nori-chan, let’s go.

[All rise to leave. Then, glancing at her father, Noriko returns to seiza]

Noriko: Father…for your loving care these many years, I thank you.

Somiya [nodding]: Be happy, and be a good wife…

[Noriko bows]

Somiya: Be happy… You’ll be a good wife, won’t you?

[Noriko assents]

Somiya: Now, shall we go?

Reading this in the abstract as dialogue you get a very different impression than what’s happening when you watch the film. There’s something else going on here, folks, something in the Ozu technique says worlds more than what is heard, or like a wordless melody says nothing at all but still means, still feels.³

Whatever story I’m on, whether film or lit or lyric or ritual, my brain tunnel-vision defaults to seeing the scene in service of a plot which is in turn serving some kind of point. My personal little Big Idea watching Late Spring is that, for Ozu, the point serves the plot that serves the scene.⁴

When I used to tell people about the films of Yazujiro Ozu I used to quip that watching an Ozu film was like watching paint dry. I’m not going to use that line anymore.

(1) Incidentally, as in in a moment of precognition, one scene in Late Spring involves a young boy glumly sitting out the kids baseball game because the red paint he put on his bat hasn’t dried!

(2) Unless you like films by Michaelango Antonioni, Kelly Reichart and Jim Jarmusch?

(3) Which is I think what some theorists would say about the medium of cinema itself (cf. Lacan?).

(4) Not that I’m a film critic, but I think I’d also describe Kubrick this way. Not that I’m a film critic.

Walter Benjamin replies less enthusiastically: “To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”

A subtle but crucial observation. With easy reproducibility, how we think of art and what we use it for changes. In a new era of reproducibility, this time through infinite derivation, when anyone can generate a Shakespeare-ish sonnet or Beethoven-ish sonata, the originals must change, too: they are just source material for a sought-after moonlight mood, a phrase well-turned.

Something special about humanity, perhaps the most special thing, is going the way of hors

With the Hemingway out of my system, I could turn my attention to billiards.

There is something – I don’t use the word lightly – something unique among games in the nature of a billiard table: it is the purest manifestation of abstract principles of physics – force transfer, triangulation, geometries – on a level that the human body can digest. Sure, kicking a football or hitting a baseball involves the same movements of object through time and space and mass, but they happen beyond the level of ruminative human observability. Though it takes no less precision, timing the swing of a baseball bat toward a fast-moving ball, even for the elite, requires transcending human-scale speed and vision, defying explainability. A cue ball, stationary on a green bed of felt, on the other hand, is seen and readily described as being such and such distance from an eight-ball that is such and such angle from the corner pocket, requiring such and such force to reach its terminus.

For some years I’d half-considered building a billiard table. I’d always liked the game. I got that gangial hit when the ball rolled lengthwise across the table to tap the other into the pocket. I was too poor a pool player and too much of a cheapskate to entertain buying a table but foolish enough to think I could build a billiard table and with just enough woodworking experience to maybe, just maybe, pull it off.

• What did it cost?
• Required tools
• References
• Build steps
  • Step 1: Rail frame
  • Step 2: Rail bumpers
  • Step 3: Base stand
  • Step 4: Table surface
• Testing, calibration, retrospection, and contraindications

What did it cost?

Required tools

This table can be fabricated in its entirety with just an Xacto knife and fine-grit sandpaper. Okay, that’s not true. But it really doesn’t take many tools.

• Staple gun: Can be found at used tool shops for around $10.
• Jig saw: Can be rented for $25 around per day at tool rental places.
• Drill: If you don’t already have a drill this probably isn’t the project for you.
• Xacto knife / razor blade
• Sand paper

Build steps

The following order of steps simplified the measuring process for me. Building the rail first allowed me to cut the table siding to snugly enclose the rails. Having the table base finished provided a workbench of sorts for finishing the playing surface.

