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Save your money and spend it on the car you need. Ouch. Score big on a new 2023 Toyota this season at Valley High Toyota. It's way easier than you think. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about transitioning to retirement with Fritz Gilbert, writer at The Retirement Manifesto. He's got a cool story to share with you.

He is 52 years old, two years away from retirement. We're going to talk about what it's like and how he's preparing for that transition. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. Today we talk with somebody who has pursued for many years the path of financial independence and who was on the brink of that transition.

I'm excited for him. I think you can be excited for him. Most importantly, he's a dude who's put in his homework. He's going to share with you some of the lessons he's learned. Very glad to have Fritz on the show with me today. Fritz reached out to me, he's a listener of the show, and he offered to connect.

And he's doing a cool thing. He's writing at The Retirement Manifesto. He's not a financial advisor. He doesn't have anything to sell. He's not pushing something, anything. He's just trying to help and educate and pass along some of the same type of help that other people have helped him with, with writing about financial topics.

But he's a very knowledgeable guy. And he's really great to bring out a perspective that I think you'll find really, really valuable and really useful. I'm not quite sure how it has happened, but I get emails from listeners from time to time. And listeners emailed me a couple of days ago and they made some comments about the average age of the audience.

And I guess probably because I'm young, I'm 30, probably because of that, I talk with a lot of young people and I talk about young issues. But I never set out to intend to make radical personal finance targeted at young people. I wasn't trying to target 30-year-olds or 40-year-olds or any – I'm not really trying to target any particular age group.

And so given that it seems that the content has skewed towards young people, I'm going to make sure that in the future that I properly represent people of traditional retirement ages. I'm going to properly represent the planning issues and things, being 50 years old, being 60 years old, 65.

I'm going to do a bunch of work on social security and things like that in the future. Bear with me. I'm making some transitions here trying to – I've been working hard to get off to a good start here in January 2016. It's just a matter of as I can create the content, I'll get it to you.

But I promise we're going to cover in depth some of the traditional retirement topics. I'm not necessarily intending to walk away from it. It's just a matter of as it comes up and as I'm able to do it. So I just thought I'd make that note that I never set out to make this show the financial independent show for 20-year-olds.

So I appreciate Fritz reaching out to me. Before I play the interview though, I just want to share with you some info on our sponsor. Sponsor of the day, number one today is SoFi, the social finance corporation. Big news from SoFi a couple days ago, press release on January 12th.

As I record this here, it is January 14th. But here's the headline from the press release. SoFi is now officially a FICO-free zone. SoFi becomes the first large lender to strip the FICO score completely from its application process for student loan refinancing, mortgages, and personal loans. So big news from SoFi.

I'll summarize the article. But basically they said that they are completely removing the FICO score from consideration of their credit approval process. They're substituting for the FICO score the criteria of employment history, track record of meeting financial obligations, and then the actual amount of your monthly cash flow minus your expenses.

So this is big news, and this is really, really – I'm glad to see it. The FICO score is kind of a weird thing in that it is important, but it's imperfect. And it can make a big difference to you about what your FICO score – your FICO score number can make a big difference to your financial life, dramatically affects the rates that you pay on borrowed money, dramatically affects some of the rates that you pay on things like insurance.

But it's really imperfect, and it can be manipulated in some ways. But what I found actually the most interesting that I had no idea about this data, and I'm going to have to research this more thoroughly. But I'll read you this little note here. "A recent survey commissioned by Bankrate and compiled by Princeton Survey Research Associates International found that 63 percent of millennials ages 18 to 29 don't have a credit card, showing that credit scores are becoming less relevant for this generation.

The industry at large is also examining the accuracy of FICO, and it's going on and talking about some other things." So this press release, I just shared it on my Facebook page today. Feel free to go to my Facebook page, facebook.com/JoshuaSheetz or the one for the show, Radical Personal Finance, and you can find the link to this article.

But it's really interesting how things are changing. The FICO score system, I'm glad that there are new options. I remember when I was 18 years old and I diligently opened up a credit card on my 18th birthday, either one or two, I don't remember. But I was working to build my FICO score right from the beginning.

Well, it's nice that some lenders are getting past that because credit cards have sunk a lot of people, and opening them just to build their FICO score is – well, anyway, I'm glad that there's another option. SoFi is your go-to resource if you would like to refinance your student loans, personal loans, student loans, mortgages in some states.

Just simply go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/SoFi. They have an easy online application process where you can find out approval in minutes. You can find out rates in just a few minutes. It's a very easy and simple process that can help you save some money on your student loans, refinance your student loans, refinance any personal loans.

If you use my tracking link at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/SoFi, then you get $200 credited to your account when you use my tracking link. So thank you to those of you who are doing so. Next sponsor today is Patrick Snow, The Publishing Doctor. Patrick is my personal publishing coach. Find out more information about Patrick at ThePublishingDoctor.com.

He is a best-selling author, has both published his own books, self-published, and also been published through the traditional format. Patrick makes his living as a publishing coach, helping other people publish their books. That is what he's doing for me and that is what he may be able to do for you.

Publishing your own book is one of the most useful marketing tools that you can do. It's not easy. I'm in the middle of the grind, but it may be worth it. If you ever dreamed about publishing your own book, go to ThePublishingDoctor.com, read a little bit more about Patrick, and get in touch with him for a complimentary consultation.

And now, straight to the content. First, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you, Joshua. A true pleasure to be here. Super fun to have you on the show today. I know you're a long-time listener of the show. I always like to profile members of the community who are doing interesting things.

I think there's a place for the big names and the people who are already established, and they can certainly provide some value. But I also love to speak with people like yourself who are just getting started, but yet really have a message and some ideas and content that can be helpful for people.

So I'd like to kick it off with—share with us a little bit about your background and how you wound up coming to be on the show as a guest today. Sure. I appreciate that. And I will say, it's interesting. I just got your email this morning with J.D. Roth, and I'm like, "Wow, you're going from J.D.

Roth to me." You're right. We are covering both spectrums, so it's great. And hopefully, five, ten years from now, I'd love to be considered anywhere near a J.D. Roth level. He's fantastic. I guess a little bit about me. I started a blog about a year or six months ago, The Retirement Manifesto.

