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We are checking back in with our Households of FI family, Martin and Ayesha, who have been paired with mentors, Julien and Kiersten of Rich and Regular. Kiersten and Julien live in Atlanta and started working toward FIRE before they married five to six years ago and have paid off $200,o00 in debt, including their mortgage. They now share their journey on their blog rich & REGULAR. Ayesha and Martin live in Chicago and found ChooseFI in January 2020 and jumped in with both feet. Martin is a natural saver and had been a positive financial influence on Ayesha before finding FI so they had done a decent job managing their money. Martin was researching dividend investing after it was recommended by Ayesha's uncle who retired at 55. Ayesha felt like her aunt and uncle had the most fabulous retirement life she'd ever seen. Thanks to his example over the last 25 years, their goal is to get to where he is. Julien had a similar retirement role model in his life. A close family friend was a Registered Nurse who retried early and showed him that there is a lot of life left after 40. Since finding FI, and partly thanks to Covid, Martin and Ayesha's savings rate has increased. It has made them aware of all the frivolous, non-essential ways they spent money before. Ayesha hates budgets and doesn't want to track every penny of her spending. She was out of work for four months during Covid and they found that they didn't miss her income and it showed them that they could save a good amount of money without feeling constrained or deprived. Having a quantifiable goal and a clear target has helped provide clarity in what they are trying to accomplish. Martin enjoys trying to optimize their spending and counting the dollars they save. When they decided to get a new television, he used Offer Up to do his research and purchased a flat-screen plasma HDTV for $40. Julien used to track every single expense and look for new savings opportunities each quarter. But now, optimizing their spending has become such a deeply ingrained habit that he no longer feels the need to look at their budget. He says it becomes like muscle memory once you sort out your own system. Ayesha feels like when you can simplify your life and have good habits, your life can smoothly and asked what Julien and Kiersten's top habits are. Kiersten says doing laundry regularly keeps them from having a ton of extra clothes. She and their son have a capsule wardrobe with 20-30 pieces of matching items. She also keeps the kitchen sink clear of dishes to cut down on kitchen accessories. Julien says they have just the right amount of things they need and notes that there is stress associated with the quantity and clutter in our lives. Having too many things adds to decision anxiety and analysis paralysis. Instead, whether it is life or a financial strategy, find a handful of things you can nail every single time and ignore everything else. Julien also says that he has never made an investment in himself that hasn't paid off handsomely, no matter if it is exercise equipment, a book, or a course. Don't allow frugality to prevent you from paying to learn new learning opportunities. New skills can improve your ability to earn more income or make you more marketable. Kiersten likes to save receipts. if the item she purchased sits for several days, she didn't need it and will return it. She also purges the house of items regularly. As far as community goes, Ayesha and Martin are doing okay. In addition to family, they have a group of friends who meet to share ideas on investing and becoming financially free. However, they aren't as familiar with the concept of FI so Ayesha feels like they don't have a like-minded community Julien notes that, especially for black people, the pursuit of financial independence can be a very lonely experience. Telling people about FI doesn't work. You have to show them, like when you get to the point where you can take a two-week vacation or a month off from work. Kiersten and Julien suggest focusing on influencing the next generation. They use their freedom to step up and help out and pick up the slack with their friends' children. When it comes to building community, stay open-minded. It takes time to find your best friends and others whose values closely align with yours, but you don't need to divorce yourself from your social circle. Like their budget, Julien doesn't check his investment portfolio very often because they won't be touching that money for 10-20 years. His attention is better spent on building the business and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. They make decisions on where to invest income every quarter. You can see the crash coming on other people's lives despite the advice you may have given. Still, Julien says to leave the gate open and don't be judgemental. You may not have been the right messenger for that message. Before starting rich and REGULAR, Julien was working for a company he loved but was underpaid. When his company p

What You'll Get Out Of Today's Show If you are willing to look outside your comfort zone, grab good information, and take action on it, you can change your life in a matter of weeks or months. One of the hardest-hit industries during the pandemic has been hospitality. Working in that industry, Anita was looking down a long dark tunnel before stumbling upon the FI community. When Anita found ChooseFI in August, she jumped right in, taking action and interacting with Brad through the FI Weekly and submitting her frugal wins of the week. By listening to the podcast, Anita heard about Jonathan starting up the Talent Stacker podcast and the program he put together with Bradley Rice on Salesforce career development. Anita gave it a shot and her results blew Jonathan and Bradley's mind. The results Anita has had are not an outlier. It's what others are also seeing every single week. Back in the spring of 2019, Bradley was on the show to talk about Salesforce and living a life by design. After Bradley discussed earning $200K a year working 15-20 hours a week, the listening audience really responded. Based on that interest, a Salesforce group was started for the community and people began landing Salesforce jobs. In just two years, the group grew to 5,000 members learning from each other. A year ago, Anita was working as a revenue manager for a hotel connected to a convention center. At that time, the pandemic was accelerating and group after group began canceling their events. As a result, she was furloughed in March. Understanding that hospitality wasn't going to recover anytime soon, Anita decided to be proactive, began learning, and figuring out what her next move would be. In addition to taking classes online, Anita researched Fortune's top places to work. The first time she heard of Salesforce was from that list but was turned off at the thought of sales. After a little research, she discovered sales isn't what they do. She signed up for Trailhead, Salesforces's online learning account, and did it for one day before concluding it was awesome. But she wondered it was real and if was as easy as it seemed. After receiving more bad news from her employer, Anita was motivated to learn more. She found ChooseFI and binge listened to over a hundred episodes when she heard about Talent Stacker, Salesforce (again), and the free 5-Day Challenge. She ended up in the paid program and because she had been laid off, she used her time to learn everything she could like it was her full-time job. One month after starting the program, she took the first admin certification program and passed. After that, she used all of the tips from the program and landed a good-paying job in January. Prior to the pandemic, Anita was in a financially stable place. She had no debt other than a car payment, although after being laid off she was forced to move in with her boyfriend. She says in her previous hospitality job, she was on a path to get o the kind of pay she is earning now, it just would have taken a lot longer. Bradley says what Anita has done is possible because cloud-based technology is less-impacted by things like the pandemic because they are skilled positions, are able to be done remotely, and without a lot of change management. There aren't enough skilled Salesforce professionals to fill all the available positions. To help fill the gaps, Salesforce developed Trailhead, a free online training app, which removed some of the barriers to entry. Being able to study inline for a few months and then land a $60-80K per year job sounded too good to be true. This is one of those occasions when something that sounds too good to be true really is true. If you don't have basic computer skills, a Salesforce career may not be for you. However, if you like the thought of helping companies generate new leads and support new customers, it might be a good fit. There's so much information on Salesforce that it can seem overwhelming. Anita explains that she is reorganizing the business to help companies become more efficient. A Salesforce professional helps a company use the software to find more customers, sell to those customers, retain the customers, and secure the customer's data. The majority of individuals can come away from training earning $60-80K a year. Anita surpassed that when her first offer was six figures and she doubled her previous salary. Bradley says the career trajectory quickly increases from there. Even someone who isn't leaning in will likely reach six figures after three years and top out around $130K with $20-30K bonuses. The more entrepreneurial-minded can strike out and become independent consultants and earn even more. Bradley makes $200K a year working just 20 hours a week. Based on his return on investment, Jonathan wouldn't go to college if this program was available to him. He spent eight years in school and came away with $168K in debt, rather than six months of training for a couple of thousand dollars. His net wor

We are circling back to check in with our Households of FI families. First up are Matt and Megan, our international, dual military couple. Having a military pension is like having multiple lottery tickets. You have both healthcare and an inflation-fighting pension, but how many of these lottery tickets do you need to really crush this game? Naval service is Doug Nordman's family business. In addition to his own 20 years of service in the Navy, his wife almost had 20 years of active duty service in the Navy before finishing her career in the Reserves. And then their daughter joined the Navy on an ROTC scholarship and married a Naval Officer. While dual-military couples are a small demographic that hasn't been extensively studied, Doug says even if they earn just one pension, they will likely have more money than they need for the rest of their lives just because of the pension and healthcare. Matt says the US military pension system is much more simple than for the UK's Royal Navy. He and Megan are working toward FI with their investments alone and consider the pensions to be an additional comfort. Matt has served for 11 years so far and the Royal Navy's systems provide a pension based on each year of service. Megan has been in the US Navy for 15 years after doing her first 10 years enlisted. She needs to fulfill 22 years before being eligible for retirement as a Naval Officer. Doug says when you're in the military with the opportunity to earn an active duty or Reserve pension, you have four lottery tickets and you only need to have one of them to pay off because you solve the healthcare problem and have an inflation-fighting life annuity with just one. If serving in the military is still challenging and fulfilling, stay in as long as you want, but when the fun stops, don't be afraid to leave. Don't fall for the military inferiority complex. Coming from the military you already have human capital. Employers can train you on the basic skills for a job, but they can't train a new employee on those soft skills earned in a military career. Co-locating as an international dual military couple has its challenges. Matt may soon be getting a medical discharge from the Royal Navy which will help solve that issue for him and Megan. Matt notes the US military provides spouses with opportunities for increasing human capital, like free courses or paying for college. Doug thinks obtaining certifications and licenses is going the help Matt find a job in the US more than an advanced degree because he's already proven that he can do things. Networking will be key. After having conversations with others about how he can fit in, what he can help them with, and what he knows how to do, he will make a shift to an abundance mindset. Megan notes that Doug lives in a high cost of living area. He says having a high savings rate on the path to FI, as well as frugality are what enables it. In most high cost of living cities, it's housing that is the biggest expense. After you figure that out, everything else falls into place. Doug and his wife bought crappy houses and put sweat equity into them before renting them out. They also eat local, optimize spending, and slow travel. Spending in the areas that provide the most value gives you margin. People who have been in the military have an appreciation for the line between frugality and deprivation. Frugality is optimizing your spending. The transition is scary and stressful, but statistics show that within two years of getting out and starting a civilian career, half of all veterans change jobs. It's not because they can't hack it, it's because they have figured out how to get more money, get a better job, or move to a better location. They've cracked the code in a corporate environment. Megan is torn with her TSP. She doesn't know if she should go traditional or Roth. Doug says that, anecdotally, in the military where a third of your compensation is not taxed, you are probably in the lowest tax bracket of your life so all investments now should probably be Roth TSP or Roth IRA. If doing all Roth contributions doesn't sit well with you, split the difference and do half and half. Roth's weren't available when Doug was active duty and he spent time doing Roth conversions for his and his wife's accounts. In the first full year after retirement, your income probably goes down a little bit and would be a good time to look at converting a little bit and then chipping away at each year. Doug believes the job offers will come following military retirement. He had offers but for him, it was always about the drawbacks to the offer than the good things they offered. If he were looking today, he would look for remote work where he could dictate his schedule to remove all the drawbacks. He advises Matt and Megan to go build their own career, to their own quality of life, and not to feel constrained to themselves into anyone else's idea of how their working years should be. While Doug gutted out his 2

This Friday's episode continues with the theme of looking back at how our perspective has changed since the show began. What has changed, have we pivoted, and what do we feel more confident about now than we did then? Last Friday Brad shared the saga of trying to find out how much a CT scan was going to cost him. In response to the story, members of the community reached out with their ideas for saving on the cost. One listener shared a link for MDsave.com, a company that contracts with different healthcare providers to provide very specific pricing for a number of healthcare-related services and procedures that you pay in advance for. Using the CPT code for his procedure, Brad discovered there were no providers in his area, but there was a good number in Charlottesville about an hour away. Had he used this website, he could have paid under $300 for his CT scan. Without using it, his insurance company was billed $2,083. For prescription drug needs, there is a similar website called GoodRX.com The healthcare system is broken. Price transparency in healthcare, like both of these websites offer, cuts the middleman out and lowers costs. Jonathan suspects that anytime you are using these apps you are sacrificing some privacy. If you have a high-deductible plan and rarely if ever reach it, you may be better with the discount as you cannot double-dip and need to choose whether you go through the app/discount card or your insurance company. However, prescriptions do qualify as HSA reimbursable expenses. Emergency funds are a part of every financial plan, with most stating a fully funded fund contains three to six months' worth of expenses. ChooseFI has pushed back a little on the standard emergency fund concept, asking if you really need one, what does it need to look like, and what are we protecting ourselves from? Both Brad and Jonathan's perspective on the emergency fund has changed over the years. Most personal finance experts conceptualize it as money sitting around doing nothing waiting for an emergency to occur. The further down the path to FI you travel, the role of the emergency fund begins to change. At what point should you stop allowing your emergency fund to lose value from inflation and invest it instead? When first starting out, a fully-funded emergency benefit provides psychological benefits. But 1o-15 years down the path to FI, there are very few true emergencies. There is an opportunity cost to your money sitting on the sidelines. Could you have that money invested, earning and growing for you? Brad can't think of a scenario where he would need thousands of dollars in cash in a hurry. Even if the unthinkable were to happen, he could pay with a credit card or a check. Worst case scenario is that he would need to access money by selling funds in an investment account and he would have it two to three days later. For individuals just starting out and moving away from living paycheck to paycheck, having $1,000 available in cash as a crisis fund makes a lot of sense. Brad keeps a couple thousand dollars extra in his checking account just so that he never needs to worry. There is an opportunity cost, but he finds it worth the peace of mind. Jonathan tries to keep as little in cash around as possible. He has one or two months' worth of expenses in cash. Because he knows his monthly expenses, when he gets paid, he's able to save first, get it invested, and live off the remainder. Interest rates on bank accounts are so low that there's no incentive to keep it there. Inflation alone erodes the value of money by an average of 3% per year. Is there a way to hedge against inflation while still meeting a need for liquidity? Beginners may need to keep their money sitting in a savings account to feel comfortable. Once you get to the point where you can put money away and realize you aren't going to touch it for 30-50 years no matter how the market fluctuates, start investing. March 2020 was without a doubt, a black swan event. Was an emergency fund a factor for you? Did you think about its value more at that time than previously? Brad certainly felt better knowing he could rely on the cash from his net worth if it was needed. Events of the last year had Jonathan thinking more about his net worth acting as a store of value. In a changing landscape, he wants to use the assets at his disposal to make sure he is more valuable. He doesn't see cash as a great store of value. Due to inflation, cash is depreciating. When it is invested in the market, it produces value and increases with inflation. As a store of value, bonds can provide stability, a regular income, and a negative correlation. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are another store of value, although due to its volatility, it feels very speculative. Precious metals, like gold and silver, are yet another store of value that can be owned physically or as paper assets through ETFs. However, with precious metal ETFs, not all are structured where every share is ba

Amanda Holden's approach to educating others includes laughter and shenanigans to democratize information and get it to stick. Amanda worked in corporate America at an investment management firm, but helping rich men get richer wasn't her calling. She hated the job and decided to establish a set of rules that we allow her to quit in six months and go travel. She chose to supplement her bare-bones spending by living off the excess of others. That including asking for leftover uneaten lunches which earned her the nickname, Dumpster Dog. Pulling burritos out of the trash and drastically cutting her spending worked. Amanda's savings enabled her to leave the job she hated and travel for a year. Dumpster Doggy has now become her identity, showing others how they can make it work even if they don't have a lot. Being privileged enough to live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world also means that we take it for granted and are surrounded by vast amounts of waste. Are we throwing so much away that we are sabotaging our chance to get what we really want? While each day she felt like she was trying just keep putting one foot in front of the other, at the time, she didn't think of it the changes she was making to leave a toxic work environment as a metamorphosis. She hated the job so much that she felt like the only option was to quit and start over from zero. Hating it that much allowed her to take a risk on doing something that aligned better with who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do. Her advice to anyone who doesn't dislike what they are doing quite as much as she did is to start saving and doing what they want to do on the side. Then assess once there is momentum to decide if you want to take it further. Amanda acknowledges that she was privileged with a level of comfort and security when taking her leap as she had a family to fall back on for help if needed. She isn't trying to sell entrepreneurship to everyone. It makes sense for some people but there are aspects of it that she doesn't love. It won't be the right fit for everybody. What worked for Amanda was starting by giving her service away for free and collecting as much feedback as she could. While she has the blog, For her business, she started out cold calling on sororities. She asked to come in to teach them about investing and then collecting their feedback. After building this foundation, she began to explore what the sticking points were for people and how she could begin to charge for her services. Amanda says it's all about connections, so utilize your network to get your information into the hands of whoever can help get you in the door. Amanda wants women to be in the conversation because when they have a seat at the table, they have wealth and the world is a better place. To reach women and make the material accessible, Amanda avoids jargon and uses comedy as an educational tool. For instance, she leads with equating a 401K or a Roth IRA with a Caboodle, which is just a fancy place for you to store your treasures. Amanda also uses a shame-free approach to money. Women are constantly feeling shamed about money, whether it's for making too much or too little, or for how they choose to spend it. She trusts you to be grown up enough to make spending decisions for yourself. Everyone deserves to be able to spend a little bit of money on themselves and have some fun. Living paycheck to paycheck might be a problem of spending too much or it might be not earning enough. Saving and investing can be automated if spending is the problem, while a conversation about earning might be warranted if income is the problem. In addition to removing the shame associated with money, Amanda says you don't have to be perfect. She uses her own mistake stories to help bring people in. While building her business, Amanda worked as a bartender and freelance writer. She still freelances for the regular income but she also puts on personal events that are more fun than the corporate speaking events where she feels muzzled. Amanda was teaching investing courses on Zoom well before Zoom became a thing. She's been able to scale the course by putting it on video. The first thing she tells people is that investing is absolutely in their capacity and that if you take a set it and forget it approach, you'll probably do better than the investing experts. Course information can be found on her Instagram page. If interested in contacting her for a speaking event, reach out to her on Instagram or by email. Website: Invested Development Website: The Dumpster Dog Blog Instagram: Dumpster.doggy Email: [email protected] Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Start your 60-day free trial with LinkedIn Sales Navigator today. Switch to Mint Mobile and save. Get started on your own journey to financial independence at ChooseFI.com/start. If You Want To Support ChooseFI: Earn $1,000 in cashback with ChooseFI's 3-card credit card strategy. Share FI by sending a

Wondering what happened with GameStop and confused about what a short squeeze is? The complexity of this kind of trading is far from the simple strategy of buy and hold investing. Even for those who have no plans to jump on bandwagon, it's good to understand exactly what is going on. We can learn what's happening, how it works, and move intelligently forward. In an effort to understand systems, Brad has been having a maddening healthcare experience. He needs a CT scan but hasn't been able to find out what the base cost will be. The negotiated cost won't be known until after the procedure so Brad won't know how much it will cost him until then. At a macro level, the stock market has had a fairly smooth move up and to the right for the past 10 years or so. For investors, it's been somewhat predictable, at least until this last week when GameStop stock began to skyrocket. There are aspects of the stock market the average investor doesn't see. Hedge funds are participating with huge amounts of money in layers that are essentially hidden to the masses, until it wasn't, and they got caught unaware. Brian Feroldi says the last few weeks have been some of the weirdest in the investing world that he's ever seen. The story has infiltrated mainstream culture and he's been getting questions from all over about what is going on. Even his mom sent a text asking about GameStop. First, GameStop is a physical seller of video games. As video games became popular, GameStop was a great investment, however, once people began downloading video games, its business prospects declined. As a result, GameStop stock prices have also been declining for many years and it is believed they will cease to exist as a business in a couple of years. Investors or many managers can make money when a stock declines in what's called shorting the stock. A short sale stock is the opposite of becoming a buy and hold investor in a stock. A short sale works by going to your broker predicting a stock's decline and state you want to short that stock at a particular price. The broker goes and borrows shares of the stock from another investor for the price you stated and you collect the proceeds from the sale. Your goal is to then buy those shares back at a later date for a lower price and return them to the original investor. The original owner of the stock makes money by receiving a small fee from the person borrowing their stock, almost like being charged an interest rate. The more demand there is to short a stock, the higher the fees. There is no set timeframe when shorting a stock. I can be shorted indefinitely. However, if the owner of the stock wants to sell it, the broker who borrowed the stock would have to go and find another short for you to borrow from. If they cannot find other shares to short, the transaction would need to be undone on the short side at current market rates. Most of us take long positions on stocks, believing the stock is going to increase in value. Allowing someone else to borrow your stock in a short position is another way to make money on owning it. Some brokers like Brian's are interactive and sent him an email asking if he would be interested in allowing his stock to be borrowed or shorted. since he's interested in holding the stocks for a long period of time, he said yes. Shorting a stock does put downward pressure on the share price. Individual investors don't have much influence, but a hedge fund taking a significant position to short a stock can drive prices down. The market price of a stock at any given time is simultaneously the lowest price buyers are willing to pay and the highest price sellers are willing to sell at. Shorts are happening all of the time, so how did GameStop land on the radar of the subreddit group, Wallstreetbets? In the case of GameStop, there were more shares sold short than there were publicly traded, which is something that very rarely happens. Wallstreetbets took the opposite position, stating that GameStop's fundamentals were different from companies like Blockbuster, and its stock price was actually undervalued. An article by Andrew Left from Citron Research predicting GameStop stock going down hard caught the attention of Wallstreetbets. Its members rallied together to buy GameStop stock. It was then that GameStop stock began to rise. Someone with a short position on a stock does not want to see the price rise. Rising GameStop prices kicked off what's called a short squeeze. There's no logical argument for saying that GameStop stock was worth $4 in December and $400 just three weeks later. What shifted was who was controlling the mechanics of the system. The members of Wallstreetbets understood that due to the large number of short positions on GameStop, if enough of them got together to buy it, they could force those in short positions to buy back into it. GameStop was priced for bankruptcy. While there's no limit to how high a stock can go, the lowest it can go is $0. In that case, th

