Our first goal: To create financial independence content that centers low-income and median-income earners.
I’ve created this blog as a resource to help low-income and median-income earners reach financial independence.
As someone who has worked many low-income jobs—including cleaning, tutoring, and working in call centers from anywhere between $7.25 to $15 an hour—I was tired of seeing the bulk of personal finance content exclude low-income earners. I’ve always had a passion for personal finance and have long held the goal of reaching financial independence, but I’ve often found myself frustrated that the FIRE space often doesn’t include low-income and even median-income earners in the conversation.
I was frustrated with seeing article after article about tech bros who pretend that investing 80% of their income was purely the result of hard work, and the endless stream of posts in r/FIRE by high-income earners who had close to 1 million dollars invested by their 30s felt alienating. And I found that content that markets real estate empire building or living in a van in order to have an extreme savings rate to be so far removed from what’s accessible to normal people.
Where is all the content for normal people with normal incomes who want to pursue financial independence? I can’t be the only one that feels this way.
Financial independence isn’t just for high-income earners. Low-income and median-income earners deserve to have content that is centered on helping them reach financial independence too. My top goal is to normalize centering low-income earners and median-income earners in the conversation about how to build wealth and reach financial independence.
Our second goal: To make financial independence content more welcoming to women and people of color.
Unfortunately, a lot of financial independence content is subtly unwelcoming to many women and people of color because financial independence content doesn’t address income gap and wealth gap.
The overwhelming majority of high-income earners are white men and most content about the FIRE movement is written for high-income earners, so the problem is that most FIRE content ends up subtly excluding those who don’t fit that demographic.
Most FIRE content just tells high-income earners how to get richer, yet doesn’t really attempt to make building wealth more approachable and accessible for middle-income and lower-income earners.
When personal finance content assumes that you can invest thousands of dollars per month, buy rental properties, do mega backdoor Roth conversions, and retire in your 30s, that content simply isn’t welcoming to most women and most people of color because it doesn’t reflect their financial realities.
Most FIRE content doesn’t address the massive gap between women’s and men’s income: Women are also far more likely to be low-income earners, whereas men are far more likely to earn a high income: 27% of all working women in the United States earn below $17 an hour, compared to only 19% of men. And 57% of those who earn $25,000 or less a year are women.
And this wealth disparity grows even wider when we look at race: 40% of Latina women and 35% of Black women earn below $17 an hour in the United States, compared to 25% of white women and 17% of white men.
In contrast, 75% of high-income earners are men, according to data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC notes that 71% of earners who make between $163,000 and $207,000 are men, and 75% of of those who make $208,000 or more are men. Another study notes that 72% of those who earn six figures or more are men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Men are twice as likely to be high-income earners as women; one-fourth of men earn $100,000 or more, whereas only 12% of all U.S. women do. And only about 2.7% of Latina women earn over 100k.
Even many middle-income earners face a wealth gap: The median income for white men is higher than the median income for women, especially many women of color. Black women are paid only 66 cents for every dollar earned by white men for the same work. According to Equal Pay Today, “Over a 40-year career, this wage gap can accumulate to nearly $1 million in lost earnings.”
All of this affects how much you’re able to save for retirement. The median female retiree has just $100,000 saved for retirement—less than half of what the median male retiree has: $217,500.
When financial independence content is marketed toward only high-income earners, that content is alienating the overwhelming majority of its female and/or non-white audience.
That’s a huge problem, and it’s one that FIRE for Normal People strives to fix by providing content that’s centered on low-income and median-income earners. Financial independence is for everyone, not just high-income earners and not just men.
Our third goal: To give you real tips to increase your earning potential.
Most FIRE content assumes that you already earn an above-average income and that you already know how to find a high-paying job.
And when they do address the problem of income, they suggest little more than “earn more” or side hustles like real estate investing that are only accessible to those with significant cashflows.
Most content specifically about financial independence doesn’t really offer much advice that’s specific to low-income earners besides “earn more.” What these content creators don’t understand is that many low-income earners don’t know how to bridge the gap between a low-income job and a higher-paying one.
Even worse, much of the general personal finance content that does target lower-income or middle-income earners offers readers gimmicky solutions (like taking surveys or playing games online for money) that aren’t sustainable and won’t increase your long-term earning potential—and these websites actually profit from keeping you stuck in a cycle where you’re just trying to earn your next penny from the next survey you take.
Part of the personal finance content industry has turned away from offering people real solutions and has turned towards writing fluff pieces with gimmicky solutions for the sake of creating content and hawking affiliate links—and that does nothing to help you improve your financial situation.
I don’t believe in putting content creation and affiliate link marketing above your needs as a reader. I believe that content writing and affiliate link marketing can and should be done in a way that benefits you and your financial situation the most.
FIRE for Normal People strives to give you concrete steps to increase your income while increasing your earning potential. FIRE for Normal People is about giving you real solutions to earn more without offering gimmicks that don’t work long-term.
Our fourth goal: To help you see that small, consistent steps can lead to big changes, even if you earn a low or median income.
Another reason why I created FIRE for Normal People is that the personal finance content industry often doesn’t address the way in which earning a low-income impacts your self-confidence and your money mindset. If you earn a low or even a median income, sometimes wealth building can feel impossible and hopeless.
But the reality is that we can overcome this block if we start making small, positive changes that compound over time. Because of the power of compound interest, the most important ingrediant for wealth building is time, not money, so you have the potential to build a life-changing amount of wealth if you start investing early—even if you earn a low income.
For this reason, FIRE for Normal People has a strong focus on helping you take small, consistent steps toward building long-term wealth.