2024 Year-End Celebration: Inspiring Wins from the ChooseFI Community | Ep 526

26:06All of this is thanks to us making decisions that help us towards our path to FI. Second generation fire, man. This is another one of these things that I find so encouraging, but it's also urgent, right? Like if you don't get those money lessons into your kids, right? If you have kids and you're just thinking they're just going to figure it out on their own, they will. And it's going to cost you and them. Yeah. I mean, Heather's rocking it first, obviously congrats on the birth of your son and just the fact that you're taking these steps, right? The path to FI is about action. And goodness, I mean, it's December when we're recording this, so it's only five months later.

26:48He already has a stock account and a 529. I mean, Jonathan, his mom was able to take a part-time position to spend more time and talk about second-generation FI. That little guy is going to absolutely be rocking it. And yeah, Heather, huge congrats to you and your family. And yeah, onward and upward from here, for sure. All right, Jonathan. Our next voicemail came in from Mike. Howdy. This is Mike from Houston, Texas, and I'd like to share a big year win for my family. My wife and I went through multiple surgeries this year, and we've been told that the issue has been fixed, and we are so thankful.

27:23These treatments cost us around$150 ,000, and we did have to take out a 401k loan at around 5 % interest rate for$50 ,000. We are grateful that my wife has gone through all these treatments, and we essentially cash flowed most expenses this past year and focusing hard on the cash flow. The Choose FI podcast helped us stay focused on wellness and not letting this hurdle disrupt our happiness. And I think one of the great tactics we came up with is the staycation. Instead of traveling somewhere for vacation, we would stay home with our toddler. And we found that this greatly reduced any kind of stress of traveling.

28:00And ironically, whenever we would go out to eat during the staycation, my wife and I, we would always discuss about how pleasant and relaxing the experience was and about how we were going to continue focusing on paying down these bills with the cash flow. So thank you, Brad, and everyone at Choose to Find for the great fire discussions and crowdsourcing. You are spreading fire. Jonathan, Mike is somebody who actually emails me quite, quite often back to my five-weekly newsletter. There's a good handful full of people who write right back to me almost every week. And I've been following along with Mike's journey.

28:35And yeah, it sounds like everything is going really well for him and his wife. And I'm just so happy and thankful. And it really shows the power of FI when something like this happens that obviously nobody would wish for clearly, but you're able to take steps and you're able to come from a position of strength that allows you to not frankly be bankrupted and to be able to make decisions that can still move you forward. And I think that's what Mike and his wife have done. And yeah, I mean, it's, uh, it's hard to overstate sometimes just how important this path defies and it enables you to live a better life, right?

29:18I mean, Jonathan, like at its essence, I think that's what it is. It enables you to live a better life. And obviously that life is going to look different for everybody. And there are going to be situations that we can't anticipate, but it helps you be resilient, right? You're not fragile when you're on this path, when you have some money in the bank, when you have a savings rate, you're not fragile. And I think that is a critical piece that we don't highlight often enough. And I think Mike's example here is a perfect one. When I hear encouraging messages like this, and huge thanks to Mike for sharing his experience with us, a couple of things come to mind.

29:55One is just, again, that idea, it's not a continuum, right? And this idea of financial resilience, being able to handle it. Because this happened to Mike and his wife, they are now, you would be mischaracterizing and, frankly, flat out wrong to say, well, now FI is impossible for them, right? Or now they're not really on the path to FI because look, they did this and then this happened. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a continuum. And they were able to roll with it in a way that very few other people outside of this community could have done, right? Bankruptcy is a thing that happens a lot.

30:34And they were able to cashflow something. And then I wanted to point something out. 401k loans are not ideal. No one hears 401k loan and thinks to myself, Ooh, is that a tactic for early retirement? Let me get one of those. I got some money in my 401k. But having said that there is a time in the play, like it is, let's be very clear. It is your money, right? It is your money. And the idea that you would let financial catastrophe happen without going through every single possible research in this context, what you really want is you want to be aware of all of your options. And then you want to be able to make an educated decision, an educated action based on what you know the consequences of said action will be.

31:18And if you've been maxing out your 401k for many years, you have some assets there. And yeah, you're not going to go to it first, but after you run the numbers, and that's the thing. And Mike said this, crowdsourcing. It's a scary place when you got to start making unexpected big financial decisions like this. And you probably want a place where I'll give you two aspects just in this conversation. You want to one, really have an easy way to find out the implications of the 401k loan. What are the consequences? Are there penalties? What's the interest rates going to be? Is there any nuance to how you make your payments?

31:52Like, how does it work? What do you need to be aware of? And then also in this conversation, and this is specific to your local area. Hey, I want to do staycations, but I'd like to do it in a pretty cool way. What are my options in my region? So geo arbitrage is a term that's floated throughout the financial independence community. And certainly it's useful to think about it through the lens of tax optimization, et cetera. But really how familiar are we with the area in which we've chosen to live our lives? Some of these made these choices just passively because where we grew up, we never moved on.

