Unpacking the Path to the Boring Middle | Ep 585

Below everyone, on today's episode, we're going to be unpacking the boring middle. But really, what I wanted to do is discuss the phases of financial independence because there's not a boring middle. That's a choice to look at it that way. What there is is a continuum of power that is accrued to your side of the ledger each and every day if you choose to look for it. Brad and I thought we were going to go one direction with this episode, and I'm telling you as we got into it, and you'll find out the conversation carried itself. This is a must-listen episode, and with that, welcome to Choose a Fi. Before we get started, I keep this podcast entirely ad-free for two reasons. First, this is a Fi 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, onto the show. And to help me with this, I have my co-host Brad here with me today. How you doing, buddy? Hey, Jonathan. I'm doing quite well. What's going on by you? Well, I'm excited to get into this episode. I'm going to let everyone know up front. So Brad and I, when we record, we typically do try to do two episodes kind of back to back. There's a little bit more continuity there, but also there's economies of scale with our schedule and getting time together. And so we were motivated on multiple levels to do this second episode. One, because there's so much good stuff here to discuss, but two, Richmond is facing some pretty serious inclement weather along with the entire lower half of the country, I guess. But it says it's coming in, man. By the time this episode goes out, we'll know what happened on the other side, but preparation opportunity. This is an interesting time to record. It is indeed. Yeah. We got the snowpocalypse coming in for the winter. Is that what they're calling it? Is that the official term? Oh, I don't know. I just made that up, but I think we're going to get over a foot, which is going to cripple the city. So yeah, we'll see. All right. Well, the fire is spreading. I wanted to quickly mention what happened with the St. Louis local group. Yeah, this was wild. We both saw this on our community platform and they were getting set to do a 5101 local event. And Kristen Knapp, who is the amazing admin there in St. Louis and has grown the group just extraordinarily and is a good friend of mine, she posted that they actually had to cancel the event. They had to cancel the meetup because they had too many people RSVP and they couldn't find a location big enough for it. So she went back to the drawing board and started to find a bigger location. But the cool thing, and we're hearing this, and actually, Jonathan, I didn't even mention this to you, but at Camp Fi in Florida, Kristen was there as well as the admins of our amazing, amazing, amazing Jacksonville, Florida group, Brad and Rebecca. And they are extraordinary. What's going on in Jacksonville should be emulated by every local group. And hopefully you and I are going to provide resources to all the local admins and have events for admins and have Zoom calls, et cetera. But yeah, one of the things we talked about at this meeting, so we had 30 people show up from Camp Fi who are admins or going to be admins. And we talked about having a series like that, FI 101, as something that we could provide resources for. So Kristen actually, her and another member of the St. Louis group put together FI 101 slides. And I think this is something that we can all crowdsource and you and I can help work on and provide as a resource for everybody. But yeah, there is a real need. And this is talk about fire spreading. This is the perfect way to invite your friends, your family, coworkers, et cetera, to give them a little bit of education about personal finance and to help spread that fire. I think that's one of one of the most interesting parts about Chooseify is this has always been really accessible. and yeah, Jonathan, it was just really cool to see what an overwhelming turnout they had. Unfortunately, they had to cancel for the time being, but Kristen is finding a bigger space. So yeah, pretty close up. Had to cancel because you needed to find more space. Yeah. Not because nobody was willing to show up, nobody was interested. It's overwhelming interest in this idea like, oh, we might need to recalibrate around what this is. But I think to your point, Brad, that's the open-ended question. You know, I think for anybody out there, it's maybe thinking about starting a local group or for a local admin that has one. Maybe the group kind of has been dormant and they're kicking off this year, but suddenly there is interest in seeing something happen. What does it look like? I think there's a little bit of an open ended question in my mind around what local admins want to do. And there's not one thing that you have to do. But in terms of, you know, what you were discussing with this group, I think we could absolutely provide resources. I've started to work for the local admins on just kind of a starter slide deck. It's not that it has everything in there about financial independence, but provides like a template and, you know, some various slides to work with to go in whatever direction you want. We have other admins like Kristen that are now providing examples of their presentations. We're going to bring those together so admins, you know, can benefit and not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel each and every time they want to do a presentation. I think the next part of that is kind of like a cadence. You know, it makes sense certainly for groups to have that minimum, you know, one monthly meetup, whatever it is. That's just kind of like table stakes, I would think, for a community. but beyond that, is there a small window or a season where you would want to do kind of a boot camp, an onboarding ramp? And what would that look like? Again, not, you know, not directive or not saying this is what's going to happen, but just to have you think about it, would there be a local admins that want to do a three-week session where it's a once a week meetup to run through certain things or a bi-weekly thing where it's happened, where there's something that individuals could take and do some action steps and come back? How many weeks would you need? How many weeks would you need to kind of run through everything? Because if you just speed roll your way through it, you know, they hear everything do nothing or maybe that it goes in the air and out the other. So there's a there's a point of small incremental actions and pacing and thinking that through where, you know, you have members that have been with you for 10 years, but every year new people are finding this or having the opportunity to find it the first time. And so you might have this situation where it's something that you're going back and each year you have this window, probably not during a snowpocalypse, but probably in the spring, I would imagine, where you're getting ready and you're letting people know, hey, we're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing it once a week or once every other week thing for a few weeks here. We have these presentations lined up and you could just start building some awareness around that. I think what we would like to do and I would like to do is one, just hear from the admins. Are you interested in that? And have us talk about it together. What can we get you to streamline that so you can do it. Two, to put some best practices in place. Like, I think all of you know this, the admins that are doing this are just doing this on a volunteer basis because they care about the community and they care about this concept. To the community members, if you have a local group and your admin is the only admin of the group, offer to help. You know, you can be as involved or not involved as you want, but this thing is much easier if you have a group of 10 plus people. If you have three to five admins, you're going to find yourself in really good shape. Highly likely to succeed. I mean, we definitely see a pattern here. Groups with more admins, are going to have more consistent events and they're gonna be better attended. That's just how it's gonna work. You don't want one person that's responsible for everything or else the group inevitably is going to lull. Keep that in mind as we go to spring. Maybe you're not doing something during the snowpocalypse, but I guarantee you as things warm up, the fire is spreading. You know it, you see it, vibes are out there. This is the window. Let's start getting ready for this early spring and think about what we can do as community where Brad and I, we can cheerlead you. You know, if you end up doing an event, you do your 5101, one, we're going to let people know about it. Help us help you. And so just thinking through the building blocks with this idea of spring in mind, where