Do you have a career that’s hard to walk away from? Whether it’s because you’ve invested time and money into your education, or took the time to climb the corporate ladder to finally be at the top, can you really walk away when you hit the 4% rule? And should you?
We will break that down today.
**Mindy Jensen:** Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me, as always, is my CEO on FIRE co-host, Scott Trench.
**Scott Trench:** Thanks, Mindy. Always great to be here. Doctoring up someone’s financials, uh, here. Looking forward to it today.
**Mindy Jensen:** BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires.
**Scott Trench:** You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting. We are so excited to have Leif, Physician on FIRE, here on BiggerPockets Money today, and Leif, of course, uh, for those who know him, started in a great spot to approach FIRE. He is a doctor, uh, earning a very high income and spent very little out of the Midwest. Uh, no surprises that he was able to satisfy the financial independence equation and do that between the frugality and the very high-powered offense on the income front. But we’re also going to talk about his business success, which he started while working full-time as an anesthesiologist, and how that’s parlayed into the ultimate early retirement and incredible options. We’re also going to get into the mindset of actually retiring and how you might really have to go well beyond the 4% rule in order to pull the trigger.
**Mindy Jensen:** Before we get into Leif’s story, we want to thank our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Connect Invest, real estate investing simplified and within your reach. Now, back to the show.
Leif Dahleen, Physician on FIRE, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. I am so excited to talk to you.
**Leif Dahleen:** This should be a lot of fun. I’m uh, you know, overdue to join you on a podcast and so I’m glad we could be here. I’m glad Scott was able to join us and this should be a lot of fun.
**Mindy Jensen:** This will be a lot of fun. For those of you who do not know, Leif is the, the man, the myth, the legend behind the Physician on FIRE blog and also, not just a clever name, he is actually a physician. So Leif, you have a, an unfair advantage that we, that’s a phrase we use here on the BiggerPockets Money podcast, and your unfair advantage is that you make a boatload of money because you’re a doctor.
How did you go from being a doctor to being financially independent? I mean, it’s, it doesn’t seem like it’s, it’s that big of a stretch. Wow, you make a lot of money, you don’t spend a lot of money, you save it up, you invest and then you retire. But there’s there’s a lot more to it, especially for somebody who is in a an occupation that is so closely tied to your personality and your person.
**Leif Dahleen:** Sure, sure. Well, you you answered part of the questions for me. Earned a lot, saved a lot, invested and lo and behold, we had enough money to do whatever we wanted, uh, including retire. Uh, but I think one of the big challenges is the fact that there are expectations, you know, from society, maybe from family, from friends like, “Oh, you’re a doctor, you’re a rich doctor.” And it starts when you’re in medical school, right? Which is you’re many, many years from becoming a poor doctor, and then maybe decades away from being a rich doctor. So, uh, the expectation to, you know, drive a particular type of vehicle or live in a certain neighborhood, um, it’s definitely there. And so, I think for me, just, you know, my identity was, uh, yeah, somewhat tied up in being a physician, but I looked at it more of, uh, you know, that’s my job, that’s that’s a career, but it doesn’t define me and it certainly doesn’t need to define, uh, how I live my life. And I found it quite easy to save, believe it or not. Now I’m making three to $400,000 a year. Uh, but I certainly know many, many, many, many physicians who had similar earning power and were not saving because this delayed gratification that, you know, we all kind of deal with in our 20s, uh, often leads to an explosion of spending in our 30s. And I feel like I was pretty well able to avoid that. Uh, I married someone who, uh, you’ve you’ve both met and know. Uh, we’re relatively frugal compared to our peers, even if we might look like spendthrifts compared to the average American household.
**Mindy Jensen:** So, I think that that is the point that I want to kind of dive into in this episode, is you had to make different choices. I mean, you said it yourself, “Oh, I was making $3 or $400,000 a year. How on earth did I retire so early? I guess we’ll never know.” Like, you know, it’s, it’s really not difficult to see, you know, the facts, but there’s a lot more nuance to it. Like you said, doctors drive fancy cars, they don’t drive HHRs, uh, except they they do sometimes. And did you ever feel like fellow doctors were kind of looking down on you when you were making these choices that didn’t align with, you know, the traditional rich doctor vibe?