32:24Some of them aggressively moved to a new region, yet we stay within the two and a half loop of our, you know, work office cycle. and our two to three destination quick service food restaurants every other weekend. There's more. In every area of the country, there's little gyms. And so when we had family visiting us this year, I made a plan to go out and come up with an itinerary of trips that we could do to local venues and destinations all within a one and a half hour radius of our area here in Richmond. And I would say, and I'm biased, that it was legendary. You know, it was a legendary two to three weeks of activities that we had teed up.

33:04I was set for the whole year after that, but that exists. Wherever you are, you can achieve this. And wouldn't it be cool to be able to crowdsource that? So Mike, thank you for the encouragement. Thank you for sharing, you know, a difficult situation that you went through and inspiring us to think about the possibilities of crowdsourcing things as we go into this next year. Agreed. All right, Jonathan, the next one came in from Crystal and this was a written one. So I'm going to, I'm going to read this here. Crystal said,

33:58on a prior episode and they love it. It outlines everything and lets you play with different scenarios. It's given us real hope of me going part-time at age 47 or 48. I'm currently 43 and being done at 53 with my husband, who's also age 47, being done by 55. This was something we never thought was even possible until we found Chooseify. The biggest win of 2024, however, is for the first time ever, I get to say I'm hitting the max on every vehicle I have. Whoa. I will max my 403B, my Roth IRA through Vanguard and my HSA. My husband will max his Roth IRA and HSA and come close to maxing his 401k also.

34:36All of this wouldn't be possible without this community and the idea that you can look at life a little bit differently. We are looking forward to many more episodes and many more wins. Jonathan, how good is that? She's crushing it, man. She should just write slogans for the show. You know? Seriously. You want to come in and do the copy? That'd be great. I don't think either of us could do as good a job as that. Right? I mean, looking at life a little bit differently. That's a cool thing that we talked about in the early days of Choose a Vibe. But really, it's like I said earlier in this episode, it's the one way for middle class people to get wealthy.

35:11But really, this is you can live the same middle or upper middle class life as everybody around you and get wildly wealthy at the same time. That's what I always found so fun about it. It feels like a cheat code at life that, oh, you mean just by making these couple little changes and being intentional and taking some action that I can get wealthy while everyone else around me is living paycheck to paycheck? Like, it just feels like a superpower. And I mean, goodness, Crystal and Scott, that is awesome. I mean, that's four short years and you've changed your entire lives. And you've gotten to, like you said, this point that you never thought you'd get to where you can max all of these remarkable accounts.

35:49I mean, that's not chump change. That's real money that we're talking about here between all those accounts between the two of you. And by the sound of it, you're six to eight years away from reaching FI and being done. And based on the ages you're talking, when you started, that probably didn't seem altogether plausible just a few short years ago. So, I mean, Jonathan, that's incredible. Huge wins. Thanks for listening to Choose a FI and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Chooseify is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at chooseify.com slash cards.

36:27I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support. All right, Jonathan, the next voicemail came in from Dallin. I'd like to share my year in wins 2024. I feel like 2024 was a year for financial growth or financial wins. In 2024, we were able to pay off our car. We paid about$17 ,000 this year for our car. We paid off one of our student loans and all of our credit card debt. We were also able to max out our two Roth IRAs for my wife at five. My wife started her second year as a history teacher, and I'm coming into my second year in the financial services and financial advising space.

37:19I was also able to, in about a week now, I'll be graduating with my bachelor's degree in finance. So just major progression, both personally, professionally, and financially. And this was in large part due to the fact that we made some sacrifices, especially in housing. We decided to stay with my parents. And we've been there for about a year and a half. And that has allowed us this housing decision, this lifestyle decision, even though sometimes it's a little uncomfortable, has allowed us to save a large portion of our income, about 40 to 45 percent of our income, depending on the month. Wow.

38:02We also did not give up a lot of our other lifestyle decisions, such as travel. We were able to go on multiple trips. We have a trip to Tokyo, Japan scheduled in the spring. and because of travel rewards we were able to afford that trip we were able to get our flights covered through a venture x card and our chase sapphire card and then for hotels we'll still pay some for hotels but a large portion of that is going to be covered through our world of quiet card the five free nights offers and a lot of this does come from choose a five being part of really listening and learning and implementing what I have learned.

38:47So I feel like 2024 was a major success and I cannot wait for the wins that will come in 2021. 2025, 2026, 2027. Three years of wins, legendary status, legendary action. And a lifetime of wins beyond that. It sounds like they are rocking it, right? So I love the, so just major progression, both personally, professionally and financially and i mean that's what it's all about right like this is not just about the nuts and bolts of money i mean jonathan right like choose if i would have stopped a very long time ago if this was just hey let's explain the nuts and bolts of fi that's really the easy part it's about the continual taking action it's about that progress psychologically personally with our health with our relationships it's having the space to be able to think about that stuff because you're not stressed constantly with the barrage of financial issues that really hinder most people.