you could have this onboarding to financial independence and have some presentations given and lean from the resources that the communities put together. That's what we're just kind of thinking about out loud here. How do Brad and I, in the role that we have and the ability to kind of share various bits of information with you, how can we assist and facilitate that any way that we can? Yeah, I like it. And just, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, just going back to Kristen, she was on Choose a Vi episode 554. It was a really great episode. And she created something called Fi Friends Travel. So fifriendstravel.com. And yeah, it's just, she puts together these amazing trips throughout the world. They have one coming up to Tanzania, Safari, Turkey, Tulip Time, River Cruise. So a really neat way to do a Fi trip. And yeah, check it out, fifriendstravel.com. All right. So with that, Brad, unpacking the boring middle, have you seen this term pop up? I certainly have. And not only have I heard of it, but we actually did an episode with just from the fine ears episode 472 last year. And yeah, that one was the cure for the boring middle. And it was, yeah, really, that was a wonderful episode. And I think it's really important to talk about it and to, and to really think about this because the five journey is a journey. But if you think of it just as numbers on a spreadsheet, you are missing it entirely. If you just wish away those years, frankly, this is get rich slowly or get rich in medium term, we'll say, which is a lot less catchy, obviously. But if you wish away 10 years, 15 years, I mean, that's an appreciable percentage of your life. It makes no sense. What I like to look at FI is we get our finances. We do all the work upfront. Right. We figure out what do we value? What are we going to spend on? We set up everything on autopay. We automate our savings. We get our savings rate up. And then we're really, honestly, Jonathan, you know this. The personal finance side is easy, especially if you can get your silly little lizard brain out of it, which is so buy, do everything. Just close your eyes and hide, right? Like, no, don't do any of that stuff. Just set it on autopilot and let it run. Okay. But now you have 10 to 15 years to figure out what do you want your life to look like? And I think that was what was so interesting about how Jess talked about this, which was, all right, now you need to experiment. Now you need to iterate and figure out what does life actually look like? And that is not an overnight process. And frankly, we also have seasons of life, Jonathan, right? Where just because you like something at the age of 32 doesn't mean that is what is set in stone for the next 60 years. It doesn't work that way. It's a constant iterative process. And I think that's what we talk about when we talk about this supposed boring middle. I think the boring middle is the exciting part. Yeah, I think it certainly can be. And I think part of this is you're making progress, right? Like the boring middle progress is happening. That's why it's just happening because of decisions that you already made, not necessarily something that you need to do now. So it's almost the lack of action that people are identifying as boring, but, and it can't, you know, it can be, but at the same point, I think recognizing that you're making progress all the way and thinking, having a way to think about it and label it. The word gamification is maybe a general term that not everybody can identify with, but I think what it actually means at its core should be something that you can get excited about noticing progress, noticing opportunities that opened up because of decisions that you made in the past and then evaluating what you could do with those opportunities that were not even really present or available for you before. It doesn't have to be boring. I have to go back and listen to the cure to see, you know, how much we're going to recycle here. We'll put that on the, Brad, it sounds like you're saying that is essential listening. Is that, is that what I'm hearing? I think that was essential. I really liked that episode a lot. 472. It'll show up. Now, I had a message from David pointing out that the links to the show, you know, inside chooseify.com slash login, when you go and you want to discuss the latest episode, he said it would be very considerate or thoughtful if there was an easy way to find episodes that you mentioned. And I said to myself, I thought so too. I already did that. They're there. I'd said this in my brain. And then I went and looked and I realized that two things, one, they were showing up on the sidebar that wasn't being present on mobile. And then two, I truncated some of the text and hit it behind a view more button. And some of the links were getting buried there. So I've said, oh, okay. I see what happened here. So you're right, David. I'm going to push those up. So, but anyways, my point being, we're taking a lot of care to make sure that these references to the other episodes, you can find them as you're listening. So 472 will be listed there. But what I wanted to kind of go, the direction that I wanted to go is thinking through this journey of financial independence, journey to financial independence, thinking about it in terms of not phases or milestones or checkpoints or actions, but all of those. And they have incremental meanings, which I wanted to explore with you. And I'll start at the top level. We have episodes titled The Phases of Five. Forget that. Forget it. It's great. It's great. But we're on a different paradigm. This is the 2026 paradigm. And in this context, my phases that I'm working with right now are very broad, general mindset type phases. And for me, it's discovery. You could say I discovered financial independence by listening to a Chooseify podcast in 2024. I discovered financial independence when my friend referred me to a Mr. Money Mustache article. I discovered financial independence when I went to a campfire down in Florida, you know, for the first time on a whim. It's that moment that you became aware of this idea in this concept. And then the next phase is directly following. So other people are doing it as discovery. Awareness is I have a number in mind. It could just be a very boring, static financial independence number, 25 extra year annual expenses. Control is you basically having the context of what you would have gotten out of some sort of financial independence 101. It's kind of going through the basics, the paradigm of things that you're putting in place. And Brad, maybe you could even talk about, I'm going to put this on you real quick, But let's just say someone has just calculated their financial independence number. They're actually kind of excited about the prospect and they're like, all right, I want to do this yesterday. What do I need to do? Brad, what things would you say that someone has done for you to say this person is now in control? Says nothing to do about their bank account, but they know their number and now they've done X, Y, Z items and you're saying they are in control. Oh, I like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. As far as finding out your number, I would even I would take the step back there because I think having control of your finances and having control on your path to buy is really understanding your finances for the first time in your life. So I think this is step one, which is you write down all of your assets, you write down all of your liabilities, all the amounts you owe. And you also then have put my account's hat on an income statement, which is just here's what's coming in and here's what's going out. And this is what's left. So you have to maybe for the first time in your entire adult life, be honest with yourself and say, all right, this is where I am today. But of course it doesn't stop there. You have to actually take action to make your life better. So I think Jonathan, for me, this level, there's just that basic control is all right, now I'm going to make steps and I'm really going to go through again, what does my life cost? And am I getting value from all of those things that I'm spending money on every month and every year? I think for a lot of us, we're spending really unconsciously. I know we talked many, many times about, and I didn't even know this was a thing until I heard from you and friends like Joel and Alexis from 5180, which I don't know if it even exists anymore. But the target the target love of just going into target and just spending money and you can it not only target of course but like you literally those were not words that came out of my mouth it actually was you talked about this with you and danny going into well you also had amazon but i said i use the words target love i don't know who this person is you're