Incremental Gains

22:47I'm going to put the inputs in because I've seen other people succeed. And that's what's cool. I actually, just one last word on this is when I went to Bali for the financial independence event that Amy Minkley post together. That was 14 months ago. And I, again, I'm not too egotistical about this, but like I'm in pretty good shape and a lot of people notice. And it was, you know, that's obviously a good feeling, but there was this one guy, Tanmay, who is just a really incredible guy. And we were talking and he hadn't done a ton of fitness in terms of muscle building by any means. And he just wanted to start.

23:20And what was interesting was for new year is a bunch of us put like happy new year's posts in the WhatsApp chat that we have for that volley event. And Jay, I kid you not tan mace biceps, like busted out of his shirt. This is 14 months later after following this Dean's programming, like to the point where like four different guys, like notice like, holy cow, what are you doing? What's going on here? And this was somebody who looked like he hadn't ever lifted weights before. And I'm like, damn, he just followed the process. Nice. It's cool. Yeah. Trust the process. Right. I mean, trust and verify, but I think one thing that just got slipped in there is, you know, it is so easy to drop facts on people, right?

23:57So in actually a minute, we're going to drop a ton of, you know, just things to just be aware of. You don't know what you don't know, but dropping facts on someone is just, they're almost irrelevant by themselves. What makes it important, what locks it in is the person understands the why. So that's why I say, you know, it's fine. I could have a list of what workout I did this morning. And also not for nothing, I did the workouts with Brad Wolf. Was that good? Why didn't it lock in? I didn't have the why, right? Did I have the why? I just went and did the work. And it was a good workout. Like I did the workouts with months with Brad, but I didn't have my own log books.

24:27I wasn't following the process. The why wasn't mine. It was his why, right? And I never took the time to lock in my why for why would I want to stick with this when, you know, I have other things that I could do. Anything will work. It's just as good as everything else. So now you have this fork in the road. I stopped doing the workouts with Brad, just time constraints, doing my own thing now because all workouts are being equal and I've gotten results many different ways. And Brad sticks with his why. And he sticks with his plan. And Brad can log and show you the incremental gains. And with very few switch-ups along the way, Brad has been able to chart a path to he's extraordinarily satisfied.

25:01And not only that, but he's been able to stay satisfied for 12, 24 months at a time, 36 months at a time. And so that's a pretty incredible deviation from those of us that find ourselves going through New Year's resolutions, where we're going to lean in for 90 days. and then at 90 days, we're so fried and exhausted and we're stressed out. Or maybe we hit our goal and we crushed it. And then, all right, now we can get back to our normal life. Versus the individual that had a why and carved out a life, you know, that's going to lead to the outcome that they want. Do you understand that that is exactly what we're talking about with financial independence?

25:35So when we talk about these things that a lot of which are gonna sound like a foreign language, some of which you're gonna know a little bit about, some of which like, well, can we go into more details? Two things come to mind. One is you are not responsible for knowing all these things today. And it's not even the point. It's just to kind of put some window dressing about the idea that there's a lot that you don't know, a lot that you haven't interacted with, a lot of opportunities out there. And then just to say, we couldn't possibly cover the infinite number of options that you're going to be able to discover on this path.

26:06The detours are the journey. They are indeed. All right, let's get into it. Incremental gains. So we've actually already touched on a couple, which is great, but I'm going to start. We're just going to bomb through as many of these as we can, Jay. Are you telling me that I can't comment on each one that you say? Is that you proactively asking me to not? No, we can comment. We can comment. I'd love to take four episodes and do this. I think it'd be fantastic. You can respond at your leisure. Okay. First one I've got. Don't buy a mutual fund of one company at another brokerage. Okay. So a lot of people get into trouble because in years past, we talked almost exclusively about VTSAX.

26:44And it really became a meme. I think, frankly, because of JL Collins' incredible book, Simple Pound to Wealth, it just became like the thing that people bought in the FI community. And I think it's very important to know. So that's a Vanguard mutual fund. Okay. People, because they've heard this term VTSAX over and over, they think I have to buy that. A, you don't have to buy that. Let's be clear. But certainly don't buy it if you're at another brokerage like Schwab or Fidelity or anywhere else, because you get clobbered with fees. Okay. This is why now the general thing that we talk about are actually exchange traded funds, ETFs.

27:19So VTI is the new VTSAX. Jay, I don't know if you knew about this, but for years now, I've been saying VTI, VTI, VTI. We're going away from VTSAX because people get into trouble getting clobbered with these fees. There are almost never fees when people buy VTI. Yep. I have some VTI that I have purchased, I think, through Schwab. I purchased VTI. I think also maybe you purchased some some boo, some BOO. Yeah, that's some people. Yeah. So let's just take a half step back on that one and just say like context here. Here's another one. There is a difference between ETFs and mutual funds. And notably, and this is a really important concept, mutual funds are very convenient and easy on most platforms because you can purchase fractional amounts.

