Proof You Don't Need a High Salary for FIRE (Teacher Retires at 50)

22:49And I opened it up through Vanguard, did the whole 100 % total stock index fund and remember thinking and just seeing. And I'm one who wants to like learn from people who have walked the path ahead of me. So like I think that's part of the reasons I love teaching is because I'm like, listen, you as a student can change, can orchestrate your life the way you want. And here are some of the tips. So I was reading about everybody who had already done this, trying to figure out how to do this on our own. and a lot of it was just start, just start investing. So I took that leap and we started just putting money aside every month.

23:26Then by doing calculations, we could kind of figure out if we kept doing this, we could have enough money by X using the Trinity study and the 4 % rule and all those things of going through that and trying to calculate backwards, how much would we need? And then also looking at our rental income and saying, okay, if we had rental income this much, if we decide to keep this, so we're using the materials we have to bake the cake. right? We weren't sure what ingredients were going to be there when we were finally there at nine years, but we knew what we had in front of us. And that really started.

23:55And then as I got further along, we started realizing, oh, there's better ways to do this. You know, for example, just keeping, instead of keeping our money in just a plain checking account, we moved stuff over to a high yield savings account. And, you know, one of my friends was like, yeah, but that's like, you know, just a couple hundred bucks. I was like, dude, if I could give you a hundred bucks right now, a couple hundred bucks, would you take it? He's like, yeah. And I said, so that one switch makes just a little bit more. And I know this is like the death by incremental gains in some ways that people are frustrated by.

24:23But at the same time, that's the only way we would have done this. We didn't want to change our prescription on life. We didn't want to change what we were doing. We decided we wanted to stay teachers. We really love our jobs. We wanted our kids to be here. So, you know, even my kids would go over to friends' houses and they're like, why don't we have a house that has a big backyard or has the woods? We live like in the downtown where we're buildings all around us. You know, we're in an apartment in our building. And we said, well, you can't have it all. You know, like you get to have your downtown areas where some of your friends are gonna come and they would, sure enough, they come over here.

24:54You get to walk down to Boba T. This is so cool. You know, and then, and there was that sense that we started saying everything's a trade-off. Everything's a difference for, you know, so they're gonna be able to pick what they want. But here's a chance for you to say, all right, we chose this as a family so we could do these other things. And just like, as an aside on this, Like, yes, we've picked time as over money. I've rarely been full-time as a teacher. I've worked mostly four days a week. And so our salary, that's one of the reasons our salary has been smaller probably too, is because we've never had full-time pay.

25:27I've always been about 80 % out of those 25 years. So that's, again, was a choice because we wanted to be, have more time. I wanted to have a day where I could like regroup, do things for myself, do things for our family. And my partner has worked part-time most of her life as well. So that's been how we've been able to exist and enjoy our lives at the same time. On the surface, four days a week sounds like you're going to get not only less pay, but also maybe fewer benefits and fewer other of those compounders from a job. But I think that a hidden underneath that analysis that looks bad in your spreadsheet is the fact that that allows at least a portion of that extra time to be devoted to other money-making enterprises.

26:10So maybe managing your multi-unit, maybe managing your investments or other things like that, which actually produces astronomical outputs over a long period of time, if put to reasonable use. Now, if you're playing video games all day, which I like to play video games, I actually played a video game right before this call. People thought I was making fun of gamers. I do that to make fun of myself here a little bit. But if that time is not used productively, then of course it's a loss in your spreadsheet. But if it is, it can actually produce compounding return. So it sounds like you're nodding in agreement with this, that that may be your experience here.

26:42Absolutely. I mean, one of the reasons I think maybe in my mid late 30s, I realized I've got to switch it up. Like we can't continue just to live like this. I can see expenses are going to get bigger. I can see that we're going to need more. So we try to figure out other things to do. I got my real estate license for a while, was doing that a little bit on the side. I helped a lot of friends buy houses in that process. I still teach private lessons, you know, music, so I could do that on off times. I'm a wedding photographer, and I've done that a bunch in summers that worked out really well, where, you know, those are the best months, times to do it around here in this area, because New England, and that was where I knew like those that day off a week, I would edit photos, you know, but it also felt like it was my time.