speaking of i promise you i can uh i can call up let's not conflate that was okay maybe i did you did you did circa 2017 but but anyway I have the most advantage of recognizing that Brad, listen to me say this out loud. Remember when you said last episode about trying to convince people that you're right? This is that. Touche, my friend. Yep. Yep. So anyway, I think a lot of us, a lot of us just spend money and we're not getting value out of it. Okay. Look, you have to take action at the beginning of your five journey to get your expenses under control. It doesn't stop there. Of course, you want to increase your income. You want to have a side hustle. So you want to have different, et cetera, et cetera. That's fine. But to get control, you need to have a sense of what you're doing and am I getting value from this? And also, I think for me, Jonathan, just the final point that comes just right up the top of my head is you want your finances on autopilot. This is very simply, right? Like everything has to happen in the background. You have to automate your savings. This means go to your HR and make sure you're getting the company match for your 401k at the minimum. and then hopefully you're saving more in your 401k than that. This means setting up all of your bills on auto pay, your credit cards to pay on time and in full every single month. You want this all just working for you so you don't have to think about it. You want it to be easy so that you can focus eventually on the things that actually matter in life. All right, so this episode is gonna quickly become this conversation because this is, I think we both understand that that question is probably, most people have a version of that and haven't really been able to process how to answer. How do I know that I'm in control? I may feel that way, but what things should I have done to not reach financial, but to know that I am firmly on the path? And I think answering this gives us the stated goals for where you should come out of any sort of 5-101, something along those lines. This is what you should feel. And this is why, in my mind, control is going to take probably 30 to 60 days. and that's kind of being in an aggressive posture where I'm gonna take actions each and every week. Control is not something you do because you make a decision to do it in the next day or there. Control is something that there are tangible action steps that you have to take. And I like the big summary category. One of them is autopilot. Let's go ahead and take the first one. He said it, but let's start there. What does your life cost? That is probably the first one. So why is it 30 days? You don't know what your life costs. If you're not watching it closely, you don't know. So a 30-day audit of expenses, recognizing the characteristics of those expenses. Are they time-bound? Maybe you've just been making minimum payments on your credit card. Maybe you have debt hanging up. Do you know how that lines up with your path to this outcome that you want? So 30 days, and there's going to be a lot of things happening in parallel. It's not like you can't do the next thing until you do this thing, but we need to have a 30-day audit of our expenses. What does your life cost? In the same way, you should probably also do an audit, but it's not going to take as long. of your income and you should start to project out, is this income, my understanding of my income, is this regular? Is this about to change? Is this, you know, where, where am I on this, on this path? But if you're in your career and you're making an income and this is the job that you're going to be in, at least to start with, okay, we know what we have to work with and we know what's going out. And now the next thing is, yes, you could go into the autopilot and we want to autopilot. We want to, we want to, you know, get all of our expenses standardized. We want to make sure that we're not paying excessive fees or any fees if possible. We want to cut anything that we don't think has value after going through the audit. We're going to want to go ahead and make sure, now that's on the expensive side of things. We're going to make sure that we have a plan for our debt. Brad said the credit cards. We're not paying interest on credit cards. That's 28%. That's crazy. If we could make 28% of our investments, that sounds great. Paying it, not so ideal. You'll always pay your credit cards on time and then full. Your credit card statement and balance is a 45-day window where you pay no interest. There's no reason not to use that. But if you don't take a few minutes and go make that single toggle option to pay your balance on time and then pull each and every month, you're missing it with credit cards and you should stop using them entirely. Or alternatively, you're like, oh, I just didn't think about it. Then think about it. This is what being in control actually looks like. So we're automating our balance payments. Brad, I can see you want to hop in here. Is there anything else before I go to the other side on the income and the investments? No, no, no. I was jumping in on investments. So I can't wait to talk about that, but go for it. I'll give it that. I'm trying to think if there's anything that I've missed here, but the big one is it's the expense audit. It's understanding what is our debt payoff plan? How is debt a factor for us? Understanding what our plan is going to be. Are we going to make minimum payments until the end? Are we going to pay it off aggressively? Are we going to order our debts from highest interest rate or highest balance? There's a little bit of an art there. And part of any sort of 101 that's going through getting in control needs to have an intellectually honest look, a nonjudgmental look at the debts that we have and the plan that we're going to make with those debts. There's no absolutes on how you're going to do it, but there does need to be a plan or the choice will make itself and you won't be happy with the outcome. Yeah, totally agree. And I think we do need to have another episode on debt and different debt pay down strategies. I know there's the debt snowball, the debt avalanche. I think there's some hybrid method that we talked about in the past. And also, frankly, all debt is not created equal. OK, while perfect world, you have no debt. But realistically, many of us have have mortgages on our home. Many of us still have student loans. I know, Jonathan, you are very aggressively paid down one hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars of student loans in about four years or give or take. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right path for everybody, depending on on their timeline, depending on their interest rate, et cetera, because there is opportunity costs to that, right? You could invest that money also and pay minimum payments or something. I'm not advocating for either way, but I think everybody needs to go in with clear eyes on what their own debt situation looks like, frankly. But I think very obviously credit card debt is terrible, right? Like as you said, 20, 28, 30% interest, that makes no sense, right? Like there are some things that are just obvious. This is hair on fire type scenario where if you're on the path to FI, you are going to get to a point where you are financially stable, financially solvent, and then ultimately wealthy. And you are not going to have credit card debt. You need to really triage this. I mean, that's a dire situation, frankly. But is that the same debt as a 3% mortgage that you got in 2021? No, of course it's not. But there obviously are people who feel like they need to pay that down immediately. I would just counsel, you need to look at your financial life. You need to figure it out. And we're going to give you information along the way, but this is a very personal decision, but Jonathan, right? There are just some obvious things like don't have credit card debt very clearly. For sure. For sure. And so we're looking at, you know, if there's this equation, you know, what you earn minus what you spend, that's the, you know, the left half of the equation. And then you have a little, you know, equal sign. That's how math works, right? On the other side, you have something that's left, this remaining balance. And this is what you figure out what to do is Some people spend up until it's gone. And if there's any, again, there should be something left, especially after this audit, right? If you haven't done the audit before, it wouldn't surprise me. Many people do spend up until they can't spend anymore because they don't have a why for what else they would want to do. After you do this audit, if there isn't anything remaining, well, then we need to go back and put our attention on the other side. What were our two options? What was what we earned? And it was what we spend. We need to make some choices there because there's ways to increase your income and there's ways to decrease your expenses. Knowing how much flexibility you have now points back to why the expense audit is so critical. Look, if you're poor, like you're dirt poor, like that's your identity statement, there's nothing to cut, okay. Yeah, if that's a true statement, if that's true for you, then cutting is not gonna be the right answer, right? We have an income problem. And so we need to spend time thinking about how do we increase the income? You can't cut anymore. That's fine. This isn't exactly the same problem for all of us, but have you looked? If you haven't looked, then we can't just start there. We need to look. And even if it's bad, you still need to know because it tells you, are we putting that energy into income? Are we putting energy into expenses? All right. Let's assume that after we've done this audit, maybe we've made a couple of trims. We've gotten rid of a couple of things, but now we're putting our energy into the other side, the right-hand side of the equation. We're looking at what was left, the difference. And this is where you start talking about things like, you know, how do I want to optimize that? How do I want it? What do you want to do with it? And now it's actually a circular loop because you could say, actually, there was actually a decent amount coming over here and I'm having to now make a manual choice about what to do with this remaining balance. What if I could go back to that pay myself first mantra? And this is what Brad says about Autopilot. You don't want to make a choice every single month about what to do with the difference. If you know there's a predictable difference left, let's go ahead and make the choice before it ever comes to the other side. Let's load up those pre-tax buckets. And you're looking through things like making sure you're taking advantage of your match and getting free money and preloading contributions into accounts, that sort of thing. Now you're starting to think about investment strategies and you're starting to think about how the fees matter and making sure that the funds that you're contributing to are not loaded with fees that are eroding your returns. It's this kind of incremental process. We're reducing our decision. We don't want to make this decision every month. We're trying to put systems in place to create the outcome that you want. And so at the end of some sort of, you know, 5101 style 30 to 60 day thing, you should have gone around that circle a couple of times and had a good amount of time to think about the income, a good amount of time to think about the expenses, a good amount of time to think about how to do the difference. And another big one is, have you optimized your taxes? Brad, how many people get super excited about their really, really big tax return? Best part of their year, a little bonus they got in the spring. Yeah. And that is, so tax refund is essentially an interest-free loan that you've given the government every single year, right? For many people who don't have the wherewithal to save money, that is pretty nice to get a couple grand back in April and it feels great. But realistically, for those of us in the FI community, we should be, we talk about the perfect tax return being a hundred dollar refund, somewhere under a hundred dollar refund, or maybe up to a hundred dollars and paying in because you want it to be as close as possible. You don't want to give an interest-free loan to the government throughout the year. You want that money to be working for you. And Jonathan, yeah, like you said, the investment side. Talking about control, I think just having some understanding of your investments for the first time ever gives you a feeling of control that is hard to describe. Because I think for most of us, investing seems like a complete black box. It seems like something that only experts can do. It's impossible. I need to have insider information. I need to pay So the man or woman down at the Edward Jones to manage my money. And you listen to someone like JL Collins and read his book, the incredible book, The Simple Path to Wealth. And you realize, oh, wow. And also, frankly, John Bogle and Warren Buffett, who echo the same exact things, which is nobody can beat the market over a long period of time, over a 40, 50 year period, which is really what our investing lifetimes look like at the minimum. it's almost impossible to beat the market. It is almost impossible. So what is your best strategy? Your best strategy is to match the market. And in this day and age, this is the golden age of investing. You can do that for almost no fee. You can buy something like an S&P 500 ETF or mutual fund or a total stock market ETF or mutual fund for a couple of hundreds of percent of expenses in minuscule, almost zero. So if your financial advisor is charging you the horrific assets under management of, oh, it's only 1% and then to prove their brilliance, they're putting you in some expensive mutual fund, you're going to lose a significant percentage of your net worth, really 30 to 50% and more than that over 50 plus years. Jonathan, that's crazy talk. So I think the control for me would be a lot of people look at that incomprehensible list of funds that they have in their 401k and they don't know what to invest in. What I always do, my quick heuristic is just look for the lowest expense ratio. Okay. It's usually under a 10th of a percent. And that is usually going to be something like S and P 500 or total stock market fund that is matching the market. That is the closest proxy for matching the market. And Jonathan, I think for me and for the vast majority of the fight community, thanks to people like JL Collins and such. That's the strategy that we take. And it is honestly, it's the simplest path to that wealth. I know it sounds trite because that's the title of his book, but there's no brilliance. There's no guy behind the guy. There's no secret to investing. It's all BS. Frankly, anybody who thinks that they can outsmart the market, they're just lying to themselves and to you to enrich themselves. It doesn't exist. It literally doesn't exist. Just match the market. So that's the control on the investing side for me, for sure. You know, I was just trying to think through how deceptive returns are, how deceptive it is for returns. And I was thinking through mutual funds and there's some that have some higher name recognition. I would say probably over the last few years, I feel like the ARC fund has had like a lot of name recognition. It's been in the press a lot. And when you see a mutual fund that has super high returns, it's very tempting to say, well, I want to do the one with the best return. And this is a huge mindset shift that you just, you won't process until you've been investing for a while. Like you personally, right? It just, this is not intuitive. What does it mean to chase returns? This is the problem. If you take a look at, oh, well, my guy has, you know, he got the last 15 years, got 300% returns, right? Well, that's pretty good over the last 15 to 300%. Well, what was the return for someone that invested in January of last year to now? Those are two different things, completely two different things. And it is irrelevant what someone did over a horizon. What matters is from your entry point to your exit point, whatever that is, what is that return going to be? And that is completely unknown, including to the fund manager. But if your money goes down, they're still going to collect your fees, right? They're going to get their fees regardless. And so, you know, over ARC's inception, maybe it's like a 300% return, something like that. Well, over the last year, maybe it's been more like 10% or 13%, or there was a year where it was down 20 or 30% or something like that. Very volatile, right? And so for individuals that are hopping in and hopping out, maybe that's okay. Maybe. But the point is for the person that looks at, you know, morning stores, top five returns, you're chasing returns. Those returns are already locked in. Now think about this, like as an individual, if you made a bet on something that blew up and it blew up and you know that that thing, you found value, you identified something that was undervalued by the market. You invested it, you made a great choice and it had a 10 Xer and here you are. Well, the problem is now you have to find the next one because maybe that one's done, or maybe it peaked and you have to get out. Well, that's going to create taxable events. And then two, you have to figure out what the next bet is and they do stumble. Now, the problem for you as the individual investor is you haven't found the person that will never stumble And regardless of whether or not they land the next bet or not their fees are a locked in thing for you You