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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Radical Personal Finance is sponsored by SoFi, the intelligent choice for your financing needs. Whether you need a new loan or are simply looking to refinance an existing loan and save money by cutting your interest rates, start your search at radicalpersonalfinance.com/sofi. SoFi is S-O-F-I, which is short for social finance, the modern, updated way for you to get a better loan at a better rate.

Again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/sofi. The show is also sponsored by Personal Capital, the best, most beautiful, free financial dashboard for you to monitor all of your investments and financial accounts. Get a free account at radicalpersonalfinance.com/personalcapital. Again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/personalcapital. I've just returned from Gainesville, Florida, where I was speaking at Camp Mustache Southeast 2017.

And today I share with you the audio from the speech that I gave on Saturday evening. Please forgive the difficult start. I had some, even though I'd gotten there early and practiced it all, all of a sudden in the moment I had some technical details that messed everything up and you'll hear as I begin, I'm a bit flustered and it takes me a few minutes to settle down.

But the topic is why wait until you're financially independent to live like you're financially independent? Hey, if you can start early, why not start now? Live from Camp Mustache Southeast 2017, it's Radical Personal Finance. (upbeat music) I'll leave the mic open this time. For those on the podcast, I just did this whole beautiful introduction with the mic on and off, but somehow with this jury rigged process to be able to record a live show in front of you, we messed the whole thing up.

So welcome to real world. This is Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the insight, the intelligence, and the fun, and the education, and everything that you need to live a rich life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, we're recording live here tonight in front of an audience of about 45 hardcore mustachians, that's what you all call yourself, right? (audience cheering) Hardcore mustachians at Camp Mustache 2017, including we have Mr. Money Mustache himself right here. So we're gonna do a couple things here.

I'm gonna first just share a little bit with you, and then this will go out as a live podcast as well. So we're gonna first start a little bit with my journey, talk with you a little bit about financial independence, and the talk tonight is entitled Why Wait to Be Financially Independent, excuse me, Why Wait to Live Like You're Financially Independent Until You Are.

Why should you wait until you are financially independent to live like you're financially independent? That's the point, third time's a charm. Technology, a little rule of thumb, is technology will always mess you up as a public speaker, so especially when you're trying something new. For those of you who don't know me, my path with financial independence and personal finance is very different probably than many of yours.

As I tell the story, I was the 13-year-old nerd who was reading books on personal finance and investing. I always loved the personal finance section of the bookstore. That was my favorite place to be. And I always wanted to be rich. That was goal number one, was I wanted to be rich.

Now, I always defined rich not as financially independent. I defined it as rich. I wanted to be a big, kind of big-shot business tycoon. That was always the goal. When I went into college, it was to go in and study business so that I would become the Fortune 500 CEO in the corner office.

Well, I worked my way through, and at 18 years old, I started the proper steps. I remember on my 18th birthday, I bought my first mutual fund, and I opened my first credit cards on my 18th birthday. So I sat there at my kitchen table, and I said, "Okay, we're going to get things started." I opened a Roth IRA and decided that I was going to get things started.

Worked my way through college, and during college, I continued my interest in personal finance. My first year of--freshman year of college, I worked my way through. My sophomore year of college, I decided I had been working too hard, so I decided to start borrowing money. It's a lot easier to borrow money.

And what's interesting is, in order to graduate from college debt-free, my first year, I worked a total of three jobs concurrently, and I was able to get through debt-free. I did pretty well. I took 18 hours of class, and I did pretty well. My second year of college, I started borrowing money on student loans, and in order to make sure that I could have more fun, I didn't work, and my grades went way down.

So I dropped classes, stopped working, and my grades went down. Theoretically, I had a good time, but looking back on it, I don't know that it was all that good. My junior year, I studied abroad, continued borrowing money, dropped out of school after coming back from Costa Rica because I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Why am I spending all this money going into debt to get a college degree? And then my senior year, after my brother had given me a copy of Dave Ramsey's book, My Total Money Makeover, I decided that it was time to get serious, and after reading it, disagreeing with him, reading it, disagreeing with him, reading it, finally saying, "You know what?

If I had no payments, how much money would I have?" I decided that I would go ahead and do what he had to say. So my senior year, I worked full-time, worked 40 hours a week, took 19 hours of class, and was able to graduate on time in my four years, and I was also able to pay off all my student loans, graduate completely debt-free, while also having cash flow in my senior year.

And so I experienced kind of the benefit of focus, and also that year I got the best grades I had gotten in college, straight A's all the way through. So that was really a watershed moment in my life, to realize how, with focus and attention, we can make a tremendous difference.

When I went past there, I was in the corporate world. I got laid off from the job that I worked in college. I mentioned that the other night when we were doing introductions. I was doing well, but I wound up getting laid off, and I thought, "Wow, I thought this only happened to other people." Very good and humbling experience.