Step 1: Rail frame

The finished frame looks like the image below. It consists of two levels of 1” x 4” pine boards (which actually measure .75” x 3.5”). The levels are glued together, but the four sides remain separate for disassembly. To avoid having to struggle shaping warped ‘common’ board from lumber piles, I splurged and bought ‘select’ pine boards for the rails.

For a standard seven-foot table (78” x 39” playing surface), the long sides were cut to 87”, the short sides, 48”.

The math:

• Length: 3.5” edge + 1” bumper + 78” surface + 1” bumper + 3.5” edge = 87”
• Width: 3.5” edge + 1” bumper + 39” surface + 1” bumper + 3.5” edge = 48”

I used a flower pot of about 4.5” diameter to pencil pocket cuts:

I used a half-lap joint so that no bolts or pegs would be needed to keep everything snug. Conscientious chiseling/sanding made the curved edges fairly flush.

At this point, since I already had linseed oil and wood stain on hand, I added a varnish to give things that British pub whatness.

Step 2: Rail bumpers

I hadn’t done any building projects that involved afixing rubber to wood, so I did a lot of roughing out the position and shape of the bumpers before cutting, using staples to hold things in place. This rubber cut well enough with an Xacto knife.

• Corner pocket “mouth” measures 4.5 inches diameter
• Middle pocket “mouth” measures 5.25 inches diameter

I also hadn’t used contact cement before, which is applied to the two surfaces that will be bonded together. Manipulating the rubber continued to be a bit squirrely, so I added more staples to hold things in place while the glue dried. I also wasn’t super confident about the durability of the vertically-bonded glue, so I added duct tape to seal the deal.

Adding the rail felt wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Most pool tables use a wood feather strip to pin the fabric to the rail, something which I didn’t feel confident fabricating. So I folded the fabric in on itself, used index cards to create a stiff-edged border, stapled that, then pulled the visible side of the fabric across, obscuring the dirtywork. Attaching the felt to the bottom of the rail didn’t need to be precise, but I tried to make it snug.

Step 3: Base stand

A few blocks from where I live someone had put a dining table out at the curb. Sturdy oak. The legs were 29” long, which would work well enough to get to a 31” standard pool table height:

I used 1x4 the cheaper “common board” to furnish the sides, since they didn’t need to be quite as precise as the rails. A second, inner layer, serves as the lip that the table surface sits on:

The pocket-catchers I mulled over dinner for a few nights. There had to be something lying around I could use to catch 2.5-inch billiard balls.

A 28-ounce can of tomatoes is 4” in diameter. Using the bolts already on the table legs, along with new bolts for the side pockets, I fastened the tin cans. They wouldn’t be visible, so they didn’t need to be pretty, just sturdy. Eating through 168 ounces of canned food accounted for a fair amount of this project’s overall time. I lined the cans with leftover felt from the rails (not shown below).

Step 4: Table surface

Much of this final work was easier than I expected, though it took some head-scratching to settle on the size of the pocket cuts. I also had to redo my felt strategy a bit. The main bits left to do:

• cut the 4’x 8’ MDF sheet to fit the table frame
• cut pocket holes with the jigsaw
• afix the felt playing surface

I first cut the MDF to fit rectangle of the table frame, accounting for a 1/4 inch gap on all sides to more easily insert and remove.

Then I put the MDF surface onto the base and added the rails to pencil in where to cut the back end of the pockets. The front cut involved some guesswork. Billiard tables vary widely in “shelf depth” and this, in conjunction with the “mouth size,” largely determines table difficulty.

I figured it better to err toward a friendly pocket cut. My billiard table didn’t need high altitude training or a resistance parachute, and the fremitus of my middle-aged hands and bell-tolling presbyopia would add challenge enough. I looked at many top-down images of tables and then seasoned to taste. The main thing is not to have the front cut exceed the line, seen below, that bridges the bumper edges:

A fine-toothed jigsaw blade cuts MDF like it’s hydrogenated oil.

