Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck family fun giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Today on Radical Personal Finance, I bring you a story.

This is an interview with Mike and Lauren, YouTube personalities and personal finance experts from Mikeandlauren.com. They have a very cool story and it's worth your attention because they are cutting loose from the workforce at the age of 30 without ever really making a ton of money. They didn't make a big business and sell it.

They never made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Just a normal couple who have followed their plan and are retiring at the age of 30. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is a fun one.

This is an inspirational and an educational version of the show. Mike and Lauren do a really, really great job of sharing some of their ideas and some of their content on our YouTube channel. And I was able to connect with them at FinCon 2015. Get a few more details, which I can now bring to you.

One of the things I do want to do is provide you with other ideas and opportunities. I've got this weird idea that the world is a big place and that the pie is as big as we make it and there's not really any competition. And sometimes different people resonate with different formats.

So for example, those of you who listen to this show consistently, you guys resonate with a podcast format. There are people who just flat out are not going to take the time to sit and listen to a long format podcast. But they might listen to a short clip of a podcast.

So there are podcasts that I think could do a good job there. Some people don't want to listen to audio. They just want to read because that's a much more efficient use of their time. So there are great blogs. There are great books. Some people like YouTube videos. And there's a real dearth of content online in the personal finance YouTube space.

Hint, hint, hint. This is an opportunity for some of you who might be able to produce interesting and useful content there. I very much see the opportunity. I very much personally would like to capitalize on the opportunity. But it is beyond my core skill set. I've tried to figure out how do I do this because I see the opportunity and it's out there.

So Mike and Lauren, however, are one of the people who are involved in the YouTube space and who are doing a good job of integrating the principles of personal finance, the principles of early retirement, the approach, and also doing it and sharing it with other people. They have a very cool story.

Now, this interview was recorded in – what was it? August, so a few months ago now at FinCon 2015. But since that time, there's actually been some exciting changes in their life which I will announce at the end of the interview. It's worth staying tuned for some of the details that they have to share with us and quick updates since the time of recording.

Before I play the interview for you, two sponsors for today's show. I want to share with you some information about them. Sponsor number one is Jay Fleischman, host of the Student Loan Show. Jay is a really great guy. He is a student loan attorney and a bankruptcy attorney and he is an expert at how you can pay less money on your student loans.

That's kind of a big deal because anywhere we can cut expenses is important and Jay will help you pay less money on your student loans. The coolest thing for you, the listening audience, is he offers a consulting package where he will share with you and do a review of your student loans for you.

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Paladin is an excellent service where they go through and they vet financial advisors before the fact and present you with a customized tailored list so that you can reach out to a financial advisor, interview them to see if they will be able to serve you and work with you and give you some really great options that are pre-vetted for you.

For details on that program, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin, radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin. And now, here is the interview with Mike and Lauren. Mike and Lauren, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you for having us. We're excited to be here. So, we're going to talk today about financial independence and a little bit about your story.

You guys are awesome YouTube creators and there's not many people in the YouTube financial independence space, right? There is not. No, there's five or six of us. Do you know anyone else who's actually doing it? Like who are some of the other channels that are actually talking about the subject?

Yes, there's Letitia Stiles at Young Finances. What's your name? Lauren Bolling. Okay, yeah. Lauren and LB in the Money Tree. Yes. There's two or three others. I'm trying to think. Not off the top of my head, I can't think of anybody. Yes, there are quite a few. Awesome. So, let's talk with your story surrounding financial independence.

When did you guys get turned on to this idea of saving your way to financial freedom? This was all Mike. Yeah, so it started when I was about 17 or 18. I was listening in the car with my dad to a Dave Ramsey show and he was telling the story of the young investor who started at 19 and stopped at age 26 and the other investor started at 26.

And for the rest of his life, the younger investor ended up with more. That magic of compound interest for me was really eye-opening. And that was not our eye-opener financial independence necessarily, but just personal finance in general. It was a whole new world to me. I started reading every blog I could.

I found J.D. Roth back in the day, Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme. Read up on that. And then it wasn't until a couple years ago that we really saw -- we had always saved about 50% of our income just naturally for real people, so that was just how it started.

And then we were looking at the numbers and we realized, "Hey, if we just bump up our savings rate just a little bit, we could achieve financial independence at a very young age." And so we went for it and that's where we're at now. Lauren, you say it was all Mike.

What was your philosophy around money? Well now, it was all Mike because I never would have found it on my own. But I've known Mike, we're high school sweethearts, so I've always kind of heard the ideas from him. And so I learned these things sort of with him. And so I like to say that I was usually a few steps behind him, that I would eventually get on board, but he kind of had to give me some time to warm up to the idea.

So again, with the, "We could do this in a few years, let's just save 75% of our income." And I thought, "Really? We're going to do that?" And then, you know, after a few days I thought, "Okay, let's try it, see what happens. What is the worst that we could do?

Save some extra money and then say, 'Eh, it's not really for us.'" Right, right. When, for you Mike, when was your eyes open to financial independence? Because there's a huge chasm between, "Oh, save 15%," Dave Ramsey, "Save 15% of your income for retirement and then go on down the baby steps," versus Jacob, early retirement extreme, save 75% of your income.

How were your eyes opened? And it was Mr. Money Mustache that, yeah, because Jacob, you know, living on $7,000 a year, I could honestly- Your wife loves to hear that idea. She did not. Those were one of the ideas that, that was one of the ideas she couldn't warm up to because I love the idea of living in an RV.

I love the idea. In my head, we've never actually done it. So who knows if I would actually love that, but so maybe she's balancing us out. But when Mr. Money Mustache showed his budget and he's not, you know, living in, you know, scarcity, that was really an eye opener that he's living like we're living now.

That's something we could do. Sounds exactly like my relationship with my wife. I would be, I'm all over the $7,000 a year in an RV and she's a little more practical than that. So in between there, there's the, you know, $25,000, $30,000 a year budget that's, you know, a little more reasonable.

