Incremental Gains | EP 582

Summary

ChooseFI Podcast Episode Summary

Episode Title: Incremental Gains
Date: January 19, 2026
Hosts: Jonathan & Brad

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Overview

In this energetic, insight-packed episode, Jonathan and Brad pull back the curtain on the broad landscape of Financial Independence (FI) and introduce the concept of "Incremental Gains." Rather than a deep-dive into a single tactic, the hosts lay out a diverse “table of contents” for the FI journey — a rapid-fire smorgasbord of tips, tools, and mindsets that help listeners accumulate small but powerful wins over time. With personal stories, practical examples, and a strong emphasis on enjoying the journey (not just the destination), Jonathan and Brad illustrate how embracing intentional, incremental changes today can add up to reclaiming decades of your life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power and Philosophy of Incremental Gains

• Mini-Retirements & Red X Months:
  Jonathan describes his “red X month” (inspired by Vincent Puglisi), where he took nearly all of December off to prioritize family time in Cape Town, South Africa.
  • "There is something really magical about that. And I think this is not only aspirational…but very possible. It might just simply be, hey, I still have to go to work, but I’m taking a red X month from all the other things in my life…Just have some free space." — Brad [05:10]
  • Brad compares this to past red X months in Maui and Scotland, reinforcing that the journey and “detours are the magic of this thing.”
  • These concepts highlight the FI mindset of purchasing freedom and flexibility, even before reaching FI “the number.”

2. The Journey vs. The Destination

• Appreciating the Process:
  • The hosts liken building FI—and life in general—to assembling a massive LEGO set or playing Minecraft: the setbacks, challenges, and problem-solving are the fun and the growth.
  • "You have to enjoy the journey. And we actually had that talk at the end [of building the LEGO roller coaster with my daughter] where I’m like, you know, part of the fun here is putting this together, and part of the fun is also having setbacks sometimes. And I think that’s a really interesting relation to life; life is not just straight up and to the right. If it was, it would be boring." — Brad [11:07]
  • Jonathan cites teaching his son Minecraft in “survival mode” rather than creative mode — a metaphor for learning, resilience, and creating value, not just receiving outcomes.

3. Why “Dropping Truth Bombs” Isn’t Enough

• Understanding Your ‘Why’:
  • The right process only sticks when it’s internally motivated and personally meaningful—the “why” must be your own.
  • "Dropping facts on someone is just...almost irrelevant by themselves. What makes it important, what locks it in, is the person understands the why." — Jonathan [23:48]
• Trust the Process:
  • The anecdote of muscle-building (and referencing Dean Turner’s masterclass in Ep. 516) parallels financial habits; both require humility, consistency, and the right mindset for incremental progress.
  • "To have a fresh mind, learn new things, is a critical part of having a good life. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Alright, I trust in the process. I’m going to put the inputs in because I’ve seen other people succeed.’" — Brad [21:44]

4. Rapid-Fire Table of Contents: Essential FI Tactics and Tips

(Starting around [26:09] and continuing with detailed commentary and examples)

a. ETF vs. Mutual Funds [26:18]

• Don’t buy a mutual fund of one company at another brokerage (especially VTSAX at Fidelity or Schwab) — it incurs unnecessary fees.
• Favor ETFs like VTI for their flexibility, lower fees, and cross-platform accessibility.
• Notable explanation of fractional shares (mutual funds vs ETFs), trading mechanics, and brokerage differences.

b. Roth IRA for Kids [30:39]

• Kids with earned income can open a Roth IRA (with parent as custodian). Documentation like 1099s or invoices is crucial for compliance.
• "It's a pretty good one... the Roth IRA for kids. So if your child has earned income, they can put money in a Roth IRA up to that amount." — Brad [30:39]

c. Roth Contributions Are Always Accessible [33:13]

• Contributions (not earnings) to a Roth IRA can be withdrawn tax and penalty free at any time. This removes psychological barriers to funding it.

d. Crushing Recurring Expenses: Cutting Cell Phone Bills [34:37]

• Using MVNOs (like Mint Mobile) can save $100/month per line—translating to $90,000 in long-term impact.
• Jonathan describes switching to Mint Mobile and using Google Fi for international travel with a crucial process tip: activate Google Fi before leaving the US and use it at least 24 hours before departure.

e. Automating Your Financial Life [40:48]

• Autopay for every bill and especially credit cards (always pay in full).
• Pay yourself first—set up automatic transfers to retirement/investment accounts.
• "We want to take our brains out of everything when it comes to personal finance…just set up principles so that things just work." — Brad [42:04]

f. The Massive Cost of Investment Fees [43:01]

• 1% advisor or fund fee, compounded over 40 years, can cut your portfolio nearly in half (example: $1,000/month at 8% vs 6% yields $3.45 million vs $2 million).
• "Fees matter. They matter a lot." — Brad [47:09]

g. The “Emergency Fund” Rethink [54:39]

• On the path to FI, you may not need a huge emergency fund in cash. Ample assets and the ability to sell investments quickly (including Roth contribution access) grant flexibility.
• "We’re not arguing against [cash emergency funds] for early-stage folks…but for people on the path to FI, you can invest above a certain buffer and sell assets if needed." — Brad [54:39]

5. Community Participation & Sharing Wins

• The episode wraps with a call for listener submissions:
  • Frugal Win of the Week — Small actionable savings, hacks, or habits.
  • Life Hacks — Broader tips that enhance life or accelerate FI.
• Submissions via the ChooseFI website; these listener-driven segments will feature in every episode.
• "This is the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. This is what it's all about...send these things in, send what you’re doing, and we want to talk about them." — Brad [62:15]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Red X Months:
  “It might just simply be, hey, I still have to go to work, but I’m taking a red X month from all the other things in my life, all these other responsibilities and meetings and scheduling. Just take a red X month from scheduling things and just have some free space. Have some time where you can do whatever it is you want to do.”
  — Brad [05:10]

• On Growth Mindset:
  “To have a fresh mind, learn new things, is a critical part of having a good life.”
  — Brad [21:44]

• On ‘Why’ Over Facts:
  “Dropping facts on someone is just...almost irrelevant by themselves. What makes it important, what locks it in, is the person understands the why.”
  — Jonathan [23:48]

• On Fees:
  “Fees matter. And they matter a lot. They just matter.”
  — Brad [47:09]

• On Shareable FI Life Hacks:
  “This is the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. It’s all about you—send these things in, send what you’re doing, and we want to talk about them.”
  — Brad [62:15]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• The Red X Month & Mindset — [02:33]–[06:04]
• Journey vs Destination, LEGO, Minecraft — [06:04]–[17:19]
• Why Mindset (Health/Finance Parallels) — [17:19]–[26:09]
• FI Tool Table of Contents (ETF/Mutual Funds & More) — [26:09]–[33:34]
• Cell Phone & Recurring Expense Savings — [34:37]–[40:45]
• Automating Finances & Credit Card Caution — [40:48]–[43:01]
• Investment Fees & Compounding Consequences — [43:01]–[49:25]
• Bank Fees & Optimizing Cash — [49:25]–[54:39]
• Emergency Fund Rethink — [54:39]–[58:34]
• Invitation for Community Submissions — [58:34]–[65:12]

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Memorable & Lighthearted Moments

• On Fear of Heights vs Roller Coasters:
  "I'd rather sign up for a marathon of the Exorcist than go watch Free Solo. That's where I am." — Jonathan [09:54]

• On FI Community's Love of Lists:
  "Brad's been making a list and checking it twice. Well, at least the making a list part." — Jonathan [00:00]

• Podcast Process Realism:
  "You only realize that after on the other side, I mean, you know… We're like, you know what? We were going to give you a hundred things, but it's looking a lot like 10." — Jonathan [13:02]

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Conclusion

The first of a multi-part series, “Incremental Gains” serves as both an energizing primer and a powerful reminder: success on the path to FI comes not from sudden, drastic changes, but from stacking intentional, small decisions and celebrating the process. With practical tactics, heartfelt stories, and a dash of their signature banter, Jonathan and Brad provide both the “what” and the essential “why” behind building a life where work becomes optional.

“The fire is spreading. We’ll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled.” — Jonathan [65:12]

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Next Steps & How to Participate

• Submit your ‘Frugal Win of the Week’ or ‘Life Hack’:
  Go to choosefi.com/login for easy access.
• Explore further: Listen to Episode 516 for a “masterclass on building muscle” as referenced for habit-building inspiration.

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For anyone new or returning to FI, this episode is both a pep talk and a practical toolbox—don’t miss it!

Transcript

[Jonathan]

Hello, everyone. This is Jonathan kicking off the intro for today's episode titled Incremental Gains. It's a little bit misleading because what we actually want to do is introduce you to the table of contents for the financial independence community. Brad's been making a list and checking it twice. Well, at least for the making a list part. We've been making a list of ideas that have expanded our horizons of what is possible and why the financial independence community, why you are so positioned to win. And on today's episode, instead of just trying to take one of those topics and do a deep dive, which is the way that we've done things historically, we wanted to, we wanted to mix things up. Let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. But why take this approach? Well, it's to do two things. First, to pique your interest if, you know, maybe you're interacting with these concepts for the first time or two, maybe you've been around the financial independence community for a while to get you thinking about things that maybe haven't been as present on your horizon. Because when you first interacted with the financial independence community, you were at one stage and here you are maybe a year or two later. And there are other tools that you just haven't thought about recently that are now relevant for you now that you're farther on your journey. And with that. Welcome to Choose Fi.

[Brad]

Before we get started, I keep this podcast entirely ad free for two reasons. First, this is a FI podcast and I don't want to promote products that I don't want you to buy in the first place. And second, I really like the clean listening experience of a show where you don't have to fast forward ads to keep it ad free. All I ask of you as a listener is the next time you open a travel rewards credit card, go to choosefi.com cards and with that, onto the show.

[Jonathan]

So we've been duking it out as to who would be doing the intros and the titles. One of us won that and, well, I'm doing the intros. Make of that what you will. So with that, I have Brad here with me today. How you doing, buddy?

[Brad]

Oh, Jonathan, I am doing quite well. This is fun. I love, love being back on the show with you.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, this is going to be a blast. Hey, the title, Incremental Gains, we're going to get to that the long way, right? I mean, have we ever in our lives gotten anywhere the short way? That title is going to be explicitly obvious by the time that you finish this episode. But in the short term, let's go on a detour. Brad. I'm just getting back from a red X month. Ooh.

[Brad]

So what is a red X month?

[Jonathan]

Yes. Vincent Puglisi brought this to our show, brought this to our community. Again, everyone in our community knows this. Brad and I have very few bordering on zero original ideas, but we do get very excited about awesome ideas that we've interacted with over time and we love to highlight them so as many people know about them as possible. The red X month was Vincent Puglisi taking a look at his calendar and saying, hey, for this window this season and it could be small, it could be a week, could be two weeks, could be three weeks. But I'm going to take a look at my calendar and I'm going to put a red X in a box right now. That's the idealistic one. That's the one month red X.

[Brad]

Big old red X. That's it.

[Jonathan]

And I did it, man, I did it for December. Now there's levels of red xyness. Mine might have been trending towards pink because I was doing a little bit of just, you know, putting out a few fires here and there, but I would say less than an hour of work a week. We went to Cape Town, one of the most beautiful places in the world. You know, I burnt, I peeled, I burned again. And wondering about the long term damage of sun exposure. Hoping that, you know, it's good, it's good, you know, sun is healthy for you and recharge. But we're back now and I'm excited to be here.

[Brad]

Wow. So, okay. Cape Town. It's funny, I thought you went to Zimbabwe to visit Danny's family.

[Jonathan]

I can see how you would think that they are. They do. My, my wife's family is from Zimbabwe. They still live in Zimbabwe, but that, you know, a lot of Zimbabweans no longer live in Zimbabwe. They live around the world. In particular, a lot of them live in South Africa. A lot of them live in the uk, Australia. It's just that, you know, there's a lot of Zimbabwe expats. So my in laws do live in Zimbabwe, but their relatives live in South Africa. My sister in law had her 40th birthday and we did a family beach trip to Cape Town which has unparalleled incredible beaches.

[Brad]

Very cool. Okay. That's somewhere I've never visited, but it's certainly on the list. And let's go back to the, the red X month because I think this is of real interest to people. This is maybe Akin to Jillian's mini retirement. Right. So there is a subtle distinction, though, and I think this is important, is that this is really. And like you said, you're bordering on pink. You might be bordering on yellow depending on the day know you. Yeah. How many times did I text you? And. And you responded instantly. So practice, man.

[Jonathan]

It takes practice.

[Brad]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll say bordering on pink. That sounds. Oh, man. But. But I think it's really the mindset, right, of, like, hey, I'm away. Like, I am taking a step away from my regular life. And I know we talked about this years ago where I took my daughters and we did a red X month in Maui, we did a red X month in Scotland the year before that, and then Covid intervened and life intervened, et cetera. But there is something really magical about that. And I think this is not only aspirational for all of us in the FI community, but I think it's very possible because, again, it's a mindset. It might just simply be, hey, I still have to go to work, but I'm taking a red X month from all the other things in my life, all these other responsibilities and meetings and scheduling. Just take a red X month from scheduling things and just have some free space. Have some time where you can do whatever it is you want to do. Some deep work, if you want to do just reading, if you want to play games, whatever it is, take a red X month. It can be very literal, like Jonathan. Well, Jonathan. Jonathan Olmest did. Or it can be however you see it. But I think Jonathan taking a step away is really healthy and really important.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. As I kind of think about that window of time and that coming back, we say this, it is the journey. It's not the destination. Like, if you really understand the playbook, the detours are the magic of this thing. Last episode, we told you. All right, here's how you're going to calculate your financial independence number. And then you took a look at that and compared to your bank account, and you realize that there's a gap. Oh, all right. And then maybe the calculator that you used to do it gave you some insight into how long before you close the gap based on, you know, what you know about your current ability to contribute. And you said, all right, I guess, you know, 10 years, 12 years, 15 years from now, and then this will be awesome. You missed. If that was the case and you missed it, you are going to accrue power from the day you did that calculation and start applying a little bit of intention into this. So this might be your day. Seven, Right? You did it. You're. You're aware you have a number in mind and you're working towards that next piece and you're like, all right, well, is there, you know, what's, what's the one thing now? I did the math calculation. What's the one thing Now? Brad and I, over the course of this episode, are going to try to roll out 50 to 101 things, right. That this show is going to put in your awareness over the coming year that you just wouldn't have contemplated or thought about before. And I want to point out this is the magic of this community. You started here because maybe there was something that you were recoiling from and it was a defensive posture. But if you get time to explore this, you realize that as soon as you've done this for a couple months, a couple, a year, what you have for the first time in your life is options.

[Brad]

Yeah, without a doubt. And the, the detour is the journey. I think, like you said, it's about taking that time along the way to appreciate it. Because FI is simply not about reaching some mythical number on a spreadsheet. It is about living a better life in every aspect. And when you have the space financially, and frankly, that might mean the first couple thousand dollars, right? Like if you don't have a thousand dollars saved up, you are in an emergency my hair is on fire situation. So the very first time you save $1,000, you have so much more space, you have so much less stress. And then you start getting 5,000, 10,050, 100 and just start snowballing. Then you can take a step back and all along that way, really focus on the important stuff. And it's interesting, Jonathan, because you brought that up about really the journey. And my older daughter Anna and I were actually putting together one of her Christmas presents. So she is a massive roller coaster fan. Okay.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, she's still enjoying roller coasters.

[Brad]

She is still incredibly so. She. It's funny, these roller coaster enthusiasts, they keep track of all the roller coasters that they've ridden and they call each one a credit. Okay, so in the four years since she's been a roller coaster fan, she's now ridden 188 different roller coasters. Different coasters she's written.

[Jonathan]

So is, is it safe to assume that fear of heights is not an issue for her?

[Brad]

Yeah, I think that's. I think that's fairly safe to assume.

[Jonathan]

I can reassure everyone after going to Table Mountain at Cape Town, that I still have a very healthy, quaking in my knees, fear of heights. And when I was watching my kids go up near the rock walls and the edges, and that was compounded by a factor of 10, and I was like, don't you know we can all die? And any prime.

