Mindy On Money

6. Enough
Mindy: ​[00:00:00] If I had a Cybertruck, I would hit people with it. , not people but cars. especially if they drive poorly.
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Mindy: Hi there, my name is Mindy Jensen and I'm Carl Jensen. And this is the Mindy and Carl on money podcast Where we talk about what happens after you reach financial independence and quit your job so you can start living your best life.
Carl: Why do we call it the Mindy on Money show?
I was the one who came up with the name. We tried some other ones, so we landed on that.
Mindy: We call it Mindy on Money because Miss Mizuma was taken. Shout out to Bianca. You know, Bianca is somebody who has really figured out what her level of enough is.
Carl: And why do you say that? Because
Mindy: she is not constantly pursuing more.
Carl: Okay. For people who don't know Bianca, she had a [00:01:00] site which she doesn't maintain anymore and is gone, but she was on the Plane with Fire movie. If you've seen that, you have seen Bianca. She is a flight attendant who got to a position of fire, which is great. I think most people don't associate flight attendants with fire.
It's always Cyber bros like me who did tech work, or maybe real estate entrepreneurs, so a flight attendant is an outlier. An outlier,
Mindy: but it makes a lot of sense. She's got an awesome story. I hope to be able to have her on the show to share it with you. But, today we are going to be talking about the concept of
. So we hit enough, even though we may not have known we hit enough. And then we continued on and I think that there are a lot of people, especially in the FIRE community, that are in the same position or will find themselves in the same position as we find ourselves today.
I've said this before, the money [00:02:00] part might not be easy, but it is simple. It's basic math. The psychology around money is the really hard part. And we're going to talk a lot about that today, how you know you've gotten to your point of enough. And, what to do after that, because leaving a job isn't easy, I think some people, a lot of people in the financial independence community minimize that, just quit and you'll be fine.
Carl: But it's nowhere near that easy, and we'll talk about that in this episode.
Mindy: One of the things you can do to help you on your path to FI is to keep track of your money. One thing that we have done is use Empower to keep track of our net
Carl: worth. Empower is pretty cool. It's free and secure. You enter all your accounts into this site and it shows you a snapshot of your money that updates multiple times per day.
So I can log in and see exactly what our net worth is and how it's trended and all kinds of other cool numbers .
Mindy: It's an [00:03:00] instant financial snapshot, and you can learn more at MindyOnMoney. com slash Empower.
Carl: Again, that's MindyOnMoney. com slash Empower .
Mindy: Okay, today we're going to be talking about having enough money.
And, I've had several conversations with friends recently about the concept of enough. And of course here, the concept is enough money, enough investments, enough, to last through your early retirement and into your traditional retirement years. And we sit here faced with a slightly different problem.
We have more than enough, which means that we worked too long. We spent too much time at work, too much time accumulating, and not enough time retired and pursuing our best life. And even as we speak, I have a job still. I work at BiggerPockets. com. I host their Money Podcast with Scott [00:04:00] Trench. I make videos for their YouTube channel and It is, what is that phrase?
If you work, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life or something like that. I really, really love talking about money. Oh, really? We didn't know, Mindy. Uh, so it's a bit different, but it's also the same. I am working longer than I really need to, but I enjoy it. And I think in the financial independence community, so much emphasis is placed on retire early.
You don't have to retire. But why are you working? Why are you pursuing financial independence? And this is something that I think is really going to need to be in the forefront of your mind as you are pursuing, or as you are contemplating what your enough number is.
Carl: Yeah, that's super important. We'll talk about that a lot more in a moment, but you can't just stop your job and expect the world to come to you . [00:05:00] There are gonna have to be deliberate decisions, and you're going to have to plan and work to make retirement a success. In a lot of cases, the work part is easier. 'cause there's the saying, people love the cage that binds them .
So it's easy to go to a job, be told what to do, when to be there. You've got a routine built in . But when you stop working. Everything is on you at that point, and it's different. It's good. It's good different, but it is different.
Mindy: The, the fire community has , wrapped itself around this concept of the 4 percent rule. Originally Designed, created by Bill Bengen, a financial planner, I'm sorry, a rocket scientist turned financial planner in 1994. He looked at the, uh, historical returns of the stock market and decided that based on the worst case scenario, 4 percent is what you could [00:06:00] withdraw from your retirement account.
