♪ Bless him in the mornings ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

♪ Got to sort of tell 'em ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. It's Friday! How about we talk early retirement today? Let's talk with somebody who's pretty normal, didn't start off with a goal, but graduated from college and started work in just a pretty normal middle class lifestyle and figured out a way to retire at 33.

That'd be a good way to go into the weekend, right? ♪ Welcome! It is Friday. Hope I didn't scare you too much. But happy Friday! Today is Friday, October the 17th, 2014. I'm in a good mood. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. This is episode 83. And today we have an interview with Justin from Root of Good, an early retiree who retired at the age of 33.

He's going to tell us how he did it. ♪ Hi, thank you for being here. And I thank you for-- Thank you for being here. Pretty excited about today's show. Just to finish this interview, and I am recording it and releasing it right away. And it's a good one.

It's a very good one. Today's interview is, again, with Justin. And he writes at a blog called Root of Good. And he's an early retiree. Has a very neat story that I think you're really going to benefit from. He retired at the age of 33. His wife is just a little bit older than he is, and she's about to retire.

He retired about a year ago. And so he followed the early retiree pathway. But in today's show, we're going to talk a little bit about some specifics of how he did it. And in those specifics, I think they're going to be helpful because he didn't always set out with a goal of becoming an early retiree.

And he just did a few little things differently. So I think this show is going to be extremely useful to you to see how there are a few differences, a few simple minor decisions that you can make that will dramatically impact the course of your financial life over time.

And I think this is one of the most accessible interviews that I've done on early retirement. It is one of the most actionable, practical interviews, and it's a fun one. Justin's a great guy. He's a very smart guy, but he's very down to earth and able to communicate clearly.

I think you're really going to enjoy it. The interview is just under two hours long. The first part of the interview, we spend a lot of time talking about his story. And in the middle part, we talk about some of the things about his lifestyle, of what it's actually like to be retired.

I've gotten some questions on the site from people saying, "Talk to someone who's actually retired. What is it actually like?" And then in the latter part, we talk about saving money with kids. Justin and his wife have three children, ages two through nine. And so this is oftentimes unusual in the early retirement community.

It seems like many people who are prominent in that community either don't have kids or just have one kid or two kids or aren't doing it with a young family. So I think this is also an instructive interview, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. And at the end, we talk just a little bit about school because it is very, very short.

I want to be clear, by the way, I've been talking a lot about school and education because that's because I'm an educator. I'm a teacher. That's what I'm doing on this show. And it's a subject that I'm really passionate about, and I think it has a lot of impact on personal finance in a lot of ways.

So don't worry, this is not the school or the education podcast. It's just that I've noticed constantly in working with clients that it always plays in. So we talk just a little bit about that at the end. You can stay tuned for that. So it's been a good week on the show.

I didn't release just a quick update on the show and what you can expect, and we'll get right into the interview. I didn't release an episode yesterday on Thursday, and I've been working on some big projects this week that have been taking time. And so also I've released some lengthy interviews this week, and so I want to make sure that I don't--I probably target about an hour of audio a day.

It usually comes out to, I think, about an hour and a half, so frankly that's probably more what I target. But since some of these have been a little bit long, I didn't release one yesterday, but also because I was busy. So next week, however, I will be back in the saddle with me releasing some shows.

I do have a bunch of really great interviews scheduled that I think I'm really pleased with some of the variety that I've been able to bring in, especially in some of the interviews. And I hope you are too. I'm working hard to bring you a real variety of shows, not just talk about technical planning, not just talk about early retiree, but all of these things, but doing it in ways that are actionable.

So if you're interested in kind of what I am seeing as the-- I guess the rhythm and the pace of the show, I'm trying to create this show as something that you'll want to listen to every day, and every day find something that you can apply. So you can't apply every day heavy technical content.

You can't apply every day an inspirational story. You can't apply every day a tip. So if that were all the show was, I think that would be kind of tough to listen to every day. But my hope is that by creating some of this variety, then we're going to--then hopefully I can help you have some ideas about some things that you can apply.

And hopefully that kind of daily shift-- my goal is that it's interesting enough on a daily basis that you'll want to come back every day and listen to the show, and I hope that's the case. So this week on Monday--again, on Monday we released the show with Ed Mills, the Millionaire Educator, which was an awesome show about somebody who was a teacher in the government school system who was able to build out his own financial independence plan and become a millionaire as an adult over a relatively short period of time.

I loved that show. I hope you did too. Then on Tuesday we interviewed Rob Roy, the author of Mortgage Free. We talked about some strategies that were not associated-- we talked about the strategies about building your own house and doing it using kind of a new eco approach, and I love that stuff.

Someday maybe I will. Wednesday I released the interview with Simon Cunningham on Peer-to-Peer Lending. Thursday was no show, and then today was his interview on early retirement with Justin. And to give you a heads up on what we've got planned for next week, I've got some interviews lined up this afternoon.

I'm going to be interviewing a man named Stephen Harris, and we're going to be talking about ways to really save money on energy costs. And I am excited about this afternoon's interview, so I assume I'll be releasing that for you next week. Stephen is an amazing guy, and I've been a fan of his for a long time, and he is more knowledgeable than anyone I've ever heard on being able to cut energy costs.

On Monday I'll be interviewing Todd Tressiter from Financial Mentor. Todd is a writer that I really respect, has built out an amazing website at financialmentor.com, and I think we're going to talk a lot about wealth building, and that will be valuable. On Tuesday I'm going to be interviewing a man named Joey, who is the author of a book called Pirates of Financial Freedom, which is exciting because that book is in a narrative form.

He is talking about basically teaching financial independence lessons. I haven't finished the book yet, but I've got it, and I'm going to be finishing it this weekend. Then I'm also going to be interviewing Tammy Strobel on Tuesday of Rowdy Kittens, and we're going to talk about tiny house living and also going car free.

She's a writer, and she and her husband live in a tiny house, so that's going to be cool. Then also later in the week I'm going to be interviewing Brett from The School Sucks podcast. We're going to be talking about school and education. Brett is a teacher, and he has some really valuable input and information on school and education.

I think that's really going to be fun. Then I'm also interviewing Joshua Becker from Becoming Minimalist, and we're going to talk about minimalism as a financial strategy. Then the following week I've got a few other interviews lined up as well, so that will be good. Then also next week I plan to release a couple of shows.

I'm going to do a show on the Alpha Strategy, which is about inflation, how to build a financial plan that beats inflation using the Alpha Strategy. That's a book written by a man named John Pugsley. I think you'll enjoy that. Then also we'll probably do another show in my education series, and we'll see how I kind of release the shows as I continue working on a couple of projects.

Additionally, leave me your questions. I have one or two e-mail questions that I might answer on the next Q&A show, but hopefully you guys have enjoyed the Q&A shows. I've enjoyed doing them, but I'd love to get some more call-in questions. I like the call-in questions because that allows me to profile you for the audience, so I'd love to get your call-in questions.

Call me in. Go to the website at radicalpersonalfinance.com, and you will be able to hear--you'll see the button that says "Send me feedback" or "Leave voicemail" or something like that. Just click that button. You can do it right from your phone, right from your computer, and you can leave a question for the call-in shows on Friday.

Then I would love to hear from you guys also as far as if you're enjoying the flow, if there's something you'd like to change. Thank you for those of you who've been sending in topics. I value every one of those. I'm usually a little slow on e-mail, but I do read every single note you send me.

If you want to e-mail me, it's joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and then I'm on Twitter @radicalPF. With that, we're going to go to the interview. I've got a couple of announcements I needed to do, so enjoy the interview with Justin. It's a good one. Justin, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

I thank you for being with us. Thanks a lot. Glad to be here. Where I'd like to start is in today's interview, I'd like to cover a couple of things. I'd like to start with your story, and then we'll get into some actual maybe tactics and techniques and tips because I know you spend a lot of time thinking about those things and working on those.

I'd like to start with your story, but as you tell the story, I want you to keep in mind this. Many people spend a lot of time in the world of early retirees, and so I've spent a lot of time in the early retirement world, and that's clearly what your path has been.

It's easy to get into the mindset of, "Oh, this is simple. Everybody knows how to do it," because when you're in the early retirement world, everyone knows what you do. I'm reminded constantly, even last night I had a friend over for dinner and we were talking afterwards, and I'm reminded constantly of how radical and how nuts the whole early retirement actually is.

I'd like you to tell your financial story from as far back as is relevant, but give special attention to telling it in such a way that the path that you followed can be understood by somebody who hasn't been exposed to the early retirement concept. What's your story with money?

>> Okay. That's a big challenge to take on there. Explain it to someone who has not been indoctrinated in the early retirement financial independence world. I guess the biggest thing would be spending a lot less than what you make. You've got to take what you want to spend and what you make, and then just take those two things and totally separate them, because some people make $20,000 a year, some make $100,000, some make half a million dollars a year.

Depending on where you live, some of that may go a long ways or may not go as far as you think it will go. But the biggest thing, I think, to wrap your head around is that you don't have to spend everything that you make, and it's all a choice.

You can choose to spend it all now, or you can choose to save a lot now and spend what you save over time in the future. Early on, that's pretty much what I figured out, was that going through college, I'm living pretty comfortably. Graduated from college. The income went up a whole lot after graduating college, and the lifestyle went up some.

We bought a bigger house. We kept the same cars we had in college, but we ended up having three kids, which drove up the expenses a little bit. We probably take a little bit nicer vacations now than we did back in college. How old are you now? I'm 34 now.

Let me get into the ages. I'm 34 now. I retired last year at age 33. My wife's a couple years older than me. I won't say exactly how many, but she's actually still working right now. She may be retiring in two months or so. I think that's when she's going to put in her notice, but we'll see if they make her an offer she can't refuse.

Definitely in her 30s, she'll be retired, unless she just wants to keep working for some crazy reason, but I don't think that's going to happen. I have three kids, age two to nine. We got started relatively early for people like us. Good for you. Yes. I don't know how old I was.