27:30You know what I mean? Like I was spending it on my own thing. And that, that psychological shift was probably more important in a lot of ways for me to feel like I was living, even though financially I made a lot more money per hour as a wedding photographer than as a teacher, without a doubt. And, and that played in a lot, but now we're at a place where we're starting to shift that away and we're starting to like simplify and not having to do many things like that. Now I'm able to choose that I don't need to do that. And I'm actually looking at my job now and thinking, what do I really love? And what do I want to do for next year?

28:03And it's given me the freedom to rephrase and reframe my moving on in my life.

28:09Mindy Jensen:I love that. Your story is similar to our trajectory. You, you know, pile up a bunch when you don't have the kids. And then you start to taper down when you are closing in on the end of your five journey. Or like, it was great to get me here, but I don't want to keep being this busy. I feel like, you know, becoming financially independent at an early age without one of these income, you know, superstar advantages, it's kind of like, like, like developing any other very, you know, a high end skill, like becoming very, very fit or professional athlete in these in these areas where it's an aggregation of marginal gains, you have to do the big things, right, of course, working out, you know, whatever, or spending less than you earn investing, all that kind of stuff.

28:47But it's this consistent application of the aggregation of marginal gains over a very long period of time through self-education, a few hundred bucks here, a few hundred bucks there on top of these other outputs that got you to where you're at. I want to go back to for a second, the four day a week component of your journey, which is sticking out to me is presenting itself as a key variable, key advantage in your journey from both a mindset perspective. Hey, I don't want to work full-time here and a time freedom. And I believe that that time, I'm hypothesizing before you go back to me, that that time was used to fix up this multi-unit, to progress your real estate investments, to generate side hustle income.

29:27That got you much more comfortable with all these different scenarios over time. Plenty of them failed, I'm sure, or failed in the sense that they didn't generate a better return than what your day job would have been. But I bet some did result in dramatic outperformance in terms of what your wealth would be if you just worked the fifth day. Can you go into more detail and tell me where you agree or disagree with that hypothesis? It's funny when people new at school would find out like, oh, you're four days a week. I'd like to work four days a week. And, you know, depending how good friends I am with, I'll be like, you can, you just have to get paid 20 % less.

30:00And that's where they end the conversation sometimes. And I think I'm the type of person, my partner and I both are the type of people that like to have projects. We like to be moving. We like to have things going on in our lives. and for us it was hard to have the five day a week where I get the end of day of Friday and I feel like Saturday is like I'm coming down off that a little bit and then Sunday I'm all of a sudden gearing back up and I really didn't feel like that was treating my life with respect that I wanted and I we had to make sacrifices I mean to do that we've been a one car family our whole life that's been a hard thing my friends like how do you do that well we it takes some maneuvering you know to like figure that out sometimes.

30:40I live in a place where the train is 10 minutes away. So if I need to, I can take the train that I walk to work from there, but it's like another 20 minute walk. So I don't do it that often, but if we have to, like, that's the kind of thing that's built in a little bit to make it work for us. That four day switch was really like intentional prior to the FI thing. You know, it was, this was, this was for us really about wanting to have time that was ours. And I really, I'm resonating right now with what you said, Scott, about it not just being like this switch that you flip, that it's a skill set that you've learned.

31:13I'm really big into connecting music with finance in this way, because like you learn a scale on the guitar. I have kids that I teach and they'll learn the scale and it's like, and they're like, okay, what's next? I'm like, no, no, that's just the first beginning. It's really the practice of music is what we're trying to get to. And I think the practice of money is really what it's more about. Like not everybody who's wealthy is financially independent, but everybody who practice money well can become financially independent. There's a very big difference. That process is massive compared to the arrival fallacy of just having money.