And then adjust for inflation and withdraw 4% again the following year, and so on and so on. And still have money left over at the end of 30 years. And if you have not read this report, it is a fascinating. Article he published in the Journal of Financial Planning back in, I think October of 1994.
Email mindy@mindyonmoney.com and I will send you a PDF of this report. It or this article. It is fascinating. I can't say enough great things about this, but the 4% rule is shortened from rule of thumb. It's not a hard and fast set in stone rule. I would like to note that the Trinity study confirmed his numbers in 1998.
And Michael Kitsis reconfirmed those numbers in 2008. And Wes Moss Re reconfirmed those numbers in 2022. [00:07:00] So, this isn't just like some whim thing that some random guy named Bill decided to come up with. First of all, he's a rocket scientist. But also, there's a ton of math and, thought that he put into this.
And, I would, you know, just as, just as much as I am, espousing the benefits of this there, you can find no shortage of people who say, well, it's not four percent. It's three percent It's 3. 2. It's 2. 4. It's you know, whatever and You will always find detractors because hey, I agree. It doesn't doesn't sell click doesn't sell newspapers
Carl: I wonder if part of the problem is the name a rule and I don't think he even used that term but it's become known as the four percent rule and when you hear the term rule you think of something that's It's strict and very defined and there's guardrails around that and I think that's part of the problem.
What if we just called it the 4 percent recommendation or some other word? Because that's how it should be. You [00:08:00] don't have to take 4 percent out. If you retire and then the stock market has a great 5 year run, maybe you can lose a little bit . On the other hand, if you retire and the stock market does the opposite, you don't have to take the 4 percent out.
Maybe you even Go back to work the biggest concern with an early retiree is the sequence of returns risk Which means the stock market has a big downward incident right after you retire, and then you don't have all that money Compounding for you, but guess what if that happens right after you left your job It's also the best time to perhaps go back to that same job or a similar job You're still going to have your skills, but back to that original point It's not a rule.
It's not a hard and fast rule. You could do whatever you want with your money. You don't have to pull off the 4 percent and do what you feel comfortable with. I think people spend way too much time talking about this
Mindy: thing. As we just spent a ton of time talking about it. But I, I also think that if you are looking at [00:09:00] financial independence, you're coming to this idea, newly discovering this idea, you will happen upon it was actually called the safe.
Withdrawal rate in that article you will happen upon this four percent rule of thumb Maybe we should just start calling it rule of thumb instead of four percent rule. We should go the whole name
Carl: The r word is still in there though.
Mindy: Yes. Okay, so you will come across this safe withdrawal rate of four percent Multiple times and it's a great starting point because so many intelligent people have tested it over and over again and come up, with the same conclusion that this could really work. this is a great place to start. Another great place to start is your spending. They kind of go hand in hand.
If you know that you're going to be withdrawing 4 percent of your, [00:10:00] portfolio, and you spend I don't know. If you don't know how much you're spending, then the 4% Safe withdrawal rate is worthless to you because you need to know how much you want to spend. We did our own guess based on flawed information and guesswork, a lot of guesswork, and came to the conclusion that we spent 40, 000 a year.
Well, if you listen to last Friday's episode, you would hear us say that we just spent 80, 000 on cars last year alone. That's 2x our annual spending just on cars. We didn't even count household items, groceries, clothing, all the other things that go into it. And we went on vacations.
You need to know how much you're spending just in your regular annual day to day life.
Carl: What are good ways to keep track of spending? Notebook,
Mindy: pen, paper.
Carl: I'm not a big fan of that. I'd rather automate it a little bit [00:11:00] more. services like you need a budget. A lot of people rave about that. I've never had any experience with it.
We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But one thing we did do, which I really appreciated, is we created a Google form to record an expense that would feed into a Google Sheet, which is the same thing as Excel. From that point we could create different tables. It's called a pivot table to see exactly how much you spent on various things.
It is a little bit tedious, because you have to manually enter all your expenses, but I think it's a worthwhile activity. It might change the way you spend a little bit, because sometimes you'll go to buy something ridiculous, and then you'll have to enter it , and it's reminding you of your purchase.
Mindy: Not everybody is like me, and some people actually like technology, and we moved on to tracking our spending through this Google Sheets and Google Forms and all of this stuff. And it was really quite helpful to be in the moment as I'm checking out. I would whip out my phone, because my The spending tracker was on my [00:12:00] phone and I would open it up and I would enter all of the information in there and it would shoot it to the computer because then it would, sort it out for us into different categories and it was very easy for us to keep track that way.
Bottom line is however you choose to track your spending is for you. Personal finance is personal. If you've listened to my other show, you've heard me say that a hundred times. And You just need to know how much you're spending.
Carl: So to wrap this up, you need to know how much you're spending and you need to know how much you're going to withdraw, your rate of withdrawal, and the four percent, I'm not going to say rule out the four percent thingy, is a pretty good place to start.
Mindy: The four percent thingy, I like that, that's great.
Carl: Let's move on to our next part. What we just talked about , I don't want to say easiest, but it is simple, like I said before. It's only numbers.
The next part, the psychology of actually stopping work, is much, much harder. So let's talk about what happens after you've done your numbers and you have [00:13:00] enough to leave. Let's talk about leaving your job.
Mindy: You just quit and everything's perfect. The end. Thanks for listening.
Carl: No, that's not it.
I think leaving work is one of the greatest disruptions of life. You think of things that disrupt your life, and one of them might be a divorce, or your kids move out, or maybe a death, but this is one of them, because you're at a job, and you're spending about 2, 000 hours a year at that thing, and then all of a sudden, you're not going to do those 2, 000 hours anymore.
That's a pretty big void to fill, right?
Mindy: Yes, that is a huge void to fill, and if you haven't been planning, For what you're going to be doing a lot of what I have seen from Carl is actually retired What I have seen in Carl's life is that? he was going to retire and then he did and then what and , he had this list of a billion things that he was going to do But other things creeped in [00:14:00] because he didn't have a real set Plan for afterwards he spent all this time But then afterwards, it's like, Oh, well, what am I going to do now?
And things just kind of took up your life. And that's not necessarily bad, but it wasn't necessarily good
Carl: either. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment . We've just been to a lot of parties, what do strangers ask each other when they meet after you've introduced yourselves?
What is the number one question? I'm so, I'm so
Mindy: guilty of this too. So what do you do for work? What is your job? Yeah, what
Carl: do you do? That's, that's the opener, right?
Mindy: Yeah, what's your job? What do you do for a living?
Carl: Our identities are wrapped around our job I wonder if that's a thing specific to America I would say it probably is more so than other countries, but isn't that interesting how that's how we Identify ourselves and that's how we define ourselves is with our work [00:15:00] What's a
Mindy: better question?
Carl: What's one awesome thing you've done this year?
Mindy: See, now then I have to think about it. When somebody asks me what I do, I have an answer. It's easy to start a conversation that way.
Carl: Except if you're retired, in which case it makes the other person all uncomfortable and they think you have a terminal illness or something
Mindy: like that.
Early retired. Yeah. Oh, I'm retired. Really? You don't look that old.
Carl: Yeah, what's wrong with your life or that's another name that you're a slacker and you just don't want to work anymore. Do you mean unemployed? Yeah, do you mean unemployed or are you on the government dole?
Mindy: But what is a word that, or what is a question that we can ask people that we would love to hear from you listeners?
Email Mindy at Mindy on money. com or Carl at Mindy on money. com and let us [00:16:00] know what questions you would like to see people asking instead of what do you do for a job or what, what questions do you ask instead of what do you do for a living when you meet somebody at a party?
Carl: Another thing that makes us hard to leave our jobs, and this one is near and dear to my heart, is much of our lives and friends are often at work.
I remember on my first job, it was for a retailer that was big at one point, but wasn't doing well. And the guy across the, the cubicle from me got fired, and he was allowed to come back into his cube to retrieve all his stuff. And when he came back, he was crying. This guy had tears flowing down. I felt so bad, I started thinking about it and this whole guy's life was wrapped up in this company.
This company had like After work sports leagues and they had all these fun events for the younger people there and He was involved in all of them. So when he lost his job, he also lost his life
Mindy: And what makes it so? so Pointed of a [00:17:00] story is when you are working at a company, you don't really have a lot of control over how long you work there.
If they don't want you to work there anymore, they're going to let you go. If you don't want to work there anymore, you can just leave, but it's not always up to you if you're going to stay or not, which makes it kind of dangerous for you to wrap your entire life around this one company.
And finally, the last one we have on this first list is purpose. How many of us get a lot of fulfillment from our jobs?
Carl: Like I thought my job when I was doing my core task, I was a programmer. It was great. I was solving puzzles like having fun all day. I didn't care if I didn't talk to anyone because I was just doing fun things with code and I really enjoyed that part of my career.
Mindy: I don't think that's very helpful to be like, Oh, I didn't talk to anybody, so I didn't care.
Carl: But everyone has their own definition of purpose or fulfillment and [00:18:00] Yeah, I'm trying to think of some other job. Maybe if you're an accountant, you like optimizing people's numbers or helping them out that way. If you're a doctor, you enjoy helping people. But, that's a hard thing to get past in retirement.
I think a lot of people feel lost. My dad was super lost in retirement. He had no idea what to do with himself.
Mindy: Yeah, you need to have things going on outside your, your job. And as you are thinking about your enough in terms of money, you need to be thinking about enough in terms of life enjoyment.
Carl: We're actually going to see some people later this week who had a plan to sell their practice, but backed out of it. I think part of their thing, and I think this happens to a lot of us too, we get pretty good at making money. And it's easy, we've got our systems in place, we're good at our job, we're making more than we've ever made because we've 20 years.
And money [00:19:00] becomes a lot easier than it was when we were younger, and it's hard to leave that behind. So we find ourselves Moving the goalposts and then we tell ourselves lies to justify it like all the stock market has been bad or there's a war going on or this and this and this and we We find some information and cling to it and then give ourselves an excuse to work another year
Mindy: Let's let's talk about the moving the goalposts for a minute because I think that a well thought out Goalpost is great But you don't always have all the information, so I don't want to slam moving the goalposts if you have new information, if you have new goals.
Maybe you have a new baby, or you have a new place you want to live, or you've decided you were single when you made these goalposts, and now you've gotten married, and you've [00:20:00] discovered that you love to travel, so you want to move the goalposts. I think you start to get yourself into trouble in terms of enough when the goalposts keep moving or they move for no reason or they move because of somebody else's goalposts and you're trying to keep up.
Uh, I I'm not sure if I said it in this episode or if I've said it in other episodes. I work at BiggerPockets. com, which is a real estate investing education website. And I have seen many, many real estate investors change their goals after they get a little bit of success. And some of the goals that they have are, I want to own 10 properties and then they want to own 20 properties.
Okay, why? Maybe the 10 original properties didn't generate enough income, and they [00:21:00] think that 20 properties will generate the level of income that they need to have enough. Great. But then I see people with goals of hundreds of properties, or even thousands or tens of thousands of properties, and it no longer becomes a goal.
The idea of having enough money so that you don't have to work anymore. It becomes this idea of like, who's the king of the hill? Who has the most units ever? And then it's like a contest. And, you know, honestly, I don't think that there are, there are some people I don't think we'll ever have enough.
Carl: But one thing I want to back up a second and I'm curious to hear. Your thoughts on this especially early retirement, it's never going to be comfortable.
There's always going to be a leap of faith involved, because you're going to have to trust uncertainty. You have no idea. How the stock market is going to perform, and that's what most of us depend on. We depend on having that 4 percent withdrawal [00:22:00] rate. And to get to that 4 percent withdrawal, we are dependent on the stock market going up higher.
So I would tell people, If you're waiting to feel comfortable to retire, you might be waiting forever because you're never going to get to that spot unless you save like a hundred million in cash and you spend 50, 000 a year.
I do think, and I noticed this with myself is it was a leap of faith, but you get more comfortable. Over time it gets easier.
Mindy: Well, let's dive into that. What made you? comfortable leaving your Six figure
Carl: job. I don't think I was I knew I had to do it. So I forced myself off The cliff .
Mindy: That's really interesting. I thought you were going to say the fact that I had a job.
Carl: That definitely made things easier as well. And that was a strange situation. We had not planned on that, right? It just so happened that about the same time I left, you went back a short time before. But we had [00:23:00] never expected that.
That definitely makes things easier. But it wasn't necessary. We'd be fine if you weren't working.
Mindy: We would be fine if I wasn't working. But I think that it would be very Nerve wracking for you, if I wasn't working. And I think that we owe it to our listeners to acknowledge that. Yeah,
Carl: I agree. You definitely couldn't get your Cybertruck if you didn't have a job.
Ooh,
Mindy: I'm gonna quit!
Carl: Just kidding. That will be a big expense.
