How to Survive the Boring Middle Phase of FIRE

Baptiste Wicht | Updated: 25 July 2026 |

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links)

I have been on the road to financial independence for almost ten years now. We have recently crossed the 60% mark on our journey. Many people ask me what I have been changing recently. The truth is, things do not change. I am in the so-called boring middle.

But what is the boring middle, and what should people in this phase be careful about? In this article, we discuss this important phase of any FIRE journey and how to survive it. We also discuss our experience with each of the potential issues that can happen.

Phases of financial independence

In a financial independence journey, there are two main phases:

The accumulation phase, where you get enough money to retire early.
The withdrawal phase, where you use your accumulated money for your early retirement.

The accumulation phase itself can be split into three:

The launch
The boring middle
The last mile

In the launch phase, you have a lot to do. You need to calculate your FI number, optimize your expenses, track your net worth, and more. It is very exciting. But once you reach the second phase, you have mostly mastered your finances, and there are very few tricks left for optimization. You basically have to stay the course.

And again, in the last mile phase, you are very excited because you are very close to your goal, and you can do the last bits of planning and validating your plan. You will need to rerun your projections, optimize your taxes, plan your withdrawals, and prepare your future life.

Most people will go through these 3 phases if they are aiming for financial independence. But you will spend vastly different amounts of time in each. For me, the boring middle started at around 30% financial independence, and I think it will stop once I reach 90%.

Boring Middle

So, for most people, the boring middle is the phase that will last the longest of the journey. And it is also the most boring one. It does not mean life itself is boring, but from a financial independence point of view, not much will be happening.

And unfortunately, some people will fall into traps during this eventless phase. This will either delay their financial independence or make them quit.

When you try to become financially independent in Switzerland, you need to accumulate much more money than in some other countries. Indeed, your target is based on your expenses. And life is very expensive in Switzerland. Additionally, through wealth tax and dividend taxes, an increasing nest egg leads to increased taxes. As a result, the boring middle phase can last even longer than in other countries. So, it becomes critical to handle this phase well.

I have been lucky in my financial independence journey so far. I do not think I have succumbed to these traps (except for one, as we will see later). Mostly, I simply stay the course. And I keep in mind that the goal is very far and that we are going in the right direction.

While not the most exciting, the boring middle phase is essential. Without it, there would be no accumulation. So, it is important to be prepared for this phase.

How to survive the boring middle

If you want to survive the boring middle, here are a few pieces of advice that can help.

Think long-term

For most people, the boring middle phase will last at least 10 years, sometimes significantly longer. So, we need to think long-term and avoid short-term actions.

The problem is that most people have a hard time keeping a long-term view. People prefer chasing short-term wins. You get much more dopamine from optimizing an expense than from waiting 10 years in a routine while watching your nest egg grow.

Indeed, once your strategy is well thought out, there is almost nothing left to do. You can keep track of it a few times a year, rebalance it if you need to, and continue investing on a monthly basis.

But most people will try to accelerate it by chasing short-term returns. For instance, some people will switch from passive investing to active investing to try to chase higher returns. And in most cases, they will end up with less money than if they had stuck to the plan. At some point, we need to accept average long-term returns. Passive investing is a great way to capture average returns with low fees.

During the early launch phase, you will likely check your portfolio almost every day. But doing that over the long term takes a psychological toll. Ideally, you should attempt to forget about your portfolio during the boring middle phase. If you can, check it once a month at most, and the rest of the time, just live your life as if you were not in the boring middle phase. But this does not work for everybody.

Another strategy is to give yourself smaller milestones. For instance, you could celebrate every time you increase your FI ratio by 5%. So, instead of waiting 10 years, you have a small goal every year or so.

And finally, if you really want to optimize something short- to medium-term, you can try to optimize your income. You could learn new things and try to take on new responsibilities. It is obviously not trivial to do so, but it is less risky than chasing dopamine on the stock market.

For most people, long-term thinking is a big issue. It is difficult to shift from short-term to long-term. But when you do so, you will be able to enjoy a much better journey, and you will get out of your own way.