So explain your current plan of financial independence and articulate the details for those who aren't familiar with the concept. Okay. So for us, financial independence, because that word financial independence is pretty set in stone, but retirement kind of has, you know, a variable definition. For us, financial independence is when all of our basic living expenses are covered and maybe not necessarily all the luxury we'd want in our life, but we have a roof over our head, food on the table and, you know, doing the things that we want to do.

And for us, that number is saving around $420,000. And with the 4% rule, that would give us around $17,000 a year, I think is $1,700 or something. And that is the budget that we set up. And so if we achieve that savings, then our basic living expenses would be covered.

And then after that, any work that we take on, whether it be just for hobbies or, you know, just general, just work that would go to more luxury in our life. And so currently we are just about halfway to that point. So we started about a year and a half ago.

We have a year and a half or two left. How old am I? I'm 28, right? So we're three years. Oh, we're way ahead. The goal is 30? You're going to do it by 30? By my 31st birthday. Awesome. So it would be at 30, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So you actually live on $17,000 a year now?

That's... so no. Yes and no. It's pretty close. We spend right now for our core expenses, almost just about that. We're really spending more like $20,000 or $25,000. But we have our YouTube channel that we're spending, you know, a few hundred dollars a month on. We're doing... We're traveling a lot.

We know we're leaving for Norway as soon as we get back from FinCon. Awesome. Yeah. So the things that are important to us, we're still spending on and... We're finding ways to make up that extra money that we're spending. And our YouTube channel. Yes. YouTube is eventually growing into that.

And then we, you know, let's sell some stuff on Craigslist because we need to make up for this gap. And we got some sponsorships recently, so that's helping that also. So we're not just kind of waiting or pushing back the timeline. There's a real tendency for me to want to stick to that real strict budget just for the people online.

But I'm like, this is real life. Let's, you know, if it happens, it happens. Like, this is what we're going for. But we're not going to... We're going to Norway with eight of our friends. So we're not going to like miss out on that trip just so for our readers, it's like cut and dry, line in the sand, no more than $17,000 a year.

But how do you actually do that living in Florida? Because you don't live in Mississippi. You live in Florida. Yeah. That's a pretty hardcore... Even $20,000 a year, do you own the house? And you're saying, well, we don't pay any rent. So that's how we do it? Like Money Mustache does?

Well, we... No, we actually love creative housing situations. And for both transportation and housing, we've done really well creatively for our entire marriage, spending about half of the national average. For whatever reason, that's just what it's always ended up. When we were in New York City, we actually lived in New York City for three years.

Wow. Yeah. And so the average rent in our area was, I think it was $3,000 a month for... We were midtown east and just searching on Craigslist and found a lady that was renting her studio apartment. So it was 296 square feet. So it wasn't anything huge, but we paid $1,400 a month.

So we're literally half the average for that area. And we're happy with it. We loved it. It was great. I really miss it a lot. We were in an excellent area. And for our housing situation now, I actually work something out with work because I work for a church.

And so there's a tiny house on the property at 600 square feet. And so that we have worked in at rent for 650, which in our area is about half of what national or half of the average rate for rents in our area. And for transportation, we've always just ended up making money on cars because I love finding deals.

Right. So I will find a good deal on a car and then we'll drive it for a little while and then sell it for either what we paid or sometimes a profit. Wow. Yeah. Here's the comparison between New York City and Florida, though. My wife and I, when we married for our first year, we lived in a 234 square foot studio apartment.

So we beat you. Excellent. You guys are wasteful spendthrift. What's wrong with you paying for the extra 30? I had a closet. We shouldn't have gone for the closet. Seriously. And a little studio in downtown West Palm Beach. And we paid $500 a month for that. So $500 versus $1,400 is a good comparison in New York City.

But that is for two people in New York City rent. That's the way to do it. Right. How do you find deals like that? Craigslist. Honestly, I'd love to say it was it would be something more creative than that. But it's just about when we want something, we start looking at Craigslist and we're refreshing every 15 minutes to an hour.

And when I know we wanted a Prius as our car, I set up notifications and you have to be the first person to call and you have to go immediately no matter what you're doing during the day. You have to drop it. And there's the same thing with the apartment.

Lauren never saw it before we rented it. It went up. I called. We rented it. That was it. Wow. How do you set up notifications on Craigslist? We have an app. It's called Craigslist Pro or Craigslist Plus. And it'll send you text updates for your search queries or if something gets posted to a category.

That's a useful tool because I've looked in the past to try to figure that out and I haven't been able to find that. So Craigslist Pro. Yeah, exactly. I think it's $2 in the App Store. So what do you actually do for work? I work for a church. And so it's kind of the Florida megachurch style.

And so I do all the lighting, sound, and camera stuff. So I do production. And that's how we kind of got into the YouTube thing is I was familiar with cameras and things like that. I actually work for a jewelry store, which is what brought us to New York.

I went to the Gemological Institute of America. So I am a gemologist, which is kind of random. And so I work for a really cool family-owned jewelry store at home. So the YouTube thing is one of the themes that I wanted to talk to you about. This seems to be, for those who watch YouTube, like the perfect thing.

After all, all you need to do is just grab a camera, start filming your life with you walking around with your selfie stick, toss it on the Internet, and you make millions of dollars, right? After all, the Shaytards did it. Exactly. Instantly famous. What are the realities of building a business and earning money on a YouTube channel?

The reality is it's a lot of work for not a lot of money. We currently spend about 100 hours a month on our two videos per week that we put out. And for advertising, last month we made $400. So that works out to about half minimum wage. You would definitely be better off delivering pizzas if you're getting into it for the money.

However, once you have an audience built, then you can follow traditional blog methods of monetizing with digital products and sponsorships. And we've actually just had recent success with sponsorships with two national brands. And I think we can say in progressive insurance and H&R Block. And they paid us to make content for their websites.

So that was really cool because that was a win-win-win. Our fans get extra content if they want it. The brand gets original content and we get paid. And for those, we were paid over $1,000 a video. So that's definitely something more lucrative once you have an audience established. This started as a hobby though, right?

You posted videos of your honeymoon. Our backpacking trip. Yeah. And so it was just sort of a way for friends and family to follow our trip. It was, there was no intention of ever promoting it or having more people watch it. It was just so that we could say, "Hey, we went to Europe and this is what we did." Right.

