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00:01:34.640 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:42.000 | your life, money, travel, all while spending less and saving more.

00:01:47.040 | I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I'm on my own quest to find every hack there is.

00:01:52.080 | So in each episode, I'll sit down with a new expert and learn everything I can.

00:01:57.680 | So today I'm talking to Brad Barrett about financial independence, or FI as he

00:02:03.280 | calls it.

00:02:03.680 | Now, FI money is a lot like FU money.

00:02:07.000 | It's about how to get to that point in life where you have the financial freedom

00:02:10.920 | to do whatever you want.

00:02:12.240 | And Brad is the expert here.

00:02:14.680 | He achieved financial independence and quit his job at 35 years old without ever

00:02:19.960 | earning a six-figure salary.

00:02:21.440 | He then went on to co-found Choose FI, the top podcast on financial

00:02:26.760 | independence, with an audience of over a million listeners every month.

00:02:30.880 | In our chat, we'll talk about his path to financial independence, how you can achieve

00:02:36.120 | it yourself, and some of our favorite money-saving hacks to help along the way.

00:02:40.880 | And since this is a new show, I'd really appreciate it if you can leave us a

00:02:45.480 | rating and a review in your podcast app.

00:02:47.880 | Thanks so much, and enjoy.

00:02:49.960 | Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront.

00:02:53.120 | All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and

00:02:56.840 | do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront.

00:02:58.640 | This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied

00:03:02.440 | upon for investment decisions.

00:03:03.880 | Brad, thanks for coming on the show.

00:03:06.600 | Yeah, Chris, this should be a lot of fun.

00:03:08.360 | Thanks for having me.

00:03:09.280 | I appreciate it.

00:03:09.800 | Yeah, I'm excited to be early in the days of podcasting.

00:03:14.000 | You are much farther along than me.

00:03:15.560 | Yeah, it's hard to believe we've been doing Choose FI for a little over four

00:03:20.040 | years now, which is still absolutely shocking to me that I'm a podcaster.

00:03:24.240 | But yeah, it's coming up on four and a half years, which is wild.

00:03:27.920 | Brad, for all of those who aren't familiar with it, what is FI?

00:03:32.120 | So FI is financial independence, that at its essence, obviously, the show is all

00:03:38.560 | the hacks. For me, FI is like the one hack to rule them all.

00:03:43.600 | It's that umbrella.

00:03:45.160 | It's when you have financial independence, you have choice.

00:03:49.960 | You have options, you have autonomy, you can spend your precious decades how you

00:03:56.360 | want to spend them on this planet as opposed to being beholden to someone else.

00:04:01.280 | So ultimately, financial independence is being at a point where working is

00:04:06.400 | optional. You know, you hear the acronym FIRE.

00:04:09.200 | I'm sure a lot of people have heard that the FIRE movement, et cetera.

00:04:12.160 | That's financial independence, retire early.

00:04:14.120 | And I feel like for most people, the retire early aspect just doesn't resonate.

00:04:19.080 | I don't know about you.

00:04:20.280 | I do know about you, Chris.

00:04:21.720 | I have a full time job.

00:04:23.160 | You are financially independent and you have no interest in retiring early, just

00:04:27.400 | like I have no interest, just like most of us who have the drive and the

00:04:32.680 | wherewithal to get to a point of being financially independent.

00:04:36.360 | We want to do things.

00:04:37.880 | We want to give back to the world.

00:04:39.920 | We want to add value, but we want to do it on our terms.

00:04:43.640 | And I think it really just starts from day one of your FIRE journey, which is

00:04:49.280 | start saving money no matter where you are.

00:04:52.600 | And this is not for perfect people who at 22 got their first job and started saving

00:05:00.240 | 80 percent of their income and just did everything right.

00:05:02.920 | This is for everybody.

00:05:04.680 | I think that's one of the things that's resonated so much about Choose a FIRE

00:05:08.440 | generally is that it's not about being perfect.

00:05:11.440 | All of us have made mistakes.

00:05:13.440 | I've made catastrophic mistakes with like real estate, quote unquote,

00:05:18.440 | investing, slash really speculating that I paid for basically my entire adult

00:05:23.520 | life, but yet I still reach five.

00:05:26.000 | And it's not about where you've been.

00:05:29.120 | It's about starting today and taking action to make your life better.

00:05:33.400 | It's about long-term thinking and planning.

00:05:36.960 | And a lot of the hacks, frankly, that you and I love so much are

00:05:40.520 | based around long-term thinking.

00:05:42.760 | We'll talk, I'm sure, about travel rewards, travel hacking, whatever you

00:05:45.480 | want to call it, like that's not, hey, I want to travel tomorrow.

00:05:48.680 | Where are all my points?

00:05:49.920 | I mean, where we've been the last 18 months in this country, I'm ready to travel

00:05:54.160 | tomorrow. But in general, I understand what you're saying.

00:05:57.240 | But today I am in need of a vacation.

00:05:59.800 | Yeah, I definitely hear that.

00:06:01.640 | The cool thing is you have millions of points because you've been planning for a

00:06:05.600 | while and you could take a vacation tomorrow.

00:06:07.920 | That's the cool part.

00:06:08.800 | So, yeah, I guess ultimately, you know, we could get into the boring technical

00:06:13.480 | definition of FI and such.

00:06:14.960 | But it's basically just when your net worth can spit off enough income, however

00:06:21.440 | you want to define that, to cover your expenses.

00:06:24.240 | So that's really the heart of it.

00:06:26.320 | But again, this is not a binary zero or one.

00:06:28.800 | It's not you're not FI or you're FI.

00:06:31.600 | And that's the only point along the journey.

00:06:34.200 | I think for most people, that first time that they have a positive net worth, that

00:06:39.840 | they have five thousand dollars in the bank, like their life is so dramatically less

00:06:46.040 | stressed than when they were living paycheck to paycheck or when they were in

00:06:50.840 | credit card debt. Just having those first couple thousand dollars so that when you

00:06:54.560 | have a little emergency, which is just frankly life, right, like life is lumpy.

00:06:59.400 | Things happen all the time.

00:07:00.600 | We call them emergencies.

00:07:01.720 | They're really not. It's just life.

00:07:03.480 | When you have a four hundred dollar thing that whatever it is, a flat tire, a broken

00:07:07.240 | fridge, whatever it may be, that's not a catastrophe.

00:07:09.440 | The benefits of FI start accruing almost from day one.

00:07:13.240 | And then it gets on up from there to getting to the point where you have what we

00:07:18.400 | affectionately call FU money, right, where the ball is in your court.

00:07:22.120 | You're not beholden to that job.

00:07:23.920 | You're not beholden to some jerk boss.

00:07:25.880 | You're not beholden to whatever whim that they, the elusive they, want to place on

00:07:31.560 | you. It's your autonomy.

00:07:33.720 | How freaking powerful is that?

00:07:36.120 | I live and work out in Silicon Valley, and I think there's this kind of common

00:07:39.360 | perception that you can't get to that point without having a massive windfall or

00:07:43.960 | exit or start a company and make one hundred million dollars.

00:07:47.120 | I've gotten to know you.

00:07:48.400 | That's not your case.

00:07:49.760 | You didn't have this moment in time where you showed up into your bank account and

00:07:53.440 | there was an extra ten million dollars.

00:07:54.760 | That didn't happen overnight.

00:07:55.920 | Is this something that kind of anyone can do?

00:07:59.680 | Yeah, for me, I think anybody can do this, truly.

00:08:03.080 | And to your point, I never earned a six figure salary in my working career.

00:08:08.880 | Never. And just a pause for everyone listening.

00:08:11.320 | You are financially independent now.

00:08:13.200 | Yes. Yeah.

00:08:14.120 | You don't have to work.

00:08:15.200 | No, I do not have to work at all.

00:08:17.000 | That's the beautiful thing.

00:08:18.000 | It's yeah, I reached that point probably mid to late thirties, we'll say.

00:08:21.640 | So I'm just I'm forty one now.

00:08:23.720 | Yeah, probably thirty five, thirty six ish.

00:08:26.200 | So, yeah, I mean, it's a fairly abbreviated working career.

00:08:29.160 | And, you know, I did well in school.

00:08:31.360 | I got a job with a big public accounting firm.

00:08:33.560 | But like I said, I never it wasn't like I was a partner.

00:08:36.520 | You know, I left that firm after a couple of years I worked for me.

00:08:38.920 | It was about making intentional choices.

00:08:40.760 | And I think that's another one of those bedrock principles of fi is being

00:08:46.000 | intentional and trying to figure out what do you want out of life?

00:08:48.920 | Do you want to spend 90 hours a week at a job?

00:08:52.520 | OK, you can make that choice.

00:08:54.480 | And again, I'm not trying to set that up as like I'm making a value judgment.

00:08:58.840 | Like there are people who legitimately get a ton of value out of that.

00:09:02.240 | Right. There are people who are building companies, to your point.

