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Tap to learn more, or visit us at asuonline.asu.edu. Gwen, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, we're up here in Gainesville, Florida, at Camp Mustache Southeast 2017. So it's providing me with an awesome opportunity to get together with other people who are pursuing financial independence, some of whom have websites, some of whom don't, etc.

So tell us a little bit about your story, especially as it relates to money and financial independence. So, my name is Gwen, and I run the website Fire Millennials. And I started my journey back in high school, actually, when my parents sat me down and told me that I was not getting any help for college.

And so I needed to figure out how I was going to pay for it myself. When did they do that? Did they, like, spring it on you on your high school graduation, or was this something that... No, thankfully they did it at the end of my sophomore year of high school.

So I had two years to come up with everything, and they gave me a deal. They said, "We pay for two years of community college. You can live at home, pretty cheap, or you can go and do a four-year university by yourself." And unfortunately, our relationship frayed over time, and staying with them was no longer an option.

I ended up briefly homeless for a little bit. And so I had to figure out how to pay for college myself. So I worked really hard at academics and extracurriculars and sports, and just had a very robust resume, as it were, and had good grades. So I submitted for a lot of scholarships and got a few, but they wouldn't help everything.

And I didn't want to get loans because I was broke and I didn't want to be in debt. So I joined the military and was in it for six years, and they helped pay for some of it. What age? Right at 18? Right at 18, yeah. The summer after I graduated, before I went my freshman year.

And then I got a call right after I signed my name on the dotted line that said, "Hey, we've got a full-ride scholarship with your name on it. If you want it, somebody else turned theirs down." Really? From a school that you had... From the school that I went to.

Ah, right after you had enlisted. Right after I enlisted. So it was kind of like, "Ugh." At the same time, they paid for all of my school. Right, right. So that was a great way to get out of college debt-free. So you served six years in the military. Six years in the military.

Which branch? The Air National Guard. What did you do? I was in IT, which actually kick-started the rest of my career because I was like, "Eh, this IT stuff is pretty easy." So when I got back from training, I was like, "Huh, I'm going to do this on the civilian side and make lots of money, and it's going to be awesome." Learning how to load mortar shells into a mortar doesn't necessarily translate over to the civilian world, but certainly IT skills can.

Yes, and that's exactly what I was thinking of when I signed up. I was like, "Well, I could do this, but there's not really any direct translation but IT. That's really useful now." So I went through college, graduated debt-free. Because of the military grants. Because of the scholarship and the military grants.

And while I was in college, I ran across Mr. Money Mustache's blog somehow. Just hanging around the internet one day. And I was like, "Wow, that's really amazing. I don't have to work anymore. Whoa, this is great." I love being in college. If I could just be in college all the time, I would totally do it.

You get to take naps in the afternoon. You get to learn stuff. And especially I had an internship, and I learned what it was like to be working in an office environment. It was like, "This sucks. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life." "How are people going to survive this?

This is terrible." So when I got my job right out of college, I started saving pretty much immediately. And got involved in the personal finance, financial independence world. And just kind of blossomed from there. So that's been how many years now since you graduated? I graduated at the end of 2013.

Okay, so three years now in the work world. Three years, yeah. And you're pursuing kind of a mustachioed, extreme savings type of approach to financial independence? Yeah, so my average savings rate is about 42%. Awesome. That's fantastic. So I've just been squirreling away as much as I possibly can.

And this is the time to do it. I'm young and single, and I don't have very many expenses. So it's super easy. You just set everything and forget it. So I maxed out my 401(k), my Roth IRA, and this year I'll add in my HSA. Congratulations. Thank you. So tell me what this looks like practically.

Because obviously a lot of people, they get out of college and they immediately start spending more than what they're earning. So first, you're working in IT? Yeah, I work in IT. And do you disclose how much you're earning at this point in time? I do, yeah. How much? I started off at about $65,000.

Now I'm up to about $76,000. Okay, so first, that right there. The median income in the United States, I don't have this year's numbers. The median household income where I was at was about $50,000. You saved me. You saved me with the right numbers. So you come out making $10,000 more than the median income.

