What if I told you your early retirement timeline comes down to just one number? Not your salary, not your investment returns, not even how much debt you have. Just one single factor that most people completely ignore. Today, we’re going back to the basics on how you can fast track your FIRE journey.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jenson and with me as always is my has a mustache but isn’t Mr. Money Mustache co-host, Scott Trench.
Thanks Mindy, great to be here, stubbling along on our journey to financial independence.
We are so excited to be joined today by Pete Adeney, but you probably know him as Mr. Money Mustache, on our podcast once again. Welcome to the show, Pete.
Thanks, I think I’ve been here before, so it’s great to be back.
Well, welcome back, Pete. It’s lovely to see you again, even though I see you frequently because we live in the same town.
And that’s a privilege.
It is a privilege. Longmont is the best town in the universe.
And I’ve lived in a lot of them, so I can say that with confidence.
All right, Pete, you have boiled down early retirement to what you call the shockingly simple math. For people that are hearing this for the first time, what’s the one number that determines when they can retire?
The one number, well, if we were going to make it an actual number, I guess it would be the number 25. but the point of that article that we’re talking about here, the shockingly simple math behind early retirement is that the only thing that matters is your savings rate as a percentage of your take home pay. So in other words, your earnings is one side, your spending is the other side, but how much of your earnings are you keeping? And if you are consistent in your behavior as you save for retirement and then after retirement, then all that really matters is what percentage of your money can you save, and that’s what determines how long your mandatory working career has to be.
I refer to this all the time because it’s the basis for any calculation for how long one has to work. Um, and the work begins here. And I think that as the years have passed and this community around the financial independence retire early world has swelled, people have both taken this too literally and not seriously enough. And there’s kind of an endless amount of debate and confusion about various components of this. When really the the point is, the more you save, you’re you’re going to shave decades at first and then extra years with every incremental bit of of savings that you get out of it. Is that is that how you read it as well from your perspective?
Yeah, and the real part is to just put a very simple and easy target for people that’s most valuable at the very beginning when you know nothing about retirement or finance or investing. And it’s good to just know the basic rule, for example, if you’re able to save half of your take home pay, then your total working career works out to about 17 years. So if you started at 20, you’d be able to retire at 37. Started at 30, it would be 47 and so on. And later you go on to realize like, oh, it is possible to save 50% of your income. It’s just not common in the United States. It’s kind of cool to know that a working career does not have to be 30 or 40 years like everybody says. And just that realization alone is why I wrote that article long ago. It’s from more than 10 years ago now, because it just opens up a lot more possibilities that you can just have a lot more, you know, decades of freedom in your life than people assume.
So I have the ability to hear people yelling at the radio as they’re listening to this, driving to their job and they’re saying, but Pete, I make $50,000 a year. There’s no way I can save 50% of my income.
Yeah, right. And I would say, well, first of all, congratulations in being like in the top 1% of the world’s population probably, still even at $50,000 US dollars. And secondly, um, yes, it’s possible to live on any amount of money. It it gets more and more advanced, um, the skills and adaptations you have to make. But you don’t have to save 50%. You can save whatever works for you. That’s number one. And number two, does anybody make more than $50,000 in this country? If so, maybe you can be one of them too. You know, things change over time and that’s the real thing is like the shockingly simple math is just the numbers that don’t really lie. And then it’s up to you to decide where you want to play within that that set of numbers. You know, we’re not really accepting complaints on this. We’re just telling you what your options are.
Love it. And let’s define a couple of variables in this. What what do you mean by take home pay?
Oh yeah, that’s a good point. So the reason I put that is, there’s all this stuff that’s like income taxes are the biggest thing. So if you have a $100,000 salary, at least several thousand or maybe even tens of thousands of that is going straight to the IRS. So we don’t really count that in in measuring your savings performance. So let’s say you have 80,000 or 70,000 left after that, that’s really the scorecard of what you’re taking home. And then how much are you saving beyond that? So if you’re saving 35,000 out of that 70,000 take home pay, then you have a 50% savings rate. And the reason that I do it that way is because once you’re retired, at least in the FIRE community where we we tend to focus on somewhat lower levels of post-retirement spending, the income tax burden is quite low. Like most people who are living on a retirement income like the amount that I spend, if I was only earning that amount, I wouldn’t really be paying any income taxes. And I encourage people to do that. That’s my personal philosophy because I like efficient living. If you want to be more in the fat FIRE community, which is what we call higher levels of spending, then you do have to account for more income taxes in retirement, and the math changes a little bit, but at the same time you’re living in such a bath of money that the details matter less because you know, you don’t have to be very efficient when you have that much income to work with.
Can you um just just for clarity, explain how, you know, pre tax savings like a 401K would work when calculating your take home pay?
Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, that becomes part of your take home pay, like if you’re not paying taxes on it. So if you have, let’s go back to the $100,000 salary, and then let’s say you’re allowed to put 20,000 into your 401K, whether it’s an employer plan or some other fancier variety. That of course gives you a tax deduction. So then your remaining take home pay might be an additional 60,000 beyond that. So in that situation, you have 80,000 of take home pay, but you’re also saving a higher percentage of it, right? Because that 20k that went straight into your retirement account is already saved. You’ve saved 100% of that magic pre-tax money and then you still have a bunch left over to save beyond. And then the math is going to work out that you’re saving a huge percentage of your take home pay.
I’ll also just chime in that once we get there, a lot of people then worry about how do I get that money out of the 401k. That’s something you can worry about later as you get towards early retirement, but if unless you again are in one of these super high income tax brackets in retirement in the fat FIRE world really, it’s not a problem in practice to actually convert that money either to a Roth or extract it from the 401k tax and penalty, low in a low tax bracket and or penalty free at that point. Those are additional reasons that the community I think has built on this work and and really really uh found ways to make that very simple observation of accounts.
Yeah, that’s definitely true. And I get questions from people a lot like that now, now that I’m doing a little bit of coaching on people that are like, how do I retire? Can I really quit my job? I have all these savings. It turns out it’s not a big deal. Even if you have a lot of it in your locked up retirement accounts because they’re not really locked up. There’s always a way to get it out. There’s both tax options and there’s just the order of spending options. Like if you have a bunch of money in a brokerage account or even if it’s a savings account, and then you cut your job off and you retire, then you can just use up all that other money first, even if it takes you like through the ages of your 50s. And then you you hit zero right as you’re like 60 years old then surprise surprise, your other retirement accounts then unlock for penalty free withdrawals at that point. And then for the rest of your life, you know, you could just live off of the the money that had been compounding all these decades while you were using up your your previous savings. So there’s always a way, and I just encourage people not to worry about these details too early. Just focus on getting the savings rate right for now and of course, mainly just enjoying your life while you’re still young and make sure you are saving, and then there’s always going to be a way to sort out the details later when you’re spending that money down in your distant future.
Alright, we’re gonna take a shockingly simple and short ad break. Then we’ll be back with more.
When you’re ready to start your business, Northwest registered agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree.
When spring hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized. Whether or not that hits you, Monarch will do your financial spring cleaning for you. One dashboard gets your entire financial life organized. No more clutter, no more mess, no more scattered logins, just accounts, investments, property and more, all in one place. One of my favorite parts is the Sankey diagram. Every month I open it up and literally watch the flow of money. It shows exactly where every dollar is going from income to all of my spending categories. It makes it so much easier to spot what’s working and what needs tweaking. Get your first year of Monarch for half off just $50 with the promo code Pockets. Use the code Pockets at monarch.com to get your first year half off at just 50 bucks. That’s 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code p o c k e t s.
I’m skeptical of a lot of financial products but life insurance isn’t one of them, at least not term life. For the vast majority of you listening, term life is simply the right answer, and the smartest way to buy it isn’t one big policy, it’s a ladder. Your need for coverage isn’t flat, it declines over time. You’ve got a 30-year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spouse mid-career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30-year policy you’ll overpay for it, you stack a few. Say a 10 year, a 20 year, and a 30 year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligations step down. You only pay for what you actually need when you need it. Ethos is a platform that helps you find life insurance 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds and apply in minutes. There’s no medical exam, you just answer a few health questions online. You can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as $30 a month. That makes building a ladder genuinely fast. Get your free quote at ethos.com/bpmoney. That’s ethos.com/bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary.
Alright, we mustache you to join us back here on Bigger Pockets Money.
I want to encourage people to run the numbers. Do these different scenarios. Don’t just hear this and automatically dismiss it, oh, I have to save 50%. That’s a suggestion. Just Google The Shockingly Simple Math and it will take you to this article and read the article. There’s an amazing chart in there that shows you, if your savings rate is 5%, you have 66 years to work until retirement. If your savings rate is 45%, you have 19 years. If your savings rate is 85%, you have four years. And there’s a bunch of numbers in between. Look at this information and see you don’t have to do 50% like you said earlier, Pete, you can, you know, choose your own adventure, just realize what you’re giving up, you are giving up more time at work than if you were to save a little bit more.
And it’s shockingly simple and it’s kind of exponential. So the first bit of saving you do is very valuable because if you save nothing, you’re going to have to work forever, you know, or at least until social security or some pension or inheritance bails you out. And then even saving a little bit makes a huge difference, huge bit. And then it gets less and less important as you save more and more, which means you can relax more and more, because it’s not going to make much difference anyway. But the problem is, most countries, like including the US, we have a very, very low savings rate. It’s like something in the five or 10% rate, and that’s why we end up with these perilously long careers where people are barely even able to go to work anymore because they’ve kind of signed up for such a mandatory career by saving so little when they were younger.
There’s one side of this, right? The in terms of the the the math, the shockingly simple math here, which is the savings rate as a percentage of your take home pay. The other side of the equation, however, assumes a return rate, a real inflation adjusted return rate. What do you use there and why do you use it?
I think I use something that was on the low side of the historical returns of the stock market after inflation, you know, like just the the whole index. I’m scrolling through the footnotes at the bottom of my article, but I think it was probably about 6% after inflation.
I think it’s 5%.
Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s right at the bottom. It says, assumptions. You can earn 5% investments returns after inflation during your saving years. So that’s a little bit lower than the historical stock market returns because we don’t want to assume a continued boom like we’ve had for the last 50 plus years. And if we do get it, you know, like when I wrote that article, it was something like 13 years ago, and surprise surprise, we’ve had an even faster economic and stock market boom since then. So people have earned more like 10% post inflation from their stock investments, which is why there’s so many happy mustachios retiring with twice as much as they expected. But once again, never assume the future is going to be as rosy as the past because you won’t have a safety margin. And then hopefully you’ll get a positive surprise in the future as well.
Can you um briefly touch on the 4% safe withdrawal rate? Is that something you use you used personally?
Yeah, built into this chart, I mean, I tried to make the chart as simple as possible, which is like, how much do I save? How long do I have to work? But there’s like math hidden beneath all that and it’s like, there’s I linked to like the equation, um it’s actually part of like Jacob Fisker’s book where he like breaks it down with all this math. But what what it really means is that if you have a chunk of money that’s invested in reliable long-term index funds and maybe some bonds as well, if you limit yourself to taking out just 4% of the value of the initial value of that chunk of money throughout your life and it’s going to fluctuate, but on average it’s going to go up and it’s also going to pay dividends. And it will approximately never run out, you know, based on all the historical patterns of our country’s economic growth, which means the stock market gradually going up. It’s a pretty safe withdrawal rate, which is why it’s called SWR, or safe withdrawal rate. So to make that really simple, if you have $1 million and you shut off your switch of income and you say, I’m going to take $40,000 out next year for my first year of retirement, and then the next year I’m going to index it for inflation. I’m going to give myself a little raise each year. I’m going to look up the consumer price index. Inflation was 3% this year so I’m going to get like a 3% increase on my 40K. And you just blindly do that without even adjusting for anything, even that is pretty safe. And the reason we use that number is because there was a bunch of studies, the most famous one is called the Trinity study and a bunch of people have done backup research since then saying like, hey, 4% usually works out for a pretty long run. And on top of that, people have a lot of safety margins like you’re going to get social security someday if you live in the US and a lot of people get at least some inheritance from family members or parents as you get older. And by not including that in your 4% rule, those are your little additional safety margins.
Oh, okay. You just use the word safety margin. You link to another one of your articles in your shockingly simple math article, conveniently just above this chart that we’re talking about. It’s called it’s all about the safety margin, and you have in there seven levels of safety. And I think this is something that is not talked about enough. People are constantly worried about running out of money. Pete, have you ever known anybody who was early retired to have run out of money?
No, everybody has tended to gradually have a bit more money than they expected for a variety of reasons. Some people keep earning income, which is like all of us have done in our post fire years just because we still have energy to do stuff and some things make money. Some people have lived purely off their retirement income. Like the shirt I’m wearing our friend Mark has been very disciplined saying, I am not going to earn money. I’m only going to work for free and I’m going to live off my portfolio. And even he has found too much. He had too much money in retirement, which just means he is more generous and has more fun than he had originally forecast, which is not a big problem. It’s pretty hard to run out of money if you follow a 4% rule type of approach. And that’s because that approach is already pretty safe, and then there’s these additional things that most people have, like inheritances or pensions or social securities or income that tend to just pile up and, you know, if you get to a million dollars of savings fairly young in your life, chances are you’re pretty good at money and managing your spending. So that’s that’s kind of a universal pattern.
I want to just quickly run through these seven levels of safety because I think people don’t realize this. Number one is primary income. Number two is backup income, uh index funds in a taxable account, something like that. Number three is optional part-time work. Number four is 401K plans. Number five is social security like you mentioned. Number six is lifestyle flexibility. And I’d hear people that I know who are retired saying things like, oh, you know what, the stock market’s down a little bit. Instead of not traveling at all or not doing anything at all, I’m just going to cut back a little bit. And then when we’re having an up market again, I’ll add those trips back in or I’ll do the the things back in. Uh and work flexibility is the seventh level of safety. And I I think that people aren’t aware or aren’t considering you can always go back to work and that doesn’t mean it has to be a full-time job. You can get some part-time job or just earn a little bit of income to help smooth out the bumps when the market dips down.
Yeah, absolutely. And the only problem is a lot of people remain overly conservative both when they’re saving for retirement and when they’ve already early retired. And I think they limit their fun and work a little bit too long and cheap out on themselves a bit too much. And I know that Carl and Mindy have been um dragged over the coals by our other friend uh in the personal finance world Remeet for being too cheap for their level of wealth too, you know. Carl’s famous for like booking multi hop flights when he could pay for a direct flight like slightly more. I would sell like my child before I I took a multi hop flight within the US, like it’s just not even an option. So I’m like, huh, I I thought I was cheap, but I guess the Jensen’s were out doing me. You kind of have to train the the frugality out of yourself because it’s possible to go too far in that direction.
Okay, so this is kind of at odds with what we’re talking about, and I hear people yelling at the radio saying this, we’re saying be frugal and save your 50% or more, save aggressively so you can get to retirement. But then once you get to retirement, loosen up the purse strings. How do you flip the switch?
Well, this is maybe a a third MMM classic article. And I have one that I wrote one that’s called it’s all about the sweet spot because you can be too cheap, you can be too spendy. The reason I wrote my early blog articles on on this like fist punching type of mentality is I was basing it on what I saw in average Americans who are they really are too spendy. You know, like people will they’ll have $0, they’ll have an unpaid credit card debt and then they’ll go out and sign up for a loan to buy like a $50,000 pickup truck when they don’t even have $50,000. And in the FIRE world, we don’t do that, you know. And the FIRE world, it’s like, oh yeah, I have I have a million dollars. Should I spring for like the $30,000 new car? No, I’m going to buy like a $10,000 used one, right? Like it’s so far on the frugal side of this sweet spot spectrum that I’ve realized that a lot of the readers and followers of our podcast and and blogs need the opposite kind of training. The regular American who’s financing the pickup truck should not listen to that stuff because it’s dangerous, it’s just it might make them go even more into the crazy tail end of over spending. Really what we should be going for is being relaxed about money, having a good time with it, but also still having a relatively high savings rate, you know, 50% or above while you’re working, hopefully. And then just always check in with yourself. Like if your wealth level increases, then make sure that all the frugality stuff you’re doing is still in line with your values. And if if you have more money, you might want to be splash out on some more stuff. Like one little example for me is I always take the toll lane, you know, like when I’m driving to Denver, and you see the little sign that’s like, you can skip all this traffic jam for $2.90, and you’ll it’ll get you all the way to downtown. I’m like, here we go. Yeah. And that’s like always the best 2.90 I ever spend and I’m like passing hundreds of cars. And I’m like, I can’t believe you guys won’t even spend three bucks to skip this incredible five mile long traffic jam. Little things like that, you might not do if you’re like, you know, on the bleeding edge of poverty, but you got to relax as your financial situation improves.
It seems like there’s an there’s an efficiency element here that is maximizing your life in a general sense, and to do that that was have as high a savings rate as reasonably possible while we’re amassing wealth. And then it’s within reasonable high constraints, how do I optimize for for something else that is not not just more wealth at this point? It’s it’s happiness or convenience or time spent doing the things you you enjoy with the people you love.
That’s so true. But I also wouldn’t even say like there’s a line like accumulation versus retirement and spending. Like you want to have a good time for your whole life. You might still be taking the toll lanes even while you’re still saving for early retirement. Of course, like you can if you can afford it and your savings rate is still reasonable, just don’t go overboard cheeaping out on yourself. And that’s why I always try to focus on things that are a win win rather than a win lose. Like taking two flights instead of one to save money is a win lose, right? You win some money, you lose a bunch of time and your trip is less fun. Whereas living closer to work so that you can walk to work or bike to work is a win win because your days are better and you’re spending a lot less on your car and commuting expenses and you’re healthier. So there’s usually so many win wins that you can get that you can do if you’re at a beginner stage that you don’t even have to get into the weeds of like sacrificing stuff you like in order to save money. Not too much anyway.
And I think that’s a really important nuance for folks who are less familiar with with all of the, I think I’ve read every single article of yours by the way over the years except for this the sweet spot one. I don’t know how I missed this one in those deep dives. There’s folks who think, oh, it’s just about being frugal. No, there’s much more to it than that. But with that caveat, could you explain why controlling spending is more important variable compared to income generation in your view?
