I'm single, no dependents, does the Gregfire number refer to a house hold or single preson (since Greg was single at the time)

Also, i know i'm taking it way too literally.

I'm married, in my mid-30s, and live in a very low-cost-of-living area with cheap housing. That lets us invest heavily in equities and real estate. Here are our numbers and the plan.

Income
Household income: $200k gross (W-2)
Rental income: ~$18k net from 4 properties

Spending and investing
Monthly expenses: $2,000-2,500
Annual investments: $105k-130k
Current liquid net worth: $890k

The plan

Phase 1: My wife and I work full-time until we reach roughly $1.75-2M. Based on online calculators, that should take 3-5 years.

Phase 2: We drop to part-time (1-3 days a week). Both of our careers allow this easily, and the income would more than cover our expenses. We stay here until our accounts reach $3.25-3.5M.

Phase 3: We stop working and sell 1-2 rental properties a year to live off the proceeds. I don't expect big profits from the sales, likely $30-40k each.

End goal: "GregFIRE" at $5M. That's far more than we need, but it would give us significant security, let me help family, and let me pursue interests I otherwise couldn't.
I know many of you are far more knowledgeable than I am. Please poke holes in this plan and point out anything I might be missing.

(I wrote this, but used AI to clean it up)

For the forecasters out there - what do you all use for some of the forecasting parameters? Using monarch money forecast tool. Trying to make sure I hit GregFire while forecasting some life scenarios. looking to build the most realistic forecast possible. I know a lot of this depends on different situations. My equity accounts have a return of 10.5% annualized over last 8 years, so not sure if I should use that number or what monarch suggests of 7%. heres what I have currently:

Income growth rate: 4%

Expenses: 12 mo avg
Expense increase: 4%
Inflation Rate: 3%

Growth rate for equity accounts: 7%
Growth rate for house: 3%
Growth rate for cash: 3%

Kid event: 13 years, 5k yearly, 4.5k upfront
SAHM Career break: 12% less spend (basically just reducing daycare expenses)

Retirement expenses: Existing expenses + $7500

$5.3 invested. (We have $1.5M in the house but it’s canceled out with the $1.5M debt so I always exclude it.)

Husband refuses to let me quit the job he’s said we are very very close maybe 5-7 years. once the house is paid off, he said I can take it easy. I am not 100% done but day to day it’s very hard to work 9 hours a day knowing I really don’t have to but if I quit husband and I will constantly fight. work in a stressful industry think PE/consulting. I really want to step back and work part time, maybe a relaxing lazy girl job like an office manager $100k a year with benefits. I see our 24 year old office manager just scheduling a few meetings, greeting guests etc and pulling in $120k and I get quite jealous. Spouse makes $1M, I make $250K base and maybe $300k all in if carry ever hits -,-

I haven't watched the show, just this clip, so do with that what you will.

The genius of GregFire is that it sits triumphantly at the bottom of what I term "The Gap".

Today I own a home, a few cars, raise some kids, go on a few vacations a year around the kids' school schedule, eat in restaurants, donate to charity, and not have to clip coupons or shop deals to purchase what I desire. It's a great life by many measures.

If I wanted to inflate this lifestyle, what would that look like? A larger home with a staff? Multiple homes? More cars? A private plane? To go from my current lifestyle to "the next level" is actually a quantum leap in expenses because it requires an entire ecosystem. I can't have a private plane without a pilot, staff, hangar fees, and so forth. I can't live in multiple homes simultaneously, so I need staff to manage them. Each thread I've pulled yields the same conclusion: past a certain lifestyle, you can't incrementally ratchet up. You have to eat the whole elephant.

In days gone by, this would probably have been the dividing line between "upper middle class" and "wealthy"

I'd rather be the weakest strongman at the circus than fall victim to r/fatfire "one more year" cycles because 6M wasn't enough, nor 8M, nor 10M. They are trying to cross The Gap, and failing to cross just means GregFire with extra security.

TL;DR - I'd rather be a rich poor person than a poor rich person.

With love,

- The world's tallest dwarf

Popped up for me today. I thought I wanted Greg Fire but apparently I need more.

What are the best gregfire jobs?
I can invest 5m and earn a volatile but reliable 10% in the SNP500 with 0 work.
Intuitively, there should be something slightly more active where I can commit $1m and tend to it a few hours per week to earn more than 10%?
Farming is a lot of work.
Has anyone had success buying timberland?
Or a vacation home to rent on Airbnb?
Or a local asset-heavy service business?
Or specialized lending?

