Wouldn't It Be Cool If ?? | Open the Aperture With Jonathan And Brad | Ep 532

0:10Hello everyone, welcome. We've made it to 2025 and today we're going to kick it to kick it. a new series. You know, the acronym is a little bit wordy. The idea behind the series is, wouldn't it be cool if I've been playing around with those letters and it's just, it's WBSIF. I don't know, it's WBSIF. So today is our first WBSIF episode. And to help me with this, I have my co-host Brad here with me today. How you doing, buddy? Hey, Jonathan, I'm doing quite well. Yeah, that definitely does not roll off the tongue. I don't know, maybe it's destined for a t-shirt at some point. You never know. I can see it.

0:41I can see it. Bracelets. We could do bracelets. Well, happy 2025. I realize maybe people are listening to this years from now and they're like, man, that was so long ago. But I mean, 2025, time has flown, man. I mean, I was just thinking about this in terms of your own personal financial independence journey. This is kind of a big deal for you. Yeah, it is. Actually, this very week is a big deal for me. So I left my job. I left my corporate job as a CPA 10 years ago, almost to the day. My last day was January 31st, 2015. And now we're in February of 2025, which is crazy. I mean, Jonathan, you and I met eight and a half years ago at this point.

1:19We've been doing Chooseify together for more than eight years. It's crazy. I remember when you celebrated your 40th and I was like, man, 40 years old. He's old. I'm celebrating my 40th this year. Oh, wow. Are you really? Oh, wow. It's wild. I still think of you as like 32 or whatever when we met 31. That's crazy. He'll be 21 one of these days. He just grows up a little bit slower. Oh, that's wild. But yeah, it's so interesting to think that I've been out of the corporate workforce for a decade now. And I think it's been an interesting intersection of FI and entrepreneurship, which I think, frankly, those are two main themes of what we've talked about over nearly 700 episodes now.

2:03And I think I gained an immense amount of strength, power, and autonomy in my life by pursuing FI for a 12-year, fairly abbreviated, but 12-year corporate career. but then it was fascinating and we talk about fu money as you like to call it a freedom unlimited money right it's a family show so i mean at that point i was well on the path to five very you know reasonably close but i wasn't there by the definition of 25x phi and obviously our view of phi in the intervening eight years since we've started choose a vi has changed dramatically in terms of now there's coast phi there's barista phi there are all these things but back then it was just five.

2:45It was essentially, you're either 25 bucks your expenses or you're not. And it was zero or one. And I clearly was not. But what was cool was I had this side hustle. I had this little website called richmondsavers.com and I was helping people with travel rewards. And I thought I could make that into a business. I thought I could turn it into something. And yeah, Jonathan, the wild part, right? Like the very next day after I left my job, I started Travel Miles 101. and that's where you found me. And it's so interesting. I like to think about life and it's kind of wacky sometimes when you think about this.

3:16It's like there was that movie Sliding Doors years ago and it's all these different paths that your life could take. And you really think about these moments that seem meaningless at the time and you just can never foresee where they're going to take you. And I mean, you sending me an email in mid-2016, just a random guy off the street who I'd never met before was, I mean, clearly one of those moments. Choose a Vibe very obviously does not exist without that. And it's fascinating. I think for all of us, for me, the takeaway is leave yourself open to serendipity. You never know what's going to happen in life.

3:51It's impossible to predict where you're going to be 10 years from now, five years from now, even three years from now. And that's the beauty of the Path to Vibe is we have so many options. Because we have saved money diligently and let it grow and compound. We have options that traditional regular people, if you will, and that's a kind of a weird term, but regular people just simply don't have. And I just find it, Jonathan, so exciting. You know, you really opened up a lot of options for what we're going to talk about. A lot of pathways there, a lot of sliding doors that we can go down with this one.