39:45And I think that's what's cool. And it allows us to be in positions where you can make decisions. And I think the two of them, I mean, they made a tough decision to stay with his parents. And I mean, that's not something that 100 % of people would do, but it's a decision that catapulted them and it's going to change the trajectory of their entire financial lives. and it's just really cool to see people making decisions like that. And that's not for everybody, but it worked pretty darn well for them. And I think that again, think a little bit differently, think outside the box, see what works for you, not what is societally acceptable, right?

40:23Like, oh, you're 22, you go out and buy a brand new car and get an apartment. Well, there goes most of your money, right? Like that's just sadly the way that it works. But what if you can think about it a little differently. What if like me, you can go live with your parents for two to three years after you graduate, save 90 % of your income. I didn't need to prove how tough I was when an adult I was. I saved 90 % of my income for two to three years. And that changed the entire trajectory of my financial life. And it sounds like it did for them. So just absolutely love this win and yeah, onward and upward from there.

40:58Brad always, you know, is wondering how long I'm going to comment after a voicemail. He's like, Oh, Jonathan, we got, we got 45 of these. We got so many more. We're going to get seven in. He's like, I know what words you're going to say, but Donald set me up, man. I can't just leave this alone. Um, do it. All right. Thank you. Thank you. I'm holding back. Here we go. So as he says this out loud, you know, it strikes me. I have a younger sibling that is a first time homeowner. It's a very tough time to be a first time homeowner. I don't know if you guys are looking around, but with interest rates where they are in prices, you know, very close to 25, 30 % higher than they were four or five years ago.

41:37And the mortgage interest rates have not decreased homes the way they, you know, maybe a lot of people hoped. The thing about life, the board game of life is the game changes, right? The underlying rules are based on math. It's the same, but the facts and circumstances change and the challenges at given times change. You know, when the stock market's on a nine-year bull run, you know, that's one wonderful set of circumstances when, uh, interest rates are at all time lows, you know, ever, that's one set of circumstances, but it doesn't mean that when you're in the opposite of that, that the game is broken, you can't win anymore, but it does mean you have to be willing to reject broken paradigms.

42:17And there's really, you know, like we're talking about the math, we're presenting the common principles of the relationship between the two sides of that equation. Really, it's three. What you can earn, how you invest, and then what your life actually costs, right? It's that intermeshing, the intermingling of those that will give you the outcome. But at the same time that we're seeing this craziness and the home market, the whole country, you know, world, but the country is what we're going to talk about in this context, the United States, has been unlocked for remote work. It has never been easier to get a high-paying job without college as it is right now.

42:53When you combine geo arbitrage, high paying incomes without a college degree, that is equally as impactful as what has happened in the mortgage department, but to the good. Right. So I'm just pointing out to you. All of us know someone that is gotten a mortgage right now, got an interest rate. And they're like, you got little shivers, right? You got to think about what do I have control over? What are my options? Is there anyone out there that's winning? And this is yes. Yes, they are. And guess what? through the context of this show and this platform, they're thrilled to share it. Not in a braggadocious, obnoxious, look at me, pity you, but in a, hey, look over here.

43:33There's something we're seeing. You need to be paying attention to the patterns, right? And you need to be evaluating. Do I have a fixed belief system that's based on a paradigm that doesn't exist anymore? Dallin reminds us that, no, you don't have to be locked in. You can be flexible and you can win. All right, Brad, that's all I got, man. I'm done. Love it. Love it. Love it. All right. The next one came in from Hannah and Hannah wrote, my wins for 2024 are a massive life design win. When we started working towards five, we didn't have a set. This is what life will look like. We just knew we wanted options.

44:07Fast forward to 2024 and it feels like we're here. Even if the fine number isn't quite in the bank yet, my husband quit his job in July is now a full-time stay-at-home dad. Our two girls are in school. So he has time during the day to get all the little life tasks done, go to the gym, have lunch with me, and take his time discovering what, if anything, he wants to do for work in the future. I have a job that I absolutely love. I get to work one-on-one with clients as their financial coach. I work for a nonprofit, so I'm helping people who otherwise wouldn't get the advice and help they need. I have a side business that I can do as much or as little as I want since we don't need the income from it because we've been so intentional with our finances.

44:45I can now take the job I want instead of worrying how much it pays. Our girls get more time with both of us and we're so much more relaxed and engaged with them each day. It's been a win for us all. And I'm so pumped. We're here. Oh man, Jonathan, this, uh, these are the kinds of ones that I just absolutely love. Talk about changes. And like we've said, it's not about just hitting that fine number. Like this is not binary. Okay. Everyone who's still for some reason is living with that myth. It is so not true. You recruit power each and every day, each and every decision that you make, it moves more of that power and autonomy and freedom to your side of the ledger.

