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You heard about it here again. That's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of all the hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. And each week I sit down with the world's best experts to learn the strategies, tactics, and frameworks you can use to have a happier, healthier, and wealthier life.

This week, I'm talking to Jordan Grumet. He's a hospice doctor whose passion for personal finance and storytelling has led him to educate others on living mindfully when it comes to money, time, and meaning. As a hospice doctor, he's had an intimate look at people's regrets, mistakes, and decisions at the end of life.

He's also the host of the award-winning podcast that I've had the pleasure of joining, Earn and Invest. And he's got a new book, Taking Stock, a Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life. The book shares some of his advice about making the most at the end of life, about our finances, our relationships, and our time.

Today, we're going to talk about what some of the biggest regrets people have are at the end of their life and what you can do to avoid them. What Jordan calls the money mind meld and how to get away from focusing too much on money and not enough on the life you want, why the best financial plans are like a dining room table, why it's hard to talk about the issues of death, both with ourselves and our family members, why time perception work might be more useful than productivity hacks.

So without further ado, Jordan, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited for this conversation. Yeah, me too. So this isn't the first time we've talked about regret on the podcast. Dan Pink and I talked about his book, which is all about regret. Ben Nempton had a bunch of learnings about regrets of the dying that sparked him to totally change and upend his career and his life, but both of them approached it from surveys and data, which I'm sure you've read, but you've also sat down with thousands of patients at the end of their life and had these conversations.

So what have you learned that might not have come out in the data that many of us have heard? So in hospice care, when we're taking care of the terminally ill, it is a very normal thing for us to sit down with patients and talk to them about their lives.

We call it a life review. So as opposed to a quantitative look, this is very qualitative. We sit down with people and we ask what was important in your life. What did you achieve? What didn't you achieve? What do you hope to achieve in the next few months? What are some of your regrets?

And the interesting thing about this is it's completely unstructured. I mean, the questions we ask are somewhat structured, but above and beyond that, it gives people a chance to tell their stories. And so this is where you get past the numbers and you start hearing about what people's lives were like, what they accomplished and what they didn't accomplish.

And so no surprise here, almost no one says, I wish I worked more nights and weekends. Like I've never heard that with any of my patients. Almost no one refers to certain economic goals. No one says, I wish I hit a net worth of a million dollars, right? I only made it to 500,000 and really, I wish I made it to a million.

It is true that people have regrets when they're dying, if they don't have enough to cover some basic needs, but above and beyond that, it's a lot more about the things that were purposeful to them, that they never strive towards, that they never looked in the mirror and said, okay, life is finite.

I only have a certain amount of time on this earth. And these are the real important things to me. First and foremost, people don't want to spend time even thinking about what purpose and identity look like in their life. So a lot of people don't even ask themselves the question because it's hard work and it's scary and the answers aren't simple.

Next, if people do kind of say, oh, you know, I really like to do this at some point, whether that's climbing Mount Everest or starting a certain hobby or writing that book, a lot of times we put it off. We figure we're always going to have more time. So what I get to experience when I talk to people is because death is around the corner, it relieves them of all society's expectations.

It relieves them all of family expectations. They get to drop all the junk and look at their lives and say, what was important to me and did I accomplish it? And often those things are what I like to call the climb, right? There are things that have to do with what purpose is in our lives.

There are things that we're deeply interested in doing. There are things that bring us happiness. And often at the end of life, what people really regret is that they didn't spend enough time doing those things, right? They didn't write that book. They didn't spend more time with those people who are important to them.

They didn't resolve that fight they had with their best friend from 20 years ago. These are the kinds of things that really weigh on people. And what happens is they really then have to try to catch up and achieve some of those things in whatever the weeks or months they have, right?

Can I get back in contact with this person and make amends? Maybe I wanted to go to climb Mount Everest. I obviously don't feel good enough to do that, but maybe I want to try to make a trip to Nepal just to see it, right? What are the things we can do to try to bring some closure to these purposeful, meaningful things in our life that we never addressed?

And I think that's what people really regret. Interestingly enough, they don't regret failing you on your deathbed. We'll sit there and say, you know what? I gave it my best and I didn't succeed. I failed, but at least I tried. It's the things that we never had the courage to try that I think really.

Gets to us when we find out that we have a terminal on this. In the book, you say living a regret-free life, but is it really more about assessing and tackling the regrets you've had than trying to completely avoid them? And is it about learning from them so that you can live more intentionally than trying to pretend that they don't exist?

I think the problem is we often take these things that are deeply important to us and put them off, and maybe that's because we're trying to make money. Maybe that's because we're trying to build a career. Maybe, like I said, it's because they're scary and they're hard. And so when we get to the end of this life and we haven't addressed these issues, we do feel regret.

I think if we can start thinking about these things much earlier, the regrets won't form because then we can start taking action earlier in our lives today. Not when we're on our deathbeds, not when we need that sudden plot twist that fixes everything. But in a sense, I think the way to avoid regrets is to start thinking about purpose and meaning now, because that's what people regret in the end is that they didn't address it earlier.

So, yes, when I'm 40, I can look back and say, hey, I really regret that I didn't think about these things when I'm 20. But hopefully if you live to 70 or 80. If you started thinking about these things at 40, you're not going to have a lot of regrets when you get to 60, 70 or 80.

So, yes, even in the middle of life, we have regrets and we can start addressing them. But I think when we get towards the end of life and we start doing that life evaluation and we have to come face to face with our own mortality, if we think about these things earlier on, we are a lot less likely to have regrets.

You said they're hard conversations. They're difficult. The question you just posed of what is my purpose? Like these are difficult things. How would someone listening in their 20s, 30s or 40s start to approach to understand that, to process it? Do you have suggestions? Well, this is exactly why I found it so amazing that my life as a hospice doctor could start informing my life as a personal finance person and someone thinking about quality of life today.

I think the dying have a lot to teach us about how to look for purpose in life today, decades and decades before we're going to deal with that kind of stuff. With the dying, we do something called the life review, which, as I said, is the structured series of questions where people kind of look at their life, what was meaningful to them and did they pursue it?

I think we should start trying to do these life reviews way earlier. Like we should probably do them yearly starting in our 20s. I talk in the book exactly about how to go through a life review, but a quick exercise a quick visualization that I think any young person can do right now is to start with the basic question.

If you were lying in your deathbed, bemoaning your life and thinking to yourself, I really regret that I never had the energy, courage or time to like whatever comes next in that sentence is germane to your sense of purpose. And the sooner we start thinking about these things, the sooner we can start striving towards them now, as opposed to waiting to a later time.

There are all sorts of other exercises that you can do or questions you can ask yourself that start getting you working on this idea of purpose. Now, one that I love to ask people, which is just so simple as like, when was the last time you woke up in the middle of the night with this idea and you were so excited you couldn't fall asleep?

Did you pursue that idea? Like how many times that happened in your life and what came of it? Because those kind of things, too, are the messages to us of what our purpose is. If that doesn't work, then you have to start doing other stuff. Like I often tell people like you got to start saying yes to new experiences that you've never done before, right?

People ask you to go do something that normally you'd say no to. You have to say yes to people in places and things you've never done. You have to start experiencing life and see what sticks. It's like throwing spaghetti against the wall. What ends up being meaningful to you?

What brings you joy when you do it? And how can you then start building that as a bigger part of your life? In the book trailer, you said your patients often die as they live. You know, some express sorrow, hope, but it's a time of thoughtfulness. It seemed the way you said that, like that was a revelation for you.