**Leif Dahleen:** I can almost guarantee, uh, maybe looking down isn’t the right, uh, term, but questioning and being curious and wondering why I hadn’t yet upgraded to something better, um, to drive. But the fact is I didn’t care that much what I drove and it certainly helps to not care too much about what other people think. Like in in rural Minnesota, uh, rural Michigan, very few people drive really nice vehicles. And if you do, that might get you some envy, it might get some weird looks like, “Who does he think he is?” kind of thing, right? You know, I’m not in Miami where I’m trying to like, you know, valet park my my little, uh, Chevrolet when when there’s Lamborghinis and Ferraris all around, right? Um, you know, the nicer cars in the, you know, doctor’s parking lot might be a Ford F-150. Um, maybe they’ve got the Raptor version or something. But it was not, uh, you know, the Midwest, as you know, is not as showy, for lack of a better word, as some other places in the world. So living in relatively low cost-of-living areas and places where modesty is a virtue, uh, certainly makes it easier to live the way, um, we did.
**Scott Trench:** I think that there’s not a lot of, you know, like that makes sense, right? Like mid six-figure salary, middle-class lifestyle in the Midwest, the numbers are going to work out. You don’t have to be a great investor, although I know that you are a great investor. Um, and, you know, because you index fund. Uh, uh, you invest in index funds, so you’re a great investor.
**Leif Dahleen:** Pretty easy to be great. Yeah.
**Scott Trench:** You know, there was a big bull market. So, you know, not hard, I think, to understand how you achieve, you know, FIRE at the highest level. All that needs to pass is a couple of years, um, and the wealth will begin to compound really nicely in that front. But I don’t think a lot of people set out to become doctors so they can retire early. That’s not, that’s not really the the general life path there. I think there’s more to it around FIRE in the concept of being a doctor that is more of a mental challenge. Can you walk us through how you how you think about actually leaving the medical profession once the numbers make sense?
**Leif Dahleen:** Yeah, um, and I I want to clarify that I don’t think you really, you know, made that accusation or whatever it may be, but I certainly didn’t enter the profession with the goal of retiring early from it.
**Scott Trench:** Oh, of course not.
**Leif Dahleen:** It just, uh, you know, it was one of those things where I was good at science and math and graduated top of my class and, uh, my grandpa was a doctor and, um, my dad and his dad were dentists. So we had a lot of healthcare in the blood and it was kind of, I wouldn’t say obvious decision, but, uh, it was one of those things I knew I could do and chose to do and it was a, a good, stable career. And so I, uh, you know, found my way into anesthesiology and about 10 years into it, uh, into my career, that is, after college, after medical school and after a four-year residency, uh, you know, and at 10 years in, I was, you know, at a place where I like my job all right, but I always liked my days off even more, my weeks off even more than that. And I guess the question is, how do you stop making that $400,000 a year and be okay with it? Um, you know, one thing that makes my case a just a terrible test case, uh, a terrible case study is the fact that when I did discover financial independence, and it was what, 2014, 2015, I realized it was, you know, a whole area of study that I had kind of ignored. I knew enough to invest in mutual funds and not to buy a whole life insurance, but I didn’t know all that much about personal finance or investing, and I’d never heard of what financial independence until I discovered, you know, these FIRE blogs. And, um, I knew that other doctors were in the same boat because I probably had more of an interest in it than most people in my profession, and I still didn’t know much. So I decided to start a website talking about it. You mentioned it in the intro, Physician on FIRE. Uh, and I’ve since moved on and and sold the site to a couple of enterprising physicians who are, uh, doing a good job with it and they’ve had it, uh, in their hands for the last almost a year and a half now. Um, but what makes my, uh, case study terrible is the fact that I made additional money doing that, uh, while I was running it, and then when I sold it. But the truth is, I discovered financial independence when I’d say 2015, added up my investments, realized, at the time spending about 70,000 a year, and this was after our mortgage was paid off, after my student loans were paid off, all of that, pretty, uh, you know, our expenses were pretty modest. 70,000 a year, you know, seven years ago, probably close to 100,000 a year now. But we were financially independent when I learned about it and I just did the numbers, like 25 times that. Yeah, that’s about where we’re at. Uh, I worked another four or five years in anesthesia and so I would have been, you know, between the additional money I made and and saved during that additional four or five years and the investment returns on our nest egg, which was already about 25x, you know, I even without the website would have retired with probably pretty close to double what I would need to be financially independent. And then the earnings from running a fairly successful online business and then selling it, uh, put us, you know, even another level beyond that. Uh, so financially, the decision was easy to make.
**Mindy Jensen:** You said after you discovered the concept of financial independence and you’d learned that you were financially independent already, you continued to work for four or five more years. Why did you continue to work?
**Leif Dahleen:** I liked the job, you know, it really did. Um, I I just, it would have felt, I don’t know, to me irresponsible to to just walk away as soon as I had, you know, the money in my hand. I liked where we were living. I just I just didn’t really want to make a drastic change. And part of starting that blog and writing about it and putting my thoughts out there for the world to read and react to and respond to, uh, was a good way for me to work through, um, you know, the finances, the psychological impact, um, all of that. It really helped me kind of solidify what I wanted to do, you know, where I was at and got, you know, quite a lot of good feedback, you know, other people in similar situations, you know, how would they approach, you know, choosing retirement versus working part-time, which I did the last two years. And so I kind of eased into it. But it it wasn’t so much a part of my identity that that my ego would suffer if I wasn’t working as an anesthesiologist. And so I learned that over the course of those three to five years by thinking about it, writing about it, and even practicing, you know, some mini-retirement style trips.
**Mindy Jensen:** Stay tuned for more from Leif on why the 4% rule didn’t work for him and why most people don’t use it today. After a quick break.
Welcome back. We’re here with Leif Dahleen. Let’s jump back in.
**Scott Trench:** Leif, mechanically, how do you fund your lifestyle? Is it from dividends from your portfolio? Is it from these other types of income streams? Like how do you actually pull money from your investment portfolio to fund your lifestyle full time?
**Leif Dahleen:** Yeah, that’s a great question, Scott. The plan I had was, like you mentioned, dividends from, uh, taxable investments, which are primarily index funds, um, a real estate fund or two, and then I would sell, you know, lots that have the least amount of gain to minimize my tax, capital gains taxes. And I have been collecting on a 457(b) account, which is a deferred compensation account that I grew to, again, multiple six figures, to repeat that phrase, uh, over my 13-year anesthesia career. And so I get, uh, a few, a few thousand a month from that. So I kind of had it all planned out. And then I sold the blog and I self-financed a significant portion of that, and so I get a check every month that covers our expenses. Uh, and that will last for, uh, quite a while. So, again, terrible test case, I did have a plan and it was working, uh, but now I don’t really need that plan. I have this, uh, plan B.
**Mindy Jensen:** So when you started the blog, did you start it with the idea that you were going to sell it eventually, or did you start it just as something fun to do?
**Leif Dahleen:** I didn’t really think about an end game or an exit plan and my, I mean, if you would have asked me back then, like, do you think this will make money? And be like, well, I mean, if it makes it, you know, 100 bucks a month, I’d be really cool. But I did not expect it to do, uh, way, way, way better than that. I guess I did realize maybe a couple, three years in that this truly is an asset that someday could be sold. And, um, when you have a business that’s very much kind of one-person focused, uh, you want to, if you think you might want to take that exit someday, kind of have to pull yourself back a little bit from the focus and make it more about the reader, which I kind of always tried to do, but once I realized, oh, this is a business, not just a blog, I tried to make sure that my focus was on the reader and not just, you know, an online diary or here’s, here’s me, here’s what I’m doing. This isn’t about me, this is about you.
**Scott Trench:** You know, one of the things that has bugged me for FIRE, um, and for countless BP Money listeners, is this concept of nobody actually ever retires on the 4% rule. It is, the math is sound, it’s it, you know, we’ve exhausted that. We’ve talked to the originator of the 4% rule, the Trinity study, Bill Bengen, we’ve talked to Michael Kitces, who has expanded on that work and refined it and polished it, made it really shiny. You know, so we we’ve talked about it, we will not question the math, but nobody ever actually acts on that. You know, again, if you can find that person who is truly a 4% rule early retiree with no other income streams, no large cash cushion, no social security, please refer them to BiggerPockets Money podcast, we would love to interview them. We have never found that person, um, and I don’t think we ever will. What is striking about your situation is not that you’re abnormal, but that that is, you know, every early retiree we’ve talked to has this, that’s actually living the early retiree lifestyle, um, and is not working to earn income, has these aces in the hole, something else beyond that, a massive real estate portfolio or a large cash position or a pension or a business or a side hustle or they work, uh, I went back to work or they’re a “wife-y”. That’s a popular one, too. But I’m I’m more curious about getting into your head here and thinking, you know, how do you think you would have been able to retire on the 4% rule and make that leap?