24, I guess. Awesome. We were 24 when we had our first kid. Awesome. Right out of college, almost. That's one thing. Some people say, "Wait until you're 35 to have kids, and then you can save tons of money between age 22 or 23 up until 35." We didn't really take that path, but I didn't find kids to be that expensive, personally.

They're really not. Yes. We've seen all those estimates of it takes a quarter million dollars to raise a kid from age zero to 18, and that doesn't even include college. The house we bought, we couldn't have bought a much cheaper house in a neighborhood that has a yard. The house is almost a sunk cost in terms of whether we have one person living here or five people living here.

The only thing that goes up slightly is utilities. Other than that, the property tax, insurance, maintenance, everything is the same on this type of house. I want to talk about some of your tips toward the second half of the show. Kids will cost exactly what you allow them to cost.

People often forget about the fact that there are kids all over the world, and no matter the amount of income that people have, there are children. It really doesn't cost that much to support kids. There are certainly some families who are not able to support their kids. I've spent a lot of time in some places where there are a lot of kids on the streets, but it really doesn't cost that much to have a kid.

But in the U.S. and in the Western contexts, they cost as much as you let them cost. That can be far more than $300,000 over the course of a lifetime, or it can be far less. That's entirely up to the parent. Yes, absolutely. Were you always interested in money?

Did you have somebody who mentored you, who taught you a path? Did you figure it out yourself? What was your path? I've always been pretty good with money, and I guess I've always saved some of what I made. I started working at age 12 or 13 probably with a paper route, as clichéd as that is.

It paid very, very poorly, and I quit it soon after I started. I think I made $30 a month or something. This was back in 1993 or so, probably, which is not a lot of money even back then. So anyway, I always save a lot of my money. Did your parents teach that to you?

Yes. I guess I kind of absorbed it through osmosis. We were comfortable enough growing up. We had a stable house and cars that mostly ran most of the time. We took the occasional vacation that was pretty modest usually. I think frugality was just the background experience growing up in general.

We didn't grow up in a high-cost living area, and it wasn't like an exclusive gated community. My peers around me were just normal in general, not any-- I didn't see a lot of luxury spending and high-class lifestyle growing up. I didn't grow up in the hood or anything, but I actually grew up in Cary, North Carolina.

So if anybody's familiar with Cary, it's considered to be one of the luxury areas near Raleigh, North Carolina. But I say I grew up on the rough side of Cary, which is not rough at all. So traditional high school, traditional college path, but did you work your way through college?

How did you pay for college? I went through public education K-12. I took a few college classes and lots of AP classes in high school. So I got about a two-year head start on college, which financially helped immensely. The AP tests were--I think they were like $300 for five or six AP tests.

I can't remember what they were exactly, but it was very cheap compared to paying full freight at a university. So anyway, I entered with roughly two years of classes under my belt, and it took three years to graduate. I worked my way through mostly. I got some student loans, but I always found opportunities to make pretty good money.

So I did engineering--well, engineering in Spanish, but engineering was the moneymaker degree. So I ended up doing research assistantships, got a grant one year for a semester to do some research. I also worked at the radio station as a disc jockey and a production manager doing--sort of doing what you're doing here on the podcast.

I don't know if you have a soundboard. I do. Yeah, okay, so we had a soundboard there, and I'd produce advertisements and take care of some of the spots on the radio station. It paid pretty well for the effort required. I volunteered for a lot of broadcasting--baseball games and women's basketball games, the spots that nobody wanted.

But I think they paid $30 for two hours' worth of work, and you only have to press three buttons and say the station name once. So it was about two or three minutes' worth of work and then two hours' worth of homework studying for $30, so a decent amount of money back in around 2000.

So I did that and did some summer programs that paid pretty well, gave a decent stipend. But I went to a public university, got an engineering degree that ended up leading to a relatively well-paid career, nothing spectacular. How old were you when you graduated college? I graduated--undergrad, I graduated--I think I was 20?

Okay. 20, yeah. And I ended up going to law school after that. But I finished law school, ended up getting my law license, but I never practiced law. So you passed the bar, but you're not practicing. Yeah, actually, interesting story. I waited six years after graduation to take the bar exam because I never really wanted to practice law.

I figured that out, unfortunately, too late into law school, but I went ahead and finished law school. But I took the bar exam during the Great Recession because that was my plan B, was to hang up a shingle and do traffic tickets and small claims court and stuff like that if engineering fell through.

So the law license was kind of an afterthought and a plan B to maybe stave off starvation a while longer if the world really went crazy. And I couldn't find anything else to do because we all know the last people or last things on earth in a disaster will be cockroaches and loggers.

That's a really interesting plan B. I've had a number of early retirees, like people who are working towards retirement, contact me and ask about sources of income. Because I think one of the things that people should be thinking about as they're engineering their financial plans is backup plans and always having margins of safety in everything.

And one great margin of safety is if you can design a source of income that's not tied necessarily specifically to your having to work a traditional 40-hour job. And most people, I think, wouldn't mind if they have some control and autonomy and they have interesting work, most people wouldn't mind that.

So whether that's doing part-time tax preparation during the busy tax season if someone built up a practice like that or financial planning. I've often thought of law, however, as being one of those options. I think I could very happily be a trust and estate attorney and I could very happily do that type of work and enjoy myself.

And that type of work, I could set it up with an online presence. I could do simple or complex planning for clients all around the country, all around the US, from anywhere in the world. And that could be a very part-time scenario where you're just working with clients and make just some money.

It's not nearly going to be as profitable, but what a neat plan B for you. Yeah, and actually just to set the record straight, that was my plan B to do full-time work back then around '08 or '09. Today, I'm actually an inactive member of the bar, so I can't practice law right now.

But yeah, that's one thing I could do if I ever really absolutely run out of money and no one will hire me and my engineering skills are stale. And I could reactivate my law license, figure out how to do trust and estates, basic wills, get the right templates, and just do traffic tickets and do on-call or court-appointed work for the court, public defenders or whatever.

All it takes for that is a law license. You don't have to have a lot of skills and you can figure it out as you go along. That's oversimplifying it, but it's not a capital murder defense or a complex merger and acquisition. It's relatively straightforward. Do you know what your net worth was when you graduated from college or are you willing to share it?

I'm willing to share it. Yeah, don't quote me on it, but probably, let's see, we owned a condo at the time when I graduated from undergrad or law school, what are you saying? Undergrad. And what I'm trying to hone into, which feel free to take this and run, is I'm trying to give the path as far as how much money did you have, when did you have it, because when you say retire at 33, that is really startling to most people, especially when you say, "I took out some student loans in college and I wasn't given a lot of money," which is kind of what you're saying.

So I'd love you to trace the path as best you can between what your earnings were, what your net worth was, and it's okay if it's rough, but just to illustrate what you actually did to help somebody who's new to the early retirement concepts to understand. Yeah, net worth probably when I graduated, I didn't track it then.

I didn't start tracking it until a few months after I started working in 2004. So this is just off the cuff, but probably when I graduated college, it may have been like $10,000, maybe around that. It's hard to say. I don't know how many loans I had back then compared to what I had in the bank, but it was pretty low.

It may even be negative. I don't know when I graduated undergrad. Similar for your wife as well? Yeah, hers was probably even lower. We actually started dating back in college, so we didn't merge finances at that point back in undergrad, but we've been living together since then. Basically, we had almost nothing when we graduated college, but that's probably a lot better than a lot of graduates that had nothing and credit card debt and lots of student loans.

I at least had an income source of a decent job off and on here and there wherever I wanted to go work. Then we bought a condo when I went to law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So we bought a condo up there. Did you go to law school immediately out of engineering school?

Yeah, straight out. I worked the summer in between at a research position in Raleigh, but yeah, straight. That paid pretty well too. Did you borrow money for law school? Yes. Okay. So then after law school, you got a corporate job, an engineering job? Yeah. After law school, I graduated.

I had some internships that paid. They either volunteer or some of them paid really well. So I made some money in the summers there, but then graduated law school and then found a good private engineering job as a consultant. Any idea? Big money, six figures, half six figures, willing to share?

Half of six figures, slightly less than half of six figures. Yeah, just for income. I don't mind disclosing it. We both started out, I think I was at $48,000 a year back in 2004, and I ended up at $69,000 a year last year in 2013. So we made decent money.

I don't know how that compares to my other peers, but I certainly know a lot of other people my age that are making more than that in engineering, especially non-civil engineering people, electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, that kind of stuff, making a lot more money. My wife, roughly the same income trajectory.

I think she started a little bit lower, ended up slightly higher than that, plus benefits. But that was pretty much our income capped out at roughly $150,000 in 2013, the last year that I worked full-time. So here's the striking thing about it, which is why I pressed you for those numbers, is that the income you said, $45,000.

When I graduated from school, I got a corporate job. I started making $40,000, I think it was, and then it was something like $45,000. So it's not that difficult if you are reasonably intelligent, and if you punch the box on the college degree, it's not that tough to get a middle-level corporate job making $40,000.

But the key is that you did something very different with your $45,000 than I did, because I'm almost 30 and I'm not financially independent, and you're 33 and you are, because I saved 10% of my income. Do you know how much of your income you saved? Starting out, we probably saved around half, once we both had full-time jobs.

My wife took a year off or so for the first kid, right out of law school, but after that she got a job. It was about what you're saying, she was in finance, and it started around $40,000 or so back then, and she's worked her way up to increase that.

So we started out saving probably about half of our income, and a lot of that comes from the tax savings from deferring lots of income as well. And then over the years, it probably increased to maybe 70 or 75% the last year or so. We maxed out 401(k)s and IRAs pretty much every year that we've worked.

And then actually, I ended up with the state for the last few years of my career, and so we had a 457 account that I also maxed out, and they took out a pension, 6% for a pension. So I don't know how much we were deferring income, probably close to $60,000 totally tax-free, in a total savings account.