And really, my whole purpose in this is I'm 52. I'm probably going to be retiring, God willing, 54, 55. So I've done reasonably well. I've always been passionate about personal finance as a hobby. And I just wanted a forum where I could kind of share some of the stuff that I've done.

And almost—I don't know if it's more importantly, but just a place is so many demographics right now. You've got so many people that are kind of in my shoes, five to ten years away from retirement. And I thought it would be interesting for people to kind of read along with somebody as they're going through that journey.

And what am I doing to prepare myself? What steps are we taking? Not only what have we done to build kind of the net worth to where we can retire early, but how do you make that transition into retirement? So The Retirement Manifesto is really all about that. So from a personal standpoint, let me touch base on that.

I've been very happily married to a wonderful woman, 28 years. We've got a daughter who's a junior in college. She turns 21 this weekend, so that's a big deal for us. And I guess that's pretty much it. I've done a corporate-type job for 30 years at my 30th anniversary this summer.

So I'm blessed to have a pension, which is not something most people have anymore, so I recognize the value of that. And life's been good. No complaints. Why are you planning to retire? The main thing is I feel like there's so much to life besides just work. And I enjoy what I do.

It's fine. But given the ability to do what you want to do for personal satisfaction instead of having to do it for the monetary side, to me it's just you've got a certain window in your life where you're still relatively young, healthy. And to me, to give that up for a little bit more money is a bad trade.

So it's really to pursue things that my wife and I want to do that are all about personal satisfaction and contributing rather than just earning an additional paycheck. How long have you been focused on retirement as a goal? I would say I've always kind of knew that I would like to retire a bit early but probably got serious about it maybe five years ago.

My wife and I, we talk about this stuff quite a bit. And I've had some friends that have retired early, seeing what they've gone through. Probably I would say the last five years I've really gotten serious about putting pencil to paper, doing the cash flow spreadsheets through to age 95.

Can we get there? That's all probably been in the last five years. On your blog publicly, do you share any information as far as your net worth or any information as far as what your projected spending are or things like that? Or do you keep that information private? I have not shared it yet.

I'm very transparent. It's me out there. It's my real name. I talk a lot about our personal situation but I've not shared the absolute real numbers financially. I'm a little bit uncomfortable being that transparent. A lot of my friends read it and things like that. Totally fine. So the question here would be when people talk about retirement, the type of guests that I have on the show, some of them are kind of hardcore savers living on $1,000 a month.

Some of them are very different and focused on spending $20,000 a month. Do you consider yourself and your family situation to be kind of middle class, mainstream focus? Or what do you think about as far as your personal spending level that you anticipate in retirement? Yeah, and I don't mind sharing that.

I haven't shared our net worth or anything. But I think right now we're targeting probably $8,500 to $10,000 a month type of spending including taxes. That includes the tax burden in there. So I would say probably middle class. We're downsizing the home. We're living a comfortable lifestyle but certainly not lavish.

Perfect. So that's what I was trying to bring out. And the reason is because your retirement plan is what I would say in the mainstream culture when people talk about retiring early, this is what they're thinking about. Mid-50s and they're thinking about a nice, enjoyable, luxurious lifestyle. They're not looking at it and saying, "Well, I want to live on $2,000 a month." That's really exciting to some people in the hardcore finance community.

But to the mainstream person, they're not imagining, "Oh, I want to go backpack around the world and live out of a backpack and spend nothing." So what were the – walk me through the phases of your savings and your career, the starts and stops and the things that you did well and the things that you didn't do well in working through your corporate career and building your financial base.

Yeah, that's a good question. I guess the main piece of it – and I've reiterated this with my daughter and I've written several articles about it on the blog. The value of starting early just cannot be overstated. All through junior high, high school, I've always worked. I remember going into college.

I had built a fair amount of savings. I've always been somewhat prudent. I was blessed with parents who felt that it was a parent's responsibility to pay for a college education. So I came out of college with no debt. We've done the same for my daughter now. I think that's – if you can do it, that's something that a parent should do.

So I came out of college with no debt and my very first – and I got a job right away. So I was 22 years old, straight out of college, and the very first paycheck I got, 15% went into the 401(k) right from the beginning. I've been saving and I've increased it from there.

So that's probably the first thing is start it early and I've never touched it and let it compound. I'm very much long-term, don't react to stock market volatility on the long-term savings. So that was number one. Number two was my wife – I'm blessed with a wife who has very similar financial views as I do.

We're not cheap by any means, but we're prudent. We don't try to keep up with the Joneses. We've avoided lifestyle inflation. And one of the things we talked about early in our marriage was when and if we're able to have children, she was going to be a stay-at-home mom.

So in our early years of marriage, obviously she was working. We banked 100% of her pay and we never got ourselves into obligations, mortgage, home payment, or car payment. I never paid for cars. I always pay cash for cars anyway. But we never got ourselves into a situation where the monthly obligations required her paycheck.

So that when we were fortunate, we actually adopted our daughter. She's great. So when we adopted her, my wife was able to stop work immediately and we never felt it in the monthly budget. So I think starting early, being careful with a working spouse to not let your lifestyle catch up to that income, and then every pay raise I've had since.

We've taken – let's say you get a 3% raise. 2% of it goes into savings. I give myself 1% to kind of spend a little bit more, and we've just consistently long-term steady saving. J.D. Roth, who you just had on, he's a big fan of that. It's spend less than you're going to do it for a long time, slow and steady, and you win the race, and that's pretty much what we've done.

How did you learn these principles? I guess I've always had – that's a good question. I've always – my parents were conservative. My dad's still alive, great guy. My mom passed away 10 years ago, but they were always conservative. They were teachers, modest income, very much middle-income lifestyle, never got caught up in materialism.

So I think it was inherent in my upbringing to recognize the futility of materialism, and fortunately my wife's the same way. So a lot of it's just my upbringing, but I think in addition to that, I've studied this stuff and read it for decades now. So I've always been a very avid reader on financial theory and personal finance type stuff.

Now I'm a big podcast listener, and I really appreciate your show. I've got a long commute, so I listen to a lot of podcasts. So now it's massive injection into my brain through all the podcasts I listen to. But it's just always been a lifelong hobby, and I've just learned from it.

