FI + Choose | Clint Murphy | Episode 518

26:22Let's compare it to California or New York and your kid ever wants a home, wow, it's almost out of reach without you or me helping them. And so to some extent, I think the thought exercise says, hey, it's not all ego and gamesmanship. There's a certain level of my wonderful partner and my kids, you all want to live here. And if we want to live here, then I need to provide a certain level of income and wealth in order for us to be able to do that. And so I didn't feel as bad after I went through the whole thought exercise of saying, hey, this is all for a reason. Otherwise, if I didn't build the worth, because we can see that it's stressful today, but 20 years from now when we're in our mid-60s, I'm 46 today, 20 years from now, we should be close to mortgage-free across the portfolio.

27:15And now all those properties are spitting out cash flow and you can say, hey, we've got a great life, but we wouldn't be able to afford that without the properties, unless I kept working kind of, you know, the age old, you're basically working till you die. And that seems antithetical to what we're doing in the FI movement. So it's let's bear the stress for a period of time. So that in the future, we don't have to bear the stress and you can still live in this high cost of living city that you want to live in. Yeah, I hear you, man. You know, There were probably seven things I wanted to instantly respond to as you were talking.

27:53No, no, it's great. It's great. It's good stuff. But it's food for thought. And I think what's fun about a conversation like this and us recording it, this is a conversation we'd be having if we were on WhatsApp or sitting around in Breckenridge. In an airport lounge. Yeah, as it may be. For six hours in Denver. but yeah I mean I think this is the age-old fat fi thing and helping your kids is a decision right let's be clear and that's right you know there's so many assumptions built in it like as you were talking about and obviously I don't think this was meant as a bad thing and I'm not implying that as a bad thing but like the you know my wife and kids wouldn't want to live that lifestyle necessarily you know just something paraphrasing like that and it's like I was thinking like the intersection of a, your son playing pickleball with you and be like the old thing of like when our kids were like two years old and you'd get them this big fancy gift or present and all they'd want to do is play with the cardboard box.

28:53Like some weird connection was made with me as you were saying that of like a hundred percent, right? Like I wonder what your kids actually want. Yeah. And what's interesting is I think at the end of the day, they want you and your time. And I think your son, and I'm not saying you're not providing that because it sounds like you certainly are, which is wonderful. But I think your son is showing you that by those texts after football practice. He's not sending it to his buddies or a girl that he met. He's sending a text to his dad like, hey, let's go play pickleball together. Yeah, that's true.

29:25That's the stuff, Clint. That's what matters. Yeah. For them, for the two boys, I don't think it comes down to lifestyle. You're right. You're absolutely right. It's not lifestyle. For them, it's my oldest is in grade 11. Now my youngest in grade eight, they're now in the same high school together. And the oldest is like, Hey, I want to graduate from this high school. Okay. And the youngest, by the time the oldest graduates will be in grade 10 and he'll be like, Hey, I want to graduate. So the way I've looked at it is okay. I hear you both. Cause I, you know, I brought up the idea of moving to Vancouver Island, which is where we're doing our real estate development on the Island.

30:05And homes are more affordable there. We're downsizing. We've sold our home. We're downsizing into a townhouse. I could probably spend 75 % of what I spent on the townhouse or will when we move in and buy a single family home on Vancouver Island that would be a great home for the family. But then they would have to leave this high school that they're really bought into. And that's what I think as a family, we've agreed you guys finish school and then me and mom will figure out, you know, do we live in Vancouver or do we live on the Island or do we live in both? You know, we have an apartment here and we have a home there.

30:48And so we can, we can be in both places at a more affordable way. Right. And what's so fascinating about, about what you've been up to and you kind of alluded to this very much in passing is, I mean, you've made some wholesale changes in your life in just the last X number of months. And you've made tough decisions, right? Like you were a CFO, very successful, making a really nice income. You literally built your dream home. And now you like in this, as you call it five plus pivot. And I kind of want to, I want to hear you dive into that. I don't want to steal your thunder, but I mean, you, you left a very stable job.

31:28You are now an entrepreneur along with business partners. You sold your dream home. I mean, these are, I don't know that you give yourself credit, frankly, enough credit, because that's not easy. Whether you did the geo arbitrage to the prairie, as you call it, you know, in Canada, like you downside significantly, you made a choice that would be really, really tough for a lot of people. And I don't think you give yourself anywhere near enough credit for it. And, and that's hard, but that's part of, I mean, honestly, I think that's part of the fun of life and how you view it of like, this is something you want to do.

32:00Oh, you're so thrilled to hear you talk about your business and all the possibilities and the different developments you're going to do. I got bought into it. I wanted to learn more. You could tell. We talked about it for hours. Yeah, that's true. And I give my wife a lot of credit for coming on the journey, right? Because it's not easy for her to say, yeah, I believe in what you're doing. I believe that you'll be successful. Let's sell our house. And for those who are listening, when we say dream house, of course, if it was dream, it'd probably be slightly to the West and it would be in a different...

32:34It was pretty darn close. It was pretty darn close. I saw some pictures of it. Yeah, pretty darn close. And I'd say dream because we actually designed it, right? We designed it in partnership with a design firm, but our hand and fingerprint was on every light, every door handle, so, so tied to us. And so, yeah, it was a dream home. And the decision, I probably did it all in the wrong order, Brad. And I learned that in hindsight, but hey, it worked out. The decision was, and it was a hard decision at the firm I was at. I mean, I was getting close to seven figures in pay and bonus. And so that's hard to throw away, but I was a bit miserable.

33:18And part of that is when we talked about at the start of the show, like the curiosity, the personal growth, the self-development, that is who I am at my core. Like learning and growth are my number one value. It's all about learning and growth. And when you're in the same role for 11 years, that learning and growth kind of disappears. It's Groundhog Day. So that's right. It's groundhog. I referred to it as like groundhog weeks or groundhog months, right? Because it's like week one, I do this. Week two, I do this. Week three, I review the cash flow. Week four, I have the cash flow meeting. Week five, you know.

33:53And so you kind of rinse and repeat the days, months, weeks, quarters, years. And so that became hard to do. And so the journey to entrepreneurship was to say, hey, what does FI and Pivot look like? FI and Pivot is the concept that I'll hit a certain number that will afford me freedom. But a debate a lot of people have, and I'm a big believer in us having this conversation in the FIRE community, is purpose, meaning, and how that ties into retirement. Because for so many of us, we don't actually want to retire. But we do believe we're part of the FIRE movement. We do believe that we're part of FI.

34:34We just don't want to retire for various reasons. And for me, one of the main reasons is I look at a lot of people in retirement, and I would say the majority of people I see in retirement seem a bit miserable. And they seem like they're on that slow path to death. Is that standard retirement? Yeah, not necessarily in the FIRE community, because I think we probably approach life a little differently. but like you look at, sorry, mom and dad, but you know, you kind of look at mom and dad and you're like, well, you kind of just watch TV all day. And you know, like your, your excitement is coming to watch your grandkid play football.

35:13Like where's the living. And I look at someone like Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett, Charlie passing away just shy of his hundredth birthday. Warren, I think is close to his hundredth birthday. And I look at that and say, well, what are they doing differently? I don't think you'd say either is retired. I also don't think you'd say they're both working full time, but they're working in a way that gives them enough meaning and purpose that it keeps their brain engaged. And so what is that path that allows me in my 60s, 70s, 80s to work a certain number of hours a week with partners who I enjoy being around that challenges me intellectually, allows me to maybe meet with young people in my industry and have those, you know, I have my lunch spot in a restaurant where I'm meeting with a young person for a couple hours a day, just to talk shop, help them on their career.

36:11And I'm invigorated by doing it. And I designed my dream building and it's like, Hey, we sell the residential or we have rental residential above. And then you have commercial at grade. And that commercial at great includes a restaurant, our office, a gym with, you know, saunas and ice bath. So it's like you spend half a day there, half a day working, you get your workout in, you have lunch with young people, and then the rest of the day is with your family. And it's like, I think if I had that, and the amount of vacation you could take is kind of unlimited because you're at that stage in life where you're more of an active shareholder than an active manager.

