Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai and in this episode I want to talk about a series of unfortunate events that has led me to conclude that Early retirement and minimalism go together like peanut butter and jelly perfect combination One supports the other if you're a minimalist it helps lower your costs and helps you get to early retirement quicker And once you're in early retirement Well, if you're a minimalist you get to keep your costs low and it helps you sustain your early retirement lifestyle further The more minimalistic you are the less things break Everything breaks over time as a result.

You've got to spend time fixing it maintaining it replacing it What a pain and when you have a lot more freedom your time is actually more valuable and therefore your opportunity Cost of not doing something you really enjoy is higher So for example, let's say you have a sick kid.

You've got to take time off work to take care of your sick kid Of course, it's a bummer, but you've got to do what you got to do But the upside is you don't have to go to work. You have a valid excuse to take one two, three four days off and You'll still get paid.

That's pretty good. Well, that's not that bad, right? Well, let's say you are an early retiree who can do whatever and you're really into pickleball all of a sudden like I am You play from 10 a.m. To 1 p.m. Every single day when the Sun is shining Well, if you have a sick kid, you're gonna have to give up your pickleball One of your greatest joys right now to take care of your child.

You're definitely not gonna get paid doing your parental duty So isn't it a little bit ironic that if you have a day job and the more you dislike your day job The happier you are to do something else. So the opportunity cost is lower to do something else What I realized from writing my post on minimalism and early retirement going perfectly together Is that whatever we do it tends to get more complicated over time?

Whether it's having children our Investments buying cars houses clothes. There's no natural path to simplicity It's actually a natural path to accumulating more and more stuff and you can do that as you gain More and more income and wealth and so these things are highly correlated more stuff more income more wealth So to live a better life, we actually have to be intentional with trying to keep the creep from growing too big keep the accumulation of jeans and shoes and all that stuff to be more intentional about simplicity and minimalism, so Actually trying to be more minimalistic might just simply throttle your accumulation of more stuff over time It might not actually make your stuff go down and then over a course of let's say 5 10 15 years You're gonna have a house full of stuff with things You don't even use don't even need and it'll start really weighing down on your psyche in my post I talked about five things that have been Weighing me down one cars.

I've had one car for 20 plus years. I love cars I was a car fanatic who would trade in and out every one to two years in my 20s and early 30s but then at some point I was like You know This is just too much hassle buying and selling and maintaining and when I went to Lake Tahoe this summer The valet just bashed my car.

Actually, they didn't bash my car I guess some laundry truck did and I whipped around I was like what's going on? It wasn't just a little ding It was a huge gash that took about nine hours of my time So time wasted and it took two and a half months to get my car back all the stress planning To go back to Lake Tahoe to pick it up to arrange Car transportation a rental car to deal with insurance agencies.

What a pain in the butt. I was thinking myself, man I wish I had zero cars, but I need a car I need a safe car to shuttle my kids back and forth to school and to doctor's appointments and playdates speaking of kids Whoo having kids really complicates your life because you care more about them than anything in the world They'll get sick, which my kids have been sick off and on for the past two and a half three months crazy Tridemic right with RSV flu coven 19 and then they get us a sick So in retrospect having one child really was like a walk in the park compared to having two children and then having no children Man, that's just be crazy freedom.

I was talking to my wife the other day We're at the mall and I was thinking man Can you imagine if we just had no children and we can just go eat in the food court? Maybe watch a 9 p.m. Movie come back at 1130 sleep in that would be nuts and it's such a different world now Of course, we're never gonna trade our children for anything in the world We love them so much, but we responsibly figured out that two was the most we could comfortably handle You know before having children we never fought after having children we fight more often because we're tired We're cranky the kids aren't sleeping and there's just a lot more to do So even with children there's a minimalism aspect, you know, there are plenty of early retirees out there with no children You know, they live in a one-bedroom apartment or maybe even something simpler It's very carefree and that's something everybody should think about What is your limit because if you have so many children that you're miserable all the time you end up in a divorce You know shouting matches.

It's bad for the kids. That is you know, that's tough That's not that's a suboptimal situation and we really don't know how far our limits can go but I think it's probably wise not to get to our Limit limit or surpass that limit because once you have children, you know, there's no going back, right?

All right In addition to cars and children property the reason why I don't want to own any more Physical rental properties or properties in general is because something always breaks, you know one property had a bike stolen out of the garage because supposedly the side door was left unopened when my Sister and boyfriend visited - there's a cracked pipe in one of my newly remodeled rental properties It was remodeled in 2020 and then both sides of the p-trap cracked and I saw it.

I was like what what's going on? So I had to spend Saturday Corresponding with my tenant finding a handyman paying 150 dollars to fix it and it was just unnecessary Stress and then in December all my electrical outlets in my primary bedroom Stopped working. It was all of a sudden.