28:02You need 30 bucks, you need 40 bucks, you want whatever you got. you could just put in that amount and you can purchase a fractional amount of the mutual fund. ETFs, you got to purchase a share, a share amount. This would mean like, let's say that VTI, and again, I don't actually know the numbers at this moment. I'll say that's to my credit, but let's say it's $240 a share. You would have to purchase a$240 increments. But here's another thing. Mutual funds resolve at the end of the business day. So you could say, I want to purchase it now, but you're actually not getting the price of that mutual fund that's showing up right now.

28:35You're getting it at the price at the end of the business day. ETFs are purchased. You're getting it at the exact price that you purchase it in the window. So there's a lot of other tiny little nuances. And also a lot of what I just said can itself be incorrect depending on the platform you purchase it on. Because if you go to something like M1, they will let you do fractional shares of ETFs using some sort of proprietary mechanism. So just there's very few absolutes, but these are a few of the defining characteristics of ETFs versus mutual funds. Yeah, I love that. And what's interesting, like you just said, it does differ on the platform.

29:09And I know this very personally, because this ties into another fun incremental gain here. So I actually just opened up a Roth IRA for my older daughter, Anna. So she had her very first earned income this past summer. She was the head of this swim lessons program at her pool. And she made about somewhere in the vicinity of$1 ,100, let's say, okay? So Jay, I opened up a Roth IRA for her and now at Vanguard it happened. So it's in her name. It's a custodial account because she's not 18, but it's a Roth IRA. I put in$1 ,100 or she put in 1 ,100, we should say, but I facilitated it. And they allowed me to buy in terms of dollars.

29:51So they actually let me buy a fraction of a share. So she wound up getting 3.24 whatever percent of a share, which is great. So that was really cool because I was under the impression that I could only buy in share increments. So at least at Vanguard, they allow you to do that, which is nice now. And yeah, the price, it looks like at this very moment is about$339 a share. But that's pretty cool. And again, this is a nice thing. My incremental gain here is the Roth IRA for kids. So if your child has earned income, they can put money into a Roth IRA up to that amount. And the nice thing, it doesn't have to be the same dollars that you earned.

30:28It's not like it has to go from your paycheck directly to it's just, do they have that earned income? And if so, that can go in the IRA and the Roth in this case. And so, yeah, this is a pretty good one. Okay. Well, oh man, I can't comment on all these. Okay. We can do multiple episodes. Fine. Maybe we just break it up and split it out for a couple of weeks. but the commentary is good. You did a comment on my comment. That's what? Okay. There's always comments. Roth IRA for kids that wasn't on the list. Just get added to the list. Just get out of the list. And I think this is a really important one.

31:00What do you do as a former accountant and a meticulous record keeper? What do you do to feel good about how you're going to validate, you know, the fact that this in fact was earned income. There's not an official way, but there is a best practice that most people should feel pretty good about, right? Yeah, agreed. And it does get a little nebulous because so in her case, she made enough money to get over the threshold for 1099 reporting. Okay, so that's$600. If you earn over$600 from some employer or whatever, you are going to get a 1099. And now so she'll get a 1099 probably in the next couple weeks, I will save that.

31:42I'll scan it and upload it to a drive and make sure we have that for posterity. So that will very easily prove out that. I think, yeah, it gets a little more nebulous when in terms of, hey, did they babysit or mow lawns or something? But I think it would be enough to make an invoice of some sort for them, just a paper trail record. It's just more, you don't want to have a giant number that you're aggregating over time and it's all just vapor lines on an Excel. There should be something plausible that shows the paper trail. And that's as good as you're going to find in terms of documentation. You create a template, get an invoice template, just make a note of the date and the amount and the time and put it in there.

32:21And I just think it's kind of the same idea. It's a lot less nebulous actually, but it's still the principle and the best practices are there. Same idea with your HSA. If you want to - You stole my thunder. I just - I just see it on your list, Brad. I didn't see it on your list. It was open. I bolded it. amending. All right. But I do use that exact same tactic for the HSAs where you have a spreadsheet on the cloud linked to a Google drive or Apple storage or whatever the thing is with a link to yourself. And you just kind of create those summaries for the year. And that's a little bit of a pain in the tail.