00:09:04.960 | There are people who just love what they do.

00:09:07.360 | We'll do that. That's great.

00:09:09.040 | Again, we can all make choices from a place of intentionality as opposed to

00:09:14.400 | that's what society tells me or I need to keep up with the Joneses, whether

00:09:18.960 | you think about it like that or not, like it's there.

00:09:21.680 | And I think a lot of us on the path to five kind of stepped off of that

00:09:26.120 | treadmill and figured out, OK, maybe I can take a step back and say,

00:09:30.000 | what do I want out of life?

00:09:31.360 | And for me, it was I want to spend time as cliche as it sounds.

00:09:36.440 | I want to spend time with my family.

00:09:37.680 | My daughters are nine and 12 now, so they're not super young.

00:09:40.720 | You know, at that point, I wanted to spend time with them.

00:09:43.440 | I wanted to be there when they got off the bus.

00:09:45.160 | I wanted to see them grow up.

00:09:47.240 | I didn't want to work all the time.

00:09:48.800 | And so for me, that was the guiding light.

00:09:50.920 | Again, that's me.

00:09:52.160 | And that's very personal for me.

00:09:53.960 | Everybody has a different decision, but do it from a place of intentionality

00:09:57.600 | as opposed to just sleepwalking through life.

00:10:00.280 | Yeah, I mean, that's my philosophical side.

00:10:02.040 | But yeah, to your actual question, anybody can do this.

00:10:04.720 | It's a mathematical equation at the end of the day, right?

00:10:06.960 | It's what you earn minus what you spend equals some gap.

00:10:11.320 | And that gap is your savings.

00:10:13.280 | And you ultimately can calculate your savings rate.

00:10:16.200 | And if you can put that money away and invest it in, you know, for us, it's

00:10:21.520 | just sensible, long-term investments.

00:10:24.120 | It's not get rich quick or I got a stock tip from my uncle or some nonsense.

00:10:28.040 | If you can do that over an intermediate period, which for

00:10:30.920 | most people is 10 to 15 years.

00:10:33.120 | I think people can somehow get a little almost like nervous because it is such

00:10:37.560 | a, an immediate gratification society that we live in when you hear 10 to 15

00:10:41.520 | years, it sounds like a lot, but I can attest it goes quick and that money

00:10:46.680 | starts accumulating quickly and it starts growing and it starts working for you.

00:10:50.320 | And that's a really beautiful point when you have enough money saved up, even

00:10:54.920 | like I said, for me on a non six figure salary where my investments were earning

00:11:00.000 | more than what I was making at my job.

00:11:02.360 | That's like, talk about an amazing day and it doesn't take that long to get there.

00:11:06.680 | And just to be clear, this wasn't, I had a trust fund and a less than six figure

00:11:10.680 | job, but this all came from you thoughtfully and intentionally deciding

00:11:14.800 | how you want to spend your money.

00:11:15.760 | Yeah, I do certainly do not come from money.

00:11:18.440 | My parents are not wealthy, probably similar to you.

00:11:21.320 | I'm hardwired to look for hacks, maybe be a little bit frugal,

00:11:24.920 | think a little long-term.

00:11:25.960 | This started for me before I knew anything about FI and even my college choices.

00:11:30.480 | I got into, you know, some Ivy league schools and places like that, but like

00:11:34.680 | I made the decision then that like that type of student loan debt was just

00:11:38.800 | something that it just would not serve me.

00:11:41.160 | So I have to say, I get pretty fortunate that I even started thinking about this

00:11:45.800 | from the time I was 18 and I came out of college with, I think it sounds

00:11:49.880 | almost quaint at this point, it was like $5,000 of student loan debt.

00:11:53.640 | And yeah, just from the very first, just started saving money in my first year.

00:11:59.040 | Associates said, you know, the big accounting firm, many of them were

00:12:02.120 | buying BMWs and renting apartments to show how adult they were.

00:12:05.760 | I lived at home for two and a half years and saved 90% of my income because what

00:12:12.600 | the hell does a 22 year old kid need to spend money on at that point?

00:12:15.280 | So I lived in Long Island, New York and yeah, purchased an apartment,

00:12:19.880 | which I guess is called a co-op there.

00:12:21.480 | And it just set the stage for my entire financial future.

00:12:26.080 | It's just, it started just from that bedrock of saving, saving, saving.

00:12:30.200 | Now I've spent some time in this financial independence community, and I think some

00:12:34.760 | people go way off the deep end, right?

00:12:37.000 | There's a world where you can get extreme and be the most frugal person.

00:12:42.080 | And that might be for some people, but I just want to be clear, despite that, you

00:12:46.640 | know, you saved a ton of your income.

00:12:48.160 | I don't think you necessarily like lived a whole life as a hermit in your house.

00:12:51.720 | Never went outside, never had a meal, never enjoyed life.

00:12:54.520 | So this isn't something where you have to give up everything.

00:12:58.720 | No, you're spot on.

00:13:00.040 | For me, it's not only is you not have to give up everything, but

00:13:02.920 | it's like the exact opposite.

00:13:04.240 | How do you live the same middle or even upper middle class

00:13:07.160 | lifestyle as everybody else?

00:13:09.280 | And yet still save 30, 50, 70 plus percent of your income, right?

00:13:13.840 | Like how do you live a life where you're winning and nobody else knows it?

00:13:18.480 | That's the coolest part, right?

00:13:20.360 | It's like my neighbors have no idea that in our working career,

00:13:25.480 | save 50 to 70% of our income.

00:13:27.960 | They have no idea because to the outward appearance, we look like everybody else.

00:13:31.840 | It's funny.

00:13:32.640 | I think, you know, I started this show, all the hacks and I certainly

00:13:36.200 | think, and we'll get to some of them.

00:13:37.600 | There are a number of quick little fun things you can do to save more

00:13:42.280 | or get a better experience for less.

00:13:44.240 | But in the case of financial independence, I think the ultimate

00:13:47.520 | hack is a mindset shift.

00:13:49.760 | The question is, what do you want your money to go towards?

00:13:52.600 | Because it can go towards your future or it can go towards right now.

00:13:56.360 | And there are things in my life that a lot of people that know me often

00:14:01.200 | call me cheap because I might not want to go out to dinner and get the

00:14:04.520 | nicest bottle of wine and order all the food, but it's not because I don't

00:14:07.920 | like food, I happen to love food.

00:14:09.680 | It's because I know that the difference between the 20 and the hundred

00:14:13.560 | dollar bottle of wine every time you go out to dinner is the difference

00:14:17.200 | between saving that $80 and over time that adds up and the independence

00:14:22.440 | and freedom and flexibility you get in your life when you have financial

00:14:25.960 | independence is worth more to me than the nicer bottle of wine.

00:14:29.440 | Yeah.

00:14:30.000 | Yeah.

00:14:30.560 | You're right.

00:14:30.920 | You're spot on.

00:14:31.680 | I mean, that psychological shift is everything.

00:14:35.640 | It's, you have to really just look like, what do you value?

00:14:38.720 | To your question a minute ago, it is not about deprivation at all.

00:14:42.760 | Sure.

00:14:43.440 | There are some people, and of course you'll see articles in the Wall Street

00:14:48.280 | Journal or whatever about the fire movement, and they of course harp on

00:14:51.200 | the people who are eating the brown bananas and other nonsense like that.

00:14:55.000 | And that's sensational.

00:14:56.280 | And I get why it's in an article, but it's so beside the point.

00:14:59.600 | This is a community of people in America and all throughout the world who are

00:15:03.920 | just living intentionally based on what they value.

00:15:07.000 | I'm the same as you.

00:15:08.080 | Bottle of wine sounds fantastic, but the marginal value of the hundred

00:15:12.320 | dollar bottle of wine over the 20 is to me, it's zero, right?

00:15:15.960 | The values in the experience and that kind of stuff I'll pay for all day long.

00:15:21.680 | We are not cheap in any way, or at least not.

00:15:24.920 | Give me some examples.

00:15:25.800 | I feel like someone listening to this here is, wow, here's a person who is

00:15:29.600 | financially independent, can do whatever they want, doesn't have to work, hit that

00:15:32.960 | point before they're 40 and never made a six figure salary, didn't have a trust fund.

00:15:38.520 | I think the assumption is that's a one room apartment and it has bunk

00:15:42.200 | beds for your whole family.

00:15:43.600 | And you guys walk everywhere.

00:15:45.520 | And if you need to clean the leaves up in your yard, you make a rake out of sticks.

00:15:49.440 | Can you give me some examples so people understand this isn't

00:15:53.120 | about sacrifice in your own life?

00:15:55.040 | Yeah, for me, it's not about being cheap, like at the margins just to be cheap.

00:16:00.160 | It's about setting up a framework of a life that just didn't cost

00:16:04.760 | that much based around value.

00:16:06.520 | And then it gives you, it's like the, uh, the Jocko Willing quote,

00:16:10.080 | the discipline equals freedom, right?

