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"We never seen this before." Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. "Yeah!" Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See cricketwireless.com for details. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we have a turnaround story. I invite you to tune in and listen to how this couple, Joel and Alexis, went from high living, high spending, normal lives, to hardcore savings on track for a very early retirement.

What's the word? Weirdos? In a complimentary way? Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, encouragement, and examples that you need for how you can live a rich and meaningful life now, while also crushing your plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today, my name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. And today we have Joel and Alexis here to tell us their story. I think you'll find a lot of parallels that you can use in your own situation. I caught up with Joel and Alexis recently at Camp Mustache in Gainesville, Florida, a couple weeks ago, and had a neat chance to hear their story, and you're going to hear it in just a moment, where they talk about how they went through their own personal transformation.

And it's really fantastic because it shows how anybody can change if the motivation is strong enough for them to change. That's what I want you to take away from today's show. I'm going to save any more preamble and just simply talk about our sponsors, and I'll play the interview for you.

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Again, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. That link will forward you through to a landing page. You'll put in your name, your address, your contact information, email address, phone number, how much money you have, et cetera. And they'll use that information in order to try to connect you with a pool of qualified candidates in your local area that you can go on to interview, meet with, and see if they are worth your working with them, worth your hiring them to work with you as a financial advisor.

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RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. This show is also sponsored by SoFi. SoFi stands for Social Finance. It's a modern up-to-date lending company. It came out of the tech – what was it? The founders were out in California and they were all in tech school and they're looking around the lending industry and saying – business school, not tech school.

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RadicalPersonalFinance.com/SoFi. And with that, here we go. Joel and Alexis, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey, how are you? We're glad you guys are here. So we're here at Camp Mustache Southeast 2017. How did you wind up at Camp Mustache and how did you wind up in this world of financial independence?

Yeah, so we had been watching in the FI community all of these Chautauquas and Camp Mustaches for the past few years. And when we finally saw that one was coming here to Gainesville – we're Floridians, so we were like, "This is so close. This is such a great opportunity to go and meet other people in the FI field." It's in Florida.

It's not in Ecuador. It's not in Seattle. You don't have to get your passport lumped in. I'm like, "I can drive to this. We've got to do this." Driving is good. I kind of said, "We have to go meet people and just kind of be a part of this," because of the photos that I had seen on other blogs, how much fun everybody was having at these events.

I said, "We really need to get more involved in the FI community." Awesome. So tell me your story, especially as it relates to financial independence. Where did you guys start? So out of college, we were software engineers. We kind of had a pretty good income, and we just kind of got into a very spendy habit.

We slowly kind of had lifestyle inflation creep in, and before we knew it, we looked at some old figures. In 2012, we were spending six figures expenses-wise. Not proud of that, but I think it was a symptom of not really enjoying my job and it being kind of stressful.

Around 2014, we found the Mr. Money Mustache blog. Well, you found it. You were... Well, you found it first, right? Jose pointed it to you. I had looked at other things. I had read Suze Orman before, and then I had seen Dave Ramsey, because out of college, I was like, "Oh, we're adults now.

We go buy things, because we have money now." I read Dave Ramsey, and he had all these steps, and then it really didn't go... There was a certain point where I was like, "Well, there might be more than this," but I didn't really delve any further, because I was like, "Oh, well, okay.

That's it. Well, let's just do our thing. We'll just keep earning." And then a buddy of ours, he pointed Alexis at Mr. Money Mustache. I kind of glanced at it, but didn't really care too much for it. I was like, "Eh, this is no big deal." She kind of really took it in, though.

She was always the saver in our relationship. I was kind of always the spender, so for many years, she didn't want to merge our accounts. I've got to ask. I've got to interrupt you. Do you feel weird telling this story while Mr. Money Mustache himself gets a beer out of the refrigerator behind you?

Yeah, you know. He knows that we did a 180. He's probably beaming with pride over there, isn't he? He punched us virtually many times. There we go. Mr. Money Mustache's beard. Can't get him on the microphone, but we can get his beard on the microphone. I'll join you later.

All right. We'll do one later. But yeah, we needed a big mustache punch for how we were spending. I didn't really think much about it because for the first time, I had this cash flow, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to spend it. I'm going to live it up." For that reason, she never wanted to combine our accounts.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. I was like, "You want to join?" It was before we were married. He's like, "If we join our bank accounts, we won't have to go through all this trouble of trying to put our rent together and our food budget together." I'm like, "No." I was like, "No way.

No way, Joel." Yeah, I would try to justify spending with more spending. You would try to justify his spending with trying to convince me to go spend. If I would come home with a shiny new Xbox One from Best Buy that I didn't budget for, and then I'd say, "Don't be mad, hon.

You could go spend $500 now to compensate." It's okay. You earn money, too. It's like fat people. I always want to get everyone else to eat the same food so we don't feel as guilty. Around 2014, she started reading Mr. Money Mustache. Ironically, about the same time, she was in a very serious car accident.

Yeah, car was totaled. Car was totaled. Luckily, she was okay. We got this check from the insurance company for a new car, and we were a two-car household. I looked at it, and I said, "You know what? Let me read this Money Mustache again." I realized it was an awakening.

Wow, life is maybe precious. Maybe we should really think a little bit more about what we're doing and how we're blowing our money. I really got into the blog. I binged through the MMM blogs over the next month. We decided to take that. It was like a $10,000 check.

It wasn't that much, but we decided, "Let's put this into Vanguard instead. Let's become kind of a one-car household," because we worked three miles away from each other, our jobs. We said, "We should be carpooling. Why do we need two cars?" If you're a Dave Ramsey fan, it was like that was a great snowball start.

Yeah, so that was kind of our inflection point. We just decided from that point forward, every month, once a month, we would look at our budget and say, "What can we trim? What can we reduce and build this snowball?" I would say our expenses went from what was six figures at one time.

The following year went down to the 50s or 60s. Then the last two years, we've only had spending barely over 30 a year. Wow, congratulations. I'll tell you, our happiness is actually better now. It's really clichéd, but it's so true that money does not buy you happiness. The happiness has actually come in working together towards this goal of FI and finding this common ground and working as a team towards the same vision.

Yeah, it was a new common front together that we could do together. I'm really glad that we found that commonality because that really, really helps. If you don't have someone on your team, then it'll feel like a struggle. We had a moment where there was a little bit of a disagreement on how gazelle or mustachian we were getting.

We decided we wanted to pay off one of our rental property at the time. We got a little too extreme in the frugality. It was a good test of our mustache muscle. How did you know it was too extreme? When Joel said, "We're not going to use the car or go anywhere on weekends, ever." She's like, "Joel, we live 10 miles from everything.

I can't do this. I'm leaving." I was like, "All right, maybe we pushed it a little too far." At our most extreme, we were able to hit an 83% savings rate. Now we've backed it off in the last year to a much more comfortable 76-ish savings rate, which is still very fast.

Like I said, we are blessed to have very good incomes. We also realize that these jobs, while they pay well, they're kind of soul-sucking. They don't allow for creative freedom. They're very stressful mentally. We want to get to that FI point so that we could spend our time with family.

Spend our time on the endeavors that we really want to work on and during our peak productive hours. When you get home, the thought of thinking after an entire day of thinking seems really unappealing. We work nine-hour workdays, which turn into 11-hour workdays. Then you get home and you're just drained mentally.

You're out of energy. It's one of those things where you said, "Wow, we can turn this around." It was the light bulb moment where it's like, "We can choose how many years we're going to work." As opposed to so many people, even the question seems funny to them. "How many years do you want to work?" "We thought you worked until you're 60 years old." That's what everybody thought.

We had just listened to our college professor when he said, whose name is also Pete, and he was just like, "Live like a college student as long as you can." I was like, "Oh, Pete." We should have taken that advice. I should have listened. Now we're on the way and maybe one to two years away from FI.

It's like we have this story where you can be really pointed in the wrong direction. Still turn things around if you have that common goal. Let me just clarify. The reason you said his name is also Pete is because Mr. Money Mustache's parents did not, when he came out of the womb, they didn't look down and say, "Oh, look.

