Introduction: Create Your Own FI Story

“The story you tell yourself becomes your reality.” –Chad Kellogg, American alpinist.

I accomplished my goal of financial independence (FI) and retired at forty-one years of age, sixteen and a half years after beginning my career as a physical therapist. Friday, December 1, 2017, was my last day at my job. So how did I spend the first Monday of the rest of my life, a day when I could do whatever I want? You’re reading it. I started the day with my usual morning routine of reading and quiet time, a workout, and breakfast with my wife and daughter. It was much like any other Monday, only without all the rushing of having somewhere to be.

I dropped my daughter off at preschool, then took a nice long walk through the park next to my house to clear my head and breathe in the crisp late fall air. By nine thirty a.m., I sat down at my computer to begin the book you’re now reading. Did I always have a passion for writing? No. Was writing a book, another personal finance book at that, my life’s dream? No! But it is the thing that I most want to be doing with my life right now. This is the book that I have been seeking for the past fifteen years and have not been able to find.

I didn’t decide I wanted to write this book. I became convinced that I needed to. This is the book that could have saved me six, if not seven, figures in financial mistakes and years of angst and unhappiness that I experienced on the path to FI because I was pursuing the wrong things. I am confident it will change your life. FI is not about retiring early or retiring at all really. It’s all about having the freedom and flexibility to design your life in alignment with your values. You can work on things important to you. You can work at your own pace. Or you can choose not to work at all. FI gives you the power to decide. It allows you to use your money as a tool to live a rich life, freeing yourself from the need to go to a job.

Building wealth that enables FI is simple, but it’s not easy. There is a diverse group of people featured in this book who have taken different paths to FI, but we each have only the same three tools to use in pursuit of our FI goals:

1. Spend Less

2. Earn More

3. Invest Better

Each tool serves as a theme for a section of the book. However, the growing financial independence community is about much more than becoming wealthy, retiring early, or any other financial theme. We align our money with our values to build the lives we want rather than the ones we’re “supposed” to live. This requires intentionality, doing things differently than the majority who surround you. Those of you who choose to follow through on the lessons in this book will find that FI is not only a possibility but a mathematical certainty. Equally important, you can get there faster than you could have imagined!

Instead of staying in careers until the traditional age of sixty-five or seventy, the principles in this book can make work optional for those in their early sixties, fifties, forties, thirties, or for a rare few, in their twenties. Finding purpose is vital to getting started down the path to FI. I’m hopeful that FI will enable and inspire people to use their freedom to pursue opportunities to make the world a better place. For you, this may mean trying to change the world, your local community, or your own family. It may simply mean becoming a better version of yourself. It may mean retirement in the traditional sense of leaving paid work and living on your investments. Or it may mean using your financial freedom to pursue a new career or start a business you would otherwise be afraid to try. Finding purpose and living intentionally are key components to achieving FI and designing the life you truly want. This book helps you get started by finding your personal “why” and then giving you the tools to design a life consistent with your values.

You Get to Choose. 

This book is called Choose FI. It would be easy to focus on FI, financial independence, and classify this as a personal finance book. But don’t overlook the word choose. This is a book about making choices. There are two paths that you can take through life. You can follow the standard path, or you can Choose FI. This initial decision is followed by many subsequent decisions, allowing you to build the life you desire. This book was designed to be a guide to assist you on that journey, a choose-your-own-adventure book if you will. You can pick and choose the levers you want to pull as you design your personalized path to FI.

I started life heading down the standard path. I was conditioned from a young age to get “good grades” so I could go to a “good college.” Getting a degree would enable me to get a “good” (i.e., a high-paying) job. This would allow me to live the American dream of owning a nice house in a good neighborhood, taking two to four weeks of vacation each year, and retiring at age sixty-five.

Shortly after starting my job as a physical therapist, I realized the career I had chosen, and the standard American professional lifestyle that accompanied it were not, in fact, what I wanted after all. Like many people, I felt trapped. I spent seven years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars on degrees that enabled me to get what was supposed to be my “dream job.” My wife and I then bought our “dream house.” Unfortunately, we soon realized we were living someone else’s dream. I got the idea that early retirement was the solution to my problems, though I had no idea if it was possible or how to do it. I randomly chose the goal to retire by age forty. I started to educate myself on the technical aspects of personal finance like investing, tax strategies, and retirement planning. Despite being diligent savers, I learned standard advice was keeping us stuck on the standard path rather than enabling financial independence. The financial advice we received was conflicted, deceptive, and unnecessarily expensive.

It’s easy to find yourself on the standard path. Most people in our society live paycheck to paycheck. Many people are paying for past decisions like taking out student loans, which were often made before they were old enough to buy alcohol legally. Homes serve as status symbols. Time and money are spent to keep them up by homeowners who rarely have time to enjoy them. Financed cars depreciate while being used primarily to transport people to and from work. Any extra money is spent on “retail therapy,” restaurant meals, and happy hours that people “deserve” because they work so damned hard to keep the hamster wheel spinning. Paying to maintain this lifestyle leaves little financial margin. Things go wrong from time to time. Living paycheck to paycheck comes with the privilege of getting to pay interest to a credit card company—at an average annual percentage rate of 16 percent—which you need to help you stay afloat. It’s hard to know how many people choose this lifestyle consciously, but regardless, it is the norm for most Americans. Most gradually slide further into a hole that keeps them trapped on this standard path.

Similarly, most people say relationships and family are the most important things in their lives, but a job is where they spend the majority of their time and energy. Why do people stay in lifestyles so out of alignment with their stated values? Those who want something better and are good savers go to financial advisors because we’ve heard how complicated investing is. We pay excessive fees and taxes following the usual advice that keeps us trapped on the standard path. Most advisors receive commissions for the sale of financial products or are paid as a percentage of the assets you have invested with them. This incentivizes the financial industry to unnecessarily complicate investing, so clients remain dependent on them. It’s also in their best interest for clients to always strive for more rather than determine how much is “enough.”

What dreams do people give up on because they drift down the standard path through life? How many people don’t start their business because they’re afraid they will fail? How many people don’t take that trip of a lifetime because they can’t afford it or can’t get vacation time approved? How many marriages start filled with hope, promise, and romance only to crumble under the strain of financial stress and time demands that burden so many?

When you Choose FI, you are choosing a way of life with more options and less fear. You’re choosing to live life in alignment with your values. FI provides freedom. It’s easy to see why choosing FI is appealing. So why do so few people do it? Why do so many fail to diverge from the standard path despite its limitations? One reason is simply the fact that the standard path is . . . the standard. It’s the norm. The standard path is deeply ingrained by schools, families, media, and popular culture. Above all else, most people have never thought that there might be a different way. We all know people on the standard path. We have all probably been on that path as well. It’s a challenge to take a different path without anyone to guide you.

Author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn frequently said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” The examples in this book and the people you’ll meet in the FI community will provide a new normal to which you can recalibrate your life. As you learn the stories of people who Choose FI, you’ll quickly see the standard path has many exits that most people bypass because they don’t realize they exist.

Choosing FI doesn’t require extreme frugality, a massive income, or special investing prowess. It starts with questioning the things that trap so many of us on the standard path and understanding that there is a different way.

Finding My Path

I began learning about personal finance by reading books and articles on my own, with no particular method to navigate all of the available information. I listened to radio show hosts like Dave Ramsey, targeted to an audience working themselves out of debt I no longer had, because that was the most readily available information, and I could listen when driving in my car. Reading and listening gave me a basic foundation in mainstream personal finance. But my wife and I were already avoiding debt. We bought a house we could afford and were paying it off quickly. We were saving roughly 50 percent of our income, far exceeding the traditionally recommended 10 to 15 percent.

On a particularly bad day at work, I typed the words “extreme early retirement” into the search box on my computer screen. Up popped what would become the first blog I ever read, Early Retirement Extreme (ERE). My life was changed forever! I dove headfirst into the world of Jacob Lund Fisker at ERE and took on the journey through his “21 Day Makeover” to early retirement. It included ways to get our expenses as low as possible to be able to retire as soon as possible. On day three, Fisker’s program suggested I could “learn to cook based on a small set of staples (rice, beans, onions). These staples are then bought in 10 lbs bags.” I guess my love of sushi and microbrews would have to go. On day seven, Fisker suggested “going car free.” On subsequent days, he advised getting rid of the cell phone, cable TV, and most of the other things that I associated with a normal life. He shared how he was able to live on under $10,000 per year. It seemed like a lot of sacrifices, but it might just be worth it. I wanted out of the standard American lifestyle, and I wanted out bad. I thought I found my ticket. I found my tribe among Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) bloggers. They showed me that the life I dreamed of could become my reality. Reading these blogs was highly motivational and educational.

Unfortunately, reading them also had unintended consequences. Three things happened that made me far less happy. First, as my knowledge of investing and tax planning grew, I couldn’t help but continue to glance in the rearview mirror, where I would see all the past blunders we made when we’d followed conventional wisdom and mainstream advice. Our investing mistakes were particularly painful because we paid an advisor handsomely for awful guidance. I spent a lot of time looking back with regret and bitterness. Second, FIRE blogs put early retirement on a pedestal, so in my mind, early retirement became a nirvana. I felt the need to retire early. Then I could be happy. I stopped appreciating all the amazing things that I already had in my life. I lost the ability to be the carefree, happy-go-lucky person I used to be. Between glancing back at our past mistakes and looking forward to early retirement, I found myself unable to enjoy the present. Third, while gaining a deeper understanding of our finances was initially a positive thing, I became overly focused on money. I focused on getting our expenses as low as possible so I could retire as soon as possible. I began to scrutinize every dollar that left our household.

Before the FIRE blogs, my wife and I gave freely to charities and other causes we believed in. Now I acted judgmentally. Was this organization as effective and efficient as we were with our money? Would that person use our gift wisely or just waste it? How could we justify giving away our hard-earned money when saving it would allow us to retire sooner? We took similar approaches with our personal spending, tightly holding on to every dollar. We began to do less of the things that had always made us happy. Rather than gaining the freedom I desired, I led myself into a different trap. I was trying to live up to what I believed to be other people’s values and expectations rather than being true to my own.

Hitting these potholes is common for many of us who Choose FI. I finally realized that I needed to figure out what I truly wanted in life. I needed to develop my own personal blueprint for building that life. I needed to learn that money is a very powerful tool that can provide many things, but it is always just a means to an end and never the end itself. This sent me on a mission of discovery, looking for truth. I began questioning everything and reading voraciously, from technical aspects of personal finance to finding personal happiness, fulfillment, and purpose. I accumulated different lessons and truths from a wide variety of sources that applied to my own life and kept them. At the same time, I took the parts that didn’t fit what I wanted for my life and threw them away. Gradually, a personalized plan began to emerge that worked for my family and me. As this happened, I felt myself becoming a happier and more empowered person. I began to see the positive effects again that financial independence could have, enabling me to pursue a variety of fulfilling paths at different stages in life.

I began to think about how to help others, each on their own individual journeys to FI. Each of you has personal strengths, weaknesses, past experiences, needs, and preferences. How could I help you reach financial independence quickly, empowering you to do whatever you desire with your life? How could I help you avoid the massive mistakes that I had made wasting a decade on a suboptimal financial path? How could I help you avoid driving yourself to the brink of depression by trying to live up to the standards of gurus whose philosophies, circumstances, strengths, and weaknesses did not match up exactly to your own?

While mimicking any single philosophy contributed to making financial and personal mistakes, I found truths in each of them. What if I started a podcast? I could interview a group of people who had overcome their own challenges and found their own truths while achieving FI quickly. I could take these lessons and look at common themes and patterns to develop principles that anyone could use to develop their own personalized path to achieve this rare yet very achievable outcome of financial independence.

A few months after this idea began rattling around in my head, I stumbled upon a new podcast, Choose FI. I listened to a few episodes. One of the hosts, Brad Barrett, was at a stage in life similar to my own. Co-host Jonathan Mendonsa was at a point where I had been a few years earlier. He had a palpable excitement to go down this road and a desire to grow and learn, but with some obvious blind spots that I was able to spot quickly due to my own past mistakes.

I found myself rooting for them to be bad and fail. I viewed them as competitors who beat me to the punch in doing exactly what I wanted to do with the podcast. However, as I listened to them, I couldn’t help but to become a huge fan and see that these guys got it and were building something special. It made no sense to try to reinvent the wheel and compete with them. Instead, I contacted them and asked if they would be interested in teaming up. I would use their interviews as the basis for this book, which could be another outlet for the life-changing message of FI. They agreed, and we proceeded full speed ahead.

Brad: 

This book exists because we feel FI is a superpower that can radically transform your life, relationships, financial stability, and ultimately your happiness. There’s normally so much stress surrounding money, but when you can reframe saving money to helping you pursue what you truly want out of life, it becomes the obvious choice. I’m Brad Barrett, a suburban husband and father of two young daughters, former CPA who left my corporate job at thirty-five to pursue entrepreneurship and shortly after declared my Financial Independence. Jonathan Mendonsa and I started the ChooseFI podcast in 2017, and the message has resonated with people all across the world. In partnership with Chris Mamula, this book represents the best of our podcast and the FI message.

Jonathan: 

In the summer of 2016, I heard Brad as a guest on the Mad Fientist podcast talking about credit card travel rewards. When I found out he lived in Richmond, VA, I reached out to see if he wanted to get lunch. My enthusiasm got the best of me and a fun conversation on pursuing FI and maximizing travel rewards morphed into an idea to start and collaborate on a blog and companion podcast. The concepts brought together by this community are powerful enough to start a movement. While it’s difficult to have a blog or podcast be linear, especially when you are learning as you go, this book represents our best effort to distill those transformative ideas into a Blueprint to FI.

This book features stories of people who have achieved or are on the path to FI. On the podcast, Brad often says FI is like a superpower that makes life easier. However, there are no Clark Kents or Peter Parkers in this book. No one in this book is from the planet Krypton, and no one was bitten by a radioactive spider. This book is filled with stories of ordinary people from all walks of life. You will read about people from rural areas with low costs of living and high-cost big cities, from an assortment of careers ranging from physicians and hedge fund managers to school teachers and military service members, from ultra-creative entrepreneurs to those who have worked only regular nine-to-five jobs. You’ll hear from those who embrace frugality as a virtue to those who travel the world uninhibited. This book features those whose investment choices range from stocks and bonds to real estate to their own businesses and any combination of the above.

While there are differences among the people featured in this book, they share three common threads. Each person:

• Challenges limiting beliefs and looks at the world in a non-standard way.

• Takes definitive actions to improve their life.

• Finds a way to utilize their own unique strengths and values and chooses to define success on their own terms.

Everyone you will get to know in this book has created their own superpowers. Through the principles they embrace, you can develop your own as well.