understand that And so these are just you got to process this because it so deceptive to go look at a mutual fund that has great returns You not getting any of those returns You getting what happens next the next chapter. And if you don't know, which none of us do, you're not even relying on your own judgment. You're relying on theirs and how they see things, right? You're relying on some level personalities because they don't have a crystal ball. They have to make guesses based on maybe additional information, but they have to outperform their fee. They have to outperform the market. So they have to take more risk. And it is extraordinarily nearing impossible to outperform the market over a longer period of time. And this is why, even though we have some people in our community that are huge fans of picking individual stocks, like Brian Feraldi likes picking individual stocks, he would never in a million years dismiss index fund investing. it's a core of his holding. But occasionally what he does is he as an individual feels like he has identified value that the market isn't priced in and he won't take a position, a long-term position. And again, as an individual investor, maybe you can afford it, but here's the real thing. That's great for Brian Feraldi. He's doing a lot of research and he makes some great choices. He's a long-term buy and hold investor, but that is not what a mutual fund is that's actively managed. They have to outperform the market. They have to make new bets to keep capturing value. And that comes potentially at, you know, you're at the disadvantage on that end of the equation. So I just wanted to throw these up there to be intellectually honest. When you're thinking about long time horizons and you want to take your brain out of it, keeping up with the market will do exceedingly well for you. And the vast majority of individual investors do not keep up with the market. So just keep that in mind. So part of control has to be, you appreciate the why of that. You stop getting shiny object syndrome. You take your lizard brain, I'm using a lot of Brad's terms here, but you take your tiny lizard brain out of it and you just say, all right, I'm going to automate and control what I can control and I'm going to reduce the fees and I'm going to look for keeping up with the market over a long time horizon. So Brad, I know I just circled the wagons there, but I just wanted to provide some context because when we're talking about the right side of the equation here, what do you do with the difference? You know, we have income, we have expenses. Now we're talking about investments, but it's a circular loop for someone that's saying I'm in control, at least with regards to the investment side of things. What would you say are table stakes for saying you're in control? Yeah. So you're in a great place, right? First off, let's take a step back and say, if there is a gap, right? Your income minus your expenses and you have a gap, you have a number there, you're doing great. You're saving money. Obviously, we want to increase that money every single month, that amount, because the more you can shovel into your investments, the quicker you're going to get to FI. But you're doing great. But now you have to put this money into work. And this is what we've been talking about. Where do you want to direct it to? So I think clearly you start with your 401k and find out, do you have a company match? You just need to ask your HR department. You want to maximize that company match because that is literally free money. It's part of your salary, whether you realize it or not. So at the minimum, you want to do that. But then where do you direct the rest of it? I think there's a reasonable case to be made to put more into your 401k because you get a tax deduction for it in the current year. And like we always say, control what you can control. And that is lowering my taxes this year. There's something to be said for that. But of course, there are other ways to save. There are something really simple like a taxable brokerage account. And now this just means an investment account that is not under one of these umbrellas of a 401k or a traditional IRA or Roth IRA. Those are retirement accounts. A taxable brokerage account is just the amount of money you have in your savings. Okay. So this could be sitting in a high yield savings account, which actually is not a terrible idea either because high yield savings account are paying three to 4% now, which is not nothing. You could put your emergency fund in there, but realistically taxable brokerage is just, okay, instead of the money sitting in your checking account earning nothing, you need to get that money to work. So you can have an account at Vanguard or Fidelity or Schwab, just like you might have a retirement account and you just open up a brokerage account and you can invest in whatever type of securities you want there. So an ETF like VTI is something that I invest in. VTSAX, of course, is famous in our community, et cetera, et cetera. But this money needs to go to work. It can't just sit there because there's such an opportunity cost, Jonathan, right? Like if the money is sitting there not earning anything, then you are giving up. You can't get wealthy doing that. The money cannot just sit there because like we said, this money is going to earn and it's going to compound and it's going to double most likely every nine years, even if it was just sitting there investing without putting in additional money each month, which we obviously are. So that's why you're going to start to see your net worth snowball. It's going to be extraordinary because not only is it growing, but you're shoveling new money in every month. So, okay, that's something you need to automate contributions. Like we talked about, everything needs to happen without you being involved. It just makes your life easy. You want your personal finances to be the easiest part of your life. It should be. Once you get past that 30 days that Jonathan talked about 30 to 60 days, there is no excuse to not have your personal finances on autopilot. Everything should have a place. Everything should be paid automatically. All of your savings, all of the money in your brokerage to your 401k, to your IRAs, it should all happen automatically. You need to know what investments you're in and why, and you need to know what are the fees. Is this just something that somebody told you to invest in a decade ago? Well, that's not a good enough reason anymore. You know how expensive this can be. You know that this could cost you 30 to 50% of your net worth just by being in the wrong investment that has too many fees. And you need to unwind that, really. So for me, it's lower expenses, know where to direct it, get your 401k match, have money going into all these different accounts that are essential. And that, Jonathan, that to me is control. Yeah. And being able to understand what is the nature of the investment vehicles that you're in. So you have your tax buckets like the 401k or maybe the 457 or the 403b inside the United States, you know, Canada, Aussie, you guys have your own names for some of these things that are pre-tax, et cetera. And then inside of that, you're making a choice about what fund you're in. You don't understand there's a difference between the tax treatment and then the actual fund. What are you in? So we're kind of moving through these phases. You have now moved out of control when you can say that's done. And here's a challenge as a community. This was our starter list. We're obviously pretty familiar with the content, right? We've been talking about financial independence now for approaching a decade, but we're not claiming to have the definitive list on this, but we are working towards standardizing a list that individuals could feel good about if they are wanting to say, you know, I feel like I'm in control now. So with that in mind, chooseify.com slash login. This is episode 585, and you will actually be able to go in and join the conversation. We'd love to hear your list. What did we miss? What should we add? And we actually will be using that feedback to start to standardize and create something, it could very likely have things on it that we didn't include today. And it could actually be standardized for various different countries as well. So definitely get involved on that. You know, we started out with our pillars of five back in episode 21. And I think probably like 30% of those would still be on the list today, not because they were bad, but because we got better input over time. We're counting on that feedback from you to help us really stand. I think it's something that would be useful for the community to have this, a list of to-dos to be able to say, I am in control. It does not mean that you're debt-free. It does not mean that you're at