Over the years, you said you work in a corporate kind of middle management, upper-level management job? Yeah, I'd say mid-level management. Tell me about your career progression. Yeah, it's been a great ride. We've moved nine times. I've always been willing to move. Well, not always. You always wait out.

So I started out at a college, entry-level job, and I've had probably 10 promotions through the course. But one of the things I did, after about 10 years or so, I was kind of getting slotted into a commercial guy. I was a sales guy and spent most of my time in sales.

And I recognized that the career advancement potential in that particular track, in our industry anyway, was fairly limited. It's more of an industrial type of company. So I intentionally kind of did a shift in my mid-30s. And I was fortunate to have a really great mentor who I talked to a lot about this kind of stuff.

And I was able to, kind of through my relationship with him, make it known that I didn't want to be slotted in a single functional area my whole career. And I was very successful in shifting to an operations focus for maybe 10 or 15 years mid-career. And obviously, a big manufacturing company, operations, is a very, very big part of our business.

That then transpired into moving into kind of the supply chain where you take customer demand and push it all the way back through the supply chain to manage all the input. So I've been very fortunate in intentionally broadening my experience to be a wider cross-functional view of the business.

And that's just resulted in some really great opportunities. And I work hard, and I think I do a reasonably good job. I've been very blessed with some nice promotions, and my career's been good. Would you – in looking back at your career and your personal finance strategy, do you feel like you have sacrificed?

Do you feel like you've been deprived in order to achieve this place of early retirement? I don't think I have. One of the things that we've talked a lot with our friends and whatnot, we've moved a lot. And you could look at that as a sacrifice, but my wife and I really look at it almost as a blessing because she's been very adaptable.

We were both born and raised – lived in our same houses our whole life all the way through school. And we've had a somewhat more nomadic lifestyle with our daughter, but in a way, it's been a really good experience. I think our culture as a whole has become much more mobile.

With social media, you can keep in touch with friends and things like that. And we've just had a really great ride living in different parts of the country and getting to experience the local uniqueness that different parts of this country have. And we've enjoyed every place we've been. We always keep a positive – I think one move we had in particular we didn't particularly like, all the other nine we've really enjoyed.

And I think back to why we didn't particularly like that one is because going into it, we kind of predetermined, "Oh, I don't really want to live here." And sure enough, we didn't really enjoy it. So that was early on. And I think we've made a conscious recognition that sometimes you have to move.

Maybe you don't particularly want to move, but let's look at it with a positive mindset. One of the things I write about on my blog is the personal choice of contentment. And I think you have to make a decision to look at the positives in life. And if you do that, you'll have positive experiences.

So we look at it now in hindsight as we really don't feel like we've sacrificed. We feel like it's actually been more fulfilling to have experiences around the country. And our daughter has done very well adapting to different schools and making friends. It's been good. It's been good for all of us.

What's the best investment that you've ever made? Personally, it's accepting Jesus Christ as my Savior. There's nothing more important than that. But from a personal investment, let's just take it broader than just money. I think you've got to invest in your marriage. There's nothing more important than protecting what's really valuable.

And money is nice, but it's not the most important thing in life. I think the relationships you have with others, most importantly your spouse and your children, means a lot more than money. I've seen a lot of guys, 30 years in the corporate environment, you can imagine. I've seen a lot of people that had the wrong priorities.

Maybe not outwardly, but you just get the sense that they're just not happy people and they've made mistakes. So I think the best investment for me is recognizing what's the most important thing and don't let your priorities get out of whack. What's the best financial investment you've ever made?

I'm not a big speculator. I can think back to my worst one. That question's coming up next. I can talk to that one. Kind of a fun story. I'll tell you what I've done, Joshua. I'm very diverse. I'm big on asset allocation. Just wrote a big article about it.

I've got a foot in every camp and I've got a bet on every horse in the race and I don't really care who wins. I'm widely diversified. And because of that, I don't really take any big, outrageous bets. I just long-term buy and hold, dollar-cost average, on and on and on.

So there's not really any one thing that jumps out as being a spectacular success. It's more just the approach of a widely balanced, diversified portfolio. And I don't really mess with it. I might make some minor asset allocation adjustments, but for the most part, I widely diversify. And I think that's probably been my biggest success, more so than any individual purchase, was just the approach of consistency and diversification and don't overreact to short-term swings in the market.

On radical personal finance, and you've probably heard me express this thought, I have the opinion that the actual choice of investment vehicle, which stock, which bond, which mutual fund, which portfolio, which asset allocation, although an important decision, it's much, much, much less important than the bigger, I'll call them personal finance decisions.

Building your career, growing your salary, being willing to do things, like you said, of being willing to move for a better job opportunity, controlling your expenses, managing and avoiding debt, keeping your lifestyle inflation down, investing in relationships, not taking on expensive hobbies if there's other opportunity, things like that.

I have an opinion that those things are – those are the 80% – excuse me. Those are the 20% of things that account for 80% of the results, and then we can make up a little bit of game with an investment plan. Based on your experience, do you agree with that perspective?

Do you disagree? 110%. I think the burden of getting into a house that's more than you should afford is so – it's such a negative impact on – it's amazing. Success in personal finance and the ability to retire early is really a cumulative journey of many, many, many small steps, and I think the small steps combined are so much more important.

All the small steps, they're not small. I mean they're important, but they're exactly what you just talked about. If you read asset allocation stuff, a lot of stuff they talk about in there, it doesn't really matter exactly whether you have 62%, 38%, or as long as you have a broad exposure, that's really all you have to worry about in that regard.

The other stuff is so much more important. We've always been very careful buying our house. House and cars are the two easiest things you can afford – manage kind of tactically. I work with some people that live in crazy, ridiculous homes, and I don't. I'm willing to drive. I live in a major metropolitan city, so the housing costs near where I work are very high.

So okay, fine, I'll sacrifice a bit because the burden of having to pay too much in real estate just kills me. So we're very careful when we make those decisions, and I think that is the trick to being successful. Tell me about your worst investment, specifically financial investment. Yeah, so what I've done – I'll give you a little context, and then it'll put it into perspective.

So the way I scratch my itch of wanting to speculate and do stupid trades is I've got 85%, 90% of our net worth is invested in these wide – I'm a big Vanguard fan, so low-cost mutual funds, diversified, blah, blah, blah. So what I've done over the last 15, 20 years is I've kind of built maybe a 10% or 15% bucket that's kind of play money.

It's all in TD Ameritrade, and I do stupid stuff. I trade options. I trade the VIX. But it satisfies that urge, and theoretically I could lose it all, although I haven't. I've done reasonably well in it. So it was in this kind of play account – it's real money, but it's kind of play account.

I inherited a little bit of money from my grandmother, and I'd put it in there. So I was feeling pretty – hey, I've got a little bit of liquidity here I can play with in my play account. And at the time, I was in a supply chain role, and we were implementing a supply chain planner from this company that was pretty widely known.

This was right at the peak of the tech implosion, so I was like, oh, I know these guys. This is a great company. They're going to the moon. So it wasn't huge, but it was probably – it was close to $10,000 that I plowed into this company, and it just absolutely cratered like everybody else in the tech boom.

So that was good because it was a lesson learned 15 years ago before I had real material investments moving around to – it's all about position sizing, diversification. I took too big a bet in exactly the wrong time for all the wrong reasons, and I paid for it. So it was a good lesson, and I'm glad it happened, but it was clearly the worst decision I've made.

I'd like to transition our conversation now to a forward-looking conversation about retirement. And first, I want to start with the big picture – goals, plans, dreams, vision. And then let's get into some of the tactical details that you've been learning about because this transition period of entering retirement is a very challenging transition period for people to do effective financial planning.

So I'd like to start, though, with your goals, dreams, visions. When you and your wife are sitting out on the back deck dreaming about the next half of your life, what are some of the ideas that you have? What are some of the things that you guys are looking forward to in this transition period?

Yeah, this is the fun part, right? This is the stuff I really enjoy thinking about and talking about with my wife. And we spent a lot of time on it. We've seen a lot of friends that have gone through it, so we've learned from them. And what we're thinking about is we are going to downsize our home.

We've got a – it's a three-bedroom, three-bath, still a nice place, but a smaller cabin up in the mountains. So we're going to move up there, and our plan at this point is to probably stay there about six months out of the year. And then, God willing, spend maybe six months with a fifth wheel and drive around the country.

I know you're a big travel buff. I love when you talk about these expedition-type trips. Ours is just going to be asphalt and campgrounds, but nonetheless, head out west and spend six months out of the year traveling around national parks, things like that. And one of the things that we've talked about is as we do that, maybe do a little bit of work camping.

I want to be at the point where we're financially independent and don't require any income at all. But I'm also cognizant that people say, hey, it's not uncommon to kind of get restless and bored in retirement. So I think we're open to just kind of explore, and if we end up, hey, we like Yosemite, let's work there for a summer.

Maybe do some seasonal work, working in campgrounds or retail, whatever. Kind of mix that in as we travel. And then I guess the other part of it would be when we're back home for those six months, get pretty actively engaged in the community. My wife is very active in charity work now, so I think I'd like to do the same and find some ways that we can get engaged in our local community and give back.

With Habitat for Humanity, I just did a build yesterday. I love Habitat for Humanity, our church work, other ways to get engaged in the community. And then obviously working on my blog. That's really why I've started it now is to kind of test out the concept in preparation and then kind of go into that a little bit harder core when I retire.

Yeah, I feel like this is the major blind spot that many people have. They assume that they'll be able to just – I've been working for – I mean you've been working for 30, 40 years at this point depending on how far back you go. And they say, well, I've been working.

It's all going to be fine, and now I'm looking forward to living the good life. And the data is very clear that incidence of depression, incidence of sickness, incidence of just general dissatisfaction with life is high for people who just retire cold turkey. And I'm convinced that the only way to successfully retire is if you are transitioning from one lifestyle to another lifestyle.

And if you are focused and you have meaningful goals, things that are important to you. Chris Gillibrand wrote a book called Quest. I don't remember the subtitle, but it's all about having a quest. And in my mind, I feel like this is the key thing that we need to be spending a lot of time talking about is helping people to clarify their specific quest.

And whether that's to visit all – I don't know – 241 national parks. I don't remember how many there are. But whether that's to visit every national park or whether it's to build 50 habitat homes over the next 25 years or whether it's to make this meaningful change or to invest in the lives of 15 young couples and absolutely help them to navigate the turbulent waters of early life and family.

Or whether it's to babysit young children to help out young couples so they can have date nights and do that. There's got to be something that's really meaningful to us. Otherwise, you meet people and they retire and then they get old and then they get bored and they get boring and then they get sick.

And then they die. Exactly. So you've got to plan for that. And there needs to be a vision that is really exciting and engaging and frankly that's work, that's challenging. That's why I'm so glad you started the blog because that will give you an opportunity to be engaged and then you can bring together this lifestyle of, yes, I'm able to engage in these fun activities, go out and we take the fifth wheel and we go and see the sunrise every day in a new park every week.

Or we do work camping and we get to connect with all these cool people. But I've also got this work where every day I sit down and write an article and I can see the impact of my work. That's right. It's so, so important. Yeah, and it's interesting, Joshua, because when I started this blog I was really kind of in my mind what's it going to be.

It was really going to be financially focused and let's talk about the value of compounding and asset allocation and all the good stuff that's out there. But what I've found as I've gotten into writing it, more and more of my writing now is focused on the, let's call it the soft side of retirement planning, exactly the stuff you're talking about.

It's amazing if you open your eyes and look at what's written out there, the amount of research that is coming. The other thing I was going to mention when you were going through the negative impacts of not having a purpose is cognitive decline. There was a big study that just came out and talked about early retirement is actually a really bad thing if you don't have some of these things you're talking about because they've statistically determined now the negative impacts of cognitive decline.

You get bored and life is not a good thing anymore. So my blog is kind of transitioned now where I would say probably two-thirds of the articles that I write are more about some of these softer issues, planning for your future and carpe diem and encouraging others and all these different things that are really what you need to be thinking about.

In this transition phase, it's not just about am I going to have sufficient cash flow to not have to worry about. That's probably 20% of the challenge. The 80% is finding what you're going to do with this new free time. It's an exciting time. I'm really excited to have the chance to go into a phase of your life where you no longer have to work.

Now you do whatever you want to do. What is that that's going to fill that time void that still brings you that purpose, that still brings you that excitement? What an incredible challenge that so many people go into that with their eyes closed and they just blow it. That's a lot of what my blog is about is how do you prepare for this mentally and emotionally and spiritually because it is really important to get it right.

