Jonathan (3:05)

No.

Brad (3:05)

It's fun. You know, it's just essentially a standard trick taking game at its essence. But there's some little flourishes here and there. There's some additional cards and the way you play it's a lot of probability based in that the first round through it's all based on betting on how many you're going to win. So you only have one card and then, and then it just keeps going up to 10 rounds. So eventually you have 10 cards. So it's actually really, really interesting. But the funny story was the guy who brought it was a guy named Felipe. And, and he actually said he's like, I heard about this game in your newsletter, Brad, and now I'm here at campfi playing it with you. I've been playing.

Jonathan (3:43)

So someone had shared it with you to share in the newsletter, is that right?

Brad (3:46)

Yeah, well, my girls got it so I've been playing it with my girls and I loved it so much. I mentioned it every so often I do this segment, I call it what I'm reading, watching and playing. And playing just includes whatever board games I've been up to or et cetera. I think I put in a couple of old school computer games like Starcraft one time. But yeah, essentially board games. And yeah, it was just, it was really fun.

Jonathan (4:05)

Yeah. You know what I've. I learned over time that there's two aspects when you're picking a game. There's the game that you want to play and then what you really have to realize, and this is the much more complex is the game for the environment that you're entering into. Right. I will enjoy any game. I will have a great time with the incredibly complex games, but not if I'm the one responsible for everyone else's experience. Right. You need to have a game master, a person that truly understands all the rules that can guide newbies and you into enjoying the experience. And then you also have to look at. All right, well, with the types of people that I'm playing, are these people that identify as game players or are they casually interested? Will they be intimidated by complex mechanics or will they get into it, how into it will enjoy? And what is the time window that we're going to have to do the game and then what's the environment that we're going to be in? And, and it's not to say that if all of these don't line up, you don't do anything. But you have to take the right game to the right environment for everybody to, you know, have a good time. What's the time constraint? What's the level of commitment? You know, all of these things come into play. So as a person that's deciding what games to bring, this was like. So I was like, well, I just got to buy them all and then you'll be ready for any situation, you know.

Brad (5:18)

Yeah. And I can vouch for the fact that you have hundreds of games. Yeah. Just real quick to everyone listening, a couple games that I think, because like Jonathan just mentioned, it is hard to find different skill levels, different timeframes, et cetera. A couple games that I bring a lot of places. So this Skull King game is great. Another one we've mentioned so many times here is Monopoly Deal. This is not the boring old Monopoly that is mind numbing and terrible. This is a really fast paced game. I actually, my girls and I taught Aaron how to play recently, so we played a couple times and then I played with Molly and I timed the game Jonathan. So I'm, I have a tendency to time things and the games took 9 minutes, 10 minutes, 4 minutes and 6 minutes. So we clicked four games in a very short sub 30 minute time and that is a great game. Another one is cover your assets, which is a very fun fast pace. I think it's one of those Grandpa Beck games. And yeah, it's not a terrible amount of strategy, but it's really, really fun. So highly recommend those and oh, you know, it's funny having you back on the podcast. Obviously we talk a lot, but we talk about choose a buy. I have all of these random stories built up that I'm, I'm, I've been jotting down another interesting frugal thing that I've done recently. We have Talked on the podcast going back to the very beginning. Again, I. I actually just heard this episode from 2017 where my friend Bo wrote in about this thing that he did, which was basically when he bought a car. He emailed every dealership within like, 50 miles of him and said, hey, this is the exact car I want. This is the exact price I want. And whoever offers it up, I will buy it immediately at any given point in the world. I think he had a response within 30 minutes. Bought the car, signed, sealed, now. I always talked about, man, I would love to have the guts to do that. What's actually really interesting, I found something. And of course, just like always, none of this is. We don't have any sponsors on this program. So let's be clear. I have no, no financial incentive with this. But there's a program called True Car by US News, of all things. So, like US News and World Report, it is exactly this. So when I got a car for my daughter Anna a year ago. So as crazy as this is, she's driving now. And literally, exactly.

Jonathan (7:29)

Really had my heart set that she was gonna inherit Golden Boy. I know that's what she was hoping as well.

Brad (7:34)

Yeah. My girls did not want Golden Boy.

Jonathan (7:36)

I heard you mention your new car being like, you know, like an Avalon or something. I don't remember exactly what it was, but something like that. And I was like, where's Golden Boy? What?

Brad (7:43)

What? What?

Jonathan (7:43)

What? What? Death of Golden Boy. I didn't hear about this.

Brad (7:45)

I know. Yeah. Not only is Golden Boy gone, but the Honda Civic that I had after Golden Boy is now gone. I have, in fairness, I have a Hyundai Elantra, so I have a 2020 Hyundai Elantra, so I haven't changed my stripes too much. But. Yeah. So for everybody out there, just Google true car by U.S. news. It was exactly that. It was, hey, this is the car I want. And you basically get offers from all the dealerships within a certain range. And I was going to buy this car from the Volkswagen here in Richmond, and I found this service, and it literally took over $2,000 off of what I paid just for signing up. And this dealership from Fredericksburg, Virginia, they drove the car down to me an hour. So, Jonathan, it was crazy. I saved like 2,500 bucks and they delivered the car. And I didn't even have to sit in the dealership for four hours and sign all the damn papers. They did everything for it. It was the greatest thing ever. So, so highly recommend it.

Jonathan (8:38)

So, Brad, I'm trying to figure out where to place this. So historically, I have started. You know, my last car was relatively expensive, but I still couldn't quite bring myself to buy brand new off the lot. So it was a new, to me, used car. And I'm just curious, as a point of comparison, when I'm buying a used car, I just be honest with you, I just go to carmax. I've been pretty satisfied with the price curve and, you know, that sort of thing. I look at my various options and it is simple and it's easy, but I'm aware that I'm not getting necessarily like the absolute best price. But I guess my question for you, coming back to this kind of tip that you had, is this for any car? Is this for new car? Is it for used cars? Like, what sort of savings are here?