45:25And Hannah and her husband and their family, they are just rocking it in every possible way. They are living the five life, regardless of whether they've hit some mythical number on a screen or not. It doesn't matter. And I mean, geez, the girls could stay at home. Dad, they get to spend all this time Hannah gets to spend her time doing what she wants with her job and something that she absolutely loves I mean Jonathan come on man right like this is just all right guys well I realize maybe time is short Brad's like no it's not we can record for four hours have you seen broken we got plenty of time sure all right here we go I tell you what Brad how about this is a counter offering I'm gonna go ahead and read two of these wins back to back and then I'll get your comments on them.

46:13And I've got them teed up here from Kat and from Weston. Ready? Yeah. All right. Kat says, I've been self-employed for nearly a decade. During that time, my husband was working a W-2 job that was becoming increasingly stressful. We had a few money saved. So he quit his W-2 job towards the end of 2023. He had a side hustle that we worked on together for the last three years that was making about 25K a year, but we didn't have the time to expand until he quit. We expanded in 2024. he made 150 % of his previous W-2 income. Because of the added income and the market gains, our net worth has increased by nearly 500K since he quit his job.

46:53I was most worried about health insurance since we had it through his previous job, but we got on an ACA plan and we've been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the coverage. We are a few years from FI, but this newfound freedom of our schedules has changed our thinking a little bit and I plan to downshift and take a half schedule in my business next year. We will continue to grow his business and we both look forward to more travel and making memories with our family. That's from Kat and I got one more. Let me tee this up and we'll get your feedback on both of those. Weston says, hey Brad, long time listener, first time sharing.

47:28Your newsletter got me thinking about how this year has gone in my FI journey and I just had to share. This year marks the third year of my wife being a stay at home mom. The fact that we've been able to pull this off has been amazing, especially for her. Now, somewhat tied to that, we realized with three kids aged five and under, man, that's an adventure right there, we would likely not be traveling as much. So we use credit card points to get the highest end iMac we could buy. This has allowed my wife to start doing freelance work and bringing in additional income, which has essentially buffered the impacts of inflation.

48:04It's also worth noting that I got my employer to start adding a match to our 457B plan. And as of next year, I'll be maxing that out. We've also been in talks about offering an HSA in the future. While being down to one income has slowed down our FI date a bit, our quality of life is higher than ever. And it's only a matter of time before our youngest starts public school, allowing my wife to rejoin the workforce. And our current financial stability allows her to take her time to find the right job. Phi equals freedom and we can taste it. Your podcast is a recurring and helpful reminder in staying on this journey.

48:46And I appreciate all you do. Weston. Nice. Jonathan, those were two great ones. And yeah, it's just so cool to see these things, right? So Kat and her husband, it actually sounds similar to what I did, right? Where, okay, you have a W2. You have a side hustle that's going reasonably well on the side, but hey, maybe sometime you have to take that leap and you have to go for it. And it sounds like he did that and just blew up their income and they're doing remarkably well. And it then gives options. So that's what's neat about, I think, entrepreneurship. And that's something that was a blind spot for us at the beginning of Choose FI was just how important entrepreneurship can be.

49:27It doesn't mean it's a requirement, obviously, but it can be for so many people in the fight community and you can do it in all different ways. You don't have to burn the boats, as they say. Maybe you can test, maybe you can figure it out and then go with it, then dive in. And Kat also said something about health insurance. And I think this is something that has long been just like, obviously an issue in the United States. We all know that. But I think a lot of people are like, oh, what am I going to do when I leave my W2? the nice thing is you have almost the exact same options now with healthcare.gov and the ACA.

50:00So it's not some big surprise. And again, if you don't make a lot of income, there are significant subsidies too. So this is not the time or place to talk about that by any means, but options are there. This is not something that I have to stay in my W2 job until I'm 65 because of health insurance. Like those days are long gone. And I fear that a lot of people are still stuck in that old paradigm. So that's why I wanted to double down on that. And Wesson, I love this stay-at-home mom and the flexibility that affords. But it sounds like, as you said, I got my employer to start adding a match to our 457B plan.

50:36Not a small thing. No, not a small thing at all. Right. Like, I mean, how cool is that? And Jonathan, I cannot tell you how many emails I've gotten over the years that say almost verbatim that whatever it may be like, Hey, my company didn't have not not only a match, but didn't have a 401k plan. And I talked to HR and I helped them or, Oh, we only had these terrible high fee options. And I explained to them how this is robbing all of us. And like, Jonathan, it's taking action. And that, that doesn't help just our community member who took the action. It helps everybody. But it's more than that, Brad.

51:09Like, you know, someone at the weekend says, Hey man, what'd you do this week? And you know, if you say that out loud, it's great. And like, Oh, that's cool. You know? And then they'll move on. Right? Like, like, like no one cares. We care. That's huge, dude. That's incredible. Like, you know what I mean? And I get this, I get this from family, from friends, you know, like there's an internal code that we have, right? Like there's a set of things, actions taken that someone in the financial independence community gets and will respond to in a way that you will appreciate because they understand what it means you go tell stranger ale i got my uh i got them to hsa their response what's an hsa is that good for you interesting fun fact well i saw the last issue of was um dude that show's been done for like 20 years oh it's on netflix yeah like from 20 years ago you know like i got them to match my 457 i got them to match my hsa dude you're changing the game for yourself and for your co-workers yeah and that's the way that weston closed the email and while being down to one income has slowed down our fight a bit.

52:16Our quality of life is higher than ever. And it's only a matter of time before our youngest starts public school, allowing my wife to rejoin the workforce. And our current financial stability allows her to take her time to find the right job. Phi equals freedom and we can taste it. I love that. Huge congrats to you. Weston, I just looked at my audio track and I saw that I blew up my audio. I blame that on you for your awesomeness. Too excited, too excited. You need to calm down, sir. All right. I'm going to read these wins that we got from Isaac and Christy. And this is from Isaac. My win for this year was the birth of my daughter.

52:52The biggest win, of course, is my beautiful new daughter, but my wife and I had some financial wins as well. I've only been working for two years, but because we've been saving around 50 % of our income, we put a lot away by this point. When we were thinking about how much the hospital bills might be, we looked at our out-of-pocket maximum and we realized that even if we had to pay the maximum, it'd only be about$4 ,000 to$5 ,000, which while obviously not nothing, it wouldn't affect our overall financial picture at all. We also had a win when it came to my paternity leave because of the way that my company policy works with my state's paternity leave laws.

53:29I'd get one month of full pay and two months of fractional pay, which is a bit less than one-third of my normal salary. I wasn't sure how that play out in practice, especially after withholdings, but I knew it wouldn't cover our expenses. The win is it just didn't matter. I planned to take time to bond with my daughter and help my wife, and because we had been saving, we weren't concerned about having a brief dip in income. That's the biggest win from this. There were so many stressful aspects of the transition to being parents, but finances, never one of them. And ultimately, this is exactly what I'm saving for, to be able to spend time with the people I care about.

54:10He says, I know that this was really long and feel free to trim it down. Dude, no, no, you maximize the impact of your words. Good job. Awesome. Awesome win. All right. I'm going to the next one, Brad, and then I'll let you respond to that. Christy says, I stumbled upon the Chooseify Facebook group earlier this year. Normally, I would reluctantly give one brain cell to anything finance related as I found it incredibly boring. To my surprise, a fire was lit and I'm actually enjoying learning about FI. This year, I paid off a credit card, opened a high yield savings account emergency fund and saved$16 ,000.

54:45I started investing in my HSA instead of just leaving it all in the money market fund. And I haven't touched the money. Last year, I used the full amount of HSA funds to cover my deductible, but my behavior has shifted to trying to save the HSA money for future health expenses. It's options. I opened a Roth and I'm 100X more comfortable with where I am investing my retirement money. And as a bonus, I also helped my teenage open a high yield savings account and get into the rhythm of building and maintaining an emergency fund. Your work is life-changing. Thank you. God bless you and your team. This is fun, Brad.

55:24I'm feeling this is i think this is why we continue to do this episode every year because not only does the community love it but i mean frankly you and i just love this this is just really wonderful it's amazing that we can talk into a microphone and people all over the world are taking action to make their lives better and i will never ever ever ever tire of that and it's just take it for granted take it for granted yeah no you're right you're absolutely right and uh you know it's funny Alan and Katie Donegan are in New Zealand right now. And they keep sending me messages of, wow, we just had another meetup in this random place in New Zealand.

55:59And you wouldn't believe how many people listen to Chooseify here all the way across the world. And it is really remarkable. And to hear a story like this with Christy, right? Like, hey, normally I wouldn't give one brain cell to this, but a fire was lit. And you think about all the things she did, right? Paid off a credit card, open high yield savings, save$16 ,000, change behavior with the HSA. I think that's what's cool. It is a total reframe on thinking short-term versus thinking long-term. And I think what we know is thinking long-term is the way to have a successful life. And now that you're not just worried about cashflow anymore, you can, in this case, HSA, this is just but one example, you can not just reimburse the expenses you paid out of pocket this year.

56:42You can let that money grow and compound for the next 50 years. And that is just a piece of information that you just simply might not have had before you found Choose a Fi. And now you do. And now because you're coming from a position of financial strength, you can do something like that. And I just find that remarkable. And again, this is another second generation Fi and that gets into Isaac and birth of his beautiful daughter, huge congrats. And I love when he said the win is it just didn't matter, right? Like, Hey, I'm down to a third of my income. We're not able to cover our expenses. The win is, you know what?

57:20It just doesn't matter, Jonathan, right? Like how cool is that? Yeah, you're right. The numbers increasingly become less relevant and that's, um, that's directly correlated with your, your stress levels, you know? Yeah, that is exactly right. And that's, That's exactly how we close it out, which is that there was so much stress this year. I mean, Jay, you and I know both having kids, it's a lot of stress. It's a big change, but finances were never one of them. And yeah, Isaac, that is just awesome. And I think yet another way that following the path to five just makes your life better. It just does.

