Is Interest In Financial Independence And FIRE A Bull Market Phenomenon?
As of this post the S&P is down about 17% in 2022. Bonds are a usual hedge to equity declines, but owning them as a means of diversification hasn’t helped this year. Bonds are down around 14% in 2022 as well. Money markets, CDs, and savings accounts are earning well below inflation, which has been over 8%. In short, 2022 has not been a great year for investing.
A few weeks back I posted an infographic about interest in financial independence and the FIRE movement and how it relates to stock market performance. In the full spirit of my purposely childish infographics there’s no real data behind the graphs. I use those to get simple ideas out, sometimes immature ones.
But I’ve had a strong hunch that public interest in financial independence and FIRE has been declining in 2022, and even since covid. My hunch and what I tried to represent in my graphic is that when things are going well in the markets, like basically the entire decade of 2010 – 2020, interest in FI will be high.
The FI/FIRE movement basically rose to prominence in that glorious decade of bull market profits. It’s human nature to pile on when things are going well. But when things turn south I suspect interest in financial independence and FIRE will wane, which is what I tried to portray in the graph.
Let’s face it, amassing enough to live on and retire early is not easy, and if you’re early in the journey and your investment accounts are shrinking it must be tremendously demotivational. I’m guessing quite a few folks gave up on the dream this year. Just my hunch.
When contemplating this I was thinking “if only there were some sort of reliable data point or metric that could show the popularity of financial independence and FIRE” Then it hit me, the google monster….
Interest In Financial Independence
Let’s take a look at google searches for “financial independence” over time. (click for larger version)
Aha, now we’re onto something…
The decline in searches after the 2008 market crash is clear, and the steady increase from 2010 – 2020 is also clear, with peaks and valleys. The peak popularity for the term was January 2020, two months before covid hit in full force. Since then the number of searches has gone up and down but generally stayed at about 2017 levels.
Interest In Retire Early
Now let’s look at the search trend for “retire early”. (click for larger version)
At first glance it looks the same as the graph for financial independence. The decline after 2008 is clear, as is the steady rise in the bull market decade of 2010 – 2020. After the covid trough of March 2020, the popularity of the search term increased until it peaked in January 2022 (my red circle). But then you see a steady decline.
Mash Up
Now let’s look at the popularity of the two search terms together. (click for larger version)
As you can see the volume of searches for “retire early” is consistently lower than “financial independence” since 2004, but they follow very similar trends. I added the green line for 2022 to show how both of them have declined this year, but “retire early” seems to have declined a bit more.
Now to have some fun, what if I mashed up the trend line for the S&P500 over top of these? Granted, in a way it’s meaningless because the google trends graphs are measuring the number of times certain terms have been searched for, while an S&P 500 graph would be measuring a stock market index price. But it would be nice to see them together from a relative perspective, even thought the numbers don’t mean the same thing.
So I did it. (click for larger version)
And there you have it…. it seems that in general the interest in financial independence and retiring early appears indeed to generally wax and wane in conjunction with the performance of the stock market. Just as I indicated in my silly infographic 🙂
One area of noticeable difference is the time period between the covid decline of March 2020 and January 2022. The S&P500 continued on an upward trajectory during that period, while interest in both search terms slowly declined, especially during 2021.
My Blog
Another not-so-scientific signal to me of the declining interest in financial independence and early retirement is my slowly dying blog. My readership numbers are off quite a bit since 2020 and continue to decline. My audience decline appears to be more drastic than the decline in searches for financial independence and early retirement from the google trend data.
I chat with a few other FI bloggers from time to time and many of them also have declining blog readership, but not all. So this not clear indicator and could well just be a reflection of my marginal writing skills, haha.
It’s also clear that blogs have fallen a bit out of favor in comparison to podcasts which have been the trendy thing to do for a while now.
Either way, my not quite fully scientific analysis here shows that interest in financial independence and FIRE might be on the decline with the stock market.
Your turn – You are reading this blog so you must have some interest in FI and FIRE – have you seen a decline in interest in these ideas?