36:49I think if I had that life, that could fuel me into my hundreds. If I retired and I had to come up with like, what does my day look like every day from retirement on? I don't think I could last as long. And so I want to build a business that affords me that. And so that's why I say FI and pivot. Like we could geo arbitrage, go somewhere and be fine for the rest of our lives. Or I could pivot to entrepreneurship by selling the house and downsizing into the townhouse. What that allowed me to do, Brad, the decision there was I didn't want to approach entrepreneurship from a place of fear. So by selling the house and downsizing to the townhouse, we take a significant amount of debt off the table for simplicity, say a million dollars in debt gone.

37:40That's a lot of payments in a year that I don't need to make now. And we take a significant amount of cash and put it in our jeans. That cash will afford me not to have to work for a year. So I have at least one year to build up runway to get income from the business to support lifestyle. And then I probably have a further two to three years in my retirement savings accounts that I could draw down if I had to, to allow the business to succeed. Right. So you're giving yourself runway. I'm giving myself runway. I think I've built three years of runway with zero salary to grow the business. Gotcha.

38:23And that's what I wanted to do with all those decisions. And that's why I'm not becoming an entrepreneur at a 45. I want it to reach a level where I could say I've got three to five years and I think I could stretch it to five. I have three to five years where I don't need to earn income from the business and I will be okay. And that's kind of where we're at. Yeah. I mean, I love the framework. You certainly know that. And I think the pivot is, I mean, I did a pivot, similar, albeit slightly nuanced, but similar in the sense that when I left my corporate job, I was not technically at financial independence.

39:01We were well down the path, certainly. But it was not a burn the boats moment where I said, I'm going all in on entrepreneurship. I'm just starting a business from scratch and I'm going to figure it out. For me, it was, okay, I started to build a little personal finance site on the side. I realized, oh, I can help people with travel rewards using credit card points to travel. And oh, I can make a little bit of money from this. And oh, what would happen if I had instead of four hours a week to do this or 10 hours a week, if I had 40 to 60 hours a week? Yes. So I believed in myself. I bet on myself.

39:39So I mean, to me, that is in essence, this five plus pivot. and it gave myself options. I knew the worst case scenario was I could always go back to being a CPA, right? Like that was literally the worst case scenario. And you and I have both worked at similar firms. It's amazing how many similarities we have in our lives. But, you know, I think, so I think we're in full agreement on that. I think there's a semantic argument when it comes to like retirement. And I think this is why I think people, and not you and I certainly, but people get entrenched in their little camps of not understanding.

40:16And this goes back to like what you said about when we were in the hot tub and we're having these really deep conversations. And what's cool is when people actually talk, you can find common ground. And I think there's, what I get frustrated with these arguments on the internet is we agree 99%. I had an argument about this recently. Rob Berger, who's a friend of the show, had a YouTube video, seven reasons to never, ever retire. And frankly, I didn't even look at it because it just seemed a little clickbaited, even though he's a very legit guy. But I responded in this Facebook post and I said, with the entire universe of available options to you at FI, I suspect you can round down to approximately 0 % of people who would pick their current job over every other thing they could possibly do with their time.

41:01It just defies all logic to think otherwise. No, I don't think you'll sit and be unproductive, but to think that of the billions of options for what you could do with your time, that you'd pigeonhole yourself to the one job for 40 waking hours a week out of 112 waking hours seems laughable. And to me, right? Like that's indisputable almost. Almost no one would do that. And I think this is one of my most frustrating things that I haven't come up with the right messaging for it, Clint, is people like to argue an anecdote and it bothers the heck out of me. And again, I haven't come up with the right way that people understand this, but like to almost anything in life, there's a half a percent or 1 % of things that go against the other 99%.

41:44So in my mind, if 99.x % of things are true, then it's always true in essence. I round down to zero for that because there's always anecdote for every single thing. Yeah, like Warren Buffett would say, well, no, I'll continue doing what I'm doing. And you're like, well, okay, fifth richest guy in the world who does whatever the heck he wants. Right, and he might love it, and that's great. And there might be a teacher, actually, wound up responding to me. I was like, it's amazing that you love teaching. It is amazing that of the billions of jobs, you found the one that you are uniquely suited for, and that just lights you up.