Here's Mr. Money Mustache." His name is Pete. I should have clarified that. I usually don't refer to him as Pete. I usually refer to him as Mr. Money Mustache. That's why you were laughing about them being both so the audience doesn't miss the joke. At this point, the thing that I want to get across to people is you can be pointed in completely the wrong direction and feel like you're on just the wrong side of things, but that shouldn't be discouraging.

That shouldn't keep you down because you really can turn things around if you have the vision and it's meaningful. You can get back on the right track. To also clarify, when we came out of college, we didn't have any debt, but then we just started accumulating debt. Like, okay, we got a mortgage in 2007.

Yeah, that was a bad idea. That was not the smartest idea. Then, of course, we didn't have any furniture or anything to our names, so then we're like, "Well, we got to fill that house with furniture, all brand new furniture." We were the anti-mustachians. It's like, "I don't have a car.

I need a new car." Actually, we should get two new cars, right? We were the anti-mustachians. Pretty much every article that Mr. Money Mustache has, we could write an article of how we did the exact opposite and how that worked out for us. We really did do things wrong, but then once we had that light bulb moment, we were like, "Wow, we can turn this around." As engineers, we love spreadsheets, so as soon as we saw the numbers, we were like, "Holy cow, this is correct.

We don't need to work forever." Yeah, this isn't any kind of woo-woo stuff. This is real. You can trace this back. You can do the math. That was good. For us, we saw that finish line, and I was like, "What can we do? How do we get there?" Let me ask you a question.

You have just recently become friends with me. My wife and I, we just graduated from college. We just bought a new house. We just filled that house with furniture that we bought all brand new on credit. We just bought two new cars on credit. How would you communicate with my wife and me in a way that would help us to understand or perhaps to start to see what it is that you see now?

First, I would say, "Are you happy right now? You're really excited. You got all this stuff. It's amazing." I just put my new car on Facebook, and I got 122 likes. Do you love your job? Do you want to do this for the next 30 or 40 years? That's the question you really want to ask.

Now, Mr. Money Mustache will say everybody should be FI because even if you love your job, it gives you power. It gives you the ability to negotiate. That's all true, but I think the real key is if you don't like your job, even if you're just mediocrely okay with your job, but you're using these purchases as kind of a band-aid to feel a little better, to maybe make life seem a little easier, you're actually handcuffing yourself to that job longer.

You think you're easing the pain maybe with some of these purchases, but you're actually just ensuring that you're going to be in that job for longer, or possibly forever with certain people. I have family members that unfortunately are in their 80s, and they're still working because they don't have another choice.

If somebody had asked me in college, instead of the question, "Where do you want to live? What kind of house do you want? What kind of car do you want to drive?" If somebody had asked me the question, "How many years do you want to work?" That just to me is so revealing.

I wish that I had known in college because I'd be done right now, but really it's just that that's the question. If you love your job and you have a high confidence that you'll be able to find jobs in that field for a long time, and you don't worry about layoffs or anything like that, maybe having the two cars and the nice house isn't such a big deal.

But if you're chaining yourself to a career that maybe you don't love-- Or if you're doing it because, "I'm an adult now. This is what you do once you leave college." Sure. Some people you're just following the pattern. You're just following the default path. That's what everybody does. Because that's what's presented to you.

That's what you see all around you. I think challenging that is a great mental exercise. Even if you decide, "Yeah, I am going to buy a new house and a new car," at least kind of challenge it. Say, "Do I need to do that? Is this going to be beneficial to me?

Do I realize the opportunity cost of what else I could do with that money?" I think that's kind of the key. That's where you want to ground yourself. And that's what I told my brother. One day, if we have children, that's what I want to get across to them.

Every dollar you spend could be used for something else, including buying your own freedom. What are you going to do when you retire? She's still working out. I'm still working on that. I'm not sure yet. I feel like in some sense I might take a month of watching Netflix, but then after that I know I'll probably get bored.

