The 13 Biggest Financial Independence Mistakes (That Delay FIRE by Years)

Summary

BiggerPockets Money Podcast – Episode Summary

Episode Title: The 13 Biggest Financial Independence Mistakes (That Delay FIRE by Years)
Date: March 17, 2026
Hosts: Mindy Jensen & Scott Trench

---

Episode Overview

This episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast is a deep dive into the most common—and some of the most subtle—mistakes that delay or derail financial independence (FI) and the pursuit of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Aimed at intermediate to advanced personal finance enthusiasts and those serious about accelerating their journey to FI, Mindy and Scott dissect both obvious pitfalls and nuanced, lesser-discussed errors, offering candid anecdotes, current market context, and actionable advice for optimizing your path to early financial freedom.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The 5 Most Obvious (and Costly) FIRE Mistakes

1. Waiting Too Long to Start ([04:12])

   • The cost of delay magnifies over time due to the power of compounding—starting early with even modest amounts sets you up for vastly better outcomes.
   • Quote (Scott, 04:27):
     “The compounding journey begins in your career at an early age… all that stuff makes such an enormous compounding difference. And the game can be very easy... for young people who get a big jump out the gate.”

2. Not Tracking Your Spending and Net Worth ([05:34])

   • Treating FI as a game: You need a “scoreboard” of your spending and assets to ensure you’re progressing toward your freedom number.
   • Quote (Mindy, 05:34):
     “You need to know how much you’re spending… you want to have this in your mind so that you are progressing down the actual path that you need, not the path that you think you’re on.”

3. Buying Too Much House or Car, Too Early ([06:23])

   • Housing and vehicles are “liquidity killers.” Keeping these costs low via house hacking, roommates, or location arbitrage frees significant capital to invest.

   • Quote (Scott, 06:23):
     "If you can keep those expenses controlled, the game gets so much easier to build wealth."

   • Anecdote ([07:53–10:28]): Scott shares his early experience house hacking a duplex, emphasizing how low housing costs accelerated his FI progress.

4. Lifestyle Creep Before (and After) FI ([10:38])

   • The insidious effect of escalating lifestyle costs as income rises—if unchecked, it repeatedly “moves the goalposts” for FI.

   • Quote (Scott, 11:24):
     "If you can fix your spending at any point… even if it’s fairly high in that initial baseline… you can make FI that much more realistic and achievable.”

   • Post-FI spending paradox: For some, being overly frugal after reaching FI makes it hard to enjoy their wealth.

5. Confusing Income Growth With Progress Toward FI ([12:59])

   • A classic error—rising income doesn’t equate to faster FI if your savings rate doesn’t rise commensurately.
   • Quote (Scott, 12:59):
     “Wealth accumulation is a function of your savings rate. And if your income is going up, but your savings rate is not, you’re not accelerating your progress.”

---

8 Subtle, Easy-to-Overlook FIRE Mistakes

1. Building a Plan That Requires You to Be Rational Forever ([13:35])

   • Relying on hyper-optimized withdrawal or tax strategies assumes you’ll execute perfectly over decades—unrealistic for most.
   • Quote (Scott, 13:58):
     “There needs to be more margin of safety, there needs to be more flexibility built into the plan than these assumptions around perfect withdrawals.”

2. Treating Healthcare as a Generic Expense ([15:37])

   • Assuming static, low healthcare costs is a costly mistake; premiums can double with age regardless of inflation or subsidies.
   • Quote (Scott, 16:15):
     "Healthcare needs to be a real thought in your mind as you are progressing down your FI journey... Today... I would pay almost double if I just changed my age in the input field to 60."

3. Blind Faith in the 4% Rule Without Spending Certainty ([17:54])

   • The 4% rule is not a guarantee, especially if your expenses are volatile or healthcare costs spike.

   • Quote (Scott, 17:54):
     “The risk in the 4% rule is not around investment portfolios... the risk is around spending. It assumes that your spending is going to be constant relative to inflation and it won’t be… particularly regarding healthcare.”

   • Quote (Mindy, 21:12):
     “It's not the 4% rule. It’s the 4% rule of thumb. And rule of thumb means something very different than rule does.”

   • In-depth segment ([23:48]): Scott details how some “offsets” (like a mortgage rolling off as healthcare premiums rise) can mask risks.

4. Underestimating Identity and Purpose Risk ([25:22])

   • FI without a plan for what you’re “retiring to” can lead to loss of purpose.
   • Quote (Mindy, 25:22):
     “You’re not retiring from your awful boss… You want to be retiring to something.”

5. Unintentionally Contributing to the Wrong Accounts ([26:09])

   • Over-concentration in tax-deferred accounts (e.g., 401k) can create future inflexibility and unexpected tax burdens.

   • Quote (Scott, 26:09):
     “A household that spends $100k a year... they’re going to feel trapped if they've got even $750k or $1 million in net worth, but it’s all in their home equity and 401k.”

   • Introduction of the “Liquidity First Optionality Framework” (LEFOF) to describe optimum account diversification.

6. Ignoring Tax Liabilities—Now and in the Future ([29:07])

   • Focusing only on current-year tax breaks can create concentrated, inflexible accounts and large Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) later.