4:23And I always find it inspiring because when you think about this concept that someone can choose financial independence, that someone can choose to pursue financial independence, it quite literally just starts with the idea, the inception that it might be possible. And I want people to appreciate that there's a lot of people that have never considered that. It's never even entered their mind that you might question the narrative of whatever the normal path is for various reasons. But just by giving yourself permission to explore it, here's the thing. Could I tell you definitively, everybody that's listening to the show that has entertained the idea, what exactly you will be doing 10 years?

5:03No, no idea. No idea. But I can guarantee you, you will never regret having more options in your life. And through the lens of what you said, like this is a continuum. It's not binary. So many of us are just, you know, head down, do what we're supposed to do, get the performance review, get the raise, you know, just go through the normal thing. that we never question what would it look like if I actually had a little bit of space? What would it look like if I got to just take a step back? You know, that line about if you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, you're either working in the business or on the business.

5:38Well, you can apply that to your life. Are you working in your life or on your life? Just take a step back. And what I'm saying is when we're talking about this decision to choose financial independence, to consider that it might be possible, or even ask what would my life look like if it were possible? What would it look like if I could just take a step back and just say, all right, here's where I'm at now. And this is a progression of small steps that I'm not even responsible for like coming up with from scratch. I just need to take a look at all the various things that this community has done and say, of those, which ones do I want to steal?

6:11Which ones do I want to implement? Which ones do I want to try? There's no downside. Right. And my, you know, where I've ended up has looked different than where Brad ended up and look different than when any of my peers have ended up. But neither of us looks back with any regret about pursuing financial independence. You always benefit from having more options in your life. Yeah. And what you said there about believing it's possible. I think to me, that is maybe the single most important thing that we do here is try to help people understand. So if you're listening to this, FI is the one reliable way for middle-class people to get wealthy.

6:51Just very simple, hard stop, end of story. This is the one reliable way. you live slightly below your means. You have a savings rate. You invest for the long-term. You're not trying to gamble and win at some penny stock or something crazy. You're investing for the only timeline that matters, which is long-term. You're investing for 40, 50, 60 years. That's what we're doing here. We are thinking long-term and truly that fine number. So right, Jonathan, believing it's possible. I think for most people, they have no sense of is retirement, is financial independence ever even plausible for me because you hear a drumbeat of negativity in the regular financial media just a drumbeat it's impossible you can't do this health care is going to cost too much blah blah blah whatever is going to cost too much inflation yada yada yada and i think i think what we do here is we make we make it an internal locus of control where instead of this external thing that someone else is acting on you you actually have the power and autonomy because your entire financial independence number drives off of very simply, what does my life cost?

7:56Okay. So your fine number is just, okay, my life costs$60 ,000 a year. You multiply by 25 and my fine number is$1.5 million. And that's my North star. Okay. We can then get into the minutia of parsing. What's the exact safe withdrawal rate. And we can go as deep as you want to go. But frankly, I'm the host of choose a fi and I don't go that deep. I don't care because it's a North star. And I know I am on this trajectory or I have been on this trajectory and path that has given me that North star to shoot for. And now I've reached a point of financial independence and it's this wonderful degree of certainty.

8:36There's never certainty in life, right? Let's be clear. We could get hit by an asteroid tomorrow and who the heck knows, right? or zombie apocalypse, et cetera, you know, all the things that I jokingly say, but I have this degree of certainty and control over my life that I simply wouldn't have had if I didn't find fi, if I didn't save money. And if I didn't think about how can I live life a little bit differently, Jonathan, right at the end of the day, that's what we're doing here. We're living life a little bit differently than our neighbors. I think frankly, we're living the same middle or upper middle-class lifestyle as everybody else around us, but we're getting wealthy in the process because like you said, it's these little actions.

9:13But when you stack those little actions, it turns into something remarkable. We were at a friend's house, some acquaintance's house. We've met them because they have a kid that's in my son's class and they're just a delightful family. And we were having a conversation. And at some point, the what have you been up to? And I was explaining that I've been working on something for ChooseFI and explaining a little bit about what ChooseFI was, what this concept was. And the direction took a hard fork, hard fork to the left. and the fellow that I was talking with, great guy, but he was just saying, I mean, is that something that like people like do that, that they're open to?

9:48Like, is that something that people, cause, cause I don't, you know, and I could tell that I'd hit a little bit of a trigger point or a pain point. It wasn't in my intent. I genuinely was just saying, Hey, this is what I've been working on, you know, specifically. And then, Oh, by the way, the backstop is here's what, you know, we talk about, this is what it is. But now we're talking about, is this concept of financial independence, just a valid concept, like that people actually do this. And I was like, well, well, this conversation just got, you know, uh, simple for me or exciting for me. You know, this is something I obviously enjoy talking about, but it was something that this individual was truly grappling with for the first time.

10:24The identity statement was, you know, I've just never really been that good with money or put that much into my always, it's something that I need to look into probably more in the future, but I don't even, you know, it was, it was a bunch of things that are very common that all of us have probably, many of us have felt these identity statements about ourselves that, you know, I'm a bad gardener, I'm a bad whatever, I don't do this. Like, it's just, you know, okay, that's fine. But, and I wasn't trying to be in the position of saying you're wrong because this is how someone feels, right? I was truly just saying what it was.

10:57And so, you know, I answered it in the way that many of you are probably familiar with us on the show and I just was kind of talking through, well, yeah, you know, it's not binary. It's, you know, it's just, this is just a playbook for life. I mean, there's nothing, get rich quick is usually a scheme that ends up with your money in someone else's pocket. But there is clearly a playbook of truth that leads predictably to some people having better outcome than others that don't benefit from the playbook, right? Not all of us are given a silver spoon. Not all of us are handed a monster inheritance.

11:26Those of us that are building wealth for the first time have to predictably spend less than we make over time, wisely invest that, not for a guaranteed outcome, but for a high probability of success. And when you rinse and repeat these best patterns, predictably the odds of your success increase. And so what we do is we just identify those patterns and we implement it. Money in your checking account is not going to do as good as money in your savings account. When you pay a crazy amount of fees on everything, you're predictably going to have less money than when you don't. When you don't optimize your taxes, well, that decision will take care of itself, right?

12:07It's just a series of these patterns that we implement. And in aggregate, they lead to exponentially different outcomes. All right. So that's the how without going into specifics, but then the why is equally important. And it was this conversation was a little bit of both. And the why was just, you know, I like the flexibility. I like the control. I like to be able to have a little bit more say over where my best energy, my best years go. I want to work. It's not that I don't want to work, but I want to work on the things that light me up, not the things that necessary, you know, light my corporate private equity company ownership up.

12:43They're just they're different. And there's alignment for a period of time when your need for the income is, you know, high enough and your ability to self-dictate is low enough. But if it's a continuum, you end up seeing them kind of start to converge. And long before one passes the other, you can start to say, you know what, maybe I don't need to do the worst of the worst of the worst every single time. Maybe I don't need to fall on that sword every single time. And then somewhere along the way, you get to maybe an impasse where you have to choose between your best interest and private equity's best interest.

13:18And you say, yeah, I think I'm going to choose mine. And guess what? They fill that slot the next day, right? That's fine. That's fine. And that's kind of the situation I ended up in. We don't need to get back into that, but I was just relaying just a little bit of that. Like just say, forget like full financial independence. Maybe that seems impossible to you, but I can see there's maybe there's some stressors going on right now. Imagine if you just had six months, one year. You didn't need to worry about how you're going to put food on the table, how you're going to provide for your family, how you're going to just imagine you had a window, a two-year window where if you brought in zero income for the next two years, you could refigure out everything, right?

14:00You could reset. Would you be doing exactly what you're doing now? I'm not telling you to change it. Then I'm just saying, entertain the thought experiment. You have no need to earn any income for the next two years and you can fork and move in a completely different direction, what would you do with that window? If you have no ideas, man, we've got an opportunity to do some exploring because this is free. This is just entertaining the idea. Where could we be in two years? Yeah. It's opening the aperture. Oh, I like that. Do we already have the title locked in? You're welcome, my friend. You're welcome.

14:35So many people live these closed-off lives. And I think that's what I've noticed is so beautiful about all of us in the fight community is we think a little bit differently. We have a zest for life. We're trying to live our lives. And Jonathan, you always say this, that time is your one non-renewable resource and to give it up willingly to a job that you can barely tolerate just doesn't really make any sense. And the cool thing is, again, there's so many more ways to think about fight, to think about life now than there were when we started this eight years ago. I know our great friend Jillian Johnsrud has talked at length about mini retirements.

15:13In fact, I've been on a mini retirement slash quasi mini retirement the last couple of months, starting with my big trip to Bali and Asia. And you can take these time periods, you can do different things. And I think that is my one call to action today in terms of this theoretical stuff is if you're listening to this for the first time, or you're fairly new to FI, this really works. This is not get rich quick. And we're certainly not selling you anything here. This is not what we do in the FI community. This is about taking the power back in your life. But let's be clear, you need to take action, okay?

15:48You cannot just listen to us. You need to actually get up off that couch and take action to make your life better. And the cool thing is, it doesn't have to start with massive things. It can start with little things. Jonathan, I think you mentioned fees in there somewhere, maybe with bank accounts or something. And, and I was thinking back to one of our earliest episodes, probably in the first five episodes, it was me on like a rant about don't pay any fees. And like, it sounds silly. It sounds small, but look at your financial life. Are you paying unnecessary fees anywhere? Are you, hopefully people aren't paying ATM fees anymore or you don't really need that much cash, but like, are you paying bank fees?

16:24Are you paying late payment fees? Like these are self-inflicted wounds. If you're doing that, it's just an unforced error. You don't have to do that. And like, there's so much low hanging fruit in terms of your budget, in terms of what your life costs. And I think it just, it needs a little bit of intentionality. Okay. So you cannot just graze through life and reach financial independence. You can't, it's not going to happen. I can promise you that, but can you apply a little bit of intentionality to it and make some significant changes? So we always say, and I think this is a really stark example is for every$100 that you cut out of your monthly expenses.

17:01Okay. So your monthly budget, if you can cut a hundred dollars, you need$30 ,000 less in your net worth, your financial independence number, your financial independence number decreases by 30 ,000 for every hundred dollars that you cut out of your, your monthly expenses. Jonathan, that is remarkable. And I mean, most people who are finding five today can make changes instantly that cut out a couple hundred dollars. So we're talking potentially of 300 bucks, it's 90 grand less you need to reach five. And that's just simple stuff. Then you start getting into, as we talk about, maybe you start getting into what kind of car do you have instead of having an$800 a month car payment?

17:38Do you buy a used car and pay it off or even a new car and pay it off and drive it for another 10 years? Well, that's 800 bucks a month. That's not insignificant, right? That's almost a quarter of a million dollars less you need in your five numbers. So the little things are the big things. That's the key. But at the end of the day, Jonathan, it's action. Thanks for listening to Chooseify and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Chooseify is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at chooseify.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you.

18:14Thanks for being part of our community and for your support. you know brad you really you teed us up to talk about the wouldn't it be cool if aspect right so this is a series and we have probably 12 to 16 of these episodes just in our minds but i think what we want to do is we want to extend an invitation and it will be a regular invitation but we're going to do these in two parts kind of like we did the friday roundhouse back in the day slightly differently. We're going to actually reverse it. So what we're going to do is Brad and I are going to schedule several of these episodes. We have it mapped out in our mind.

18:53It's something we wanted to do. And we had a couple of false starts. We've named it various things. We've called it Five Fundamentals. We've called it Financial Independence A to Z. But really, we just wanted to go through this content in a very comprehensive way. But the hangup was always that we could either do a very thorough job or we could kind of do something where it's crowdsourced but it was very hard to do both together because they require a lot of communication and organization and it's a relational thing to build an episode together. And so what we wanna do is invite you to build the episode with us.

19:26So we kinda just did a little bit of a why-fi right now, which is always an important conversation before you go into anything tactical. Nobody cares about the math until they get the why. And I'll just tell you that the individual that I was speaking to this conversation came back a few days later. I think we had something going on with the kids and this guy's super committed and dedicated to his family. He loves to be present. He loves to be at these events and probably due to a work conflict. He just couldn't choose to be there at this particular time. And he said to me, Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I've been thinking about what we talked about for like the last three days.

19:58It's just been in my head. And I was thinking about it, you know, when I couldn't come to this event, that it would be really nice to have some of these options.

20:08So So now we have permission, and you're giving us permission by continuing to listen, to talk about the how. And we're going to do this together. So today we're going to finish this episode just briefly transitioning and talking a little bit about the FI number. But that's because this is going to be the topic that we're inviting you into to start with, our kind of our A to Z series. Calculate your financial independence number. How much do I need? And so we're going to talk about this concept just for a few minutes to tee this up. And then when this episode goes live, we're going to keep the feedback options open specific to this episode for about three or so weeks to give you a chance to listen to the episode, to interact with the episode.

20:52And we're opening a brand new platform, which you'll be able to hop into. We're going to make it very simple and we'll have more details to follow. And Brad will be sharing it in the newsletter as well. It'll be very easy to find just on the homepage. and you'll be able to find this episode and you'll be able to leave a voicemail. If you think you have something that we missed, you'll be able to ask your questions and you'll be able to get feedback either from us or from other people in the community. We'll collect the feedback for a couple of weeks until we have enough. And then we're gonna come back and we're gonna do a comprehensive episode.

21:22And what I love about this approach, and I'll get Brad's feedback as well as, you know, eight years ago when we first started and we just wanted to share kind of what was on our minds, we would release content and it was good. I mean, it was a good episode. It was entertaining. It had a lot of truth in it. But we would immediately get feedback and we kind of cringe because there were obvious things that we missed or we would have loved to add. But at this point, it was too late. And so by doing it this way, those of you that are super invested in getting this comprehensive look, you know, a lot of these considerations will have an ability for us to kind of seed the idea.

21:54You'll be able to ask your questions and you'll also be able to provide, you know, thoughtful insight either by voicemail or by a discussion comment. And we will bring those back in and create our evergreen version of this piece of material. In this case, we'll be talking about calculating your financial independence number. So Brad, I'll hand that one back to you. There's a lot there, but I just kind of want to set the stage for why we're calling this Wouldn't It Be Cool If? Yeah. And I love that when you came up with that phrase. So yeah, I mean, to me and why I'm so excited about this and why I think you should be so excited about this is this is actually fulfilling the goal that Jonathan and I and the community set back in 2017, which is to make choose fi the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show or community is ultimately what it's turned into.

22:43And frankly, like Jonathan said, we've tried a couple of times and we just never, we never had the tech. And I think we've had to basically cede that to Facebook, which frankly, most people absolutely love Facebook and want nothing to do with it. And that's probably more true now than ever. And I think it's never sat well with me that our entire community is on Facebook. And it's worked to some degree, but it just, it never worked beautifully. And I mentioned this on an earlier episode a couple of months ago when I had Jonathan on was Jonathan has worked his tail off the last year or two to create something remarkable.

23:21And it was with the goal in mind to be of service to our whole community, to you. And what's wonderful is we have the smartest, most interesting people in the whole world in the five community. And wouldn't it be cool if we could harness that ability to create something great for all of us and to do this in public, to work together, to create something awesome and to constantly keep updated. I think, Jonathan, that's one of the biggest things, right? Is things are constantly changing. And that's yet another thing that I love about the bike community is we're always looking down the field, right?

23:59Like things change constantly. That's just a fact of life. Nothing ever stays the same. And we need to stay on top of it, right? So there's some new rule on rolling 529s into a Roth. And like, that's uncertain right now. Well, what if we created a page on our website, as we're going to talk about, and created something cool about that and kept that constantly updated with not only our friends and colleagues who are experts, but you in the community who is maybe going through this and maybe has done it or maybe has a question. That is our goal here is to provide something that can be a true resource for all of us.