**Leif Dahleen:** When I was blogging, I wrote up an investor policy statement, and in that, I said that I would retire with 40 to 50x our spending. And why so much, right? That gives me a two to two and a half percent withdrawal rate, uh, which is quite a bit lower than 4%. Um, and there are a few reasons. I figured I wanted that cushion to allow myself to spend more, uh, to allow for inflation, to, due to the fact that I still kind of enjoyed working, it wasn’t like a hardship or a travesty to continue to work. And since I already had 25x, well if that goes up 10%, that’s another 2.5 and I was making a multiple of our annual spending. I could set aside about 3x per year. So every year that I worked, I might be adding about five years worth of spending between my investment returns and my earnings, you know, when we were spending so little. So it just seemed like, yeah, it seemed well worth it to continue on another four to five years in what at the time was a fairly new job while my kids were young and going to be in school. Um, so yeah, without, you know, I can go back and look at that and that was written with no assumption of any online income and say that’s where I would have been comfortable retiring at two to two and a half percent withdrawal rate based on what our spending was then, but also understanding that in retirement, that can change. You’re going to, you know, in our case, travel more, which is more expensive than staying home. Um, we’re going to potentially regret, um, the cars that we drive, right? You never know. We we probably, I guess we have upgraded. We’ve bought our first new car in retirement, right? So, you know, just knowing, knowing that there are many unknowns and it’s the unknown unknowns that I wanted to have that large cushion for.
**Mindy Jensen:** Do you believe in the 4% rule? Do you believe that 4% is a withdrawal rate that is sustainable? You mentioned 2.5 and I know that leans more towards Big ERN and his thought process. And the 4% rule is originally meant for, like, a 30-year timeline, and you, uh, God willing, will be a much longer timeline, which is where Big ERN’s advice and recommendations towards the the lower end.
**Leif Dahleen:** Yeah, excellent point. That’s another reason. Yeah. But, um, I do I think the 4% rule can work? For sure. Um, and and for some people, if, you know, they’re not adding four or five years worth of spending every year that they work, they might be adding a half year’s, you know, worth of spending every year that they work. And so, boy, to get that far beyond the 4% might be a hardship, it might be a decade or more. And so, I mean, you can look at the historical data a million different ways, like Kitces has, like Big ERN has, um, like Bill Bengen and has in the Trinity study, all of that. Uh, I certainly looked at all all of it and, yeah, it, it is, it is sound, uh, for a 30-year time frame. There’s a very, very, very good chance that you will not run out of money. So yeah, I guess my answer is I do believe it can work, um, but I thought it would be easy enough to just work a little longer, one more year, four more times. And yeah.
**Scott Trench:** That’s it. That that, that’s the, that’s the thing, right? Is is, you know, again, I think what’s what’s super valuable for people listening here is here’s a guy who’s actually retired. Yeah, 300 bucks, time and track meet for the local high school, and who knows the math as well as anyone. You literally ran the website, Physician on FIRE, for years, which is a great FIRE website that talks about the 4% rule and these types of things. Yet your policy statement does not allow you to retire on the 4% rule. By the way, neither does mine. Mine’s posted publicly on the BiggerPockets website around that. I ain’t retiring on the 4% rule on that and nothing else because I’ve interviewed too many people to know that no, nobody’s mind actually works that way with just that level of wealth. Yeah, you cross the threshold to FIRE, but you’re not actually retiring early on that level of wealth, even if that’s what you do all day long and that’s your and you know the math as well as anybody in the industry. And that’s the phenomenon that fascinates me here on BiggerPockets Money is it’s the FIRE, the 4%, crossing the 4% rule threshold is the starting point. Now the journey to actually retiring begins, and that often takes people several years of transition, um, or comes with so much abundance that it’s kind of like, “What the heck did I go to work for today?” on this, which we occasionally have crossed on Finance Fridays where the guy’s job was clearly just holding him back, um, and was a waste, complete waste of time relative to the overall financial position.
**Leif Dahleen:** I can’t say that I won’t ever truly work again, right? I mean, something might, you know, just cross my plate that just sounds like really cool or might be something that I start independently on my own. Um, I’m 48 years old today and tomorrow and the next day. So I’ve got plenty of time and youth and sound mind, I think, to, you know, to do something different if I choose to. Uh, right now, it’s it’s still pretty fresh. I’m a little more than five years retired from medicine. I’m about a year and a half retired from blogging. And and I spent most of that last year, you know, building this house, moving into it, you know, making it our own, and traveling in the summer and, you know, being a stay-at-home dad and my wife being a stay-at-home mom. But it’s all very fresh, and at some point, especially when we’re in an empty nester situation, maybe I’ll feel differently about being retired and staying truly retired. So if, you know, I come back on the show in five years, you know, maybe I would have a very different perspective. And I I never try to make long-term plans, you know, more than about a five-year plan because, you know, man plans, God laughs, right? It’s like, it’s going to be very different, no matter what I think it’s going to look like in five years. Uh, whether, you know, whether due to exterior, you know, circumstances or internal motivations and, you know, you change your mind and who knows? So, I’m not saying I’m not going to announce anything. I don’t have anything to announce, but I know enough to not, you know, say that, “Here I am, I am retired and I’m never going to work again” because that’s not how they work.
**Scott Trench:** This is a soft launch of Smaller Pockets from Leif, uh, in 2027, uh, that you just heard here. So, love it here.
**Mindy Jensen:** We have to take one final break, but more from Leif on life after FIRE when we’re back.
Welcome back to the show.
**Scott Trench:** Let me ask you another question here that relates to this question around the 4% rule and why, you know, why I think very few people actually stop working at the 4% rule. Let’s say that my goal is, um, let’s let’s use $100,000 in annual spend and the goal is 30 times that number, so that’s $3 million in wealth. And then you have a year like last year, the year before where the stock market, you know, goes up 20-ish percent from that point. So now now you have $3.6 million, which is 36 times. And maybe your wealth passed it, maybe it’s been five or six years since that point and there’s so much more than what you had intended at your retirement, which I think is actually going to be a normal, you know, the 4% rule, again, is so conservative that most scenarios end up with wealth being much greater.
**Leif Dahleen:** Right. And you started at that 100,000 and right, adjust for inflation, not adjusting for your portfolio at all, you know, if you’re doing it by the book.
**Scott Trench:** That’s right. If you’re just in stocks in the in that portfolio, that’s a very, that’s happened to everyone who fired five, six, seven years ago, um, for example, from a relative wealth perspective, even after accounting for inflation, um, around that. And so how does that change the perspective on life and time and money at that point? Does, you know, do do you, you feel like an obligation to some degree to to do more travel, upgrade things to a fancier level, buy the nice car? Like, how does that, how does that change your perspective when what I think is the average outcome for folks in your situation that have retired five, six years ago transpires over a couple years?
**Leif Dahleen:** Well, I guess what you’re saying is that anyone who retired like in my cohort of that, you know, five to, you know, six years ago, four, five, six years ago, uh, we’ve seen, you know, tremendous stock market returns over that time frame. And what we’ve done essentially is survive, uh, the most critical period where a negative sequence of returns can really, uh, make your the rest of your, your financial life a little more difficult. It makes it less likely that your money is going to grow over the 30-year period because if that in that five years and, now, the most important years for survival of your portfolio is about, you know, two years before you retire to about five years after. There’s that, you know, seven to maybe 10-year time frame where if the stock market goes down each of those years and you are spending, now it’s going to be a bit more than 4%, maybe it’s 5%, maybe it’s 6% if you’re going by the book, starting with, you know, 4% of the initial balance and adjusting with inflation each year and ignoring the, you know, the actual value of the balance of the portfolio, uh, then you you’re actually spending a larger and larger percentage. Now, in that situation, a human might say, “I’m not going to stick with this, you know, by the book, 4% of what I started with adjusted for inflation. I can see that I have 28% less dollars than I did two or three years ago. I’m going to spend less, we’re going to take one less vacation. We’re going to postpone buying a new car to replace the used car.” Uh, and so you’re asking kind of about the opposite. Well, we are no longer really at risk of succumbing to a poor sequence of returns. And I think you’re right that we could choose to spend a bit more than the formula might suggest. On the flip side, boom times tend to be followed by bust times. There’s a lot of volatility over the years. And so you don’t want to go hog wild. You don’t want to do a reset after a run-up of 50% or 100%. You don’t want to go, “Okay, now it’s 4% of the $3.6 million,” because the 4% rule does account for good times and bad times, but if you’ve only seen good times and you do a reset, now again, you are at risk of sequence of returns going downward, which they probably will in the, you know, not too distant future.
**Scott Trench:** Okay. So, so, we, so the answer is don’t move the goalposts. That that’s it. And and the pile gets bigger and bigger, which just continues to create, to keep things very stable. But you just don’t move the goalpost and that just gives you more and more and more and more security long-term. And sounds like the other part of it is you’re just content with exactly what you have from a lifestyle perspective and there’s not, there’s also probably not that pull to withdraw more than what you have. Is that, are those factors coming in?
