We're Becoming Millionaires… Now How Do We Talk About It?

Hello and welcome to Choose a Vi. Today on the show, we have a fun one. First, we have our first ever Where Are They Now segment. So we bring back Andy Hill, who is a guest in episode 68. And it's such a fun look at the last decade where his life has taken him. Him and his wife, Nicole, have built something extraordinary. But it's never a straight line. And I think that's what's fantastic. If you're looking for how do I get my spouse on board both ways, I think you're really gonna like that. And you're gonna get a lot out of what they've been up to and what they've been able to build for themselves and their family. I also start the episode with a whole bunch of life hacks. We talk about the success of FI 101 in our St. Louis group and Second Generation Fi. We had David's son take notes during the event just on his own volition. And it's really neat to see the order of operations of investing that he talked about. I also go into building a perpetual money-making machine. The fact that you were going to be a millionaire, that's what compounding does. and that there's no secret. There's no person behind the mask or behind the curtain that's gonna help you get to FI or help you learn some secret of investing. That's the beautiful part. This is the simple path to wealth. This is, we're not selling you anything. This is just you taking action day after day to build an extraordinary life, both financially, but more importantly, in all the ways that matter. I think you're really gonna enjoy this episode. And with that, welcome to Choose FI. Before we get started, I keep this podcast entirely ad-free for two reasons. First, this is a five podcast and I don't want to promote products that I don't want you to buy in the first place. And second, I really like the clean listening experience of a show where you don't have to fast forward ads. To keep it ad-free, all I ask of you as a listener is the next time you open a Travel Rewards credit card, Go to choosefi.com slash cards. And with that, on to the show. All right, welcome to Choose Fi. I'm excited to have a rare solo episode today. So I'm actually recording this on February 9th, and we're getting set for our big live event here in Richmond, Virginia. So I just picked up Alan and Katie Donegan from the airport last night and got to hang out with them, which is great, watch a little bit of the Super Bowl. and yeah, this should be fun. I think these live events and just getting together in person, I know we talk about this really often here, but it just matters. And it's amazing to see what's going on all across the country and across the world in our local groups. We actually had St. Louis, which is an absolute rockstar group. Kristen Knapp has completely revitalized that group. And they had 70 people show up for FI 101. It was a presentation that Alan and Kristen did there. And it was just remarkable. I actually saw a Facebook post and this was a guy named David posted and he said, Alan Hanson, this was my son taking notes tonight. And he even underlined invest. And he said, hashtag second generation fi. So this is a picture of spiral notebook from elementary or middle school. And David's son wrote, save and invest the rest. And then he had the financial order of operations. And his big question was, where does my next dollar go? So he took notes from this presentation and it was, one, start with a small emergency fund. Two, get your 401k match. Three, pay down high interest debt. So it looks like they're saying anything greater than 10%. Then four would be a bigger emergency fund. Then he has five and six is basically maximizing your tax deferred and retirement accounts. So he has listed Roth IRAs, 401ks, HSAs, et cetera. Seven would be taxable brokerage. Eight would be prepaid future expenses, which is a really interesting one. And then nine would be basically pay down low interest debt. So this is a really interesting order of operations. And I actually love that they started with small emergency fund, because I think a lot of us get bogged down in the traditional financial media of you need to do everything possible just to squirrel away a year's worth of expenses or six months worth of expenses where it's 20, 30, $80,000, something like that. And you're not investing that along the way. And I think that's something we've talked about here, where obviously having a net worth is critical, but having this money just sitting there doing nothing as an emergency fund doesn't really make sense. Not in this day and age when if you were invested that money, you could still sell it at any given moment and transfer the money back over to your bank. It's in your bank account in one, two or three days and all is well in the world. So I think clearly we're not saying don't have a net worth. We're just saying just rethink the emergency fund in terms of how much money you need sitting there idle doing nothing. So yeah, I really like this. And my friend Gwen actually was in the audience there and she sent me a picture of the 70 people watching this event. And it was just really, really impressive. So we're going to start rolling out. We're going to actually use their presentation and give it to admins of every local group in the world. So if you're looking for 5101, ask your admin about it and we can make that happen. That's what's so wonderful about having this worldwide community is we can share resources. So Alan and Kristen put something together amazing and you can be part of it. So just make sure you sign up. I think I haven't done the greatest job with this. Jonathan and I have talked about all the amazing things that he's building. But really just very simply, all we need you to do right now is just sign up and do nothing else. Sure. If you want to get in there and talk, you can, but it's really not that important right now. If you sign up, just go to choose a bit.com slash local. If you haven't signed up yet, or just choose a bit.com slash login, if you have, and just put your email address in and pick your local group and sit back and you're going to get email notifications of every local event that's happening in your area. And that's what's, it's really exciting. We're not stuck with Facebook anymore. So yeah, so that's a really cool one. I just, I really wanted to highlight this because I love the second generation five thing. I love that people are coming out to learn about five and we can all get better together. And yeah, it reminded me. So going back to picking up Alan and Katie, I wanted to do a couple of random little life hacks that I, I, sometimes I do things in my own life and I don't know if everybody knows about these things, if nobody knows about it. So I'm just going to quickly bomb through a handful of these. So first was, again, I picked them up for the airport yesterday and I am fanatical about tracking flights. So I just go to flightaware.com and you can just go to their homepage. You pick flight tracking and then flight finder. And this is really cool. It's a GPS tracker of every flight in the world. And you can actually track not only the flight that you're on, which frankly doesn't really do all that much because you're on the plane. you know if it's late or not, but you can track the incoming flights. So just put in your airport, put the airport you're going to, or just the flight number. And when you click on that flight, you can click, where is my plane now? It's right there in the top middle. And if that plane hasn't taken off, you just click, where's my plane now again? And you can just, you can track back on where that flight is coming from and see if there are any delays. So I do this pretty often to determine when I need to get to the airport. And I know sometimes, oh man, it looks like my incoming flight is going to be delayed. If I have a connection or some such, it's really very convenient. Again, I'm a little fanatical about it. So take it for what it's worth, but I think this is really, really convenient and a lot of people can get value from this. So definitely check that out. Another couple of random life hacks. So I was listening to an old episode and a friend of ours named Noah, who used to have a website called money metagame. I don't know if it still exists, frankly, but he talked about buying discounted gift cards. And I think this is something that a lot of us just totally are unaware of. He mentioned a site called Gift Card Wiki, and it still exists. I don't know if that's the best gift card site, but you can just Google buy discounted gift cards. And I think there's like Gift Card Granny and other random sites like that. And let's just say you're going to a store, you're going to purchase something. Very often, you can buy a gift card for a discount. It might just be 5% or frankly, it might be 10, 20, 30% if it's a more obscure store or something that people wanna just unload their gift cards on. You're not gonna get a 30% discount on Amazon, of course, but sometimes you can get three, five, 7%, something like that, which isn't terrible. So that is a really nice little life hack, especially as you're going to buy something. I don't necessarily say go randomly buy thousands of dollars of gift cards in stores. you're not 100% certain you're going to buy. But Noah talked about literally being in a store, getting ready to buy something. And as he was walking to the counter, he went to this gift card wiki and bought the gift card for the item he was quite literally going to buy five minutes from then. So that's a really cool one. I mentioned a couple of things in my newsletter recently. So if you're not getting my newsletter, basically we have three things going on here at Chooseify. It's this podcast, which obviously you're listening to. My newsletter goes out every Tuesday. it's really short but i think it's quite high value so choose a way to come subscribe and then the third thing of course is that local platform so you can get notified of local events so i mentioned that unfortunately i actually almost got hacked with my email which i have almost impenetrable email passwords and i have two-factor on everything so i'm pretty secure but somebody was trying to log in it got triggered it was an old email address of mine that's through a Microsoft email. So I kept getting triggered with these two factors to approve or deny. And luckily, I was able to deny them. So there really wasn't ever a major concern. But nevertheless, it made me realize that email is one of, if not the biggest attack vectors for most of us. And because it's something that we type in fairly often, a lot of people don't have secure passwords, which is a real miss. If you think about it, most of your financial accounts and services and credit cards and Vanguard and your bank, the password reset goes to your email address. And that is a major security risk, especially if you don't have a secure password, if you don't have two-factor authentication. So this is something that you really, really need to lock down. I think all of us should have a password manager. I know one that a lot of security experts recommend is Bitwarden. And you definitely want to Google that directly, make sure you're going to their official site. and that's something where they can help you create really almost impenetrable passwords and save them and you just need to remember your master password and that is a massive security way to increase your or decrease your likelihood of getting attacked let's say so i actually after this happened i reached out to my friend tom who is a former fbi special agent and expert in cyber security he was actually on the podcast a couple times he was in episode 515 and 397 i asked and what I should consider doing about this. And he said that there are a lot of two-factor authentication methods, but there's a physical device called the Yubikey. So it's Y-U-B-I-K-E-Y. And he highly recommends it. He says to use that wherever possible. And this is what he said. I'm gonna quote him as far as email addresses go on essential accounts. He said, I use a specific ProtonMail email address for all my financial stuff. Nothing else uses that email. And both for that and my Gmail, I have them tied to my YubiKey. And then I have an old email that I use for unimportant things. So basically what he's doing, he's opening a new email address that is solely used for these essential logins. Okay, so don't put newsletters on there. Don't put even like your frequent flyer mile or something, just the absolute essential things. Some other people responded to my newsletter and said, another thing you can do is put an alias