32:53But if you're serious about this vehicle, which will show up, we'll talk about it some more. If you're serious about this approach, HSA as an investment vehicle, it is worth it to have that documentation. And absolutely, because these numbers are going to get big fast over periods of time, you want to have a well-documented paper trail. Yep. Totally agree. Another one that I had on the list, since we're talking about Roth IRAs, is Roth IRA contributions can always be taken out tax and penalty-free at any time. For the longest time, I did not realize, and I didn't intellectualize what this really meant.

33:31It was just word vomit, but it is so important. it really is important. And I think this will let a lot of people more freely, mentally, contribute to a Roth IRA because all things equal, I guess the argument would be, oh, but what if I need that money? And that's why some people don't contribute to retirement accounts because they think it's stuck there. And for traditional accounts, that is true to some degree. Now we've talked repeatedly about, and we will talk, Jonathan, in great detail in the future about ways to take money out of traditional IRAs and 401ks before you're 59 and a half. But when we're talking Roth IRAs, you've already paid tax on this money.

34:09That's the whole point. Roth contributions are after tax money. So the nice thing is whatever money you contribute, you can pull out at any time tax and penalty free. Now, if there's earnings, if there's growth on that, that cannot come out tax and penalty free. But if you put in five grand one year and you have an emergency and for some reason you need money, because that's where, let's say that's where you put your emergency fund. Okay. you can pull it out tax and penalty free. So that's very important to remember. And Brad, we talked about the power of cutting a hundred dollars of recurring expenses out of your budget.

34:42I mean, last week you've made the case that it's worth$90 ,000 to you over a period of 20 years. It lowers your fine number by over 30 K and that a hundred dollars a month invested is worth$60 ,000 at an 8 % annual returns. You put all that together. There's a 90 K swing. if you can just find$100 a month to cut. So I have a story here. This is not revolutionary in that a lot of people at this point in time have started to hear about MVNO. So you have your cell phone service of choice. Maybe you're with one of the big ones, but there are these other MVNOs and there's a bunch of options. But notably, I am using, and a lot of our community or a lot of people that I know are using Mint Mobile.

35:22And Mint Mobile, I believe, and again, this is all abstracted from you, so you kind of have to guess, but I believe Mint Mobile is running on T-Mobile lines in a lot of places. You know, they buy allotments from different providers, so you don't always know. And they're not the only ones that do this. Google Fi, as an alternative, also runs on other providers. I can confirm, because I had a troubleshooting issue with Google Fi, that they are, in fact, at least in Richmond, Virginia, running on T-Mobile lines. So that's just the case. So anyways, how do you pick between the two? Well, price is certainly a very important thing to run on, and Mint Mobile is shockingly affordable, probably 15 bucks a month per line with a very forgiving data allowance.

35:58Google Fi, on the other hand, has gotten relatively uncompetitive and they are close to 60 bucks a month by the time that you, you know, add in the data, et cetera. They're charging you$10 per gigabyte of data, something like that. So it just, it just adds up really, really quick. And I was very frequently getting bills where I was like, well, am I really saving Google Fi? Let me give Mint Mobile a shot. Your worst case scenario, you can actually go back. Most mobile phones these days use eSIM, so you don't even have to get a SIM card. you can quite literally go into your settings, toggle it on, toggle it off.

36:29You could even have two lines if you wanted to. And by the way, you're still probably paying less than you would with one of the traditional vendors. But again, it comes down to this idea of, I really, at some point, I mean, I make very few phone calls, but when I do make a phone call, I kind of need to be able to hear the other person and can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? You know, you can't be doing that. So I've tried Mint Mobile in Virginia and I'm satisfied. It's, you know, maybe not perfect all the time, but it is beyond what I would expect or need from it. And the data always works well.

36:58And the voice signal is perfectly satisfactory. So with that in mind, here's what it comes down to. Google Fi is incredible at international. It is so good at international. Mobile, not very competitive on international. They quickly charge you for roaming. So here's what I processed. And I realized, and this is again, a very timely little thing for people that are considering it. I told my wife, I was like, I've liked Google Fi. I've used them for a long time. They're massively jacking up the rates here. And I just don't feel like it's that competitive. We're going to switch over to MetMobile.

37:26If we don't like it, we can go back. Let's just do it. We have an international trip coming up. We're going to Cape Town. I have experienced Google Fi in other countries and there's nothing like it. They just buy the contracts in other countries and it works just like you have it there. So I set it up before we left, about a week before we left, I made one mistake. And this is just a very good cautionary. You can absolutely set up Google Fi for the month that you're going out of town. But if you do it, you need to set it up before you leave. You need to be in the United States when you set it up.

