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Exclusions apply. See website for details. Just an ordinary couple, relatively middle class, mainstream, but well on their way to financial independence. And my interviewee today has some valuable lessons to share about what's worked, what hasn't worked, and what they wish they had done differently on their path to financial independence.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Today is Thursday, November 6, 2014. This is episode 97 of the show. Today, I'm going to be interviewing Chris from eatthefinancialelephant.com. Chris, I know you're a big fan of the show. I'm sure you're excited to be here.

And I'm excited to be here. So I want to start by saying, Chris, thank you for being here. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm excited to be interviewing you, too. Today, I'm going to be interviewing Chris from eatthefinancialelephant.com. Chris and his family, they're just ordinary people, relatively mainstream, middle class professionals, living a fairly mainstream-looking lifestyle.

But they're well on their way to financial independence. Chris is going to share some of the stories, some of the things they've learned, some of the things that have helped them, and some of the mistakes they've made. It's a great interview. I hope you enjoy it. Chris is someone who has reached out on the show to me.

And he reached out to me and said, hey, can you come on the show and share my story? And I've looked around a little bit of his site. It first came to my attention because he'd linked over to my show a couple of times. So I was able to see some of the things that he'd written about my show and that it was being helpful for him.

And this is a compliment. What struck me about Chris's story and even in our correspondence is that he and his family are relatively remarkably mainstream. They're not as wacky as some of us. I'm a pretty wacky guy. If you've been listening for a while, you know that. And I'm pretty hardcore, and that's cool.

And there are a lot of other people that are way more hardcore than I am. But sometimes the most hardcore or the most extreme people who have stories are relatively inaccessible. If you're trying to convince your spouse that you can pursue this financial independence thing and all you've got to do in order to get there is save 83% of your income, and that means you're just going to live on $3,867 a year, and in order to do that, you're going to move under a bridge during the summertime and you're going to move into your car in the wintertime.

That might be a plan that tickles Joshua's fancy, but that may not be a plan that your spouse is willing to accept. So the question is, does that mean that all is lost, all hope is lost, and therefore we should just throw it all to the wind and spend everything, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die?

Well, I don't think so. I love to bring on stories from relatively ordinary people who are pursuing financial independence or who have achieved financial independence and hear about the things that have worked and the things that haven't worked for them. So this is a really great interview on that topic.

Chris is going to share a little bit about his background. There are specifically some real nuggets in today's interview. We're going to talk about his financial transition and transformation with he and his wife. We're going to talk about where they came from, relatively ordinary background, talk about some of the things that you can trace these themes that helped them, specifically how he and his wife have accumulated a bunch of college degrees with almost no money out of their pocket, talk about some strategies for paying for college in advantageous ways.

We're also going to talk about some of the mistakes, probably one of the more interesting parts of the conversation. Chris and his wife got a really sucky financial advisor that gave them some bad advice, and he really was upset about that. I think it will be instructive for you to hear about, and I think it will be helpful.

Since this is a business I come from, there's a lot of bad advice that's been given over the years, and we've got to do better. So I love to shine the light on the bad advice that's given so that people will be more educated and more confident and more competent and then will demand a higher level of quality from their financial advisors.

So sit back, relax, enjoy the interview. There are some real nuggets here, and I hope that you benefit hugely from it. So Chris, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Thanks. It's good to be here. I'm happy to talk to you. I'd like to start just by asking you to share your story around money specifically.

Where did you come from, where are you going, and where are you at in your journey? Yeah, absolutely. Where we're going, I guess kind of what brought me here is we've recently started a blog about just our journey towards early financial independence and early retirement. I think the thing that makes us interesting is essentially that we're-- like when you read other early retirement blogs, I think we're just extremely, extremely normal people.

We have an extremely normal background. Neither of our parents have college degrees. We grew up--I'd say the combined total of our parents' house is about $120,000 in value. We're just small-town, normal people. Never had any financial background, never had any investing background, never had any tax planning background. And I think the value, like in our story, and the thing that makes it interesting is just that it's definitely something that anyone can achieve with just a little bit of thought and just a little bit of doing things different than what everybody else does.

And so that's what I'd like to talk about. Where are you in terms of--so you're primarily working toward financial independence. I know from your blog that's your primary focus, early retirement, financial independence. Where are you on your journey? Are you close to declaring yourself financially independent? Are you still getting started on the process?

Where are you? I'm 38. My wife's 36. Our goal, our plan is to--by the time I'm 40, so within two years-- to be at least financially independent. We don't really know 100% do we want to actually retire in the traditional sense of not working at all. Do we want to work part-time?

We're kind of figuring all of that out, and that's what a lot of our blog is about in our journey. That's always a concept for me. Me personally, I don't see much point in retiring and in the entire concept of not working. It doesn't make any sense to me.

But it certainly has got to be a little bit different to make that from this perspective, where I don't yet have a choice in the matter, versus knowing that you don't have to continue doing what you're doing if you don't want to. So until I actually get to the point where it's an option, I'm not sure I'm going to place too much stock in my opinion about whether or not it's worth it or not.

It's a little bit theoretical. So it'll be a neat feeling, I'm sure, once you get to the point where you know, "I don't have to do any further work if I don't want to." What started us on this is we were very anti-debt, and so we developed a pretty high savings rate from an early start point.

We just found that we were making way more money than we felt like we needed. We're very much outdoors people. We love climbing, skiing, doing that kind of thing. We didn't want our lives to revolve around working all the time, and so we were just going to kind of wing it.

I was just telling you I didn't even know how to start and stop my microphone on Skype. I'm not much of a tech person, so we weren't following all the early retirement blogs and everything. We were just figuring stuff out and living our lives, and our lives definitely didn't revolve around this.

We were going to pull the trigger and just kind of wing it and move out west. We got a surprise when after being married for 10 years, we found out my wife was pregnant. Awesome. So, yes, we have a two-year-old daughter. Awesome. So that kind of set things back.

We just kind of--we never lived our lives like everybody else, but all of a sudden we were--we found out, "Oh, my goodness. How are you going to pay for college? How are you going to do this and that with a kid?" We just kind of thought, "We can't do this." After a year of doing it, we realized now we really value our time even more, and now it became even more important.

So that's why it became--the formal part of planning it and make sure we're doing this right, that's why that became such a goal for us. Did you have a mentor in your life personally, even though you weren't involved in the online community? Did you have a mentor, somebody that was inspiring you to save money?

Yes, definitely. I mean my parents--my wife and I came from very different backgrounds, but my parents--my dad, he started a small business. My parents never made a lot of money, but they managed to put my brother and I through college, our undergraduate degrees, and we didn't pay--like we graduated, both of us, with no debt.

And my parents started kind of--they had a small business, and they started scaling back by the time they were 60, and they retired a little bit early, like two or three years early, and was never making much income. And in fact, what kind of really set this whole idea off in my head-- we moved back to our hometown when I was about 30, and so I was about three or four years into my career, and my salary was about $60,000.

So again, we don't make huge money. We do well, but not huge money. And my dad and I just happened to be talking, and he mentioned that in their entire life they've never made more than $60,000. And I just thought, just intuitively, if they can do all this and never have done that, and we're only 30 and we're already making that, it just makes sense that we could do it.

And for context, what region of the country are you living in? We're in like western Pennsylvania, New York, and Pittsburgh. So you're in the Northeast, and so not a high cost, but not necessarily a low cost of living place, right? No, very average. And what percentage of your income have you and your wife been able to save?

This is the hard part trying to write our blog, is we're kind of doing revisionist history. All history is revisionist history, don't worry. We never had a written plan. We never actually had a budget. What we did, my wife finished school one year ahead of me, and she completely paid for her own schooling.

And the first year she took out some loans, so she had like one year worth of student loans, and she bought a cheap used car. And we just kind of decided that when she got a job, she was making about $35,000, $36,000 to start. And so combined that was way more than we made when we were putting ourselves through school and working through school, and so she was supporting both of us.