57:54This is that superpower that we've all been looking for. All right, Brad. Well, I'm going to keep this pattern going because I think there's a plausible chance we can get through a few more of these and a pretty respectable number of wins. And we just, we do appreciate so much everybody that sends them in. We realize you took time out of your day to share and we want to do our best to publish as many of them as possible. If we weren't able to publish yours, it's a true apology. Let's now tee up. I got this one from Patrick and then one from Rick and Kelly. And Patrick says, hi, Brad and Jonathan.

58:26My name's Patrick from the Bay Area, currently Coast Fi. Do I need to have a sidebar to talk about Coast Fi? Because I love the concept Coast Fi, but we'll have to do that in the new year. I'm going to go and save the energy and spare Brad on this one. This year, I'll end up maxing my HSA and Roth IRA. I will also get some money into my 401k, both on the traditional and a little bit on the Roth side. For shorter vacations, I went to Seattle, Portland, Honolulu, Puerto Vallarta, and Shenandoah. not that far from Brad, I believe. For events and more purpose-driven travel, I went to economy and two events with the Financial Planning Association.

59:05Those were in Denver and Phoenix. Also had the amazing opportunity to take a sabbatical to South Korea. Was there for a little over two months, and I don't know when or even if I could do something like that again, but I'm even more excited about the career wins. So I'm now a part-time engineer, part-time financial planning intern at RIA. I completed my CFP curriculum, not easy by the way, and I passed the series 65 exam. I'm now serving in an FPA position that aims to help those attempting to make the career change to financial planning. I'm currently studying for the CFP exam. Can't articulate how grateful I am.

59:40Well, Patrick, how grateful? Maybe, maybe not, but how excited and zestful for the next year you are, that's coming through loud and clear and we're thrilled for you. You're crushing it. Keep it up. Keep that momentum. Really cool stuff. All right. This other one from Rick and Kelly. So Rick says my year end win is a simple one. It's the fact that my wife and I discovered the five community in 2024 and finally pulled our heads out of the financial sand. They were doing that ostrich technique. Just don't think about it. It'll be okay. I'm coming into five much later than I would have preferred with a divorce at 40 causing me to start at zero and several years of digging myself out of a financial hole after that.

1:00:19That was 15 years ago. I was lucky enough to find the partner of my dream seven years ago, and we've been working together on our FI education and journey for six months now. One thing we found is that while we had much room for improvement after listening to untold hours of Choose FI and other podcasts, we'd each made some solid decisions and are well on our way to FI. I'm 55 years old now, and if the market is at all kind over the next five years, my hope is to retire at least from my day job or by the age of 60. We have our home, which we plan to sell within two years to downsize and build a much smaller dream house with the profit from the proceeds.

1:00:59We also own two rentals, which we're doing everything we can to have both be mortgage-free within three years. That would result in a positive cash flow of$4 ,500 a month. we should have enough in our 401ks and our IRAs to take up to a 4 % distribution to make it work after determining our 25x PHY number. Now, the thing that inspired our PHY education is that we traveled to Spain and Portugal this past May. And while in Portugal, we stayed with a longtime friend of mine with his wife and kids, and he retired there at the age of 50. He asked us a simple question, when will you be retiring? My answer was as it had always been.

1:01:38And by the way, I'm going to read this answer, but I think that's probably the default answer for most individuals coming up here. Um, I'm not sure. Maybe never, certainly not sooner than 65 or 70. His response was perfect. Why? All right. We then learned all about their five journey and they turned us on to all sorts of podcasts and resources, starting with Mr. Money Mustache. And after we got home, we dove in. And now I feel so incredibly on top of our financing, knowing where every penny is spent through YNAB, restructuring our 401ks and IRAs to a mix of index stocks and index bonds. As a bonus, we've amassed around 300 ,000 ultimate rewards points through Chase and then also through Capital One cards.

1:02:26And we're continuing to add more to our travel rewards portfolio. I feel like we found the easiest to learn secret financial life rewards of all time. My next goal is to help educate our adult children. They're mostly in their 20s to begin their journey and achieve their financial and life goals younger than me. I realized I did a lousy job teaching them about financial matters. So this Christmas, their gifts will be a collection of books, your money or your life, simple path to wealth, rich dad, poor dad, as well as start an IRA for each with an index fund portfolio. Leo. My plan is to give them the IRA with the instructions.

1:03:03If you simply don't touch it, look at it in 20 years, you'll be very happy. Invest even just a modest amount each month, and you'll be shocked. It may not be the most exciting gifts they've received, but it will be the most rewarding. Thank you for all the education resources and inspiration. We still have much to learn, but we're loving the process. And my thought on that is it may not be exciting to them, but everybody listening to this show and certainly you and I are geeking out over how awesome it is. And that's the point. You found your tribe. When you share it in this community, we get you.