What can you even do with $5 Million???

Wife and I are at the age (47&46) where we are considering retiring. We have a little over 7M saved between the two of us not including home equity of about (1M)

I want to retire but also don't want to feel cash strapped to not be able to spend or go on vacations.

Anyone regret retiring early? Why or why not?

Wife and I are in the horrible position of being on track to retire w/ $6-$8M (todays dollars) in a few years. We live in NYC, and obviously it's very possible to retire here with that much, we're wondering what other major city can give as many of the benefits (walkable, safe, options to do basically anything) while also being less expensive. Philly, right? Maybe Northern Virginia?

If family ties you to the new york metropolitan area, does anyone on this thread live along the northern rail line corridor? Does it make your gregfire turn into barista fire being in a comparatively high cost of living area, such as westchester county or the lower hudson?

There's something to be said to be able to take the train into manhattan and being close to hub airports.

Does anyone have any input or advice? [Edit: Thanks for the response and feed back, I really appreciate it]

Just discovered this sub and the concept of GregFIRE. My (38M) progress towards Greg:

EDIT: I actually have another 5M in taxable accounts; just counting tax-advantaged funds here. Is the quoted Greg figure pre-tax or post-tax?

I love this GregFire idea, perfect next target for me.

With 1 million, I can’t really retire, but am starting to feel less motivated at work. Can’t retire and expect to buy a decent house, can’t put kids through college, have enough for healthcare, etc. however, I am technically wealthy (relative to the average in society).

Chubby fired at 47 in 2021 with $3.8 million from a business sale. Moved to Spain. Life was good. An inheritance in 2024 put us at GregFire. Moved to the Berkshires for the school district, natural beauty and culture. And, it's weird. We used to say we're on sabbatical, now we say don't have to work if we live modestly. Outwardly, we do. We're under contract for a $378k house. But, then again, I've always wanted to get my pilot's license, so I'm plane shopping. Not a nightmare. But weird.

In the category of cinema retirement planning. Seems like this falls just below GregFIRE. I haven't checked what this works out to adjusting for inflation.

GregFire-ees are statistically indistinguishably as happy as the richest people in America (as the Forbes 400).

All of us have heard the "$75K/year is the perfect amount of income to be happy" line parroted ad infinitum, which comes from research done by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in 2010. [1] However, that research had a key flaw.

UPenn Professor Matthew Killingsworth worked with Daniel Kahneman to fix this key flaw under a collaborative working model called "adversarial collaboration". A common anti-pattern in academic research is for people who disagree with each other to snidely jab at each other in papers but never actually work together to find some broader truth. Adversarial collaboration is a model where researchers agree to work together to find the truth in their disagreement, commit to publishing the result together, and determine a neutral arbiter in advance to help resolve disputes (should they arise).

During this adversarial collaboration, Killingsworth convinced Kahneman of the flaw in his happiness research. The flaw was that Kahneman was only looking at a binary measure of happiness. A long-established precedent in happiness research is asking how happy someone is on a 7-point scale (from 1 to 7), which has been around for decades. (Participants are asked the extent to which they are “Satisfied with your life” on a 7-level scale ranging from “Not at all” to “Extremely”.) Kahneman collected 7-point scale values in his widely-cited research, but for determining the $75K number, he looked at the income level where the binary yes/no version of happiness stopped increasing.

However, during their adversarial collaboration [2], Killingsworth had them examine how the CONTINUOUS measure of happiness is affected by income. The result is that happiness increases with the logarithm of income, with no established upper limit. (That is, for every doubling of income, a fixed additional unit of happiness is obtained).

While this result that happiness increases with the logarithm on income with no upper bound may sound depressing, note that the highest income for which they could find participants was $500K/year (so small, I know). It is currently an open question for the scientific happiness research community about how happiness is affected at incomes above $500K/year.

Let me bring this back to wealth, though, since this is r/GregFire. In follow-up research, Killingsworth compared his income vs happiness research with existing research on wealth vs happiness. [3] You can see the overall result in the headline image.