And the little bit of money I was making while going to grad school, I just paid off her debt. So within one year we were debt free, and we were like, "Wow, this worked awesome." And we were able to completely get out of debt. So when I started also making about $36,000 when I started, we just figured we'd just save my money because we wanted to buy a house.

So we just started with like that 50% savings rate. And then throughout our lives, we just kind of always have lived off of her one salary and always have saved. I'd say roughly $50,000, but I mean certainly if big events came up, we would spend some of my money.

And if some years we didn't want to spend, we would save some of her money. So it was never exact, but it was about 50%. And you graduated from graduate school at what age? 25. Okay, and so you're working up to about 40. So if you're going back to kind of the math of early retirement at a 50% savings rate, you would expect somewhere between 15 to 20 years to be able to be financially independent under kind of the standard formulas that we use to do some of those projections.

So it sounds like you're right on track as far as referencing again Jacob's early retirement chart. 17 and a half years is what he would say at a 50% savings rate of how long based upon that very simple math which is so useful for early retirement folks. So it sounds like you're right on track for that with a 50% savings rate.

Yeah, and it's really interesting. I actually cited in one of my posts. I linked to a--there's a Mystery Money Mustache blog post. It's something like the-- The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. You read that. And I linked to that and, yeah, just because we never said, "Well, we're going to retire at this age.

Let's do this." It just kind of worked out that way. I thought it was kind of interesting and kind of validates that. The other strategy and what I'm hoping to bring from today's show is some useful tips and strategies from just-- you sound like a normal guy in a normal family.

And I think sometimes this is so helpful because many of the people that I bring on the show will be inspiring, but they'll also be a little bit inaccessible. If somebody is making $50,000 and I bring someone on making $5 million a year, it's a little bit--it's inspiring, but it may not be very accessible.

On the same hand, if I bring someone who's spending $5,000 a year and living in a kind of a non-mainstream lifestyle, that's also tough for some people to take. So you guys sound like relatively straightforward people. Would your neighbors know that you were weird early retirees? I would say no.

No. I mean our lifestyle looks pretty much like everybody else's. We live in a newer housing development. We built our own house. We're a two-car family. We're pretty average normal people. Right. And what's so interesting is that one of the keys that I've found working with clients has been if you can use a mental trick, something like, "Well, we live fine on one wage, so let's just save the other," which is what you and your wife did, that is so valuable.

My wife and I did that when we were married is that we just simply from the beginning we knew that we were hoping to have a family and we knew that when we were able to have kids that we didn't want both of us to be working outside of the house.

So right from the beginning we just never spent any of the money that she made, and we never factored in. We never built a budget and a lifestyle that factored in her income at all. We just saved 100% of her income, and it was easy to do because we never got used to it.

So then there was never that crisis moment that so many parents face when they have a child and they're trying to figure out, "How on earth do I afford to stay home?" Well, if you just never spend both incomes, you never have to deal with that question because you know from the beginning that you've never spent the money, so therefore it's not going to affect your lifestyle at all.

So that's a powerful strategy I think that many people can apply. Absolutely, and just to kind of touch on that point a little bit more, one of the things that really inspired me to start my blog, as much as I'd like to help other people because you definitely just to be an inspiration that you can achieve financial independence early, whether you want to retire early or not, but I'd love to be able to figure out, and I don't quite know how to reach to younger people, but I work with a lot of students and I just see the students coming out now with this just crushing loan debt.

Their experience is going to be different than ours, and it's going to be really hard to find a different experience. But if you start off and you live below your means from the beginning, as you grow your career and as things change, it's much easier to maintain something. I mean I guess just like it's easier to be average weight than it is to be 300 pounds and get down to average weight.

Right, expectations. We adapt to whatever we consider to be normal, and this is what is so odd about living in the world that we live in. We live in the US-American context and probably much of the Western world, which would be probably my guess the majority of the people that are listening to this show.

I know I have at least a few listeners. I have one listener in India and at least one, which is pretty cool. But in the Western context, it's pretty remarkable how our set point, like what we're used to, affects everything that we think. I'll give an example and then I'll set you up for talking about dirtbagging, which is where I'd like to go next.

Recently, you made a comment on my show page where you bestowed on me an honorary dirtbag degree, right? Yeah, I thought that was a humor. I'll let you explain the concept of a dirtbag. What was so funny is basically this was after my adventure of traveling around the country and just living in the car for two weeks.

It's kind of a fun adventure. What's funny is it's pretty wacky in today's world, but my father is 70-something years old. He's in his early 70s. What was normal, he grew up in Colorado and his parents were from California. From time to time, they would make the road trip from Colorado to California.

What was normal when he was growing up is that they would drive until they were tired and then they would just pull the car off the side of the road. They would roll out a sleeping bag on the ground beside the car and they would sleep. Then in the morning, they would get up and they would get back in the car and they would continue their trip.

That was a fairly normal way of traveling. Now, I'm sure the wealthy may not have traveled that way. They may have had more comfort, but his family, they weren't wealthy and they weren't not wealthy. They were just normal people. This was a normal way to take a road trip to pull over on the side of the road, lay down a sleeping bag, sleep, and then get back in the car and go.

Well, today, to do that, many people would have concerns about my safety and how do I do this safely and how can I do this? That's completely abnormal to do something like that. Now, our normal set point, what we're accustomed to is I need to find a hotel, so I'm going to find a cheap roadside hotel.

I'm fascinated how we can just simply change what's normal for us and then by simply choosing to live a different version of life, you can accumulate an amazing advantage that many people don't get to enjoy. It's largely just a mental game, isn't it? Yeah. I don't know that it's even a matter of tricking yourself into it.

It's a game. Just using common sense, at least in our opinion, but if we're going to travel, say I live in Pennsylvania and I go to Colorado because I want to climb and be in the mountains, it doesn't really make sense for me to pay $200 a night for a four-star hotel that I'm going to lay down, put my head down, sleep there, get up, and go back to the outdoors.

One of our favorite trips ever, we went climbing in Colorado and just in the front range outside of Boulder, Denver area. When you're doing that, you have to be down off the mountains by three, so you have to start usually in the dark with a headlamp by four in the morning.

It makes no sense to drive from a hotel, so we would just sleep on the side of the road. You do your climb, you get up, you come down by one o'clock, and then Colorado has all these amazing little breweries and restaurants. We had a fairly standard vacation after that.

We'd go eat and then we'd go to a Starbucks. This is the part where I guess people probably think we're weird, but we go in and we use their facilities. We brush our teeth in their thing and it makes the $5 coffee not seem so expensive. They use their free Wi-Fi and we plan the next day's climb.

Then we would just drive out wherever we could get as close to the trailhead and find a place and pull off. That's where we'd sleep. That's just normal for us. Why do you have to be off the mountain by a certain time? Out west, typically one, two o'clock, there's usually thunderstorms come in, so you don't want to get stuck up on a ridge.

You want to get up and down before the threat of that comes in. Got it. Interesting. What's so funny is that I look at a guy like – I'm not sure how you say his name. Is it Yvon Chouinard, the guy who founded Patagonia? Is that how you say his name?

Yeah. I read one of his books one time and it's just so fascinating to me because he, in many ways, embodied what I think of as an ideal lifestyle. He comes from the dirtbag rock climbing lifestyle. Totally – didn't need a lot of money, decided to – found a need for an equipment.

I think he started making some kind of – I don't know how you say all the rock climbing terms, but he started making some kind of rock climbing equipment and wound up building a company, wound up building a massive company, which has then given him the ability to fund things that are important to him.

He can run his company on his own terms because he just has a different outlook on life. I really don't think he's that concerned about – he's not fearful. I doubt he's fearful of losing his wealth. He may – who knows? It could happen. His company could go bankrupt.

