In her recent Marketwatch article, Why We Ditched the FIRE Movement And Couldn't Be Happier, Lisa (AKA the "Mad Money Monster") describes her and her husband's brief, disconsolate foray into the world of the financial independence/ retire early craze. Her idea was to save very aggressively so that she and her husband could rapidly build a retirement-ready net worth, but the couple soon hit a major snag. As she puts it "Our extremely frugal lifestyle took shape by cutting out almost everything we ever enjoyed. We cut our cable, slashed our mobile data plan,