So you add all that up, and we're putting in maybe $60,000 or $65,000 maybe, completely tax-free. And so we paid almost no tax. We can put a link to this on the podcast, but I think in 2013 we paid $150 in tax on $150,000 income, which sounds ridiculous, but that's part of the thing.

We got to where we were, is we paid almost no tax. Love that. Well done, by the way. That's excellent planning. I'm proud of you. What were the things that you did differently that you noticed than some of your buddies who also went to the same school, you know, your social circle?

What did you do differently than them? Because I have done a lot of financial planning for 33-year-old couples who are making mid-level incomes and who are just trying to figure out how to save 5% or 10% of their income. What did you do differently than what your friends did?

Probably the biggest thing is I think I've always thought about things in terms of long-term net worth growth and kind of when I frame big decisions in life of how will this make me wealthier in 10 years from now? From should I get an MBA, should I buy a new car, should I upgrade my house, should I put my kids in private school or to a private preschool or something like that, or should I have kids at all, that sort of thing.

Most of that stuff you can model out pretty well financially and figure out. Maybe that's the weird part is that I actually modeled things and figured things out and did the math on it. Most things are quantifiable to some extent. So you can figure out the impact of if you buy a house that's twice the cost, well there's going to be twice as many expenses with it, and not just the mortgage but taxes, insurance, maintenance.

If you live in a nicer neighborhood, you're going to have fancier Joneses to keep up with. So there's the lifestyle inflation costs associated with that. Probably the weird thing is we stuck in our starter home that we didn't know it was going to be a permanent home when we bought it, but it ended up being our permanent home, I guess.

We're here 10 years later, so we're still here. We didn't move houses a lot. Every time you move a house, there's transaction costs, real estate commissions, fixing it up, decorating, that sort of thing. Cars, the same thing. We actually still drive our 14-year-old cars that we bought brand new in college with loans at the time.

So we're still driving the same reliable Hondas that we bought way back then. They don't look as pretty as they did back then, but they still get us where we need to go. I think the biggest part is just not really inflating the lifestyle a whole lot above where we were soon after college.

There's probably a jump after we graduate from college because there's more money available and it's a reliable source of income and that sort of thing. I guess I see the small things like some friends would buy more electronics quicker, so they would be on the early edge of the technology booms.

They would buy the HDTV back when it was thousands of dollars for a TV. We waited a few years and it was like $500 for a big flat screen TV. The same thing with computers. I would buy the cheap ones and they might buy the fancy expensive ones. It's probably just a lot of small things, paying attention to a lot of the details.

I'm sure that the biggest impact was housing, cars, and taxes. Saving money on those three things. Housing, cars, and taxes. I'll share a little bit of what I learned. I'm glad you shared that because that's kind of what I was expecting. We've never talked and I have flipped through your blog, but I haven't read your whole archive, so I don't feel like I know your entire story.

I'm glad that you share that because people often think that they have to do something super extreme and something super hardcore in order to be able to build financial independence. I love Jacob Lund Fisker. I think he's a neat guy, but man, is he intimidating to some people. For many people in an average Western society, the idea of him saying, "I live in California on $7,000 a year," which is only for one, plus his wife, $7,000 or $10,000 or however much, that is really intimidating for many people.

But I've learned that you don't have to be intimidated. You just have to do a few things right. The things I have observed is it's interesting that there's a high -- it seems as though there's a higher correlation between engineers and the wealthy than there should be based upon the number of engineers in society.

Tom Stanley talks about that in his research on professions. Many engineers have a higher propensity to accumulate wealth than some other professions, even though their earnings are not necessarily extremely high on a large basis. I'll tell you how I learned this, and I want to tie it to the lessons that you may not have -- you may be more unconscious than conscious.

I started doing financial planning for people. When I'm doing financial planning, I started running an analysis for them where I showed them what their earning would be, or what their total income would be. If I were sitting with you and your wife at 27 years old, I would take, "Okay, you're earning $60,000," and I would project that forward from, let's just say, 25 to 65 so I can do the math, so there would be 40 years of income.

Then I would inflate that income at just a 3% inflation for cost of living. The remarkable thing is I would always do that and compare that to the balance sheet. I would illustrate to my clients their balance sheet. Here are the assets that you have, the financial assets here, the financial liabilities that you have.

Now here's your income. At any normal middle-class income, you wind up with a total income of millions of dollars. You look at this balance sheet, and usually someone's stressed out by, "I've got $13,000 of credit card debt, and I owe $17,000 on my car, and I've got a $182,000 mortgage." But when compared to the $3 million income, you look at it and you say, "This shouldn't be that big a deal.

It really shouldn't be that big a deal to take $3 million and pay off the car, pay off the credit cards, pay off the house, and save a million or two bucks with investment growth." But then I would do financial planning for a lot of 50- and 55-year-old couples, and I'd find they're still in the same situation.

I finally figured out—it sounds stupid to say, but it took me a long time to figure out—that the key is that people don't stop. They always keep their balance sheet right about how it is. And the average person—and most people listening to this show are not going to be average—but the average person in a Western society is continually upgrading.

So instead of buying a new car and financing it because you don't have the money, which would be fine if you just did it one time, you finance a new car and then you do it every four or five years. And instead of buying a house and putting a mortgage on it because you don't have the money, which would be fine if you did it once or twice, many people—what does the realtor say?

Five to seven years? Upgrade. And every time you upgrade, there are all of the costs of the transaction. So you have sales commissions, you have just all the fees and the costs of the transaction. Then you have all of the costs associated with the move, which can be several thousand dollars.

Then you have all of the costs associated with setting up the new house the way that you want it to be—the new furniture, the new drapes, all of the new stuff. And there's all these little embedded costs all along the way. And if we could just think a little bit more in advance and make an intelligent choice, and like you said, buy a brand new Honda that's going to last for 14 years and may very well last for another 10, and buy a house that's going to work for a long period of time and then just stick with it, then what can happen is that, although it's not so dramatic in the beginning as far as the expense difference, over time, just by keeping those expenses constant and then the income growing, that leads to the wealth building.

So it's fairly simple, but very few people recognize as far as why. You can't be constantly upgrading, because if you're constantly upgrading, then you're going to wind up constantly increasing costs, and you're not able to save money. Yeah, I don't know that we consciously realized that early on. But we were frugal-minded way back when, and I figured when I bought a new car, it should be able to last for 10, maybe 20 years.

I didn't think about where I'd be sitting here in my chair today 14 years later, still driving it necessarily, but I thought that it could last that long, potentially. And the same with the house. We just said, "Well, okay, it's a good deal on a house." We bought it at an auction from the city.

It didn't need too much work, but a tiny bit of stuff we put into it. But it made sense at the time, and it was in a decent location. But I think realizing those friction costs of moving house somewhere else, and even to a different city, sometimes people focus so much on the income side of, "Well, I can move across the country and get a 20% pay increase." But the cost of doing that and the cost of flying back home a few times a year if you want to visit family or friends, and the cost of packing up in a realtor's commission and the moving company.

I mean, unless your company picks it up, some of those costs will be offset. But all those costs sort of add up, and it's not as simple as just saying, "I can get a 20% pay increase." The cost of living may be 25% more, and so you're actually saving at a lower rate.

Or after taxes, you may be losing money by moving somewhere. And maybe it's worth it for your career if you can take a huge jump forward in your career by moving. But we sort of just stayed in one place and focused on getting as much money as possible into our investment accounts and letting it grow free of taxes.

Most of our investments are tax-deferred. And the goal was, we know that's money that's sitting in our account, and to try to move to a new house even here in town, that's money that's going to disappear from our savings. We're not going to be able to keep saving. We're going to have a bigger down payment.

Just all those costs, they add up. We might be slightly happier in a new house temporarily, but we would get used to it so quickly. The same thing with luxury cars. I don't even like driving that much. I do it because I want to go somewhere and not because I enjoy driving in a fancy car.

I'd rather just walk if I could do it. It's weird how you end up where you do, but a lot of it comes down to just focusing on those small costs and the big costs. It really is. It's the small costs and it's the big costs. I forgot to mention the taxes.

That is a big deal for you. I'll give you a number. I was trying to pull up the IRS tax table and just see what the tax table would be on $150,000 of income, ignoring some of the exemptions. But if you look at it and you say... Here's the other key.

In order to take advantage of tax deferral, you have to be able to defer the income and not need it to spend. I'll just use this statistic because I just Googled it and found it. It says that the average tax rate on $150,000 is 23%. I don't know if that's true or not.

Let's just for the sake of the example say it because I wasn't able to pull up the tax table in time. But 23% of $150,000 is $34,500. By being able to live on the median wage of $30,000 to $40,000 with three children, you can wipe out all of your income tax bill with $150,000 income if paying $150,000 of taxes.

That's $34,500 of savings right off of your budget. But people don't see that. This is why I hammer so hard on people is do your income statement and include the gross income. People don't do that. They keep a budget that says, "Here's what my after-tax income is." But they miss the almost $3,000 a month that they're spending on taxes because of their high consumption lifestyle.

So it all works together. Cutting out taxes allows you to save an extra $34,500 per year on tax savings. Then by not upgrading the house, then by not upgrading the cars, you can live a fairly normal-looking lifestyle just by not doing those things. Over time, you do it for a few years and you can build wealth.

But somehow we don't grasp that formula. Yeah, and it's funny that $34,500 figure, that's roughly about what our lifestyle costs now. So it's interesting to think of it that way of we were saving enough on taxes to essentially fund. Every year that we saved on taxes was an extra year of expenses that we were funding.

But then even beyond that, that income is growing tax-free, and so it's actually invested. After 10 years or so, it's going to double, and so it's actually two years of living expenses just from being smart on taxes for one year. So that's a pretty--yeah, I don't know if it was $34,000, but it'd be interesting to find out exactly what it would have been if we did not defer all the income.

