470 | The Spectrum of Financial Independence | Chris Hutchins

26:02That nonsense is gone. It was gone years ago. That's not a prerequisite to being a member of the financial independence movement, certainly. And you can do what you want. That's the whole beauty of this, Chris. You have the freedom to do what you want in life. And if that means you want to work because you love it, then do it. That's great, but do it on your own terms. So again, we're being a little conservative, but that's okay. again, understanding what's the opportunity cost. And for people who are working in jobs that they don't love and that it's that one more year syndrome, how many people fall prey to that?

26:36Like, oh, I don't feel safe enough yet. I don't feel safe enough. What if I need the 2.5 % safe withdrawal rate? What about 2.25? And I don't think social security is going to be here. And you can come up with all of this stuff that will keep you working in a job that you potentially hate forever. And that's not a good alternative either. So clearly, I'm kind of setting up almost like a straw man, ridiculous argument here, Chris, but maybe not, because I fear there are people that could fall prey to them. I think the one thing that you got to remember is that it's not binary. If you have a job you hate, you don't have to just quit that job and never work again and be able to replace your income for the next 30 to 60 years.

27:16Like if you build up enough to get you by for a year, then you can go try to find another job that you might like more. And it turns out if you love it more, you might be able to advance better, negotiate a salary better, be more productive. You might end up making more money in the long run. So I just want to highlight that I know a lot of people that find themselves sometimes in their career not happy with their job. And if I look back now that I've kind of had the professional experience, most of them found other things pretty quickly that they loved. Some took longer than they needed. So a lot of them worried that they couldn't quit their job because they needed enough money, millions of dollars to cover their income forever.

27:54And I know that because I was one of them. But I quickly found other things that I loved. So that's more of an emergency fund issue than a financial independence issue. You don't need to have your entire life covered in costs before you can take time to find something you love. And I have a good friend who did this. He knew he was ready to find something new and knew that it might take a year and had enough savings to do that. Didn't think he needed financial independence, retire early money. And about six months in, he found a thing that he's really, really excited about. And it took time, but he's going to be much happier.

28:28And I think his career will flourish because of it. So I don't know. That's just one perspective I have. Yeah. No, that's really cool. I mean, that resonates with me and my own life, frankly, and you as well, right? We both did this with our own entrepreneurial ventures. And it's cool to have options. And I think that's what pursuing FI gives you. It gives you options. I mean, for me, if I didn't have any type of side business, and I was just, I mean, I was a middle manager at doing corporate state tax returns. I was a CPA. And I was on the path to FI. I was still a number of years away. And I had built businesses on the side.

29:07I mean, Chris, they weren't bringing in a ton of money, but it was something that I had proved the concept to myself. And then I said, oh, if I could actually do this full time, maybe I could turn this into something. And it's in the points and miles world. You don't even realize, I don't think, all this time that we've known each other, that that was really my first foray into entrepreneurship was through points and miles. And it was for basically regular people. I was helping people get to Disney World, take Disney World trips, not first class on Singapore suites or anything like that, That just literally trips to Disney World because I figured if I could save$4 ,000 for my family, there are millions of other families who want to go to Disney World.

29:46And yeah, is that super attractive to a 24-year-old kid who's looking to fly first class and do all the travel hacking type stuff? No. But is that appealing to tens of millions of families who want to go to Disney World? Yeah, you bet. And then I scaled that with my next business, Travel Miles 101. And it was just, I wouldn't have had that opportunity. I wouldn't have had the guts, frankly, to leave my job, my nice, safe job when I had two daughters and a wife, if I wasn't pursuing fine, if I wasn't 80 % of the way to my fine number. It was that security blanket. It made a massive difference, you know?

30:19So you said 80%. So I'm curious, how are you tracking this, right? What are the tools that you use? Because I think I downloaded Karsten's kind of toolkit, which is a spreadsheet that, you know, I spent about 20 minutes on it and I made it about 10 % or less the way there. Which is not to say it's not a helpful tool, but I think there's a world where you can go down a lot of rabbit holes. So just to be clear, his tool is incredible, especially when it comes to modeling a lot of the things he talks about. If you want to nerd out, I'll also link to that in the show notes. but high level, what are the tools you're using on a daily basis to kind of manage your money and track your financial independence journey?

30:56Yeah. Well, you, the all the hacks guy are going to be very disappointed to me. I am as low key and low tech with this as one could possibly be. I still use the Excel, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I've been using for like my entire FI journey. I have it literally quarter by quarter saved, my net worth saved for the last 10 plus years now. And which is actually a really cool exercise. I just love, and I know our good friend, Paula Pant does this as well as like loves really getting into the nitty gritty of like, I know it sounds silly, but like entering those numbers into the spreadsheet, like there's something like really visceral about it that like is better for me personally than using some fancy tool or some fancy projection software.