Mindy: We shouldn't have to, we shouldn't spend that money. We should just give that up
Carl: Let's talk about some strategies to help others who are considering early retirement I think we've got some really good tips here for people and the first one is something I actually did in my job Which was super great.
I went part time. I went from like four or five days a week down to three days a week So I just went from Tuesday to Thursday This did two pretty important things. It still provided [00:24:00] us with enough money to cover most of our basic needs and having that four day weekend After I experienced that, I'm like, well, like, like two days is okay, four days is even better, but I need more.
And that gave me the confidence I needed to really leave. And I think I only did that for like the last six months. So to back up a second, I was super nervous asking for it. I'm like, oh, they're never going to approve this or they're never going to want to see me go part time. And then I asked for it and my boss was like, oh yeah, sure.
That's fine. That's great. And even if you're a W 2 employee, there's still ways to negotiate this. You might lose your health insurance. You might have to go on the health care exchange if you're here in America with our wonderful health care. But there's ways to do it, and I think this is a great way to partially test drive early retirement.
Mindy: Yeah, I think it's, it, there are things that help. Get that yes from your boss. First of all, you have to be a great employee. You can't be one of those [00:25:00] phoning it in employees and having your, you know, asking for a favor from your boss and have them be like, oh sure, totally. But that wasn't you. You were a great employee.
You had a lot of skills that they needed and they wanted to be able to keep you in whatever capacity they could.
Carl: Okay, our next tip is to test drive retirement with a Cybertruck. No, sabbatical. Sabbatical, sabbatical and Cybertruck, they kind of sound the same.
Mindy: They don't sound anything alike you big weirdo.
Carl: A lot of companies, especially if you've been there a while, encourage employees to take sabbaticals and many of them even have formal policies around this where it might not be difficult to take three or six months, especially if you've been there a couple years and then you're guaranteed a job.
You can take this time to see what life is like on the other side and maybe it's great and you decide you never want to come back, or maybe it's not so great and you really need that job in your life or you aren't comfortable with your numbers. But at least then you've tried it and you won't have regrets about not trying it.[00:26:00]
Mindy: And just like traditional retirement or early retirement, you need to have a plan for your sabbatical as well. Have a definite time length, have a list of projects you want to get done, or a list of books you want to read, or TV shows you want to watch or exercises you want to do. Whatever it is that you're going to do in your sabbatical have a Some sort of structure so you don't get to the end of the sabbatical and be like, huh?
What did I do for the last X number of months? That's not going to be helpful at all
Carl: Our next tip some companies encourage you to take Time off longer than sabbaticals. I'm thinking about Apple specifically with this. I think If you leave in good standing, their policy was, and still is, that you can take up to like one or two years off and pretty much always come back to your job.
And I suspect other big tech companies are like this too. Part of the reason for these policies is right now workers are so hard to find. So [00:27:00] if you're considering anything like this, I think now is the golden age to ask for a little bit more from your employer.
Mindy: And again, being a great employee is the first step to being welcomed back.
Carl: Okay, so our next couple revolve around what I talked about with my old co worker who cried when he lost his job. Establish a life outside of work . And this is easier said than done, especially if you've got kids, you're probably not going to have a lot of time. But think of things you might want to do after you quit your job.
Some people don't know they're lost. And they go back to work. You don't hear about that that often. But I would try to encourage people to try different things and experiment with, with different hobbies, different art, I don't know, whatever, moves your boat. What would you do in retirement?
Mindy: In retirement, there is a long list of books that I'd like to read that I just don't feel like I have time for right now. I'd like to write a book. [00:28:00] Or several books. I have a lot swirling around in my head right now. I would like to start more podcasts. Hopefully in February or March I'll have yet another podcast out.
Stay tuned. I'll share that with you later. I would like to be able to exercise more regularly. Something that we have started in the month of December 2023. We are at the gym probably three or four days a week. I'd really like to be there. Five or six days a week. I'd like to bike more and Just get on your bike and ride Is that a queen reference?
That is a queen reference. Nice I just want to Stay active. I have a lot of people who tell me that I don't look my age and I'm starting to feel my age I would like to get more active be more limber and be you know, in great health for the rest of my life. I don't think there's any classes that I really want to [00:29:00] take.
Like, I definitely don't want to go back to school. My, school history can be summed up by D's get degrees. Woo hoo! A little bit of travel. But I have a really great life right now. I would like to have it more leisurely. How about you?
Carl: What I did when I left my job is I overcompensated by trying to do too much and signing up for a million different projects.
We bought another house to flip, which I'm still working on. We were in the middle of a flip at the time. I think it's a good idea to err on the side of doing less. It's okay to be bored and just
Mindy: Oh, really? Do you think that? Really? As evidenced by all the times that you're bored? Now I'm
Carl: okay with going for a walk for two hours a day every day and I wouldn't have been okay with that initially.
Life's a journey. You have to figure yourself out and that's half the fun of the whole thing.
Mindy: If you're only listening to this and not [00:30:00] watching it, you missed me giving him the stink eye. He was not. Okay, with just hanging out before. He's getting better. I'm wearing him down.
Carl: So, our last couple are to work on relationships with your friends and also your partner.
Friends are super important and a lot of them don't have us. You especially read about this with males, I think, cause if, if you do have a single worker household, it tends to be the male in the relationship if you've got a traditional relationship. So a lot of men are, and he's looking at me like I'm nuts again, a lot of, a lot of men are especially lonely after they've worked a whole career and then they leave and everything they knew was at work.
So work on that stuff beforehand, but also your partner. I think this has actually happened to at least one person. I know it's, it's no public person, so don't speculate, internet people. But if you don't work, you're going to be around your partner a long time and A job, especially an [00:31:00] intense job, where you're at work a lot, can mask a lot of those issues.
But all of a sudden, if you're thrust into a life together, you're going to have to know how to negotiate that, and you're going to have to be on good terms with your partner. So work on relationships.
Mindy: Yeah, that's, that's really important. And that's not something that you can, okay, we're retired, now we're going to work on our relationship.
You need to start that now. Date your spouse. And
Carl: I know that me being in your life more often is a big enhancement for you,
Mindy: right? Yep, sure is. We have, we have
Carl: a big house and we can get, we can get away from each other when we need to.
Mindy: So we have created a document that we are going to link to in the show notes, you can find this worksheet at MindyOnMoney. com slash enough.
It's kind of a guided tour to help you work through the things you need to think about when you're trying to determine your [00:32:00] enough number. Because the 4 percent safe withdrawal rate is a great starting point, but that's not the end all be all.
And I know that if everybody. Listening has heard me espouse the benefits of the 4 percent safe withdrawal rate thingy on multiple podcasts, but it isn't written in stone. So, you do want to do a lot of different, thinking exercises as well. Number one, read the original 4 percent rule article. And again, if you can't find it online, it can be kind of difficult to find.
I found it. I saved it to my computer. If you'd like a copy, email Mindy at MindyOnMoney. com and I will email it to you back. It's very quick. Just, hey, can I have the 4 percent rule article? Sure you can. Thank you so much for listening. Determine your fine number after you've read that article based on the information that you find in the article and based on your spending now.
It wasn't the 40, 000. We thought we were spending. It's more like 80
Carl: what would be your number one [00:33:00] tip for year enough and stopping your job ? I
Mindy: was going to say determining what kind of lifestyle you want to live in your retirement, your early retirement, your traditional retirement, whatever.
Determining what kind of lifestyle. So definitely discuss it with your partner if you have one, what is your level of travel going to be? How much will you be supporting others? Are you going to have children? Do you have children now? Are you going to retire when they're 10? Are you going to retire when they're 27?
How old are you going to be when you're retiring? How in how many years do you want to retire? Where are you going to live? If you're going to live in California, that's going to be a very different number, very different enough number than if you're going to live in Southeast Asia. What's your level of health?
Are you going to need care? Constant care? Do you have, chronic diseases? There's a lot of different factors at play, but your general [00:34:00] lifestyle that you are going to be pursuing is going to be a huge factor in figuring out your enough number.
Carl: I'm going to give advice that might be the opposite of what you said, and all I'm going to say is, it's three words, and then I'll expound on it, don't be rigid.
I've been retired for almost seven years now, and my life looks so much different now than I expected it to be, and in many ways it's better, but there are things that I could have never anticipated. And that's one of the glorious things about financial independence.
Carl: If you would have told me I would have owned a co working space seven years ago, I would have thought you were nuts and I wouldn't have been able to do it if I still had a job because it consumes some of our time or like I'm writing a book now. I wouldn't have had time for that either. So don't be rigid with anything with the money part either.
And I'll say something that a lot of people are going to cringe at. If you're not at even your 4 percent rule, but you have significant savings, You [00:35:00] don't have to wait till you've got that to stop your job. You can take some time off while your kids are young and go back to work after that. Nothing has to be set in stone.
And your journey is going to be different from everyone else's. TAke some chances. . I think
Mindy: early financial independence is taking some chances.
Carl: But I would err on the side of even being a little bit more, I don't want to say reckless, but
Mindy: Definitely don't say reckless, because then people are going to be emailing us in ten years, I quit my job and now I have no money!
Carl: You should be doing things that scare you every once in a while, that get you out of your comfort zone, because that's where you grow. And leaving your job, even before you get to your big number, to explore some incredible opportunity, to spend time with family, to get in the best shape of your life, that might be a worthwhile thing to do, even if it's going to give you a little bit of queasiness when you initially do it.
Push yourself off the cliff.
Mindy: Be thoughtfully reckless.
Carl: Very thoughtfully reckless. Take [00:36:00] calculated risks.
Mindy: Yeah, calculated risks. Absolutely. And have a safety net.
Carl: Yeah, I'm so happy I did. My life could have taken two different directions. I could have been in a cube for the next 20 years, writing code on a computer, which might have been fine, we would have died with, massive amounts of money because we have excess money right now.
I can't imagine what it would have been if I would have stayed working, but I would have been in a cube having someone else tell me what to do. Or I could have the life I do now, which is a great big open book where I can exercise for two hours a day. I love going to the gym and just working out without a time constraint, spending time with the kids, never saying no to something that your kids might want to do, like ice skating as our kids are doing now or reading a book to them, being able to embrace opportunities that come at you, which you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
Mindy: The girls are going to listen to this and be like, oh, they're never going to tell us no again. We still tell them [00:37:00] no, but it's not based on money.
Carl: And our kids aren't going to listen to this. They're probably not. Mom and Dad, you're so boring. You're always talking about money. I just want to get pizza.
Mindy: Okay, well, I think this is. A good place to wrap this up.
Carl: Where can people find us?
Mindy: People can find us at MindyOnMoney. com. You can email me, Mindy, at MindyOnMoney. com and email Carl at Carl at MindyOnMoney. com. Or you can find us wherever podcasts are. And
Carl: if you want to hear about Mindy's Cybertruck Adventures, go to MindyOnMoney.
com slash CyberMindy all one word.
Mindy: Yeah, there's nothing there. There will be. Oh, great. It'll be awesome. Totally worth your time to type that out. And next week we are going to talk to the J. L. Collins of The Simple Path to Wealth and Pathfinders fame.
Carl: I call him the blog father [00:38:00] of personal finance. The blog
Mindy: father.
The godfather of personal finance. No, blog father. The blog father of personal finance.
Thanks for
Carl: listening. Bye.
​
Mindy: Carl, on our last episode, we talked about you being a cyber bro. Well, you called yourself a cyber bro. I called you a cyber nerd. And you are proving me right with your cyber nerd shirt and your little cyber nerd, Christmas tree ornament and your little cyber nerd remote control truck. you're really going all out with this, doubling down on the cyber nerdery. We
Carl: should tell the audience what I'm wearing and what objects are around us in case they are not watching on YouTube. I have Well,
Mindy: if you're not watching on YouTube, you are missing out on this amazing Cybertruck display of affection.
Carl: I have a Cybertruck shirt on, we have a little Cybertruck remote control [00:39:00] toy, and for Christmas, Mindy got me a Cybertruck ornament, which is beautiful. It was adorning our tree moments ago, and I took it off so it could be here with us on the podcast. But! Great. Truth be told, you're the one who has a Cybertruck reservation, right?
Is that true? I do?
Mindy: Yeah. Did you reserve one in my name? Of course I did. Why? I don't want that thing. I don't really
Carl: want it either, but I thought you
Mindy: would. What? How long have we been married and you think I would want that truck? I'm not gonna drive it.
Carl: Sometimes you get angry, you've got road rage, and you're like, I would, if I had a Hummer, I would just hit them.
And she wouldn't really do this, but the Cybertruck would be a
Mindy: I wouldn't really do this. Sure, keep telling yourself that.
Carl: So maybe I'm gonna cancel your reservation. It sounds like this might lend you in some hot water.
​[00:40:00]