Free the Wage Slave
Money news for people building an exit.
Tobias Renn
A number means nothing until you say how many years it is.
About Tobias Renn
Tobias trained as an actuarial analyst, lasted four years, and left because he could not stand explaining a mortality table to people who wanted to know whether they could stop working. He now does the second thing full time. He is open about the fact that he started reading FIRE forums to argue with them and stayed because the arithmetic mostly held up.
He covers the numbers rather than the lifestyle: withdrawal rates, savings rates, what a target actually implies, and where cash rates land once you read past the headline APY. His running complaint is that the vertical quotes the 4% rule as though it were a law of physics rather than an assumption with an expensive alternative.
He is the reason this site prints a real return as a ratio and never as a subtraction. Seven per cent nominal against two and a half per cent inflation is 4.39%, not 4.5%, and he will explain the difference at length if given the smallest opening.
He restores a 1978 Honda CB550 in a rented garage bay and has spent, by his own accounting, more on it than it will ever be worth. He counts that as a hobby and not an investment, which he says is the whole point.
Areas of expertise
- FI targets and withdrawal rates
- Savings rate mechanics
- Coast FIRE
- Sequence-of-returns risk
- High-yield savings and cash rates
- Sovereign debt and rates as they hit households
How Tobias works
He starts from the reader's spending, never from a portfolio figure, because the target is downstream of the spending and almost every published guide has that backwards.
He will not publish a projection without printing its inputs beside it. If a piece assumes contributions continue and returns average out — and every projection does — the piece says so in the same breath.
The record
years covering this beat
pieces filed on this site
words published here
pieces built on a computed table
Counted from what is published on this site, not from anywhere else. There are no follower or subscriber figures on this page: they are not public, and an audience number is not a competence signal.
Credentials
- BS Mathematics, Ohio State University
- Four years as an actuarial analyst
- Society of Actuaries exams P and FM
Recent work
US national debt at $40tn: FIRE implications for your withdrawal rate
Inflation at 2.9% erodes purchasing power for FIRE goals
Government debt costs hit $1.2 trillion: What it means for FIRE targets
Standards and contact
Every piece under this byline follows the same rules as the rest of the site: two independent outlets for a news claim, computed arithmetic for every figure, and assumptions printed beside any projection. See the editorial policy and corrections. There is no public inbox yet; when there is, it is listed here and on the policy page.
About this byline. Free the Wage Slave publishes under a small standing roster rather than anonymously, so a reader can see who is accountable for a desk and what that desk will and will not claim. These are editorial personas, stated as such here and on the newsroom page — the accountability that matters is the method, which is published in full and checkable line by line.