M1 Finance transformed Jonathan's ideas about how simple complexity could be and has quickly become his favorite investing platform, especially for taxable accounts. Brian Barnes investing story begins at the age of 10 when his parents exposed him to trading stock in a brokerage account with Ameritrade. He was captivated by the notion of investing and the intellectual puzzle of how a company was doing. His parents laid a general foundation of financial independence and security. Once basics were covered, they placed value on putting money someplace where it could accrue value, compound, and become ownership is something valuable. Getting started at the tail end of the Dot Com bust, it was a great time to be buying when prices were low and companies were valued cheaply. Brian says there is a big difference between traders and investors. Traders speculate on price and try to make money on short-term movements. Investors buy ownership in companies, asset classes, or industries to accrue value over long periods of time. When you aren't making frequent investment decisions, it becomes more about viewing your portfolio in totality and making a decision on what to do with the extra money you have leftover from your paycheck. In the trading world, you have to go in and make the same decisions to buy the same securities over and over again, but with M1, you can make the decision once and let the software automate the process. With day trading, you can't just be right once, you need to be right over and over and over again, constantly timing the market perfectly. It's difficult to predict costs even when commissions are free and it's tax-inefficient. With an investing mindset, you want to own over long periods to accrue value and generate cash flows. At the age of 25, Brian realized investing platforms hadn't changed in 15 years. He looked at consumer applications work that sought to make things simpler, more intuitive, and automated wondering why there hadn't been progress in the financial services world. He thought it would be nice if he could tell a software platform the portfolio he wanted to own, and anytime he had money, he could throw it into the platform and it just went to work. He wanted to deploy all of the money by purchasing fractional shares so there wasn't any cash drag. And finally, incredibly low fees with no commissions. As M1 has expanded, it's grown from his "wouldn't it be nice" idea to other areas like borrowing and spending, allowing users to have one financial institution instead of needing to use multiple apps. M1's philosophy is that a great product allows you to do complex things simply. What they allow customers to do is determine what share of their portfolio they want in any given investment and then the software handles the complex and mundane administrative work. It used to be that you had to buy lots of 100 shares. It was a big step forward to be able to purchase odd lots of shares. Being able to purchase fractional shares with M1 is transformational. They do this by purchasing in whole shares and adding the leftover fractions to their own inventory account. It makes it easier for the customer to deploy more money consistently and have a diversified portfolio. M1 is a commission-free platform. Traditional brokerages made 10-35% of their money from commissions. Through technology development, the cost to trade is only an electronic message. Though not free, on a per-transaction basis, it can be no-cost to the user. M1 can make money monetizing the assets held on their platform so by being efficient, they don't need to charge transaction fees, making it a win-win arrangement. M1 is not good for day traders. It's suited for systematic investing in the portfolio of your choosing. Their trade windows occur twice a day and aggregate all orders on behalf of their customers once in the morning and once in the afternoon. While you can invest money every day through M1, a good financial habit to establish is to invest the extra cash you have leftover from your paycheck every two weeks. M1 allows for that to be automated. Portfolio management in M1 orients itself around a pie concept. At the highest level, the pie is 100% of your portfolio. You can then begin to divide up the pie into slices based on what percentage of your portfolio you want in specific investments. The slices can then become their own pies. It allows for a diversified portfolio, controlling risk exposure, without the risk of becoming overconcentrated. In M1 you can rebalance your portfolio in the next trading window with the one-click button although that method is tax-inefficient. Instead, additional contributions will automatically work to rebalance your portfolio with your pies without causing taxable events. With investing, taxes are going to be your biggest fees. Minimizing taxes controls costs and maximizes long-term success. With M1's dynamic rebalancing, it tries to minimize the sale of securities with tax consequences

After four years of working on the ChooseFI podcast, Brad and Jonathan want to share their lessons learned, the list of things they might do differently, and highlight a few episodes to re-listen to. Brad is back in the studio after missing out on Episode 290 with Paul Merriman. He's doing fine and appreciates everyone's concern. With Paul Merriman's Ultimate Buy and Hold Portfolio strategy, the thesis is that diversity is great, but own equal amounts of all asset classes versus a cap-weighted index fund to capture the growth potential of small companies. Unfortunately, for the last 12 years, the majority of growth has come from large companies. Brad says Paul's book reads like a FI manual with a high-level overview of small steps that could be million-dollar decisions. The decisions are not little. As discussed in Brad's The FI Weekly email this week, the Rule of 72 states how long it will take you money to double at a given rate of return. 72 divided by the rate of return is how many years before the money doubles. For example, 72 divided by 8% equals 9 years to double your money. The impact of that last double can be worth millions, that's why getting started early is critical. If your new and haven't already, today is the day to start. Jonathan agrees Paul's book is a great FI primer and was surprised by how much he enjoyed reading it. He says it would make a great gift. ChooseFI often talks about the aggregation of marginal gains. It can be quantified as each half a percent improvement means we can make an extra million dollars. Come up with 10 and that's an extra $10 million over your investing lifetime. If you can't do all 10, pick three or four and implement early, aggressively, and consistently. If they could turn back time and look at how their own understanding has grown and developed over the last four years, what would the conversation look like from both micro and macro views? Starting with investing, in the beginning, the most powerful concept inspired by JL Collins was to avoid the fees, a sentiment echoed by Paul Merriman as well. Diversity and time in the market are also key. You will lose approximately 40% of your total net worth when invested with a financial advisor at 1% in a mutual fund with a 1% expense ratio. The dramatic loss happens when your gross 8% market return is reduced to just 6% after fees. In Episode 052 with Todd Tresidder, he highlighted that there are three asset classes you could invest in, paper, like the stock market, entrepreneurship, such as starting your own business, or real estate. Inside of paper assets like the stock market, Todd says complexity can be valuable, but others like Big Ern and Rick Ferry say most people will do far betting sticking with something simple they understand. It's important to talk about the things that will increase the likelihood of success then discuss nuance. While Brad craves simplicity, Jonathan enjoys learning more. There's no one right answer, only what works for you. Jonathan always conflated individual stock purchases with day trading, but episodes with Brian Feroldi helped him realize they are not the same. For Brad, individual stocks always seemed like gambling. While he doesn't advocate having a huge percentage of your net worth in individual stocks, it's no longer the 0% he would have advocated for years ago. The software available through M1 Finance allows Jonathan to implement the complexity associated with some of these strategies and maintain them simply. As for investing in entrepreneurship, it has become something Jonathan loves doing. It's an investment he has total control over, as discussed in episodes with Alan Donegan after he pointed out entrepreneurship was left off the Pillars of FI list. After a disastrous real estate failure in his 20s, Brad learned real estate investing can be a significant part of his portfolio if you are investing and not merely speculating. He now owns two single-family rental properties which have been successful so far. When you decide to start adding complexity, the price that's paid is usually time. Jonathan believes we are all stuck in a system, but the FI community is working to break out of the system in the best possible way to bring control back over their lives. Following the path to FI by saving money gives you options, power, and agency. In every aspect of life, look at the rules of the game, survey the field, and make the best decision that's going to work for you. Skills are more valuable than degrees. Upcoming in a future episode is Anita, who recently graduated from the Talent Stacker program. Coming from the hospitality industry, she had a four-year degree that left her with massive debt. After two to three months of training in a new industry for just a couple thousand dollars, she's now making multiples of what she was before. The best way to learn something is to do it. If we can build a system around that, we can eliminate the need to wait four to eight years and g

Does your portfolio own enough of the companies that carry a lot of the growth over extended periods of time? When you buy index funds, you aren't as diversified as you think you are. Cap weighted index funds mean you are buying a lot of the companies that are doing really well. But there are two asset classes Paul Merriman is a fan of that he thinks don't get enough attention, small cap and value. Although many people claim to believe in a buy and hold strategy with investing, their behavior says otherwise. They like to buy when things are hot because they believe it's going to keep going up. If you look back as far as 1928, a lot of the time the S&P 500 is walloping small cap value returns, yet at the end of this 92 year period, small cap value made 24 times the amount of money the S&P 500 did. Even though there are long periods of underperformance, when small cap value does take off, there is outstanding performance. Then when it reverts back to the mean, there is a higher compound rate of return. Owning a large cap fund means each holding in that portfolio, and how much of the portfolio it represents is based on how large that company is. The big companies represent 80-85% of the corporate public value in our economy. However, history shows that the smaller companies and the value companies produce a better rate of return because they are more risky. It doesn't have to be a lot to make a big difference. If you were put 10% in a small cap value fund, it would give you a legitimate shot at having 20-30% more money when you retire. The top 20 companies probably make up 20-30% of the money you have invested. Investing in an S&P 500 or total stock market fund provides an illusion of diversity. As companies get to be bigger in size, it becomes increasingly more difficult to double or triple in size. Companies are valued by the number of shares times the price in the market. Large cap index fund companies average a market capitalization value from $50 billion to $150 billion. Small cap companies are roughly 1/50th the size of the big companies with values averaging $2 billion. They are legitimate companies, but many of them will fail. Since 1928, the S&P 500 or total stock market compound rate of return has averaged 10%. However, research has shown that only 4% of those public companies made virtually all of that 10%, while 96% of companies averaged just 3%. As an aggregate, small companies are much more likely to double or triple in size. Value companies can be seen as companies that are out of favor and years later, they may still be out of favor. Academics don't advise buying value companies one at a time. People come into value companies to make them more meaningful, profitable, and efficient turning those companies around. The problem with great companies with a great future is that when something happens to pop the ballon, those companies can fall 25% in a day, similar to what happened with the Dot-com bubble in 2000. Telsa, for instance, is a car company on the verge of bankruptcy several years ago and now it's up 400% even though it is barely turning a profit. With a current share price of $800, it's going to take a lot to double your money, yet people still believe in Tesla. Paul wants to help people figure out how to invest in an unemotional way and don't get caught up believing in something that isn't likely to happen. Last year, growth companies were up 35-40%, however, looking back at 90 years of evidence, growth produced a lower rate of return than value by 2% a year. Paul's latest book, We're Talking Millions!, is all about the extra half of 1%. For every half of 1% you can make on your portfolio over a lifetime, you add a million dollars. Finding more of those half of 1% and adding them up is a lot sexier than finding the hottest thing in the market. In his book, Paul lays out 12 simple ways to capture those half 1% that the market is ignoring. Paul's been hearing complaints for years that his work has been too complex. It's was something his firm did for his clients, but most individuals do not want to make it that complex. Someone in their twenties, investing just $5,000 a year for 40 years, can use these strategies to make millions over an investing lifetime. It's not all because you took more risk, it's also how you protect your money from others getting their hands on it, like money managers. Choosing to save can be a million decision, and choosing to save early can be another million. In one mind-blowing statistic, Paul says 25% of millennials will not put money in the stock market. The ultimate buy and hold portfolio might be difficult to replicate inside a 401K. To make things more simplified, Chris Pedersen developed a system to implement the philosophy with roughly 98% of the benefits. The goal is to keep it as simple as possible so that anyone can do it and won't need to manage it other than for a few minutes a year. One way to buy a target date fund. But because they don't have enou

For almost 12 months, we've all been trying to do the best that we can. As frequently discussed on the show, we try to do things slightly different, optimize in the ways that we can, and make the best of the situation. Jonathan's wife Dani has been coming up with all kinds of creative little activities for the kids. Even Jonathan was recruited for a rock painting project. Brad has been listening to a new podcast, Ordinary Sherpa, created by Heidi, a member of Jonathan's Talent Stacker podcast. The podcast is about creating little adventures in life with your family. At the same time, in the mastermind group Brad takes part in, he was inspired by a discussion related to dads really showing up to be a part of their kids' lives. The podcast theme and mastermind group discussion converged for Brad when his daughter, Molly, asked him to go explore the creek with her. Rather than playing along for a minimally acceptable amount of time, Brad showed up like he really wanted to be there and they had hours of fun exploring together. What if you started to show up for everything in your life with the attitude that you really wanted to be there? It's difficult to be focused on growth in all areas of your life at the same time. There are different seasons when you will be able to lean into one over another but it's good to figure out a baseline you're comfortable with and recognize when it's time to rebalance. Since Brad's financial life is on autopilot, it's not something he spends much time focusing on. However, sometimes things do backslide and he needs to return a little focus to it. Such as, he recently canceled two recurring charges for streaming services, not because their costs were going to have a significant impact, but because he was no longer getting value from them. Relationships is an area Brad believes he could spend more time focusing on. If he were to ask himself, "Am I showing up as the best version of myself for my wife and kids every day?" his answer would be "no". Who should be leaning into and leveraging their Roth 401K? Sean Mullaney, The FI Tax Guy, says the Roth 401K works similar to a 401K except the funds going in are taxable today and come out later tax and penalty-free. Those currently in a high tax bracket looking to retire early are probably better off contributing to a traditional 401K. But someone just out of college in a 10% federal tax bracket may benefit from paying 10% in taxes today rather than 20-30% later on. Even someone who may have substantial taxable income in retirement may benefit from a Roth 401K. A Roth 401K can also be a hedge against future tax rates for anyone who prefers to lock in their tax rate today. If your 401K plan offers it, you don't have to do all Roth 401K or traditional 401K. You can split the difference. For example, a 60-year-old new retiree with a large 401K will be taxed on every dollar withdrawn. We don't know what future tax rates will be. Roth 401K withdrawals don't work the same way as traditional 401K withdrawals. You can structure it in a way that you can recover tax-free contributions, From a Roth 401K, you may need to rollover into a Roth IRA. For the early retirees who don't plan to retire at a super early age or anyone with artificially low income for a few years, the Roth 401K is a strategy to consider. If you aren't 59 1/2 yet, Roth 401K withdrawals are subject to the cream in the coffee rule where 2/3 of the withdrawal is tax and penalty-free but 1/3 is subject to ordinary income tax and a penalty. This is different than a Roth IRA where contributions may be withdrawn at any age tax and penalty-free. When you roll over a Roth 401K to a Roth IRA, the Roth 401K contributions go in as Roth IRA contributions, and earnings become Roth IRA earnings. You could then take out the full amount of contributions tax and penalty-free before touching the earnings. If you aren't 59 1/2 and need to access your Roth 401 contributions, it makes sense to roll them over to a Roth IRA first. If you have employer stock in your 401K, there may be net unrealized appreciation. You do not want to roll it over from a traditional 401K to a traditional IRA without considering a tax planning strategy. This requires assistance from a tax professional. If you want to do a backdoor Roth IRA, rolling over 401K to a traditional IRA isn't a good idea. The fees associated with 401K plans have gotten better over the last 10-15 years. The investment choices are better with lower fees. It may not make sense to do a rollover. As a general rule, retirement accounts have required minimum distributions (RMDs) once you turn age 72. The exception is the Roth IRA. While RMDs from a Roth 401K are not taxable, you want to keep that money growing tax-free as long as possible for you and your heirs. If you're 72, Sean would recommend you roll your Roth 401K to a Roth IRA for that reason. Generally, you need a separation of service to do rollovers from a Roth 401K to a Roth IRA. Look for your

Should you rush to reach FI? Or use it as a map in a lifelong pursuit to master your relationship with time, money, and happiness? Brandon, from the Mad Fientist, wishes he would have found more free time to work on other goals while on his journey to FI. When Brandon was first on the show four years ago, he had just reached FI and discussed the psychological hurdles he had to overcome. What's changed for him since then, and with the benefit of hindsight, what would he do differently? Brandon's dream as a child was to write music and put it out in the world. However, his musical tastes are not mainstream, so becoming a pop star was never one of his ambitions. He did not want to just be a consumer, he wanted to be a creator and always felt that it was his job that was holding him back. It wasn't until after reaching FI that he realized it wasn't was what holding him back at all. He had been spending his free time on things like television on travel instead of his music project. His problem was psychological. As a math and science guy, he didn't believe he could do it. Trying meant the risk of failure, and if he failed, the dream would be gone. It took Brandon two years to come to grips with and get over that hurdle. During his pursuit of financial independence, Brandon has tunnel vision, with all his time and effort devoted to making and saving more so that he could reach FI more quickly. The result was a decrease in his overall happiness. He admits that he did it wrong. The whole point is to master the relationship between money, time, and happiness. Mastery is probably better to focus on over goals. Goals delay your happiness because you are always looking to the future instead of enjoying the present or the journey. Reaching FI for Brandon didn't have an impact on his life other than making him more confident that he could step away from his job. Motivating yourself to do something is hard when you don't have any sort of external motivation to do it. In 2017, Brandon wanted to do two things: get better at songwriting and get fit. The personal trainer he was working with asked him how much he wanted to bench press or how much muscle mass he wanted to put on. Those were goals Brandon didn't care about. With his mastery mindset, he only wanted to get healthy and stay healthy. In contrast to getting fit, his specific goal for songwriting was to write a song and share it with his brother. When he finished it, not only was it awful, but the whole process was awful and it caused him to quit pursuing any additional songwriting until he summoned up the courage again in 2019. Pursuing mastery may be summed up by asking, "Am I better today than I was yesterday?" Continuing to answer yes is pursuing mastery. Brandon found it to be true that doing something consistently changes who you are. He never felt like a musician until he was doing it for 25 hours a week. He still feels like his triangle is skewed toward money at the expense of time and happiness so he has been trying to figure out how to use money to get more time or increase happiness. For example, he wrote eight songs and wanted to get them to sound as great as possible, so he hired a Grammy award-winning sound mixing engineer to help mix his album. He was able to both learn and make a better final product. He doesn't want to waste money but does want to figure out how to use it efficiently and maximize the triangle of money, time, and happiness. There's a lot of unconscious spending in society that doesn't really bring happiness either. Getting on the path to FI helps you sort out the equation a bit more. We're terrible at knowing what will make us happy. That's where experimenting comes in. Experiment with your spending and your activities. What still feels good a week later versus ended up being meaningless. It's okay to spend money sometimes as long as you do it from a place of value. If you are in a deprivation zone, one thing that helped Brandon was to relax for two years with respect to his spending. If it was something he and his wife wanted to do, they did it. At the end of the year, although it felt like they had lived an extravagant life, they spend just $3,000 more than normal. In the deprivation zone, you are testing the lower limits. You can test the upper limits and then hopefully find the sweet spot. It's difficult to find where the sweet spot is for you without testing the limits. Once you have the bigs things taken care of, the little ones don't seem to matter. Brandon had already limited his large structural recurring expenses. What he had given himself latitude with were the everyday one-off decisions that in aggregate, turn out to barely move the needle of his finances. Brad and his family have anchored themselves to a $2 per person per meal per day rule. It helps them to apply intentionality to their meal planning. He thinks it's better to try and optimize and then dial it back if gets to be a little too much than continue to go through

Are you the kind of person who sets New Year's resolutions? Like many Americans, Jonathan used to set weight loss goals for the new year, but not this year. Instead, he and his accountability partner, JD Roth, spent the previous nine months working on it and began the year, at or very close to their goal weight. Not having to work on big weight loss goals is allowing Jonathan to be aware and focus on testing smaller adjustments that will make him feel better and have more energy. Brad once had an experience while on vacation that made him realize how his normal diet was causing him joint pain. He wasn't even aware he had joint pain until one day it was gone. It was only then that he understood he had a problem that needed to be worked on. When you live an examined life, you don't have to accept the things that are reducing your capacity to function as normal. Brad thought his morning smoothies were a healthy choice, but it turns out the negative impact was a sugar crash necessitating an afternoon nap. It wasn't something he noticed until he stopped the daily smoothie routine. The examined life concept can be applied to your personal finance life as well. It's not as much a goal as it is a mastery of process. Brad embraces James Clear's concept of setting up systems that work in his life versus setting goals. He has set up eight different things he wants to accomplish as a part of a system with checkpoints along the way. In an attempt to develop two new habits, Brad is habit stacking. With habit stacking, you take one habit you have and combine it with another you want to create. Brad has combined his desire to become more fluent in Japanese with moving more during the day by taking walks around the neighborhood while listening to the Pimsleur language learning app. It's not perfect, but it's a system that is working for him. Brad is also following the advice of Chris Guillebeau and conducting his own annual review. This annual review sets the big picture, the intentions, the purpose, and outcomes. It then breaks life down into different areas where concrete goals may be set, such as self, health, family, community, travel, and others. While neither has large plots of land in suburban Richmond, VA, Jonathan and Brad have both contemplated starting some sort of micro garden. Listener James wrote in to say that he's been able to cut down on his grocery bill by going a whole year eating only vegetables he's grown himself. James says knowledge isn't needed. Just try growing things. You'll learn as you go. Also, grow what you are actually going to eat. Kale is great, but not if you won't eat it. And finally, squash is king as it produces pounds and pounds of food. Start with a 4'x4′ or 6'x6′ plot of land and plant 2 summer squashes and 2 winter squashes two feet apart. Water the roots, not the leaves. If you don't have a yard, get creative like a friend with a yard, a community garden, or a local farm. In your own garden, build up your soil health with compost. When you are genuinely interested in learning, finding mentors willing to help can be easy. Jonathan's brother, Andrew who edits the podcast, has been interested in sustainable homesteading. Through the ChooseFI Facebook groups, he has found a community to learn from and is getting free room and board in exchange for work. You get so much power and understanding in your own life just by understanding the concepts of FI. You don't need to be at your FI number to achieve power and autonomy in your life. It starts the moment you decide to make small changes to make your life better. Neither Jonathan nor Andrew have reached FI, yet for all intents and purposes, they are living a financially independent lifestyle. The goal isn't to have the most money, it's to be post-money, which is beyond the point where money matters. What do you want your life to look like, and what do you need to pull that off? Suzanne sent in a question about expense ratios. She didn't know where to look to find out how much she is paying across their various investments. First, there may be a fee attached to the fund for it being executed the way it is, known as the expense ratio. Second, if access to the fund is through a financial manager, there could be an assets under management fee. The impact these fees can have on your investments is enormous. They can cost an investor millions of dollars over a 40-year time frame. Brad suggested Suzanne google the funds' names or ticker symbol and expense ratio, such as "VTSAX expense ratio". The result should be just one or two clicks away. To reduce costs, long-term investors should use a commission fee platform to purchase funds, such as M1 Finance when investing outside of your employer. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Chris Guillebeau's "How to Conduct Your Own Annual Review" Grass to Veggies ChooseFI Episode 248 You are More than Your Social Capital with Laura Oldanie M1 Finance Review If You Want To Support ChooseFI: Earn $1,00

Many industries we once believed were recession-proof have proven otherwise. What can we do to build multiple streams of income and the resilience needed so that we're not reliant on anyone else for financial security? Side hustles and passive income are key strategies. Daniella worked for an IT company for four years when they laid her the weekend before her wedding. Luckily, she quickly found a remote job working as a contractor but was laid off from it as well. The layoffs ruined Daniella's confidence and self-esteem. Before the first layoff, she was living paycheck to paycheck and carrying debt. Occasionally, she needed to sell things for gas money until the next paycheck arrived. It was a financial low. Daniella still had the severance from her first job in an emergency fund and was encouraged to freelance to keep stable while looking for a new job. Freelancing was something Daniella had some experience with and reached out to an old client. The talent stack Daniella developed was not simply technical. She had a strong artistic and design background which was mostly self-taught. She says when going for a job interview, be upfront about all of the experience you have. Think about it and write it all down so you don't leave anything out. Not all jobs require the employee to be a world-class expert. Sometimes having a wide variety of experience and being able to synthesize different pieces of information is what employers need. The freelancing came out of panic. In addition to the debt, she had not been aggressively investing for retirement and believed the only way to go forward was a job. After finally landing a new job with a FinTech company, Daniella began reading about personal finance for her blog about the journey she and her wife were on to get their finances together. Dabbling is something Daniella has done since high school but it was never something she believed could be used to build wealth. Reading the stories of others changed her mind. The future became clear on what they had to do versus what they wanted to do. While her original side hustles only fueled her spending behaviors, they eventually morphed into doing fun things. Her wife is an expert in reselling guitars, and in addition to freelancing, Daniella also did thrift store flips, repaired items for resale, and sold her own paintings of live concert events. Daniella is in a much different financial position now. They have one year's worth of an emergency fund saved up, and all of their debt is paid off. They still have their side hustles, and her blog makes a third of what she makes in her full-time job. If she were to lose her job again, she would be able to reach out to the huge online network she's built over the last three and a half years. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter and great for networking. Daniella started by searching for different hashtags on Twitter. Jonathan loves Facebook groups. When there is something he wants to learn, he leans into Facebook groups to benefit his talent stack. Daniella believes Twitter is especially good for freelance gigs, while Instagram is good for anything since people expect others to slide into their DMs and comments on that platform. Since she can work remotely from anywhere and they have multiple side hustles, Daniella and her wife are working on a move from Missouri to Washington State. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Give your child a headstart with their financial and nutritional well-being with Meal Planning for Kids. Watch shows live and on-demand with Fubo TV. Build a better real estate investment portfolio with Fundrise. Get started on your own journey to financial independence today at ChooseFI.com/start. If You Want To Support ChooseFI: Earn $1,000 in cashback with ChooseFI's 3-card credit card strategy. Share FI by sending a friend ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence.