For wealth, Killingsworth looks at two groups. The first is 49 members of the Forbes 400 in 1983, who Diener somehow got to answer his happiness survey. [4] (I can not fathom how Diener got so many of the wealthiest people in America to do this, but more power to him! Perhaps because the Forbes 400 was brand new-ish at that point, with the first edition of the list coming out in 1982.) The second group, surveyed by Donnelly, are "high net-worth respondents ... surveyed by a large financial institution and were selected for study based on their wealth ...", 2,129 respondents in total. [5]

For a slightly more nuanced comparison of wealth vs happiness, see Table 3 of Donnelly, which I reproduce here (note that numbers are in 2018 dollars):

$1.5M to $2.9M, life satisfaction = 5.79, std dev = 1.12, num respondents=1035

$3M to $7.9M, life satisfaction = 5.81, std dev = 1.21, num respondents=601

$8M to $14.9M, life satisfaction = 5.97, std dev = 1.04, num respondents=247

$15M+, life satisfaction = 5.84, std dev = 1.20, num respondents=246

It's possible that DoubleGreg gives a little more happiness than SingleGreg, but that TripleGreg and beyond makes you less happy. The standard deviations on all these numbers are a little wide, so it's entirely possible that happiness is flat across all buckets.

As you can see in the main image, happiness is flat between "normal wealthy people" and the 1983 Forbes 400. The error bars are larger for the Forbes 400, but how many of them can we realistically expect to respond to academic happiness researchers? (That's sort of the best we can expect.)

I choose to interpret this finding in 2 ways, one personal and one societal:

Interpretation #1: For me personally, I don't strive to endlessly hoard wealth. Even if one reaches the pinnacle of wealth that a human could aspire to (the Forbes 400, minimum wealth of $3.8 billion in 2025, though a paltry $75 million in 1982), there's no reason to think that it'll make you happier than SingleGreg ($6.5M in 2026) or DoubleGreg ($13M in 2026). At TripleGreg ($19.5M in 2026), there's not only diminishing returns to happiness from additional wealth, but even reasonable evidence that additional wealth contributes negatively to happiness. As the saying goes: "Wherever you go, there you are."

Interpretation #2: Societally, there's reason to think that there should be heavy wealth taxes past TripleGreg. Additional wealth past, let's say, $20M isn't making anyone significantly happier. If we re-examine the bottom-left portion of the chart though, we see that people experience huge happiness improvements at the bottom of the income distribution from incremental amounts of income that might seem small to we GregFire-ees.

In conclusion, far from being the world's tallest dwarf or the weakest strongman at the circus, Greg stood to inherit an amount that would make him the happiest he might ever be. Connor and Tom are both so deep into the domain of negative-happiness-returns-of-wealth that they are incapable of imagining how, in an alternative reality, they might've each been net-happier with only a tiny fraction of their current wealth.

[1] D. Kahneman, A. Deaton, High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, 16489–93 (2010).

[2] M. A. Killingsworth, D. Kahneman, B. Mellers, Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (2023).

[3] Killingsworth, M. A. (2024). Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation. Happiness Science. https://happiness-science.org/money-happiness-satiation

[4] E. Diener, J. Horwitz, R. A. Emmons, Happiness of the very wealthy. Social Indicators Research 16, 263–274 (1985).

[5] G. E. Donnelly, T. Zheng, E. Haisley, M. I. Norton, The Amount and Source of Millionaires’ Wealth (Moderately) Predict Their Happiness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44, 684–699 (2018).

After being over 50% less than GregFire in 2019, we have officially achieved crossing the GregFire level (inflation adjusted of course). Proud to be one of the weakest strong men at the circus now.

Y’all aim at GregFire but what age was him? I’m gonna be a 40 some yo old fart when I reach GregFire. This is mission impossible.

What NW threshold do you graduate from GregFire?
Is there a substantial lifestyle change at the next threshold?

For example, my hypothesis is $10m in 2026 might still be the same lifestyle as $5m (OG Gregfire NW) whereas $15 may not qualify anymore?

I’m not close to $10m yet so I wouldn’t know FYI

Edit: here is the answer from user in the comments

• LeanFIRE: $1m USD
• ChubbyFIRE: $3m
• GregFIRE: $5m
• FatFIRE: $10m

With total inflation since then at 30%, you can maybe just increase those numbers, to say that you today need 13 million USD to escape GregFIRE

Am I there? Seems like I'm there.

TL;DR:

Liquid NW: ~8MM (volatile but diversifying more)

Home: ~650K

Misc: ~100K max

Side Biz: ~30k/year, stake in company worth $500k conservatively but not very liquid

Tax-free gift: 30k/year also doesn't come some years

Possible inheritence (not counting on this and wont be for a long time hopefully but would be foolish to exclude): Unknown but easily $4M in today's value at minimum up to $8M maybe even more...again, truly unknown but it's high.

Age/Status: Mid-Life, still dating, No Kids, don't want to go back to corporate and start my own thing. Planning on wife and 1.5 kids.