   • Quote (Scott, 29:55):
     “For this particular audience… in their 30s, for example, in a 401k or tax-deferred account, you are at real risk… there could be a real consequence there.”

   • Advice: Consider multi-bucket strategies, and don’t blindly max your 401k without modeling future taxes.

7. Diversification Missteps ([33:11])

   • Over-exposure to a single asset class (e.g., all equities, S&P 500), or haphazard diversification (like crypto or unfamiliar assets), heightens risk.
   • Quote (Scott, 33:33):
     “There’s an argument for simplicity… but in retirement… there’s a big gap between known best practices and actual behavior… The FIRE community… they're not actually moving… to diversified portfolios that include bonds or risk parity style portfolios.”

8. Not Exercising Your Spending Muscles During the FI Journey ([35:38])

   • Extreme frugality for years can be demotivating and make it difficult to enjoy spending even when FI is achieved.

   • Quote (Mindy, 35:45):
     “Keeping the things that are enjoyable in your life are what make life worth living... what’s the point of doing this if it’s not to enjoy the life that you are moving towards?”

   • The journey should be a “continuum that gradually increases your optionality and therefore, on average, your happiness” (Scott, 36:24).

   • Real-life promotion anecdotes ([37:26]): Both hosts share stories of declining career advancement to prioritize family/time.

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Delaying Action ([04:12], Mindy):
  "Start, start today."

• On Housing Costs ([10:28], Scott):
  “I don’t think that privacy in my 20s would have been worth the incredible reward that that choice… compounded into here in my 30s.”

• On Post-FI Spending ([12:47], Mindy):
  “It has been difficult to flip the switch on the spending. One of the things is me asking myself, how can I use my wealth to make my life better?”

• On Purpose in Retirement ([25:22], Mindy):
  "You want to be retiring to something because you don’t want to get to early retirement, quit your job, and then sit around and be like, okay, now what?"

• On Account Concentration ([32:11], Scott):
  “What I don’t want when I get there is for that to be $1.75 million in my 401k and $700,000 in my home equity and $50,000 in my emergency reserve.”

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment & Topic | Timestamps | |--------------------------------------------------|-------------------| | Obvious Mistake #1: Waiting Too Long | 04:12 – 05:34 | | Obvious Mistake #2: Not Tracking Spending/Networth| 05:34 – 06:23 | | Obvious Mistake #3: Housing/Car Over-spending | 06:23 – 10:28 | | Obvious Mistake #4: Lifestyle Creep | 10:38 – 12:47 | | Obvious Mistake #5: Income ≠ FI Progress | 12:59 – 13:35 | | Subtle Mistakes (starting with Planning Fallacy) | 13:35 – 38:58 | | Notable Quotes and Anecdotes (various) | Throughout |

---

Overall Tone and Style

Candid, practical, and sometimes humorous ("bye bye blueberry piece!"), the episode balances tactical advice with real-world caveats. Scott and Mindy are self-reflective, often using their own mistakes to illustrate points, and urge listeners to “turn your brain on” rather than follow FIRE rules dogmatically.

---

Final Takeaways

• Be deliberate, not dogmatic: Don’t blindly follow rules (like “max your 401k” or “4% rule works!”)—always adapt strategies to your evolving circumstances.
• Track and review regularly: Your FI journey is dynamic; recalibrate for changing realities (costs, taxes, life stage, etc.).
• Balance present and future: Enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Find ways to make life enjoyable while you work towards independence.
• Purpose matters: FI isn’t just about quitting work—it’s about living meaningfully.

---

How to Engage

Listeners are encouraged to share their own FI mistakes or questions with Mindy and Scott via email. For more resources, visit biggerpocketsmoney.com.

---

Transcript

[A]

Mindy and I are so grateful for the following sponsors who make BiggerPockets money possible. When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their Fund 6 offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly in a 70 LPGP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days. After that nine month commitment, the fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum investment is typically $100,000, but Pine Financial is able to reduce that minimum for BiggerPockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure I am personally invested in this fund through my self directed ira. Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com Pine P I N E Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.

[B]

When you want more Start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides who are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Northwest makes life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business, they give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements, meeting minutes and thousands of how to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And with Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data and all services are handled in house because privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com money free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered [e-mail] money free.

[A]

Audible has been a core part of my routine for more than a decade. I started listening years ago to make better use of drive time and workouts and it stuck. At this point, I've logged over 229 audiobook completions on Audible alone and I still regularly re listen to the highest impact titles. Lately I've been listening to Bigger Leaners, Stronger for Fitness, the Anxious Generation for Parenting Perspective, and several Arthur Brooks audiobooks that have been excellent for mental well being. What makes Audible so powerful is its breadth beyond audiobooks. You also get Audible originals, podcasts, and a massive back catalog across business, health, parenting and more, all accessible in one app. If you're looking to turn everyday moments into real progress, Audible has been indispensable for me over 10 years. Kickstart your wellbeing journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com

[B]

bpmoney if you're chasing financial independence, you've probably optimized your savings rate, cut your expenses, and invested consistently. But what if the biggest thing standing between you and financial independence isn't your income, it's your mistakes? Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me, as always, is my Has Never Made an Investing Mistake Co host Scott Trench Thanks.

[A]

Mindy Is selling a bunch of stocks to buy real estate right before the market goes up 10% in a given year count as a mistake? If so, I think I've made plenty of mistakes on some big ones. Here we're going to break down the five biggest mistakes that many people make on their way to financial independence today. The ones that quietly cost you years of freedom, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a whole lot of stress. Before we get into those mistakes, I'll let you know that we're breaking these out into five very obvious ones. These will be no surprise. You've heard them before. Then we're going to talk about eight more subtle mistakes that I think are largely ignored, debatable, or really, you know, more, more kind of under the surface, more insidious than the ones that are most obvious to the fire community. So without further ado, Mindy, do you want to kick us off with the biggest mistake?

[B]

Waiting too long to start? Scott, you've heard about financial independence and you're like, oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And then a few months or a few years go by, you hear it again and you think, oh, I'm. I'm going to do that down the road. Start, start today.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, starting early just is such a. It's such a basic building block of personal finance discussions. The compounding journey makes such a difference. You've all seen the math or heard the math, I'm sure, from anybody who's been around in the finance space for a Long time talking about the huge advantages that someone who starts investing even small amounts in their early 20s or even before can have over the course of a lifetime. And it's not really even just there. The compounding journey begin, begins in your career at an early age. It begins in high school with the grades you get, college, whatever, those first jobs, what you do in your free time, all that stuff makes such an enormous compounding difference. And the game can be very easy, relatively speaking, for young people who get a big jump out the gate and benefit from that from the rest of their lives. And it can be conversely, really hard to catch up later in life. The second biggest mistake is not tracking your spending and net worth. This is a game, right? This is a competition in a relative sense to your best life. And if you can't play a game, if you don't have a scoreboard set up right, this is how much I make, how much I'm spending, and how my asset and portfolio is growing. Am I moving towards that number that represents financial independence for me?

[B]

Yes. And this is something that continues throughout your journey. You don't just track your spending at the beginning and say, oh, I'm set. You need to know how much you're spending. Because as your life progresses, as we just go further down the calendar years, things get more expensive. You don't want to make the mistake of thinking that you're spending $36,000 a year and that's how you calculate your fine number. And then you get to retirement and you think, oh, I'm actually spending 60, or you realize you're actually spending 60, your retirement number is going to change. Keep an idea of what you are spending is what your net worth is. And this doesn't have to be an every minute thing, but you want to have this in your mind so that you are progressing down the actual path that you need, not the path that you think think you're on.

[A]

Absolutely. By the way, you can track these numbers in a spreadsheet, you can track them in a free app, or you can go with the biggerpockets monies partner, monarch.com, which is what Mindy and I use to track our spending and net worth. And that is we have a deal with Monarch where if you are listening to the show and you use the code pockets P O C K E T S, you will get 50% off your first year, which I think is 99 or $100. So go check that [e-mail] that's the tool that I use with my Wife Virginia and Mindy, you and Carl use to manage your finances. All right, the third mistake is going to be buying too much house or too much car too early. This is the real liquidity killer, right? We talk, everyone talks about, you know, don't buy a cup of coffee or whatever, you know, that how much that habit can cost you over the course of decades. And that's real. You know, there is a very real dynamic to, you know, a component of, in the context of aggregation of marginal gains and not, you know, not overspending on the day to day items. But really the liquidity killer is going to be how much you're paying for rent, what your mortgage or fixed housing costs are, what your car payment is, or how much you shell out on that car. If you can keep those expenses controlled, the game gets so much easier to build wealth. I mean, it just, it just fixes those, those costs at very low levels and allows all of that to go towards either discretionary spending or investing. You might even be able to live a higher quality of life in a relative sense in terms of the little, little enjoyments that bring you true pleasure every day and build more wealth if you keep your housing and vehicle costs under control.

[B]

Scott, let's play a little game. When I met you, you were working at Biggerpockets and you owned a duplex, and you rented out half of the duplex and lived in the other half. What was your mortgage payment for the entire duplex?

[A]

I believe the mortgage payment was 1550. The other side rented for 1150. And I had a roommate paying 550. So. So there was a very, very low housing outlay there. I wasn't for free because those costs didn't account for maintenance and, you know, utilities and those types of things that came up. But it was pretty close.

[B]

That particular property was in an up and coming neighborhood, not in a amazing neighborhood. If you were going to go rent an apartment back then, you could have very easily paid $1,500 for the rent on an apartment, a decent apartment, not an amazing apartment. Would you say that's fair?

[A]

Well, before that, I lived in an apartment for 1200 bucks before I bought the duplex. Right. And I had a roommate, so that made it fairly cheap.

[B]

You did have a roommate. So your choice to purchase a property instead of continuing to live in a property with a roommate changed a lot of your finances because essentially your rent, your housing expenses every month were almost zero, or actually zero, not including maintenance and all of that, but you don't have maintenance every single month.

[A]

The house hack is. Is an ideal way to do this in many situations. It's harder now in 2026 than it was in 2014 to find those opportunities. Right. That, like, this was not, like, a very popularized term, the house hack in 2014. So I was relatively limited in my competition. You could buy a duplex and pretty much make it work or come pretty close with, you know, 5% down. And I think it's a much harder dynamic in 2026. But still, the question is, how do I keep my housing costs low? Right. And I think that if you're asking that question and making the most reasonable choice in your context, that is going to be. Make a much bigger difference than almost everything else. And the same thing goes for your vehicle.

[B]

Yes. And it's not about just house hacking. You can be the tenant in somebody else's house hack. That's a way to keep your housing costs lower than if you have your own apartment and you're paying the entire rent yourself. Just because housing costs have gone up since Scott did this in 2015 doesn't mean that's the only way to keep your housing costs low. Have a roommate, Live with your parents. Live with somebody else's parents. Is it fun having a roommate? Yeah, sometimes and sometimes not. But keeping your housing costs low and taking that money and investing it, getting started today is going to be your best bet.

[A]

Yeah. I'll tell you this. I don't think that privacy in my 20s would have been worth the incredible reward that that choice and others like it compounded into here in my 30s.

[B]

And, you know, tagging off of that, Scott, is lifestyle creepy before you reach financial independence and even after you reach financial independence. Lifestyle creep is described as. As your income grows, your spending grows, too. Your lifestyle could have creeped up by graduating from college and saying, I don't want to have roommates anymore. I have my first real job as an adult. I deserve to have my own place, and I deserve to have a place that has a doorman and a pool and a hot tub and a gym inside and happy hours on Friday night and free breakfast every morning. It's not free. You're paying for that in exchange for the amount of rent that you're paying. So your lifestyle didn't creep up when you were in your 20s, and frankly, mine didn't either, but it was because I wasn't making any money.

[A]

I think that with lifestyle creep, there's two dynamics to it. Right. One is when I was 23, like, I was a fool to think that my Lifestyle was not going to increase if I wanted, as I did. And I. And we eventually got married and started a family. Right. Of course, that's a different dynamic than when you're a single man leaving college. Right. And biking around town. But I also think that if you can fix your spending at any point, once you kind of got settled into that more permanent lifestyle that is the big catalyst for fi, even. Even if it's fairly high in that initial baseline, because career progressions, because some components of that spending might be fixed, like your home mortgage payment, for example, if you can just stop moving the goalposts, you can make FI that much more realistic and achievable. I'll also say that after you reach fi, there is a switch that needs to be flipped to some degree, which is you probably do need to spend more, right? A lifetime of pursuing wealth to achieve financial independence can wire your brain to be overly frugal and not spend the wealth that you have amassed on there. And so I think that, Mindy, this is something that you struggled with to switch over to a spender. You haven't moved the goalpost, and you probably should move them now that you are. And your portfolio withdrawals can support a much, much greater spending level spending than you have in your life. I will say that this has not been a problem for me in the same way as many in the FI community. So Trench household is free and clear from. From this particular concern.

[B]

It has been difficult to flip the switch on the spending. One of the things is me asking myself, how can I use my wealth to make my life better?

[A]

The last obvious mistake, I think, is going to be confusing income growth with progress. Right? This is not obvious to a very novice personal student of personal finance, but it's obvious to anyone in the FIRE community who's listened to more than a handful of podcasts. Right? Wealth accumulation is a function of your savings rate. And if your income is going up, but your savings rate is not, you're not accelerating your progress towards financial independence in any meaningful way, Right? So income growth matters in the context of personal finance because it allows us to increase our savings rate if we keep our spending relatively constant or at least see a fat rise slower than our income growth.

[B]

Yeah, that's a really good point, Scott, that I don't think a lot of people really take into consideration. Okay, let's look at some of the more subtle five mistakes. Those sneaky ones that kind of creep up on you while you're not paying attention to everything. Number one, building a plan that requires you to be rational forever. And clearly this is something that you wrote down. Scott, explain Rational forever.

[A]

I've been going crazy in the last few weeks and building this like super app. It's not ready for publication yet. That like that talks about how retirement withdrawals and early retirement all map to keeping in a low income tax bracket and optimizing for ACA subsidies and those types of things. We've talked to Cody Garrett and Sean Mullaney, authors of Tax Planning to and through Early Retirement. We've talked about decumulation strategies and portfolios with Frank Vasquez. And so as I put all this together, I'm realizing there's an opt in optimal path to withdrawing from a 2.5 million dollar for example fire portfolio to sustain your spending. And it's ludicrous. It's there, you can do it. It's not insane to say that, that this can't, this can't be executed for a year or three. But to have your plan hinge on optimal decumulation across decades in a changing tax landscape and healthcare landscape is ludicrous. It's not a good plan to say I'm going to be this tax optimized genius for 30 years until I get the traditional retirement. And I think that's the failure of a lot of FI discussions out there is we're talking about this idealized state and not the practical messy reality that actually maps to the vast majority of people's portfolios. So this is not a mistake for the small handful of people who are truly able to execute in an elite level forever and DIY a lot of it. But I think it is too much to ask of me for example on here and I've put the 10,000 hours into studying this subject in already. So that's what I mean by building a plan. To be rational forever, there needs to be more margin of safety, there needs to be more flexibility built into the plan than these assumptions around perfect withdrawals.