42:20That is wonderful. But please understand how rare that is. because for the rest of us, we didn't just fall backwards into the perfect job at 23 years old and stayed in it for our entire working career. Like the world doesn't work that way. Right. So I think people are deluding themselves is my actual issue that like, you might like your job. You might really like your coworkers. That's wonderful. I'm not arguing that every job is bad. I've never argued that never, ever, ever. But I think if you're intellectually honest, And if you have any degree of introspection that of the other billions of things you could do with your 112 waking hours, that if you were to not work at that job, you know, if you went in and wiped your slate clean, there is no way that you would pick of those 112 waking hours to pick 40 plus of them to work at that job.

43:10I find it laughably silly to even imagine that more than one out of a thousand people would fit that bill. And that again, rounds to zero for me, but it doesn't mean that we're being unproductive. Like exactly what you described, like even your little salon there that you described. I'm going to build this thing. I'm going to have younger people that I can mentor. I'm going to work out and I'm going to go like, that's fantastic. That's not sitting around. It's this picture we have in our head of retirement being wasted on a couch. Nobody wants to waste away on a couch. Nobody's arguing for that.

43:44If you think anybody's arguing for that, you're an idiot. Nobody is arguing for that, right? Let's be clear. A hundred percent. You know, maybe we can get some research on this from someone. If you look at anyone who's won a lottery over, let's pick an arbitrary number,$10 million, how many of them are still in the job today that they were in when they won that lottery? I would argue you're probably to your point close to zero. Yep. It just tells you right there. People win life-changing money. And not surprisingly, we call it life-changing money because they change their lives. And so for most of us, if we had life-changing money in our bank account, and for everyone, life-changing money is a different number, right?

44:24And that's part of what you've talked about probably over the years so many times is like, what's your number? but a simple one would be to say, if you had$10 million, would you be doing tomorrow what you're doing today? And I think for the vast majority of people, the answer would be no. I'm a hundred percent aligned with you on that one. And to me, that's okay. Like it's not, it's not giving up. It's not capitulating. It's not saying your life is bad. Listen, we're all working as a means to an end. And this, for most of us, it's financial independence. It's to get to the point where you can do what you want with your time.

44:54And that's great. And listen, I think, Clint, what a lot of people are worried about in that deep-seated lizard part of their brain is they're worried about being bored. They're worried about being, quote-unquote, unproductive. They're worried about what are other people going to think. They're worried about having that backslide into sitting on a couch for 16 hours a day. And I understand that. But to me, because you're so worried that you're just going to keep working in a job that you're tolerating or maybe even like to some degree. It's fundamentally misunderstanding the amount of choice you have in life.

45:27There are so many things to do. And by pursuing FI, you have the option to do those things. And Clint, you see it in little ways, right? Like you can go play pickleball with your son. Totally. Yeah. Like when I designed my perfect day, like that's a big part of it. And I'm going to do a little bit of a play on the name of the podcast and the idea of FI and pivot, because what it really comes down to, Brad, is FI and choose. So we choose FI so that eventually when we hit FI, we have choice. And so people can FI and choose, and they can choose how they want to live their life on a daily basis. And it can be full retirement.

46:12It can be not full retirement. It can be barista. It can be coastal. It can be fat. It can be lean. It's all about getting to a number to give you choice and then choosing. And I think an important concept to you and me is this idea of intentionality is doing the introspection, doing the deep thought to say, what does a perfect life look like to me? And I've realized for me, it's intellectual stimulation. So I want to have my podcast. I want to be writing my newsletter. I want to be going on trips with you and people like you, like we did to Denver, to have deep conversations, to spur my thinking, to do athletics.

46:57We hiked a frigging Colorado 14er. It's not like we didn't do any athletic. Like that was an adventure. And I want to do that stuff. And I want to travel the world with my wife and I want to see so many different countries and I want to learn their languages and live their culture. And I want to make sure that when I'm home, I do not choose to do that couch lifestyle, which is why I've designed this idea of this half day adventure in this office that I've built. And then outside of that, I'm playing pickleball and I'm hanging out with my family and I'm reading books and I'm talking to interesting people.