in which Google has alias ability as well as ProtonMail something I not gonna go in and explain this but you can literally make not only the email address but make it very specific for each individual account by just adding a plus sign. It actually doesn't undo your email address. You can add email address plus and then whatever Vanguard or plus Wells Fargo or plus Bank of America, whatever it is. And it allows you to basically have a unique email address for each one, but it's still tied to that one email address. So that's something that's really nice. And another nice security option that also somebody else wrote in for me is called Google's advanced protection program. So you can put this on your Gmail. And this is something that, yeah, Google has added as a benefit. And it's just it's pretty easy to set up and basically makes your email not hack proof. Nothing's hack proof. But this is something a lot of us have Gmail accounts. So I would highly recommend Googling that. So yeah, Google's advanced protection program. And yeah, just quickly rounding out the little life hack edition here. So annualcreditreport.com. This is something that I feel like a lot of us should know. I know most of us are able to get our credit scores now for free through our banks. I know Capital One offers this with the credit card that I have, and it's all well and good to get your credit score. But you actually want to check your credit report as well. So there's the three main credit bureaus. There's Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. and if you go to annualcreditreport.com, you can get these credit reports absolutely free and there is some ambiguity. So it used to be that you get one of each of these reports for free every 12 months. So this was, federal law allows this. So this website, which looks like it was made in 1997, but it's legit, it's annualcreditreport.com. This is part of that federal law that allows you to get a free credit report every 12 months from each of the three reporting companies. OK, so what I would do is I would make and this is actually my next and final life hack for today is my task list, which is called to do is so T-O-D-O-I-S-T. And I have a recurring task for every basically every four months. But I put three different tasks in. So check Equifax report every January 1st, check TransUnion every May 1st, et cetera. So four months later. So every four months I'm checking my credit report. And actually, I had an issue. It's funny because I have a pretty good online security in general, but you just you never know when you get hacked. And I got somebody open up a credit card in my name. I don't know what their plan was, but maybe it was just like an initial foray. But I was able to shut it down before anything happened. I was able to freeze my credit score, which was really, really easy. and what's nice now it seems like that these credit reports are possibly available as frequently as every week now it's it's slightly unclear when i'm on the website it looks like it might be available more often than once a year from each of the brewers but even at the very worst it's just log in every four months get the next one and just do a quick glance at your credit report and see if if there's any issue so i think that's a really nice one and yeah like i said finally that Todoist app. This is something I've talked to friends and family about very recently. So it's top of mind. It's I don't have to do's floating around in my brain anymore. I can't describe how much this has transformed my life. It is absolutely mentally freeing. And this is this has been almost a decade now. And I can't even imagine a life without a task list app like this. And Todoist is nothing especially special about it, frankly, but it works for me. I'm able to put in tasks. I'm able to make comments. I'm able to make recurring tasks, which is really, really nice. Okay. So this is something that I just, I put everything in there. I mean, literally down to, I have an electric toothbrush and I want to charge it every month. So I have charge every fifth of the month or whatever it is, or every four weeks. And it just, it recurs. I have a special mailing box, PO box for choose a file mail. So I have that on a recurring task, every little thing, groceries, I have a running grocery list and down to things that only happen once a decade, like renew my passport. And when everything is out of your head and I'm talking everything, this has to be done 100%, but when everything is out of your head, you are mentally free in a way you almost cannot even imagine. So I highly recommend this. I cannot recommend it more, more highly, essentially, just give it a whirl. And I think the app is free to use at first. I think there's like some nominal fee if you want to add a couple little features, but frankly, I don't even know if they're really worth it, to be honest. But yeah, that's a big one. So those are my life hack addition for the day, which hopefully there's some value in there. I think at least one of those is going to add value to your life. And I wanted to talk about a little interaction that I had in real life. So one of my real good friends, really bright guy, he has been pursuing the path to FI kind of outside of the FI community, but he's at a point where he's reached FI and he was talking about investing. And I think it's easy to get bogged down in there's some secret, there's some knowledge that you don't have, there's some other level, and you just have to find it. You have to spend the time or you have to do the research or you have to know the right people. And it was fascinating because I was listening to an old episode with JL Collins, the original episode he did on Choose a Vibe about the simple path to wealth. And of course, since then, he's subsequently sold well over a million copies of the book, The Simple Path to Wealth. And so it was interesting to hear it as the book was coming out and knowing the success it's had. But he basically said, he's like, look, if I thought there was some secret, if I thought there was some way to improve my return, I would do it. I would spend the time. I would do this because I know how little things matter, right? And the difference between an 8% return, which you probably can get in the market, and a 9% return when compounded over 