But there were certain things that I wanted to be a part of more in my community. By helping out, there's this one place called The Promise. They help people with special needs. I would love to devote more time to that. I do when they have the opportunity, but sometimes it's like, "Oh, we need a volunteer at 2.30 in the afternoon on Tuesday." Right, you're working full-time.

I'm working, but I would love to go help out with that. That's one of the things that I would like to do more of. For me, it's just being able to spend more time with family, being able to work on creative endeavors. I write music. I also write fiction, literature, things like that.

There's a lot of creative things I want to do. I'm also working on starting a blog later this year, so I want to have more time to be able to put into things like that. Basically, just be my own boss, be in control of my schedule, be in control of my hours, not have to give 12 hours a day to an employer who, to them, I'm just a number.

I'm craving that control over my schedule. Mr. Money Mustache jokes a lot about the alarm clock as a thing that he destroyed when he retired, and I totally get that. It sounds so simple and so trivial, but it's really-- I'm going to take a hammer to that alarm clock when I go up.

It's going to be wonderful. And all of your backup alarms for you to wake up in the morning. You set the seven-- Oh, so you're going to beat your iPhone over the hammer. There we go. Probably. You just betrayed yourself. Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. It's definitely exciting to see people recognize with the simplicity of the math the progress that they can make.

And the thing that perhaps to me is the most important is just sitting here watching you two, it seems much easier to communicate now together about money and to be of the same mind than it was before. Absolutely. In my mind, that's the biggest benefit. Yeah, we didn't always communicate that easily about that.

We both saw the light bulb. We both saw the meaning behind it and what it represented in terms of our freedom. And since then, we've become a team, and I think it's improved our relationship. It's brought us closer. Knowing that you've got somebody who kind of sees things eye to eye-- I've heard a lot of stories of other people where one person in the relationship isn't quite as on board with the FI lifestyle.

For me, we were kind of the opposite. Usually it's the guy trying to convince their wife. For us, it was her getting me on board, and I'm really glad that we ended up going down this path because it's changed our lives. I think your marriage will benefit for many decades to come.

Joe, Alexis, thank you guys for coming on. Do you know the name of your blog yet? Not yet. We're going to keep you posted, though. We're working on it now. If we get it done in the next few weeks, then maybe we'll be able to get it linked before the show goes out.

Thank you guys for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Pay careful attention to the lessons that you can learn from Joel and Alexis' story. Alexises. I always get confused on how to make a possessive form of a name that ends in S, like sheets. Is it sheetses or is it Alexises?

Pay attention to the story that you heard from Joel and Alexis and think about how you can apply some of those lessons to your own life. A couple of things I just want to clarify to you. Number one, sometimes being uber-aggressive is easier than making small incremental changes. If you have a clear goal and if that goal is close enough, a lot of times you can just focus in and just hustle for a short period of time, and you can make dramatic change if the motivation is high enough.

So consider if you would be better served by really digging in and focusing on an aggressive financial goal in your life. Number two, I just recommend think about how they were finally able to come to the place where they can work together on their money. If you're working with your husband or your wife and you have a hard time interacting with them and finding a place of common understanding, think about what's important to the other person.

Try to make things simple and make sense and try to share with them in terms of what's important to them. When you're trying to convey an idea to somebody, you always want to speak in their language. Try to connect it with their goals. So don't look at your husband or your wife and try to tell them all the things that are important to you.

There's a place for that, but don't start there. Think about what's important to your husband or wife and try to work together to find an opportunity to make them see how your suggestions are going to get you closer to that. Regardless, I think Joel and Alexis' story is very inspirational and I hope it has been inspiring to you.

I'll put links to Joel's blog since the interview. He's gone ahead and got it up, so I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes for today if you want to check it out. It's a brand new baby blog, but I always want to help people and give them as much exposure as possible.

It's just their story as they work their way through it. That's it for today's show. A couple of quick closing things. Thank you to those of you who support the show as patrons directly supporting me. If you're not doing that, if you found value in content like this, it takes time and money for me to go and do things like get these great interviews.

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