615 | How to Get More Years of Freedom | Fritz Gilbert

20:43We're going back tomorrow. We got a new dog collar with a dog tag on it. So we're going to go back out and see Badger running around his yard and just have some one-on-one on time with the owner. So it's relationships with the volunteers. It's physical labor because you're out there doing stuff. You're getting outside. It gives you a reason to leave the house and do stuff. You're giving back to the community. You check all those boxes of the things you need to try to replace that you used to get from work and you can do it in spades through charity work. And that's not the only way to do it. But if you're struggling, you know, let's say you're one of the post-fi listeners and you're kind of like, Hey, I'm two years in.

21:16It's about typically when it hits about two years in, you're kind of wonky and you're not sure what you want to do with your life. Try to find a way to give back. It's a really, really good Avenue for finding a really fulfilling way to spend your time. Yeah. I love that. So freedom for Fido, is there opportunity for other people to have chapters of this or is this, are you pretty locked in on the geographic location you're in? I'll tell you what we'd love to do, Brad, just like Fences for Fido helped us get started. We would be more than happy to help other people get started. You know, we can't really expand our coverage area because our volunteers have to travel and okay, now you want to start one in Richmond.

21:52Okay, great. But then for us to kind of physically get engaged with that would be really difficult, but to mentor somebody to help them start it and walk through what we've learned and how we do things, absolutely. We'd be 100 % on board. There's a huge need. Different parts of the country have more of a need than others, but we've had people reach out to us and say, hey, I'm interested in starting. We're like, great. Yeah, we'll help you. And so far, none of them have taken traction because they realized this is a pretty big commitment and I haven't retired yet. It's just something I'm thinking about.

22:18Okay, great. Let us know. But we're always willing to help anybody. I wrote some articles on how we set up the 501c3. So even if you're not wanting to do something for dogs, but you just want to know, hey, how do I go about starting a 501c3. Google the retirement manifesto, just how to start a charity. And there's content out there that anybody can grab for free. Yeah, that's cool. Mentorship is something that's definitely come to the forefront for me. It's something I'm really interested in and I'm looking for a path for that on a one-on-one basis. Of course, I could probably make the argument that on some level, choose a via as mentorship.

22:52But my friend Keith, who I've mentioned on this podcast a number of times going way back to like 2017. He had one of the best quotes of all time.

23:00Jonathan Mendonsa:I never dreamed past here. And it was such an interesting thing that just hit me. It was like, he built this life that he never even could have aspired to more. And yet he's continued pushing the ball down the field and always look for ways to improve himself and live a better life. And one of the ways that I've seen him do it most recently is through mentorship of actually younger men in their twenties and thirties who are getting started in their careers, in their investing life, in building businesses. And it's like, it's just one of the nicest, most wonderful things I've seen. And like, I got to hang out with one of these guys that he's mentoring when I went up to visit him a couple of weeks ago.

23:37Jonathan Mendonsa:And it was like, wow, I need this in my life. And I think for a lot of us, I don't know, I can't speak for you, Fritz, obviously, but like, as I was a young man growing up, like there were very few men who were mentors that were available to all of our great detriment. And I just thought it was just such a cool thing, especially because, frankly, there is a societal stigma against a lot of it, you know, thanks to some, you know, unfortunate people and organizations, but it's neat to see people doing that. So anyway, that's somewhat of a tangent, but important nevertheless. Let's loop it back in because what you're talking about, that's curiosity and experimentation, right?

24:12That's, hey, this kind of interests me. I kind of want to find a way to get involved in, you know, doing something. That's your curiosity side of it. And now you're going to start experimenting with different ways to do it. That curiosity, that's why I say they're my two favorite words post-fi. Because if you apply curiosity and experimentation in almost any environment, it leads to good things. Yeah. Those are great words. Curiosity and experimentation. I do try to live by both of those. Yeah, I know you do. We're kindred spirits. You know, something else we should mention, talk about what changes before and after fire.

24:42I was thinking about this the other day. You know, when you're pre-fire, you're focused on the money, You're focused on the numbers, the numbers, the numbers, 25x, 4%. Maybe I can go to 5%. You know, Bill Burr, Bill Burr, it's changed his mind. Great. I can get out earlier, right? It's all about the numbers. And what's interesting to me is when you and I were first going to conferences in 2017, right, FinCon, everybody's talking about the numbers. You go to these conferences now and very few people are talking about the numbers, right? They've started to recognize that the true path to a fulfilling life post-Fi, the numbers are essential, but they're far from sufficient.

25:17And it's all that other stuff and figuring out the way to navigate through that, that really gets exciting. That's the fun part. So you'll notice as you make this transition, that that obsession you used to put into the net worth and where you're at and dragging your spending and all that, that diminishes. And the amount of brain energy that you put into this trial and experimentation, curiosity, what am I going to do with my time. Maybe I want to get into mentoring. Maybe I want to start a charity. That's the type stuff that starts consuming your thoughts much more than the financial stuff, which is what it was when you were trying to build to get there.

25:52Jonathan Mendonsa:Yeah. And it's interesting, right? Because really at the end of the day, the numbers part of this is the easy part. When you talk about the simple path to wealth and the equation that we've always talked about here, which is basically just what you earn minus what you spend equals the gap. And can you invest that gap in something that's going to be productive? Most likely for most people, low cost index funds, broad base index funds, like a S and P 500 or a total stock market fund. And really all the little financial optimizations, the backdoor Roths and the, all those different things. Like I gotta be honest, I don't even have time for them anymore.

26:29Jonathan Mendonsa:Like they don't move the needle. They're just the return on hassle for me of any of that stuff, it's just not there. Yep. I'm with you. And that's almost sacrilege, right? To say that because so much of it has been about optimization. I just saw a thing from Jordan Grumman. He wrote about how he's intentionally sub-optimizing his portfolio because he doesn't want to deal with the hassle, right? He's like, I'm just going to make a very simple withdrawal plan. People are starting to talk about it's okay to sub-optimize because spending all your time to get that 95th percentile improvement thing, that's not time well spent.

27:00Get it good. Get it close. Now, this sounds foreign to people that are pre-fi because that thinking is post-fi thinking. But that transition, probably 99 % of the people that I've talked to post-fi, they've gone through that. So it's a real thing. And look at fitness. How many people are getting into fitness, right? I think about this a lot. I love my fitness stuff. I've got my wearables, right? I've got my Fitbit. I've got my Strava. I've got all that stuff. Guess what? That's kind of like tracking net worth, right? You can look at your resting heart rate. You can look at your weight. You can look at your cardio load every day.