Brad (9:20)

Yep, so I use this for new car. It's interesting because I got two cars around the same time. I wound up buying a used car for me, the 2020 Hyundai Elantra that I mentioned. And I actually went through Hertz Auto sale. So Hertz rental car, they sell some of their old rental cars. So I wound up getting a really good deal. I did the price comparison on CarMax and I wound up getting it for like, I think it was 4 or $5,000 less than I would have paid for a comparable car at CarMax. Now, granted, it was a rental car, so who knows precisely what kind of condition, et cetera. It did not have a lot of miles on it in the grand scheme of things. So it seemed like a risk worth taking.

Jonathan (9:59)

Well, yeah, we only had 12,000 miles to drive this thing into the ground. How bad could it be? Challenge accepted.

Brad (10:06)

Why does it smell like smoke in here? So, yeah, I went that route for my car, but yeah, for my daughter. I mean, to be perfectly honest, and this is would be an interesting conversation at some point, not today necessarily, but she's basically, you know, my daughters are my most precious things in the entire world. And the safety features on a new car were kind of worth it for me, especially for somebody who has resources. Right. So, like we've talked for so many years about used cars, used cars, used cars. But it's a totally different thing when you're 16 year olds and the most precious thing you have in the entire world is driving a car. So, yeah, we wound up buying a brand new Volkswagen for her. And yeah, I went through this shoe car and like I said, it saved me about somewhere between 2 and $3,000 over what I would have paid at just the dealership that I walked into. Now, in all fairness, could I have negotiated down to that if some other dealership within 60 miles was willing to pay it at my local dealership? Probably. Was I actually going to do that, Jonathan? No, I was not. Because we both talked about how that is the least you're looking for.

Jonathan (11:09)

You're walking through the lot looking for the person that you're going in to go. I'm excited for this. I woke up, I had my Wheaties for breakfast. It's time to negotiate.

Brad (11:17)

Yeah, yeah, Definitely not my thing. So anyway, it's a cool thing for people like me, especially who are not looking to negotiate. They negotiate for you. And yeah, it was really, really great. So a bunch of frugal wins buried in there for sure.

Jonathan (11:29)

Nice. Well, you know, you don't normally steamroll me, but I was going to respond to the whole board game thing, but I am very excited about your frugal win and I think it's a great life hack as well. I guess I'll just store my little notes here about games for another day, but there it is. True car. True car. This. This little segment is not brought to you by a true car, but there is possibly savings for those of you looking to get a better price on a new car. All right, so today we're going to be rolling out our goals episode. And I think it's really important to say that this episode, more so than maybe any episode that we've ever done up to this point, shows our intention and commitment to crowdsourcing personal finance. When we started at the beginning of this year, we said that this year changes everything. And we followed up by just kind of rolling through a table of contents for financial independence. We had a goal of getting to a hundred, and I think we covered 10, 12 last week. We tacked on a few more, but I think what we decided, we're actually kind of enjoying the rhythm of that. And we'll probably keep trying to do that, but we're going to try to weave them in in any way that you guys want, you know, so as you leave us, you know, voicemails and comments and messages that tie to things that are on the, you know, what we want to cover next. We're going to just kind of pick and choose from our table of contents list and go through them. And based on the feedback that we've gotten on the last couple episodes, most of you appreciated that approach. Now, we do both recognize that we could get more facts out there, more list of things that you could do, but I think most of you recognize that the value is actually from the commentary on those items. It's from the nuance, it's from the conversation. And so we are going to not speed up, but we are going to try to be very intentional about covering the entire playbook of financial independence on the Choose Fi podcast, your home for financial independence online. So with that cutaway, Brad, why don't we go ahead and kick into this and we're going to start off with a voicemail, and this first one is from Sam. This is the first voicemail that we've played on our radio show. So congratulations. There's got to be some sort of achievement there for that. I appreciate you. Here it is. Hey, guys, this is Sam in Alexandria, Virginia. I love the idea of a voice recording, Jonathan. Like you said, this is a radio show. Let's have some callers on my. One of my goals for 2026 is to be more involved in my local Phi community and actually to make some Phi friends. I've only got a couple, and they kind of predate all of Choose Phi, so I'm excited to get to know.

Brad (14:02)

Some more folks in the local area.

Jonathan (14:04)

Not too many of the local area group events have fit with my calendar, so I decided to put some on there myself. I kind of copied the Richmond walking group idea, Brad, and put four walks on the calendar up here in the D.C. metro area. And we've already got 14 people signed up. So we'll see how it goes for the next month or so and maybe we'll start ourselves a little tradition up here. So thanks for what you do and thanks for having the Call to Action function added. It's a. It's a cool feature. So thanks, guys. Man, that was awesome. Sam, you're winning in 2026. Brad, doing a walking group in D.C.

Brad (14:42)

Yeah, I love it.

Lottie (14:43)

Yeah.

Brad (14:43)

And this is the neat thing about the platform that you built, Jonathan. It's anybody can create events. That's the best part. So if you're listening to this, choose event.com, login, create your account, join your local group, create events. If there's not an admin there, step up and be the admin of your local group. Just create events and make it happen. That's the beautiful thing. Jonathan, I sent this to you. We always go through our different platforms and such, and I saw this came in from Cliff and he said, Portland Oregon Monthly Meetup 18 strong. First time posting the meetup on both Facebook and the Choose a By app. And it doubled the attendance, putting it on the app. And that is Just absolutely fantastic. We're seeing this all over the country and. Yeah, it just. It makes it easier.

Jonathan (15:26)

Well, I think this is. There's something really huge about this. I think a lot of people probably say, you know, Facebook, it's where all the people are. But Facebook goes out of their way to promote algorithmy type stuff. You understand that, like, this group, people have to make a choice to be inside of the choose fi community. That takes a little bit of, you know, additional work. And when you're there, you're there for a very specific reason. And so I'm not at all surprised to see that. And I expect fully that we're going to see, you know, more of that in the future. In fact, one thing that I'd like to do, and this kind of goes to that whole wouldn't it be cool if idea for our community, like, Sam, he has a. He's doing a weekly walking event, right. So that's the sort of thing for that. You probably don't need to send out invitations for something every single week. It kind of misses the point. But what you're doing is you're forming an actual community. And that actual community would have probably a group calendar that they could sync any way they want and have this overlay on their personal calendar to see events that the FI community has highlighted and been interested in. Brad, you. You brought to my attention how Liz from Frugal woods pointed out that when she was living in Boston, a lot of people would think Boston was an expensive, you know, cost of living area, but she made the case that it was actually quite inexpensive through the lens of how many free things there are to do do. Wouldn't it be cool if that could be something that a community could crowdsource as a community calendar to have awareness around all the incredible opportunities that are being offered for those that are paying attention.

