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ChooseFI | Financial Independence Podcast
Are We Taking the Wrong Risks? With Chris Hutchins | Ep 567
01:16:46
Brad interviews Chris Hutchins, host of the podcast All The Hacks. They dive deep into challenging the traditional mindset of financial independence (FI), exploring the balance between saving for the future and enjoying life experiences in the...
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- [00:00]
Brad Barrett
Hello and welcome to Choose a Five. Today on the show we have my good friend Chris Hutchins. He's the host of the podcast all the Hacks. And he's someone I call on when I just want to have a far ranging conversation. He's someone I talk to in real life. And we actually had planned on chatting about a number of things that we had texted about. And we decided, hey, let's just record an episode and let the audience be a fly on the wall for this conversation amongst friends. And I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. It hit on a lot of things that are really timely for both of us. And Chris really started with he's feeling like he's too conservative with his fly goals. And this actually ties in nicely with last week's episode with Aubrey Williams. And we do touch on that in the episode. And ultimately Chris is curious, are we taking the wrong risks? And I think a lot of us are really conservative when it comes to our money, but are we conservative with our time? Are we, are we conservative with the seasons of our life that are running out? And I think these are really important and timely questions and I think you're really going to enjoy this. And with that, welcome to Choose Fi. Chris, my friend, it is good to see you.
- [01:15]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, it's good to see you. It's good to do this again.
- [01:17]
Brad Barrett
Yeah. So in my post Jonathan era here at Choose a Pie, you and I have only done a couple episodes, but they're the closest to like the old Brad and Jonathan episodes that I can get because obviously you're a buddy of mine in real life and it's fun to just do these kind of rollicking roundup or hey, what's on our mind kind of episode. And I think that's what we're going to plan on doing today. Right. So we've been emailing back and forth and texting and you were telling me about a couple of interviews you've done recently. So this episode's coming out at the beginning of October. In the last month or so, last actually three weeks, you had episodes with Tim Ferriss come out and Tyler Gardner. And you basically said, I have all these things firing in my brain now and maybe why am I so conservative with my Fi goals? What is going on in terms of like living a good life and goals and finding time with friends and all of these things, building businesses and when to take a step back? So obviously that's a lot, Chris, but I mean, this is, instead of us having this conversation just on the phone, which we probably would have. We just decided to record it. So I'm going to let you run with it and then we'll just kind of. We'll go from there.
- [02:24]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. I feel like a lot has been happening the last few weeks, including back to school, which as a parent, it's like, your kids go back to school and you're like, oh, I don't see them as much now. I'm starting to be like, I want to spend more time with them. Time is more fleeting. But I think this big moment came when a good friend of mine said, oh, you've got to have this guy, Tyler Gardner on the podcast. I was like, I don't know who that is. And he was like, you got. You got to find him. So I reached out to him and sure enough, made it happen. And he just says it, how he feels it, and he's like, he's kind of both. Feels like he's inherently in the FI community, but also is not in that. Like, he hasn't been on your show. He hasn't made the rounds, but has a lot of strong opinions. And the biggest one that kind of just left me. You know, you have a conversation with someone and it just leaves you thinking for a while. And that happened to me with Bill Perkins talking about die with zero. And Tyler was talking about the 4% rule. And he was like, you know, we always talk about the 4% rule as kind of a real safe way to make your retirement savings last. So if you started with a million dollars and you want to withdraw 4%, you know, there's a 98ish percent chance that you won't run out of money. And for people in the audience that know the exact numbers, if I get them off by a little bit here or there, you know, apologies, but I think applies.
- [03:41]
Brad Barrett
Agreed.
- [03:42]
Chris Hutchins
So he's like, you know, we're always optimizing for that. We're. We're trying to make sure we don't run out of money. But he said the median outcome is actually that that million turns into like $10 million, you know, so at the expense of potentially ending up with way too much money and having saved more than we needed to, having worked longer than we needed to, you know, we are optimizing for almost certainty that we don't run out of money. And the number of ways that you can supplement your income in a financial independence life where you're not working is so vast and almost everyone. And I know you've had conversations on the show for years that I've either been a part of or listened to about people who make money after their, you know, retirement per se, after they quit their, their 9 to 5 and in financial independence. So, so that theme of, well, there's always ways to make money. And I think in my personal life especially, I go a little bit farther down the deals, the points and miles, the kind of, that kind of crazy stuff. And the more I've been doing that, the more I've been realizing that the ability to make money doing things that are fun, that aren't nine to five jobs, but that are real amounts of money, like not hundreds of dollars, but thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year. And when you run the numbers, the difference between making no money and making $20,000 a year or $30,000 a year is really vast. And then the last thing I layered into the calculation in my head was a lot of the things I'm planning for around how much money I spend right now are related to me having a home that I'm paying a mortgage on which in some number of years won't be the case. You know, 25 right now, kids, a lot of the expenses related to kids might not be there. And, and so I don't know. I just look at it, I'm like, gosh, I'm optimizing for a 4% rule calculation on an amount of money I'm spending when in reality it's much more likely that I will have way more money than I planned because that's just how the markets work. And obviously we could be wrong. You know, secrets of return risk. Like there's a lot of things that could happen, but I just wonder if we're being too cautious and avoiding risk too much. And I think you actually told me you had a conversation that by the time this comes out will have also come out about whether we're all trying to avoid risk too much.
- [06:07]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, it's funny, that was, I literally recorded that yesterday. And this is, that episode's coming out the week before this one. It was with Aubrey Williams. And yeah, he, we were talking about chances of success as well. And his quote was something to the effect of a 100% chance of success of your withdrawal is a 100% chance that you over saved by definition. Right. And like that's a pretty cool aha moment I thought. And I mean that is, that is absolutely true. And like you said, as Tyler said, the median outcome according to him at least is you're going to have $10 million. That, I mean, Chris, that's crazy on a $1 million.
- [06:45]
Chris Hutchins
This is for someone whose target was one.
- [06:47]
Brad Barrett
Right.
- [06:47]
Chris Hutchins
If your target was 500, then it would be 5 million. If your target's 10 million, then it'd be 100 million. You know, it's like 10 times your money, was the conversation we had. Now, I didn't run those numbers. Is it actually.
- [06:58]
Brad Barrett
Right. And that's why I caveated that also. But yeah, in any case, I've heard it as millions, as the median outcome. But yeah, I think what's interesting, Chris, is that you said but we could be wrong. And then there's the, the dot, dot, dot at the end of it. Right. Which I think that actually speaks to the inherent fear of a lot of people. And I think that's why so many of us are ultra conservative. We're safers. Most of the people in the fight community are savers by definition. To get to fi, you have to have a significant savings rate. You're thinking about eventualities. And I think that's where we get tripped up is we're all looking for certainty. And it's interesting because Tyler mentioned something in that episode that was totally unrelated to this, but it reminded me, I've said almost verbatim the same thing, which is by looking for certainty, we are giving something up. There is an opportunity cost. Now, he was talking about in the case of investing or not investing. And I think this is where people get tripped up of is investing risky? And now the question is ultimately they're trying to say, like, I feel so much safer just putting it in my savings account or my checking account, because the money, it's never going to go down. So they're conflating risk and volatility. The way that I always look at it is what is truly riskier, right? So if you put your money, if you put a hundred grand in a checking account, now obviously you would say, of course, put in a high yield savings, yada, yada, yada. But there are many people who are just so scared they want to stick that money in a checking account earning essentially nothing, 18 years from now, that a hundred grand is still going to be a hundred grand, right? By definition, if it earns no interest. Whereas had you invested that in the stock market at a, hopefully an 8% annual return, which it would double every nine years, right? After nine years, that's 200 grand. After 18 years, that's 400 grand. So now, Chris, am I going to tell you or anybody listening that that money is never going to go up or down, that it's going to be this perfect straight line up. Of course not. There's volatility. That's how it works. But which is truly riskier? I think the answer is obvious, that it's riskier to put it in a checking account in that scenario. Now I think similar to what we're talking about here, which is riskier. So you are guaranteeing for most people who don't especially love their jobs, or even if they've kind of deluded themselves into thinking like their job is the one thing that they would pick out of the billions of options, which is ridiculous as it is, but nevertheless like they're working for years extra, giving up the only resource that is finite, their time in order to take their success rate of their portfolio from 95 to 99.9. It's like that is not riskless. You have given up years in a job that those years they don't come back. We're on a one way path to maybe 90 years if we're lucky. And to give up two, three, five of them or more just to go from some crazy success rate chance to a marginally higher one. That seems, that seems crazy to me.
- [09:53]
Chris Hutchins
I totally agree. Especially when if you look at the two sides of this equation, so one is a risk that you work longer than you need to, or you say, or you know, I could even argue that the risk isn't that you're working longer, it's that during those years of work you're saving too much. You know, when you're young, when you can travel, you know, you're not affording yourselves the, I don't even want to say luxuries because for a lot of people in this community, myself included, those luxuries sometimes are like getting the appetizer, you know, like they're these tiny things that we convince ourselves we don't deserve because we're trying to save too much. So one risk is that you're just not living the life you really want to live because you're so focused on saving, which could look like spending less than you want, or it could look like working longer than you want, or the risk that later in life you run out of money. Now the crazy thing is in that second risk, it's not like one day you find out I have no money. You will probably find out that the market didn't return early on and now you're looking at your 40 year horizon and it's looking like it's 30 and, and you have time to course correct, right? You might not be able to get that exact job you have now. But when I look at how much, 10, $20,000 a year closes the gap on a lot of this math. I think you could go deliver doordash, you know, like there are jobs available to people who want them. They, they might not pay what your engineering salary does, but this fear that, oh well, if I quit my job now, I will never make another dollar, so I have to get to certainty is, is crazy. And so the confluence of all that, then I had this conversation with Tim Ferriss like you did, and it went down the path of a little bit. I don't even know what the right word for this is. It's like, well, nobody's really going to remember most people like a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now. Like most of what we do is not going to make a lasting impact on the world. And that a true happy life, you know, if you're grinding to try to do this thing, to make this impact, it's probably not going to have a huge impact on the world. It will probably have a huge impact on the people around you. So if you spend most of your time and energy and resources enjoying time with others, with humans, making real life connection, you know, spending on those experiences with those people, you'll be more fulfilled. I'm sitting here thinking, I'm in my 40s. Should I really just be using my resources to have more experiences with my family, with my friends, on my own? You know, maybe there's some silent meditation retreat. I've never experienced that, you know, because I'm trying to put out content, because I'm trying to, you know, build a company, because I'm trying to do all these things I'm not doing. And it's just really made me reevaluate a lot. And then later on, the kids going back to school and, and for people who haven't seen this, there's some really cool charts. I'm happy to send you a link, but Sahil Bloom wrote this book, the Five Types of Wealth. I've done a couple interviews with him and in one of them we talked about, you know, the time spent with different people in your life and where that peaks and where that drops off. It's like your, your time with your kids like kind of goes away when they're off to college. It's like, like, I want to spend that time. So we have this idea next summer of what if we just find a way to take the summer off. And I realize that's not everyone's job. Allows that. But, I mean, if you were optimizing for a 4% rule and you decided it's a 5% rule, well, maybe. Maybe your job does allow it. I had Jillian on, who I know has been on your show. We talked about many retirements. It just seems like I really need to rethink the priorities of where I want to take my risk. And maybe I don't want to want the risk that I'm going to give up these opportunities. And I'm okay with the risk that maybe I'm going to have to do some instacart deliveries in 20 years if the market is in the 10% failure. Like, it's not like I'm saying I want to optimize for 50% failure, but you'd be wildly surprised at the difference between a 2% failure rate and a 10 or 15 or 20% failure rate.
- [14:02]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, and I've seen that. And it's funny because that's what Aubry and I talked about yesterday in that episode. So I. I'm excited for you to listen to that when it comes out, because, yeah, he was talking about, essentially, it was just. It was so commonsensical, if you will, that, like, it gave me a framework which was he basically optimizes for 90% success rate, and then he creates these guardrails that, okay, you. At the time that you. Let's say you fi. You have this number for what is a 90% success rate, and that's your withdrawal. And I think he used engaging data or Fire Calc, but I'm pretty sure it was engaging Data. And basically when, if and when your net worth got down to a 75% success rate. So you actually start that at the very beginning. You have these two numbers. So let's say for every million dollars he talked about, 90% success rate was 4.39% withdrawal rate. Okay? So you could take out $43,900. Now, if your portfolio got down to where it was a 75% success rate, then basically, I think that was $910,000. So if your portfolio dropped to that point at any point, then you basically just rerun the numbers and bring it back up to, okay, here's my portfolio today. What would get me back to a 90% success rate? Chris, to your point, it was just a couple hundred dollars a month. That's all we're talking here. So he had this continual adjustment potential that gave me some satisfaction of, okay, this actually makes a lot of sense. And to your point, I mean, we're talking like in this case, $5,000 a year at most was the difference. And I know you with all your tinkering and all your, all your fun ways to earn money, like you could essentially fall out of bed and earn $5,000 in a year with bank bonuses or some other kind of crazy schemes that you're up to. But I mean, realistically, all of us can earn 5, 10, $20,000 pretty easily. And that was a real eye opener for me. And yeah, I mean, I think there's that. I think to your point about Sahel Bloom, I know where we've quoted for forever is wait, but why's article the tail end? And it's probably where Sahel got his info. And it's like, man, by the time your kids are 18, you've spent 90% plus of the time you'll ever spend with them. And you know, I don't know that you know this necessarily, but my daughter is like 17 and a half at this point. She's, she's applying early to William and Mary here now as we speak. She is going to college in less than a year. In 11 months, she will be at college, wherever that is. And I mean, Chris, that's talk about an eye opener. I mean, you have to maximize this time. And I think it's like this continuum of fi, right? Like, I think a lot of us have gotten away in recent years from the necessary frugality that I think, frankly, truly is necessary at the beginning of a fight journey. I think for most people, they're earning the income that they can earn at that moment. So what is the low hanging fruit? The low hanging fruit is a little bit of frugality and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think frankly, me talking about Daiwa0 so much after hearing Perkins on your, on your podcast three years ago. I mean, I must have referenced that episode 50 times on my podcast. So it became an ever present here in the FI community. And it's like, do I think that was a DennisService to the FI community? No, I didn't and I don't because I think frankly, there are a lot of people like me and you who are now getting into these later stages of FI where we're either at or near FI and we have to think about it, Chris. Right? Like what do we want life to look like? And I don't think that takes away from the message that frugality is important. It always will be. Right. Like, I've also talked recently how every hundred dollars that you Cut out of your monthly expense. We know that it lowers your fine number by $30,000. So every $100 lowers your fine number by 30,000, because obviously it doesn't stop there, right? You're investing that money, and you invested over 20 years at an 8% return. That's 60,000 you have. So it's a $90,000 swing for every hundred dollars you cut out of your budget. So anybody who tells you that little things don't matter literally doesn't understand. So that's important. But also, you and I are at points in our lives where it's like, all right, we both have daughters who are growing up. We both have businesses that we can spend too much time on. It's not easy to come up with the answer.
- [18:26]
Chris Hutchins
It's also, I have a personality where I enjoy work. Like, you know, I've met some people in the financial independence community who are like, I don't enjoy working, and I'm very excited to be done with work. So I could just kind of read books and hang out and go on a hike. And I just actually like building, like, and today, with all the tools that you have at your disposal when it comes to building products and technology and software, with all the AI coding tools, like, gosh, I could. If you said, your family is leaving for a year, you can't intergage with them, and, like, how do you want to spend your year? I would probably just go build all kinds of stuff. Like, it's fun, but that comes at a cost. And so I'm trying to think about how I want to prioritize things. I think I regularly had this budgeting conversation where my wife and I would look at, you know, broadly where we're spending money, and then we would ask ourselves two questions, which were like, if we cut 20% of the costs, and if we increase 20%, what would that look like? And then we would compare the 20% we'd cut to the 20% we'd increase. And almost every single time, the things that we would increase if we added 20% to our budget are more valuable and we are more excited about than the things that we would cut if we reduce 20%. So I like to say, like, it's not actually about spending less money. It's about identifying are there things you're doing that you could replace and you'd be happier, more fulfilled, you know, better use of money, et cetera, and then do the same thing regularly with time. And I don't mean calendar auditing. I'm not a good Calendar auditor looking at my day to day, minute by minute, but looking at the major projects you have, it's like, okay, you know, I have these five or six major areas of our business. We took listeners on a trip to Iceland last year and my wife and I went on the trip and it was absolutely amazing. It was one of the best trips we've ever taken, really. And not just because Iceland's amazing, because the people we met, you know, and you know this, you've engaged with your community. I have to like in real life, at events, in Facebook groups, in meetups, and it's really fun. And so getting to go on a trip that was one of the best trips you could take to Iceland with a group of people that have similar outlook on life beliefs was amazing Then this year we're doing two trips, but we're not going on them. And it turns out that I thought planning a trip to Iceland was very enjoyable and it could be a good business then. Now we're planning a second trip to Iceland that starts on Saturday that were not going on. That is a lot less fun. Planning a travel business where you're not getting the trip is just not a joy. And it will make some money, though. The US dollar has depreciated about 14% against the Icelandic kroner since we booked the trip. And we priced the trip in US dollars, but we pay for the trip when we're on it in Icelandic kroner. So that was a big learning moment. But we're like, we don't want to do that. Like, I don't think we want to take trips unless they're the trips we're going on. So is there a trip we're going to plan again in the future and invite people and go on it? Yes, probably. But are we going to try to have a line of business where we take the trips we've been on and run them for other people, you know, going forward? No, I think the people that go on this trip will have the best time of their lives. If you're listening now, by the time that you will have already gone on the trip and enjoyed it. But we're evaluating these big key areas of how we spend our time. And you know, some of them are silly. Like we have a hot tub in our house, our house hot tub. And we found that we were spending more time maintaining the hot tub than using the hot tub. So we drained the hot tub. So we still have it, but it is not functional. You can't use it. I almost bought like those balls From a ball pit to just be amazing. We just have a little ball pit in the backyard. And I was surprised they were more expensive than I thought. But this is a good example of, you know, how much more expensive was it? A couple hundred dollars of balls? Like, am I being ridiculous? Should I have just spent that money? Because I don't know, what could be cooler than having, like, if I was a kid, if my parents had a ball pit in the backyard, like, I should just buy the balls, throw them in the hot tub and call it a day. I'm going to make that a goal. I'm going to try to. I'm going to get involved before the end of the year. It was also a fun one. You know, one of those, like, Google interview problems. It's like, how many balls do I need to fill a hot. Yeah. So figuring out how many I needed was another one. But I think that we just started evaluating all these things, both money and time, and we're just trying to be really intentional about it. And I don't know, I feel a lot better about how the next five years might be with kind of some of these approaches of regularly sitting down with your partner, with your family. Obviously, when our kids are older, let's engage them about what kind of family do we want to do? How many date nights do we want to have? Do we want to have. Now we take dates with just one parent, one kid. Like, we're just evaluating the routine also. And I think as a financial, frugal person, we never spent as much time thinking about what we're doing. We spent more time thinking about how much it cost and where we were spending our money. And now we're like, what are all the things we do? Do we want to spend more energy on family travel with extended family or just us? You know, sometimes you get roped up into, oh, we've got this family reunion, and then we've got to go see this person and this person, this person. We're like, we realized and credit to one family member of ours who she was like, you know what? For Christmas, we're just going to do it with our kids. Like, we've decided that traveling on Christmas morning is not a thing we're going to do. And it was this light bulb moment where we were like, oh, didn't think about that as an option. And then I looked back at my childhood and I was like, I don't actually remember always traveling. It's something you do, I think, before you have children. It's like, well, I'm going to go see family for the holidays every time. And then you have kids and then I don't know if maybe it's just us. It's like for the first couple of years we kept up with that old routine where you're always going to see family. And then at one point we were like, well, let's just make the rituals for ourselves. And so we've been spending a lot of time just redefining what we care about, what we want to do. And it's been really exciting.
- [24:37]
Brad Barrett
Nice. Yeah. I love the questioning sacred cows. Right? It's. There's so many things that we just do because we do them. And I, as you were saying that I was thinking about this is a ridiculous, silly story. But like a handful of years ago, my mom. So she would always have us over for Thanksgiving and then for like the Christmas ish holidays and for whatever reason, she would essentially make a Thanksgiving dinner both for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas or Christmas Eve. And it's like, would have the turkey again, we'd have the whatever. And it's like. And it was just so stressful, like for her and my brother who were cooking. And it got to the point where it was like, it was pretty miserable. And we actually said to her, like, for Christmas we're like, mom, we just had this meal, like, what would you like to eat? And you know, I'm going to be funny with the caricature, but she is literally a Jewish mother and like many Jewish people, she loves Chinese food. So on Christmas we literally had Chinese food for our Christmas dinner. And it was just great. I mean, Chris, it was just fun. It was fun. We did something different the next year. We had appetizers. Everybody brought appetizers. And it was like, we've done this same thing for 40 years. What would it look like if it was just a little bit different? And I think I would challenge everybody listening to say, hey, what am I just doing? As a matter of course, what am I doing? Because we've always done this, right? And it's like you can actually think about things. You can do something a little bit different. Like you said that one family member has said, hey, guys, we're going to just do ourselves this year. And that's great. That doesn't mean they don't want to see you. It just means, hey, in this season of life, this is what we want to do and that's perfectly fine. And I would have applauded them because it's a big step. It's hard to do that. Sometimes it's hard to go against what you've always done. I know it sounds silly, but I think it's important to scrutinize things. I really do. You were talking about, essentially, experimentation and iteration, right? And it's like that Iceland trip. You learned a couple things. Well, a couple of major things, which is you don't want to be a travel organizer. Like, that's not a future business for you, clearly. But you did love organizing the trip you went on. So who's to say you only have to do that once a year, right? Like, I mean, when we're talking about fi and being conservative. And hey, you could even if your podcast made $0, right? If you. At some point, you and Amy, 10 years from now, if you want to just travel seven times a year, I'm sure you could have seven listener trips where you plan them personally, and the tiny little bit of profit could just cover the two of you. And, hey, look, our travel is paid for. Now, obviously, for you, that's a little bit less impactful because you have so many points and miles. But nevertheless, for normal people, that would be a boon. That would be fantastic.
- [27:19]
Chris Hutchins
Let me tell you about normal people, right?
- [27:21]
Brad Barrett
You are not normal in any way, my friend.
- [27:23]
Chris Hutchins
No, no. Yeah, I am definitely not normal. That's fair. But let me tell you about my grandparents. They did not travel much. They grew up in Oklahoma, and they traveled a lot by cars. They went to lots of national parks, took my mom and all their siblings there. They went to world fairs. They were ambitious. Once they went to Canada, and in 1975, they crossed the Atlantic on their first trip, and they loved it. And in the next 33 years, they went to dozens of countries, went to almost every continent. And what they did was, and they were true fire folks. They retired early by moving to a retirement community. Right? They were not very frugal, and they wanted to travel, and so they organized trips. So their last name was Sayre. Sayre Tours. They took five to seven trips every year with the retirement community they lived in. They lived in the same retirement community from about 50 to 90, 40 years.
- [28:21]
Brad Barrett
Wow.
- [28:22]
Chris Hutchins
And they just said, hey. And it turns out when you move into a retirement community in your 50s, you are a lot more organized, spry, easygoing than everyone else in that community. And so they volunteered. They said, hey, we're organizing a trip to Sweden. Hey, we're organizing a trip to China. We're going to Vietnam. Like, they went all over the world. In fact, in my tracker of, like, how many countries have we been to. So my wife and I have this, this Google sheet that's called Countries to Visit. And just for fun, when I first put it together, I put my grandparents in there as well. So it's like, where have I been? Where have my parents been, where's my wife been? And then where have my grandparents been? So they ended up at 53, which is for, you know, two travel to go.
- [29:03]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:04]
Chris Hutchins
And, and I've worked at a library, worked as a teacher, like did not have wild resources. And so they found that they love travel. And so they did exactly what we're describing without a budget, without points and miles, without any of it, by just moving to a retirement community early, finding a group of people and with no public audience and organizing trips to go to these places. And like you said, even not as a professional travel agent, you could, back then at least you'd book 20 flights and say, hey, you know, I'm the organizer, could I get the flights for the organizer free? And no one had any qualms letting them be able to go on these trips for free. And they did it for decades all over the world. And I will say of all of our grandparents, between my wife And I, those two outlived every other one lived till their 90s. And I think that the social bonds they had living in this retirement community for 40 years, spending almost every waking moment, like with other people, you can't underestimate how valuable that is in your life. And if you go back and listen to the conversation I had with Tim, which you haven't done yet because it hasn't come out, but for anyone now, it should be out. We talked a lot about just the value of spending time with people. And Tim has some tactics that I liked which were if you want to do it, you just have to make it happen. And so what he does is he plans it out a year in advance and he books things so there's a sunk cost and invites the people. And that's like the anchors of the year is making sure that you do these things. And it's so easy to get caught up with, oh well, we didn't plan this, we didn't plan that, let's plan it last minute. And so I was like, whatever you want to do, just do something to make it happen. Maybe you don't book every aspect of it, but put a non refundable deposit down on something that you know you want to do. I think there's something to that. And I have let something that I used to think was super Valuable die. And I'm going to revive it, which is. I had this idea and I called it Monthly Memorables.