I was watching World Cup soccer Saturday morning I came back to my room and nothing was turned on. I mean what the heck how random is that? So I had to get a handyman. I hired an electrician for $145 an hour and this just takes more stress and more time And oh, yeah in January no, yeah, February 6 2022 I ended up fixing a leak at my rental property and I end up repainting the entire house and that cost $20,000 so things just Naturally atrophy things break get old and you've got to keep on maintaining it over and over again So from now on all my cash allocated towards real estate will go to private real estate Investments or public REITs this way.

It's a hundred percent passive I can still earn the passive income and not have to manage anything. Everybody's got to find their own limit Oh, and there's another thing as I was driving back home after dropping off my son from school. I saw this beautiful Victorian house, it's probably like forty eight hundred square feet five bedrooms, you know, just classic 1896 built and I was thinking myself Hmm, there is no way I'm ever gonna buy a house like that because all I can think about are where are the potential Leaks and maintenance issues during this winter Maybe the wiring is old and it's knob and tube instead of a Romex wiring.

So at some point in your life I'm 45 now you might no longer want to own that big Expensive beautiful house. You might start looking at all the luxury mansions out there and think Hmm what a nightmare to maintain So if you really want to enjoy property It might be best to get that really nice house before your life gets so complicated So so far we've discussed about having more children more cars more homes well what's interesting also is that as you get older and wealthier your net worth gets more complicated and the more Complicated your net worth the harder it is to track and so when you can't track everything Well, you can't remember everything.

Well, there's always this niggling kind of like did I miss something? What am I doing wrong? Is something at risk of exposure that I'm not aware of and so that's why we have tools like personal capital You can sign up at financial samurai.com forward slash PC to track all your accounts It's similar to you know feeling less stressed once you write everything down on a to-do list on a paper or a whiteboard on a Refrigerator you feel more at ease because as those tentacles grow It just seems so unruly to track and there is something to be said about just having most of your net worth in real estate or in the S&P 500 or there's actually something to be said about having no investments and just making a living by working or generating truly 100% passive income such as let's say from music royalties or book royalties, so be aware of net worth Complications net worth creep as well.

It's probably gonna happen to you, especially as you get wealthier Oh, man, you know Please put together your death file of all your usernames and passwords and put together that a revocable trust with a good trustee or list of trustees to help Figure things out just in case Alright, and finally something interesting part of my life Which you're listening to right now is the financial samurai podcast and the financial samurai blog and then there's the newsletter between 2009 and 2012 there was just financial samurai I would write three posts a week and then respond to comments and that was that but since I left in 2012 there has been Online media creep, you know I started creating a newsletter to keep in touch with people who really wanted some more personalized and special information And then I started recording this podcast.

I think starting in 2016 2017 it was off and on for the first couple years, but then recently over the past two three years I've been very consistent and then I did some video interviews during my buy this not that book tour and I decided there's no way I'm gonna do YouTube as well.

So as you can see there's this creep it fills my time Even though I have two kids even though I'm very busy It's I just can't help but try to do more and more and more which is why I've Really become more strict on sticking to 20 hours a week or less on financial samurai Otherwise, I would probably spend easily 40 50 hours a week doing everything I can because I really like it But I know it's just not healthy because also things tend to break for example, if you are old-school and get financial samurai posts via an RSS reader like feedly You'll notice that it stopped working for a week and there's two thousand plus of you And the reason why is I guess some new plug-in had old code that conflicted with the PHP in the background of financial samurai So it caused these posts not to release on the RSS feeds and on my email feed as a result I was more stressed I didn't do anything wrong So I had to talk to my system Administrator who has been working on this for the past week to fix it and clean up the back end so it'll work better Why does this stuff happen every one or two years?

Well, it's because any kind of software technology always has bugs and whenever there's an update Those bugs tend to come out and conflict with each other So now I've got to spend $400 and just try to figure it out if I was a minimalist Mmm, I would cut down on this online stress and online activity So maybe maybe in 2023 and beyond I should just focus more on one thing newsletter podcast or financial samurai calm this work creep is What most entrepreneurs deal with and the most gung-ho worker bees deal with as well There's always something new to do and if you have a job that is correlated highly correlated with reward Then the natural inclination is to just work harder and do more and more stuff So if you want to be a minimalist, you've really got to be specific on what is enough How much is enough what gives you fulfillment and purpose because if you're not specific in your goals and your limitations This creep of everything that we do and everything will have will continue to grow and grow and grow Alright, thanks so much everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this episode And if you liked it, I'd love a positive review you want to subscribe to my newsletter It's at financial samurai comm forward slash news and if you want to support my book this holiday season It's by this not that at financial samurai comm forward slash Nt because of the book success I'm actually considering signing a second book deal and thanks to all of you for supporting it and This puts me at a crossroads because I just said maybe I should focus only on financial samurai or the newsletter or this podcast so if I introduce Book writing a second book again.

My life isn't getting simpler But maybe there is a solution to this desire to keep writing and maybe there is a simplicity in writing That I'll soon find out Stay tuned