Did that change the way you lived when you process that thought and how has it? Well, so it's this interesting idea, right? People die as they live, and so people often ask me, like, is death painful? Is it scary? How is it going to feel for me? So what I see in hospice patients is people who are anxious and uptight and unhappy in life tend to be anxious, uptight and unhappy in death.

And vice versa, people who are at peace, people who feel content, who have strong relationships and a sense and purpose in life tend to feel the same way in death. So if the germane question is, how do I die a good death? The answer is, let's start working on living a good life.

So I think if we come to terms with some of these issues at a much younger age, the process of dying becomes a lot easier because you're a lot more at peace with what happened in your life. So, yeah, it was kind of a revelation because it, again, made me start to look back and say, we're doing this too late.

We're having these conversations and thinking about these things when we're old and retired or getting a terminal illness. And we should really be talking about these things in our 20s when we're setting off on our career journey and trying to decide what kind of life to build. And someone listening to this right now might not think, oh, this is a personal finance conversation, right?

It maybe hasn't gone there yet, but where I think a lot of people get held up is so much of your younger career is tied into earning, making money, progressing, and maybe for some people that is their passion, maybe for others it's not. How did all of these learnings kind of intersect for you with personal finance and come together to be the same conversation?

So the problem is we're doing it all wrong. We're putting money first and then figuring out once we get our career and our money in order, we can start working on life. My argument in this book and my argument from my experience as a hospice doctor and a personal finance expert is we need to put the money aside, especially when we're young, just for a moment.

That doesn't mean we're going to stop working, that doesn't mean we're going to stop thinking about how we're going to build wealth, but we need to put those ideas aside and start thinking about purpose, identity, and connections first. And the reason why is we make this mistake that money is the end goal, where my argument is money is a tool and money is a tool ultimately so that we can live lives of purpose, identity, and connections, right?

The fire movement, financial independence, retire early. We are all rushing, rushing, rushing to make enough money so we can stop working so we can do what? Live purposeful lives. I'm trying to flip the switch and say, let's start with purpose, identity, and connections. Let's start doing some of those exercises and the hard work and figuring out what that means.

And then once we're on that path, that's when you start looking at your finances and saying, how can I now build a path to financial independence or a financial structure that supports that purpose, identity, and connections? And that way we can be really intentional about why we make money, how we make money, and what we're doing this all for.

When we don't do that purpose and identity work first, we are chasing after money as a goal, and often we don't even know why. We get this idea of a certain net worth, we get this idea of a certain job position, and it sounds great, and it sounds meaningful.

But a lot of times when we get to that place, we get to that net worth, or we get to that job we were so excited about, we actually feel more depressed as opposed to happy. And there's a few reasons for that. One is because money is a little bit of a false goal.

Looking at your bank account isn't going to make you feel more purposeful or give you a better sense of identity. So when you get to that place, you thought that was so great, like a million dollars in the bank, most likely two things are going to happen. One, you're going to start saying, oh, well, I don't feel as good as I thought I'd feel.

Maybe I have to start going after 1.5 or 2 million. So before you know it, you're right back on the treadmill trying to make more. The other thing is this idea of loss aversion. The fear of losing is almost twice as bad as the fear of never getting there in the first place.

The minute you get to that million dollar net worth, or you get to that job promotion that was so exciting, you start worrying about losing it. Like, oh my God, the market's going to change. Something's going to happen. I'm going to have this big expense and all of a sudden I'm not going to have my million dollars anymore.

And that actually causes us to be more fearful than happy. And I see this, especially in the financial independence movement. When people get to financial independence, they get to that net worth number and they find themselves crushed, anxious and afraid. And the reason why is because none of those things really have a real sense of purpose and identity.

There's no meaning in those things. They're just these easy goals we set up. And they're really easy because they keep us from doing the hard work of trying to figure out purpose and identity. It's really easy to go for the low hanging fruit. It's really comfortable. It's what society expects of us.

We can go on Instagram and see all the pictures of people taking beautiful vacations and having beautiful things. And it's really easy to strive for all that. But in the end, I don't think it makes us happy. And so that's kind of where I'm coming at this from. That's why I realized when I started looking into personal finance, I started blogging and podcasting.

I was already financially independent. So to me, it wasn't really exciting to go, OK, how do I invest? How do I save? How do I set up my 401k? I felt like those one-on-one conversations are important, but they weren't what I wanted to have. I want to have those two-on-one conversations now that I'm starting to get a hold of my finances.

What do I do? But in having these conversations, I realized I was a little bit late to the game, like my life would have been served much better if I had started thinking about what was purposeful first and then started building my financial framework. Let's say we're all bought in with we need to figure this purposeful conversation out at the beginning.

Is that just the life review? Are there more steps to that process before if you've set money aside, bring it back into the conversation? Or how long should someone expect it to take to figure that out? So I think figuring out your purpose and identity are things that take years.

But I actually suggest that people take a few months to really start doing some meditation, some thought and some of these purpose and identity exercises. And we can go into some other ones like identity exercises if you want. Once you start doing that and start saying, okay, these are the things in my life I feel that are important.

I think then it's fine to start looking at your financial structure and saying, okay, I need to build a financial pathway, but let's see how I can at least take this idea of purpose and identity and build it into that. So what kind of jobs am I doing? What's my end goal?

What am I going to take this tool of money that I'm making and how am I going to use it? The important question is how are we going to, instead of deferring all of our gratification and spending all of our time front-loading the sacrifice and grinding it out to do well at work and make lots of money, the idea is how can we enjoy today and tomorrow, not just kind of put it off till later.

And so I think this happens simultaneously, but I think you need at least a few months of thinking about purpose and identity before you really start jumping into how you're going to change your financial life. So in the book, you mentioned these three brothers, and one of them sounds like the one you just referenced, right?

The eldest brother front-loads all this effort and work to enjoy all the fruits of his labor or her labor at the end. The middle brother takes breaks along the way, like sabbaticals, and the youngest one just enjoys the journey. When I read that, I thought, okay, well, there's multiple ways to enjoy this journey.

Is the message that all three ways could work or is the message that the first one is not really as good as it seems? The message is that all three ways could work. So my hypothesis is once you start thinking about purpose, identity, and connections and start getting a hold of what those things are in your life, now is the time then to use that information to help you build a path towards financial independence.

The parable of the three brothers talks about three ways of doing it. The eldest brother, which we talked about, was more front-loading the sacrifice, that traditional fire movement, grind it out, make it high net worth. Once you hit that net worth, quit and let your money support you. The middle brother was much more like the passive income and side hustles.

Financial independence wasn't some big net worth number. It was actually making enough money through passive income and side hustles each month to pretty much support your needs. And then the youngest brothers, the passion play. This is the idea that if the goal of financial independence is to live a life of purpose, identity, and connections, if you're lucky enough to come out of college or high school and find a job that fulfills your sense of purpose, identity, and connections, something you do, even if you weren't getting paid for, but you happen to get paid enough to cover your monthly needs.

In a sense, you're immediately financially independent, although you may work till 60 or 70 because you're probably not saving a lot and you're just covering what you need. Any of these three mechanisms, these archetypes are fine. In fact, I argue that we may switch back and forth from time to time, or we might even borrow some of the different techniques of each of these brothers.

So when I look at my own trajectory, my father died when he was 40 and I was seven and he was a doctor. And all I wanted to do was be a doctor like him. I had no care about money. So in a sense, I was very much a youngest brother.

I wanted to enjoy the past. I thought that medicine would give me a sense of purpose, identity, and connections. I could care less about money. This is what I wanted to do with my life. Something happened though. I went to medical school residency. I started practicing it and I burned out and I'm like, I can't live this life anymore.