1:03:37We love it. And I'm inspired by it. Yeah. And you have found your tribe. That's what's so cool about a community like ours is we have people all across the world and those people understand you. That's why I talk about live events all the time. That's why we Talk about our choose-a-by local groups all the time because those in real life meetups make a massive difference. Those connections make a massive difference. And yeah, Jonathan, when Rick said, my plan is to give them the IRA with the instructions. If you simply don't touch it, look at it in 20 years and you'll be very happy. That reminds me of, I think it was the John Bogle quote about, hey, if you just keep putting in to, you know, I'm paraphrasing obviously, but to your index funds, wake up in 30 years and you might need a cardiologist with you.

1:04:22It's really, it's astonishing how regular savings and compounding can just make such a massive difference in your net worth that is hard to fathom. It's hard for our brains that are kind of linear brains to understand exponential growth. But when you see it on a computer screen, it is remarkable. And yeah, I mean, Rick nailed it. And what a cool question that their friend in, I guess, Spain and Portugal asked them is, when are you going to retire? I mean, talk about like just putting their feet to the fire and Rick's answer was like, what the hell? Nobody's ever asked me that before. I don't know.

1:05:00Maybe never. And then, I mean, talk about a forcing function for a conversation of like, Hey, this is what we've done. Oh, wow. It kind of opened their eyes too. Is it kind of like the same question? I mean, I think it's much easier, but just, just for context, I think people put it this way. It's kind of like saying, so how do you feel about this latest presidential election? Let's just, let's just, let's do a little softball in there, you know? Like, here, I'm going to sip of the wine. throw a grenade into the room. Yeah. No, but I love, I love that he felt confident enough, the friend. And I want to say that we as a community have an opportunity to transform people's lives, not by anything we've done, but just quite literally by just asking engaging questions, you know, whether it's this one or a version of this, but just why did he listen?

1:05:43Think about that. He listened because he recognized his friend had unlocked decades of his life and And his current track was maybe being okay after 65. Do you realize that everybody's on the maybe be okay after 65 path, even if they're good at personal finance, because that is what the system teaches, right? It is what personal finance teaches how to be okay after 65. And if you do good things and truly they will not interact with the possibility that you can reclaim, not just your golden years, but your best years. It is astonishing to me, but when you're speaking inside the financial and a business community or listening to choose fi this niche is the only niche that even presents that as a possibility.

1:06:23Think about that. Isn't that fascinating, right? It's a reframe on your entire financial life. And yeah, again, it is power from the very beginning. And, and just going back to Patrick, maxing all these accounts, doing all that incredible travel, going to a live event at economy, which I think is a wonderful one and having these incredible career wins. I mean, I just, I love hearing all these. It is really awesome. So Patrick, Rick and Kelly, thank you. Jonathan, I think we should close it out with the last voicemail that we got. So this one came in from Jake and just as a heads up to everybody else, I'm trying to put in, in my newsletter in December, all the remaining written wins that we received.

1:07:03So if you are not signed up to my newsletter, choose about a comm slash newsletter. I send it out every Tuesday. It's usually three segments from me And then six of these wins that people have taken that week or that month to make their life better. It's a really, honestly, it's a really good newsletter. And you don't have to say that, Brad. I can say it's a really good newsletter. You do a great job on it. You can tell you lean into it every week. I enjoy it. I really genuinely do. And, uh, yeah. So December, I highlight all these wins. So it, uh, it's a really cool way to close out the year with year end wins.

1:07:38So choose a better comp slash newsletter. but Jonathan, let's close out this episode with Jake's voicemail. Hello, Brad, Jonathan, and the Chooseify community. My name is Jake. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I'm calling in to share some 2024 wins, the biggest of which is definitely that I quit my job to become an entrepreneur and start my own business. And that's a huge win, big leap, and also a little scary, but it was made a lot less scary because of our journey towards Fi and many of the things that I've learned from the Chooseify podcast. And I want to share a few of these factors with you all.

1:08:12So first, my wife and I were talking about this in 2023. And up until this point, I hadn't really considered it super seriously. It was more just an idea of becoming an entrepreneur. My wife asked me, when are you going to do that? I said, I don't know. In the next few years, I wasn't in a rush. I enjoyed the work I did. I wasn't trying to leave my work or anything like that. So I didn't really push myself to really think about it deeply. And she pushed a little bit harder and asked me a really good question, which is why not do it now? And I didn't have a good answer, except there's some vague unease around like financial stuff.

1:08:42And so we decided to dig into the idea of what it would take for us to feel comfortable having me leave my job and basically cut our income in half. And when we ran the numbers, which we hadn't done in a little while, we realized that we were at Coast Fi and no longer needed to put a huge emphasis on like saving for the future. We had done a lot of that work already. And so that took a huge pressure off of the decision to leave from a financial perspective because we realized that we could live off my wife's income and then take this leap. So being on the path to FI gave us the freedom to make this decision.

1:09:14So that's like the first kind of takeaway for me. Also, the book Die With Zero, which needs no introduction on this podcast. If you're listening to this and you still haven't read that book for some reason, go do that, please. It's a great book and it changed my relationship with money. Tactically for this decision, it helped me kind of reframe losing my income from a loss to a I'm spending my money on this experience of starting a business. So yes, like I didn't have the income anymore when I quit my job, but I gave up that income effectively spending it because I could have kept at my job and effectively gave up that income to start this business.