And the, uh... Crap, what was I going to say? I don't know. Hobby. Started as a hobby. Oh, yes. Thank you. Perfect. Yes. So we love making videos. It's a hobby that we have. And we would definitely make YouTube videos, even if there was no money involved. Albeit, we would not be making two videos a week.

That's a lot of work. But if you don't love it, I definitely wouldn't recommend getting into it. There's easier ways to do it. So with regard to your financial independence plan, when you reach that, so what percentage of your income do you save now? We shoot for 75%. Realistically, we're looking in the 65 to 70%.

Okay. And so you're targeting a couple, three more years. Do you have any idea of what you'll do at that point in time? That's the thing. Back to creative housing. Yes. Well, we get a lot of questions. Well, I don't want to retire early. I don't ever want to stop working.

And we don't want to stop working. We just want to pick and choose what we do and when we want to do it. So we can do the things that we love and when we want to. And our plan right now, at least, after we achieve financial independence, is to live on a sailboat and do some sailing around the world, which comes back to that creative housing.

What are we going to do when we only have $1,700 a month? Or I'm sorry, $1,400, $1,500 a month coming in. That's a realistic budget for sailing the world on a sailboat in a small space. If you talk to a financial advisor, any mainstream financial advisor, and also, even if you start posting in some early retirement forum, and you tell them, "All right, we're 30 years old and you're similar age," right, Lauren?

I'm actually a year and a half younger. Okay, so a little younger. We're about 30. And our plan is to save $428,000. And we're going to live on under $2,000 a month for the rest of our life. The response will be, at the minimum, you're naive. Right. And at the more normal, you're stupid.

Yep. What do you have to say to those critics? Well, what we have to say first is that we don't plan on living on just $1,400 a month or less. We plan on pursuing our hobbies. So right now, I'm really into woodworking, building things, making things. And we can't-- and our YouTube channel is a hobby.

And inevitably, we're going to be making a lot more money than just our financial independence budget from our hobbies. And if we're not, we'll have to go back to work. That's what I love to say to those criticisms is, "What's the worst case scenario?" In your wildest dreams, our plan doesn't work out.

What's the-- we go back to work like everybody else? Right, right. And we have half a million dollars in the bank? How is that a bad, worst case scenario? So I've always said this in the comments of our blog to that kind of criticism. If we're not millionaires by the time we're 40, then we did something wrong.

Because we're going to be making money, and we're not going to need that $1,400 a month. That-- and that's just going to compound and build on itself. And money is not going to be an issue. I don't know how to-- there's just a gut feeling. I can tell, like-- Right, right.

It's not going to be a problem. Well, also, if you just consider-- and I think Jacob Lundfisker, early retirement extreme, always made this point very well, especially in his book, which has been a strong recommendation on this show. The type of person who's able to, number one, build financial independence for themselves, and number two, live a frugal lifestyle, is an extremely well-rounded person.

Where if you wanted to get a job, you're not-- you don't have a resume that simply says, "Oh, I did this one job in this one career." You have a resume that says, "I have skills in dozens of areas." And you can take your pick of the housing market.

And with your many skills, you are much more resilient, personally, to be able to find all kinds of new ways of earning money. Exactly. And much more adaptable to any situation. If we're having trouble finding work, we already have experience cutting back on our budget. So, exactly what you said.

We're building skills in retirement or in financial independence that, if we should have to go back to work, we're building those skills to go back to work. There's somebody who's close to me in my life, and this person has an amazing story where they spent years working as a truck driver.

And they got to their middle age, and as a truck driver, they didn't have much money, working for a large beverage company. But they said, "I'm done." And they quit. And they switched. And instead of working on truck driving, they started to build a real estate business. So, they were very handy.

He was very handy with his hands and was able to work and work on houses. Well, he didn't have much money, but he bootstrapped his way into the first couple of houses, buying them for cash, never borrowed money on these properties, but finding the cheap properties, fixing them up, flipped a couple here and there, and fixed others up, kept some as rentals.

Well, fast forward, they hit financial independence. Well, number one, in many ways, he was job independent from the beginning, because he just said, "That's it. I'm done." He filled in the income gaps with all of these crazy little things, making money on all these just weird things, finding a lawnmower here, and some guy, "Hey, I'll give you 20 bucks for the broken ticket home.

Fix it. Flip it on Craigslist during the grass season for $180." You just make $100 here, a couple hundred dollars there, and it was due to his physical skills. I mean, it's like he makes money on everything, but he doesn't make a lot of money on anything. It's just a lot of little things with this diversity of skills.

Fast forward, they're financially independent eight or nine years later with a number less than 10, but more than five rental houses that provide for them, and he still makes money on everything, just flipping things. And it's something that I believe in what you do and what you show on- You're describing our plan for financial independence right now.

Because on your show, you're demonstrating even you've got this weird financial independence and DIY thing. Exactly. And you're building a diversity of skills that are applicable to, number one, the needs of life. "Hey, my wife needs a jewelry cabinet, so I'm going to make one." And also, those skills have value in the marketplace.

"I'm going to make some custom pieces and sell a few custom pieces here and there." Exactly. For a friend, we built an Apple Watch charging station, and we were just flooded with emails asking for people to purchase them. And of course, we should build those and sell them. That makes the most sense.

But it's not what I want to do with my time right now. We're happy with making videos. So exactly as you said, I don't know where the money is going to come from, but I know if we can cover our basic living expenses, the money is going to come for the luxury from other sources, just as you described.

And if it doesn't, then our plan didn't work. I mean, at least we have food on our table and a shelter and a roof over our head. Exactly. How much do you think you could sell those watch stands for if you were going to put them on Etsy or whatever?

Probably $200 or $300, I would think. That'd be my guess. And in my mind, this is one of the values. I encourage all of my listeners to start a blog, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, do something to start to establish a presence. Because if you are just a skillful woodworker making cool stands, but you don't have an outlet for that, no one's going to find that.

On the other hand, I don't know if you're a skillful woodworker or you're a mediocre woodworker, but if you're a woodworker and you have a platform, then you can make one watch stand as a project with a friend, and all of a sudden you've got a business. Exactly. We've made a video exactly about that, that with an audience, it's unfair.