27:34You can look at your sleep. You've got all these metrics that you can get, but it's totally unrelated to financial. But because you've got those natural tendencies as a FI aspirant, those kind of naturally fit in the post-FI life. And it makes pursuing other things enjoyable because there's metrics behind it and there's goals behind it. And how many people do you know post-fi? I know quite a few, I could list right off the top of my head that are probably just as much focused on their physical fitness as they were on their financials pre-fi. It's an interesting transition. You're the same way.

28:06You're very focused on fitness. Yeah. I've been talking about this for years now. I feel like a broken record, but it's so important. It's just so, so, so important

28:14Jonathan Mendonsa:because I'm sure both of us have seen parents or people in the older generation really start breaking down. And at an age when I don't think it's required to break down, I think that's kind of the passive mentality is, oh, I'm filling the age. I don't even care what it is. Oh, I'm 65. And you know, which you're pretty close to. Oh, I'm 70. Oh, I'm 80. Like as if it's a fait accompli that you're going to break down and like barring any injury, I don't see how I get from my age now, 47 to 70. And all of a sudden the wheels are going to come off. I'm going to to be incapable of getting up and down off the floor or incapable of lifting heavy things or incapable of putting my bag in the overhead compartment when I fly.

28:59Jonathan Mendonsa:Like there's no world where that would happen because there's no day when I'm just going to magically wake up and not be able to do those things unless I just stop doing those things, which I'm not going to do. Well, and the thing is, you know, there's benefit. So this is where to me, there's an analogy to the pre-fi pre-fi. You're trying to build your net worth. You're focused on those numbers to achieve a goal, right? That goal is to get out of work as early as you can and go out and enjoy life. Great. Well, what's the post-fi equivalent? It's focusing on fitness. Why? So that you can extend those years on the backside, right?

29:30So you're gaining more years of freedom. It's just instead of using the money to get out earlier, you're using the health to live longer. And I see it firsthand with Freedom for Fido. We're talking about that. We got a volunteer, great guy, Jimmy, 78 years old. And he's out there driving T-posts, digging holes, mixing cement. He's working as hard as I am. If you saw this guy, you'd think he's in his late 50s, right? And he's 78 years old. So I see firsthand. And then you've got people you went to high school with or whatever that are kind of my age. And you're like, wow, they're like really bad shape.

30:02You start to see this bifurcation between people that are taking care of themselves and they're suffering the consequences, just like people who don't take care of their money and they're never going to be able to quit, right? It's exact same process. process it's just that it is a non-financial area of focus that still gives you that same benefit of longer enjoyable years and it has an absolute payback so it's an interesting evolution that most people go through so i i don't know that's something i think about from time to time i mean

30:30Jonathan Mendonsa:honestly fritz that is one of the most consequential things that i think has been said on choose if i maybe ever which is the gaining more years of freedom what an interesting reframe that's a paradigm shifting reframe for me because I've never been able to explain it. But really, both money and fitness are gaining you more years of freedom. Yep. That's a game changer for everyone. Well, I'm honored. Thank you. That's that's how I think about it. And and it's real. And what kills me, Brad, are the people that make excuses, right? It's kind of like people that are pre-fi. Oh, I can't save any money because I don't make enough and I can barely cover the bills.

31:07OK, fine. You know, you can cut your Netflix. You know, right. It's the same with exercise. I don't have time to exercise. You always have time as a matter of what are your priorities. And if you, if you want to run the risk, increase the risk of, you know, not being able to pick up your grandkids someday or whatever, then fine. You know, you've read Outlive. I mean, there's all these good fitness books out there, Younger Next Year. There's all kinds of evidence that this stuff matters. And to make excuses and just deal with the consequences, it breaks my heart to see people who do it. And I, and I suspect most of your audience is in the camp that says, I recognize I'm getting more healthy years post-fi if I do this stuff.

31:43Yeah. I think, like you said, it comes down to priorities, but embedded in there is the word sacrifice.

31:50Jonathan Mendonsa:And for its sacrifice has such negative connotations, but ultimately you have to make choices and it's really do hard things. I know we're talking about post-fi life here now, but I think all of this applies to pre-fire life as well, in that we all have to make choices. We all have to do hard things. And there are going to be trade-offs. Maybe that's the better way of putting it than sacrifice, because we don't live in some fantasy world. We live in a world which is bounded by limited resources. That's just the way the world works. There are always limited resources, which for many of us, we think of resources as money, but also time.

32:33Jonathan Mendonsa:And you have to make decisions with those finite resources. And it's not to scold. Nobody here is ever going to scold you for making financial choices, whatever you want. You can do whatever the heck you want to do. But let's be clear. If you want to live a wonderful life, in my estimation, you need to save money. You just have to. That is a prerequisite for a wonderful life because you will be stressed constantly if you are living on the financial edge. Just hard stop, end of story. So yeah, is it annoying when Mr. Wonderful from whatever Shark Tank tells people to not eat avocado toast? Yeah, because he's kind of a jerk.

33:11Jonathan Mendonsa:But is he directionally accurate? He also can be directionally accurate with that. Again, I'm not going to scold somebody for buying avocado toast. That's not my style. But if you bought avocado toast three times a day, or fill in the blank or coffee out at the local roastery or fancy beers and you're spending all your money, you got nothing left, right, Fritz? Like you have to save money. So I think everybody wants to like YOLO it and say like, oh, don't tell me what to do. But at the end of the day, you need to make choices that make your life better. And I think a lot of that comes down to making harder choices, making the not obvious choice, not the easy choice.

33:51Yeah, and the thing I would add to that too is when you think about post-fi life, let's assume your finances are now locked in, you're fine, and now you're starting to think about things like fitness or my sense of identity to your earlier point or how do I want to get involved and give back? Those are all areas where there's so much flexibility on how you want to answer that, that to me, it's not necessarily a sacrifice anymore. Let's say you want to get in shape. Well, you're not sacrificing an hour to have to go to the gym. What you do is you find something you love to do that also gets you in shape.

34:23Maybe it's trail running. Maybe it's, you know, mountain biking. Maybe it's swimming. You find something that you enjoy. And guess what? You're making those gains, but with a lot less sacrifice because it's something you're enjoying. Maybe you really love that latte and you don't want to give that latte up. Okay, that's a sacrifice because I love that latte. Well, you don't have to make as big, in my view, the post-fi sacrifices that you make because they are so flexible in all these different areas of your life. You can choose things and experiment, curiosity and experimentation. here we go again, right?

34:53Hey, I'm kind of, maybe I want to start hiking. Well, you start hiking, you decide you love it and you want to do the Appalachian trail and get, you know, that's not as much of a sacrifice because you're intentionally choosing something that you enjoy to do and you're still getting the benefits. And there's so many, I know fitness is so huge for you and I'd love to ask you about that actually, what you're up to, but there are so many ways to go about it and there's no one right way. It's interesting because I've been talking for a couple of years now about this training program that I've been doing, which is basically hypertrophy, which is muscle building and strength building.

35:25Yep. I've heard you talk about it.

35:27Jonathan Mendonsa:Yeah. And I love it. And I fear based on just a couple emails that I've gotten that I might be almost talking too highly about it in the sense that like, it's a, this is the only way. And I can't imagine I've ever used those words because that's, that's also not my style, but I like to reduce things to their essence and to simplicity. And when I see something that just makes sense, it's like all the pieces in my brain click together. It's like why I stand on a hilltop and talk about the benefits of five, because I feel like it's the fundamental essence of truth in life. This path to five is universally good.

36:02And it's funny because, yeah, again, I hope that people haven't gotten that sense from me with the workout.

36:06Jonathan Mendonsa:But what I've found after 10 years or 15 years of iteration is it's like the 80-20 analysis on how can you get top 1 % results with maybe 10 or 20 % of the inputs. It just makes sense to me. Again, it's like all the pieces fit and clicked into place for me. Let me tell you what I'm doing. And actually, I do a lot of the same stuff. I built a home gym. We were doing an expansion on our cabin and we decided to add a gym as part of the project. So I've got a really nice home gym now, which I love. But back during COVID, I left the gym. Gyms were closed, blah, blah, blah. So I didn't go the Peloton route because, hey, I'm fine, right?

36:41I was a little cheaper. I went NordicTrack. So it was a little bit cheaper than the Peloton. Same idea. It's the online bike. And the beautiful thing about the Nordic track is as you're riding up and down hills, you're, you know, you get your big screen in front of you and you're riding along with your instructor, your trainer, and you start going up the side of a mountain where your bike literally tips up and the, and the gearing goes, you know, it replicates it perfectly. It's beautiful. It's amazing. 35 bucks a month. It's worth it. But in addition to that, they've got thousands of workouts.

37:09So any, if you want to do yoga, if you want to do, you know, strength training, if you want to do, they have treadmill stuff, they've got all these different pieces of equipment, blah, blah, blah. I just have the bike, but I use the workout app on my phone and I just shoot it up to my TV. I got a big TV in the gym and I've got professional trainers, you know? So what I've found is I'll experiment with different styles and different trainers. And then you, you hit on one and you're like, I like, I can feel the difference that this lady or man is making. Like this resonates with me. And you kind of start getting drawn to those types of workouts.

37:42That's curiosity and experimentation, right? So I have settled in now where I'll do, you know, three or four days a week of strength training. A lot of it's like you're talking about three reps, you know, increasing weight and lower reps per round. And then I'll do a 30 to 45 minute spin session. But in addition to that, I'll throw in some Pilates and flexibility stuff because, hey, I'm a little bit older. Let's work on, you know, the hip flexors a little bit. So I throw in a lot of flexibility stuff in addition to the strength training. And then I'll do like HIIT stuff where you're doing high intensity intervals.

38:12So you're getting the cardio benefit while you're also lifting weights. So I have a whole menagerie of things that I do. And that's just one aspect of my fitness folk. I'll go out and walk the dog once a week. That's my commitment. I got a very active two-year-old pit mix who weighs about 80 pounds. He's a beast. I love the guy. He has as much energy as I do. So we're like, okay, we're going to go out and do a six-mile hike. And I kind of get out there and I'm like, okay, this is a workout. So, you know, I'll throw in some trail jogs. I'll keep my heart rate up. You know, I'm doing it as a fitness exercise.

38:42but I'm also out in the woods and enjoying the walk. And then I'll go swimming. I'll do mountain biking. You know, we build fences every week. I've found that the flexibility to just weave a lot of different stuff in based on curiosity and experimentation and what works for you. It works really well for me to go about my fitness in that manner.

39:01Jonathan Mendonsa:Yeah. You follow your energy also. Yeah. Recently, Aaron and I went to Utah. So we went to the Salt Lake City area. We didn't go to the the national parks in Southern Utah, but there was incredible hiking just in the mountains that basically ring this desert Valley that is Salt Lake city. And yeah, just to the East of the city there. I've hiked in some of those. I was out there a couple of years ago. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. It's incredible. I mean, I had one of my all time favorite hikes was this one day we went to this little Cottonwood Canyon and it was this beautiful basin where there were wildflowers.

39:34Jonathan Mendonsa:We were there at the right time. And then we hiked up to this Alpine Lake at like 9 ,000 feet. And then across a pass to another Alpine Lake. And it was just, it was incredible. It was just extraordinary. And I think we both have in our mind's eye that we are people who love the outdoors. We talk about going to Shenandoah National Park all the time, which is just in our backyard, basically. It's an hour and change drive. And yet Aaron's lived here for 10 months and we've only went out there twice. So it's like, okay, well, is this really what you say it is? So it's like proof is in the putting kind of scenario.

40:08Jonathan Mendonsa:But now that we're back from Utah, we are making a point to do, hopefully, at least minimum. I don't want to set crazy expectations, but two of these hikes a month. And hopefully we can build from there. But we just were both so energized from it. And frankly, we felt better. I think that's another fun thing of, you talked about wearables, but like a lot of it is just end of one testing of, you don't even think, even if you're fi and you're inside all day, you might start feeling some malaise, some exhaustion, some whatever. And it's like, oh, you get out, you're on vacation. Well, nothing's changed in terms of I don't have to go to work, whether I'm home or I'm on vacation.

40:45Jonathan Mendonsa:But hey, interesting. I walked 15 to 20 ,000 steps today. And oh, interesting. I was out in the sun for five to 12 hours. And all of a sudden, my my HRV is dramatically better on my fitness tracker. My sleep is better. It's just so fascinating. And yeah, we can really live into these things now. What I like to, you know, because I was writing my blog every week. So I'm on a computer and I'm like, you know, this is a self-imposed thing. My readers aren't saying, if you don't write once a week, we're not going to read your stuff anymore. I mean, if they leave, they leave. You know, it's a hobby for me.

41:20I mean, yeah, it pays my health insurance. You know, that's great. Get a little bit of money from it, but not a lot. But I'm like, you know what? This is totally self-imposed. So start writing less. And I did. And my views per post actually increased when I was writing less. And I'm like, huh, that's weird. You know, so now I've got more time to go hiking with a dog and swimming in the lake and doing that fitness thing because I made an intentional choice that, okay, part of my experimentation is reduce my screen time, right? Reduce my computer time and get more time outside. And I just feel better for it.