Which is like an average of two people's income, yeah. Right, which is fantastic. And that's due to choosing a career that is in high demand and where you actually need some skill and knowledge applied. Yep, yep. So congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations there. And when you got out of college and you have this idea to say, "I want to live inexpensively," what did you do?

Where do you live? Do you have a car? Tell me about kind of what your lifestyle looks like at this point. So I gave myself three months to furnish a place because I had lived in a dorm for four years. So I didn't have a bed. I didn't have a dresser.

I didn't have a kitchen table, you know, so I had to fund everything. So I set my 401(k) to just the match. I get roughly 6% to 10% match depending on how you calculate it. And so I set it-- And by the way, I'm going to interrupt you. I don't remember we said where you're living.

I live in a very low cost area in the Midwest. Okay, okay, very good. So-- So you set your 401(k) to just the match. Set the 401(k) to just the match. And then I let myself spend whatever I needed to furnish my house. But I didn't go crazy. You know, I scoured state sales and Craigslist.

And I tried to buy used as much as possible. And I got some great deals, Lazy Boy Couch for $150. Nice. Yeah, it was amazing. I love that couch. So then after three months, I jacked up my savings rate as much as possible to max out my 401(k). And I actually made a mistake because I calculated my match as my contribution.

So at the end of the year, fair enough, sure enough, there was $18,000 in my account, but I had only contributed $13,000 of that. Ah, so you could have-- Missed out on some of that space. Right, you could have put an extra five grand in. Yeah, so if you're thinking about doing this, then make sure you exclude the match from your calculations because that doesn't count towards your contribution.

Right, so just for clarity, you can put up-- is it this year, I guess $18,000 or is it $18,500? $18,000. $18,000 into your 401(k), but that's based upon your actual contribution. Your employer can put in whatever the match is on top of that. You're just limited to $18,000 in your 401(k).

So I missed out on about $5,000 in tax. My audience is crying their eyes out. Oh, no, you missed it. I know, right? So terrible, $5,000, you poor thing. Exactly. Yeah, so going from that, spending whatever I wanted on house stuff and then cracking down, I was like, "Oh, wow, this is kind of hard to do." And I was living in a pretty cheap place.

It was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house for $950 a month. Renting the whole house? Renting the whole house, yep. And it was about 1,500 square feet, something like that. And I wasn't using all of it because, again, I didn't have very much stuff just starting out. So I got a roommate, and he paid half the rent, and so that brought my housing costs down even more.

And I kept my car out of college, so I didn't immediately go and get a car because I'm adulting, I have a paycheck, I can do that. Adulting, that's the first time I've heard that. Oh, really? That's great. That's one of my least favorite phrases. Millennials use it a lot.

It's like, "Oh, I paid my bills today. #adulting." I'm out of touch now. I am a millennial, but I guess I'm in a different phase of life, so that's new to me. Yeah, so I kept those two expenses really low, getting a roommate and keeping my same car that was paid off.

So I feel like that's really what helped me at the beginning because I didn't have to worry about, "Oh, I have to pay $250 for my car payment today." But I could be putting that in my Roth IRA instead. So instead of paying other people, I paid myself first.

Perfect. Yeah, so if you're paying $900 to rent a three-bedroom, one-bath house, that drops you down to $450 plus utilities. Yep. And then no car payment, basic insurance costs, basic other costs. Do you have any guess of what you spend at this point in time on a monthly basis?

So in 2015, I spent about $39,000. In 2016, I spent $41,000. Okay. So where is the excess money? Are you spending it on travel or other things? Travel--well, my housing costs went up significantly when I moved for my new job. I went from paying $450 to paying $1057 a month plus utilities and everything.

So a good chunk of that went towards higher housing costs. So are you planning to do the same thing, get a roommate, lower those costs, or are you comfortable at this point in time with your situation? I said I was comfortable because I moved very close to work. I was a mile and a half away.

