The Reality of FIRE

You've seen the numbers: the 25x rule, the 4% withdrawal rate, the studies on whether the money will last. Here is what no spreadsheet can show you: what it actually feels like to walk away from your career, and whether it's worth it.

In 2016, at forty-three, my husband Trin and I left our corporate jobs, sold nearly everything we owned, and spent almost a decade moving slowly through the continents, one at a time. We had no guarantee the money would be enough, and we weren't even sure what this lifestyle would cost.

Will the money be enough?

You can't know for certain. Calculate it all and give yourself the best chance, but life doesn't follow the spreadsheet, even without changes as drastic as ours. At some point you have to take the leap and make corrections along the way.

What we learned is that slow travel costs far less than we imagined. We averaged less than $19,000 a year for the two of us. When you have time, you wait for the lower fare, pick the next destination based on the best deal, and shop on Tuesday when everything is half price. We still said yes to the big dreams, like the Galápagos and Antarctica.

Our net worth kept rising, too, even though we'd left well-paying jobs behind. Rental real estate and index funds did the quiet work, and compounding is a wonder. If you're a spreadsheet junkie like me, you can see our cost of travel by country.

And if you try it and end up back at work? You still tried. You won't spend years at your desk wondering "what if?"

What will you do with all that time?

The usual advice is to start hobbies before you retire. We couldn't. Corporate life left no room for anything on the side, and I suspect that's true for many people. Often the new passion shows up only after, because that's when there's finally time to explore it.

For us, travel filled the hours: researching where to go and where to stay, then actually doing it, on trails and on long walking tours of cities. Trin did most of the planning, so I still needed something productive of my own. For me that became writing, but I had to learn it. I promised myself one post a week, and that steady practice became a skill, and then a passion. This month I'm publishing my second book.

There was no room for that in my old calendar. On the road we had real time to sit inside a new culture and to have a conversation that ran past midnight with no alarm waiting on the other side.

Who are you without the title?

In the U.S., identity is welded to work. At a party, the question isn't who you are; it's what you do. I had an easy answer: director at a Fortune 50 company. Once the title was gone, I had to figure out how to answer that question.

Trin, easygoing by nature, barely felt the shift. I'm a driven, type-A person, and I needed a purpose for every hour. Work is a good thing; we're made to work and create. The question was whether I could feel productive another way. That's not a failure of FIRE. It's the bill for letting a job do the answering for too long.

The upside is that we finally had the time to build a better answer.

The bottom line

Was it worth it? Yes. Not because every day was easy, and not because the future ever stopped being uncertain, but because the life on the other side turned out to be bigger than the one we left. I wouldn't have learned to write inside my old job. Trin wouldn't have had a decade of roads to figure out. The money, watched instead of worshipped, did what money is for: it paid for the experience.

The reality of FIRE isn't the withdrawal rate. It's waking without an alarm clock and the freedom to decide what the day is for.

Bonnie Truax left her corporate career at 43 to travel the world with her husband, Trin, funding a decade on the road with rental income instead of a portfolio draw. She writes about travel, freedom, and what's worth carrying at 43bluedoors.com. Her new book No Home Address is out on Amazon on October 20, 2026, and the Kindle edition is available to pre-order now. See more at bonnietruax.com.

The book link is the author's Amazon affiliate link. firenum earns nothing from it.

Bonnie's spending gives you a number to try: $19,000 a year at the 4% rule is a FIRE number of $475,000. Work out your own, or put your real income, rentals and travel years into the Fire Planner and see whether the money lasts.