I love your blog, but it’s quite hard to figure out where your old posts are when you read on an iPad. Between figuring out the side panel and having to scroll to the bottom, you have to be a motivated reader to find them. Perhaps readership might improve if your archive was easier to find?
Android phone user here. No issues with access on my device. I hit the top banner to get to the home page and scroll to find blogs by date or category.
Thanks Trish and I appreciate that input!
First off THANK YOU very much for the kudos and your readership. As for my old posts, the best way would be to use the categories at the bottom right of the sidebar, but that might not portray the same on an iPad as a desktop etc. Bottom line, I know my blog layout is a bit crowded and I do need to come up with a better solution to get to old posts. I just need the motivation to do it as to me the back-end blog stuff isn’t as much fun as writing.
Regarding the “area of noticeable difference…March 2020 and January 2022”. I wonder how many people, including younger boomers, who were wanting to retire before COVID, decided to just go for it and take the leap during that time period. IMO, the increase in work from home likely decreased some people’s desire to FIRE.
With the ‘great resignation’ I think many did but I also think many used quitting to just get a better paying job or one closer to home or that has better benefits etc. WFH also adds a wildcard into the whole thing for sure
i’ve said it again recently, the time to start getting rich and your financial house in order is now. even though the markets are off this year lots of people are still gainfully employed (at least for now).
i’m ready to throw dirt on my blog and put it out of it’s misery.
Best time is now, a better time was yesterday. And don’t bury the blog yet, there’s muffertos to be had!
I like ur blog…I’m in my mid 50s and have a keen interest in Coast FI more so than full on FIRE. With inflation on the rise and one child left to go to college i don’t think full FIRE is in the cards. Plus I’m in healthcare so part time status is always an option. I’ve tried to “talk up” FIRE to my younger colleagues, but they’re just not that interested right now.
Part time is a great way to glide into FI for sure, I love it. Thanks for your readership!
A great example of developing a hypothesis, then testing to see if it can be validated. Interesting data, tho not nearly as fun as your simple graphic last week. 😉
Good question on overall FI blog trends, I would say my readership is steady, but it’s hard to gauge since I intentionally reduced my writing frequency. Basing my perspective on views/post, which has generally held steady. Keep the faith, we’ll see an uptick in the market soon, and I’ve heard that may correlate to an increased interest in FI!
Your blog is much bigger Fritz and you also started before me. And oh yeah you’re a better writer too so there’s that 🙂
Excellent analysis Dave. I do sense the same type of trend of declining interest in FIRE. Here’s another adjacent hypothesis. What if managers/employers have changed the way they treat employees (in a good way) so that the desire to FIRE becomes less important. As you mentioned above, FIRE requires delayed gratification which is hard. If you are treated pretty well at work, the FIRE effort might not exceed the pain threshold. Just an idea, I have no hard data to support the idea other than the fact that unemployment numbers have been very low for a couple of years. Thanks
Interesting hypothesis. Better work environments along with more WFH and flexibility might decrease the interest, great comment!
Great analysis, although something you might have guessed even without data. It would be interesting to add the number of people who retired in the same timeframe, I am pretty sure there was a surge in the last couple of years. Also, I do agree with other comments that WFH has mitigated the urge to retire asap – or at least it did the trick for me.
I haven’t look into retiree numbers, might be worth exploring but I don’t know how accurate they are. Thanks for stopping by!
Your thesis is spot on Dave, and your graph is very indicative of this trend. Funny thing is, now is when people should be accumulating assets to be able to FIRE, not when markets are at ATH’s. As far as your blog, I for one enjoy it! That said I think you’re right folks are more into TikTok, Youtube, and Podcasts, maybe you should complement your blog with one of those other mediums???
Of the three you listed I would consider YouTube and a Podcast a slight possibility, but definitely not tiktok. I can’t dance and I have no interest in letting the Chinese spy on me 24×7, haha!
Isn’t that the truth about Tik Toc! Well, if you do either of the other two, I’ll be tuning in!