Probably not. But even so, he'd probably in many ways be just as happy getting the chance to be outdoors with his buddies and kind of doing the things that he loves because he hasn't built this life of comfort that if he loses this life of comfort somehow, it's going to destroy him.

I really just find him to be a neat character to look at and consider how I could apply his financial lessons to me and to many other people. There's tons of interesting stories and it's just a matter of – we're so drilled into our head that you go to school from this time, then you start work and you work a 40-hour week and you do it until you're 65.

There's just so many options and it's just a matter of what you choose to do. All right. So I'd like to hear – as you've been on this journey, I'd like to hear some of the influences that have really helped you and some of the ideas, specific ideas that have helped you in your journey as you're working through it right now.

And then after we go through that, then we'll switch to some of the mistakes you've made and some of the errors that you've committed that if you had known about them, probably would have helped you to do better. So let's start with what are some of the tricks and techniques and influences that have really been beneficial to you as you've been working your way through your financial independence plan?

I guess I think the key thing is just starting from the very beginning and getting off on the right foot. So we both were highly educated. We each have three college degrees and we had a total – I would say my wife's college debt was less than $10,000. And mine, I had absolutely never any college debt.

How did you do it? For myself, and this is kind of the same approach we're taking with our daughter, just starting – like my daughter's two. We already have – I would say we probably have close to $25,000 saved for her. And that's kind of – and we're just going to gradually – even if we retire, I have a little hobby job where I teach rock climbing at a college.

And just the little additions from that I'm projecting will be enough to pay for her college. That's our plan. My parents kind of had a similar approach with me. Like they just – they never made a lot of money, but it was just always a priority. I know like instead of getting birthday presents and things as a kid, they always asked my grandparents for savings bonds.

And it was actually the bonds back then. I remember having a big stack of them, and we would cash them to pay. So that's how I paid for mine. For my wife's college, she flat out just worked. She just did a little odd job. She worked in the school library.

She worked in the pizza shop. And then her last two years, she actually got a full-time job working as a bank teller and worked up to an assistant manager. And they were a little bit flexible. They let her take – she had to take like a core class, but most of her classes she did night classes, weekend classes, correspondence, whatever.

And she completely put herself through school and was starting to pay off her debt as she was going through school. So that's how we did that. And then as far as our master's degrees, both of hers, she just had a straight tuition reimbursement. So she got both of her master's degrees that way.

I got my master's degree. It was a two-year degree. My first year, I had a scholarship that covered almost all of it, and that was just a matter of because I worked at the college while I was going, I qualified for it. And then the second year, that went away, but I had saved enough because I also worked even though my parents – basically, they didn't just pay for me.

They basically said you have X amount of dollars, and I had some skin in the game. And they said if you graduate with some money, you keep it, and if you use it all, then you have to pay the rest. And so I was still working my way, and I guess they didn't completely pay for me to go through school, but that's how we did it.

And so I was able to actually pay off my second year. And then my – so I had a master's degree, and then I got a doctorate through my work. And we don't have tuition reimbursement, but I convinced my employer that it was an investment. And so we kind of worked out an agreement that he paid all my tuition, and I just covered like the little bit of travel costs and books and things like that.

So I was able to do that without any debt also. So that's six degrees with no debt. So this is a very – your wife also has a doctorate? She has an MBA, and she also has a master's in operations research. So two masters. So this is fascinating, and you brought out several strategies that I think are valuable strategies.

Tuition reimbursement for your wife, and then you had a tuition reimbursement from working at a college, and then also kind of like a private scholarship. And I have experienced two of those things myself as far as me paying for my school. And I think this is one of the things that we can really do a good job if we just simply look for some of these opportunities.

I want to start with working at the college. What were you doing at the college? Were you teaching, or how did you get that opportunity? It wasn't actually like that. It was because my undergraduate degree, I worked – I'm a physical therapist, and my undergraduate degree was in sports medicine.

So basically you had to do internships. So anything you did with the athletics department – so any former athlete also could have got this, but I was working through my internships as what I had to do to go to school, and that qualified me for the scholarship. So I wasn't technically working for the school while I was going to grad school.

It wasn't that type of an arrangement. And then the second year, though, when that wasn't available, you just weren't doing the internships anymore? I did. I worked for – I mean you have to – I'm in the medical field, and as you – to get into grad school and things, they always require these hours.

And I would just always go in with the approach of what can I do to – I have to do these hours anyway. How can I get a job? So I would do anything I could do to get a foot in the door in these places when I was doing my volunteer hours, and I worked at a couple places.

So I continued to work as a paid employee, as an aide, I guess you would say. And so I was just able to make enough money to pay my way. And also the place I ended up working my first job, I worked pretty closely with the owner of the company, and he actually gave me a bonus to sign on.

So that was kind of part of it too. So I just think working at a college is a valuable way to gain a discount at least, a discount, or if not 100 percent discount on cost of tuition. And all colleges, all universities have positions available, and if you are eligible, you can work – you could work in many schools.

You may be able to work if you're a hands-on person in the maintenance department or something like that. Or if you're an academic, you can work in the academic side. You can work on the service side. There's always an opportunity somewhere around the college which will allow you to have a discounted degree.

And that may be a really valuable strategy. I think it's possible for young people to do, starting right from 16, 18, 20 years old, whenever they're going to college. And it's also possible for adult learners who are going back and finishing a master's degree. And it seems to me that working in the college environment, it's a pretty attractive type of environment in many cases to work in.

It's a pretty – it seems almost like a lot of fun to me because here in college, it's got a pretty fun schedule. And just the whole environment seems like a pretty positive environment. So that's a valuable strategy. Just to kind of touch on that a little bit, like I said, I teach a class right now.

And just the amount of money I make doing it, because we're doing it for so long, it actually is our plan to pay for our daughter's school. But just to touch on some of those benefits, I mean just by just working this little part-time job, I don't qualify for – like I couldn't go back and get credits because I talked to them about that.

But just – I mean you have access to the entertainment that comes to a university, and so that's cheaper. You have access to world-class libraries. You have access to – like my daughter's in the swim class. And it's not a big deal, but it's $50 every two months. And we just keep re-enrolling her because it's free for us.

So you have all these little fringe benefits of working for a university that you kind of just leverage one thing on top of another. Even if you're not getting – yeah. It's a great part. Even if you're looking for a lifestyle, for me, if I were looking to move, I would seriously consider trying to find a university town to move to.

Because being in a university town, especially even if I were a middle-aged retiree, I would want to live in a university town. Because sometimes you can find one that's a lower cost of living. And the fact that the university is there means that you have a constant influx of young people.

And the fact that in our society, the way that the college finances often work is that the parents or the student loans are funding the students' lifestyles, which means there's often a constant flow of money through the town. And so the economy is often vibrant. It's maybe small, but it's often vibrant.

You have access to cheap, really great entertainment, like you said, whether it's musicals, plays, sporting events, the access to the library, access to kind of fun local opportunities. And oftentimes it can be done less expensively. You have some risks because if something happens with the university, that's going to affect the environment.

But I would rather live in a university town than many other places. And there are some neat ones all over the country that you can find with a little bit of research. I agree 100%. And then you also mentioned a tuition reimbursement program, and this is another one that people often don't look for is many times people are just looking for a job based upon who's going to pay me the most money and straight up salary.

But a tuition reimbursement program can be incredibly valuable. And some employers will often offer one and some employers won't. But if you're looking for a job, consider having a tuition reimbursement program. This is actually – I just finished my master's degree in financial planning and Northwestern Mutual, they paid the bill for it.

So I didn't have to pay the bill for it. They're the ones who paid the bill for it as part of my compensation package. So that can be something that's incredibly valuable when you're looking for employers is do they have a tuition reimbursement program. Yeah, and just kind of on that too, like I said, my employer paid for my last degree but we don't have that program.