- [31:05]
Brad Barrett
We talked about this on a previous.
- [31:07]
Chris Hutchins
Episode, but the idea is every month do something that makes that month memorable. And so for someone who didn't go back and hear that episode when we talked about it last time, it's like, just try to make sure it doesn't have to be an international vacation. It can be. We, you know, you did an escape room, which, as a nerd for escape rooms, I would highly recommend everyone try at least once, because if you don't know if you're an escape room person, you might be talk about something that's like, one of my favorite things to do in life, but I just feel like we need more of that. Like, more time with people, more time doing things we enjoy. And I'm going back to where we started. The risk that we're not doing that seems higher than the risk that I need to go make a little extra money or spend a little less in retirement if the market is, you know, just happens to perform a lot more poorly for me than it's expected to.
- [31:59]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, no, I definitely hear you. And I think the hard part is just making it happen. And I think it's okay to come to that realization and then redouble your efforts. So, for instance, last year in 2024, I organized a small trip to Breckenridge with a handful of people that I know from the FI community. And it was great. And we had people fly in from a couple of different locations and a couple of local people, and it was just, we had a grand old time for 4 days, whatever it was, hiked at 14er and played pickleball and had hours long conversations over coffee and board games and things like that, and it was great. And frankly, I didn't make it happen in 2025. And, you know, I could always come up with every excuse. Chris. Right. Like, obviously, I've been dealing with finalizing a divorce this year. I've been busy. I've been traveling a lot, yada, yada, yada. But, like, had I just booked an Airbnb in February for August, it would have happened. And I saw you light up when you were talking about. About escape rooms. And it's like, hey, what if you just put it on the books every three months? I'm literally just booking this for six people. And what does it cost? 50 bucks a person? At most 30. But whatever it is, like, just prepay for six people and invite four friends every single time, you, your wife and four friends, you have it on the books four times a year and then it'll be fun. Who am I going to invite this time? Who's going to come out? Like, that's something that would be so easy and so low cost. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, you're talking like five to $700, probably, maybe less over a year for six of you. And like, literally, I, Chris, obviously people listening to this can't see. I saw you light up. You look like a different human. You, you're, you're a jovial guy anyway, so let's be clear. But like, you looked like substantially different and like, you gotta lean into that kind of stuff.
- [33:48]
Chris Hutchins
Sadly, we have done basically every escape room in the Bay Area, so now it's every time we travel, we have to do them. But I, I hear you a hundred percent, like doing those things, making them happen, planning them in advance. The risk that you can't fill, you know, the Airbnb or something like that is so low. I think, you know, we, we, we were going to go to Mexico and we rented a house and we were like, oh, I wonder if we can fill it. It's over New Year's, no problem. And like, we have kids and ever, all of our friends have kids and it wasn't a problem.
- [34:21]
Brad Barrett
Thanks for listening to Choose a Five and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Choose a Pie is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at choose a vi.com cards or I keep this page.
- [34:33]
ChooseFI Host
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- [34:36]
Brad Barrett
The top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support.
- [34:41]
Chris Hutchins
One of the reasons I actually like playing the points game is that some of the best way to get the most value out of your points is to book something when the schedule opens. Right? So a lot of airlines are well known for releasing inventory a certain number of seats, you know, when their schedule opens. So for a lot of airlines, that's 360 or 361 days out. And so my wife and I had talked about taking the kids to Japan. And so we were like, we should take kids to Japan. And naturally, as someone with a lot of points and miles, we're not really interested in flying in economy class to Japan. And so we knew that a lot of these seats are going to open up 361 days out. So we planned our Japan trip 361 days out. Now we don't book any Hotels, we have no idea where we're going. We have flights to Tokyo and we're going. And the entire like I go back to this book, Happy Money, where it's like these five different ways to spend money for happiness. It was kind of like a science recap of some research. And one of them is to prepay for things. And the reason is twofold. One, you know, the, the last moment of your trip, if you're prepaying for, you know, a vacation, is not paying this hefty bill. It's like if you prepay all the hotels when you check out, you don't have to look at that big thing. And the other is that you could just anticipate it and be excited about it like the entire year. Our Instagram feeds now are just basically all filled with crazy fun family and kid activities in Japan. And we've saved so many of them. And we've planned this thing versus if you plan a week out, you know, you're kind of scrambling to figure it out. And so because the way these schedules work, we book these things so far in advance and so we missed the boat on next summer's, you know, go live abroad because we haven't figured out where.
- [36:26]
Brad Barrett
Okay.
- [36:27]
Chris Hutchins
But the idea for spring breaks for Christmases, times where you might already know we're probably going to go somewhere. I love that, you know, the price to book your flight 12 months out, 11 months out, 10 months out, doesn't change that drastically. But when you're using your points like you often some of the most sought after destinations open up seats right as the schedule opens. And in a couple days or hours or minutes, in my case, they disappear. And so I like that. That is one thing that is forcing us to make decisions and so it just forces us to plan and commit to stuff.
- [37:02]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, that's brilliant. And the conjunction of that and the anticipation. Right. Like to look forward to that as a family for 360 days. That's not nothing.
- [37:10]
Chris Hutchins
And now, now, just to just to make this sound like it's not all as perfect as it is, the particular airline we booked on was Japan Airlines. Release two seats at schedule open.
- [37:20]
Brad Barrett
Oh, and you only got two business class.
- [37:22]
Chris Hutchins
They fly from San Francisco to both Tokyo airports. So we have two seats on one flight and two seats on another.
- [37:29]
Brad Barrett
Goodness.
- [37:29]
Chris Hutchins
And so I'm confident that before we leave, something else will open. One of my pieces of advice for people that are trying to use their points, obviously flexibility makes the value go a lot further, but you know, booking something that will work, set Some alerts and then wait and then something almost inevitably always opens up. The amount of availability that opens up like the week before is really, really high. But it's super stressful to be like, you know, what a word. Space for flights opens up a week before travel. Let's just plan our trip a week before. It's like it's not fun to not be able to anticipate for a year. So we have flights to Japan. I'm, I would say 80% confident that we will all four be on the same flight in business class.
- [38:13]
Brad Barrett
Okay.
- [38:14]
Chris Hutchins
However, I am not confident we will confirm that until, you know, if you told me how confident will I be that we will confirm that? 14 days out, it's like it goes down to 20%.
- [38:23]
Brad Barrett
Oh, wow.
- [38:24]
Chris Hutchins
But I'm saying by takeoff I feel confident that will happen. But we have something that's fine, right?
- [38:30]
Brad Barrett
And worst case scenario, you meet up in center city Tokyo and it's not the worst thing. Not ideal, but not, not a total deal killer.
- [38:38]
Chris Hutchins
We have two daughters and as you know, the older they are, the easier they get to travel with. So my wife's like, okay, I'm fine if the backup plan is we split up. But you're taking the younger kids.
- [38:51]
Brad Barrett
Nice. Is she going to fly into Haneda right in the middle of the city too?
- [38:55]
Chris Hutchins
I think she is in the easier commute. I think I was like, how do I optimize for her having the easiest travel experience though she is quite well traveled and I am not. I'm not. This would be our fifth trip to Japan. So not worried about that. But never with kids. And oh my gosh, if you have kids, there is just so much cool stuff to do in Japan. They have like a bakery that is kids only. So like the kids have to go in and buy stuff, but the adults aren't even allowed in. They have this place called Kidzania where all the kids get jobs. And this is like one of the coolest. Like a 3 year old will go for a few hours and, and learn to be a bank teller. And in a very kid appropriate way. Or they'll be a pizza maker or they'll be a fire person. You know, like, and it's funny because it's mostly in Japanese, but they rotate. They're like on Mondays these five occupations are in English. On Tuesdays these five occupations are in English. And so we just found all these incredible things that we've never even considered on all our past trips to Japan. So like, I am so excited for this trip. It's brought me just the planning of it and we're not even going for another seven months. And I'm like, so excited about it. I've never. We used to plan so last minute. And I'm loving this committing in advance and we're going to extend it to next summer. We're thinking for a couple of the destinations we go to, let's just rent a bigger house and like, send an open invitation to family, maybe some friends and say, hey, we've got room for another person to join us these two weeks. We'd love you to come. Like, that is awesome. Once it's booked. Sorry.
- [40:27]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. And really, like, what is the Delta? What's the difference in terms of cost? Right? Like, you're already there. You're already getting an Airbnb for X number of days or weeks. Like to get one more bedroom. It's fairly negligible for what you're getting back in terms of, wow, this is really awesome. We get to share this experience with people and. Yeah, I really like that. It's funny. So my daughter is a massive roller coaster enthusiast. I don't know if, if you know this is a thing, but there's like this worldwide network of roller coaster enthusiasts. So I actually know two of the best amusement parks in the world. Roller coaster parks are in Japan. So I think your kids are a little too young. But I knew off the top of my head, I'm like, oh, Nagashima Spa Land and Fuji Q Highland. Like, she's told me about all the coasts. She has like an encyclopedic memory of all these roller coasters. So I think a future trip for us to Japan is definitely, definitely in the cards. But yeah, it was funny. I was going to ask you.
- [41:19]
Chris Hutchins
Not a roller coaster fan? No, I wish I was, but I might actually have an episode that your daughter will enjoy. Because this listener of mine who emailed me is a professional theme park consultant. I want to say I'm trying to remember the exact terms he used, but he basically, that is his job. He plans and helps people create theme parks and all kinds of stuff. And he was like, maybe we should do an episode. It's like all about that and how to get the most out of those experiences. And I was like, ah, we'll see.
- [41:52]
Brad Barrett
That sounds fun.
- [41:53]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. So I've got something for her.
- [41:56]
Brad Barrett
Well, yeah, I know you at least have one listener for that episode. That's. And you know, it's funny because you're saying, like, we missed the boat for next Summer. And obviously that doesn't mean you're not going to book any kind of trips, but you're talking about like that months long trip. And I just want to make sure I heard you right. But like, I think you were saying that under the guise of, hey, we didn't get that 360 days out. So I don't have the exact thing. But that doesn't preclude you from taking a trip.
- [42:21]
Chris Hutchins
We missed the boat in terms of we didn't book it 360 days out. But when the Paris Olympics happened, it's funny, we ended up going to the Paris Olympics unintentionally.
- [42:30]
Brad Barrett
Really.
- [42:31]
Chris Hutchins
Like we went to the Olympics, but we had to go to the Olympics because we just regularly set these alerts. So if people have points and miles and you want to get the value out of them, there are a handful of tools. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'm not going to run through them all or I'll send you a link of an episode I did where we run through them. And you can say, hey, I'm looking for flights nonstop from this city to Europe, you know, for four passengers in business class in July or August. And you can set that alert nine months in advance and just wait for something to happen. And I think it's hard. Sometimes I get these messages from people who say, hey, I heard you talk about taking a family of four to Paris. I don't see any flights. And I was like, yeah, if you're only looking today and you're only looking for a specific day, it's really hard. And honestly, I think in the recent past, I'm starting to make a case more for cash back. I know it sounds crazy for me, really, from you come back to that. But I think if you say nine months in advance, say we want to go to this region of the world and we're willing to go across these two months, no problem. Like, no problem that something will pop up before you leave. That's a good value for your points. But if you're not flexible, then it's. It could be tough. I think it's, you know, I have friends who, you know, are kind of at a stage in life where they either can't or don't want to be flexible. And they're like, I want to go from this city to this city and I want to fly direct and I want to fly on this day and like 1 in 10 or less times, it's actually a good deal to use points. So I've convinced them all. I said, like, you should just not be playing the points game. It's just not worth it for you given how little flexibility you have. But if you're flexible with where you go, when you go, how you get there, what class you're, you know, how last minute you're able to find out, you know, that you have seats, all that kind of stuff. And I don't mean flexible with all of them. I mean, if you're flexible on one axis, I think you can just get so much value out of it. But, but I ran the numbers the other day on how much value you get back booking flights with dollars. So when you book flights with points, you don't earn anything to earn miles. You can spend money on a credit card or you can fly on an airline, or you can stay at a hotel, usually for almost every program when you fly on that airline, if you're paying with your miles, you don't earn miles. And on most airlines, if you pay with your flight with miles, you're not earning points that count towards status, right? You're not earning credit card points because you didn't pay for the trip with cash, you paid for it with your points. And so you didn't put more than the taxes on your card. And so I started to add up all the different things that you would get back. You know, you get the credit card points, you get the elite status, you'd get the points from the flight itself. And honestly, the total was somewhere in the range of 10 to 25%.
- [45:26]
Brad Barrett
Really?
- [45:27]
Chris Hutchins
Meaning that if you're looking at cash fares and points and the flight was $200, you should really discount it by 10 to 20%. Like if you really care about status, maybe it's higher on the 25. If you don't, maybe it's 15. But because you're earning points on that trip, because you're earning points on the credit card, like you're actually getting back, probably, I would say, depending on your circumstance, at least 10%. And so obviously if you're booking a one off flight on an European airline that has no frequent flyer program and you know, maybe that number is smaller, but for a lot of us that number is higher. And so I found that we were probably doing the math wrong. When people say, oh, well, I'm getting 2 cents per point, it's like, well, are you getting 2 cents per point? Because you really need to be comparing it to, you know, the net cost of your flight. And if you book a flight and then you end up getting 5,000 miles for flying on that flight. You know, if you square it all out. I'm not going to do the math. I did an episode on what are points worth A few weeks ago. So in September that went through all the math, but I was like, ah, it's kind of interesting. And then also if you have cash and you need to book a hotel or a flight, you could just buy points too. So we, we took this amazing trip to Costa Rica. Just my wife and I though I would encourage anyone going to this hotel to bring their kids. We kind of regretted not doing so. And it was the Waldorf Astoria, which sounds so fancy and honestly it was. But we, we booked it with points or we used free night certificates. But to use points, Hilton sells their points all the time for half a cent. So it's like you could go to this website for this hotel and say, gosh, that room is fifteen hundred dollars, but you could buy the points. The day we booked it, you could have bought the points to book the same room for $600. And so when I started looking at things through this lens, I was like, well, yes, you can earn all these points on your credit card and get these awesome stays, but a lot of times you can buy the points also. And so the ceiling of the value you're getting from your points is not the value of the trip. Right. Because if you could buy a fifteen hundred dollar room for six hundred dollars, then when you value your points, that room's not a $1500 room, it's a $600 room. So I don't know, I was going through all this and I just think that if you love the game and if you really want to optimize it and you want to be flexible, you know, great, I do and I still play it. But if not, I think the opportunity cost is actually not as high as people think because I think it's close. The math is close. Okay. And I, especially with you know, cards that are earning more and more cash back these days, it's not crazy for me to suggest someone who doesn't want to open 5, 6, 7 cards a year to play that game.
- [48:12]
Brad Barrett
But that's the key though, Chris. Right? Like the not opening card because the signup bonuses, that's where unless, unless the math has changed dramatically since I've been in the game so significantly. Like the sign up bonuses, that's where the vast majority of the value is. Like, are you talking about like ongoing spend?
- [48:29]
Chris Hutchins
Most people I meet get excited to hear about, oh, I could open this card and get 100,000 points. And then I say, yeah, and you could do it 10 times a year, you know, five for you, five for your partner. And they're like, that's cool. And 80% of them don't want to go down that extent of the rabbit hole. So they're like, maybe I'll open up a new card once or twice a year. Which means that most of their spend is not going towards a signup bonus. Look, I will tell you, as you know, if every dollar you spend goes towards a signup bonus, that is the highest ROI way to maximize your credit card spend. But if you're not focused on signup bonuses, and you say, you know, I've got my Chase Sapphire Preferred or reserve and I'm spending my money here, or I could open up, you know, a 2% cashback card, or if you had the assets to qualify for, you know, Platinum honors status at bank of America, you'd get a 2.625% cash back card. I don't know, I could make a case that that is for a lot of people going to have the best long term outcome and not leave you as stressed as you might be with cards and all these coupons. And if you look at the American Express Platinum card, that's changing tomorrow, $895, you get your annual fee. Then you've got clear credits, you've got Uber credits, you've got Resi credits for restaurants, you've got a Lululemon credit. Like, it just keeps going. I think you've got a Walmart plus credit, you've got the entertainment credit, Equinox credit. Like, it's just, it's unbelievable how much work it can be. And sometimes I look at all of this and think, oh, I can get the most value out of this card. I could go shop at Lululemon and get some value. But. But at the end of the day, if you look at all these credits and ask yourself, what would I buy these credits for? I think that's a healthier way to frame it. And you're like, I know that almost no one listening would buy a. And unclear if the Lululemon credit actually gets added. I'm reading a rumor, right? It will know tomorrow. But if there's a $75 per quarter Lululemon credit, you would never buy that for $75. Right? Like, it would force you to have to commit to spending money somewhere. So. So I just feel like with the fees going up, if you want to play the game, play the game and you can get value. But the time spent playing the game for some people might not be worth it. I love it, right? If you get joy out of it, great. But if you don't, I don't know, go buy the Hilton points. When you want to book the Hilton resort, go, you know, buy Avianca miles which are on sale like 20 times a year to book Star alliance flights or just go book flights in the portal. Right? Like, you could use the travel portals for a lot of these airlines and get value as well. And, and sure, you're not going to get the best value on earth, but there's something really freeing when you're like, oh, I'm just going to pay cash, right. Like, if anyone's ever bought travel for work and also played the points game, it's like, oh, it's really nice. When I travel for work, I just look for the flight I want and I pay for it. Whereas when I travel personally, I'm like, how do I get these deals? How do I find the right thing? How do I use my miles? So I don't know, maybe I'm still going to keep playing it. I'm still going to make content around it because I love it and I think there are ways to simplify it and I'll try to share those, you know, for the rest of time. But it's just, I'm surprised at how much closer the math is right now than I had thought. If you're not going bonuses, if you're going bonuses, it's obvious math is in your favor every time.
- [51:48]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, but like you said, 8 out of 10 people are not going to want to open X number of cards per year. So, yeah, I mean, you have to talk to what are people realistically going to do? And yeah, I think most people want to open one, zero, frankly, zero, one or two cards a year. And yeah, that changes the calculus for sure.
- [52:05]
Chris Hutchins
Do you still play the game?
- [52:07]
Brad Barrett
A little bit. A little bit. I've opened up a couple cards in the last couple years, but yeah, I'm more. I use my Chase Sapphire preferred card for most of my. You're going to recoil. So don't yell at me because I haven't optimized. But I love those Ultimate Rewards points. So I use that. I have a United card that I opened last year, but yeah, otherwise I don't know. I just, I need to get back into it. There have been so many great bonuses that I've seen recently. So I don't know if you need.
- [52:34]
Chris Hutchins
To, like, if you've accepted that you're not going to be opening up lots of cards. Maybe the answer is you need a really solid card for all that everyday spending instead of getting one point on that card. On the Chase card. Right. Like your everything else card. I don't know.
- [52:51]
Brad Barrett
Believe me, I totally hear you. I'm actually having Devin from point me to first class on. I know you had her on a couple months back. And yeah, we're going to kind of reboot the travel rewards concept here at choose if I think it's. As you know, obviously I started travel miles 101 literally 10 and a half years ago at this point, we put like 60,000 people through that email course that existed back then. And literally the flexibility as you described it was quite literally lesson number one. I think that is the key to succeeding in travel awards. And to your point, you don't have to be flexible on everything. You just need to be a little bit flexible. And who's more flexible than people in the FI community? Right. Like, by definition, especially once you've reached fi, you have nothing but flexibility. So again, if you, if you out there are listening to this and say, hey, I want to travel to Europe next fall, well, that's the easiest thing in the world. That's shooting fish in a barrel. Like Chris would say, it's 100% chance that you could go to this nebulous Europe next fall and get a trip for free or nearly free. Right. It's anytime. Because the example that I always.
- [53:58]
Chris Hutchins
I used to like saying free or nearly free.
- [54:01]
Brad Barrett
Well, now there's an opportunity cost.
- [54:03]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. Like if you need 100,000 points to get your family to Europe and you could have otherwise had $1,000, there's a cost. I think that cost works if you're flexible, because those tickets might have been $1,000 each. So I used to say that.
- [54:18]
Brad Barrett
No, I think that's wise. And I think when people fabricate travel and then try to delude themselves into believing that, oh, I've earned all these points, I've earned all this free travel, but they wouldn't have taken it otherwise. And like, that's where the opportunity cost comes in. Like, that is a clear actual cost. And I think people lose sight of that.
- [54:35]
Chris Hutchins
But for a frugal person, which I know there are some of you listening like me, it's really great because it feels free. Right. Just because there's an opportunity cost and it's not actually free doesn't mean it doesn't feel free. And so for a lot of us, it's, yes, we could have used a cashback card, and then we could have put all that money into VTI and we could have grown our portfolio faster and reached by sooner. We could have. But instead, we earn these points. And once they're points, it's like converting them to cash is the worst deal. And so we've got to travel, and now it actually forces us to take trips because we have these points. And so as much as I will say the opportunity cost exists, so you can't say they're free, I will say I love that they feel free, because for someone like me and many people listening, it forces us to spend money on things that, if we had cash, I'm not sure we would. I think I would own more index funds instead of have more experiences. And I want to tell you that's not true, because I know the values I have should force me to do the experiences and not save the money. But playing the points game is in some way forced. It's like a mortgage. It's forced experiences instead of forced savings.
- [55:43]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And I think. Right again. It's easy to delude ourselves into believing that we would do these things, but a lot of us are frugal by nature. And there's something. Even though clearly we would say something like a gift card, it was funny when you were saying the Lululemon, the credit, I was like, well, if you have a middle school daughter, you probably would pay $73.50 for a $75 credit because you're essentially guaranteed to spend it. But. Well, I could intellectually make an argument that, hey, if somebody got me a gift card to. Let's. Let's talk about escape rooms. So for my birthday, somebody could hand me. Let's just say my mom still wants to get me presents, right? Like, she's. She's so cute, and she still does. Like, she could hand me $100 in cash, or she could get me $100 gift card to the local escape room, and I would value the $100. Mom, this is not. Because she's listening. Don't do this, please. But, like, I would use that, and I would get a ton of value out of it, and I wouldn't have gone to the escape room otherwise, because with that hundred dollars, in the entire universe of things that I could have done, what would I most likely have done? I most likely would have deposited into my bank account and it would have sat there, or I would have transferred it to one of my brokerages and invested it, right? So There is a forcing function about some of these things. I think that's what you're arguing with the points and miles. Like, it's a forcing function for saying, like, hey, dummy, don't save that extra thousand dollars when you're talking about having millions of dollars potentially. Maybe you should travel. Maybe you should do something. Maybe you should have an experience. Maybe you should take that gift you got for a birthday and not just deposit in the bank, but actually do something fun with it. Like, I think, Chris, this is the hard part for a lot of us. And like Pete, Mr. Money Mustache talks about the skill of spending, and he always talked about, like, there's two aspects of it. There's the skill of spending at the beginning of your FI journey, which is optimizing spending. It's being frugal, it's being wiser. It's buying what you value, as I would say. But then as you get closer to fi and at fi, that skill of spending becomes a different skill altogether. It's a skill of spending money wisely, and it's spending it on things that you value, things that you. That light you up. Getting trips with friends or going to these escape rooms or going on roller coaster trips like I do with my daughters. Like, you have to shift. And there is something about a forcing function. So, yeah, I'm glad you slowed down on that because I think it's important.
- [58:03]
Chris Hutchins
Yep. So I would encourage everyone to just try to figure out things they want to do, book them in advance and experiment. Right. Doing these things, it gets easier. Like, it actually is like a muscle. It's like, oh, we're going to practice spending money. And then you're like, oh, it's a little easier to spend money. Now, I'm not saying be reckless. I think. I can't remember if Tyler was the one that said this in our interview, but it's very unlikely that someone who's very frugal will spend some money and. And then be like, oh, my gosh, now I burned all my cash. Like, we're talking about learning to spend a little bit more. And it's not like it's going to change you into a reckless spender.
- [58:40]
Brad Barrett
No, no chance. No chance. And speaking of extra spending, so about maybe 45 minutes ago, you talked about you and Amy sitting down and talking about like, hey, what's the 20% we'd cut? What's the 20% we add? Let's go back to 20% we'd add what jumps to mind. Like, are there things that you're. You Chris Hutchins, who has a successful business and presumably a decent bit of assets. If I know you well, over the last 20 years, you've been saving, like, what are you holding back on? Like, are there things that even still you're too frugal on? Or is this more like a pie in the sky kind of exercise?
- [59:11]
Chris Hutchins
These are going to sound so ridiculous to most people, but maybe they won't. Maybe they'll sound so relatable. We have a really loud garage door opener. Okay, but it works, right? It works, but it is just obnoxiously loud. And I'm not sure if it's the springs or if it's the garage because it says quiet drive on it. So, like, you'd think that, like, that branding. Gotta be quiet. Come on. But it's not quiet by any stretch. And I think the things that I struggle the most with spending are if that garage opener broke, no problem to spend money on it, but it's a. Like, I don't like that garage. Like, I want a garage door opener that's quiet. Whenever I go to my parents house and I hear their garage door opener, I like. Oh, it just makes me like, just hate my own garage door opener more. This is not a $50,000 fence, right? This is relatively minor. And I think there's a lot of things in life like that that, you know, we've been talking for a while about upgrading some of the furniture in our house. It's like, you know, now, I wouldn't say with toddlers, it's. It's always the best time to upgrade furniture because we have two white couches that, you know, been destroyed. But I think it was shocking the actual cost of doing these things. Like, it's not like our lavish purchases that if. If all the money in the world fell on our laps, what would we buy? I don't want a Ferrari. Like, I don't want a Gulfstream Jet. I just want a quiet garage door opener. And we wanted to put this one we just solved recently, but we wanted to make the garage a gym. That was nice. And then we wanted mirrors on the wall and we just got caught up in like, well, how much are the mirrors going to cost? What do they look like? And funny enough, this is actually a complete contradiction to what I said recently, but we recently got the Mesa homeowners credit card.
- [61:00]
Brad Barrett
Okay.
- [61:01]
Chris Hutchins
And so if anyone's not familiar, it's pretty new. And it is similar to how Bilt gives you points for rent, Mesa gives you points for your mortgage, except they don't require you to actually pay your mortgage with the card. You just have to show them that you have a mortgage, upload a mortgage statement, and every month they'll give you the number of points for how many dollars. Your mortgage payment is up to a hundred thousand a year, as long as you put $1,000 a month on the card. And the card earns 3x points on tax payments, on home improvement, on daycare, all kinds of stuff. So I have a blog post for it. I got a referral link, all the good stuff. But they have a dollar fifty a quarter Lowe's credit. And I was just like, ah, these credits where it's like, nah, do I have to go to Lowe's and buy an Apple gift card and go sell the Apple gift card online for $45 at all that. But we were walking by Lowe's and I was like, well, it's the end of the quarter, right? It's like September. I got to get in there. And then I saw these four by, I think four by six foot mirrors, okay, Just loose mirrors and mount them on the wall. And I was like, well, I got this credit and we just bought the mirrors, mounted them on the wall. It was like $300, right? All in all the mirrors, all the mounting equipment, everything we needed minus the credit, it probably was less. It was probably closer to $200. Now we have mirrors on the wall in our garage gym. And I couldn't be happier. But it's those little things that, you know, aren't necessary. Like when your water heater breaks, it's really easy to replace. But when it is just like noisy and slow and not big enough, it's really hard. And I think some of it is, well, it's not broken. Why would we fix it? And then part of it is it feels wasteful, you know, to buy something if you already have it. You know, it's like a new washing machine and that kind of stuff. But I can't tell you that every time in my life that we've spent the money to do one of these things, Especially with how much angst you have living with this thing. Like, I would love opening the. I would just sit in the garage, opening and closing the garage.
- [62:56]
Brad Barrett
We need an intervention here, Chris. I mean, honestly, like, as soon as we get off this call, just call.
- [63:02]
Chris Hutchins
A company, tell me what it was like. If I could just replace the garage. If it was truly the garage door opener, that'd be great. But I don't know if it's those springs above the garage Door opener. I don't know if the garage door is misaligned line. If I knew the answer to that question, then you don't have to do it yourself because.
- [63:16]
Brad Barrett
Okay, we're having an intervention. You live in a major metro area. Like, just find a garage door company, have them come out. They will fix it for you.
- [63:25]
Chris Hutchins
I know, I know. I do love. I get an immense amount of satisfaction. Like, diying projects. Like, real. Like, I enjoy it. Okay, so this is like, I want to fix it, but you're right. I would be so much happier if we just took care of it. Yeah.
- [63:39]
Brad Barrett
Just make the phone call.
- [63:40]
Chris Hutchins
I know, I know. This is. By the next time we. We do this, hopefully I have a quiet. It's not going to be a quiet drive because I already have one of those and it doesn't work. But. Yeah, so when we looked at that extra 20%, it was just funny that most of the things we wanted to do didn't cost that much money. Like, they were just things that were, like, little luxuries that we were depriving ourselves of that, you know, aren't, by all intents and purposes, like huge luxuries. I don't know. I wouldn't. Obviously, anytime I'm buying something, we're going to find a deal. Right. Like, if anyone's listened to my show, it's like, here's the shopping portal plus the coupon, plus the cash back, plus this, this. So we find ways to make any of those things good deals, but we've been getting better at replacing them with things that we were spending money on that, you know, I don't know. It's like, fine, but we'd rather do this other thing.
- [64:30]
Brad Barrett
Yeah. And I don't think either of us are arguing against our nature or that it's going to become some slippery slope and we're all of a sudden going to start spending oodles of money. We're not. We're not arguing that we should do that or advocating to anybody that, like, oh, all of a sudden fi just means go and spend whatever you want. Like, you and I are wired the same way. I mean, you much more so than me, obviously. But, like, it's fun to diy. It's fun to come up with novel solutions to things or come up with, like, whatever that answer is that you think is not necessarily optimal. But, like, I always look for, like, what fits that sweet spot for me, and I think that's fun. I think it's intellectually stimulating. I told you, I'm moving here Shortly. And part of it has been, okay, what's the best way to move? And I think there are lots of answers. And I think what's nice is always having in the background to any of these stressful situations that money always solves this. And I think that's kind of like how many times do you stress about something that like is easily fixable with a fairly nominal amount of money? I'm like, chris, I suspect all the time you do that. I know I do. And it's like, but when you say like money solves this, that doesn't mean you go out and just throw cash around. It means to me at least that lowers the ambient stress. Because I always knew that for a couple thousand bucks, whatever it is, 3,000 bucks, I could just hire a moving company, they could come in, move and that would be that. But we went up finding like a U Haul that was a really nice size and it enabled us to cull down some items that I had and such. And like, it made it a more fun process because it actually got me closer to my goals, which is not owning a lot of stuff. So it was actually like this really wonderful forcing function again for, hey, not only am I getting a fraction of the cost in the actual move, but it's also furthering my goals of I don't want to own junk anymore. So I donated a ton of stuff and I am at the point where I just, I don't have that much stuff anymore and it feels really liberating. So like that was a fun exercise. But I always, I knew in the back of my mind, like, if it ever got stressful, If I made 27 phone calls, which clearly I didn't, but like I could just hire a company, they could come in, I could just wash my hands of it and it would be done. And I think like, that's a nice stress lowering mechanism that I've found is like, is this something I'm worried about? Is this something that I'm going to have consternation about for the next year or two? Like, okay, does money solve that? Do I have money?
- [66:58]
Chris Hutchins
Yes.
- [66:58]
Brad Barrett
Yes. Okay, well, I don't think I need to worry anymore. So that doesn't mean I can't come up with this fun solution because again, you and I and so many people listening are going to. But I don't know, it's really helped me. I suspect that would help you too.
- [67:11]
Chris Hutchins
I was going to tell you to just hire the mover. When we moved, I hired a mover and I have no regrets. I Don't think I'll ever move myself again. I would say you could hire, pack and move or just move. So it was funny. We did, we will pack everything. You know, we'll pack most things except the kitchen. I just didn't want to have to do all the plates and all that stuff. And so we got the joy of, okay, we're taking this, we're not taking this. And then someone else came and finalized it, carried it, put it in a vehicle, moved it, and I am very glad we spent the money there. That one was one where I was like, it didn't even cross my mind to rent a U Haul.
- [67:46]
Brad Barrett
Wow, okay.
- [67:47]
Chris Hutchins
Sometimes I don't have a problem, but most of the time I do. But one thing similar to what you said, you have this thing in the back of your mind which is, well, I know that there's an option if this is stressful. I did this crazy episode a while back. You might have listened to it, episode 181 with this guy Kai, who runs another podcast called the Daily Churn. And we talked about how to make money online and we talked about signup bonuses, but he is kind of a full time deal seeker and he finds these deals, whether it's meal kits or bank bonuses or credit card points and miles and signup bonuses or anything, and he's made that a 20 hour a week side hustle and generates easily $3,000 a month. And so when I went into my kind of safe withdrawal calculator, I assume that in retirement I can easily. And if you want to optimize for the 4% rule, here's a good to take this full circle. Let's say you can't get over. You don't want to go to the 5% rule, you want to use the 4% rule. Well, at least assume that you can do something to make $3,000 a month. You know, so now I've learned this thing that could make me, let's call it $35,000 a year. And so now if I live on $100,000 a year and I make can make 30, well, now I only need enough savings to close the gap of 65, right. And I'm using round numbers to make this kind of more straightforward. But that's given me a lot of kind of relief knowing that there will always be a way that I enjoy to generate income if my business or my, you know, job or anything like that ever goes away. And so whatever that is for you, find the thing that makes the worst case scenario better. And, and then Factor that in. Because I imagine that let's say you want to optimize. You'd say, you listen to all this and you're like, no, I'm okay with the risk. I want the 4% rule. I want the 98% success rate. That's fine. But assume that you could supplement your income a little. Doing something for you that might be $10,000 a year, it could be 50, it could be whatever number, and factor that in as well. And then that 4% will still be there. But it might be more money. It might mean less money saved because you need less money to spend because you can supplement your income. It's like my. My Social Security is online deals. And that episode with Kai was like a masterclass in how to. How to think of. Through every category of all of them.
- [70:12]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, I remember that episode. And our mutual friend Noah and I have talked in real life about similar things in terms of, like, he's pretty sure you could make, yeah, $30,000 with these deals or credit card bonuses and things like that. And it's like, okay, well, is that something that I want to spend time on today? No, but it's nice having in the back of my mind that I could do that, right?
- [70:33]
Chris Hutchins
And also, like, percent of cases where my retirement estimates fail, you know, like, my worst case scenario is that I have to go do this thing, right?
- [70:41]
Brad Barrett
Because that's like, that's a significant percentage of a retirement spending, right? Like, even you, you live in a very high cost of living area. You have kids, you have whatever. Like, I'm sure your life doesn't cost $50,000 a year, right? But, like, even if it costs $200,000 a year, right, like, $30,000 is still 15% of that. That's a not insignificant amount. Like, if you're talking like, wow, if all goes to hell with my withdrawals, like, I can turn this on at any moment, and that's a 15% difference. Like, that's massive. That has to. I mean, I haven't run the numbers, but I'd be curious to see, like, what that would take your success rate from and to. It would have to get it close to 100%. And that's not nothing. And again, this is one of those things. I think so many of us think our lives cost way more than they do because we always think in terms of, like, oh, this is what I earned. But it's such a. And hopefully so many of us in the FI Community have changed this. Like, you go back and you look at retirement Calculators Right. Like the old school retirement calculators. It starts with the fundamentally flawed place of like, what's my income now? And it's like I want to tear the rest of my hair out. Like it has nothing to do with what you earn now. Because even if you made $500,000 now, to reach 5 in 20 years or 15 to 20 years, you need to save 40, 50%. You obviously have taxes, a significant amount of taxes built in there. Like if you make 500 grand and how many of us make 500 grand, there's almost no way your spending is more than 200,000. So it's like that's actually the number now for most of us in the real world. If you make combined 150 or 200 or 100 or 80, whatever it is, like your spending is only a fraction of that because by definition to get to 5, your savings rate has to be significant. So that's why we always say like the starting point for FI is what does my life cost? It has nothing to do with what do I earn now. So I think so many people get caught up in like, oh, I've got to somehow replace all of my income. And it's like, no, I promise you don't. I really, I absolutely promise you do not. Because again, savings is massive and your tax, your effective tax rate and your total tax liability is going to be the highest when you're at your highest earning years. And as we've talked so many times on the show, like, there's so many amazing ways to get your, your money out of accounts. And with the standard deduction, the long term caps gains rate of 0% up to like $96,000. Like so many of us are going to have effective tax rates in phi of 0 to 5% federally that like your taxes are essentially going to be zero. And again, that's not nothing. So like all these things, we just get showered with benefits as people in the FI community and it's just, again, it's an interesting rethink. And then you say like, okay look, maybe I'll have my mortgage paid off. Maybe I won't have any car payments. Like my life actually doesn't cost that much. But even if all went to hell, I could turn on a small amount of this income and that would make a measurable difference. And it just absolutely would.
- [73:40]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. So that's my new outlook on life is let's optimize more for doing things now. It's not, it's funny because it's a lot of the themes from Bill Perkins die with zero. Right? It's like, go live in the now, do the things during the right season of life. But it's. It's not that I'm now optimizing for having less money. I'm just willing to take risk in different. I'm. I'm shuffling risk around because I often think it's like, well, I'm willing to take on more risk. I'm not willing to take on more risk. I'm just willing to take on risk that my portfolio doesn't hit my goal at the ex, but. But I'm getting back all the risk I took that I didn't do things that I wanted to do. I'm getting back all the risk that I gave up time working that I didn't want to do. Like, I'm trading risk instead of taking it on. And I think all the time. You know, I saw this stat today about how life expectancy would go up if autonomous vehicles replaced driving. Right. Waymo is pretty pervasive now in the Bay Area, and they just got permission to go to the San Francisco airport. So a lot of Waymos around here. And it's my. My daughter looks at them, and she picked up from a friend. They're called computer cars because there's no person driving them. But it was like the life expectancy would actually change in America if we.
- [75:00]
Brad Barrett
If we could snap our fingers, if.
- [75:01]
Chris Hutchins
We had the accident rate of autonomous cars instead of the current accident rate. And I guess it's death rate because life expectancy, but that doesn't mean that we're not driving. Like, we all take risk every day. We. We decide it's. It's way more risky to not live our lives than to not drive. Right? Well, it's way more risky to not live our lives than risking that we never run out of money. And I say never. So we just have to rethink risk. And I think the conversation I had with Tyler is good. I'm excited to hear the conversation you had with Aubrey, and I think it's just something that all of us in this community need to. Need to really push ourselves to think about. And for some people, it might not change anything. And for some people, it might be this giant light bulb moment. So if it is one of those things I know you and I both want to hear.
- [75:46]
Brad Barrett
Absolutely, Chris. That's the perfect place to end this episode. As always, my friend, it's good to chat. These are fun conversations. I'm glad we recorded so people can find you your podcast. Is all the hacks. And it's wonderful. It's one of my favorite podcasts. As I told you before, I listened to today's episode already by the time we're recording this at noon Eastern. So it literally is can't miss. For me, Your website is chrishutchins.com and is there anywhere else you want to send people?
- [76:14]
Chris Hutchins
Nope. You can find everything if you search my name or all the hacks anywhere. Podcast. And then we've got a newsletter where every Saturday I send the all the deals and all the news and all the crazy stuff I'm up to each week.
- [76:24]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, I emailed you back. That's my favorite part of the newsletter. Now what's going on, Chris is now.
- [76:29]
Chris Hutchins
I'm going to move it up. So I find that there's all these things that a podcast doesn't afford the ability to share. Like last week I did this thing. It's like, well, I'm not going to do an episode about going to Lowe's and building a mirror, but in the newsletter I was like, here's the exact mirror I bought. Here's how much it costs and that kind of stuff. So it's been fun to have an outlet to share things that I just can't always fit into the podcast.
- [76:52]
Brad Barrett
Yeah, I love it. Awesome. All right, well, everyone check out Chris's podcast. Check out the website. Definitely sign up for the newsletter. It's something I really enjoy. I read it every. Every weekend. So. All right, until next time. As always, thanks for being part of the choose to Buy community and thanks for listening to the show.
- [77:07]
ChooseFI Host
Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the choose to Buy community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first, subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player. Just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choose a comm, slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the the newsletter list right there. And I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox.
- [77:43]
Brad Barrett
So that's the way that I keep.
- [77:44]
ChooseFI Host
A pulse of the community and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. And finally, if you're looking to join an in real life community, we have choose a vi local groups in 300 plus cities all around the world. So head to choose a vi.com local and you'll find a list of all of Those cities in 20 plus countries.
- [78:04]
Brad Barrett
All across the world.
- [78:06]
ChooseFI Host
And if you're just getting started with FI or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways choose a Fi episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the Fi community. And even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up. And it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence. What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to.
- [78:33]
Brad Barrett
Live a better life?
- [78:34]
ChooseFI Host
And then choose if I created a Financial Independence 101 course that's entirely free. Just head to choosefi.comfi101 and again, thanks for listening.