**Leif Dahleen:** Yeah, that that’s, um, yeah, that’s good. You know, I’m not saying that you should never spend, you know, your investment returns because most of us who are following, you know, not even the 4% rule, but something less than that, are going to end up with piles of money when we die unless we give it away while we’re still alive or choose to spend a lot more. And I think the younger you are, the more cautious you should be because I still know that I could have a 50-plus year investing time frame. Um, but my parents who just came to visit, they are in their late 70s and their investments have done well recently. I’m not going, I’m not going to tell them to forgo that $30,000 trip to South Africa that they took a week ago, or whatever it might be, right? Like they’re at a point where they don’t need to worry about 50 years, 20, 25, that’s a possibility. Um, but 50-plus, no, it’s it’s probably unlikely unless there are scientific advances that are are coming and coming soon that will blow us all away.
**Mindy Jensen:** Leif, what is the biggest difference between what you thought retirement was going to be like and what reality actually is?
**Leif Dahleen:** I think I probably assumed I would be more, you know, quote-unquote “productive.” And you know, do you know Parkinson’s Law?
**Mindy Jensen:** I don’t.
**Scott Trench:** I believe that’s the one where time, or the the time a task will swell to fill the time that you allot to do it.
**Leif Dahleen:** Exactly, exactly. So when you have unlimited time, the the things that you want to accomplish have an unlimited time frame and and no deadline. And so I I find it’s much easier to procrastinate, you know, and things that I might have gotten done in a weekend because I had the weekend and that’s all I had. Well, I’ll work on it and I’ll put around for an hour or two here and then an hour or two there, uh, but there’s much less urgency and many, uh, of those things that, “Oh, I’ll get to it eventually.” So I guess I thought I would be more productive in certain ways and, uh, I think I have found a balance where I like to do different things throughout the day and not just focus on one thing all day long.
**Mindy Jensen:** Yeah, the, the productivity aspect, uh, I am not retired, but my husband is and I have seen him, like as soon as he was done working, he’s like, “This is my time now. I have to run everywhere and be so fast all the time and just produce, produce, produce.” And I was like, “or you could take a break because now you’re retired.” And now he’s, he’s morphing into the, the, uh, it takes a lot longer to get things done because there’s, I don’t want to say there’s no sense of urgency. And I’m certainly not throwing him under the bus.
**Leif Dahleen:** Probably a better, better sense of balance, right? You know…
**Mindy Jensen:** Yes, it is okay to read a whole book that’s doesn’t teach you anything. It’s okay to go and run a marathon if that’s your jam, which it is not mine, but I hope you win.
**Leif Dahleen:** Yeah, no, that’s that’s definitely, definitely true. Um, yeah, before the we started recording, we were talking about what we did on the weekend and I was like, which days were the weekend? Oh, yeah. Um, let’s see. I, I, we had a family gathering and I made a bunch of pizzas and then I watched football the rest of Saturday and, and most of Sunday too, and that’s okay. I, I enjoyed football. Didn’t get a lot done this weekend.
**Mindy Jensen:** But also, what else do you have to do?
**Leif Dahleen:** Talk to you. Talk to Scott.
**Mindy Jensen:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it’s perfectly valid to take your time and enjoy your life.
**Leif Dahleen:** I make dinner most, most days. Yeah.
**Scott Trench:** All right. Well, Leif, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story with us. Thanks for sharing what a day in the life of retirement looks like and, and, and being so open about the the actual reality of getting way past it from a financial um, standpoint before making the leap. Um, super interesting. Congratulations on your fantastic retirement and, uh, your multi-marathon, your mornings, uh, that you have just for fun, and you’re not even running, running the full marathons uh, on there. Just uh, that’s just training for you, uh, it sounds like at this point. So congrats on that and, uh, can’t wait to see what the next couple years bring for you. And last, super excited for the launch of Smaller Pockets.
**Leif Dahleen:** I gotta check that before you do. If I log off quick, you know why. domainname.com.
**Mindy Jensen:** Leif, it was great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time today and we’ll talk to you soon.
**Leif Dahleen:** Sounds good. Thank you, Mindy. Thank you, Scott. We’ll see you soon.
**Mindy Jensen:** That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He of course is the Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying, “Take a bow, Highland cow.”
