StockMarket-FIRE.com is about achieving and maintaining my own version of Financial Independence, what I call “Stock Market FIRE,” or just “Market FIRE.” It involves foregoing day-to-day conventional full-time employment and enjoying life, while actively managing my own stock market investments and using conservative options trading strategies to generate income, even when the stock market is in decline. This site is designed to educate and inform others about my own Market FIRE journey. It does not provide individualized investment advice, for which you should seek the services of registered financial advisors, accountants, and/or attorneys.

I spent 20 years studying in school and over ten years as a practicing attorney in the public and private sectors. After living frugally and putting in a lot of hard work, I had every prospect for a financially comfortable life. Except I also almost worked myself into an early death and needed emergency surgery. Though I recovered physically, I had a new perspective on life. Rather than continue on with an unfulfilling life of toil, at only 39 years old, I quit my mundane, soul-starving law firm job in order to embrace my own form of early retirement, allowing me to focus on what I really wanted to spend time on in life.

Before turning 40 years old, I had by default joined the FIRE Movement – something I had only first read about two years beforehand. FIRE is an acronym that stands for “Financial Independence – Retire Early.” FIRE is a growing movement of younger and middle-age people who aggressively save and invest early on to be financially independent, allowing them to quit working full time for other employers and leaving open the option of working for themselves or retiring completely. However, according to most financial models, pure “early retirement” would require savings of over one million dollars in order to live comfortably. The most common formula for when early retirement is mathematically feasible is that a person must have saved 25 times their typical annual expenses. Other forms of FIRE have developed (i.e., “Coast FIRE,” “Barrista FIRE,” or “Lean FIRE,” for instance) that recognize people who, by choice or necessity, continue to do some types of work, whether semi-optional full-time work, part-time work, side hustles, or other income-generating activity while still leading either partial retirement or having the option of full retirement, only drawing as needed from savings and investments. After all, most people who achieve financial independence and “retire” early don’t actually retire in the conventional sense, meaning that they want to remain active and continue some type of work, as long as it’s on their own terms.

In my case, when I fired my former law firm, I was not a millionaire and would not yet have been a “qualified” candidate for conventional FIRE. But I also already enjoyed actively investing in the stock market with my after-tax non-retirement brokerage account. I also had a separate government pension from my prior ten-plus year legal career before I went into the private sector. After not finding any full-time legal positions that I wanted to apply for, I developed my own version of FIRE based on active management of stock market investments, what I now call “Market FIRE.” I would take a sabatical from full-time legal work, of uncertain duration, and manage my own stock market investments to generate the money I used for regular living expenses.

Even with the volatile and unsettling bear market of 2021 and 2022 (which did cause a hard-to-bear decline in my net portfolio value), I was able to generate more than enough income with my stocks to meet my living expenses without having to sell my longer-term stock holdings. This methodology allowed me to hold onto my stocks so that I could have the benefit of the eventual recovery in their value. With Stock Market FIRE, I would only do legal work (both pro bono and paid) for causes and clients that I wanted to work for, on an as-wanted basis and not an as-needed basis. Even without millions of dollars or 25 times living expenses in the bank, I was able to maintain financial independence without depleting my savings.

By temperament and training, I had always been a “buy and “hold” style of investor. One of the perverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was that I, like many stock investors in 2020 and early 2021, was able to enjoy a parabolic rise in the growth tech stocks that predominated in my portfolio. Psychologically, these COVID-era gains made it possible for me to envision a feasible path to FIRE based on stock market capital gains. However, at the time I quit my law firm job as luck would have it, the stock market started to enter a vicious rotating bear market in growth stocks and soon thereafter entered the post-pandemic full-fledged bear market. Fortunately, with my greater amounts of free time, I taught myself conservative options trading strategies to hedge my stock positions and generate substantial income with covered calls and cash-secured puts.

Stock Market FIRE, as I developed it, thus consists of two equally important and complementary investing concepts: (1) buy, hold, and periodically adjust holdings in quality stocks, in order to generate long-term capital gains, and (2) leverage these long-term stock positions by selling covered call options against them, in order to generate consistent shorter-term income in the form of options premium. This site will discuss these concepts, illustrating them with current and recent stock market and options developments. This site will also specifically discuss the application of Stock Market FIRE concepts in my own situation. Although not the focus of this site, we will also discuss other foundational aspects of FIRE, including personal finance and career development concepts that allow people to accumulate the capital needed to thrive with Stock Market FIRE principles.