Yeah, and that's what I always thought about is even making small changes, like the first $1,000. If you put in $1,000 into a 4 and K and you're in the, say, combined state and federal-- I'm in a state with income taxes, so if your combined state and federal income tax bracket is, say, 32%, you put in $1,000, well, it doesn't cost you $1,000.

It costs you $680. And the other $320, that's given to you by savings on taxes. So people think, "Well, I can't afford $1,000," but you only have to be able to afford $680, and that's like 50 bucks a month. And so it's a very, very tiny amount of money, but you get to actually save-- every dollar that you put in, that it takes out of your paycheck, you're getting half that much back again in terms of a tax break.

And so it's just--I mean, for me, I could see that mathematically, like, "Oh, okay, well, if I'm putting in $10,000, I'm saving $3,200. If I put in $20,000, I'm saving $6,400." It's a huge amount of money. Right, right. And you're just pointing out--I mean, all we're doing here, without going into a long tax conversation, but income taxes, the whole concept of income taxes, in my opinion, it's asinine.

It's utterly asinine, because what happens is that all of the people who are mildly intelligent, who are the most productive people, figure out a way to avoid them, and the people who are not generally very productive pay them all. And it's a completely asinine system, and there's always a way to exploit any system that's set up on a political basis, and this is a really good one, which is it's entirely straightforward, it's easy to do, and it can result in some major, major advantages.

I think it's awesome that--I mean, I love that you did your post on the $150,000 and $150,000 of income, and I will make sure to link to that in the show notes. Question for you, as far as your distribution strategy. So, here would be what I would say, as a skeptic.

I would say, "Okay, listen, Justin, this all sounds great, but come on, man, you're 33 years old. How on earth do you know you have enough money to live on? What makes you so sure that you are retired? That's ridiculous. How could you be retired at 33? How do you know you're not going to run out of money?" I would say, "Hey, you got a good point.

I don't know." And that's kind of a plan C or a plan D is, "I may have to go back to work, but so what? I mean, I'm going to have 5, 10 years off from not working, and I may have to go back to work, but I don't have to make a ton of money.

We only spend $32,000 a year. That's a little bit above minimum wage, but it's not a-- I don't have to go back to engineering. I could do something else." But in terms of why do I think it's very, very, very likely that we will have enough, we could always reduce spending.

We have $5,000 or $6,000 in the budget for travel. That's pure luxury. There are other areas we can cut back on, or we could defer spending, like big improvements to the house. There's part-time jobs. There's small freelance income online. There's my being an attorney and going and doing traffic tickets, that sort of thing.

There's small, relatively easy ways to not work a whole lot and still make some money. So those are sort of plan B, plan C, plan D things, reducing expenses, pulling in some side income, and then if it really, really fails, ultimately, or the portfolio balances get so low that I'm afraid of running out of money, I might have to go back to work full-time.

But those are sort of plan B and beyond. In terms of plan A, we have a little bit over $1 million. Probably, well, a few weeks ago, it was probably closer to $1.3-ish million in the investment portfolio. Today, it's probably closer to $1.2 million. So we've lost a little bit, around $100,000 in the last few weeks.

You haven't lost any money. The values reflected for what people are willing to pay you today for the shares of the companies that you own, they're willing to pay you $100,000 less, but you haven't lost any money yet. Sorry, that one's a big one for me, so I have to correct that.

Yeah, and that's absolutely true. If you look at, "Am I going to be selling any of the stuff that I've lost money on on paper?" No, I'm not selling it tomorrow. I probably will not sell it within the next year because we have more than a year's worth of cash in our savings account.

I might actually invest some of the cash that we have sitting around just because values have gone down. But the bigger point is we're only spending--so if you look at our spending, $32,000 per year. We can put a link for that, too, down below this podcast, the full budget that we have.

So $32,000 per year, that's around 3% from $1 million, 3.2% of $1 million. So our portfolio could actually drop in value by another $200,000 or so, and we would still be spending around 3.2% of what's left. If you look at the $32,000 divided by the $1.2 million we have today, I don't know, it's probably--well, I can do it really quickly.

That's 2.67%, so we have a withdrawal rate below 3% right now. That's slightly above our dividend yield on the portfolio. And in terms of historical success rates, there's the 4% rule that says you can take 4% of your portfolio each year and increase it for inflation each year and have a 95% chance of having your money last for 30 years.

In 30 years, I'll be $64,000. Social Security, if it still exists in today's format and the payment's the same, I'll be eligible for Social Security by then. So it'll be a little bit less than $32,000 per year for the two of us. But if I can last 30 years, Social Security will kick in and cover most of our core expenses, and it'll be a very bare-bones retirement, you know, we're 60-something, if our portfolio is exhausted after 30 years.

And that's with the 4% spending rule. We're spending a little bit less than 3%, but we'll just say 3%. So each year, we're actually leaving an extra percent on the table, probably. And so over the long term, if stocks grow at, say, 7% or 8%, and we're only spending 3%, each year, our portfolio will grow on average.

I mean, there's going to be ups and downs, obviously, but we're not even spending the full amount that we probably could spend from our portfolio. So in other words, I don't think -- I think the chance of us running out of money is pretty small. I'll put the odds of me getting bored and going back to work because I'm bored as a higher probability than us running out of money.

I agree. And even if it's not getting bored and going back to your traditional job, I would say that the odds of you finding some kind of project, doing something that interests you, that's going to change the world in some remarkable way, and then putting your engineering skills and your legal skills to use and then figuring out how to make some money out of it purely as enjoyable is going to happen to you.

But one quick thing on the numbers. With the amount of money that you have saved, even if you sold all of your investments today and you completely cashed out and you put everything into currency sitting in your house, then at $1.2 million divided by $32,400 per year, you have 37.04 years of income sitting that would be able to sit there in currency.

So even if you didn't -- I like to show people that one now. That doesn't count for inflation. But a lot of times people are so uncomfortable with the withdrawal rates that if you just think about that, you've got 37 years of income sitting there. You've got plenty of time to figure something else out.

Yeah, that's kind of the way I think about it. People are like, "Well, aren't you worried?" I'm like, "Well, I'm worried like 20 years from now I'm worried, but not like tomorrow." I mean, I could fire off -- if I put out one resume a day for the next 20 years, that would be 7,000 resumes I could send out between now and 20 years from now.

I mean, somebody's going to just like my name or something or like where I went to school or they're just going to hire me because they can't find anybody else. That to me is like, "Well, I'll find a way to make money somehow doing something sometime between now and 20 years from now." Right, right.

Yeah. And I love the withdrawal rates as being a useful tool for people, but there are risks associated with that. The cool thing is that when you have money and you have capital, you can figure out what's an intelligent way to deploy it. And that intelligent way may be building a cottage behind your house that you can put Airbnb people in.

It may be starting a bed and breakfast in the country. I mean, it may be starting a -- there are a gazillion types of things you can do. Once you have the capital, though, you have the time to build whatever it is that you want to do, and you always need to be looking at what's the wisest way to invest it.

And that may not just be pulling mutual fund money off on a safe withdrawal rate strategy, or it might be. It just depends on what you want. Yeah, and just to touch on that in terms of where I'm at, mine's mostly that ladder. I really only have those investments in mutual index funds, mutual funds, and that's what I'm planning on relying on.

But like you're saying, I mean, it would not be that hard to take some of that money and put it into a capital asset that has a higher rate of return with more risk and more labor required of me, like a piece of rental real estate. I could take 10% of my portfolio, sell it, and then go buy a house somewhere in my neighborhood, $120,000, $130,000, $140,000, and then rent it out for $1,200 a month and maybe net after vacancies and paying insurance and maintenance fees.

I could probably net $800 or $900 a month roughly from that, which is say, I don't know, $10,000 a year or so net. So it would be more risk, obviously. It would be more work for me, slightly, having to manage a rental property. But that's one of those things that if it ever gets really, really, really tough, I mean, there are ways for me to make more money and get higher returns with more risk.

Maybe more risk. I don't know. Maybe not. But I'm not stuck with this current strategy. I mean, it's something I can reevaluate every day, every year, is it working for me or not. But I think you highlight a good point, is that once you have that capital sitting there, I mean, I can go out and buy 10 hot dog carts and hire 10 high school students to run 10 hot dog carts tomorrow and deploy them around the city and maybe make some money off of that.

I don't know. I mean, that's just off the cuff. But when you have money sitting in the bank, you have that ability to start little ventures here and there if you want to, to make more money. And you're not really stuck with strictly sticking to index funds and bonds and stocks and that sort of thing.

I mean, there's tons of different investments out there. I just haven't personally gone into any of those just because I'm lazy, I guess. And just for right now, I just want to have some freedom to just do whatever and not have to worry about anything else right now. I had three former clients, all of whom had interesting investments, all of which funded their entire lifestyle at a level greater than what you need to spend money on.

One of them owned a cell phone tower and they had it rented out, I think it was to Verizon or something like that. And just the rent from the one primary customer funded their entire lifestyle. One of them owned a Family Dollar store. Like out in the country, basically, they built a store and they had it on a lease to a dollar store.

I don't remember if it was Family Dollar or Dollar General, one of those types of stores. And I don't remember the term. It was like about a 15-year lease. And that funded their entire lifestyle. And the third one owned a campground in the south where you are. I think it was Tennessee, maybe.

And just the campground, which was a seasonal campground, funded their entire lifestyle. So, it can be in all of them where the investment cost was less than a million bucks. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think what you could do with a million bucks or 1.2, 1.3 million to definitely get a lot more returns.

And I guess for me, the risk that I would see is that geographic concentration. Right, right. I've got a cell phone tower. And so, if, bam, all of a sudden you have to have a cell phone tower that's 10 feet higher or the FCC shuts it down or new technologies out there, WiMAX, PHY, something or other that makes the ranges 20 miles and all of a sudden you need a cell phone tower in a city.