[Brad]

What am I doing?

[Jonathan]

So you are safe. I'm usually able to mostly keep it, like, under control. And I still actually, just for the record, I do actually really enjoy roller coasters, but I thought I could intellectually overpower this, like, slowly building fear of heights, and I just haven't quite been able to beat it. I thought maybe you can just go and stare over the edge long enough and suddenly this will be resolved and now you can go watch the movie Free Soul. Yeah, I can't even watch Free Soul. Like, that's just, that's, that's just, that's a. There's horror movies. Like, I'd rather sign up for a marathon of the Exorcist than go watch Free solo. That's where I am.

[Brad]

Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, yeah, anytime you can take one step and, and fall to your doom. Probably, probably not ideal, but, but, you know, this is me.

[Jonathan]

And then next door there's the people. Caribbean down the mountain. I'm like, we're just, they're just. There's something different in our DNA.

[Brad]

But safely tucked away under a restraint on a roller coaster is not so bad. So anyway, we found on Etsy this guy named Costa Bricks who basically puts together PDFs of Legos that you can buy. It's this really cool thing. He sells these PDFs for like $7. And it's of hundreds of different roller coasters. You can buy each individual one. Like your favorite coaster, let's say, which hers is velocicoaster down in Universal Studios in Florida. And then he gives you the instructions on how to buy the bricks individually through either Lego or there's like some other knockoff site called Webrick. So you get the, the LEGO show up and you have this 100 page PDF that he put together and you start building them. And it was so interesting because Anna got, she just wanted to be done. She got like instantly frustrated. In fairness, I don't know that she's ever put any Legos together. I know I've done it with.

[Jonathan]

What is the number of pieces that we're talking.

[Brad]

It was like probably a thousand. It was a lot.

[Jonathan]

I mean, that's, that's a, that's a pretty big commitment.

[Brad]

Yeah, yeah. It was like, I. I'm not sure if it was exactly. It was somewhere on that order, but it was like, yeah, it was like 60 or $70 to buy the bricks. It was a really neat thing. This is actually very cool. And then like, like I said, like seven bucks for the PDF. But it was interesting because I actually had that thought about, like, you have to enjoy the journey. And we actually had that talk at the end where I'm like, you know, part of the fun here is putting this together, and part of the fun is also having setbacks sometimes. And I think that's a really interesting relation to life, is life is not just straight up into the right. If it was, it would be boring. We all go through setbacks, we all go through hard times. And I think that's, that's part of the spice of life, frankly. And, and I know I've talked about this repeatedly in the past year in response to this middle class trap thing. I don't know if this even crossed your plate.

[Jonathan]

It may, I may have become aware of it.

[Brad]

It was just from my ranting and raving. You know what?

[Jonathan]

Disagreement is healthy. I love it. I love it. So I'm glad that the conversation happened last year and I think the community is better for it. You know, even if there's polarizing opinions. I just think having the conversation is valuable and I'm happy to be. Maybe not in the room, but listen to my EarPods, you know, everything both sides have to say.

[Brad]

Yeah, no, agreed. And yeah, I mean, I think it's important to lean into hard things sometimes instead of running from it. And it's easy, it's safer, it feels safer to run from hard things. But like, whoever was proud of themselves by just taking the easy route all the time, it just doesn't. It doesn't make sense. That's not, that's not life. So anyway, this was like.

[Jonathan]

You only realize that after on the other side, I mean, you know, there's. There's this tie in here and I know you were saying that's neither here nor there. And here I am doubling down and we like, 15 minutes later, we're resolving this. We're putting a hammer in our own coffin and we're like, you know what? We were going to give you a hundred things, but it's looking a lot like 10. So we should probably go ahead and round this off.

[Brad]

Yeah, it's looking like three episodes of Incremental Gain.

[Jonathan]

We're gonna have to record on the back end of There was gonna be a double Parter, here's, here's a great example that my son is now 8 years old and this show started roughly around the time that he was born. I mean he was, this show was maybe started just six months prior to him.

[Brad]

Yeah, he's gonna be nine soon. In a couple of months.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, gotta be. You're right, you're. Thank you. You're right. Your, your method of accounting for time is more accurate than mine. He has a birthday coming up in the next few months. So with that in mind, we've actually been kind of slow to introduce them to tech. I know there's different ways of. People have different opinions on this and certainly I think I would agree that you need to be proficient at technology and it would be to your detriment to not know anything about technology going into the world that is, that is coming here. So with that just kind of understanding in mind that yes, he's going to become aware of tech and how to use it, but when and how is an open ended question in our household. Having said that, I just got them set up with, with Minecraft this year. Playing it for the first time and when you're learning how to play. And again, I didn't really grow up with Minecraft. I was just a little bit before all of that came on. But I know it's captured the imagination of a generation of people. It's millions and millions of people that play this. And also not for nothing, there's an aspect of world building, there's an aspect of puzzle solving and creativity and giving you now. So I can appreciate a lot of the attributes that go into this game. And so it's one that I was kind of interested in him, you know, just dabbling around the edges with. And when you start playing Minecraft, you have two options, one survival mode and one's creative mode. Creative mode. Nothing bad can happen to you. You have everything, do what you want. And my son would like that. He would like that a lot. Oh, I could just have all the things and I'm like, yeah, but Zachary, there's a mechanism behind this game and if you just, it's fine to be over there and see what's possible, to know it exists. But if you never want to go to the other side and actually do the game, play the game, you're going to miss the journey. So you see why I'm like, I'm literally saying this within the last two weeks and I've had to hit it because it keeps falling back. I'm going to go and delete this creative. We're going to delete it. You will go to survival, you know, that sort of thing. But it's like, all right, we got to, you know, we got it. We got to take Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? We got to solve. We got it. We have a shelter. We got to have a place to sleep. You don't want to be staying up with those zombies taking you out, man. You got to. You got to get to the next day. Here's how you build basic resources. And again, by the way, I say all this, I don't actually know how to do anything in this game. Like, if there's a level below a newbie, that. That would be me. And I'm only doing this more as a. As a gateway to him, just to be able to interact with him and. And learn this game with him together, as opposed to just doing something like smash brothers, hit him on the head again, Hit him. Or, you know, just. I can see that there's merit to, you know, delayed gratification and incremental puzzle solving where because you do this, this opportunity opens up to you. Because you do that, these opportunities open up. But again, he wants the creative, easy way where you just have everything. And we all do, don't we? Of course you do. Just give it to me. If my parents had given me the money, if I had the silver spoon, if I. But think about it. Just. Just play it out. And, you know, there are individuals that just were. It was. It was handed to them, it was given to them. Do they appreciate it? I know at some level, absolutely. But, you know, there's a difference between when you figured it out yourself or. Or when you had an invested role in it versus when something was just handed to you. And that speaks to the fact that $100 is not $100. The how you get there is as important as the outcome. And so whether we're talking about how do you introduce your kids to tech? And Brad and I will have plenty of opportunities to go down those detours. My family's homeschooling this year. I'm very excited about that. I didn't know that was going to be a thing that we were going to be doing, and we'll certainly have a chance to talk about that. But whether you are talking about how are you mentoring your kids and helping them, or whether you're talking about how are you going to tackle this idea of incremental gains and what your mindset going to be, there's so much merit here, and you're going to just look for it. Don't just disregard anything that isn't immediately tied to the outcome you want. Take advantage of this, the amount of time, the power over your time that you're accruing, the flexibility and the options and just say it's okay to look around and what do I want to do next? Because that's what you have. You have options and you are reclaiming. It's not a present tense past tense. You're only going to get. You are reclaiming your most precious non renewable resource, your time.

[Brad]

All right, so Jonathan, incremental gains, right? So you started us 15 minutes ago with. So it's 5am, I just got back from Zimbabwe, I'm jet lagged my red X month. And then we, we took a 15 minute detour. Where were you going with that? Because I think that was the start of incremental gains.

[Jonathan]

Everything changes, everything stays the same. Uh, incremental gain.

[Brad]

So Jonathan can talk.