[B]

Oh, perfect withdrawals, yeah. There is no such thing as perfect. Another sneaky FI mistake is treating health care like a generic expense. Oh, health care is going to be X. Health care isn't going to be X. Health care is going to change every single year. Scott, did your health care go up this year? Mine did. I think on average 26% health care costs increased. And that's just the premiums, that's not the actual going to the doctor and your co pays and your prescriptions and all of the everything else. Healthcare needs to be a real thought in your mind as you are progressing down your fight journey.

[A]

And I hate to be a party pooper on the fire movement kind of best practices and court assumptions here, but I think that the healthcare discussion is a very real threat to a significant portion of the fire communities baseline spending plans. I think that it implicitly relies on receiving low income tax credits for healthcare subsidies for decades, which I think is a bad political bet to rely on. It's not bad to take those subsidies, it's bad to rely on that as your foundational assumption that you're going to be, that's going to carry you through, through an early retirement. And then I think that a lot of people don't understand the basic reality that today, forget inflation, forget health care inflation. This is not an argument that health care inflation is going to outpace cpi. You can have that argument with somebody else. This is just a fact. If I was going to go and get a health care plan on the Obamacare exchange, the Affordable Care act exchange, right now for my family, I would pay almost double if I just changed my age in the input field to 60. That's not a inflation thing. That's a today's price for that same health care plan. And that I think is not factored into people's plans. It is not a generic expense. You cannot say that your spending is $40,000 a year or $100,000 a year and health care is 17,000 of that unsubsidized and will stay there. It will go up, it will go up to 35 or perhaps $40,000 for a household like mine in Colorado by the time I retire without assuming any excess health care inflation. So that's a real subtle mistake that's made in the fire community. And you must, I think, internalize that or understand how to model those out if you want a safe or realistic plan for your family.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

All right, next up, we have blind faith in the 4% rule without spending certainty. There's a lot of debate. I think there's like levels of like understanding of the 4% rule in the finance world. Right. The first level is I heard somebody say that's an answer to like how much you need to retire early. The second is, wait a second. The 4% rule is not 100% secure. It does not survive all the scenarios in history. And in fact, 4% of scenarios it ran out of money. Which is the point. The point of the 4% rule is here's a scenario that resulted in not running out of money over any 30 year period. The next level is, wait a second, early Retirement is longer than 30 years. I should probably think about that in the context of the 4% rule, which was designed for a 30 year portfolio. So the next level beyond that, now we're starting to get into more expert territory is. Oh right. The 4% rule does have these drawbacks and it also doesn't account for the flexibility that is in practice common in many fire scenarios like the ability to earn some kind of part time income, the ability to reduce spending targets and those types of things. But I think there's a level beyond that level of understanding that is still eluding the fire community at large and needs to be addressed. The risk in the 4% rule is not around investment portfolios, which is a known variable. If you're relying on the 4% rule, the risk is around spending. It assumes that your spending is going to be constant relative to inflation and it won't be, at least in the context of health care. For an early retiree, that changes once you get past traditional age. Spending does begin to drop over time after a traditional retirement age, but the risk is in many cases, in some aspects of your spending you will see periodic boosts or declines depending on where you are in life. Are you sending little kids to daycare? Are they going to public school? Are they going to college? What's your health care cost going to look like? That is something you have to lock in. You need to know your spending if you're going to use the 4% rule and you need to be confident not only that you are able to project it for your family, but that it's going to be not be very volatile. Volatile spending also kills the 4% rule. Those are the real risks, the real subtle risks that can blow up a fire journey and make a mistake in your plan. And that is what I want to. Again, I'm a big proponent of financial independence and fire believe it can be achieved. These are not killers. These are things, mistakes that people make that can have real life consequences over time. When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their Fund 6 offers investors exposure to real estate credit largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly and a 7030 LP GP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days. After that nine month commitment, the fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum Investment is typically $100,000, but Pyne Financial is able to red minimum for Biggerpockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure I am personally invested in this fund through my self directed ira. Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com Pine P I N E Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.

[B]

When you want more Start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the US with over 1500 corporate guides who are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Northwest makes life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business, they give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements, meeting minutes and thousands of how to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And with Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data and all services are handled in house because privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Visit Northwest registered agent.com money free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered [e-mail] money free I love Matt said no one ever. Nobody starts a business thinking you know what would make this more fun? Calculating quarterly estimated taxes. But somehow every small business owner ends up doing it. Your dreams of creating, selling and growing get replaced by late nights chasing receipts, juggling invoices and wondering if that bad sushi lunch with Scott counts as a write off. Change all that with Found. Found is a business banking platform built to take the pain out of managing money. It automatically tracks expenses, organizes invoices and even preps you for tax season without you doing the heavy lifting. You can set aside money for business goals and control spending with virtual cards and find tax write offs you didn't even know existed. It saves time, money and probably a few years of life expectancy. Found has over 30,000 five star reviews from owners who say Found makes everything easier. Expenses, income, profits, taxes, invoices even. So reclaim your time and your sanity. Open a Found account for [e-mail] that's f o u n d com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with found. I like the way that this is worded, Scott. Blind faith in the 4% rule. We in the FI community call this the 4% rule, and that's where we stop. But we've abbreviated it. It isn't the 4% rule. It's the 4% rule of thumb. And rule of thumb means something very different than rule does. And I think that there are a lot of people who have heard it, they've read the article, they see that this works and they hear 4% rule. Stop thinking that rule is where that phrase ends. It's the 4% rule of thumb.

[A]

Yeah, Mindy, I can't help myself. So I want to go into one more level of depth on this because I such a nerd on this in this world. Remember that healthcare example I used? Right? That healthcare cost surging from 17,000 unsubsidized to 35 or 40,000 unsubsidized by the end of an early retirement from age 35 to 60, for example. That's a real risk to somebody in the lean fire or traditional fire space in terms of a percentage of their overall spending. It's incompatible with a 4% withdrawal sequence. However, that risk in many cases, for example, with a family of $100,000 in household spending would be completely offset if they have a house right now with 20 years left in the mortgage because the mortgage won't rise with inflation and then it will roll off entirely. Right. When those healthcare premium, the risk of spiking healthcare premiums rises the most. Right? And so the 4% rule in that particular case, a fairly normal common scenario, a house that's firing in their 30s or 40s and has a house with 15, 20 years left in the mortgage, those two things completely offset. I don't like the 4% rule accidentally being right in my plan. And that is a problem, right? If that family does not have a house as a renter instead, now that all of a sudden that risk risk is there, you have to have actually have those offsets, those flexibility dynamics or those other income streams or the inheritance or the Social Security coming in at some point to offset those risks in the 4% rules Spending categories in order for it to apply. And I think that's poorly understood by a lot of folks and accidentally correct in many cases. And that's fine for a lot of those folks. But I really worry about lean fire folks who do not internalize these concepts.

[B]

That is a really great point. I worry about lean fire folks. Scott, next up is underestimating identity and purpose risk. And just in a nutshell, this is what are you retiring to? You're not retiring from your awful boss. And if that's all you're doing, then that's not the right choice. You want to be retiring to something because you don't want to get to early retirement, quit your job and then sit around and be like, okay, now what? Start understanding what it is you want to be doing after you no longer have this 40 hour or more obligation on your time. Number five, unintentionally contributing to the wrong accounts. And Scott, this is the middle class trap that we talk about or the LeFoff.

[A]

Well, we're going to give a shout out to our friend Brad Barrett. Brad Barrett from Choose Fi has given us some strong feedback that he does not like the term middle class trap and many people agree with him. This is, this is fair. So we like the term middle class trap, but we have conceded that we will stop using the middle class trap quite as frequently. And instead we have come up with the lefoft, the liquidity first optionality framework, the lefof. Here's the issue right when we're talking about optimal early retirement approaches, the answer to where should my money be? Is we're generally aligning as a community to it should be in multiple places. There should be a balance. There should be some in our Roth, there should be some in our pre tax 401k or, you know, equivalents, the deferred retirement accounts. And there should be some in after tax brokerage. And the reasons for this have to do with tax brackets. There's a 0% long term capital gains and qualified dividends tax bracket. That's a really powerful tool that we don't want to waste by having everything, for example, in a 401k, we want to have some of that in our taxable brokerage. Obviously, if it is good to have some things in a taxable brokerage, it's even better to have that same money in a Roth in many cases from a pure tax optimization strategy. So first there's an argument to be made that balance should be the goal and not concentration in a single one of these buckets or lack of attention to all of them. The second that I think is a very powerful argument and is more qualitative, right? This is something that's a little harder to prove. Mathematically is there's a real power in having after tax liquidity that gives you optionality in your 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, long before you actually begin withdrawing from your portfolio. A household that spends 100 grand a year and has two working individuals making maybe 175 to $200,000 in household income, they're going to feel trapped if they've got even 750,000 or $1 million in net worth, but it's all in their home equity. And 401k, if 2 or $300,000 of that wealth is actually in an after tax brokerage account that could be harvested today, that's going to create optionality for one spouse to stay home, to start a business, to invest in a rental property, to house hack, whatever those look like. And those are real investment opportunities that have the power to provide optionality or actually get you what you want from your financial position and or may perform as well or even better than passively manage index funds in a stock market in your 401k. This also doesn't account for the fact that many 401k plans have expensive funds with high fees that offset the advantage of being in that 401k over long periods of time to some degree. So anyways, I think that the argument here is that if you're unintentionally optimizing for current tax benefits, you could be costing yourself both in real terms. Maybe it may be truly tax inefficient to just max out your 401k blindly across several decades. And you're also going to be missing this subtler and more arguable benefit that we believe there is to having some

[B]

after tax liquidity that kind of rolls into the next one. Ignoring tax liabilities both now and in the future. You run the risk of setting yourself up for very real large RMDs down the line. If you are contributing to your 401k, constantly contributing to your 401k, and then all of a sudden you find yourself with a larger than intended pile of investments, A because you're not spending as much, or B you just had a really great growth segment of the stock market and all of a sudden you're in these tax brackets that you have no control over because RMD starts when they start and you can't say oh, I'm not ready to sell my stocks. The government says tough.

[A]

I think there's smart people who will say the RMD worry is overblown. And I think that I totally agree with them. For most people And I disagree with them. If you're listening to this podcast, the Bigger Pockets Money audience is particularly high income earning and particularly wealthy. And they're particularly concentrated in their 401k. And so for this particular audience, someone who's got got several hundred thousand or approaching a million in their 30s, for example, in a 401k or tax deferred account, you are at real risk of this dynamic if you just continue maxing it for the next several decades. And there could be a real consequence there. And I will also say that this problem gets harder as time passes because a typical career, you earn more and more and more. That's a typical career progression. As your career progresses, your earnings go up. Debt puts you in a higher and higher income tax bracket, which makes the math for contributing to a 401k that much more compelling in the present. And so my argument comes back to these tax liabilities. You know, thinking about that really hard early in your career and saying, hmm, I'm going to max my 401k for most of my career, but at some point I'm going to have to choose when and where I'm going to do that. And it might make sense to not max my 401k in the very early part of the career if I agree with this balance dynamic and max it out in the years when I'm in the higher relative earning tax brackets. So those tax liabilities are fundamentally bets and assumptions that you have to make. And I think that I at least am arrogant. And I think many Bigger Pockets money listeners may share this arrogance where they think they're going to win, they think their career is going to go nicely and result in them earning more and more income over time. Just something to be said to actually bet on what you think is the realistic outcome for your situation.

[B]

Yes, and I think that there's a lot of blind faith, to use that phrase from a moment ago in maxing out your 401k. We're definitely not saying don't put any money into your 401k. We're saying make sure you understand the tax liabilities now, the tax benefits now versus the tax benefits in the future. And it could be just a back and forth. I max out the match and then I put in the after tax accounts this year and next year I max out the 401k and put less into the after tax accounts. But, but regardless, it's because you're thinking about your strategies. You're not just doing something that you heard somebody say one time that's right.

[A]

I think that a great exercise to illustrate this point is to say I'm shooting for this two and a half million net worth number at some point in the future. That's the midpoint of what biggerpocket's money listeners say they need to achieve financial independence. What I don't want when I get there is for that to be 1.75 million in my 401k and $700,000 in my home equity and $50,000 in my emergency reserve. Right. That's. That's not a good situation. That is going to help us maximize our tax benefits. A better situation might look like having that wealth spread across a 401k, a Taft or tax brokerage and a Roth. There'll be an argument about how big each of those pieces of the pie should be, but it should be more balanced and less concentrated in my view, if we're going to make the optimal decisions in many common fi journey scenarios.

[B]

Yeah, I mean your money is going into investments. It's just where the investments are held. The different tax obligations of each different kind of account. So this is where a conversation with the CFP could be greatly beneficial to you.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

All right, Scott, again, tagging off of those is diversification missteps. Investing only in one sector or one index or going into bonds to earn early because you heard that they're a good hedge or going into something that you know nothing about, like crypto. Make sure that you're not diversifying just for the sake of diversification.

[A]

I think that what we're learning here is there's tons of different ways to perform factor investing in the market. There's an argument that's emerging and I'm not sure if I'm convinced yet that alternatives to the s and P500 or a total market index fund, like a tilt towards value stocks or international growth in value and those types of things could either outperform or perform differently or reduce volatility and drawdown cycles over the index funds that are the most popular vehicle in the fire community. And I'm not sure I yet buy completely into that, even after talking with Paul Merriman. I think there's an argument for simplicity and a lot of people have done very well with those total stock market index funds. And I think there's more debate to be had there, more thought in the context of retirement though, and truly transitioning to fire. That is where there is a big gap between known best practices and actual behavior of the financial independence community. The financial independence community is so used to and has been rewarded for so long by investing in all equity portfolios that they're not moving. They're not, they don't actually move, at least in large numbers, large percentages that we can measure in our polling to diversified portfolios that include bonds or risk parity style portfolios that include different assets that are not tightly correlated and perform differently in different cycles. And I think that's a misstep. Right? There's a good bet what's a good decision and what's a good outcome, and there's a bad bet and bad outcomes, and then there's sometimes bad bets with good outcomes in there. And I think the fire community and people listening to this should understand if they're being rewarded for a bad decision that, you know, good result, bad decision, or if they're making a good decision and seeing that pay off for them. And I think that's, that's a hard question you should ask yourself if you are truly at or near your phi number, did you actually transition to a portfolio or does your strategy involve some kind of ongoing source of income that obviates the need for that diversification?

[B]

Yeah. And again, this goes back to thinking about what you're doing with your money, not just blindly following your same strategy over the course of your entire investment, investing and growth career.

[A]

Okay, last one here is going to be not exercising your spending muscles during the financial independence journey. Mindy, do you know anything about this one?

[B]

I've heard a little bit about this. Something about being frugal with your nose to the grindstone and not enjoying your life at all ever, ever, ever, ever. Yeah, that can actually be a real hindrance to your fi journey. Because if you're not having any fun at all, you could decide, you know what, I'm done. I'm not going to do this anymore. Keeping the things that are enjoyable in your life are what make life worth living. So if you cut out everything enjoyable just so you can get to a point where you quit your job, you're not going to have very much fun. And what's the point of doing this if it's not to just enjoy the life that you are moving towards while you're on the path to that life?

[A]

Another way of framing this mistake is people think that they need to grind for 50, 15 years and it needs to be misery and then they're going to be free and life is going to turn as soon as they, they leave. And that's not how it should go. The journey to financial independence should be a continuum that gradually increases your optionality and therefore, on average, your happiness, the ability for you to control your time and day across that continuum. And I think that's the right answer to the financial independence journey. And the wrong answer is I'm going to grind it out and be miserable for the next seven years. Going to finally finish the play. Now, in practice, that could be different, right? You know, you got your RSUs vesting at your company and they're going to come due in two years. Grind it out, finish the play. But, you know, in a situation that does not have these kind of golden handcuff types scenarios, I think that there's a, hey, take a step back, say no to the promotion. Take a job that is a little bit more flexible, Spend a little bit more on that journey if it delays your journey by one year, but make your life that much better. Those are all, I think, reasonable pullbacks from the extreme origins of the fire community, you know, a decade or two ago.

[B]

Yeah, don't take that promotion. I love that idea. Scott. I was offered a promotion at a job and I didn't want to do the job that they were offering me. That wasn't something that I was interested in. That would have cost me more time with my family. Like the money wasn't worth the elevated time I was going to have to be at work. And for a promotion I didn't even want in the first place. Carl had also turned down a promotion. He was offered to be a team lead, and he asked, well, what does that entail? Less coding? Well, I want to code. He was a computer programmer. All he wanted to do was code. He didn't want to manage people. He didn't want to do these other things. He just wanted to code. So accepting a position that has reduced coding and more management was absolutely not what he wanted to do. It doesn't matter about the money. It matters about what it is you want to spend your time doing. So not all promotions are a great idea for you personally. Just know what you're getting yourself into before you get them into it.

[A]

And I took every promotion that was offered my way until I became a CEO and did the exact opposite of all that. So with that, I think we've covered all of the mistakes in the financial independence journey here today. Mindy, what do you think? Is any, any of them surprise you or any ones you think people are missing?

[B]

Nope. Scott, we covered every single mistake you could possibly make in this episode. Episode. However, if our listeners think that they have found another one, we would love to hear from you. You can email mindyggerpocketsmoney.com or Scott biggerpocketsmoney.com let us know what other mistakes you think people make on their financial independence journey.

[A]

I'm looking for these mistakes right now. I'm having, I'm having the time of my life, Mindy, these last few weeks just like obsessing over like the next level of like modeling out early retirements and thinking about each type of spending, what's flexible, what's not, how portfolios interact with that, which income streams do. I'm shocked at what I'm finding and that I'm, that I'm relieved at, oh, well, I'm finding this thing and it's a real risk and it's completely offset by this other thing. And so what I think is really the underlying observation across all of this is there's a real danger for some folks in portions of the fire community for missing some of the mistakes that we're talking about, especially in the subtler world when the stakes begin to really matter about when you're leaving a job for a very long period of time. And there are also many, many offsets to those, those mistakes that form in practice. And so it's not a reason to panic, but it's a real reason to turn your brain on and do that next level of analysis across your financial planning journey, especially as you are seriously getting ready to pull the trigger and move into financial independence and stop wage paying income. That is likely your best option for generating income.

[B]

Yeah. And I think that people are following a path without veering. So we wanted to just introduce these mistakes. If you identify with any of these mistakes, start thinking about how you can change them. For free resources or to sign up for our newsletter, go to biggerpocketsmoney.com you can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram at biggerpocketsmoney. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?

[A]

Let's do it.

[B]

That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying bye bye blueberry piece. I love math. Said no one ever. Nobody starts a business thinking, you know what would make this more fun? Calculating quarterly estimated taxes. But somehow every small business owner ends up doing it. Your dreams of creating, selling and growing get replaced by late nights chasing receipts, juggling invoices, and wondering if that bad sushi lunch with Scott counts as a write off. Change all that with Found. Found is a business banking platform built to take the pain out of managing money. It automatically tracks expenses, organizes invoices and even preps you for tax season without you doing the heavy lifting. You can set aside money for business goals, control spending with virtual cards and find tax write offs you didn't even know existed. It saves time, money and probably a few years of life expectancy. Found has over 30,000 5 star reviews from owners who say Found makes everything easier. Expenses, income, profits, taxes, invoices, even. So, reclaim your time and your sanity. Open a Found account for [e-mail] that's f o u n d com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found.

[A]

When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their Fund 6 offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly and a 7030 LP GP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days. After that nine month commitment, the fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum Investment is typically $100,000, but Pyne Financial is able to reduce that minimum for Biggerpockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure I am personally invested in this fund through my self directed ira. Pine Financial Income is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com Pine P I N E Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.