I mean, that's those disruptive things or campgrounds. I mean, maybe it floods or that area, the highway gets shut off, the national park closes, or they start drilling for oil in it, so it's not recreational. Those are the sort of things where, like, by having my money split up in thousands of different companies all over through index funds, I'm relatively diversified to the point of not having to worry too much about a particular city or area or country or technology or industry going under.

So that's sort of the, I'm accepting a lower return in exchange for diversification of risk. 100% agreed. In fact, the client had the cell phone tower, the primary tenant disappeared and they had to scramble to fix that. And there are unique risks in all of those. Good point. Question.

People have a lot of interest in hearing how, when people actually retire, how they spend their time and what they do. And I'm interested, you've been, you quit your job, what, a year ago? How do you spend your time and what's life actually like now? So I like to think of it in terms of right now I'm probably 50% stay-at-home dad, 50% lazy bum doing whatever I want to do.

And I think that'll change over time just as my kids get older and they're less time intensive. The youngest one's two and I just heard him run over here and rattle on the door. My wife's actually home today too, just hanging out. But so just on a daily basis, probably a few hours a day at least I'm spending with the kiddo, taking the other kids to school, walking up to school and back, doing play dates, that sort of thing.

The rest of the time, today might be a good example, we're going to go out, we're on an adventure to find some good fresh fish and fish eggs to make sushi at home. Fun. We make sushi all the time but don't really have a great source of fish around here.

So we're going to go on a little venture to try to find that. So that's going to take up a little bit of time and then making the actual sushi. So we have more time to do those kind of things like if we were at work, it'd be stop by the sushi place, get takeout, come home, eat it.

This way we're going to be able to create, hopefully, create a source of awesome fresh fish for sushi in the future. Other than that, I mean I spend a lot of time, it kind of goes in cycles where I'll like to read a whole lot and so I'll read a lot of books.

This week I read, I think, a whole book in two or three days. Sometimes I'll binge watch a whole TV show on Netflix or something and just sit down and over the course of a week watch 20 episodes of something. I was on a self-learning kick for a while doing learning French on Duolingo and taking a bunch of courses on Coursera on financial markets and the history of evolution or I guess evolutionary biology and computer security.

Just a few different things that were like, "Hey, I don't know much about this. Let me learn more about this. I'm curious." It's sort of just whatever I want to do. I mean it's hard to define exactly what I'm going to do. Next week may be totally different than this week.

I guess it's like one of those things where you say, "Oh, I want to jump into this and do this but I have to go to work. I don't have time to do this right now." Well, now I can just say, "No, it's cool. I'm just going to spend the next two days learning how to use Photoshop because I want to do XYZ on my blog and I want to learn how to edit photos and crop them really quickly." I want to crop them, resize them, format them and fix defects on them and do some of these cool overlays and stuff like that.

That was one thing probably six months ago I did. I just sat down and went through a bunch of online video tutorials and learned how to use the software that I have to edit photos. Actually, I used GIMP, G-I-M-P instead of Photoshop. GIMP is free. Photoshop is expensive. Those are the sort of things.

I mean nothing outside of vacations. It hasn't been like this huge, "My life is totally different now." It's like seven-day weekends every week pretty much. That's probably the next few years until I get all three kids into school. Then after that, I'm going to have a lot more free time.

So I'm not sure what I'm going to do all day then but probably a lot of the same. Me and the two-year-old, we'll go out and do things during the day pretty often too. So just a little bit of this and that. We've been able to take longer vacations.

I think we've spent close to four weeks on vacation this year, which is, given the normal North American or I should say United States allotment of vacation time, four weeks a year is pretty rare. Most of that is just kid-related. Between school and summer camp and other activities, it's hard to find time off to go on vacation.

We took a road trip to Canada for a few weeks and then took a cruise for a little over a week to the Caribbean. So more vacations are definitely, more trips are in the cards for us as the kids get older and easier to take care of. Is there anything you feel restricted that you're not able to do because you don't have the money to do?

Is there something that, do you feel impoverished? Do you feel restricted? Not exactly. Probably in terms of if we had more money, it would be nice. The only thing I can think of is just maybe traveling to Europe, Western Europe. It's pretty expensive. So we probably won't spend a lot of time there particularly.

But that's like ten countries in the world. There's another 205 or 6 other countries out there we can visit. There's lots of other things to do in the meantime. But in terms of material consumption, no, I can't think of anything that we want or want to do that we don't do or don't have right now or that we could not afford easily.

So I don't think it's really restrictive. And there's always going to be that restriction on something. Bill Gates has limits on what he can buy. He can't buy a country. Well, maybe some small countries. So I think no matter whether you have a million or ten million dollars or a hundred million dollars, there's always limits on what you can consume, what you can afford.

So I guess I can't think of anything now that I would, if I had an extra million dollars, that I would go out and get. It's two ideas for you. One is that if you want to go to Western Europe, and I'm sure you've already thought of this, but just for the audience, how I would handle that is rent the house out for three months.

Find somebody who wants a short-term rental of some kind, rent the house out for six months or a year, go and buy a camper van in Europe, and then spend six months traveling around Western Europe. And by going slower, you can do it cheaper. The house can fund the additional cost, and you turn that asset that's currently not creating revenue, you turn it into something that basically funds the premium of traveling around Western Europe instead of Eastern Europe.

And then you sell the camper van when you're done in Europe and keep on going. There's always a strategy that can be employed to hit financial goals, even if you are living on a specific budget. Yeah, that's exactly it. When we were trying to figure out what to do this past summer, we actually had Southern Spain on the list of… We had a few different places we wanted to go, and that was one of them.

It would have been basically fly to Europe and spend probably a month, maybe two months there, and possibly rent out the house while we're gone. But just to travel more slowly, we probably would have rented an apartment somewhere instead of a camper van, but going more slowly and by doing that, spreading out some of those big costs like airfare or train tickets to different places, spreading those out over time so that the whole trip for two months may have only cost double what it would cost for two weeks.

Because so many of the costs are… I mean, like food. I realized when we're not here, we're saving $1,000 a month. When we're not here at our house, we're saving $1,000 a month or so just on not paying utilities or not paying much for utilities. We're not consuming things as much, not paying for groceries.

And so, yeah, we're going to spend more money if we were in Europe, for example, on groceries, but we're not spending money here in the U.S. on groceries, so that's $600 or so that we'd be saving a month on that plus some more on utilities. And we're not driving around here.

We'll be taking public transit over there probably or if we rent a car or something. So then, yeah, like you're saying, and then we've rented out the house, that's another probably $1,000 a month we could net probably. Travel is only expensive because people have to do it in a two- or three-week period of time because there's three major costs of travel.

Number one is getting there, and especially if you're going to fly somewhere. I mean, if flights to Europe are $1,000 a piece, that's $5,000 of getting you and your three kids there, assuming your two-year-old has his or her own seat. So the cost of getting there and home. Number two is the cost of maintaining all of the lifestyle at home plus the cost of travel.

So the way most people travel is you have a mortgage payment, you have a car insurance payment, you have a health insurance payment, you have all of these costs from home, and then you're adding travel costs to that. And then number three is the cost of what you're doing while you're there.

So the way U.S. Americans go on vacation is we're so stressed out, we've got to do everything in two weeks. So we spend $80 on Monday to rent the jet skis. We spend $250 on Tuesday to get the entrance tickets to Disney. We spend $800 on Wednesday actually there at Disney or whatever the thing is.

And we spend, spend, spend, spend, spend because we've got to get all the activities in because that's the other cost. That actually being on the road is not that expensive, especially if you're renting an apartment or something like that. But all of those are constraints of working. If you don't have, if you have more than two weeks, then instead of, instead of taking, you know, a $5,000 plane ticket cost, that's a total cost amortized over two weeks of $2,500.

But amortized over 15 weeks, that's $333 a week for traveling to get there and back. Then if you can arrange your expenses at home either to not be there or to subsidize them with your, get rid of your mortgage payment or, you know, take the insurance off the cars for three months.

I mean, every situation is different. You can cut those at home costs. And then by having more time, you can go on the off-peak days. You can spread things out and you can live. And then the cost of travel just plummets. But all of it is a cost of working.

Like the entire incentive system around life is you're screwed if you work because it's expensive. Yeah, yeah. And that's what you just described. That's pretty much what we had planned for this summer. We were going to spend five weeks driving from North Carolina up to Canada and spend most of that time in Canada and then drive back.

And so, you know, driving there is way cheaper than five plane tickets, even when plane tickets are only $250 each. But we would have our car in the meantime so we can drive between cities, take day trips wherever. And we rented apartments. But we ended up cutting the trip short after about two and a half weeks.

We just got really tired of just the--with kids. It's kind of hard. And so we knew that, you know, we may want to just cut it short and come back home anyway. And that's why we drove somewhere instead of flying. So it's easily cancelable and we can just head back home.

So we were just kind of worn out, travel-weary from being on the road so much and being away from home. But hopefully in a few years we can--maybe even this summer, this next summer, we can go and do a long trip somewhere. But I think that's kind of--those, you know, three-, four-, five-, six-week trips, eight-week trips are probably going to be more typical for us.

Just because, like you're saying, the marginal cost to add on an extra month of vacation is not that much. I mean, especially if you're saving money at home, it may be almost nothing. And in some parts of the world you may actually save money, you know, because we like to go to Central America, Mexico again, or Thailand eventually, Southeast Asia.

And a lot of those places, the cost of living, even a somewhat luxurious cost of living is no more than our cost here in North Carolina. And so once you cover those, the plane tickets, the big expense there. So yeah, that's what we're looking forward to, that we don't have those constraints on time.

And we can travel more slowly, and we can travel off-peak if we potentially, you know, depending on what we do with the kids' schooling and everything. We have that flexibility to go places when it's cheap and spread those big costs out over a longer period of time. Right. Let's wrap up with kids.

You've got three kids, and you're living on $33,000 a year with three kids in North Carolina. Do you have some ideas that have helped you and your wife to not need to spend a ton of money on the kids? Any tactics, techniques, tips that you would share with us?

Let's see. Well, probably the biggest savings is I don't work, so there's no child care expenses. That saves us $12,000 a year or more compared to the going rate for a daycare. Or for three kids, it could be $20,000 to $30,000 if you hired a nanny or more. We send our kids to public school, which we live in a metropolitan area that has a pretty decent school system.

My wife and I both grew up here in the Wake County public school system, went to school here, K-12, and it worked out pretty well for us. Our kids actually attend one of the worst schools in the district as measured by test scores and demographics and poverty levels. But it's actually a pretty good school.

It sounds weird to say that, but there's just not that many bad schools here in Raleigh. Our kids are doing very well on tests and performance-wise, it does not seem to be adversely affecting them. It gives them a taste of how other people in the world live outside of gated communities and protected enclaves that most wealthy people of my means would likely live in.

So it's sort of a cultural immersion experience as much as an educational experience as well. We live in a decent school district, and the school is pretty good. The kids' small class sizes, that sort of thing. But if you look at it, just without digging into what is it actually, but it's a decent school.

And middle school and high schools are good around here. So public schooling, if you can get in an area where public schooling is good enough, not perfect, but good enough, that's going to save you a lot of money as well. So those are probably the biggest expenses, educational expenses, child care.

Cars, I have a Honda Civic, and we can fit five people in a Honda Civic. When we had a booster seat and a car seat in there, it was a little bit tight. Four-door or two-door? It's a four-door. Two-door, I would say go for the four-door. I don't know if it's extra money, but it's certainly worth it in terms of sanity.

Absolutely. So you can fit five kids in a Honda Civic. You don't have to have an eight-passenger SUV if you only have three kids, although it would be nice sometimes to have more capacity. Our next car might be a nice new used minivan or SUV, small SUV. Go with the minivan.

It's awesome. I agree. My wife does not want to drive a minivan, but to me it just makes perfect sense that they're less expensive. You can haul stuff in them. Here's how you can convince your wife. Well, it's hard to convince people, but I'm saying rent an SUV. So my wife and I have a minivan.

We love it. This weekend we're taking a trip, and I have my brother's Honda Pilot. I'm a fan of Hondas. It's the worst car ever designed in the history of mankind, because we have one son and two dogs, and we can't fit in the Honda Pilot. It's just so -- the design is so ridiculous when you compare it to the design of the ease of fitting stuff in the minivan and having tons of room.

Sorry. That was a little bit strong of me to say, but it's just -- you compare an Odyssey versus a Pilot, and you figure they cost the same, they run the same, except one is actually easy to use and live in, and the other basically just looks stupid. I mean, it -- excuse me.

The one is easy to -- I get all tongue-tied. The one is easy to live with, and it's really useful, and it looks like a minivan, and the other looks cool but is so difficult to actually use every day and has half the room inside. That was what I meant to say.

I didn't mean to be so strong. Hopefully I didn't offend your wife if she listens. No, that's okay. We'll have to have that argument or discussion or fight or whatever it turns into down the road. But, no, I think that's, yeah, focusing on, like, how do you use it and what the practical implications are, and is it actually -- the things that you actually care about more than, like, what does it look like or what is the name of it.

To me, those are more important, so I'll keep working on her and see what we can come up with. But, yeah, a lot of those things, I mean, it's -- I've gathered the same thing, that minivans are more versatile in terms of hauling capacity, and I'd probably finish a sheet of plywood in there if I needed to.

Yeah, I had a Ford Expedition, and now I have a Hyundai Entourage. And I grew to hate the Expedition because it was just this massive vehicle that is designed to do -- it can only do a couple of things well. A, it can haul a trailer, and B, if it's four-wheel drive and if you need that, you can lift -- you can put a lift on it and have some big off-road vehicle.

The only thing that the minivan can't do as well is you're not going to lift it and make it in four-wheel drive, which I don't have any use for, and you can't haul as heavy of a trailer. But even some of the newer ones now, I mean, they're rated for 3,500 pounds, but people still have this mental image over them.

But in terms of practicality, once you've had both of them, I know very few people who've had an SUV, who've driven and used a minivan, who've ever wanted to go back, unless you have the need to haul a trailer or you have the need for the off-road, high-ground clearance capabilities of it.

Right, which we don't have either of those. I mean, I thought about getting a trailer just to maybe get some kayaks or canoes and be able to haul them a lot easier, or bikes even, or just general stuff. And yeah, like you're saying, you can even put a hitch on a Honda Civic.

I mean, you can't carry buses with it, but that's a very simple way to turn something cheap, like a Civic or a Ford Focus or something, turn it into this awesome utility vehicle, being able to haul everything, put a hitch on there and get a small utility trailer. I'm sorry for being so opinionated.

I shouldn't have expressed my opinion that strong. It's just I was so glad to get rid of the Expedition and get a minivan. I want other people to avoid my mistakes. I will tell her. I'll make sure she listens to this part. I'll say, "Look, here's another smart person that's good to get out." But yeah, that's just one of those things of like, I don't know.

I've never had this desire to get an SUV. Not that I have anything against them. I mean, if they were practical and for some reason I need to haul a trailer, I mean, I'd go out and get a nice big V8, four-wheel drive. So maybe if I want to go off-road, I mean-- Yeah, if you live at the top of a mountain in North Carolina with a rutted dirt road, you need the ground clearance.

That's different. I live on a 36-foot-wide paved road that gets scraped from snow pretty often in the wintertime. The two times per year that it snows here, which I don't even need to go anywhere when it snows. I mean, school's canceled, but the grocery store, I can walk to it.

I do walk to it. And I mean, I'll be fine if it snows. I don't have to drive anywhere. And it's certainly not worth paying a premium for a more expensive car and then getting worse gas mileage as a result too. Yeah, so to jump back to kids, I'm trying to think of anything else.

Food, obviously, you have five people. It doesn't cost 2.5 times the cost of feeding two people. And we don't go to Costco or Sam's Club. We just shop at regular grocery stores. But you can buy stuff in bulk that's cheaper per unit. Probably a bigger cost savings is actually using up all the ingredients so that if you buy a bag of apples or a bag of onions or potatoes, you actually use them all up instead of throwing half of them in the trash when they rot because there's more mouths to feed.

People think, "Well, oh my gosh, having three kids will cost 150% more than feeding just two people." But the reality is I think you're able to sort of use those groceries that you do buy more efficiently. And cooking for five really isn't that much more work than cooking for two.

So your savings from cooking at home versus going to a restaurant are a whole lot more when you have five people to feed instead of two. So I think housing, I don't know how people do it in high-cost living areas where houses are a million bucks or more. To buy a two- or three-bedroom house instead of a one-bedroom or a studio, it's going to be a lot more expensive.

I guess I'd say look at that and evaluate are you really making that much more money after taxes in these really high-cost living areas enough to justify paying that much more for housing? Or does it make sense to commute in from the suburbs? Or should you look at maybe relocating somewhere else?

I know it's tough because you have family and friends there, but lots of people from here have moved to New York or Silicon Valley. And then they come back after they realize, "Wow, it'd be really hard to raise a family there and manage to save any money." So we live in an area where housing is relatively cheap.

And the difference between a two-bedroom house, if you can even buy those, versus a four-bedroom house, it's $20,000 to $30,000 maybe. And then the other costs for a house aren't that much more. Clothes, obviously. Hand-me-downs are a big one. We have lots of older cousins that have handed stuff down to our kids.

There are ways to get clothes for cheap, like thrift shops, yard sales even. When you're a kid now, today in 2014, you're so lucky because there are so many toys out there. They're so cheap, and people want to get rid of them all the time. And you can get boxes of toys for free from friends that want to clean their house up because they're just everywhere.

I went to the toy store the other day. We very rarely go there. And I was like, "Holy crap, people pay hundreds of dollars for train sets that you can get on Craigslist for $10?" And like, "Wow, these retail prices are insane because so much of the stuff you can get almost brand new for almost free from other places secondhand." And in reality, do you really want all those toys around your house?

Probably not. Other than that, that's probably the big areas where we've saved a lot of money on having kids. Extracurriculars, be reasonable about it. Some people say only one at a time. Don't do soccer and ballet and basketball and Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. Don't do all those four or five things.

You're just going to drive yourself crazy, and you're going to be out of the house every night of the week, which isn't-- So then you don't just have the cost of tuition for these different--or fees for these different things. You're not going to be able to do anything at home during the week.

Your kids don't have time to play with their friends after school, and you're going to have to eat out every night and get takeout every night. You're not going to have time to sit down at home and have a meal. So we've kept extracurriculars to zero or one things at a time so far.

So it's been a huge savings in terms of money but also sanity. Any other kid-related questions? I can't think of anything else that we've done really well on with kids, but I think it's just an overall concerted effort on all fronts for kids. It's interesting. Again, as with earlier--and this is not meant as an insult, but it's really not that remarkable as far as how not to spend money.

It's a couple of things applied consistently, but what's remarkable is how wacky our society is that what you've just described is not more normal. I look at it, and I see the lifestyle. You mentioned the extracurriculars. My wife and I talk a lot about this, and if you look at it, most people don't recognize the cost that all the activities cost them.

It's not necessarily the fees that are associated with the activity. It's the lifestyle cost. If you have a softball game on Tuesday and Thursday and Friday night, and if you and your spouse are working during the day, there's no chance you have time to make a meal. Because you don't have time to go grocery shopping, you don't have anything on hand that's convenient, so you have to eat out.

Then you're so tired from being out Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday night that Saturday morning, about all you want to desperate to do is to sleep in. You can't handle anything yourself. You can't mow your own lawn. You can't fix your own sink because you're just trying to recover. There's this massive lifestyle cost that comes because of the decision for allowing your schedule to be so full of those things.

