On our last episode, we had Mr. Money Mustache on to talk about the shockingly simple math to early retirement. The truth is, early retirement isn’t about how much you earn. It’s about how much you save. The math is very simple. So why isn’t everyone doing this?
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my has a high savings rate co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here as always with my 401OK co-host, Mindy Jensen. I don’t know if that works. But we’ll we’ll we’ll go with it. We’ve talked about this thing often that people desperately want to achieve financial independence, but they don’t want to make any changes to their current lifestyle. And I think that there’s a little bit of tough love and some good news on the other side of that that will be able to highlight in this episode. I think that you have to voluntarily reduce your current lifestyle in order to achieve financial independence. But on the other side of financial independence, you may be able to spend much more than the entirety of your current income even adjusting for inflation and still have plenty leftover. And so that’s the silver lining.
Mindy: Scott, I am excited to talk about this episode and kind of wrap up what we learned from Pete. Let’s start off with our actual savings rates on our journey to FI. What was yours?
Scott: When I first started my career, I was making $48,000 a year and I was probably at a 30% savings rate out the gate. That was, you know, three months in, I have a Corolla or whatever. And there’s just like a a limit at that point based on how I set things up to how much I could possibly save. By the end of year two, my savings rate was closer to 50 to 55% and that was because I purchased a house hack property and I switched jobs and was able to increase that income from about $48,000 to $60,000, $65,000 annualized after that first year. So between those two things. So how about yours when you first started out?
Mindy: So, we have always been savers and I distinctly remember like one of the earliest jobs I remember actually doing a big savings, um I had discovered that at the time the contribution limits to the 401k was $15,000. And I happened to be making a whopping $30,000 a year. So I went into my HR department and I said, can I put 100% of my salary into my 401k starting in January? And she was like, well, no, you wouldn’t get a paycheck then. And I’m like, well, be that as it may, can I do it? Is that allowed? And she’s like, well, you could do it, but you won’t get a paycheck. I’m married, my husband makes enough to cover us, like it’s okay, I want to do it. Three times she came back and checked with me three separate times. So at one point, I had a 50% savings rate, but that was just my salary. And then Carl was also working. He was also contributing to his 401k, but he made a lot more money than I did. I was making 30 and I think he was making about 100. At that time, our savings rate was 50% of my salary and probably another 50% of Carl’s salary because we were living off of half of his, he was contributing some to the 401K, and then when my salary came back in, then we would live off my salary and he would supercharge his 401K savings, but then we were also doing after-tax brokerage investing. So I would say at a minimum, our savings rate was 50%, but it went up probably, I don’t think we actually tracked this, but I think at one point we were probably at 75% because Carl started making more money and then we started spending less.
Scott: That’s the big key is if income expands while expenses stay relatively flat or if better yet if they can go down, like in your situation, then your savings rate is going to naturally shoot up. And that’s a problem I think a lot of people have when they begin their fire journey is many people I think discover fire when they’re making somewhere close to a median, maybe a little bit above a median income, and they don’t realize that if you’re on the fire journey and you’re diligent at work, it is almost certain that over a 10 year career, if you’re starting at an entry level, you’re going to advance into something that is not entry level by the end of that career, and that’s going to result in huge income or much much greater income than when you start. This is actually a frustration in the fire community because everyone’s like, I want to hear the story about the person who makes $50,000 a year and achieved fire. Well, we have a lot of people who started out making $50,000 a year. We have very few people who finished the play as a multi-millionaire close to retirement who are still making $50,000. And that’s the challenge with computing your savings rate. It’s very hard to get to these really high savings rates at a low income. It’s very easy at a high income if you keep your expenses flat.
Mindy: Scott, I think that a lot of people are going to be pushing back, especially people who are newer to the FI community, are going to be pushing back on this, well, I couldn’t save 50% of my income. Okay, you I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume or to expect that somebody goes from a 0% savings rate to a 50% savings rate. But you can go from zero to five or zero to 10 probably pretty easily. And you can go from 10 to 12 or 10 to 15 or 10 to 20. You can incrementally ramp this up and the reason that we are sharing this information is because there’s still a lot of people who don’t understand that your savings rate is so important to your overall ability to reach financial independence. You said this so succinctly and so well in your book Set for Life, talking about how if, I can’t remember the name of the person you used, let’s call him Scott. If Scott earns $100,000 a year and spends $100,000 a year, he has nothing left over to save. But if Scott spends $75,000, he’s saving 25%. He’s also saving one-third of his spend. So every year he works, he is accumulating another third of a year of spending. If he drops that down to spending $50,000, every year he works, he’s generating two years of spend. I think there are some people, I know there are some people because I am this person, you need things phrased in multiple different ways before it clicks. And when I read that in your book, I was like, oh, of course, if you are making 100 and spending 50, then year one, you have generated year one and two expenses. But it didn’t occur to me to think that way. That’s why I love you so much, Scott. You think differently than I do.
Scott: That’s a logical extension of the work that Mr. Money Mustache did in his article, right? Like all I’m doing is taking that point and condensing it down to the savings rate component, right? Savings rate is a double whammy, it’s a double benefit to your financial independence goals. And I think the way I phrase it in the book, Mindy, is a little bit more extreme example of let’s say you’re making 100 grand a year and you save 10%. That means you’re going to that means you spend 90 and you’re going to accumulate 10 a year. Nine years to accumulate one year of cash that that would support your financial position. Let’s say you spend 50 on that $100,000 year income. Now in one year, you’re going to accumulate $50,000, and for simplicity, I’m assuming no like after tax. So, not only are you accumulating another $40,000, but you’re accumulating your freedom nine times faster because you’ve accumulated a year of cash in one year instead of nine years in the first example. So it’s so exponential. And the benefits don’t stop there because when the next opportunity comes along at work, for example, you can say, you know what, I don’t need more cash, I really don’t, I’m already saving plenty. I’d really like equity, or I’d like a bigger bonus potential, or boss, could you give me a chance to sell some something on the side. And maybe that doesn’t work if you’re working at, you know, Walmart in a massive corporation, but that does work if you’re working at a small business. Absolutely. Someone will be interested in that. That’s what I did, right? So ask my savings rate is, right? Well, after that first year, it becomes really hard to compute my savings rate because I got an equity position in Bigger Pockets. And I didn’t ask Josh a single time for a raise. I never asked our private equity sponsors for a raise in the entire time that I was working at Bigger Pockets. I just consistently said, I’d love more opportunities to sell and I’d love more equity when those times come. I didn’t even ask for specific amounts. Everybody knew the whole time, the whole the whole way along that I wanted more upside. And I could do that because I spent such a small percentage of my income. And if you don’t think that that mindset greatly benefited me over the long term, you’re crazy. Right, I could have gotten a higher base salary and missed out on huge amounts of of potential at my job. That would have been a huge mistake. Now, is that always going to win? No. And did it always win? No. But it was a consistent over a long period of time, much better way to approach things. And so yeah like what’s the savings rate? Well, when Bigger Pockets sold in 2018, for example, to our first private equity sponsor, well, that then I had an enormous savings rate, right? like 80, 90% because I made multiple years of my annual salary in one go. That’s an enormous contribution to my my financial position. There’s a lot of a lumpiness that will begin coming in your financial position if you have the opportunity or set of circumstances that could even somewhat mirror a journey with a startup or a small business, for example.
Mindy: We need to take a quick ad break, but more when we’re back.
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All right, let’s jump back in. I love that you’re thinking about it in a different way. Most people just want to be shown the money. So I love that you’re looking at different equity plays and that benefits you greatly down the road. So your savings rate allows you to take advantage of these alternative ideas. If you were making 100 and spending 100, you would still have the ability, but you probably wouldn’t think about that because money is not your primary focus, like saving money is not your primary focus. Another aspect of a higher savings rate is a lower total FI number needed. So if you’re spending $100,000 and you want to retire early, you’re going to need $2.5 million amassed before you can retire. If you’re spending 50, you need half of that, $1.25 million in retirement money. And if you’re spending 25, you need a quarter of that. Just like a quarter of the spend, you need a quarter of that. It’s a lot easier to amass a $500,000 net worth than it is to amass a $2.5 million net worth. Math doesn’t lie.
Scott: And it’s all a spectrum here, right? Like very few people in the Bigger Pockets Money Community want to spend $25,000 a year for their entire life. I’m not necessarily saying that that’s what you ought to do. I’m saying that however that you should attempt to spend $25,000 a ridiculously small amount of money, maybe adjusted for inflation to $35,000. That’s around where I was. I was spending about 25,000 10 years ago now when I was getting started on this journey. But you start there. You start there and you do that for a little bit and you get happy with it and find contentment there. Your asset base begins to swell and then you can ease off, right? And and once you get to the other side of the capitalism snowball, you’ll find that the average return, especially if you’re using safe withdrawal rates of like a 4% to to compute your portfolio, the average return is almost always higher than that, which is the reason why we use the 4% rule. And so you’ll begin to see your portfolio expand and expand and you can begin spending more on there. That’s why lean fire is such a good, you know, that 1 million mark or so, maybe even a little less, is such a good milestone for many. It’s freeing because then you can begin thinking about other things. Like for example, I think you’d be silly to turn down a really good risk adjusted bet on equity in your company and instead opt for a higher base salary. If you’re approaching those numbers, because that could massively multiply, it has potential upside for you and is often comes with with additional benefits or better overall risk adjusted compensation. There’s only tradeoffs here, but the game gets so much easier if you’re able to keep your expenses low relative to your income or your asset base because you can take more and more and more chances. It’s not just like a little bit more optionality, it’s exponentially more optionality.