[Jonathan]

Stop talking. That's the problem. So I'm back from Cape Town, I'm experiencing jet lag. And it's actually working to my benefit because I'm bouncing up at 5am and I have this desire to start taking care of my health and, and I, I've been doing a lot of development, so I haven't had a lot. I felt like I haven't had a lot of time. And so this whole I'm just gonna brute force things and I'm gonna out calorie myself and outwork myself. I, that's just going out the window. That was a luxury. I don't, I gotta be very judicious with how I use my time. So I've kind of taken. Well, I'll just say this out loud, Brad. You recorded an episode that blew my mind. Episode 5, 16. I was not a part of that episode. I listened to it after I saw repeated feedback from members in the community. And I've continued to see a stream of messages from people coming in. And you know how sometimes like you say something to someone and you have a great idea and, and that person just won't hear it. They won't do it. All of us have had this. We have, we want to tell them about finance. We want to tell a family member about financial independence. We want to do X, Y, Z and they just won't hear it, but then suddenly they hear it from somebody. Well, that was me. We've all been guilty of this. I did this to you. You did this episode. You told me about it. I just was, had my own Ideas. And so here I am and I'm like, you know what? I know my plan isn't going to work. I don't have the time to do my plan. Let me just start over. Let me go listen to this. And then I was just shell shocked as I had a paradigm changing experience listening to episode 5 16. Did anybody get that? Did you wr choosefi.com 516 it's called a masterclass on building muscle. And Brad recorded it with Dean Turner. So that is as big of a shout out as I can give to a single episode, maybe ever. And I'm just telling you, play that one next. If you're all interested in thinking about building muscle and having the healthiest year of your life, you should go listen to that. All right, well, here I am and I'm going to the gym at 5am and I know that Brad and I are going to be recording. And I'm just having this thought about this incredible overlap between what I'm going to be doing if I follow through on what you discussed in that episode and this path to financial independence, this idea of incremental gains, and it's not resulting where you are, you know, a success or a failure based on that workout. It's literally impossible to fail. In fact, the point is, get your ego out of the way. You do what you can do. You follow the plan, you let the results take care of themselves and you follow the plan. And if you were to look at the end of the workout, just a single workout, and decide whether you are a success or a failure, it's ridiculous. What you've done is you fundamentally changed the way that you are approaching health and fitness. And that's okay. Because if you think about what you've done up to this point in time, has it really worked for you? Has it really worked for you? If it has, great. But if it hasn't, that's why you're still listening. So in that case, what if there was something that we didn't know, that we didn't know if. And we realized, just like with personal finance and financial independence, instead of just demanding the outcome, demanding the everything, we got excited about the journey and the process of incremental gains. So I started writing titles down and that's how we got here.

[Brad]

Brad, nice. I love it. And I appreciate that you, you finally listened to that episode. And what's interesting is we worked out together a few years ago when I was actually getting started with this programming with Dean. And I think what's interesting, like you have been really fit in your life at points. And you've been going to the gym for decades. And I think sometimes, and obviously this is not to.

[Jonathan]

I'm okay with you saying this. You have permission to say what you're about to say.

[Brad]

You had a lot of preconceived notions from the gym, and I think that has probably served you well in a lot of aspects of life. And, and I think in this instance, it might have hindered you from really buying in. And that makes sense from a worldview. And I think it's hard sometimes to have the white belt mentality of just, hey, I'm a newbie, like, I'm going to start over and I'm going to, I'm going to trust in the process. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of parallels to fi in that this is really, it's starting afresh. Yeah, maybe you, maybe you've learned some bad lessons about personal finance in the past. Maybe you've learned virtually nothing. But, but you've just been muddling along and now you realize, okay, this is a total reorientation on my life. And I think, I think, honestly, it was interesting. John, I think it's not two hours ago and I didn't know we were going to talk about this today, but I was texting with my good buddy Adam, who I've known for literally 40 years, and I was saying to him, because we were both talking about our parents and how they're getting older and maybe have some health challenges and such. And I was saying to him, I'm like, look, I think you should listen to episode 516 and let's talk about it afterwards. I kid you not, Jay, this was two hours ago. I'm like, this will change your life because it is, it is a superpower on the level of phi. And it's just, it's a really cool thing to be able to start over in life, just in any aspect of life, to have a fresh mind, have a fresh mindset, learn new things. I think this is a critical part again, of having a good life, is I'm open minded to new information. And there are some times where I'm just going to say, all right, I trust in the process, I'm going to put the inputs in because I've seen other people succeed and that's what's cool. I actually, just one last word on this is when I went to Bali for the financial independence event that Amy Minkley puts together. That was 14 months ago. And I, again, I'm not too egotistical about this, but, like, I'm in pretty good shape and a lot of people noticed and it was, you know, that's obviously a good feeling. But this, there was this one guy, Tanmay, who is just a really incredible guy. And we were talking and he hadn't done a ton of fitness in terms of muscle building by any means, and he just wanted to start. And what was interesting was for New Year's, a bunch of us put like, happy New Year's posts in the WhatsApp chat that we have for that Bali event. And Jay, I kid you not, Tanmay's biceps, like, busted out of his shirt. This is 14 months later after following this Dean's programming, like, to the point where like four different guys, like, notice like, holy cow, what are you doing? What's going on here? And this was somebody who looked like he hadn't ever lifted weights before. And I'm like, damn. He just followed the process.

[Jonathan]

Nice.

[Brad]

It's cool.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Trust the process, right? I mean, trust and verify. But I think one thing that just got slipped in there is, you know, it is so easy to drop facts on people, right? So, and actually a minute, we're going to drop a ton of, you know, just things. Just be aware of. You don't know what you don't know, but dropping facts on someone is just. They're almost irrelevant by themselves. What makes it important, what locks it in is the person understands the why. So that's why I say, you know, it's fine. I could have a list of what workout I did this morning. And also, not for nothing, I did the workouts with Brad. Well, if was that good, why didn't I lock in? I didn't have the why, right? Did I have the why? I just went and did the workout and it was a good workout. Like, I did the workouts with months with Brad, but I didn't have my own logbooks. I wasn't following the process. The why wasn't mine. It was his why. Right? And I never took the time to lock in my why. For why would I want to stick with this when, you know, I have other things that I could do? Any, anything will work. It's just as good as anything else. So now you have this fork in the road. I stopped doing the workouts with Brad. Just time constraints, doing my own thing now because all workouts are being equal and I've gotten results many different ways. And Brad sticks with his why and he sticks with his plan. And Brad can log and show you the incremental Gains. And, and, and with very few switch ups along the way, Brad has been able to chart a path to. He's extraordinarily satisfied. And not only that, but he's been able to stay satisfied for 12, 24 months at a time, you know, 36 months at a time. And so that's a pretty incredible deviation from those of us that find ourselves going through New Year's resolutions where we're going to lean in for 90 days, and then at 90 days we're so fried and exhausted and we're stressed out or maybe we hit our goal and we crushed it. And then, all right, now we get back to our normal life versus the individual that had a why and carved out a life, you know, that's going to lead to the outcome that they want. Do you understand that that is exactly what we're talking about with financial independence. So when we talk about these things that a lot of which are going to sound like a foreign language, some of which you're going to know a little bit about, some of which like what? Could we go into more details? Two things come to mind. One is you are not responsible for knowing all these things today. It's not even the point. It's just to kind of put some window dressing about the idea. There's a lot that you don't know, a lot that you haven't interacted with, a lot of opportunities out there. And then just to say we couldn't possibly cover the infinite number of options that you're going to be able to discover on this path. The detours are the journey.

[Brad]

They are indeed. All right, let's get into it. Incremental gains. So we've actually already touched on a couple, which is great. But I'm going to start. We're just going to bomb through as many of these as we can. Jay.

[Jonathan]

And are you telling me that I can't comment on each one that you say? Is that you proactively asking me to not have.

[Brad]

We can comment. We can comment. I'd love to take four episodes and do this. I think it'd be fantastic. You can respond at your leisure. Okay, first one I've got, don't buy a mutual fund of one company at another brokerage. Okay. So a lot of people get into trouble because in years past, we talked almost exclusively about vtsax, and it really became a meme, I think, frankly, because of J.L. khan's incredible book, Simple Path to Wealth, it just became like the thing that people bought in the FI community. And I think it's very important to know. So that's a Vanguard mutual fund. Okay. People, because they've heard this term vtsax over and over, they think I have to buy that.

[Jonathan]

A.

[Brad]

You don't have to buy that. Let's be clear. But certainly don't buy it if you're at another brokerage like Schwab or Fidelity or anywhere else. Because you get clobbered with fees. Okay? This is why. Now the general thing that we talk about are actually exchange traded funds, ETFs. So VTI is the new VTSAX. Jay, I don't know if you knew about this, but for years now I've been saying vti, vti, vti. We're going away from vtsax because people get into trouble getting clobbered with these fees. There are almost never fees when people buy vti.

[Jonathan]

Yep. I have some VTI that I have purchased. I think through schwab. I purchased VTI. I think also maybe purchased some. Some boo. Some bo.

[Brad]

Yeah, the S&P 500.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. So let's just take a half step back on that one and just say like context here. Here's another one. There is a difference between ETFs and mutual funds. And notably, and this is a really important concept, mutual funds are very convenient and easy on most platforms because you can purchase fractional amounts. You need 30 bucks, you need 40 bucks, you want whatever you got. You could just put in that amount and you can purchase, you know, a fractional amount of the mutual fund ETFs. You got to purchase a share a share amount. This would mean like, let's say that vti. And again, I don't actually know the numbers at this moment. I'll say that's to my credit. But let's say it's $240 a share. You would have to purchase, you know, a $240 increments. But here's another thing. Mutual funds resolve at the end of the business day. So you could say, I want to purchase it now, but you're actually not getting the price of that mutual fund that's showing up right now. You're getting it at the price at the end of the business day. And ETFs are purchased, you're getting at the exact price that you purchase it in the window. So there's a lot of other tiny little nuances. And also a lot of what I just said can itself be incorrect depending on the platform you purchase it on. Because if you go to something like M1, they will let you do fractional shares of ETFs using some sort of proprietary mechanism. So just there's very few absolutes, but these are a few of the defining characteristics of ETFs versus mutual funds.

[Brad]

Yeah, I love that. And what's interesting, like you just said, it does differ on the platform. And I know this very personally because. And this ties into another. Another fun incremental gain here. So I actually just opened up a Roth IRA for my older daughter, Anna. So she had her very first earned income this past summer. She was the. The head of this swim lessons program at our pool. And she made a bet about somewhere in the vicinity of $1,100, let's say. Okay. So, Jay, I opened up a Roth IRA for her, and now at Vanguard, it happened. So it's in her name. It's a custodial account because she's not 18, but it's a Roth IRA. I put in eleven hundred dollars, or she put in eleven hundred, we should say. But I facilitated it, and they allowed me to buy in terms of dollars. So they actually let me buy a fraction of a share. So she went up getting 3.24, whatever percentage of a share, which is great. So that was really cool because I was under the impression that I could only buy in share increment. So at least at Vanguard, they allow you to do that, which is nice. Now. Yeah, the price, it looks like at this very moment, is about $339 a share. But that's pretty cool. And again, this is a nice thing. My incremental gain here is the Roth IRA for kids. So if your child has earned income, they can put money into a Roth IRA up to that amount. And the nice thing, it doesn't have to be the same dollars that you earned. It's not like it has to go from your paycheck directly to. It's just, do they have that earned income? And if so, that can go in the IRA and the Roth in this case. And so, yeah, this is a pretty good one.

[Jonathan]

Okay, well. Oh, man. I can't comment on all the. Okay, we can do. We can do multiple episodes. Fine. Maybe we just break it up and split it out for a couple weeks. But the commentary is good. You did a comment on my comment? Yeah, that's what.

[Brad]

Okay, there's always comments.

[Jonathan]

Roth IRA for kids. That wasn't on the list. Just get added to the list. Just get out of the list. And I think this is a really important one. What do you do? As a former accountant and a meticulous record keeper, what do you do to feel good about how you're going to validate, you know, the fact that this in fact was earned income. There's not an official way, but there is a best practice that most people should feel pretty good about. Right?

[Brad]

Yeah, agreed. And it does get a little nebulous because so in her case, she made enough money to get over the threshold for 1099 reporting. Okay, so that's $600. If you earn over $600 from some employer or whatever, you are going to get a 1099. And now. So she'll get a 1099 probably in the next couple of weeks. I will save that. I'll scan it and upload it to a drive and make sure we have that for posterity. So that will very easily prove out that I think, yeah, it gets a little more nebulous when in terms of, hey, did they babysit or mow lawns or something?

[Jonathan]

But I think it would be enough to make an invoice of some sort for them. Just a paper trail record. It's just more. You don't want to have a giant number that you're aggregating over time and it's all just vapor lines on an Excel. There should be something plausible that shows the paper trail and that's as good as you're going to find in terms of documentation. Just create a template, get an invoice template. Just make a note of the date and the amount and the time and put it in there. And I just think it's kind of the same idea. It's a lot less nebulous actually. But it's still the principle and the best practices are there. Same idea with your hsa.

[Brad]

If you want to thunder, I just.

[Jonathan]

Brad, I didn't see it on your list. It was open.

[Brad]

I folded it.

[Jonathan]

Amending. All right. But I do use that exact same tactic for the HSAs, where you have a spreadsheet on the cloud linked to a Google Drive or Apple Storage or whatever the thing is with a link to yourself and you just kind of create those summaries for the year and that's a little bit of a pain in the tail. But if you're serious about this vehicle, which will show up, we'll talk about it some more. If you're serious about this approach HSA as an investment vehicle, it is worth it to have that documentation and Absolutely. Because these numbers are going to get big fast over periods of time. You want to have a well documented paper trail.

[Brad]

Yep, totally agreed. Another one that I had on the list. Since we're talking about Roth IRAs. Is Roth IRA contributions can always be taken out tax and penalty free at any time.

[Jonathan]

For the longest time, I did not realize and I didn't intellectualize what this, what this really meant. It was just word vomit. But it is so important.

[Brad]

It really is important. And I think this will let a lot of people more freely mentally contribute to a Roth ira. Because all things equal, I guess the argument would be, oh, but what if I need that money? And that's why some people don't contribute to retirement accounts, because they think it's stuck there. And for traditional accounts, that is true to some degree. Now, we've talked repeatedly about, and we will talk, Jonathan, in great detail in the future about ways to take money out of traditional IRAs and 401ks before you're 59 and a half. But when we're talking Roth IRAs, you've already paid tax on this money. That's the whole point. Roth contributions are after tax money. So the nice thing is whatever money you contribute, you can pull out at any time tax and penalty free. Now, if there's earnings, if there's growth on that, that cannot come out tax and penalty free. But if you put in five grand one year and you have an emergency and for some reason you need money because that's where, let's say that's where you put your emergency fund, okay, you can pull it out tax and penalty free. So that's very important to remember.