00:16:11.720 | Like for us, it was setting up this framework of a life that didn't cost

00:16:15.320 | so much to allow us the freedom to spend on things that we want.

00:16:18.800 | So just to talk about the framework for us, it was cars.

00:16:22.240 | Okay.

00:16:23.160 | We don't value cars at all.

00:16:25.880 | We, for the longest time had a 2003, a Honda Civic and Toyota cars.

00:16:32.280 | And we just upgraded to 2013.

00:16:34.480 | So we're still a eight year old for us.

00:16:36.720 | A car gets you from point A to point B.

00:16:38.920 | So I didn't have a car payment on my '03 Civic for 13 years.

00:16:44.040 | That sounds like a little thing because, oh, it's only a couple hundred bucks a

00:16:47.800 | month, but because you've seen a compound interest calculator, that

00:16:51.080 | alone can be hundreds of thousands when invested and compounded over decades.

00:16:55.480 | So we love craft beer, but we don't necessarily get value out of going out

00:17:02.680 | or spending $7 on a beer plus tax and tip.

00:17:05.920 | We want to spend time together.

00:17:08.520 | So that was the intentionality behind it, which is, okay, what are

00:17:13.320 | we getting out of this experience?

00:17:14.880 | We're getting spending time together.

00:17:16.160 | So every day at five o'clock we have a happy hour with a different craft beer.

00:17:21.920 | Okay.

00:17:22.560 | So $4.40 rolls around.

00:17:24.480 | I grab the beers, put them in the freezer.

00:17:26.040 | And for $1.50 a beer, we're sitting there and having happy hour in our house.

00:17:30.920 | So like that to me is just, it's like a little rethink as opposed to going out

00:17:36.360 | for $20, $40, $50, whatever for happy hour a couple of times a week, we're

00:17:40.480 | doing it in the house and we're just applying that intentionality.

00:17:43.320 | We meal plan.

00:17:44.120 | Again, it's not about deprivation.

00:17:45.640 | My wife is a fantastic cook.

00:17:48.040 | She loves cooking.

00:17:49.520 | It's one of her passions.

00:17:50.760 | So for her, it's how do I explore and cook new things?

00:17:54.680 | And, you know, we have this kind of top 50 list of recipes that we keep

00:17:58.480 | adding to and culling the list.

00:18:00.040 | And again, that's where we're looking to get out of this.

00:18:02.280 | And we're eating delicious home cooked meals for a couple dollars a person.

00:18:06.760 | It's this line, Chris.

00:18:08.240 | So how do I get this amazing experience, but again, win in the process.

00:18:13.680 | And how do I cut to the essence of what am I looking to get out of this?

00:18:17.600 | Whereas contrasted with, we love hanging out with friends, right?

00:18:20.400 | And if our friends want to go out to eat, like there's never a time

00:18:23.240 | where we say no, because of money.

00:18:24.800 | Of course we go out, right?

00:18:26.480 | Of course we do.

00:18:27.280 | Because that's what we value.

00:18:29.640 | We value spending the time with them.

00:18:31.400 | Or, you know, you asked the question, like, what do we do?

00:18:33.880 | We travel significantly.

00:18:35.560 | So we pre COVID times, we take August as our kind of a red X month, we call it.

00:18:42.600 | So you look at the calendar, you take a big red marker and put an X through August.

00:18:46.920 | I'm not planning anything other than this trip.

00:18:49.560 | So we went to Scotland one year, we went to Hawaii the next.

00:18:55.000 | We were supposed to go to Alaska last summer.

00:18:56.600 | Unfortunately, that got got nixed.

00:18:58.600 | We never think about scrimping and saving when we're there.

00:19:01.960 | You know, if we want to do some type of catamaran tour or a helicopter ride, of

00:19:08.040 | course, we're going to do that because again, we set up the framework of a life

00:19:11.520 | that doesn't cost that much.

00:19:12.880 | So, yeah.

00:19:13.600 | So you decided, and I think a lot of people don't do this.

00:19:16.400 | You decided, okay, I could order in DoorDash or Uber Eats every night, or I

00:19:21.600 | could buy groceries and I could go to Hawaii and stay at a nice hotel and go on

00:19:26.080 | a helicopter tour, or I could stay at a hostel.

00:19:28.200 | And you just said, look, if I do all of the expensive things, I'm going to work

00:19:33.240 | for my entire career and I'm never going to have time to think about it.

00:19:36.200 | And, and for you, having someone bring your meal to your house every night is

00:19:40.400 | just not worth not being able to have the experiences of traveling with your family.

00:19:45.160 | And you just made the decision of what's important.

00:19:47.600 | Sometimes I have this problem when I'm going out with friends or, or just

00:19:50.880 | discussing life, they're like, why would you do that?

00:19:52.800 | Why would you make that crazy decision?

00:19:54.960 | And oftentimes it's not about the fact that I don't love certain things.

00:20:00.000 | It's about the fact that I just love other things more.

00:20:02.400 | I really value trips and going all over the world, eating food, meeting

00:20:07.800 | interesting people, staying in interesting places, and to me, finding a way to do

00:20:13.440 | that is worth a whole lot more than having someone make my dinner every night.

00:20:18.640 | And I still like to go out to eat.

00:20:20.480 | I don't get as much value out of the high-end restaurant as I

00:20:23.280 | do the local ethnic restaurant.

00:20:24.960 | We still go out, but we try to do it less.

00:20:27.520 | And we, same as you, we have an app where on Saturdays and Sundays, we

00:20:31.320 | plan out the meals for the week.

00:20:32.760 | We go buy all the groceries.

00:20:34.560 | I'm a little crazy where I'm like, let's go to Costco and Whole Foods and

00:20:37.960 | balance it off to get the best deals.

00:20:39.840 | But yeah, it's for me, it's just about picking what you want to spend money on.

00:20:42.640 | You can spend money on anything, but if you make it intentionally, you can

00:20:46.360 | kind of ramp up that savings rate.

00:20:48.080 | It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size

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00:20:54.720 | Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many

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00:23:54.640 | So a question I have is, do you have to save 90% of your income?

00:23:58.880 | Like for some people, you have two kids, we live in the Bay Area.

00:24:01.880 | Could someone who lives in the Bay Area and has two kids still save money?

00:24:05.440 | And how do you get started and how much do you have to save to make it work?

00:24:08.840 | Like what's the, you said it's, it's just math, but how does that math work?

00:24:12.320 | Yeah, that's a good question, Chris.

00:24:13.720 | And, and obviously I am certainly aware that everybody has a different

00:24:18.880 | life situation, but it is obviously a lot easier for me in Richmond,

00:24:23.520 | Virginia than it is in the Bay Area.

00:24:25.400 | There's no value judgment.

00:24:26.640 | That's one of the other nice things I think about the community

00:24:29.800 | tone that we've established is again, it's about your life and your decisions.

00:24:33.880 | And I obviously understand that there are different situations.

00:24:37.000 | So, you know, there is an article and we should link it up in the show notes.

00:24:40.040 | So it's the shockingly simple math behind early retirement.

00:24:43.680 | That's on Mr.

00:24:44.840 | Money Mustache's website.

00:24:46.320 | It just goes through basically the number of years to retirement or to

00:24:51.160 | financial independence is really how I look at it, depending on your savings rate.

00:24:55.560 | Do I think that it's going to be easier for, they're just

00:25:01.080 | practical realities of life, right?

00:25:02.840 | Is it easier for someone making a couple hundred grand living in a low cost of

00:25:07.480 | living area to get to financial independence than somebody, you know,

00:25:10.960 | making 60 K living in the Bay Area?

00:25:12.960 | Yes.

00:25:13.400 | Obviously it's easier for that.

00:25:15.200 | The first person, everything is about that choice.

00:25:18.040 | The psychology is 95% of this, like the nuts and bolts of the actual money

00:25:23.600 | stuff I find to be the easiest part by far.

00:25:26.800 | It's just the psychology of, of why do I want to do this?

00:25:31.320 | What am I saving money for?

00:25:32.640 | I feel like there's a perception that people like you and I, who've chosen

00:25:36.640 | that financial independence is important.

00:25:38.400 | We must spend 30 hours a month on our finances.

00:25:41.920 | We're constantly tinkering and doing everything.

00:25:44.880 | Is that anywhere close to reality for you?

00:25:47.120 | I spend well less than an hour a month on my finances, like less.

00:25:52.280 | I say in my podcast, I spend 10 minutes a month that that might be a slight

00:25:56.680 | exaggeration, but it's not, it's not all that far off.

00:25:59.680 | And if I spend more than 10 minutes, it's because I'm still doing like

00:26:03.880 | archaic things, like balancing my checkbook, the things that are utterly

00:26:07.000 | absurd in the, in this day and age.

00:26:08.400 | But yeah, my financial life is completely on autopilot.

00:26:12.960 | It's about taking my brain out of the investing.

00:26:16.360 | It's taking my brain out of my financial life because frankly, we

00:26:20.920 | let our emotions cloud everything.

