Get your partner on board with FIRE with mental time-travel, chunking, and social proof
This topic has come up a few times in forums, blogs, and podcasts, but I don't recall seeing anyone tackle it head-on.
Unlike many people in the FIRE community, I'm not an engineer or in IT. A lot of my work focuses on influencing people to act in what are often in their and the collective best interests. Even if they don't quite recognise what those best interests are yet.
I think some of the strategies I've picked up along the way might apply here.
How do I get my partner on board with FIRE?
Before I get into it, I want to share a word of warning: The line between benevolent influence and manipulation is thin and hazy.
I'm not telling you that because I'm afraid you will go around manipulating poor innocents. I'm telling you because if somebody suspects you're trying to manipulate them, they will put their guard up and lose trust in you.
If you do not put genuine effort into empathising with and respecting your partner's perspective, you might as well not bother trying to change their mind.
Let's take a moment to step into a spender's shoes.
I think most of us would agree, there isn't much down-side when it comes to FIRE. The average American, saves under 5% of their income per year.
According to this famous post, saving 5% of their income would have the average American working 66 years before they can retire comfortably.
If given pause to think about it, most people would agree having to work for 66 years would suck. Particularly when upping their savings to 10% would shave 15 years off their working life.
This is where I think it's safe to say influencing others to save more towards retirement is not such a bad thing.
However, the FIRE community tends to take this to extremes. Myself included.
Towards the higher end of savings rates in the FIRE community, let's say 60%, finding ways to save an additional 5% only reduces our working lives by about 2 years. That's nothing to sneeze at, but at what cost?
For someone earning an average wage, forgoing healthier food and a gym membership to retire a few years earlier might not be in their best interest. There is no clear line where pursing FIRE moves from rational actions in one's best interests, to a dysfunctional obsession that causes harm to the person and those around them.
If you're pushing hard for FIRE and it is disrupting your partner, you are starting to touch the sides of what could be seen as dysfunctional behaviour. If that's the case for you, you need to stop and deeply consider how pushing your partner to reduce their spending, or being such a miser that they don't feel supported, could hurt them, you, and/or your relationship.
Before you try to convince your partner of anything, make sure you're starting from a place of empathy. They might be holding your early retirement dreams back by wanting to eat out three times a week, but if you're into FIRE then you're already pretty unusual, and you need to appreciate that.
My point is, people can be too much of both ends of the spectrum. They can be too much of a spender, and you can be too much of a saver. If we all acted perfectly in our best interests, we'd probably be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
MENTAL TIME TRAVEL
There is a reasonably well-known study where psychologists showed people a digitally-aged photo of themselves, then asked them to make decisions about saving money. Those shown a digitally-aged photo of themselves opted to save more.
The authors' logic was that people tend to prioritise the present over the future. But if you can give people a more visceral connection with their future, then they don't discount it as much.
When it comes to your partner, you could digitally age a photo of them, print it as a mask, and wear it while you talk to them about FIRE.
No. I'm kidding. Don't do that. Unless you wanted to solve the problem by getting a new partner - that might be a good way to start.
I think the big lesson from the aged-photo study is that people rarely stop and deeply imagine their future. We all know we're going to get older, but we don't necessarily imagine the wrinkles.
The legitimate technical term for this exercise, or at least one of the technical terms, and the one I like the most, is mental time-travel. Check out the Wikipedia page if you don't believe me.
So how do you leverage this?
Try having a conversation with your partner. Not necessarily about FIRE - that'll come later, but about what they imagine your lives will be like in 10, 20, 30+ years. Where will you live? What will your home look like? What will you both do for work? Where will you holiday? How would you like to be thinking about money? Do you want to have to work? Do you want to go to 4 days per week? What will you do if one of you gets sick and can't work for a while? Do you think you will have short hair, long hair, grow a beard, grow out your leg hair?
Imagine the wrinkles.
Then work backwards. What do you need to be doing now to help you get to where you want to be?
There is a some-what related body of literature that suggests you should imagine both the best case and the alternative case scenario. For example, imagine what your future would look like if you saved $50k p/a for the next 5 years, and compare that with what your future would look like if you both kept spending the way your partner spends.
If you use the comparison technique, just be sure you contrast it with the positive scenario.
Mental time travel is just one type of visualisation technique. The whole point of visualising is to bring your values to the front of your mind, and make sure you're considering what's important to you when making decisions.
Bonus time travel tip:
An alternative is to go straight to your values.