31:51It becomes less of a binary thing and more of a, this is a skillset that you learn as a musician. You know, I leaned forward to my kids all the time at school and I say, I have the secret to learning guitar. And they're like, what? They lean in more and I'm said, practice. And they roll their eyes and they get really frustrated. But I say, this is really what it is though. It's no more than what we have to do. And that is the work, right? That is the hard thing to actually do. Making money a process is actually the difficult piece for us. It's been going through and just trying the little thing here and here and seeing if this worked and then keep moving forward.

32:25And so for us, the having that day off made all the difference for us to be able to like have the time to really think through what our life was and how important these things are and what we wanted to do, what we valued too. One other thing that I'm picking up here, or I'm going to hypothesize next is, is with this time off, with this intentionality, with this, this devotion to the practice of getting better with money, I'm pulling another concept here, which is this concept of independence, self-reliance, the ability to do a lot of things yourself, I would guess that that skill has been a massive transformation for you personally over this nine-year journey as well, to the point where you're comfortable perhaps taking on a much greater set of responsibilities with regards to home improvement, maintaining your finances, thinking through even maybe basics of estate planning or those types of things.

33:14Things that I think maybe your previous self would have been helpless to take on 10, 15 years ago. Now do not scare you, which I think is perhaps very empowering. Is that also something that has happened over this journey? Absolutely. I mean, I just read Cody Garrett's like tax book or whatever that was just looking through it. I would never have bit off anything about taxes. That's like, I understand finance and I feel like that's, it's like working on my car. I don't really ever have friends who love working on their cars. I have no desire to do that, but like taking those bigger picture things now and trying to boil them down.

33:48I mean, that's what I do as a teacher. I just told my kids, I teach financial literacy to eighth graders. And I was just saying to them, like, if you don't understand it, that is my problem. Like it means I haven't simplified it well enough for you. So trying to break it down into simplified chunks is part of the deal. And I still don't feel like I understand finance even after doing it for nine years like this, because there's so many variables that have to do with me. Like on day one in my class, I write in and say, I said, good personal finance is not about the numbers. It's about, and I put a blank underneath there, and they talk about that for a while.

34:23What it is, and ultimately I write you underneath here, that it's really about them. It's about, because I can tell them exactly what to do financially. Here's what you could do and make all these things happen, but it's how it integrates with your life, which is just like music, right? Like you can hear a song here at one point in your life and hear it later and have different meaning. And you can hear it in a group of contacts with other people and have different meanings. So music has that same kind of like organic movements that I think you end up kind of figuring out this has meaning now.

34:53What does this mean for me? And this is more of a process than like, like I said, like an arrival, like I've landed in this destination.

34:59Mindy Jensen:So we have talked about your journey. Let's talk about the destination. You are almost financially independent. What do these numbers look like? And what does life after Phi look like? Will you continue to work? I'm working on that right now. I'm trying to figure that out. I love my job. I feel very fortunate about that. It's not always been easy. And there's been moments where as a teacher, you're kind of like, I don't want to do this. But actually, knowing that I have the ability to retire at the end of this year has completely changed my outlook on my job. I'm looking at it now in a light where what do I really want out of this?

35:41you know and I'm realizing that I love the unpredictability of students a lot like that unpredictability the classroom is like the definition of unpredictability and I can go in and some of the biggest moments that I've learned from my life have been things that I haven't created on my own so I'm looking at it with eyes that maybe this is something that I I need and maybe it's something that I really enjoy doing enough that I want to stay with it which is awesome place to be but I don't have to and that's also an awesome place to be could you Can you walk us through your portfolio? Like what are the numbers that support financial independence?

36:15Right now I'm a hundred percent on total stock market index funds. My brokerage account is about 20 % of all our investments. And then my 403B is about half. And that's also in index funds as well. My HSA is something I've been putting money in forever. I've been trying to, you know, tell other people the benefit of that, of being like the triple tax advantage. And that's been awesome. So we've just been paying for our medical bills and pretending that we do that. That's our money we're putting into our retirement. So if we get a bill for going to the doctor, that's like 400 bucks. We pay for that with our own credit card or cash.

36:58And then we say that's we're pretending we're putting this in our retirement because then that money just stays in our HSA and we collect those bills. So at any point now we could just go and take those bills and trade them in for the money that's on the HSA. My partner and I both have Roth IRAs and those are probably, I think about 20 % as well of our total portfolio. And I think other things that we have in there, I mean, like I said, our rental property is part of our end game here as well. And I will say that we have some backups on backups too. Like we've built into our retirement plan, the flexibility that we know we can continue to work.

37:37That's purposeful. Knowing that if we wanted to, we could just say, hey, we can just get a job and pick up some extra cash here if we need to, or we can stay a part-time work. But we didn't set this goal to be able to say, hey, we're just going to stop everything instantly and do something different. We have been kind of structuring and building our life the way we want it for these whole nine years. So we're living in the moment as we're doing it on purpose, not trying to just hold back and withhold the whole time. We've traveled You know, we just went to europe um for our whole family and we do that every two years because we have friends who live in croatia And so we go and visit them every two years and we save up credit card points And my kids know that this is part of our lifestyle too that we don't spend sometimes on certain things so that we can do this And they love it and they want to do it.

38:24So they're willing to kind of participate in that as well You know when we think about fire journey, you know a lot of people in are in your shoes where in the context of our our world, right? where we're getting close to our FIRE number, but we're all in S &P 500 index funds or the equivalents of those, maybe a total market index fund. Something that is very aggressive, a very aggressive concentrated stock portfolio. How do you feel about that? And do you have any thoughts about shifting to the more traditional retirement portfolio versus staying in a aggressive, with this more aggressive allocation as you approach your FIRE target?

38:57Right now, I am comfortable saying I'm going to stay in 100 % in total stock market index funds. But this is something I've been toying with the past, you know, even two years of just why and what. I don't mind the volatility because I do, like I say to my students, you have to have a belief in humanity. You believe that humanity is going to continue to make their jobs better and want to keep working if you're going to put stuff in the stock market. I'm believing in the United States that I think that the companies here are going to keep doing better. They're going to try. So right now I'm comfortable saying 100 % and because the volatility doesn't bother me as much because I'd rather take the risk of having it be in there and potentially making more and being able to have more than doing bonds.

39:45Or I've looked at like risk parity, you know, and just trying to understand a little more about that. But it just the complexity of that is not appealing to me because, again, time is more important. The reason my friends are like, you just obsess over money. and I'm like the only reason I do this is because I don't have to think about it that is the truth is that the truth is that I've learned about it so much because I don't want to have to think about it and I'm at a place now where it doesn't stress me out like I've learned enough and I understand and we have now set our the wheels in motion where I don't have to think about it and I really appreciate that and the 100 % in the stock market total index funds makes that that much easier for me.

40:25So I think there is like a time is greater than money for me piece to that, that me trying to understand a little more may not make that much of a difference. Even though you've heard me say, we've been hacking off these little aggregational nominal gains over and over and over again, right? This one for me has just not been as big for me to make that choice. If I were to look at your portfolio overall, it looks like you've got a, you know, a position that's like 60, 70 % on stock market index funds, which is what we refer to as 100 % index funds. Then you also have a real estate component to the portfolio, which is relatively lightly leveraged, I'd imagine at this point.

41:04And in the process of amortizing, could you give me an idea of what your real estate portfolio looks like right now? How much debt and how much equity is in it? Our house is worth somewhere around$900 ,000, I think. And I think we owe like$150 ,000 on it. This property has other additional units. Is that correct? There's three units in it. Yeah. We live in one of the three. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back in a beat. Really, Scott? When's the last time you enjoyed checking your finances? Well, Monarch is trying to change that. Open it up, and in a couple of minutes, you know exactly where you stand with your spending, your goals, your net worth, your investments, everything all in one place.

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43:12Mindy Jensen:Thanks for sticking with us. So if we really look at your portfolio, you know, we've got what's called 60-40 stocks real estate here. You happen to live in a component of the real estate and the real estate component is extremely lightly levered. It's almost paid off essentially, I imagine with very low interest rate debt, which is why you haven't bothered paying the rest off. Now we have a very different overall portfolio construction, right? That real estate component can be thought of almost like as bond-like in its very lightly leveraged state, given where you're at. And that justifies a pretty high concentration in stocks for the rest of your portfolio using traditional portfolio theory.

43:47So there you go. Without having to change anything, we've kind of gotten into a much better place. I think in there, that's what I've kind of done with my portfolio to a large extent as well this last year is really, really allocate more to real estate to make myself feel better about not having about the stock market and how that work plays around with traditional and 4 % safe withdrawal rates. I also couldn't justify going super heavily into bonds with low yields and pretty long time horizon for myself. Oh, it makes total sense. I mean, even with like the new 4%, you know, being 4.7 with Bo Bergen and all that just being higher, we I'm actually I round that up.

44:22I'm going to make a little shamed face, but 5 % and just say that this is what we're going to do. And we're going to take the 5 % knowing that we have flexibility built in from a lot of different angles, you know, real estate being part of it, but also the ability for us to make some extra money, like we could stop work, you know, at the end of this year, which would be awesome. But again, you know, when you read any of these blogs, or we talk to anybody have something that's meaningful in your life. They all talk about how important this is. And I've been looking at that for the past two years and thinking, what do I really wanna be about?

44:56What do I really wanna do? And so it makes me look at my job and think, one of the reasons I got into teaching is because I actually love it. I really have enjoyed being with students. I really enjoyed being with kids. I don't wanna just give that up just because it's under the umbrella of work. I need to understand what work means and what that work looks like that can be significant for me in my life. So I have that as an option. So even if we were to stay on and work, you know, 40 % or 60 % or whatever it is, then we're still making some extra money there. We don't have to take that 5 % we're going to take out, you know, when this whole thing starts for us.

45:32I bet wedding photography in North Boston is also a pretty good side hustle. Yeah, it's been great. It's been really good. I've enjoyed it. I haven't had to market myself much, but it's been really good in the long haul for sure. And I've enjoyed it. I mean, you can tell I'm kind of a people person. So it's a good place to be. Awesome. Last question I have on your portfolio here. How do you think about your cash position as you kind of approach financial independence? We've tried to have enough for like an emergency fund that's covers six months to almost a year actually for us. And that's, I think, more because we own a multi-unit that I want to be able to have enough on call for when, you know, I have a guy coming tomorrow to look at one of the burners you are already, you know?

46:15So it's just things break, things are breaking more frequently because we have more things that can break more frequently. I think I'm a little bit more conservative in that, that we just want to have a little bit more on hand. But at the same time, that emergency fund becomes something that we save for for our kids' education too, because they go to school, private schools like we teach in. And so every month we put money aside so when the bill comes, we can pay it. So we're kind of putting money into this fund that's just like a, almost like an ongoing extra fund that we just have because that's, it's in the high yield savings account.

46:52So we know that we're going to get return on that. So that's where we keep our cash position mostly. I wouldn't say it were like, it's not like we're keeping two years of expenses and of everything, but we try to make it so we have enough no matter what. But I also look at our HSA and what we've contributed to the Roth as being really liquid, you know, so we have the ability to pull things out of both of those. I recently added up all of our bills that we have from HSA and we have almost exactly the same amount that we have in our HSA right now. So we could theoretically take all the money of our HSA right now because we have bills that are associated with that amount.