But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew there were a number of things that I wanted in a job, but I didn't know how to achieve them. So a couple weeks later I was meeting with--having lunch with my former boss, and he said, "Have you considered the financial services industry?" I said, "No, not really." I was a hardcore index fund guy.

I hated whole life insurance. I thought brokers were out to make you broker. Everything's a total scam and a total waste of money. So I said, "I can't do that." But I decided to go ahead and start doing some interviews. So he sent me to a friend of his who was actually his financial advisor, and I sat down with the man for my initial conversation.

I was really impressed with him. He was a Navy nuclear engineer. He was a certified financial planner, chartered life underwriter, chartered financial consultant, and I sat down, and the whole time we argued about whole life insurance. Basically I always set out to convince him that whole life insurance was the biggest scam in the history of financial products, and he started telling me things that I didn't know.

And I realized, "Wait a second. Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. Maybe there's another side to this type of story." So that opened my eyes. Just the other aspects of the business opened my eyes, and I realized that if I worked as a financial advisor, I could get a lot of the lifestyle benefits that I wanted to get.

I could get a flexible schedule, a flexible business, doing work that I cared about, helping people, and make a lot of money doing it. I went and interviewed around the business. I ultimately wound up with that same company, a company called Northwestern Mutual, and I started with them at 23 years old, and I was a fresh-faced, believe it or not.

I have a baby face hidden under this beard. And I was 23 years old, and I was driving a $2,000 Honda Accord with 220,000 miles on it, going out and said, "Okay, now I've got to learn the ropes in the financial services business." So I started off selling life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance, and health insurance.

And I went to school and just started studying. And over the years I transitioned my practice from an insurance primary practice to an investment and a retirement planning practice. Along the way, I got my certified financial planner designation, chartered life underwriter, chartered financial consultant. I went on and got a master's degree in financial planning and a number of other industry designations, because the amount you know is important.

So along the way, I grew very frustrated with the world of personal finance and the world of financial advice. And I got frustrated how so much with my learning, how much of the financial advice that I heard out in the world of punditry was not wrong, it just wasn't right in every situation.

How there are more elegant solutions, how there are ways to use different aspects of the tax code, there are ways to use different financial products in different situations. And I also grew frustrated with how there was this really exciting world of early retirement, financial independence, stuff that made me click, and yet it wasn't working in the mainstream.

And as a financial advisor, I sat down and asked hundreds of people, "What do you want to do when you retire? What age do you want to retire?" And the same standard answer, 65. "Well, what do you want to do? People don't know." And I said, "Somebody should go and try to cross this chasm." So in July of 2013, I sat down in the middle of my bed with a digital voice recorder and I said, "Okay, hey, this is Joshua," and I talked for 45 minutes.

And if you ever want to hear what I said, it's still in my podcast feed. It's the very first episode of the podcast. Just sat there and just talked and turned it off, and I listened to it later. I said, "Would I listen to that?" And I said, "I would listen to that." It wasn't great, but it was interesting.

There were some interesting concepts that would be helpful. And as a financial advisor, I spent a lot of time on the road. So I've always been a--read a lot, but I also drove a lot. And so I would probably listen to about 50 to 60 hours of audio per week on 2x speed.

So I've consumed hundreds of hours of audio. And I'm a verbal person, so I think verbally as well. So I looked around at the world of blogging and I said, "There's lots of great voices there." I have no particular talent or skill to add, but I couldn't find the type of podcast that I wanted to listen to.

So I said, "Well, maybe I should create it." So the first three weeks, I created ten episodes, and I just really enjoyed it. And then I went to my company and I submitted to them and I said, "Okay, here's my outside business activity." And I get a phone call and they said, "Take the show down or leave one of the two." Well, my wife was, as I remember, six, seven, eight-- six months pregnant with our first baby.

I had just bought a house. Now I was very proud--if I told you what my name was in the Mustachian forums, I could go show you my house purchase. But I had just bought a house. It was a beautiful purchase. It was right next to my office. I could walk to work.

It was two-thirds of a mile from my office. We had gotten rid of our second car and were in this situation. But still, I wasn't financially in a position to where I could just walk away from what I had spent five years building. So I reluctantly shut the website down.

And I spent the next six months trying to decide if there was some way that I could make a change, because I saw a hunger for people, for information, and for education that was presented in a straightforward way-- to treat people like adults, not to say, "You have to do this because this is the only way to do it," but to say, "Here are the different options, and you can choose.

Here's how this works. Now make a choice." So I spent six months deciding whether or not I was going to do it, and then I spent six more months deciding how. And the reason was I had to actually completely leave my industry in order to make the jump. There was no way for me to stay in the industry.

I called around. I talked to people like Jeff Rose, some of you guys would know, or some of the financial advisors that are in the media space, and I concluded that there was no way for me to stay in the industry and do what I wanted to do. So it took me a while to figure out the plan.

But I figured out the plan. I said, "If I just leave and go get a bird-brain job that doesn't require any kind of long-term thing, I can run my bills and pay for my expenses and not have to dip into savings for that while building the business." And on July 1, 2014, I launched Radical Personal Finance.