30 or 50 years is enormous. And it's worth the time. It's worth the effort, obviously. But there's nothing to suggest anywhere that there is some secret. And certainly net of fees and the fees we pay on buying expensive mutual funds or hiring some financial advisor, it makes it almost impossible to beat the market. And that's why I told my friend, I'm like, look, if you want to take 10 or $20,000 and just play around and have fun, just do that. Think of it as an education. I mean, this is someone who thankfully is at five. So that type of money is not going to make a difference and find out for yourself, but also keep in mind that the only term that matters is the long-term. So I don't doubt that somebody just almost by sheer luck can beat the market over a quarter or a year or even five years. But if you think that you're going to just find some secret somewhere, it's just highly, highly unlikely. There are people throughout the decades who claim to have some secret. And that's why, I mean, we even look back, think about a guy like Michael Burry, who called the big short. And I mean, that was a genius, genius thing. But he's been prognosticating for the last 15 years. and we still look to him as a genius because he got one thing right. That's how hard it is to do. To get one massive thing right is almost impossible. That it almost doesn't matter what your track record is after that, people will still look to you. There should be alarm bells going off in your head that, wow, this is almost impossible. There's no world where I'm gonna beat the market. Certainly not net of any fees. And it just, it's a bad bet. I think that's one of the biggest things. people don't look at what is my highest likelihood of succeeding, okay? Here's the secret. You are going to be a millionaire. You are going to. You're going to be probably a multi-millionaire. You are building a perpetual money-making machine. That is what FI is. You are building an asset base that spits off money to you every single year and just works as this perpetual money-making machine. That's just such a beautiful visual, right? When you think about it, you, by front-loading the effort, by saving money, you are building this thing that is going to spit off more return for you each year, probably than you've ever earned in a calendar year while doing no work. That is remarkable. That's what we're building here. We're building this perpetual money-making machine. You are going to be a millionaire. Just think about, think about somebody who has a hundred thousand dollar income. Okay. which is reasonable for a family, even a single, certainly in this day and age, but even just saying a very middle-class income, two people making $50,000 each, and they have a 12% savings rate. I think a lot of us, if you check out Mr. Money Mustache is the shockingly simple math behind early retirement. You can see what really it looks like when you have a five savings rate of 30 or 40 or 50 plus percent. But even just on a hundred thousand dollar income, you save 12%, right? So $12,000, this is on the gross income. You save $1,000 a month, right? Throw that into a compound interest calculator. Throw in for 30 years at an 8% return, you're saving $1,000 a month. Your net worth is $1,500,000, $1.5 million, okay? You save $0 from there on out, that money's going to double every nine years. Nine years later, at 39 years in, you have $3 million dollars. Then another nine years later, you have six million. I mean, this is absolutely crazy. That's what we're talking about here. That's a 12% savings rate on the gross income on a hundred thousand dollar income, which I think a lot of couples can really very easily do. And you start getting into five savings rates. You talk about 30%, you talk about 50%, 50% is more than four times this. So you're talking an enormous, enormous amount, right? $4,000 a month. I'm plugging this in. Yeah, obviously the math is pretty simple. It's $6 million after 30 years. It's $12 million after 39 years. These are real, real amounts. Okay. You are going to be a millionaire. That's what we're doing here. And this compounding is going to work in your favor. You're building something remarkable. Okay. And don't ever lose sight of that. We are doing something remarkable here in the fight community. And really you're putting in, in most cases, about 10 years, 10 to 15 years of concerted savings, and you are making every subsequent day of your life easier and better. That's what you're doing, okay? This is not just playing around. You are transforming your entire life, transforming it. Think about how fast a decade goes by. Think about the last decade. It blinked by. So I would posit that the next decade for most people is going to blink by. And for people who are saving nothing, they're going to wake up 10 years from now. They're going to have the same negligible net worth and they can't get that decade back. Or you can follow the path to FI, you can save and you can transform your life forever and maybe make it generational. It's not hyperbole. And that's the thing. Again, nobody's selling anything in the FI community. This is the simplest thing ever. It's live below your means. It's save money. It's invest in low cost funds and ETFs. Something like VTI is what I put all my money in Vanguard's total stock market ETF. And again, I'm not trying to sell you a secret. There is no secret. There's nothing. It's just that it's live below your means. It's try to build an extraordinary life. It's experiment and play around and have fun and spend time with people you love and learn new things. How can that be anything but an unmitigated good, right? It can't be. It just simply can't be. Our upcoming guest here, I actually am doing the first ever, where are they now segment So this is Andy Andy was on episode 68 way way back seven plus years ago in 2018 And he taught financial peace university classes He really him and his wife Nicole got on board And it wasn a straight line as he going to tell you They certainly had some issues and they worked through them and FI helped make them stronger. And they had these budget parties every month and really built a life together. And if you want a story of where your life can go in a decade, I think Andy's story is really going to be interesting. So I'm very excited to bring