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The story
A Yahoo News article about a 42-year-old man who FIRE’d (Financial Independence, Retire Early) with ¥120 million in assets and declared himself a full-time stay-at-home dad — only for his lifestyle to fall apart and his wife and daughter to leave him eight months later — became a hot topic on 5ch.
The thread mixed pointed math arguing that “full FIRE just isn’t realistic with a wife and kid to support” with plenty of voices suspecting the article itself was nothing but a made-up story.
Things went fine for a while after I quit my job. But once I no longer had a reason I absolutely had to get up in the morning, my life gradually fell apart.
I’d wake up after my wife and daughter had already left the house — often not until nearly noon. Even when I meant to cook dinner, it felt like too much trouble, so I started relying on delivery and store-bought side dishes instead. I stopped exercising, stopped seeing anyone, and only opened my laptop to check my portfolio.
I’d go whole days unshaven in loungewear, and there were even days I started drinking in the afternoon. Naturally, my wife wasn’t going to stay quiet about it.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Just let AI take the jobs already.
Stuff like this getting normalized is exactly why it's better not to marry carelessly these days. The risk is way too high.
Seems like a bunch of bored people with nothing to do even after FIREing are crawling out of the woodwork now.
Stock prices climb with inflation too, though.
Nah, this is just a pressure valve for people too broke to FIRE themselves.
Yahoo News checks their click numbers really closely when picking articles. It just means a lot of people read stuff like this.
He's still got it invested, so it should be plenty.
If you follow the 4% rule for withdrawals, that's under ¥5 million a year. That might work living alone, but isn't it pretty thin for supporting a family? And with the risk of a crash on top of that, full FIRE seems rough. He should've gone at least Side FIRE or Barista FIRE instead.
Where exactly do the investment returns disappear to?
The 4% rule is the line where withdrawing 4% is supposed to keep your principal from shrinking (i.e., maintain it). If you're not worried about leaving an inheritance for the kid and you go "Die With Zero," you can spend a lot more every year.
That's the one I was thinking of.
Trrrump! 🇺🇸 (riffing on Trump's exaggerated pronunciation of "fired")
Well yeah, that's because we're in a bubble right now. There's no point judging a long-term investment by a short-term number. Forget that figure — going by the long-term average return of something like the S&P 500 index, you should be planning around 4-5%.
What do you actually do with your time now that you're FIRE'd?
My kid's 9 months old, so right now it's mostly childcare, shopping, and gaming. Before the baby was born, my wife and I used to travel and go fishing too.
Doesn't having an unemployed parent mess a kid up?
You can still work if you want. It's just that once making money stops being your life's purpose, you get bored of it. That's why guys like Kiriya-san (a famous Japanese investor known for living almost entirely off shareholder perks) go off and do goofy stuff like that.
Maybe he leveraged up and took on risk during the COVID bubble, or picked the right generative-AI stocks at the right time.
Even on a ¥5 million salary, that's ¥100 million over 20 years — totally doable.
Saving that much would be insanely hard, but if he was investing it, the market's grown like crazy in recent years, so it's doable.
Background and Key Points
FIRE — Financial Independence, Retire Early — became a genuine mass movement among Japanese salarymen in the 2020s, popularized by figures like the poster child “Kiriya-san,” an investor famous for living off shareholder perks (kabunushi yūtai) rather than a salary. The math posters cite, the 4% withdrawal rule, comes from the Trinity Study: withdraw 4% of your portfolio annually and, historically, it holds up over a 30-year retirement without depleting principal. On ¥120 million that’s about ¥4.8 million a year before tax, which is a modest but livable single income in Japan — thin, though, once you’re supporting a spouse and child rather than just yourself, hence the pile-on math in the thread.
Where the thread actually splits is not whether ¥120 million is “enough” in a spreadsheet sense, but whether the man’s collapse was a money problem or an identity problem. One camp does the arithmetic and concludes full FIRE with dependents was doomed from the start, pushing him toward hybrid models like Side FIRE or Barista FIRE (retiring but keeping light part-time income). The other camp, including a self-described already-FIRE’d married poster, argues the numbers were fine and the real failure was losing structure and purpose once “earning money” stopped being the point of his day — a psychological failure, not a financial one.
What outside readers will likely miss is the marital-property angle raised in the thread (#10): under Japanese civil law, assets built during a marriage are treated as shared marital property (kyōyū zaisan) regardless of whose name is on the account, so unilaterally FIREing on a jointly-built fortune reads to many commenters as a unilateral decision imposed on a spouse who never agreed to it — separate from whether the money itself was sufficient.
*This article was compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyō G board) thread “A 42-Year-Old Man FIRE’d with ¥120 Million and Declared Himself a “Stay-at-Home Dad” — Eight Months Later, His Wife and Daughter Were Both Gone.”
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