[Jonathan]

And Brad, we talked about the power of cutting $100 of recurring expenses out of your budget. I mean, last week you made the case that it's worth $90,000 to you over a period of 20 years. It lowers your fine number by over 30k. And that $100 a month invested is worth $60,000 at an 8% annual return. So you put all that together as a 90k swing if you can just find $100 a month to cut. So I have a, I have a story here. This is not revolutionary in that a lot of people at this point in time have started to hear about mvno. So you have your cell phone service of choice. Maybe you're with one of the big ones, but there are these other MVNOs and there's a bunch of options, but notably I am using and a lot of our community or a lot of people that I know are using Mint Mobile and Mint Mobile, I believe. And again, this is all abstracted from you, so you kind of have to guess, but I believe Mint Mobile is running on T Mobile Lines in a lot of places, you know, they buy allotments from different providers, so you don't always know. And they're not the only ones that do this. Google Fi as an alternative also runs on other providers. I can confirm, because I had a troubleshooting issue with Google Fi, that they are in fact, at least in Richmond, Virginia, running on T Mobile lines. So that was. That's just the case. So anyways, so how do you pick between the two? Well, price is certainly a very important thing to run on, and Mint Mobile is shockingly affordable. Probably 15 bucks a month per line with a very forgiving data allowance. Google Fi, on the other hand, has gotten relatively uncompetitive and they are close to 60 bucks a month by the time that you, you know, add in the data, et cetera, they're charging you $10 per gigabyte of data, something like that. So it just, it just adds up really, really quick. And I was very frequently getting bills where I was like, well, am I really saving Google Fi? Let me give Mint Mobile a shot. Your worst case scenario, you can actually go back. Most mobile phones these days use esim, so you don't even have to get a SIM card. You can, you can quite literally go into your settings, toggle it on, toggle it off. You could even have two lines if you wanted to. And by the way, you're still probably paying less than you would with one of the traditional vendors. But again, it comes down to this idea of, well, I really, at some point, I mean, I make very few phone calls, but when I do make a phone call, I kind of need to be able to hear the other person. And can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? You know, you can't, can't be doing that. So I've tried Mint Mobile in Virginia and I'm satisfied. It's, you know, maybe not perfect all the time, but it is beyond what I would expect or need from it. And the data always works well and the voice signal is perfectly satisfactory. So with that in mind, here's what it comes down to. Google Fi is incredible at International. It is so good at international mobile. Not very competitive on International. They quickly charge you for roaming. So here's what I processed and I realized, and this is again, a very timely little thing for people that are considering it. I told my wife, I was like, I've liked Google Fi. I've used them for a long time. They're massively jacking up the rates here. And I just don't feel like it's that competitive. We're going to switch over to mobile. If we don't like it, we can go back. Let's just do it. We have an international trip coming up. We're going to Cape Town. I have experienced Google Fi in other countries and there's nothing like it. They just buy the contracts in other countries and it works just like you have it there. So I set it up before we left. About a week before we left, I made one mistake and this is just a very good cautionary. You can absolutely set up Google Fi for the month that you're going out of town. But if you do it, you need to set it up before you leave. You need to be in the United States when you set it up. And very importantly, you need to be start using your data 24 hours before you leave the country. Because once I got over there, we hadn't used it on my wife's. I had set it all up. I had kind of done something on mine, I had set it up on hers, but we hadn't switched it over and actually used it. I called customer support, could not get them to switch it over. So her phone was dead in the water with Google Fi, even though I had paid and set it all up. This is just one of those little things. You're allowed to switch your phone service and guess what? When you didn't finance your phone and lock yourself into three years of payments so you could get the new iPhone for free, you have portability and options. So just think about that. $15 a month per person. What is the average phone bill these days? Are you tying it in to your Internet and your cable and you end up with a $400 a month monster package? There's 10% savings there. Absolutely.

[Brad]

Yeah. This is such low hanging fruit. It's interesting because when I, I'm going back and listening to all our old episodes, one of our most popular episodes of all time was 21. It was the pillars of Fi. And literally one of the pillars we made is like cutting your cell phone. It was, it was very cute. But I think what it really highlighted was the power of these small differences, these small changes. And like we said, every hundred dollars a month you cut out your budget. It's worth $90,000 to you over 20 years. And yeah, this is a perfect example. There are still lots of people who are spending 80 to $120 a month on their cell phone service per line. This is crazy. So we're not in the bag for any particular cell phone company, but I use My mobile. And they're fantastic. It's 15 bucks. I think I get five gigabytes of data. But the important lesson is on the path to fi. We are trying to find an optimized way to live. Now, does this mean that we are like everybody else who's just freely spending and oh, if I want it, I'm going to buy it kind of scenario? No, because we understand there are limitations to life. If we all made unlimited money, we wouldn't have to make any choices. We live in a world where we have to make choices. And one that I've made is, okay, I'm only going to spend 15 bucks a month for whatever it is. A couple of gigabytes. It might even be five gigabytes of data. Frankly, I'm never even close to that. Jonathan, I. But what that means is I don't download podcasts and I don't stream YouTube when I'm outside of my wifi. That's it. That's the only difference I have to make.

[Jonathan]

Yep.

[Brad]

And frankly, I probably could because I have multiple gigabytes unused every month, so I probably could do that. Maybe that's even antiquated thought. But I'm making a tiny, tiny sacrifice and I'm saving a hundred dollars a month on my phone. Okay, so. So is this the hey, yolo the hell out of life? I can just throw money around like it's nothing? No, I'm making a very optimized decision and I'm just giving up this tiny, tiny little thing. And that one decision is going to be worth $90,000 to me. That's a no brainer.

[Jonathan]

I have no comment. Moving on.

[Brad]

Hey, let me move on. I'll move on to one.

[Jonathan]

We have. We've done five.

[Brad]

All right, we got to keep moving. All right, I got three all at once because they tie together. Okay. This is about automating your financial life. I think this is the key to everything. You want to take your brain out of everything. When it comes to personal finance. You set up every bill you possibly can on autopay. I can't think of anything you have to do anymore. That it doesn't allow auto pay in some regard. So please automate all of your bills and most importantly, credit card. You want to make sure we talk a lot about credit cards here in terms of. Credit cards can be one of your biggest financial tools. But we are cognizant that tens of millions of people get in deep, deep trouble when it comes to credit cards. This is why Dave Ramsey is so dogmatic. About not touching credit cards. I understand where he's coming from. I think we're smart enough in the FI community to understand why he does that for the people that he talks to and why our advice is a little bit different. We can succeed wildly when it comes to credit cards in terms of travel rewards and such. But. But you have to pay your card on time and in full every single month or none of it is worth it. The interest free loan you get, the travel rewards, all the good stuff, the protections, none of it is worth it if you're paying 25% interest. So please set up your credit card to pay from your checking account on time and full every single month. Pay yourself first. That's another really important thing. If you've previously spent every dollar that comes in and all of a sudden you listen to choose a buy and, and you have a new mindset. It's all well and good to think you're going to change overnight, but realistically, our brains get in the way. We want to let our brains off the hook. We want to just set up principles so that things just work. That the pay yourself first mantra that you've heard in personal finance for decades, it genuinely works because the money is gone. Then you can freely spend whatever else is left, but that's it. You can't get into trouble because you've already saved your 10, 20, 30, maybe more percent of your income because it's just getting sent to where you need it to be sent, whether it's your IRA, your 401k, traditional savings, whatever it is, it's happening automatically in the background. So that's my talk is pay yourself first, automate everything, pay your credit cards. Don't let your brain get in the way.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, you could very easily now shift this. And now talk about getting your brain out of the way on the investment side either. And I'm going to, I'm going to stagger or just run barrel my way through a couple of of these to put them together. The fees matter. The fees matter. So we have on here, you know, just. Are you aware if your mutual fund or your advisor has you in funds that have a 1% fee and then they've got some sort of fee on top of this. Are you aware of what the cost of those fees are to your portfolio balance over a period of 20 or 40 years? Do you realize how that compounds? If you were to have a 1% know fee, whether it's coming from your advisor or coming from the actual funds that they have you in versus having you know, the same result in a fund that didn't have any fees, it's cutting your portfolio in half over an investing lifetime. It's a traumatic amount of money when you look at it through that lens. So the fees matter. Now next to that, it's very easy and simple. And I feel like when I say, you know, Brad, I promise we'll come back to this one and we'll do the math on that for you. We have a whole episode. In fact, Brad, you have the note on what episode we did that on.

[Brad]

I don't, but I actually just pulled up a compound interest calculator to do it.

[Jonathan]

Run the example. I was thinking we were going to go ahead and knock out three or four. This was, you've just cut my barrel out from underneath me. But go for it. Let's be correct here. It's a big one. I mean, it's a game changing epiphany here.

[Brad]

It's a really important one. So, okay, what I did was really simple. We use an 8% annual return here at choose of I as the back of the envelope. What we anticipate. Now, obviously some years are more than that, some years are negative. We, we can never know exactly what the growth will be of the stock market, but over the long haul, 8% is what we use. So I said, this is a 40 year investing lifetime and you put in a thousand dollars a month. Okay, now that sounds like a big number to a lot of people, but really you make a hundred grand between a couple or even a solo person. $100 a month is a 12% savings rate. So that's, that's a lot of people in the FI community are many multiples of that. So I basically said, all right, look, we expect a 8% annual return, but when you invest in something like VTI or VTS X, there's a couple of hundredths of a percent. Tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of what's called the expense ratio, the underlying expenses. So I said, okay, let's say it's 4, 100 of a percent. So the best return you could get is 7.96% somewhere in that vicinity. Okay, so Jonathan, if you put in $1,000 a month at 7.96% annual return after 40 years, you have $3.45 million. Not bad. That sounds good. That's not too shabby, right? That's if you save 12%. Okay. So most of us in the fight community are going to have three and a half million dollars. Okay. Which is pretty cool in and of itself. Now, like you said, if you go to an advisor who charges you a 1% fee, which sounds like nothing, they charge us assets under management. It's a, um, so 1%. But they're not going to put you in VTI or VTSX.

[Jonathan]

They can't justify that.

[Brad]

They can't.

[Jonathan]

How could you say, well, I'm just going to put you in the same thing as everybody else. They have to be more creative to justify their brilliance and more importantly, their fee.

[Brad]

Exactly. So they try. And even though we believe there's no. There are no mutual funds on earth, actively managed funds that are going to beat the market over 40 years. So I think it's a fool's errand. But like you said, it's about incentives. So this person has to convince you that they are brilliant. So they're going to put you in a fund that has something akin to another 1% fee. So that means your 8% market return now goes down to 6%. Right. So you're getting a 6% annual return. You're still putting that 1,000 bucks in a month over 40 years. Instead of having 3.45 million, you have 1.99. You have $2 million.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I threw out there. It's going to cut it in half. And I remember those numbers. They sat with me and it was raw and it was painful, but I wasn't 100% sure if that's what your calculator was going to say. That's crazy.

[Brad]

It is. Almost. Almost half. That is unbelievable. So the key here, the incremental gain, is fees matter. And they matter a lot. They just matter.

[Jonathan]

And Brad, you know, it also ties to what you just said earlier about how you just need to automate things here. I want to point this out. All of us have this feeling about what the market's going to do over a period of time. But also, as we get more and more money that's sitting on the sidelines that we could invest, we get more and more anxious about which point should we go in. So getting your brain out of the way and thinking about horizon is so much more important. Horizon and fees are so much more important than when you go in with your bag of money. And I'll give everybody example. It should be crystal clear in all of our minds. Covid happened, right? And there was just this crazy fear around what was going to happen. And at any given point, and there were people that probably called it right and people that called it wrong and maybe regretted at the point. On my. My point here is now all right, it's now 20, 26 and you're sitting on all this money that you've had on the sidelines this entire time, waiting for the quote unquote market to drop so you can find a big opportunity. You could go back and find the worst day to invest in the market, you know, back when, right before COVID happened. And, and you'd still be thrilled with the choice and you'd rather have the money invested than where it is now. Time really matters here. And it's so easy to get caught up in, oh, what's the right day? Should I do it at the beginning of the day, should I do it? And people much wiser than me have said and quoted, time in the market is so much more important than timing the market. And the problem with winning, when you time it once and you nail it, is you start to think that you are really good at this. And we only get one life. So it's only when you look back that you realize, wow, I okay, got the win there. But it would have been really easy just to take my brain out of it. And I would have been, you know, 3.45, $4 million, you know, just based on stupid math and investing over a long time horizon. That's just the reality of this. Nobody keeps up with the market because their brain gets in the way and they want to pick the right day and the wrong day and, and you get it right once or. But you don't stay that way over an investing horizon. Very, very, very few individuals over a 40 year period can do that. And it's not your advisor.

[Brad]

Yeah, Jonathan, that's clearly the massive impact for fees. But there are fees everywhere. There are convenience fees, there are bank fees, there are ATM fees, there are overdraft fees, there are all sorts of fees. If you're paying fees in any aspect of your financial life, unless you're doing it very purposely, right. Like I pay one or two annual fees on credit cards that I have very specific reasons to do. Like I might get a free night certificate from my Hyatt card or I might have a couple hundred thousand Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So I keep my Sapphire preferred card open. I'm doing that with eyes wide open and very intentionally. But if you were paying fees anywhere in your financial life, it probably means you're doing something wrong or you're just being lazy, frankly. If you're getting ATM fees, I don't know who needs cash in this day and age, frankly. But like, if you're paying ATM fees because you're too lazy to go to your bank and do it. I mean, come on, seriously, like if you're paying overdraft fees, if you're any of these fees, convenience fees, what does convenience fee matter? Like, even down to again, people in the fi community, we have assets, we don't have to worry about cash flow. I've noticed that sometimes like my insurance company charges me a monthly fee to pay with a credit card or something like that. So I just simply ask the question, hey, can I pay this annually and only get hit with one of these small fees or something? Or frankly, can I pay annually with a check and not have to pay a fee? And the answer was, yes, of course you can. I asked the question.

[Jonathan]

I think you're right about the outcome. But I would, I would suggest that the solution you can be a little bit more creative. So I could definitely empathize with the person that's too lazy to go to their exact bank. But I agree with your point that I'm not going to pay fees. I'm going to die on the hill of trying to find ways to pay fees, especially to a entity, a banking institution that's making money by holding my money. Like this is literally you get to hold my money. So I'm not going to pay you fees for that privilege of that I know that you're making money off my money, you know, regardless. So with that in mind, what are your options? Well, you could go to your bank. Absolutely. That's one way to solve it. But online banks are desperate for your business and they don't have physical locations. They're all competing for your money. And especially in that lane, if your bank is, and you are, you need to use ATMs a lot. And for whatever reason that's not working for you, you should look online at an online bank that offers online checking accounts if that meets your needs. I know USA as an example offers up to $25 a month in ATM fee reimbursement. I'm having a personal grudge match right now with my bank because they want to charge me for checks. I happen to use need checks for a few transactions in my life in particular where they would charge a processing fee for a credit card or something like that. And I we're talking about tithing, charitable donations, et cetera, things like, of this nature. And I prefer to use a check. So I go through checks and my wife uses checks when she's paying for various things for our kids. So anyways, I need checks and I'm running out of checks. My bank wants to charge me. They say, hey, if you have a checking account that has $20,000 average balance a month, we won't charge you for that. Or you can pay us, you know, some 36 bucks for 100 checks or whatever. The number, some crazy number. I'm like, this is madness. This is mad. Well, it's on you to resolve it, right? You got to decide the level of friction and you can do the. I usually can just go and have a conversation and get the outcome that Brad just suggested where as a one off, they're perfectly willing to just comp you these checks this one time. And by the way, the one time is about once a year. But alternatively to that, you could go find an online account that has a checking offering and, and gives you unlimited free checks. They're out there. So just take advantage of the fact that banks actually really, really do want your money. To me, it doesn't seem really, and this is actually another point, you shouldn't be storing lots of money in the checking account making 0.01% interest. So the fees work against you, but they can also and should, you know, in terms of the form of interest, they should work for you. So if for some reason you do need to have an amount of money like $20,000 plus in an account, I would not be very comfortable leaving that in an account that makes.01% interest. That doesn't seem like a strong strategic move, especially if the benefit is free checks.

[Brad]

That is very true. Very, very true. I would say. I totally agree with that. My slight, slight addition and maybe counterpoint would be for me, I leave an additional couple thousand dollars extra in my checking account to lower and mitigate my stress. Okay. I think this is one of the beautiful things about personal finance is I think everything should pass for me at least the sleep well at night test. And for me, I don't want to deal with, hey, is my electric bill coming out on the 14th? I don't have enough money. What if my credit card bill is a little extra this month? I leave a little extra buffer in my checking account and I never have to worry about that. Now I am again, I'm doing stocks.

[Jonathan]

Below 20 to 18, five for a day. They're hitting you with five bucks a month.

[Brad]

Well, that's crazy. That's obviously crazy.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, madness.

[Brad]

Yeah. Definitely not talking about your crazy scenario, but just in general.

[Jonathan]

I agree. You're, you're softening me up. Thinking about, I'm like, all right, was that too hard? You want, if you have money Sitting on the sidelines, you should try to optimize it to whatever degree you can. I mean, we can agree on that, right?