At the start of the documentary 'Playing with FIRE', the couple make a list of the things in their lives that bring them the most joy. In making the list, it was clear that the things that brought them the most joy weren't big costs. Maybe it's having a coffee in the morning, sleeping in on Saturdays, or having family around for dinner every week. The things that bring most of us joy aren't that usually very expensive.
Following this process allows you both to visualise your current lives in a different way. Ultimately, that's what you're asking your partner to do. Live differently now, so you can live better in the future.
You can use a list of the activities of things you most enjoy on a day-to-day basis not to mentally travel through time, but to mentally travel to a parallel universe where you both spend less, but still try to maximise the things that make you truly happy.
Perhaps visualising this alternate life and what it might look like will help your partner build a connection with their alternative self, and make them more comfortable with the idea of saving more.
CHUNKING
You know that saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees? It refers to someone who is stuck in the detail (trees) being unable to see the big-picture (forest).
Well, it works both ways.
Sometimes when people see a forest for the first time, it's difficult for them to comprehend it is made of trees.
Instead of introducing your partner to the forest, introduce them to a tree.
When it comes to influencing someone to take a first step towards a large goal, the size of the goal can be paralysing. Breaking large and potentially overwhelming goals into small steps is generally referred to as 'chunking'.
Maybe you recognise the concept in other metaphors...
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
A journey of a thousand miles starts by taking one step.
If a tree is still too big for your partner to consider, start with one branch. If a branch is too big, start with a fist-full of leaves.
One of the reasons chunking can be so effective is because it builds an experience of success.
Having a taste of success is intrinsically rewarding, and can build your partner's appetite to take another fist full of leaves, grab a branch, and eventually fell a whole tree. These experiences of success create a positive feedback loop, where people can enter a 'success spiral', growing from one success to the next.
Think back to your own journey of discovering the value of saving and investing. Were you instantly hungry for early retirement, or was there some smaller goal that you were interested in?
For me, I was in my teens when I realised if I had $500 in a high interest account (which at the time was paying ~7% if you can believe it), the bank would buy me a family-size pizza on my birthday every year for the rest of my life.
It didn't take me long to realise that $5,000 in the bank would mean I would never have to go to work to pay my phone bill again - the only bill I had to pay at the age.
Even now I can find looking at the entire forest disheartening. It's just so big, and sometimes it feels like I've barely made a dent.
If a pizza every year is a fist-full of leaves, and paying my phone bill is a branch, now I mostly focus on days I don't have to work next year. Every month I hit my investment goal means one less day I need to work in subsequent years. Every year, not including portfolio growth, I buy myself nearly another two weeks off. Those days are my trees.
But going from trees to a whole forest is still a big jump.
That's a lot of the reason I put together the milestone calculator.
Instead of focusing on the whole forest, I focus on a small chunk of the forest.
For example, investing enough to know if I don't add anything more to it during my working life, my portfolio will grow enough to give me a financially independent retirement was my first small chunk of the forest. Some people call that Coast FI. Coast FI also means everything I do save and invest brings my retirement age earlier. It's a nice feeling. If I ever feel like I'm still a long way from FI, it's comforting to remember that I have made it this far.
Flamingo FI, the chunk of the forest I'm currently focused on, tells me that the period that I don't have to invest before I can retire (i.e., can coast) is only 10 years. Having 10 years of work left would feel like the dream is in reach. I imagine when I hit Flamingo FI I will feel a weight of work pressure and expectation lifted off of myself. It's not just having 10 years of work left, it's 10 years of work just to cover expenses, meaning I could go down to 3 days a week, or be much more picky in the type of work that I do.
Perhaps this is where chunking meets mental time travel. The more obtainable the chunks, the move vividly I can mentally time travel there.
Bringing this back to you and your partner, when you talk about FIRE with them, do you focus on the forest, or the trees? And if you do talk about the trees, are they your trees, or their trees?
Maybe they're not interested in a pizza on their birthday. Maybe they want a beach holiday every year.
You have to talk to them about their dreams, their goals, and propose a plan that makes those trees seem fell-able. Forget about the forest for a while, and allow yourselves to get lost in the trees.
Bonus chunking tip:
Robert Cialdini is a psychologist well known for his work on influence and persuasion. One of his six principles might apply here. It's actually a bit of a joint principle: commitment and consistency.
Commitment describes how if people commit to a small action first, they are much more likely to follow through with a bigger action later. For example, asking your partner a few days in advance to have a conversation about your budget might make them more open to not just having that conversation, but openly considering ways to spend less.
Part of why people are more likely to follow-through if they commit to something in advance is the other component of this principle - consistency.