financial independence, but it does mean that you did the work and you put a plan in place over a 30 to 90 day period of time. So without in mind, now for the first time, you are in the next phase, which is you have options. You have options. And when you have options, you should start thinking about gamification, right? That's gamification there. And part of this is when we're talking about options, we're now looking at things like milestones, right? Milestones that we could potentially hit. This is a concept Joel from 518 mentioned to us and he had his own list, which were probably good, probably worth listening to, but we're probably not going to use them directly for this one, although there will be some obvious overlap. Milestones are things that you should look for to recognize your progress. Things that you can put in the coming soon mirror, right? Things like, when are you going to be debt-free except for the house? That would be a big milestone if you could be debt-free except for the house. When are you going to have the house paid off? That might be really, really far in the distance. Not every milestone is going to be for every person. When will you reach something like Coast Fi, which is something that we explored just in the last episode and we'll talk a little bit more about today. Something like Barista Fi, Lean Fi, these types of things. Inside of each milestone, maybe you have smaller things which are more like checkpoints, little actions that you could take. Something like I just had my first, I was able to max out my 401k for the first time. I was able to get my first tax return under $100. I was able to have my first 100k in an investment account. And there's a million of these, right? So we're thinking about gamification out loud. And through the lens of options, you're saying, what do I want to prioritize first? Maybe based on the milestones that are most interesting to me, maybe based on checkpoints that I think are very achievable that I could do in real time. you're getting a little bit of victory, a little bit of progress each and every day, but it doesn't have to be the boring middle, right? It's not like there's nothing happening between control to independence. We're going to work through these ideas of recognizing our options, then working through our optimizations and thinking about things. Your optimizations could really carry you all the way to independence, which would be the final phase. And independence, you could be targeting lean fire, fat fire, any ridiculous number that you want. But independence basically says, you know, if you never made another dollar, probably going to be all right. Probably going to be all right. And you could have retired or not retired. Retirement is a completely optional thing that we'll get to in a little bit here. Yeah, I love this. So options to me, once you have everything set, like you said, once we have control, you do have options. You have a world of options because you are in an increasingly stable and then really significant financial position, which gives you, as we always talk about, FU money to do things that you want, which maybe for the first time in your life, you can do that. But you have options in every aspect of your life. You can take a mini retirement, possibly. You have different flavors of FI, as we've discussed, Coast FI, Barista FI, Lean FI, whatever, Fat FI, frankly. Also, there are different, many, many, many different investment options. We've talked at length, of course, about low cost index funds, but that's not the extent of your investment options. There are many people in the FI community who invest in real estate. There are many people who invest in plenty of other things. That's something to consider. I think, frankly, the bedrock of most people in the FI community's investment life is going to be low cost index funds. But there are many people who play at the margins with, again, with real estate and individual stocks, bonds, et cetera, even crypto, things like that. Is that unreasonable? No. I mean, you have options and you need to look and you need to be very rational about it. But Jonathan, I think that's part of the fun is there's no prescribed path to FI. Yeah. Okay. There are general principles, but this is a very uniquely personal thing. And like we've talked about, you ruthlessly paid down your debt extremely quickly. That's a thing. And that's wonderful. And that worked for you and your family. Other people might make a different choice. Does it make one person right and one person wrong? Of course not. But I think we all need to do some introspection and really think about what does this path look like for me and my family and the people around me? I think that you can't think about your options without thinking about what does my life look like? I think that's a great point. So you actually, I'm glad you rounded it off. I'm glad you even said things, you know, individual stock picking and crypto. It's all here. Like there's no dogma. I mean, you hear us, you know, we recognize that there's a responsibility for us not to go off the rails here and talk about every fringe way that someone has made a million dollars, because the key is to help as many people achieve their goals as possible. And for every single person that you know, that's made a bunch of money with crypto, there's a broken bloody stream of people behind them that are bankrupt and lost everything on a bet because rug pulled, et cetera. And so it's not about what has worked for someone else. It's just increasing the odds of your success, your personal success. And even in our own lives, when there have been a choice that we made that led to a better than positive outcome or a suboptimal outcome, you have to personally own that. You can't go back. And so even when we have done something else and we recognize, oh, well, we got suboptimal. And you know that you could have done better if you had just done the market. In other cases, maybe you've done better in something else that you took a stab at, but you also know that you got lucky. You got lucky. And can you do it again? Maybe, but would you get the same outcome? Not necessarily. And so there is, with the point that you made about me paying off my debt, that's a great thing. Personal finance is personal. A lot of people gave me not a hard time, but just said, you know, you would have made more if you had done this and you just stayed in the market time. And that's not a wrong answer in absolute terms, but what it fails to capture is the nuance of personal finance is personal. And then at a tangible level that most people probably could appreciate, paying off my loans and prioritizing them allowed me to feel much more confident about stepping away from my job when I had to make a choice between doing the Choose FI podcast and doing my job because I had paid off my student loan debt. I had decreased my risk because I had decreased my risk. I could take more risk and I was able to do that. So when you're looking at how do you evaluate whether something is a good choice or a bad choice, just be aware that someone giving you their opinion doesn't have all the context. They don't have all the facts that you're aware of. And so getting rid of risk can allow you to take more risk. If you have your finances on autopilot and you have your slam dunk path to financial independence on autopilot, you can be pretty risky with this stray five or $10,000 that you want to do X, Y, Z. And guess what? You're not all in on that hand because no one else is going to dip into their fi pie to make up for your bad choice, right? You got to build your own. No one else can do this for you. What we can do though, is we can give you the tools to build it for yourself and give you the best chance of success by highlighting for you the principles that stand true over time. That's the difference. And that's why this requires nuance and it requires your input. Yeah. Agreed. And as you were talking about that two principles that I had written down on my list of a hundred that I made back to the list. Oh, the table of contents is coming back. Yeah, it's always coming back. Come on. So a couple of things in terms of decisions, right? So we had the incredible poker player, Annie Duke on episode 262. So she wrote a book called Thinking and Bets, which I think is just an absolutely essential book for just living, basically. And she talked about the concept of resulting, which is we generally look at the result of a decision and then say, okay, did the result turn out good? It was a good decision. Did the result turn out bad or poorly? Then it was a bad decision. And that's just, that's simply not the way that life works. Sometimes you can make a horrific decision and just get lucky. And it turns out right. That doesn't mean it was a good decision. It was never a good