But again, that's just kind of one of the little benefits of when you are – even if you're not financially independent by the 25 times your expenses rule. But just by having some independence, it gives you that freedom to negotiate things and you're not afraid to ask for things.

And also you can look for – like you said, maybe the job that doesn't pay the most and just direct salary. But when you look at all the other benefits, you just start to have freedoms to do some things like that. Right, and I'm glad you went there because that was going to be the next one.

And so I also personally had this one happen to me, exactly the scenario that you just laid out. When I was in college, my freshman and sophomore year were pretty mainstream. But my junior year, I studied abroad the first semester. And while I was abroad, I really went through – it was kind of one of those very transitional times in my life.

I went through in many ways kind of like a crisis of what am I doing, why am I doing it. I came back and I got in an argument with the dean of the business school I was in and in frustration with some things he wouldn't allow me to do as far as me designing my educational plan.

I had hated studying on campus so I had built out a plan where I was going to study abroad the next year and a half. And I mapped out all this coursework and the dean said, "No, I'm not going to give you credit for those courses," and I said, "Fine," and I quit school.

And I dropped out, called a former boss that I had worked for previously and I said, "Hey, I need a job." He hired me, started working for him, transitioned over to a company and while I was in school, transitioned from an agriculture job, which is what I was doing.

I was running a tree farm and switched into the corporate world. Well, in the corporate world – excuse me. I didn't have the degree finished but my boss said – they said, "What are you doing? What are your plans?" So I'd like to go back to school and they said, "Well, we'd like to have an opportunity for you to work for us after school.

We like the work you're doing. We think you're an asset to us." And so they were actually willing to support my education with, A, giving me a flexible schedule. So this was unusual but I was able to set my own schedule for when I was in school. And then, B, they gave me – I don't even remember how much money and it doesn't matter.

But they gave me a not insubstantial sum of money just purely as a bonus to help pay for my school. And so I got an informal, privately negotiated scholarship program that wasn't available. But just simply by being a valuable employee and them wanting to keep me on, then I was able to negotiate something like that.

So people often forget that the key is not to necessarily go out and say, "I'm going to go look for money. That's valuable." But if you're worth money and you are an excellent worker, then your employer may be willing to negotiate something with you if it's a win-win. And in this case, it was a win-win for me and it was a win for the employer.

Yeah, I think that's been a constant theme throughout both of our careers. I think everybody looks at what can you get from your employer. And this is my dad had a small business. I think just getting this ingrained from him. But you have to look at how can I increase my value to the company.

And then if you do that and you do it well enough – I mean there are some companies that only care about the bottom line. But generally speaking, if you're working for a decent place and if not, go look for another one. They're going to recognize that and it's going to open up a lot of doors to you just by a little different approach.

And again, that's a lot of what we talk about is just doing things a little bit different. Nothing drastic. I still work a normal job. But just taking a little bit different approach and it's had just a dramatic outcome in our situation versus the average situation. One of my biggest frustrations is that our culture doesn't seem to promote excellence and hard work.

And thankfully, there are great parents, great teachers, great coaches, great friends, great uncles, aunts that do. But we have this inverted pyramid. It seems like in the popular culture that pay me more and then I'll do more. What a bunch of crap. Go do more and then you'll get paid more.

And we've got to constantly over-deliver and then the compensation will work its way around. But you've got to earn before you're paid. You don't get paid and then earn. You've got to earn before you're paid. And this is one of the reasons why I think I would love us to teach more as a culture entrepreneurship.

Because if you've been an entrepreneur, if you've run a business, if you've hired people, you find out that actually the biggest problem that every company faces is finding good workers, finding good people to run their company. This is the fundamentally biggest problem. And once you've been on that side of the hiring desk, you recognize that.

And it dramatically changes the perspective on how you approach a job search. If you've always been an employee and you've never been a hirer, then you think, "Well, I've just got to somehow skate through this job interview and figure out how to trick the system." If you've been an employer, you know that you're just looking for good people and you've got to do all this crap to weed out the people who aren't going to be of benefit for you.

So, as a worker, we've got to market ourselves and then deliver on the marketing that we've made to an employer and deliver way more than the cost of the work for them. And then everything will work out. And all of a sudden, you'll find that there are bonus programs you never knew about.

There are opportunities for advancement. There are better perks than anybody else gets simply because you're able to deliver more value than anybody else does. >> And like I said, I've never been an entrepreneur, but I've been taught by my father to think like one. And just even from my very first job, like I said, when I got out of school, my master's degree, my first job, I had it.

My job was lined up before I ever graduated. And that was a time when it was pretty hard to get jobs just because I worked, like I said, it was a smaller company. I worked directly with the guy that owned the company. And he saw value in that. Not only did I have a job lined up, but I had a sign-on bonus when most of my classmates were having a hard time finding a job that was acceptable.

So, yeah, I mean just by, like I said, thinking a little bit differently and approaching it, even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur, to learn to think like an entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. >> I think it holds great value. >> Absolutely. And then the other idea that you said I think is a valuable way that your father structured things with you, and I've thought about doing this with my son, is I don't see much value in just simply paying for college.

I don't see -- because if there's no skin in the game, I paid for my school, and if I'm able financially to help my children, I would love to do that. But I've often looked at it, and I've wanted to make the deal with my kids, and we'll see what happens as time goes on, if my own philosophy changes.

But I've wanted to make the deal and said, listen, I've got $100,000 sitting here. I'm going to give it to you, and you can choose what you do with it. And I would hope that -- I would need to be confident in my child's maturity before making this decision, that I thought this was going to be a blessing for them instead of a curse.

I've wanted to say, here's $100,000. Now, you've got a few choices. You can go and you can spend $100,000 on tuition. You can spend $200,000 on tuition and fund $100,000 out of your pocket. You can take this and you can go spend it, and you can go party. You can take this and you can invest it.

And you can start a business. You can spend $20,000 on school, and you can spend $80,000 on starting a business or whatever. But here's the money. Now it's up to you to choose how to spend this. And I feel like doing something like that where it's not just specifically tied to tuition would dramatically -- it's not just tied to I'm going to pay for your tuition, what school do you want to go to.

I think that would dramatically influence a young person's perspective on their options. And they would look at the low-cost options. They would look at the high-cost options. They would look at the not-college options. And they would look at the college options. And then that would help to make a more rational decision about what's right for them based upon their goals instead of just you need to go to college and here I'm going to write a check for it.

And so I really like that type of thinking. Yeah, that's definitely our plan. I mean we're actually -- we've become really in tune with tax planning within the last year as we started to learn things. But with our own daughter, we're actually not using -- it was at the 529, I believe.

We're not using that. And we're basically -- we're keeping the money all in our control. Nothing's in her name. It's all in our name. So we have complete control to pull the strings. But we have a separate -- a completely separate brokerage account. We just basically flip the names on the account so we can keep track of it.

And, yeah, just so we -- we're not -- I would never think it's a good idea to just give a kid that's 18 years old that money. But if you give it to them and with guidance and with strings attached, yeah, I mean that's our plan. Yeah, I think that one of my interesting points of research, I think it's possible that we could do a good enough job helping children to achieve the maturity needed to handle at 18.

I'm not sure if I could have handled it at 18. I think I could have. But maybe I needed it at 20, and that would be up to kind of the individual parent. But I'm with you. Even though I doubt I will ever utilize a so-called college account, a 529 or an ESA, I doubt I'll ever utilize that for my child just simply because I don't like the restrictions on it.

And it's -- I don't like the restrictions on it. What else has helped you? What are the other, like, things that have been beneficial to you and your wife on your journey? I think, like, if you read, like, if you read, like, an early retirement extreme or Mr. Money Mustard, they all kind of hit on the same things.

And I think we've done -- you know, we're not extreme. Like I said, we are a two-car family, but we've done much better than most people with cars. Like, we always -- we've just always bought used cars. We've always held on to them. We've always maintained them. Even just little things like we hardly ever trade our car.