What You'll Get Out Of Today's Show 2021 kicks off the fifth year of the ChooseFI podcast. Despite being at different points in their own financial journeys, Brad and Jonathan have experienced the benefit of incremental growth with both their finances and self-improvement. While it may seem simple and even mediocre, they are living amazing lives. You need to control what you can control, starting from wherever you are. If you can optimize at the margins, you can reclaim decades of your life. It's not just the ChooseFI podcast trying to share this message and concepts. The entire community is working to share this message. In a Facebook post from Jessica, she shares that her goal at the age of 19 was to save $5,000 so that she could feel stable. She began finally saving at the age of 26. By spending less and earning more, five years later, she hit the net worth milestone of $100,000. The concepts ChooseFI presents are not new. The show brings information together to tell a story to motivate and encourage people to take action with it. Don't just do what people tell you to do. Look at what they are doing. JL Collins' blog series, The Stock Series, started out as a way to document what he wanted to teach his daughter about investing. Warren Buffett plans ate leave 90% of his investments in a low-cost index fund. What is impressive about index fund investing is that there is ample evidence that over the long-term, this simple plan outperforms other strategies. Index funds, like total stock market index funds, are self-cleansing. Rather than trying to pick the winners or attempting to build your own index where you need to stay abreast of what's happening in the market, your ownership in companies performing poorly automatically decreases as a percentage with an index fund. To illustrate this point, of the original companies making up the DOW in the early 1900s, none of them remain within it today. With an index fund, you end up buying the up and coming companies that are replacing those losing value without having to do any research. It's an odd phenomenon that people do not like to buy stock when the market is down. There are drops of 10% just about every year, 30% every few years, and black swan events like 2020 are more common than we like to believe. Despite of the ups and downs, stay the course and keep investing. US currency is backed by the confidence of the federal government. As much as a large percentage of the world also has confidence in our government, $100 today is not worth the same as it was a hundred years ago. Not only has inflation eroded the value, but more money has been printed than 100 years ago. Whenever the government prints more money or injects a stimulus, our money is worth a little bit less. What is the value of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin? They are speculative. You buy now and hope later someone else will pay more for it. Brad has sworn off speculative purchases after a horrible real estate investment years ago, but as a life-long learner, he has a remote interest in it. Warren Buffett has described Bitcoin as "rat poison squared" because, like gold, it doesn't produce anything. Investing in it is speculative. Moving money back and forth for 5 billion people in the world is both difficult and expensive. People without real access to the world economy can use Bitcoin to meet their needs. There are thousands of different cryptocurrencies available and most of them may disappear at some point. Their value is volatile and utility limited. It's also subject to manipulation and is currently unregulated, but we'll keep hearing more about digital currencies. The future is going to change, so Brad is always willing to learn. Since it's the first episode of the new year, what can you do to make your life just a little bit better? Increase your contributions to your 401K by 1%. Look for investment options with the lowest fees and think about moving them over. Cut an expense you aren't getting value from. Max out your HSA account. Contribute to your 2021 IRAs and other retirement investment accounts. Use Trim to help you lower your recurring bills. If you are looking for a new career, train for a new SalesForce position earning $65-80,000 a year with the course Jonathan and Bradley Rice created. The five-day SalesForce Challenge with Talent Stacker is free. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Meal Planning Made Easy ChooseFI Episode 284 JL Collins Get a free 60 day trial of Linkedin Sales Navigator Start the year with a smart money move and get up to $3,500 when you transfer to M1 Finance Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist ChooseFI Episode 072 Should I buy Bitcoin with Myles Wakeham ChooseFI Episode 099 Generous Giving on the Path to FI with Michael Peterson Save money magically with Trim ChooseFI Episode 117 Making the Case for Part-Time with Bradley Rice Sign up for the free five-day SalesForce Challenge If You Want To Support ChooseFI: Earn $1,000 in cashback with ChooseFI's 3-card c

When it comes to investing strategies, one of the most influential books available claims that if you keep it simple, you'll actually do better. Here to talk about the philosophy behind his investment strategy is one ofChooseFI's most requested guests, JL Collins, author of The Simple Path to Wealth, and popular blog series, The Stock Series. The influence of JL Collins cannot be overstated. The content he produced changed the trajectory of Brad's life and made him feel comfortable investing. In 2011, JL's daughter was in college but was turned off of all things financial after he pushed too hard. Because he wanted her to know how to invest and handle money, he decided that he needed to write it down for when she was ready. It was suggested that he archive the advice in a blog and share with friends and family. Much to his surprise, strangers began to find it and he quickly had an international audience. The book came out of the growth of his blog. Always having the ambition to write a book, The Simple Path to Wealth became a more organized and concise compilation of his blog articles. Four years later, 2020 has been its best selling year and the success has greatly exceeded expectations. Readers have responded positively to the authenticity of his writing, which he believes is because he was writing for his daughter. Now that she is a young adult, she's been receptive to the information and is now on board with the strategy presented. For Brad, investing always seemed like something that required thousands of hours of understanding and special insight until he began reading The Stock Series on JL's website. It gave him hope that he had a chance at long-term success for wealth that would last for many decades. JL acknowledges the method in the book is the last and best method he came to after going through other iterations involving picking stocks and actively managed funds. The other methods work, but they are harder and a lot less powerful than a low-cost index fund. JL says this method isn't just for beginners, it's the best way to invest for everybody. The most powerful way to invest is the simplest and the easiest. He realized that not everyone wants to think about investing the way he like thinking about it. Most people know it's important, but have more important things they want to do with their lives. His approach allows them to set it and forget it. The investing world is complex by design because the more difficult it is to understand, the more Wall Street can charge in fees. Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, was the first one to invent index funds and talk about index fund investing. Because outperforming the market as a whole is extraordinarily difficult, only 20% of fund managers in any one year can do it. After 30 years, the percentage of fund managers that can do it is less than 1%. Even Warren Buffet wrote in his 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter that he would advise the trustee of his estate to invest 10% in government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. A mutual fund, or similarly, an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), takes money from a lot of investors and lumps it together to invest it in something. The S&P 500 index invests in the 500 largest US companies that make up the S&P index, while an actively managed mutual fund may focus on a different parameter, such as energy or technology. An actively managed fund attempts to pick stocks that over time will outperform the index which is an expensive route and reflected in what the investor pays for the fund, called the expense ratio. Every fund has an expense ratio, but what matters is how high it is. Because index funds don't have those expensive fund managers, the fees are very low. JL's most recommended Vanguard fund, VTSAX, has a 0.04% expense ratio. Actively managed funds average 1%. The impact 1% has compounded over time is dramatic. On a $1M portfolio, you may be withdrawing 4%, or $40,000, each year, while 1%, or $10,000, goes into the pockets of those managing your portfolio. That's money not going to you or working for you by growing over time. In an article Brad wrote several years ago, he looked at the impact fees had on an investment portfolio. With a 1% expense ratio and/or a 1% fee for assets under management, the fees over a 40-year period cost millions of dollars. Owning index funds means you own all of the companies within that index, both the winners and the losers. VTSAX is Vanguard's total stock market index fund which invests in virtually every publicly-traded US company. There is very little difference between VTSAX and the S&P 500 index fund since VTSAX is capweighted, meaning it owns more of the largest companies. Only 15-20% are small or mid-cap companies. JL loves index funds because they are self-cleansing, meaning that you benefit from the winners while the losers drift away. The worst you can lose is 100% on a company, but you can gain 200% or even 1000% with the winners. Tesla is a great

It's Part 3 of ChooseFI's end-of-year wins where we hear directly from our community members. During this live event, listeners shared the actions they've taken during the past year that have helped them to spend less, earn more, and enjoy the journey. This year, the year-end-win episode took place in a three hour live Facebook and YouTube event featuring around 20 members of the community. Are you building an amazing life or are you a cog stuck in a very depressing wheel? It could be either or it could be both. The community members featured in this end-of-year wins episode have had the wake-up call. We can't control everything, but there probably are some things we can control that we haven't yet considered. Hopefully, these wins from the community will provide inspiration and imagination to find improvement with at least one thing. Our first win comes from Sara, who teaches high school science. She began listening to the podcast in December of 2018 and after binge listening to half of the available episodes, she opened a Vanguard account with all of the money she had saved. This year, she put money into 457s, maxed out Roth accounts, and put some money in a 403b. And finally, Sara also just made her last mortgage payment, paying it off in just 11 years. With the mortgage paid off, Sara is now debt-free. A special shout out to MK who recently gave birth to a brand new tax-deduction, otherwise known as a baby girl. MK and her husband, Jason, hit FI in their late twenties, and in addition to working for ChooseFI, MK has written a handful of science fiction books and teaches others how to self-publish with her YouTube channel, Author Your Ambition. The next end-of-year win comes from Whitney who fired her financial planner this year. While her financial planner had set Whitney and her husband up fairly well, they were finally ready to fly on their own. Now that she understood what she was doing, she was able to get out of some of the actively-managed funds and do some tax-loss harvesting. After an unfortunate incident with a supervisor, Whitney was motivated to figure out how she could not work if she didn't want to. Previously, she had no extra time to figure things out, but being at home due to COVID allowed her to explore hobbies, take care of health issues, and do more activities with her son. Although making even the 1% better changes aren't always easy, it is a positive feedback loop where it becomes easier and easier. Whitney plans is to retire in the next couple of years. Next is Carlos, who welcomed a new baby this year. His wife took some photography classes and after seeing that her photos were pretty good, set up a new business as a photographer. Jonathan says he's noticed a pattern when trying to learn a new skill. The first is that it's something that interests you. Next is finding a community, getting some training, and finally doing it. Although Carlos' wife had to hit pause with the business a few times during the pandemic, she's still managed to have success even in this challenging year. Carlos started a blog this year. As an immigrant from Brazil, he had issues with the IRS and decided to share his experiences so that he could help prevent others from making some of the same mistakes. He's is writing the first article and will soon be launching Alien Moolah. Citlali and Jose have spent the last year adapting and keeping good habits. They moved to California three years ago and needed to get a budget together and manage cash flow after encountering high rent prices. They found ChooseFI early when just six episodes had been released. Living on a single income, they were open to the messages presented. Since then, they have tried house hacking, Citlali earned a degree through Udacity, got a job working on autonomous vehicles, and they moved to Texas, which decreased their cost of living. Jose says the aggregation of marginal gains has helped them to save. Meal prepping has cut their meal costs and allowed them more free time during the week for other things. Because the pandemic has them driving less and they've built up a good emergency fund, they've reduced their auto insurance coverage and cut the cost in half. They also frequently use the library for ebooks and more unusual things like museum passes. Citlali's big win this year for a 50% salary increase following her performance review which is helping to increase their gap. But Jose and Citlali are reaping the benefits of FI before reaching it. With family in Mexico that has been hit hard by the pandemic, they have been able to provide financial assistance to buy food and pay off medical debt. Shannon's year has been one of adaptation. She works at a college where her responsibilities have increased and transitioned. As a result, her boss was able to negotiate approval for her position to be full-time. The increase in Shannon's gap allowed her to pay off her car loan. Shannon also started a unique side hustle creating videos combining W

It's Part 2 of ChooseFI's end-of-year wins where we hear directly from our community members. During this live event, listeners shared the actions they've taken during the past year that have helped them to spend less, earn more, and enjoy the journey. This year, the year-end-win episode took place in a three hour live Facebook and YouTube event featuring around 20 members of the community. After listening to the podcast for months or years, how did individual members of the community take in information and take action leading to success in a very challenging year? Success isn't just the nuts and bolts of money. Ultimately, it's a life optimization strategy. In response to Brad sharing in an earlier episode that he was joining Alan Donegan in his burpee challenge, Christine wrote in to share that she was inspired to step up her run by throwing in burpees along the way even if she couldn't complete the pushups. Being perfect isn't realistic. Challenge and struggling are important, as is trying to get to the point of mastery. You grow during times of discomfort and failure. The first end-of-year win comes from Eric. Introduced to FI by his best friends over a year ago, Eric binged listened to the podcast. In January of 2020, Eric and his wife re-scripted their financial life. Eric is an architect and started creating YouTube content as a side hustle on his channel 30X40 Design Workshop. Re-scripting their financial life started with paying down all their debt, including mortgage, with the cash they had saved that wasn't doing very much for them and built a six-month emergency fund. Having that headspace allowed them to take more risks during the year. They don't have a specific monthly budget, but as long as his wife keeps her job as a research scientist, they are good. Everything he makes is going toward FI, including a post-tax brokerage account and 529s. The FI literacy they've picked up from the podcast has shown they are a lot closer to their FI number than they thought. The friend who introduced Eric to FI was Jason, who also had end-of-year wins to share. Jason figured out early in his career that he didn't want to persist working for other people until retirement age. Five years ago, Jason learned about the FIRE community and began to buckle down, working toward a strategy. Jason says they've always been good savers and put salary increases and bonuses toward retirement savings. In 2019, he realized 2020 was the year they could hit FI. He actually achieved it in May 2019 and stayed at his job until June 2020 because he had some things he wanted to see through. In June, they moved from a high-cost-of-living area to a more moderately priced location. He began blogging on his website, The Next Phase is Now, to help work through the tornado of feelings he was experiencing. Before retiring, they lived on their FI budget for a full year to give them confidence. Currently, Jason is drawing from his cash reserves, which he moves from a Fidelity account to his checking account once a month like a paycheck. Next up is a question from Rebecca, who wants to know how to calculate her FI number when both she and her husband have pensions. Jonathan says the difference between your monthly expenses and your pension is what your FI number will need to cover. The book by Grumpus Maximus, The Golden Albatross: How to Determine if Your Pension is Worth It, as well as episodes 057 and 227 with Grumpus are good to check out if you have a pension. The next listener sharing her wins is Sara. Sara sold her care and began investing in VTSAX this year after graduating in 2019. As a new investor, the market fluctuations this year were intimidating, but after reading The Simple Path to Wealth, she felt like she was getting in during a low period. Sara's only debt is $78,000 in student loans which she hopes to pay off by age 30. During this 0% interest period, she has deferred making payments and has saved $20,000. It's a safety net that she's trying to decide what to do with. Her employer offers a .5% match up to 6% in her retirement plan. Sara has increased her contribution since deferring her student loan payments and is looking to roll over an account from a previous employer. Sara is trying to keep her expenses low and estimates her savings rate to be 30-40%. Listener Jake has made a lot of big moves this year, which means undoing all of the American dream ideas that had been drilled into him, like the fancy apartment, car, and clothes. They weren't making him happy. After listening to the podcast, Jake took action and moved into a place that cost him half as much, traded in the fancy car for a used Prius he paid cash for, and slashed his spending. Another big move Jake made was to refinance his private student loans with a 10% interest rate to 4%. He's putting every extra dollar toward student loans and will 100% debt-free by the end of January. The Talent Stacker podcast has lit a fire under him and Jake's goal for the end

It's the ChooseFI Christmas Edition where we hear end-of-year wins direct from our community members. During this live event, listeners shared the actions they've taken during the past year that have helped them to spend less, earn more, and enjoy the journey. This year, the year-end-win episode took place in a three hour live Facebook and YouTube event featuring around 20 members of the community. Despite how tough this year has been, many people were able to implement some of the strategies and tactics discussed on the show into practice and find more margin in their lives. The first featured win comes from Valerie. She purchased a condo a couple of years ago and has been working on renovating it. While not a financial win, Valerie says putting it behind her is her biggest personal win. Finally closing out the permits allowed her to refinance her mortgage, saving her $466 a month. She was also able to pay off her credit card renovation debt, saving her an additional $600 a month. In total, Valerie paid off $34,000 of debt. Besides the debt, Valerie also maxed out contributions to her HSA and because she now has an additional $1,000 a month, she increased her 401k contributions from 8% to 11%. Valerie opened her first taxable investment account and rebalanced her portfolio, while her side hustles earned her $4,000, mostly from participating in focus groups. Due to COVID, Valerie wasn't spending as much money and it allowed her to focus on things she might not have had the time to do and she's now one-third of the way to her FI number and hoping to retire by 2030. Brad comments that cutting $1,000 in monthly expenses is $300,000 less Valerie needs in retirement when using the 4% rule. Valerie has been sharing her copy of ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence with family members. The second end-0f-year-win comes from Michelle who learned about ChooseFI after Googling financial independence while attending a conference. To convert her husband, she had him read ChooseFI's book and then scheduled a date night to discuss it. Michelle's husband, Greg, never thought he could retire early. They didn't have a lot of debt but bought into the concept of getting 1% better and things began to snowball. During the last year, Michelle and Greg joined their finances, maxed out their 401k, sold a rental home, bought a short-term rental, and broke up with their financial advisor. They opened a Vanguard account and moved their accounts over after discovering their financial advisor was making a lot more in fees than the $50 per month to come up with an investment plan. Because Michelle and Greg met later in life, they had maintained separate accounts. After joining finances and being transparent, they found making small 1% better changes each week didn't hurt at all. All of the extra money that came in from COVID refunds or bonuses went toward paying off the debt from new windows. They also started travel hacking. Michelle says when breaking up with your finical advisor, chances are they won't understand FI, so state that it's you not them and feel free to contact her for help breaking up with your advisor. Up next is Chris, who has been a member of the FI community for about three years. He got started by reading The Simple Path to Wealth and Your Money or Your Life. For Chris, the pandemic has been an opportunity allowing him to save $15,000. He's been able to max out his HSA and Simple IRA. Chris also has two adult children to who he has introduced the concept of FI, as well as his nieces and nephews who have been very receptive to the information Chris has provided. He says to reach out and if they are interested they will let you know. One of the actions Chris took this year was to switch to Policygenius, which saved him 50% on policy premiums. The next end-of-year-win comes from Lauren. Lauren found ChooseFI in late-August and is on Episode 61R. Lauren got a side gig in August being a census worker which enabled her to pay off all $7,000 she had in consumer debt. With all of the premium pay she earned, it ended up being $1,300 a week. She says she wouldn't have taken on the side hustle if it wasn't for the podcast. After learning about 403b's, she switched from stocks and bonds to VTSAX. She and her husband also opened up a joint VTSAX account and reduced all of their monthly recurring bills to as low as they could possibly be. She's currently looking for hacks for satellite service. In July, they moved into a home that they are caretakers for, which is an upgrade that eliminated $1,100 in rent. They found the caretaker job through her mother but says other caretaker or home sitting positions can be found online. Since August, Lauren has earned or save roughly $9,000 since finding ChooseFI and taking action. They are now trying to pump as much money as possible into retirement accounts. When an old job asked her to come back to work for them, she opted to focus on what things were important, like the baby s

Is it possible to live fabulously without being fabulously broke? The Debt Free Guys say you can. After a year and a half of dating, John and David finally came out of the closet to each other regarding their finances. Between the two of them, they had $51,000 in credit card debt even though they had 15 years of experience in financial services helping others with managing their money. Starting with the first credit card his parents gave him for emergencies, David began a 17-year run carrying credit card debt. Instead of reserving for emergencies, he viewed it as a source of side money and never understood the value of paying it off. Despite never paying the balance off, his credit card limits kept increasing. After accumulating a significant amount of credit card, he began having trouble making even the minimum payments. Once, when his parents wired him money, it was immediately garnished from his bank account because he had failed to make payments. And yet he still didn't learn his lesson. Both John and David came from a time when it wasn't okay to be gay. As a result of being a part of a marginalized community, many parts of society sent the message that they couldn't be who they were. The baggage they carried, as a result, manifested itself in various ways, one of which can be financial challenges. Prudential conducted a study that showed there is a sexual orientation and gender identity pay gap. A university study has also shown that simply being gender non-conforming can limit you from getting a job or being promoted. As a result, gay men sometimes seek validation through their clothing, bodies, cars, houses, and vacations even if they have to finance it. The LGBT community hasn't traditionally fit the image of retired couples financial services companies market to. The community hasn't been encouraged through representation to think about their finances. The premise of the Queer Money Podcast is the get the finance conversation started which is what any community needs to start moving toward financial security. They challenge the community to think about what it is they truly want in life despite how they are told they should look, act, and want. It was the trap they had been living in. Although they were making decent salaries and experts in money, John and David weren't living according to their values. After having the discussion, they decided what they wanted was to be able to retire comfortably, travel without accumulating credit card debt, and give back to the LGBT community in a way that didn't penalize them. David says that even in the financial services industry there is a facade and although the experts know what they should do, they are hiding the truth about who they really are. Even for those who know the tricks to save, it can be hard to put it into practice. When you don't tell the truth about who you really are, you don't seek assistance or help to become the person you are pretending to be. While their credit card debt was at $51,000, John and David were spending $10,000 a year in interest payments. They believe that like them, most people who have similarly high credit card debts have a spending problem, not an income problem. The first step is to sit down and have the conversation with yourself, your partner, or your family about what it is you want your life to look like. The second step was eye-opening. John and David performed a spending analysis tracking when every penny spent had gone in the previous year. They had been living like rock stars, spending money on dining out, happy hours, designer clothing, and travel yet they didn't think their quality of life had been that great. They finally realized they were financial messes when walking into their dark, basement apartment right after considering buying land to build a vacation home on in the Colorado mountains. They questioned where their life was going and confessed their debts to each other. Figuring out what they wanted took three to four months, the spending analysis took a weekend, and it was two and a half years to pay off the credit card debt. Unfortunately, after paying it off, they reverted to old habits and racked up $6,000 on reedit cards again. Realizing they were on the wrong path again, they corrected course and paid that off in several more months. The spending analysis showed that with several small tweaks, they could recoup a lot of their spending. Grocery and dining out costs were cut and when going out with friends, they tried to do it without spending much money so they could maintain the social aspect of their lives. John and David knew that if they could not have fun during the process of paying off debt, it would not last. When confessing why they couldn't spend on activities like before, they found the friends they told were completely fine with it. For some friends, it created an opportunity to have their own money conversation, while other friends did drift away. One of the strategies John and Davi