I could walk. I could ride my bike. That cut down on transportation costs, which was nice. But now that I look back on it, I was like, "That's kind of dumb." I really wanted to be close to work, and that was great, but it was a very expensive area of town.

And I could have lived 15 minutes away and saved a couple hundred bucks a month by just living a little bit further away. So now I slightly regret the fact that I spent like $14,000 in rent last year. So I just moved for a new job a month and a half ago, and I'm going to buy some multifamily rental property, but I moved in two weeks, so I didn't have time to find a place to stay.

So it was either go with a very expensive short-term lease, or I put out a call on Facebook. I said, "Hey, does anybody have any short-term housing options that I can use for a couple of months?" And a friend of mine--because I moved back to my old town-- a friend of mine said, "Hey, I've got a giant empty basement and a really big mortgage payment.

It would be great if you could help me out and move into my basement." And so I said, "Well, it would be great if you could help me out and let me live in your basement for cheap." And so both of us think that we got better into the deal.

So now I live in a basement for $400 a month, all-inclusive. Great. And I get a garage, which is just amazing. In the Midwest is useful. In the winter, yes. No ice scraping. No ice scraping, no snow scraping. That's worth at least an extra $100 a month, right? Absolutely.

Better lifestyle. Yes. So how old are you now at this point? I'm 26. You're 26. And I haven't looked at your blog. Do you disclose how much money you've saved? I do, yeah. How much money you've saved based upon this process at this point and then what your plans are from here?

So in three years, I've increased my net worth $115,000 to $125,000. Congratulations. Thank you. And what's next from here? Next, after Camp Mosh Dash is over, I will be talking to a realtor and looking in my area for multifamily rental options. I want to get at least a triplex or preferably a quad.

Quad. That way I can live in one unit and rent out the others and have other people pay from a mortgage so I don't even have a housing cost. And instead of even having housing costs, I'm getting paid to live there because people are paying me. So it's house hacking.

So that's a great way to live very cheaply and get some extra semi-passive income coming in. So you're on this website, Fiery Millennials, and we millennials are quite the buzz. Not all the press is positive. Tell me about your work and what you're trying to accomplish in speaking to the millennial generation about money.

Yeah, so there are a lot of big-name bloggers out there, and it turns out that most of them are older with families, and they're either really close to financial independence or they've been financially independent for a couple of years now. And it's just not very relevant to a lot of young people's situations.

So I started this blog, and people reach out to me, and they're like, "Wow, you're going through the exact same stuff I am. This is useful information to know because you're going through it at the same time I am." So I like to inspire people that it's actually possible, that we can do this crazy thing and retire way before normal.

Because you hear news articles, it's like, "Oh, millennials will never retire. Inflation's going to happen, and you're not going to be able to save because student debt is so high." But I want to prove that there are other options out there and that you don't have to work until you're 70, 75.

Why do you want to retire? I hate working. Have you thought about getting a job that you don't hate? Well, that would require me to lower my standards of living, which I'm not willing to do. I did actually just so I got my new job, and I thoroughly enjoy this job way more than I did my last couple of positions.

So I don't hate working quite so much anymore. But it's still not doing fun things. Growing up, I was heavily influenced by the Girl Scout organization, and I ended up getting a lot of mentoring and a lot of stability out of that life. So I want to mentor the next generation of girls coming up.

But unfortunately, you can't really do that unless you're available to work all summer at a Girl Scout camp and get paid like $600, $700, $800 for the entire summer. So I want to be able to choose to do jobs that don't pay much but are really fulfilling and really useful to people or just really fun like being a ski instructor out at Breckenridge for the winter.

Right, right. So a lot of--in the statement that you said, you said, "I hate working." This is probably a common theme among many in the millennial generation, and it drives other generations batty because they don't understand. So what do you mean when you say, "I hate working"? Why do you say that?

What do you mean by that? So I hate getting up when it feels like -20 outside, and I have to get up, and it's dark, and it's cold. I just don't like getting up and being forced to do things that I don't really care about. There's politics involved. You have to play the game, and you have to climb the ladder, and you just have to deal with a bunch of stuff that is, in the long run, useless and won't matter.