It's up to each parent what they see value in, but it's just my job and our job to point out the financial impact of certain very small, seemingly minor decisions as compared to making one decision versus another. Most people aren't tuned into that. Yeah, and it's really – I mean it comes down to tradeoffs and choices of if you're busy most weeknights and every weekend doing whether it's martial arts or dance or cheerleading or gymnastics or organized sports, team sports.

If you're always busy, I mean you're missing out on all these other aspects of life that just happen like hikes in the woods and free things at the city parks and nature parks and just hanging out with friends and sleepovers and campfires and going camping for the weekend, small vacations, trips out of town, going to the zoo, all those things that are free or almost free, very inexpensive.

But hugely broadening your horizons on multiple dimensions instead of just this one single dimension of playing softball really well or being the best gymnast out there or something like that where – I mean I don't want to say don't do it obviously because maybe your kid has a special talent for it and maybe they'll do really well.

And maybe that's like the thing that they love. But I look at it for us like, well, we're free most weekends and so we can do a lot of different things and we can take the money that we save and travel overseas without really worrying about money. And so our kids are seeing different things and getting to experience different things in the same sort of way.

But it really comes down to tradeoffs. I mean I don't know if there's any one right way to do it. I think just be cognizant of it that it's a time and money issue as much as – it's not just the fees that you're paying but it's that impact on your lifestyle of constantly being busy.

And I almost feel like there may be some long-term – like the impact on kids in general is just if you keep them busy, busy, busy all the time with these organized activities, they never develop that ability to entertain themselves and think about what do they enjoy doing in their downtime.

And so all of a sudden they grow up and they turn 18 or 19. They go off to college and they're like, "Well, I have to be doing something right now all the time. I can't just sit and relax and listen to music or go to the library and pick up an interesting book and learn about something new or just enjoy the downtime." I almost feel like it's – as a society – and you can escape this – but as a society, we're breeding people with little attention spans that aren't creative enough to go out and fill up their own times with independent activities that are entertaining.

So that's another sort of aspect to it that I've thought about. But yeah, that's – so kids are interesting and can be really expensive or can be not very expensive at all depending on how – on the choices you make. Yeah, I'll respond to that and then I'll give you a chance to have the last word and share anything else as we wrap up here.

But I have much – I have similar opinions to you except much stronger. These are purely my opinions. No one has to agree with me. But I think – my personal opinion at this point is that I think that the cycle of school and sports is one of the most destructive cycles in kids' lives because first, I don't equate school with education in any manner.

I personally have an opinion that school teaches very poor – school is probably a negative impact more than it is a positive impact for many reasons associated with actually what you do in school and what you're required to do in school. And the primary purpose of school is not to educate.

It's to create units of production that can be easily slid into a factory work system. And so that's why everything is standardized. The idea is that everything is standardized. And that's a pretty strong opinion and I don't expect many people to agree with it. But if you just look at the sheer amount of hours in a week, let's say a young person has what, 168 hours a week.

You got to sleep. So let's say you're sleeping what would be 8 hours a night. So that would be 56 hours a week. So 7 days a week. Let's say that then you're in school and how much are you in school? You're in school what, 30 hours a week?

And then going there, getting home, spending time in homework. So let's just say that comes out to 40 or 50 hours a week going to school, coming from school. Now if you add in all of the side time and you add in sports and especially to do well in something like those extracurricular activities.

If you have football practice every day after school and you have games every week. And then you need to be spending time conditioning, doing certain things. You're limited. All of your time is limited to school and preparation for sports. You can't work, you can't explore hobbies, you can't explore personal interests and you basically come out with one thing only.

You come out with a diploma and you come out with a skill in a sport. And when you get out of school that puts you so far behind in life. You don't know who you are, you don't know what you like, you don't know what your interests are, you don't know what your passions would be.

You don't know how to connect those things. And instead of having a broad range of skills that you can actually apply in different ways, you are a mega specialist in something that has little possibility of resulting in either lifestyle happiness or financial happiness. And the long shot at professional sports, if that's the goal, fine, go for it.

But even that doesn't, I mean that seems like one of the worst professions in the world to me. Again, that's a very minority opinion. But it's just, I think it's destructive. And the viewpoint that I've had on it is I sit and do financial planning with people who are excellent high school athletes and excellent students.

But you come out and their skills are so one dimensional that they're lost. And you're sitting there, they're sitting there crying in my office saying, "I've got all this money, I've got this lifestyle locked in and I don't have the ability to think laterally." And I was fortunate to never be involved, with the exception of one year playing basketball, I was fortunate to never be involved in sports.

And I was able to spend a lot of that time learning about things I was interested in. My primary point with school is that you can't actually spend time learning about things that you're interested in school. So you have to do that outside of school. Well, if all of your time is sucked up by extracurricular activities, you never have time to learn things you're interested in.

So you wind up with your only interest is sports. And so then that sets you up where after school, all you have time to do is sit around and watch football and memorize statistics. And these are very difficult skills to have, to build a quality life around. And people can do it and they can make a career off of it.

But it just seems when you look at it at the whole, when you look at how much time in that one precious period of our life where we should have the time to explore things and to learn and to enjoy that learning process and broaden our horizons. Then if all of that time is sucked up from the age of 4 to 18 and it's filled for us, we never have the opportunity to develop ourselves as an independent, unique person who is an individual.

We're stuck into the mold that everyone else wants us to be stuck in. It's a pretty strong statement and I recognize that most people it would make them really upset. But I look at the backside of it and having people sit in my office and I say, "Didn't you ever have any time in the summer to go and work or to go and try some different hobbies?" "No, I had to do my sports camp and I had to go and learn how to run a faster 40-yard dash and now I've got a knee injury.

And what did I learn? I learned teamwork." Come on, you can learn teamwork doing anything. So feel free to respond, disagree. I agree with you and I take it a little farther. But I think very few people ever think about the long-term effect of that. But to be clear, as I shut up, I think there can be a very valuable way to use anything, to use sports for a specific child's needs.

So if you notice that your son or daughter has a certain need in their character or in their personality that's not being addressed, you may use sports as the way to address that. And it can be an excellent solution for something, but just on a general basis, I think it does more harm than good.

Yeah, that's a pretty radical take, but I think... I'm pretty hardcore, don't worry. I don't expect you to agree. I think I generally agree with that. I'm not sure if I'm as hardcore in my opinions as you, but I've sort of seen the exact same thing just growing up, coming of age and looking around other people where it's almost like people become these unidimensional beings as adults and you wonder what else defines you.

I know where I've worked, a few different places, and I remember there was one night I was stuck at a Christmas party at a table with a few other people, couples, and it was an engineering firm, so it was all guys that worked there pretty much, but it was the guys that were talking.

I was there for like an hour or two, and I swear, all they talked about were baseball statistics the entire time. And I was like, "That part of my brain doesn't exist. I don't have that mental capacity to store data on who struck out who and batting averages and when they played for different teams." I don't see the usefulness of it.

I guess if you get entertainment value, maybe it makes their life more relevant somehow. But I guess it's because they grew up and all they ever really dove into was that little part of sports. And that's all their life after school revolved around batting practice and running the 40-yard dash and getting better and going to baseball camp and going to baseball games and then professional games.

I'm just glad I wasn't really raised in a big sports family. But that's all they ever talk about is sports. And I'm like, "Do you guys ever watch any science documentaries or read books about anything, science fiction? Or do you ever go hiking in the woods or take your kids out and do that kind of stuff?

Or do you ever look at finances or other cultures overseas or anthropology or sociology?" It's like I'm a freaking alien if I bring up anything besides that, besides sports. But we get to choose who we associate with as adults. I don't know that I really count any hardcore sports fans among my friends.

Not that I'm real close with. Or at least we're not talking about sports. I guess people know that I'm not a big sports fan, so they don't talk about sports with me. I know what a football is and I can throw one, but I'm not very good at it.

I probably couldn't name more than two or three players that are playing in the NFL today. And mostly because they went to my college. I guess I'm just going to leave you a little bit about school and how valuable it is. I get what you're saying about it being sort of an assembly line of instruction and learning.

But I guess I see the other parts of it too, the recreation and the creativity parts of it. Even in elementary school, they have science and social studies. My kids go to an engineering school, an engineering magnet school. They have some more STEM-related, science-related, engineering-related activities they do there.

They get mathematics exposure and reading, writing. And then there's the music, drama, art. And then there is physical education. I think they get a good, broad mix of exposure to a lot of different things there that you can recreate that through homeschool. I guess I'm just kind of lazy.

I look at school as a supplement to a good, well-rounded education and not as what happens between 8.30 a.m. and 3.00 p.m. That's not it. It's after school and it's on weekends. It's walking to school and looking at different creatures and explaining how these animals work and talking about finances or the economy or religion or history or whatever.

Something comes up, being able to learn more about it. We encourage our kids to read books outside of what they have to read for school. They're not reading a whole lot. They're in third and fourth grade, the older kids. But we really encourage them to read books, fiction and nonfiction, and expose them to different mixes of interests out there.

I think we both agree about this. If you fill up all their time with one particular activity, plus school, there's virtually no time left to really learn what you like to do in your free time and what interests you. To sort of follow that and pursue that interest, that may lead nowhere or may lead to boredom eventually and you may pick up something new.

Somehow, I feel like having more free time almost sounds like a hippie or something saying, "We need to just sit around and have tons of free time to just chill out and relax." But I think there's some validity to that, just to be able to figure out what you like doing that entertains you at an earlier age.

Because there's just so many adults that are just like hollow shells that they can talk the talk in terms of sports and reality TV shows. Maybe they're really good at their career, but a lot of times that's kind of the extent of it for a lot of people I've worked with.