1:09:49So I kind of framed it from a loss to let me spend my money on what I actually want in my life. And then the third piece here, which comes up a lot on the podcast is don't just focus on the number. Think about what you want to do in FI as well as how to get there. Like the journey along the way is important as well. But thinking about that end result of what would I do when I hit FI and I leave my corporate job? The answer was basically what I'm doing now. And because I had the ability to do that now, it makes sense to just make that leap now. You might as well start that process now and start doing the things that I would want to do when I actually hit FI and get that freedom.

1:10:24So basically it was just realizing I'm at freedom. So start it now, even if I'm not at my fine number. So Brad, I'm noticing this pattern that someone that we trust, someone that means a lot to us, ask us a question that we never gave ourselves permission to ask. Why? Think about it. Like we've seen that pattern twice and it's questioning assumptions that allows us to just think about it and realize, well, there isn't really a good reason. Right. And I just, here's, here's where I want to go with this, this path to financial independence at bare minimum, at absolute bare minimum, it's going to give you the space to answer the question why.

1:11:06And it's going to give you, you know, this community is going to give you the tools to then map out the game plan from there. That's the heart of this. Yeah, Jonathan, I hear you. And Jake said some really interesting things that jumped out to me. and it was, don't just focus on the number. Think about what you want to do in FI as well as how to get there and to enjoy the journey along the way. But what was cool, what he said was, but thinking about that end result of what I would do when I hit FI and leave my corporate job, the answer was basically what I'm doing now. And isn't that poignant and powerful?

1:11:43And I think that's what having that little bit of space allows you to take that step back, kind of survey the field that is your life and figure out, hey, what do I actually want to do? And I think this is where we've looked at the concept of FU money, which Jonathan, you always love calling Freedom Unlimited money. Family show, brother, family show. It allows you to make decisions that like, hey, look, I might really like 20 % of my job. I might really like 75 % of my job. And I really hate this remaining stuff. What would it look like to go in there with a position of power and say, hey, look, I'm going to leave, or I think I'd really like to do this 75 % of the job and I'm really darn good at it and you won't have to replace me.

1:12:25Okay. That sounds like a win to everybody as far as I'm concerned. And I think that's, what's cool about what Jake's saying here is, okay, look, the answer is basically what I'm doing now. And that is a wonderful realization. And this show and this community have never been the anti-job platform. Like we are not anti-job. Anybody who thinks that is really mistaken. This is about making decisions that make your life better and opening your eyes to what those are, whatever it may be. We are agnostic as to what those decisions are in your life. But I want you to go in with eyes wide open and make decisions from that position of power.

1:13:04And it sounds like Jake has done that. And it sounds like Jonathan, honestly, all of these wins, all of these people have made incredible decisions across this year. and I know you and I are just super excited about 2025 and beyond. It is incredible. We're coming up on year nine of this and I'm as excited about this as I've ever been. And I think we just have a lot of good stuff coming just for us here. I think what we can add back to the world and what this community can do together. All right. Well, that tees us up guys. This is the mandate. This is the movement. The fire is spreading, right?

1:13:38We have three years, all of us to go from where we are right now. You're listening to this week of Christmas, you know, and actually for those of you that took time out of your weeks, I mean, maybe there's a lot going on to listen to this episode this week. I hope that you just got a little pep in your step. I hope that you feel the encouragement. You're feeling hyped. You're excited about what's coming. We're going to hit the ground running in January. Brad and I, we have a tentative recording date for an episode in early January, probably come out about halfway through the month, something like that, Brad.

1:14:04I don't have the hard date on that yet, but we're going to lay out the game plan, right? And And we're going to give you a lot more details on what we talked about at the beginning. But this is going to be effectively a new chapter in the life cycle of ChooseFI. And the biggest thing is that we expect and anticipate that the conversation will be continued following many podcast episodes. The podcast episode will be the place where we focus on something. And then as a community, the larger ChooseFI community, but then maybe also with a large emphasis on the local groups as well, we are able to continue that in a meaningful way that ensures that you're able to take action on the steps and you're able to get the questions that you had or that you encounter after thinking about it answered.

1:14:55And then as that happening, it trickles back and it informs everyone. So we all kind of can increasingly talk about these concepts, hash them out, polish them and turn them into game plans in our own life when they're relevant. So we will give you more details and we will probably be asking for your input and feedback. But that is what I think all of us, if we were really thinking about it, we would come to a similar conclusion on what would improve the experience for all of us. I think this is directionally the right approach. I feel more confident in this than I ever have of any idea that we've circulated or had in the past.

1:15:29And really this early January, it will be about us laying it out for you and inviting you to join us and partner with us on it. Brad, thanks for letting me come back on the show with you, man, and do this episode. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Love doing this. And yeah, talk to you in January. All right, buddy. We'll see you then. The fire is spreading, my friends. We'll see you next time as we continue to go down the roadway strapped.