But I also realized that to leave my job in medicine, I needed to build up a certain amount of money so that I could quit my job. So I started grinding it out and doing things to make lots of money. So I transitioned from a youngest brother to an eldest brother, right?

All of a sudden I was grinding it out, front-loading the sacrifice, making as much money as I could so I could quit and then find my sense of purpose, identity, and connections because I was done working. But in the midst of doing that, I started picking up these little medical side hustles to make a little extra money on the side.

One of them was hospice. Hospice was something that I really enjoyed that ended up being a side hustle. So in a sense, I also took a little bit of the road of the middle brother. Interestingly enough, hospice also became the thing I would do even if I wasn't getting paid for it.

So by doing the side hustle, I learned that I had a new passion. So then again, I started back looking like a youngest brother. The point is you can change from time to time to time, but those pathways need to be in service of your purpose and identity. And the mistake that we make is we don't even consider purpose and identity a lot of times when we start going towards a career pathway.

We just zoom off into it thinking that we'll achieve some status of either wealth or position and that becomes what we think is meaningful or important to us. And for a small subset of people, it may be. But for the majority of us, all that does is delay the hard work.

Do you have an example of someone that you've met along this journey of writing the book and blogging and podcasting that kind of ran through this exercise maybe for a month or two of purpose and the kinds of changes that came after it? I mean, I did. That's exactly what I did.

So what happened with me is I realized I was burning out of medicine. I didn't want to be a doctor anymore. I went to my accountant, my financial advisor said, "How much money do I need to retire early and start pursuing the life I want to pursue?" They gave me all sorts of cockamamie numbers that made no sense.

But eventually, Jim Dolly, the White Coat Investor, sent me his book to review for my medical blog. And that gave me the vocabulary to understand financial independence. And I realized I had enough money. My net worth was high enough to actually leave work right away. The problem was I hadn't done any of that purpose and identity work.

So I had no clue what I wanted to do with myself. So I became depressed and anxious. I didn't know what to do. Like I could walk away from this identity that had been my whole life after my father died. But then who was I and what was life about?

So instead of leaving work, I slowly started subtracting the things out of work I didn't like that were giving me friction. But then I had to do the hard work of figuring out purpose and identity. And I did a lot of the exercise in the book. At that point, I was treating hospice patients.

And I was thinking about what has purpose for me. I also started writing a blog where I daily wrote about finances and life and what they meant to me. It was almost like an online diary. And then I had to do the hard identity work. What I suggest in the book is the great identity exercises to ask yourself or say the statement I am and then fill in the blank, right?

So the first thing that came to my mind is I am a doctor, which is how I totally identified most of my life. But then I realized that's just what I do for a living. It's not all of who I am. Eventually, I kept asking myself that question. I am, you know, a father, a son, a spouse.

Okay, those are my family relationships. I am a Plutus Award winner for the Yearning to Invest podcast. That's an achievement. But is it really who I am? After doing all this hard work, doing these exercises, I came to I am a podcaster, a public speaker, a writer, and that kind of coalesced into I am a communicator.

And that identity fit. So now I had a sense of purpose was to have these great, amazing conversations where we talked about important things. Identity was that of being a communicator. And I had to get there before I could actually transition fully out of being a doctor and start subtracting more and more out of my job until I was left with the one thing that was still very purposeful for me, which was the hospice work.

So I've done this exact process. The interesting thought when it comes to my career is when I started medical school, I actually volunteered in hospice the first week of my medical career. So my first patient I ever saw was as a hospice volunteer. Something in my chest was telling me hospice work is for you.

But instead, I ignored that. And part of the reason I ignored it is because it wasn't as prestigious and it didn't make as much money as all the other things I could do. But I go back now and I say, if I had understood purpose and identity, if I had done some of this hard work at a much younger age, I might have started my medical career in hospice and I probably would have never burned out.

And interestingly enough, I probably would have made a lot less money. I probably wouldn't have made it to financial independence, maybe into my 50s and 60s, as opposed to now. I kind of made it in my early 40s. But I probably would have enjoyed my career more and it would have been an alternate pathway that probably would have saved me a lot of pain and anxiety that I got as I burned out in medicine when it wasn't really meeting my expectations.

So I had to do this work and I'm a perfect example of why putting purpose and identity first might have made my trajectory easier and less painful. I feel like I have a similar experience where I meet people that have known me well and tell them that I started this podcast and they're like, "Yeah, you were supposed to do this 10 years ago." And I was like, "Well, why didn't you tell me 10 years ago?" It seems like everyone I know thought that this is what I should be doing, but somehow I was the last person to figure it out.

I don't remember if I read the exercise in the book, but sometimes I like asking other people who know you really well to talk about you because it was shocking to me that everyone thought I should be doing this before I knew it. And I thought, "Man, if I could just have somehow interviewed them and asked them." So now, I regularly ask people that know me well, like, "What are things that you think that I should be doing more of?

What are the things I'm doing that you wonder why I'm doing?" To try to pull that information out. I mentioned that in the identity section in the book. And if you're having trouble with the statement, "I am" and filling in the blanks, it's a great time to do exactly that.

Go ask family and friends and be aspirational. Like, "Not only what am I today, but what could I be? Like, what am I in my most heroic life?" And I think, again, those type of exercises, interviewing your family, say, "Well, how do you see me as?" It's very powerful because you're right, we ourselves have these blind spots.

And again, I think sometimes we spend a lot of our time pursuing things and worrying about what we think we're supposed to be doing as opposed to what we want. And so, we do so little work trying to figure out what we want. Again, the dying, it's amazing. You find out you're dying and all of a sudden, all you can think about is what you want.

And so, I'm trying to bring some of that urgency a little earlier in our lives so that it can help guide us. Science has shown that being charitable can actually have a huge impact on your happiness, which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Daffy today. They're a not-for-profit community built around a new modern way to give and they have a mission I think we can all get behind, helping people be more generous more often.

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I highly recommend you check it out. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass. And as an AllTheHacks listener, you get 15% off an annual membership. Go to allthehacks.com/masterclass. That's allthehacks.com/masterclass for 15% off Masterclass. Along the journey you shared for yourself, you talked about this trap that in the book you call "The Money Mind Meld", where you care way more about the money.

And I found myself in the same trap. It's like, we got to get to this net worth. We got to get to this net worth. I recently read "Die With Zero" and I was like, maybe the net worth I'm really targeting is ending with zero. Like, maybe the number doesn't matter.

But how did you get out of it? A lot of people that I think listen to the show, people that I know are optimizers stuck in that. Can you talk about that transition? Yeah. So, I talk about the money mind meld. It's this idea that we become mesmerized with so much about money that especially when we're in the pursuit of it, it's the only thing we can see, right?

We forget about everything else that's important to us. The problem with the money mind meld is once you reach that goal, you get to that place that you thought was so vaunted, you don't find yourself happy. And this is really what it comes down to. Money doesn't really ultimately make us happy.

And so we have to change our mindset and really start thinking about money as a tool instead of a goal, right? Money itself does nothing for us, right? There are numbers on a computer screen or useless pieces of green paper if you happen to have cash. But when you think about it, that doesn't mean anything.

What it means in society today is money is a currency, right? It's a storing of energy, potential energy. It's a storing of goods and services. So we can use that money to buy goods and services. But what we're really talking about is freeing up our life with that money so we can pursue our sense of purpose and meaning.