31:44And I know you've dove into a whole bunch of these things. So I want to get back to you on this because you have a better answer. But yeah, I mean, I very simply, I have my CPAs brain. So I've come up with income statements and net worth statements that I just track in Excel. And I basically maybe spend an hour every month just kind of really tying everything out to, I run everything through my checking account. So I use that as the account that I run everything off of, and then any transfers into other accounts. And then obviously increases or decreases in the account balances at Vanguard or Fidelity or Schwab or Wealthfront or wherever it may be.

32:23And that then ties out to my net worth. So basically I'm doing this probably, like I said, about an hour a month, give or take to track my checking account. And then at the end of every quarter, I spend probably no more than 30 minutes logging into every account that I own, that I have assets at, and just jotting down in this Excel spreadsheet, my balance there. So it ultimately then ties out to my, I get my net worth. So yeah, I know it sounds like a lot of work. It's really not. And there is something fun about it. So I know that doesn't appeal to you at all. But yeah, tell us about where the rabbit holes you've dove down.

33:03Yeah, I mean, obviously, I took a more tech forward approach than a spreadsheet. Although I used a spreadsheet for a long time. But I just found that if I didn't update it for six months, you know, it was just a lot of work. So I think that for everyone, there's kind of two to three tools. And I think for a lot of people, it can just be two. And all of the stuff we've talked about this entire episode really comes down to knowing two things. It's knowing how much you're spending and knowing how much you have. and I guess knowing how much you make also, but that's usually a lot easier number for a lot of people to peg.

33:36And so it's how do you track your spending and how do you track your net worth? And how do you project from that would be the third piece of the puzzle. I used to try to track spending in Mint along many years ago. I've done an entire episode where I broke down. I actually went and used all the tools. Mint, YNAB, Monarch Money, Copilot, the one that Quicken launched, Simplify, and a couple others. And I played with all of them. I synced all my 2022 transactions, looked at everything. And the end goal was like, I'm going to pick the best one. And I had some ideas of what it would be. But at the end of the day, I went with Copilot.

34:13I think it's for anyone who's on Apple products, it's the best. If you're on Android or Windows, it's an iOS, Mac, iPad, only adventure. But for me, it almost makes it so easy and fun and simple and that's just like what I've chosen. That after I reached out to them and I was like, hey guys, I've been pitched by a handful of companies in this space to work with them as sponsors of the podcast. But at the end of the day, I want to work with the products I use. And that's how I've actually done most of the sponsorships we have. So I did end up working with them. So full disclosure, they are a partner of the show.

34:51And if you go to allthehacks.com slash copilot, you'll get a discount. But I think that is how I manage how much I spend. I did a whole episode on all that. So I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. Then for how much money I have generally, Wealthfront has a free version of linking your accounts, seeing how it's going, doing some light projections. I'd put it in the like, I don't want to play around a lot. I want you to kind of give me best practices on everything. What I think goes a step further than that is a product called Kubera, which I first heard about at FinCon when they presented on stage.

35:26I later started using. And then later, I would say partnered with... They're not a sponsor of the show. But we've worked together on the All the Hacks membership. So All the Hacks members get their first year of Kubera free. Both of these tools are not free. So your option of a spreadsheet is free. My option of two apps, I pay for both of them. They're not huge expenses. But I think Kubera is like... Imagine if someone wanted to build the website version of the spreadsheet you have, where you can put it in categories, you can look at, especially on the investment side, you can look at cost bases or IRRs, but they're calculating it all on there all for you.

36:03They're pulling all the info. And then they just launched recently this fast forward feature where you can put in a set of simple rules in multiple scenarios and be able to just see what happens. So this isn't the full on financial projection tool that you could go down every rabbit hole of tax assumptions and everything. But you could say, and I'm looking at mine, it's like, let's say my assets grow by 3%, factoring in inflation. Let's say my salary continues for this many years. Let's say inflation is this. Let's say I have a future expense for college starting in this year, lasting for four years.

36:39Kind of some simple rules. On mine, I have six. And it'll project forward and say, here's your net worth in a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years and what that'll generally look like. So I think Kubera, I've abandoned my spreadsheet for Kubera for tracking net worth and everything. The thing that I think has always been the problem is there are a handful of providers of linking services, meaning where you'd log into your bank account and they'll pull data on a read-only basis. And most apps use one and Kubera works with two or three of the top ones. So they know that if you're trying to sync that obscure Vanguard a census retirement account that I have.

37:18They know to make sure you use Yodely instead of Plaid because it syncs better. So I love that. And then the third one is one that I recently started playing with after a bunch of listeners emailed in and said, hey, hey, hey, you haven't included Projection Lab. And so I said, oh, you're right. I haven't included Projection Lab. I'll make sure at some point to go look into it. And I had a call actually with Kyle, the CEO or the founder of this company. And it's really interesting. I think if you're the kind of person that wants to model out a lot of scenarios, toggle things on and off, look at the tax implications, look at the flow of capital on a year-by-year basis, like Projection Lab is amazing.

37:58I will say I think jumping into it, it's not going to be the I want to set up three simple rules. Like there's an onboarding and you walk through a lot of stuff. But once you're done, the flexibility you have is really cool. And you can define steps along the way. like, when will I get to financial independence at 33 times income? When might I get to fat fire at 50 times income? You can set these milestones and see these projections. So I would say if someone needs a app to track their spending, I'm a fan of Copilot. If someone wants to track their net worth, I'm a big fan of Kubera. And if you're an All The Hacks member or want to be, it's free for your first year, which is cool.

38:39Then finally, I would say if you want to go really deep in the weeds, you can use Projection Lab. And I don't say deep in the weeds, it's not interesting for most people. You're going to spend more time on it. And if your money is important. I love putting my money on autopilot. But if I'm trying to figure out big decisions, I like having all the data. And so right now, we're looking at school. If we ended up paying for college or doing private school, what are those huge costs? What kind of impact do they have? And I think those are really interesting questions to ask. And when you want to factor in the taxes of it and you want to factor in required minimum distributions from retirement accounts and like, it's pretty interesting.

39:18Yeah. You showed it to me right before we jumped on and yeah, it looked fantastic. And there is a spectrum, right? I mean, clearly I think we are, we are the spectrum here of mine is aside from people who aren't tracking anything, which please, please, please, please track something. You just need to, at the very least, what do you spend? What's your net worth? You just, you need to do that up to you who are trying out all these different tools and want to get it. I would say by any measure, you are being more accurate than I am. Right. And, and having these major expenses, like just seeing that, Hey, from in my case, 2026 to 2034, I'm going to have college for each of my daughters.

40:00It's going to be eight straight years of college. That clearly needs to be factored in somehow. And if I was earning zero dollars, then we would potentially have an issue. Am I really at Phi? And I think it's an interesting thought experiment in my case, but for a lot of people, hey, if you've quote unquote reached Phi, maybe you're earning a fraction of what you were and you have these massive expenses coming up that you haven't modeled. Well, there are many of these software options. I know there's a new retirement. I think there's On Trajectory. I've just loosely seen those in the past. But yeah, this Projection Lab looks amazing.

40:36Yeah. And just to be clear, normally when I want to do an episode on this, I'll go play with every tool. And so Projection Lab does not get the seal of I have gone and played with every tool. But I just got so many emails from listeners to check it out. And many of those people have gone and played with every tool that I thought it was worth looking at. But honestly, I say that because I enjoyed spending an afternoon going to enter it in. But I equally enjoyed on Kubera creating four or five, or I guess six rules that's like to college, growth, inflation, when does my income end and how do my expenses change?

41:11And just having like a very simple form of how do things project out to the future. So I care more about people being aware of the circumstance than I do about them going deep, deep down rabbit holes. But those are the three tools that I say all of my financial life kind of lives through. It's not related to business, right? There's like QuickBooks for business and all that stuff. But for me, it's those three tools are how I'm doing almost all the tracking. And we'll see where Projection Lab fits in in the long run, whether it's a thing I check every month, every year, or whether it's a thing I use to make big decisions.

41:46No, that makes perfect sense. And Chris, I actually wanted to double back to something you said before, because I think there might be some people who are looking for some additional clarity on this. So we were talking about lean fi. You were saying that you were potentially going to be taking money out of some accounts. It sounded like your taxable brokerage account, but you're going to be putting money in also into, let's say solo 401k or some other pretext options. You mentioned that very much in passing. And I always love to close the loop on things. Can you give a little more detail on that?

42:19Because I think there are going to be a lot of people who are like, Chris, I want more info on this, like the real nuts and bolts of how people are doing this. Yeah, I mean, I think I did some aggressive saving early on and built up a good taxable brokerage account. Now, we could have a whole conversation about was the deprivation of skipping dinners, not ordering appetizers, like, was all that worth it? Conversation for another day. So now most of my savings is non-retirement savings. However, and our expenses have gone up. And right now with Amy leaving her job to work on all the hacks, I would say our income has gone down, right?

43:0012 months ago, we had two jobs and a podcast and now we have zero jobs in a podcast. And so we just frankly do not have the income right now to both live and contribute to retirement accounts. And that's not to say you should feel bad. No, we're in a fine financial position. It's just if you look practically at the dollars coming in, all the expenses we have related to the podcast, we have a full-time employee, all this stuff. Practically, we want to cover our expenses and there's just not a big buffer left over to fund retirement accounts. However, there are a lot of great options, whether it's backdoor Roth IRAs or solo 401ks, or I just got this cool email about this option that I'm not entirely sure how it works, but something that goes one step even further than just solo 401ks.

43:52It was called a cash balance plan. So I'm just gonna read this description. This is an advanced retirement plan for business owners that are making mid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit and wanna put away more than the 66 ,000 a year solo 401k plan allows. Unlike a solo 401k, a cash balance plan is a defined benefit plan and does not cap total contributions. Instead, the plan is set up to achieve a maximum allowed balance of$3.4 million at retirement, which in turn allows you to deduct hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It's an advanced retirement plan. It costs considerably more to set up, about$2 ,000 to set up and maintain each year, but it's unparalleled in the size of the benefit and it can be combined with the solo 401k.

44:37So I don't even think... When I read this, I wasn't thinking this is for me. I was just thinking it made me realize that there are a lot of things as a business owner, or even if you were just an employee, that you could use your money to be more tax efficient in the future. But if you don't have the spare cash, what do you do? It's always been crazy for me to think, let's withdraw from our long-term savings. If you look at our wealth front balance for the last, I don't know, five years, it has not been touched. We don't withdraw from it ever. It's our long-term retirement plan. But now I'm like, psychologically, I'm talking about pulling money out of it so that I can take income somewhere else and put it somewhere else, which in turn might mean investing my savings into the business and then the business contributing to a retirement plan.

45:25It's a little complicated and we're working with our accountant to make sure we don't mess it all up. But it's just something that we're considering right now in that interim stage. Once you go full, quit your job, financial independence, you tap into your savings all the time. But now that I'm living this Coast Fi thing, which is so funny to say, having not really actually known, having misunderstood what it even meant as early as this morning, it's like, well, I don't want to touch my savings anymore. Even though I had that attitude, now I have a name to define why I'm not touching that savings.

45:56And then almost immediately, I'm like, no, no, I'm going to touch it, but I'm going to replenish it through another door. Yeah, I love that. So right. In essence, you're netting to zero in the sense that you would be pulling money out of your taxable brokerage account to cover your life expenses, but also contributing to retirement accounts, whatever they may be, whether it's this crazy cash balance thing or 401k, etc. But in essence, what you're doing then is getting the tax benefit from those contributions. Yeah, it's like I'm basically shifting my after-tax, subject-to-tax-in-the-future investments to tax-advantaged investment accounts, which will reduce my income and give me more growth in the future.

46:41So it actually is not a zero sum. It's actually a net positive sum, other than the short-term capital gains hits of selling my portfolio, which fortunately, because we've been keeping this money in Wealthfront for a while, we've built up a ton of tax loss harvesting. So I think I can actually mitigate most of the capital gains with kind of built up capital losses. So yeah, it'll be a net positive. Yeah, that's very, very cool. And for anyone listening, I think, look, you might not be a business owner, you might not be in a situation in any way similar to Brad or mine. But if you work at a company, and you're not maxing out your 401k, because maybe you just had two children, and you decided to quit one of your jobs, and you're in a situation where cash is tight.

47:24but you do have savings in a taxable account, just a standard brokerage account, I'm not going to talk about what you should do. I'm not going to give personalized financial advice, but definitely worth considering using some of your long-term savings to live on so that you can put some of your income into a more tax-efficient vehicle for long-term savings. Yeah. And it's important just for people to be cognizant of just this concept. So yeah, it's very cool that you're doing this in real life and welcome to the Coast Fi world. I like Yeah. So one thing we haven't touched on, now that we've kind of evolved our thinking on financial independence over the course of, for you, probably a decade, for me, probably a handful of years, I'm curious to hear some of the changes you've made.

48:08I think we both kind of went from more deprivation, less spending to training ourselves to spend. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how did you learn the skill of spending and what have you been using it for. Yeah. The skill of spending is such a great way to put it. And yeah, Mr. Money Mustache had come up with this earlier in the year as a phrase that really just appeals to me. I think skill of spending on the front side of FI is largely, okay, you do have to be more optimized, especially if you're living paycheck to paycheck or getting into debt every month. Okay. You have to cut.

48:41You have to be a little more efficient. And that doesn't mean deprivation necessarily, but it means being smarter with your money. But yeah, Chris, you and I are now at points where I think we've evolved. The other side of the skill of spending is learning how to spend for life benefit, for memory dividends, for just enjoyment and for connection, for what we talked about last time. Something that you're working on is trying to buy back your time in a lot of senses, right? Like there's lots of ways to spend and to spend well that can really help your life. So yeah, I mean, I am really thinking about this in a lot of ways.

49:16We're certainly spending to get time back just in little ways, even something like that is very obvious to most people, getting a cleaning service at our house, which we never did forever. Spending more on food now than we ever have because we just spend a lot of time cooking and cleaning and it doesn't really make that much sense anymore. And we're at a point in our lives where, okay, the ease, especially with having two daughters now in middle and high school, and we're driving them all over the place and to spend an hour cooking and 20 or 30 minutes cleaning up. It just, it doesn't make any sense for a couple dollars.

49:57So clearly spending more money there. I mean, Chris, the biggest thing is like experiences. I think this is something that I've been honestly like really proud of myself this year. And this also comes back to like the memory dividends and die with zero and Bill Perkins. I love music. And this is like a part of my life that has really not been an important part of my life for the last 10 years, because I've let it kind of fall by the wayside. And I think in a lot of senses, like since my daughters were born, like I lost myself that might be hyperbolic, but I lost myself in a lot of like the things that I love doing.

50:32I used to love watching the English Premier League on Saturdays and going to concerts and doing just a lot of fun stuff that I just had let, like I said, slip away. And this year, I challenged myself to really make moves on this and see what I can do. And I actually planned an impromptu, last-minute solo trip to New York City to see Bono from U2. So he was doing this like really small concert at the Beacon Theater that was partially a book tour. So it was like half one man show, half book tour slash concert. It was very, very interesting. But I bought tickets on StubHub, bought flights, got a hotel.

51:14And it was like the week before. And I just, I'm like, this is the coolest thing ever. I'm going to take a trip to New York. And it was, I mean, Chris, it was really awesome. And that is something I never would have done in my entire life before reorienting the skill of spending. What do you think changed that made it possible now when it wouldn't have been possible in the past? Yeah, I think in a weird way, it is understanding that time is finite. And maybe that's that I'm 44 years old and not getting any younger and my kids are growing up. And like I said, I might have lost some part of myself over the last 10 years where I haven't focused on things that bring joy.

51:57And I just really want to do that. There was no moment. It was just understanding that you got to do it. You got to live life. You can't be worried about saving money all the time. And even just little challenges, Chris, like as silly as this sounds, the Richmond airport is like, it's not very expensive long-term parking or even like the short-term parking. But I was like on this trip to New York city, I'm like, what would doing this trip? Like a rich person look like. And it was almost like a Ramit Sethi kind of thing. And it was not parking in economy parking. It was parking in the daily lot that was right there.

52:31And I could just walk over to the airport. And Chris, this cost me like nine extra dollars. Cause I was, it was a 24 hour trip. So this is not that big of a deal, but it just felt great. It was just, it was really cool. And it was like, okay, how can you find these little things that actually make a difference? And going back to the food. We're now getting these amazing meals brought into the house. And it's just a couple dollars more, but it's just reorienting to what's the value here. So it's like this valuist play is like this term valuist. I've talked about this on the podcast for so many years, but I never really embodied it in actuality.

53:08I think I did to some degree, but I didn't get there. And now it's just, all right, look, like I said, and I know it sounds a little morbid, but I think it's important is understanding the finite nature of your life, right? And like the finite nature of seasons of your life. You know, I took a trip to see Taylor Swift in Pittsburgh with my older daughter and we bought very, very expensive tickets on secondary. And man, Chris, we had the time of our lives. And like, we'll be talking about that 30 years from now. It was amazing. And I don't regret any single one of those dollars I spent on that trip.

53:42It was astonishing. And I'm just, I'm really fortunate to be in this position, but I'm really proud of myself that I've made these changes in that short a period of time. A lot of the language you're using, memory dividends, seasons of life, were languages from Bill Perkins' book, Die With Zero. I know I had him on for, I want to say episode 91, but I can't quite remember the number. Did that have a big impact on you? Yeah, it was episode 91. Nice. Yeah, that book had a massive impact on me. It really did. And it was just the conceptual framework. And I mean, Chris, I knew all this stuff, right?

54:18Like sometimes it just crystallizes and hits in a moment when it matters. And I think that's what's also interesting about taking in a lot of different content. Like I probably listen to way more podcasts and read more books than I probably should, frankly. But like sometimes you just you hit on something like this where it is just a life changing thing. And I don't know what it was. But again, like I'm even doing like little things now. Like I went to a yoga and meditation retreat last month that like, that's something I never would have done. I never would have had the guts to like, just go off for two days by myself and just be.

54:57And it was awesome. It was just really fantastic. And like, again, just trying to build these things into life. Like I'm part of a mastermind group where it's about 24, 25 of us guys. and now we're trying to do more in-person events. And like, Chris, I always had an excuse. It was always like, oh, it's too far. Oh, I need to be home for the weekend with my wife and my daughters. Like it's selfish to leave. This is the script that I always had running in my head. Like it's selfish to leave. But you know, it's really important to take care of yourself too and to find joy in little ways. And like, we had this day of fun at one of my buddy's house.

55:3412 of us kind of converged on his house in New Jersey. and we had like eight hours of playing like this like Olympics of games. And it was just, cause it was the most fun I've had in years. And like one of the guys cooked this amazing like Michelin star-esque dinner. It was just like one of those days I'll remember forever. And like, I know I could tell you for certain a year ago, I would have said no to that weekend. I would have just said out of hand, no. So again, this reorientation. So I think, yeah, I mean, a lot of things have changed in my life and I think they've changed for the better.

56:07Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's selfish to take care of yourself. I think it's selfish if you don't encourage your partner to also do the same. So I'm sure you found that balance as well. And I think that's the important thing. I had a similar moment, which was more serendipitous in that it wasn't something I would have said no to. But we had this moment where we invited some friends up to a house we were staying at in Napa, not ours. And there was a volleyball court. And for like two hours, we were all just playing outdoor volleyball, probably getting sunburned. But like, you know, we're blasting some good 80s rock.

56:39And I just had this moment where I was like, wow, this is like, I want more moments like this. And the downside is that with kids and stuff, you have to really plan them. You can't just expect to text five friends and be like, hey, do you want to go do this thing an hour away right now? No, like it's just it's not practical anymore. Maybe when I get a little older and my peers and friends or kids are a little older and easier to travel with, maybe it'll get a little better. But you have to plan ahead and you have to commit earlier. And I think I'm still learning, but you've got a couple years on me and your kids do as well.

57:09So I hope I get to that place where you are. But I had the same impact when I talked to Bill Perkins and I made that episode. And we actually planned a trip to London and Paris. Right. I talked about it in the episode and then we just booked it. And we were like, we just have to do it. And in a weird way, we stopped tracking our net worth after that episode. We stopped caring about whether it went up. And we started focusing on, do we just have enough now? And when do we want to spend our money? Do we want to spend it later? Do we want to stop working? And for us, now we've both found something we like doing.

57:40So I don't know. It changed a lot for me. I'd encourage anyone to go pick it up and read it. Or if you want a preview, the hour version, I interviewed him in episode 91, which we can link to in the show notes. But yeah, that changed a lot for me. And we started spending a little bit more on things that some have an ROI, some don't. But I actually am surprised at how much we've been able to accomplish with the podcast now that we have a little more free time because we've spent a little bit of money on other things. Whether that's someone to clean or someone to help with food, or that's hiring an assistant or an employee for your company.

58:20These things that felt like they were big expenses we were nervous about, but now that we have them, they've unlocked a little bit more creativity, a little bit more time. And we've been good in our career at turning that into opportunity. And so you'll never know unless you try. That's some expenses, right? the Taylor Swift concert is probably not one that's going to make you more money in the long run, but it's certainly one that's going to give you memories that far exceed that. And I, whatever version of that exists when our daughters are a little older, I'm very excited to do the same thing.

58:52Yeah. Yeah. And it's important to prioritize it. And I think just, just it being in your mind. And like you said, going back and listening to that episode 91 of, of all the hacks, that episode was more impactful to me than the book was honestly hearing him talk it through. So yeah, I think that's a perfect starting point for people. Well, to go back to the early Retirement Now blog, he gave a review of that book. Yeah, that was part 60, right? Yeah. And what was interesting was, you know, he justifiably said, a lot of these things aren't new. And I think the thing that Bill Perkins did was he took a bunch of concepts that we've all known, right?

59:28We've all known that experiences are valuable. We all know that, you know, money diminishes, our health diminishes. But if you can package it in a good way, like ultimately, a lot of things are just storytelling. And I will say that when it comes to telling a story about money, most people aren't that great at it. Like it's something that a lot of people get bored with, aren't interested in. And Bill Perkins weaves a story around it that I think just comes alive when you hear him talk more than when you read the book. Though you'll hear a reminder if you go listen to it, and I'll give it to you here.

59:59It is not an episode to listen to with young children in the room. It is definitely not. He has a very colorful vocabulary. He does indeed. And yeah, I mean, even like you said, talking about health, right? And health and longevity and vitality, like spending money on that is important. I think we both have become a little more cognizant of that. I know this year I hired a personal trainer who I met through Twitter actually, which is kind of wild. But that again is something I can guarantee you. Two years ago, there was no chance said I would have done that. 0 % chance. And it has been the best money I've ever spent on my health in my entire life.

1:00:40Now, I got a question about this. Yeah, shoot. So I was watching this video that a past guest of mine, Nassir Yasin, Nas Daily made, and he hired a personal trainer in India from this company called Fitter. And I haven't done it yet. I haven't pulled the trigger on this service yet, but I was thinking about it and I want your perspective. So your personal trainer is remote, right? They're not located where you are. You don't see them in person. They don't come to the gym with you. Correct. Is there a reason that they need to be in the US? Because if you look at the cost of living around the world, if someone could motivate you just as well, but in India, they can certainly live on less.

1:01:19And I was blown away. And by the way, I have no connection to this company. So I don't want to endorse it at all. But I was looking at it and the personal training sessions were like$5 a session. And you could do it five days a week monthly for like$100 a month or something in that ballpark. I don't want to quote the prices because I'm not an expert here. But I was just surprised. And then it just got me thinking, there are some services and practices that are really tied into our system, right? Hiring a tax accountant, you want someone who's really familiar with the rules and the regulations here.

1:01:51But I was like, ah, personal trainer, someone to just throw on a tripod and motivate me to work out and whatnot, live video sessions every time. Why couldn't that person be overseas? So I want to hear your perspective on whether you think that you could get a similar output from that. And if so, how does that change your thinking? Yeah, that is really interesting. I definitely think that you could hire someone from anywhere in the world. So it depends what you're looking for, right? So how you described it, if you're looking for somebody to be there with you or just create a video or whatever, five days a week, motivation, a little accountability.

1:02:30Absolutely. It makes no difference where they are. Yeah. My, my guy, uh, Dean Turner is my personal trainer and he's fantastic. Dean Turner training.com is where he's located, but you know, he's in Philadelphia, which is not that far from me, but I'm never going to meet him in person in all likelihood. So yeah, he could be in India. He could be in Australia would make no difference whatsoever. I am paying for his expertise, though. Okay, not for the motivation. So yeah, clearly, if I was paying for motivation, I would move to that service you just mentioned. That sounds like a slam dunk. I mean, that actually sounds amazing.

1:03:05I suspect a lot of people would benefit from them. But you could even pair the two, right? You could probably find Dean and be like, help me come up with the curriculum, and then say, great, now someone else... This is my big challenge with a lot of services is that you want to pay for experience and execution. And you can't get good experience without paying for it. People charge a lot more for their time when they have experience. But then it doesn't make sense to pay for the execution also. And I think about this with financial planning. A human financial planner will give you a better financial plan that connects your emotions and stuff.

1:03:39And I'm not against people paying a fixed price for that. I think that's really valuable. It's just if you then on top of that, tack on a ongoing 1 % of your assets forever fee to manage the investments, that's where I'm like, oh, I don't know. So I wonder if there's a hybrid approach here where I think it's totally fine to pay financial planning fixed fee annually and then a much smaller fee for investments. Is there a Dean Turner plus fitter, like super combo where you get daily motivation and workout regimens following the curriculum of someone who has a lot more experience and personalization?

1:04:16Yeah, that's fascinating. So this now is turning into a business lesson for Dean, I think, right? So because, yeah, I wonder if he could scale his business more that way, if he used his expertise to create the programming, but then he found these people wherever they may be, and certainly a lower cost area. and he could then potentially outsource part of the day-to-day with knowledgeable people who are well-versed in his methodology, that would actually be really interesting. Dean, if you're listening, at a minimum, if you go down this path, I'd love to give it a try. That would be really cool.

1:04:54I bet he'd be super interested in that. So yeah, to be continued on that. But yeah, I mean, I think accountability is important. I think that's why people like group exercise classes also, right? Like somebody else is waiting for them, whether it's CrossFit or yoga or whatever it may be, Orange Theory Fitness, all these things. When you have people waiting for you and, oh, they text you when you're not there. Why? It's so easy to fall out of an exercise routine. And I think, to me, accountability and motivation are really, really important. That's why I thought this was so interesting because I was like, you know what?

1:05:27I would work out to avoid losing$5. dollars. I might have gotten comfortable in my life spending money, but I have not gotten comfortable losing money. You know, it seems so much harder to be comfortable just giving up money, even though you probably in some cases should. So in this particular case, I'm like, it would almost be worth it just to say, I'm going to work out three days a week from 8 to 830. And I'm going to book it with a person, just any person. It could even be non-existent. It's like, I'm going to pay this money and my wife gets to light it on fire if I don't work out. But even better if you have someone that can sit there and kind of motivate you along the way.

1:06:04Anything else you've been doing in health that's worth covering? I know the last time you were on, you said 2023 is going to be your year to get healthy. Yeah. Yeah. My bold move was healthiest year ever. So yeah, I mean, a lot of it has... I talked last episode about DNS that I have been doing to kind of maybe deal with some nagging shoulder and hip issues that I had. And that's helped dramatically. I think I've just been much more open again to spending money on massage. I get a massage and that cupping thing. I don't know if you've ever seen that on swimmers at the Olympics. So I do that once a month.

1:06:43I found something in a Tony Robbins book that he was talking about this thing called fascial counter strain. And it's like a massage slash fascial release, which I really, really enjoy. It winds up, what's so funny is the guy who owns the business here in Richmond is in the financial independence world. He's like, are you by any chance Brad from Choose a Buy? It was hilarious. So yeah, I mean, I've been doing that. I bought an aura ring to track my sleep. So I've been really focusing and trying to dial in in my sleep a lot. I think I mentioned to you that I bought a hot tub and I just bought a cold plunge, but it was actually not one of those super duper expensive ones.

1:07:26Uh, one of our listeners, a guy named Mitch reached out to me and told me about this thing called the ice pod. So it's, I thought you were going to go down the path of the ice barrel, but the ice pod. No, no, no. Yeah. This is a, yeah, it is something you can buy. So it's by the pod company. It looks like pod company.com. This thing's like 150 bucks. I mean, honestly, Chris, it's nothing special. It's just kind of like an insulated little, uh, if you've ever seen one of those like blow up hot tubs that costs like 500 bucks, this is something similar for cold plunge, but the last handful of nights, we just got it up and running.

1:08:00My two daughters and I have gone out after dinner. It's getting dark now. Okay. It's, you know, getting later in the year. So darkness, we go out, go in the hot tub, go in the cold plunge back in the hot tub. And it's just like this cool little experience together. And I mean, this cold punch thing, like I said, it was like 150 bucks. It was fantastic. So even if we don't use it much beyond the next month or two, it would be well worth it. So yeah, just all these little things that I'm just trying to just trying to add to my life. And, uh, you know, some of the stuff is really cool. Like these experiences that I'm having now with my family.

1:08:33I love it. Yeah. One of ours will be a sauna, which is days from now we're getting added on, which will finally, I think, get our cold plunge more usage. Oh. I think for as much as I enjoy hot tubs, I enjoy saunas a lot more. Yeah. Is it an infrared sauna or a barrel sauna? It is neither. It is a full kind of finish. I've been working with this company that I'm not ready to share, but when I am, they're building like, they might be like the best sauna makers in the US, at least making it accessible. So it's kind of a much more finished sauna experience. I went really deep down the rabbit hole of saunas.

1:09:13Surprise, surprise. And there's this Trumpkin guide to saunas, which is like this crazy guide. And barrel saunas have plenty of critique. And so I was on the fence about it. And I actually met someone who's like, no, no, no, I'm building this company. And we're going to make the best saunas. And we're going to do it in a way that is modular and easy for people to order and set up at their home and build something really nice. And yeah, I'm very excited. but this is like a proper Finnish sauna style experience that gets hot. And so I don't know, Amy and I are very excited to add this to our routine.

1:09:49And ideally, it'll be like a put the girls to bed and have a little time together in the sauna, dip out to the cold plunge, finish off in the sauna and sleep better. Heck yeah, I love it. Oh, that's really cool. All right. So to be continued on that one, for sure. To be continued, maybe the fourth edition of Brad and Chris record a podcast together. If you make it out to the West Coast, we can see if the audio equipment handles the heat. Sounds good. Might not be a video version, but you know. 2024 goals. I like it. I love it. Awesome. This has been great. You know, the emails I got after the last time we did it, I think I got 20 emails that were just like subject more Brad.

1:10:28So for the 20 people who wrote in asking for more Brad, here you are. Hopefully there was at least a more Chris email in your inbox too. I'll just pretend there was. You know, we got flooded with them. I copied you on all the responses. So, you know, they came in. Awesome. Well, this has been great. I'm excited for your healthiest year ever. I hope you finish it out strong and we'll chat soon. Yeah. Thank you, my friend. As always, it's good to chat with you. And yeah, until next time. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast.

1:11:01So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choosefi.com slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there. And I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community. and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show.

1:11:35And finally, if you're looking to join an in-real-life community, we have Chooseify local groups in 300-plus cities all around the world. So head to chooseify.com slash local, and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20-plus countries all across the world. And if you're just getting started with FI, or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways. Choose a Vi episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the Fi community. And even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up. And it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence?

1:12:11What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life? And then Choose a Vi created a financial independence 101 course that's entirely free. just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening.