FIRE is ‘not just for white guys’

In 2020, Purple left her corporate job to retire early at just 30 years old. 

The blogger, who goes by Purple online and in the media to maintain her privacy, has been traveling the world and chronicling her FIRE journey, which stands for financial independence and early retirement, online for the last decade-plus.

But one trait sets her apart from many of the well-known members of the FIRE community: she’s a Black woman.

Economic inequalities like the racial wage gap and lack of generational wealth can make it harder for Black Americans to retire, even on the standard timeline. 

In fact, Black Americans across income brackets are less likely to contribute to a retirement savings account, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office study. And the median value of retirement accounts among middle income Black Americans ages 51 to 64 is $34,960, compared with $93,226 for white Americans in the same age bracket, GAO found.

Retiring early can be comparably difficult for young Black Americans, especially when they don’t often see themselves reflected in FIRE success stories. 

In Purple’s experience, the community has grown more diverse in the last decade, but readers still sometimes tell her she’s the first or only FIRE success story they’ve found they can identify with. “I’ve never seen someone that looks like me doing this” and “I thought this was just for white guys” are some of the phrases Purple tells CNBC Make It she hears often.

Purple hopes to show other Black women that financial independence and early retirement is possible.

In addition to the systemic economic inequalities that hold many people back from higher-paying jobs and valuable assets like homes, Black Americans may be skeptical of the FIRE movement in general, Purple says. Part of that may come from a long-held distrust of American financial institutions. 

“Minorities have had such an issue in the past with trusting our financial systems,” Purple says. “We’ve been burned so many times.”

The U.S. banking system has historically been discriminatory toward Black Americans through practices such as denying loans and lines of credit to Black applicants at higher rates than their white peers.

In fact, 65% of Black adults with household incomes of less than $50,000 who applied for credit were denied entirely or approved for less funding than requested in 2023, according to a LendingTree analysis of Federal Reserve data. Just 47% of white adults in the same income bracket had their requests denied. 

Many Black Americans have also reported negative experiences within financial systems, such as lower valuations on home appraisals.

Purple personally saw her mother work with a financial advisor for years who turned out to be losing her money rather than helping it grow, she says. Though her mother was still able to retire at 55, Purple vowed to learn from her missteps. And now, she hopes others can learn from her journey and the growing community of early retirees from diverse backgrounds.

“Unlike in the past, we now have index funds and we can DIY invest,” Purple says. “We have a lot of tools at our disposal.”

When Purple was first learning about the FIRE movement around 2013, she made a concerted effort to find stories from women — especially Black women — about navigating the salary negotiations and savings strategies that are often required to achieve financial independence.

Despite Purple’s feeling that major media was full of white men’s FIRE experiences, it wasn’t difficult for her to find other voices once she started seeking them out. “There are hundreds of women writing about this journey,” she says.

As she attended more and more FIRE community meetups and events like FinCon, an annual gathering of personal finance content creators, she saw attendees become increasingly diverse. It’s a trend she hopes to continue, and she’s happy to be an inspiration for other Black women.

“This message [about FIRE] is getting out there, and it’s not just for white guys,” she says. “[FIRE] can be for everyone.”

Purple transparently shared each step she took to retire early on her blog, from job hopping to increase her salary to tracking her spending and living frugally.

“There were a few people [of color] out there that were on the [FIRE] journey when I started, but there weren’t big voices that I could find that had done it,” she says. “And so I thought [sharing my journey] would be helpful. And people seem to think it is.”

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