Brad (16:55)

Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. That episode, going all the way Back to episode 12 with Liz from Frugalwinds, that's one of the best episodes I've ever heard on frugality anywhere on the Internet, on podcasting. And yeah, she said exactly that. And it's. It's so. It's counterintuitive based on what we know know, quote unquote. Right. But realistically, there are free things everywhere, especially in big cities. There are free things everywhere. Let's be clear. But you just have to open the aperture up and find that. And yeah, Jonica, like you said, we can crowdsource this. Every local group should be crowdsourcing these things. Everybody should be mentioning, hey, I'm going to such and such. Does anybody want to join me? Like, these things are easy and they're obvious and they exist. We just have to find them. And that's. To me, that's the fun part.

Jonathan (17:40)

And the cool thing is, you know, in the absence of this community, you got to find them on your own. But in many cases, individuals in this community have already found them. So I stumbled into Ron, the admin of the Richmond local group. I stumbled into him at the Farmer's Market here in Richmond. Not surprising. Farmers markets are incredible and they happen everywhere, but there's some that are better than others. But Ron was there with his band, right? He was there with his band playing a gig on the weekend and caught my attention. Caught his attention and had a nice chat there. But five community members find interesting opportunities in there because they have more time, right? They have more time. What are they doing with it? Ron is doing something very interesting. That's a choice that he makes with this weekend. Brad, I could see you. You're lighting up. You can have Ron, please.

Brad (18:25)

Ukulele. So, yeah, he's doing something very interesting. Nevaeh says. I. I love that. Yeah, this is great. So love this win from Sam and Jonathan. Let's queue up the next voicemail.

Jonathan (18:34)

So, Brad, the next one we're going to read. This is from community member. Their username is. I'm doing quite well. I wonder where that came from. My word for 2026 is preparation. I'm planning to dig deep with a 70% savings rate while simultaneously saving for a home. It's going to be a challenge, but I'm grateful to be in a position where this kind of aggressive saving is even possible. I'm treating the 2026 as the year I earn my freedom, setting the stage to buy a home and potentially retire from my physical therapy career in late 2027. Wow. This is incredible, Brad. There's a lot of change and a lot of intensity into something that I'm doing quite well. Is targeting as a very focused year, you know, effectively a sprint where a lot of things are going to pivot if they can pull this off. But. But they believe, based on, you know, information they have that we don't right now that this is entirely possible.

Brad (19:30)

Yeah. That's incredible. And this gets to the heart of saving money isn't deprivation. Right. They are saving money very intentionally to buy their freedom. And that's an incredible thing. This is not. I always get so caught up when people think that what we're Doing is something negative in some weird way. Like there is nothing negative about the path to five when done properly. This is about reclaiming the only thing that matters, which is your time. And I love this. Preparation is a great way of putting this. And I would throw this out. I actually had something written down, Jonathan, that I was going to run past you, which is something akin to a money challenge. And this goal is the perfect example. What if, what if you did something that you didn't think was possible? Like could you take your average credit card bill and cut it 10%? Okay, what about 30%? Could you do that? Like, is that a money challenge worth taking on? Is there something that if you sat down and applied some intentionality and prepared and said, oh wow, this is gonna make a material difference in my path to fight. Is that something you could do? And it would be really interesting to have almost like a after action report and say, how did this impact me? Did I even feel it? And I spent, I suspect really strongly. You wouldn't even miss that spending one iota and you would supercharge your path to fi just like this. This community member is, I mean, I love this.

Jonathan (20:55)

Okay, well, I think what you've teed us up is for our next call to action, Brad, we are going to roll one out. It's going to be a 30 day challenge. It's going to be a money challenge. It'll have two parts individuals that want to participate in this challenge. On the Choose Fi podcast, you go to choose a five.com login, you'll say, I'm taking the challenge. I'm going to identify 10% savings and these are maybe the areas that I think that I can do this. You're going to initiate the challenge and then at the end of 30 days when the challenge is over, you're going to have a second option to tell us, did it work? Did it not work? What was the feedback? What was the outcome? What did you learn from this? And this is how we're going to tee up a whole show around a community that took action on this show and, and found 10%, that'll be our money challenge. Brad, what do you think?

Brad (21:42)

Oh, I love it. Well, I just teed you up for some work.

Jonathan (21:45)

Of course that's how we do this. But I sandbagged you and maybe it, maybe you kind of like. Well, yeah, but I knew you would take it.

Brad (21:51)

I got you first. I got you first. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think that'd be great. I think it'll be really interesting to See how much people can actually save when they apply some intention on but to our community.

Jonathan (21:59)

This is how, you know when we say there has never been a podcast like this, right. This is why we said this year everything changes. This is the direction of the show. We, we don't want you to just hear ideas. We want you to take actions on the ones that you know at some level that you've already been wanting to do. You just needed somebody, an external force to give you a little push, to remind you that it actually makes a difference. And you know, we're going, if you want the accountability, we're here to provide it for you. Take the money challenge, go to choose a five.com login. It'll be open once you initiate, it'll be like a 30 day window and then we'll follow up with you and get your feedback on that challenge.

Brad (22:38)

All right, like you said, we're a radio show. Let's, we got a bunch of voicemails. Let's play another one. Hi, this is Jenny. For 2026, I have some financial goals and I also have some personal and health goals. My financial Goals include saving $50,000 for retirement and putting some money aside in a sinking fund to save for a car. Also, my oldest is going to head into his freshman year in high school, so I want to actually move a quarter of his 529money from investments into cash to so that it's ready if he does go to college. For my personal goals, I want to read a hundred books, which I did last year and want to continue this year. And my sister is getting married and I'm her maid of honor. So my goal is to plan the best bachelorette party ever. For my health goals, I want to meal plan more and meal prep with my sons who have recently become interested in eating healthier.