Like, because we're trying to teach this financial independence, like this is what we're doing. You could do it too, except that a big part of our plan is we have an audience to utilize and kind of leverage anything we want to do in the future. We'll inevitably make money with an audience.

But anybody can do this. Everybody can't do it with a big YouTube channel, but anybody can do it if they start to learn and understand a little bit of marketing ideas. One of the backup backup backup backup plans, I keep lists of things. Okay, Joshua, if you go broke and you got to start over again, what are you going to do?

Or if this business fails, what do you do? So I keep lists of these things. But one of the simple ones that I have is, believe it or not, I would enjoy raising chickens and selling free-range pastured poultry. So I've talked to other people who have done this, and it's one of these silly little things where you start very small and you sell your birds before you even get them simply through basically Facebook.

And if you start little and you start advertising to people and you say, "Okay, I'm going to do 100 birds," and you go around all your friends, "Here's the plan. I'm going to do pastured poultry." You give them the price, blah, blah, blah. You can sell all your birds before you get them based upon marketing through Facebook.

And then you sell them, you get referrals, more customers, and you build slowly. So anybody can do something today. The tools are so easy. It's not necessarily YouTube. Exactly. Yeah. And it's funny you say poultry because we had chickens ourselves. We had to give them to friends. We were having troubles with predators.

But we want to start that up again. We want to have our own poultry and eggs. So very funny you say that. You mentioned that specifically because we've thought about that. Right, right. And this is how society in many ways used to be, right? You would market to your friends and neighbors, but in a local place with your sign, with your business.

Everybody knew what little cottage business you had. Then we've gone into a system of employment where everybody just works at, "Okay, I do this job and I don't talk to people." But now there's almost a new phase. And as the job market continues to shrink, as companies continue to cut costs, many more people need something.

And if you've got something built up that's a thousand bucks a month, and you know, "I could scale this up," then in many ways you become or at least start to feel more confident. You either become invincible or you start to feel more confident because however much the church is paying you, you can start making Apple watch stands and sell them on Etsy and replace it in an instant if you wanted to.

Exactly. And it's something that I wish we could do a better job of explaining that to our audience because what you just put into words is what kind of our channel is about. Yeah, you've got three minutes and 15 seconds. Exactly. We've got three minutes and 15 seconds. Exactly.

So that's why our channel, we do not do a great job of building it as fast as possible because if we were going to build it as fast as possible, it wouldn't be named Mike and Lauren because what does that mean? It wouldn't be about finance, DIY, travel, and woodworking because you would pick one niche and stick with it.

But the idea is that we're building all these skills and any one outlet, just as you described, could at any point replace our income. So the next one, which when people say you're naive, and I know you have some perspectives on it, so I'm interested in hearing honestly, kids, how do they impact financial independence?

Well, it's actually interesting that you bring that up because I am pregnant right now. Congratulations. So we have a boy that we're expecting in March. So we're very excited about that. And we've decided that I'm not going back to work after that. So that kind of should be interesting.

Yeah. So it's funny that just as, was it the same week or two days after we found out she was pregnant is when we started getting sponsorships for our channel. And it was kind of like, okay, this is a weird timing that, okay, this is going to be probably replacing her income.

And if her being home, it's something she can do from home, we can replace her income, hopefully from our channel with digital products and sponsorships and that kind of thing. And now back to the, we're doing a bad job of building our channel. If we were just stuck to one thing, now it's going to be very baby related.

So we have a whole new section of our channel and a whole new audience that will hopefully build. Are already saying how they're excited to see baby on a budget videos. And then that that will be for the people who are already subscribers and then bring in so many others and how we're specifically kind of going to combat that, that thing to our budget, the baby it's, it's getting creative about everything.

So our house right now is 600 square feet, but there's a laundry room in the back. So instead of moving to a bigger house, we're going to convert that room for around $500 or so just put a drywall and and do that. And then, you know, the sailing thing once we retire or financial independence is, is going to be a very similar, you know, budget.

Our budget is not going to increase in the traditional ways. You know, the figures $242,000, I think the average child is seven or 30% of that is housing. Well, we're very creative with our housing situation. 20% or 16% is transportation because everyone goes out and buys a new SUV.

And so we just don't do that. And based on people we've talked to, we're expecting it to add a few hundred dollars a month to our budget. We're not that naive to think that, oh, everything's going to stay the same. But it's, we can apply everything we've done in our life up to this point to the baby and hopefully be creative with how we make money and how we save money.

Just call my wife and talk to her. She is the wizard in this area. I think for two kids, one two-year-old and one three-month-old, I think she's bought, I think, two outfits total because they were things that she really loved and she wanted, she felt like she just wanted to buy an outfit.

And that's what I've started reading is the asking for hand-me-downs because a lot of people think, oh, they're having a baby. They're going to want everything new. And of course, that's not us in general. So I've already started asking, oh, you have something? Can I get this? And so it's so great.

We've already, I've started storing things that we've received for free. So I think that's really interesting. One of the secrets that she uses is, number one, we never say no to when somebody gets to give something because then when people are picky, what happens is people often stop offering you stuff.

If you say yes, but you clarify that, okay, if I don't want this, I'll go ahead and dispose of it and move it down the stream for you. Then people are happy to give you things. And then once you get a reputation as a receiver, then people are willing to give you things.

So the first, when we bought our house, which is on the market right now, thinking just to make sure I'm right, the entire time we lived there, we didn't buy a single piece of furniture. The entire thing was furnished with free furniture. Now, it wouldn't have been on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens.

And we had been planning to go ahead and, okay, we're going to go ahead and start buying some furniture. But we lived there for over two years, three years, and we didn't buy a stick of furniture. We haven't bought a single thing of baby clothes. We haven't bought a single, we never bought the swing, never bought anything.

Because when you bring in together, number one, the blessings of a baby shower for those few things that are really nice that you need. And number two, everybody is trying to get rid of kid stuff. Because in our society, there's such a waste stream of kid stuff. Any parent knows that their house is just bursting at the seams and parents love it.