Fast forward, we're two and a half years later, and I worked part-time doing that-- I worked part-time and created the show full-time for the first year, and then after a year, I was able to make enough money from the show and my associated business to where since then I've been living on the income from Radical Personal Finance.

So... - What was your bird-brain job? - So at first, I thought, "Well, maybe I can go and deliver pizzas," because I heard you could make $20 an hour, and I needed about $2,500 a month of income. I figured if I did it at night and delivered pizzas, then I could listen to podcasts, I could compose shows while I'm doing it, and I could make $20 an hour.

Well, I did it for a week, and I found out you can't make $20 an hour delivering pizzas. No matter how hard you hustle, you make $10.73 an hour. So it wasn't worth it. So then I thought, "Well, maybe I should go and sell cars. I like sales." What I ultimately did was I found a consulting role using my background in financial planning.

So I worked as a back-office consultant making financial plans for financial advisors and then training them on how to present them to the clients in a way that the clients would actually get it. There are some financial advisors who understand financial planning, but the majority of people whose name says "financial advisor" on their card don't actually get financial planning.

So my job was to educate the advisors so that they could do a better job for their clients. So that worked great. It was completely on my own schedule. I did it on off hours. So my number one job was radical personal finance. I did the show every single day, and that was how I financed my transition.

Soon after I left--story I mentioned last night-- I went out to--flew out to Colorado and was driving up to Wyoming to visit my 100-year-old grandmother, and I was able to swing by, and I emailed Pete, and I said, "Hey, I'm coming through Colorado. Are you around?" And he invited me by and graciously spent the evening with him and his wife, and another--he was hosting a meetup.

And then he actually very graciously hosted me in his attic for the night. So that was a very gracious thing. But it was funny. As I told him, I said, "Here's what I'm going to do." I don't know if you remember. I said, "I'm going to create this podcast.

It's going to be five days a week. It's going to be just hardcore financial information, really interesting." He said, "Who would listen to that? Why would anyone listen to that much?" So I guess podcasts don't fit into the retirement lifestyle. But that's been my journey so far. Now, in that process, I feel like I have a unique perspective.

And I have a unique perspective based partly on my professional background. Remember, I came from the world of personal finance. Then I went to the world of professional financial advice, and now I'm back in the world of personal finance. And so I can kind of bridge that gap. If you ever want to ask me questions on why do financial advisors do the things they do or why do they believe the things they do, etc., I can answer that.

And that is a whole speech in and of itself right there. But I also have an interesting perspective of trying to show how these things relate. And because I study the industry, I kind of see what works and what doesn't. So the reason I chose the title of the talk, which was "Why Wait to Live Like You're Financially Independent Until You Are Financially Independent," is because I feel like this is one of the concepts that's under-discussed, especially in our area.

And I want to start with a simple question. I've divided you into the room. I've divided the room in half, and I've put those of you who are financially independent on one side, and I've put those of you who aren't financially independent on the other. So I want you to think.

I want you to ask a question. I want you to think. In the last day and a half, as you have been visiting with your compatriots, have all of you spent all of your time visiting with people on this side of the room? And all of you spent all your time visiting with this side of the room?

Because we don't talk to them, we don't have anything in common? No? No? There's actually been cross-proliferation? Okay. So my point with that is to say that although in our minds we often think there's a big difference between not being financially independent and being financially independent, you guys haven't demonstrated that in the last few days.

You've talked to one another, you probably all have interesting lives, interesting experiences, and you're all on the stages and journeys toward financial independence, in financial independence, and it's not a hard and fast line. Now I think this often gets lost in our thinking. I am not financially independent by the standard measured as I have enough income, passive income from the dividends and income from my investment portfolio to support my lifestyle.

But I feel financially independent. I don't think I feel as financially independent as I will feel when I'm there, but I still feel financially independent. I'm here, and you all are here, with these people. Don't miss that. It's not like there's a super secret club after financial independence, but before, like you just can't do anything fun.

You think there is, and I just don't know about it, right? Now it's given away. So I really want to drive this point home, because I think sometimes the sacrifices of focusing exclusively on the FI date are a little bit too high, and we should consider very seriously if they're worth paying.

Now I love the questions that JD asked this morning. I love his presentation on mission statements, but I want to give you one more question. I wonder if any of you have ever done this one as a journaling activity. Here's the question. I challenge you to write this down and to think about it.

This morning you did JD's questions. Here's my question. What would you do if you knew you could never retire? What would you do if you knew for the rest of your life it were never possible to become financially independent? How would you approach your life under those circumstances? Yeah, what would you do as a career?

How would you build your life? You have to support yourself. Yes, you have to be able to live, but you can never quit work. A lot of people have been a house husband. If you find the right woman, you can be a house husband. I asked this question not because I believe that achieving financial independence is not possible.

