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BiggerPockets Money Podcast Archive
Every episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, from the beginning of time. Thank you for listening, and for coming to our website!
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The Hidden Cost of a High Savings Rate Nobody Talks About
There’s a chart that’s changed a lot of lives. If you’ve spent any time in the financial independence community, you’ve probably seen it. It lives on Mr. Money Mustache’s blog, in a post called “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The chart shows the relationship between your…
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How to Talk to Your Partner About Money Without It Turning Into a Fight
If you’ve ever tried to explain the concept of financial independence to a spouse who didn’t ask to hear about it, you already know how this goes. You’re excited. You’ve just listened to six podcast episodes back to back. You’ve run the numbers three times and they keep getting better. You sit down at dinner,…
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Chapter Twelve: Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them (Or: The Mistakes That Will Derail Your Plan)
The path to FIRE is exciting, empowering, and full of potential. It’s also full of traps. Some of these traps are obvious. Don’t rack up credit card debt at 22% interest. Don’t panic-sell everything when the market drops. Don’t assume you can retire on $500,000 while spending $100,000 a year. But most of the pitfalls…
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Stop Panic-Optimizing: When “Good Enough” Is the Best Financial Decision You Can Make
There’s a special kind of financial paralysis that only affects people who are actually doing the right things. It doesn’t happen to the person who has $47 in their checking account and a drawer full of unpaid bills. It happens to you. The person who has already maxed out their 401(k), built an emergency fund,…
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Chapter Eleven: Life After FIRE (Or: Now What?)
Reaching Financial Independence is a financial milestone. Living it well is a life design problem. For years, maybe decades, your identity has likely been tied in some way to your work. Your schedule revolved around it. Your social circle formed around it. Your sense of progress, accomplishment, and even your sense of purpose may have…
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The Market’s on Sale – So Why Do People Run Away?
There’s a peculiar phenomenon that happens in both real estate and the stock market, and it goes something like this: the moment something becomes a genuinely good deal, a large portion of the buying public suddenly develops cold feet, an urgent need to “wait and see,” or a full-blown panic attack. It’s as if the…
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Chapter Ten: Accessing Your Money in Early Retirement (Or: How to Get Your Cash Without the IRS Freaking Out)
There is a moment in every FIRE journey where the math works, the portfolio is ready, and a new question shows up. How do I actually get my money out? This is where many people hesitate. They’ve spent years maxing out retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs because that’s what all the financial advice told…
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Trust But Verify: A Love Letter to Our Community (And a Warning)
The Financial Independence community is a wonderful, weird little corner of the internet and the world. We talk openly about our net worth. We share our savings rates like they’re baseball stats. We debate the 4% rule with the enthusiasm most people reserve for sports arguments. And when we meet each other in person, whether…
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Your Credit Card Statement Isn’t Going to Review Itself
There’s a particular kind of financial embarrassment that has nothing to do with being broke. It’s the embarrassment of realizing, often at the worst possible moment, that you’ve been cheerfully ignoring something important for months or even years. Not because you’re irresponsible. Not because you don’t care about money. But because life got busy, things…
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Don’t Panic-Buy a Tesla Because Gas Went Up 40 Cents
Every time conflict rattles the Middle East and oil prices spike, car dealerships quietly uncork the champagne. Here’s why reacting to pump prices with a brand-new vehicle purchase is one of the most expensive impulses in personal finance. There’s a ritual that plays out with clockwork-like reliability whenever geopolitical tension flares up in oil-producing regions…