37:54And very importantly, you need to be start using your data 24 hours before you leave the country. Because once I got over there, we hadn't used it on my wife's. I had set it all up. I had kind of done something on mine. I'd set it up on hers, but we hadn't switched it over and actually used it. I called customer support, could not get them to switch it over. So her phone was dead in the water with Google Fi, even though I had paid and set it all up. This is just one of those little things. You're allowed to switch your phone service. And guess what? When you didn't finance your phone and lock yourself into three years of payment so you could get the new iPhone for free, you have portability and options.

38:28So just think about that. $15 a month per person. What is the average phone bill these days? Are you tying it into your internet and your cable and you end up with a$400 a month monster package? There's 10 % savings there. Absolutely. Yeah, this is such low hanging fruit. It's interesting because when I'm going back and listening to all our old episodes, one of our most popular episodes of all time was 21. It was the Pillars of Fi. And literally one of the pillars we made is like cutting your cell phone. It was very cute. But I think what it really highlighted was the power of these small differences, these small changes.

39:03And like we said, every$100 a month, you cut out your budget. It's worth$90 ,000 to you over 20 years. And yeah, this is a perfect example. there are still lots of people who are spending 80 to$120 a month on their cell phone service per line. This is crazy. So we're not in the bag for any particular cell phone company, but I use Mim Mobile and they're fantastic. It's 15 bucks. I think I get five gigabytes of data. But the important lesson is on the path to fi, we are trying to find an optimized way to live. Now, Now, does this mean that we are like everybody else who's just freely spending and, oh, if I want it, I'm going to buy it kind of scenario?

39:45No, because we understand there are limitations to life. If we all made unlimited money, we wouldn't have to make any choices. We live in a world where we have to make choices. And one that I've made is, okay, I'm only going to spend 15 bucks a month for whatever it is, a couple gigabytes. It might even be five gigabytes of data. Frankly, I'm never even close to that, Jonathan. But what that means is I don't download podcasts and I don't stream YouTube when I'm outside of my Wi-Fi. That's it. That's the only difference I have to make. And frankly, I probably could because I have multiple gigabytes unused every month.

40:19So I probably could do that. Maybe that's even antiquated thought. But I'm making a tiny, tiny sacrifice and I'm saving$100 a month on my phone. Okay. So is this the, hey, YOLO the hell out of life. I can just throw money around like it's nothing. No, I'm making a very optimized decision and I'm just giving up this tiny, tiny little thing. And that one decision is going to be worth $90 ,000 to me. That's a no brainer. I have no comment. Moving on. Let me move on. I'll move on to one. We've done five. All right. We got to keep moving. All right. I got three all at once because they tie together.

40:55Okay. This is about automating your financial of life. I think this is the key to everything. You want to take your brain out of everything when it comes to personal finance. You set up every bill you possibly can on auto pay. I can't think of anything you have to do anymore that it doesn't allow auto pay in some regard. So please automate all of your bills. And most importantly, credit card. You want to make sure we talk a lot about credit cards here in terms of credit cards can be one of your biggest financial tools, but we are cognizant that tens of millions of people get in deep, deep trouble when it comes to credit cards.

41:30This is why Dave Ramsey is so dogmatic about not touching credit cards. I understand where he's coming from. I think we're smart enough in the FI community to understand why he does that for the people that he talks to and why our advice is a little bit different. We can succeed wildly when it comes to credit cards in terms of travel rewards and such, but you have to pay your card on time and in full every single month or none of it is worth it. the interest-free loan you get, the travel rewards, all the good stuff, the protections, none of it is worth it if you're paying 25 % interest. So please set up your credit card to pay from your checking account on time and full every single month.

42:05Pay yourself first. That's another really important thing. If you've previously spent every dollar that comes in, and all of a sudden you listen to Chooseify and you have a new mindset, it's all well and good to think you're going to change overnight. But realistically, our brains get in the way. We want to let our brains off the hook. We want to just set up principles so that things just work. That the pay yourself first mantra that you've heard in personal finance for decades, it genuinely works because the money is gone. Then you can freely spend whatever else is left, but that's it. You can't get into trouble because you've already saved your 10, 20, 30, maybe more percent of your income because it's just getting sent to where you need it to be sent.

42:49whether it's your IRA, your 401k, traditional savings, whatever it is, it's happening automatically in the background. So that's my talk is pay yourself first, automate everything, pay your credit cards, don't let your brain get in the way. Yeah. You could very easily now shift this and now talk about getting your brain out of the way on the investment side either. And I'm going to, I'm going to stagger or just run barrel my way through a couple of these to put them together. The fees matter, the fees matter. So we have on here, you know, Are you aware if your mutual fund or your advisor has you in funds that have a 1 % fee and then they've got some sort of fee on top of this, are you aware of what the cost of those fees are to your portfolio balance over a period of 20 or 40 years?