I believe it is. I asked the question not because I believe achieving financial independence is not worthwhile. I believe it is. I'm working on that plan. But my emphasis to you is that in many ways I think you would probably pursue some of the things you're doing now and live similar to some of the things that you're doing now.

If you think about what is Pete's core message with Mr. Money Mustache, I'm going to sum it up. I think Mr. Money Mustache is a secret ploy, the whole financial independence thing, is a secret ploy to get people to realize how awesome their lives already are and can be with less.

Now, Pete, if you had to go back to work, would you all of a sudden move out of the house that you're living in now and all of a sudden say, "I have to go somewhere else"? If you had to go back to work, would you start by looking for a job in Longmont, Colorado, or would you immediately say, "I'm going to Miami, Florida"?

Yeah. We could go through that whole list. I'm sure Pete would consider it. He'd say, "Man, I live in this super fancy house. I don't really need it. I could live cheaper, but my bet --" I won't ask him to achieve it. "My bet is he'd stay in that house.

It's not that expensive. It's not that crazy of a cost. It's not that hard to justify. It's just a comfortable house that he's put a lot of his sweat equity into making it exactly how he wants it to be." And I think that if you look -- JD, if you had to go back to work, would you all of a sudden move out of where you're living and say, "I'm going to go to Miami, Florida and do something different"?

And what would you say to him? Bill, similar? Right. So, again, no question. Monday mornings, I think, are much more free over here than they are for those of us over here. Amen. Right? But the lifestyle doesn't look that different. So if you think about what you would do if you knew you could never retire, I have found that to be an incredibly helpful thing.

Where would I live? How would I live? What would my daily schedule look like? Earlier I was having an interview with Joel and -- where are you? Joel and Alexis. There you are. I was looking for two, and I found two. I was having an interview with Joel and Alexis, and they were talking about how, Pete, you wrote, and you said that one of the greatest things you did was destroy your alarm clock.

So let me give you an example. For me, my definition of financial independence has often been this. My definition was, "I don't want to have to get up with an alarm clock and leave the house." I don't want to have to get up with an alarm clock. So immediately after I closed my business, my financial planning firm, and moved over to starting Radical Personal Finance, I lost the need to have an alarm clock.

I lost that need because I run my own schedule. I do it when and where I want to do it. Go ahead. How old are your kids? Do you have one kid or two? I have two. Three-year-old and one-year-old and one on the way. So, yes, we'll come back to that in a second.

But I lost--this was when they were still little and slept late. Kids sleep late for a while, and here's the secret. Don't move your child from a crib to a toddler bed too soon. My son was so well-trained in a crib, he would sleep until 9 a.m. It was great.

And then we moved him into a toddler bed. The next day, 4.30 in the morning, he was up. It took me five months--five months of training to get him to sleep until about 6 or 6.30. That's a bit of an aside. What I found, though--and so I worked on this, and I put myself in that position where I would focus on not using the alarm clock.

But then I found I wasn't getting as much accomplished as I wanted to. I found that I wanted to make a bigger impact. I wanted to get more done. And so then I started setting the alarm clock again. And so now, for me now, I don't have to set an alarm clock.

Yes, I have children, and they sleep until 6.45 or 7. But what I find now is I set the alarm clock for 5, 4.30 in the morning because I want to, because I feel very seriously-- I feel like I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm not a night owl. I'm an early-to-bed guy.

I'm useless after 9 o'clock. My brain shuts down. 10 o'clock, I'm dead. I was trying to be nice last night and talk, but it doesn't work. For me, 4.35 in the morning is a great time. So the point is I don't have to set an alarm clock, but I want to because I feel that what I'm doing is important.

And I'm convinced this is a major thing that all of us want. We want to feel like what we're doing is important. Now, I challenge you to think seriously about this question. And I'll give you another one. So one was, what would you do if you knew you could never retire?

A few of you didn't believe that. What would you do if President-elect Trump issued an edict that said wealthy people are bad and he took away all your money? So you could do that one if you want to. It could have been President-elect Hillary Clinton, whichever it was. The point is this.

Things happen. And throughout history, lots of rich people have found themselves suddenly poor. Lots of rich people have gone through a change in government. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. I have lots of Cuban friends. Lots of Cuban friends who went to Miami after Fidel Castro came to power and took all their money, took all their business, and they fled with the clothes on their back.

I'm deeply interested in history. There were all kinds of Jews who fled out of Europe with nothing but the clothes on their back. And guess what? Many of them came to the United States, to other places, and they started again, and they did it again. They got rich again.

One of the most important things about becoming financially independent is the person that you become to become financially independent. It's acquiring the skills. It's acquiring the perspective. It's acquiring the lifestyle. It's acquiring these habits. The reason that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is not always, or even necessarily, the fact that somehow there's some mass oppression of people.

The reason the rich get richer is because they do different things than the poor do in general. It's not true on a global basis. In the United States, however, that's true. So I challenge you to spend a lot of time focused and thinking about the impact that you want your life to have and set your life up in such a way that you're going to achieve that goal, but you're not going to hate the process.