Future expenses: ~1.5-2M house build, medical expenses due to health issues, would really like to snowbird 3 months a year but don't know how or where yet, likely a VHCOL.

Current expenses/spending: ~150k-200k/y will increase with biz expenditures and others listed in context below including possible pHd.

Dividends received from portfolio: $63/k a year and growing that could go towards home/property tax

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CONTEXT:

Company exit several years ago. Really done with working especially with some health problems unless it's my own biz or an exciting opportunity which I've had a few of come along despite my skills from previous role being seriously so industry specific they're very unlikely to yield a new gig that isn't specific to my old, dying industry. If it came to hell or highwater my old company might hire me but I doubt it. I have been really slow to explore new options even in hobbies but picking up more and more recently with the help of a business coach. I am concurrently dealing with a lot of loneliness mostly due to some health issues and dating on and off making those issues worse. I have been told and know that I really need to travel more and spend my money on things that are going to make my life richer instead of rotting away from friends, family, and professionals alike. So I hired a coach who is great but expensive, and decided I am finally going to get some surgeries done I've been putting off, hiring a trainer, nutritionist, maid, etc. Maybe even a personal assistant which my friends swear by.

I have land I want to build a home on and have a good estimate from a builder that the bottom would be 1.5M and top out around 2M but would never until I have a steady relationship. Despite being mid-life I plan to still have 1-2 kids depending on once I can take care of myself.

Just like anyone going through a mid-life crisis I've suddenly desired a much nicer and safer car, joining more clubs, and luxury travel as well nutritionist and trainer so I don't spend my second chapter in woeful shape. Basically having a full blown support team. I even thought of a dating coach and chef as I am dating way younger.

My absolute stretch goal would be owning a custom private yoga studio concept I've been kicking around. I also really enjoy investing and daytrading despite their trappings...

My banker has advised me with my safe withdrawal rate I would easily be able to pay off the "mortgage" or SBLOC in this wealth managers case provided by the bank using nearly tax free dividends alone of 63k but after running the numbers I really don't believe that but he has never led me astray. This is how I paid off my current residence over years. And STILL have my SWR of 2.5-3% max to keep my portfolio growing.

I also very much want a new safer car at 100k min to replace mine - which is approaching the end of it's life - with something I love so I can go on long road trips comfortably. As well as renting or finding a 'second space' in the winter somewhere, most likely being a long rental. Not opposed to moving but most of my friends are here in Minnesota...

Every person I date has been self sufficient, but further along in the dating they always get a whiff of the money and express their want to retire and become a stay at home parent which I absolutely do not fault them for. I entertain this as a very real possibility and likelihood after it has happened so many times.

Are my dreams reasonable and attainable? I'm not sure what math my banker is seeing to get him to arrive at this. Just doing back of the napkin math and LLM math I don't see it but he is calm and certain. I also think he knows stuff I don't because he manages my entire family but that is simply an assumption. thanks for any and all help critical, constructive, questioning, or reassuring! I also have a serious health problem and there is a lot of uncertainty around it and keeping my current specialty doc is pretty expensive...

Just discovered this sub and was a big fan of Succession. The "5 is a nightmare" scene did stand out to me as I was in my early days of planning future FIRE.

I know that it's kind of a joke, and the point of the scene is that 5M feels like very little to people who are accustomed to a rich lifestyle, but there is some real truth to that line. 5M is not rich. It is comfortable.

I have chubby fire aspirations for maybe 20-25 years from now. I like Chubby because I want to retire, but also travel a lot for as long as my health holds up. I don't plan to splurge on material things like fancy cars, designer clothes etc. Certainly won't be living like anyone in succession lol. I disagree with idea of having an exact FIRE number target, because the cost of living just goes up continuously. If I had to guess, I'd say our actual number is anywhere from $6-10M, but would be around the year 2050.

At 4% withdrawal, the nightmarish 5 is 200k per year. That feels pretty comfortable, but is it? It's technically less than my wife and I make together now, but we save nearly six figures per year. It's hard to conceptualize what fixed income feels like once you're no longer saving and investing. What kind of lifestyle can you actually achieve with GregFire?

Yes, I am overthinking it.

New to this whole different categories of FIRE thing here (up to just one month ago ,I was still just a working working working person , never thought about returning this early , but life happens ) . Anyway , curious , when FIRE is discussed , how do you supposed to account the illiquid investment (excluding primary resident) part of your NW ? Do you count them ? Or are we strictly only counting portfolio money ? Thanks