And then the key is organization. So we have bins, she's got bins laid out, boys clothes, these months, girls clothes these months. And if you stay just a little bit ahead, you got to be thinking ahead, just like with everything in finance. If you think just a little bit ahead, you can be prepared.

So we're going to move up the up sizes, put this batch away and bring on the next one. I can't tell you how happy we are to hear that because we also just like it, we've never paid for a piece of furniture in our entire marriage. And our plan is the same.

We don't plan on paying anything for baby clothes. Just because as you said, there's this endless stream of everybody just... People wanting to get rid of things, so why not take them? And so that was our plan. And it's nice to hear that that might actually work out. Yeah, I've done some shows on it.

But even we have, most people are not interested in frugality. But when people are, we have a few things like, for example, my wife is a genius at cloth diapers. We are very interested in that. All right, so we can give you the speech off the air. But you know, something as simple as cloth diapers, you take, it does require an upfront cost.

But even that, the average cloth diaper... So here's something that I think the audience will also enjoy and also you'll personally enjoy. Have you researched the cloth diaper marketplace? Yes. It is stunning. I never would have guessed that the used diaper marketplace... And Lauren is shaking her head. It's amazing, right?

I know. It's nuts. The used diaper marketplace. You never would have thought until you started looking into it. It's one of the strongest secondary markets I've ever seen in my life. The depreciation on cloth diapers is like 30%. It's amazing. It's nuts. So we started looking at this and it blew my mind that, you know, here you have, you know, cars depreciate just like that.

And, you know, a couple of years of use on a car and you're at 40% of its original value, it seems like, especially some cars. Cloth diapers, a couple of years of putting baby poop in them every day. These things are still 70% of their value. Right. But she learned things.

So she bought a couple and some people gave them as gifts. But then she went out and she went on FreeCycle and asked for diapers. And what happens is the elastic gets stretched out and they're bad. And so she would get all these diapers where the elastic was just stretched out, get some elastic and replace the elastic.

So her cost, she's got probably almost 100 diapers, I would guess, of different sizes. Her average cost, I made her keep track of it just so she could tell me, it was like $3.10 a diaper or something like that. Which when you buy these things, $20 to $30 is new.

But you take $3.10 a diaper, it makes all the difference in the world because you take away this $50 to $80 monthly expense that many parents face with disposable diapers and you replace it with the cost of water and the cost of detergent plus that upfront cost. And then knowing they have a remainder value, you can take this cost that for many parents is, I mean, hundreds, maybe over $1,000.

And it turns in if you resell them, if you don't have more kids, you resell them and it's amazing. So there's always a way no matter what. But what happens is we're so trained as consumers to automatically think about, I need to go and buy that solution instead of looking for a creative solution.

Exactly. I'm curious, how did you guys handle the birthing costs? Yeah, so we, that depends at different times. We chose, that was one area where we spent a lot of money. We chose to work with a midwife at a birth center. And so those are covered under insurance based upon the costs of the deductible or whatever the insurance plan was.

And so with the first baby, I always had a high deductible health plan and that cost $5,000 with our son because that was my deductible. So we paid $5,000 and birthing centers are not cheap. But that was one area where I would personally, and I think most parents, you're not going to go cheap on the cost of your baby's birth.

Money is not the deciding factor. The health and safety and happiness and experience of mom and baby is number one. But that doesn't mean that you can't plan carefully for the cost and prepare. And so what we spent a lot of time doing was working very hard to avoid the potential of having a C-section because there you go from essentially a $5,000 birthing cost to $35,000 birthing costs under the US medical system.

So there were all kinds of things that we did systematically to prepare for birth and to do everything we could to influence the possibility. There are medical emergencies in which case you can't avoid them. And obviously that's where it's nice to have health insurance and plan ahead for that with a cover.

But you can do all kinds of things to prepare for that and that's how we handled that. Something we're interested in and still need to do our research. So unfortunately we can't talk too much in depth about it, but as an overseas birth, both to kind of shrink those costs a little bit, but also give our son the gift of dual citizenship.

>> Right. >> Particularly, I mean we would love to have it. >> An anchor baby. >> Yeah, an anchor baby. Exactly. Exactly. We'd love to have it in the European Union, but that's really difficult to do. They're very strict about that. So we were looking at that as possibly in the South America or something like that.

I was just curious if you had any. >> No, I don't have any insight on that. I know that Patrick Schulte from Bumfuzzle wrote about that on his, because they had come back from their boating trip and then they were pregnant with their older daughter and they went to Mexico.

>> Mexico, yeah. >> And they wound up having a C-section delivery with both of their kids. But the total cost, just paying cash, was a few thousand dollars, if memory is right, three to four thousand dollars in Mexico. >> Yeah. >> So that could be something worth considering. I want to talk practically for a couple minutes about how you actually do YouTube and how do you integrate frugality with YouTube?

Are you guys frugal with everything else, but with YouTube you go out and you buy the latest, greatest gear and you've got thousands and thousands of dollars of gear? Is this your weakness? >> We do have thousands of dollars of gear, but like everything, there's always deals to be had.

The one thing that we did spend on was our camera, and that's the Canon 70D. And it's a DSLR and it's unique to every other camera, particularly DSLRs, because of the autofocus. So doing travel and stuff like that, we really wanted that. I would say we have around four thousand dollars in equipment, but it's not necessary.

If it's something you're interested in, the cell phone that you have takes 1080p video, but the audio is not there. So we highly recommend doing some sort of external audio or even like a smart lav microphone to make sure you get good audio. And as a podcaster, I'm sure you understand the importance of good audio.

And we would say that on YouTube, good audio is even more important than quality video. We actually did a video comparison about that. But so you can do it really well for $1,500 or less. You can do it pretty good for $500 or less. And then you can do it with the cell phone in your pocket if you're just getting started.

And most people wouldn't know the difference, honestly. There's a YouTube video creators channel named DSLR Guide, and it's a young man in England, I believe. And what I admire about him is he demonstrates in his videos the impact of skill versus money. And he did a video demonstrating, he did the whole thing shot on a cell phone camera, and he showed the impact of skill with lighting to create a good looking product, sound and all of that just with a cell phone camera.

And watching that, somebody with the latest, greatest equipment, but none of the skill could not duplicate that with a $70,000 camera. So as with many things, start with skill and practice skill first before buying gear. Yep. We would definitely invest, before investing in a camera, we invest in a good microphone and good lighting.

And honestly, if you don't even want to invest in lighting, daylight is a wonderful source of light for video. How do you do the editing process? Do both of you work on it? Yeah, we both work on it. We use Adobe Premiere to do the editing. And usually what we'll do is I start on all the rough cuts and get it down to the three and a half minutes, three and a half to five minutes is what we aim for.

And then Mike will come in after that and kind of bump everything down a little bit, add the music and do some graphics for it. Have people hired you to do other video productions for them? Yeah, that's recently. Other than sponsors? Um, actually, not really. Mike has done some at work, which is kind of how it started.

But other than that, no, no, not really. So the reason I'm pointing this out is the sponsor stories are cool. And you shared in your presentation here that I mean, you made quite a bit of money on those deals, which is awesome. But again, skills. So if somebody is trying to build a video business as their sole source of income, that's a challenging business to start and to scale.

But if you're building a hobby, making YouTube videos, you may not ever get a million subscribers, but your friends and your acquaintances, and as you share them on Facebook, will say, "Oh, so and so does video and they need some videos made for the company." And they'll say, "Can you do this?" And $1,000 here, $2,000 there revolutionizes the financial independence plan.

Absolutely. And if there's three areas with the skills that we have now, we could absolutely get into doing custom promotional for companies. We could do real estate is a huge thing. The multi-million dollar houses, particularly in Florida, agents are looking for high quality video of that. And then the wedding business, if you tack the word wedding onto anything, it immediately becomes a $3,000 to $5,000 product.

Did you have an expensive wedding? Did you have a frugal wedding? We were pretty frugal. My grandma did the cooking, and we're very lucky that the church that Mike works for, and that's how we met. We met at youth group at church, and so we've been there forever. It seats how many people?

1,200. And so we didn't have to scale anything back, and where we had the reception was kind of open. So we had a really big wedding, but it wasn't that expensive. You know how much we spent? I think it was under $10,000, wasn't it? It was. So it wasn't on the really frugal scale, but it wasn't $28,000 either.

Do your friends get you? Yes. Surprisingly, yes. We're very lucky with the group of friends that we've had, that we've grown up with. Mike and I have had the same friends for 15 years. And so sometimes they'll give us a hard time, and sometimes it's a running joke. We're always at the butt of a joke, but they at least get it.

Have any of them started to follow your path? Actually, we're seeing a lot of our younger friends very interested in what we're doing, which is really, really cool to see. Just wanting to sit down, and they want to set up their Vanguard accounts and get started. And so just being able to help them do that has been really, really cool.

Yeah. Tell me about, and just a couple questions, and then we'll wrap up here. But with the sailing, are you sure that you're going to like that? No. No. We could hate it. How do you intend to test that? Well, that's where we're very lucky being in Florida. We live 10 minutes away from the water.

And so we can kind of start it out by finding a good deal on a boat, going out, see if we like it there. And we can head down to the Caribbean if we feel comfortable at some point, and kind of test the waters and see how it goes.

Yeah. We actually own a sailboat, believe it or not. It's a 16-foot Hobie Cat that we've never taken out. Well, Mike has once, but he hadn't taken any lessons, and it kind of pushed him back into the public beach. We ended up into the public beach at Siesta Key.

My friend and I had to get out and walk it back down the beach, and the lifeguards were screaming at us on the megaphones, "Get off the beach." I don't know how to get off the beach. I have no idea how. I told him we need lessons, and then we'll go from there.

Right. So that's an example of Hobie Cats can cost $2,000 or $3,000. I happened to find one that needed some repairs for $800. And so, yes, we've never taken it out, but at any point, we can sell it for a profit. And it's the same thing if we get a boat, I plan on restoring it.

And if we don't like it, we'll sell it for a profit. And that's kind of the theme of everything we do, is find a way to do what you love doing and not lose money or make money doing it. The final theme that I wanted to explore for you a moment is back to marriage.

The situation of one spouse starting to read Mr. Money Mustache or Early Retirement Extreme and getting all just fired up about, "Look, there's all these opportunities." And the other spouse is caught in, not caught, excuse me, is just simply in the normal lifestyle, not thinking about that. It's weird in our culture.

And so this can often bring a little bit of tension in relationships where you get all fired up, "Look, look, let's do this." And many couples struggle with that. Lauren, do you have any thoughts on things that Mike did well in talking with you or things that he did poorly or how it often seems to be husbands that do this, although I'm sure it's wives, how a husband can effectively communicate with a wife to share a vision?

This is something that we've discussed a lot. We've actually talked about making a video or even a series about it, about how to get your spouse on board. And I just, I think he always gave me the opportunity to, like I said, I often need to warm up to things and he never pushed me into it like, "Oh, we're starting this today." Or he would say, "Why don't you read some of these articles?" Or even he'd point me towards Mrs.

Money Mustache's post, which was nice to see the woman's perspective and see what she had to say. And so I think that he just let me warm up to the idea versus, "This is what we're doing and I've got it planned and you don't have a say." Do you have any comments, Mike?

Yeah. This is a really hard question to answer because you're talking about people who have had a relationship for, could be 10, 20 years, and then someone has their financial awakening. And what if they don't ever get on board? What if they're never warming up to that idea? And I don't have a great answer to that.

And we get comments on our videos all the time. Well, how do I find a woman who, because a lot of times they can tell that I'm the one kind of leading the discussion. And I would say show before you tell. And it would be the only advice that I would have.

That if you're going to adopt a frugal lifestyle, adopt it for your own if the other partner's not on board. And then show them that you're still happy, you're still surviving, you're still thriving with that lifestyle. And then hopefully they warm up to it. And if they don't, I don't know if there's a relationship counseling at that point.

Because money is a big part of relationships. You can't really avoid it. It's, I wish I had better news, some bubbly answer to like, "Oh, it's all a bing, bong, boom, one, two, three, you do this." And then everybody's happy. Yeah, I would say show before you tell. Final words of advice.