And I don't have time and energy to just have to care about all that stuff, so I don't want to care about it. So going to work and doing stuff that I don't really care about is just kind of draining after a while. -Are you lazy? -Yes. Straight-up answer.

I'm working on it. It's one of my goals for 2017. For my goals post I put in there, yes, I am very lazy, and I'm working very hard to fix this. If I can procrastinate it, I will. I'll put it off until the end of time, anything I can do.

But I'm working at doing it, recognizing, like, "Oh, I'll just check this thing on Facebook." No, put the phone down, put Facebook away. You have things to do right now. Get them done. Get it done, get it over with before it becomes a bigger problem. Like I wrote a post about how FI is like doing your dishes.

The easier and quicker you do your dishes, the faster it goes. So right after a meal, you just rinse it off. Boom. Easy done. You clean it, maybe throw some soap and water on it. All my dishes are clean. If you ever come over to my house, I promise, they're all clean.

But if you put it off, you just lay the plate next to the sink, and you say, "Oh, I'll get to it later." Then all the food becomes hard and crusty, and it's a lot more work, and then things grow on it, and it's gross, and it smells weird.

Same thing with FI. The longer you put off starting to save for retirement, the harder it gets. Start off when we're young, it's a lot easier comparatively. So you have a goal of being financially independent as quickly as possible. And your primary motivation, it sounds to me, is so that you can, number one, have control over the little details of your life.

You don't have to get up when it's cold and go out of your house when it's dark to go to a job. So you can--and I understand that. You can stay at home and get up and have a nice cup of coffee and look out at the snow instead of having to go out in it.

And also because you want to do work that is more meaningful to you, that is more in line with your own goals. Is that an accurate summary? Absolutely. Nailed it. So you see your exit path as save enough money that you could live on so that you can switch to something else.

Absolutely. So what's your target savings amount? I believe it is somewhere in the--right over half a million dollars. It's like $567,000 or something. It's kind of in flux. I don't know what my expenses are, like what my base expenses are. So I have an average of $40,000 a year, but will I actually spend that much more now that I'm house hacking and I'll have things going forward?

So I don't quite know. So tell me--because your employer would very much like to engage you in a way that is deeper. Your employer wants you--it's hard for me to believe that you're lazy. I know you might--I think we all have things that we like to do that might be perceived that way.

But if you spent six years working in the military, that means that you've had to undergo a significant amount of discipline that's imposed upon you by that system. If you've successfully graduated from college with a degree in IT, that means that you have imposed upon yourself self-discipline enough to study and to do your work.

And if you have been able to go out into the working world and you're earning 75,000 bucks a year, you're not--I don't believe you're lazy. I work hard--I force myself to work a lot harder than I should. I should be working smarter, not harder. Why? Well, I put things off and it becomes harder and more difficult.

But why do you think you should be working smarter, not harder? Well, it would be easier to do that. So by not being lazy, I could be lazy in the future. But you're not lazy. Here's the thing, you're not lazy. So if you were--here's how it--if you were--I don't know.

If you were going and working as a ski instructor now, or if you were going and working as a summer camp counselor now, and you lived in your car, then I might possibly believe that you're lazy. But I don't believe that you're lazy. I think that you just haven't been able to connect yet the sense of meaning and purpose with your job.

And the reason I'm pushing on this is because it annoys me deeply when people make generational stereotypes and characterizations of millennials as lazy. True. Certainly, I think that we as millennials, we have our own problems, just like every generation has its problems. There is, it seems to me, too high of a sense of entitledness.

There is, it seems to me, too high of a sense of specialness when we're not all that special. We're people, just like billions of other people around the world. The world doesn't revolve around us. I think those are accurate characterizations that, of course, there are exceptions. But the one that annoys me is lazy, because I don't think most of the people that I know, most of the millennials that I know, are not lazy.