47:35That's all I want to do in life. And if I can do that for the rest of my life and I can build a wealth that allows me to choose that, that's the goal. That's the pivot is FI and choose. Dude, I love that. I think I want to rename the podcast at this point because that's what it is. Yeah. Choose FI to give you maximal choice. Yeah. You're both choosing FI and then when you are FI or whatever you define it as, it gives you this amount of choice that you have never had in your life before. 100%. Ever, ever, ever. And you may choose, to your point, there may be that few percent of people out there who choose to do what they're doing.

48:12Right. And that's fine. It's wonderful. It's not only fine, it's amazing. You were already in the right spot. You hit the jackpot already. So if you're sitting out there and you're, for some weird reason, grumbling, and you want to write me an email like, I'm that person and I love my job. Wonderful. Nobody's arguing about that. Like you, I'm so thrilled for you, right? Like think about a world where you really essentially looked into this job that you truly love. You're adding value. It's adding value to you. That's amazing. Never give that up. Nobody's arguing. You have to ever, no matter how many millions of dollars you have in the bank, do as much as you want of that.

48:47Like, you know, we've referenced, uh, Buffett and Munger, like they obviously weren't going to stop. There were more billions than you could possibly imagine. Why would they ever stop what they're doing? They've built a life that they love. It would be insane to do that. Yeah. And in a good-natured way, I want to kind of push back on you as like a thought exercise, maybe for outside of the podcast. It's like you've both described this. I think there's an intersection here of how you're describing this ultra fat fi that you want. But the life that you actually want doesn't cost very much. It doesn't require it.

49:19I know. I know. At all. I'm really battling that a lot lately. Part of it is I know that like when we go to Las Vegas and we're walking by the clothing stores and I mean, it's going to sound so pretentious, right? And so like I walk into like Xenia and I'm like, oh my God, these suits are so beautiful. And oh, I would love to own one of these. It's like, well, how many of them do I really need? I'm only going to wear so many clothes. Like what if I bought two of them? And, you know, I only like to wear navy. So what if I bought two Navy or a Navy suit and a nice Navy sport coat? Okay, that would set me back a lot of money, but I'm not going to do that every year.

50:00So again, even if I had these indulgences, do I need all this money? And the answer for sure is no. The answer for sure is no. So somewhere in there, I probably will hit a number and I may start the journey with my shareholders to go from active manager to active shareholder sooner, somewhere in that 55 to 60. So I need to, with my partners, build a very, very successful real estate development company over the next decade. And in fairness, it's okay to do that because I actually enjoy it. Like building a company, building a culture, building homes. There's no issue with that. I enjoy it. But from a net worth perspective, I can probably get to the number that affords me the lifestyle I want to live for the rest of my life faster than I think.

50:57And it's probably a lower number than I anticipate. And if that's the case, maybe I stop sooner. Or to our point, if I've designed it, and this is the fun part, if I've designed it in a way where I love what I'm doing. And I love going into the office and I love being involved in the business the way I'm involved. And as a shareholder, as an owner, as a partner with my partners, I talk about this intentionality with them a lot. I talk about as we grow the business, we need to design our roles in a way that we're doing the aspect of the business. 80 % of the time, we're focused on what we love.

51:36And 20 % of the time, we'll deal with shit we don't want to deal with. That's life. but 80 % of the time we're doing what we love. And if we can design our roles in that way, none of us will not want to do what we're doing. And then we hire around us to support the other stuff. Right. And so perhaps I get there sooner, but ideally what I've done, Brad, is I've designed it in a way intentionally coming back to our intention. I've designed it in a way where I'm that rare person who's emailing you and saying, well, Brad, actually, I love what I'm doing. And I've built it in a way where I can go play Pickleball and I can travel.

52:16And I love it in the office. Right. And I would love, obviously, I get emails and messages from you more often than this, but I would love to get that email from you, that proverbial email a decade from now saying, hey, I remember that recording we did back in October of 2024. I did it. Like, how cool would that be? But I think it's the intention that matters. And that at its essence is what we're talking about here because you are with eyes wide open trying to build this framework of a job where you and your partners can each work on A, what you love and B, presumably your zone of genius, if you will.