That's all it really does for us. So in order to really get past the money mind meld, you have to realize that money is not making you happy. Money will solve your basic money problems, but nothing else. And that money is a tool, one of many tools, right? So we have our youth.

We have our energy. We have our intelligence. We have our communities. We have all these tools and all of these tools are in the pursuit of a goal of living a purposeful life. We have to stop looking at money as the only tool or the goal and start realizing where it fits.

One of the ways I really tell people is, you know, think about what happens when you reach that money goal. How will you feel? And at first people like, oh, I'd be so excited and happy. And then you kind of say, well, what next? What would you do? What would that money get you?

Why would your life be better because of that? Right? And so on some level, people are going to say, I could take that great vacation or I could fly first class. But when you really drill down, you realize that those things aren't truly the key to happiness. Like they're nice perks, right?

But they're not the true key to happiness. So then you start pushing further and saying, okay, what would this really allow you to do? And if people are really thoughtful, they'll eventually get to this point where they're like, it'll allow me to do this thing. I always wanted to do that.

I was so scared that I never had time. And then you start saying, well, why couldn't you do those things now? Like, is it really money that's holding you back? And what you realize is that money often becomes an excuse, right? Yes. If you had all the money in the world, you could stop working completely.

And that would give you a certain amount of more time to pursue things. But most people realize that when they actually get a hold of what's purposeful and has meaning for them in their life, they could start bringing those things into their life now. And that the money is just an enabler.

But again, we have some of these other enablers. And when you only focus on the money, a lot of times when we get to that point where we have enough money, instead of actually allowing it to enable us, it makes us more fearful. And we either go for more money because we don't know what the heck we want to do with our lives.

Or we just get afraid that we're going to lose it. This is part of my gripe with the fire movement. Now, I'll caveat. So I was in a documentary on it, playing with fire. I'm guessing you've seen it because a lot of the community has watched it. If anyone hasn't, I'll link to it in the show notes.

But in the recent past, especially through your book, I really struggle with the RE part. Like this idea that we should get all this money so that we can stop working and just kind of do nothing or travel or whatever it is. And I think the word retirement is too messy.

Many people I think say, "Oh, retirement. No more work." For me, I think if we could reframe that concept as financial independence is just when money lets you do the thing you want to do. And if you're already doing it, then you already are. Like you said, if you had been a hospice doctor from the beginning, maybe you had been financially independent out of medical school.

Or maybe once you paid your medical bills, but maybe not. And so, that stresses me out thinking about people trying to have this goal of just doing nothing. How do you feel about that RE part of the movement? I think that was both the greatest thing for the movement because it made it exciting and fun to talk about, but also the most detrimental to the real message.

Because the real message is not retire early. Most of us got here because we actually enjoy some kind of work. And I think we find purpose in work. The point being is that what really matters is not whether you're working or not. Because I think we work most of our lives.

And I think most of us enjoy doing some kind of work. It's more about the autonomy and the mastery and the independence. All those things that make us feel good about work. I think that's what, when we're talking about retiring early, we're not really talking about not doing things.

We're talking about reclaiming our control of doing things that make us feel good. Those things may actually create money. Often they do or create some kind of content or product, right? We build something, we make something, we write something. This is all very important to our sense of identity and our sense of waking up in the morning and feeling like we have something productive and exciting to do.

But what we're really looking for is control. Control and independence. And so, it's really, you get to financial independence and then you have control of what type of work you do, when you do it, and what the end goal of that work is. And that's something that most people feel is lacking in traditional employment today.

I would challenge anyone listening that feels like they want to achieve this fire journey goal to stop worrying about trying to save enough that you could stop working for the rest of your life. I think what you said about people often end up being able to monetize whatever they would do if they stopped working is very true.

So, I try to challenge people to say, "What if you just took a year off, did the thing you love?" I think for a good number of people, not everyone, but for a good number of people they'd find within a year, that thing that they love actually does generate income.

And all of the math of, "Oh, I need to save enough to live on 4%." Well, that's true if you're not working. But that goal of maybe if you're on the coast, maybe you think you need $10 million, but if you take a year off, find out that the thing you love doing makes more than $0, well, then the amount you actually need to do that full time could be half of what you need.

It could be nothing because it makes enough money to sustain your lifestyle. So, I think that far too often we assume that in retirement, we make no money, when in reality, if your retirement is just doing something you would do for free, many of us can get paid to do that thing also and it changes the entire equation.

When I have these conversations, I want to be really clear about this because people look at my story and even probably your story, a lot of our stories and people say, "Well, duh, it's really easy to say that when you have money, right? You have space, you've made money, you have savings, you have investments, it's really easy for you to say these things, but I'm a 22-year-old out of college, I have just enough money to cover my rent, I'm barely putting food on the table, you know, it might be easy for you, but for me, I don't have time to do all this stuff." And this is the conversation I really want to have, right?

Because again, it's easy for us in our 40s and our 50s when we have some savings to start talking about meaning and purpose and side hustling and monetizing things so that we can stop doing what we don't like. But, you know, the 20-year-olds, the people who are struggling to put money on the table are looking at us and saying, "Yeah, that's a real privileged version of life that we don't have." But I want to start thinking about those people too, because I think it's really important.

We talk about money as if it is the and only tool, but the truth of the matter is we have lots of tools that help us live a purposeful and meaningful life. So, if you are 22, you just got out of school or you didn't go to school and you're just working that eight to six, barely getting by.

And you're like, "I don't have space in my life for side hustles. I don't have space in my life for these things." I would like to look at those people and say, "Well, money is one tool. But again, you have other tools. You've got your energy. You've got your youth.

You've got your communities. You've got your skills. So, maybe you work your eight to six Monday through Friday. And then on Saturday night for three hours, pick something you're really passionate about and start a side hustle, right? Three hours on a Saturday. Let's see what happens with this in six months.

If after six months, you've been doing this passionate side hustle three hours every Saturday and you make zero money from it, guess what? You still just added purpose into your life by doing something you like and you're passionate about. So, you've won even if you haven't made any money.

But let's say you were lucky enough to make a little money doing this side hustle. You used your tool of energy, which I don't have in my 50s. I've got kids. I'm busy. I don't have nearly as much energy, but you're in your 20s. So, you have a little more energy.

You use that tool of energy instead of the tool of money. You created the side hustle. The side hustle made a little money. You hate your eight to five. Maybe it becomes a nine to five. Or maybe it becomes a four day a week instead of a five day a week.

And then because you have a little more energy now and you're really liking that side hustle because you're passionate about it, you keep building it out. Maybe in three or four years, it's covering 50% of your income and you drop your job even further. Or maybe it allows you to go to a job that you make a little less, but you like doing it a lot more.

So the point is, how do we use purpose to create space in our life? How do we use all these other tools we have, including money, to start being more thoughtful about what we're doing with our time now? So you and I can look as we get older, as we have more money and say, OK, now we have this tool of money to get us to this place where we have more control.

But I'd like younger people also to start thinking about ways they can take more control too of the lives they're living so they don't get caught in that rut where they're 40 or 50 and they have tons of money, but they've never really spent any time thinking about what's really meaningful to them.

So you mentioned money is a tool. It's an important tool. I do want to spend some of the conversation to talk about that tool. You spent a lot of time in the book talking about financial planning and after you do the hard work about how to do it. And I like this idea of bringing something fun to the conversation.

So it's a dining room table. You said it's not a flamingo. It's not a three legged stool. Talk a little bit about what that is. What is the financial plan to you? Because I think as someone who started a financial planning company, it can be a big thing that's daunting, that is complicated and takes hours and hours to go through.