41:48So that's what I'm going to do. There are so many things like that, that you have the freedom, especially post-fi and to not take advantage of it and continue to experiment and tweak things. Like you said, Hey, we went to Utah and we were like, man, we just feel good. You know? Well, you wouldn't have known that if you wouldn't have gone to Utah and done that hike, right? That's an experiment. That's really what I encourage people is, you know, look for things that interest you and you never know what's going to stick. You know, maybe it's not fitness for you. Maybe we're just dwelling on that too much.

42:14It's just a very good analogy to use of how things change post-fi. The other thing we should talk about is, and I'm sure you've talked about this ad nauseum, but the other thing that really struck me was how those skills that we build pre-fi, dollar cost averaging and, you know, okay, blah, blah, blah. Those skills are really not very well suited for the withdrawal phase. So you've got to kind of change how you're managing your portfolio. At the same time, recognize that you have the freedom to change how you live your life, right? So your entire skill set of having that routine and going to work and being good in your professional environment and managing your money on the accumulation side, all of that changes when you cross that line because your skills to manage your portfolio are different and your skills to manage your life are different.

42:58I think one of the biggest surprises people have is how disruptive that transition really is. Not for everybody. If you plan for it and you think about it, the more time you spend planning, the smoother it'll be. Not just on the financial side, by the way, but you've got to spend that equal amount of time thinking about these non-financial areas we're talking about. But it's a big transition because everything changes. So something to think about. I want to hear more about that because I actually meant to double back to something you said earlier, which was not on the financial side necessarily.

43:28It was more on the life side. You talked about those first two years after you left your job. And it sounded like they were an inflection point. It was when we were talking about volunteering. And I do want to hear about, well, let's ask about that later because we don't want to do two things at once. But let's talk about the actual finances because you basically just described this as a sea change. And this is not all that long ago in the rear view for you. So what did change for you? What was the hardest thing to grapple with? I would say the biggest thing is probably psychological. You're moving from, you know, your net worth is going up all the time.

44:04You're contributing. How much? What's my savings rate? Great. I'm getting a raise. I can shovel a little bit more in. Hey, I got my bonus. I'm going to save two thirds of that. Right. It's all about growing that pile and then knowing that, man, for the rest of my life, the pile is what it is and I've got to start living out of it. And it's going to be withdrawals rather than deposits. And getting your head around that is probably the biggest thing to think about and preparing yourself for that. But what I found, Brad, is we can talk about portfolio construction. I use the bucket strategy, but somehow you've got to replace your paycheck.

44:36So I set up a system where I automatically transfer money out of a Capital One money market fund every month. So it's exactly like you're getting a paycheck, right? And then I refill that based on what's going on in the markets, you know, periodically. And I have targets for how much cash I want to have, how much I want to have in kind of bonds to buffer if stocks go down. And I've written a lot of articles about that. But basically, it's moving from that adding to the pile to starting to draw back from it. That's the biggest change. But what I've found is after you're a couple of years into that, and if you think back, I retired in 18, right?

45:10We had the downturn with COVID. It was a very short one, but there was another one, I think in 19 bonds and stocks both went down at the same time. There were two pretty quick blips right after I retired. And I sailed through those and you're kind of like, Hey, this is working, you know, and, and you start gaining confidence in the systems that you set up. And after about two or three years of living through that and dealing with it, there's much, much less anxiety about, Oh, I'm going to outlive my money. You know, it's like, no, well now granted we've had phenomenal years in the market. So, you know, we're blessed, but that's number one.

45:43The second one is I think most people in the FI community are naturally frugal and you get to a point where you're like, you know what, I've got maybe 10 good years left where I can really go traveling and I've saved all this money. I've always been a lifelong saver. How do you mentally shift from saving to spending? And there's a lot more people that are starting to talk about this now, right? Because people are post-Fi and they're starting to experience it. And I went through that as well. I struggled for a while learning to spend. So what we've done is we said, okay, we're going to set up our paycheck.

46:15We're using a conservative, like three and a half percent safe withdrawal rate. So that money's coming in every month and we're never transferring it back out of checking. It's in checking. So if that checking account keeps growing and growing and growing and growing by the end of the year, Hey, it grew too much. We give it away. Or you know what? Hey, we'll take that. And we'll take a little bit from next year. And we're going to go to Antarctica next year because that money we've got to spend the money. There's no gold stars for not spending that money. You've got to spend that safe withdrawal number that you've determined and force yourself.

46:43And little tricks like that, that help you get more comfortable with it. And then learning to be able to spend, like my gym we talked about. We're like, we want to stay here the rest of our lives. This house isn't that great. It's a cabin. We want to turn it into a home. So we did this nice home expansion. It was a six-figure expansion. It didn't blink. It didn't bother me because I knew we had it. I knew we were within our safe withdrawal. We had some unexpected income. So we threw that into the house and we'd like, Hey, unexpected income. I don't need to save that. We've got everything else covered.

47:11Right. So teaching yourself tricks to be comfortable spending is another big part of the transition that most people go through. Yeah. A phrase that I've heard and I love is the skill of spending. I think the skill of spending is applicable on both sides of FI, both extreme timelines, which is when you first start with FI, especially if you have been a spender, if you've had some financial difficulties, you need to learn the skill of spending to start being more frugal, to start being more intentional, to make decisions that move you forward financially. But then just like a lot of things in life, what got you there won't necessarily get you there.

47:52And that's what you're talking about is this other skill of spending, which is learning how to spend, learning how to loosen the purse strings, learning how to set up systems like you just said of, hey, come hell or high water, we've got this 3.5 save withdrawal rate. And even if we don't quote unquote need it, that money is going out the door. And it doesn't mean you're going to put in a fireplace and burn it. You're going to donate it to charity or you're going to go to

48:16Jonathan Mendonsa:Antarctica or you're going to build this amazing gym and addition to your cabin, which is going to benefit your lives for the rest of your lives. That's absolutely fascinating. I love it. You loved my thought about you gain more years on the back end. So let me throw this one out there to you. The way I look at spending in post-fi is these are investments, just like when you're saving and you're making investments in the SP500, whatever. When you get into this spending difficulty. What I found helpful is these aren't spending decisions. These are investments for non-financial gains. So the gym, yeah, it was an investment and I'm going to get more years of healthy life out of it, right?