Teachers have been getting taken advantage of when it comes to their investment options. Thankfully, the internet and technology have made it easier to get the word out and help teachers wanting to do better. During his first year of teaching, Dan Otter was asked if he cared about his financial future. He politely listened to a hardball sales pitch about an investment scheme he didn't fully understand. Rather than blindly following other teachers at his school who had invested in it, Dan began to educate himself by learning about John Bogle, Vanguard, and low-cost investing. He learned the salesperson who had approached him was trying to sell him a high-cost annuity inside a 403b and that it was a terrible product. Unfortunately, most of his colleagues had signed up for these poor investment products despite having more than 100 options available to them, including Vanguard. Dan began to speak up and asked pointed questions when other teachers began to talk about their sales agent in the teacher's lounge. Though he had never done it before, he started looking at their statements and showing them how much the fees were. Appreciating Dan's insight and help, it was suggested that he put on workshops. After thinking about it, he bought the domain 403bWise, and with help from a friend, they built and launched the website in March 2000. The mission of the website was education and advocacy, where teachers and school employees could come and learn about the 403b in a non-sales environment and also advocate for low-cost options like Vanguard. Although this was 20 years ago, Dan says the problem with 403b persists today. Teachers usually find 403bWise after they have been sold one of these expensive products. Dan says that not all 403b's are created equal. After working in different environments where 403b's are available. They were largely terrible in the public school systems with many vendors. Private schools generally have just one vendor, as do universities, like Fidelity, TIAA-CREF, or Vanguard. 403b's fall outside of federal oversight, specifically Arista regulation, so the employer does not have the same kind of fiduciary duty. Just being on the list signifies tacit endorsement, however, the vendors are not vetted by the school districts. Just because you aren't paying money out of pocket, doesn't mean there are no fees. Vendors make the fees hard to find. Teachers all over the country can get fee information on the website, 403bcompare.com. Dan says to look for costs in two places; mortality and expense, and then look at the mutual funds that are part of the annuity. If you find out that you are in a bad product, you may also have to pay 7% of your balance just to get out of it. Using the hypothetical example of a relatively new teacher earning $50,000 per year who expects to retire after 30 years, the difference between investing in one of these terrible annuity products versus one found after learning more from 403bWise can be $200,000. Over 35 years, a teacher contributing $250 a month earning 6% will earn $185,391 when investing with one of the lunchroom sales agents, while the teacher investing the same $250 a month earning 6% interest with a low-cost company will have $343,000 at the end of 35 years. Dan was able to visit the Vanguard campus as a guest of their 403b unit and says they are very focused on this market and getting on vendor lists. A good fee for a 403b is 0.5, or 50 basis points, or less. Companies like Fidelity, Vanguard, and Aspire Financial Services are good. In California, CalSTERS, the state pension agency, created their own 403b after and is on most vendor lists. Do not confuse Fidelity with American Fidelity Assurance, which is a high-cost company. A 457 may be an even better plan than the 403b. Reputable 457 plan companies include TIAA-CREF, T. Rowe Price, and Vanguard. The National Tax Deferred Savings Association is a well-funded lobby with an interest in maintaining a high cost, multi-vendor 403b environment. Montgomery Country schools in Maryland is one of the few school districts to put their 403b plan out for bid. They reduced the number of vendors down to just one, Fidelity, and plan participation and contribution have increased. Dan would like to see every district do what Montgomery County did, but it needs to start with the teachers from the ground up. The 403Wise website has three main sections, education, advocacy, and community. Under the Quick Start Guide, the tool, Find a Good Vendor, on the home page allows teachers to search within their own school district. 403b compliance is often outsourced to third-party administrators who bring in vendors who yield them revenue. Even one of the big national unions, the NEA, has an endorsement deal with a financial company called Security Benefit, which offers a product called the NEA Value Builder with load fees of 5%. After being sued, they offer a fantastic and unadvertised product called NEA Direct Investment. Anyone who

Don't fall for the misconception that financial independence is just for 20 and 30-year-olds. It is for everyone at any age and it's not too late to get started. Amy had a wake-up call in her early 40s. Starting with no net worth, through flexibility and adaptability, she got started and reclaimed decades of her life. Amy describes herself as a trier of many things. She used to wonder how other people do it. How do other people drive new SUVs, live in a large home, dine out, and save for their kids' education and their own retirement? She says most people don't do it all. You have to select for yourself what's important and save wisely to spend on it. Previously, Amy was trying to keep up with everybody else, thinking that she needed it all to be happy. She was buying all the stuff but wasn't saving for the future. She heard something on the radio one day about needing to save a million dollars for retirement and thought it didn't seem possible to get there. She and her husband were in their 40s and she knew something had to change. Amy began looking at what other people were doing but what she didn't know if that everybody was just like her, trying to keep up and not saving for the future. She had grown up with a single mom who had a lower-middle-class income. She always wanted more because she felt like she was always lacking. When she got a job and was earning money, she worked hard and thought she deserved all those things everyone else had. She had fallen into the trap of thinking money equals happiness and once in, it was hard to get out of that trap. While she had a mortgage and car loans, she didn't have much other debt. However, she was spending almost everything coming in and her net worth wasn't moving forward much. After a divorce a the age of 43, Amy's net worth was approximately $150,000. The desire to get out of a job she hated and start her own business lead her to examine her spending. She began researching methods and ideas for saving money where she found Mr. Money Mustache and many other personal finance blogs and websites. Though Amy realized she and her new husband were older, she thought that they could make significant changes and create the financial space they needed to retire early for them. Trying to keep up with everybody else wasn't getting them anywhere, but she might be able to learn and try to keep up with the people saving money and retiring early even if they were far younger. Originally, they had been thinking they would don't retire until 67, so retiring in 10 years in their 50s sounded much better. Trying to convince her husband to get on board with the changes that needed to be made meant that his habits had to change. They had to reframe their thinking. Amy says the Dave Ramsey quote sums it up, "Live like no one else now, so you can live like no one else later." They realized that despite chasing happiness by going out to dinner and buying things wasn't actually making them happy. Cutting back didn't feel like deprivation because they weren't things that weren't meaningful or lighting them up. Amy and her husband reevaluated where their money was being spent. She thinks making communication a foundation of their marriage was essential. It was hard to talk about what they wanted their lives to look like 10 and 20 years down the road and how they were living five years ago wasn't going to get them there. Using the 25 times expenses rule, Amy guessed they would need a million dollars to retire and targeted 2024 for retirement. To do it, they cut expenses, got rid of their newer vehicles, and refinanced to a 15-year mortgage. To increase their incomes, they both changed jobs twice. With all of the changes they made and a phenomenal stock market, they have been able to cut their timeline to financial independence down. They considered themselves FI in 2019, just six years from when they started. Amy was able to increase her income during those six years by finally completing her degree after going to school part-time while also working. It gave her the confidence to try and find a better paying position. Because she was a hard-worker and stayed in touch with people on LinkedIn, she was approached about a new position. She then negated the significant salary increases. To prepare for salary negotiations, Amy used Glassdoor and LinkedIn premium to see what other positions were paying. Amy says you have to believe it's possible never too late to start. You have to be flexible, willing to embrace fear and go for it. Give up the ego and be willing to learn, even from a 25-year-old. Stop worrying about what other people think. Stuff isn't going to make you happy, but having your family safe and secure and being able to retire will. The changes Amy made were sacrifices, they were changes that gave her options later. If you're in your 40s and you've never questioned drift, there's probably 30% you can cut without missing it. Initially, Amy and her husband cut too far, but then th

Setting up your financial life includes updating your investor policy statement and examining the rationale for equal weighting inside your index funds. Brad is giving his physical fitness a boost in December with a month-long burpee challenge. A full-body exercise that can be done quickly at home without any equipment, Jonathan asks what would change about your life if you took the challenge of doing 10 burpees every day for the next year? Brad was inspired to take on the burpee challenge after watching Alan Donegan and his wife, Katie, in a video they posted of themselves doing burpees. They weren't holding anything back and completing each rep with a high degree of difficulty. He wondered what it would look like to give everything your all in life, like Alan and Katie were with their burpees? Jonathan reflected on how he is often more focused on getting to the end result than he is in the quality of the movement, which he likens to the old saying about losing sight of the forest for the trees. We should focus on systems, processes, and workflow, over results. Get up off the couch and do something that will make your life better in some small way. Cancel a subscription, get rid of convenience, meal plan, do something that makes your life 1% better. And if you start doing burpees as a result of this episode, send in an email to let Brad and Jonathan know. Although we often talk about and identify the massive actions people can take to make their financial lives better, the community has been very receptive to the idea of aggregation of marginal gains. This year, Jonathan has been having conversations with his wife about their investor policy statement and what changes they might make to it since they feel like they are in a place of calm and unemotional decisions can be made. Brad and Laura believe in thinking long-term, lowering their expenses, continuing to invest, and having things on autopilot. Their investments are almost entirely in low-cost brand-based index funds, like total stock market and S&P 500 funds. they also do have some bonds, international stock funds, and rental real estate. Jonathan and Dani have similar investing strategies. They invest for the long-term and diversify in low-cost funds to avoid fees. Recently, Brad and Jonathan discussed the difference between a total stock market index fund and an S&P 500 index fund and how with a cap-weighted fund you a disproportionate amount of the largest companies. A lot of investors believe you should try to have small and mid-cap companies equally weighted in your portfolio. It used to be difficult to set your portfolio this way. Recently, online investment firms have come online, such as M1 Finance, Betterment, and Wealth Front, whose interfaces have made this significantly easier to do. Jonathan recently conducted an experiment with his own investments following one of Paul Merriman's portfolios that can be found on M1 Finance. Fifty percent went into a total stock market index fund, and the other 50% went into an equally weighted fund. With the impact COVID had on small businesses this year, the equally-weighted portfolio was crushed. However, when pursuing FI, we are interested in performance over the long-term and Jonathan notes that the smaller companies that have been crushed this year, might actually be on sale. Because Jonathan doesn't like sitting on a bunch of cash, even in an emergency fund, the idea of negative correlation is appealing to him. He wants his emergency fund to hold steady or go up when the market is down and is willing to sacrifice a little bit of return to achieve that. Your options to equally weight index funds may be more limited at large institutional firms, but with M1 Finance, Jonathan was able to set up a Negative Correlation pie, a Can I Pick pie, and an Equities pie. Jonathan's M1 Finance account acts like an emergency fund but is also a growth machine. It is more conservative than his 401Ks. He views these taxable investments as another form of savings. Some of Paul Merriman's recommended ticker symbols are VIOO, the Small Cap 600, IJS, the Small Cap 600 value, VOV, the 1000 Value index fund, VOO, the S&P 500, and others like VEA and VWO. While many of us want to keep things simple and do not want to be stock picking, when investing in something like an S&P 500 Index fund, we are essentially stock picking. Understanding that, Brad still chooses to invest mainly in total stock market index funds. In episode 194, Frank Vasquez talked about after taking a hammering in 2008, he wanted something in his portfolio that would go up when others were fleeing the market. He discussed corporate bonds, precious metals, and US treasuries were some of the types of investments people flee to. Jonathan and Dani decided to invest in precious metals, which will hopefully be more effective than a savings account While Brad doesn't believe in investing gold, Jonathan notes that if there is ever a loss in confidence in government

Continuing the conversation discussing financial basics, today's episode covers how to get started investing, banking, and setting up your financial life. As a recent college graduate, Brad had the motivation to get his financial life together but didn't really know how to go about doing it. During his first job, he wanted to open up a Roth IRA after learning about the power of compound interest. Unfortunately, the investment advisor who helped get him set up invested in a fund with a 5% upfront load. That means 5% of his investment automatically went to pay the advisor's commission. Brad'sinvestment was treated like a quick payday for the advisor. Not all financial advisors are bad, but you can learn how to get set up with a low-fee or no-fee investment without feeling confused or overwhelmed by the process. It's important to understand all of the possible fees that can impact the return on your investment. In addition to load fees, there are other fees to watch for, such as assets under management fees where you pay a percentage for the advisor to manage your account, or expense ratios which pay the team who actively manage the activity of buying and selling within the fund account, and with a surrender charge, you may pay fees to get your money out of the investment. If Jonathan was giving a family member financial advice on how to get started, it would begin with banking. Do they have a banking system set up and understand the differences between checking and savings accounts? What other variables should be considered? Getting a checking account set up is first and becomes the repository for income coming in and money going out, such as paying bills. Brad uses autopay to have many bills automatically draft from his checking account. Brad likes simplicity. Because he knows which days money will be coming in, he sets up his bill autopay dates around that. He also ensures he has a couple extra thousand dollars in his checking account to cover anything unexpected with him having to track the balance every day. Jonathan does something similar in that he uses the pay from last month to pay this month's bills, which means there is always around a month's worth of pay in his account giving him plenty of margin. Try to minimize fees in every aspect of your life. Select a bank account option that requires the lowest minimum account balance to avoid a monthly fee. Avoid overdraft fees by asking the bank to remove that option or connect to a credit card. Don't pay ATM fees by trying not to use cash or plan ahead and withdraw cash from your own bank fee-free. Some online banks will reimburse ATM fees. Brad doesn't keep all of his financial assets in a checking account. He used to use a saving account at the same bank that was connected to his checking account. However, it earned very little in interest. Online savings accounts, like those at CIT Bank, frequently offer a much higher interest rate on their savings accounts and still allow access to the money within 2-3 business days. Your investing goals are determined by two items: your cashflow and what sort of safety net you need. Money that might be needed in the short-term and accessible within days, such as for emergencies, should be kept in cash in a savings account. Money that isn't needed for 10 years or more, should be invested because money can lose value over time due to inflation. Instead, that money can be making money and beating inflation. To maintain value, your money needs to make 1-3% per year just to keep pace with inflation. Knowing how much to keep in savings and when to move to investing depends on your risk tolerance. Make sure your bank is FDIC insured, which means it's backed by the United States Government and covers depositors in the event of bank failure. Once you have a checking account set up and you are putting away something each month into savings, getting started investing would be the next step. Brad says the best place to get started is with your company's 401K. Find out what the 401K match is and invest at least up to the match. The match is free money from your employer and technically part of your overall benefits package. It may be something like a 100% match on the first 3% of your salary you invest. If you make $100,000, 3% equals $3,000, it means you invest $3,000 of your salary and your company also puts in $3,000. It's a guaranteed return. If there's an option to check a box and automatically increase your contribution by 1% each year, do it. Instead of a 401K, teachers may have a 403b or 457 which are essentially the same type of investment vehicle. The maximum amount an employee may contribute in 2020 is $19,500. The total limit for employee and employer contributions combined in 2020 is $57,000. Each person needs to figure out what works best for them in terms of funding an emergency fund, paying off debt, investing in their 401K, or Roth IRA. Since contributions may be withdrawn from a Roth IRA tax and penalty-free, it

It's no secret that Brad and Jonathan's families are board game fans. One way they can typically save 20-60% on the cost of board games is by watching for price drops on Amazon using CamelCamelCamel. Brad was able to save a substantial amount on the purchase of a squat rack simply by being able to stand by and wait for the price to drop. Listener Liz heard about CamelCamelCamel on the podcast and added a list of board games to her watchlist. She was eventually able to purchase all of them at roughly half the list price. Life may be the ultimate board game where your finances are a piece of it. When you know the rules, it makes it easy to win. Just like there are strategies for winning at Monopoly, there is an unwritten and unspoken framework for living a better life. Now that 2020 is getting back to a more steady-state, it may be time to start wargaming your finances and look at your risk tolerance. This year that stress-tested our investor policy statements and mindset. Perhaps you don't have the risk tolerance you thought you did. Times of stress and uncertainty are not the time to make changes. Adjustments should be made when times are calm. There are different variables to consider and one of the questions to ask is "How much does your life actually cost?". This can change over time and affect your risk tolerance. A couple of years ago, Brad intentionally increased his costs by moving to a more expensive home. Though it increased costs by 40-50%, they felt the life benefits would outweigh the additional costs. The only debt Jonathan has is his mortgage, reducing his structural expenses to housing, food, utilities, and insurance. He thinks even some of that could be cut down to support a survival budget if required. If this year has shown us anything, it's that your income source may not be a stable as you might have previously thought. You shouldn't be dependent upon anyone. There's a mindset of positivity that takes a terrible situation and figures out how to pivot. With your wargaming plans set, you can find a way out of it. Brad lived through a financial calamity at 22 years old when he worked for Arthur Anderson. After the Enron scandal, his company went out of business. He witnessed others who were living on the financial edge, but because Brad lived at home and had very little debt, he was fine. Jonathan says he doesn't mind spending a lot of money on an item, but he doesn't want to spend a lot of money on something that locks him into structural, recurring payments that make his life more expensive. If something were to happen to his business, Jonathan is confident that with the skill set he's acquired and one year of financial runway he's saved, he would have a very soft landing. The events of the last year have him reevaluating his investor policy statement, possibly driving changes to his investment allocation to a more conservative approach now that the market is at record highs. Jonathan is considering making these changes after riding the roller coaster of the last year and holding firm. Now that things are back to relative calm, he can make decisions based on knowing himself better, not based on fear. In the episode with Paul Merriman, he made the case for a portfolio that weights all of the asset classes evenly. Total stock market funds are cap-weighted, meaning the top companies make up a disproportionate percentage of the total market cap. Therefore, a disproportionate amount of your money is invested in these top companies and you aren't invested as diversely as you think. Jonathan has had half his money invested in a total stock market fund and half in a portfolio more similar to what Paul Merriman recommends through M1 Finance. Paul Merriman's method has gotten crushed in the last year, but over a 40 year window, it should bring higher returns. Jonathan is trying to figure out a mix that he is comfortable with. Another expense area to look at are investment fees. It used to be expensive to invest, but investment costs have become much more competitive. You don't need to spend 1% on commissions and another in expense ratios. Fees have gone to near zero if you look for them. Don't let people "help" by trading on your fear. War game your finances out. Think about the variables unique to you, analyze your risk tolerance, your income, your expenses, and what you have control over. This year's Year-End Wins episode will be a live podcast on Dec 8th at 7:30 pm Eastern time. RSVP for the live event at ChooseFI.com/2020wins. If you want to share your 2020 win, send an email to [email protected]. This week's book winner is Abbey. She turned 22 this year, is almost finished paying off $17,000 student loans and maxed out her Roth IRAs for 2019 and 2020, as well as her 403b, 457, and HSA, and broke the $100,000 mark in her first year of nursing. Congratulations, Abbey! Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Register for The Simple Startup Winter Challenge and save 15% with promo code "po

It's end-of-year tax planning time. As you get further along in your financial independence journey, there are likely more end-of-year tax planning items you'll need to be aware of. Having a checklist to review annually is useful. It's been an unusual year and December is that time to begin making end-of-year tax considerations. In addition to the normal checklist, there may be additional items to consider in this remarkably different year. Sean Mullaney says unique to 2020 are Roth conversions. While Roth conversions should be on the checklist every year, this year there was a much greater chance of diminished income which may provide the opportunity to make Roth conversions in a lower marginal income tax bracket. In any year when income is much lower than it normally is, Roth conversions would be at the top of your mind. The deadline is December 31 and there are no extensions. While complex situations may benefit from professional consultations, anyone with mostly W2 income can find their tax brackets online. If your income has dropped from 22-24% to 10-12%, locking in a Roth conversation at that lower rate is effective tax planning. A Roth conversion is when you go into a traditional IRA account and convert it to a Roth IRA. This is a taxable event, but you are intentionally choosing it because you are in a lower tax bracket for the year rather than convert or withdraw funds in a letter year when your income is higher and the taxes will be higher. How much money should be converted to a Roth IRA? Sean says he has never encountered a client who has had too much money in a Roth IRA. While the action is irrevocable, there is no penalty for converting too much. If a portion of the conversation is taxed at 22%, it is not the most efficient conversion, but your future self will likely still be quite happy that you did it. Some employers allow for Roth conversions within their 401K plans. The deadlines for completing some of these end-of-year tax planning checklist times vary. Solo 401Ks and qualified business income tax deductions should be completed as soon as possible. In addition to Roth conversions, another item with a Dec 31 deadline is charitable contributions. Checklist items with an April 15 deadline are traditional IRA, Roth IRA, and health savings account contributions. A good rule of thumb is individual tax accounts have a tax return deadline, not an end-of-year deadline. The reason solo 401Ks have an "as soon as possible" deadline is that unlike IRAs, solo 401Ks require more time and paperwork to do. It may not be necessary to have it funded by Dec 31, but you'll want it set up and have a well-documented game plan. S-corps do have to fund the employee-side by the end of the year. The first item on Sean's checklist is charitable contributions. With that category are two options to consider, a donor-advised fund if you plan to itemize deductions this year, or regular year-end charitable contributions. If you don't plan on itemizing, in 2020 up to $300 per tax return make be taken as a charitable contribution against your adjusted gross income. Another checklist item to be completed by the year's end are small business expenses since they are deducted when paid for, not when accrued. Businesses who have had a good 2020 may want to accelerate these payments to get the deduction this year. While businesses that have struggled in 2020 may want to hold off making payments until 2021. In response to a question from Brad regarding credit cards, Sean confirmed that credit cards work on a cash basis so the deduction takes place in the same in which the credit card was used, not when the credit card bill was paid. Paying bills with a check becomes a little trickier as you may need to prove to the IRS that the check was written and mailed on a business day prior to Dec 31 even if the vendor does not deposit the check until January of the following year. A backdoor Roth IRA applies when your income is too high to contribute to a regular Roth IRA. If you've done a backdoor Roth IRA in 2020, don't roll over any 401Ks, 403Bs, or 457s into tractional IRAs before Dec 31, wait until Jan 1 so it's not complicated by the pro-rata rule. To clean your investments up before leveraging the backdoor Roth technique, try and roll traditional IRA accounts into a new employer's 401K plan. Then implement the backdoor Roth IRA which may be done by April 15. Sean has a blog post describing the process to get clean with traditional IRAs before doing a backdoor Roth IRA. Tax-gain and tax-loss harvesting are also both Dec 31 deadlines. The stocks need to be sold by the end of the year. With tax-loss harvesting, you may not repurchase those securities within 30 days before or after the sale to comply with the wash sale rule. If you're in the 12% marginal federal income tax rate or lower, the capital gains rate today is 0%. You may want to sell stocks to diversify your portfolio or sell and rebuy the same stock to realize the large capi

We're going back to basics and taking a deep dive into the Roth IRA and the levers, tools, and investing strategies available to investors. Although ChooseFI offers the free FI101 course, taking small actions are important. Get up to speed and start taking action with the free five-day challenge by going to ChooseFI/start. ChooseFI has presented basic investing strategies over the years and will revisit in the coming months to distill and hash out all of the different methods to understand the fundamentals. Many of the strategies have a lot of overlap starting with low-cost broad-based index funds. What they all share is a common-sense approach and simple investing strategy which is that time in the market is better than timing the market. Most traditional index funds are cap-weighted resulting in a higher percentage of money being invested in a few top companies. Rather than take a dogmatic approach to low-cost broad-based fund investing, it may require the application of scrutiny, being open-minded, intellectual honesty, and consideration. JL Collins helped open up Jonathan's eyes to the power of simplicity and helped give him the confidence to start doing better with his finances. But as the terms and concepts have become more familiar, other perspectives become visible, along with the pros and the cons, and the questions he's been able to ask have gotten better. The questions you have as you learn more are worth exploring to help build confidence in your plan. When investing, minimize fees as much as possible. Fees for buying and selling, expense ratios, and advisory fees are all negatively impact your long-term returns. We can learn new things and get rid of limiting beliefs. After a speculative real estate investment went poorly, Brad was afraid of real estate investing. However with some security, knowledge, and looking at it as a business, he has now invested in two single-family rentals which are doing well. Financial independence is not finances. It's not money, health, or time. It's all of it. It's making objective, fair-minded judgments about societal norms, seeking the truth, and making decisions in our best interests. Sean Mullaney is a big proponent of the Roth IRA and the possibility of using a Roth IRA as an emergency fund. Sean says that I all his years of practice, not one of his clients has ever had too much in Roth accounts. The advantage of the Roth IRA is flexibility. With a workplace 401k, your employer does not have to allow distributions and if they do, it is probably subject to penalties and taxes. In contrast, contributions may be withdrawn from a Roth IRA at any time, tax and penalty-free. In a world of uncertainty, you never know when you'll need access to these accounts, whether in an emergency or for early retirement. A Roth IRA can do double duty as an emergency fund and as retirement investing until a separate emergency fund can be established. Sean recommends reading the article on FItaxguy.com explaining Roth IRA Withdrawl and microlayers. Backdoor Roth IRAs are for high-income earners who do not qualify for regular Roth IRAs. Roth IRAs are funded with earned income up to an established limit outside of workplace retirement accounts. Roth IRA limitations for 2021 are a modified adjusted gross income of $198,000-208,000 for married couples and $125,00-140,000 for singles. For an emergency fund, only contributions that may be withdrawn from a Roth IRA. Over the course of contributing for many years, the balance should have grown, but only the contribution amount may be withdrawn tax and penalty-free. Roth IRA earnings may be withdrawn tax and penalty-free only if held in the Roth IRA for five years and you are 59 1/2. Contributions should really only be withdrawn for early retirement or in the event of an extreme emergency, not for minor emergency expenses as the money cannot be put back in. Sean says the same rule applies to health savings accounts. Leave the money in to grow tax and penalty-free because when you take it out, you stop the growth. Pay out-of-pocket instead and document the expenses to claim in the future when you really need the money. Brad and Jonathan scan their invoices into a Google drive. For those on the path to FI, unexpected expenses like a stained ankle are unfortunate events, not emergencies because FI puts you in a position of strength with additional options. This week's book winner is John, who negotiated a $100 per month rent discount by prepaying six months in advance using money saved for a future home down payment. The new location also allows John to bike to work saving on transportation costs. With this year being so tough for people, Jonathan thought back to an episode with Bradley, who made over $1 million in ten years with Salesforce. Intrigued by the conversation, he contacted Bradley again to see if his success was replicable. As a result, they built a training and job placement program and launched the Talent Stacker podcast. One of

As the ChooseFI community continues to grow, it's necessary to discuss some fundamental basics that serve the audience who are just getting started, as well as provide a refresher for those who have been on the path for a long time. In this episode, we revisit the magic of compound interest and investing for beginners. Getting to financial independence where work becomes optional and your investments are producing enough income to live off of for the rest of your life is easier when you understand why saving and investing now is important. Kimberly asked a question in the ChooseFI Facebook group requesting help understanding compound interest and the basic principles of a compound interest account. Investopedia states that interest may either be simple or compounded. Simple interest is based on the principal amount. In contrast, compound interest is based on the principal amount plus the interest that accumulates on it every period. For example, in a simple interest calculation, a deposit of $1,000 earning 10% interest each year would earn $100 in the first year, resulting in a balance of $1,100 in year one, $1,200 in year two, and $1,300 in year three. In a simple interest calculation, the interest percentage is not applied to the interest earned beyond the initial principal. The real world, however, works on compound interest, which is based on the principal amount and the interest that has accumulated. Using the same example of $1,000 in principal and 10% interest, after the first year, the balance is the same at $1,100, but in year two, interest is calculated on the new balance, resulting in $110 of interest and a new balance of $1,210 going into year 3. It starts small in the early years but really ramps up later on. Using simple interest, a $1,000 investment at 10% will have earned $4,500 (45 years x $100), for a total of $5,500. To illustrate why compound interest is often called the 8th wonder of the world, when using compound interest, that $1,000 investment at 10% grows to $72,890. The difference becomes even more apparent when using the example of $1,000,000 earning 10% simple interest versus $500,000 earning 10% compound interest. After 45 years, the simple interest balance grows to $5,500,000, while the smaller $500,000 principal grows to $36,500,000 with compound interest. When you don't spend everything you make and invest in compound interest vehicles, you can be well on your way to becoming a millionaire or multimillionaire. Einstein has been attributed with saying, "Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it…he who doesn't…pays it". The benefits of saving and investing are not limited to the end of the 45 year period. There are benefits all along the way. Compounding returns are always working in your favor, creating income that you don't need to work for anymore. It's rare to earn a high enough income to become wealthy, but saving reasonable amounts of money and investing it can bring wealth in an intermediate amount of time. Where does a beginner go to start investing and earning compound interest? There's usually no one there to hold our hands and walk us through the process. Based on a video Brad recorded for The Simple Startup discussion how credit cards aid him while other pay interest on them, one of the students asked how Brad figured out how banking works and not pay interest on his credit cards. Using a credit card is frictionless for Brad. Not only are there excellent fraud and theft protections when using a credit card, he very rarely has to pay any fees to use it and he also has until the end of the statement close, followed by the statement due date to pay it off, which can be weeks after the purchase was made. As long as you pay in-time and in-full each month, there are no fees or interest when using a credit card. It is effectively an interest-free loan from the credit card company making it a great tool for those who have their financial life in order. You don't need to be afraid of credit cards, you just need to understand how they work. Do not get one if you cannot pay your balance on-time and in-full. You can reduce the friction and schedule it to autopay on-time in-full each month. There are studies that show people who use credit cards tend to spend 12% more on average. That may be true, but it's likely not the same people who understand the power of compound interest. The FI community is focused on increasing our savings rate, paying ourselves first, and buying back our own time. If you value something spend lavishly on it. If you don't care about something, why are you going to spend your money on Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation ChooseFI's suite of financial calculators Learn ChooseFI's 3-card cashback strategy and earn $1,000 or more Get started on your path to financial independence at ChooseFI.com/start If You Want To Support ChooseFI: Earn $1,000 in cashback with ChooseFI's 3-card credit card strategy. Share FI

In a world of uncertainty, how can we future-proof our skillset and also create an environment to help our kids thrive as adults? Growing up, Brad never thought about entrepreneurship, but as he has gotten more into this FI mindset, the concept has shifted for him and how he is a model and mentor for his girls. While Brad initially thought virtual learning might not be good, he has reframed it and now believes his daughters will look back on this year as a time when they were living their best life. Both girls have gone through The Simple Startup workbook, but Molly seemed especially taken to it. After spending a day last week cleaning out one of Brad's garden beds in her free time at home, his daughter Molly and her friend have decided they would like to start up a landscaping business. It may be that you just need to see the framework and behavior model for entrepreneurship. The business idea may not be as important as understanding the framework for building a business as quickly as possible. Brad sat down with Molly to help her think her way through what it is she is capable of and really wants to offer with her business. Whether or not her gardening endeavor ever takes off is less important than the thought process they worked through which can help her out the next time she has a business idea. Having these conversations with your kids is a great way to connect and future-proof their lives. While the majority of people in the world will never become entrepreneurs, it's good to start thinking like an entrepreneur and have evidence of what you have skills you have built. The Simple Startup still has openings for the Winter Challenge. One student from a previous course is 9-year-old Analise, who while hesitant at first, ended up crushing it with her business, Creative Card Designs. The concept behind Creative Card Designs are fun personalized cards you would want to send to someone to say hello, thank you, or for occasions like birthdays. Analise hand draws each card. She has some designs that can be personalized but also takes design requests. Her business mission statement is: To connect people by making quality, personalized cards for different occasions. Keeping her business under control, so far Analise has sold two cards. She wants to make it bigger, but sometimes she messes up and burns through her materials just making one card. So she's trying to scale her business by going digital. This will allow the cards to still be personalized, but make it easier on her. After coming up with the idea, starting the business, and creating different designs, Analise has set up a website for online ordering which goes directly to her Gmail account. Currently, she's charging about $5 a card and making a $2 profit, but by going digital, it will be easier to make the cards and allow her to possibly drop her prices. Brad thinks Analise will be able to test out the price for her cards and find the perfect per card price. Analise's motivation for starting the business was to make money, but also thinks it's good to learn how to take control of your own things and not always have to work for someone else. Andrea, Analise's mother, says the business has been going well and that her daughter has enjoyed learning and adding to her knowledge base. Andrea appreciates that someone is providing support and guidance when they have these ideas. Analise didn't go into the class with the card idea in mind. she had several ideas she was torn between and sought feedback from Rob and her classmates before settling on the personalized card business. Her advice to other budding entrepreneurs is that you have to come up with an idea for something people actually want, as well as something that will be profitable. She says that if you have a business, don't give up too quickly, and you have to work hard at it if you want to be successful. Analise isn't too afraid of failure. After drawing designs and spending all her money on materials, she realized she needed to just figure out another way. Andrea says that she's seen her daughter develop a sense of enablement, that she can come up with an idea and watch it grow, and also learning to persist when things aren't always simple or easy. The Simple Startup instructor, Rob, modeled coming up with solutions to get past obstacles the students encountered. Learning isn't about reciting facts, but learning how to flex your creative muscle and problem-solve to get things done. Andrea says The Simple Startup Camp was much more of a value proposition than she had expected. Being virtual, it was low-pressure, but also comprehensive and detailed with all the aspects of what's required to run a business. Analise even went through a mind-mapping exercise to assess her strengths, resources, and likes to come with a business idea. Although some lessons were virtual, Analise was always an active participant. Students in the camp had Rob and each other to reach out to if they were stuck. It was like her

One of ChooseFI's most popular guests is back! Dominick Quartuccio returns to talk about after the shock of 2020, how to bounce back and what it looks like to design your life for next year. Brad's relationship with Dominick goes back to when they were in college together. After reconnecting several years ago, Dominick has become a source of inspiration and a mentor to Brad. In previous episodes, conversations with Dominick have centered around the idea of drift. It's the state of existence where we think we're making intentional decisions with our lives, but in reality, it is habits, patterns, unconscious beliefs, expectations, societal pressures, etc. that are really driving decisions. It's only when an outside force, normally a quite dramatic one, forces itself upon us that we wake up from that state of drift. For the first time in human history, the entire world is going through an experience together. It's caused everyone some sort of pain, whether it was losing a loved one, a financial loss, or anxiety. Most of us have gone through periods of suffering in the past that when we look back on them, those were the moments that made us into the person we are today, and given the choice, we wouldn't change them today. Instead of wishing to speed up 2020 and get it over with, Dominick encourages us to pause and look at the past year to see where you've been and highlight the standout moments. The purpose of this exercise is so that we can envision a 2021 that has the potential to be the most meaningful, fulfilling, and prosperous year of our lives. In his role as a leaser, Dominick has seen behind the curtain of people's personal lives and noticed a distinct difference between those who have an inner foundation of work leading up to the pandemic and those who have never done the work. Fortifying your inner foundation allows you to be strong and thrive if there are tougher times in the year ahead. There are two parts to the exercise of designing the next year of your life: looking back at the year you just had and looking forward to creating the year that you want. Dominick places inner work underneath the umbrella of personal development. Where personal development could be an external skill to better yourself, such as reading a book to learn a new skill that can be applied in the real world, inner work is oriented inward, like examining what lights you up. When the conditions of the outside world change, when you've done the inner work, you don't feel shaken and you are standing on something stable. We've experienced more emotional turmoil in the last year than any other, making it worthy of introspection. In the last year, what were some of the standout moments, both the highs and the lows, beginnings and endings, new and lost relationships or jobs, and the trials and tribulations? Start with going back and looking at your calendar. Looking at it will trigger memories of travel or meetings. Next, go through the photos you've taken. There may be some real standout moments you've forgotten recorded on your phone. Finally, review your journal or scroll through any notes you've taken to see what you were thinking, seeing, and what your attitude was. After looking back, begin looking for themes. Was it bringing your life back into balance, loss, finding love? This year Jonathan and his wife got on the same page of their work-life relationship and she's embraced the idea of building her talent stack which has helped them have a common direction in their marriage. COVID has allowed Jonathan to watch his kids as they grow and evolve into different people every week. He has also lost 20-30 pounds, winning a bet he made with himself on Healthy Wage. He embraced the idea of community and is doing weekly calls with his father and JD Roth. He watched the income for his business take a nosedive and then recover from working to build new lines of revenue. He also built two new businesses using skills acquired in the last four years. He says it was his best year ever. Dominick posed the question to Jonathan about how he would've handled the same downturn to his business if it had occurred three years ago. Jonathan said he's a completely different person now and doesn't know how he would have interacted with who he was three years ago. This year has proven he has grit, determination, and gets stronger during times of trouble. For Brad, he and his family did CrossFit together five days a week for months. His theme is togetherness and it wasn't limited to his immediate family. The mastermind group he belongs to with Dominick was part of it. He's also been able to see his parents more this year and had the time to spend talking with his daughter who was experiencing anxiety and trying to work her way through it. Brad thinks what was important about this year was being able to see the hard work of parenting come to fruition. Dominick mentions that during a normal year, these moments speed by. The pandemic has forced us to slow

ChooseFI Facebook Community Manager recently posted a meme that hit home with Brad. It said, "Plot twist: 2020 has actually been the best year of your life. You faced challenge after challenge, you've adapted, and you've overcome. 2020 has forced you to grow exponentially. Don't take that for granted." 2020 had been Jonathan's best year ever. Instead of giving in to fear, doubt, and insecurity, he decided to lean in. By being more intentional with the things that were important to him, like his health, Jonathan has lost 20 to 30 pounds and is in the best shape of his life. Jonathan also sought to build his personal talent stack and built two new businesses. He is feeling more agency and is more fulfilled than at any other point in his life. Previously, Jonathan's beliefs about himself were all based on external validation. But as he began to get more freedom and autonomy in his life, he began to question those beliefs and reclaim his identity statement. Learning that things such as student loan debt is good debt and you'll have to work until retirement age, just aren't true allowed him the space to challenge the status quo in other areas of his life. Initially, he even questioned whether the success of ChooseFI was the result of a random lightning strike of luck. However, he's taken his interest-led learning and skills he's learned, applied them to two new business models, and achieved success with them. The interest-led learning Brad and Jonathan frequently discuss on the show helped Jonathan lean in March, and it also lead Brad's eight-year-old daughter, Molly, to learn how to cook a perfect pan-seared chicken breast just like Gordon Ramsay. The things you believe about yourself become part of your identity statement. But you can turn the limiting beliefs around and say that you're the type of person who can learn anything. It may be just a Google or YouTube search away. You can reframe your identity by asking yourself what you want it to be. Though she isn't running now at nine months pregnant, part of MK's identity is that she is a runner. However, in high school, she was the slowest person on the team. She thought she couldn't do what the other's on the team were doing, but her coach didn't have the word "can't" in his vocabulary. His mindset is something she has carried through to other areas of her life. MK challenges you to take the word "can't" out of your vocabulary too because once you aren't allowed to use it, your mindset will shift and you can begin to redefine who you are. A case in point for the power of working to get 1% better was in the news last weekend when Chris Nikic became the first person with Down Syndrome to complete a grueling Ironman triathlon. Emblazoned across his shirt was his training mantra, "1% Better". You can make a choice every day to live your life a little bit better and when your finances are in orders, everything else gets a little bit easier. You make the choice not to deprive yourself by saving money, to empower yourself, and put yourself in a position where you have the freedom to think about all the other things that truly matter, like health, relationships, and spending time how you see fit. While it's about making a choice, if you don't get up off the couch and take action, nothing is going to get better. If you have a question you'd like to have answered on the show, submit them by going to ChooseFI.com/voicemail. Or reply to Brad's weekly email, The FI Weekly. Get on the list by going to ChooseFI.com/start. The first mailbag question this week comes from Sara who wants to know how to master financial independence when you don't have a 401K. Sara has been working through the podcasts and read, ChooseFI: Your Blueprint for Financial Independence, but her husband is a bartender and doesn't have a 401K. W-2 employees without access to a 401K could consider being an advocate and talking with their employer about getting a 401K like Waffles on Wednesday talked about when they were on the show. Just giving employees access to a 401K does not have to be cost-prohibitive and can be a win for both owners and employees of small businesses. It's important to remember there are no rules to FI. Just because others are talking about maxing out their 401K and then doing a Roth conversion ladder, doesn't mean that's what you have to do. Brad admits it wasn't until the last two years at his job before he maxed out his 401K contributions. The path to financial independence does not depend on a 401K. It's predicated on savings rate. The goal is to save that in the most-advantaged way possible. Between marginal tax brackets and child tax credits, it may be fie just putting money into a Roth IRA, which has a $6,000 limit this year. If you have your own side hustle, you have options for retirement accounts, like a SEP IRA or solo 401K. A SEP IRA is easy to set up through any major online brokerage firm and put in roughly 20% of your income. There are potentially even higher thresh

Optimize your finances during your 20s, no matter what your income is, and build significant wealth. But what are your options when working an entry-level job when you have a large amount of student loan debt? Amy's first job out of college was an entry-level position earning $30,000. By the age of 25 had a $100,000 net worth and has tripled her salary in the last few years by learning how to market herself. The average cost of a four-year college degree in 2019 is $122,000. Amy was fortunate that her parents paid for college and she graduated with degrees in Communications and International Relations without any student loan debt. She graduated without any job offers and her only source of income came from waitressing which wasn't enough to live in Boston on. After a couple of months, she contacted a temp agency and got a job earning $15 an hour. Nearing the end of college, she saw that recent graduates weren't getting the jobs they had hoped to get. She calls that time her "Year of Fear" because she didn't have much in savings and terrified of what was going to happen. For the rest of the year, she continued to work full time at her temp job and waitressing on the weekends. With the benefit of hindsight, she realizes she has an average amount of skills as anyone else coming out of college, which is inadequate for the realities of today. The ultimate goal of going to college is to graduate and get a well-paying job. But the focus is on grades and prerequisites, not how to find mentors, write a resume that resonates with people, or navigate the application process to get the jobs you actually want. The way the job application process works now is broken While there may not have been any skill Amy believes would have initially made landing a job easier, it would have helped to find people who agreed to meet and interview her in the first place. After submitting resume after resume to company websites and since times out of ten hearing nothing, Amy emphasizes flipping the script and having the companies and recruiters come to you. Amy was able to go from $30,000 to $93,000 a year by learning how to market herself on LinkedIn so that people found her. What makes you stand out and how can you improve your chances? The first step is to decide what it is that you want. If you are marketing to everybody, then you are marketing to nobody. Next, start looking at the job positions and titles that you want, study the job applications for those positions, the job requirements, descriptions, and language used. Using that verbiage in your resume or LinkedIn profile allows hiring managers to see that you are perfect for the role and HR departments who use algorithms to narrow down the prospects, which relies on keywords that your resume or profile will likely also have. It can be difficult to figure out what you want at the age of 20. Amy chose a degree in Communications because it could apply to almost anything she wanted. Though she says to figure out what it is you want, figuring out what you want for just the next couple of years is fine. You can always pivot, but you just need a direction for your resume. Employers don't generally look for someone well-rounded, instead, they are looking to fill a specific need. Show you can fill that need and you're more likely to be hired. The salary increase she received for her second job out of college was pushed by the recruiter Amy was working with who found her on LinkedIn. Amy continued to use the same tactics with her next move but added in extras that may not have been relevant, like her HTML skills. That one change opened the door with recruiters looking for marketers who also understood coding. Landing that job bumped her salary up to $86,000. Answering the question, "What do you do?", always results in a simple answer, like Marketing, not what you actually do or what skills you possess. When helping out a friend earlier this year with his resume, Amy noticed that the skills section of his resume didn't speak directly to his particular skill set for the jobs he wanted. You don't have to be world-class at anything, but with the right variety of skills, you can stand out because there are fewer people who have that intersection of skills. Earlier this year, Amy started her blog, We Want Guac, after looking at different finance blogs while trying to figure out what to do with her new and higher salary. Building the blog has continued to add to her talent stack. Amy says that in 2016 she was the ultimate cheapskate, attending events to take advantage of the free food, and ordering small items when eating out with friends. The salary increases enabled a shift in mindset from deprivation to one of abundance. Part of her mindset shift came out of creating a budget. Her budget didn't mean restricting herself from spending. Instead, the numbers showed her the limits could be more than she expected and it would be okay if she did spend more. It gave her permission to spend more on