It’s pretty essential for the table to be level. Before going further, because I wanted to avoid sleepless nights vexing over whether all those missed shots were due my inept play or my inept building skills, I checked the levelness by setting a ball, before adding felt. After a moment or two of youthful indecision, the ball settled into middle-management apathy.

A few months earlier I’d wandered through the clutter shelves of Kent’s Tools, a local second-hand tool-slash-junk shop, one of those places where ever day everything is always somehow “twenty percent off!” On the grounds that I figured it was a handy tool that I’d certainly have a use for on one project or another, I purchase a spring-operated staple gun. The pool table was finally my project for it.

Videos of re-felting pool tables showed technicians stapling the felt on the underside, so that’s what I initially did. But when testing the table, I found that the felt bunched up unevenly and made the playing surface less level. So I added staples on top and cut away the excess.

Based on videos I’d watched, I figured I would have a tough time stretching the felt taut to avoid creases and wrinkles, but in execution, this didn’t pose much of a challenge.

And that was it. The pool table could be assembled. And, relatively easily, disassembled.

References

• Dimensions for a 7-foot pool table: https://www.dimensions.com/element/7-foot-billiards-pool-table
• Recovering a pool table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suu7SbG_ol0&t=490s
• How to make a pool table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOggSa2UTlU

Testing, calibration, retrospection, and contraindications

• My litmus test for any D.I.Y. project: If I could go back in time and decide again whether to build it or buy it, would I again build it? Yes. The table action is good enough that a beginner like me can only blame myself for missed shots, good enough that paying three or four times more for a ‘real’ table feels remains satisfyingly unjustifiable.

• Going into this project, I was well aware that in if you don’t have a level playing field, all you have is a glorified green-felted dinner table. Hitting that perfect shot only to watch the ball drift with teenage angst further and further from the pocket? Pretty deflating. So I took my time making sure the table base was both level and that the table sat evenly on its lip. You can’t readily test it, though, till you’ve built it.

• I would have made the side pockets sit deeper in the rail. In my build, it is a pretty tight squeeze to get the wrist into the side pockets to retrieve balls.
• I’m not sure if I would have used a thicker piece of MDF, say 3/4 inch. A thicker board is going to better guarantee a level playing surface, but it’s also heavier, and I like that the table can be disassembled pretty easily as-is.
• If you’re armchair woodwright like me, you’ll have to accept that “precise calibration” sometimes needs to take the form of a proverbial matchbook under the table leg.
• If the project was not a failure of execution, it may have been a failure of ambition: I do not and will not ever have a game room; I have no indoor place to place a seven-foot table, one that requires additional girth for playing. So my table is consigned to the outdoor patio. DIYer beware.

A Message to the Citizens of Earth:

The Space Traders Federation presents SPACE WHEEL – released from Space Customs and made available to you by our earthwide distributors. SPACE WHEEL has already delighted the populations of innumerable planets. Its farsighted engineering represents a major victory in the never ending battle against the forces of friction, gravity, and entropy. What was accepted only in astrophysical quark theory is now a reeling reality. Launching SPACE WHEEL onto its curvilinear path will create the effortless motion of winding up by running down. Sit back and observe. Give it space to take its time.

Universal regards, The Space Traders Federation

Yesterday I spent some time sorting through my three plastic storage bins of personal history. One bin is labelled “Peace Corps,” another “Academia,” and the last – where the SPACE WHEEL was lurking – is the catch-all “Mark Historical.”

I don’t recall when I came into possession of the SPACE WHEEL and have only a vague recollection of having played with it. Actually, “played” may be the wrong verb; you kind of just watch it. The toy, itself, appears to me now as I assume it did when I was a kid: a cleverly designed, mildly brain-tickling illusion of perpetual motion. And because of this I assume that for most kids with a SPACE WHEEL, by the time its battery had lost its charge the toy had also lost its novelty and had become another object taking up…space…an object that no longer sparked joy, that inexorably went the way of thrift stores, swap meets, white elephants, landfills.

But my adult brain is tickled by that message, from the Space Traders Federation.

