Cooking The Books

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's how the FIRE movement works, and how New Zealanders are adapting it to their own circumstances. Hosted by Frances Cook.Retiring decades early in your 30s, 40s, or 50s, sounds like something a millionaire would do. And yes, it helps to have a big stack of cash to get there, but you don't have to be earning millions in order to do it. That's the argument of the people who follow the FIRE movement, also known as Financial Independence, Retire Early. The idea behind it is relatively simple. You work out how much you spend in a year to stay alive. You save and invest until you have 25 times that much. Once you hit the goal, you retire, and you only withdraw four percent of your investments per year. If you've invested well, that should be a safe amount to pull out for decades to come. To help get there, the FIRE crowd is a big fan of frugal living. It's a double whammy, because of course cutting back