Or you can kind of think about it in a more simple framework like I think you present. So the idea is, you know, the American table, the dining room table is an institution in our country, right? This idea that the family sits around it. And I like it as a model for how our financial plans should be because it's stable, right?

It's hard to knock over a dining room table. It's solid, well built, and it supports us. And I think we should look at our financial plan the same way. So a lot of people build a financial plan that looks a lot like a flamingo, right? Think about a flamingo.

They've got their one leg. They're incredibly unstable. Anything could knock them over. This is a person who really puts all their eggs in one basket, right? They have their W2 job. They work for some company. And maybe if they do invest at all in stock, maybe it's through their 401K.

Maybe it's actually in that company itself. And so everything depends on this one company. And God forbid, a la Enron, this company goes down, something happens to it. The flamingo is incredibly easy to knock over. So then you can think about a two-legged table or stool. Still not that stable, but a little bit better.

That might be someone who has a W2 job. And maybe they now have a 401K with some broad-based index funds, right? Or maybe some bonds. So again, a little bit more stability, but still not perfect. And then we start thinking, how can we even make it more stable? Like a three-legged stool.

Now, maybe we add in a side hustle or some real estate, right? And so then again, we're now creating more space. And then the four-legged dining room table, something that even if you knock a leg off is still going to be incredibly stable is your W2 job plus the broad-based index funds, plus some real estate, plus a side hustle.

Maybe if you're excited about some alternatives, you have a little crypto here or there. Again, the idea is you're creating these different legs. It's this idea of a diversification, but it makes it a little bit more obvious. And again, the whole point of this is really what we want to do is we want to build a financial plan that supports our sense of purpose, identity, and connections.

We want to build meaning into our life. To do that, we build a stable financial plan, and then we practice risk medication, right? What we're really doing is trying to protect ourselves against the unknown risks, like you suddenly lose your job, like an economic downturn, like a healthcare crisis or problem.

Like all of these things, we want to create that dining room table that's going to support us so that we can withstand whatever trauma, whatever black swan, or I call them white swan events that happen, right, these events that a black swan event is a totally unexpected event that can really ruin our financial lives.

White swan events are events that can ruin our financial lives, but they're not totally unexpected, like a healthcare problem, right? People get sick and end up spending a lot of money on healthcare. It's common. A divorce, right? The whole point of all this is to build a solid financial foundation so you can mitigate your risk and withstand the winds of change that are going to affect you and your financial plan so that you can continue using that money to do what it's supposed to do, which is give you the space and time to do meaningful things.

So at its core, would it be fair to say a lot of times people think of the financial plan as what do I do with my savings? And your point is, you have your income, you have your savings, but then you might also have some other assets you own, whether it's a business, whether it's real estate, and you might also have not just your job, but your other income.

And the more you can start to build different buckets of money that aren't just your savings, the more stable you can be. You mentioned the dining room table was four. At some point, maybe you don't need your 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th. Like if you can get four, which if one falls off, three is still a little stable, four kind of solid pieces of financial wealth, if you will, whether it's a job or that's kind of a place to strive for.

Yeah, and perfect is the enemy of good. I love these posts on social media where you have someone in the personal finance world that says, I've got nine forms of income, and they love to say the different side hustles and the difference. That's great. But for the majority of us, four or five revenue streams that are stable, that are diversified, that are uncorrelated, like I don't want to go too far, but how can we start building these streams and be thoughtful about it, right?

So, OK, I'm going to retire. Do I have a pension? Do I have a 401(k) that I can start taking distributions from? Do I want to set up an insurance policy that'll pay me like a spia? There are different ways of doing this so that when one revenue stream drops off, you can create another revenue stream.

And therefore, again, you can protect yourself from change because that's ultimately we have no control over change. We have only control over the best planning we can do and then what we do with our lives. So that's the planning piece. But you do talk a little bit about how one of the ways to tackle your finances is to spend less.

A lot of these tactics are, OK, you can get a side hustle, you can make more. But you talk about not just trying to do the small things, but really building that kind of savings frugality mindset into your daily life. Can you share some examples of how you've done it and how people might do that to make their finances a little more automated in terms of how they save for the future?

Yeah, you know, there's some tips in the book about just simple things. I especially talk about it when I talk about budgeting, because I think budgeting is something that people really struggle with. And my family has never been a good spreadsheet budgeter. So there's great apps nowadays and you can do all sorts of spreadsheets on budgeting.

But I think there's some really easy things you can do that help streamline your budget to make sure that you're not spending frivolously. So with my wife and I, we were lucky enough to both be employed and have two decent jobs. So a basic rule for us is we lived always off of one salary and the other salary went directly into either savings accounts or into investment accounts with us not even seeing them.

So it was as easy as you want to buy something. There's either money in that checking account or there isn't. We took half this money off the table before we even had a chance to think about it. So simple things like that. Other little things, you don't have this as much today, but it used to be back in the day, if you wanted to buy something from a vending machine or something, you had to have the money on you, right?

You used to have to have cash. It was before the days where we all had phones and we could just hold our phone up to the vending machine. So an easy thing I did is I never carried cash. Some people never carry credit cards. It's like, okay, I'll have my one safety credit card, but I'm not even going to give myself the means to spend.

Other things you can do is like, we rarely make big purchases on a whim or on a spur. So if we're at Target or if we're at some place and we see something that's $500 or even $250, we're unlikely to go buy at the moment we see it and think we need it.

So often there's a cooling off period, especially with something new that we want to buy, where we give ourselves a week to think about it, just to make sure we truly need and want this thing. I think there are a bunch of other different hacks we can use. We can automate, we can, again, make sure that our money is going right out of our paycheck into things like our 401k so we don't even see it.

But I always say with savings that you can only squeeze so much water out of a stone, right? There's only a certain amount of movement we can make there. And it doesn't make sense to squeeze so hard that life is painful. If you have the choice, right? If you don't have the choice, you don't have the choice.

But if you have the choice, you don't want to squeeze so hard that you're not enjoying your days and that you're suffering. Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be. I get it. Life comes at you fast, but trust me, your friends are probably desperate for a good hang.

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So please consider supporting those who support us. So I'm going to transition a little bit here. We talked about our personal finances as people listening, thinking about it. But another important thing is thinking about others' finances, especially the legacy you leave, the legacy your family leaves. You intentionally don't use estate planning as much as financial legacy documents.

So I'd love to hear that story because I think it makes it a little easier. But how do you think people should approach that as well as the conversation with their loved ones who maybe aren't thinking about it? I think when we talk about estate planning, it's this big, scary idea, and it's really easy to put that off or not pay attention to it because it seems so complicated.

And again, let's not forget when we're talking about estate planning, what we're really talking about is what's going to happen when we or our loved one dies. And no one likes to talk about that, right? Because you start thinking about what's going to happen when this important person is gone.

I like to talk about our legacy documents instead, because as opposed to thinking about when someone's gone and no longer with us, I like to approach it as this is the way you're going to stay positively in people's lives, right? By planning appropriately, by doing these financial legacy planning or the financial legacy documents or the medical legal legacy documents, this is so that your impact remains, that you still affect those people you love and that even God forbid when you die or a family member dies, that that positive effect is still out there in the world for years and years later.

So this is your mark on the world. But it's a difficult conversation to have. And I especially think for people in our age group, a lot of us are in that sandwich generation where we have young kids, but we also have parents who are getting older. And I'm dealing with this right now with my in-laws who are currently moving.