this to you. So this is our first ever, where are they now segment? All right. So we're trying out a fun new segment called where are they now? And way back in, I think it was March of 2018 episode 68. I had my friend Andy Hill on and the episode was basically financial peace graduates. What's next. And this was a really fun episode where Andy talked about getting his wife, Nicole, on board and their budget parties that they had and lots of just different interesting aspects of the beginning part of the journey to FI when it was just the two of them trying to figure it out, try to talk about their dreams for the future, trying to work together. Their entire lives were ahead of them, which is so amazing. And where is FI going to take them? I think this is one of the fun parts about having a podcast that's lasted nearly a decade now is we can touch base with people. So this is now almost eight years later to the day since we recorded it. Andy Hill, welcome back, my friend. This is awesome. Thank you for having me, Brad. Yeah, it's been quite a while and there's a lot that's happened in eight years. Well, let's hear about it. So yeah, like I said, this is an experiment. So I'm just going to start with the hard hitting question of where are they now? What has happened in the last eight years? Oh my gosh. Yeah, I would say around that time in 2018, we were right in the thick of it, man. This was actually probably one of the more difficult years in our marriage. This was at the time where I was super excited about a side hustle that I was building. I had two kids at home. So this would have been a six-year-old and a four-year-old. And my wife was doing the full-time stay-at-home mom thing, which could be, you know, it sounds cushy to some people who aren't doing it, but it's a lot of work and there's a lot of detail that goes through it. So what I'm projecting here is a high stress year in our marriage. And it became one of those things where we continued to meet every once in a while, every month for our budget parties and talk about our finances and move forward. But it was also at one of those points where we're saying, what do we want to do going forward? What do we want to do? We've done some cool things. We just shared with Brad that we just paid off our mortgage and we have completely paid off all of our debt, things like that. But really, what is next? And for us, we were trying to figure our way to financial independence. And it was a lot of conversations that became contentious in our relationship based on what I was interested in versus what she was interested in. Ultimately, a lot of those conversations, because they became so heated, led us to marriage counseling, which was actually a blessing. It was one of those things where at the time I felt a little bit like a failure. How can I let this happen? I've got so many good things going on in life. How can I put my marriage to the side? But marriage counseling ended up being a fantastic thing for us that year in 2018 following this interview. And it really pushed us in a direction of what is a good middle ground for our relationship where I can find some sort of relief from this corporate career that I don't like, where I can see my kids more, where I can spend more time with my wife that's quality, not just in passing. And my wife at the same sense, where can I feel not so like we're pinched every moment for everything we want to do? I want to get out of this house and have some more fun too. I want to experience some goodness with you. Where can we find this middle ground? And that's where we were launched in 2018, 2019. Wow. Yeah. And that is, I know I can speak from personal experience. That is a place that many of us find ourselves. And on the one hand, there are a lot of aspects where, like you embedded in there, they seem like these absolute unmitigated, wonderful things, right? Like I get the privilege of staying at home with my kids or when we talked about this on your podcast, that's going live about the same time as this is I get the privilege of staying at home from work at some point. I think we both eventually left our jobs and that sounds great, but nothing is great. Just in a vacuum, you have to work at it and you need to be intentional. And I think these things that sound great, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be perfect for you. And I think what you said in there was, what's a good middle ground? And what are our hopes and dreams together? What are our hopes and dreams individually, which is important also to remember that you are individual humans. It's okay to have individual hopes and dreams as well, together and with your kids and et cetera. I think these things are important. So obviously, right, you're describing this difficult year, but obviously the punchline is eight years later, Yeah. You're still together? Absolutely, yeah. We're still together, but it was that moment that really kind of pushed us to figure out what we wanted together. And I think that coming out of that, it led us to say, okay, what is our version of financial independence that might not be the prescripted version that we've read about online or heard about? What's our version? Okay, well, there's a lot of different versions out there. We really like this version of Coast Fire. We've gotten to a point where our investments can grow without any further support. We are mortgage free. And could we take ourselves off the gas a little bit with regard to the savings rate? And that will allow us to pursue things that would provide us more happiness in the now, as opposed to continuing to grind to try to get somewhere that might provide us happiness, whatever, eight, seven years from there. And will our relationship still be there seven, eight years from there? Because I don't want to hit financial independence and not have somebody to be going on runs with and having coffee with and spending time with because that would not be what I want in financial independence. So we started to pursue this path of Coast Fire and said, hey, this is a great middle ground. This will allow us to, once we achieve that, decide if we both want to choose maybe part-time work instead of full-time work. And that pursuit helped us to have some great conversations about what a part-time work life could look like for us