48:55Okay. There's no financial return, but I'm getting years of life. The second house in Alabama, number one, if, if, and when our daughter moves, we can sell it. It's not really an expense other than the carrying cost. It's an investment for a non-financial gain. We get to be close to my daughter and granddaughter. You can think about a lot of these spending decisions as investments, but instead of having a financial return, they're giving you some kind of non-financial return. I think that's a really good way to think about it. Sorry to interrupt you. No, please. That was wonderful.

49:23Jonathan Mendonsa:I totally agree. And I'm curious on a more micro level, how this skill of spending has evolved for you, especially over these eight years. I mean, because I think on some level, when we talk about this stuff, it gives people, especially who are at FI, tacit approval to make these decisions, right? Like you need to start spending so many of us, as many experts who've looked at people in the FI community, people who are ultra savers, like most of us are going to die with many, many, many millions of dollars, unless we're careful. 100%. That's not winning as far as I'm concerned. No. The hard part of that is you can always say, well, what if, what if I need long-term care?

50:01What if inflation keeps going, well, what if social security gets cut? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if, right? You can justify any decision with the what ifs. And that's where people get in the trap. And, you know, I've got some 80 year old friends here. You know, I mentioned the guy at Fido and he's 78. His wife just passed away. And he's like, you know what, Fritz? He said, I have so much money. He said, I never planned it that way. He said, I wish I would have spent it more with my wife when she was around and we could have taken those trips together. We talked about, if you wait, you're going to have regrets.

50:2990 % of this audience is going to have a lot more money than they think they will. So go back to your question. How did I go through the transition? It was gradual and it probably took a couple of years. I wrote an article about the first example of it. You know, I love mountain biking. I'm out here in the mountains, but Hey, I'm getting older, you know, I'm, I'm fit, but riding 1500 feet up the side of a mountain on a traditional, you know, bike, you know, I was gassed. Right. And you get to the really steep portions. I had to get off and push occasionally. And I was like, man, I just hate not being able to get up these hills anyway.

50:57I used to run marathons, right? But I am older. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to get an e-bike. What the heck? Screw it. I'm going to try one. Curiosity and experimentation. So I go in the bike store and it's like, man, that thing's like five grand, you know? And right next to it was a very nice traditional bike. You know, it was like 1500. So I'm like 1500 or five grand, 1500 or five grand, man, 3 ,500 bucks extra. I'll just get the traditional bike. Like, Brad, I was in there for like 90 minutes having this intense mental debate with myself. More with yourself. Yeah. And then I was like, wait a minute, 4%.

51:28I know I've got the money. It was, you know, late in the year. And I knew we had extra. I was like, I'm never going to feel that 5 ,000. Get the stinking e-bike, right? So I did. And now I get to that steep hill. It's got varying levels of assistance. You know, I don't cheat. I try to push myself and I get a good workout. But getting up that steep hill, okay, I'll take it up a notch. And I'll get up the big hill. And it's like, oh, that feels good to be able to get up those hills again, right? So that was my first test was this bike, the$3 ,500 dilemma. And I chose the more expensive bike and I've never regretted it.

51:58And that was probably in 2021 or somewhere in that time frame. And then after that, I would say they've gotten bigger. The biggest one was our cabin expansion. And our logic there was, look, we know at some point in our lives, if we want to stay here forever, which we do, we love it here. We have good friends here. We have our charity now. We're very grounded in this community. We love the environment, everything about it. Okay, so let's assume we're going to live here. You know, if we're 80, are we going to be able to get down those stairs to our bedroom and, you know, blah, blah, blah? Like, no.

52:29You know, realistically, we should have a better master bedroom and a master bath. And boy, it'd be nice if all that was on a single level and we start doing the numbers and we start looking at it. And the decision point there, Brad, was, okay, we can not spend the money until we're 80 and maybe we need it, maybe we don't. We can do it then. Or, you know what? We've got the money now. As I mentioned, we had some unexpected income. I got a board of directors job I wasn't planning on. We got some inheritance, et cetera, which is another thing most people realize is all those numbers you build all your spreadsheets around, they're probably, you're going to make some money somewhere that you're not planning on.

53:00That's just reality. So my point is when you do start making some of that money that you weren't planning on, you better spend it because that wasn't in your numbers and you knew you were fine and you left your job. So you don't need it. So I did a spreadsheet when we left and I charted my net worth projection to age 95. and I kept it. And I said, okay, this was 10 years ago, right? So here's where our net worth should be today. And you look at where it actually is, way over that, right? Because the market's been 20, 25 % for like eight out of the last 10 years. And I've got this extra income coming in.

53:31So lock something into stone when you made your decision. Here's what my projection was of what I was going to have. And then when you start seeing the actuals, because the 4 % rule, don't forget, that's worst case scenario, right? So in anything better than a worst case scenario, you're going to have more than that. So give yourself freedom. So back to the house, we were starting to see that this widening gap between what I thought we'd have and what we actually had. And we're like, you know what? We don't need it. We knew on that original spreadsheet that we'd be good if we had that and we have this.

54:03So what the heck? Let's take some of that Delta, put it in the house now. We'll get 20 years of enjoyment out of it that we wouldn't have gotten if we wait until we're 80. Okay. Maybe we won't need it when we're 80. Oh, shame on us. No, we'll get 20 years of enjoying a nice master bedroom with a master bath on the ground level. We love it, right? And I got my gym. It's finding ways to give yourself permission, whatever works for you. To me, it was looking at what we projected versus what we actually have and then setting up that automatic paycheck and saying, okay, you got to spend it by the end of the year.

54:34Putting those two together kind of worked for us. Yeah, that's great advice. when you're talking about that concept of, okay, here's what I expected my net worth to be and here's where it is way above it. That's really neat. It reminds me of an episode that we did, just a quick reference to it, episode 566 with Aubrey Williams. It was on risk-based guardrails. Yep, I saw him at economy. Yeah, he's great. I know exactly who he is. Yeah, he's brilliant. And that episode, if anybody, if you haven't listened to that, that is a really foundational episode. So just go back and listen to it.

55:05Jonathan Mendonsa:I think it provides a lot of comfort for anyone on the path to fly. So that's Choose If I episode 566. But I think it's important to give ourselves some grace and let everyone know that, yeah, it's easy to say there's some sacrifice and you have to make hard choices and yada, yada, yada. But it can still be hard in the moment. And I think that's okay. You were talking about sitting there, I'm picturing the little, the one Fritz angel on one shoulder and the other Fritz angel on the other for 90 minutes trying to hem and haul over buying this e-bike or not. And in the grand scheme of things, I think you said$1 ,500, like is$1 ,500 going to make any appreciable difference in your life?

55:44No, of course it isn't. Exactly. But yet I'm picturing Ramit Sethi listening to

55:50Jonathan Mendonsa:this and yelling at both of us. And I just reject that because like these decisions, they still matter because otherwise we'd just be running around like throwing dollar bills into the air. And that's never going to be us. I still make decisions based on value. And it's hard to take that out of yourself entirely, but you have to understand that about yourself. I think it's important. And like an instance that I'm just going through now is Aaron and I are headed up to the slow fi retreat. The fine ears put on a retreat up in New Hampshire in the white mountains, and it's in early October. And we're going to travel around that area and do some hiking.

56:25Jonathan Mendonsa:And then because we have to fly out of Boston for direct flight to Richmond, we're not that far from one of my favorite towns in the world, which is Ogunquit, Maine. It's this beautiful seaside town in Southern Maine. And I was just looking up my two favorite resorts. And they're right on this beautiful walk called the Marginal Way. And one of the places, this place called Terrace by the Sea, had rooms for like$200. And they're kind of like dingier motel style rooms. They're still lovely rooms, let's be clear, but they don't look that great. But then there's the one with the ocean view and it's like$500 a night.

56:59Jonathan Mendonsa:And I'm like, I'm still going back and forth on this. Like, we're not going to spend that much time in the room. The whole point is being outside in this beautiful New England town, right? And it's like, do I want to spend 2.5x on a room that I'm not going to really be in? But I can make the argument, but it's so much more beautiful. And we have morning coffee out there and maybe we have wine and cheese in the evening. And it's like, I don't think that means I'm losing at five. Like, I don't think, you know, if, again, if Ramit was here, like, I think I could pretty comfortably argue back that like, that's actually a reasonable decision.

57:28Jonathan Mendonsa:And yeah, like is the extra what$300 a night times, you know,$900 probably, is that going to make any appreciable difference in my life? No, it isn't. But there does have to be some end to those type of decisions. We're lying. If we don't say this is a perpetual challenge. I love his quote. He says, why spend less when you can spend more? And it's like, what are you talking about? Of course, I'd spend less. Well, no, if you can spend more and it's not going to make any difference on your living expenses for the rest of your life, well, spend it. Right. He would say, get the$500 room and don't even think about it.

58:01Yeah, I know. But that's not natural because we are five people and we've worked hard to get here. Right. It is a perpetual challenge. But I will say this, like with any muscle, the more you exercise it, the better you get. And we are by definition responsible. We're not going to be frivolous. We're not going to do something ridiculously crazy. And if you spend$300 more on a really nice room and you and Aaron have a really special memory as a result of that, that's a financial investment for a non-financial return. You're always going to remember that special time you got the really nice room.

58:32You'll have that memory for life. We do every year for my granddaughter. We bring her up to the cabin and we have grand camp, we call it. She's turning eight. She started school yesterday, second grade. And we said, you know, she's getting old enough now. We probably ought to start doing trips with her, right? Give her a chance to travel. So we're going to go out and do a dude ranch. and we're looking at these dude ranches, you know, the whole family rides horses, my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter, they all rides. We're like, okay, we're going to go do a dude ranch. That'll be fun. And we're looking at kind of the, you know, the cheaper ones or the little bit nicer ones, you know, and we had the exact same thing you're struggling with.

59:02And we're like, let's look at the numbers. You know what? That's not going to change a thing. The projected versus the actual, we got it in there. We're covered the three and a half percent. We know the cash is covered. Hey, we got this extra income that we can just spend. Let's get the nicer thing and really create an awesome family memory while we can. It never gets easy, but you start getting better at it. It really comes down to knowing your finances and getting over that deeply ingrained habit of fear and just looking at it analytically and saying, okay, look, if I pull this out and I project that out for the rest of my life, guess what?

59:37We're still going to retire with a million instead of 2 million or whatever, right? I mean, you're still going to retire with more than you need or you're going to die with more than you need. So you've got to do whatever works for you, but it is something that you have to be intentional about trying to work on because if you don't try to work on it, you will. And most people do severely underspend what they can safely spend. Yeah. And it's interesting that you pulled out that quote from Ramit, the why spend less when you can spend more. It's actually our good friend, Brandon from the mad scientist just put out a podcast.

1:00:08I think we're recording this on August 7th. He just put it out like a day or day and a half ago. He publishes like one podcast a year. And this one is called A Decade of Freedom.

1:00:18Jonathan Mendonsa:And it was really interesting to see Brennan, of all people, really have his mindset changed. This was a full circle moment for him, I think. He was a lean fi, aggressive lean fi. He was one of the OGs, right? He was one of the real people in the community. And he's totally flipped, which is great. I'm glad to see it. But that article here, that podcast episode was, yeah, it's worth listening to because it's exactly what we're talking about. And the other thing he said was, look, if you're kind of on the border between lean fi and maybe being a little more conservative and working a few more years and kind of getting a little closer to fat fi, he said, choose fat fi.

1:00:53He said, fat fi is a lot more fun. You know, he said, you want to get to yourself in a position where you can spend money and enjoy those luxuries. You know, you don't want to work your whole life to get it. But realistically, if you're talking about one or two years versus the rest of your life, Hey, you know what? Pad your numbers a little bit. It's kind of nice to be on this side of it and be able to spend money like this. So yeah, he was very transparent.

1:01:15Jonathan Mendonsa:Yeah. That's interesting. I, I don't know what to think of that. I'm not a hundred percent. I like the concept, but I think that might be, I don't remember him saying that verbatim and I'm sure you're right. I was listening to it in haste, but I read the transcript, so I didn't listen to all things. I'm sure you're right. I think so many people are so conservative with their five numbers that almost by definition, they're going to be fat five, even on what they think of as regular five or lean five, because most people are including lower return projection. They're including zero social security, which is just not politically plausible.

1:01:50Almost certainly like They're including earning no extra money ever.

1:01:54Jonathan Mendonsa:It's all of these things. So I like the concept because again, we've been talking about spending more and I think that's so important, but I don't know. I, part of me just recoils at that because people are so susceptible to one more year syndrome as it is. Yeah, I would agree. I don't know if that's necessarily a sound advice. The way I look at it though, is what I did, right? We kind of targeted kind of a mid five, not lean because we wanted to be able to do fun stuff. We had kind of our base budget and we had some discretionary stuff and we kind of padded the discretionary so we'd be able to take trips to Europe or whatever, you know, every couple of years.

1:02:26That was in our base case scenario. So we were kind of mid-fi. Well, now what's happened is the market's done much better than we projected. I've gotten some income that we hadn't planned on. So now, yeah, we probably are technically fat-fi, right? Which is great. Right. And the point being, if you plan for a 50 and you end up in 80, don't be shy to say, hey, we were OK at a 50. So I know I can spend some of that 80 that we've gotten now and I can maybe go to a 75 or 70 and we're still going to be fine. That's the way I look at it is look at your base case. And if you're doing better than that, find a charity and make a donation.

1:03:01Jonathan Mendonsa:You know, I'll do something that ties into that risk based guardrails episode that I talked about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It does. Yeah, that's so important. And interestingly, you talk about different conservative natures. I'm having Aubrey Williams on again with Dr. Bobby Du Bois, where they talk about another paradigm shifting thing for me was when you look at most retirement calculators, even five calculators, most of them, certainly some of them give you the ability to change this, but most retirement calculators automatically assume that you're going to live to age 90 or 95. Most of them have it built in at 95, which is average life expectancy is somewhere between 78 and 82, depending on if you're male or female.

1:03:44So again, we talked earlier about, hey, you want to add more years to their life. And clearly we all want to live as long as we possibly can. But the actuarial tables usually don't lie in the cosmic scheme of things. Again, it's just it's painting that picture of there's a real high likelihood because of all of these assumptions that you're making, that you're going to die with many millions of dollars. So it is okay to start loosening the purse strings. And as I'm saying this out loud, I'm looking at that additional$900 expense for this hotel. And I'm like, all right, Brad, this is kind of a no brainer here.

1:04:16So hopefully, hopefully the room is still available and I can actually pull the trigger on it. So I don't look like a, like a liar after the fact. Hey, we just booked the more expensive dude ranch last week. So we're kindred spirits again, And everybody listening going, oh, I can't believe it. We're losing these guys. They're going off the deep end.

1:04:34Jonathan Mendonsa:No, no, no. Well, as we close up, I'm curious about like money moves post-fi. I think one of the real interesting aspects is being able to control your tax rate. And I don't know if my memory serves here, but I feel like you had either a pension or a small pension. So I know that impacts into controlling your tax rates since that's guaranteed money that's coming in. But I'm curious, like how you think about money moves post-FI and how you try to control your tax rate. Let me talk about two things, I guess, in particular. One is the Roth conversion question, obviously. And, you know, I'm a baby boomer, right?

1:05:09I'm one of those old guys. And my first 20 years of work, we didn't have the Roth. So all of my retirement savings at work, you know, the 401k, you know, you could either put them in after tax or you could put them in a pre-tax, but that was it. So of course I was putting them in pre-tax, right? Save the tax thing now, right? So I had put a post out when I retired about how much of our portfolio was in pre-tax versus Roth. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but we were very, very heavily tilted towards pre-tax. And I'm like, we've got to deal with this. And looking at the tax rates as they stand now, I wrote an article about this.

1:05:39I think it's called the golden age of Roth conversions. And I compared the current tax structure, which is still in effect, with the immediately prior one and kind of a more historical one. And the rates right now are so favorable. You can go up to like 24 % and do$450 ,000 of income or something. It's a huge number. So I'm like, okay, now's our chance. So we've been slamming this thing. We do the marginal tax bracket game and we look at the tax brackets and we top it off. And then I might even say, you know what? I'm going to go ahead and top off the next one because we've got so much in pre-tax.

1:06:11I've been doing that ever since I retired. And then I heard your episode, thank you, with Cody and Sean, right? They were talking about, you might want to reference the episode, but they were talking about how, here it is, 581. And they were basically saying, you know, the Roth thing isn't as big a deal as you think it is. Let's look at a worst case scenario, right? Because I was always thinking, I want to get this money converted in case I die. My wife gets hit with a widow's tax. And I want to do this while we're still married, filed jointly. So it's favorable, blah, blah, blah. And they laid out a really strong argument.

1:06:43You know, it doesn't make that much difference. So the worst case scenario, widow's tax, lady's 80 years old. They still have all this money because they didn't convert any of it. OK, she's got to pay a big tax bill, but she's got a bunch of money there to pay the taxes with. So it's not that big of a deal. And I was like, huh, that's a really enlightening debate, right? And so this year, I'm turning 63. Irma kicks in because Irma applies two years after. In fact, it's basically a surcharge on Medicare. Number one, it's a lot harder to do an Irma calculation than it is to do a marginal tax bracket.

1:07:14So it's a little bit more complicated, but you can still do it. You're guessing more, but I'm definitely scaling back. I'm glad I did the aggressive ones when I did. I took advantage of it. I got quite a bit of it moved over, but I'm not in a race to get it all moved over because their arguments there about the consequences of not moving it were very sound arguments that say, you know what? It's not as big a deal as people make it out to be. So people can do what they want to do on it. I think it makes sense, at least to your marginal tax rate, to do Roth conversions, especially in your early retirement years before social security starts, before you get on Medicare.

1:07:45To me, that's a no brainer. Beyond that, it's not as black and white as it seems. Yeah, that makes sense. And of course, every person is different. Every situation is different. I think one of the beauties of FI, as I've laid it out over a decade, is really we can, to a large degree, control our effective tax rate. 100%. In FI. We have so many amazing levers to pull. And I think a lot of it does come from flexibility. I would love to have personally, in order to pull all those levers, to have pre-tax money, to have Roth money, and to have a taxable brokerage account because it touches on everything.

1:08:23So the new tax structure that's been in place for, I guess, certainly the last handful of years, some probably close to a decade at this point is we get these massive standard deductions. It's on the tune of$32 ,000 for married filing joint at this point. It might be even a little bit higher than that. Plus the HSA. Yeah, plus all those things that you can put, right. If you have a bronze ACA plan, you can max out the HSA. And if you have Roth money, of course, you can pull that out. And you've already paid the tax on that on the front side. And then interestingly, the long-term capital gains at 0%.

1:08:58That's outside the scope of what we can talk about here. But I've done an episode with Cody on that. And that's astonishing.

1:09:04Jonathan Mendonsa:I mean, it can go up to taxable income for married filing joint somewhere in the vicinity of like$96 ,000 at last check, which is taxable income. Unless your spending is extraordinary, you can almost certainly, I think the vast majority of people in FI can pay a 0 % effective tax rate on even pulling money out of this is for their current expenses. So I'm not talking about making those massive Roth conversions like you're talking about But just to get by for that year between pulling out long-term cap gains, which is out of your taxable brokerage, right? Which that's just the gain portion. So the basis, the actual proceeds would be significantly higher than the gain, of course.

1:09:47So you can pull out a significant amount there. Roth, you can pull out, of course, 0 % tax. And then you have this massive standard deduction that you could pull whatever it is up to that amount each year out in the 30s of$1 ,000. I don't know how to say that. But that's astonishing.

1:10:03Jonathan Mendonsa:I look at this silly phrase that's been thrown about by some people in the FI community of this middle-class trap. And I think it's the biggest load of BS that I've ever heard in my entire life, frankly, because this is winning. Having the ability to put money into a pre-tax vehicle at your highest marginal rate and then take it out most likely at a 0 % rate. And if not, worst case, probably at a 10 % or 12 % rate. That is literally winning. Especially for the FI community, because you're doing all that before social security comes in, before the ERMA surcharges come in, right? Okay, you got to deal with ACA.

1:10:36You don't want to blow up your subsidy. That's fair. But for people that have built a good net worth and they're getting out early and they have no planned income, there are tremendous opportunities. And you've got to make sure you understand. This goes back to my earlier point about the skills that you needed to build your wealth are different than the skills you need to use that wealth after you retire. This is one of those examples. Let me touch on one other big thing I changed. So Roth conversions, we touched on, these were money moves after buy. So that was number one. Number two, I set up the bucket strategy, which I've written about, and I had three years in cash, seven years in bonds, and the rest was in stock.

1:11:10So if you do the math, it turned out to be roughly 60, 40. And basically my goal was, I don't need more in cash and bonds because I've got like 10 years covered there, so I'm not going to worry about it. And as the market grew, I just naturally let that funnel into equities. So my asset allocation was growing for stocks because my measurement for the bucket one and bucket two cash and bonds were based on the number of years of spending, not the percentage of my portfolio. So as your portfolio grows, it's a denominator effect, right? The denominator, the stocks became a larger percentage of the portfolio.

1:11:48And it's kind of a reverse glide path, right? Which is what they say you should do. My sequence of return risk is getting less of a risk. My equity portion is growing, but I never planned on that. It's just because I was holding my bond and cash positions essentially fixed. And then I was letting the growth roll into equities. And that's been an interesting phenomenon to watch. So that's number one. So now my asset allocation is closer to like 70, 30. The other thing I did, and this was from whatever that year was I mentioned, 2019, 2020, when both stocks and bonds went down because I I had everything in bond ETFs, funds, and they move in price, right?

1:12:24As interest rates go up and down, those bond funds, let's say you have a five-year bond fund, it holds a rolling five years worth of maturity bonds. So if interest rates go up, the value of that bond fund is going to go down. And we don't need to get into bond dynamics, but it's just reality. So I was faced with a situation where my bond portfolio and my stock portfolio were down at the same time. And I said, there's got to be a better way to manage this. So the big change I've made in my bond portion is I stripped out from my ETFs and I built a very specific bond ladder over the next 10 years.

1:12:57And I own these Invesco bullet shares where you can buy a specific year and you can buy a 2031 ETF that expires. They might hold 100 bonds. It's a BSCV as an example. That's a 2031 corporate bond fund. They might hold 1 ,000 bonds that all mature in 2031. So you hold them to maturity. So your yield is guaranteed. So I'm getting, what, 5 % on a guaranteed income. So I've replaced my cash bucket and my bond bucket with this bond ladder, which is now every year it rolls forward, right? So I've dwindled my cash down as these rungs of the bond ladder have started moving up. So now I've got roughly 50 % of our spending that's going to mature every year in December, roll to cash.

1:13:42and it's just sitting there. And the beautiful thing about this, I've got my IRA because tax location is important and bonds are best in a pre-tax fund. So I've got them in the IRA. Well, they mature in December. Guess what? He talked about tax planning. I can make that withdrawal in December or I can wait until January. So it gives me a two-year option on where I want to recognize that income to pull that stuff out of my pre-tax IRA. So it's beautiful from many, many different angles. Yeah, that is fascinating. And I love that concept of holding the bonds to maturity because yeah, in that instance, it doesn't matter what the prevailing bond interest rates are because if you're holding it to maturity, okay, it's what the coupon says.

1:14:23You bought it for X and it's giving you Y interest rate and that's just going to be held to maturity. That just simplifies because I think a lot of people get confused with the underlying mechanism of what a bond is in that scenario because they do see the fluctuating price and it's like, oh but if I actually held this bond until the end I'm going to get my exact dollars back. Exactly and nobody wants to go out there and try to figure out how to buy individual bonds I didn't anyway these bullet shares by Invesco are really good tools and they've got tips too so if you look at my bond ladder you know it's got tips in there so they're inflation adjusted hey that's even better right it's a guaranteed x percent but it goes up if inflation goes up it's going to offset some of the inflation so it's a pretty good way to handle the non-equity side of your portfolio.

1:15:04I like that. Fritz, that is fantastic. I just love chatting with you. I suspect let's not take so long before the next episode. We have so many things to talk about. I know we had originally planned on talking about your amazing economy speech. And yeah, maybe we could just make that episode two here in short order. Sure. 20 things you should do in the year before you retire. I got to say, that was fun. I love Diana. That's a great conference. But I got a lot of good response on that. And I had fun with that presentation because I was thinking about what did I do in my last year of work that really worked, right, that set me up to make this transition.

1:15:38And I was like, okay, that's going to be the content. So I put together a whole slideshow on these 20 things. And you and I were talking about it. I think I put up a social media post. Hey, you want to come on and talk about it? Yeah, sure. So now four months later, we're on and we never even talked about it. Yeah, that's funny. Well, round two for sure. So, all right. People can find you at theretirementmanifesto.com. That's it. Anywhere else? You can check out freedomforfido.com. If you want to check out my wife's charity, that'd be awesome. Beautiful. I love it.

1:16:02Jonathan Mendonsa:All right, Fritz, thank you. Hey, thanks, Brad. Before we go, I want to remind you that Chooseify has always been bigger than just this podcast. Chooseify is really four parts all working together. The podcast is where we explore ideas. The newsletter is where I get to write to you personally. It's a little more reflective, and it's where I share ideas that I think are worth passing along as I'm thinking about them each and every week. Jonathan has been building and expanding our online community, where the conversation continues, where you can ask questions, share what you're working on, and learn from thousands of other people walking this path right alongside you.

1:16:38Jonathan Mendonsa:And our local groups are where all of this becomes real life, where you can actually meet people making similar choices, build friendships, and build better Tuesdays together. There are more than 300 Chooseify local groups around the world with in-person meetups happening every month. If you're only listening to podcasts, you're really only experiencing one part of what we've built. You can join the newsletter, our online community, find your local group, or leave a comment on today's episode at choosefi.com. And we'd love to hear from you. You can always reach us at feedback at choosefi.com. Until next time, keep asking better questions keep taking action, and keep designing a life you don't need a vacation for.