If somebody is listening and for the first time in their life, they're saying, "Wow, I never even knew that was possible." What advice would you give them to build a financial, to just start down this path? I would say first start reading, start doing research, and then just try it.

Because again, what is the worst that can happen? You end up saving some money and you realize that that extreme way isn't quite for you. Then you can scale things back a bit. But just do it. If you're considering it, why not try it? And I would say question everything.

And that's, we have potentially one of the ebooks that we want to write is question everything you know about money. Because it seems like everything we're taught is almost completely backwards. That car payments are a part of life. Well, they're not. A house is an investment. Sometimes, not always, you have to go out and buy the latest and greatest to be happy.

Well, that's not true. And if you just at least allow yourself to question everything that you've been taught, then you can form your own opinion about it and maybe go in a different direction. And if you form your own opinion and it's in line with society and the culture of today, then great.

But at least give yourself a shot at a different way of looking at things. If you question it and think about it, you can often reframe the decision. And a lot of people look at making a certain decision, making a frugal decision as, well, that's worse than the less frugal decision.

But if you change your frame of reference a little bit, my wife and I, we have a $5,000 minivan. I don't know what it's worth now. But to me, I don't want a new minivan because we love to go to the beach. We've got two big dogs and we've got two kids.

And I love, I want a van that's filled with love and just joy. So when we go to the beach, I don't want to be saying, "Oh, wash your feet up. No, dogs get down." It's like, no, I'd rather have fur all over the car and just be dirty and salty and wet.

And okay, so the seat got wet. Big deal. I don't want to be fussing at my kids about the fact that the seat got wet. To me, it's a benefit to have that versus, "Oh, my car is not the fanciest." That's funny that you bring that up because we have our Prius, and it was dinged up when we got it.

And the interior was well-loved and well-worn. And when we had goats, they decided that they wanted to start jumping on our Prius. So you'd look out in the yard and the goats would be on top of the car. But it was sort of a, "Oh, that's fine. It's already densed in it.

It's okay." That's a big deal. That's awesome. And then also, when you create the joy, my wife and I, the best date we ever had was actually Valentine's Day one day. And for whatever reason, I don't remember why, I didn't want to spend much money, but I didn't. So I called her and I was on my way back from something.

And I said, "Okay, get ready. We're going to go out for a date." So she got dressed up for a Valentine's Day date, and I didn't have any reservations or anything, so I wanted to have a picnic. So she got dressed up and we grabbed a couple of bicycles and tossed them in the car.

And we went to the grocery store, and I think I gave us a limit of either $10 or $20. And I said, "Here's our budget for our date." And the whole fun was to go all around the store and try to figure out how could we get something fancy and fun with this very small budget.

And then we took it to the beach and we put out a towel and just ate the food. That was the most memorable thing. Far more memorable than the $250 fancy dinner where everyone else was at with the stuffed out restaurant. So the frugal decision wasn't giving up anything.

It was actually better when you reframed the decision. Exactly. Guys, keep doing what you're doing. I love that you're working on YouTube and it's another medium to reach many people. And some people, some weirdos might listen to my hour and a half shows, but many more people will listen to a three minute video and that can pique their interest.

So tell everyone about your channel, website, all your properties, all the things you have to offer. Yes, you can find us at MikeAndLauren.com. If you want to go straight to YouTube, you can go MikeAndLauren.tv. That'll go straight to our YouTube channel. MikeAndLauren on Twitter, MikeAndLaurenTV on Facebook. And I do want to say that if any of your listeners are bloggers that are interested in getting involved in YouTube, please email us.

We love helping. We want more financial information on YouTube because right now it is just a mess of scams and pyramid schemes. And you look up investing for beginners and literally nine out of the top 10 are all just selling some pyramid scheme product. And we want more content on YouTube that is financial related.

So please email us and we'd love to help you out. The email is hello@MikeAndLauren.com. So I'll go ahead and just record this and I'll probably leave it in the interview for people to do. But let's talk about me with Radical Personal Finance. And you can give me some advice as being down there as far as what you would do.

I've looked at, I couldn't have done YouTube in the past. I don't have any experience with video, any necessarily skill. And I couldn't have compressed the ideas and thoughts that I have into a short version. So I focused on audio, which was the missing piece that I saw in the marketplace.

And that's how I built Radical Personal Finance. I feel at this point, though, that I could articulate my message and some thoughts and some ideas in a much shorter format. And I'd like to start reaching some more people in the video space. But the challenge is I already have such a high workload with my show.

I do the show five days a week. I also am doing some writing. So writing a book, also writing for other publications. And I also have a family and I would like to do video as well. So the question I've faced is how do I do it? I also don't have any computer equipment capable of editing video.

And I have cameras, I have mics, I have all of that stuff. But I don't have the editing equipment. I'm curious. So I've thought about how could I go ahead and start this and should I do this? And my thought has been I could just shoot raw video. And through planning, proper planning of the presentation, using some interesting visual aids with my actual presentation, just do kind of a one-shot thing, no cuts, things like that.

Do you think that's possible and that would save me from having to do all the editing time? Or would you say you got to hire an editor? - Yeah, probably not. I would definitely edit. We even go as far as to edit the breaths out of our videos. If we take a pause or if there's just even a space in between our words, we'll cut that out.

Because people on YouTube just kind of expect it. A lot of the videos you'll see from the top bloggers are just very fast-paced. - Right. - And there are financial videos on YouTube from like a lot of the big corporations have, like Bank of America and have long-form financial videos.

And they seem to do well. So I guess I can't say from experience that long-form one take wouldn't work. Just in our experience, our own personal view time is three and a half minutes, no matter what length we make our video over time. So when we initially, our average retention rate is about 80% or higher per video to our initial subscribers.

And then once it gets put in the suggestion engine and in search, people usually stick around for about three and a half minutes and that's it. And that's been confirmed by a few different channels. So I would say faster and hire the editor over trying to do it in one take.

And that takes a little pressure off for you as well. - Do you think it's, is it the kind of thing that is it even worth pursuing, given that it's not going to be my primary focus, but I see it as more, well, this is a way to develop another platform, another arm to it.

Is it worth doing or should I just stay exclusively focused on what I do best? - I think YouTube is where we're going, honestly. And I thought this back in 2013. And I'm glad that we got involved when we did, even though we were pretty late to the game.

Most of the big channels now started around 2007, 2008. Just that's where all our friends are going. And the younger generation below us, we're behind that. They watch more YouTube than we do. I think it's really accessible to people. I like that there's a face behind the words. And I like the informality of it.

And podcasting is similar, but you can be goofy on YouTube. I would definitely recommend it. And maybe one way you could start would be just filming your podcast and then doing clips from that. If you wanted to do the one take with almost no effort, that's what Dave Ramsey does actually on his channel.

He'll take a call and then he'll just put one call on his YouTube channel. That'd be a great way to start, test the waters and see. - Yeah. Well, see, I had to solve the editing issue. And my library has big fancy Macs that I could go and use.

But at this point, I just really questioned, is this the best use of my time to learn how to edit or do I just need to wait until I'm ready to go ahead and hire an editor to do it? And I haven't answered that question. - For me, and I don't...

For me, it's all in the editing. Like our personalities come through through the editing process. - Right, I agree. - Because when we... If you were to watch our raw footage, it's 22 minutes long. And it's us going like this. No, I missed that. It's us going like this.

And then you see the, it's us going like this part, back to back, cutting out our breath in between the next sentence. And so a lot of our, what you see on YouTube is from the editing process. So I don't think we would ever outsource. Maybe we would. I would outsource the editing process.

I don't know if I would necessarily start there though. Just so you can get an idea of what it takes. And yes, the initial learning curve is pretty steep. I'm not gonna lie. You would have to put in some time to learning how to edit. But we can now edit a video in, you know, under an hour or so.

- Right. - Yeah, it's not too bad. - Which it was a lot more than that to begin with. - Right. - Awesome. Last question. Do you have to get a Mac? - We were Mac people. So we're pretty biased. Although we have the, at work, we have the newest, fanciest Mac you can buy, the 12 core Mac Pro.

- Right. - It still gets caught up in rendering. It can't, it's not. And I have seen Dave Dugdale at learning DSLR video, or it's just learning video now, is a big Windows guy. He's almost tempted me to make the switch over just to see what kind of performance is possible.

Because you have that customization that you can do. - Right. - But as far as ease of use, if you have a Mac with Final Cut Pro, that's gonna be your easiest transition into video, I think. - Awesome. Cool. Thanks guys. - Thank you. - Thanks for having us.

- Now, since the interview was recorded, I told you I would give you an update. Mike and Lauren have released some new information on their YouTube channel that I think you would be interested in. Number one, as they mentioned in the interview, they are expecting a baby. Very interestingly, they are planning on having their baby out of the country in Costa Rica.

This is a form of medical tourism, which will lower the costs of having the baby, but also give the baby some unique options. Go and check out their YouTube channel for information on that. Also, interestingly, having the baby seems to have served as a catalyst in their life. And instead of sitting around and waiting for all of their plan to come to fruition, they are actually using this as a time to change.

And they're using the foundation that they've built with their YouTube channel to actually jump a bit early. And instead of working on their plan of saving up just a certain dollar amount and then jumping, they've built enough of a platform with their YouTube audience that they are in the process of selling many of their things.

They're gonna be moving to Costa Rica. They are buying a large motorhome. They'll be moving into that large motorhome, building a mobile wood shop to hook up and drag around the country behind that. And they're gonna be going on the road, touring the country, filming videos, doing DIY projects with their audience while they travel the country, bringing that content to their YouTube audience, and then making money from their YouTube plans, which funds their life.

And I think that is awesome. Once they announced that, I wrote them an email and I said, "By the way, guys, I'm so glad that you are jumping ship." Because what happens is there's this kind of purist mentality, this idea that, "Well, I've got to tell everyone that they can build financial independence just by working at their job, and so therefore I can't quit." Hey, if you're in a position to quit and you've got a business that you can flip to, do that.

That's gonna be a tremendously valuable thing for you. And I encourage all of you in my listening audience, recognize what's going on and recognize the themes. Go and watch their videos and then perhaps you'll be able to see these themes. Recognize the theme. The process is get control of finances, build assets.

They're working towards that big lump sum number and along the way, an opportunity comes along. And that opportunity in their case is to build a business, doing something that they like to do, and that gives them the mobile freedom and the lifestyle. Using the skills that they have developed, starting by doing them for free, the skills, the equipment while they built it up, and now it will be their full-time deal.

And they don't need millions of dollars to do it. They just need enough money to buy the RV, have enough money and savings to make the switch, and to get started. And that is the process of financial independence. So I hope that Mike and Lauren's story can be encouraging, inspirational, and educational for you.

I think they do a really great job and I am thrilled that I was able to bring them on the show. Go check out their YouTube channel, MikeandLauren.com. We'll link you through to it. MikeandLauren.com, if you sign up on their email list, then they will share with you all the details of their net worth, and their spending, and their income, and all of that stuff as well.

MikeandLauren.com is their stuff. So thank you all so much for being with me on today's show. I hope that you have enjoyed it. A bunch of exciting shows in the work here for December. I've been working on some of the outlines for the scripting of just some of the content and ideas I want to bring you, and there's going to be some good ones.

So I'm going to bring you a show on budgeting, which I'm very excited about. Try to lay out the framework of budgeting, and how it's universally applicable to every area of your life. So check back for that in the future. Big thanks to those of you who support the show on Patreon.

If you would like to support the show, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I will be making some adjustments to that campaign here at the end of 2015 as well, but I would value your support and your financial support there. So thank you all so much. Thanks for listening. I am out of here for today, publishing this show.

It's early on Friday morning. I'm heading over to Tampa with my family. Got a business meeting over in Tampa with somebody, and then also spending the weekend over there with friends. And in fact, I should shoot Mike and Lauren out and see if they're around. One of the cool things about podcasting, you're connected with people.

So thank you for listening. I will be back with you soon.