Jonathan (23:31)

The community is bringing it today. Brad, this is a pretty epic goal on multiple fronts. First of all, we have an incredible savings goal just from a dollar amount perspect. But then on top of that, we have some tactical moves with regards to actual savings and investing horizon, that sort of thing. It's time to get some money ready to actually be used. You don't do the 529 just to do the 529. You know, you do it to grow and get some help and then at some point you're going to move to a more conservative posture because now it's time to actually use that money.

Brad (23:59)

Yeah, agreed. This is a great one from Jenny. I love, I love your goals and yeah, I Think really the low hanging fruit of in terms of saving money in our general budgets is the grocery bill. I think for people who apply some intentionality to their grocery bill, I think you could easily save a hundred to five hundred a month. I really do. I think it's just, it's just about meal planning. It's about thinking ahead. It's not. You can't scramble after the fact. Right. If you're just doing this with some planning like Jenny plans to with her kids, I think it's just an absolute slam dunk. And really, Jonathan, we talk about the big three expenses, right? It's housing, it's car and it's food. And for a lot of people the food, there's just a lot of fluff there. And yeah, this is a really cool one.

Jonathan (24:46)

You know what's interesting is when she said that her sons have showed an interest in eating healthier. I just experienced for the first time the other day. I've been trying to go to the gym each morning. You know, roughly around these days, you know, the jet lag is now over. So it's kind of come back to around 6:30 or so. I'm still kind of heading out the door to go to the gym, but my son, who's always up like a bowl of lightning at 6am man, he is just ready to go and he's 8 years old, about to be 9, he says, hey dad, can I go with you to the gym? And I said, not quite yet. You got to get a little bit older and we can get you there. And a little piece of me, tiny little piece of me. There was a selfish side of me that was thinking, oh, this is my time. But the secondary part of this was thinking that's going to be pretty cool, man. He's getting pretty close. I got to start thinking about doing this and I don't know if I'm going to wait until he's officially the gym age to go. We got to start doing more workouts, you know, in the garage. You got to say yes to this. And so it's just kind of cool to think about your kids, you know, coming up next to you and absorbing some of your interest in doing it along with you.

Brad (25:41)

I love that. I absolutely love that. And yeah, final note, 100 books. Give me a break. That's, that's amazing.

Jonathan (25:46)

That was my first thought and then I got distracted by the other stuff. What is, what books are we reading here?

Brad (25:52)

Yeah, that's so cool. Jenny, thanks for calling in. Really appreciate it. All right, Jonathan, what Do we have next?

Jonathan (25:57)

All right, Brad. Next we have a call in from Dan, sharing with us an upcoming transition.

Brad (26:03)

Hi, this is Dan from outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I'm 45, and although I'm very close to FI with 23 times my annual spending saved, only 3x is currently saved in a taxable account. And another 3x is represented by the Roth contributions I have made over time. So 2026 is a year I direct more of my savings to taxable accounts, and I try to figure out if this is the year I can find a way to take a break, maybe shift to Barista Phi, and maybe start doing Roth conversions. Regardless, I plan to keep listening to choose fi.

Jonathan (26:45)

That's awesome, Dan. I appreciate that being one of the goals for 2026, but really, you gave us a lot to work with here. There's this interesting point in time where you're past the basics. You're now, you know, in the middle to well on your way, and you're starting to think about the glide path. And really, for the first time, the buckets and the tax treatments, you know, of where your money is is going to dramatically affect the options that are available to you. And so with regards to things like a Roth conversion ladder. Right, something like that, doing Roth conversions, well, that's typically going to happen after you leave the workforce, but how are you going to cover your living expenses for the period of time that you're doing these conversions? This is not something that you want to wake up the day before you retire to figure out. You need to think about it ahead of time, and you're clearly doing the right thing. Brad, I think we're not. I'm not trying to move on, so I want to give you a chance to respond to that as well.

Brad (27:39)

Yeah, I honestly, I'd love to follow up with Dan and maybe we could do a case study on this, because what jumps out to me. So he said he's. He has 23 times his annual expenses saved. So, Right. We. We'd say The Phi is 25x in general terms. And he said he only, quote, unquote, has three times in taxable accounts and then another three times in Roth contributions. So that's actually really interesting because, yeah, that Roth IRA conversion ladder, I think we always said you basically need five years of expenses in your taxable accounts. But realistically, I think Roth contributions count as the exact same thing because those can be pulled out tax and penalty free at any time. So as far as I'm concerned, that does represent an additional amount essentially in what's accessible to do that? Roth IRA conversion ladder.

Jonathan (28:28)

Yeah, it's an interesting way of looking at it. It's almost like, and I agree with you, so you're saying what he just said is he has 6x that's not in a pre tax bucket. He has 3 years of living expenses inside of a taxable account and he has three years of living expenses that are contributions not to be conflated with total balance inside of your Roth. That's contributions. And so when you're thinking about, all right, I need to figure out how like should, should I keep just throwing everything into the 401k and, and Brad, you and the FTAX guy and Cody have really been beating the drum of like RMDs aren't the thing to be worried about. It's not the RMDs. But I think what does still stay needs to be top of mind is if you're really thinking about doing something like a Roth conversion ladder, the one big thing that you need to get in front of is when you step away and for the window of time that you're going through this conversion process, you need to have five years of living expenses to keep the whole thing going. Five years or more to keep the whole thing going. And so it sounds like Dan has that part sorted. Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Brad (29:33)

Yeah, I totally agree. So yeah, I would actually challenge Dan that I don't think he needs to move away from pre tax contributions at all. I'm a massive fan of pre tax contributions. I think anybody in the FI community who understands the value of that and the fact that we can most likely pull our pre tax money out almost tax free, maybe very likely tax free, depending on our expenses. It's why we in the FI community don't believe as strongly in Roths as traditional personal finance people do. Because we have these amazing strategies to get this money out where you put it in tax free and you get it out tax free or pretty darn close. So yeah, I mean Dan, of course it's impossible to give you advice based on just a paragraph, but I think you really need to rethink that and everybody else listening. Like there's a lot of talk about Roth, but man, there is really something special about what we can do with five strategies with these tax deferred items like the 401k and the traditional IRA. I think there's a real high likelihood you're going to pay no tax on that ever. So if it were me, I just keep on pumping, pumping that money in.