Following US Election Day results, it's important to remember the alligators and kittens, a concept to approach overall mental wellbeing. The negative influences in life are alligators and all of the things that make life better are kittens. Focus on getting rid of the alligators. It's a human bias to focus on the negative. How do you focus time and attention on the things that make life better? For Brad, he cut watching the news out of his life which has helped him to achieve a better mental framework for life. The business model of the new is to keep you watching through the next commercial break. They cause anxiety. You can stay informed without being a part of that model. Control what you can control and you will be in a better financial position four years from now regardless of the election outcome. There is so much outside of our control right now and worrying about it isn't productive. Despite the number of people who are confident they know what will happen to the stock market as a result of the election, the fact is that we just don't know. Market uncertainty is one of the reasons to have a plan for your money regardless of what is going on and automate it. Not only is it difficult to try and time the market, but you need to get it right twice, both when you buy and when you sell. The FI community is about long-term thinking. It's not about quarterly earnings or even five-year trends, but performance over multiple decades and the decisions that will help get you to the wealthiest point over that time period. With that long-term thinking in mind and in a time of calm, it's a great time to write down your investor policy statement. Having a plan for your investments, written down in an investor policy statement helps you to avoid being reactionary or make rash decisions. In February, the Dow hit a high of 29,500. By March 20th, it had dropped 20-30% and many predicted it would go even lower. Defying the dire predictions, the Dow recovered 30-40% of its gains within a few months. The problem with making market predictions is that there are far too many variables for you to account for and again, you have to get it right twice. Even the professions are wrong 50% of the time. What chance do you have of making your investment decisions around emotion enough to stay solvent or long-term or outperform the market over the long-term? Essentially no chance. The highest likelihood of long-term financial success is to control the expenses on your investments. Low-cost index funds are going to be your best bet. Following your investor policy statement and injecting new money when you can benefits you with dollar-cost averaging. Time in the market is much more powerful than timing the market. ChooseFI listeners are creating space and making progress in their lives. Patty commuted to paying off debt within five years and just made her last payment, including more than $40,000 in credit card debt. Joe replied to Brad's email, The FI Weekly, Joe shared that he and his wife transferred his 403(b) from a high-fee broker to Vanguard and also started on their journey to earning travel rewards by opening a Chase Sapphire Preferred card. November 8th is the LAST CALL to apply for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card with its highest-ever bonus of 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points after spending $4,000 in the first three months. For more info, go to ChooseFI.com/CSP. Teachers are primarily the ones using 403(b)s, most of which are laden with really high fees and very few options. ChooseFI plans to have an episode in the coming months with Dan Otter discussing doing better with your 403(b). Crystal sent in a message saying that she had no idea about fees and was investing with Edward Jones. Her investments hadn't done much over the last five years and now she's educating herself, but the fees appear to be hidden. Since the market has done so well over that last five years, the reasons why Crystal hasn't made money are because she wasn't invested in a strategy that allowed her to keep up with the market or she was getting crushed by the fees. Brad says finding the expenses for his old company's 401k options was relatively easy. Included in the table of investment options, one of the columns listed expenses. Other titles may be expense ratio or expense percentage. The numbers may range from 1.50 to 0.03. Without a nicely organized table, you may need to look up the expense ratio by looking up the ticker symbol. A low-cost index fund investment strategy is simple and not complex enough to require help from a professional. In contrast, a complex investment plan is probably costing you a lot of money. With an actively-managed fund, a person, or team of people, are making decisions on what to buy and when to sell. Through the fees, you end up paying them for their time. And then the data shows that they aren't even keeping up with the market. The difference between expense ratios of 0.1% and 1.0% is tens of thousands to millions of do

Yanely grew up in a low-income household in Brooklyn and then attended Brown University. But by the time she graduated, she had accumulated a bunch of credit card debt that she was hiding from her family. She tried to figure out dealing with her debt on her own by reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos. After paying it off, she thought it was ridiculous she had never learned it in school and started her own YouTube channel to share her story. That eventually led to her landing the perfect job and a solid career path. Growing up, there wasn't a lot of money in Yanely's household, so there weren't many conversations about money either. When there was talk about money, it was always negative and caused tension. One thing that her father did teach her was to never have a loan or owe debt to a friend or family member and that she needed to always pay them back. Interestingly, that sense of obligation did not transfer over to institutional borrowing which she believes is a common mindset in neighborhoods like the one where she grew up. When Yanely was accepted to Brown University, she had no idea how expensive it was going to be. Although she received a full scholarship, she discovered she still need to purchase things such as textbooks, a laptop, and other supplies. Because her father taught her not to borrow money from anyone, she wanted to figure it out on her own and applied for her first credit card. She attributes her attempt to be resourceful using credit cards to a lack of financial literacy. She thought she was doing the right thing and on the right path at the time. Her payment history was good since always made the minimum payment and never missed a payment on her credit cards, but her credit utilization was high as she was always close to maxing out her card limits. With each credit card application, banks continued to give her credit cards with higher and higher credit card limits. Trying to keep up with the rich kid lifestyles of her classmates ended up getting her $15,000 in debt. Moving from a neighborhood filled with Caribbean immigrants to an elite university was a culture shock. Yanely felt like she didn't fit in because she didn't talk or act like her fellow students. Not understanding expressions and phrases others used made her feel dumb. Going from a top performing student in high school to feeling like being in the wrong pack may be part of the reason why it's physiologically difficult for low-income who attend prestigious universities. Yanely says the biggest thing a low-income student can do is expose themselves to the rigorous language and vocabulary that is going to be expected of you. Students are often not prepared for how much harder they will need to work, it ends up being a shock, and they go home. Approximately 2/3 of her credit card debt came from spending on just trying to keep up with her fellow students. Although there was no overt peer pressure, it was unspoken. Straight A's and scholarships are not enough. Students like Yanely need to have both academic and social grit to survive in an environment that is not in their comfort zone. Reading The Millionaire Nextdoor to help her figure out how to pay off the debt, she noticed the descriptions of poverty and generational poverty were describing the life she was living. She decided she was going to be the one to shift the trajectory of her family in terms of wealth. Yanely had a choice to make between continuing a pursuit to fit in and look good while racking up debt, or the alternate route of smashing her debt aggressively and begin to build wealth, breaking he cycle of poverty. The interviews of people who didn't come from wealth surprised her, opened her eyes, and completely shifted her mindset. She realized she was going to need to completely wipe her mental slate clean and start with new and fresh beliefs about money and how it works. Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, authors of The Millionaire Nextdoor devised a formula for determining if you are as wealthy as you should be. That formula is: Your Age multiplied by Your Annual Income (from all sources except inheritance) divided by 10 = Your Expected Net Worth Growing up in a neighborhood where spending to reflect success and social status was prevalent, Yanely understands the pressure and had never imagined there was a different route. Her beliefs were shaken to the core listening to interviews of self-made millionaires answer questions and discuss the strategic money decisions they made with a clear goal in mind. It opened her mind and made Yanely want to explore more. Despite FI not even being in her purview a handful of years ago, Yanely just hit Coast FI after beginning to maximize everything she was doing with her investments and prioritizing tax-efficient investments before even paying her rent. Yanely paid herself first. After learning more about 403bs, she determined her priority should be a Roth IRA. She then invested as much as sh

What's in your talent stack? Inspired by content discovered over the last four years while producing ChooseFI, Jonathan has spent the last couple of months hard at work on the side on a new passion project. As said many times here on the show, financial independence isn't about doing less, like sitting on a beach sipping cocktails. It's about aligning your what you value with your life and having the freedom to pursue what you are passionate about. ChooseFI has given Jonathan the opportunity to look at and do better with his personal finances, but it's also helped him realize that he loves to work hard, but not necessarily for a paycheck. He'll work twice as hard when it aligns with his interests, passions, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. While Jonathan has not reached FI, he does have all the benefits of it. FI is not binary because the benefits of FI start accruing from Day one. Time is your precious non-retable resource. You can stick your head in the sand and gut things out until reaching FI, or look around and see what other options we can create for ourselves that bring more joy, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. When you find that your ladder is leaning up against the wrong wall, you don't need to stick it to that commitment and grind it out for another 20 years. You don't need to wait for anyone to give you permission. You can pivot. One of the better messages to come out of the FI movement is that no matter what has happened, huge student loans, disastrous real estate deals drug addiction, or divorce, you can always move forward and make your life better. A life optimization strategy begins with financial security and gives you space for mastery and exploring new things. You don't need to be in the top 1% of anything. Just being better than average at a bunch of different things will open up opportunities. What does a high value, high return on investment, talent stack look like? Students coming out of college are ill-prepared for the way the world really works. The world wants to know what have you done and what can you do for it. What if you were to focus on the skills the world wants and is willing to pay a high salary for? And then very economically earn certificates stating that you can do this work? You can retain and earn these skills in a year or less. There are very few jobs that actually require a college degree. Through certificate programs, you can get jobs earning between $60,000 and $160,000 a year. Jonathan says if he were starting over, knowing what he knows now, this is what he would do. Jonathan has started another podcast, the Talent Stacker podcast. It's not for those set on going to college. It's for people looking to see what other choices are out there or who are unhappy with the choices they previously made and are looking for something different and don't have another four years to earn a degree. The Talent Stacker podcast does not just regurgitate information learned on previous ChooseFI podcast episodes. It helps you recreate what these other people have done step-by-step. The framework of the Talent Stacker podcast is based on a handful of different categories. The first is a time for money or a service role where you trade an hour of work doing something for a set hourly rate. The second category is sales, where you help make it easier for a current audience or customer base to make a purchase. Category three is marketing or expanding the current customer base. The fourth category is team development or leadership or bringing a team together to focus on target goals. The fifth category is systems, process, and workflow, helping teams to work more efficiently. In reality, many of these categories have overlap. If you can do a little bit of several of these, you can become what is called a Rainmaker. Jonathan recognizes how each of these skills has been used and added to his talent stack through the ChooseFI podcast. Building a talent stack is not just limited to business owners. It's a mindset about learning new things and how they can help make you a better person. Brad used his skills as a travel rewards enthusiast, along with his business-building skills and CPA degree to build a travel rewards coaching service. MK found success in her corporate career through choices like learning basic HTML to build her talent stack, which helped her to climb the ranks, and then eventually launch her own business. Her pregnancy has caused her to look at streamlining things and becoming more efficient to keep her passive income stream growing. Your real education doesn't start until you get the job. College merely proves to an employer that you know how to learn. Jonathan worked with Bradley Rice from Episode 117 to create an actual career development program in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that you can replicate in six months and make $60,000-80,000 a year, with a path to making $200,000 in 3-5 years. With four years of starting ChooseFI, Jonathan has become one of the top i

Your money story informs so much of your life even if you're not aware of it. For 30 years, Leisa Peterson has been researching and studying how trauma in early life contributes to the money challenges faced later in life. Growing up with a scarcity mindset, money became an escape that gave her motivation. Leisa decided in her mid-twenties that she was going to have money in her life and not have any stresses about it as her parents did. Earning money became an all-consuming response to the trauma she had experienced. There's a very broad spectrum of trauma from mild to quite serious and not everyone reacts to it in the same way. Some people like Leisa may end up wanting a lot of money, while others are lead to feeling like they have no control over money. An adverse childhood study from Kaiser was intended to understand how childhood trauma affected health. In Leisa's reading of the study, she found one of the findings included financial problems and realized this was something not a lot of people were talking about. These childhood experiences become very disruptive, brings an uncertainty to how life is viewed and crushed the sense of self. The concept of scarcity and uncertainty go together. This leads to struggling with either an extreme need to control or feeling out of control with money. Because kids are absorbing everything we say, it's important to change the language we use around money. When people become more familiar with their trauma backstory, they are better able to talk with their partner about their money challenges. Disconnects in communication can occur when each other's backstories are quite different. We can only know what we know from our own perspective. The job in relationships is not just to understand ourselves, but to see the other person and how they are approaching money differently because of their backstory. When people think of something as being scare in supply, they are going to buy more of it. Toilet paper is a relevant example of this for 2020. Someone coming from a home without enough money may have strange buying behaviors. Their idea of scarcity or uncertainty may be showing up in their daily behaviors with money. For spouses or partners who have different money stories, Leisa encourages them to just start somewhere. Think about how money was treated at home growing up and have a conversation about it. Questions to consider asking are: Did mom and dad talk about money? Did mom and dad fight about money? What is your first memory of money? When did you make your first money? How did that make you feel? Were you afraid? It can be difficult to have these conversations for the first time with another person. Journaling is a way to privately have them with yourself first. The first person you share these feelings with should be someone you trust and it may be someone other than your partner. Throughout her career, Leisa has found that people react to money very differently. The majority either hold it tightly or avoid control of it altogether, with a minority viewing it as a tool and are at peace with it. Having one strong fire in your life influences the way you think about money in life. The earlier the influence in life, the better. Parents sometimes joke or convey the wrong message about money. Leisa says it's important to go back and close the loop with children. In the FI community, we want our children to have the skills to take care of themselves and be financially independent, but is it possible for them to have too much abundance? Leisa says she wants to be very open about what goes on in their home, discuss their failures, and teach them the value of money and hard work. After reaching her goal of becoming a millionaire, Leisa made a massive change in her life. She and her husband sold it all and took a year off to travel with their son. The trip changed their entire approach to life. Previously, Leisa's family had been consumers of their money. After the trip, they took their nest egg, created investments where their money began working for them. A result of Leisa's drive to become a millionaire was that once achieved, people began to treat her differently. The outward display of wealth began to affect her friendships. It was then that Leisa realized the money was not all that important to her. Leisa's book, The Mindful Millionaire, tells these stories about our money experiences, our relationships with money, and how we can transform them into thinking about money as a tool. The key takeaway from this conversation is that words matter. It's important to think about the unintended consequences of the conversations we are having with our spouses, partners, and kids. Have humility in these conversations and be honest. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Build a better retirement plan today with NewRetirement ChooseFI Episode 246 Overcoming and Battling Financial Abuse Open a commission-free brokerage account with M1 Finance Get started on your own journey

Jonathan draws a parallel between the episode on Monday with professional poker player Annie Duke and hitting his weight loss goals. Finding himself well over his desired weight, Jonathan took a health challenge and has kept the weight off for six months making him a weightloss statistical abnormality. Where most people diet and get to a goal weight, because the effort was a diet, they end up regaining the weight. What Jonathan did was make a lifestyle change. Tying to the discussion with Annie Duke, Jonathan recognized that he couldn't control everything, made better decisions, and set himself up for more opportunities. All of it helped to increase the opportunity for luck to strike. Jonathan isn't alone in his endeavor. Through weekly accountability phone calls with his father and FI community member, JD Roth, they check in to ask if each has followed through with their goals for the week Their goals aren't all that strict but they are trying to be 1% more intentional with their decisions and look at their decision-making framework, watching for triggers, giving into them less often, and coming up with solutions to not be tempted. Brad notes the discipline equals freedom and that the framework Jonathan has created for himself makes everything easier and no longer requires willpower. The accountability and decision-making strategies Jonathan applied to his weightless journey can be used for virtually anything you want to achieve in life. Taking action and trying to be just 1% better what ChooseFI is all about. All of the small wins begin to add up, creating nothing but good, grows your gap, and continuous the virtuous circle. When we upgrade the quality of our decisions, the impact of them begins to compound and increases our probability of success. Brad discusses how 70-80% of the contestations he hears involve one of the three killers of happiness: sarcasm, complaining, and blaming. We can change our mindset and the locus of control to impact our future. He believes putting space between stimulus and control can have positive and compounding effects. As often mentioned on the show, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Those five have the greatest influence on your life and you don't want them to have those happiness killer characteristics. Be intentional with your five picks. Choose people who give you a path forward and will hold you accountable to the things you said were important to you. Brad and Jonathan discussed how the concept of resulting, pro and con lists, and infecting others with our opinions before asking for advice is not helpful when trying to make better decisions. As mentioned during Monday's episode, making better decisions requires depth and an understanding of probability and magnitude. A challenge for listeners is to write down the five people you spend the most time with and who have the most influence on you. Then write down that their characteristics are that make them a good fit for your top five. And finally, what are the ideal characteristics for people who would be influencing your decisions and where can you find them? The second exercise is to approach someone and ask for their opinion on something without prejudicing it first. Don't lead with what it is that you really want to do. Ask your question in a way that gets you additional information you maybe hadn't considered yet. The first win from the community comes from Jodie, a self-professed broke chick who found FI in 2016. Since then, she's doubled her salary, gotten out a debt, flipped a live-in property, paid off her card, got married, formed two business with her husband, quit her job, and hit $100,000 in investments. Congratulations on taking action and changing your life, Jodie! In response to Brad's weekly email, Evan writes about not shooting for FI with reckless urgency, but a thoughtful understanding of the use of money and how it can improve his life after breaking his finger required surgery. FI isn't about deprivation, but buying the things you value. While the world is slowly getting back to normal during the pandemic, John calls in sharing how his wife was able to pivot her events business, Escape Room Races. The pandemic killed her in-person events, but she was able to rebrand, and pivot to a virtual format which is bringing in tons of new virtual events and they just had their biggest month ever. Speaking of live events, previous ChooseFI guest, Christine, from episode 137, sent in a letter saying that at least 50 ChooseFI listeners have come to Nashville and taken her tour. Last Fall, one guest from New Zealand Brough five friends from all over the world after hearing about Christine's tour, A Little Local Flavor, on ChooseFI. She also has converted her friends into ChooseFI listeners. When you respond to Brad's weekly email and we read your win on the air, you will get one of the ChooseFI Publishing books. The first winner is Ahmed who wrote in to say he recently graduat

Annie Duke is a world champion poker player and author of Thinking in Bets, a book which makes the case for embracing uncertainty in our decision-making framework. In Annie's latest book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, she answers the question, what does a good decision-making process look like and how to incorporate that into your own life. The only way we can become better at making decisions is from our own experience, and our experience is going to be the outcomes of past decisions we've made. We need to understand the way in which knowing how something turned out can mess with our ability to figure out why. In a thought experiment concerning the 2015 Super Bowl between the Seahawks and the Patriots, Annie reviews a play called by Pete Carroll in the last seconds of the game. Though widely panned as the worst play called in Super Bowl history, Annie states that it's hard to evaluate the quality of the play called when we already know the outcome. Had the outcome of Pete Carroll's play been a touchdown, the reaction would have been the opposite. This phenomenon is called Resulting, where the quality of the result is attributed the quality of the decision. Reviewing the actual odds of the result of that specific play, Annie determines that Pete Carroll's decision was far from the worst play called of all time as there was only a 25 likelihood of that specific result. Annie applies what she's learned playing poker, specifically realizing that what you see happen doesn't change the decision that you make, to other aspects of life. The paradox of experience is that while we know we need all of these experiences to learn, we see how things unfold and we take our lessons for individual experiences, not in the aggregate. Poker has some surprising similarities to real life in that your outcome is a combination of luck and the quality of your decisions. The definition of luck is what you don't have control over. You cannot control your own luck. You can control the quality of the decisions you make and reduce the chance that luck has an influence that will turn out poorly for you. While we are all under the influence of luck, we are also very much under the influence of our own decisions. In our decision making, we should see the luck clearly and make the decisions that are more likely to advance our goals. Brad ties that to ChooseFI's philosophy of the aggravation of marginal gains and striving to do 1% better. We have a lot of cognitive bias that delude us into believing things are much more stable than they really are. COVID has torn that away from us. We are also feeling the effect of imperfect information. COVID is not a special case, it's just something we can't hide from the uncertainty. COVID does give us an opportunity to think about how to navigate uncertainty which will improve all decisions we make. A pro and con list has no dimensions to it, specifically missing are the magnitude of the payoff or how much will it advance or take away from your goal, and what is the probability of each con. These lists also amply biases you already have and can be gamed to reach a predetermined decision. With inside view thinking, our personal models create cognitive trenches. When new information comes in, we mold it into a model we already have rather than be objective. An outside view is what is true of the world. To try and avoid inside view thinking, we need to expose ourselves to different perspectives of corrective information. The foundation we base our decisions on is flimsy and full of inaccuracies. We should increase the probability that we collide with perspectives and information we don't know. It's okay to say you don't know very much and decide to get more information to become a better decision-maker. Making a good decision with one stock doesn't necessarily make you a good investor, you would have to look at all the decisions made with your portfolio. When getting to your outside view, it helps to get yourself into the future because it helps us look back on ourselves. We also need to realize that we tend to believe we are more likely to be successful than we actually are. It's helpful to think about all the ways in which you might fail. A pre-mortem is the idea that time travel and negative thinking will result in an outside view and lead to better decision making. A backcast is the opposite of a pre-mortem where you look at the luck and skills that lead to a positive outcome. To find groups of people to get the best opinions from, find people who are interested in finding what is true in the world, but by putting the framework in place, you can turn anybody into an amazing true-seeking pod. When seeking other's opinions, it's best not to divulge your own opinion beforehand. It results in one of three ways: it might show the other person's opinion is right, the truth may lie in the middle somewhere, or it may show your opinion is right and help you to understand it better. Ann

After 18 years of ownership, Brad says goodbye to his beloved Honda Civic, Golden Boy. When it comes to car ownership, ChooseFI often talks about only buying a new car every 15 years. Over a 45 year adult lifetime, the savings, when invested, can amount to almost $750,000 when compared to someone who leases or just manages a constant car payment. Although Brad wanted to keep the car, it had been having some mechanical issues and his family was no longer comfortable riding in it anymore. The impact it was having on Brad's family was not worth it. For his next vehicle, Brad opted for a 2013 Honda Civic rather than a brand new car. He purchased his new Civic through Caravana, the car vending machine business, who was selling Civics for roughly $3,000 less than CarMax. The buying process through Caravan was quick and streamlined. The car was delivered to his home and he spent approximately one-hour signing paperwork and finalizing documents. There are sweet spots when purchasing used vehicles. Although Brad's car is seven years old, after five years, cars have generally already depreciated at the fastest rate. If you are going to buy new, keep it forever. If you buy used, target 5-7 years old. Listener Oscar wrote into the show asking about Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) which hasn't been something that ChooseFI has discussed much in previous episodes. A HELOC is a revolving line of credit on your home where the equity you have in your home is used to secure it. For instance, a home worth $300,000 with a mortgage balance of $100,000 has $200,000 worth of equity. A HELOC allows homeowners to tap into the equity locked up in their homes. An advantage of using a home equity loan over other options for access to cash, like credit cards, is that the interest rate is often much lower, although it is a variable rate and can change. The interest rate on a HELOC may be in the 3-5% range versus 15-30% with credit cards. For homeowners who placed a sizable down payment on their home, whose home has appreciated, made extra payments, etc., a HELOC becomes a potential source of low-interest revolving credit. A HELOC is different from a home equity loan in that with a loan, the loan amount is deposited into your bank account and interest begins accruing immediately. A HELOC provides you with the ability to tap into the equity at any time, such as in the case of an emergency. No interest accrues until you decide to access the money. It gives you options if ever needed. Occasionally, HELOCs can be had for no closing costs. Considering that the process to apply and be approved for a HELOC can take weeks, it can be useful to have one in place so that it is already available if and when it is needed. Frequent guest and friend of ChooseFI, Big ERN, does not have an emergency fund. He believes that there is an opportunity cost to keeping 6 months of expenses in a liquid account that is likely earning every little in interest. In a thought experiment, he tried to envision a true emergency that he could not cover with credit cards or a HELOC. Those working to build an emergency fund before beginning to invest are potentially missing out on higher interest rates earned from investments. They might be better off investing their savings and using money from a HELOC to cover monthly expenses in an emergency rather than selling off investments or using high-interest credit cards. Jonathan mentioned that there are schemes to paying off a mortgage early using HELOCs and credit cards that people can learn about for a fee. Brad doesn't doubt that these might work, but it's too complex. There's no insider knowledge worth paying for. He doesn't believe these methods are any more beneficial than making additional principal payments to a traditional mortgage. Rather than a HELOC, Jonathan uses a margin loan through M1 Finance for a line of credit. He can borrow up to 40% of his invested assets with an interest rate of 2.75-3.5% and have the money in his account in minutes. Margin loans on investment accounts are lines of credit options for renters. Listener Alex wrote in with his win with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) and Health Savings Account (HSA). Listener Rachel wrote in saying that she has reached FI and didn't even know it. As a result, she was able to leave a toxic work environment in the middle of a pandemic and spend more time with her nice and nephew. FI wins read on the show win their choice of one of ChooseFI's books so keep them coming! Listeners Brian and Deb maxed out their 401Ks this week before their contracts ended to take full advantage of the company's match and on Oct 23 will officially be financially independent. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Learn about ChooseFi's 3-card $1,000 cashback credit card strategy ChooseFI Episode 022 The Ultimate Guide to the True Cost of Car Ownership Get a fantastic term life insurance policy at a fantastic price with PolicyGenius Earn a high-interest rate on your savin

Immigrating to the United States as a child, by early adulthood, Jully found herself caught up in our consumer culture and had acquired five figures worth of debt. After working to dig her way out and starting on her path to finical independence, she's become an advocate. Drawing from her experience, she now help Latinas become financial powerful through investing. At the age of four, Jully moved from the Dominican Republic to New York. Her extended family all began making the move as well, but as many immigrants to, they continued to send money and invest in their socioeconomic systems back home. For immigrants, investing in their home countries has multiple purposes. There is often an expectation that money will be sent home to support the family. Jully's father supported her grandmother by building her a new home and making sure she was taken care of. However, when the grandmother also immigrated to the US, the house back in the Dominican Republic was rented out and became the first property in a real estate portfolio. Immigrants have struggles that a typical American doesn't go through. Investing in real estate in their home countries helps connect them to their communities. However, Jully says immigrants tend to invest more in real estate than in the stock market. She shares the message that it is important to diversify their investments. When she started working for a non-profit at the age of 19, Jully began investing a 403b for the free money. That decision was criticized by her mother who felt retirement was a long way off and that it wasn't necessary because Americans receive Social Security. When her family first arrived in the US, they didn't speak the language. It was a lesson in how to figure things out in the moment and just survive. It took a couple of years before her father began thinking in an entrepreneurial way and on a bigger scale. He went from driving a taxi to starting a bodega business. The bodega enabled Jully to see both her parents work in that environment, build their business, send money home, and contribute to the community. The money lessons she learned from her parents were to be generous and give. But the reality was her father worked a lot to build their life and they didn't see him much. Had he invested more, perhaps they would have been able to see him more. Jully went to school for fashion merchandising and economics. When she got her first job, lifestyle inflation kicked in. Working in the fashion industry required looking good with the latest trends. After accumulating the debt, Jully realized that she was channeling her emotions with her shopping. She was both celebrating and consoling herself with shopping to the point where it became unhealthy. Thankfully she had continued to invest even when the debt was bringing her down. It wasn't until her father became ill that she realized the safety net she had in her parents won't always be there. At that point, she began working to pay off all her debt. Once debt-free, Jully increased her 401K investments to around 20%. Jully notes that when first entering the workforce, you feel that nothing can go wrong, or if it does, you'll just figure it out. But you have to start with the basics. You have to start with the foundation of an emergency fund. Credit card debt is subject to incredibly high-interest rates of 12-30%. With five figures of debt, the compound interest is working against you and it's hard to fig yourself out from under it. To get out from under her credit card debt, Jully had to make significant payments toward it. The key was knowing her survival number. She created a simple chart with eight categories of things you need to come up with a survival number. The categories include housing, food, transportation, and even entertainment. Jully's survival number is $581. The items in her $581 figure are the absolute minimum things she needs to survive and keep her life sane. The reason she can keep her number so low is by house hacking her four-bedroom apartment. With master leasing, she is responsible for the rent each month, but she then uses sub-leases to rent out rooms. She uses Craigslist to market the rooms for lease in her apartment and thinks it is important to find people with similar lifestyles and working schedules which creates a good co-habiting space for everyone. After paying off her debt in 2016, Jully felt an incredible sense of freedom, quit her corporate job, and went to work for herself. She has been inspired and motivated by the financial independence community to use her platform, Investing Latina, to provide resources and stories, to inspire others to do more, increase financial stability, and reach financial independence. Given the struggles that her family faced when they first arrived in this country, Jully speak about building credit and establishing yourself. Jully's conversations with new immigrants start her three pillars, building credit, investing in the stock market, and real estate.

In our eighth Households of FI touchpoint episodes, Kristi was successfully following the standard path with a six-figure job and keeping up with the Joneses but waiting to take a breath and enjoy life. After finding FI, she realized the money was no longer the goal but simply a tool. Kristi has been connected with Big ERN, from Early Retirement Now, and over several conversations, they discuss Employee Stock Purchase Plans, 401K contribution strategies, the phase of retirement, and more. While wealth accumulation is simple math, decumulation is more complicated so Big ERN created the ultimate safe withdrawal rate series. Some recent changes Kristi has made to her investments since starting her path to FI are moving from a Roth 401K to a traditional 401K and maxing her contributions out. She also moved her current balance and future contributions out of target retirement date fund and into an S&P 500 fund. While Kristi has the option to self-manage her 401K in a Schwab account which would give her access to a total stock market fund, Big ERN doesn't believe that the difference between it and an S&P 500 fund is minor. Expense ratios are a more important consideration. Moving from a 0.2% expense ratio to a 0.02% might be worthwhile, but leaving the money where it is fine when the difference is 0.01% unless it is an in-kind transfer or a quick process. Human Resources may know how long the process is likely to take. Kristi approached her HR department about making after-tax contributions so that she could do a mega-backdoor Roth conversion, but the HR department was not clear on how much she would be allowed to contribute. She found the ChooseFI community to be quite helpful for bouncing ideas off of. She's also interested in her company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). The advantage of it is that she can purchase stock at a 15% discount, but she will pay taxes on the discount and be required to hold the stock for two years. Such a purchase gives her investment a 5% per year boost, however, there's no diversification in purchasing company stock. Kristi's income, bonuses, and employment are all already tied to her company. That being said, Being ERN says he would probably still do the ESPP, although he would only keep two year's worth of money in the plan and then pull it out. After taking it out, it will be subject to long-term capital gains. The ESPP may have contribution limits, in which case she should make the additional contributions to her 401K and then do the backdoor Roth conversions. Big ERN likes to say don't let the tail wag the dog, meaning that asset allocation and expected returns should be the primary concern before tax considerations. Kristi has a difficult time determining exactly how much to contribute as her company does it by percentage and how bonuses are paid out. If she overshoots it, she could miss out on the company match in the last month of two of the year. Big ERN says some companies will do a true-up, or another HR term, where they will still contribute the match. Some who have access to a true-up prefer to contribute the maximum to their 401K at the beginning of the year so that their money is in the market longer. Those without a true-up need to be careful. Big ERN suggested Kristi could look at the minimum and maximum of her salary and bonuses to come up with a range. $19,500 divided by her maximum would give her a rough percentage to start the year with. Toward the end of the year, she will need to look at it again and make adjustments. Kristi also asked about Big ERN's thoughts on the stages of retirement, but she is most interested in the early retirement phase. Retirement is an uneven path. Health expenses may be higher before Medicare kicks in and there will be a boost of income once Social Security is received. How do you structure your withdrawals? What are the tax aspects? Which accounts do you tap into first? And what should the assist allocation be? Big ERN doesn't recommend 100% equities for people in retirement. 75% stocks and 25% bonds is a better allocation. Kristi will likely have to rely on more than just her taxable accounts during the early retirement phase. She could tap into her Roth IRA accounts as well which may get her to 59 1/2 when she could then begin withdrawals from her 401K tax and penalty-free. It's best to spread the tax liability as equally as you can due to our progressive tax system. Although trying to optimize taxes is important, safe withdrawal rate and asset allocation are significantly more so. Not all of the withdrawals in retirement are taxable. Some of the withdraw money is principal, which taxes were already paid on. Good tax planning versus alright tax planning in retirement probably doesn't make a significant difference. Kristi was also curious about when contributing to taxable accounts might be advantageous over continuing to fund retirement accounts for those who want to retire early. Big ERN thinks what there are cases when i

Brad has been taking part in a mastermind group and teaching its members about financial independence. While they understood the "Why of FI", how to get started wasn't as clear. The Back to Basics series of episodes covers just that, how to get started on the path to FI. The journey to financial independence is not about deprivation. It is about a life of personal choice and abundance. Its starts with understanding your "why" and then setting goals for the next 5, 10, or 15 years. There's a difference between the money you need to pay bills and meet basic needs and discretionary spending. Understanding how much your lifestyle costs is the first step. It can be psychologically difficult to do this first step. It may reveal mistakes, but it's important to be honest with yourself and not beat yourself up over them. We all make mistakes. After knowing what your life costs, what comes next? To calculate your FI number based on your current lifestyle, multiply your monthly expenses by 12 to get your annual expenses. This is how much money you will need each and every year in retirement to cover your expenses. The 4% Rule of Thumb suggests that you can withdraw 4% from your total assets each year to live on and reasonably expect the money to last for the remainder of your life. For example, if you have $1 million in assets, 4% of it is $40,000 that you could withdraw each year. The 4% withdraw rate is adjusted for inflation. To get to your FI number, multiply your annual expenses by 25. $40,000 multiplied by 25 is $1 million. $80,000 in annual expenses, multiplied by 25, results in a FI number of $2 million. Whether starting with a net worth of zero or with some assets, the next step would be determining your current path to your FI number. The point of saving money is not for it to be finally used for a retirement far off in the future. Save to reclaim decades of your life when you can spend time as you see fit. Reframing the goal of saving allows you to reorient and see that saving money is investing in your time. One of the reasons Brad and Jonathan enjoy board games so much may have parallels with financial independence. Both involve iteration and getting better and better at making smarter decisions through gamification. People who win games the most have an intermediate mindset. They understand the limitations balanced with longterm thinking. When looking at income, what is the bare minimum needed to cover your expenses? For a married couple living in Virginia spending $80,000 a year on expenses, they will need to earn an income of $102,000 before taxes and without contributing to savings or retirement. They would pay $9,000 in federal taxes, $5,000 in state taxes, and roughly $8,000 in FICA (social security and medicare taxes), for a total of $22,000 in taxes. When income and expenses are exactly the same, you can never afford to retire. How do you create some space between the two? Expenses are not always fixed. Cars loans come to the end of their terms and student loans are paid off. Add in some cuts to a few other line items in your budget and you might find an extra $1,000. How might that change things? Cutting $1,000 from your monthly expenses reduces your annual expenses and subsequently your FI number by a whopping $300,000. What should you do with that extra $1,000 a month? Putting that savings into a 401K allows that money to begin working for you. In addition, the $1,000 a month going into a 401K becomes a tax deduction and reduces your federal income tax. For the couple in the previous example earning $102,000 per year and bringing home $80,000 after taxes, contributing $12,000 to a 401K doesn't mean they have $12,000 less to spend. With the tax advantages of contributing to a 401K, they will bring home $70,000, only reducing their take-home pay by $10,000. They saved $2,000 in taxes. Since they already have enough money to meet their expenses, that extra $2,000 saved in taxes could go toward a Roth IRA. Part 3 in the Back to Basics series will talk about optimization on both the income and expenses side of things. Our hypothetical couple, starting with a zero net worth, after investing $1,167 a month (totaling $14,000 per year) at an average 8% rate of return, will hit their FI number of $1.7 million in 30 years. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION ChooseFI Episode 257 Back to Basics: Getting Started With FI Part 1 ChooseFI Episode 132R Insurance | A Framework Easily compare and buy life insurance with PolicyGenius Get started on Fundrise with no advisory fees for 90 days Smartasset.com ChooseFI's financial calculators Learn how to get started on your path to financial independence at ChooseFI.com/start IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT CHOOSEFI: Share FI by sending a friend ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence.

In this ChooseFI Back to Basics episode, we review Health Savings Accounts (HSA). What happens when you need to finally pull money out after funding it year after year? ChooseFI Chief Content Officer, MK, is just weeks away from having her baby. For years, she and her husband, Jason, have been funding separate HSA accounts without making any withdrawals. They now contribute to a family plan HSA and decided it was a good time to test out how complicated the process was to withdraw HSA funds. They discovered some plans are easier than others. The process of withdrawing funds from the fund MK had rolled over to Fidelity was super easy. Jason's was a bit more tricky due to the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPPA) compliance laws and auto-reinvest settings. Now that they tested it out, they feel confident they will know what to do in the future. An HSA is a type of investment vehicle that gives you a tax deduction in the current year and helps pay for healthcare-related expenses. Only those participating in qualified in high-deductible healthcare plans are eligible for HSAs. For 2020, the IRS defines a high-deductible plan as one with a deductible of $1,400 for an individual, or $2,800 for a family. the maximum a family may contribute in 2020 is $7,100, and half of that for an individual. The money going into the account isn't subject to income tax and sits in the HSA account until you submit for reimbursement of healthcare expenses. HSA withdrawals for healthcare expenses are also tax-free.The benefit of an HSA is that the money can build and grow over time. Healthcare expenses do not need to be submitted for reimbursement as they are incurred. HSA participants can pay out-of-pocket and wait for years before requesting reimbursement if they choose to. The IRS criteria dos state that the high-deductible plan must be a qualified plan. Check with your company's human resources department to determine if your plan is a qualified one. HSA participants should also understand who their plan is with, what investment options they have, and what the fees are. Based on fees, Fidelity and Lively are two good providers who offer low-cost, board-based investment fund options. The goal is to cash flow medical expenses in your younger years when they are generally lower, funding the HSA with pre-tax dollars and allow them to grow until later in life when healthcare costs begin to increase. There may be additional tax benefits from using your employer's HSA provider rather than Fidelity or Lively. Because you can submit for reimbursement years after the expense was incurred, save your receipts. Brad has a Google doc that lists all of the healthcare expenses he pays out-of-pocket and saves a pdf of the receipt in his Google Drive account. Even if your provider offers a way to upload receipts, you should always maintain your own records and only use the provider's system as a secondary backup. If you change HSA, you could lose your receipts. It is your responsibility to verify to the IRS that you've been using the funds in the HSA appropriately. It makes it easier if you have all of that information maintained in your own cloud-based account. After several years or decades of cash-flowing healthcare, it may be possible to have tens of thousands of dollars of reimbursable expenses that are accessible anytime, tax, and penalty-free whenever it is needed. The final episode in round one of the Households of FI series airs next week. Throughout this series, ChooseFI follows eight diverse households at different points on their path to FI. More exciting news for ChooseFi is the website redesign, expected to launch in the coming weeks. The new website format was designed with your experience and journey to financial independence in mind. The content on the site has been curated so that people looking for specific content can easily find what they are looking for. If you would like to receive a notification when the new website has been launched, go to ChooseFI.com/subscribe and an email will be sent to you when it's ready. Brad recently gave a presentation to Dominick Quartuccio's Do Inner Work mastermind group on the Why of FI. Though people seemed to understand the why of FI, there were questions regarding how to get to FI. How does someone go about getting started? It starts with visualizing where you want to be in 10-15 years, what your goals, and what kind of options you'd like to have. If Brad were to go back to when he began his journey, he would have said that there's got to be more to life than what he's experiencing. Life was comfortable, but it felt like Groundhog Day. He could see himself doing it for the rest of his life. The second task when starting on the path to FI is to take an assessment of what your life actually costs. What you earn minus what you spend, equals the gap, or the amount of money you have left to work with. Adding up your structural expenses, recurring monthly bills, unplanned expense

How can you recognize the value in the secondhand market, begin optimizing a strategy, and turn it into income? Today's guests, Rob and Melissa Stephenson, the Flea Market Flippers, have built a six-figure business flipping the bargains they find. Rob spent weekends as a child with his parents visiting yard sales. They bought items and then listed them for sale to a bigger market using the newspaper classified section. Rob followed in their footsteps, flipping items as another side job without realizing the full potential of it. Selling used items is no longer a local market. With the launch sites like eBay with 181 million users, the whole world becomes the market. Rob and Melissa's business model capitalizes on larger items, such as commercial exercise equipment or restaurant equipment. They find the items locally from establishments going out of business. They look for the higher retail items which will make them a lot of money. It helps them to work less and make more profit. From their 89 sales last year, they made $80,000. For example, over the summer, they found a 40-inch range that retailed for $4,500. They bought it for $200, brought it home, then sold on eBay for $2,800. Over the last five years, Rob and Melissa have honed their freight skills and can ship very large and heavy items for reasonable prices. While they have become comfortable shipping large items, Rob and Melissa want people to start where they are at. Start with the items in your house, learn the system, how to take photos, how to sell on eBay to slowly build your confidence. The majority of the time, they research an item before buying it. Some things do sell quickly, but other items need time for the right buyer to find them before they sell. There are skill sets involved that make flipping items work: finding the deals, researching prices, making offers, marketing, taking good photos, and shipping. However, Melissa says it's actually a really simple business. There are lots of options for finding items, but Rob's favorite apps are Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp. He will scroll through them for ten minutes while sitting in his LazyBoy at night. There are fewer risks than there were several years ago. Smartphones have made it possible to jump onto eBay to check everything for the last 30-60 days that has sold. It's similar to the MLS with the housing market and looking for comparable properties that recently sold. If you can't find it on eBay, a good rule of thumb for items in good condition is 50% off retail. They no longer do many actions on eBay, opting for Buy It Now and listing for the price they want. Since you can see what an item has sold for the in past, if you want to sell it quickly you can just price it a little bit lower than that. Rob and Melissa sell 85% of their items on eBay and the rest on Facebook Marketplace. They usually cross-post items but eBay is consistently a winner. Fees on eBay are 13%. PayPal processing is 3% and 10% goes to eBay. They believe the opportunity to sell to a larger audience is worth the fee. Taking good pictures is important, with clean photos and nothing in the background. Fancy photography equipment isn't required. They still use their iPhones for everything. Since eBay allows up to 12 photos, you should use all 12 photos. The title for the item is the most important since eBay is essentially a search engine and the searches will come up on Google too. Descriptions are less important and Rob likes to underpromise and overdeliver so people have realistic expectations. Since they already have a good idea of how much it going to cost, they build it into the item cost and offer free shipping. It helps items to sell more quickly and reduce emailing back and forth with the buyer. Rob and Melissa love what they do and already feel like they are retired even if they haven't hit their FI number. Rob spend about 20-25 hours a week on their flipping business. They both like to travel and have a goal of being able to pay for the trip by flipping while on the road. Flipping is something Rob and Melissa are so passionate about that they teach a course. They have two groups they've been teaching, one with no experience flipping, and another group of experienced flippers looking to go freight. Rob and Melissa offer a webinar, which can be found at ChooseFI.com/flip, and a paid course. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Get an increased bonus of 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points with the Chase Sapphire Preferred Improve your writing skills and get a 20% discount on Grammarly Premium Check out Rob and Melissa's webinar IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT CHOOSEFI: Share FI by sending a friend ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence.