My experience

Luckily, long-term thinking is easy for me. I am a very driven person (too much sometimes), and I can keep disciplined over many years.

Optimize yourself

Since you cannot really optimize your finances anymore during the boring middle phase, you could try to optimize yourself. This can give you some secondary goals to pursue while waiting for your nest egg to grow according to your plan.

One great thing to try is to improve your health. If you are planning to retire early, you want to be in good health to enjoy your retirement. I am not a health expert, but the basics are really simple:

Exercise for both strength and endurance
Eat diversified whole foods in reasonable amounts
Sleep well

The second thing you can do is train your brain. It is less obvious and much more personal. If you want to keep your brain active, you need to learn new things and do things differently. Ideally, you also want good social interactions.

You can also give yourself a goal of learning a totally new thing (a new language, a new instrument, a new skill, …). This will keep you occupied and help you take your mind off over-optimizing your finances.

My experience

As a software engineer and a sedentary person, I need to focus on my health to be sure I reach financial independence in good health.

Do not delay your life

One essential thing is not to stop living. Some people entirely delay all fun and expenses until their early retirement. There are two issues with that.

First, if you only live for your goal, you are unlikely to be happy. The boring middle is a long phase, and you need to keep enjoying your life. For this, it is important to keep living and remember that early retirement will not change everything.

And the second thing is that delaying these costs means you are skewing the true picture of your expenses. You may be fooling yourself into thinking that you do not need much money to live. And when you start living (in early retirement), you will have to spend a significant amount of money to do all you delayed. As a result, you may well spend too much money in the early years, where it is riskiest (thanks to sequences of returns risk).

I think we should live the same life in the accumulation phase that we do in the withdrawal phase. Of course, there will be some differences because some people will want to do more things (because they have more time) or travel more. But these must be considered in the financial independence computations. And if you plan to travel a lot after retirement, you might as well start traveling a little during the boring middle phase.

Our experience

We bought a house and a new car during the boring middle phase. We are not delaying our life.

Avoid lifestyle creep (or plan for it)

When you are in the boring middle phase, you are accumulating money. Ideally, you are also increasing your income. It means that during this period, you will have the highest amount of disposable money you have ever had.

In the previous section, we just said we should spend a little and enjoy life. But we should still be careful about lifestyle creep (lifestyle inflation).

First, the most obvious catch is that the more you spend, the longer it will take you to reach financial independence. But that is a small factor, because it is up to you to find the balance between saving and spending.

The second issue is that some of the expenses from the boring middle phase will stay in retirement. Many people do not realize this and forget to update their retirement plan. So, if you were planning to spend 100,000 CHF in retirement but added 10,000 CHF over time, you need to update your plan; otherwise, you may run out of money.

For instance, if you move during the boring middle to a larger house, you will likely have more maintenance to do. Or, if you buy a larger car, you will pay more in gas and insurance. If you start new hobbies and clubs, you will also likely keep them up in retirement.

Generally, it is better to avoid lifestyle creep for financial independence. But if you are choosing and accepting to inflate your lifestyle, you should plan for it in your financial independence plan.

Our experience

With the new house, we are experiencing lifestyle creep in the boring middle phase. We are trying to limit its impact but will raise our retirement spending if we need to.

Conclusion

Overall, the boring middle is the least exciting phase of financial independence. It lasts a long time, and not much is happening. For many people, this lack of events results in either giving up or making some errors. By trying to over-optimize, we can often do things that seem helpful but actually hurt our long-term results.

It is important to think long-term during the boring middle phase and not attempt to chase some short-term wins. Once we realize we are in this phase for many long years, we should keep enjoying the journey and simply be happy to progress towards our goal.

Personally, we are somewhere in the middle of the boring middle phase. We can keep a long-term view of our goal and avoid chasing short-term wins. Instead of focusing too much on our finances, we are focusing on optimizing other areas like health and knowledge. Our only issue is that we need to be careful about keeping lifestyle inflation under control.

What about you? What do you think about this phase?