This is one of the big challenges for those of us who are younger. If we don't dedicate meaningful time to considering and clarifying and working and trying different things, we start to get an idea of the vision and the values and the things that are important to us. It sneaks up on us and it's very easy in our modern, comfortable, western lifestyle.

It's very easy just to put in your time and it's very easy just to go to work, be happy enough with what you're doing there, go home, watch some TV. It just sneaks up on many people. I doubt listeners of this show who just through the fact of listening to a show like this, they're demonstrating that they're a different class of person.

But it's hard. This is hard work for people to do. Have there been any resources or tools that you have used to help you to clarify your vision that might be helpful for other people? I don't know if I have a specific book. Obviously, if you think about extreme early retirement, Jacob Lundfisker, I know you're a fan of his.

His kind of touches on this in terms of it's a change in lifestyle, not just a financial spreadsheet that determines it. I think the bigger resource that I found is self-educate. I can't tell you how many blogs I read. I really love to read this stuff. The amount of information that's out there on a steady flow, if you just sign up for emails, sign up for mine, sign up for others, the amount of information, you can delete it, the subject comes in, it doesn't look interesting, okay, fine, delete it.

But the amount of information that you just come across over the course of a week, a month, a year that dwells on this topic, if you have a focus on it, it's like anything else, those things that you pay attention to, you tend to see more of. If you pay attention on this element of retirement, it's amazing how much is available out there in the blogosphere, if you will, on these types of topics.

That's really what I've done is just kind of opened up myself to a big flow of information. Then I choose what I don't want to read. I just delete, delete, delete, that's fine, or I read. Then what I've been doing with my blog is as I come across things that are relevant and along these lines, I've got a little thing in Evernote and future articles, I'm sure you have the same thing, and I save some of these articles off into my Evernote for future posts that I do, and then I weave them in and I put hyperlinks.

There's a lot of external links that I put into my articles. I'm not an expert on this stuff. I reference a lot of what the experts are saying, and I've referenced you a fair bit in my blog because I really, really appreciate what you're doing. So that's really the biggest resource I have is just the amount of information that's available, and then I try to funnel it down and put out relevant stuff into my articles.

What's the biggest lesson that you've learned so far from blogging your way into retirement? Probably exactly this that we're talking about. I think as I said when I wanted to start this, it was all about the financial numbers and let's do a cash flow analysis and how do you project your income, what's a safe withdrawal rate.

As I really--you tap that out--not tap it out, but you kind of hit the big hitters within the first couple months, and then you really start recognizing that a lot of these other areas are much more important. I think the lesson I've learned, and what's interesting too is the reader feedback I get seems to be higher for those types of articles, which is totally counterintuitive to what I thought it was going to be, but the demand for this type of discussion seems to be--maybe again I'm paying more attention to it, but it seems to be escalating.

There's such a demographic surge right now for people that are right where I'm at a few years out, and I think people are starting to recognize the importance of getting this right. So to me that's been the biggest learning so far is be open to write about whatever's on your heart, whatever's on your mind, and see where it goes.

It's been interesting to see this evolution away from the financial articles to--and I still weave a lot of those in. They're very important, but I write more and more about these types of issues and how you think. The last one I did was Before I Die, and it tells the story.

I was in Charleston a couple years ago, and there was a big construction barrier on some project, but they made it out of a chalkboard. It was eight feet tall and 30 feet long, and they just wrote on the top of it "Before I Die dot dot dot," and then they left chalk up there, and all these people got to write some of the things.

To me that was just fascinating, and so I wrote an article about it, and it's all about exactly this. So yeah, I think that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned. Here's my theory on why there is more interest in the softer side rather than the hard science of it.

Number one, people have a tough time with math and science, and very few people take the time to really engage with that information. You've got to really be a nerd or it's got to be very applicable to you. And even for those people for whom it's applicable, most people don't enjoy that discussion.

I mean I've been through those situations working with somebody in that transitional phase, and you're sitting there going over a Monte Carlo analysis and explaining the probabilities of success of various portfolios. And even though it's very, very relevant to them and it's very, very important, and I'm doing my best to use clear and layman's language, I can still just look up and I can see the film coming across the eyes as the glaze spreads.

And it's like, "All right, Joshua, wrap this up in two and a half minutes. Monte Carlo analysis is not all that sensational to people." But I think the bigger reason is that the statistics – we've been sold a bill of goods, this idea that it's normal for people to accumulate a lot of money to be able to retire.

And the vast majority of people simply do not, have not, and will not accumulate enough money to be able to do what you're doing. The percentage of people who are actually in your type of financial situation is vanishingly small. And so you basically have 90 percent, perhaps more – I can't cite the specific percentage off the top of my head.

But you basically have 90 percent of people who will never be able to afford to retire, but they're still looking for meaning. And to me, this is one of the major themes that I want us in the financial punditry arena to talk about is you need to work on your financial plan and work hard to be in a situation like Fritz is in where you are financially independent or you're on track for financial independence.

But don't give up hope if you're not there or if you're not going to be there because you can also build a meaningful and valuable life where you're making an important contribution to society without saving $2 million. So that is a message of hope, and it's a message that runs against the grain of what is often talked about in society.

And many people that I've worked with just feel hopeless. They feel – they say, "I'm 50 years old," and again, study the statistics out and you find that an average 50-year-old has a few tens of thousands of dollars of equity in their house maybe. And they have maybe a thousand bucks in savings and they have maybe $20,000 in a 401(k).

Well, that ain't going to cut it. So the vast majority of the financial discussion, the Merrill Lynch ad of the couple walking down the beach with, "Oh, you're going to have $3 million and call our financial advisor," it's just simply not relevant. And you see people wanting to say, "Well, I'm not a failure.

I've lived a good life. Now, how do I adjust to the reality of the fact that I can't afford to retire but I still want to live the good life in the latter half of my life?" And that's why it's so important for us to continue clarifying for people because as far as I'm concerned, I intend to be financially independent and I'm working hard on that.

But if I'm never financially independent, I'm not willing to give up the good life. I'm not willing to live under this cloud of, "Oh, I'm just a failure because I'm not financially independent. I'm not able to retire." I could go and take my family and I could get a fifth wheel and I could get a truck and I could go and be a work camper and I could write my blog and I could do today exactly what you're planning to do in retirement without all the resources.

And that's what's so cool about the world that we live in is you can pursue them both simultaneously. And yes, there are tradeoffs. But you can pursue them both simultaneously. And so all the messaging around retirement planning is changing and must change to deal with the reality of shrinking government help programs, shrinking social security payments, shrinking Medicare, shrinking Medicaid payments, and shrinking bank accounts.

People that have wound up – their investments have been a disaster. And so to maintain relevance, just watch what the AARP is doing. That's what you can say, life reimagined. Right. I was just going to say their whole thing now is life reimagined. And so instead of the AARP image being, "Hey, look.

We're going to tell you how to live great on your annuity streams," the whole thing is, "Well, you're screwed because you don't have enough money. But how can we help you reimagine your life?" Which is really great. I'm really glad about that messaging. But to me, I think that's one of the reasons why you get some – you're getting a lot of traction on the softer side rather than the harder side because people are waking up and realizing that this idea and concept of the magical retirement is – it's not reality for the vast majority of the population.

Yeah, I agree. And I like that twist that you're – because I've thought for a long time about how concerning it is, exactly what you said when you were talking about the Monte Carlo presentation, which I love Monte Carlo. I could spend hours with you on that kind of stuff.

But I'm a nerd. Most people aren't like that. And it's really bothered me to think about what percentage of people are so woefully unprepared. If you look at the average balance in retirement accounts and things like that, it's really concerning. So this is kind of the first time I've heard it, and I absolutely applaud the approach.

You've got to find a way to make those people that aren't prepared have a purpose and have a reason to be excited. Okay, I'm going to work until I'm 70 hopefully, but at least I know I'm going to have all this other stuff that I'm doing or this other approach to work that's still going to bring me a fulfilling life because they don't have a choice.

And what's the answer to that? You're absolutely onto it. So, yeah, that's – and you think about it. Even now, I'm still working full-time. I work a lot of hours. But I did a Habitat build yesterday. And I think one of the things that I've learned is when you're generous with other people or you find a way to contribute through charity or whatever or you help out another family, there's so much reward in being a giver that I think if all of us took a more charitable approach, even if you've got to work until you're 75, find a way to help somebody.

Find a way to get engaged because there's so much reward in that. And I don't know if people – until you've been through it and you've kind of experienced it, it's almost a revelation about how rewarding that is. And that's kind of – I've talked about maybe I'll get into coaching.

You talk about how the lower income people don't really have a good way to get served in the financial community because of the fee structure and all the other things you talk about. I've kind of thought about, well, maybe I can help there. Maybe I can do some coaching as I get into retirement and share some of these ideas because there's so much reward.

And I think that's something that anybody can think about. What gift do you have that others would benefit from? And you can do that on the weekends. You can do that in the evenings. And I'm working full time. I'm writing a blog. There are ways that you can contribute to society that give you personal reward that don't require for you to be retired to do them.

There's a lot of them. And I think you're right. That's a good area for people to think about that don't have a choice. Absolutely. Let's talk technical approach a little bit. As you started out and said, "Okay, I've got a pile of money. I've got some money in my 401(k).

I've got some home equity, etc. How do I actually approach this retirement question? How do I actually do it and switch from living off of my paycheck to living off of my investments?" How have you approached that learning process and what is your plan going forward? Yeah, that's a good question.

And I don't necessarily have it all answered. I mean I've done most of this myself. And fortunately, Vanguard is our company 401(k) provider. So they've got a one-hour service where you can talk to a CFP every year. And I've been very encouraged by the things that they've said. As they look at my account, "Hey, you've done this well.

You've done this well. You've done this well." But I think probably the biggest revelation to me when the mindset shift from being a contributor to a retirement plan to having to now generate an income stream out of that, where that probably became the most visual to me was when I first – this was probably five years ago – when I first took my first stab at trying to put together, "Hey, how would I cash flow my life?" So I started – I'm a spreadsheet guy, not a geek.

But to me it's much easier to manage numbers if you've got a spreadsheet approach to it. So I just put together a spreadsheet from now through age 95. And when you start visualizing, okay, you've got X amount of net worth, so much of it is in an after-tax or pre-tax and 401(k), IRA, whatever.

And you build these various asset classes and you assume a certain amount of return each year, which that's where I love the Monte Carlo. I wish I could do it on my spreadsheets. I'm not that good. But when you start visualizing those withdrawals coming out of those asset classes and you look at the – I'm trying to use a 3% withdrawal rate to build a little bit of protection into it.

That's when it really starts – it's kind of good to do a dry run like that while you're still contributing to the 401(k)s and retirement accounts because it really brings to light how things change when now you're pulling from those accounts instead of going into it. So I would say the biggest thing I've done thus far, and I would really encourage people to do it, is to try to cash flow out through your life and see what happens to the account balances and how things change if you go into different asset allocation and things like that.

So that's number one was just to visualize it. Number two, as I said, I'm very fortunate to have a pension. So the longer I work, the higher the pension goes. It caps out, but I'll never get to the point that it caps out because I'll retire before then. But there is value in each additional year I work because the pension amount goes up.

And what I'm looking at now, I've played around and the annuity thing where – I think you just did a podcast on this a while back. It is generating a lot of interest now because it's exactly – it's the right tool for the job. There's certainly a place for annuities in here.

And the way I'm looking at that is I'm going to – it's a little bit difficult for me because I'm an early retiree and obviously the 401(k), for the most part, difficult to tap to your 59.5. I know there's the early withdrawal strategies you can do, but I'm trying to avoid that.

So I'm trying to do everything with after-tax money until I get to 59.5, and then I'll tap into the retirement money. But probably when I get to the 59.5 and have access to that larger pool of liquidity, I'll probably go ahead and do some median annuities. My goal would be to try to top up between my pension and ultimately Social Security and some annuity base, get to where the base requirements – minimalistic lifestyle, but your base requirements are covered.

And then do a bucket strategy where I'll do probably two to three years in cash and then three to ten years in something intermediate and then ten years longer in equities, the standard bucket approach. That's the way I'm going to do it. I haven't obviously done it yet because I'm still a couple years away, but that's what my strategy is at this point.