Maybe they're leading fulfilling lives. I don't know. I've been trying and I'm actually not going to spend much time on the school thing because I'm trying to be very careful not to turn this into the radical education podcast. I've actually done a good bit because I'm in the middle of recording an education series on how to pay for college.

What I decided to do is to start at the beginning with avoiding, as with most things, you're an engineer. You have to go back to the very beginning and understand what you want to accomplish. Then once you figure that out, you can figure out the most intelligent way to it.

I'm trying to be very careful not to turn this into just a school education podcast, but it is a subject of great interest to me. I'm going to take the risk of bringing on one person next week. I'm going to be doing an interview with a man named Brett who hosts the School Sucks podcast.

The reason I'm spending so much time on it is because with financial planning, it's incredibly important. The cost associated with school for us as individuals, for ourselves, and also with our children is a major, major cost. It's a major factor in financial planning. That's why I'm running the risk of bringing it into the financial discussion.

In the same way that taking a three-week vacation because you have to fit into your child's school setting has a much higher cost than taking a six-month vacation with your child. I see it applied throughout life. I'm pretty hardcore on it simply because I've spent a lot of time reading.

When I've spent the time reading, I found stuff I never knew about, and it helped me to solve certain things with my financial planning clients that I never could figure out. You made the comment about empty shells. I've learned it with a hatred of learning and a feeling as though people can't grasp simple financial concepts.

That's how most people feel when they're working with a financial planner is they're fearful of financial concepts because it takes them back to school. I'm going to stop there to not go on and on, but I think that a lot of those things we need to understand the reasons, and it has helped me to understand my history and my path as we try to figure out what's going forward.

The point is, though, you cannot become financially independent if you're not well-educated. You have to be well-educated because if you're not well-educated, you're going to lose your money, and you're not going to be financially independent anymore. You're going to be taken advantage of, so we need to have excellent educations.

We need to educate our children in an excellent manner, and then more importantly, we need great teachers. That's why the conversation is so difficult. There's a difference between school and education, and there's a difference between teachers and school. I'm running the risk of spending too much time on it just because I believe it's so important from a financial planning context.

I think you're right. I guess I'm fortunate to either have the gift for understanding relatively complex financial models and interactions between different systems, part of your own personal finance systems, and being able to model that through spreadsheets. It's all stuff that I've learned either self-taught or in school or just from exploring it on my own or sitting down and doing the actual work to develop a financial model like what will I have in 20 years?

Some of those are just the skills or the patterns of thinking that you learn, maybe not in K-12 education but in engineering school or in finance classes. A lot of it's that same of thinking about something and figuring out how you would solve it and what the knowns are, what the unknowns are, and then how do you determine those unknowns or can you assume them away?

You've got to have that basic understanding of how all these systems work, science, biology, chemistry, physics, some basic understanding of how compound interest, how finances work, discount rates, legal system, understanding the legal and political system. Really, all that stuff is taught in high school. In my experience, all that stuff, those are high school subjects.

Theoretically, by the time someone's 18, they would have all that core knowledge, but I don't think that's necessarily true in practice. I think maybe the majority of kids fall through the cracks somewhere in there, maybe a large majority. I don't really know. I think I went to a pretty advanced high school, so I'm not sure if my peers were a good example of the common knowledge.

I'll be like, "Oh, that's common knowledge," and someone will say, "No, that's not common knowledge." Usually, I would submit to you, if you want to know what the result of the government education system is, look at the average citizenry around us and how well they're doing with money. If you want to know how well the average citizen is doing with money, just look at the government because the government is a reflection of the average citizen.

That would be my way to say, "Here's what is happening." That doesn't mean, however, what I've usually experienced is that there's often a great teacher that takes an interest and spends some time ignoring what's on in Florida. We have the FCATs. I don't know if that's a Florida thing or a federal thing.

I don't remember if F stands for federal or F stands for Florida. Usually, you have a great teacher, and I had some wonderful teachers in my life who ignored the official curriculum, what they needed to do to pass the test that was required to get their school an A rating, and spent time teaching life skills, things that were actually useful.

Or, you had an unusual school, and there are some unusual schools that do some different things. Those things usually serve people well. My encouragement is for all of us. I like to be involved with junior achievement. The thing I love about junior achievement is I get to go in and work in doing that.

I haven't been able to do it for a few years with the time that I've been able, but I get to go in and work with students. Because I'm not tied to any of the results that the teachers are responsible for, their standardized test scores, I can talk about what I think really matters.

Sometimes, I'll share some experiences, but I've had some amazing stories from students, just from, what is it, 10 weeks or 8 weeks or whatever of going in for an hour and sharing some life skills. It's so gratifying. Teachers, encourage your students and take the risk of teaching some of these things that are actually practical.

Then, we'll figure out as a culture how to fix the school thing, little by little. Justin, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you making the time. I really do. I think your story can serve as inspiration and education for many, many people, and I appreciate you doing it.

Thanks a lot for the opportunity, Joshua. I appreciate it. It's been fun. I hope anybody has any questions about what I'm talking about. Shoot me an email or on Twitter and Facebook. Your website is rootofgood.com, and then on Twitter, you are @rootofgood. Is that it? I think it's @rootofgoodblog.

Okay, @rootofgoodblog, and then you're on Facebook, @rootofgood. You can just search root of good. What's the root of good thing? Where does that come from? When I was brainstorming blog names, I was trying to think of something creative. The saying, "Money is the root of all evil." I'm basically saying the exact opposite.

Money is the root of all good. By the way, Scripture doesn't say, "Money is the root of all evil." It says, "The love of money is the root of all evil." Yeah, there's sort of that perception that people think money is the root of all evil, but it is not.

Right. There's so much tension in our society surrounding spiritual and religious concepts. I like to at least make sure that the Scriptures are quoted accurately. Yeah, and for me, is it good or evil? Really, it's useful. Everyone's pursuing it. Let's not be coy about what everyone's trying to do out there.

They're trying to get more money. People like money because it's useful. You get to buy things with it. It makes it so you're not starving, you're not dying on the street, you have a warm house to live in in the wintertime. It's useful. It's good. It provides the things that you need.

There's no point to try to pretend that somehow money is evil or it's bad or it corrupts people. People are corrupted probably because they're just corrupt, not because they're after money. Even without money, they would be corrupt. So anyway, Rootofgood.com, poking fun at the old saying, "Money is the root of all evil." It's not.

It's the root of good. I like it. Very good, Justin. Thanks again. All right. Thanks a lot. I told you it would be accessible, right? Justin sounds like just a great guy. I've never met him other than that interview, but sounds like a really great guy. I want to make two quick comments on a couple of things that he mentioned, and I want to emphasize them for you, and then we'll play the music, and we will be out of here for today.

Number one is do not miss—make sure you notice—that Justin in many ways hasn't done that much different than many others of us can do. So make sure that you notice that. He just made a couple of small decisions differently. And a lot of times—I mean, this show is called the Radical Personal Finance Podcast, but a lot of times we think we've got to get so hardcore, and I like to—hardcore is cool.

I'm a pretty hardcore guy. But you don't have to. You can go to college. You can go to law school and borrow money for that. You can buy a brand-new car with payments. That's fine. And you can buy a house and get a mortgage on it. That's fine. None of those things matter.

I mean, it does matter. And can you get better results faster? Probably, yes. But you can do all of those things. But you can't do all of those things again and again and again and again and again and expect to get rich. So no matter where you are, recognize that.

Hopefully—just recognize that. I think that'll make a big difference for many, many people. And then number two, no matter where you are today, recognize that you can pretty quickly change things. I mean, Justin and his wife's story is pretty neat just because it's a pretty normal story. But here they are at 33.

I mean, that's a 10-year—I'd say probably a 10-year financial independence plan. And you can do that. Just make some careful decisions on taxes. Make some careful decisions on housing. Make some careful decisions on cars. Improve your incomes. And be generally careful, and you can make some dramatic improvements. So I hope that's helpful to you.

That's it for today's show. I'm going to read a couple of reviews. And I want to thank you for those of you who have been leaving reviews. By the way, these reviews really help the ratings of the show. Also, your subscription helps the ratings of the show. So if you enjoyed today's content, make sure that you subscribe to the show.

But the key thing about the reviews is, I'll tell you, they make my day. So even if you don't care about the ratings and all that nonsense—and frankly, I don't care that much. I care a little bit, but I care more about those of you who are listening every day and how I can serve you more and more every day.

But I'll tell you, the most heartwarming thing is I have a little notification on my phone that when you leave a review, it makes my phone buzz and gives me a notification. And I go read that review, and that just makes my day. So forget about the external systems and all of that nonsense.

If you want to make my day, I'd love your review on the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. That would really help me to feel great. And so if you haven't left a review and if you've listened to today's episode, I would really appreciate it. And let's just go with the most recent one, right from this morning, by Harsh Alexander.

It says, "Glad a friend told me about this. I have an interest in early retirement. A friend told me he was a fan of this show. I'm so glad I gave it a try. This is one of the best personal finance podcasts on the air. Great job, Josh, and keep up the great work." Thank you.

That made my morning this morning. I woke up about 6 a.m., and it was sitting there on my phone, and I really was really thankful. Thank you for that. That was a five-star review. Let's do one more, an absolute must-listen by Danny with a U.S. review. "I've tried out 15 to 20 financial podcasts over the past year or so.

Some I've stuck with, some I couldn't unsubscribe from quickly enough. Radical Personal Finance is the only one that I've become a stark, raving lunatic about listening to, however. Radical Personal Finance is the only podcast I've ever found that feels like sitting down with a friend and having a chat.

I've found myself engrossed in topics that were previously uninteresting to me just because of the interesting slant that Joshua took on them. For example, the How to Become a Millionaire on a Walmart was the best piece I've ever listened to on a Walmart salary, and it was without question the best piece I've ever listened to on income disparity and upward mobility.

I'd give this show 10 stars if I could. Danny, that made my day. I've run out of music. Have a great weekend, everybody. Thank you for listening." With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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