Who is Max Prosper? (part one)
The Man, The Myth, The Legend
Hi. I’m Max.
You’ve probably read a few of these newsletters and wondered just who I am. Why did I start writing financial advice? Why in July 2025?
I’ll explain the history over time, starting with today’s “early life” section that illustrates my personal journey. I doubt this part will help you with FIRE, but perhaps it will help you understand how I stumbled upon the path.
The Background
My paternal grandfather was a World War 2 veteran and a child of the Great Depression. The man wasn’t just thrifty. He was cheap. He earned a solid pension with retiree healthcare from a long career with a major blue chip employer. Instead of spending it on vacations in retirement, he would take me to a wholesale discount surplus store to buy packaged foods that had been damaged in-transit. We ate mystery cereal in unlabeled plastic bags. One time we used a 50-cent coupon at Jack In the Box to buy two 25-cent tacos. He argued with the cashier about having to pay the 3 cents of sales tax before begrudgingly handing over the pennies.
But you know what? The man was financially independent. He owned his house of fifty years outright. He owned his car outright. He had savings in the bank and added to it every year from his pension. Living through the Great Depression had taught him the importance of saving.
My father was raised by his father and a good bit rubbed off, although as a member of the Baby Boomer generation, the hard times of the Depression were a story, not an experience. My father didn’t earn a college degree, but he rode the wave of digitization in business starting in the 1970s and stayed gainfully employed at a number of Fortune 500 companies as a front-line systems engineer.
I was born in the 1980s in the southern United States. (Sorry, it’s 2025 and sharing specific answers to your password reset questions isn’t advisable.) We relocated to Texas in the late 1980s during the oil bust, and I grew up just fine there. My father never earned six figures, but we didn’t worry about having a roof over our heads. Our childhood was modest, but not spartan. My mom stayed at home with me and my siblings. Public schools were good quality and it was a happy life!
Upbringing
For context, here are some notes about my childhood:
We never flew on a plane (all trips were in the car)
We never took a cruise or went to Disney
No passport
We wore handed down clothes from cousins
We shopped at Walmart and Kohls
We did all our own chores (cleaning, landscaping, painting, simple repairs, oil changes)
We played youth sports, participated in Boy Scouts, and attended religious services every week
We went camping constantly (it’s a frugal getaway)
I’m listing these items to provide some context on where I came from. Hopefully it’s clear that while we didn’t live in poverty, we were never exposed to luxury. Some people had it way better than me. Others had it much worse.
Disaster
My father didn’t save much. Apparently children are expensive and he had more of them than most. He often told me his plan was to work until he died. It’s not what he wanted, but he made it to his 40s without any retirement savings and it’s really hard to catch up. (You should know this since we talked about compound interest!)
Well, he was right about his plan, though not how he expected. He died in his early 50s. One month he was at his desk. The next month, he was gone.
He often told me all the things he wanted to do if he could retire. It was mostly travel to national parks and hiking well-known mountains. But there were a lot of them! Unfortunately, he never got the chance.
Lessons
The lesson here is pretty obvious. Do you want to die in your office? It turns out exactly zero people think that sounds good. Many financial independence stories were launched with a death in the family. There is no way to guarantee good health in your 60s and 70s. One option is to move your FIRE date up so you can achieve some of your bucket list items in your 30s and 40s!
As I mentioned previously, I didn’t become serious about FIRE until 2014. I’ll share a clearer timeline about my career and path in later posts.
Hopefully you enjoyed learning a bit more about me,
Max