from maybe call it 2020 on. And those were really exciting conversations. They started to bring some more joy and happiness and planning in our relationship. And eventually that's where we moved. At the time, we were considering rental properties and things like that as sort of our way out. But that ended up being something where we both looked at each other and said, this is going to be a lot more work than we thought. The whole passive income thing, I think it's great, but it's not going to come until much later, as we know from our friends who do real estate investing. And we don't really want to do a lot of that active required investing or active income in the beginning to make it happen. So I had been doing a side hustle at that time. We had built up enough money to buy that first rental property in cash. And my wife just said to me, which was a beautiful thing. She said, Why don't you just take that as your runway for starting this small business and give it a shot, man. See how it goes. And that was like the best thing she could have ever said to me. Yeah. Talk about support. That's incredible. Yeah, it was great. It was fantastic. Yeah, she gave me that permission and it was fantastic. And with that $100,000, with a side hustle that had proven to make some money, that and the confidence of my wife and that FU money in the bank was enough for me to say. in January of 2020, goodbye to my corporate career and move towards a life of, you know, part-time solopreneurship and, you know, full-time living, which was great. That's so cool. And with the backdrop of Coast Fi, I think that has really opened up the world of Fi to so many people because it was always in a lot of people's minds. I tried to dispel this myth for years, but it was a zero or one, right? It was binary. It's I'm not Fi or I'm Fi. And those are the only two methods. And I think thankfully we have found these different flavors of five and yeah, just to quickly summarize what coast five is for people out there is basically you get to the point where you saved enough money that that money, your net worth can compound in the background and you don't need to add to it. So basically, obviously to get to that net worth, you need to have saved money along the way. But once you reach that point where you're comfortable coasting, you just need to bring in enough money each year to cover your annual expenses. And that, Andy, is where you talk about you can do part-time. You can do a side hustle that doesn't need to bring in a boatload of money because, frankly, most side hustles don't bring in a boatload of money. But if it covers, if each you and your wife had side hustles or even just had a part-time job or whatever it is that covered the expenses, well, that meets the definition of cost-fi. And that's pretty darn good and a whole lot less stressful than going to two nine-to-fives. Absolutely. And it became a lot easier too when we, as we talked about in our conversation, lowered our expenses to become, hey, could we cover this with two part-time jobs? We went from spending around like $10,000 a month to after hitting Coast Fire and after paying off our mortgage, feeling comfortable spending around $6,000 a month. So between us two, we were like, okay, can we both make whatever, $3,000 a month? Or you make four, I make two or vice versa or whatever. Could we make this happen? And we figured out we could. And we have been doing that part-time deal for about four years now. And it has been fantastic because we've just leveraged a lot more of that time, that time freedom towards things that we care about more. That's taking care of our health, that's spending time in our relationship, that's slow morning coffee in the morning as opposed to running out the door, going for runs together, and spending more time with our kids and being present parents. That has a cap to it when you've got a preteen and a teenager. Eventually, they don't want to spend as much time with you. So I got to take advantage of it while I can. Connecting with my friends more, connecting with my aging parents as they're getting older. These are just other identities that I wanted to lean into as opposed to just worker. But I still do enjoy working. I try to do my work week between Tuesday and Thursday. So I have that four-day weekend. I'm still experimenting with that a lot, whether that is three physical days or 20 to 25 hours a week spread across the work week. But overall, I'm finding by giving myself 20 to 25 hours back in my week, I'm able to live a more fulfilling life that brings both my wife and I a lot more happiness. Nice. I love that. I wanted to go back to the conversations that you and your wife had. So first, I guess the budget parties. I think this is something you started in your late 20s. Yeah. almost really 15 years ago. And it sounded like this was something akin to like a monthly budget party. So I'd love for you to tell everybody about that, because I think a question that many people have is how do I get my significant other on board? And I think that's something that you've had the entire journey, which is so cool is we had this touch point about halfway through in episode 68. And then like you just said, a year or so later, you and your wife had a different inflection point where it was, okay, we're doing great. We're debt-free. We're on this path. Everything's wonderful, but everything's not so wonderful because just because this is what everybody says that being a stay-at-home mom or doing whatever is the path, it's not necessarily the path for our family and our relationship and us. So you needed to shift. I'd love for you to take a couple of minutes and talk about both the inception with getting each other on board, those budget parties and then how it adapted. Absolutely Yeah It really started when we got married We were both living for today and enjoying life as newlyweds It was a lot of fun When we got together I was making and she was making So immediately by getting married I get a double raise. I'm like, this is great. And we were just having fun, going to concerts, going to restaurants and just enjoying ourselves. And then when we learned we were going to be parents, something flipped in my brain where it was like, okay, we're going to be taking care of a little girl soon. And I want to give her the best life possible. Something for me turned to my finances being like, okay, I've always been interested in it. I've definitely lapsed recently by taking on a lot of debt and enjoying life and living for today. What can we do to make this a possibility where we're giving her a great life and maybe mom and dad aren't worried about the bills as much and the finances as much. So I approached Nicole with some ideas around debt freedom and net worth building and savings rates. These were all numbers focused ideas and goals. And I remember approaching her with these ideas of how we could do all these great things after a really difficult day at work where she was pregnant. She was coming home from their corporate job that she really didn't like. And I said, wouldn't it be great if we became debt-free? And in order to do that, you're going to have to get rid of that car you like. And we're going to have to meet and look at these spreadsheets. What do you think? And she just walked right by me. It was like, I don't know what you're talking about or what you're reading or listening to. I don't want to have anything about it. I had a horrible day. Leave me alone. And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is genius. But then I realized, okay, what does she actually want? I'm talking about her numbers and goals and things like that. What does she desire in her life? And then until I realized, I'm not speaking in terms of what she actually is interested in. I know that she doesn't like her job right now. I know that she'd eventually like to work part-time or be a full-time stay-at-home mom. How can I speak in terms of something that she's interested in as opposed to something that is numbers focused that I'm interested in. So I again approached her and I said, okay, would you be interested in discussing a plan where you could eventually work part-time at your current job and then eventually stay at home mom? Absolutely. I can't stand this job anymore. Let's talk about that. That's where these budget parties were born from. I used the word party because she really wasn't interested in looking at the budget. So I thought I'd put a little marketing spin on and make it sound more fun than it actually is for her. But, you know, and I tried to make it fun, too. So if you're the leader like I was on the financial side of things, like I tried to take care of a lot of the work beforehand and just say, OK, what can I do to present these numbers to her and get her buy in? So we're both on the same page with regard to how we're spending our money, where it's going. And then her portion of it is, of course, a very important vote. But maybe all of the back-end preparation or those parts. Maybe if I'm more excited about it, then I should do that. So I would do those things. I would try my best to make it a little more fun, maybe order a pizza, get a bottle of wine, things like that, try to make it a moment. I wasn't always the best with that. I could still do better with that today, but also being consistent with it too. So every couple of weeks or once a month, this happens where you get together and it doesn't just have to be about money. And it wasn't just about money. It was about talking about what our week looks like what's going on with the little kids? What are the birthday parties that are coming up? Are we going on a family vacation soon? Making sure we're talking about our calendar. We're talking about our goals, our priorities, and the money that goes along with it, essentially the tool that helps us to do those things that we care about. So we've been doing that for, yeah, probably 15 years now. We still meet at least once or twice a month. And I know from my own sanity's sake. It helps with my own financial anxiety. That's something that I deal with personally. And those moments help me to feel more relaxed. It's best for our relationship, best for my mental health. And I think afterwards, she always feels pretty, you know, clean in the brain a little bit to being like, okay, now I don't have to worry about those things either. And now I know there's a plan for them. And it's just, I don't know. It's like going to the gym. You know, you got to do it every once in a while and you got to keep that consistency so that you have a clean financial life. And that's how we've been seeing it lately. Yeah, and being on the same page. It's so important. It really is. And that's a big part of the reason that we went to Barrage Counseling originally is because we were not taking the time to actually communicate. This is just one more moment for us to have dedicated time to communicate about something very important to us. So would highly recommend it. Yeah, totally agree. And then, like I said, you had that inflection point, as you talked about in 2018, 2019. I think that a shift, and obviously in your case, you've described what the shift was, but I think the larger point for the audience is you often are going to have shifts in life. Oh, yeah. Right? Like this is part of life. This is part of the flavor of life. And I think it's important to adapt. And it sounds like you and Nicole adapted exceptionally well. That doesn't mean it was easy in the moment, obviously. Let's be clear. And you mentioned the counseling, but I suspect many, many tens or hundreds of hours were spent conversing and talking about, okay, we thought these were our goals and dreams, maybe circa 2011 or 2016, et cetera, but they're not our goals and dreams circa 2019. What were the conversation points? Because I suspect there was a lot of friction. I think this happens in life. You mean you got what you wanted? I can picture it. I'm not saying you did this, but you got what you wanted and you're less happy. Sometimes that's hard for people to deal with. But obviously, again, with the benefit of hindsight, seven, eight years later, this worked out. Like, how did you guys approach that particular aspect of the conversation? Because I suspect that was not easy. Yeah, I would say the only thing that has been consistent in marriage, at least mine, is change. You know, things change. We change. Our values change. Things that we cared about at 28, I don't care about anymore at 44, you know, and same with her. And I think that unless we're taking time to communicate and update each other on what's going