It's really hard to talk to your parents about money issues in your money situation. So in the book, I talk about a few tactics that help you start these conversations. In a way that's non-confrontational. So one of my favorite ways to start these conversations is you ask for advice, right?

So people are very open to having us ask them for advice. So let's say you actually understand this legacy planning yourself. You actually have a good hold on it, but you want to start broaching it with your parents. The easiest way to say, look, I was thinking about doing a will and maybe a trust.

Mom and dad, what did you guys do? Like, what should I do with this? It's kind of foggy in my mind. I don't know what to do. It's a really great way of assessing where your parents are, because then they're going to feel like they're giving you advice. So they're going to be open.

They're not thinking you're like, mom, dad, when you die, what am I going to get of yours? That's not what you're asking them. You're saying, I need to do this for my family. You know, what should we do? It's a great way to broach the subject and get a feel for how much thinking they've done on this.

You may find that they've done tons of thinking about it. They have their wills and their trust, and they can actually tell you and help you do it yourself. Or they might look at you and say, hmm, we've never thought about this before. And that's a perfect chance to say, well, I'm doing it.

You want to do this together? It's a great way to start the conversation. That's one way to do it. Another way I really like to broach the conversation is being in hospice. I've seen some real tragedies. So it's easy for me to approach my parents and say, I was taking care of this guy and his mom was sick and she had Alzheimer's.

And the dad had taken over everything, the medical power of attorney. He had taken over the finances for the family. My patient, he was really happy. His parents were managing all these things because his mom was getting sick and he just wanted to be with his mom. Then COVID came along and all of a sudden his dad got sick and was on a ventilator.

And guess what? I didn't have the financial power of attorney. My patient couldn't pay for his mom's needs because his dad was on a ventilator. And he didn't have any rights to all the financial paperwork, to the checking account, to any of that. So I've experienced these things. And I could go to my parents and say, you know what?

The funniest thing happened to one of my patients. Tell that story and say, gosh, I hope that kind of thing doesn't happen to us. And so by talking about how other people have had these bad experiences, it's a wonderful way to actually breach the conversation with your loved ones.

And it's a real non-confrontational easy way. So that's another way to do it. And the last way I really like to do it is to talk about it in terms of legacy. So instead of saying, when you die, who's going to get what stuff of yours to go to your parents and say, you know what?

My kids are young. And I, as well as I want my kids to really remember you the way you are after you're gone. Let's talk about how you want to be remembered. What do you want the kids to have of you? What do you want them to remember? What is your legacy?

And a lot of times that leads to talking about things, even like property, like mom and dad. Every year we take all the grandkids and we go to that cabin that you guys own in Wisconsin. After you die, what should be done with that? Like, do you want us to still do that and think of you every year when we go do this?

Do you want us to sell it? What would you want done with this thing? But by framing it in terms of their legacy, I think then you can open up a difficult conversation and make it about celebrating the people we're talking about. Because the idea behind this, and no one thinks of it this way, but really estate planning should be a celebration of people's lives, right?

We should celebrate with their medical legacy planning, like living will, medical power of attorney. What we're doing is we're celebrating their dignity and what they want done for them when they can't speak for themselves. With their financial legacy documents, like their wills and their trust, we're celebrating all they've achieved economically, all the things they've acquired, and how those things are going to continue in the world after they're gone, and they're going to stay present in our lives.

So, if we can reframe this as a celebration, it makes it much more approachable and it makes the conversations much easier. - You just gave me an idea, which I think is really interesting. So, two things came from this when I was just listening. One, something I want to make sure my wife and I do is, and I wish that we had done with my grandparents, is take some time to capture who they are, their story, whether that's on video, whether that's written, so you have something to share.

So, that's just something that's top of mind for me is, I saw Sean, I think from My First Million, posted that he did a podcast with his mom, where he interviewed his mom like he was doing an interview. But he didn't publish it, right? He didn't go out and share it with the world.

He just did it because he wanted to have an archive of a conversation he had. So, that was one, which I thought was just really interesting, was trying to document these people that are important in your lives that won't be there forever. But the other is talking about ways that you could keep alive things.

So, in your case, there's an actual physical cabin, right? That might be something that's a lot easier and tangible. But if your family has really loved going to a cabin, but always renting it, maybe you could ask your parents, if you have money left over, yeah, you could give it to someone.

But is there anything you want to do with it? You think about people with tons of money and they grant these scholarships, so kids could go to school under a program. Or I remember my sister's college, someone donated a pool of money and the whole purpose of it was, it was enough money that the interest on the donation would be able to buy a passport for every kid at the university that never had one.

And I thought that was so cool. And I'm now thinking, oh, if I have money when I die, I would love to not just leave it, but also leave a purpose for it. I would love you to take this money and take a trip every year like we took when we were kids, you know, that kind of thing.

So, trying to talk about this with your parents, but maybe to turn their legacy into something tangible that you can bring to life with your family and can be passed on is a really interesting idea that I'd never thought about. I think our lives are like a stone being dropped in the ocean.

We are here for so little time and once we break the water, we're gone. But the ripple effect of that stone can carry on for miles and miles and miles. And so, a lot of the thought is, what is going to be the ripple of my life? And so, I'm convinced that living this life of meaning and purpose is going to affect those people around you by thinking about your legacy planning, by setting aside money to do those important things, that's going to be your ripple that will carry on after you're gone.

And I personally find that extremely comforting. I imagine those in their final days would find it comforting to know that what they care about is going to kind of transcend their own life into others. Yeah, totally. I mean, it's about legacy and that's why I think we should call it legacy planning.

Are there any things that you think are commonly missed in legacy planning that aren't as daunting to go tackle as maybe an entire estate plan or maybe you've done that? Things that you're like, "Hey, even if you think you've done it, make sure to think about X or Y or Z that might not be the obvious." I hate to say it and it's so estate planning 101, but it's so straightforward.

Everyone needs to go check their beneficiaries. You need to of all your policies and you need transfer on death for all your bank accounts. Right? It's just such an easy thing to do that everyone forgets to do and it can save you a huge amount of hassle. I talk about in the book and I actually interviewed someone on my podcast whose husband died and they were both very young and he never changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy because he had set it up a decade earlier and he had an ex-girlfriend's name on it.

And think about how painful and difficult that could be. A life insurance policy is supposed to, God forbid, you die, it's supposed to make your family's life easier and then you find out that this money is all set to go to a stranger. Lucky enough, the stranger in this case transferred the money over to the true beneficiary, to the person's wife.

But these are easy things and we forget to do them. So do the easy things first and then we can start looking at the wills and the trusts and the big stuff. But do the easy things first. One thing that really resonated with me in Silicon Valley where lots of people have earnouts and golden handcuffs is this one more year syndrome.

So the one more year syndrome is - the idea is that it becomes really easy to convince yourself to put off doing the hard work, to pursuing a life of real meaning and purpose for you because you're just going to stick around one more year so the things are a little more solid.

So your net worth goes up a little bit more. So you have insurance for one more year. You start convincing yourself, "Hey, this job isn't so bad. I don't love it. It's easy to stick around." And a corollary to that is the what-if syndrome. What if the stock market drops?

What if I have a healthcare crisis? What if all these bad things happen the minute I leave my job? And so what this allows us to do is to stay in jobs that we don't like, that aren't fulfilling a sense of purpose or meaning for us. And years turn into decades and we still haven't left.

It's like it allows us to put off doing the hard work and it becomes an excuse. And so we do this because we don't want to do the real hard work. Life is finite, time is finite and at some point you run out of years. And especially when you get to the end, you really will wish that you would utilize those years instead of sticking around at a job you really didn't need.

Any help for someone struggling with that right now of how do I stop worrying and get out when I feel like it's the right thing but I keep saying one more year? So what I've done and what I certainly did in my career is instead of taking the full plunge of just going from working full-time being a doctor to not being a doctor at all, I started just subtracting out stuff I didn't like at work.

So I took the middle ground. I just said, okay, let's look at all the things in my job I don't like and start getting rid of them. So can you go part-time? Can you go half-time? Can you get rid of the clients you don't like anymore? Can you hire someone out within your job to do all the things you don't like and just spend the time doing things you do like?

How can we bring more purpose even within that work setting? That's one way. The other way is to just at some point bite the bullet and say, you know what? If I leave my job and I don't like what's happening, I can always go back to work. And for a lot of people, they can.

And so a lot of times you have to turn it around and stop saying, what if this bad thing happens? And start saying, what if I don't have that much time left? Like people worry about running out of money, but what if you run out of life? And I think when you start framing things in those terms, they realize that yes, if your finances are iffy, maybe you do need one more year, but if it's pretty clear cut and you're like, this is pretty good, realize that life and time are finite.

And the only thing we can control is what we spend doing in those time units, those little slots of time we have, you are specifically choosing to do something you don't like in that time slot for no other reason than it's easy. And so, how can we change that mindset?

A lot of the purpose of this entire conversation has been around the fact that there is some finite amount of time. And some people find out it's less than they thought. Some people have a lot of it, but even when you have a lot, the days, the weeks, the months, they always feel like you don't.

And you have a whole section of the book about time perception and the way you think about time is really important in a well-rounded life. So, I'm curious what some of the best ways people should approach their time differently or alter that perception to be happier and to live that well-rounded life.

In personal finance, we always talk about time as if it's a commodity, right? You can buy it, you can sell it, you can trade it. Nothing is farther from the truth. Time passes no matter what we do. We have no control. We don't know how much time we have on this earth, right?

We don't know if it's 50 years or 80 years or 70 years. We don't know, but that's out of our control mostly, right? We can exercise, we can do a few things, but we've got a set amount of time on this earth that time passes and you can't do a thing about it.

So, there are really two choices here. If you look at time as a series of time slots, because it's just easier, days, weeks, months, hours, however you want to look at it, we can try to control the activities we place in those time slots or we can try to mess with our perception of time and that's it, right?

So, when it comes to what activities we place in those time slots, this gets back to trying to figure out what's purposeful to us and then building a financial life around it so that we can fill up as many of those time slots as possible with things that are purposeful to us and subtract out as many as possible of those things that have no meaning or give us friction, right?

So, that's the one thing we can do and that's what the book is mostly about is learning to bring more purpose in your life, whether you have money or not, but then ultimately bringing money as a tool to even help you do that further. That's point one. Then we can mess with the perception of time and this is a little bit harder to understand.

There are all these sayings that kind of touch on this idea but aren't clear about it, like when you have kids, you say the days are long but the years are short. We always talk about this idea that when you're young, time lasts forever, but when you're old, time flies by.

The point about thinking about this is just if we know how we feel about time, we can change some things to help us perceive it a little bit better, right? And a lot of this is very personal. It depends who you are. So, for like me, I was very cognizant of the fact that time felt like forever when I was a kid, but as I get older, time seems to fly by.

So, for me, the path of the eldest brother actually made a lot of sense because I didn't mind grinding it out when I was a kid. I thought I had all the time in the world as I was in my 20s and 30s. I didn't mind doing the hard work of being a physician.

That allowed me to accrue a lot of money so that eventually I could retire early. Now, time seems to fly by, but I have so much more control over my time than I ever did at any other time in life. So, the perception is that time is flying, but I feel so much more freedom and space because I don't have that many things I have to put in my time slots anymore.

It's all up to me. Like, I don't have any official things. I don't have to do anything for work. Really, I get a lot more control over this. That was especially the thinking of the financial independence fire people of old was to do that, right? Because they perceived that sometime in the future would be more valuable than time today.

Funny, younger people who are entering the fire movement today look at it the exact opposite. They perceive that time today is just as important and they don't want to put off purpose and identity and connections. So, for them, they're looking at the path of the middle or the youngest brother because they want to enjoy today.

They don't want to grind it out. They don't want to waste a second. So, they perceive today as more important or at least just as important as tomorrow. So, for them, they're not going to really do that path of the eldest brother. They're going to really look to be a middle or a youngest brother.

So, we can play with what we put in those time slots and we can look at how we perceive time and what feels more important to us. And that's the only control we have of this most important thing in our life that pretty much is going to pass and happen no matter what we do.

And are there things you do that you haven't mentioned whether it's daily or annual or weekly routine that you think make your use of time more optimal now than it maybe was in the past? So, strangely enough, I feel like I have all the time in the world. So, I feel really now a place of time abundance.

And I think there are a few reasons for that. One is I wake up really early. I love waking up early. And the strange thing when you wake up at 4.35 in the morning, you just feel like your days last forever. So, for me, that's a great way to combat these worries about time.

The other thing is because I've been real thoughtful over the years and have been financially successful as well as in other realms of my life, I've really been able to subtract out the things I hate. And so, I feel like partially I have an abundance of time because I've been able to get rid of the things I don't like.

All those things about work I didn't like, being on call, working weekends, all those stressors in my life. So, I think that's a good thing for us to do whether we have lots of money or not is to say, "How can we substitute things we like in place of things we don't like and start getting rid of those things we don't like?" I've also do some other kind of daily habits that really help me.

I like something called work bursting. So, as opposed to spending lots of time doing important things, I like to set a good two hours aside or an hour and do really hard stuff in a real concentrated burst of energy. And then I put it down and I do something leisurely for the next few hours.

So, it makes me feel like I have a lot of time in my days because that really hard, concentrated work I do in short bursts. And so, I really enjoy doing that. There are also some hacks. In the book, I talk a little bit about Parkinson's Law and the Pareto Principle.

We can talk about that now if you want, but this idea that we can take advantage of these principles like Parkinson's Law says that basically the time you have to do a task will end up being the amount of time it takes to do that task, right? So, if you have a task and you have five hours to do it, it's going to take you five hours to do.

On the other hand, if the same task, you only have two hours to do it, it's going to take you two hours to do. So, you can play around with this a little bit by for instance, halving the amount of time you give yourself to do things. So, if something normally takes you five hours, say "okay, I'm only going to do it in two hours".

Most likely, you'll get 80 to 90% of the quality by spending a lot less time doing it. And there's some other tricks you can do. A big part of that, especially when you're doing these tasks, especially if they're burdensome, is being really clear about defining what done looks like.

And so, making a goal of what done looks like and then deciding that when you hit that point, you'll stop and it's unrelated to time because often we go way past what's appropriate, especially if we feel like we have five hours allotted to something instead of two. So, I think there's some other tricks and hacks you can do, but the idea is to be thoughtful about how you use time most efficiently and then put those things in place to give you the sense of time abundance.

You mentioned that you used to be in a place where you were filled with time stress and running around trying to get more and more done and now you've gotten comfortable letting go and letting your wife, your kids set the pace for things. For people that are type A out there, and that sounds crazy, any advice?

I think it's about being really thoughtful. I mean, a lot of us who are successful are used to being super efficient. It's how we got to our success because we could do three things at once or we could get more done in a day than other people. And I love that, right?