But, like, if you look on Kelly's Blue Book, there's always about a $2,000 or $3,000 difference between your trade-in and then what you would buy a used car for. So if you just kind of just leverage little advantages in the system like that to sell your own car outright and then try to buy from somebody who you know takes care of their vehicle and where you make it a proposition where it's mutually beneficial and you can save a few thousand dollars.

So just little things like that. Housing has been a huge one. And we talked about, like, kind of what things kind of set us off on this path. We grew up in, you know, very modest backgrounds. Probably the combined value of our house is -- we grew up in maybe $100,000, $120,000.

And we got out of school and we were making, like, $35,000, $40,000 maybe each, so like $70,000, $80,000. But we had no debt and we had really good credit. And they approved us for a $350,000 or $400,000 mortgage or something. And we were just like, this is ridiculous. But I guess people do that.

So we always live, again, just living way less than our means. And we still had bigger and nicer houses than we were used to growing up in. But, I mean, our original house was $140,000, I think. And then the house we built was like a $250,000 house. But by that point we had put down over $150,000 on it, so we had a tiny little mortgage.

So I think a lot of people look at, like, should you carry a mortgage or should you not carry a mortgage? We just look at it as just buy the house that fits you and then figure that out. But don't just take a huge mortgage because that's kind of a secondary question then is should you pay it off fast or not.

But just limit how much housing expense you have is a much more important question that you don't hear talked about nearly as much. There's a little change in mindset that many people in our culture simply don't seem to tune into. Debt is marketed to you. People don't recognize that.

But, like, mortgages are marketed to you. Car debt is marketed to you. Business debt is marketed to you. The banker or the lender or whomever is on the other side of the transaction wants to lend you money. Just because somebody wants to lend you $350,000 doesn't mean that you need to go and take it.

You need to decide about that. You need to think about why do they want to lend me this money and do I make sure that I understand this? And, therefore, am I making an intentional decision based upon what's right for me and what my goals and circumstances are? And sometimes it may be to borrow $300,000 and sometimes it may be to borrow $65,000.

But consider that debt is marketed to you. It is a product that you are buying just like everything else. Yeah, so that's kind of like for us. So, people talk about good debt, bad debt. I mean, in my book, I mean there's no good debt. I think a reasonable mortgage is okay, I guess.

If you exhausted every other opportunity, line of thinking, and you couldn't figure out a way to pay for your school, you can at least limit your cost but maybe a little bit of debt there. But other than that, I mean, I guess there's nothing in my life that I value more than, you know, that would make me want to pay interest to buy it right now that I couldn't wait for a little bit.

That's always been our approach. The financing decision is different from the purchase decision is how I think about it. Make the purchase decision on one hand. So, am I going to--do I want to purchase a $100,000 house or do I want to purchase a $250,000 house? Do I want to purchase a college degree or do I not want to purchase a college degree?

That's the decision and it should be made based upon the value of the purchase for you. Then you've got to the financing question and then that's going to be an individual discussion. Okay, now that I've decided that I'm going to purchase this $100,000 house, is it in my best interest to do it with borrowed money or is it in the best interest to do it with saved money?

What happens is people often confuse those two things in their thinking and they're making the borrowing decision based upon the purchase decision or vice versa instead of saying-- because if you pay cash for a $250,000 house when you could have mortgaged and been happy in a $100,000 house, I would submit that the $250,000 house is going to provide a real drag on your wealth building plan and the reason is not because of the mortgage.

The reason is because of the fact that you spent twice as much as the house and that probably is going to come with other carrying costs, heating costs, cooling costs, higher cars, fancier neighborhood, HOA fees, higher expenses, insurance expenses, things like that. But those are two separate things. First decide what can I afford from an actual purchase perspective.

Then based upon my situation, my assets, my investment plan, all of the variables and factors, my value of freedom, my value of debtlessness, then make the financing decision as a separate decision. I agree completely and I never really thought about that. I read The Millionaire Next Door book about a year ago and he lays that out.

But before that, I had never even thought about that. That was just something that was just intuitive to me. But all the different costs that go along with homeownership that you just think about. Everybody looks at what is the cost of the house and what is your mortgage payment and maybe they consider insurance and that's it.

It kind of stops there but there are so many costs that go with owning a house in a particular neighborhood and the lifestyle that goes with it that people just don't think about. I watch this every week. Every Saturday I think about this in my neighborhood. I despise the idea.

I live in Florida so we have grass year round. Some of you guys have snow and snow blowers and I don't even know how that stuff works. But I despise the idea of being a slave to a lawn, of mowing grass every single week. I think grass is the most pointless, useless invention of all time when used from the perspective of ringing my house.

If you're going to set out a sports field for a football game, awesome. That's a great place for grass. Or if you're going to build a park where you're going to fly a kite, great. Grass works well. But the whole point of grass traditionally, historically, was a way of showing off how rich you were.

And so now we all have basically this standard that I'm going to have grass around my house and then the grass has to be well trimmed. When we were shopping for a house, it was extremely important to me that I not buy a house, which is standard where I live, that I not buy a house in a community where the lawn has to be mowed every week.

Because that means I either have to hire the lawn mowed every single week or I have to mow the lawn every single week. And either of those two things has a big impact. If I have to hire it done every single week because that's what will make my neighbors upset, then that's a cost of, I don't know, let's say it's 30 bucks a week.

That's an additional cost. Let's say I can get away with it every two weeks versus every week. So that's an extra $60 a month. If I'm going to support that money, that's an extra $10,000 that I need to save to support that $60 a month extra cost from mowing the grass every week versus every other week.

And if I'm going to do it myself, then that means every Saturday I've got to be out there for an hour and a half or whatever mowing the grass. So a simple decision, it was important to me to look at and say, "I want a neighborhood where I'm not going to let my grass get two feet high.

I don't want my house to look like it's in foreclosure, but I'm not going to buy in a neighborhood where I have to mow this thing every week and be a slave to the standards of the neighborhood." There is a dramatic personal time cost and expense cost over a very simple decision like that.

And this has played out many times with all aspects of home ownership. Yeah, I agree. I mean, if we didn't have the baby, we would be downsized by now. We kind of came to that realization that after living in this house for five or six years that, I mean, every weekend we were climbing or skiing, so we weren't home.

Every week we were working a normal week. And the only time we were home, we were cutting the grass or cleaning the house or doing stuff like that. And it was just, it's pointless. Like now, the equation has changed because we have a niece that lives right up the street, so they're awesome for my daughter to play with.

And there's a park right down the street. Awesome. We're kind of reframing how we're looking at the situation. But yeah, without her, we would have not been in this house. We would have probably sold it by now. We came to that realization. So even though we did much better than most people because we're not paying a ton of mortgage interest, yeah, we still have way more house than we needed when we built this.

Right. Anything else specific that you think has been really valuable to you that you'd like to share to help other people before we switch to some of the mistakes that you made? No, I just think it's just a matter of… Like I look at like the early retirement extreme.

It's been very helpful to develop some philosophies. I look at like people like you see the extreme couponers, all these different things. We kind of do, I guess, a little bit of everything. So we're probably – we got there not by doing anything great. But we're just better than average in a bunch of different areas.

Like we never had school debt. We never had much mortgage interest. We never had a car payment. We do pretty well on our food. We stay in a lot. We use coupons. Like I said, just our travel, our travel is cheaper than others because of the hobbies we have and the way we like to travel.

So it was never really sacrificing but it was just kind of just trimming off the edges from a bunch of different areas and it adds up when you do it that way. It does. And one of the problems with – that can happen even in my show and online, I'm glad you're doing your blog, is that the people who are oftentimes led, feel like they want to share a message, are oftentimes pretty extreme.

And they're pretty kind of hardcore. But if you actually get out into middle America and you start working with people, you find that lots and lots of people are wealthy. And this is one of the insights I gained from being a financial advisor and sitting down with over a thousand people.

Lots of people are wealthy. They just are kind of stealthily wealthy. They don't advertise it. They don't tell people how wealthy they are. And their lives don't look any different than anybody else. They've just done a few simple things consistently over time. They underbought a little bit less on the house, chose not to live in the fancy neighborhood, chose to live in the semi-fancy neighborhood.

They chose to instead of driving the car for four years, drive the car for six and a half years. And then – and all of the so-called rules that the extreme people would espouse, I've run across wealthy people that have broken every one of those rules. So if you don't want to buy used cars because that's just a big deal to you, fine.

Go buy new cars. And buy new cars every eight years if you want. Just make sure you're not buying new cars every two years or every three years. Buy a new car every eight years. Or if you are buying – if you're going to lease a new car every three years, find another way to save and be okay with the results and the cost of every decision that you make.

You don't have to look wacky. You can do this with an amazing lifestyle and get wealthy at the same time. Yeah, and I'm glad you said that about the blog because that's kind of one of the things that inspired me because when I first started reading, I thought these other people – man, they're so much smarter.

Like why didn't I say this? Why didn't I do that? But the whole point of this is that you don't have to be extreme. And like people – like I look at kind of with our lifestyle, people say, "Well, how do you save 50% of your income?" We could have easily saved more.

We just didn't really have a purpose because I think kind of to your point that a lot of people are stealth wealthy. I think a lot of it is just because it's so ingrained that you work a 40-hour week to get your health benefits and to do this. And you do it at 65 because that's when your Social Security kicks in and your Medicare.

It's just so ingrained that people don't even know how to think differently. We're kind of in that a little bit. Like we talked to our advisor. Like we used a financial advisor and he kind of scoffed at us a little bit when we said – like we said we want to retire early.

He's like 50, 55. We're like, "No, 40." And he would kind of like scoff at us a little bit and we just kind of thought, "You're the expert." I guess we are a little crazy but we didn't know. Like we didn't know how to do it until we finally started figuring this stuff out on our own and reading the blogs and doing stuff like that.

And that's why we thought our voice would be a good addition. Was he of any help to you in figuring out like how to actually do it or was he just not able to really conceive of it? I just don't think he took it seriously. I don't know just because it's so far outside of the normal.

I don't know. Like I guess in retrospect, we should have seen the red flags that this wasn't what he knew how to do or anything. I think like when you go – like the traditional advice for using a financial advisor is that you go by a referral that somebody you trust because this is an important decision and you want somebody that's not going to rip you off.

And I told you like my parents are great mentors to us and we went with the guy that they used and we saw that they had satisfactory results and we thought we would do okay with him. In my experience now that I know what I know, I would say that if you take a little bit of time to just get a basic like a background knowledge and say one approach like for us, we're using passive index of investing.

If you get a little bit of knowledge in that and you set a plan and follow it and if you have a very basic knowledge in using tax advantage accounts, it would be almost impossible in my opinion for an advisor to provide value that would outweigh their cost. Yeah, two aspects of that.

Number one is I have found a lot of people who are interested in early retirement get very frustrated with mainstream financial advisors and having been on both sides, I think there are many reasons for it. One of the things that happens to advisors – well, two ideas I'd like to hit on is number one, just because somebody is a financial advisor doesn't necessarily mean that they're excellent with money.

The business of financial advice is very much a business of skill. So that skill may be if you're cynical and for many advisors this is the only skill, maybe a skill of sales. So the skill of building relationships, building trust and then setting out the skill of sales may also be the skill of actually technical knowledge.

So there may be a financial advisor who's very skilled with an area of technical knowledge but who is not excellent with many aspects of personal finance. I know many advisors and if you ask any of us who are in the business, you will find that many of us know many advisors who are one paycheck away from ruin.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're terrible advisors but what it does mean is that they pretty much suck when it comes to talking about personal finance and how to run a budget in a certain way. But the majority of people are not kind of budget crunchers, know where every dollar goes, that type of person.

So many people get along very well with advisors who do not pay attention to the personal finance things because they don't pay attention to the personal finance things as well. But there are lots of advisors who are one paycheck away from disaster. To their discredit they are but that's the fact.

I've talked and known many of them. The second challenge is that it's very easy for advisors to get jaded. So if you put in context, and it's one of the reasons why I started this show, if you put in context the fact that the general savings rate in the United States of America is negative or close to zero.

I don't remember the latest statistics but it's basically negative or zero. And that most advisors struggle to get people to save 5%, 3%, 7%, 10%, 15%. That is the majority of your conversations. So if you are having an average of 10 to 15 financial planning meetings in a week and 40 to 70 financial planning meetings in a month.

It's unusual to find in that scenario somebody who's saving 50% of their income. So you don't really know what to do with it unless you've gone out and thought about here's how I'm going to actually approach this. And so it's such a weird kind of radical thing that unless you've got an advisor who is interested in the topic and who is comfortable with it.

It's probably going to be a real culture clash. And I think there's a real benefit for some advisors who are knowledgeable in the areas of personal finance, excuse me, in the areas like the early retirement world to really specialize in that area. To market themselves as specialists because there are a lot of questions that early retirees have that an advisor can answer for them.

But the average advisor is just simply not even comfortable with how do you get money out of a retirement account when you're retiring at 40. Most advisors don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, and I mean I guess my – the reason I have such a strong opinion is not that I think that whether advisors are competent or incompetent or good or bad people or whatever.

But it's just the whole model. It's basically broken because for an advisor to make money, I mean they have to charge you money. So your interests are at conflict from the get-go. And so they have to somehow provide more value, and it's just – it's really hard to do that because basically the only two ways that you can be paid as an advisor are you sell based on commissions in which case you're taking a large chunk, which is going to make it hard to overcome that.

Or you have to have a certain amount of assets under management. And in either case, you're going to steer people away from investing just basically buying another 401(k) because it has to be under your management. And more than the investment cost and more than the performance, the tax advantages are so huge.

Like that's really the only advantage you have as a wage earner is to use your 401(k), 403(b) things. And there's no way for an advisor – it's very hard at least for them to tell you to max those out and then still have enough left over for them to make any kind of decent wage.

I mean it just doesn't work that way. Yeah. There are challenges with the compensation model. I agree with you a little bit, which is totally cool. No big deal. I'm planning a whole show on this with another advisor and we'll go through kind of in detail and talk about some of the advantages, disadvantages.

I mean – and your point is valid. What strikes me about you and then also many of the listeners probably that I would think is – the corollary that I would think about would be an example like physical fitness. And feel free to disagree with this if it doesn't make any sense.

But I would say that there are a couple of different ranges at which hiring a coach in the area of physical fitness can be valuable or not valuable. And you always have to hire an advisor and that advisor must return for you a value in excess of what they cost.

Otherwise, you should terminate the relationship. In the same way that as an employee, if as an employee I can't return for my boss a profit that exceeds my cost, then he should fire me and I should move on. So if I'm being employed by a client as an advisor, if I cannot return value in excess of my fee, whether that fee is structured as an hourly fee, an engagement fee, a commission or a fee for assets under management.

If I cannot return value in excess of that cost, I should be fired immediately. The challenge is that not all advisors and not all coaches are going to be able to provide value at all different phases for different people. So if somebody, let's say somebody eats the standard American diet, they're very out of shape, they're very overweight, they have no knowledge and no history of how to eat or what to do.

And this person comes in and they consult with a nutritionist or a basic maybe health coach, diet coach, something like that. The nutritionist and the health coach with some basic information about some ways to eat better and some basic concepts of here are the food choices you should make, here are some mental tricks that will help you make better choices.

That nutritionist can bring that person a great deal of value. Now that same person can go and get all that same information from a book pretty easily. So this is the area that many advisors work in where they're saying, teaching someone here, if you use a retirement account, then that will gain you money.

If you invest in a mutual fund, that will return more money than having the money sitting in a bank account. And so this is the level at which many advisors work and it's a great value, I think, many times to the client. What frustrates people... Can I interrupt? Sure, please.

Here's kind of my counterpoint to that is that I don't argue that financial advisors don't play a role. As you build wealth and you can use maybe a fee-only planner who, when you have a million dollars and if you make little mistakes, a little bit of knowledge is worth a ton and so their value does outweigh.

But what I'm saying is for somebody who's in the early stages, those people don't want to work with you because you don't have the assets to be under management or you don't have the money to pay them that fee. So the people that most need it are not served well or you're going to have probably most likely not very good advisors, I would say, because there's just not a good model for it.

The whole model is basically broken, is kind of my point. And to give you the example of ours, I did one post on our last year. We spent about $8,000 in our expenses. Between expense ratio, commissions, 12B1, which is part of the expense ratio, we had a variable annuity inside of a rollover account.

We just got a lot of bad advice. But on top of that, every year he advised us to contribute up to the match in our 401(k), which for me was about, let's say, $5,000. So we left $30,000 that we were paying taxes on. So that's an additional, say, at a 25% top tax bracket.

That's frustrating. That's an extra $7,500 every year. So that's a lot to overcome with any traditional financial product that an advisor could sell or any advice even that they could give you to somebody that already has a savings rate. Now, if you're saying that your advisor is going to teach you how to get to that 50% savings rate, if they're going to teach you how to get through college without debt, to do some of the things that we already knew how to do.

But if you can develop a savings rate, then there's really not much value that I think that a financial advisor adds by selling you products. And I think where the financial advice industry would be much more valuable is to take the people that are living paycheck to paycheck and get them to where we're at.

But that's just not what happens in my reading and my personal experience. Right. You'll like – and I don't disagree with anything that you say, actually, and that is very frustrating. It feels like a complete betrayal when you look back and if you feel like you have an advisor that either you feel didn't serve you well or that you know did not serve you well, and that is frustrating.

And one of the things that – one of my missions personally is I want to expose and clean up the problems in the industry. I feel that those of us who are involved in an industry have a responsibility to – we need to take responsibility for the problems of our industry.

Mine is the financial industry, and that is one of the reasons I'm doing this show. I'm going to expose the problems and work on solutions to help people – to help change the market. If you're in the medical industry, you need to be exposing the problems there. If you're a police officer, you need to be exposing the problems with your industry.

If you're a teacher, you need to be fundamentally working on your industry. Because those of us who are in the industry who care, it's up to us not to complain and gripe and moan about people seeing the problems, but rather it's up to us to see the problems and fix them and expose them.

I believe that's our responsibility. And absolutely to your credit, I mean as you know from – we've had some exchanges on my blog and on your site. I mean I'm a fan of yours. I like what the message that you have. But I think – like I originally kind of had my eyes opened.

I know you had Todd Treseder on last week, and I started following his work and reading his things. And like hearing something from somebody like you or from him, it has value from an insider but from someone like myself who I can say, "Look, just last year alone, we got charged $8,000 and left $7,500 on the table in tax benefits.

And we had less return than we would have had for just buying an index fund." And that's really all our advisor did was helped us to get an asset allocation, helped us set up automatic deposits. And that was basically the extent of what we feel that we got in value from him.

So I think to actually see an example of real life how that can or can't help you, I think that's helpful. And that's why we kind of chose to share our message. Right. And I'm glad that you did. One of the best things about the internet is the democratization of information where you cannot suppress information effectively anymore.

But the only way that that information gets out to help people is for people to publish it, to publicize it, and to get it out there. And the – any industry will respond when the market demands it. So our job is to affect the market and then the industry will respond to it.

If I keep on – whatever the issue is that's important to me, whether it's crappy financial advice or whether it's the quality of the food that I eat or whether it is the – you insert the issue that's important to you. The market will respond to the demand for that.

So if you're frustrated with not having an option, just affect the demand. Affect the demand. I'd like to finish real quick just the metaphor that I did and then I've got – there are models. The focus of our interview today is not going to be to go into the models.

But you have laid out a problem that faces the financial advisor trying to figure out how to make a living and help people. And I actually have a new model that I invented in my head and then I have some other people that were kind of interested in testing it.

But I'll talk about that on a completely different show, about kind of models of financial advice and some of the new models that I think can and should be developed to do it in a better way that serves the advisor and serves – I wanted to start – should I start with the client?

Serves the client better and then also serves the needs of the advisor to be able to enable him or her to have an effective business. But real quick on the diet example I was going to use, that coach, that nutrition coach would be – would not bring any value to somebody who is – who has read a few books on diet and nutrition and is knowledgeable.

That basic coach wouldn't – probably wouldn't be able to bring any value to that person. And then on the flip side, maybe somebody who has some knowledge, who has read those books, would have a very difficult time finding a coach or a nutrition coach who is able to help them pass the basics.

However, it's very possible that if that person were an elite athlete that they may be willing to pay a massive amount of money for very specific elite knowledgeable nutrition advice, a little tweak here, a little adjustment there because that may make a very big difference. And this is the problem with financial advice is that oftentimes you either have an entry-level beginning advisor or you – and those are the people who are available to people who don't have a lot of money because the advisor has an incentive to work with clients who are wealthy.

And so the wealthiest clients can get the best financial advice where they have the most elite knowledgeable advisor who's able to adjust and focus on a few specific ideas that go far beyond funding a retirement account. But it leaves much of the market poorly served. So I'm not anti-advisor because I think that many of those advisors from having worked in the marketplace, it's very easy if you pay attention to personal finance information to get a skewed perspective of what people do.

You think everybody knows about investing. Everybody knows about asset allocation. The reality is the average advisor is spending most of their day trying to get people to save 5 percent of their income or 10 percent of their income or buy some life insurance or put money in their 401(k).

And so that is where our culture is and it's only through education that we're going to be able to adjust what the culture is and then hopefully help people to pass through – to gain their own knowledge. And I would encourage people listening to this show, I don't think – many people listening to this show will need to transition from the basic level of advice they've gotten to either not needing external advice because they've learned enough or needing to upgrade to a more elite advisor if their circumstances warrant it.

But I get very frustrated by trying to figure out how to fix the industry as well and trying to figure out how to deal with it because it's a really difficult nut to crack. >> Yeah, definitely. Like I said, it's just systemic problems. >> Right, there is. >> And it's as much the fault – I mean like I said, the information was out there.

It wasn't like the internet was invented last year when I started reading it. I could have looked at stuff myself. I could have smelled a rat. But it's just – that's what I – one of the messages I want to get out is just you hear that over and over.

You should go to somebody you trust and like just through my experience, through like just things like reading the Millionaire Act store, we associate people that know what they're doing with their money as people that have a big house, people that drive a big car. And oftentimes, those people don't have any money.

And even in the case of my parents who did very well, like I said, they put us through school. They retired a little bit early. They did it because they did a ton of stuff well in the stuff that they taught us. It really had – I mean yeah, they made money off their investments, but they could have probably done a lot better just by decreasing their cost, using more tax advantage.

And maybe in their situation, it's different because my dad was a business owner. Maybe they got better advice. But the bottom line is you have to go and educate as a consumer. And also, there is things that need fixing in the industry. But it's a two-way street. I don't just blame him and I take responsibility for my lack of knowledge and my lack of doing research.

I mean I wouldn't go out and buy a $15,000 car without researching it. But I threw away $15,000 last year. Granted, I didn't know how bad it was until I started learning. But it's pretty telling. Right, and I'm glad that you can share that story because financial knowledge is not that complicated to accumulate.

But you got to actually spend a little time sitting down and studying it. And I always loved Sy Sim's mantra for his company. An educated consumer is our best customer. I would say an educated client is a good financial advisor's best client. I've always most enjoyed and preferred working with clients who are educated because then what can happen as an advisor is you can clearly articulate your value proposition.

And you can have confidence that your client understands your value proposition. And that's a really valuable thing rather than your client not being knowledgeable and not understanding what your value proposition is. When I was practicing advisor, my value proposition was never the delivery of alpha, never the delivery of outperformance.

I always assumed that you're going to under--that I don't beat the market. That's not what I do. But that's a very small portion of what a financial advisor can do as far as the services offered. But most people still, many people still, if they don't understand what the different options are, then they feel that, oh, this advisor is going to beat the market.

So the reason I'm hiring this person is they're going to beat the market. And there are--I don't want to belabor the conversation past that point right now. But the best thing you can do for yourself is become educated. The best thing you can do--this is affecting the medical industry.

It's very interesting as it is a very challenge to some of the physicians I've worked with. It's a major challenge if they've been a physician for a long time to go from a position of superiority with the knowledge and a monopoly on knowledge where I've noticed this with some of the older relatives that I have is that they view their physician as kind of a mini god, meaning the doctor says this, so therefore the doctor knows.

Well, I know him well enough. I've done enough research to know that just because the doctor says it doesn't mean it's so. So that's a major change even happening in medical advice. I mean I can't--being in the medical field, amen to that. That's all I'll say to that. Right.

And this is really tough for older--this is really tough for older physicians, I think some of them, to take. It's also really tough for some older financial advisors to take. But I think the public is better served by the proliferation of information. And if I'm knowledgeable and then I have a doctor who's knowledgeable and who can explain to me, "Okay, this is what the situation is here.

This is why I'm making this recommendation," then I'll get better advice, the doctor will have a better life, and I'll get better treatment. Same thing with financial advice. The reason I do this show, one of several reasons, is to make the information accessible and strip away some of the mystery from these terms.

And then my hope is that by creating a more educated public, that will give incentive for advisors to raise their game, and then they'll become much more team members with each other working together toward the fulfillment of the client's financial goals while concurrently satisfying the advisor's financial goals because that's why the advisor is doing it, is to earn a living at it.

And hopefully we can raise the level of satisfaction. Because right now, financial advisors, we have a lower public perception than any other industry, including the often made fun of used car industry, which I think is also unfair. But there's a lot of scumbags in that business, too, which is why the good ones should be getting the business right now.

There's good and bad people in absolutely every industry. And like I said, I don't mean to make a blanket statement, but I do stand behind what I said. You absolutely have to become educated. And if you are educated, people in the accumulation phase, you can do at least most of it on your own.

Everybody needs some help and some advice from somewhere, but just choose that really, really wisely. Because as well as we're doing, we've made some pretty expensive mistakes. Yeah, and I'll go in on a future show. I've got some ideas that I think are going to build out a new business model for advisors that I think will better serve some clients and then will also help the advisor to be able to make a living in a practical way where they can really deliver a lot of value.

So there are some options. I'll talk about them in future shows and see if people can work through them. Any other mistakes that – and by the way, I will also make sure to link to your post so that people can read the details that you wrote in your post on your bad experience with an advisor.

Any other mistakes that you made that you would like to help people avoid as we wrap up here? I think we've done pretty well. I think the biggest thing where we've done well and the biggest thing where we've done bad is I think whenever you question things and just don't just accept just because everybody else does something as the way to do it, whether it be buying your car, paying for your college, buying a house, investing, whatever, just the more you can educate yourself and you'll see that a lot of things are done just because it's the way they're done, but it doesn't mean they're the right way.

That's kind of the message we're trying to share with our blog is just dare to think a little bit differently, dare to do your own research and put your own thoughts into things. There's a reason why everybody works 40-hour weeks and does it until they're 65. It's because people do most of the things the same way with little variants here and there.

But if you make a couple changes and you really think about things, you can have a drastically, drastically different outcome. Absolutely. The best thing that we need to develop is one of the core skills we need to develop is the skill of critical thinking, questioning the assumptions that we bring to something, testing them, and then discarding the ones that don't serve our purposes and keeping the ones that do.

That's an extremely scary thing to do sometimes. There's a reason why we have the aphorism "ignorance is bliss," but it's also extremely rewarding because if you question things, you can often find a more efficient way to reach your goals. So develop the skill of critical thinking and question all of the assumptions and figure out what's right for you.

It's a scary process, but it's a rewarding process. I'm glad that you can illustrate that with—and this is not an insult, this is a compliment—with just a fairly mainstream story, but show how it's possible without living in a tent in the wilderness. I think that's super cool, but I'm not going to live in a tent in the wilderness right now.

Without living in a tent in the wilderness and pooping in a bucket, you can live a happy, enjoyable, financially abundant life. I think that's really awesome. I definitely don't take that as an insult. Like I said, when we started the blog, it took a lot for me to overcome.

I'm really dumb compared to these other people who got this and just see these things. Also, I don't think we're all that interesting compared to even like you had just recently, the Go Curry Cracker, and they're doing the slow travel all over the world. It sounds really interesting, but quite frankly, I don't know anybody that's doing that.

I think our message is kind of the same message, it's just hopefully maybe something that everybody can find accessible and can implement some things. Different stories will appeal to different people, and that's the cool thing about the proliferation of information available. We'll all meet people at different—I'll give you the secret about me.

I really don't care that much about early retirement, believe it or not. I get it, but I don't have much interest in retiring early. Even though I spend a lot of time talking about it, to me, it just doesn't fit with any of my vision for life. I'm much more interested in saying, "How can I build businesses that matter, do work that matters?" I've only got a certain amount of life left, and I've got to make it count.

The financial independence, the concept of being financially independent and financially free is incredibly valuable to me, but I don't view it as an obstacle in any way because there's no lack of money that's keeping me from making a difference and achieving the things where I want to make an impact.

If I'm making an impact in something, then the money will always follow. But to other people, it's a message of hope that can really hit them in a valuable way. Only by knowing all of the options can you feel confident in the decisions that we make. Once I'm financially independent, we'll see if I still hold the same view that I do about early retirement.

It's hard for me to imagine my opinion changing, but who knows? We'll see. Like I said, we don't know what our retirement's going to look like. You'll have to read the blog to see the ending of this. EatTheFinancialElephant.com. Anywhere else that people need to know about? Any other projects that you want to tell anybody about?

That's it. Otherwise, we're living a normal life and raising a baby. It's a beautiful day in Pennsylvania, so we're going to go out climbing this afternoon. That's my kind of deal. Chris, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Pretty cool just to hear from a relatively normal person, right?

Yes. Hope you learned a lot. That's it for today's show. Go check out Chris' site. All of the links that we mentioned are linked to in the show notes for today's show. So feel free to go and check out his site. Check back tomorrow. We'll be doing a Friday Q&A show.

There's still time if you haven't called it in today. There's still time for you to call in your question. If you would like me to answer the question for you, go to the website and you'll see the "Leave me a voicemail" button right there. You can do it from your phone.

You can do it from your computer. On Monday, I'll be sharing with you some ideas of my ideas about how to do a more meaningful educational plan for your child. Tuesday, I'm going to be rolling out the membership program on Episode 100. If you're interested in that, feel free to tune in.

I'll tell you how I'm going to run that and give you the background on the show, where I'm going to take the show in the future. Wednesday, we'll be back to some technical planning next week. So I'm going to keep on with the normal ebb and flow of the show.

Hope you enjoyed today's show. Please make sure if you liked this interview, make sure that you're subscribed to the show. iTunes and Stitcher are two really great places to do that or whatever podcatcher of choice that you enjoy using. Would love a review, especially on Stitcher. If you're a Stitcher listener, please leave a review for the show.

Also, a review on iTunes is super helpful. That helps people find the show. I love that feedback. It helps me to continue to get better with the show every day. Thank you for listening. Be back with you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment.

Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy. And consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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