Jonathan (30:37)

And he also says part of this is he's trying to figure out a way to slow down, to take a break, to shift to barista Fi. And so I think it would be kind of cool, as we're kind of thinking about table of contents and throwing things out there, just to talk about some of these things that have popped up, and they have cute names, and the names change over time. One that I think is here to stay is certainly this idea of Coast Fi. Barista Phi. I like that as well. I remember there was fatfi and Lean Fi and all these. It doesn't really matter. But the point is financial independence, the path to financial independence, it's not binary. You start and then nothing happens between now until you get to the finish line. Most of us know this at an intellectual level, but we don't slow down to realize the options that are available to us in the middle. And so Dan's thinking about that right now. Do I really need to wait till I get to 25x? What does it mean that I slow down? How do I slow down? You know, the people in the financial independence community tend to, either due to nature or just due to patterns that they built over time, end up becoming high performers. And a high performer that's used to getting results sometimes struggles with the concept of doing less. So that's a mindset shift. When the performance has gotten you the results, are you allowed to do less? You see people that are really good at academics struggle with this. Is there a point of diminishing returns? What happens if I just slow down a little bit? And certainly when it comes to life and when it comes to, there could be a real value. As you start to reclaim more of your time, you realize that you want to put your time into different things, and not all of them return monetary rewards. And that's okay. So with that in mind, coastfi is probably one of the most popular frameworks. And the idea behind this is at some point, your money is generating more returns for you than your contributions, right? And there's a point in time that you can calculate. Coast by basically says if you could hit a certain dollar amount in your investment accounts, whether it's pre tax, post tax, etc. And then, you know, you identify the age you are, and then you were just to stop. Would that money, on its own, just through, you know, average market returns and projections, would that money, on its own, that invested money, generate enough for you to, by the time that you're 65 or a regular retirement age, hit your financial independence number and so you could then say, well, what if I wanted to, you know, hit financial independence sooner or whatever. You know, there's all sorts of ways to tweak the calculator. But the basic idea is if you work really hard early on and you have horizon, then there's a case to be made. There's a point in time where you could just stop making contributions and you could just be paycheck to paycheck. But because you did the front loaded the work, you're already going to be fine. In fact, you're going to be more than fine. You're going to be far better positioned than anybody else in your sphere of influence.

Brad (33:21)

Totally agreed. Yeah, I think coastfi to me is absolutely revolutionary. And yeah, I joined Jess and Corey from the Finers on their Coast FI Summit live event a couple of months back. And yeah, I think it, it really is just something cool where basically you've saved enough money that that money is compounding in the background and you can just coast on into fi and it works whether you want to reach FI in whatever timeline suits you. Right. So knowing again, Jonathan, another thing on our list of a hundred is the rule of 72. So this is how quickly will my money double, in essence. So you take the number 72 and you divide by your expected return. So we always say 8% annual return. So literally you just take 72 divided by 8 and it comes out to 9. So that's the number of years it takes your money to double. So for instance, let's say your fine number is, I don't know, a million dollars. Right. And you currently have a $250,000 net worth. So if your fine number is a million, your annual expenses naturally are $40,000. So let's say you have 250,000 and you say, okay, I'm going to co sign in. So what that means is that money is going to double in the background every nine years. So after nine years it's 500,000, and after 18 years it's now a million. So you know essentially that you're going to reach 5 in 18 years if you can just cover your $40,000 annual expenses. So instead of needing a job that pays you, I don't know, a hundred thousand or something where you're paying taxes and then you're saving and then you have your 40,000 expenses. You just need to cover the 40,000 expenses. That's the beauty of Coast Phi. So it enables you to take, maybe take some more time off, maybe take a less demanding job, whatever. But I think it's a really cool rethink on. Okay. Understanding that my money is compounding in the background and I just need to cover my life census. I think most people can do that.

Jonathan (35:12)

Yeah. And the other one, Dan, you just, man, you're just teeing up the table of contents. Right? But you threw out the other one. Let's just hit it. Because I think we're adding flavor and nuance to just thinking about things a little bit differently. Barista Phi. All right, so I don't know if this is like lexicon, official lexicon at this point, but most of us can appreciate this point. What if the idea of no work actually wasn't your goal, but it was just work that I could do regardless of what I was making? Right. It was like, I'm going to make something, it's going to happen. I might work at the library. I might go get a job at the scuba shop. I might be a yoga instructor. I might be like anything I want. It isn't going to bring a killing. All right. But it's my passion. I'm there for other reasons. It'd be really great if I didn't have to sacrifice my financial independence goals and I could just do what I wanted to in the absence of worrying about what the paycheck was. Maybe it's a minimum wage up. So the idea of barista Phi would be, what number would I need to hit if I was planning on having some nominal amount of income, right? A nominal amount of income, a minimum. Just peg it to minimum wage, minimum wage income, or part time hours or whatever it would be. But I can count on that. I'm going to do at least that. And then everything else needs to come from my investment accounts. If you could hit that, how does that change the number that you're targeting? And especially if maybe where you are right now is killing you slowly or quickly, does that speed up or offer you more options that you could truly move to the work you love? Even if the work you love is not compensating you enough to help you get your goal right, you are giving yourself these off ramps by starting now. Instead of like waiting 10 years from now and saying your 10 year future self saying, why did you start 10 years ago? Why do you wait 10 more years? Because it's done this. We could just be there right now. So go to that scuba shop, get that job, Go be that ski lift instructor or whatever it is. Go do the thing that is barista Phi. That is the possibility. So we just covered Coast 5 Barista Phi. And we've brought them back up as a reminder about the official lexicon. Do we have an official lexicon? Is there a dictionary of financial independence, Brad?

Brad (37:23)

I don't know. I guess we could make one, but.

Jonathan (37:25)

We got to make one. All right. Wouldn't it be cool if.

Brad (37:27)

Nice.

Jonathan (37:28)

All right, Brad. Next we got a call in from Lottie.

Lottie (37:30)

Hi, Brad and Jonathan. I am so excited to be leaving you this voice recording from the uk this year, we're going to be working towards hitting our half FI number 50% of the way there. We're about 10 years in and we're fully coast Phi. Frankly, we're probably lean Phi, but we're sort of going for a bit more of a FATFI number. We're also going to be working towards enjoying spending the money that we've allocated to spend, because we don't just want to fall off the edge of a cliff when we hit FI and not have built up any muscles in actually spending and enjoying money. So the first thing we've done is book a trip for ourselves and our three kids in February to go to a little cottage on the beach for my youngest son's first birthday. What do I hope will be different a year from now? I'm hoping that I'm going to have become better at saying no to things. I feel we have the resources emotionally, physically, financially to say no to more work and to say no to social obligations that we just really don't want to do and don't serve us. And also, I hope we will have said yes to more things that are going to bring us a lot of joy. What feels exciting, challenging, or even a little scary? I'm trying to optimize my health. I've been doing a lot of work on fitness and nutrition, and that feels quite scary. It also feels scary to put myself out there and make my voice known in the Choose Fi community. So this is my first scary thing that I'm doing right now. Thank you for all the amazing work you do. It brings me joy to listen to the podcast every week and to laugh and to learn about the American tax code. Who knew it was so fascinating? Thanks again. Bye.

Jonathan (39:14)

And to laugh at the American tax code. That should be said as well. I respect the fact that she held that in reserve.

Brad (39:21)

She could laugh at the American healthcare system, too, while she.

Jonathan (39:25)

Oh, so many humorous things are just like one giant.

Brad (39:30)

Oh, goodness. First scary thing. Jonathan. First scary thing. How cool is that?

Jonathan (39:34)

Oh, man. Let's do more scary things.

Brad (39:36)

Yeah. And that's the Cool thing is you just lean in. And who knows if the next scary thing is I'm going to host a meetup in my local area. Right. Like, that would be really cool. And yeah, it just sounds like they're rocking it. I first enjoying spending money. That's a really important thing. I think the skill of spending is. It's an interesting thing on both sides. Right. The skill of spending starts with. At the beginning of your fi journey, you have to get optimized with your spending. Instead of just being. Having money pouring out of out the window, you have to learn the skill of spending wisely. But then at some point, it does shift and you need to think about, okay, I need to spend on what actually adds value to my life. And I think. I think that skill of spending is a continuum. So, yeah, and she actually added in another piece of lexicon in LeanFi, Jonathan. So we're nailing all of these first. It sounds like, yeah, they are CO5. They're 50% in or 50% of the way to her fine number. As we said, almost by definition, you would expect nine years from now for that to double. That's assuming $0 of additional savings. So Coastify is great. Lean Phi is a severed thing where essentially, if you cut out all of the extras in your budget and you just focused on the essentials, so you add up all of the essentials, what could I actually live on in a year? So that's like your lean budget, if you will. I could live on this now, Is this going to be the perfect life for me? No, probably not. But it's. Could I live on this? Yes. Multiply that amount by 25. That's your lean Phi number. So Lottie's saying that she's probably Lean phi and about 50% of the way to true phi, as she or the fat fi that she probably wants.

Jonathan (41:14)

You find that individuals that are stating things out loud are usually drastically underestimating their progress on things. So as I'm reading this, I'm thinking to myself, laddie could probably never earn another dollar again for the rest, you know, and they're there. They've hit it. And I don't mean that that's a. That's a good thing. But I'm just saying in general, when we're thinking about where we are, most of us tend to say we just need a little bit more. We just need to do one more. Even those of us that recognize that the one more year thing is kicking our butts, we still kind of build in a little bit of buffer. And my point is not so much that you should abandon the way you're feeling right now, because that's amazing, but it's just recognize you've already made it, give yourself the freedom to say you're there. Right. And enjoy, you know, this next phase that you're entering into. And thank you for sharing with us. It's really exciting to think about the financial independence movement just being a worldwide thing. And agreed, some of you aren't dealing with the same tax code. When we say Roth, you're like, all right, skip 30 seconds, you know, that sort of thing. But the process, the mentality, leanfi, coastfi, these off ramps, these shifts in mindsets, the way that you're gonna find the 10% savings, things like that, some of them have direct translations, some of them you're going to find your community that's going to tell you things like for instance, here in the United States, you know, the, the standard deduction has just gotten to be a bananas number. And so for those of, you know, individuals that are thinking about doing things like doing itemizations, it's almost to the point, it's so ridiculous that it's just like, okay, or you could just do the standard deduction every year. But the more extreme example of that would be like staggering donations, taking advantage of things like donor advised funds, et cetera, or front loading a lot of giving and then, you know, passing it off to the intended beneficiary over the following years while claiming the standard deduction. This strategy translates to most countries. Most countries have a version of this where you can do more donations in one year and then you can take the tax benefit from that in the single year and then you can do something else in the following years. And that's something that you know, you should be aware of and you just have to think about with the way that your tax code is structured. If money is fungible and you're in a place where you can balance out your cash flow over three years, you know what you're going to be doing, it's not going to hurt. Is there a way that you can front load some spending here to capture an increased benefit over a longer period of time, A short to medium term horizon?

Brad (43:38)

Yeah, Jonathan, I would jump in and say two quick things. So first for all of our non US listeners, of which we have listeners in I think over 100 different countries, and you could correct me the most recent number, but choose a 5 is probably 95% universal for everybody and then 5% US specific, so just ignore that if, if you want or chuckle like lady does. But yeah, Jonathan, the standard deduction. So this is actually really interesting because somebody asked this in our choose a phy Apps feed about basically saying like, hey, I paid off my mortgage. What am I going to do now for deductions on my tax return? As if the mortgage interest like was a really integral part of that. And I think realistically now with the standard deduction being so significant over the last handful of years, this has changed really dramatically with some new tax law. The standard deduction for 2026 for married filing joint is $32,200.

Jonathan (44:29)

And get a lot of mortgage interest area.