00:26:24.160 | So for me, it's everything is on autopilot.

00:26:26.520 | Like I, I sweep money in automatically to my investment accounts.

00:26:30.440 | Like it just, it happens.

00:26:31.760 | I don't have to think about it because I know if I have to think

00:26:34.400 | about it, I'm going to screw it up.

00:26:35.800 | That's just the way our tiny little human brains work.

00:26:38.760 | Yeah.

00:26:39.080 | I spent the last 18 months building an automated savings

00:26:41.640 | product at Wealthfront because I truly think one of the greatest

00:26:45.440 | financial hacks is automation.

00:26:47.120 | We get in the way of ourselves and data shows time and time again, that

00:26:51.120 | people left to their own accord will buy when the market's up and sell

00:26:55.680 | when the market's down, which is statistically not the thing you

00:26:58.280 | should do the opposite, and that is just an unfortunate thing.

00:27:01.840 | You know, I take it one step further than you, which is I do want to

00:27:05.200 | optimize to the one more degree.

00:27:07.240 | So I go and change all my bill dates.

00:27:09.920 | So I know my income comes in on the 1st and the 15th.

00:27:14.080 | So all of my credit card bills get paid on the 2nd and all of my wife's credit

00:27:19.640 | card bills get paid on the 16th and the product I built monitors our account.

00:27:24.680 | And anytime it sees excess, it sweeps extra cash.

00:27:28.480 | So I know that because we're paying those bills right after we get paid, we can

00:27:33.960 | afford to have a lower threshold for how much we leave because we can time it.

00:27:38.560 | And in fact, when we first launched the product, one of the most requested

00:27:42.800 | features was, "Let me choose which day you check for excess cash," because

00:27:47.240 | other people were doing similar things.

00:27:49.040 | They said, "I want to check every month on the 4th because I pay

00:27:52.440 | all my bills on the 2nd.

00:27:53.720 | And then I know if you look on the 4th, I can basically go down to a few

00:27:57.520 | hundred dollars because I've paid all my bills for the month."

00:27:59.880 | Now, you don't have to go that far, right?

00:28:02.640 | Like the difference, by the way, of leaving a few extra thousand dollars

00:28:06.280 | in your checking account over the grand scheme of your life is insignificant

00:28:10.400 | compared to how much extra you could save by making bigger, more intentional decisions.

00:28:14.920 | So I want to loop back and just understand.

00:28:17.120 | Let's say I'm a new person.

00:28:18.520 | I'm listening to this and I said, "Wow, I've never been intentional about this.

00:28:21.560 | I want to get started.

00:28:22.680 | How do I go about figuring out this thing?"

00:28:26.520 | You said the math is easy.

00:28:27.640 | It's 5% of it, but could we jump in and just kind of understand what's step

00:28:31.680 | one, if I want to get serious about more aggressively pursuing financial independence?

00:28:36.560 | Yeah, I think step one for really anybody is you have to figure out where you are today.

00:28:43.200 | And again, for most of us, we have never, ever sat down and looked at our finances.

00:28:51.960 | For most people, finances are the most stressful aspect of life.

00:28:55.840 | And what do you do when something's stressful?

00:28:57.520 | You try to, I don't know, throw it under the covers or never look at it,

00:29:01.440 | never think about it ever again, right?

00:29:03.240 | That is really the strategy that so many people take when it

00:29:06.880 | comes to their personal finances.

00:29:08.000 | So you've got to be really honest with yourself.

00:29:10.920 | So that means, all right, you got to sit down and as much fun as this sounds like,

00:29:16.120 | you got to sit down for an hour or maybe a couple hours and figure

00:29:19.840 | out where the heck are you today?

00:29:21.800 | What does your life cost?

00:29:23.240 | Do you have any idea?

00:29:24.360 | What percentage of people in general population have any idea

00:29:27.560 | what their life actually costs?

00:29:29.200 | Very few people have any sense.

00:29:31.440 | How much income do you have coming in?

00:29:32.960 | Most people know that one.

00:29:34.520 | Most people know how much income they might not know the after-tax amount,

00:29:38.480 | but that one, fortunately, is pretty straightforward.

00:29:40.800 | I would imagine so.

00:29:41.840 | But just seeing that on paper that first time and numbers don't lie, right?

00:29:46.160 | Like you're going to have some sense real quick.

00:29:48.360 | All right, where am I?

00:29:50.160 | Right.

00:29:50.600 | And also as part of that exercise is putting it on paper of your net worth,

00:29:55.400 | which is, you know, a fancy accountant speak of just, hey, what do I own and what do I owe?

00:30:00.920 | And you take what you own, you subtract out what you owe and that's your net worth.

00:30:06.000 | And hopefully it's positive, but even if it's not, again, this is not about having

00:30:12.320 | been perfect leading up to this, it's just about where you are today and

00:30:16.080 | making some changes going forward.

00:30:17.680 | I think personally that FI is not in any way about deprivation, but

00:30:22.720 | that said, you have to make choices.

00:30:25.000 | And clearly, if you're in the red every month, if things are not going well,

00:30:29.360 | you're going to have to make some decisions.

00:30:31.880 | And for most people, it's about low hanging fruit.

00:30:34.880 | Like, where do you get started?

00:30:36.040 | In all likelihood, that's going to mean cutting something because most of us, if

00:30:39.880 | we could earn more income this month, we probably would already.

00:30:45.000 | I know that's somewhat trite, but I think again, if you're looking to how do you get

00:30:49.080 | started is, all right, I've already done the exercise of what does my life cost?

00:30:52.920 | Again, you see some things on paper.

00:30:55.280 | Like even I fall prey to this.

00:30:56.720 | I'm sure maybe you don't, Chris, because you're pretty damn locked in.

00:30:59.320 | I just looked at my credit card bills a couple months ago and just

00:31:03.160 | said, you backslide sometimes.

00:31:04.560 | And that's not, oh, beat yourself up or anything.

00:31:06.800 | Things happen.

00:31:07.440 | Also, you make choices, right?

00:31:09.120 | Our family show is MasterChef with Gordon Ramsay.

00:31:12.160 | So we're going through that.

00:31:13.080 | It's on Hulu.

00:31:13.840 | And we hadn't watched Netflix in six months, but it was still getting hit to

00:31:18.920 | the credit card every single month.

00:31:20.000 | So I didn't even realize that, frankly, which is stupid.

00:31:23.320 | And again, this is it's 12 bucks.

00:31:25.040 | It doesn't sound like much, but it's the exercise, right?

00:31:27.920 | It's the exercise of, hey, not only did we see that, but we saw that we were still

00:31:32.680 | paying a rental fee for my daughter's saxophone and she just made the jazz band.

00:31:38.800 | She's, she's doing great.

00:31:39.840 | She's in her like advanced band and she wants to play the

00:31:42.280 | saxophone going forward.

00:31:43.320 | So we just purchased it.

00:31:44.800 | We called the company up and it was like a 10 month break even point.

00:31:48.560 | So it costs us 500 bucks extra to buy the sax and we would have paid 50 bucks a month.

00:31:53.080 | So that was a no brainer to us.

00:31:54.600 | And again, that's from a position of financial strength, right?

00:31:57.320 | Like we're not worried about.

00:31:59.240 | About cashflow.

00:32:00.520 | We're not worried about, do I have the money?

00:32:02.680 | We have the money.

00:32:03.440 | It's just, then it comes down to value decisions, which is such a fun place to be.

00:32:08.200 | Then it's not for most people.

00:32:09.680 | It's, Hey, I can't afford that 500.

00:32:11.960 | So I'm just going to keep on paying this 50 a month indefinitely.

00:32:15.360 | You can make a decision from a position of strength there.

00:32:17.920 | So again, just from that one tiny little exercise, even somebody like me who

00:32:21.920 | theoretically should be locked in on this stuff, we made two decisions.

00:32:25.600 | That that's not nothing, right?

00:32:27.800 | That's 60 bucks a month for most people, $720 a year.

00:32:31.560 | If they're at a point of break even at the end of the year, you've got 720 bucks

00:32:36.320 | just from making those decisions that impact your life negatively, 0%.

00:32:40.760 | Like how cool is that?

00:32:42.200 | That's great.

00:32:43.360 | Yeah.

00:32:43.640 | Similar thing happened to me where I was paying for my cable modem for gosh, almost

00:32:48.320 | five years when the break even point was 10 months.

00:32:51.480 | So I think one of the things that's more stressful, but necessary is figuring out

00:32:57.800 | how much you're saving, which is for most people, how much you make minus how much

00:33:02.480 | you spend.

00:33:03.040 | So it's doing the inventory to figure out how much you spend.

00:33:05.880 | Is there an easy way to do that?

00:33:07.360 | Or is this kind of the one aspect of this where you got to go look at your bills,

00:33:11.800 | look at your accounts and really figure it out?

00:33:13.600 | Yeah, I actually, I'd love to ask you that, that same question.

00:33:17.080 | Is there, is there an easy way?

00:33:18.320 | You know, I'm a, I'm a tech dinosaur.

00:33:20.040 | So I, I suspect there is a way I know, you know, an app like personal capital is able

00:33:25.080 | to, to use that to some degree.

00:33:27.000 | I don't know if you guys at Wealthfront have anything cool either currently or in

00:33:31.080 | the works.

00:33:31.480 | I like doing it.

00:33:33.480 | And again, this might make me a dinosaur here, but I find there's some value in

00:33:38.000 | doing it like on a sheet of paper on Excel.

00:33:39.880 | It just feels more real to me.

00:33:41.880 | In that sense, like I'm going through and I'm just saying, Hey, what does my life

00:33:45.560 | cost?

00:33:45.840 | I think there is value in, you know, if you have a significant other sitting down

00:33:50.280 | with them and just doing that exercise together and just seeing it tangibly in

00:33:56.440 | front of you, it just, it feels more real.

00:33:58.800 | But Chris, what, what do you think on that?

00:34:00.600 | So it's interesting because I think the amount you spend in a given category is

00:34:05.600 | something you have control over.

00:34:07.200 | So there are a lot of tools that'll tell you here's how you're doing, which I think

00:34:11.240 | is something interesting after you've decided what you want to do.

00:34:15.200 | There are plenty of places online where you can sync all of your accounts and get

00:34:18.680 | all of your transactions, or you can look at your statements.

00:34:20.920 | But for me, I think it's helpful to say, because it's about decisions, going

00:34:25.200 | through and saying, here's how much I spend in, on my car, on my home, on my

00:34:29.480 | kids, on food, on groceries.

00:34:31.960 | But then I want to go and see what impact it would have by making those trade-offs.

00:34:36.240 | What if I saved this?

00:34:37.560 | How would that affect me?

00:34:38.680 | What if I saved more?

00:34:39.720 | How would that affect me?

00:34:40.840 | We at Wealthfront have, haven't built a tool that will help you itemize your

00:34:44.920 | budget, but we did build a tool that lets you say, here's where I am today.

00:34:48.520 | What if I saved this much?

00:34:50.360 | And if I want to retire at this date, what does it look like?

00:34:53.080 | It's a tool called Path.

00:34:54.280 | And we're not the tool that's going to help you figure out how much money you

00:34:58.000 | spent on coffee last month, but it's helpful in the next step, which I think

00:35:01.880 | is really important is understanding what the sacrifice means.

00:35:05.040 | Let's say you go to a fancy gym and that fancy gym costs you a hundred dollars a

00:35:10.000 | month, and you realize you don't really go that often and, and you could do it at

00:35:14.640 | a gym that's $50 a month.

00:35:16.160 | What does the extra $50 a month cost?

00:35:17.960 | And if you sum up all of those decisions, you might say, wow, all of those decisions

00:35:22.120 | mean that I could save an extra 10% of my income, which now means that I

00:35:26.800 | could retire five years early.

00:35:28.840 | And, and I say retire, but I really think it means I now five years

00:35:33.480 | sooner can do whatever I want.

00:35:35.680 | And for most people that's still working.

00:35:37.960 | And if you know that you want to work forever, your forecast doesn't have to

00:35:42.680 | assume that you need to cover all of your spending.

00:35:45.520 | You find after doing all of this, that you spend $120,000 a year.

00:35:49.520 | And I use a much higher number than I know you spend because I'm on, I'm in

00:35:53.280 | the Bay area and spending what you do here is hard, but if you know that you

00:35:57.720 | always want to do something and you're pretty confident that at the bottom end,

00:36:01.800 | yet that something could make, let's call it $60,000 a year after taxes, then you

00:36:05.840 | don't need to save enough to cover $120,000 forever, maybe you only need

00:36:10.640 | enough to cover $60,000 or if you know that once you're financially independent,

00:36:15.200 | you don't have to live in the Bay area.

00:36:17.160 | You don't need to cover what you spend today.

00:36:19.840 | You could cover what you spend in the future, but I know there's a simple

00:36:23.440 | rule that I'll let you explain briefly, but how do you figure out what that

00:36:26.600 | number is that you need to get financial independence?

00:36:29.440 | There's an easy calc, but I think just like everything, there's

00:36:32.800 | nuance to every aspect of life.

00:36:34.880 | So there's the 4% rule and a lot of people may have heard of this.

00:36:38.960 | We at Shoes Off, I call it the 4% rule of thumb because we definitely do not

00:36:43.640 | want to imply that, that this is some hard and fast rule and that you're

00:36:47.600 | guaranteed, but in essence, how it works is you look at your annual

00:36:53.040 | expenses and you multiply by 25.

00:36:56.640 | So just really simply, if let's say you spend 80 grand a year and that's your,

00:37:03.160 | that's what your life costs or use your number where you said 120.

00:37:06.040 | So 120,000 times 25 is $3 million.

00:37:10.120 | Super simple math.

00:37:11.840 | That is your fine number, because I guess there's a whole

00:37:15.880 | bunch of academic research.

00:37:17.360 | Again, this is not, uh, not my area of expertise, but it's, you can basically

00:37:23.400 | withdraw again, the rule of thumb, roughly 4% from your investment assets,

00:37:28.560 | from your net worth, and it even indexes for inflation.

00:37:32.560 | So you're not stuck at that number forever, but you can very

00:37:36.880 | reliably expect your money to last.

00:37:39.400 | If you pull out 4% a year and now you're investing, all of

00:37:43.200 | that money is being invested, right?

00:37:44.400 | So the hope is that on average you're earning 7, 8, 9%.

00:37:49.280 | Again, life is lumpy, right?

00:37:51.000 | So as you well know, in the market, there are many years where it's up.

00:37:54.080 | There are some years where it's down and that's all accounted for in this, right?

00:37:58.120 | So again, the math is almost beside the point here.

00:38:01.400 | It's more that directional accuracy is how I look at it.

00:38:05.080 | I'm a CPA.

00:38:05.920 | Theoretically, I should be a numbers guy, but like, I understand

00:38:08.760 | how important the psychology is.

00:38:10.600 | And I think that's what gets people started is like, why am I doing this?

00:38:15.120 | To your point, what's the goal, right?

00:38:17.080 | Like when you can see, oh, when I'm saving an extra thousand bucks, it means I can

00:38:20.880 | retire or get to five 10 years earlier, 12 years earlier, like that matters.

00:38:26.120 | Or instead of throwing up my hands and listening to the media and, you know, I'm

00:38:30.720 | not one of these vilify the media people necessarily, but you know, you hear Susie

00:38:34.440 | Orman saying, oh, you need $10 million to retire.

00:38:37.760 | Who knows what healthcare is going to be, you know, like, I don't know about you,

00:38:41.200 | but I hear 10 million and my brain shuts down because that would not have been

00:38:45.200 | realistic for somebody like me on my salary.

00:38:47.800 | But when I hear that I control it, that it's based on my expenses, that is an

00:38:54.720 | entirely different game.

00:38:56.400 | I have control over my life, not some elusive day, right?

00:39:00.440 | Not some what's going to happen in the future.

00:39:03.280 | Things can happen.

00:39:04.120 | We can have the zombie apocalypse.

00:39:05.640 | You can't account for that kind of stuff.

00:39:07.080 | You know, like the black Swan events happen, but we're all screwed if we

00:39:10.640 | have the zombie apocalypse, right?

00:39:12.000 | For me, it's just, what are my yearly expenses?

00:39:14.400 | I multiply by 25 to get my net worth that I need to be at five.

00:39:18.000 | And I feel reasonably comfortable within a degree of accuracy, but that that's

00:39:22.280 | going to cover me for many decades.

00:39:23.920 | And final point, sorry for talking so much here, but final point is like you

00:39:28.240 | said, you're going to earn money.

00:39:29.920 | You're not going to sit on your butt doing nothing, but you're going to do it

00:39:33.080 | on your terms as opposed to somebody else's.

00:39:35.480 | And again, we talk about what are the game changing things like doing it on your

00:39:39.760 | terms, that pretty much changes everything and you can do what you want with these

00:39:44.960 | precious decades you have.

00:39:46.080 | And yeah, that's pretty inspiring to me.

00:39:48.120 | Yeah.

00:39:48.680 | And I think you get, you gave two examples.

00:39:50.960 | One of the $120,000 to live, which I live in the Bay area.

00:39:54.960 | We have a child until we had a child, our annual expenses were under a hundred

00:39:59.200 | thousand dollars, which for Bay area incomes is relatively low in terms.

00:40:04.000 | So we were able to save.

00:40:05.120 | Aggressively with kids and starting to think about childcare.

00:40:09.200 | We creep right over that number, but I still think we're in the

00:40:13.160 | boat of aggressive saving.

00:40:14.400 | And if we live somewhere else, it could be much lower.

00:40:16.880 | And I think one thing that is interesting is I've, I have my gripes with the 4% rule

00:40:22.160 | or, or, you know, multiplying by 25, because if you say, okay, we spend a

00:40:26.720 | hundred thousand dollars a year.

00:40:28.160 | And so that means we need two and a half million dollars.

00:40:31.000 | That somewhat sounds almost impossible.

00:40:33.680 | The question I asked people was, okay, do you really think that when you have

00:40:36.720 | financial independence, you'll make nothing?

00:40:38.160 | Is that the future?

00:40:39.680 | It's, and are you going to continue to live in a really expensive

00:40:42.520 | place if you're earning no income?

00:40:44.720 | So our calculus has been, look, if we truly decide that the thing we want in

00:40:48.800 | the world is to not work and to not make a cent of income, we don't need to commute.

00:40:55.360 | We don't need to go to the office.

00:40:56.960 | We're probably not going to live where we live.

00:40:58.480 | And so even though I might spend over a hundred thousand dollars today, when I

00:41:04.080 | think about calculating my financial independence number, which is something

00:41:07.680 | that I've done, I'm not using that same spending number, and I'm assuming that

00:41:11.960 | maybe I could cut it in half and, and maybe that number comes down closer to

00:41:16.480 | $1 million, and $1 million still seems like a lot of money and it certainly is

00:41:21.280 | for almost everyone, if you are able to put aside 20, $30,000 a year of your

00:41:26.840 | family's income over 20 years, that's almost a million dollars right there.

00:41:30.520 | And so it's something that I think, you know, and 20% of your income

00:41:34.360 | or 30% of your income, it goes higher.

00:41:36.600 | Some people are aggressively driving that number up.

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00:42:30.720 | So jumpstart this year by signing up for a Trade subscription.

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00:42:47.360 | allthehacks.com/trade.

00:42:49.880 | Do you all remember episode 122 when I spoke to chef David Chang about

00:42:56.400 | leveling up your cooking at home?

00:42:57.960 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen.

00:43:00.440 | But one of his top hacks was using the microwave more.

00:43:04.080 | I'll admit I was a skeptic at first, but after getting a full set of

00:43:08.080 | microwave cookware from Anyday, I'm a total convert and I'm excited to

00:43:12.240 | partner with them for this episode.

00:43:13.600 | Anyday is glass cookware specifically designed to make delicious food from

00:43:17.960 | scratch in the microwave, and honestly using it feels like a kitchen cheat

00:43:22.280 | code because it speeds up and simplifies the process so much.

00:43:26.200 | The cookware is a hundred percent plastic free and you can cook, serve, store,

00:43:30.760 | and reheat all in the same dish that happens to be dishwasher,

00:43:34.920 | freezer, and oven safe too.

00:43:36.720 | And if you need a recipe suggestion to kick off your Anyday adventure, I

00:43:40.440 | highly recommend David Chang's Salmon Rice.

00:43:42.960 | It is so good.

00:43:44.400 | And if you haven't checked out the Matte Black Ayo Collection they launched

00:43:48.840 | last year, you have to check it out.

00:43:50.960 | So to get 15% off our new favorite cookware, go to allthehacks.com/anyday.

00:43:58.000 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/anyday for 15% off.

00:44:03.120 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:44:08.200 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:44:11.040 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can

00:44:16.080 | go to allthehacks.com/deals, so please consider supporting those who support us.

00:44:22.440 | So I'll diverge a moment to say this show wouldn't be All The Hacks

00:44:26.800 | if we just talked about one.

00:44:28.080 | And we spent a lot of time talking about the big psychological kind of intentional

00:44:33.280 | shift of looking at financial independence.

00:44:36.280 | But I think one of the biggest things that you can do to increase the time in

00:44:41.560 | which you achieve that is to lower your spending.

00:44:44.720 | And it's both lowering your spending to increase your savings.

00:44:47.880 | So there are certainly ways to increase your earnings that will help here.

00:44:52.280 | I guess my question is, if someone's trying to aggressively get to financial

00:44:56.800 | independence faster, there have to be some kind of money, earnings, savings,

00:45:02.120 | spending hacks that make it easier.

00:45:04.760 | And I remember going on your podcast a year or two ago, and you had a section

00:45:09.920 | where you said, "What's your favorite life hack?"

00:45:11.840 | So I'm curious, in all the people you've talked to, what are some of the best

00:45:17.000 | hacks to help you do this more aggressively, make it feel less like a sacrifice?

00:45:22.640 | Yeah, that is a good question.

00:45:24.560 | I actually have a list here of the first 150 episodes, and you're on there, which

00:45:30.360 | is cool, and yeah, I think for a lot of people, there's always a range of this

00:45:35.280 | stuff, so there's extreme stuff like geo-arbitrage, which is moving to a lower

00:45:40.960 | cost of living area.

00:45:41.840 | I don't think many people, when they're first getting started with Fi, are exactly

00:45:45.400 | going to do that, but maybe something along the lines, and this is near and

00:45:49.600 | dear to your heart, but house hacking, which in layman's or normal person's

00:45:54.040 | term is just mostly having a roommate.

00:45:56.480 | It's rethinking, "What are my biggest expenses?"

00:45:59.440 | And for most people, the cost of housing is the absolute number one.

00:46:04.160 | In essence, that's, hey, you're buying a place, so in theory, you're the owner

00:46:08.360 | in a perfect world, though it doesn't by any means have to be that, and then you

00:46:11.840 | are either renting an apartment as part of that, or just renting single rooms out,

00:46:17.960 | and for many people, they can pretty much cover their entire mortgage and live for

00:46:23.920 | free, so they are-

00:46:25.440 | And we did this.

00:46:26.000 | This is what we did in San Francisco.

00:46:28.360 | Yeah, yeah.

00:46:29.120 | When we were looking for a place in San Francisco almost a decade ago, the

00:46:33.400 | requirement was, "Let's find a place that has a way to rent out a room that doesn't

00:46:40.600 | require us to have a roommate," so for us, that made it harder.

00:46:44.520 | We were looking for places that had a small in-law unit in the back, or what we

00:46:49.000 | ended up finding was a standard three-bedroom apartment, but one of those

00:46:53.280 | bedrooms had an external door, and so we were like, "It's not a full apartment.

00:46:58.720 | It doesn't have a kitchen," but we basically took the door to the inside of

00:47:02.680 | the house and put a lock on it and rented it out like a studio.

00:47:06.280 | It had a bedroom and a bathroom, and our tenants didn't have a kitchen, but most

00:47:11.400 | of them had a toaster oven or a rice cooker or different things to get by, and

00:47:15.560 | the Bay Area is somewhat notorious for having employers that offer lunch or even

00:47:19.840 | dinner sometimes, so that makes it a little easy, and we rented that apartment

00:47:24.280 | out for five or six years, and we covered the cost of the mortgage almost every

00:47:31.440 | year, and we spent nothing to live, which in the Bay Area is an expensive place to

00:47:36.880 | live.

00:47:37.080 | We paid nothing, and that, I think, was one of the best things that allowed us to

00:47:43.480 | save was taking that approach, so big fan.

00:47:47.040 | That's incredible.

00:47:47.840 | Yeah, so that is definitely a massive one and was the number one most popular.

00:47:53.120 | I think a bunch of people said the library, and again, this might sound

00:47:57.760 | untrue, but we probably take out thousands of dollars' worth of books every

00:48:01.800 | single year from the library.

00:48:02.800 | Is that the greatest life hack of all time?

00:48:05.160 | In theory, the library probably isn't when you first hear about it, but that can add

00:48:09.160 | up dramatically, and I don't know about you, Chris, but reading is probably my

00:48:13.720 | number one hobby.

00:48:14.720 | I absolutely love reading.

00:48:15.800 | It's the best way to learn everything you possibly can about the world, and the

00:48:19.560 | library is there.

00:48:20.200 | It's part of your tax dollars, and especially nowadays, there are so many ways

00:48:23.760 | to get Kindle books, so it's not even like I've got to delay gratification.

00:48:28.880 | I can think about a book, and 30 seconds later, have it on my Kindle, and it's

00:48:33.360 | free as opposed to paying for it.

00:48:35.400 | I do this all the time, so I'm not as voracious a reader as many, but I think

00:48:40.680 | that's changed a little bit.

00:48:41.800 | I'm more of a books are a way to consume content of information, so if I'm going on

00:48:47.120 | a trip, and I want to understand the place I'm going, my instinct is let's go get the

00:48:51.680 | Lonely Planet guide for this country.

00:48:53.680 | Or when we had a child, there were some books that I was like, "I just want to go

00:48:57.000 | read a book about dream feeding.

00:48:58.960 | I want to read a book about all these different aspects," and my first search is

00:49:03.280 | always the library's digital archive, and I would say maybe eight or nine out of the

00:49:09.000 | 10 books I ever want to read are on the library in digital format for free, and so

00:49:16.120 | one in 10 books, I'll buy, and then nine in 10 books, I just check out from the

00:49:20.680 | library. You get it for 30 or 45 days, and the San Francisco Public Library has three

00:49:25.840 | different websites linked to it for digital books, so I have them all bookmarked, and

00:49:30.960 | I'm like, "Let's search Overdrive.

00:49:32.280 | Let's search Axis," and it's not that $10 on a book is going to make or break the

00:49:37.440 | year. It's an expense I don't need to spend, and if you make it about the $10, it's

00:49:43.440 | hard to think about, but if you make it about what are the things on my list that I

00:49:46.880 | don't need to spend money on, and I don't have to lose anything.

00:49:49.920 | I don't have to give up anything, that is the mindset.

00:49:52.720 | That's the exact mindset, and that goes into the very next one, which is cell phones.

00:49:57.440 | There's always a way to get, in my estimation, almost the exact benefit from

00:50:02.840 | something at a fraction of the price in so many cases, and that's what's fun about

00:50:07.120 | these hacks, but $100 plus a month for unlimited data and whatever on your cell

00:50:13.240 | phone, that's not that out of the ordinary.

00:50:16.520 | I know plenty of people who are still paying that, but yet there are so many

00:50:21.000 | services that, like Republic Wireless or Mint Mobile are the two that come to mind

00:50:26.880 | really quickly, that for me, I get a couple of gigabytes of data every month.

00:50:32.840 | I get free phone, whatever, on Wi-Fi, which is where I am 99% of my life, and this is

00:50:39.560 | even pre-COVID, so it requires some tiny little bit of intentionality, which is

00:50:45.280 | just, for me, and I kid you not, this is just, I don't download podcasts or stream

00:50:50.840 | YouTube videos when I'm not on Wi-Fi.

00:50:53.400 | That's it.

00:50:54.640 | That's the list, right?

00:50:56.080 | That is all that I don't do, and that's my horrible sacrifice, and my cell phone

00:51:01.920 | costs about $15 a month, as opposed to $100, so $85 a month, month after month,

00:51:08.840 | year after year, I think I've been with Republic Wireless for five plus years now.

00:51:12.720 | That's real money.

00:51:14.080 | That adds up.

00:51:15.360 | It's remarkable.

00:51:16.560 | Again, where can you find that tiny little sacrifice that works for you?

00:51:20.120 | Like we said with the library, is it a horrible sacrifice to have to drive to the

00:51:24.200 | library to pick up a tangible book every now and again?

00:51:26.440 | No, it's not.

00:51:27.120 | Of course not.

00:51:27.640 | Is it a sacrifice at all to get the digital copy?

00:51:29.840 | No, zero.

00:51:30.680 | That's wonderful.

00:51:31.400 | So it's just, it's that little bit of thinking, right?

00:51:34.240 | It's what we talked about before.

00:51:35.880 | Another massive one is travel rewards, and I know you're going to do episode or

00:51:40.360 | episodes on this, so we're not going to go too far into it, but it's about the

00:51:44.640 | intentional use of credit cards to earn massive signup bonuses and ultimately

00:51:49.760 | massive accumulations of points that can help you travel for pennies, if not

00:51:55.200 | pretty darn close to free, and now again, is that instant gratification?

00:51:59.520 | Is it, "Hey, I want to go to Paris tomorrow.

00:52:03.200 | Where are all the points?"

00:52:04.440 | You know, no, it doesn't.

00:52:05.440 | I mean, in some cases.

00:52:06.600 | Well, with Capital One Venture, we could go on.

00:52:08.760 | Yeah, there are credit cards, even right now, that have a 100,000 point signup

00:52:13.000 | bonus that you can immediately redeem for $1,500 of travel, and that could be two

00:52:18.520 | people going to Europe, and I wouldn't even say it always has to be plan ahead.

00:52:22.640 | Now, if you're like me and you want to go way off the deep end and find a way to

00:52:26.960 | fly halfway across the world and stay in a bungalow over the water and fly in

00:52:31.880 | first class, yeah, you have to plan because there's no signup bonus that's

00:52:35.160 | giving you that many points, but I'm not paying for it.

00:52:38.240 | I always like to say, "I'm at the point where I don't want to

00:52:40.920 | fly over an ocean in coach.

00:52:42.880 | I'd rather play the game to get the points."

00:52:45.160 | I would never pay for it.

00:52:46.320 | I don't think I've ever paid for a first-class lie-flat seat in my whole life.

00:52:49.920 | That would be crazy.

00:52:51.400 | I both think that it would be crazy to cross an ocean in coach

00:52:55.440 | and crazy to pay for business class.

00:52:58.240 | Both of those things seem for many people to be impossible to think at the same time,

00:53:03.200 | but yeah, I play the same game.

00:53:05.360 | I sign up for cards when there's a really big bonus.

00:53:08.440 | I track what's going on and it's paid off a lot.

00:53:12.520 | I mean, you have a course, right?

00:53:13.680 | Didn't you make a course for this?

00:53:15.320 | Yeah, this was actually what kind of bridged me from leaving my full-time job.

00:53:21.240 | Yeah, I started a site called TravelMiles101.com about five years ago.

00:53:27.400 | And yeah, we created a step-by-step course for regular people.

00:53:30.720 | That's kind of how I always approach everything.

00:53:32.200 | It's like, how can regular people win?

00:53:35.360 | The lie-flat, first-class, travel around the world.

00:53:38.520 | That's wonderful and that's aspirational.

00:53:40.280 | But for a lot of people, it's like, how can I take one close-to-free family vacation next year?

00:53:45.960 | And if you could do that, that's a massive savings.

00:53:48.880 | Three, four, five thousand plus dollars.

00:53:51.040 | That's humongous for people.

00:53:52.480 | So yeah, that was...

00:53:53.640 | You've done this more than once.

00:53:55.280 | Oh, yeah.

00:53:56.400 | Our first and most famous one is going to Disney World in Florida.

00:54:02.160 | We took my family for plus my parents and my in-laws and all of us went on points.

00:54:08.560 | We stayed at the Disney Swan Hotel, which is like a nice luxury hotel.

00:54:12.800 | We got Disney tickets for free, all using rewards points.

00:54:16.280 | And I think for our family, it was a hundred and fifty dollars instead of about five thousand.

00:54:20.960 | And it just required a little bit of planning.

00:54:22.520 | It wasn't hard.

00:54:23.040 | There was no aspect of it that was hard.

00:54:24.680 | That's that kind of travel up to luxury travel.

00:54:27.760 | Like my wife and I went to Bermuda and we stayed at like the Fairmont Hotel, which is just this incredible hotel.

00:54:34.480 | We actually got this suite upgrade because she would love that.

00:54:37.560 | It was that they had just just upgraded the suites at the Fairmont.

00:54:42.120 | And literally the room we were in was the one that was on the hotel homepage as like the be all and all.

00:54:49.000 | It was so amazing.

00:54:50.440 | It was like it would have been a thousand dollars a night.

00:54:52.880 | And at that point, I don't think this offer still exists or I'm ninety nine percent sure this offer doesn't exist.

00:54:57.800 | But at that point, it was like two free nights with the Fairmont Hotel hotel card.

00:55:02.560 | And my wife and I each got one and we got this free suite upgrade.

00:55:05.480 | So it was a four night hotel stay in this suite that would have been easily four thousand dollars for zero dollars, literally nothing.

00:55:13.440 | And we used again, you'll go into these hacks later, certainly in another episode.

00:55:18.240 | But we wound up using British Airways miles to fly on American Airlines from JFK to Bermuda.

00:55:26.160 | And it was far fewer points than we would have used because we had this little like sweet spot that we found using British Airways than if we had American Airlines miles.

00:55:36.600 | So not only did we get the entire vacation for zero dollars, but we actually spent far fewer miles than we would have if we didn't know that extra little hack.

00:55:45.400 | So there's always there's always a layer upon layer of these hacks, which is fun.

00:55:49.320 | Yeah, I know there's a lot of people that think, gosh, using miles and points is hard.

00:55:54.200 | You've got to figure it all out.

00:55:55.680 | And I think you can go take a class.

00:55:57.800 | Look, and Brad didn't mention this, but his course is free.

00:56:00.640 | And so you could take that.

00:56:02.360 | You could try to go learn all this.

00:56:03.600 | I'll throw one.

00:56:04.640 | I have no relationship to this company, but there's this company I found called Flight Fox.

00:56:08.680 | And I think now they're mostly focused on corporate, but there's a big button that says book a personal trip.

00:56:14.040 | And I just pulled it up.

00:56:15.000 | If you want to take a trip with miles and you want to go to one place for two adults and two kids in economy, they charge you one hundred dollars.

00:56:23.640 | And they guarantee that if they don't find a flight with your miles that beats whatever you can find on your own, they don't charge anything.

00:56:30.840 | You could go down the rabbit hole of, OK, do I transfer my points to Avios to go book them through British Airways' website to go get this deal?

00:56:38.520 | What's the path?

00:56:39.920 | And by all means, I've gone down that rabbit hole.