52:54Like the area where you can add the most value. Exactly right. Yeah. Why would you ever want to leave a job like that? Because it's not a job then. You've built something that's a passion of yours that you add value to, that you're earning a nice income from, obviously, and you're building something, so you're getting significant equity from it. What would ever possess you to stop that if it's not infringing on your life? It's just part of a holistic life that you've built over a 15 to 20-year period. It would be ludicrous to walk away from that. And you do it in a way that's fair to each partner.

53:24So you say, hey, how do our hours tie to our pay? How do we set it up so that we can each do it by a certain age? Like, hey, I may be the oldest, but I'm not going to be the last, right? So what is that age where we all want to do? And I learned this from a shareholder in my last shop where he called it, maybe not retiring, but I want to work differently. And I'll hit an age where I want to work less hours. And he's almost describing what I'm describing. And I'm getting that from seeing him do it. And I'm learning that there's a path. Like I'm having these conversations with my partners now to say, hey guys, like when I hit 60, somewhere in that 55 to 60, that'll mean I've been pushing hard with you guys for 10 to 15 years and pushing hard at this level for 10 to 15 years.

54:08And in fairness, I've kind of already been doing it for a decade as a CFO of one of the larger development shops. When you push that hard for 20 to 25 years, you get tired and you guys are going to get tired when you're there. So how do we set ourselves up so that we can do this? because if I'm the first, then you'll benefit from the path I'm taking if we set that path up in a fair and reasonable way. We're not only setting up a path for me, we're setting up a path for you and for you. And so let's have these conversations along the way so that when we get there, no one's surprised. And let's start with the end in mind because that's the only way.

54:43We've got to be intentional about the future so that we can work back to what we need to do today to get there. Right. Start with the end in mind is so important. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is like when you do any type of arrangement or contract like this, if you will, operating agreement amongst partners or even as people sometimes talk about with like prenuptial agreements, like and that's kind of a side tangent. But this specifically with operating agreements or partnerships is you're trying to understand eventualities, how you want them to be, but also realizing things can go south and go bad in a lot of senses.

55:21And we, from this very sober and positive standpoint today, are trying to think through, like, things can work out different ways here. And we need to think about this because we're all, like in your case, we're all not going to just merrily work 40 to 60 hours a week for the rest of our lives. Like, why would you build a business to do that? It doesn't, it's crazy. You're shackling yourself for no reasons. And, you know, it's funny, friends of ours built a dental practice with, this is years ago. And I'm not sure. Hopefully this operating agreement didn't actually come to pass. But Laura and I were aghast when we learned about it.

55:58It was like, they basically went off on their own to build this dental practice with two other partners. And they put into the agreement, the partnership agreement, that they had to be actively involved until they were 64 years old. And at that point, they were in their 30s. And I was like, are you out of your mind? Like, If you build this amazing dental practice and you're saying you could hire a dentist to actually do your job for a fraction of it and you want to just stop working at 48, 50, 55 even, you were literally, when you were in your mid-30s, writing into an agreement, you have to work until you're 64.

56:37Or like, Clint, I've never, I had to bite my tongue, obviously, because you can't tell people they're acting irrationally. But like, from my five sensibilities, I'm like, this is crazy. You have to rip this operating agreement up. This makes no sense. It's common. And I mean, in fairness, the agreement I have doesn't even have an age. It just has a requirement that as a shareholder, you have to be actively involved as an employee in the business or its affiliated companies. Now, I'm okay with that language because everything in agreement, in any agreement, has the idea of add a comma and say, unless agreed otherwise.

57:24It's implicit in any agreement you ever sign. It's not in writing, but everything in any agreement ever is unless agreed otherwise, unless mutually agreed otherwise. So what does that mean? It means that one, don't be an asshole, right? Two, add tremendous value to your partners, personally, professionally, and financially. Help them become better people, help the company become a better company, and help everybody to get rich. If you do those two things, when you start to approach those periods in life, you can have those conversations to say, hey, here's where I'm at in life. Here's what I'm thinking.

58:04Let's come up with something reasonable and let's negotiate what the future looks like. And if your partners are wealthy and you've been a big contributor to that, and ideally they've been a big contributor to you being wealthy, and you've all made each other better people, and you've all built a company together that's amazing, generally, if they're the right people, which ideally you sourced in creating your partnership, you're going to have that conversation that says, hey, let's be fair and reasonable people. What does a good future look like for you? Recognizing that I want same good future for me when I get there.

58:40So in my agreements with my partners that I have today, that language isn't necessarily there. But the conversations are happening. Let's say I'm 46. The next youngest is 40, 41. The youngest is 36. So we're all in a different stage. And that path will get to the same spot. So those conversations will happen over time. And I think hopefully in a way that allows everybody to FI and choose, and we choose to be together in various capacities. For example, maybe somewhere along the way, the development business is kicking ass, taking names, and we've hired great people. And then I say, hey, as we approach our later years, it'd be great for the three of us, four of us to have an income portfolio that pays us dividends.

59:32So if we do stop being in the day-to-day business, we have cash flow. because part of moving from active management to active shareholder, maybe there is four hours a day of management. Well, it's fair that you're paid a lot less than the guy who's there every day. Okay, well now my cashflow is gone. So what if I go build an income portfolio that replaces that cashflow? Now my job becomes managing an income portfolio and building out that world, which will be labor intensive for the decade that I build it. But once it's built, that world is a lot less labor intensive than a development world. So how about I build that with and for you guys, and then I manage that in a 50 % capacity, still involved touching the development world.

1:00:17I'm more active in the income world, but it requires a lot less activity. What does that look like for all of us? So there are ways to do it in a way that everybody wins. Yeah, I love that. And while everyone listening, obviously, is not in the real estate development world, But the lessons that you just passed along are the critical ones, right? So it's A, build relationships. Just be a good person. Be a good person, yeah. Help people out. Look to help, like build those relationships over years. But then also understand the way that incentives work. And you're both doing things for you, but you're then setting the stage for, hey, this is going to help you out as well when it comes time for that to be your stage of life.

1:01:03So you're helping them in a stage of their lives where they don't even realize they're going to want that potentially, but you know, it's coming quickly. Yeah. I think that you have five plus shoes. I mean, Clint, that is pretty, pretty darn cool. Yes. I love it. You've coined a new phrase. So, all right, my friend, I think to me that feels like the perfect stopping point. I think that just puts a bow on it. This was an amazing conversation. That was fun. I would love to have you back on as many times as you'll come back on. And yeah, that's what's so cool about FI, about conversations like this is it can go any which way.

1:01:37And I mean, we have topics for many future days. So again, my friend, thank you for being here. Yeah, I love having conversations with you, like talking with you like we just did. To your point is like when we're sitting in the airport and we did that for what, four, five, six hours together. And we just did this, you know, we chatted for most of that time and it felt just like this. So this is a really fun and wonderful experience and definitely look forward to doing this more with you in the future. Okay. Big shout out to the Capital One Lounge in Denver Airport. We spent multiple meals there.

1:02:09Super value. Get that card. I think there was a deal on it at the time we were in it. If I was American, I would have got the card in a minute. Yeah, I use my Capital One Venture X as you get. Yeah, the Capital One Lounge. It's awesome. So anyway, Clint, where can people find you? So we've talked before, Twitter is your, or X, I suppose, is now your big thing? Yeah, X is the biggest. The number one spot is thegrowth.guide. Thegrowth.guide, that's the website. And that gives access to the podcast, the newsletter, the social media. The algorithm, as you know, is pretty crazy on X right now. LinkedIn seems to be a spot that's growing at a faster rate than Twitter.

1:02:53And it's a lot less crazy over there. but we are on X and LinkedIn are our two biggest platforms. Wonderful. And yeah, I can vouch certainly for your podcast and the newsletter. Those are can't mess for me every week. So yeah, the growth.guide and we'll have that in the show notes certainly. Yes. All right, my friend, until next time. Thank you. 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. So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe. And then subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

1:03:27I 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. And 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.

1:04:03So 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. Chooseify 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? What 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?

1:04:40And then Chooseify created a financial independence 101 course that's entirely free. just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening.