Do not plan for FIRE

Most advice I see regarding FIRE is to do the following:

1. Put all your income and spending on a spreadsheet
2. Set FIRE "goal". This is usually some point in time in which you want achive FIRE.
3. Adapt your income, spending, investments to line up with your first "goal". This sometimes involves running some form of simulation to determine your success percentage.

It is not worth spending time setting FIRE goals and creating a plan to accomplish them. Personal finance is a constantly changing, difficult to predict system. Asset valuations are not stable and are difficult to predict. This is not disputed. Investments for FIRE tend to be those that favor stable long term growth to mitigate this risk.

The important part, income and spending are not stable.

This means any FIRE plan can be instantly invalided by any significant change to your income and spending. Just had a kid? New promotion? Rent increase? Back to the spreadsheet you go. This can also make your previous FIRE "goal" invalided, defeating your previous expectations.

> What should be done instead?

I will refer to an idea analogous to software development. You can

So what would this "incremental FIRE" look like? Everyone spending time researching FIRE and adapting their finances around it, has a shared task in order to achive their goals. The task is to build wealth. Wealth is built by minimizing spending, and maximizing income. The remaining savings is placed into assets as wealth.

Don't spend time planning and creating date-based expectations for your financial independence. Instead, spend time optimizing your current income and spending to build wealth. This is an iterative process. Keep track of your spending vs income frequently, I review mine monthly. If you are spending too much, you can adjust your spending habits accordingly.

> How do I know if I'm spending too much, or too little?

This is the optimization problem you will need to solve based on your personal financial situation. To reach a better answer, spend time understanding the problem. How much do you value wealth over what you will receive by spending now?

As your wealth grows, so does the likelihood of achiving your FIRE goals. There is no set date in which suddenly, you achive FIRE. It is an incremental process, so your approach should follow.