decision. It was a terrible decision. It just worked out okay. So it's really important to not delude yourself. And you are pretty easy to delude. And another thing, frankly, is investing is not gambling. So many people think investing is oh I going to buy this piece of paper or now little digits somewhere on a on a computer screen And I going to just sell it for more as soon as it goes up Like that not investing That is gambling. Investing is what you're really doing when you're buying something like a total U.S. stock market index fund is you're buying a little ownership piece of three to four plus thousand companies and potentially 100 plus million workers that work for those companies. You are now a part owner of all of those companies and all of those people are working every single day, five days a week to enrich you. And that's a totally different reframe on investing rather than, oh, the number on this screen is going to go up and, oh, it's, I see a little green on that number, Jonathan, that cute little numbers in green. Oh, great. Or no, the number's red. It's bad. That's a day. That's a day thing. It's not a 50 year thing. Investing is a 50 year thing. I've been trying to make peace with this idea of individual stock. I've had some success here and there, but I also recognize how much you had to think about it and how long you had to be willing to be wrong before you were right. And I've been trying to think about, is it gambling versus, you know, is it you thinking in bets and is thinking in bets gambling? There's probably a little bit of overlap, but I think you, I really probably for the first time, you helped me kind of parse out the difference there. Looking at a ticker on the screen based on Apple's 24 hours charts that it shows you on your little phone, Google or iOS and saying, all right, do I think later today it's going to be green or do I think later today it's going to be red? Like pure gambling. What I love about Brian Feraldi in general and his thought on what he's looking for stocks, he's looking for value. He's looking for things that he believes, this has nothing to do with gambling. He believes the market has mispriced something because of a short-term bias that will correct to the other way. Now he is thinking in bets, but is that gambling? Well, I don't think it's gambling to the same way that we kind of have like a derogatory statement like Russian roulette. Let's see what happens. What it is, is he believes he's identified value that the market with its short-term bias and needing to always be able to convert can't appreciate. And so he locks in a position, but he has to be willing to hold it for at least five years. And anytime that I've made like money, like in an individual position, I recognize that because I felt like I knew a lot about a thing and what was happening behind the scenes. I bought that position. And usually what happened is my position dropped in value by 30 or 40%. That's just kind of what I've seen. That's a horrible feeling. You feel like you're the biggest idiot in the world. You question yourself, but the thing is, when that happens, you're saying, all right, but was the thesis true? Did that invalidate my thesis or is that the market doing its frothy thing that has nothing to do with my medium to long-term thesis? And so I've actually had a few things that made three or four X, you know, with the benefit or a five year plus window. And now I'm like thinking, oh, you're a genius. You're so smart, but you're not. You got very lucky. But what was true, and I think what differentiates it is this idea, thinking in bets or really not gambling, having a belief about something, but to get through. But here's the problem with it. Here's the problem. I've had some success with it. No one guarantees you an outcome. And let me tell you, when it goes down and you feel like a sucker, you don't want to tell anybody about it. When you're winning, you want to tell everybody. But here's the problem. And this is why, again, going back to what I said earlier, but nobody that saw how you won with that thing should trust you with their money to go find the next one because your odds of finding the next one are still zero. It's a coin cost. It could go either way. And the more that I recognize that, the more I have an appreciation for the fact that like, and this is what a mutual fund is up against as well. They have to keep up with the inexorable market. They have to make a choice to beat the market. So if I were in the position of having to produce better than market returns for individuals, I would have to go find the next thing. And if you don't want that responsibility, but you still want to end up with three to $4 million, you should just take your lizard brain out of it and find a way to reduce the fees and think about time horizon as opposed to timing the market. This is kind of like I've been really fighting for a long time internally and externally a way to verbalize this little cognitive dissonance between maybe some individual success I've had at times, but literally with five-year periods of feeling like a complete fool, right? But then some success, but then actually starting to balance that out with like the more and more I appreciate about, I want to do other stuff with my time. Yeah, I still want to be a millionaire. Yeah, I still want to have stealth wealth. Yeah, I still want to achieve my goals of financial independence. I don't want to spend time looking at what the market is doing today or tomorrow or this quarter or next quarter, wondering what the Fed Reserve interest rates are going to do to XYZ. I don't want to do that, but I would still like the outcome. How can I do that? This is kind of where I landed. I have a deep appreciation and respect for the simple path to wealth. Yeah, agreed. And there's also a concept of return on hassle, which is an interesting one. I like that. I like that title down. It's so true. I mean, so yeah, as you said, it's kind of a fool's errand to think that you're going to outsmart the market because you have to get it right twice. It's hard enough to get it right on either the buy or the sell timing, but you have to get it right both times. The chance of you doing that over and over again by finding some absolutely brilliant thing and then getting it right on both the buy and sell, it is just improbable. And that's the thing. It's like, what is your best chance to be wealthy over a lifetime? I think it is a simple path to wealth. It just is. And then also, like I said, the return on hassle, Jonathan, you know, you like you just talked about embedded it in what you just said for the last couple of minutes. It's like, you're thinking about this all the time. You don't want to tell people, you want to tell people about your successes. You're ashamed of your feelings. I want to talk about it. I can't stop talking about it. Right. And it's like, I mean, you're doing all of this and I find it very hard. And of course, let's be clear. You're doing this with, if you are doing this, you're doing this with a small percentage of your assets. Most of your assets are in low cost index funds, but you have some play money to do this kind of stuff. Like the likelihood that with all of that and any fees that you have to pay, that you're beating the market, that you're beating the passive portion of your investments. It's pretty slim, but even if it is, it's probably a small amount. And is it worth the hassle? I think that's a question. Is it worth the stress? Is it worth the, I don't want to tell my significant other about this. I don't want to tell my friends about this. Is it worth the hassle? And I think for most of us, it's just simply not. Yeah. I think what you said there, and I wanted to highlight it is because any single individual could look at a pick that has outperformed the market over a five-year period. Okay. But what about over 40? You know, like, like stretch this out. Now imagine you're all in on this hand. Are you all in on this hand over 40? Is that going to keep happening? Are you going to keep nailing the winners? Or is the very fact that you had success here likely to, you know, tilt your decision-making to make more risky things and then end up be behind? So again, I think very, a lot of people can make a choice or two choices and periodically and outperform over, you know, this thing and maybe wildly outperform, but you don't get to go back. You don't get to go back. And the stats just show us the vast, vast majority of the people. In fact, 99.999%, maybe everyone that tries to do this over time, over 40 years falls flat. So I think that's the balance act there. And yeah, I mean, you don't need to be embarrassed about talking to anybody about anything, but certainly as a cautionary tale or a life lesson, recognize the fact that everybody wants to talk about their