Mindy: Cutting expenses for most people is not going to be difficult. You have to want it. I mean, this isn’t going to be you’re living the exact same life that you have been and now you’re just able to save more. You’re going to have to change your life. And one of the best examples that I can remember us ever talking to on the show is Mrs. Frugalwoods way back on episode 10. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s a great episode. She said, you know, we discovered this concept of FI and we decided we wanted to get there as fast as we could. So we cut out every expense we could, absolutely everything for a month. And then we decided, you know what? That month wasn’t our favorite. We miss these three things. But we cut out, you know, these hundred things, we miss these three things. So they found a way to inexpensively add them back in. Specifically, she liked to take yoga classes, but yoga classes are $20 a pop or they were when she was taking them. And she discovered that if she would arrive to the yoga studio early and check people in, she could get a free class. And she’s like, well, I’m going to do that. I want to keep the yoga, but I don’t want to pay $20 a class for it. There’s all sorts of examples of creative ways to be frugal, creative ways to reduce your expenses so that you can get down to a 10% savings rate this month or a 20% savings rate, increase just a little bit, look for creative ways, and ask in the Facebook communities, ask in your whatever frugal groups you’re in, whatever fire groups you’re in, the immense creativity of this entire community is overwhelming. Ask in any Facebook group, ask in the bigger Pockets Money Facebook group, what are ways that you have found to reduce your expenses and you will be overwhelmed with the responses. In fact, we’re going to post that in our Facebook group. So hop on over to facebook.com/groups/bpmoney to share your favorite frugal tips and your favorite tips for reducing your expenses.
Scott: I’ll share mine here, which is you always like to start with all these examples of things to cut out or whatever. But I I always start from the opposite s- spectrum of like, what are the absolute largest line items in your in your budget and how do you eliminate them? And like the most obvious one is housing. House hacking or living with a roommate. You know, are you going to live with a roommate or house hack and then blow $2,000 in a month on eating out or you know, entertainment or whatever? No way. That one choice of house hacking is going to have so many downstream effects on the overall way you you’re spending. You’re going to go go home every night and remember, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this u- in order to be become financially free and I have so much I have a huge surplus, of course. But like, I’m not going to go and just blow it now on this other thing.” If you sell that fancy pickup truck and buy a Corolla that’s eight years old, you’re not going to have to go and get it washed on a regular basis, right? You’re not going to be, you know, spending a lot of money to maintain the thing. There’s a great example in the Millionaire next door about this business owner who was gifted, he very successful business owner, deca-millionaire in, you know, 1990s. His friends gave him a Rolls-Royce, like business associates who we’d made a lot of money, and he said, I don’t want it. He just gave it back because his hobby of throwing bloody fish that he was that he would catch at a local lake into the back seat of his, you know, 15-year old pickup was incongruent with drag in a Rolls-Royce. Right? As as was the the image that he wanted to project in a general sense to his employees. They didn’t want to show up to the facility in his uniform in a Rolls-Royce. And I think that’s a great mentality to adopt in these early years especially of fire. It’s probably a good one for life, but it’s so important to assume that identity for yourself in these early years to get things going, right? And that applies to so many other areas, right? If you’re you’re not going to wear a super expensive watch, for example, and then not have a nice shirt to go with it or not do these other things in many cases. So the accumulation of even one of these status artifacts, even as a gift, can actually be a curse, right? There’s examples again in in Millionaire Next Door of parents will buy their children homes. And it seems like such a good gift. But now the children who are not in the same income tax bracket as their their neighbors. Yeah, they don’t have a mortgage payment, but they have property taxes. They have the schools that the other neighbors are sending them to, the hobbies that the people are so it’s it’s putting yourself in that environment that’s conducive to saving money and it becomes easier and easier over time. One thing that I think you were mentioning here is the time component as well. This is not an overnight exercise, right? You’re not going to go from spending a lot to spending a little in a month. You can cut out some things and do a cold turkey reset, but to really drastically cut your spending over a long period of time, you’ve got to make these changes one after the other in the biggest areas of your life over time and get comfortable with them and let them ride for a while. And then again, the optionality to live at a middle or upper middle class or even fat fire lifestyle may come back to you in spades one day from your asset base if you are able to start the journey by cutting them in a semi-permanent way in the big areas.
Mindy: I hear what you’re saying, Scott. I’m going to push back a little bit and say that it might be difficult for somebody to embrace the concept of house hacking, especially someone who has children, who has discovered this idea and decided that they want to pursue financial independence, but maybe they bought the house five years ago and they’ve got the low interest rate, their house doesn’t necessarily work for house hacking with their current situation. So if that’s you, I hear you yelling at the radio saying, Scott, I can’t do that. There’s other things that you can do. And every dollar that you take out of your expenses can go into your investments.
Scott: And I think there there are things you can do, but one of the biggest realities there is just don’t upgrade from here. If you just stay put in the house and the current vehicle that you drive, pay them off, whatever, and don’t allow the next big purchases to come into your life, then you will naturally grow out of this problem over time. I wish there were a faster option, but you know, I I do think you will not be able to dramatically ramp your savings rate from, you know, 20% to 60% if you’re in that situation. It’ll creep up year by year as you make the conscious choice year by year to forgo these large additional expenses that could come in like the remodel for the house or the next car or whatever. It’s harder for someone who’s in this, you know, that that next middle phase of life. It’s so much easier for like the 23-year-old, the 25-year-old who’s single to make these decisions to get that snowball moving. Or I would also argue the 50-year-old empty nester than it is for that person who is, you know, just starting or about to start a family, for example, and doesn’t want to make those tradeoffs because I would argue that the nice house maybe is more important than fire for a lot of people in that stage of life. And maybe maybe maybe the aggressive pursuit of fire in seven in seven years isn’t worth that tradeoff for a lot of folks.
Mindy: That’s a good comment, Scott. The tradeoff. You do have to make a change. You can’t continue leading the life that you have been leading with your, you know, zero to 10% savings rate and retire in 10 years. That’s just not going to happen unless the stock market just takes off and I don’t predict that, like I’m some prognosticator, right? Anyway, I think that you have to determine how bad do you want it, how much do you want to give up, and how much do you want to keep in. Carl and I got to our position of financial independence in seven years, six years. It’s been so long, I can’t even remember, which makes me feel bad. But we got there rather quickly, but we gave up a lot. We gave up more than I would be willing to give up if I were to go back and do it again. I would have had a longer timeline and a more enjoyable life. So, this isn’t something that you have to make a decision with right now. We’re just introducing this concept, hey, your savings rate is the most important factor to your financial journey. So, how bad do you want it, how much do you want to give up, and how much do you want to keep in?
Scott: Yep. All right. After a final ad break, we’re going to talk about the levers you can pull if you don’t want to decrease your spending, but still want to increase your savings rate. And we’re going to talk about Mindy’s trash cans. I promise they’re related.
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Thanks for sticking with us. Scott, let’s say that we’ve got somebody listening who says, “You know what, I just don’t want to reduce my spending.” What would you suggest to them? What levers would you suggest they pull so that they don’t have to decrease their speding?
Scott: Well, then of course it’s going to be income, right? I mean, this is someone who is by definition not retired, so they don’t have a lot of assets. And then so how do you increase income? And I think that a good portion of the fire community can be a little bit myopic on this topic, right? They’re they’re going to be saying, “Hey, we both work W2 jobs and we’re going to work them for the next 20 years. Here’s our spreadsheet and retire then.” And it’s like, why? Why is that your plan? Right? Like you spend half of one spouse’s income, right? At some point, take your shot. At some point, start a business, buy a rental or live and flip, or do something that could possibly move your financial position forward faster so you don’t spend 20 years grinding it out to fire per your spreadsheet math. That’s the that’s the answer, right? And and I think that that’s the problem with like I I look at a lot of these like folks who are seemingly have everything right. They know their spending, they know their income, they both work, for example, in a married household and they spend half of their income, they’re saving at an aggressive rate. And it’s like, “Guys, like the the challenge here is nothing can work to go that can go beyond that, right? All that can happen is your promotions come at a slightly faster pace. Why doesn’t one of you start that business and take that shot?” And if they do that for five or seven years, surely you’re going to hit a couple winners or your odds are going to be fairly successful on that front. Now, this is different if somebody’s three or five years away from fire, right? Then just finish your plan and get it done. But it’s those longer timelines that I’m saving 15% of my income, what do you know, what do I do here? Well, get your savings rate up, but once you get that, don’t just chug it out for that that length of time, do something that could work in there. And that is typically going to be, again, a real estate or a business or a side hustle play. And again, it’s it’s people need to think in these terms of, yeah, you’re going to fail, but you’re also going to succeed if you keep doing these things. You don’t have to plow hundreds of thousands of dollars into these things. You can plow a few thousand dollars or a few months of time into an idea, either scale it or exit it and go again, and again, and again. So that’s my answer to that. What do you think?
Mindy: I really like that answer. The creative business. I can hear people yelling at the radio, “Scott, I don’t know what kind of business to create. There’s nothing that comes to mind. I’m not an entrepreneur.” I want to tell two stories. The first story is about all the Airbnb owners out there who are desperate to find somebody to clean their property. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s a steady job. I bet if there’s one Airbnb in your town, there’s 20 Airbnbs in your town and every single one of them has a hard time finding people to clean. The second one is far more lucrative. That’s that’s an easier to start, all you need is cleaning supplies. Easier to start, not as lucrative. The second one, I have a friend whose son graduated from high school last year. College was not his path. He decided that he was going to start a window washing business. And he did, and he bought a like a used truck, and he does window washing around our town in like I think there’s like a three or four town radius. He is so busy in just about a year that he has hired multiple of his friends. Every couple of months, he goes and buys a new truck and hires two more people to go and do this again. He’s hired somebody full time just to answer phones and do scheduling, and he is booked solid. Maybe that doesn’t make your heart sing, cleaning windows, but did you catch the part about where he’s hiring people to do this work with him? You don’t have to be in the trenches doing the work. You just have to be able to have the work done. So there’s a lot of business opportunities, a lot of business creation opportunities if you are just a little bit creative. Scott, we had someone on one of Dan Sheek’s kids who cleans garbage cans and then morphed into hanging Christmas lights. Do you remember that story?
Scott: Yep. That was an amazing story. I saw somebody cleaning garbage garbage cans on our street the other day. It’s like, look at that.
Mindy: Well, I had to clean my own garbage can because there was a bunch of gross things in there. I would have gladly hired that person.
Scott: I’d hire somebody before I do that. Yeah. It was disgusting. I don’t know who cleans garbage cans in my area.
Mindy: Okay, if you’re in Longmont and you clean garbage cans, email mindy@biggerpocketsmoney.com. You can come clean my cans. Okay, if you’re in Longmont and you clean garbage cans, email Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com and you can come and clean my garbage cans.
Scott: Moving on past the uh garbage can cleaning business though, I I just think it’s it’s this concept of like there’s a million ideas out there. One of them’s going to work. You know, you know you’re adding way more value than what you’re getting compensated for if you’re an employee. That’s the point. You don’t get the job if you’re not adding more value than you cost. That doesn’t continue over time. So you know that’s there. That’s fine. Lots of people work a job. I’ve done that for years and after the whole time I still do that. There’s nothing wrong with that. But know that the odds, if you’re the kind of person who is listening to a finance podcast regularly, consuming books and information, bettering yourself, eventually you have a great chance of being successful in business. and odds are and I would all bet and I think you should bet that if one of the two of you, the more maybe entrepreneurial inclined one in a couple for example, is starting a business or attempting that on a on a regular basis, you’re probably going to reach fire faster and you’re probably going to have a much higher fire number faster, you’re gonna be thinking about chubby or fat fire, uh potentially within a decade or two if you’re just getting started than if you just both crunch out a very formulaic approach to it. And that’s my big criticism of a big portion of the the fire community that it’s all numbers on a spreadsheet with a very prescriptive, save this, max out the retirement accounts, march it out for 15 years. I don’t think it has to be that way for most folks in here and I think I think you can have at least a crack at a better outcome. but it’s not going to show up in your spreadsheet. So I can’t compute the odds for you.
Mindy: Okay, Scott, I think we gave our listeners yet more things to contemplate. Shall we wrap up?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: Okay, this was a super fun conversation. I really appreciate you, Scott. I am encouraging all of our listeners to hop on over to the Bigger Pockets Money Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/bpmoney and join in the conversation about ways to reduce your expenses, creative ways to reduce your expenses. And have you started a business? Share what kind of business you started and how much it cost you to get started, the ups and downs of it. I would love to hear those stories too.
Scott: Mindy’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Mindy: Yes. And if you clean garbage cans in Longmont, email me. All right. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench, I am Mindy Jensen saying, take care Teddy Bear.
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