My perspective on it is that millennials recognize that oftentimes our parents-- and this is not personal to me, and I wouldn't put words in your mouth. I'm speaking generally from observation of my generation. Oftentimes, our parents have spent all this time working for-- let's talk about money and retirement.

Many of our parents have spent a lot of their time and their energy and their focus of planning for their retirement, planning for their career, work, work, work, work, work. Sure. Put aside the fun, put aside the things that are meaningful. We'll get to that in retirement. But the problem is that retirement is a pipe dream for the majority of the population.

True. They don't have enough money. They're not going to save enough, and they're not going to have this golden retirement that you see on the Merrill Lynch ads of a silver-haired couple walking down the beach in Charleston, South Carolina, right in front of their beautiful coastal house that looks like it belongs on the cover of Coastal Living.

Right. This is not going to happen. Now, I think our generation, we look at that and say, "Well, that was dumb. Why didn't you pursue a different plan?" Right. And so you're pursuing a different plan. But you're saying that based upon the math of, as Mr. Money Mustache would put it, the seeding, shockingly simple math behind early retirement, if you just save a high enough percentage of your income, you can accumulate half a million dollars.

If you keep your expenses low, then that may enable you to live on the income and it will give you more flexibility. But I don't think you're lazy because the type of person you have to be to do that much work is not a lazy person. Yeah. I'm not afraid of doing hard work.

I've done a lot of hard work. I don't shy away from it. I mean, buying rental properties is very much hard work. Absolutely. It's definitely not super passive income by any means, even though people term it as such. I don't know. I guess I see what else I do and I have the whole picture.

I love taking naps after work. Sure. It's my weakness. But this is normal. I cook for that. Needing enough sleep is a normal thing. So I'll leave the question there. It's an interesting challenge. Obviously, we have to look at personal situations and you can't stereotype too much a generation.

But I do observe that that's a stereotype. It's a real management challenge for managers because in the business world, people who are managing millennials are oftentimes left saying, "What do I do?" because millennials do not seem motivated by things that other generations were motivated by. For example, more money is, in general, less motivating to a millennial than is more autonomy.

Right. Yeah. Or the thing that I've been recognizing with a lot of my friends is a sense of doing good for the world. Right. A lot of my friends don't want to work for the oil companies or whatever because of their impact on the earth and instead want to be in a position where they're doing good for the world.

Even if that means working at a nonprofit for less money, they'll feel better about what they're doing day in and day out and working towards that sense of purpose. Right. Which, ironically enough, I get through my company. So that's why I'm very happy to work for them. Because it's involved in something that's more meaningful.

Yes, because their mission statement isn't just making tons of cash. It's helping the people of the world. Sure. So that was going to be where I was going to go next because here we're recording this and tonight I'm giving a presentation to all of the attendees here at Camp Mustache.

And my presentation is titled "Why Wait to be Financially Independent to Live Like You're Financially Independent?" And the point of it is essentially to say that there's a way where you can get the benefits of financial independence more quickly than just necessarily saying, "Let me wait until I save a million dollars." Right.

So have you pursued, for example, the Girl Scouts of America needs IT personnel. Have you ever considered going and pursuing a job with the Girl Scouts of America and their IT department? I have looked into it, but I still have contacts in the Girl Scouts. And not to disparage their organization by any means, but the local council is not a great environment to be in.

Even though their message is overall, "Do good for the girls." It's a little dicey sometimes. So tell me more about when millennials connect with you and your message. What are some of the emails that you get in terms of the meaning and the relevance of your message to the millennial situation?

I get, it kind of is 25/75. So 25% of the messages that I get are, "Oh my gosh, you're another girl going for financial independence." It's so refreshing to hear a woman speaking about this because overwhelming majority is male. So I get a lot of female bloggers that want to connect and be like, "Yes, this is great.

I'm so excited to hear your voice." And then the other 75% are, "Wow, this is really relevant and I'm so glad that you're writing because I'm going through this exact same thing." And I read your blog and I go, "Yes! This is what I've been thinking. Like why can't my friend save $100 a month for retirement?