00:56:42.600 | You've gone down that rabbit hole and you might enjoy it.

00:56:44.760 | But I don't want people to think if you don't want to go down that rabbit hole, there are other ways that you can still get incredible deals.

00:56:51.640 | So that trip that might have been five thousand dollars that you did for one hundred fifty dollars.

00:56:56.080 | Someone else might not want to do all the research, but maybe they could use a service that would help them do it for two hundred and fifty dollars, which is still a gigantic savings.

00:57:05.640 | So there's more than one site out there that helps with award booking.

00:57:09.480 | I've been a fan of FlightFox and a lot of times people call me and say, hey, I want to book this crazy trip.

00:57:14.520 | I've got these Amex points or these chase points, and I just don't know what to do with them.

00:57:18.680 | And I say, look, do you want to go spend a few hours and figure it out or do you want to just pay one hundred dollars and someone will figure it all out for you?

00:57:27.080 | And if you're taking a trip that otherwise would be thousands of dollars, especially with a guarantee that they'll find something better than you can, it can be a great way to both not have to spend all the time in the world learning it and get a huge

00:57:39.440 | deal. Yeah, that's massive.

00:57:41.480 | I'm actually going to go check out FlightFox after this and maybe put it into the course.

00:57:45.120 | So by the time this goes live, you might see that in there.

00:57:47.560 | That's really cool. Any other final hacks?

00:57:49.680 | Yeah, I mean, you know, there are there are a ton of little ones like waking up early and maxing out your 401k and things like that.

00:57:57.960 | I think one that that I love, Camel Camel Camel, which is a site that is like it looks like it was built in nineteen ninety seven.

00:58:05.760 | But it is such a great website.

00:58:08.560 | Basically, anything that exists on Amazon.com, which is pretty much anything in the entire world, you can see the price history for.

00:58:17.720 | And more importantly, you can set price alerts so that you can look at you'd be shocked at what a difference the price can possibly be on one particular item.

00:58:29.400 | So, like, for instance, we built a home gym at our house here and I went to buying a squat rack and the one that I found is pretty mid priced item.

00:58:38.920 | It was like most of the time it was like three hundred bucks and which is really not that much in the grand scheme of things.

00:58:44.000 | But I noticed that it went down under two hundred dollars a couple of times a year if you look at the price history.

00:58:50.600 | So I just set a price alert for whatever was one ninety seven or some such.

00:58:54.960 | And when it hit that Camel Camel Camel just sent me a email.

00:58:59.960 | I went and I bought the thing.

00:59:01.200 | But that's one example.

00:59:02.600 | Obviously, if you need something right away, this is not going to help all that much.

00:59:06.160 | But like we are a big board game family, like we absolutely love board games.

00:59:10.120 | So there's at all times a list of probably 50 board games that my wife wants to buy for for the family, because she's the one who does all the research.

00:59:17.200 | And we just plug them into Camel Camel Camel and say, hey, look, we can wait for that price to drop.

00:59:23.720 | We can wait for that best all time price, because almost invariably it's going to happen a couple of times a year.

00:59:28.800 | And again, like I was saying, almost every item on Amazon, 10, 20, even 50 percent.

00:59:35.200 | Sometimes it's because like the first time you look at that, your mind is just blown.

00:59:39.080 | So I just realized that Camel Camel Camel now has a browser extension.

00:59:43.400 | You go to any site and you don't even have to go to Camel Camel Camel.

00:59:46.760 | You can say, oh, OK, what does the history look like?

00:59:49.720 | And you can see a real time chart of what that has done over time and where it's at.

00:59:54.320 | And that's awesome.

00:59:55.160 | Sometimes I'm like, this is the lowest it's ever been.

00:59:57.240 | Now is the time to buy or almost every day.

01:00:00.120 | This thing is $40 today.

01:00:01.560 | It's $50. And Camel Camel Camel is like, send me an alert when it drops back to 40 and I'll buy it then.

01:00:07.000 | And so we do similar things like that.

01:00:09.800 | To me, it's a fun game.

01:00:12.000 | It's like, how do you win at life?

01:00:14.320 | It's just like at its essence, like we find this fun.

01:00:19.040 | And I think most people that get into it do as well.

01:00:21.920 | Yeah, it's really leveled up the quality of life you can have for the cost.

01:00:25.720 | And I think my big takeaway is that the more I spend time with Brad, the more I understand.

01:00:32.200 | You don't spend a lot of money each year.

01:00:33.800 | I don't know if you share how much money you spend, but it's not a lot.

01:00:37.720 | And you live what to me seems like an incredible life where you get to do the things you want

01:00:43.320 | and you drink the beers you want and you visit the places you want to go and you play the games you want with your wife.

01:00:48.840 | And that sounds wonderful.

01:00:50.480 | And you've done it because you chose what you cared to spend your money on.

01:00:54.520 | And you chose that having the independence to do whatever you want was worth the savings.

01:01:00.240 | And you use the time you have to find a way to optimize it so that you didn't have to sacrifice.

01:01:05.840 | And I think that's just like a shining example of what you can do.

01:01:09.480 | Thank you, Matt.

01:01:10.480 | Yeah, it's we feel like we are just rolling in abundance, just absolutely rolling.

01:01:15.840 | Like I could never have imagined a life this good.

01:01:18.160 | And it's amazing that it came just from just being intentional.

01:01:22.240 | So, yeah, it's been quite a journey.

01:01:23.880 | And yeah, it's just it really is pretty amazing.

01:01:26.080 | Yeah. So you've got a podcast.

01:01:27.600 | Where can people find it?

01:01:28.840 | Where can they read about what you're building, everything you're doing with Chooseify?

01:01:32.080 | Yeah, Chris, thanks.

01:01:33.080 | We built this entire kind of ecosystem.

01:01:35.880 | It's amazing how the Chooseify community has grown.

01:01:38.560 | I mean, obviously, it started as a podcast and the podcast has grown really beyond our wildest dreams.

01:01:44.320 | But it's more than that.

01:01:45.560 | It's about the community.

01:01:46.520 | We always say it's not about me and Jonathan, my co-host.

01:01:49.080 | It's about all of us on this path together.

01:01:51.160 | And we have a whole bunch.

01:01:52.680 | We actually have Chooseify local groups in 300 cities throughout the world, which is amazing.

01:01:58.160 | Like you said, you're asking questions about the Bay Area.

01:02:00.440 | I can't answer those questions.

01:02:02.120 | Yeah, I'm in that group.

01:02:03.560 | And it's great because the questions in the group are like, child care is really expensive.

01:02:08.600 | What are you doing?

01:02:09.520 | And frankly, people who don't live in the Bay Area or maybe New York or a few other cities, those answers aren't as helpful.

01:02:15.920 | You can give a very apropos hack that you've come up with.

01:02:19.000 | Yeah. Chooseify.com/local.

01:02:20.800 | You can see all those lists.

01:02:22.160 | And yeah, we have a bunch of so those are Facebook groups.

01:02:25.320 | We have a main Facebook group with about 80,000 people in it.

01:02:29.080 | And it's just a really active, positive place where people are sharing their wins, they're asking questions, they're looking for support.

01:02:36.160 | We've built something I'm really proud of.

01:02:37.840 | Yeah. And I guess final thing, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, since I mentioned the travel course before TravelMiles101.com, we do have a more advanced one at Chooseify.

01:02:46.360 | So at Chooseify.com/travel if anybody's interested.

01:02:49.560 | Brad, thank you so much for being here.

01:02:51.440 | I really appreciate your time.

01:02:53.080 | This has been great.

01:02:54.160 | Yeah. Thanks again, Chris.

01:02:55.200 | This is a blast.

01:02:56.480 | All right. That's it for this episode of All The Hacks.

01:03:00.160 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:03:02.200 | I'm just getting started with this show.

01:03:03.880 | So if you like what you heard, I'd really appreciate a rating in your podcast app.

01:03:08.360 | Or if you'll simply tell a friend about the show, that would be amazing.

01:03:11.800 | And finally, if you want to find links to anything we discussed today, or if you want to share a suggestion for what we can talk about in the future, you can do both at AllTheHacks.com.

01:03:22.680 | I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money.

01:03:32.520 | That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement.

01:03:36.360 | It's called The Personal Finance Podcast, and it's much more about building generational wealth and spending your money on the things you value than it is about clipping coupons to save a dollar.

01:03:46.560 | It's hosted by my good friend, Andrew, who truly believes that everyone in this world can build wealth, and his passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining.

01:03:55.840 | I know because I was a guest on the show in December 2022, but recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your mind.

01:04:05.360 | And it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating in their employer's retirement plan.

01:04:12.000 | And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared.

01:04:15.680 | The Personal Finance Podcast has something for everyone.

01:04:18.360 | It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with your money and grow your wealth.

01:04:23.920 | So I highly recommend you check it out.

01:04:25.920 | Just search for The Personal Finance Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts and enjoy.