That is because what we’ve seen is that throughout our incredibly wealthy country, people seem to be able to manage to like blow any amount of money. Like no matter how high your income goes, people can blow it all and still end up in debt. And that’s why we hear about the movie stars and the NFL players and everyone else who’s had multimillion dollar pay outs that still end up bankrupt shortly afterwards, even though like just one year of their income is more than enough to raise a family in upper middle class forever if they just invested that money. So, it’s I mentioned that stuff because I want people to understand that having at least some concept of your spending is important. And also, if we’re just thinking about the math of early retirement, the spending has more powerful effect because it accelerates your path to early retirement by making your savings rate higher, right? lower spending. And presumably, you’ve learned the skills of how to have a happy life on this lower spending level. So that after retirement, you’ve locked in lower spending. So any amount that you’ve saved also goes further. So that’s why I consider it a double effect because it lowers the amount you need to save and then it lowers the amount you need to spend for the rest of your life to be happy. So a smaller amount of investments gets you further. And very few people talk about lowering spending at least before this whole fire movement started because there’s just such an implicit bias in the United States that more spending is always better, no matter what. It’s like you always want more.
I also think that there’s not really a profitable way to communicate the value of spending less from a mainstream media perspective, right? Like there’s not like like a product you can sell. It’s just like don’t spend money. So like like there’s a million ways to do that. You can there’s like tools out there like Monarch money, for example, that are great or mint.com or Excel spreadsheets, but I think I think that that’s another challenge is you can sell a course for five grand to help somebody make money and if it helps them do that, maybe maybe somebody gets value out of that, but there’s nowhere to do that. And your view was, this is just common sense. I just want to share it with the world. And I think that was very refreshing and very powerful. And that’s why it appeared so unique at the time.
Maybe, yeah, because you could argue that in a commercial magazine or newspaper, they’re depending on all these advertisers who are selling stuff, like in a wealth magazine, most of the ads are for luxury products, you know, like Mercedes and Rolex and all this stuff. So um, those advertisers are going to be a little bit pissed if the main message of the magazine is don’t buy Mercedes and Rolex products because it wrecks your chance of an early retirement.
Pete, let’s look at your specific situation. What was your savings rate and at what age did you start your fire journey? How long did it take you to save up enough money that you felt like you could early retire?
Hm, deep, deep history. So I did try to write this down once because what happened to me is I retired early and then enjoyed six years of retirement before I even started writing my first blog article. So it was already kind of stuff I’d done just passively. I was always kind of like, um, a an interested in money and I would I started reading investment books when I was a kid just because I found that whole subject interesting. So when I started earning like a professional salary, which was really just pretty average, it seemed like a ton of money to me, especially growing up in a family that wasn’t super high income. So I just saved, I lived the life that I thought was very luxurious, which left a lot of money left over still because I was an engineer and I liked to do things efficiently. And then after that money started building up and it’s like tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands, I’m like, well, what should you really do when you have too much money? There’s got to be some good use for this. And I already knew about investment. And so as I I just kind of put two and two together and realized, well, investments are a form of passive income. So as soon as your investments cover your lifestyle, then you can quit your job. So that realization was probably in my early 20s and I’d already been saving up for a while. My fiance at the time and I were both like, living this kind of lifestyle. At that point, we realized, okay, there’s only going to be a few more years that we have to work before we are financially independent. And we also wanted to start a family. So we thought it would be great to get all this done before the baby was born. so that we could have the time to be full-time parents. And um, those are all the pieces that went together. Really the whole career took me about 10 years, right? Because I started working around 20, finished working around 30, just before 31 actually, so you could you could just round it up to 31. I think is that all the questions?
What was your savings rate?
Oh, the savings rate. Yeah, it varied depending on income, right? So initially, I started off making at the time like $44,000 was my first salary. And that was Canadian dollars too. So my savings rate was lower and I bought a car as well in my first year after graduation. So it’s probably like 10% the first year. But it quickly went up and towards the end it was more like 60 plus percent because our salaries were up in the $100,000 range times two, you know, two workers. We were spending what we thought was a lot, it was like 40 plus thousand, which would be 80,000 in today’s dollars, but that still left a lot to save. It kind of happens like this like and at the end as your salary goes up, your spending level is probably going down because you’ve already filled out your household, you got all the furniture you need, you’ve got your car, have a paid off car, you’ve optimized all this stuff, you’ve already got your bikes as a young adult, you know, all the things you need to buy when you become an adult. So I find the spending kind of goes down, which makes it easy to save. And then of course, every time there’s a life change like having children, your spending’s going to go back up, but then it goes back down again as you get through each stage. So 60%, maybe even as high as 65 or more. That combined with like I did a bunch of home renovations, so we kind of like did some forced equity in our first house and then rented it out in order to buy the second house. That all kind of like in a big messy way added up to financial independence after about 10 years of work.
You said you bought a car after college. We used to ask guests what their biggest financial mistake was and that was hands down the number one answer was, oh, I bought this brand new car after college. Scott, you also brought a brand new car after college. Was it a brand new car, Pete? Was it like a big, I I can’t imagine you ever in one of those $50,000 pickups, which are $70,000 now, by the way.
No, I’ve never been a pickup truck guy, but I like sports cars, so I bought a sport E car for for Canada anyway. And it was only like two or three years old. I remember it was a 1994 Ford Probe GT, so it’s kind of like this little sporty two-door thing that was a clone, mechanical clone to the Mazda MX-5 Miata, which is also a cool car. Not Miata, MX-6. It was fun. It was like more than I would have spent if I was Mr. Money Mustache at the time. But really what it did is it it basically just consumed most of my first year of savings. Um and it was worth it, right? Like that’s an example of a splurge that was uh worth it. So like it delayed, you know, it cost $15,000 at the time. So maybe like 30 of today’s dollars, thousand. But I had so much fun with it, and my friends thought it was cool, and you know, it’s a good date car and everything. So I wouldn’t take that um decision back. It was worth it delaying my retirement by a very small amount.
Interesting. Okay, that was not the answer that I was expecting.
Yeah, and then I bought a $10,000 motorcycle right when I moved to the US cuz I’m like, wow, I’m making so much money. It was brand new Honda like sporty bike. And that was like another $11,000, which is like 20,000 of to today’s dollars. That was maybe a bit of a worse decision. I probably wouldn’t repeat that, but yeah, I still recovered from it. I sold it for like $5,000 a few years later with hardly any miles on it because I I didn’t really need a motorcycle. But um, it was still fun. You know, I don’t don’t super regret it or anything.
And then you bought a 50 to 75 year retirement following that. Those didn’t impact things too much.
You can afford to be very inefficient and still do pretty well. Like the key is being slightly less ridiculous than average. So like I did some ridiculous stuff, but not as much as my co-workers who would buy like a $50,000 BMW and like a pickup truck with six wheels and like drive one each, you know, alternate driving them to work from a really, really far away like horse property. So like that kind of stuff is such bigger numbers that it really that’s what kind of sabotages your retirement is when you’re you’re doing multiple years of salary just getting burned up on on all these little purchases and big purchases.
This is our final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this.
When you’re ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree.
When the change in season hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized. And that’s great. If that’s you, or if it’s not you, either way, let Monarch do the financial spring cleaning this year for you. One dashboard gets your entire financial life organized. No more clutter, no more mess, no more scattered logins, just accounts, investments, property and more, all in one place. Another feature I love about Monarch is the weekly AI recap. It catches spending spikes before they become problems and flags big net worth shifts or upcoming expenses. It’s like having a quick personal check-in every week so nothing sneaks up on me. Get your first year of Monarch for half off, just 50 bucks with the promo code Pockets. Use the code Pockets at monarch.com to get your first year half off at just $50. That’s 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code Pockets, P O C K E T S.
If you’ve been putting off life insurance, I get it. The old process was miserable. Phone calls with an agent, a nurse coming to your house for a blood draw, then waiting weeks to find out what you’d pay for. That friction is exactly why so many people who should have coverage don’t. Here’s what I believe. Most BP money listeners need term life, and the right move is to build a ladder, a few term policies of different lengths tacked together so your coverage steps down as your mortgage shrinks and your kids get closer to being financially independent or you get closer to hitting your financial independence number. The thing that makes that practical now is Ethos, a platform that helps you find life insurance all 100% online. Same day coverage, no medical exam. You just answer a few health questions online. Up to $3 million in coverage, some policies as low as $30 a month. So building a two or three layer ladder that used to take a month of appointments is something you can knock out before your coffee gets cold. Get your free quote at ethos.com/bpmoney. That is e t h o s.com/bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary.
Thanks for sticking with us.
I’ve got a couple of tangential questions here. One is and I’m going to I’m going to lodge a a complaint here. I know you said we can’t take complaints. Um, but this is a common one that we get is is where are all the stories of the people who fire but only ever make $50,000 a year the whole way through adjusted for inflation. And and these these folks are rare in the space, but you know, you mentioned you you you started with a $44,000 salary and ended at 150, 200. We’ve had so much trouble finding this person, right? Like we’ve we’ve heard from the community over and over again, we want to hear from this person and we just can’t find them out there um at a high level. My hypothesis is has something to do with the fact that if you’re going to pursue FIRE, you’re going to get very good with money over a long period of time and that is going to naturally translate to boosts to the income over a decade or a 15-year, you know, grind that typically it takes most people to achieve this goal. But have you found examples of that $50,000 earner the whole way through? And do you think it’s it’s reasonable to expect people to be able to get there with the income that low?
Yeah, so it’s kind of rare and it’s possible that because our platforms are filtering for a certain type of person, you know, like people who seek out finance podcasts and websites and they’re like readers they might tend to just be higher income people, but I did remember a couple like so one person who I’m still in touch with, his name is Joe, and he and his wife at the time um they were teachers in like the public school system in Las Vegas, which I think is notorious for having fairly low salaries for public school teachers, and Joe became the main guy who encouraged me to start a forum on my blog. So like this thing called forum.mrmoneymustache.com. He was like the lead moderator so I heard lots about him. He’s a really really smart guy. Both he and his partner are geniuses, so on top of being teachers, they also just started like save, save, save, they lived really fruga and then they would buy a rental house and then manage it really well and then leverage that to buy another rental house and they were really good at, you know, managing the tenants. And eventually they built up a pretty big real estate income portfolio that was bigger than their teacher’s salaries. So they’re like, great, we’re done. They ended up like that that wealth level kept going up and up and up and even after quitting the teaching jobs, they ended up in an upper income situation just because they were so good at all these other things. So um, it’s a little bit like your story because they started out with lower incomes probably like 35,000 each and they had children, but they worked their way up from that situation and, you know, that’s one of the things about the United States is there is a lot of upward mobility and if people are smart and work a lot, it’s pretty hard to stay in a lower income unless you’re really dedicated to just staying exactly in this thing that you’re passionate about or if you’re spreading your energy out around, you know, like to to other things like raising a family, you’re obviously going to be less devoted to your career. So, anyway, the point is, the math still works. You just have to spend less money. But the people are rare because America has a lot of money in it and that’s why I moved here, right? That’s why I moved from Canada to the US in my 20s is because I wanted the same upward mobility and my salary doubled as soon as I crossed the border that happens a lot in this country and that’s great.
The other place that I think people get stuck on a lot is with kids and planning for those expenses. And that did not seem to impact you and and and it has it seems to have no impact on some a portion of the the the FIRE community and it’s a just an enormous roadblock that’s insurmountable for another portion of that. And have you observed that dichotomy as well with with folks? And how do how would you respond to that?
Kids are um interesting in the form of expenses because they can cost as much or as little as you want, right? Like as a parent you get to choose, short of like medical emergencies or whatever. But in general, the kids like most parents choose to spend more on their kids and this goes up with each generation and richer people have always spent more on their kids than less wealthy people. So I think it’s more about do what you can afford and don’t worry that it’s going to wreck your kids’ lives if you live a frugal upbringing, right? Cuz I grew up my parents spent almost none on us, you know, there’s I have two sisters and a brother, so we’re a big family. And we didn’t have any spare money, so nobody did any expensive activities. We just like run around playing in a forest or go to school and then find something to do after school. There’s no after we didn’t do it like after school activities. And that was like great. You know, I had an amazing childhood. It was super fun, all kinds of like wild, you know, creativity stuff, like making our own cars out of scrap parts and tree forts and everything else. And we didn’t lack for anything despite the fact there was no money. And then we had to pay for our own educations too, our own college educations because the parents didn’t have the money to just fund everybody like what happens in the rich families. So I don’t think there’s any shame in that for parents who don’t have a ton of money. And so that should make it easier for everybody to get through the child raising years without as much pressure as we apply to ourselves. And now, you know, in my life now, I know a lot of people who are in the child raising stage living in very wealthy communities. and sure enough, they spend a ton on their kids. You know, they might spend 40,000 per child per year on all the stuff between all the sports and private school tuition maybe, or just things that they buy their kids. And that’s fine too, but it’s totally up to you. It’s not really, it doesn’t have to be expensive. We have just the one child, or who’s a grown up now. And I like to joke that he cost less than nothing because it was so intense to raise him that his mom and I weren’t able to go out and do the normal stuff we would have done, like go out for dinner or go on vacations cuz a child demands so much and, you know, if the kid’s crying all the time, you don’t want to bring him on the plane and destroy everybody else’s vacation, so you stay home and do stuff locally. So um, that actually saves money, pays for his diapers.
I have one more area of expense that I think trips people up when they think about this math of the shockingly simple math early retirement. So we’ve discussed income, we’ve discussed um expenses as the major component. We’ve discussed the investment returns. But I think that the expenses, um there are some expenses that people don’t consider when they get to retirement or that trip people up like child care, which is a cost for, you know, the costs of raising a child in general that we just discussed. Those are costs for a period of time and that then go away, presumably when children become adults, right? Or could get bigger if if you decide you want to pay for an elite fancy private school or college education for example. Um so there’s things like that that trip people up. And then there’s also insurance, which I think is a last major bucket that is a challenge for people because that’s often covered in part or in full by an employer while one is working. So could you maybe share your kind of high-level overview of how you view insurance as a general concept and how you think about things in your personal life as a financially independent multi-millionaire? And how one should kind of wrap their head around that when they are approaching early retirement?
Yeah, I mean, to focus on health insurance specifically, because that’s the thing that most people worry about in this country. It’s not as expensive as most people assume. That’s the one thing. Like if you’ve gone through your life with employer health insurance coverage a lot of people don’t even know how much the employer is paying for it and so they assume, oh, I can’t leave my job because I need this insurance that you can’t get any other way out. Well, guess what, your employer is paying this money. So obviously it must be a finite amount that they can afford to cover, and you can buy that insurance for at least as cheap as your employer as it turns out, like when you when you look on the marketplace nowadays, what is it called? The Affordable Care Act has made insurance a bit easier and more transparent to buy. So it’s it’s in the hundreds of dollars per month, not in the thousands of dollars per month, you know, on a per person basis. So it’s not as bad as what people assume. And part of the reason they get confused is because when you quit a job you get this option to continue your health insurance through the program called Cobra, but the cobra insurance is always like some ridiculous like multiplied to infinity. It’s not what your your employer was paying, but they charge you more. Maybe just because you’re scared or they think you’re desperate or whatever. That’s not the real price of personal health insurance. And then on top of that, I have there’s other alternatives like I use a direct primary care physician subscription, which is like in my opinion, much higher quality healthcare, but it’s only 100 and something dollars a month. So which is basically like a doctor subscription. And then I have a separate thing that I don’t really need that’s just like a catastrophic healthcare program, you know, where if I have more than a $5,000 expense, they’ll reimburse the rest of it in any given year. But the wealthier you get, the more this doesn’t even matter because you can self-insure. Um like if you think about, you know, Warren Buffett, he doesn’t need a health insurance company to come in and pay his bills if he has medical bills. He may or may not have health insurance, but he doesn’t need it. So the higher your wealth gets, the less insurance matters. And like that’s one of the reasons I don’t keep insurance on my my house, my primary house, and that’s just because it’s it’s not a very expensive building and I could afford to rebuild it if it burned down and I would as a house builder, recreationally, I would make it cooler than it is right now. So that would actually be kind of fun. But don’t come burn down my house. It’s not an invitation, but so like whereas if I was just starting out in my 20s and I had a huge mortgage on this house, I absolutely couldn’t afford to replace my house out of cash. And also the mortgage company insists on you carrying insurance. So insurance isn’t a big factor, you know, like it’s it’s more like helping you sleep at night, but it shouldn’t be a giant part of your spending.
First, great point on the mortgage component, right? I am now starting to have a couple of properties without mortgages and you can boost the deductible very high on, so I I would not feel comfortable replacing some of my properties round up, so I carry insurance, but I have I’m fine with a 20 or $30,000 deductible, which sends a very clear message to the insurer, hey, I’m only going to be calling you if the place burns to the ground because I’m not Mr. Money Mustache and will not find it fun to rebuild the property of my own um in this particular in in this particular case. So that makes it much cheaper, much, much cheaper, like thousands of dollars a year um in premiums cheaper. And then I also was uh, you know, I am a little surprised at the difference in rates for families on the private marketplace even if you have a high income, um they’re significantly cheaper. But a big component of that is you just take it for granted I think Pete, that you’re going to use a high deductible plan, which I think almost everybody who pursues FIRE should be doing um in that sense. Because why if you you have millions of dollars, you can self-insure up to 20 or $30,000 in a given year and that will make a huge difference in your or your family’s overall premiums that you pay for health insurance. And then last, I’ll also say that as you think about this in a self-employment world or beginning to massing significant assets, there’s a whole bunch of alternative solutions that are coming up like the direct primary care which you mentioned, which I also have for both of my kiddo, and it’s fairly cheap. Um it’s like 130 bucks a month, I think for both kids. An infant and a two and a half year old. Um and it’s great. The doctor responds anytime, day or night. I never have to go to urgent care. You know, and in the case of a serious emergency, we of course have to go to the emergency room, but otherwise we’re able to get all these prescriptions filled and all those types of things and set appointments pretty quickly. It’s a much better way of doing medical care than I’ve I’ve ever experienced.
And there’s no co-pay. So, you have like a little thing where you need a prescription, let’s say for strep throat, you just text them, they’re like, oh yeah, or maybe a video call and the worst case you go in, and then they’re like, here’s your prescription and then the whole thing’s done. There’s no bill for that. Whereas even with the health insurance, you typically go to the Kaiser office and you’re waiting and everybody else is sick around you and then you feel like you’re in this third world situation and then you get a bill for like $200 until you reach your out of pay max whatever deductible thing. So the whole thing feels terrible in the old system and great with direct primary care.
Yeah, and I have an article on that too, just to plug it a little bit. I wrote this article called two years without health insurance and what I do now. And then that’s how I landed on this idea of using the health share program, which is by, you know, the researcher on that was our our co-owner of headquarters, his name is Bill. He got us all or at least me interested in this program called Sedera, which is one of the health sharing companies. He convinced me to sign up. I’ve been a happy subscriber ever since, and it just helps like not have to think about what if something happened, even though I’ve never really had a health cost since I moved to the US. It’s still just nice to know that you have the coverage in case.
You know, the article around Shockingly Simple Math really presumes a stock market, you know, pretty linear return because that’s hey you have to have to model these things. And that’s I think led there’s been a lot of confusion in the the early retirement space about how to factor in other types of assets like real estate and I’ll throw in crypto for example. How do you think about those in the concept of an early retirement portfolio. Um let’s start with real estate maybe how how your framework on that because it’s probably a little easier than um something like a crypto investment.
Yeah, that’s for sure. So real estate it’s supposed to be pretty passive income source if you’re doing it well, but it still has numbers that you can attach to it. Like you’ll have an amount of money that’s tied up, you know, the capital amount you own of a property, and then you’re going to have its net cash flow after all your expenses, and that’s the part that you get to use towards your early retirement. So, at the very most simple level, if someone’s retiring off rental properties, you could just say like if the cash flow that’s free and clear from these properties is enough to pay for all your bills, then you’re retired. And then that’s kind of nice because you know that your rental properties are probably going to go up with inflation automatically over the years. It’s going to be lumpy, but it’ll still go up. Sometimes you get lucky and like in the Denver market, it’ll go up much faster than inflation and your rents will rise faster than inflation. So you’ll get a positive surprise. But if you’re just modeling it, I would suggest to take the conservative route, which is you figure out the cash flow only and then remember that if you have mortgages on these rental properties, those are going to get paid off eventually as well. So every time you have a rental property that has a principal plus interest portion in its loan statement that principal is savings. Like you’re actually saving every month. A lot of people miss this detail. So a $1,000 mortgage payment might have like $271 going to principal. The other $800 is interest going straight to the bank. And then they they put that whole thing as a cost, and it’s not a cost. They’re actually saving and then the interest is a cost. And eventually that goes away and then you’re going to get like that property is going to be free and clear and suddenly you’re going to get a huge cash flow bump. So I would consider that as like additional saving that you’re doing. You can do like a cash out refi if you need to get access to that money. I think the big picture is that real estate should be out performing the stock market if you’re doing a good job at it, if you have the right properties, because it’s a job, right? Like, if it’s not out performing the stock market, then you shouldn’t have real estate because why not just have this totally passive investment? So I always encourage people, like including people I’ve been coaching recently, to look at each other rental properties, don’t keep it just because you have it, make sure it is a valid rental property, like make sure you don’t have like a million dollar house that’s only giving you $2,000 of rent because you’d get way more in passive stock market income if you just sold that and and bought the index funds. But in general, I don’t know, is that how you would you agree with that? is is mostly basing it on cash flow but remembering that the cash flow is going to gradually increase?
I struggle with it because I think that that’s the most conservative way to think about it, right? is is this is an inflation adjusted extreme of income. You know, if you buy a $500,000 house that generates $30,000 a year in net operating income, that should be a reasonable baseline target for a paid-off rental property. Hopefully some folks can do better than that, that should just produce that amount of income give or take, perpetually. And the advantage to that is that it’s a much higher cash flow stream potentially, if you’re in a higher income tax bracket, more tax advantage the way you could harvest that money from a more traditional stock bond portfolio. But then it’ll also there’ll also be work and some lumpiness to those cash flows, of course, and you can’t sell it off in chunks, the same way you can from a stock bond portfolio. And then the leverage component should amplify those returns, yes, in the in the accumulation phase. So I I completely agree. I think it’s challenging for folks to wrap that around in their heads, especially when they’re in between those two states, the high leverage, high return phase and the the paid off cash flowing phase when it will under perform the stock market over a long period of time, but also produce that very predictable cash flow stream.
It helps if you just do a net worth calculation where you add up the value of all the rental properties and then subtract the mortgages, any debt that you have on them. So then you really understand how much assets you have working for you. And then you compare that to the cash flow and decide whether to keep them, first of all. And secondly, you can do a future forecast and say, well, what’s it going to be like when these are all paid off, whenever that might be, and then that’s going to be your terminal, your final cash flow if you let them all have no mortgages. And that’s what your your long-term budget’s going to be. Between those two, like if you’re smart enough with money to accumulate these properties, I’m sure you can do the analysis and determine what your retirement budget can be.
I think the challenge is in that middle piece, because that’s there’s a 30-year window where most people are in that middle section. And in that middle section, if the cash flow is tight, you can’t really count on it the same way that you can on one that’s paid off or that has a very large spread between the gross rent and the and the mortgage payments. And I think that we find a lot of people who invest in real estate have this in practice a problem translating that theory to how much can I actually spend from this portfolio right now? And the answer is almost always what you just said, make a list of all your properties, determine which ones are winners, which ones are losers, sell the losers and keep the winners. And that’s very challenging in practice for a lot of folks um for a number of reasons.
Okay, last question here. Let let’s talk about other assets that are a little harder, right? Maybe they don’t generate cash flow, they’re not stocks like let and let’s use Bitcoin. You and I share I think a a similar viewpoint on Bitcoin. I had a video come out last year that looks like it was pretty poorly timed called The Rational investors case against Bitcoin. The the comments have not been kind from the Bitcoin community. They have strong opinions there. Uh and then you have an even better uh titled article which is uh more frank, why Bitcoin is stupid uh from seven or eight years ago. Um but how does one think about this asset that has gone up in value a tremendous amount over the years in incorporating it into one of these retirement portfolios?
Yeah, well, I would think people should sell it and buy a real investment because Bitcoin is like a dice roll that has just been continuing to come up on sixes over and over and over again. And people are like, see, I’m a genius investor. And and other people believe that it’s going to keep happening. Like Bitcoin is entirely dependent on belief. Like there’s no actual fundamentals. It doesn’t generate any any income. And that’s why it’s by definition, not just my opinion, but that’s why by definition, it’s a speculation rather than an investment. An investment is something that generates income over time and it would be worth it owning it for your whole life if you were never allowed to sell it. And imagine if somebody said, well, Bitcoin is great, but the the price doesn’t actually matter because you’re never allowed to send sell it and it will never give you dividends. Would people actually want to own Bitcoin in that situation? Well, no, of course not because it’s it’s guaranteed by definition that it’ll never give you anything. However, Bitcoin has value only because you’re hopefully that someone else will buy it from you for more in the future. Or some people dream that it’ll replace the US dollar or whatever. Like either way, you’re hoping you can buy stuff with the Bitcoin. So that’s not an investment. Um and you can keep speculating on it and that’s fine. And if it goes up more, good for you, but I certainly wouldn’t bet any percentage, any significant percentage of my future wealth on this very, you know, moment of human hype. I’d rather own something that generates ongoing income like a rental house or a business, which is what stocks are. So that’s up to you.
Well, you don’t invest in Japanese Yen, you don’t invest in Euro, why would you call it investing in Bitcoin?
Yeah, well, the reason people think it’s investment is because it has been going up recently during its very short life span and that’s how bubbles work, right? People get excited, they get FOMO, and then they make up, they fill in the backstory of like why this is different, you know, why it’s not a speculative bubble, like, oh, well, the Federal Reserve is is corrupt. It’s fiat money is all toilet paper, like, we need to have independent of this and that and like, and the reasons keep shifting because the story has to, you know, keep existing, otherwise the whole thing doesn’t have any value, like it’s dependent upon a story and a belief system. And I just don’t play those games, right? Like I’ve never been part of any religion or belief system or like worshiping leaders just because they’re famous. So that’s how I feel about Bitcoin too. And if other people want to have a different opinion, that’s great. It’s funny because the criticisms I get from my article, they’re all based on people who didn’t read it. Like 100%, they’re like, how do you feel now, Bitcoin’s $117,000. Like, whereas right in the article, it says, this article is not about the price. It’s just about the idea of speculating on anything based on future price improvements, like that’s not an investment. And no one reads that. If Bitcoin goes to four quadrillion dollars, my article is exactly as valid as it was if Bitcoin had gone down to 1 cent because it’s not about the price of Bitcoin. It’s about the meaning of of speculating on on things.
It looks like the three of us will not be making our blood lines as one Bitcoiner put it to me with this uh speculation here. I completely agree.
Bloodline?
You’re missing out an investment that can make your blood line. Actual quote from I presume Bitcoin bro in response to some argument I made against it at one point. So.
Is that talking about um, having a bunch of, you know, building a dynasty and then you give money to your children so that they’re they’re rich in the future?
I think if you just hold Bitcoin forever and never sell it, it just perpetually compounds in value going up at infinitum and then your heirs and descendants are rich until the end of time.
No, the first generation makes it, the second generation preserves it and the third generation spends it.
That’s true. And that’s the other funny part is like they’re criticizing this approach that we have even though I’m like, well, I’ve lived most of my life in financial abundance and been retired since I’m 30 and I’m almost 51 now. So like, I can’t be doing anything all that wrong. Like how much more do I want? How much better money situation do I want? So I don’t need Bitcoin.
Well, thank you so much for coming on here today, Pete. It’s always just a privilege to chat with you. It’s been great to see you a couple of times recently. Thank you so much and and um, yeah, I hope you continue enjoying your your retirement here. And what what you know, what what’s on the docket for the rest of the day?
That’s an even bigger privilege to be on BP money, so thanks a lot for the invitation. And the rest of my day, it’s just a dad day for me, so I’m going out for a hike with my son and I’m doing some construction for the rest of the day and it’s going to be awesome. Happy Tuesday.
It is Tuesday.
I had to check.
Love that you had the check. Like your watch is uh, just Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Nice.
doesn’t even have hours and minutes. It just has the day of the week.
I’ve seen clocks like that. That would be a great wrist watch.
Okay, Pete, before we go, where can people find you online?
Um, if you just look for Mr. Money Mustache, you’ll find all the different versions of me. My favorite place is people reading the blog or joining the boot camp, but I also have a mostly inactive Instagram account and Facebook and uh, X, slash Twitter, whatever.
Awesome. Okay, Pete, thank you so much for your time today and we will talk to you soon.
All right, you too.
All right, that was Pete, Mr. Money Mustache, and Scott, I always have a great time talking to him. What did you think of his commentary?
It’s just always a privilege to chat with Pete. He he really pioneered a lot of stuff in the world that we live in, um in in the fire community here, and he’s only continued to expand those concepts even, you know, as he has enjoyed uh decades long early retirement um during that time period. So it’s just truly a privilege to chat with him and love the the refinements and the the evolution, um but the the lack of deviation almost in its entirety from the core principles that he’s stuck to his entire life.
Yeah, he is uh you said he pioneered a few things. I think he pioneered a lot of things. He was one of the first financial bloggers talking about how you can reduce your spending to retire early and live the life that you want. Uh he was certainly the person that we found first and when we talk to people, it’s almost always, oh, I found this one article from Mr. Money Mustache.
It’s funny because you’re mentioning his first car purchase, which I didn’t know before. That was that was kind of fun to hear about. His blog obviously influenced my first car purchase and you wouldn’t you would not believe the amount of time I agonized over whether I should buy a then brand new 2014 Toyota Corolla or if I should buy a 2006 or 2007, seven or eight-year-old Toyota Corolla because of his blog uh and and the wastefulness component of that. It seems like such a silly thing to agonize over 10 15 years later, but um that’s that’s where I was thinking. I never had the cool car. Sort of have one now, um with my my Tesla here, but that was funny for me to hear that.
I was actually surprised that he had purchased a fairly new car right out of college. I thought for sure he would have been very frugal his whole life. So, that was a fun little tidbit that I had never heard before.
All right, Scott, this was a super long episode so we should get out of here. Are you ready?
Let’s do it.
That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jenson saying farewell Gazelle.
When you’re ready to start your business, Northwest registered agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/moneyfree.