It's so simple." Right, right. So first of all, do you have any idea about any data on the distinction between male bloggers, female bloggers in the personal finance space or in general? Through my personal observation, it skews male but not overwhelmingly so I would say it's probably like 60/40 maybe.

Maybe 65/35. Why do you think that is? What's your opinion? I have no idea actually. I don't know. Maybe because of the whole stereotype that men take care of the money and women take care of the home. I don't know. I generally don't know. Because there are studies that just came out that show that the overwhelming majority of millennial women have their finances in order and are saving well for retirement.

Whereas the millennial men who aren't doing so well at saving are bringing the numbers down. So that's kind of ironic to me that there are so many male bloggers out there but yet overwhelmingly it's the females that pay more attention to finance. Especially when they're young like we are.

Yeah. Where are you hoping to go from here? Well, I would like to start up buying some properties and getting that passive income coming in as I use my air quotes. And then I just want to settle in my new job and really explore how that's going and dive in deep and do a really good job for them before I head out.

So I'm thinking sometime in the next three years I'll say I have enough, it's enough and that I'll be able to be financially independent and work on things that interest me more and inspire me more. Right. Alright, two last questions and then I'll have you tell about your blog.

Worst financial mistake or decision that you've made in your life thus far? Probably the 401k honestly. Yeah, that first year missing out. Because I found financial independence so early I was able to read everybody's mistakes and avoid them and make my own mistakes. Right. So yeah, that's probably the one thing that I beat myself up over.

Well, that's what you beat yourself up over. It's a great example of the value of education and standing on the shoulders of giants so that you can avoid the mistakes of other people. Oh, it's totally true. Yeah, I love that everybody's been writing about this stuff because I'm like, wow, I never would have thought that that would be a problem.

Yeah. That's great. Best financial decision, investment, transaction, windfall that you've experienced thus far? Probably the last month of income that I got in December of 2016. Not only did I get a 10% raise for my new job, I got several moving allowances and a bonus. So my normal salary is like $5,000 a month and then -- just a little over that actually -- and then I got $20,000, just over $20,000 worth of income in one month.

That's awesome. And I didn't go buy a new car. I didn't do anything with it. It's sitting in my bank account because it's for my down payment. Congratulations. So I'm pretty proud of having the discipline to say, oh, no, I don't need to go on the shopping spree and buy Armani clothes or whatever.

It's like, no, I'm just hanging on to it. Good for you. That's fantastic. Tell all my listeners your website address, pitch what your content is, share any products or resources that you would like my listeners to be aware of, please. So my blog is www.fierymillennials.com. This is obviously a play on the FIRE, F-I-R-E, Financial Independence Retire Early community.

Thank you for catching that. But also because people who meet me are just like blown away by my personality, which is also pretty fiery. Right. So that's a play on that as well. But it's Fiery Millennials spelled like the campfire, F-I-E-R-Y, millennials.com. I'm looking at my business card just to check.

F-I-E-R-Y, yeah. Yes. Yeah. And you're primarily writing with a millennial target audience? Yep. Yep. Although some older people who are in the beginning stages of FI will also find it useful just for the general finance advice. One of the secret tools of teaching is oftentimes if you teach kids, you can teach parents or older people better.

Yep. And they won't feel insulted by your kind of talk down to them. You just say, "Oh, I'm just teaching younger people." But all of a sudden now you can package your content in a way that it slides past people's filters and they learn something. Yes. So it's aimed generally at those just graduating college or just starting their first jobs.

And as they face paying off their debt and figuring out, "Well, okay, I just paid off all my student loans. What do I do with this extra $600 a month now?" It's like some people go out and spend it all on board games or whatever. And then other people are like, "Oh, I should probably do something with this." And then they look and they're like, "What to do with extra money?" And they come to our realm.

Right. That's awesome. Yeah. So I want to inspire people to think that, "Wow, maybe early retirement is actually possible for me." Awesome. Well, Gwen, thanks for coming on the show. We'll look forward to watching your journey as you pursue financial independence and a more meaningful work and life that will sow into the community that you care about.

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