Now, for those of you who are financially independent, if I told you that you could pursue a very aggressive plan for financial independence, very aggressive and do it very quickly, but it were going to cut a decade off of your life at the end, how many of you would take that bargain?

I don't think any of you would. None of us would. Now, what this is pointing out--I hope you recognize what this points out-- (audience member) If I were younger, I might take it. (laughter) There we go. Age brings a little bit of perspective. What I'm pointing out is that life in pre-FI is not so bad if you're doing the types of things that are going to lead you to FI.

And so that's why JD was joking me that I talk a lot about the stages of financial independence. I think you should enjoy the process. It's on my website, there's a podcast, JD has his version of that. Financial independence can be experienced in stages. And I want to just give you a couple of ideas of some things to add into your thoughts in addition to simply that one day, that one goal.

These are not my stages, these are just things to consider. The number one thing is your career choice. You can become financially independent in a career that's well-suited to you, and you can become financially independent in a career that's not well-suited to you. These are not mutually exclusive things.

So for those of you over here, if you hate your job, change it. There are lots of jobs out there that will pay you double the money that you're making now that are much more well-suited for you. And there's no reason why searching for a better job, a more profitable job, a job that is more appropriate for your unique skills, experience, talents, and ability has to in any way conflict with financial independence.

The only reason it would conflict is if you were only focused on that one date, that FI date, and you said, "I'm going to put my head down and blow my way through to it." These are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can choose a great job, and if it takes a little while for you to move to that other job and then start to make the plans along the way, that's perfectly valid.

This afternoon, Felisa and I did a podcast. I encourage you, look for it on my feed. It was powerful because she shared her process up and then down, and now she's working her way back up, and she says, "Oh, I'm five to seven years." But, Felisa, how would you have felt if the only thing you did for the last 15 years of your life, or 10 to 15 years, was stress about the fact that you weren't financially independent?

You would have missed the whole most important years of your children's life. So sometimes the price for FI is very high, and I think sometimes it can be too high. I'm not the one to say what it is or what it isn't. I don't think that you're suffering just because you don't have a car.

Pete was wearing a shirt yesterday. What was the one, the bicycle, and it said Energizer, or what was it? Antidepressant, right? So you can look, and that's what everything that he writes about, everything that is so attractive, the reason why he's created a leaderless cult, is that he talks about how great things are.

And we're all comparing, "Hey, who spends less? I spend less. You spend less." It's the weirdest conversations in the world. It really is. It really is. And it shows how, when you frame things in a different way. So I encourage you, think carefully about your job. Other things. Debtlessness.

Much of the stress that people experience is based upon debt. We all have stories of consumer debt. If you just simply eliminate or substantially lower your debt, you remove a massive amount of the stress. I'll pick on Felisa because she told her story publicly. If Felisa and her husband had not had massive amounts of debt, because they were very focused on growing as quickly as possible, they wouldn't have experienced the massive stress.

Now, they wouldn't have been financially independent as quickly as leverage, theoretically, could have gotten them there, but they would have avoided a whole lot of stress. I was telling some of you last night, I used to be so hard on Dave Ramsey. I had so many conflicts with him.

I was so frustrated with him. I have almost no criticisms of Dave Ramsey anymore. Because now that I've walked a little bit in his shoes, I realize why he does some of the things. I often have this conversation around the topic of debtlessness. I have this conversation with people and they say, "You know what?

It's really hard to go wrong if you don't borrow a bunch of money." It's really hard to go wrong. You may not get there as quick. Leverage is powerful. I'm a financial planner. I cannot deny. Leverage is powerful. It's powerful both ways. So, consider that. Consider Jim Collins' concept of "F-you money." This means not enough money to be F-I, but enough money to make your own decisions, enough money to make your own choices.

For me, I think this number is something like 100 grand. I know the date. When I first had $100,000 in a checking account, I sat there and I said, "I'm financially independent." I made the decision. Earlier, Bill and I were talking. Very powerful conversation. I encourage you to look for that one in the podcast feed as well.

We were talking about the day that he made the decision to say, "I'm no longer going to make decisions for money." He learned it late. I made that decision when I had $100,000 in the bank. I don't think I'm as hardcore as he probably was. I still consider it money.

But I made the decision. I said, "From now on, there's nothing that I have to choose. I don't have to sell my soul for money. And I'm not going to." If you combine those two things, debtlessness and $100,000 in the bank, there's no transition that you can't make into a great career.

There's no business that you can't start. You have everything you need to take some steps. That's a strong approach to financial independence. One of the things I learned when I started studying the history of retirement, and I did it because I was always interested in it, I learned, and I maintain this, it sounds weird, the people who can afford to retire don't retire.

And the people who are desperate to retire are the ones who will never be able to afford to retire. I have searched diligently for this elusive retiree. And no, I'm not the internet retirement police. But let's pretend I am for a moment. I've searched diligently to find this retiree, this person who goes from not working and doesn't continue to earn money.

And I have yet to meet them. - I found one. - Yeah? I found one, I read, I forget the guy's name, I think it was the guy who wrote "How to Live on Charles Something" or one of the old guys. I tried to get him on my show, I called him, he's like, "I don't want to do a podcast interview." I said, "Ah, there he is, and I can't even get him on my show because he was retired.

He was actually legitimately retired." - And the Reddit exists, they exist, though. - I'm sure the Reddit exists, they do. I think they exist, I think they do. But I have a hard time finding them. And back to that reason, back to that thing. How do you conceive of any of these people here just not doing anything?

Now, you don't have to do things for money, but none of us, all of you do things that aren't for money already. All of you volunteer, all of you help family. And so it's not like you've got to wait until you're financially independent to say no to money or do things that don't earn you money.

And before, you have to do everything that earns you money. There's a scale here. So you just don't have to start with money as the primary goal. You can work on other goals. So think about that. A $100,000, $100,000 in the bank buys you a huge degree of financial independence.

And a career that gives you the characteristics that you want is really valuable. Years ago, I worked for a-- well, my managing director when I first started, his name at Northwestern Mutual, his name was Ed. And Ed was this great guy. He's the kind of guy all of you would love.

Ed loves boats, and he loves fishing, and he loves fast cars. And Ed loves to work hard because he loves his toys. He is no stranger. He loves his toys. He had an airplane, and a boat, and a motorcycle, and he had this crazy Mercedes 12-cylinder souped up by Rentech, just this ridiculous car.

But one of the things that was fascinating, years later, he finally retired, '67, he retired, a rich guy, moved down to the Keys. And I went down and visited him down in the Keys. He had a job of a guy who paid him $100,000 a year, just flat, to drive his boat for him when he came down and flew down with friends of his, with friends for a few days fishing.

Now, Ed loved fishing. Ed had his own multi-hundred-thousand-dollar boat. I'm talking the big ones. But he had a guy who was paying him $100,000 just to come up and run his boat for a couple days, because the man appreciated how Ed ran his boat. And I've observed that again and again and again and again.

Bill and I were talking earlier. He said, "I get all kinds of offers. People who used to work for me just fired half his clients they didn't want before." But he still has things. He doesn't make decisions for money, but he still has things that bring him in money.

So you don't have to wait, is my point. One of the things that you should seriously consider is spending a lot of time on career selection and seriously consider entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is very difficult. We know that. But it also gives you, in an instant, many of the aspects of flexibility that you're looking for.

There are many businesses that you can do that give you that flexibility, that sense of control. So you don't have to wait until you're financially independent in order to not be beholden to somebody who has you punch a time card. I don't punch a time card, and I know one special.

Many people here don't have to punch a time card. So you can change. You can make adjustments. And it's possible to do this within your career, to switch from one position to another, and it's possible to do this by changing careers. And when you combine all of the skills that you have to live well on not a ton of money, that means that you can make even a lateral or a down career move.

You're not stuck. One of the challenges is so many people are stuck at their lifestyle. If you go out and you're earning six figures, and you've got a big mortgage and big car payments and big debt, you can't take a job that's cheaper. One of my financial planning clients, a man made a lot of money.

But he said, "I could go and work as a bag boy at Publix," our grocery store down here, "at Publix, and I could do it." He never borrowed money, never exposed himself. And he had tons of money, had tons of freedom, because he kept his expenses down. Well, guess what?

The mustachioed lifestyle has bought you that. It's worth considering. Finally, one of the most powerful things about financial independence is by considering financial independence, it opens up the opportunities for you to consider alternative approaches, alternative lifestyles. And the skill that you gain in living more cheaply, the skill that you gain in putting yourself in a situation where you can tackle things that are hard, those skills can be translated to many other things.

My wife and I, over Christmas here, we took our camper van, and we took our kids, and we traveled for two weeks all around the Southeast here on a road trip. And one of the things that's so interesting, those of you who have RV'd would know, is that in every campground, there's somebody called a camp host.

And the camp host's job is basically, they get a free site, a free campsite to park their RV in, including utilities, water, and cable, if the campsite offers it. If it's not out in the boonies, a lot of them do. And all they need to do in exchange for that is, they clean the bathrooms, they do a little bit of picking up around the campsite, and at some facilities, they may do things like checking in and helping people out.

Most of the time, the people who are camp hosts are retirees, traditional kind of 60-ish age, and usually they have these huge rigs, like these massive fifth wheel trailers, or these massive motorhomes. The things are awesome. I mean, they're huge. But last week, I saw this person who had this little old F-150, like a 1979 F-150 pickup truck that they were driving, and this tiny little ancient, like from the '70s, single axle travel trailer parked in the camp host spot.

And they were doing camp hosting with this cheap little rig that you could buy for six grand cash. Now, most people don't want to live in a trailer. Most people don't want to do that full time. But here was a couple who was completely happy in that trailer. And so you can grasp or pursue alternative ideas if you're flexible.

And you can use and you can combine these things in radical ways that allow you to get where you want to go faster. So you can use your flexibility, you take a job as a camp host, you use that as a time to write your work, do your art, whatever it is, and you can put these things together.

I was never able to get them on my show, but there was this awesome story from a guy in Finland who wanted to build an app, but he was completely broke and he had no time to do it. So he quit his job, he bought a tent, and he moved to the forest.

And he lived in a tent in the forest during the summer. He was in Finland. And he had a solar panel to power his laptop, and he had a simple tent there set up, and he would code, code, code. He didn't need the internet to do his coding. And then once a week he would go get groceries, come back.

He got his app built. Now, I don't know the story beyond there, but he got his app built because he did that. Now, did he have to wait to be financially independent in order to build his app? Did he have to go work the soul-sucking job that he hated?

No. He put these things together. So be flexible in your thinking and consider pursuing different approaches. My final closing thought for you to consider is this. How many of you have done or want to do a physically challenging race or, like, event? Or how many of you like to challenge yourself physically?

All right. All the hands. For some people, it comes in, "I'm doing a heavy lift. I'm doing this hardcore workout." For other people, it's, "I'm going to run a marathon. I'm going to do a tough mudder," things like that. You like to challenge yourself physically. Now, do you challenge yourself physically because it feels good in the short term, because it allows you to sit down and do nothing, or do you challenge yourself physically because of the results on the other side of the activity?

No? Yeah. For you to say both, I don't know what to do. You just stole my whole thunder. It was supposed to be latter. That was the point. The point is that we do difficult things. And in our modern world, so much of life has become unchallenging that we go out and seek weird, crazy, strange challenges.

I'm not against that. Here's something for you to consider. Why can your job or your career or your business not also be viewed in that light? Why can you not derive similar amounts of satisfaction from the job or the career or the business that you're doing? The answer is you won't derive that satisfaction if the job, career, or business has no meaning to you, if it's not personally important.

But if it is personally important to you, you can derive the same amount of satisfaction from that as you can from finishing a marathon or finishing Fran at the CrossFit gym or finishing the Tough Mudder. You can derive satisfaction from that. So there doesn't have to be the fact that, "Well, I can work hard and do a construction project," or, "I can work hard and do a cool deal." You don't have to say, "I don't get that same sense of challenge from business." Business can be fun.

Jobs can be fun. They can be competitive. JD's building Money Boss again. He doesn't have to. JD, I guarantee-- I mean, do you have, in the long run, are you-- I mean, do you compete with people? Not saying that you have to be number one, but do you kind of get a little joy out of competing with people or collaborating with competing?

I like collaborating with people. I'm not competing with anybody in the financial world. Okay. So that's fine. For me, I just-- I notice that people-- Do you want me to? Hey, if you want to compete, I'll take you on. I'm kidding. The point is that these things are fun.

I collaborate with a number of other podcasters, but I also enjoy competing with them. It's fun. I think we're all in the same world. We all have different voices, but it is fun for me to get with some of my other friends who are podcasters in this financial space, and we hash out ideas, and we're all doing different things.

Our audiences cross-pollinate a little bit, but the competition is fun. Now, it's important to me. So for me, radical personal finance is an outgrowth of my goal setting, my mission, all those questions that JD asked. For me, the big one was, "What is your perfect day?" For me, my perfect day was to wake up, to be able to wake up when I wanted to-- Got that one wrong.

I got it right, and then I realized that was silly. I wanted to wake up when I wanted to, have breakfast, have a cup of coffee, and go into my office, and I wanted to sit down and do something that was important to me in the finance space. And I love to teach.

I love to teach. And so I said, "If I were financially independent, this is what I would do." And my ideal day didn't have anything to do with where I lived or the type of house. It had everything to do with the type of work, and it had everything to do with being able to do the things I wanted to do the way I wanted to do them-- to not be filtered by somebody else, to not be suppressed by somebody else.

And it was after, I think, a year, I sat down at the kitchen table with my wife one morning for breakfast, and I just thought, "I feel free for, I think, the first time in my life because I have the power to hang myself or to succeed all by myself." I thought back--I thought back through it over the years.

And I went to high school. In high school, all the ministry-- I went to Christian high school, so we had far more rules than a lot of other people. And the administrators could have power over me and the things I did, and the teachers, and I could risk suspension and all of that stuff.

And then I went to college. I had all the same things. Went to a Christian college, too. So there I had even more rules than a lot of other people have. Then I went immediately into the corporate world, where, of course, I'm accountable to my bosses and accountable to the corporate brand.

And then I go into the financial services industry, where it's like the rules go up through even there. You can't post on Twitter without it getting recorded by compliance, and you can't--like, everything. And then it was when I finally left that, and I was doing radical personal finance, and I realized I can say or do anything I want, and I'm accountable for the results.