on in our lives, how our goals have changed, how our values have changed, then we'll miss that. And by freeing up more time in our schedule over the last five years, we've been there to be able to communicate and to be able to understand how those changes are affecting things we're actually been interested in or not interested in. And when you've got young kids at home, it's even more important because talk about change. Those changes happen really fast as young kids. So I think opening up that time to communicate and find out what we're interested in and how we can support each other with our individual goals has been very good. I think I was in my own head, my own silo for a little while. And of course, there were a lot of thoughts up there and somehow she didn't hear those thoughts. And I was very surprised at that. But it wasn't until we actually took the time to actually share those things and speak out loud and create some collaboration that we were able to move forward in a life that we both feel very happy about. That's incredible. So fast forward to today and the where are they now. So is it still is Coast Fies still the plan? I love that concept, man, because it was around $550,000, I think around like late 30s, early 40s that we hit. And I started to look at those compound interest calculators, even with a nice whatever, 6% real rate of return or 7% real rate of return. I'm like, this is going to be 2 million plus by the time we're in our 60s. That's plenty for us to live on. And that became very convincing to me. Now, right away, I didn't just stop all contributions. But I lowered them. I think we were doing upwards of 50% savings rate at one point. And I just started to edge that down to closer to 10%. And it just felt freeing because with that 40%, I could say, well, do we want to maximize more of our family experiences now? Or do we want to work less? It's that 40% where I can now say, whoa, what do I want to do with that? And my wife felt the same way. She's like, yeah, let's have some more fun. Yeah, let's work less. We've done the hard work. Let's do that. And lo and behold, even with the decreased contributions and savings rate, that $550,000 is close to a million dollars now in retirement alone. I mean, the market has been nuts over the past six years, but it does prove the power of what this can do without your help and your contributions. So I would like that to be out there for people to know that, yes, if you're waiting, if you're hesitating, there are other iterations of financial independence that can give you that life that you're interested in. A lot of this is psychological. Most of this is psychological, honestly, and a little bit of it is numbers, but that has been a really freeing thing for us. So haven't really contributed much to traditional retirement accounts. We mostly just want to get our enjoyable life set right now. And then, yeah, if we can build wealth from there, from a three-day work week on, great. And then maybe we'll invest a little bit more after that or not. But we're happy right now. And we're experimenting with a three-day work week for both of us. Man, and experimenting. What a beautiful word, right? I think that's just so important. And yeah, for everybody listening, that Coastify concept and the intersection of compounding and the rule of 72 basically means at an 8% annual return, you expect your money to double every nine years. So as Andy's saying, basically your money quadruples in about 18 years that you're figuring out a little less return. So maybe 20 years, but something like that. And it's 550 turns into quadrupled 2.2 million. Right. And that's, that is a remarkable figure. Now you actually took, again, with flavors of five, you guys took an interesting aspect, which is you didn't lower your income because that's a part of Coastify that you could have done. You just decided to spend more during this time period. And now, obviously, people are listening to that and saying, oh, but Andy, that means your fine number has gone up dramatically. And you're not saying that at all. You're saying this is for a time period and albeit a material percentage of your lifespan, right? 20 years is not immaterial out of 80 to 100 year lifespan, but you can do that and you can work three days a week in this experiment and have this all operate in the background. And that's a really fun way of looking at this. It's been fantastic. It's been a combination of enjoying a little bit more today with regard to our spending and working less. So I think finding that balance was what my wife and I were both looking for in marriage counseling. Like I didn't like my job and I didn't want to keep working at it. And she wanted to enjoy a little bit more life right now. And that is the beautiful compromise we found. And I, I don't think that we have been happier in our marriage than we are today. Amazing. Annie, well, that is the perfect way to leave this. This is the inaugural, where are they now segment? So I'm so glad it could be you. So I know a little bit of where you are now. So obviously from this episode, but you have a podcast called marriage, kids and money, which is fantastic. Obviously you're listening to this on a podcast player, just subscribe to it. You can hear it and he's fantastic. So subscribe to that. And you have another really cool thing going on just now. Yeah, absolutely. I have a new book out called Own Your Time. It's specific to this type of conversation for families who are looking for some financial freedom in their lives in order to buy back. The most important resource is time. And they can do that for their families. They can do that for themselves personally, for their health, for that community that they're missing for their friends, because having just the sole identity of a worker can be all consuming. And if you want to have a more diversified life, that's what the book is all about. I love it. And it's own your time. And I love the next part, 10 financial steps to put your family first and escape the corporate grind. It's fantastic. You got it, man. Yeah. You can grab it on Barnes and Noble. Thank you so much for having me on, Brad. Love it. Yep. Thanks for being here. And until next time, I'd love to do another touch point. Hopefully we won't wait eight years, but definitely another one.