43:33Do you realize how that compounds? If you were to have a 1 % fee, whether it's coming from your advisor or coming from the actual funds that they have you in versus having the same result in a fund that didn't have any fees. It's cutting your portfolio in half over an investing lifetime. It's a traumatic amount of money when you look at it through that lens. So the fees matter. Now, next to that, it's very easy and simple. And I feel like when I say, Brad, I promise we'll come back to this one and we'll do the math on that for you. We have a whole episode. In fact, Brad, you have the note on what episode we did that on?

44:08I don't, but I actually just pulled up a compound interest calculator to do it. Go ahead. Run the example. I was thinking we were going to go ahead and knock out three or four. You've just cut my barrel out from underneath me, but go for it. Let's be correct here. It's a big one. I mean, it's a game-changing epiphany here. It's a really important one. So, okay, what I did was really simple. We use an 8 % annual return here at Chizovaya as the back of the envelope, what we anticipate. Now, obviously, some years are more than that. Some years are negative. We can never know exactly what the growth will be of the stock market, but over the long haul, 8 % is what we use.

44:42So I said, this is a 40 year investing lifetime and you put in a thousand dollars a month. Okay. Now that sounds like a big number to a lot of people, but really you make a hundred grand between a couple or even a solo person, a hundred dollars a month is a 12 % savings rate. So that's, that's a lot of people in the fight community are many multiples of that. So I basically said, all right, look, we expect a 8 % annual return. But when you invest in something like VTI or VTSAX, there's a couple of hundredths of a percent, tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of what's called the expense ratio, the underlying expenses.

45:19So I said, okay, let's say it's four one hundredths of a percent. So the best return you could get is 7.96%, somewhere in that vicinity. Okay. So Jonathan, if you put in a thousand dollars a month at 7.96 % on your return after 40 years, you have$3.45 million. not bad. That's not too shabby. That's if you save 12%. Okay. So most of us in the FI community are going to have three and a half million dollars. Okay. Which is pretty cool in and of itself. Now, like you said, if you go to an advisor who charges you a 1 % fee, which sounds like nothing, they charge us assets under management. It's AUM.

45:57So 1%, but they're not going to put you in VTI or VTSA. They can't justify that. They can't. How could you say, well, I'm just going to put you in the same thing as everybody else. They have to be more creative to justify their brilliance and more importantly, their fee. Exactly. So they try. And even though we believe there are no mutual funds on earth, actively managed funds that are going to beat the market over 40 years. So I think it's a fool's errand. But like you said, it's about incentives. So this person has to convince you that they are brilliant. So they're going to put you in a fund that has something akin to another 1 % fee.

46:31So that means your 8 % market return now goes down to 6%, right? So you're getting a 6 % annual return. You're still putting that thousand bucks in a month over 40 years. Instead of having 3.45 million, you have 1.99. You have$2 million. I threw out where it's going to cut it in half. And I remember those numbers. They sat with me and it was raw and it was painful, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure if that's what your calculator was going to say. That's crazy. It is almost, almost half. That is unbelievable. So the key here, the incremental gain is fees matter and they matter a lot. They just matter.

47:09And Brad, you know, it also ties to what you just said earlier about how you just need to automate things. I want to point this out. All of us have this feeling about what the market's going to do over a period of time. But also as we get more and more money that's sitting on the sidelines that we could invest, we get more and more anxious about which point should we go in. So getting your brain out of the way and thinking about horizon is so much more important. Horizon and fees are so much more important than when you go in with your bag of money. And I'll give everybody an example. It should be crystal clear in all of our minds, COVID happened, right?

47:44And there was just this crazy fear around what was going to happen at any given point. And there were people that probably called it right and people that called it wrong and maybe regretted at the point. My point here is now, it's now 2026 and you're sitting on all this money that you've had on the sidelines this entire time waiting for the quote unquote market to drop so you can find a big opportunity. You could go back and find the worst day to invest in the market back when, right before COVID happened and you'd still be thrilled with the choice and you'd rather have the money invested than where it is now.

48:20Time really matters here. And it's so easy to get caught up in, oh, what's the right day? Should I do it at the beginning of the day? And people much wiser than me have said and quoted, time in the market is so much more important than timing the market. And the problem with winning when you time it once and nail it is you start to think that you are really good at this. And we only get one life. So it's only when you look back that you realize, wow, I, uh, okay. Got the wind there, but it would have been really easy just to take my brain out of it. And I would have been, you know, 3.45,$4 million, you know, just based on stupid math and investing over a long time horizon.

49:05That's just the reality of this. Nobody keeps up with the market because their brain gets in the way and they want to pick the right day and the wrong day and you get it right once or twice, but you don't stay that way over an investing horizon. Very, very, very few individuals over a 40-year period can do that. And it's not your advisor. Yeah. And Jonathan, that's clearly the massive impact for fees, but there are fees everywhere. There are convenience fees, there are bank fees, there are ATM fees, there are overdraft fees, there are all sorts of fees. If you're paying fees in any aspect of your financial life unless you're doing it very purposely, right?

49:43Like I pay one or two annual fees on credit cards that I have very specific reasons to do. Like I might get a free night certificate from my Hyatt card, or I might have a couple hundred thousand Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So I keep my Sapphire Preferred card open. I'm doing that with eyes wide open and very intentionally. But if you were paying fees anywhere in your financial life, it probably means you're doing something wrong or you're just being lazy frankly if you're getting atm fees i don't know who needs cash in this day and age frankly but like if you're paying atm fees because you're too lazy to go to your bank and do it i mean come on seriously like if you're paying overdraft fees if you're any of these fees conveniences what does convenience fee matter like even down to again people in the fight community we have assets we don't have to worry about cashflow, I've noticed that sometimes like my insurance company charges me a monthly fee to pay with a credit card or something like that.

50:41So I just simply asked the question, Hey, can I pay this annually and only get hit with one of these small fees or something? Or frankly, can I pay annually with a check and not have to pay a fee? And the answer was, yes, of course you can. I asked the question. I think you're right about the outcome, but I would, I would suggest that the solution, you can be a little bit more creative. So I, I could definitely empathize with the person that's too lazy to go to their exact bank. But I agree with your point that I'm not going to pay fees. I'm going to die on the hill of trying to find ways to pay fees, especially to a entity, a banking institution that's making money by holding my money.

51:17Like this is literally, you get to hold my money. So I'm not going to pay you fees for that privilege of that. I know that you're making money off my money, you know, regardless. So with that in mind, all right, well, what are your options? Well, you could go to your bank. Absolutely. That's one way to solve it. But online banks are desperate for your business and they don't have physical locations. They're all competing for your money. And especially in that lane, if your bank is and you need to use ATMs a lot and for whatever reason that's not working for you, you should look online at an online bank that offers online checking accounts if that meets your needs.

51:48I know USA, as an example, offers up to$25 a month in ATM fee reimbursement. I'm having a personal grudge match right now with my bank because they want to charge me for checks. I happen to use and need checks for a few transactions in my life, in particular where they would charge a processing fee for a credit card or something like that. And we're talking about tithing, charitable donations, et cetera, things of this nature. And I prefer to use a check. So I go through checks and my wife uses checks when she's paying for various things for our kids. So anyways, I need checks and I'm running out of checks.

52:21My bank wants to charge me. They say, hey, if you have a checking account that has$20 ,000 average balance a month, we won't charge you for that. or you can pay us, you know, some 36 bucks for a hundred checks or whatever the number, some crazy number. I'm like, this is madness. This is mad. Well, it's on you to resolve it, right? You got to decide the level of friction and you can do the, I usually can just go and have a conversation and get the outcome that Brad just suggested where as a one-off, they're perfectly willing to just comp you these checks this one time. And by the way, the one time is about once a year, but alternatively to that, you could go find an online account that has a checking offering and gives you unlimited free checks.

53:01They're out there. So just take advantage of the fact that banks actually really, really do want your money. To me, it doesn't seem really, and this is actually another point. You shouldn't be storing lots of money in the checking account, making 0.01 % interest. So the fees work against you, but they can also, and should, you know, in terms of the form of interest, they should work for you. So if for some reason you do need to have an amount of money, like$20 ,000 plus in an account, I would not be very comfortable leaving that in an account that makes 0.01 % interest. That doesn't seem like a strong strategic move, especially if the benefit is free checks.

53:37That is very true. Very, very true. I would say I totally agree with that. My slight, slight addition and maybe counterpoint would be for me, I leave an additional couple thousand dollars extra in my checking account to lower and mitigate my stress. Okay. I think this is one of the beautiful things about personal finance is I think everything should pass for me, at least the sleep well at night test. And for me, I don't want to deal with, Hey, is my electric bill coming out on the 14th? I don't have enough money. What if my credit card bill is a little extra this month? I leave a little extra buffer in my checking account and I never have to worry about that.

54:17Now I am, again, I'm doing below 20 to 18, five for a day. They're hitting you with five bucks a month. Well, that's crazy. That's absolutely crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely not talking about your crazy scenario, but just in general, I agree. You're, you're softening me. I'm thinking about it. I'm like, all right, was that too hard? I mean, you want, if you have money sitting on the sidelines, you should try to optimize it to whatever degree you can. I mean, we can agree on that. Yeah. Without a doubt, without a doubt. And I think that's something, Another kind of countercultural thing that we've talked about here is the concept of the emergency fund.

54:48And this, we had Big Earn from early retirement now on a couple of years ago to talk about this very specifically where he argues, and we in turn argued as well, that we don't need the massive emergency fund in the traditional sense. I think a lot of people who have financial issues, for them to get to a couple thousand dollars of net worth is a massive thing. And we're not arguing against that. It's just, let's talk very specifically people on the path to FI. We have an increasing amount of assets and we're going to be very wealthy, right? Many of us have a hundred thousand or more in terms of assets.

55:25Now let's say my annual expenses are $60 ,000 a year. So six months of expenses are 30 grand, right? Do I need$30 ,000 sitting in a checking account or even a high yield savings account doing nothing? No, I don't because I I have assets and there are very few things short of a ransom note or something crazy that you actually need a ton of cash for in a couple of hours. Basically, in this day and age, you can transfer money in one or two business days. So our argument on that episode was you can invest all of your money above and beyond whatever that threshold is. Like I said, I keep probably five to ten thousand dollars in my checking account just as a sleep well at night test, but you could put less than that in, frankly, if you had money pouring in every month from your W-2 job.

56:10But above and beyond that, if I had money sitting in my investments in an emergency, I just sell the investments and I transfer the money over. So it's an interesting rethink on the traditional emergency fund, which is, oh, wow, I've saved this money. It's just sitting here. I'm safe now. We're all safe on the path to fly. We have plenty of assets and they're growing every month. And going back to things that we talked about earlier, this is one of the reasons you were mentioning the Roth, you can get your Roth contributions out. You can get them out anytime. You don't need to be 59 and a half.

56:43So in terms of where can your emergency fund go past a certain point, if you're waiting to invest some very, very long time because you feel like you need to have some monster amount of money to be able to have an emergency fund before you can do it, the rethink here is it's not debating whether or not you should have a way to cover an unexpected expense. Like, right, it's where is it? And there's a lot of options. And some people might say, well, it could never be in anything outside of a checking or a savings or a CD or whatever, or it could only be in a taxable account. And we're saying, if you understand the rules of this game, there's a lot more flexibility than you would have ever considered.

57:21And if you have$30 ,000 worth of contributions in your Roth IRA, first of all, if you don't have an emergency fund and you're relatively early on in your journey, congratulations, you're winning. But then if you do have an emergency and that happens to be the only free cash that you have and you have to resolve this, that money's accessible. Your contributions are accessible. So it's just, it's misguided to say, well, that money's locked up in retirement. No, your contributions can be accessed before 59 and a half. You can't have the gain back that that is where you're going to get taxed and penalized if you try to pull that.

57:54So just be very aware of that difference and really start thinking through where does that and how much does that emergency fund need to be and where does it need to be? How long are you going to delay investing for your future? Brad, all right. I'm going to admit defeat. Let's see here. We had a goal of getting 100 things mentioned. That was maybe an unspoken goal. I don't know if we said it out loud, but we made it to 14 or 15. So I guess, and here's what I would say. If it was just us quoting a list without commentary it's a mediocre value but i'm finding this very informative and i'm it's just it's great so i am open to doing another round of these what do you think let's do it okay all right everyone so we will be returning same bat time same bat channel and we'll be doing uh financial and if brad was that did that land does anybody still remember that little 1960s batman television i got it okay cool just making sure i just like i don't know i don't how far back are you allowed to go man that was you know was it the greatest superhero television show of all time i'm not telling you that it wasn't uh anyways we'll be back at the same time next week and we're going to go farther with these things that you just don't know that you don't know and we're going to try to i thought we were just going to list them that's what brad told me i didn't totally believe them because i've i've been here before but nonetheless like i'm actually pretty happy with the level of depth that we're covering i think it's better for you this way and as a result of this totally good we're doing another round of this we'll try to hit a few more next week and then we'll see if we need to keep going.

59:20But let us know, is this working for you? Are you enjoying this? Does this feel like the show that you want to check back in for? And to that end, I want to invite you to be a part of it. So we had a bunch of contributions for our goal setting for 2026. We're going through the process of listening to those, reading those, and building our episode around it. That's going to be rolling out in the next couple of weeks here. So that is now closed, but we are going to be featuring segments and we want to feature you on these segments in many, many episodes to come. And so there's two segments. It's going to always be open, right?

59:55It's all, no matter when you're listening to this, we want your feedback. We want your voicemail. And the two segments that we're announcing right now, and they're probably not a surprise, but hopefully they're exciting, are Frugal Win of the Weeks and Life Hacks. And so I will give Brad just a second to explain, Brad, what is a frugal win of the week? Yeah, Jay. So good question. I actually highlighted one of these a couple of weeks ago on our first episode back that came out at the beginning of this month where it was just something simple. It was, hey, I have these element electrolyte packages every morning and I actually found a way instead of paying$1.50 to them per package, which was crazy for some salt, magnesium, and potassium to make it myself at a cost of a couple pennies.

1:00:42That's something really simple. And it was just like a fun, fun win. I think that's what we're looking for. Like another one that I've got, which is I'm in this walkable community now and Whole Foods is actually here in the community. It's a five minute walk down the road. On Tuesdays, they have buy one, get one on pounds of ground beef. So I literally put in this, another life hack or, and this actually ties into life hacks is one of my longstanding life hacks is I use this app called to do it. So T O D O I S T. And basically I put my entire life in this to do it. So I have outsourced my entire brain to this.

1:01:19Jonathan, I kid you not. I have a recurring task on Tuesday, which is go to Whole Foods for buy one, get one ground beef. And it's just a nice little way I can go anytime. I can be lazy. I can go whenever, or I can just go on Tuesday when they have the sale. This was just a cool little frugal one of the week. So along those lines, up to massive things. It doesn't have to be minuscule like my two. It can be something significant. So maybe that gives a little flavor for both frugal ends of the week and life hacks. There are hundreds of thousands of you listening to this podcast. You have so many incredible things that you're doing in your lives.

1:01:54Let's share them. This is the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. This is what it's all about. It's not limited to me and Jonathan. It is expansive. It's all about you send these things in, send what you're doing. And we want to talk about them. We can bomb through these life hacks. We can talk about dozens of them, or maybe five or 10 since you and I'll bog down with, with all our commentary, but that's the cool thing. These are forever. These are evergreen. And we're going to talk about them. Hopefully on just about every episode, we'll pass along a Fuga one of the week and a life hack.

1:02:25Someone's like, Brad, Jonathan, can you just get out of the way, more of the information. I don't need all the editorial. So how does, how does someone submit this? Yeah, absolutely. So Brad and I have been racking our brains for what intuitive looks like. This is something Brad's heard me say intuitive. It doesn't come easy. It's earned over time. And so we have decided this is the path forward. You're just going to go to choose a buy.com slash login. It's that simple, right? If you want to be a part of the community, you need to be a part of the community. So you're going to do that and you're immediately going to have a dashboard and at the top of your dashboard, it could change over time, but a version of calls to action, right?

1:03:01How are you going to take action each and every week and also be a part of the podcast? How do you want to, do you want to contribute to the podcast? So this, you know, top dashboard item that will show up as soon as you log in will be your gateway to contribute to the show or to do something based on something you heard on the show. We just wrapped up our goals where people shared with us their goals for 2026. We're putting that episode now, but right in that same area, you're also going to see the option to leave a frugal win of the week or to leave a life hack. So a life hack is a super broad, expansive thing that can cover anything you really, you know, you want that you just think other people need to know about.

1:03:39For me today, I just was letting you know, Hey, you may not be Google Fi year round, but if you're doing international travel, they are really, really good for international travel, but make sure you use it the day before you leave the country to make sure that you don't have any issues on the other side, but you might have one about a very niche scholarship opportunity that had something to do with being a caddy at some school in the Midwest. We've had these before and they have provided value to many, many thousands of people over the years. So if you have something you haven't heard us mention on the show and you think we need to be aware of it, we want to bring you in and we want to feature that information.

1:04:15Absolutely. And we will certainly be adding additional segments. So it's not just going going to be limited to those two, but that's where we're rolling out right now. So yeah, truceyvet.com slash login. This also doubles as the local group. So whenever you want to log into your local group, when you create an account, you will get email invites for all the local group events, which is absolutely critical. We have been hamstrung by Facebook for eight or nine years now, where only a tiny percentage of people, thanks to their ridiculous algorithm, get notifications. Now you get an email notification of every local group event.

1:04:48Jonathan, we've seen 30 to 50 % increases in local group attendance since admins have started using your platform. And it's really, really remarkable. If you don't, for some reason, remember choosavet.com slash login, you could just go to our main homepage, choosavet.com. In the upper right, there's sign in. You can go there. That doubles as the same thing, but just really simply, if you wanted that nice, simple thing, choosavet.com slash login. All right, my friends, the fire is spreading. We'll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled.

1:05:20Thank you.