Sure, the cynic can call it a page out of the Children’s Toy Marketing Playbook: embed a mythology around a clever but – let’s be honest – one-trick-pony gadget. But contemplating the message as an adult, I think that, marketing or not, it worked. The message, which must have been genuinely delightful for someone to compose, transforms the SPACE WHEEL into more than its mechanism. It invokes the possibility – the imminent presence – of further frontiers technological and sociological. It is an invitation to imagination.

And it stands in contrast to how I assume most kids toys are packaged today, as solely functional packaging for the toy per se. As such, it evokes a time quite different from now, where children’s toys were not an inventory of big-box-store homogeneity and cheapest-to-mass-produce-wins business decisions. Indeed, the now-defunct company that made the SPACE WHEEL, Andrews Manufacturing Co., appears to have been a small operation in Eugene, Oregon (its Operating Manual includes an address to which you can send requests for replacement parts, $4.00 for a rotor, $3.00 for a set of tracks; it also apparently held the trademark for “TOP SECRET” until 1988).

That’s probably rose-colored thinking…or nostalgia-colored thinking? But it appears I’m not alone: SPACE WHEELs in good condition with original packaging sell on eBay for $150.00.

I’m 45, and if things go according to forecast I’ll retire in the next few years. This departure from the norm of retiring in your 60s, a financial planning concept referred to a ‘Financially Independent, Retire Early (a.k.a FIRE), will have been made possible through more than a decade of planning, steady income, and just as steady saving. More than a decade, yes. But not decades.

For many people FIRE is simply not financially feasible, period. Earning at or near minimum wage or having big non-negotiable expenses mean you simply can’t sock away enough for the math to work out. I am quite conscious of privileged position I and my wife are in.

But FIRE is feasible for many people who don’t think it is. My wife and I are not high income earners and we haven’t spent the last decade living like monks. Most of the time most of us just don’t stop to reëvaluate how we’re spending and what we’re saving. We stick with a mental model of what feels reasonable spend on stuff and what feels possible to save. That mental model tends to stay unexamined, nearly invisible, like the water for fish in David Foster Wallace’s memorable commencement speech.

So if FIRE is legit, you say, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Here’s part of the problem: for most of us financial independence might be something we can plan for but isn’t something we can count on. Sure, early retirement might be possible, but is it likely or unlikely? Why scrimp and save when there are big variables outside our control: return on investment, unexpected debt, the long-term viability of social security. The natural reaction when there is no way of knowing is to decide there is no point in trying. But as David Spigelhalter would contend, “if we want a firmer grasp on uncertainty, we need to start using numbers, and a first step is to try to define what we mean by words such as likely.” So brace for some math.

A related but distinct problem is psychological. The FIRE methodology involves saving hard early then living off those savings. Even when the maths show you’ll have equivalent financial equilibrium through your lifespan as if you’d gone the traditional work-till-sixties route, we are uncomfortable with living off savings (though of course FIRE is more nuanced than that; those hefty savings are generating income, for one). It feels riskier than earning (and spending!) a steady income year after year. So brace for some feels.

Contents

• The unexamined financial norm
• Critiques of conventional wisdom
  • “Buy as much house as you can afford”
  • “Save 20% of your monthly income”
  • “FIRE is only an option for folks with six-figure incomes”
  • “FIRE requires penny-pinching minimalistic aceticism”
• A better retirement calculator

The unexamined financial norm

For the average United States citizen there is the assumption of a normative, monolithic financial life journey that looks something like this: you spend your twenties earning little and simply staying afloat, paying the rent, paying off student debt, and if you’re able to save something that nest eggs usually vanishes in a couple years in the form of a down payment on a mortgage and a new car. Then you’re a thirty-something and you’ve moved up the career ladder and you’re earning a bit more and instead of pouring money down the renter drain, you’re paying off a mortgage, which feels good. But you also have new expenses, the largest often being children. So maybe you’re able to save 10% of your income each year. You will need to work roughly 30 more years in order to retire.

Many people assume this is the only way. Because, well, everyone else seems to be retiring in their sixties. And you have only so much ability to influence how much money you make and how much money you can save.

Un-ex-am-ined! An oversimplified-for-the-sake-of-making-the-point math comparison shows that the same individual with the same earnings can either retire in 30 years or 15 years, the only difference being how much they’re saving:

Individual A (conventional): a thirty-something starts saving 10% of their income every year. After 30 years they will have accumulated enough to stop working ($500/month * 12 months * 30 years = $210,000, compounded annually at 10% = $986,000) and can retire.

Individual B (FIRE): a thirty-something starts saving 50% of their income every year. After 15 years they have the same amount saved as Individual A ($2,500 * 12 months * 15 years = $300,000, compounded annually at 10% = $956,000).

But you just said the comparison was simplistic! you say. Sure, those individuals may have the same total savings, but Individual B now has 15 more years of life to finance than Individual B.

Consider this: Individual B, who has been spending the last 15 years on an annual budget that was just a fraction of their take home pay, doesn’t need to significantly adjust their lifestyle, post Working Era. In contrast, Individual A (who was only saving 10%, putting the additional 40% toward discretionary spending) presumably will now need to downsize their lifestyle significantly to maintain retirement viability.

But what about social security? you say. If you work only 15 years, you’re going to have a lot less social security to draw on.

The FIRE math doesn’t rely on social security as an assumed income stream. Social security should be seen as a fallback/bonus, not a necessity.

But what about inflation? What about health care costs? What abouut the stock market crashing?

You remain unconvinced. But you’re still reading! Let’s take a closer look at the unexamined bits of conventional financial behavior.

Critiques of conventional wisdom

“Buy as much house as you can afford”

Conventional wisdom says you should ‘buy as much home as you can afford’ (1). For the cynics out there, note that the people frequently giving this advice – homebuilding conglomerates, real estate agents, and mortgage lenders – profit more when you spend more. Cynicism aside, given this ‘wisdom’ contradicts the more intuitive “buy the least expensive house that meets your needs” motto, some justification would seem to be in order. The justification as I understand it, frequently only implicit (2), is:

• A more expensive home is going to appreciate more over time, so it’s a good investment.
• A more expensive home is usually in better condition, so it won’t cost as much to maintain.
• As your family grows, you’ll need more house in the future, so buying a bigger house is actually “thinking ahead.”
• As your career progresses, your income will likely increase, so your huge mortgage won’t be so large a percentage of your expenses later on.
• Putting your money in real estate is an inflation hedge.
• Selling the house later on is “tax free” (you generally don’t pay tax on the principal of the sale).

Whoa, whoa. Multiple problems.

1. A more expensive home means a larger down payment. That means you’ll be taking a large chunk out of your current investment savings when you need it most (due to the way compound interest works).
2. A more expensive home also means more expensive repairs, utility bills, property taxes, furnishing costs and – the biggest hindrance to early retirement of all – a larger mortgage that will take longer to pay off. All of these expenses means you’ll have less money each month to put into investments.
3. This advice was apparently most common in the US in the 1970s, when inflation was high and house prices compared to salary levels were relatively favorable. Given how much more houses prices are relative to income fifty years later, the same math doesn’t work.

Others who have come to the same conclusion:

• Don’t buy as much house as you can afford
• “How much house can I afford?”
• Three money myths about housing
• Should you buy all the house you can afford?)

“Save 20% of your monthly income”

If you go seeking financial guidance, you’ll invariably run across the 50/30/20 rule or variations (see the 80/20 rule). Whatever the flavor, the basic idea is to set aside a specific proportion of your income for saving, the rest being yours to do with. In the case of the 50/30/20 rule, that’s 50% for fixed costs, 30% for discretionary spending, and 20% for saving.

Chalk it up to nature’s problem with vacuums or money’s unusually flammable state in wallets: this approach could have been designed by evil-genius behavioral psychologists. By framing disposable income as anything – more precisely, everything that is left over after you pay your bills and save something, this rule disincentivizes future-thinking and wise spending. Savings becomes another fixed cost that reduces your available cash, while the discretionary chunk is treated like free money that you can’t even consider saving: it must be spent whimsically because it’s in the discretionary spending bucket.

Instead of “Save X percent of your monthly income, then spend the rest as you like,” try on “Save all your monthly income, then figure out how to cover your costs.”

Jasmine starts the month by saving all her paycheck, minus a calculated typical amount for fixed monthly costs and just a lagniappe of cash for discretionary spending. Halfway through the month, she finds something she’d really like to buy but doesn’t have enough money in her lagniappe. There’s nothing stopping her from drawing on savings to buy it. In fact, it should be perfectly okay to do so. But because it’s coming from her savings, it’ll probably be a bit unpleasant and Jasmine will think a bit more about whether it will really increase her happiness/comfort. Discretionary spending becomes a cost, not a freebie. Et voila: no more evil-genius behavioral psychology.

People who have large fixed costs or high rent may only be able to save 20% most months. Even so, the “save it all” mental shift will end up saving more: when an unplanned cash inflow comes along, that money goes directly into savings.

This highlights what I think is a misconception about the FIRE approach, namely, that once you put money into your saving engine it can’t come out until retirement. There’s nothing wrong with drawing on savings to cover even discretionary spending. But if your money’s first stop is savings, it’s less likely to ever make a second stop at discretionary spending.

FIRE is only an option for folks with six-figure incomes

“Alright,” you say. “I accept FIRE works. But it’s out of the average person’s reach.”

Financial independence is not available to many people. Saving money every month is just not possible if you’re living paycheck to paycheck. But if you can save, early retirement may be more realistic than you think:

1. In 2021, the median annual salary in the US was $56,310. (3)
2. After taxes, that’ll leave you with $42,232.
3. If you budget 50% for savings, you’re left with $21,000, or $1,750/month, to cover expenses. (That may seem austere; see “Playbook for early retirement,” below.)
4. The other 50% ($1,750/month) goes to savings.
5. If you invest $1,750 monthly for 16 years, assuming a realistic 7.5% return from the stock market, you will amass $702,000 (4).
6. That $702,000 will allow you to spend $40,000 annually, indefinitely, without running out of money. (That’s $20,000 more than you were living on, Work Era.)

FIRE requires penny-pinching minimalistic asceticism

Frederick Backman’s A Man Called Ove tells the story of a grumpy old man with a comically frugal approach to life. Ove makes a scene demanding the two-item discount price for one item. Ove only puts ten minutes at a time in the parking meter because “They’re not getting a load of money for time we might not even use!” When he decides to end it all by sitting in his garage with the car running, Ove struggles with the fact that it’ll “use up a lot of expensive gas for no good reason afterwards.”

Many blogs discussing FIRE promote clever-sounding life hacks that save a few bucks here and there. While I find those life hacks cool, realistically speaking, they are mostly pennywise gimmicks which don’t make a difference in the financial big picture.

In other words, frugal savings doesn’t need to be – shouldn’t be – a one-size-fits-all action plan.

I’ve heard others helpfully distinguish between $3, $30, $300, and $3,000 decisions. The decisions where you’re saving/spending $3 just don’t affect the financial big picture. Isolated $30 decisions (as opposed to, say, recurring payments) also don’t affect the macro scale. So don’t sweat them. But do think extra careful about the $300 decisions. And exercise extreme dubiousness toward the $3,000 ones.

The takeaway from the table below should be that FIRE shouldn’t be about stripping your lifestyle to the bone. It should be about making intentional decisions about most the high-impact expenses. The rest – to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel – is just spare change.

Things that will save you money but not affect when you can retire

It’s well and good to do any of the things below. The numbers under “estimated lifetime savings” might seem like a lot, but from a macro perspective, they won’t significantly affect your retirement age or lifestyle.

A better retirement calculator

The second best retirement calculator I’ve found is the FIRE Age Calculator. The thing I don’t love about it is that it calculates the age you can retire at based how much you can save, rather than calculating how much you should save based on what age you are going to stop working. It’s just a perspective shift, but I think it’s important to frame the age you want to stop working as the fixed value and the amount to save as the variable.

It may seem subtle, but I think there’s a practical effect, instead of asking the question If I save X, when can I retire? to ask If I stop working at age X, how much do I need to save?

Enter my own retirement calculator: https://fire.markfullmer.com

Footnotes

• [1] Conventional wisdom says you should ‘buy as much home as you can afford.’ Web search results suggest that nowadays this would be more accurately described as “the common wisdom is that the common wisdom has been ‘buy as much house as you can afford’.” The concept apparently came about in the 1970s as a strategy against inflation. Nowadays, with a few exceptions, there are more results from frugal-living websites that cite this advice as common only to use it as a straw man argument to prove why FIRE is more sound than “conventional” thinking.
• [2] Contemporary justification for buy as much home as you can afford is usually implicit. Maybe lenders and real estate agents realize that making this statement explicitly is suspect; web searches more commonly turn up sites framed around “How much home can you afford?” which gives the impression that they’re trying to figure out the right amount to spend to fit your budget. In actuality, what they’re calculating for you is the maximum amount you can spend on a home, which, for me at least, is something quite different than what can be afforded.
• [3] The US average salary in 2020 was $56,310 Per U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000
• [4] Variations on saving/retirement can be tested using https://fire.markfullmer.com. If you assume a 10% rate of return, for example, and live on $30,000 in retirement, you can stop working in 10 years by saving $1,750 a month.
• [5] “Work long enough to be eligible for employer-provided health insurance in retirement” = $12,000 per year in savings. This calculation is derived from looking at what my own employer-provided retirement option would save for a married couple compared to us purchasing insurance through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. It’s a roughly $1,000 monthly premium for the both of us, compared to about twice that via the Marketplace (https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/average-cost-of-health-care-by-age).

References

Spiegelhalter, D. J.. The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck. First American edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2025.

You know your name. You know your secret. Put your secret in and get out your better secrets.

But your body is not your better secret place. THEY know your name. THEY do not need your body. What if THEY know your secret?

Think.

Think.

Let you have a mailbox. Letter yourself a scripture with strange secret. Use your scripture to get out your better secrets. But think: if THEY know your mailbox THEY know your scripture. And . . .

Think.

An address. Let you have an address. Radial protocol of your existence. But an address only is an only finger away from public && THEY know.

You have a safari and it has a version. You have a chrome and it has a version.

THEY know.

Think.

You have a smart object, pinned against the folds of your suede pocket outer thigh, Buzzing, plaintiff, lonely. Send your smart object a strange secret against the folds of your suede pocket outer thigh. Put your strange secret and get out your better secrets.

But: you step away for a cuppa, a fag. You are typically conscientious but this time, this one time, you are not.

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So: let you set an hourglass, disappearing grains of timeout. THEY will have to move fast.

Oh, you have so many secrets.

Let you have a master secret to mistress all the secrets.

Desecrate your master, sprinkle your carthage salt upon it, mish hash of algorithm alphanumer.

THEY heave ho the back door, chortling throaty at your carthage salt.

Let you have ten cluster of ridges expanding out in concentric Dali vortex, raked sand of zen garden at your fingertips. Thumb the small green square to prove your better secrets. Or: Let you have a coiled cortex of ocular bevy not entirely genetically determined. Not even your identical twin has this thing. Shine the red beam on your coiled cortex to prove your better secrets. Or: Let you have a thin bend key, heart of magnet with other strange secret. Slide, swipe, touch, brush to prove your better secrets.

So.

So this is what you do.

Slide shine thumb desecrate send your concentric coiled thin bend hourglass smart object mailbox address salt name secret to –

Your secrets are safe from even you.