I think that's really served me at times in my career, but the other side is you become so super efficient that it becomes anxiety provoking. And then instead of feeling time abundance, you start feeling time scarcity. And it's the oddest thing that the more efficient we get, the more we start cramping more and more into smaller spaces and start convincing yourself we don't have enough time so we start rushing through things.

So, for me, I've had to really let go of the reins and really put things in place so that I don't have as much control over time. So, one of those ways is again, like as opposed to rushing around to go somewhere, I now let someone else decide our time frame and make myself stick to what they want.

And so unload that worry about time because I've gotten so good and efficient at time that I'm rushing everywhere and I knew that had to stop. So, it's two signs of a coin, right? In one way, it's really great because it allows us to do a lot of things.

But if you get too crazy about time, then you're no longer enjoying yourself and you're rushing to get through what you're doing now to get to the next thing, which kills all sorts of enjoyment or being present in what you're doing. And that's no good either. We didn't talk much about the fact that you have children.

I now have children. You've spent a lot of time thinking about money at a level and purpose and identity at a level that I haven't yet. And I certainly haven't for my kids. Two months, two years old, maybe it's too early. But given what you've thought and for any parents listening, what advice do you have for taking some of these lessons, whether they're purpose-driven, whether they're financial-driven and teaching them to children as parents?

Get it together yourself and then model that behavior and your kids will follow suit. I think we often talk about what exercises we should do with our children, what we specifically should teach them didactically, what we should get them involved in. I'm thoroughly convinced that the way your kids actually learn is watching how you navigate the world.

So, it sounds a little funny, but I think that we as adults should concentrate on ourselves, develop these great meaningful habits and live them out in front of our children so they can see. And I think that more than anything else will give them a good handle on what living a purposeful life, a full life looks like.

I'll add a caveat to what you said, which is for some of these lessons, just doing them only works if you also expose your children to it. So, from a financial standpoint, I might be organized and thoughtful about my personal finances and maybe at two years old and two months old, it's not the time.

But at some point, I can't just live that, I also have to bring the family into it. Making sure that you're not just doing it, but you're also sharing that you're doing it. For some of these things matters. Maybe for doing a job you're fulfilled, people will kind of get that through osmosis with you in the house.

But I do think that when it comes to finances, some of the things that I want to do in the future, at least just not make them taboo topics that we don't talk about as a family. Yeah. And I think also part of that modeling good behavior to go the next step forward and be a little more explicit is also giving them the space to then try those techniques and fail safely.

So, in our household, one way we did that is our kids could watch how we dealt with things financially, but then we started giving them a yearly allowance, which we gave to them the first of the year. We clearly stated what they were responsible for and what we were responsible for.

And then they had to decide what to do with that allowance the whole year. They weren't getting any more from us. And so, that was a way we'd been modeling for years good behavior, but then we could actually set up a controlled experiment where the truth of the matter was there was no real risk for them, but they could then experiment, try some of those things, those techniques that we had been modeling, see what worked for them, see that hadn't, make some mistakes, have a little egg on their face when they did something wrong and then learn.

So, I think that's part of that modeling is then to give them some space. - And how did the allowance for the year up front experiment go? - In some ways, it did some unexpected things, but then at least we could address it. So, for instance, my daughter, we found became ultra scared of spending and always had way more left at the end of the year than she probably should have.

My son, on the other hand, was confident everything would work and often spent too much in the beginning and then a catastrophe would hit and he'd find that he didn't have enough money. A perfect example is he spent most of his money, he had just a little bit left and he had about three or four months left, and then he dropped his phone into a lake when we were paddle boarding.

And so, all of a sudden, he's like, "I have zero money. I can't buy a used phone. I can't do anything, but I didn't foresee this coming because I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn't see that something unexpected might happen." It plays out differently with different kids, but the idea then is then to have those gentle conversations.

With my daughter, it might be, "Hmm, you know, it's great. You had a lot of money left over. Your bank account's really growing, but are you enjoying that money?" Right? And then for my son, it might be like, "Yeah, money's a powerful tool, but if you're not careful and a good steward of it, you may find you don't have it when you need it." And so, those are different conversations you can have, but it all starts with the modeling, then kind of those simple experiments, and then the talking to him.

So, did you loan your son money against his future year of allowance? How do you handle that one? The darn problem with my son is he's so goddarn innovative. Here's a perfect example. Like, my son is known as the electronics guy on the neighborhood. So, people give him old or broken electronics.

The other day, someone gave him an old or broken phone, and he realized it was still under warranty, sent it back to an Apple, and they sent him a new phone. Okay. So, he figured it out himself. So, he's a pretty savvy guy. He figures out either how to fix most things or to find his way into something new.

The problem with this phone is it ended up at the bottom of the lake. He couldn't get it back. This has been fantastic. There's a lot more in the book, and I want to hear more about where to find everything you're working on. But before that, one thing I like to do is ask people to pick a place that they know well, anywhere in the world, and share with listeners who may go there someday, a place to eat, a place to grab a drink, and maybe an unusual activity that they should check out to kind of fulfill their inspiration for travel.

Is there a place you have in mind? I'm not a big travel guy, okay? But here has been my joy with my family and I've spent so much time remembering and thinking about these vacations. So, it's added a huge amount of joy in my life. Once a year, especially before COVID, my whole family would take a week and go to Mexico.

A lot of times we go to like Playa del Carmen or someone in the Cancun sign, and we go to an all-inclusive hotel, and we would literally sit by the pool for a week altogether. The all-inclusives have good restaurants, and the wonderful thing about it is it costs a lot up front, but once you pay for it, everything's paid for, right?

So, you get pretty much all the food, all the drinks, all the sun, all the pool, all the spa that you want. So, it's expensive up front, but I've had so many joyful weeks. It's still the one thing I look forward to every single year. It's the thing I dream about in the middle of the winter in Chicago when it's cold and we're all like snuggled up in our beds.

And the time I got with my family, with the kids, to think about the progression every year and how they changed and how we were together is priceless. So, I guess the moral of the story is if you get the chance, take some time to go somewhere where you don't have a lot of things planned, but that's just a fun place to be, where you can be with your family with no responsibilities and no worries about money and just be for a week.

And it's really, really valuable. - I don't know if this has always been the case, but there are some really nice all-inclusive resorts. I think my assumption is always that they're all like these cheap crappy resorts. That is not the case. - Oh no, there are some nice ones if you're willing to pay for it.

But again, if people are listening to your show, they probably understand how to travel hack, they probably get free flights, they'll probably get some bonuses and some free things from the hotel they go to. So, for them, it may not actually end up being that expensive, but it's a wonderful luxury.

And I suggest anyone, especially with a family, do it if you can. - Wonderful. You could go find the book anywhere books are sold, but where can people stay on top of everything you're doing and working on? - So, the easiest way is to go to jordangrumet.com. That's J-O-R-D-A-N-G-R-U-M-E-T.com.

There you can see links to the book. You can also see links to the three ways in which I create content. So, from 2005 to 2018 or so, I wrote a medical blog, over a thousand posts there about being a doctor, about life in general. That's linked there. The diversify blog was the blog I started about personal finance, that's linked there.

And then the earn and invest podcast is what I spend my most time doing right now, which is the most current, and that's also linked there. Or you can just go to earnandinvest.com. But jordangrumet.com or earnandinvest.com are the easiest ways. You can see links to all my socials there and everything.

- Yeah. And you're on a podcast now, so you can also just search for the earn and invest podcast. While you're listening, there's a great episode with me, of course. - Well, of course. That was a great episode. - Well, Jordan, thank you so much for being here. - Thanks for having me.

This was a blast. - I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) you