FIRE is so much more than investing money. It’s a state of mind, a lifestyle choice if you will, that mashes up environmentalism, minimalism, anti-consumerism, philosophy, values etc etc. I don’t think it’s possible, at least not for someone earning an average salary, to reach FIRE unless they’ve done the mental work. And the biggest payoff, IMHO, is the resilience that it builds into your life. The bloggers (I hate podcasts) that focus solely on the money aspects are the bookmarks that get deleted rather quickly. The ones that speak to the philosophy behind it all are the ones that I continue to follow.
While the term FIRE might not be talked/written about much now, what I find encouraging is that there is now more focus, at least in the mainstream media, on that old Depression-era slogan – “Wear it out, use it up, make do or do without”. To me, that slogan is pure FIRE.
Great reply Veronica!!, and basically exactly what happened to me along the way on the discovery of FIRE and mostly adhering to the foundations of the MMM lifestyle. I think my Mustachianism is what helps us true personal finance devotees to the downturn in markets. The get rich quick crowd is always quick to disappear when times get tough.
Get rich quick never works except the lottery. And a large portion of those winners lose it afterwards, so there’s that
Great comment Veronica and I agree! As you know I post about the psychology behind money decisions far more than I do about the nuts and bolts of investing – to me it’s THE important thing. And I love that slogan, that’s good stuff!
Perhaps it should appear on one of your t-shirts????
If you do make t-shirts and they sell, I’d like my portion of the royalties to be donated to charity please. 😉
Great analysis. This tends to be the way with a lot of things. The hysteria and hype around Crypto/Web 3.0 at their prime was insane. The same people are still around but tweeting a little less.
From your blog perspective. Have you checked landing pages within Google analytics? This is usually a good indication as to whether it’s an algorithm update or general readership.
You can also use the tool SEMRush.com which is a traffic estimator tool. It looks like you’ve been victim of an algorithm update. From the SEMRush data your peak was May 2019 and again in February 2021. Since then the amount of keywords within Google’s index has declined considerably. This could be due to an algorithm update or perhaps a technical glitch on your website?
https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?q=accidentalfire.com&searchType=domain
Hope this helps a little?
Ryan
Overall I think google algorithm changes are indeed a large part of it. Google used to feature one of my posts every 2 or 3 months back in the day and they just plain stopped doing that. Thanks for the link to that tool, I’ll check it out. But I also think contributing factors are a general wane in interest in FI/FIRE, and the rise in popularity of podcasts versus blogs. All of these together are contributing but it’s hard to say by how much. I appreciate the help Ryan!
That’s interesting – I noticed that my site has taken a hit this year, too. I assumed that since we moved back from Panama, some of the interest has just dwindled, but you’re take makes a lot of sense. It can be a little discouraging, but hang in there, my friend! If you enjoy it, keep writing… once you don’t, let it go.
PS Wanna start a podcast? 😉
It is discouraging for sure, but I realize I’m not the only one. As for a pod, if I ever started one I have a hunch I would not be about FI/FIRE. And I would have to take voice lessons, I suck on mic
Please excuse my internet ignorance, but could you share how you determine the search volume for FI & RE? I’d love to get the raw data, and then throw it in R to determine the correlation coefficient between said variables and the market. I’ve got nothing better to do, and that sounds like fun to me😄.
As for the death of blogs and the rise of other mediums, I’m kind of at whatever. Sucks for those that solely write for the money, but maybe we’ll somewhat return to a blogosphere where people mostly write for the sake of it, and we read other’s posts to learn about stuff beyond what you can get in a tiktok video. Podcasts are great and all, but I think there’s a depth to writing which cannot be replaced by the spoken word. I like that words have to stand on their own, and aren’t assisted by flashy videos engineered to play on our emotions, or depend on one having a charismatic voice.
