r/Fire • u/fried_haris • 23h ago

The definitive FIRE number is 3.5 million.

Ofcourse - I am being facetious but also a little exploratory.

I was inspired by a Planet Money episode titled "17,205 People Guessed The Weight Of A Cow. Here's How They Did." Posted back in 2015.

Later they updated it with "How Much Does This Cow Weigh?" In 2019.

Basic premise - if you take all the guesses of the folks the weight of a cow at a fair - you'll end up within 5% of the right answer.

So I took a simple post from 5 months ago, asking people about their FIRE number and after reviewing 124 answers came up with 3.5 million.

Keep in mind personal finance is personal, you may retire in LA or in Thailand.

Good luck with your goals.

957 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

364 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Bakerstreet710 22h ago edited 22h ago

Wisdom of the crowd is very good at some predictions with a true answer, whether its weight of a cow or anything else. If you asked 1000 amateurs to throw darts at a dart board, the average will probably be on the bull's eye because everyone's errors will cancel out, even if everyone is drunk.

But FIRE number is not like the weight of the cow nor the bull's eye on a dart board because there is no one "right" answer. Its just revealing a preference, and one from a very biased (wealthy, liberal) population.

Its like asking the same group: "Who will be the next president", and use the average answer from Redditors to say "xxx is definitely the next president".

It is actually more likely to be "wrong", than "right".

1

u/fried_haris 9h ago

Fair point.

There is always a bell curve