People generally feel compelled to act with a sense of internal consistency. If they clearly commit to something, they are more likely to do it.
This is not a prefect rule. There are no guarantees, and it's not illegal for people to change their minds, but it does improve the odds if they commit in advance.
I think consistency deserves to be its own principle, because I don't think it necessarily needs explicit commitment to be effective.
For example, if your partner is broadly supportive of you investing money, but doesn't feel like they understand investing enough themselves and aren't interested in learning, then next time you have the opportunity to purchase an investment at a good price, put in some extra money for them.
If you then tell them that you've bought them some XYZ because it was a good deal, they might be more interested in the performance of XYZ. When XYZ pays some income, you can tell them that they made some money from XYZ.
Now that I think about it, consistency is really about people being already invested in a particular outcome. And we know once people invest a small amount into something, be it with their time or their money, then they will be inclined to invest even more later.
Out of a sense of internal consistency, you may find they will be more open to investing and growing passive income. Particularly if they can start to see capital growth or dividend cheques rolling in from XYZ.
SOCIAL PROOF
One of the biggest reasons people don't follow through with what they in-principle agree they should do is ambiguity about success.
Think about mental time travel; knowing you're going to get older is not enough. Even being able to see yourself getting older isn't enough. You need to have enough confidence that making small sacrifices today will lead to disproportionately larger benefits in the future. People in the study who were shown an aged photo of themselves needed to understand that saving now, meant their future selves would be better off.
But finance is inherently tricky to get your head around. Exponents are hard to fathom. Compound growth when you crunch the numbers seems unreal. Sometimes I doubt it, but I've seen enough other people succeed with investing that I'm convinced.
Also, for what feels like an eternity when you're starting out, the effects of compound interest aren't really noticeable. Unlike other goal pursuits, where progress can be felt more linearly, when it comes to long-term investing, we don't get that same sense of steady progress. The 'proof' doesn't immediately come from the doing. It takes somewhat of a leap of faith.
Here is where you can leverage proof from others (i.e., 'social proof'). Social proof works best when the success story, or role model you're looking to, closely matches you and your circumstances. Or in the case of talking to your partner about FIRE, closely matches them. Let's say you're a junior software engineer, living in Colorado, and are familiar with the mathematics behind exponential functions. Reading MMM will probably be quite inspiring, as he was a software engineer and lives is Colorado.
But if your partner is a school teacher in a city with a high cost of living, maybe with family close by and no wish to move to a low cost of living area, then the 'social proof' from MMM will be less convincing. Just because MMM scrimped, saved, and sacrificed for 10 years to retire at age 30, doesn't mean they can do the same. But if Sam, the 35 year old teacher from Melbourne is three years off retirement, then maybe it's not impossible after all.
It's not to say that MMM won't be convincing, it's just that he will be less convincing than someone your partner can better identify with.
So, keep an eye out for FIRE success stories from people in your partner's profession, or in your local area, or with their same passion for decoupage which they've now turned into an Etsy business. Whatever it is that your partner might be more inclined to identify with will likely be more convincing 'social proof'.
Bonus social proof tip:
This isn't so much of a bonus tip, but a reframing of the same point.
I remember when I was young a few footballers were getting into the news for the wrong reasons. The media angle was that these people are role models, and they need to role model responsible behaviour. I remember empathising with the footballers, thinking they didn't choose to be role models, they just want to play footy. They're not asking anyone to copy them.
But that's not what a role model is. You don't choose to be a role model.
Everyone is a role model to someone. More so than you might think.
People will naturally look to you for social proof based on your actions. When you're in the public eye, there are just more people that can see your actions.
One of the challenges you might need to work against, is that it is extremely easy to see a lot of social proof with friends and family, or more public influencers, who have the dream holidays, dream cars, and dream houses.
Without thinking about it, these people role model what we feel we should also be able to have in our lives.
Do you feel a particular pang of jealousy when you hear about someone you went to school with who has bought a luxury car, or is skiing in Aspen? If you do, it's likely because you can more easily identify with them than you can with Dan Bilzerian.
But we rarely know the whole story. Because people tend to only share their life high-lights, we don't see the sacrifices they make, or the debt they're in.
If your partner is influenced by social proof to spend, go deep with them and pick apart what it took that person to get what they have, and what it would take for you to have the same thing. If the person skiing in Aspen is a teacher in a high cost of living city, then imagining the sacrifices they must have made might just help you to identify the first fist-full of leaves your partner will be willing to grab.
Header image courtesy of absurd.design
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