Ha, you are not internet ignorant, if you know R you’re smart 🙂 I used Google trends, simple and easy to use and you can get data back to 2004. Not sure if they give out the raw data, you’ll have to poke around for that. In the basic charts they use a 0 – 100 scale where the value 100 is given to the peak month of searches for a term. The other numbers are a percentage of that. So I guess if you found out what the raw # is for the peak you could get the rest easily. And you make a good point, maybe blogging is slowly drifting back to the old days before listicles and SEO-driven clickbait to one where folks just want to write and exchange ideas. That would be nice 🙂
I was way over complicating stuff; didn’t even need R, just used the CORREL function on sheets since it’s only two variables. Doh. Trends is pretty cool, thanks BTW. You can dump any of their stuff into a .CSV, so that’s sweet.
Anyways, on to answer the question that no one ever asked:
The correlation coefficient between
FI and VTSAX(used instead of SP500 b/c VTSAX and chill) is .70605
RE and VTSAX is .78410
and interestingly it’s only .68054 between FI and RE.
This is using data which goes back to 2004.
All this confirms your initial infographic from the previous posts, using an overly sophisticated method that no one probably cares about 😉.
Aha, so cool and thanks for doing that. I saw the .csv option but didn’t have time to explore and the charts met the need for what I wanted to show. Very very interesting, that’s pretty strong correlation indeed. Cheers!
Long time reader here who’s never commented… I hope you don’t stop writing this blog! I love it. I always enjoy your insights and graphics and links. 🙂 And definitely an interesting correlation to notice between FIRE and the stock market. People have such short memories… as far as I’m concerned, financial independence should be at the forefront of EVERYONE’S mind right now. I’m sure there were millionaires made in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, when people with foresight invested in the market when it was quite cheap.
Short memory disease is indeed a thing in America. I benefitted massively from the 2008 crash as I stayed the course and had a lot of shares ready for the 2010 – 2020 decade. Staying the course is just as important now and this correction in the end should create lots of millionaires. Thanks for reading and commenting Natalie!
I wouldn’t say you have marginal writing skills, clearly your blog is interesting as you get many comments and write compelling posts! I think you might be right in the correlation though.
Maybe podcasts are the new cool thing, and some are good, but honestly reading a blog still wins in my view for a number of reasons, like going at your own pace, and focusing on sections/topics important to you rather than listening to two people go off topic and then lose your focus.
Yeah I think the podcast trend will start to subside somewhat, there’s only so many that can possibly be listened to. I am a fan of health an fitness podcasts, but only from the biggest names and most credible scientists. Thanks for the kind words Gary!
Great post as usual…my blog certainly is much smaller, and I did transition to a Podcast for most of my newer content…. But nothing truly communicates and sinks in from a data point like a well written blog with just the right number of hyperlinks to relevant context, and not an overwhelming number of notices in the inbox. I think you have a great recipe.
Keep the posts coming.. and ohhhhh the infographics! One of the best tools my past marketing guys at “work” used. The market Megatrend certainly was a driver on FI / RE, I would agree a direct correlation.
Cheers, and looking forward to your weekly insights and more of your excellent writing!
Lambo
Thank you Lambo, comments like this mean a lot!
Cnbc viewership might be a proxy for stock market interest, but probably only for lefties, lol. I guess you could combine with fox biz channel.
I think cable is dying and they’ll all be gone before we know it
Dave, I was disappointed in your “silly infographic” when you first posted it as you didn’t reference any data. No data? Conjecture? Not like you. Google Trends, while not precise, is a wonderful tool. Used it quite a bit in my former Consumer Products R&D role to confirm hunches about consumer trends. Not something to take to the Marketing VP and pitch a multi-million dollar advertising campaign, but good enough to inform what questions to ask and what prototypes to show consumers.
Haha, my infographics are proudly backed by nothing but silliness, but they speak a truth that doesn’t need any backing 🙂
I think people are too busy trying to survive when the economy stumbles. 2020 wasn’t a normal stumble, though. Workers went through a lot of changes over the last few years.
My readership is way down as well. I think people would rather watch or listen to something. It’s just easier for most people.
Interesting to hear that you are down too, you have a WAY bigger blog than I do and as you know you are one of the originals. Either way, I owe a lot to you for whatever readership I do have, so thanks as always Joe!