Brad (44:32)

Yeah, right. I mean you would need a lot of mortgage interest. You need a lot of, a lot of everything. Basically state taxes and charitable contributions. Yeah. For single individuals, it's half that. It's 16,001. So realistically, I think I googled and the IRS said 91% of people use the standard deduction. So realistically, let's be clear, like unless you have something really interesting happening, you're using the standard deduction. So all of those other things like give to charity, to give to charity, not because it's, this should be kind of obvious, but give to charity for that purpose, not because you're going to get some tax deduction. Because I mean, frankly, even if you're over the 32,000, it's just that marginal amount. So if you added up all of your itemized deductions and you're at 33,000, well, you're only $800 over the benefit. And let's say you're in a 22% marginal bracket. Right. Like we're talking 100 bucks of value for all of those things you're supposedly getting deductions for. So it's very important that people understand the tax code in our community and what you think you're getting in terms of tax deductions. Like that might have been the case 7, 10, 20 years ago, but it's really not the case now. But like Jonathan said, the final word on this, there are some advanced strategies. Like Jonathan, I know you tithe to your church and that's a significant amount. Right. Like doing two years of tithing in one year. You could do it in January and December in essence. Okay. Plus your state taxes, plus some mortgage interest like that might get you appreciably over the standard deduction.

Jonathan (46:00)

I'm really thinking about doing that. I've realized now that going each year is costing me money. And I'm thinking what would be the return be your front loading. You know, this is money that's. Now I'm really thinking about doing this move and moving into two to three year tranches going forward just because the deduction has gotten so ridiculous. It's just, it's, it's. Which is great, which is wonderful. It's a wonderful thing. I'm not complaining about the deduction. I'm just realizing that by doing regular pacing of my donations, each year is in aggregate kind of just netting out. And I'm like, well, there might be a real benefit to grouping them together. I have to think through that and think through what the savings will be. And I'm not 100% convinced because there you just got to think through it. But I'm going to be making the donation, the contribution either way. So it's just thinking, all right, what's the best way to do this? So I will probably report back if I make a firm decision on that. But certainly the big thing you're right about here is you don't want to let the tax tail wag the dog unless you fully appreciate the picture.

Brad (46:59)

Agreed? Agreed. All right, Jonathan, what, when do we have coming in next?

Jonathan (47:03)

Brad, this next voicemail we got is from Wilson. What I love about this one, Wilson is going to highlight for us the fact that you can just, you can start over. Like if you, let's say you want to work, you're excited about a career, but you made a choice as an uninformed 16 year old and that sets you off on a path. And at the point of 26, you came out, you're working in the career and the career is toxic and you're miserable with that choice. Some people just think they have to keep their head down, maybe because of student debt, etc. And then you know, on 65, whatever, and then you just take a lot of really expensive vacations to just make up for for it. You outspend the stress. Right? Well, we don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. This voicemail from Wilson really highlights that.

Brad (47:43)

Hey, Brad and Jonathan, my name is Wilson, I live in Southern California. Really enjoying the content you guys are putting out. Been an avid follower of choose fi for about seven or eight years. Last year in 2025 I was able to negotiate a layoff for my company, so left my corporate career about 15 years and looking forward to the next steps in 2026. A lot of the reason I did this was to be home a little bit more with our Littlest who turns 2 this year before we sent her off to daycare. Maybe something to blame you guys for or thank you for, but I've gotten the personal finance itch. So I completed a CFP course recently and I'll be looking to make a career pivot into financial advising. Looking for my first role, hopefully this year. So really loving what you guys are doing this year on the podcast. Making it more community, like, looking forward to more conversations like this. Jonathan. P.S. i'm also a pharmacist by training, so cheers to us pharmacist career changers. Thank you.

Jonathan (48:37)

So Wilson goes on to add that his wife doesn't actually believe it that they've made. And I get that. Right. You just, you've been, you know, kind of doing things behind the scenes. Things are working out. You say, hey, guess what? We are. And then your significant other says, no, we're not. Okay. I mean, you can look at the spreadsheets. I don't look at the spreadsheets, but it's right there. Yeah, but it's. It's a spreadsheet. Yeah, but it's a beautiful. I put it. I put a legend. Congratulations, Wilson. And as a former pharmacist, like, where, you know, I know that there's probably someone out. There's probably, like the happypharmacist.com they probably do exist, but Wilson knows that's a tough career choice, and there's a lot of other ones like that, and you got to get to a long path before you're there. So finding out on the other side usually leads to, you know, a little bit of an identity crisis and some heartache. But it sounds like Wilson has navigated this and is making this transition in a wildly successful way.

Brad (49:31)

Yeah, huge congrats.

Jonathan (49:33)

So we heard some really awesome goals for this year. There's some exciting things coming up. We have many more responses and replies which we're going to make an attempt to go through and actually to share in the show notes for this episode so that you can give feedback and encouragement to various individuals that are on this path and are stating something that they potentially want accountability for this year. So we're going to figure out how to do that. It's exciting. I will just say that one big thing that we're doing is we're trying to create the town hall, the town center for the discussions each week. The show is better when you interact with it. Two weeks ago, we talked about cell phones. In passing, we mentioned two that were on our radar for MVNO with various features and benefits and use cases. We had some excellent feedback on that and we got some additional mentions for various locations and options in the country. So if you see or hear something that sparks your interest and you want to go farther, one, you can interact with us to ask follow up questions, you know, in this, in the discussion for the weekly episode, and that's inside the community. But two, you're also going to be able to get rounded out additional information from the many active community members that are participating in these conversations. So again, to do that, you can just go to choose a5.com login to access the community there. And it's very easy to find the latest podcast episode when you do that. But I will just say, Brad, we asked for other people's goals. I think it would be interesting to go ahead and, you know, prompt you. Do you have any goals that you want to share with the community for 2026?

Brad (51:05)

Yeah, I definitely do. So I have, I have a split up here, I guess, into personal. Choose a vi and money, we'll say, which is, I guess, personal. So start with the money side. So, as I've mentioned on the podcast, my life has changed fairly dramatically in the last couple years. And now that I have my solo finances, I'm really trying to get a handle on exactly what I spend, exactly what my life costs. And I'm really going to redouble my efforts to get everything on paper and get a real sense of what does my life cost. Track everything, go back to the basics, really, Jonathan, it's something, because I've been on autopilot for so long, it is something I haven't done in a while. So this is really scrutinizing, even down to the money challenge of looking at my credit card bill and seeing can I cut things? Are there things on there that I'm not even aware of? I'd like to think there aren't, but I think that would be pretty naive. So, yeah, I'm going to do that. And also getting my daughters more financially savvy, you would think they're, they're the daughters of, you know, somebody who podcasts.

Jonathan (52:07)

The world's greatest accountant. Former accountant.

Brad (52:10)

Yep, we'll go with it.

Jonathan (52:12)

You can find him@haronfire.org yeah, you know.

Brad (52:16)

You know, but yeah, so I just took them to the bank, each of them to get a checking account. So I want them to have more autonomy over their finances. They're both growing up. They're not little kids anymore like when we started the podcast. So as they get older, I want them to have More say in their own financial lives and see when they spend, see it come out of their bank account and can they pay for things. Hopefully would even set them up with a credit card each and have them understand how that works. Set up autopay. So I really, really like their own personal finances to be their own as opposed to it being commingled with my finances. So that's a big goal for sure. Personal. I am finally, I've been talking about this on podcast for almost nine years. I'm going back to Japan this year. That is going to happen. So that is, that's a big goal of mine still in the planning process. I think it's a 99% chance, but that is a big goal. I've wanted to hike to the top of Mount Fuji since 1998 when I studied abroad there and saw it in the, in the distance and was just wowed. So that's going to happen. Yeah, I have some general health goals. I don't, I don't know if, honestly, it's funny because I wrote this in my newsletter. I said I plan to go to the gym basically five times a week, which is 250 times. I would like to do strength training three times a week. I'd like to do more of like a zone 2 cardio once a week and then more of a high intensity interval training once a week. So I think that's very, very doable. And you know, I'm going to start tracking it and make it happen. And then, yeah, just on the Choose a VI side, I really want to see every single local group have their events in our new Choose a Vibe community platform. I think this is, as I said earlier with Portland, we're seeing this at Richmond. I know we got a message from my friend Noah who went to the most recent case study and said they had to bring extra chairs into this massive library room at our local library because it was overflow at the case study. And it's because people are posting these events and Ron and all, all the other people here in Richmond are posting events in the app that you created. And I really want to see that in every local group. So I know you'd love to have some automated way to do that, but I think it's going to be pretty hands on for me. So I'm dedicated to making that happen. So, yeah, those are my big goals in different aspects of my life.

Jonathan (54:36)

Nice. All right, so I just made some notes here. So let's see. So for my actual, you know, financial independence, tactical tax optimization related Stuff one of mine is actually looking into and making a decision one way or the other on strategic charitable contributions, likely using a donor advised fund and just, just trying to see what is the tax benefit for front loading contributions to then capture the standard deduction on the other side. So that is, that's the one that I'm doing the deep research on this year and I'll have some conclusions about that which I can report back, you know, later on this year from like my own personal talent stack, you know, side of things. So I was able to get us a choose a phy app into the App Store and into the Google Play Store and that sort of thing. And that was a Herculean lift and that was one of my goals for last year and I was able to get that done. I'm not like over the moon excited about the app. It's good. I mean it's great. But my stated goal was I don't want you to have to log in through a browser. I want you to be able to just access it through the App Store. People are like, what is a web app? All right, this year I'm going to be learning React Native. So I've decided after circling the wagons a bunch of times and trying a bunch of other things that the approach that I want to do is React Native. So I'm going to be learning that, adding that onto my talent stack, it would be starting over because I don't know how to do anything in React Native. But I do have a pretty good approach to learning new skills and I'm excited to see at the end of this year if I can't do that. So I'm saying it out loud, you know, I'm going to do it regardless. But I'm just letting you know that is a thing for me. The other one that's related directly to the platform and I worked on this last year with the goal of getting it out. I did get it out, but it's in beta. But we got to go farther is this financial independence planning tool and as of right now it's in beta. And it does a couple things really, really well. It will allow you to differentiate between a static financial independence number which is based on expenses and it'll start to differentiate into what I'm calling effective need, meaning you have some expenses that are going to roll off and you have some income that's going to be starting. These happen on a timeline. And so what you actually want to target is your effective need. What is your effective need number, which often will Be less than your static financial independence number. You could think about things like a pension, Social Security. I made this incredibly more difficult by trying to also stack on a world tax engine on top of this. Just because I'm an idiot and I don't know why I was like, well, let's just make it work for all the tax codes. I'm going to have to do it all for the. Let's just do it for all the tax codes. And so that means that everything just takes longer. And so not only do I have to get the US tax code right and get rid of all those validation errors, but now I also need to incrementally start doing it for the countries where, you know, our members are. So I'm thinking kind of in order of people that have taken a stab at this, I'm thinking Canada, Australia, uk and then in descending order from there, just by members and who's showing actual interest. So that. That is going to rob me of sleep. So that is on the choose advice. I said the last thing is just kind of on the personal and relationship side of things. This one's kind of funny, but it's also serious, like it's a real thing. And I made a commitment to my wife. I'm really trying to focus on not having to always be right. And I say this in jest, but I'm very serious about it. It's a very real thing. I find it often when I know I'm right and that's completely different than actually being right. But when I know I'm right, I want to make sure the other person knows it and even more than that knows why they're wrong. And that is not a good character attribute in aggregate over long periods of time. And I can and I've. And so when you're winning, when you're proving that you're right at someone else's expense, it just doesn't go well, it doesn't age well. And I've been reflecting on as I get more older and more entrenched in my own opinions. So please, please hear me, people. I'm not a bad person for this. It's just, this is just something I've recognized about myself. I'm course correcting and I'm saying even if you think the other person is wrong, really validate in your own mind whether or not you need to let them know and just be a little bit more humble, you know, about that. So that's just kind of a relationship saying I am not a person to speak to other person's relationships. But in the spirit of goals, if I think I can do a better job with this, I think that my relationships in aggregate will be a lot better. So that is kind of my goals for 2026.

Brad (58:50)

I like it.

Jonathan (58:51)

All right, guys. Well, I tell you what, I want to let you guys know. A little Easter egg here. Most of our best titles come from you. All right? And so probably what you're going to see us doing is identifying something in an episode. It won't always be the next episode, but identifying something that somebody said in this episode that leads to a future episode. Sometimes it'll be obvious, sometimes it won't. But over the next two weeks, one of those two titles, I guarantee you, you will not be surprised by. In fact, I bet you can even bet what it's going to be. You'll see it come up. We'll end the episode by just reminding you. Join this Conversation Join this Community go to choose a five.com login the fire is spreading, my friends. We'll see you next time. As we continue to go down the road. Less Travele.

Brad (59:36)

Sa.