And I felt that freedom. So I challenge you to spend time thinking deeply about the process while you're working towards the goal. And I challenge you to consider what JD said this morning. I personally--my personal opinion-- I don't ask you to buy it. I don't think that financial independence is a great goal.

I think it's a great milestone, and a very worthwhile one. I remember the day that I paid off all my debt in college. Two weeks before I graduated, wrote a check to Sally Mae. I think it was, like, 13 grand, something like that. Called Dave Ramsey. "I'm debt-free!" I was just...

And... I felt kind of empty. I was like, "What do I do now?" And it took a long time for me to grab the next thing. Now, on my show, I've interviewed a bunch of people who've become financially independent. And here's what I've noticed. Those who set financial independence as the primary goal often reach it and don't know what to do.

Those who have goals that reach beyond financial independence jump into it joyously and benefit from it. So make sure that when you're thinking about financial independence, that you think about the "why." Don't wait for that magical date to pursue the "why." There are lots of non-profit organizations out there that need executive directors that are willing to pay $200,000 a year for work that matters.

I just use that because people often associate my generation, millennials, like non-profits. "We don't want to go work for the for-profit. We want to go work for the non-profits." Guess what? You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working for non-profits, or you can volunteer your time.

The choice is not either/or. So think carefully about that as you go through the process of your financial independence journey. And make sure that you don't miss life now while you're waiting for tomorrow. Otherwise, you and I are likely to do what so many other people have done-- miss life now while thinking about tomorrow.

And I'm telling you, the price can be too high. So those are my thoughts. I encourage you just to consider them. It's a subject that I'd love to see us talk more about that we don't talk a lot about, and I don't think these goals are mutually exclusive. So I'm happy to take questions.

Does anybody have any questions on anything on that? Or if there are no questions, I can wrap up, but I'll answer questions on anything. - I'm going to make this talk so awesome, it's really good. - Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Go ahead. - You said that you would-- that potentially you might feel bitter having reached financial independence.

What do you think would actually change about your life right now if you were this moment financially independent? - Yeah. If I were this moment financially independent, I think I would do-- so right now I do-- in 2017, I do five podcasts a week, and I do that because I had so many years of pent-up frustration of all of these topics that I wanted to get out that I just couldn't conceive of.

I was like, "Oh, I could do one a week." I was like, "It'll take me years to get everything out." So I still feel that way, but it's also a lot of work. It's a lot of work to do that. To create five new one-hour speeches every day is a significant challenge.

If I were financially independent, I think I would drop my show to, like, two days a week. But here's the thing. I'm not waiting on that in order to-- I'm not waiting on financial independence to do that. I think there's an interesting business case to be made to do that now.

I may do that next year. It's just a matter of me building things out. And right now, I'm working very, very diligently to create the things that I want to create. Like, I'm so frustrated at-- you know, for me, 2016 was, for me, in many ways, a disappointing year because I want to build and chart the path clearly for people.

There's so many simple concepts, and one of my skills is to be able to take all of the disparate ideas and create a very simple framework. Like, I've built--I have a book outline. It's called "The Framework of Wealth," where in ten words, I can give you a framework for every piece of financial advice you will ever need in your life.

I can't get the book done. I'm working--I keep working on it. But I'm really good at that, and so I want to create the type of useful, helpful products and courses and books and whatever that help people to see. Because here's the reality about finance. Most things in finance are like this old story of the elephant.

Y'all remember the story of the elephant. There's three blind guys or four blind guys that are gathered around the elephant, and they ask each other, "What's the elephant like?" One of them says, "It's kind of like a tree trunk." And the other one says, "No, it's not. It's like a spear." And the other one says, "No, it's not.

It's like a snake." And the other one says, "No, it's not." It's like, "What does a tail feel like? I don't know." You get the point. They're all touching the elephant. They just are all looking at different parts of it. And in finance, it's exactly the same way. I challenge you.

You give me a financial-- piece of financial advice that you hate, you think is wrong, I'll give you a situation in which it's right. Give me a financial product you hate, tell me it's always wrong. I'll give you a situation in which it's right. And that's what I kind of learned from studying professional finance.

That I didn't get from personal finance. So what I want to do is I want to give people those tools where they can look at a situation, they can look at a product, and they can evaluate it with a clear approach. So that's my answer. Other questions? Other comments?

I would hit the music, but I was so flustered at the beginning. That was supposed to be smoother than what it was. Thank you all for listening. Thank you all for doing what you do. Pete, I just want to honor you publicly. You have--your work has fundamentally transformed how people approach money.

And I think I've benefited from it. I used to sit in my office, you know, fancy financial advisor office with people, and I would pull up the shockingly simple math behind early retirement. And I would just use it, and I would explain to them, "Listen, you and I are dickering around about whether you can save $225 a month or $263 a month.

This is ridiculous. Let me give you an extreme example. Now let's work towards that way." And you have done a phenomenal job of taking simple concepts that should have been obvious to many of us and teaching them to the masses. So I thank you for that. I think we're all in your debt for that.

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