47:29So I feel pretty easy to, you know, grab that money and it's pretty flexible for us already. So you have your liquidity situation really well thought through. It sounds like I love that approach with the HSA. I have not thought about that in terms of adding that to an emergency reserve and being able to just like have a one one step, you know, process to reimburse myself with all that. That's a great concept. Yeah, I can make my HSA card and I can go to the ATM and you can take money out with that, you know, or I can just go on the app and click and it goes right to my account. I just kept not wanting to invest so many things when I didn't know a lot about it that I felt like it was going to be trapped and locked.

48:06So as soon as I found a version of that It didn't lock the money in a way for retirement forever, even though we know that's not the case with 72T and SEB. But I knew that that was important. So having the Roth and the HSA were really key for me, for sure.

48:20Mindy Jensen:Yeah. If you structure your portfolio correctly or you put money into the different types of accounts correctly, you might not have to access your retirement funds early at all because they will just be there. Like the HSA, I do the same thing. I've got a big stack of bills waiting to be reclaimed from my HSA. And I don't need the money right now. So I'm not taking the money out of the account. I'm just letting it grow. I've got it invested in a little bit more aggressive than just the total stock market index fund. We lean tech heavy in our investments, but I might even have the HSA in some individual stocks just because I want it to grow big because like you said, it's triple tax advantage.

49:01Mindy Jensen:And I like not paying taxes if I don't have to. That's my favorite way to pay taxes. Yeah. What was the book? The book, the tax book was saying his big overarching theme was pay taxes when you pay the least amount. It's like, yep, that's it right there. All right, Andrew, thank you so much for your time today. Is there any place people can find you online? Yes, I am at cadenceofcash.com. That's my kind of music slash finance world. and it's just in its beginning stages, but I'm starting to be a little more writing about this process for me and also how we got to where we got. Music, money, and the rhythm of what matters most.

49:42Mindy Jensen:There you go. I love it. Andrew, thank you again so much for your time today. This was a lot of fun. And anybody listening who says you can't do it on a teacher's salary, well, Andrew did it, so you can too. All right, that was Andrew Luman. And that was a very interesting conversation that we had with him. Scott, I was a little surprised that he didn't have a pension. And actually, I like that better for him than most teachers who are essentially forced into contributing to a pension. I like that he was able to put it in after-tax brokerage accounts, his 403B, and really direct it himself. I wonder if in the next couple of years or decades, if you're going to see a lot more of this, the emergence of a lot more private school or private school-like educational programs, homeschool.

50:30There's programs in a lot of Republican states, for example, that allow parents to use funds that would otherwise be allocated to public schools for other educational purposes. And whether you like that or not, that's not the point of this, it's not a political discussion, that is likely to create changes in the educational environment for both parents and teachers, which will be really interesting, I think, in the coming years. And I think Andrew's approach to financial independence from a private school background is illuminating here. There's a little bit more flexibility that came into his life and I think and the approach that he could take maybe than what would have been commonly available at public schools.

51:04And I think it was really interesting to hear about how someone who's working part-time as a teacher or not full-time as a teacher in a high-cost living area was able to achieve this. And it really comes down to mindset. This is a creative individual who made incremental changes over a very long period of time to improve his financial position. And the compounding is absurd in this particular story. Congratulations to him. And I hope he just loves life over the next five, 10 years.

51:29Mindy Jensen:Scott, I don't have to hope that he loves life. I know he's going to love life over the next five to 10 years and beyond because he's loved life the last nine years that he's been on his journey. That's one of the best things about his story is that they didn't save and save and save for the future. They lived in the now while saving for the future too. I really love that part of his story. Well, should we get out of here, Mindy? We should, Scott. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying don't pout sauerkraut. I'm skeptical of a lot of financial products, but life insurance isn't one of them, at least not term life.

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