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At Wine Enthusiast, we bring wine to life. It's really not every day that you actually get to interact with a patriarch or a godfather of an industry, but today we have that chance. And even better, you will like and appreciate the fact that not only is today's guest an early retiree, but he's somehow figured out how to actually stay retired and not earn any money or do any work or...

Well, okay, he does do work, but at least he doesn't earn money doing it. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and today is Monday, December 8, 2014. I've got a good one for you today. My guest is a man named Doug Nordman. If you've ever interacted at all in just about any early retirement forum or online discussion about money, I bet you've seen him.

He goes by the handle of Nords. Well, if you didn't see Nords, I'm sure you saw one of his Hawaiian shirts. He's known for having a pair of jeans, a pair of flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt on just about any time you meet him, and I think that's awesome.

These are some of the perks that you get when you are actually a financially independent early retiree. Also, one of the perks that you get when you leave the military and after however many years of keeping your hair short, you get to grow it out into a very nice ponytail.

So, my guest today, as I mentioned, is a man named Doug Nordman. Doug is a really awesome guy. He and his wife both retired early, and he has gone on, and well, he and his wife, they live in Hawaii, and the cool thing is that they've actually stayed retired.

They actually don't do anything for money. Although he does blog, he blogs at a website called themilitaryguide.com, the military guide with hyphens in between. So, he blogs there, but he gives away all of the information, excuse me, all of the revenue from the site goes away to military charities.

He's also written a book for retirement to give advice in the military space, and all of that money, those revenues are given away as well. One of the coolest things about Doug is he's been around in the early retirement space for quite a while, and today, I hope you enjoy this conversation.

It's part personal story, personal lessons, but then it's also a good bit about the actual history of the early retirement movement. Enjoy. So, Doug, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Thanks, Joshua. It's good to be here. So, I think of you, and I'm going to have you tell your story here, kind of introduce yourself, but I think of you as one of the patriarchs of the early retirement space, and so this will be fun.

I like patriarch a lot better than geezer, but yeah, that works. So, I brought you on today to talk about the history of retirement, and you are a successful early retiree. To the best of my knowledge, you retired early, and you've been able to stay sort of semi-retired early.

So, I'd love for you to share your personal story, and then also, primarily what we're going to focus on today is talking about the history of early retirement and its evolution over time, but what's your story as it surrounds money and early retirement? Well, I joined the Navy right out of high school and started my career in the early 1980s in the submarine force and retired from that after I got my 20 years in 2002, and as I was coming up on retirement in the '90s, I started trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself after I left the military, and I wasn't really happy with what looked like the options and opportunities, and when my wife and I were both in the military back in the '80s and '90s, we were both on active duty, and then later on, she moved from active duty into the reserves, and so she and I have been a dual-income couple for our working years.

She retired from the reserves in 2008, and as we were saving our money, we were very busy, as you might imagine, in the service, and it was easy to be frugal when you're on sea duty or deployed or either just underway all the time working hard, and so we'd always try to save at least one income whenever we could, and over the years, we noticed that was compounding very nicely to the point where it was almost like having a third income in the house, and as we got through the '80s and into the '90s, it became more easy to calculate how much you'd need for retirement.

Back in the '80s, if you wanted to figure out when you could retire, you had to send away for a notebook or a workbook or maybe you could get a floppy disk from a finance company, and most of them would assume that you were going to retire at age 65.

If you wanted to retire earlier than 65, you had to figure out what math they were using in their tables, and you had to do your own formulas, and you had to extrapolate your own stuff, and so that wasn't even on the radar of most financial companies or most planners or even most investors back in the '80s, and then in the '90s, people started getting a little more flexible.

They were starting to see people retire earlier and realized that maybe age 65 is not the traditional retirement date. In retrospect, years after it was published, I discovered a book that had been written in 1984. It was written by Paul and Vicki Terhorst. I don't know if anybody knows this one anymore.

It's been out of print for years, but it's called "Cashing in on the American Dream, How to Retire when You're Age 35." I remember finding that book when I was 41 years old, and I was thinking, "Crap, I missed the deadline. I was too late." He was an accountant at a consulting firm, and he managed to save enough money to actually retire in 1984.

That was one of the very first people that I was aware of who early retired. He and his wife, Vicki, became expatriates. They became world travelers, and they spent the last 30 years going from one country overseas to another. I mean, from South America to Europe to Asia, they've been everywhere.

What really made an impact on me and my wife was in the early '90s with the publication of a book by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin called "Your Money or Your Life." Have you heard of that one? I have. In fact, I've actually read "Cashing in on the American Dream" years ago, but "Your Money or Your Life" was one of my favorites from an early age that completely shifted how I thought about money.

It was still on my top 10 recommendations list. Oh, absolutely. The movement lives on today. I mean, Vicki's kept the website going for years and does seminars and still talks about it with everybody she can get a hold of. It made a big difference in 1992. I think that was one of the first times that anybody had seen a widely publicized way to save your income and get to the point where you had more passive income.

At that crossover point, that chart in the book is very important for a lot of people these days. So, we used that. As the '90s went on, we began to realize that we were getting closer and closer to that financial independence. I'd say by late '99, early 2000, it looked like we were probably going to make it.

We had been saving 50% of our income for 20 years. If the math is done and you look at the safe withdrawal rate and 25 times your annual spending, it looked like we were going to make it. I retired in the summer of 2002, so it's been just over 12 years.

We've taken our retirement finances through two recessions and everything's worked out fine. I mean, the recession itself is not fun, but it's nice to see that your retirement savings will carry you through, that your investments are working out the way they should. By now, we're comfortable with volatility and we understand how things are going to work and we all feel like we know what our spending is going to be.

From here on out, we're just enjoying ourselves. You used the word semi-retired, but it's all for fun now. I haven't had a W-2 or any income for 12 years. I give away all the income from the book and the blog that I get to military-friendly charities and that helps people want to contribute more advice and stories for future editions of the book and for other books that I'm going to write someday.

It's what I always admired most about Joe Dominguez, author of Your Money or Your Life. If everything I've read about him was correct, it seemed that when he retired, he actually retired and didn't go on to try to make a bunch of money telling other people how to get rich and retire.

It seemed that he really did walk his walk and just simply lived on his portfolio and either gave away or he gave away, I think, income from his book and some of those other things, right? Is that correct? Oh, absolutely. By the time he died of cancer in the late '90s and by the time that was occurring, he had still continued to put all of his investments in treasury bonds and he was living off of treasuries and inflation was just eating away at him.

By the time he died, he was living in a group home and I think he was managing to live on a very small amount of money, something like $8,000 or $9,000 a year. So he stuck with his portfolio through the rest of his life even though Paul Terhorst, the writer of Cashing in an American Dream, he started out all on certificates of deposit, all on CDs in 1984, which you could do with interest rates back in 1984.

But even Paul by now has moved to a mix of index funds from the S&P 500. But Joe did not do that and he never attempted, as near as I can tell, to profit off of Your Money or Your Life. I'm sure people took care of him, but he didn't attempt to go on a world tour and make himself filthy rich.

Was he burned by Wall Street? It just seems so strange that that's always what you have to, whenever I give the book away, and even in the updated version they mention this, but I always have to say, "Listen, you can't necessarily do this on treasuries anymore." Was he just burned by investing or do you have any idea why he was so committed to that investing course of action?

He made his first million by the time he was 29 years old, I believe, in the late 60s. And I think he just felt that he'd seen enough and he wanted to do his own thing. I don't know that there was any particular trigger or trauma or event, except the realization, of course, that every day that he was working, he was losing that much of his life and he wanted to save and be able to do his own living.

Interesting. So when you were setting out, did any of these, and it's been at least a decade since I read Cashing in an American Dream, so I don't remember anything that's in it. I've tried to track down, for the show, I've tried to track down Paul. I haven't been able to find him yet.

If any listener knows how to get a hold of him, I'd love to interview him and some of the other people as well. But did they talk about actually any metrics? For example, today we commonly talk about 25 times annual income, but did they talk about any metrics or was it more of the idea at that stage?

Well, no, for them it was the idea. And of course, he's an accountant. He was able to take his CPA skills and figure out how to project his cash flow and the assets he'd need for that. And what he did was look at his spending that they could achieve overseas in various inexpensive third world countries and figure that out with the CDs.

So when they retired, 100% in CDs and they knew the income from the CDs was going to pay their costs of living overseas. Got it. Yeah. Going from 17% CD rates for a six month CD back in, I don't know what year that was, to today. I would imagine your income plan would collapse if it were still based on CDs.

Don't try this at home, folks. These are trained professionals and we didn't know much back then. How old were you and your wife in 2002 when you retired? I retired at age 41 and she was slightly behind me in age and our daughter was almost 10 years old. I don't know if you've raised kids, but at that age it's what I refer to as the danger zone.

So I was glad to be able to spend more time at home with her. Sure. Yeah, my wife and I have a one year old son at the moment. So we're not there yet. All I got to say is it gets better. Awesome. We're enjoying it now. So if it gets better, we're excited about that.

How big of a role in your financial planning did the military background make? And I assume you did your 20 years in order to get the full payout amount. What big a role was the military pension system in your retirement? It started out as barely covering a portion of the bills.

When you retire from the US military, you at 20 years get a pension that's based on approximately 50% of your base pay. And when I say approximately, we use an average of the final three years of the highest pay you've had during that 20 years and you get 50% of your base pay.

What that works out to in real terms is that you have your regular military paycheck and your housing allowance and your food allowance and maybe some CPA or some bonus pay for other specialties that you have. And then you go and you retire, your income drops to about one third of what it was during your working years.

Because again, that pension is based on your base pay and you don't get any extras for any of the allowances you've been earning over the years. So most people are caught unawares. They think, "Oh, well, I'm making $80,000 a year when I retire. I'll get a pension of $40,000 and life will be good." Not so fast.

If your income is $80,000 when you're on active duty, all of your income, your allowances that are not taxed as well as your taxable income, when you retire, you'll be looking at a pension more around $23,000, $24,000 because of that issue with base pay. And back then we had retired with a mortgage on our home and we had expected that we would be able to fit that into our finances.

What we anticipated was that I'd use the military pension to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage and the rest of it we'd handle from our investments. You know, the 4% safe withdrawal rate, we had enough investments to make that work. And then, I did not anticipate this at all, but then interest rates started dropping in the 2000s after the recession and we started refinancing.

And so, over the years, the military pension rises with a cost of living adjustment just like Social Security. It's the same COLA. Over the years, 12 years of military retirement, my pension has risen by 27%. But more importantly, we've refinanced this property enough that our mortgage payment has dropped by 40%.

And so, today, my pension, $42,000 a year, covers almost all of our spending. We could live on that $42,000 a year if we cut back and had to do that with non-discretionary expenses. But of course, we spend a little more money for entertainment and travel. But it's been very reassuring to know that the military pension and the inflation adjustment have covered us over the years and taken care of us.

One other big advantage for the military retiree is cheap healthcare. I don't know if you track the numbers, but military retirees can get health insurance through TRICARE. The full coverage program, TRICARE Prime, has a monthly premium of about $55 tops. It rises a little bit every year with inflation, but again, it's one of the cheapest health programs around and it's enabled us to retire as well.

If you looked at other insurance policies that you could get through the healthcare exchanges through the ACA, it costs, what, eight, ten times more than that for people even without pre-existing conditions. So those two factors, cheap healthcare and the cost of living adjustment on the military pension have been a big factor.

Yeah. I've never actually worked with anybody who was on TRICARE. I briefly studied it in a textbook for one of my registered health underwriter classes. We had to do a bunch of stuff on TRICARE. It always struck me as something that I wanted to research more. In order to be eligible for TRICARE, do you need to do, what are the benefits, in order to be eligible for TRICARE after termination of service, what are the requirements for that?

Do you know? You get TRICARE Prime or TRICARE Standard when you retire from active duty. When you retire from the reserves, and the reserves are a little different from active duty, the reserves in National Guard, you retire and you're awaiting your pension to start at age 60. When you retire from the reserves of the Guard, you can also get a form of TRICARE insurance.

It's called TRICARE Retired Reserve. That is not subsidized by the federal government, so you end up paying a fairly high premium. It might be as much as $600 or $900 a month, depending on individuals or families. That is a good insurance program to have to bridge the time from when you stop drilling with the reserves or National Guard until you start your pension at age 60.

Everything else requires you to be on active duty or be in drilling status with the reserve or National Guard. The TRICARE programs assume that you're in uniform. When you get to Medicare age, you might have heard of TRICARE for Life, which is a supplemental Medicare insurance. That pays a second payer to Medicare for military retirees that are age 65 or over, as soon as you start Medicare.

How big of a difference does military or can, because I know now you write specifically towards the military audience. How big of a difference do the other ancillary benefits in addition to salary and in addition to healthcare expenses? For example, housing provided, I'm not fully, my dad was in the Navy in the subs, but I've never been in.

I know that a lot of other stuff is covered. How big of a difference does that make from the perspective of an early retirement? Twenty, 25 years ago, it used to make a substantial difference. Big box stores have cut that down quite a bit these days. For example, you used to try to retire near a military base so that you had access to a commissary for food and used to try to go on a base to buy cheap gasoline or to be able to use the exchange.

Costco, Walmart, Sam's Club, all of those big box stores have followed up on that model. Today, the prices are pretty close. You generally know what's cheaper at Costco and you know what's more expensive at Walmart and you know where to buy gas on base at a good price. I would say that the base access is not as significant as the cola and the healthcare.

Some people though, you take great comfort in being able to go on the base where you know the culture and you know the places that are familiar to you. You can go work on your car at the auto hobby shop. You can go pull your car in and rent a lift for the ridiculous sum of like $5 or $10 an hour.

You can go join the gym and have a workout program there or a runner's club. Again, it's a very nominal fee for retirees. People enjoy doing that. We're much less tied to military bases in retirement than we used to be 25 or 30 years ago. I'm going to read a paragraph here, but the question is, "Do you think that joining the military would be a primary strategy for someone who's primarily interested in saying, 'How quickly can I retire?'" And before you answer that, I want to read a paragraph as an introduction here.

This is from a Yahoo Finance article, which you are very familiar with both this article and the follow-up. But the paragraph here is about a young man named Anton Ivanov. And the story was that at 27 years old, he had become a millionaire. And one of the primary ways that he did this was by joining the military, which allowed him to save 60% of his income.

And this paragraph in the story here says, "Fortunately, military life was the perfect environment for a single person looking to save. The bulk of his fixed expenses, housing, food, transportation, insurance, were covered. He set up automatic transfers for his savings and investment accounts and followed a strict schedule. First, he maxed out his annual Roth IRA contribution.

Then he contributed the maximum to his annual thrift savings plan, the federal employee version of the 401(k). Then he split the remaining balance between his brokerage account and the savings funds he keeps for future real estate investments. While he studied here and extra cash through one-off web design and programming gigs, he got through freelance job sites like elance.com and odesk.com.

He estimates these side jobs added another $15,000 to $20,000 to his annual income." So if that paragraph were true, then this sounds like basically the ultimate retirement plan. Join the military, all of your expenses are covered, save 50% of your income, use all your extra time to earn extra money, and invest it wisely.

Comment away. It actually works. It's the real proof, the real system. And it's a shame that he went and lied about his actual sources of his assets and destroyed his credibility. I take that very personally because he's a military veteran. You should know better than to lie like that.

But the reality is that all those methods he describes work just fine in the military. I'd even go a step further and say that in the military, when you're in uniform, you are extremely familiar with deprivation. You're used to living outdoors for weeks at a time. You're used to living in a very small space with a very small bed and very limited storage.

You're used to working long hours and strange hours. You're used to only being fed once or twice a day if you're out in the field. There's a whole bunch of different things in the military that we put up with that even convicts in the federal prison system have lawyers who have given them more privileges and more rights than some people in the military.

And yet, it works. And by that line between frugality and deprivation, you can easily save 40 to 50% of your pay while you're in active duty, even if you're single, even if you're married. Either way, you can still try to save 40 to 50% of your money while you're in uniform.

And the way that he lays out the savings program is exactly where you're supposed to do it. Max out your Roth IRA, max out your thrift savings plan, put the additional money in taxable accounts, and plan for your transition. It works. The math is there and the money from the military is there.

Admittedly, when you join the Navy or any of the services at the age of 17 or 18 years old, you're going to have a very small paycheck. And you might be challenged even at maxing out the contribution to your Roth IRA. But the longer you stay in the military, the more your pay rises, the more you get promoted, and the easier it is to max out your Roth IRA, your spouse's Roth IRA, your thrift savings plan, and that accelerates and compounds.

So everything he said, it works. It's just a shame that he had to lie about his assets. Yeah, and the backstory on this is as we record this on November 25th, a couple days ago it came out. The backstory was published that I just referenced. But then some days later it came out that the man had evidently lied about the entire thing and the bulk of his million dollar net worth, I guess he actually was a millionaire, but the bulk of that million dollar net worth was accumulated through his, like an inheritance that he had received of some kind.

And that was the primary source of wealth. And so the problem was that it may have violated the actual facts, and that is a legitimate issue, violated the actual facts, but that doesn't take it away as a useful example. Exactly. And again, he destroyed his credibility there, but the math still works.

And I'd encourage all service members today to keep maxing out their contributions to their IRAs, to their thrift savings plan, and save as much as you can for as long as you can. The reason is because in the military you're extremely experienced with being frugal, and you know when you've gone too far because you've experienced deprivation too.

How much does, at 18 years old, someone joining up, 18, just a rank and file person, how much does an 18 year old recruit make, would you guess? It's pretty pitiful. It's about 17, $18,000 a year in paycheck. But again, housing is subsidized or free. Food is subsidized or free as well.

It depends on where you're stationed and whether you're married or not. And the total compensation package when you just join the military is probably about $30,000 to $35,000 a year. Again that's highly dependent on what part of the country you're living in and whether you're stationed overseas, because the living allowances that you get for food and housing will vary with the location you're stationed in.

And I would add to that, that after you've been in the military for a couple years, you're probably getting at least one promotion if you sign on for a very technical field or if you sign on for a little longer commitment, like six or eight years, then you get a couple more promotions.

So that starting salary is like going into a McDonald's and working a minimum wage job. However, if you were doing the equivalent of working at McDonald's, then by the way the military works it, within six years you'd be running that McDonald's. And that's what happens in the military is that with a six or eight year enlistment, you'll be at least up the ranks to E5 or E6 and you'll be looking at annual compensation of, again this depends on skills and where you're stationed, of between $50,000 and $75,000 a year.

I have a friend who owns a bunch of McDonald's and if you apply yourself in six years you can be running any McDonald's in the world. It's not, that's right, it's not about the skills, it's just about the work and the persistence. You know, I don't know if your father was a nuclear trained submariner or not.

He was on the last of the diesel boats. Oh, okay. Diesel boats forever, guy. The nuclear trained officers today in the submarine force are able to, at their sixth or seventh year of service, make over $100,000 a year on a bonus contract. It's as high as $130,000 a year total package just for all the nuclear training and for being willing to stick around past that initial obligation for a few more years.

Right. I'll tell you an interesting story, I'll make it very brief, but Admiral Rickover actually, he rejected my dad and when he applied to the program because his grades weren't good enough and he was very hard working but he was working full time and going to school full time and he'd gotten his engineering degree and he was rejected.

So he stayed on the diesel subs but looking back on it later, he was on the last of the diesel subs. And they sold it to, it's parked in Arkansas, Razorback I think is what- Oh, okay. Of course it's Razorback. Yeah. That was the boat that he was on.

But he looks back on it and he says one of the greatest blessings that he ever had was that he didn't wind up in the nuclear program just because at that time, the lifestyle, I mean it was so difficult as it was to be on the diesel boats and out on six month cruises and just the sheer difference of intensity that it would have required from the nuclear program.

And he was glad later with hindsight that he was, that passed over for that. I got a chance to speak with the Admiral myself three days before he retired and he was a little grumpy about it but that's how I got in the program. After he had what, he was the one who completely changed the rules for how many years, right?

Exactly. So that he could keep running the Navy long past anyone that was supposed to be around. Well, they actually passed some new laws. Congress passed new laws after he retired because by that point, he'd outlived all his supporters in Congress. It did make us very intense and focused over the years.

In the last 12 years, I spent a lot of time trying to slow down and not be so intense and focused about certain things just because of my submarine nuclear training background. I believe it. So let's continue on the early retirement theme. So your early influences were Paul Terhorst's book, Cashing in the American Dream and then Your Money or Your Life.

But you've watched this develop. So today, I've come in on the tail end of this stuff. Basically now where it's this massive, I think it's a massive movement all across the world. What were some of the other developments and especially how did the online community develop? I was dialing into bulletin board systems with a modem back in the late 90s.

Back then, one of the more popular places to have an internet discussion was The Motley Fool. This was back when The Motley Fool was a brand new startup and very popular among people because all their forums were free. They had a very robust retire early homepage there that had a lot of people posting on it and a lot of discussions back and forth.

Then The Motley Fool tried to charge a monthly fee. It was some ridiculous sum like $5 a month to be a member of The Motley Fool forums and that led to a mass exodus. That business plan did not work out well for the fools but the residents there on the retire early page left and went to a new forum that was started by a guy who's still in the business today.

He started his forum in 1996. It's the retire early homepage. His name is John Greeney. He retired from the oil and gas industry in the Houston area back in the late 90s. Even today, it's been 18 years, he still posts to his forum I'd say four or five times a year.

They all moved over there and they started doing the same research and discussion that they'd been doing on The Motley Fool. Another forum got started in 2002. This is one that I've been associated with for over 12 years now. It's called the earlyretirement.org website, early-retirement.org. That got started in 2002 by a web designer, a guy who had retired from an IT job.

He said that when he was working in the late 90s that one of his office mates had a retirement ceremony and they made a big joke out of putting all kinds of retirement stuff on a door to his office. One of them was a printout from that John Greeney retire early homepage that had all the information about early retirement.

That was the first time that this guy at earlyretirement.org had thought about early retirement. What he managed to do was not only to retire early, but he and his spouse bought a small boat, a trawler, a 36-foot trawler. They actually spent their time cruising up and down on the intercoastal waterway.

He was running the forum from his cell phones in the afternoons after they would tie up somewhere he'd get online with his cell phone at some pitiful data rate and manage the forum. That went on from 2002 to about 2005. The forum kept growing the whole time as more of us got in there and got interested in figuring out the math and the lifestyle behind early retirement.

That was Dory36. He named his online presence for the boat. He was on a 36-foot trawler. I had worked on that forum when I retired in 2002. About 2004, I started asking questions about the lifestyle and the finances. I'd been, of course, early retired for 18 months by then, but I was just checking in with the experts here to make sure I didn't miss something.

I wanted to make sure I understood all the factors and had accounted for them all. I wanted to know if the, I wouldn't call it a failure rate, I'd call it a recidivism rate was higher than 50%. I wanted to know if people were just sitting around for a couple of years and then going back to work.

I was, "Oh, no, no. If you're having fun and you're early retired and you're enjoying life, it's probably going to continue like that for the rest of your life." That was very reassuring. I hung around on that board. I've been posting there since early 2004, over 10 years, almost 11 years now.

There have been a few other sites over the years. One other site that started up in 2004 was started by a retired radiologist. His poster name is Raddr, R-A-D-D-R, Radiation Doctor. He did a lot of math and number crunching back then. He figured out a lot of the math behind the 4% safe withdrawal rate.

He looked at long-term retirements. The original 4% safe withdrawal rate was for a 30-year survival on a portfolio. He did research, some of the first research I'd seen, to extend that out to 50 years. Of course, he came up with a slightly smaller number, but it was encouraging to see that it could work.

His board is also still active these years, after all these years. He did a lot of the website research and then left that as a webpage and then went on and started a forum. I'd say the next big initiative was Morningstar. The Monopoly Fool was one of the first places to have a robust bunch of forums about investing in retirement, but Morningstar also had a bunch of forums of their own.

There was an incident, I'd say around 2006, 2007, I'm not exactly sure when, a lot of the boards were not very well moderated by Morningstar. One of the forums that they had there was the Vanguard Diehards. They had a notorious troll on there. That troll just completely ruined the environment for everybody.

It actually inspired a number of the Vanguard Diehards to break off and start their own forum and that became Bogleheads. Interesting. Yeah, that was the start of Bogleheads. It was the problems that Morningstar had taking care of moderating their own forum. I think it's been one of the greatest things to happen for early retirement.

The Bogleheads have done a lot of work to make sure everybody understands not just early retirement but investing and conventional retirement, whatever retirement you want. One of their biggest contributions has been their wiki. They've put together a very robust archive of information articles on retirement, investing, and lifestyle. We've contributed to a substantial archive over there for the military as well as for other types of occupations and other people that are interested in either a traditional career and retiring in their 60s or early retirement or maybe they're just interested in working for the rest of their lives or living overseas, however they want to do it.

Let me ask you a question and interrupt your time flow here with a question about forums because I personally have really enjoyed a lot of forums and have learned from them. I've recommended to many people, including clients, that the best place to go is to find a good forum and ask people.

But I have two concerns about that. The first one is a small concern that usually forums are organized around one specific theme so you've got to find the right forum. For example, if you are in the Bogleheads forum, you're going to get acolytes of John Bogle, which is nothing wrong with that, but there are other points of view and that would be different than I've never been in the forum, but I'm sure there's a Berkshire Hathaway stock owners forum somewhere.

I've never been there, but I'm sure it exists. So that would be a different perspective. But my bigger concern is how to figure out who knows what they're talking about in the forums because I've privately connected and I've privately contributed and anonymously contributed in a few forums, which I think is one of the big major values.

But there are a few forums where I've publicized who I am. Probably the one I've participated in the most is the Money Mustache forum, which is a great forum, but sometimes I go in there and I see somebody giving bad advice. The other day I posted somebody had a question on life insurance and I only had time, but I said, "Let me give it..." The question was I'm 23 years old and I went in and they said, "What kind of life insurance should I buy?" And I said, "Well, that's a great consideration and it's a topic I know my stuff in." And they were trying to figure out the difference between the AICPA offerings versus others.

And all I simply said was I said, "Don't buy level term life insurance. Buy annual renewable term life insurance at your age." And that's a very unusual but very, very strong and I feel very strongly about that perspective. But I'm very qualified to go in and defend that, but I'm not willing to dedicate the time to going into the forum and saying, "Here's why you need to listen to me." And I don't want to go in and get in an argument with people, but the problem is that many people are very well intentioned, but they might not have necessarily the level of technical background to understand what they're doing.

How do you figure out who's blowing smoke and who knows what they're talking about in a forum? You have to do your own due diligence. And so somebody will come across in a forum, they may be very articulate, very reasonable, their name may be Anton Ivanov, and you have to figure out if what they're saying is not only making sense for your particular situation, but whether you can find that information and confirm it at other websites.

I try, every time I talk about military benefits or pay or military retirement, I try to back it up with the source from either a study or from the instruction on the Department of Defense website or some other credible source. And it's that way when you're talking about early retirement or investing.

You'll go to a study somebody has done somewhere, maybe it's something as simple as a Vanguard marketing sheet, but it might be something more thoroughly researched, like the work that Wade Pfau is doing on the safe withdrawal rate, or some old stuff like the original Behnken thought about the safe max withdrawal rate, or even the Trinity study.

So you have to read, you have to get familiar. I would not blindly go into an internet forum and say, "Oh, hey, great, this anonymous guy on the internet says I have enough assets to retire. Good, I'm done." Instead, you've got to go sit down and do your reading and do your math and figure out from a retirement calculator or from whatever books or whatever other authoritative websites you personally trust whether you want to do this.

And it's not just, "Is the math there? Can I do this because the math works? Can I do this because a research study and a computer simulation say this works?" You also have to have a personal level of comfort that might actually be a bigger challenge than saving enough assets.

And that personal level of comfort can take a while to develop. You may figure out that you have more than enough money to last the rest of your life, but you still have to figure out how you're going to live your life and what you're going to do with your time.

And the joke on most of the early retirement forums is, "What are you going to do all day?" And there are other books and other websites to go to for that to help you figure out what your interests are and how you're going to occupy your time. And I think that being responsible for your own entertainment is a big challenge for some people especially if they identify closely with their job.

That can hold up the transition and make it even worse if they're actually laid off or fired. So there's a big emotional component to retiring early that is very reassuring to get from posting on internet forums and reading what other people have to say about early retirement. But again, you've got to do your own due diligence, got to read, got to figure out if this is really going to work for your personal situation.

I don't have many concerns about the personal finance issues or even like saving money issues. Those things are fairly simple. What I have concerns about are when people get into specific discussions on specific products. For example, there's a massive difference between one insurance product from one company versus another or versus from one annuity product to another annuity product.

People often throw, I observe, many contributors throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, "Oh, no, you can't. Don't ever buy annuities." Forgetting the fact that Doug Nordman is living on one annuity right now called the military pension system and will have another one called the social security system.

Doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with an annuity, it just means you got to get a good one and it's got to fit. And then the other thing is when people often get into legal advice surrounding trust, estate planning, tax planning. I used to think that the advice was good and then I learned.

As I've grown, then I've learned, the problem is I just don't have time to contribute. So I love forums. I think they're awesome. I always just worry though, I hope people are backing it up with their own due diligence. It's a great place to gather ideas and to gain from stuff.

I've learned so much stuff in forums that I can never find in a textbook, but got to back it up with some research. Oh, and you've got to learn the vocabulary so that when you do go talk to a financial professional, you know what questions you should ask and you are listening for the keywords and the caveats and other tricky phrases that might make you get the wrong impression.

I always love people say, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to a financial advisor. What options do you have?" Because man, it's the greatest thing in the world when a client comes in. I come from the background of a financial advisor. It's so wonderful to work with a client who knows their stuff, knows the questions they should be asking and allows you to spend your time showing off your skill and your knowledge answering something that's better than, "How do I save money?" Well, the other thing is you can educate yourself for free on an internet forum and then go into that financial advisor's office and start a project that may only take an hour to explain to you instead of five hours to educate and then explain to you.

So it saves quite a bit of money just educating yourself. I tell people that financial advisors have to know a little bit about everything. They've got to be a mile wide and an inch deep on every topic of finances. But a person that is saving for their own early retirement, they only have to be an expert on their finances.

They can be an inch wide and a mile deep on their own financial situation. That's all they need to talk about with a financial advisor is to know what they need to understand for their personal situation. They can get a lot of that from an internet forum and then confirm it with a professional if they're not certain that's what they want to do.

They can gather some good data as far as points of concern. "Here's what I should be watching out for." Someone like me can say, "Well, have you considered this, this, this?" Work those things together. The key is the financial advisor can know your actual details. And that's the difference that I've observed.

At this point, when someone says, "This is what you should do without knowing details," I'm done. That's bad advice. Well, the more you lurk, the more you post on internet forums, the more you hang around the advice that people are giving, the quicker you'll be able to see who's just using absolutes and negatives all the time and they only see things in black and white instead of the shades of gray, others who are stuck on one particular topic and never figure out how to take a more nuanced view of things.

It takes a while to see that when you're on an internet forum, but that's why I like sticking with one for a while to understand the personalities and the backgrounds of the people who post there. Until we all start posting our tax returns and our salary structure and our paychecks on internet forums, we're all going to try to keep those details private.

So you have to figure out what's right for your own situation. So the bogey heads grew and then early-retirement.org grew. Were there more developments after that that made a big difference? We started crowdsourcing on early-retirement.org forum. One of the posters was an entrepreneur and a guy in a tech business in the '90s and he had just retired early.

His idea was that he was not going to completely retire cold turkey and never work again. He wanted to retire and do a little of this, a little of that, maybe some consulting, maybe some part-time work. He really didn't know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, but he expected to live a life where he did some work all the time as long as he was capable of it.

His name is Bob Klyatt. Bob went on to write a crowdsource book from the early-retirement forum called Work Less, Live More. That came out in 2005. Bob's pick on that book was one that he had a lot of personal stories in there from the posters on the early-retirement website.

He also had a lot of advice from us, enough advice to the point where he went out and he paid a programming firm to simulate a different type of withdrawal system that no one had looked at until now. Bob was one of the first guys to develop a variable withdrawal strategy in retirement.

What that meant was that you could retire and start taking money out of your portfolio at what you think was the safe withdrawal rate of 4%. But then if a big recession hit, you could cut your spending back a little bit and not have to cut it back too severely.

Bob was able to actually hire a computer firm that could do the programming and do the analysis and show that in retirement, a variable withdrawal system would allow your portfolio to survive longer. Nobody ever been able to figure this out before because it's just too complicated. The original research on retiring assumed that you spent the same amount every year adjusted for inflation because that was the most the computer programming could handle back then.

So Bob's contribution was nice to see a variable system, which is the way that I spend in retirement. No matter how logical or how experienced you are, when the market's up, you're going to probably spend a little more money. When the market's down and everybody's jumping out of second-story windows, you're probably going to spend a little less money in a recession.

Bob also used that crowdsource model to get a lot of content for the book and that really helped him write it, was being able to have people email him stuff and he would try out snippets of chapters on us and he would ask us questions about the text or the conclusion of the book.

The publisher had a hard time with understanding the concept of early retirement. So he was able to show that there was a big forum where this was discussed all the time and explain to the publisher what was going on and they bought into it. When I saw Bob do that, I thought, "Geez, you know, the military service members that retire, they've already got a pension adjusted for inflation and they've already got cheap health care.

There should be more military retirees. Where are all the military retirees who are going to do work less, live more?" And that's how my book got started. We crowdsourced on the same model that Bob Clyatt used. We got a bunch of advice and stories from service members and their families and veterans and military retirees.

I would write a chapter and farm it out to 20 or 30 people and take their feedback and keep working it. I took it very slow and took it very leisurely, but over the next six years we wrote a book and published that as the Military Guide to Financial Independence and Retirement.

Now, Bob has gone on in his, he calls it, semi-retirement to become a sculptor. Oh, he is an incredibly talented sculptor. He was one of those guys who always enjoyed high school art classes, but when it was time to go to college, his father suggested he should study business and get a real job instead of being an artist.

So Bob avenged himself by retiring early and going back and starting his art. But he has done amazing work. He lives on a suburb of Long Island near New York City and he has a lot of art galleries around there that he exhibits in and his last name is spelled C-L-Y-A-T-T, Cliet, Bob Cliet.

And look him up in the internet for Bob Cliet Sculptures. He does wonderful work with figures of people's bodies and people's heads and abstract, a take off on a sculptor of a person or somebody out there doing something like leaping or dancing. He has figured out how to do amazing structural things with sculpture.

I had no idea when I sat down to watch him do a video of how to make a head out of clay. I had no idea there was so much engineering in it. And Bob has done a lot of work on it. He's actually traveled to foundries in the People's Republic of China to build sculptures of his art three or four foot high.

A head that big cannot be built out of just clay. It has to have a bunch of infrastructure inside it. And then he's figured out how to do the metallurgy behind casting it. So he's just done tremendous things in retirement with art. And he's living his dream. He's having a wonderful life.

And his spouse keeps having to bring dinner out to the art studio late at night after he's waiting for something to cool or he's experimenting with some new technique. He has really figured out what he's going to do all day. And I feel the same way after I got the book written and published that I had never had a day when I felt bored or where I felt unfulfilled or had trouble figuring out what I was going to do with myself.

And Bob and I, we immediately connected on that basis. And we've been good friends for the last almost ten years now. This to me is one of the things I love about early retirement is just not viewing it as a goal but viewing it as a milestone that I think of.

It's a journey. Right. Because my observation, maybe you know somebody. I've had people ask, "Can you bring someone on who doesn't work?" And I'm like, "Well, the people who actually have the money to retire, they don't quit working. Now, they may quit working for pay. It sounds like you've done that.

Have you done that fully? Are you doing anything that earns you money?" No. All the income from the book and the blog income goes to military-friendly charities. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One of them is what we're going to now start calling the Ivanov reason where you want to be completely transparent about your income and your assets.

But the other reason is that it encouraged people to contribute their advice and their stories. I said, "Hey, if you help me write the book, then when we start giving the royalties to charities, you get a vote on which military charity gets the royalty money." And it really encouraged people to volunteer that I think otherwise would not have been interested.

That is so cool. I love the crowdsourcing of books and ideas. What a cool world we live in. Well, you know that you can go out there and write an e-book and you can freelance an editor, you can freelance a cover designer, you can freelance a copy editor, whatever you need.

And you can also crowdsource that. If you've got enough people who are happy to help, there are a lot of people out there that are retired artists, retired editors, retired copywriters, retired authors. And if they want to help you with your project, they'll contribute the labor. It's inspiring to them and it's fun.

I also wanted to touch on, you talked about the variable withdrawal strategy. This is one of the things I love about the early retirement community is in general, the challenge that there's often a very different language that's spoken between mainstream financial advisors and the early retirement community. And what I think people often forget, at least in my observation, is that the mainstream financial advisor's job, it's so rare to find someone who's saving 10% of their income that you're almost excited when someone's saving 10%.

Now you run across somebody who's saving 20% or 30% or 50%. It doesn't happen in a financial advisor's job. So you can forgive us if we're a little bit surprised when someone says, "I'm saving 70% of my income. What do you think about my financial plan?" This is not something that we see every day.

And not only that, but you realize they're probably going to retire earlier than you are. Right, right. Yeah. And just because someone's a financial planner does not mean they're good with money. I know a lot of it sounds horrible, but it's the truth that I know a lot of financial planners that are close to broke.

And people often forget that, I think, when I use the term financial planning, that's application of skill. Is an application of financial knowledge and skill to a specific problem. It doesn't mean that somebody has the same lifestyle goals as their client may have. It really bothers a lot of people.

And right or wrong, I think if it bothers you, find a different advisor who does have that. I mean, this business is very much a business like many other things. But the point is that when you give me the opportunity of having a variable withdrawal strategy with a retiree client, where they're willing to adjust their income significantly based upon market performance, even though I certainly can design a plan that doesn't take it into account, that margin of safety is an amazing thing.

And it just brings such a buffer to the decision that it relieves the stress on me as a planner. That's very abnormal, because most of the time, the clients that a planner may be working with, they're coming to the age of 65 and they've barely got it. And they're not willing to change their income.

And they're not willing to change their lifestyle one bit, because after all, they've worked towards this retirement plan and everything is based upon spending a higher level of income in retirement. It's a very tough financial planning nut to crack. And so just the ability to learn to be flexible with expenses and live a great lifestyle on varying expenses from year to year, your planner will love you if you give that scenario to them.

I don't think people anticipate that actually is going to happen. They see that they want to live the same lifestyle in retirement that they had before retirement, only they just don't want to have to go to work. And they don't appreciate that there will probably be a big spike in spending during that first five years of retirement, just as you all run around and enjoy life and travel and fulfill all the things you swore you were going to do as soon as you could get out of the office.

But over the 30 or 40 years of a retirement, it turns out that by the time people are in their 70s or 80s that they've done most of the things they really wanted to do. Most of the expensive experiences have been experienced and most of the expensive objects have been purchased and used.

And people start to focus on the things that are very important in their lives and they don't necessarily cost much money. And there have been surveys and urban studies, but it's mostly anecdotal data that says as you get older you tend to spend less money. And so that's a variable retirement withdrawal system right there.

And nobody has really tried to figure out how to quantify that. And Bob, with his system, was one of the first to figure out how you can cut back just a little bit during a recession without having to take a huge whack at your lifestyle. I like the approach of having some annuitized income that covers your bare bones of your spending.

Do you have to pay all your non-discretionary expenses? Do you have enough annuitized income to cover that during a big bear market? And if you can handle that, then you can handle all the rest of the surprises that come up in your life. You can even go out there and spend the money on a fantasy vacation one year and then cut back another year and make up for it.

So that is very human. It's the way we all like to spend our money and measure chunks to cover certain activities or certain events. And we don't want to have to be a regular rigid computer program. So if a financial advisor can come up with a couple of rules, like Bob Clyde's system or some other types of variable withdrawal systems I've seen over the years, all you got to do is whip out the rule book and see what you can do and figure out how to live within that.

It's a wonderful way to give yourself the confidence to retire before the traditional age and not have to worry about money when you are retired. Yeah, the safe floor, the floor of income is what we call that approach. That's the one I've always found to be the most intuitive for people.

It really helps people make sense. I don't remember. I just went and looked up Clyde's book and I realize I've read it because I recognize the cover, but I don't remember his system. What was his system that he laid out in there? Well it's frequently confused with the Trinity study of the 4% safe withdrawal rate.

And let me briefly mention the Trinity study's system is that you take your 4% when you retire and then every year you raise that by inflation. So the Trinity system, you start at a 4% withdrawal rate and every year you boost it by the inflation rate. Bob has a different version of that.

Bob starts at 4% every year. Every year that you're retired, at the beginning of the year, you withdraw 4% of your portfolio. You don't even think about inflation. If the stock market was up the last year and your portfolio is up, you start in January, you withdraw 4% of that portfolio and that's the money you're going to live on that year.

If the stock market's up, that's fine. You're not going to have much of a problem with that. When the stock market is down though, Bob gives you a variable system to soften the blow. If the stock market loses 20%, the nightmare scenario is that the following year you would have to cut all of your spending by 20% and people are not willing to do that.

And Bob's computer research was able to prove that you could cut your spending back a little bit. So Bob's system says if the stock market's down, instead of taking 4% next year and having to whack a big spending cut, take 95% of what you took last year. Just take a little spending cut.

And so instead of having to cut way back because the market was down, you cut back just a little bit from what you had last year. And if the market's down the next year, well, you just take 95% of what you'd spent the year before. So you're cutting your spending a little bit by a few percentage points until the market recovers.

And then once the market recovers, you go back on the 4% of withdrawal every year. And if the market's flat, same rule, 4%. And what he was able to show was that over the 30-year period and even longer, that that variable withdrawal rate would get you through the bear market.

The big problem with the Trinity study is that if you got through a severe bear market in the first five or 10 years after you retired and you were boosting your withdrawals every year for inflation in the face of that big bear market, you could chew way into your portfolio during that first five or 10 years and it would never recover.

And one of the more popular threads on Radder's board is the Y2K retiree. And he's had a thread running. It's been 14 years. He's had a thread running there on the Y2K retiree who retired in January of 2000 when the NASDAQ was approaching its all-time peak. And this hapless retiree has rigidly followed the Trinity study.

And every year he's taken an inflation adjustment on his 4% safe withdrawal rate. And by now, because he's been boosting his spending every year for retirement, he's looking at a withdrawal of about 10% of his portfolio every year just to keep adding the inflation adjustments onto his original 4% withdrawal rate.

And it's become clear after 14 years there's just no way that his portfolio is going to recover from the damage that was done by the 2001-2002 bear market. He just took too much money out during that. And in the 2008 recession, that's more or less the final sentence on the possibility of his portfolio ever recovering.

So Bob being able to show that you could vary your spending during a recession was a big step forward, I think, for people. And today, you can probably find five or six more systems of variable withdrawal rates with different rules and different systems and different processes. And there's even different ways to run a portfolio.

I know people who are going to wait until they can survive on only the interest and dividends from their portfolio. They're never going to touch the principal. They're just going to keep working until they build a portfolio big enough to have the dividends and the interest that they earned from their investments support their lifestyle.

And they'll live like that. Makes me wonder with this retiree, makes me wonder if did they set an age, this hapless Y2K retiree, and could they have adjusted it with him taking Social Security at some point and gotten that complicated with it? I think Social Security would eventually save him as his portfolio is running out.

But that's what he'd be living on for the rest of his life is Social Security. So I don't think that a particular age was chosen for this guy. It was probably in his 40s or 50s, of course, the typical age group of most early retirees. But no, they didn't count on him being saved by Social Security.

Poor guy. Oh, well, we will eulogize him. We will eulogize him as the perils of sticking to a fixed plan. Well, that's a neat system. I'm glad you reminded me. I need to, one of my reading projects for next year is I'm going to really dig through, I've read some of the literature, but I'm going to try to develop a comprehensive survey of all of the studies that have been done on safe withdrawal rates and see if I can bring that to the show and kind of talk through the developments.

Has the movement grown, the early retirement community? I guess community is a better word than movement. Has the community grown? I think so. It's grown that there's more people. I don't know if it's necessarily grown as a part of society. For example, the number of people who get on the Internet every year goes up by 50 or 60%.

And so every year there are plenty more people learning about early retirement. But I couldn't tell you whether 1% of society is interested in early retirement or whether it's risen to 2% or 4%. I can't tell you if the worldwide interest in early retirement has gone up over the years as a percentage of the humans on the face of the earth.

I do know that with all the calculator tools out there that people are beginning to realize that as they approach an age where they might have enough finances to be able to retire, they're able to convince themselves that yes, it is feasible, the math does work, and yes, you can do it.

And you just did not have those tools back in the '70s or '80s unless you happened to cash out of a large inheritance or a business and know that you could live off those dividends for the rest of your life. Today, you can figure out your sources of income.

You can figure out how you want to structure your portfolio. You can figure out how your assets are going to work together to give you your income for the rest of your life. And you can approach that with a high degree of confidence that even if you retire in your '30s, that you'll still be able to sustain yourself for the rest of your life.

And plan B may be going back to work. And that may work for the years until you're in your '40s or '50s. But after that, the idea of going back to work may be less attractive and you may not have the skills to find a job when you're in your '60s.

You didn't mention in your timeline, you didn't mention Jacob Lund Fisker and you didn't mention Mr. Money Mustache. Did they add to the conversation? Oh, definitely. And you know, in this timeline we're discussing, we're barely into the late 2007, '08. So keep going then. Don't let me interrupt you.

Keep going. I've got another phone call in 10 minutes, but we can keep going for hours. The next two big initiatives were of course Jacob Lund Fisker, who I think started his forum probably in 2010, 2011. I'm not sure exactly when he really came online. And probably 2008, 2009 now that I think about it, because in a couple of years he passed the torch to Mr.

Money Mustache. But Jacob, of course, had learned the extreme frugality approach. You can either save up more money to support your retirement lifestyle or you can drastically cut your expenses. And that was a big step forward. As Jacob has said, it was never about retiring early. It was always about a sustainable lifestyle and minimizing your footprint on the earth.

And that's what made it so easy for him to pass the torch to Mr. Money Mustache. That was early 2011. And I'd say that everything he's taken from Jacob and developed since then has grown a huge following of people that are happy to have somebody who supports their frugal and their green lifestyle aspirations.

And oh, by the way, if you do this for 20 years and do it with more than half of your pay, you can retire early. That's just the icing on top of the cupcake there. Yeah. So something, there's a skill that Pete, I first, I don't remember, I think I originally found Your Money or Your Life was my path into knowing about it.

Because for me, I grew up reading personal finance books about, say, 15% and you'd be rich at 65. And then I read Your Money or Your Life. And that totally just surprised me. And I think that led me to early retirement extreme was kind of my entry into learning more about it.

But I think that the work that Mr. Money Mustache is doing, though, is although he's not as accessible as mainstream, he's a lot more accessible than Jacob was. And his skill with writing, being funny and engaging. And then the thing that I most appreciate, and sometimes I get concerned he's going to cross this line, but that Money Mustache is he steers away from a lot of the technical topics.

So as a financial advisor, I would often struggle to say, "How do I get this concept across to a client?" And I would send him a Money Mustache article. And that Money Mustache article, a lot of times, was funny enough, but straightforward enough that they would read it and then it would make them think.

And they would say, "Oh." And they would start reading around. And because he steered away from the technical topics, he didn't say, I mean, he did a little bit about indexing. But he didn't say, "Here's what you've got to do," which is where it becomes difficult to recommend something to your clients because you have to give it all kinds of caveats.

"Well, this here. Listen to this and this and this, Mr. Client. Here, read this book. But you have to ignore .7, 13, 14, and 67." And that's really tough. That was where it came to, I used to give away Dave Ramsey's books. I would carry them by the box and I'd have to give so many caveats that finally I said, "They're not going to read the book." So I was able to send them his blog articles.

And I've sent dozens and dozens and dozens. And I've had many clients where it's just enough who his writing is the perfect fit for is kind of high income, middle class income, high lifestyle spending. And he makes it sound so easy. Like, "Oh, how crazy for you not to be able to live on $20,000 a year.

What's wrong with you? You're a weak, flabby guy." He makes it sound so easy. And it's so funny, but there's a ring of truth to it. I had a lot of clients come back and say, "Wow, that really helped me. Now let's figure out a plan for me." And so I feel like he's probably done more to advance the cause for the early retirees than many others because it's so accessible for middle income professionals, which is in my mind where you have the easiest go of high income, high lifestyle, a couple of optimizations to the lifestyle, and all of a sudden, high savings.

Well, it's very clear what's valuable to him, what brings value to his life, and it's not spending money. And that helps people figure out what brings value to their own lives and how they can cut their expenses and just spend the money on the things they enjoy. This has been a great podcast conversation.

We should continue it. Yeah, this has been fun. I was just going to... Last question and we're done because you got to get the other phone call. What do you actually do all day? Yeah, what do I do all day? I start the morning, literally every morning, I check the surf forecast to see what I'm going to be doing that day because if the surf is up, I'm going to rearrange my priorities and go find some.

But otherwise, I get up in the morning and I write, I work on an article or a book or a chapter or a post for the blog and I'll work on that for 20, 30 minutes or so. And then the rest of the day is free and I'll usually do some chores in the morning.

We've got home improvement or yard work to do around the house and I enjoy a lot of the reading I do on the internet. I probably keep up with 50 or 60 blogs through an RSS feed and I enjoy catching up on that. I enjoy reading in general. It doesn't have to be personal finance.

I'll read for a couple hours every day. And my spouse and I spend time together, go for walks, exercise, just everything else that everybody else does except I get to do it every day, all day. And if I need to go surfing, I can change the schedule and do what I need to do and catch up later.

Doug, thanks for coming on the show. I really enjoyed having you. Thanks, Joshua. This has been great. Pretty cool, eh? Doug, thanks so much for coming on and for sharing some of the history. I love learning about it and there's more history there than I ever knew about. And what a cool way to build a life.

One of my dreams is that from a young age, we can help more and more people be financially independent from an early age. Now whether or not financial independence is measured from the perspective of never having to work again, I think that's awesome and that's a really great definition.

But even just the attitude of being financially independent and a little bit of money piled up can really make a big difference in people's career choices and to help people make a transition and stop doing mind-numbing work and be able to pursue the things that are of great interest to them.

So, very cool. Doug, thanks so much for coming on. I hope you enjoyed this show. If this was your first time listening to the show, we'd be thrilled. We're here every day, Monday through Friday, with in-depth, hardcore financial planning talk, lots of great interviews like this, a wide range of subjects.

So make sure you come by and subscribe. You can subscribe on iTunes or on Stitcher. Hopefully within a couple of weeks, I'm working on an app which will work on every device and you'll be able to subscribe directly on the application and bypass some of the problems that some of the external applications have.

If you would like to connect with me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com is my email address. You can find me on Twitter @radicalpf, Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Let's read another review on our way out, a short iTunes review. This one comes in from Cal Maniac. Cal says, "All steak, no sizzle. Joshua is genuine, intelligent, and an excellent communicator.

His insights and perspectives are truly outstanding. He is data-driven, skeptical, and thinking about the big picture, yet very much down to earth. No gimmicks or other typical flashy financial BS. In one word, this podcast is brilliant." Cal, thank you so much. Thank you. That means the world to me.

I really appreciate it. Thank you to each one of you who has left me a review on iTunes or on Stitcher. I appreciate each and every one of those. They help the show rankings from time to time for help to other people find us as we go on. If you've enjoyed this show, I'd be thrilled if you would consider joining the Irregulars.

That's the membership support program which is how I've designed to support this show. Details can be found at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/membership. Have a great day, everybody. 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.