Remember that if you have funds in your company, 401(k), if you leave that company, which is I would say obviously your plan, you can withdraw the money from that plan at 55 rather than 59.5. You're aware of that, right? But you have to leave at 55, and I may not be.

I'm debating. And that's one of the things I'm thinking about. I'm kind of torn right now. Part of it will be how much do we sell our primary house for, how soon does my daughter get out of college, blah, blah, blah. But I'm kind of in that 54 versus 55 decision point right now, and that is a factor because I'm thinking, hey, if I wait one more year, then suddenly all that is accessible.

But you have to retire after you're 55 or in the year that you turn 55, I guess, right? So, yeah, I am aware of that, and I appreciate you pointing it out. With regard to – so you have the pension and you're thinking about kind of an annuity strategy.

In my mind, the pension is – that is an annuity. It's solving that problem that you have of just the basic thing that the annuity provides is a level floor of income so that you're not concerned about the fluctuation of your other investment accounts. And you probably give up a little bit of total return, but you get the satisfaction of the floor of income.

And one of the things that I've observed, which is very challenging, it's one thing to have a stomach of steel when you're in an accumulation phase. And you're sitting there and saying, "Well, I've got plenty of income. I've got a nice salary. You've got everything that you need coming in from salary." But when you go into a distribution phase, it becomes a little different because now you're worried about, well, this month if I'm going to get this big fancy fifth wheel and my fuel budget for pulling this thing is going to be $1,000 a month if I'm going to be traveling a lot.

So where is that $1,000 going to be coming from and what's my plan if the markets start to fluctuate? Exactly. Yeah, and I have thought about that because back during the '08 downturn, I'm like, "Hey, this is great. I'm getting equities cheap." I've never had a problem with it and I do all the risk assessments on the various sites and I've had a fairly aggressive personality for this stuff.

But I also recognize this little downturn we had in August. It's a lot more concerning now when you're getting closer to the finish line. And I imagine once you cross that line, it becomes a whole other level. So that's where this bucket strategy, most people say keep one to two years liquid.

I'll probably do like three to four years just because I don't want that anxiety of having a correction and knowing that you have to tap into that because that's devastating. Absolutely. On any of the projections, you do not want to get hit with a timing issue, especially in early retirement.

Absolutely. Sequence risk is huge. So that does concern me. Yeah. With regard to your other, I guess, plans and specifically you're planning to buy -- do you own the camper already or are you planning to buy one? We're going to buy one. At this point, our thought is we've camped for years and we've always had different campers.

We've never gone to the big fifth wheel. But our plan at this point is to sell the primary residence. We've got a fair amount of equity in that. So that liquidity that we'll generate from that sale is going to go. And that's kind of in my cash flow model that I talked about.

I start with X of equity balance, and that depends on how much we sell the house for. And then you pull from that, okay, we've got to buy the fifth wheel. I do have an F250, so I've got a truck. And we've got the second home. Currently we rent it out and we generate some rental income from it, so that's fine.

So really the liquidity required to get the launch date is kind of built into this primary home sale. And then you subtract from that the purchase of the fifth wheel. But, again, we're very conservative. We'll go with something a couple of years old. We'll be very prudent, get something that's comfortable but not extravagant.

That was going to be my next question. So you kind of have this question of how long am I going to use this? And there are various schools of thought. You could say, well, I'm going to go ahead and buy this. I'll buy it new. I'll buy exactly what I want.

I'm going to own it for a long period of time. Or you could take a more, I guess, lower cost approach. I'm going to try to find a deal, and maybe I might have it to use, so I'm going to have to deal with a couple of things. But at least that lowers my cash outlay.

How would you approach that decision? Exactly what you just said. It's been kind of fun because the last couple of years, my wife and I, whenever there's an RV show, anywhere within like an hour or a half, and we live near a major city, so there's a lot of RV shows.

Whenever there's an RV show, we love going to the RV shows. And what we've said, starting a couple of years ago, hey, let's see what we really like, and then let's keep the pamphlets and things like that. And I'll take pictures and put them in Evernote or whatever. But let's keep track of what we really like in, say, the 2013, 2014 model year.

And then you almost say, let's stop looking because there's always something new or there's always something better. Let's manage our expectations and kind of target this time frame because when we're ready to retire, those are going to be three or four years old, and that's going to be the approach, is try to get something slightly depreciated but still with a lot of life in it.

That's a good plan. It's a good way to get clear on what you want, enjoy the excitement of shopping, and then you've got to stop shopping otherwise. Exactly. They're making their money off of you keeping on the newest model. This little change that we did, and this is going to make our lives so much better.

Exactly. And you know what? It doesn't matter, right? I mean the fact that the TV is a half inch instead of three-quarters of an inch, I mean it's crazy, right? So don't get caught up. And that goes back to this whole concept of not getting caught up in materialism, right?

You've got to have sufficient stuff to cover your needs, but be really, really careful about managing your wants because the wants can kill you. I do love that. I know many people don't want to do the travel thing in retirement. Many people do, and it always becomes a cliche, but I'll tell you, for two people, some of the fifth wheels-- I have a family member that owns a fifth wheel, and it's big, and it is beautiful, and it is exactly custom-built for two people.

And when you just put two people in this big, giant fifth wheel, it's got a couch, it's got recliners, it's got a fireplace in the back, they've got a kitchen, they've got a full washer and dryer, a large bathroom, and then this large king-size bedroom, and the whole thing is in the fifth wheel.

And so they love to take it, and they take it all around to the parks and just set it up, and it's more comfortable than most houses are. It's beautiful, and it's such a cool lifestyle to be able to be in cool locations, but to have all the comforts of home they don't want for a thing.

It's totally comfortable, totally amazing, and I think it's a really cool lifestyle for people to enjoy the fun of travel with the comforts of home. Exactly. And I don't know if it was on your podcast or another one, but it might have been you. You talked a couple months ago about the tiny house phenomenon, and really a fifth wheel is a perfect tiny house, right?

I agree. It's mobile, it's a very comfortable lifestyle, and we have some friends that are doing it full-time right now, and I don't think I could go--my wife and I both, we feel the same way. We couldn't go full-time hardcore. We've got to have a base because I think to be perpetually nomadic would be--I struggle with that a little bit.

I think it would be nice to have a base where you know you have a home, you can go back and unwind for periods of time, but then you go off on these adventures and you drive to Alaska for six months. I mean, what an exciting thing. It's really exciting to be at this stage in our life and know that that's a very real possibility within the next two years that we're going to be doing that.

It's fun. I think variety adds a lot to the zest of life in that doing anything again and again and again becomes old. Travel, I think, becomes old and monotonous if it's not broken up. So even for me, my ideal schedule at this point, which I'm working--I might be able to achieve in 2016 or it might take me until 2017, but at this stage of my work-life plan, I want to work three months, take a month off, work three months, take a month off, work three months, take a month off.

I intend to work January, February, March, take April off, May, June, July, August off, September, October, November, December off. I like that structure because it allows you to stay focused on a project, a work project. Here's the project for this three-month period. Then it allows you to get away and so you can enjoy both aspects of it.

It's really fun to throw yourself into projects that keep you tired and worn out. You get to the end of the day and you're exhausted. It's really engaging to life. But then on the flip side, it's also nice to go on vacation. But vacation, if it's a permanent vacation, becomes very hollow after a while and you want something to return back to that has meaning.

So this flow of life, I think, is a key area for us to focus on. Yeah, and I think what you're seeing now, obviously you're a younger generation than I am and you're seeing more and more of that. It kind of goes to the earlier discussion we had about these people that realize they're going to have to work the rest of their lives and, man, what am I going to do with myself?

I really like the trend that you're starting to see with the millennials or whatever you want to call yourselves of this mini retirement scattered through your career. You can either do a three-month, one-month like you're talking about. I've got a friend who worked for four or five years in corporate America and he's taken a year off.

He's down in Buenos Aires right now for a year with his wife before they have kids. That whole approach to life is really a great way for the younger generation to go about it because people aren't in one career, one company for 30 years anymore. It's totally socially acceptable to change companies and what a great way to kind of fit in this retirement concept but do it as you go.

Now the trade-off, I think, is you've got to do that with open eyes that you're probably negatively impacting your ability to get out early on the back end. You're trading now for tomorrow but it's not a bad trade. It's a really good thing to think about and I applaud you for it.

By the way, I'll just say as a very faithful listener, this whole thing that you've done with doing the Patreon first and now doing the affiliate advertising and we love your new baby and everything else. I really applaud the approach you're taking to break out of the career thing you were doing with Northwestern and to try something on your own and to tweak it because you've got to make a living.

You're going to be hugely successful because you're willing to try new things and you've got fantastic information. I'm really going to be interested to watch how this unfolds for you over the next three to five years because I think it's going to be hugely successful. So accolades to you for your approach.

Thank you. Not every day is easy but I'm definitely excited about it. Maybe someday soon we'll be out on our camping trip and we'll pull up next to you at a national park and we'll do another podcast over a picnic table. That would be incredible. Three years from now and see what life has transpired.

Let's keep in touch. We'll do that. Last question for you is this. I believe your daughter is in her early 20s and I'd like you to take a couple moments and pretend that you're going to face a freak accident this afternoon. You've only got a couple of minutes just to share with her some life lessons and some general advice surrounding her financial life management.

If you had a few minutes to speak to someone like your daughter, a man or woman in their early 20s, and you had a few minutes to encourage them and share with them some of the most important lessons that you want them to remember, what would you share with the person in that situation?

Wow. You've got 30 seconds to think on your feet to give an incredibly important answer. Great question. I'll just kind of wing it here. I think first and foremost is have your priorities in the right place. Look at things from an eternal perspective. Personally, as I said, I'm a Christian.

Get the faith side of it right. Have a relationship with God. That's the most important thing in life. The second thing is keep finances in perspective. Don't become so obsessed with money, which she won't. She's not like that at all. Just as a general reminder, money is a tool to other things.

Make sure that the other things are what you focus on. Don't become obsessed with saving too much money, but don't get obsessed with spending too much money. Have a balance. Life is like a wheel. You've got all these spokes in your life. If your spokes aren't all roughly the same length, the wheel doesn't turn very well.

So have a balanced approach in life. Make sure that you're taking care of your relationships. Find the perfect man and invest in him in that relationship. Invest in your children. Make them the priority. Then, I guess the financial-oriented thing would be that first paycheck you get, start with 15 percent.

Get used to spending the money. Every time you get a raise, just increase and increase those savings because time is on your side and it's only on your side now. Once you're 35, that window's gone. You've got a very limited opportunity early in your life to take advantage of the compounding, and that's really the trick.

Tough question, but I think those are my initial thoughts. Fritz, thanks for coming on. I really enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you, Joshua, and good luck with the show. Let's keep in touch. And thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I should mention too, theretirementmanifesto.com is the website.

Sorry, I forgot to ask you. Theretirementmanifesto.com. That's correct. I'm also on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, The Retirement Manifesto, on all of them. But look me up. Send me an email. If you guys want any particular issue addressed, I'm just a small little blogger here. So I'm very open to any suggestions from any of your listeners on something they'd like me to write about, and I'll research it and write it, and I'll keep in touch with you, Joshua.

I really appreciate your time today. Hope you enjoyed the interview. Thank you so much for listening today. Find out more information from Fritz. Make sure to check over to his website, theretirementmanifesto.com. Keep in touch with him and with his journey. He just published an article today on what he's doing to prepare and what he has done to prepare for the volatile market.

The article titled today, "Five Moves I've Made in Today's Market Volatility." I think you'll enjoy that discussion from somebody who's looking at a large portfolio balance to try to figure out what do I do with my investment accounts in order to maintain my retirement plan. So make sure to go and check that out there.

I think you'll enjoy that very much. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you would like to support the show directly, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. That allows you to support the show directly. If this content and information, education is useful to you in any way, I would appreciate your support there.

I plan to make some changes to that program, hoping to engage a few more of you. So details coming on that in the next few days. And I think that's it. Late at night here. Gonna hit publish on the show. And I am getting up early tomorrow morning. It's a late night and early morning.

Heading over to the west coast of Florida, Sarasota for the weekend to attend a seminar there. I'm gonna try to record a show on the way there. We'll see if I can make that happen for you. But for now, that's it. See you all soon. The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back!

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