winners. So when you have this person giving you a hot tip, they don't always win. They're not talking to you about their dogs, right? They're not talking to you about the things that they got burned on. And if you have, you know, there's a story and I think it's, maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but the point will still carry. Let's say you have this crew of people that start out with a hundred thousand people and they choose option A on one side and option B on the other. And they call half their list and give them option A and option B. Then they make their bets and then A wins and B loses. All right. So they never talk to B again. Now they take that little list of option A where they just won and they doubled their money. And now they say, hey, we got a new pick. Here's C and D. Now they split that list into two cohorts, right? And they bet one side and then they bet the other. One side wins, one side loses. They cut that listen up. Now this tiny little cohort has just had two wins in a row. Now they're unaware that 75% have been scalded, but for these people, two picks in a row. All right. Now they move on to ENF with this little cohort and they split them in half again. They pick two sides. All right. But now this time, these people can't miss. They can't miss. I will give you all my money, all of it. All right. Like whether that I'm sure a version of that has happened over time. This is a parable, if you will, but I'm sure a version of that has absolutely happened. And you don't know. And so be very careful about hot tips and what people aren't telling you. If you don't want to worry about any of that, again, return on hassle, simple path to wealth is absolutely the way to go. All right, Jonathan. Well, speaking of options, we had one of our community members wrote in. His name is Fish Guy, and it is specifically about options. He says, my 2026 looks a little different. I'm considering taking a sabbatical starting in May for about six months. My wife and I are 30 years old, have about 700K in assets. We have very safe jobs, which makes it feel very risky to step away intentionally. We make about 240K combined, no kids. This break will hopefully serve as a reset to help us figure out what we want our lives to look like. Now, there's a lot of angst leading up to this, particularly because we have no plan for after the sabbatical. But we feel more empowered than ever with the FI community behind our backs, and we feel certain that now is the time to make the change. Curious to hear from other Coast 5 folks who have taken a similar leap of faith. Brad, what we have here obviously is a couple that have control and are contemplating their options and they're going to lever the power that they've accrued before reaching financial independence to just take a step back and then see what life they want to step back into. Yeah, I love it. And I love also the question of I'd like to see what other people in the community are doing. And Jonathan, that's the cool part is now we can all discuss this, right? So go to chooservite.com slash login right across the top. When you're listening to this episode, you'll see a big, big banner that says this episode's title and you just click on it and you leave a comment and let's discuss this. Let's talk about it. All right, Brad, this next message we got is from Marty. Marty says, my biggest goal for 2026 is to pay off two of three credit cards. Total debt between the three of them is 55K. I'll be paying one off in March, basically paying off about 35K this year. So I would say Marty is in control, right? Do you understand? Like Marty is not debt-free, but Marty for the first time, maybe because clearly this credit card debt has been accrued. Marty has a plan put in place to achieve a short-term outcome that is going to unlock a lot of options. Because Brad, when you don't have 55K of credit card debt hanging out over your head, you know, at a 20 plus percent interest rate, you have significant cashflow options. So many options. And yeah, sometimes this is not all about being a millionaire or a multimillionaire. It's about getting more power on your side of the ledger. And Jonathan, you famously say, get back to broke. Like that was, that was something that I didn't appreciate. I mean, you said that hundreds of times I didn't appreciate it. And just hearing it now, it hits me different because frankly, for somebody who's 30, 50 plus thousand dollars in debt, getting back to broke is an amazing thing. It's extraordinary. It's life-changing. And yeah, paying off debt as your first act on the path to fi, that's pretty damn good. And yeah, onward and upward from there. I appreciate you saying that. I was always aware when I was saying it and I was super feeling it that you weren't impressed with my pros, but yeah, it always resonated with me just because it felt so far away. You're 168K and I was angry about it, right? I was angry that I'd made these choices at a young age, trying to do right, trying to be on the professional path, trying to get success. And here I am in a career that's just toxic. And I'm going to have to unwind all this to unlock, in my mind, to unlock options. So yeah, back to broke was a, it was a big deal for me. So I appreciate you saying that out loud, even now. You know, Brad, we actually had a lot to cover and I had the goal to do even more community member content in this. And I think it's just going to be sometimes, you know, the content drives itself and sometimes you find a way to do both. You just never know until the episode's over. But I thought maybe for this episode, why don't we wrap it off by bringing in frugal wins of the week. We just added it to the platform. We're encouraging members to leave us their little frugal win. And sometimes it's big things and sometimes it's the tiny 1%. And today we have a frugal win of the week and this was shared with us by Eddie. And Eddie says, as a new dad, my caffeine intake has increased over the past year. I was primarily drinking energy drinks. And even with buying in bulk, I saw the cost start to pile up. So I switched over to buying a jug of black tea from Walmart instead. This jug costs around the same as one energy drink, but it can last me the whole week. I'm easily saving $50 a month just from this switch. You know, my only concern, Eddie, would that you wouldn't be getting a lifetime supply of taurine in every dose. That's awesome. small little wins, right? Yeah, I like that. I like that. And yeah, my caffeine consumption, I actually get the, I guess the kind of curry cups, but they're Amazon brands. So Amazon has their own brand called Happy Belly. And I forget exactly what they're probably like 20 cents per cup thereabouts. Not saying it's the best thing in the world, but they taste great. And yeah, pretty good deal. So always lots of ways to save in these things if you're willing to just do some research. Look around. I've been pretty happy with the light roast, the breakfast blend on the happy belly. You know, I was, uh, I was actually just this last week thinking about it. One of the first things that I ever, uh, documented on the podcast or tried on the podcast was trying to get into like a coffee mode kick. And I was talking about how I was getting my coffee at Costco, et cetera. Anyways, but I decided I wanted to learn how to do a pour over cup of coffee. And I was using this thing called the Chemex and I had this little grinder and I would do it all right there and it would be my morning ritual. And I was thinking about it last week. I am still using that same coffee grinder, a little Capresso coffee grinder that I bought 10 years ago. And if you think about it, you know, in terms of valuing the things that you purchase, when you purchase something, how often do you use it? If you use it every single day, then putting the price on that, you know, can be a little bit higher than something you use once every, you know, six months or a year or whatever else. It's just taking up space. This little coffee grinder has lasted nigh on to 10 years with daily use. And it just keeps on going. The Chemex would have too, but my, uh, maybe it was me. Somebody dropped it and it broke. I don't remember. Anyways, details were lost to time. It would have done it pretty well, but I, you know, drinking your coffee black, just like drinking your tea black and just focusing on how do I get a great tasting cup of coffee, as opposed to just covering up with cream and sugar. And until you get that pumpkin latte taste, there's calorie savings there. There's monetary savings there. And if you can find a little coffee grinder to last 10 years, like that little Capresso, then, you know, there's the joy of seeing something well used. All right, my friends, the fire is spreading. We'll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled.