← ChooseFI | Financial Independence Podcast
ChooseFI | Financial Independence Podcast
How Kyle and Jamie Got Back to Basics and Found Balance on the Path to FI
01:03:21
Kyle and Jamie Holmson paid off an astounding $123,000 in medical student loans in just three years—all while balancing a waitress’s salary and a resident’s income. Their journey highlights the importance of adopting simple, practical financial...
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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to Choose a Fi. Today on the show, we have a guest who is actually a listener and a member of our community. Kyle Holmson wrote in to me a couple of weeks ago and proposed this really interesting episode about Back to Basics being the theme of where him and his wife Jamie are on their FI journey. So they essentially found FI. Three plus years ago, they paid off $123,000 in medical student loans, basically on a waitress's salary, and now most recently, a resident salary. And they've really run the gamut now of the FI journey in this encapsulated short little time. I think the story has a little bit of everything, and on the backside of this intro, I'm going to read a little bit of what Kyle wrote to me. I think it's absolutely fantastic, just about a sense of nostalgia for embracing five principles at first and just how exciting it is. And I think it is exciting, and some of us kind of lose that along this boring middle of our journey. And sometimes when you just regroup and you go back to basics and you look at your life in terms of how can I embrace simplicity, how can I make changes that make my life better, and how can I take action? It's going to embolden you. And I think this episode will embolden every single person listening with that. Welcome to Choose Fi. Kyle, my friend, thank you for joining me and thanks for reaching out. I'm really excited about this episode.
- [01:38]
B
Hey, Brad. Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. This is going to be a lot of fun. I've been listening to the podcast for a while. I'm really excited to be here.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah, this should be awesome. Your story is fantastic. I said on the intro that I'm going to read a little bit of your email. I don't normally do this at such length, but the email was just so beautiful and perfect that I'm going to set the stage for your story here. So, like I already said, you and your wife discovered choose a VI in 2021. You said it fundamentally changed our lives. On a resident and waitress salary, we managed to pay up $123,000 in medical student loans within three years. Reflecting on the journey, I've been inspired to propose an episode idea which would be Back to Basics. Looking back, I feel a sense of nostalgia for the time when we first embraced the principles of fi. It was an exciting period filled with positive changes, solidifying a mutual goal with my wife, gaining a clear vision for our future and experiencing a newfound camaraderie. However, as we dove deeper into the FI community. We found ourselves hyper optimizing every aspect of our lives financially, health wise and beyond. We took it to the extreme in many areas and came to understand that the sometimes overemphasis of optimization in the 5 personality often detracts from focusing on the more significant and meaningful aspects of our lives. Returning to basics became crucial financially it meant prioritizing, saving more than we earned and investing the difference for our health. It involved focusing on fundamental exercises such as body weight exercises. Adopting a diet centered around whole foods, cutting out process ones. Cultivating genuine human connections became a priority. Face to face interactions and spontaneous text or calls. This journey really became about simplifying our lives and rediscovering what truly matters. Kyle wow, that's amazing.
- [03:26]
B
It sounds a lot better when you.
- [03:27]
A
Read it but yeah, with dramatic effect. But man that that is a beautiful FI journey. And in just a couple short paragraphs when you hear that reflected back to you, your own words, what are your first thoughts?
- [03:44]
B
It just really brings me back to that initial time when I first discovered any sort of personal finance books. I think I was introduced to some pretty classic stuff early on from my dad. I think one of the books was one up by Wall street by Peter lynch and the other one was the Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. And they were great books. They focused definitely more on stock analysis and value investing. But it just didn't have that appeal to me that the choose fi community did. So we had an idea to save but it just lacked a clear purpose. This was all pre medical school. It was around the time I started to date my now wife and we were moving out to Idaho. We did all the typical personal finance stuff where we had two roommates, we shopped at the local kind of budget grocery store. But we basically had no idea what we were spending, earning, saving. And just looking back it felt like we had this huge blind spot and we were going through the motions. So hearing you read that it just gives me a surreal feeling to just realize how far we've come. And it was a pretty awesome journey along the way.
- [04:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. And this was not. We're not talking about like a multi decade journey here either. That's the wild part about this. This is three and change years. So it's a fairly abbreviated time. But I want to go back to what you just said about flying blind because I think that's an important point where most people who are first finding personal finance and choose if I start but just real quick before we get there so we're going to put a pin in that. Come right back to it. Your dad gave you one up on Wall street and the Intelligent Investor, that book, the latter by Ben Graham, which is Warren Buffett's hero, basically the person he looked up to. Most parents don't have the knowledge or wherewithal to give their kids those kind of really precise books. What kind of background did your dad have? How did your parents teach you about personal finance?
- [05:45]
B
So I think my dad has always been a very frugal guy. I think he got it from his parents as well. His dad was from Norway and his mom was from Estonia, and they actually fled to the US when the Soviets invaded their country. So I think he grew up living off of a professor's salary, and I think his grandfather taught him those ways to just really save and be frugal and live beneath your means. And I think that just stuck with him. So I think he dove into the general personal finance area with whatever resources he had at the time. I know he doesn't have access to all the podcasts and blogs that we have access to now. So, you know, when I was younger, and I'm like, hey, do you have any, you know, like, finance books? You know, just off of whim, to see what he would recommend, you know, he gave me those books, and it was a good jumping off point. Although, you know, I don't really think it got to the heart of what I was looking for.
- [06:33]
A
Yeah, I wonder. I mean, it's incredible that he gave you those books just from a very high level. But, yeah, in terms of like a starting point, I don't know if those necessarily would be the ones that you would give future kids, let's say, or some such, or I would give my kids. But nevertheless, just the fact that it was part of your life growing up, that's interesting in and of itself. I'm curious, did your dad's, I guess, knowledge of personal finance or just awareness, let's say, did it impact you positively in any way? Did you make any kind of interesting college decisions or anything like that? Did any of that kind of stuff factor in?
- [07:10]
B
It definitely did. I went to probably one of the more expensive colleges. I would say it was Connecticut College, and I knew it was an expensive choice to do. I did a year at Purdue, and then I transferred to Connecticut College, and I knew how much it cost a semester. And then I talked to my counselor, my guidance counselor at college, and I went over how many credits I had, how many credits I needed to be able to graduate. And I figured if I just took as many credits as I possibly could. My fall semester of senior year. I could graduate early and essentially save $50,000. So I ended up taking, I think it was 26 credits at the time to graduate early, and I would not have done that again. I was like, I mean, looking back, it was kind of crazy and I kind of wish I just would have enjoyed it a little bit more. But I was like, hey, Dad, I graduated.
- [08:02]
A
Wow, man. It's hard enough to take 15 or 18 credits. Now there's 26. Goodness. All right, well, thanks for humoring me with this sidebar because, you know, sometimes there really are those gems in terms of, hey, what would you pass along to. As we've always called it, second generation phi. Right. I think that's something a lot of us, whether we're at a place in our lives where we have kids or ever going to have kids. I mean, you're going to have somebody in your life, and this is to everybody listening. You're going to have somebody in your life who's growing up and is trying to figure out where they want to go with their life and their personal finances. I actually, interestingly enough, just had the. I've been on the board of my swim team for the last eight years, and the coach of the swim team just started listening to Choose a Pie.
- [08:48]
B
Oh, that's awesome.
- [08:50]
A
Right? It's amazing. And just incredibly nice guy, incredibly bright guy. And I mean, I love helping people in my real life like that. So, like, I'm always trying to think about, how can I explain this? So I think that's something all of us should be thinking about. It's like, what are those, like, little tips that you could pass along. How would you get somebody started? So anyway, that's maybe topic for a separate podcast someday.
- [09:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's just goes back to getting out of that blind spot, I think finding these resources early on so you can go on and share that knowledge with people you care about. And, you know, it really wasn't up until my third year of medical school. I was on a psychiatry rotation. It was an inpatient psych facility. It was up in northern Idaho, essentially in the middle of nowhere. And my school had put me up in this inn. So we stayed there for, you know, a month essentially. And it was like kind of one of those inns you see in a horror movies where they had like this dimly lit vacant sign and like one of the letters is missing and there's like the flickering lights in the lobby that like grumpy old caretaker, like, manning the front desk. I was like, oh, boy, here we go. So. And it was a five hour commute each way, and I could have stayed up there, but I was like, I'm away from my fiance at the time. So I drove home five hours on the weekends each way. And I was listening to podcasts around the time, and it was the Motley fool that I was listening to just was the only one that I had any information about. But it just felt like there was something missing about that way of financial thinking. It was a lot of stock picking, a lot of, you know, just individual stock picking and financial analysis. And one random evening I was hiking after work and I just randomly googled best financial podcasts and I stumbled across Choose Fi. It was just one of them on the list. So I randomly clicked an episode. I think it was the Big Earn episode back when he was talking about how much an emergency fund you actually need. Oh, yeah. And he was saying, oh, you only need about $10,000 in your emergency fund, especially if you're working, because how often are you going to need 6 to 12 months in savings when you're actively working? And I think that was just a game changer for me because I was like, this guy is coming up with the craziest ideas that is totally going against the grain of what all these other personal finance experts are saying. So I was hooked at that time. And I started to listen about five hours of Choose Fi each way when I commuted back to Boise for the weekends. And just thinking about all those early episodes with, you know, Jeremy from Go Curry Cracker and then Liz from Frugal woods and all the Mr. Money Mustache episodes, I was like, it was just that aha moment, you know, I finally found a purpose to our saving and being frugal. And it just felt like we're on the right track.
- [11:27]
A
Man, that is awesome. And that is like the perfect segue from Flying Blind, which I said we'd come back to. How do you get started on your personal finance journey? And yeah, I think that old episode, that was episode 66 with Big Aaron. It's called the emergency fund. Is it a bad idea?
- [11:47]
B
Yeah, it was. It was an interesting. It was just so different than, you know, what you normally hear.
- [11:51]
A
Yeah, I think that's what typifies the FI community. Right. Is looking at a problem a little bit differently. How can you look at the same world, in essence? And I've always looked at it as, like, this fun game to win. And maybe that that exact messaging might not resonate with everybody like in their own lives. But for me, it's like, okay, how can I live the same middle or upper middle class life as everybody else, but get wildly wealthy in the process and essentially give up? Nothing like that feels like a cheat code for life.
- [12:21]
B
Yeah, no, exactly. Like you are playing the game, you're finding all these different tips and tricks, but you're also enjoying life at the same time.
- [12:29]
A
Yeah.
- [12:29]
B
And I think finding fi. It just came at this perfect time that left a strong enough impression on myself to take action and focus on those tips and tricks. You know, we were in the middle of nowhere, Idaho. We were just working long hours by myself, away from my friends and family at this psych facility. And I remember thinking. I read this book early on, before medical school. It's called the House of God. And essentially a fictional satire about this group of interns. A hospital, I think they were basing it on a hospital in either Mass General or Beth Israel. And they were focusing on all the psychological aspects of their work. And there's this one great line that I remember that stuck with me. And Samuel Shem, the author, he says it's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading, yet so valued by society. And, you know, basically saying that behind the veil of what society sees as a doctor, like all the prestige, the money, it's just another job. And like many others, it has its challenges. I mean, it can take a toll on your wellbeing. And I know a lot of other careers have similar issues as well, but finding financial independence at that time, I was like, wow, okay, you have a semblance of control over your life and a sense of control over your future, and it doesn't have to end in burnout down the road. And I think that was that impressionable part of me that just led to that jumping off point where I felt like we were on the right track after that.
- [13:52]
A
Yeah, that's such an interesting point. That sense of control. And I think this is so important. No matter how much money you make, no matter what your job is and how much proceeds you have, or. Or not as it may be. And let's be clear just for everybody out there, keep this in mind for the rest of the story. Kyle is on a resident salary and only has been for the last two years. This is a well under six figures salary, so we're not talking big bucks. He is a doctor, but he is not making what you think of as doctor salary. So it's not like, oh, of course it was easy for him and his wife to pay off $123,000 of debt. No, this was really hard. His wife has been a full time waitress for the last number of years, which is a wonderful profession, obviously, but we're not. This is not again, a doctor's or a lawyer's salary. Kyle is on a resident salary. So I just want to keep that in mind because I think it's. Kyle, it's so easy, right? Like people can often write somebody off, like, oh, it was easy for them. And like you said, control. I think also taking ownership is something else that typifies the five personality.
- [14:54]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think like we did the math. I was like a per hour basis that's probably closer to minimum wage if you like factor in the hours because it's salary based. And it's true that some people can typify these other people's like, oh, they can do it because X, Y and Z. But I really think anybody can do this, you know, if they start somewhere, start small and then begin to take action.
- [15:16]
A
Agreed. It is all about taking action. So let's go back to the beginning of you taking action, you and your wife. Right. So like you said, you were flying blind. And that's, that's most people, let's be clear. Most people, as we always said, they stick their head in the sand when it comes to personal finance because it's just easier that way. Especially when, well, you're racking up, quote unquote, good debt. Right. Nobody's going to say $123,000 is a bad deal to come out as, as a doctor. Right. But nevertheless, that's still a big negative to start digging your way out of. And you need to at some point say, okay, here's where we are, here's what we earn, here's what we spend, here's this big looming debt. And I guess let's start with how did you introduce this to your wife? So you found choose a VI on these crazy 10 hour journeys and probably binge the first couple hundred episodes. But how do you introduce that to Jamie? At first, yeah.
- [16:12]
B
So I think it was just like being a medical student at the time. I was frightened about ending up in that financial hole and weighed down by all these financial obligations and expectations. So it's like your typical introduction to your partner where you're listening to all these things. And then I finally got home one day just so excited, frantically get out of the car. I'm like, Jamie, you know, I'm listening to all these guys. We're going to go to 1. Down to 1 car. We're going to sell our car. We're going to bike everywhere. We're going to shop at these discount grocery stores. We're going to walk to do all our errands. It's going to be amazing. Oh, yeah. Okay, honey. You know, just because we're always trying to do new things and, like, a lot of them fizzle out, but I'm like, no, this one's going to stick. I promise. Like, we're going to actually do this one. And we did. We really did. And, you know, we started to track all our payments. We downloaded the Mint app, and we started to track our expenses and our savings. And then probably the most important thing we did is we started our debt payoff chart. And it kind of looks like a candy crush board where, you know, we put our debt, $123,000 at the top. And we made all these little boxes. Each box was $600. And at the end of each month, if we hit that $600 month, we would collectively fill in a box. It was just in colored pencil. And, you know, we put it up in our closet, and we just, like, put on the inside of one of our closets. Not that we were trying to hide it from anybody, but it's just, like, not something we were trying to show off either, but it was just something fun we did at the end of each month. And again, my wife at the time, when we were in medical school, we were on a single income. She was waitressing at this little Vietnamese restaurant at the time, working, you know, a decent amount of hours to pay for all our expenses and also have a little bit left over to save and spend on fun things at the end of the month. And it was literally just $100, $200, $300 here and there for several months at a time until I finally started making salary. And we were able to amp up those payments. But we were so used to living on one salary that when we came back to Maine to start residency, we just kept living. Like, we were living on her salary and just used pretty much my entire salary. We were just funneling that into our debt every month. And I think that's where a lot of the progress really started to happen.
- [18:28]
A
Yeah, that's. That reminds me of how a lot of doctors say, like, live like a resident, right? Or some variation of that. And you're living before you got your resident salary, right? So you're living on one salary, which, I mean, talk about flexing the frugality muscles. Right? I mean, that's. That's staggering. And I'm looking at this. You send me a picture of your chart and I absolutely love it. It reminds. Yeah, like you said Candy Crush or like, I don't know, a Candy Land board or something like that. And all these little. It's just so cool. And Debt Free Land is how you entitled this.
- [18:59]
B
I think we saw that, some variation of that on Pinterest and we're like, this is awesome. We're going to totally use this. And it worked out so well. We just had so much fun doing it. And you can, you might see in little writing there. There's little writing in pencil around each boxes. I'm not sure if you can see it on the picture, but each month we decided to write down one thing that was memorable or something fun or different. We did. And we actually got the idea from one of your. With Chris Hutchins.
- [19:25]
A
I was just going to say Chris Hutchins did that. I was literally going to interject with that.
- [19:29]
B
Yeah, I remember he said, you know, I just want to do something different and new every month. And we found that too. We found that at some point we were aggressively saving. And if we got to the end of the month and it wasn't something that we looked up ahead of time, like looked at back at our photos on our cameras and saw what we did. It's just when we were filling it out, if we didn't remember anything we did that month, we're like, wow, we're probably over saving. We weren't really going out and, you know, living our lives like we could have. We were probably working too much. So it was those months where we looked back, um, and it could be very simple things. It was just going for a hike. You know, we went hiking in the White Mountains. We went to the local islands and took a ferry over there and biked around. Or it could be something bigger, like we took a family vacation. And just having those little things written down made us realize that, you know, we can still save, but we are also enjoying it along the way. So, yeah, it was a really good time.
- [20:17]
A
Yeah, there is something really to that. It's. This is an intersection. Sometimes this sounds like a little like hokey or like, I don't know, some like, bro y thing like, oh, how can you optimize your morning routine? Like, I don't love that kind of stuff. But I think a lot of people talk about journaling and the importance of that and also gratitude journaling specifically.
- [20:36]
B
Yeah.
- [20:37]
A
And I Don't think there's necessarily some like super duper, like inside secret to that. I think what it does on some level is like it's activating. Whether it's like your reticular activating system or just like making you hone in on positive things. I know I've actually experienced. I have long wanted to journal and honestly, Kyle, like, I just don't do it for some reason. I'm. I'm incapable seemingly of doing this. But I have a mastermind call every month. And the thing that we've done recently is between calls, we keep in mind our absolute highs and our absolute lows. We talk about like ones and tens. So just kind of write them down and then we go over them and if there are any commonalities amongst the people in the group, we hone in on that. Now what I've found is it's similar to the gratitude journaling in that I am constantly now looking for positive things. There are very few things in my life that are truly ones. Right. Like the worst of the worst. So I'm actually looking for these highs and it's like, oh, wow. When I look back on what I jotted down, that was a darn good month. And I think they're really. There's something to that. And I want to talk about this actual sheet because I think, you know, from listening to all these episodes that it's the little actionable things that really resonate with people. So a. How on earth did you pick $600 for each box? I know that sounds like a silly question. So there's that. And then most importantly, and this is before your salary started, but you talk about like an extra hundred or two hundred or three hundred dollars a month. So in the grand scheme of things, small amounts but not small. Those are material amounts. Did you actually send them off and pay them to the student loan debt? Like, how did you do that? Did you do it every time you had X number of dollars, did you put it in a separate account? I would really love to hear that.
- [22:26]
B
Yeah. So like the nitty gritty of it, we. It was after listening to the Big Earns emergency fund, we're like, I guess we don't need that much in savings. You know, if anything we had like a zero percent. If you. Why Like a Discover card. So we had an extra. It was like three or four thousand dollars if we really needed to in an emergency. So I don't remember the exact number. Maybe it was like two, three thousand dollars we kept in cash. And then at the end of each month after expenses, if there was anything left over, we would just directly pay that off into our student loans. And we were at a new medical school, so they didn't have federal loans, so we had private student loans. So we just logged on to their website, paid it off and went on our way.
- [23:05]
A
Okay, so easy as that. And the $600, was that just totally arbitrary?
- [23:09]
B
Yeah, that was arbitrary.
- [23:10]
A
Yeah.
- [23:10]
B
We just counted up a bunch of boxes. We're like 600 sounds about right.
- [23:14]
A
That's amazing. Okay, I like it. And just to be clear to everybody listening who hasn't listened to that episode 66 in a long time, Big earn. Kyle nor myself are saying don't have an emergency fund. Obviously the argument was to have cash sitting around at that point when it wasn't earning anything. At that point in time, you couldn't get 5% on a savings account. So to have money, certainly six to 12 months of your expenses sitting in an account earning zero when you had other assets made little to no sense. So that was the thesis of that episode was, hey, you have assets. There are very few things that are truly an emergency that you're going to need to come up with tangible cash for. So most things you can pay with a credit card and you have 30 or 45 day grace period before you get hit with expenses. So Kyle, I did want to interject that just in case.
- [24:01]
B
Absolutely. Definitely. Good to clarify.
- [24:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. Slightly important concept, but for most of us right in the FI community, having an emergency fund is to a large degree, I think it is optional. Especially when you're sitting on a significant taxable brokerage account or something like that. It's, it's. We can adjudicate that on a separate episode, but nevertheless.
- [24:21]
B
And it also just goes back to, you know, at the time we did end up selling a car. I mean, we had two cars and we were leasing one at the time and we just completely sold it. My wife lived a couple miles away from work. We got a cheap used bike and she started biking every day. And to be able to really cut back our expenses, I mean, we were basically not spending much at all. So we felt more comfortable having a lower amount in our emergency fund, knowing that if we needed to, we could hold off on these debt payments and just focus on our living expenses. But our expenses were so minimal that it just felt like the comfortable thing to do.
- [24:57]
A
Yeah, and that's for a lot of us, that's the back to basics part is the, the old school FI mentality of frugality which I think, frankly, we've gotten away from in the FI community to a large degree over the last couple of years especially, I've brought it into the this world, the Die with Zero book, significantly. And while I think that is an important message for people far along the path to FI at some point to contemplate, I still think frugality plays a massive part in all of our lives, and we can never lose sight of that. And I think where you described it, and I want to back up with this to that point when you originally brought this to Jamie, and basically you're like, oh, my goodness, I found these crazy things. And I'm picturing, like, Danny, Jonathan's wife, like, patting him on the head, like, oh, Jonathan, you. You first said so.
- [25:45]
B
Exactly.
- [25:47]
A
But you wrote you solidified a mutual goal with your wife, gaining a clear vision for our future and experiencing a newfound camaraderie. And there's a couple steps between, hey, honey, I found this thing. We're going to go down to one car. We're going to be super frugal. We're going to ride bikes, to, wow, this changed our lives for the better. Like, let's talk through that. Because I think that step is what most people fear when they find FI and they don't know how they're going to explain it.
- [26:16]
B
Yeah. And I think it's one thing for a significant other to try to explain it in their own words, but what I found to be really helpful is to find maybe episodes or books that I think would really resonate with her. And then I remember I listened to the Liz Frugal woods episode, and then I ended up buying her book, as, you know, Jamie likes to read. And I just gave it to her as a gift. I was like, hey, like, I think you'll really like this book if you want to check it out. And she devoured it, and I think hearing it from someone else's story made a bigger impact on her than just me and my incoherent ramblings. And that's really where we jumped off together. I mean, I remember in the Frugal woods book, she talked about, you know, getting away from the weekends of, you know, the hustle of the city and going out and hiking on the weekends. Just, you know, a free, cheap activity to do while you're also spending time with your loved ones. And that's what we did. There is a mountain range about two hours away from Boise. It's called the Sawtooth Mountains. And we. A lot of times we would drive up There two hours on the weekends, and we would listen to these financial podcasts together on the way out, and we would just enjoy, like, a simple time in the woods together. But, you know, the ride was awesome because it was just. I'm like, oh, you should, you know, listen to this one. Listen to this one. And she humored me and tolerated it, but I really think she enjoyed it at the same time.
- [27:33]
A
Well, she must have, right? I mean, just the sheer fact that you went down to one car and she's the one riding the bike.
- [27:38]
B
Right. Yeah. To work.
- [27:39]
A
I mean, that sounds like certainly buy in to me. And you said you experienced this newfound camaraderie, and you're describing that with these hikes and listening to the episodes together. Can you talk about that clear vision for our future? Because I think that, again, is, like, it's a sticking point for people. Not in terms of, oh, we're on divergent paths, but how do we talk about this?
- [28:02]
B
I think it broke down into what we want our lives to look like on our FI path, and then what we want our lives to look like after fi and then what do we want to spend our money along on the way, essentially. And I think a lot of these conversations came out during our long car rides or our long bikes or hikes, and we would just talk about this, and we would talk about what she valued, what I valued, what were common, what were different. And we figured out where we want to allocate our money to live the most fulfilling life, whatever that means to us. And I think that's where that initial conversation started. And then we talked about where we want our lives to end up and where we want to live, how much we want to spend on a house and do we want kids in the future? And I think this just kind of escalated into everything that we wouldn't have thought of if we didn't start focusing on our finances at first.
- [28:59]
A
Yeah, that is critical. I think most people, and I never mean this as meanly as it comes out, but, like, are just sleepwalking through life, and it's because they're not having intentional conversations like this.
- [29:13]
B
Yeah, it just really forced us into that introspection to create a life that was more centered around our values and that was, you know, spending time with our family. That was one of the main reasons why we applied for residency on the east coast, closer to our family, and just spending time with friends, just having a general peace of mind, but, you know, also carving out some time to relax and play a little bit and, you know, A lot of people are caught up in the constant hustle of their lives, but, you know, just spending time, you know, outside and, you know, just enjoying your life a little bit.
- [29:43]
A
Yeah. And when your life doesn't cost that much, like you said, you were living on one salary for a number of years, and you flex those frugality muscles when your life doesn't cost that much, it affords you a lot more flexibility. Right. In terms of both the present and the future. And. Right. The future very clearly of, okay, I am not stuck in a job. Whether I like the job or not, I have flexibility. And also, not for nothing, but in terms of, in the current mode, when you cut everything and it sounds like you might have over optimized, and we're going to get into that in a minute, but when you're living a lean lifestyle, you have some extra slack to increase that for a short time. If there are things that you value or a trip you want to take, it's not about cut, cut, cut. It's to me, establishing a life that just doesn't cost that much, the structure of it. And it sounds like you certainly did that in terms of your transportation. We always talk about the big three, Right. The housing, transportation, and food.
- [30:42]
B
Yeah.
- [30:42]
A
So clearly you hit that on. On transportation. Are there any other optimizations that you thought were especially useful in those other two categories or really any other ancillary thing that you'd love to pass along?
- [30:54]
B
Yeah, definitely the big three housing. You know, the first year we moved out to Idaho, we had Jamie and I, and then we had two different roommates. So I mean, we were paying like $500 in rent. And then we moved to another place. It was closer downtown, closer to her work, and we were paying like $800 a month between the two of us. And when we first showed up at this place, it wasn't even. I don't even think they cleaned it from the last people. I had like mildew in the bathroom. There's like still stuff in the carpet. We're like, oh, well, we're here. We signed the lease.
- [31:22]
A
No going back now.
- [31:23]
B
Yeah, and it worked out. You know, we. We got free stuff on the Facebook marketplace. We refurbished old furniture. Basically all our furniture was free. We repainted a lot of the walls and we just made it our own. So, you know, just. It made it special that way, making it our own rather than like going to a fully furnished place. And I think, you know, all this was possible because we went back to those basics and we set a really lofty goal of paying off our debt in five years by the end of residency. Like that was our goal. We started around the third year of med school and we said five years Bayana residency. And we knew full well that that was ambitious. And here we are with our debt paid off, and it was just all about setting up those basics, setting up those systems in place, and then automating the rest. And I'm not sure, I think you might have touched on this book before in the past, but it was a book by Scott Adams. It was called how to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big. And he talks a lot about focusing on systems and not necessarily the goals. So we set up all these systems in place, like saving a lot of money, investing the difference, you know, focusing on our budget for food, focusing our housing and focusing on our transportation, and then essentially just letting time take care of the rest. We didn't really have to think about it after that because everything was automated. And, you know, eventually we reached our goal without having to put, you know, too much thought into it. I mean, definitely there was some effort involved, but a lot of it was just aligning those systems in place.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah. That is, I think the key to winning a personal finance is systems and automation. Right. You want to take your little brain out of it. I think that's how I look at my own. Like, I know my brain is going to screw me up because there's going to be inaction or I'm going to try to outsmart. I say that very tongue in cheek. Outsmart the market or just do something silly. And. And it almost invariably just leads you down the wrong path. And I think setting up a system that just works where you don't have to interject any type of willpower, decision making is the crucial point for everybody. So there's so many ways in this day and age, this is the golden age of personal finance and investing, you can essentially set up every single thing on autopilot. You should not be at this point in time. I really Hope nobody under 50 is still, like, paying for their utilities with a check or something like that. Everything can be on autopay. Your credit card should be set up to pay on time and in full every single month. Autopay, like all of this. Right, Kyle? It's just, it all works. And it's not that hard to set up. Yeah.
- [33:55]
B
And I think you've said before that, you know, once you get everything set up, you're really not spending a lot of time thinking about your finances on a monthly basis. And you know, I always think about it's like that airplane analogy where if the airplane is like one degree off course and after 40 or 50 miles, you're going to be so many miles off course. And I feel like finances can be like that, especially when life starts to get busy just having a general way to course correct. And it can really be about 10 minutes every month. I mean, that's pretty much all we spent. At the end of the month. We would fill out our boxes on our debt chart, we would log on to our mint, see how the spending has changed, looked at each category, really not obsessing about everything, but realizing at the same time that the small expenses do matter, when we would just see where things are drifting in each category. You know, if we had a month where our Amazon spending was off the charts, really, okay, maybe we'll just, you know, have a spend a free month the next month. Or if our dining and drinks was just way too high, then we would cook in a lot the next month. And if we wanted to have a drink, we would go grab some beer and we would go down to the park and watch a sunset. You know, simple as that. But we would really, you know, not obsess about it, but at the same time, just a little awareness to nudge your life back towards the right course and back towards the way you want it.
- [35:08]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a really cool and not extreme way of going about it. Right. I think sometimes I always fear when people do anything that's akin to like a diet or short termism, like, oh, I absolutely must keep this under. They're setting up arbitrary constraints in essence. Like, my category for entertainment is $175 and I am incapable of going over that. And like, that's so silly. What are you, Are you going to say no to your friends over $12 or $20 or whatever it is, like, give me a break. If you really want to make an adjustment. Okay, well then make it like Kyle and Jamie did. Make it the next month. That's a nice centered way to go.
- [35:50]
B
About this and having that flexibility now. And we can touch on the period of over optimization before we get into how we changed a little bit to loosen up the purse strings and enjoyed our life a little bit more. But there was a time where we did take it to the extreme. Our parents will still probably make fun of us. We were adding oatmeal to our cereal to make the box last longer. And it was just something we did. And we're like, oh, we're going to make this box last so long. And we would buy like 4 way connecting flights back from Boise to Maine. It was just like Boise to Denver, like down to Atlanta and up to Portland. And we're like, yeah, we saved 200 bucks. But it was like a 14 hour day. And there's this one old picture that one of us has on our phones. It was just, we have like our patio and there's like two camping chairs and basically just like our cardboard box is our patio table. And we're like, hey, this works. But you know, you do start to take every new aspect of your life to the extreme, like when you dive on this personal finance journey. And I think after hearing about the simplicity of investing, I started to dive into the weeds a lot more. It just seemed like we were drowned in financial information. I started reading more, obsessing over asset allocation, investment strategies, this mutual fund over another mutual fund versus etf. What's the perfect stock bond split. And then I listened to Brian Frawley. I'm like, oh my God, do I need individual stocks? It seemed like every new book or podcast I listened to, there was just a new perspective on the quote unquote right way towards achieving financial independence. And I think that's why really having us get back to the basics just improve our overall quality of life. And as I started my anesthesia residency, life became more complex and all that mental bandwidth I had to analyze and optimize every aspect of our financial life just kind of tipped me over the edge.
- [37:39]
A
Yeah, yeah, it sounds hokey if you've. Or unbelievable if you've never looked into this. But there's a finite number of decisions that we can make in a day essentially. And before our brain, more or less. I would say overloads is kind of a ridiculous way to describe it, but our brains stop working as optimally. How I think about it is I want to save the important decisions for things that actually matter. Like this finite brain space that I have. And like there are just so few things, honestly, Kyle, that actually matter in life most of these things. At the end of the day, 60 years from now, am I going to care if I was in VTS X or VTI? No chance.
- [38:21]
B
No, just like any big S&P 500 equivalent and just set and forget.
- [38:25]
A
Right. VO would be wonderful. That's. And like it matters so little now obviously that's how I approach this. And this is hard fought wisdom. So please, like, I never want to make it sound like I figured this out from the time I was 17. Like, man, I've made more mistakes than you could possibly imagine. So I totally get this. But I think this over optimization is something that a lot of people do fall prey to because, like you said, it's so easy to. Because on a lot of levels, you're getting so much in the way of positive feedback from making these decisions to be frugal. Right. So at the beginning, the first 50 decisions are going to just almost invariably make your life better. You're going to all of a sudden have all this extra money, like you said. You have this camaraderie with your significant other. You're on the same path. Everything's wonderful. It's unicorns and rainbows. But then you get into putting oatmeal into your cereal. Does that even save money for.
- [39:19]
B
I don't even know what we're doing at that point. Must have been a really good cereal box. But, you know, it's true that, you know, that excitement and that camaraderie that initially sparked that fi journey with Jamie and I just. It kind of just began to fade. You know, it used to be so fun finding new ways to do things. You know, after listening to the Frugal Worlds episode, we started cutting each other's hair. And we still do that today. We just like a fun thing we do with each other. And I've gotten really good at cutting hair. She's gotten even better. And you're just like, getting books from the library or refurbishing furniture. Like, all that stuff that we used to do for fun just kind of seemed like a little bit of a chore now that life was getting busier, you know, we just started traveling less, you know, worrying about driving and how much gas was cost. And, you know, it just started. It seemed like it was tilting a little bit more towards deprivation than it was towards living. And I remember Matt Fientis, he said, like, he went towards the extreme of one things, and he took a whole year of spending just basically whatever he wanted. And at the end of the year, it was only like $2,000 extra. At the end of the month, you would get an extra beer at the bar and just not worry about that stuff. And that's really why we started what we called our monthly memorable on our debt repayment chart, just so we would never fall prey to that deprivation.
- [40:29]
A
Yeah, I think that's so important. It's amazing. You're hitting all of these seminal episodes of Juz of I. Episode 12 was with Frugal Woods. Episode 17 with Mad Fientist. I actually recently went back and started listening to the first, let's say 50 or 60 episodes. I'm kind of working my way through. And it is staggering for anybody out there who's new to choose a fire you just started in the last year or so. Go back and listen to those early episodes. They resonate today. And 99% of it is really accurate as of today. So obviously if you hear me say, oh, the limit for 401ks in 2018 was blah, blah, blah, don't listen to that clearly. But pretty much everything else. It's amazing how this all builds on itself. And Kyle, when you were describing the mad scientist there about it's easy to get into deprivation mindset and then you realize, oh wow, the difference between that and living a somewhat rich life is in his case it was just a couple thousand dollars. In your case, just looking at the math of this on a resident salary and a wages salary like and paying off all of this debt. It's not like when you left this hyper optimization that you went crazy. Like there's not that big of a delta between that and living what you would see as a rich life. And I think that's really important. It's just a couple thousand dollars at the end of the day.
- [41:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, just looking at our expenses, it really hasn't changed much. We've just been more aware of how we're spending our money and doing stuff that we value. We definitely got on board with the travel rewards game. It was right after our wedding. We actually started residency like a few days after our wedding. So we didn't have the typical honeymoon. So we opened up credit cards and we got a lot of Chase points and we transferred them over to Hyatt. And for those that you don't know, Hyatt has an incredible redemption based on the Chase Rewards points. And we ended up, they have great all expense paid resorts and Cancun and Cozumel and Aruba. So we went down and did six days at essentially just some free honeymoon just based on Chase and Hyatt points. And we ended up getting the Southwest Companion pass. One year we took a backpacking trip back out to Idaho and we were saving money at the same time, but we were really enjoying ourselves by, you know, putting all these things into place. And like you said, it's just kind of like gamifying it and just knowing the rules, knowing which levers to pull and you know, at the end of the day we were able to do all these things and save money.
- [42:53]
A
That is really great. And word to you for the future with those Chase points. Now, Hyatt actually, they just purchased a whole extra number of lines of all inclusive resorts. So it used to be. I know when I looked into the. The Hyatt all inclusive, there were only a couple. It was like four. There were maybe two in Cancun and two in Jamaica. Now you can use Hyatt points for. I think it's somewhere in the order of 50 different all inclusive resorts from a lot of brands that you've heard of. So that is yet another reason I. I'm with you, Kyle. I love using Hyatt points. I have a Hyatt card that I accumulate points. Of course I transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards. So, yeah, that's my favorite redemption. So you guys did your honeymoon on those Chase points. That's.
- [43:35]
B
And it was just. It was a delayed honeymoon. But, you know, we still. We made it work and it was totally fine for us. You know, we weren't rushing to do anything. And it just made it that much more special knowing that we were just getting it essentially for free, just based on knowing the rules of the game.
- [43:48]
A
That is awesome. Thanks for listening to Choose a VI and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Choose a VI is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at choose a buy.com cards. I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support. So, okay, you got into this oatmeal and cereal deprivation mindset. I'm going to use that forever. Mind you, that has now entered.
- [44:19]
B
That's the epitome of going over the edge.
- [44:21]
A
That's the worst one I've ever heard. More than brown bananas. More than reusing tinfoil.
- [44:26]
B
That's the new Fi character.
- [44:29]
A
Oh, thank you, Kyle. You did it. So, okay, how do you come out of. Might be hyperbole to call that an abyss, but we'll say the hyper optimization. How do you change course? Because there has to be some awakening that. Okay, this has gone too far.
- [44:46]
B
Yeah. And I think it was really when we started coming back to me and I started working. And everyone knows your typical intern year, you work a lot of hours. And I remember reading it was this blog or article. I'm not sure if it was any relation to Choose Fi, but someone wrote an article called the Fog of Work, and it's essentially a military metaphor for retirement. And it's like the fog of war where there's uncertainty and confusion that arises during the chaos of war. And his argument was like, when you're in this fog of work, when you're in this day to day grind of working long hours and just having a busy life, it just blinds us from what truly matters. And I think taking a step back and, you know, working with my wife to find out what we really enjoy and, you know, writing it down, making a list and writing down what we want to spend our money on while also pursuing a better future, really put things into perspective on where we can start spending money and where we can enjoy our lives in the meantime.
- [45:50]
A
Yeah, I like that. So that was the fog of work, was the article.
- [45:53]
B
Yep, the fog of work. I don't remember who it was by.
- [45:55]
A
Oh, it's interesting. I just googled the fog of work. I think it's actually by Doug Nordman, our good friend Doug Nordman.
- [46:01]
B
Okay. Yeah, it probably was found through the.
- [46:03]
A
Choose a. Yeah, that's cool. It's on themilitarywallet.com so yeah, we'll link to this in the show notes. And that actually reminds me, I definitely need to get Doug back on the show. So he, along with his daughter Carol wrote the book raising your money savvy family for next generation financial independence. And that was phenomenal. Phenomenal book. It actually came out almost four years ago to the day at this point. And yeah, Doug is a great resource for all things military, but frankly, all things fight. So, yeah, neat little. Neat little link up there. So, okay, so you read this article, you kind of had a sense that something was out of balance. But what were like the next steps? Because there's always one, two or three things that you can look back on and say like, okay, this actually changed.
- [46:46]
B
Yeah, I think we started to prioritize traveling and spending time with our friends. So I think previously we would worry about, you know, when we were invited out to dinner, we'd be like, oh gosh, this is going to be so expensive and we're going to get the cheapest thing on the menu and we're looking at the menu items beforehand and you know, if we want a drink, we're like, oh, we'll just have a drink here and then go out. But you know, now when we're invited out, you know, it's just these one time expenses that we're not really batting an eye at. You know, we want to prioritize spending time with our friends, especially when we're living busy lives and we don't have as much free time to spend with them. So those little things is prioritizing travel to see other people, too. I mean, we just recently, it was just last weekend we got back from a trip from seeing some medical school friends that live out in Missouri. And previously, we would have been just shocked about spending money to go for a long weekend. But especially when old friends are scattered across the country just prioritizing those relationships. It's the compounding effect. We talk about that a lot in finance, but there's also an aspect of compounding in relationships. Well, you have those old school childhood friends that because you've been with them for so long, you can lose touch for three to six months and get in contact with them. And it was like not a day has passed. You just jump in right where you left off.
- [48:07]
A
Yeah, I think that is so important. And I think what you're describing ultimately here, Kyle, is balance. You're not saying that extreme frugality is the only path to fight. You're not saying being super spendy is the only path to fight. It's all right. I have set up a life that doesn't cost that much. I have optimized by using things like travel rewards that enabled me to get experiences that maybe I otherwise wouldn't have paid for, but that I really want to do. But also, frankly, just saying, sometimes it's just worth spending the money. Right? Like, we need to bang that into people's heads. Like, sometimes it's just worth spending the money, and you have to be okay with that. And sure, there are ways to save some money every now and again, but case in point, like, I met my best friend from home, actually, in Philadelphia last weekend. We went to see a concert and we got tickets last minute. It was fantastic. But I was able to offset by staying in a Hyatt. Actually, I stayed in a category, too. Hyatt. It costs 8,000 points a night, which is absolutely nothing. And we paid for a meal and the tickets, obviously, but I didn't think about that twice. Right. Even if I had to pay for the hotel, because that kind of connection is really, really important. So, yeah, I mean, the more that we can get this into people's heads, that when you set up this framework of a life that doesn't cost that much, everything else gets easier. And you got to stop trying to keep up with the five Joneses. Right. Like, Kyle, does it matter to you if you're at a 56% savings rate or a 53% savings rate with a much better connection?
- [49:38]
B
Not at all. It's just about keeping some sort of consistency and saving. But if you're not enjoying the journey along the way, then there's really no point to it.
- [49:45]
A
Yeah.
- [49:45]
B
And I think looking back, I always thought it was about the financial goals. I remember the day that we paid off our debt. I came home at the end of the month and we paid off. I log in and I paid off like I do at the end of every month, and I was like, wow, this is the month that we paid off. And I got home earlier than Jamie at the time, and she came home and I'm like, we did it, honey, we did it. We paid off our debt. And then it was surreal at the time. And then afterwards, it was pretty anticlimactic. Looking back on it, I'm like, oh, well, all right. Well, now what do we do now? And I know I keep referencing your previous shows, but I remember listening to one with. It was the orthopedic surgeon. Is it Bo? Bo, the orthopedic surgeon. Yeah. And you guys were talking about how, you know, you're not, like, gonna hit a number all of a sudden and, you know, just fly off into the sunset and, you know, that's not the end of it. And it's like the Greatest Prize isn't about reaching that goal. It's everything you do and learn along the way and you do together.
- [50:40]
A
Totally, totally agreed. And, yeah, Beau was on two episodes, 396 and 441. He was the one who initially co the term the valueist way back in 2017.
- [50:50]
B
Yeah. And that's brilliant. That's just exactly what it's all about. It's just finding the stuff you value.
- [50:56]
A
Yeah. And I think that segues us into the next area that I wanted to talk about, which was in your email you wrote, I saw fi as a way out of the often relentless field that is healthcare. It was fear driven at first, but eventually led to discovering meaning and value in my life and during my training. So this was not, hey, I'm getting out of the field of healthcare and medicine as quickly as possible. I suspect at first it had something to do with that, but it quickly morphed into something else entirely.
- [51:25]
B
Yeah, it was. It was, like, interesting. When I was at that psych facility that we talked earlier about working long hours as a med student, I could see, you know, a lot of these doctors that just wanted to cut back on their hours and spend more time with their significant others and their kids and their friends, but it seemed like a lot of them, not necessarily a bad thing, but they kind of got tied up in the narrative. You know, being a doctor was their identity. It's what they did. And I don't think a lot of them would necessarily know what to do if they stopped. And if you really never have an end point in mind, you can rationalize and justify those future expenses. And it's not just in medicine. It's just the same thing. And, you know, in the corporate ladder where you're, you know, there's an allure to chasing those professional milestones. But for us, it's a very set track where we go to undergrad, med school, residency, fellowship. I mean, some even do an additional fellowship if you do like electrophysiology with the cardiologists. And then, you know, people get their first big attending paycheck, they buy a big house and a nice car and go on these expensive vacations. And I remember hearing about these doctors, they were telling me, you know, I was a fly on the wall med student, and they were telling me that they're still carrying this debt at 55 years old. And, you know, I get it. There's a lot, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of training, a lot of delayed gratification. But like you said, there's definitely a sense of keeping up with the Joneses in a regard. And I remember, I think it was Morgan Housel he said, wealth is what you don't see. And it's true, you see all these big expensive things like a nice house and a nice car. But in reality, that's money that is spent and gone forever. And then that money that that money could earn is also gone forever when you factor in compounding and investing. So looking back on it, you know, it was fear driven at first. I was scared that I was going to end up at 55 years old and having this debt paid off and not really living the life that I really wanted to live. So I think that really put us into the next step of starting our financial journey.
- [53:23]
A
Yeah. So, Kyle, next step. That's an interesting jumping off point because we've talked a lot about fi, but also, as I read in your email at the beginning, this doesn't stop when it comes to personal finance. The optimization, the next step, the even the returning to basics, the simplicity. How else has this newfound mentality about FI impacted your life in a positive way? What other areas? Have you seen it?
- [53:51]
B
Yeah, I think we really started to focus more on our health and just overall wellbeing. I know, you know, we talked about like over optimizing and I think this, seeped into our approach to health and wellness as well. And it's just embarrassing how extremely complex workout programs I've done in the past where in reality it just needs to be simple. And I think talking about health stuff and finance stuff, it goes hand in hand. Because if we have all this money and not our health, then what's all this for? And I think that's why it's great that the dialogue is shifting in this community and it's great that you've been bringing on new podcast guests like Dr. Bobby Dubose, who talks a lot about evidence based literature in terms of living long and also living well at the same time. So I think those next steps that we did, the first thing we did when we moved back to Portland was we got just a simple home gym setup. And that was as simple as it was like a hundred dollars squat rack, that dual serve purpose as a pull up bar. We have a spin bike, a couple Kett Bells and a couple dumbbells and that was about it. And we really shifted our approach from. I ran track and cross country in college and we shifted our approach from aggressive cardio and heavy lifting to more body weight and calisthenics. And I know you talk a lot about the zone two cardio. So we've just been focusing on that together. And you know, just making things more accessible and making things easier with less of a barrier to entry is huge in terms of keeping things consistent. So when I come home from work, it's just this equipment's just staring at me. I'm like, oh, I might as well work out as opposed to getting in the car, going to the gym, changing, coming home. I mean, we're already on a time crunch with a busy schedule and I think, you know, consistency is key. So just having that easy and accessible, it was really important.
- [55:43]
A
Yeah, there's really something to that. I know James Clear talked about that significantly in Atomic Habits in terms of just making it easy. Right. Like the more barriers you can cut when you have that home gym, no matter how simple or complex it is in the house, it's right there. It's easy. If you want to go to the gym, lay your clothes out, put your shoes out and, and just make it so that it's harder not to do it than to do it in essence.
- [56:08]
B
Exactly. And I think again, just focusing on the basics. There's this great guy, he's on YouTube, his name is Kyle Boges. He talks a lot about the basics and bodyweight exercises and really essentially all you need is a pushup a pull up and a squat movement. And this is great for busy people, it's great for moms, dads, people with hectic work schedule. And he essentially does two sets of those three exercises, maybe six days a week. He calls it high frequency training. But because he doesn't push his body to a limits every day, he can come back and do it the next day and there's a lower risk of injury. But at the same time he's also building strength and muscle. I remember I read somewhere that like essentially you only need, it's like two sets, two times a week is the minimum amount you need to build strength and hypertrophy, obviously at the higher intensity range, like 6 to 10 rep range. But just that minimal amount is such a low barrier to entry, to building more strength while also mitigating that risk of injury of, you know, aggressive cardio or heavy lifting.
- [57:13]
A
Yeah, it is amazing just how easy it can be. And of course there's always different degrees, right? Like you can make things as complex as you want, but it's the same with personal finance. Like you can make it as complex as you want. Does that mean you're going to get better results? No, probably not. Especially with fitness. Like if you're not looking to get to a world class level at anything, which essentially none of us are, right, it rounds to zero. So do you need all of these crazy optimizations? No, probably not. And I think you just have to find what works for you. Like for most people who are just living normal, relatively sedentary lives, even if they don't think about it, like Kyle, honestly, like just walking, just trying to get X number of steps Today, like the 10,000 is essentially made up, but it's directionally accurate and it's pretty hard to get 10,000. But you're going to be a heck of a lot healthier if you walk 8 to 12,000 steps a day than if you're walking the normal, which really amounts to 2 to 4000 is what I've seen in my own life.
- [58:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think overall the goal now, as opposed to like you said, being, you know, an elite athlete, is just feeling more comfortable and strong doing just a wide variety of activities. So, you know, being able to go and hike with friends, go for a long hike or you know, play Frisbee, you know, we were playing spike ball this last weekend and just a lot of movement. But you know, when you do these things ahead of time and you focus on strength without injury, then you feel comfortable doing these things without, you know, you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to wake up sore the next day or everything's going to hurt. And, you know, I, after running for so long, I ended up with two torn hip labrums. I had a slipped disc. And, you know, that's why I'm just not necessarily focused on that heavy lifting anymore. Just being able to do a wide variety of activities with all my friends. And I think jumping back to Bobby Dubois podcast, he talks a lot about, you know, those pillars of health and one of them being those social interactions as well. And being able to do a lot of things comfortably in just a lot of different activities is a great way to mix those two pillars. I used to be a big solo exerciser, but I'm just really trying to connect with other people while doing things that I like to do as well. And it's just like hiking with friends or going backpacking or just casually running very slow with the group or even doing spin bike classes. That, that little effort of mixing those two things, that will allow you to live longer but also live well.
- [59:34]
A
Yeah, right. And how can you stack things? That's another James Clear. Right. Like, how can you put a couple of these things together so that, well, the individual parts are wonderful, but together it's even better, in essence. And yeah, Bobby. So Dr. Bobby was on episode 498, and he has, like, you've mentioned a podcast called Live Long and well with Dr. Bobby, and we'll link those up in the show notes. But yeah, it's just about simplicity. And in your case, getting out. Getting out in nature is wonderful. Getting out in nature with friends or your wife, that's even better. And that doesn't cost all heck of a lot, right? It costs virtually nothing.
- [60:11]
B
Yeah, no, it's definitely just the simple things. I think one of the things that we added that I think made a huge difference. And just our health and I would say flexibility is. You know, we read this book, it's called Move youe DNA by Katie Bowman. And she is a biomechanist. And she essentially says that we don't move as naturally and through as many full ranges of motions as we did previously. And she even talked about she was accomplishing all these incredible cardiovascular feats, but she just, her body just felt terrible because when she was biking and running, she was only moving her body through a very limited range of motion. And what she recommended is obviously stretching and mobility, but also moving through deeper ranges of motions throughout your day. So one of the things we did was we sit on the floor now to eat our dinners and lunches and sometimes breakfast. So we don't have a dining room table, we just have a little coffee table. And I think we have. It's two. I think they're meditation yoga pillows, but we just sit on them and it's amazing. I mean you're basically stretching for 20 minutes a day and we're. You're opening up your hips, you're kind of shifting around, moving in different positions. You know, we have a doorway pull up bar that will. Every time I walk under, I'll just hang on it for 20, 30 seconds. And it's amazing how good that is for your shoulder health. So her book talks a lot about that and she goes more into the biomechanical aspects of it. But it's a great read for anyone wanting to think about improving their flexibility or feeling better in their bodies.
- [61:36]
A
Hmm, I have never heard of that one. I mean I, you know, I, I follow a lot of health stuff. Move your DNA by Katie Boma. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. I'm gonna buy that literally the second we get off here or see if my library has it, which hopefully it will. But yeah, even just little things like that, you said, like what's known as a dead hang. Right. Just find something like a pull up bar or something to just hang off of. And yeah, I've heard over and over, but for some reason I don't have a pull up bar in my door frame here. For 12 bucks I could get one of those and that would, that would make it easy. But yeah, Kyle, I've thought about doing that for years and I haven't done it. So it's amazing how like. Yeah. Can you just take action on these things? So. All right, well, I've got, I've got marching orders for this is get myself a pull up on, get myself that book. I mean, I try to put my money where, where my mouth is in essence with this show of like I say, every single time we do an episode, I hope there's something, at least one thing somebody can walk away with to take action on. And I think you've provided a number of them. But those are just for, even for somebody like me who's been in the FI world for 15 years at this point. There's always something, something little you can just do to make your life better. And I think like you said, it can maybe go a little too far in terms of over optimization. But when you have the north star of simplicity, it just helps guide you towards a better life. And I think that ultimately is what you're doing here. And I'd love just kind of as we close out here, are there any other aspects of that living a better life that you wanted to talk about before we say goodbye?
- [63:07]
B
I think I hit on all the main ones, but that was really the reason why I wanted to share the stories. I just wanted to give some hope to those who are just starting out their financial journey or those who are already on it. It absolutely is possible to save and reach your financial goals and still have a fulfilling life, whatever that means to you in the process. So definitely just get started wherever you are, no matter how small, and you'll be amazed by the progress can encapsulate.
- [63:34]
A
It better than that. Kyle, thank you so much for coming on. This is really, really great and I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people.
- [63:40]
B
Yeah, definitely. Brad, it's a pleasure.
- [63:42]
C
Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Choose5 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 fi.com subscribe and it's really, really easy to get on 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.
- [64:18]
A
So that's the way that I keep.
- [64:20]
C
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.
- [64:40]
A
All across the world.
- [64:41]
C
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 VI episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the FI community and even.
- [64:54]
A
Though it's a couple years old at.
- [64:55]
C
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 live a better life and then choose. If I created a Financial Independence 101 course that's entirely free, just head to choose a5.comfi101 and again, thanks for listening.