Picking back up with the Household of FI series, Vivian is a single mom who found FI in the last year, but initially, it seemed impossible. It wasn't until she was introduced to the ChooseFI podcast and saw real people reaching financial independence that she believed she could do it too. Vivian has been dealing with a number of challenges: a cancer diagnosis, a child custody battle, and caring for parents who have no savings of their own. As a pharmacist, she earns a significant income. She's already managed to pay off $300,000 in student loans in six years and believes she can save $60,000 a year. Vivian has been paired with mentor, Leslie Tayne, also a single mom and attorney who helps people with debt relief. Leslie acknowledges that what Vivian is going through with her separation is one the most challenging times in her life and it is a very emotional experience along with being financially damaging. However, there is a light on the other side and she will come out with more freedom and more control. Because her significant other's mom used to watch her child while she was a work, childcare is a challenge right now. Childcare is expensive and not something you can find discounts on. As an attorney, Leslie helps her clients to fix their financial messes without judgment. She doesn't believe in a debt-free life since life has its ups and downs. Instead, it's okay if being debt-free is not realistic. We should learn to embrace our debt but what is important is how you manage the debt. Due to the separation, Vivian will be selling the house that is entirely in her name. If she makes a profit, she should talk to her tax preparer about qualifying for a capital gains exemption. Vivian is also interested in ways to save for her child's college education to which Leslie offers several options: contributing to a 529 plan, a state pre-pay program, or a regular savings account. There are tax advantages to contributing to a 529 plan over a savings account and should Vivian's child decide to not go to school, the money in the 529 plan may be used for grandchildren or withdrawn with earnings taxed at regular income tax rates. The Texas pre-pay option would allow Vivian to lock in current undergraduate tuition rates and required fees. When it comes to budgeting for groceries, Leslie says that her family mostly eats at home and orders out just once a week. One trick to not overspending at the grocery store is not to take the children with you, shop with a list, don't allow yourself to get distracted, and buy non-perishables in bulk. When you have no choice but to bring your child with you, you can allow them to pick one item so that they can pick something they want without filling your cart with everything they want. It limits your financial exposure when shopping. While eating out, rather than order a kid's meal, share bites of your own meal, and develop a taste for adult foods. Vivian's daughter is not yet attending pre-K schooling, due to the virus but may be able to find reasonably-priced options that give her the option to socialize. Because her significant other has not been cooperative during their separation, all of the attorney costs and other fees have gotten be very expensive. Vivian needs to be as cooperative as possible to limit her financial exposure. Leslie says a good piece of advice is don't marry or get involved with anyone you don't want to be divorced from. It's often advisable to keep finances separate in a relationship and protect any assets with a prenup or postnup because it is very tricky to untangle them should the relationship end. Everyone should look at what deciding to combine finances in a relationship really means and how it impacts things. Brad reviewed the capital gains tax question and said because Vivian has lived there for at least two of the last five years, she would be eligible for up to $250,000 in capital gains tax exclusion. The decisions being made should be ones that will make life better over the long-term. Brad's goal is to set the groundwork for a successful life. Jonathan notes that Vivian doesn't appear to have an issue with her savings rate, instead, she may be at risk of slipping into a deprivation state. To fight this urge, Brad believes we need to have a better idea of what the path looks like for her. As ChooseFI follows Vivian during this study, she will need to better understand her expenses and her FI number. She needs to have a sense of where she is to know where she is going. ChooseFI recognizes that some audience members are just finding and joining us now. ChooseFI is building out a curated path to help you figure out where you are and what information will serve you best. Sign up to receive this information and more at ChooseFI.com/start. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION ChooseFI Episode 155 FI for Single Parents The Tayne Law Group Compare life insurance policies with Policygenius Get 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points with the Chase Sapphire Pref

Building a business online has never been easier than right now, but Corbett Barr was forging his path in the early 2000s when it was hard. We're diving into his origin story to learn what gave him motivation and why he believed entrepreneurship was for him. Working as a consultant in Fortune 500 companies, Corbett had the kind of job a lot of people really wanted and could build a career around. Though he wasn't aware of financial independence at the time, he didn't want to climb the ladder only to find it had been leaning up against the wrong wall. Unhappy with his career, he was nudged toward entrepreneurship but was scared to take the leap until a friend asked if he wanted to become involved in a new project, which he was able to do without risking any of his own money. In his early 20s, Corbett was furloughed from his job during the 2000-01 financial crisis. During his efforts to stay afloat, he was ashamed and learned how important it is to save as much as possible. His savings gave him enough of a cushion to last a year or so in order to find out if he had what it takes to be an entrepreneur. His picture of entrepreneurship at the time was working yourself to the bone, sleeping under your desk, and hitting a home run before earning a bunch of money and doing whatever he wanted. But he found that he still had a host people he still needed to answer to and felt even more trapped than if he were an employee. After putting in so much time, effort, and money, it was painful to realize he didn't have much to show for it. But after having a taste of entrepreneurship, it was hard to imagine going back. Rather than jump into another project, Corbett and his wife took an eight-month sabbatical in Mexico to clear his head, reset and pivot. The Mexican sabbatical allowed him to put some space between himself and the friends, family, and San Francisco venture capitalists influencing his life to see that something else was possible. It was around that time he discovered concepts of location, independence, lifestyle design, and digital nomads. He realized that perhaps what he wanted wasn't to be wealthy, but instead to have enough time and control to do the things he wanted, like working on the things he wanted or spending time with friends and family. When discussing the dark side of entrepreneurship, Corbett says we don't often see the path of destructions can leave in people's lives. However, it has become much more democratized in recent years where you don't have to take investment money or big-name advertisers. It allows you to really be in control and think about how you go about doing it. Though he originally envisioned building a product and then finding customers who wanted it, he decided to go with an audience first business where he would find customers who wanted a product he would then build for them. An audience first strategy ends up taking a lot of the risk out of things. In the beginning stages of entrepreneurship, it's all about finding your topic and what you are going o building toward. It's good to jump into something you are interested in and can become good at. It can take experimentation and doesn't necessarily come overnight. Something that Corbett teaches is "minimum viable income" where you cut back all of the fat. Though he jumped in with both feet and lived off savings, people like Brad did things on the side. And adding an extra thousand or two in income through a side project, it can change the entire trajectory in terms of FI. Some of Corbett's observations about working for yourself are: you have no one to blame but you, when you work for yourself, you don't have to worry about a new boss, you decide when you work and when you don't, no pointless, actionless meetings, no cubicles, and the coffee is amazing. When living a nomadic lifestyle, Corbett and his wife consider the total annual cost of their home base, including any rent they might receive back. Some locations are better than others, so you may need to get creative about it. In 2009, when Corbett began building his audience first business, he began with free ebooks on affiliate marketing, followed by an online course, and then another, and another. He began to realize that he wanted to layer coaching and community on it. He's been doing that through Fizzle since 2012, along with a podcast. Free consultations are a great way to understand what questions your audience has and then build it into your product. There are ways to ease into charging for the product you are creating to find out if it's viable. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Quickly and securely send money to people with PayPal Get a $75 credit to boost your job posting on Indeed.com Wondering what it would look like to make work optional? Go back through the ChooseFI archives or visit ChooseFI.com/start IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT CHOOSEFI: Share FI by sending a friend ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence.

Going back to the basics of ChooseFI being a crowdsourced show, Brad and Jonathan address what's going on in the FI community with a wild card Friday episode. Why revisit content that's already been discussed? After several years of introducing new ideas, the ChooseFI audience may be in a different place financially and ready for a refresher on some of the more advanced concepts presented earlier in the show's history. And newer listeners may not have combed through the archives and missed out on topics relevant to their situation. This episode back to basics provides an orientation of what ChooseFI hopes to deliver. Goals for the podcast are to introduce a new idea or story during the Monday episode. But not every strategy or tactic works for everyone. Friday's Roundup episode looks at that idea from different perspectives, incorporates audience feedback, and seeks to answer additional questions. The FI Weekly is the email Brad sends out every Tuesday where he provides subscribers with ideas to ponder, inspire, and motivate people on their own journey and shares what actions he is taking to make his life a little bit better. Opt in to receive Brad's email, The FI Weekly, at ChooseFI.com/start. Financial independence means different things to different people. For Jonathan, it means he has options allowing him to choose what he does during the best years of his life. For Brad, it means freedom, giving him the ability to live life on his terms, spending time with his family. Pursuing financial independence doesn't mean living a life of deprivation. It's about choice. No one should tell you how to spend your time, your freedom, or what to spend your money on. You have the freedom to spend money on an expensive car if you choose, as long as you understand the impact of that decision. It's not even about being at financial independence or not. Simply being on the path to FI gives you options. Whether you're in a toxic situation at work or want to pursue a passion project, just working toward FI gives you options those on the standard path cannot afford to take. Sharing stories from the community and discussing the decisions they have made broadens and brings to light the scope of options available to the variety of personal challenges you may have. The pursuit of financial independence is not necessarily about hitting that FI number. It's a life optimization strategy. If you are working in a low-wage job and don't see the path, you can be trained in a new industry and be making $60-80K within six months. Check out the Talent Stacker podcast. Shane recently posted in the ChooseFI Facebook Group, "I'm a recent college graduate, 23 years old. What advice would you give yourself when you were my age regarding investments, retirement/401K, and student loans? I want to invest, but I also have about $30,000 worth of student debt, but I'm only making around $41,000 a year." Brad notes that a lot of people like Shane are looking for tips or special advice that will get them to financial success, but that there's nothing complex about it. It comes down to savings rate and time. Increasing savings rate is easier when you reduce your structural expenses. If your life doesn't cost much, you can increase your savings. When first starting out, Brad and Laura weren't making high salaries, but they set themselves up for success by moving to a city with a lower cost of living, purchased a home with a reasonable mortgage, and have driven the same car since 2003. These choices allowed them to have a 50% savings rate and meant if Laura decided to stop working once they had kids, they would be fine. Brad and Laura became wealthy because they didn't care about looking wealthy. With some quick math, Jonathan calculates for Shane to have a 50% savings rate, his monthly expenses will need to be $1,700 a month. With a mortgage and expensive car payment, that may be difficult. He might do well trying something like house hacking. Shane could purchase 4 bedroom house, rent out rooms to friends and cut his housing expenses down to $300 a month. 40% of most people's expenses go to housing and transportation. Optimizing in just those two high-cost areas can make a huge difference in your savings rate. Anchoring yourself to a food budget of $2 per person per meal per day in another way to reduce a major expense category. Laura sits down once a week to plan out several meals for the week, making enough to have as leftovers on a second night. The meals she cooks average that $2 per person per meal goal which helps them save over $1,000 on eating out and picking up convenience foods at the grocery store. A rough target for housing expenses is 25% of your take home pay. For investing, Brad recommends Shane begin with low-cost index fund investing and JL Collins' book The Simple Path to Wealth. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Build your plan NewRetirement Sign up to get The FI Weekly delivered to your inbox every Tuesday! Switch to Mint

Everyone's path to FI is going to look a little bit different and there is so much we can learn from each other. Hoping to inspire and share lessons learned through conversations with community members, Brad and Jonathan speak with Julia Harder, an active duty member of the Coast Guard, is already well on her path to FI. Always a natural saver, Julia was influenced by her dad, who stressed the importance of investing, and Dave Ramsey's teachings that debt is bad. She was on a good financial path, yet she still felt something was missing. Though it sounds counterintuitive, Julia's path to financial independence began with divorce. Prioritization to her marriage, she rarely spent money on anything she didn't absolutely need. During her marriage, her husband helped her learn that some spending can be a good thing. Unfortunately, he was an irresponsible spender and there were months Julia found she couldn't pay all of the bills. Although she knew something was wrong, she failed to listen to her instincts and all of the red flags that kept popping up. she just assumed everything would be okay rather than taking a step back and thinking about it critically. Following her divorce, she was left with a $300,000 mortgage, a $20,000 car loan, no savings, and was feeling like she had hit rock bottom financially. Following Dave Ramsey's advice, Julia began to follow his steps to get back on her feet and find herself and her financial objectives again. Julia was all in on Dave Ramsey's strategies. She cut up her credit cards, began using cash for everything, and made a budget every month. It gave her discipline and solidified her habits. She found ChooseFI in May 2019 after she began teaching personal finance to other members of her Coast Guard unit. The thought of optimizing investments and taxes really caught her attention. It was exciting to begin taking action to optimize her money in these areas as well. It was more difficult to come around with respect to travel rewards credit cards, but because she had learned to be disciplined with her budget, she could spend money on a rewards credit card and begin optimizing her travel spending too. Before ChooseFI, Julia thought she was killing it with her 15% savings rate. She assumed 59 and a half was the earliest she could retire because that's the age her finical advisors had given her. She was blown away when a ChooseFI guest discussed their 70% savings rate. It was then that she realized she could control so much more than current her zone of awareness concerning savings and retirement. Julia plans on remaining in the Coast Guard until eligible for a pension at 20 years of service. While others often ask if she'll be bored, she has a list of passion projects she can't wait to pursue without having to worry about how to pay the bills. As someone who always enjoyed public speaking, last Fall, she took up book narration after reaching out to a friend with audio experience for help getting started. She's also joined Jonathon's Talent Stacker class and looking to start a podcast. Julia keeps a list of all the things she wants to accomplish and FI will give her the freedom to pursue them without being obligated to a job or other people's expectations. Between Julia's pension, TSP, Roth IRA, and a taxable brokerage account, she plans to hit Fat FI in 2027 when she becomes eligible for her pension. Calculating a FI number with a pension is a bit different than multiplying annual expenses by 25. Julia estimated her pension using the military's pension calculator. She multiplied the difference between her pension and her expenses to calculate her FI number. While she still follows the tenants of Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps and has met the minimum standards, she believes she has moved on from the standard path of working for 40 years and is more in line with ChooseFI. Jonathon stressed that like Julia, members of the military with a pension, the Roth Conversion Ladder is not going to be a good option since it requires a few years with little to no income. When exploring the idea of a talent stack, some people may have a difficult time identifying what they are really good at. It might start with identifying a pattern in what others tell you you are good at. To watch the video highlights, click on ChooseFI.com/252 RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Get "unstuck" with Jillian Johnsrud and the Everyday Courage podcast Build a better portfolio today with Fund Rise and get your first 90 days of advisory fees waived Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond by Michael A. Singer IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT CHOOSEFI: Share FI by sending a friend ChooseFI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence.

Martin and Ayesha are both natural savers who have been great about living below their means but lacked a real plan. Their goals are to maximize investments for retirement and finding ways to utilize dividend funds. After stumbling across the ChooseFI podcast, they felt like their financial independence number and retirement seemed obtainable which has helped push them to commit and make even bigger changes. While Martin and Ayesha had a 20-25% savings rate before finding FI, Brad commended them on what a great job they were doing. He also stressed that FI is about living a better life and having the financial security to get you there, not what your savings rate is. Despite the inclination to save, Ayesha always resisted the thought of meticulousness and restrictive budgets. However, she found that she could get behind the idea of focusing on spending on what they truly valued, so they began using Personal Capital as a less obtrusive method of tracking their spending and gaining insight into their habits. Something that Martin and Ayesha place considerable value on are experiences, particularly travel, spending time with friends and family, and being healthy. Instead of getting together at restaurants and spending money on pricey meals out, they began hosting monthly potlucks. Ayesha has found the website Budget Bytes to be incredibly economical when it comes to low-cost recipes and efficient for discovering uses for the ingredients she already has in her refrigerator. It's helped to cut their grocery bill to around $600 per month for their family of 4. Due to quarantine restrictions, Ayesha was out of work for months, which she calls a blessing in disguise. During that free time, they were able to take a deep dive into their spending and immediately saved $500. It also allowed them to slow down and spend more time with family enjoying the outdoors, playing games, and eating all three meals together. Following the time off from work, Ayesha has realized that it does cause her some stress which made her want to buy things. It also strengthened her conviction to reduce her workload within 5 years to perhaps just one day a week so that she can find more joy in the moment. Although Martin enjoyed his two-hour daily commute, working from home during the pandemic has made him more aware of the importance of time. He now strives to make the most of his time and focus on using it in ways that bring him the most value. While their monthly expenses are not constant because life is lumpy, it runs around $3,500 but can go as high as $5,000 a month when home repairs are needed. Martin and Ayesha have a goal of reaching FI in seven years and are looking at exploring several different options to help get them there. With option one, they would withdraw money from an investment account to pay off the mortgage on their home. The money saved on the mortgage payment would then be invested for the next seven years. In option two, they would use their investment account to pay off half of the remaining mortgage and continue to make the monthly mortgage payments which result in a mortgage pay off in seven years. Their third option is to refinance their current mortgage which has 17 years left at 3.3% interest rate to a 15-year loan at 2.6%, but that refinance incurs $7,000 in fees. The payments would remain the same, but the home would be paid off two years earlier. Ayesha likes the idea of not having a mortgage but doesn't want to do it if the numbers don't make sense. However, Martin is okay with a lower net worth if it means they can get rid of their mortgage because he feels they would have more options. Brad admits this is an issue he and many others in the FI community struggle with. With such low-interest rates on mortgages, it's almost always a better option mathematically to keep the money invested, but it doesn't mean it's the right decision for everyone. The psychological aspect needs to be considered. If they would like to pay the mortgage off in seven years, the best thing they can do it to use an amortization calculator and see how much extra they will need to pay each month to have the mortgage paid off in seven years. Martin and Ayesha can then see how that payment fits into their current lifestyle. As a fourth option, Brad pointed out that they can drastically reduce their FI number if they were to pay off their mortgage. With a FI estimate of 1.25 million, using the 4% rule, they would have $4,000 per month. If the mortgage was paid off, they could reduce their monthly expenses by $1,600, and then their FI number is only $750,000. After living through the 2008 housing market crash and not having a plan, and then this most recent market downturn, Martin and Ayesha have realized they may not be as risk-tolerant as they used to believe. Brad suggested having an investor policy statement that they've written down to help them stay the course in times of uncertainty. The biggest takeaway is the being on the path to

Once you realize financial independence is possible for you, how do you ensure the money lessons you've learned are consistently passed down to future generations? Anne Zonca's family is well ahead of their time when it comes to financial independence. When many are focused on second-generation FI, Anne herself is third generation FI working to pass along her family's lessons to her own children. Children of the Great Depression, Anne's grandparents were deeply effected by having lived through it. Starting out in marriage with literally nothing, they worked hard and saved so that they never had to live through a financial situation like that again. Understanding that saving was not enough, they began investing in the stock market in the 1950s. With a formal education, her grandfather stayed informed with the Wall Street Journal and sharing stock tips with his brother. They invested in individual stocks, picking ones they felt were stable, like oil and gas, or utility companies. For stocks that paid dividends, they reinvested the dividends. with this strategy, they were able to build a substantial amount of wealth. Anne's mom recounted stories about how her grandfather got into stock investing, but Anne became more aware of her grandparents investing prowess around 14 when they began gifting stock to their children and grandchildren. While the value of the gifted stock wasn't necessarily a large sum, it was substantial considering they were regularly gifting to 4 children and 11 grandchildren. The gifted stocks were paying decent dividends, but rather than receive a lot of checks for small amounts, the dividends were all reinvested. Though the growth on the stocks gifted to Anne was not enough for her to reach FI, she definitely had a heart start and was learning about stocks and investing at a young age. Her grandparents gifting stock to the family was a win-win scenario as her grandparents did not have to sell the stock and pay capital gains on the appreciated value. Though the recipient bears a tax burden, children are entitled to a certain amount of capital gains each year tax-free. Currently, children can have up to $2,000 of capital gains before being subject to capital gains taxes. Following the example set by her grandparents, Anne's parents were able to achieve financial independence as well through entrepreneurship and real estate. Although preceding generations had reached financial independence, it wasn't wealth being passed on from generation to generation that got them there. It was the lessons of spending less than you make and smartly investing the extra that perpetuated generational success and wealth. Despite her grandparents' success in the stock market, there was remarkably little conversation about investing until the grandkids were older and showed an interest in having such conversations. As a result of the gifted stocks and her parents being good stewards of it for her, Anne was able to use it and graduate from college debt-free. As life is often bumpy, Anne experienced her own financial setback when she divorced her husband and the courts gave her ex-husband half of everything her grandparents had gifted to her. Luckily, the money lessons she had learned allowed her to be in a financial position to leave behind the marriage and move on with her life. Although not everything has gone fairly or smoothly since the divorce, Anne has adopted a great attitude by understanding that it's only money, she will be able to move on, and that she will still reach FI. The advice she would give to anyone else going through a divorce is to work with the things that are burdening you, follow your heart, and don't sacrifice your life, happiness, or the person you want to be over a bad decision. You can work hard and invest. There are still a lot of opportunities to save money, meet goals, and find love. Having been a stay-at-home mom and yoga teacher, Anne needed to get back into the workforce to support herself. A friend advised her to do it scared. The first year was hard, but she built up her skills and got her CPA certification renewed. Anne's grandparents lived long enough to begin gifting stock to their great-grandchildren, so her kids have been the fortunate recipients of these gifts and their associated money lessons. In addition to the stock gifts, Anne started a program of investing pocket change with her kids. Now that they are are in high school, they listen to ChooseFI with her and she's established stock accounts for them so that they can become comfortable investing in stocks and mutual funds. To impart a FI mindset in her children by being an example. Anne drives used cars. She also has them responsible for paying their own car insurance, which incentivizes them to get good grades to earn a discount. And she gives them some say in how Anne she invests money for them. Anne says financial independence means freedom. She can make decisions independent of the financial impact. Second, third

Brad is back after taking August off of work as his Red X month. Though his original vacation plans were changed because of COVID, he made the best of it. They spent three weeks in Long Island visiting family, enjoying the pool, board games, and a digital detox. While Brad was away relaxing, Jonathan used that time to work on a couple of big passion projects. During the month of August, Jonathan created a podcast course and membership group. He also started a new podcast as a way to demonstrate to the group how you start one. The Talent Stacker podcast uses the content discussed on ChooseFI but then goes even further and fills in the holes to focus on skills, certificate programs, and career paths that don't require the high cost of college. The first episode of Talent Stacker has already been released and this coming Monday's episode will feature Bradley Rice where he and Jonathan discuss a carer path you can start for free with no talent stack, no career, and no experience and after 6 months of training, you can make a minimum of 60-80K with the ability to scale for an even higher income. The Talent Stacker membership program has lifetime guaranteed access where they will work with you to as long as it takes to get you working in that new job earning $60,000. Programs such as the one discussed on next Monday's Talent Stacker episode are becoming more popular with examples like Google's new career certificate program which also takes about 6 months to complete at a fraction of the cost of traditional college. The Vice President of Global Affairs at Google, Kent Walker, stated they consider the certificate to be the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles. The next Households of FI family featured this week is Carol, sho found FI in 2020. In her mid-50s, Carol claims she is financially illiterate and does not want to end up being a burden to her child. Her goals are to change her deprivation mindset when it comes to money, retire with financial security, and kick her lifelong issues with credit cards. Carol was introduced to financial planner, Roger Whitney, to come up with a financial plan of attack. Since finding FI, Carol has jumped right in reading and listening to as much as she can. In that time, she has cut her debt in half. She believes her first steps should be to pay off debt, start an emergency fund, and begin saving aggressively for retirement. She also knows she needs a mindset shift. Carol struggles with budgets, but she's contributing to her 401(k) for the first time and is only giving herself a small amount of spending money with everything extra going to savings after her bills have been paid. Roger suggests there are two ways to tackle the mindset issue, either toughen up and do it, or set up a system to capture her excess money. Rather than focus on the big hill Carol needs to climb, Roger wants her to focus on what little thing she needs to do next to begin to create momentum. He also suggests that having a community like ChooseFI is great for providing encouragement, assistance, and being a virtual mentor. Carol wants to know which is more important paying off her credit cards or building her emergency fund. Because she's been good about not using her credit cards and they have a high-interest rate, Roger wants her to focus on paying off her cards with every extra dollar she has. Second, Carol should set up a system for how she manages her money. It can be helpful to have income deposited into a savings account we don't see and then transfer spending money to checking accounts at another bank. After paying bills and buying groceries and gas, Carol has about $200 leftover at the end of the month before she receives her commissions from sales. With her commission checks, she would like to save 50-60% of her income. Carol's company offers both a traditional 401(k) and a Roth 401(k), but she is unsure what the differences are. Roger explains with a traditional 401(k) contributions and growth are tax-deferred until withdrawn, while Roth 401(k) contributions are made from post-tax income and grow tax-free. The next two levers Carol needs to focus on are earning as much as she can in commissions which is the most effective way to make the plan work. The next lever is to hang on to the money she is earning. Side hustles are another area Carol is looking at to increase her earnings. She's already published two books and is working on a third, as well as looking for another side hustle. Since she enjoys writing, Roger suggested that Carol could share her journey on her blog and collect readers and be an inspiration. Mentioning that seeing her M1 Finance account grow, Roger thinks it would be useful to set up a system around that kind of excitement for continued encouragement. To watch the video highlights, click on ChooseFI.com/249. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION Freelance to Freedom by Vincent Pugliese Total Life Freedom Talent Stacker Podcast Google Career Certificates R