[Brad]

Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt. And I think that's something. Another kind of countercultural thing that we've talked about here is the concept of the emergency fund. And this. We had big earn from early retirement now on a couple years ago to talk about this very specifically where he argues, and we in turn argued as well that we don't need the massive emergency fund in the traditional sense. I think a lot of people who have financial issues, for them to get to a couple thousand dollars of net worth is a massive thing. And we're not arguing against that. It's just. Let's talk very specifically, people on the path to fi. We have an increasing an amount of assets and we're going to be very wealthy, right? Many of us have a hundred thousand or more in terms of assets. Now, let's say my annual expenses are $60,000 a year. So six months of expenses are 30 grand, right? Do I need $30,000 sitting in a checking account or even a high yield savings account doing nothing? No, I don't, because I have assets. And there are very few things short of a ransom note or something crazy that you actually need a ton of cash for in a couple of hours. Basically, in this day and age, you can transfer money in one or two business days. So our argument on that episode was you can invest all of your money above and beyond whatever that threshold is. Like I said, I keep probably 5 to $10,000 in my checking account just as a sleep well at night test. But you could put less than that in, frankly, if you had money pouring in every month from your W2 job. But above and beyond that, if I had money sitting in my investments in an emergency, I just sell the investments and I transfer the money over. So it's an interesting rethink on the traditional emergency fund, which is, oh, wow, I've saved this money. It's just sitting here. I'm safe now. We're all safe on the path to five. We have plenty of assets and they're growing every month.

[Jonathan]

And going back to things that we talked about earlier, this is one of the reasons you were mentioning the Roth. You can get your Roth contributions out. You can get them out anytime. You don't need to be 59 and a half. So in terms of where can your emergency fund go past a certain point if you're waiting to invest, you know, some very, very long time because you feel like you need to have some monster amount of money to be able to have an emergency fund before you can do it. You know, the rethink here is it's not debating whether or not you should have a way to cover an unexpected expense. Like, right. It's where is it? And there's a lot of options. And some people might say, well. Well, it could never be in anything outside of a checking or savings or CD or whatever, or it could only be in a taxable account. And we're saying, if you understand the rules of this game, there's a lot more flexibility than you would have ever considered. And if you have $30,000 worth of contributions and your Roth IRA, first of all, if you don't have an emergency fund and you're relatively early on in your journey, congratulations, you're winning. But then if you do have an emergency and that happens to be the only free cash that you have, and you have to resolve this, that money's accessible, your contributions are accessible. So it's just. It's misguided to say, well, that money's locked up in retirement now. Your contributions can be accessed before 59 and a half. You can't have the gain back that. That is where you're going to get taxed and penalized if you try to pull that. So just be very aware of that difference and really start thinking through where does that. And how much does that emergency fund need to be and where does it need to be? How long are you going to delay investing for your. Brad. All right, I'm gonna admit defeat. You know, let's see here. I have. We had a goal of getting 100 things mentioned. That was maybe an unspoken goal. I don't know if we said it out loud, but we made it to 14 or 15. So I guess. And here's what I would say if it was just us quoting a list without commentary, it's of mediocre value. But I'm finding this very informative. And I'm. It's just. It's great. So I am open to doing another round of these. What do you think?

[Brad]

Let's do it.

[Jonathan]

Okay. All right, everyone. So we will be returning same Bat time, same Bat Channel, and we'll be doing financial independent. Brad, was that. Did that land. Does anybody still remember that little 1960s Batman television.

[Brad]

I got it.

[Jonathan]

Okay, cool. Just making sure. I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know. How far back are you allowed to go, man? That was. You know, was it the greatest superhero television show of all time. I'm not telling you that it wasn't. Anyways, we'll be back the same time next weekend. We're gonna go farther with these things that you just don't know that you don't know. And we're going to try to. I thought we were just going to list them. That's what Brad told me. I didn't totally believe them because I've. I've been here before. But nonetheless, like, I'm actually pretty happy with the level of depth that we're covering. I think it's better for you this way. And as a result of this, totally good with doing another round of this. We'll try to hit a few more next week and then we'll see if we need to keep going. But let us know. Is this working for you? Are you enjoying this? Does this feel like the show that you want to check back in for? And to that end, I want to invite you to be a part of it. So we had a bunch of contributions for our goal setting for 2026. We're going through the process of listening to those, reading those and building our episode around it. That's going to be rolling out in the next couple of weeks here. So that is now closed, but we are going to be featuring segments and we want to feature you on these segments in many, many episodes to come. And so there's two segments. It's going to always be open. Right? It's all. No matter when you're listening to this, we want your feedback. We voicemail and the two segments that we're announcing right now, and they're probably not a surprise, but hopefully they're exciting, are frugal win of the weeks and life hacks. And so I will give Brad just a second to explain. Brad, what is a frugal win of the week?

[Brad]

Yeah, Jay, so good question. I actually highlighted one of these a couple weeks ago on our first episode back that came out at the beginning of this month where it was just something simple. It was, hey, I have these element electrolyte packages every morning. And I actually found a way, instead of paying $1.50 to them per package, which was crazy, for some salt, magnesium and potassium to make it myself at a cost of a couple pennies. That's something really simple. And it was just like a fun, fun win. I think that's what we're looking for. Like another one that I've got, which is I'm in this walkable community now and Whole Foods is actually here in the community. It's a five minute walk down the road. On Tuesdays they have buy one, get one on pounds of ground beef. So I literally put. And this is another life hack or and this actually ties into life hacks is One of my long standing life hacks is I use this app called todoist. So t o d o I s t and basically I put my entire life in this todoist. So I have outsourced my entire brain to this. Jonathan, I kid you not. I have a recurring task on Tuesday which is go to Whole Foods for buy one, get one ground beef. And it's just a nice little way. I can go anytime. I can be lazy, I can go whenever or I can just go on Tuesday when they have the sale. This was just a cool little frugal win of the week. So along those lines up to massive things. It doesn't have to be minuscule like my 2. It can be something significant. So maybe that gives a little flavor for both frugal wins of the week and life hacks. There are hundreds of thousands of you listening to this podcast. You have so many incredible things that you're doing in your lives. Let's share them. This is the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show. This is what it's all about. It's not limited to me and Jonathan. It is expansive. It's all about you send these things in, send what you're doing, and we want to talk about them. We can bomb through these life hacks. We can talk about dozens of them or maybe five or ten since you and I bogged down with with all our commentary. But that's the cool thing. These are forever. These are evergreen. And we're going to talk about them. Hopefully on just about every episode, we'll pass along a frugal one of the week and a life hack.

[Jonathan]

Someone's like, Brad, Jonathan, can you just get out of the way more of the information? I don't need all the editorial.

[Brad]

Come on. It's good stuff. So how does. How does someone submit this?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, absolutely. So Brad and I have been racking our brains for what intuitive looks like. This is something Brad's heard me say, intuitive. It doesn't come easy. It's earned over time. And so we have decided this is the path forward. You're just going to go to chooseify.com login. It's that simple, right? If you want to be a part of the community, you need to be a part of the community. So you're going to do that and you're immediately going to Have a dashboard and at the top of your dashboard, it could change over time. But a version of calls to action. Right. How are you going to take action each and every week and also be a part of the podcast? How do you want, do you want to contribute to the podcast? So this top dashboard item that will show up as soon as you log in will be your gateway to contribute to the show or to do something based on something you heard on the show. We just wrapped up our goals where people shared with us their goals for 2026. We're putting that episode now. But right in that same area, you're also going to see the option to leave a frugal win of the week or to leave a life hack. So a life hack is a super broad, expansive thing that can cover anything you really, you know, you want that you just think other people need to know about. For me today I just was letting you know, hey, you may not be Google fi year round, but if you're doing international travel, they are really, really good for international travel. But make sure you use it the day before you leave the country to make sure that you don't have any issues on the other side. But you might have one about a very niche scholarship opportunity that had something to do with being a caddy at some school in the Midwest. We've had these before and they have provided value to many, many thousands of people over the years. So, you know, if you have something you haven't heard us mention on the show and you think we need to be aware of it, we want to bring you in and we want to feature that information.

[Brad]

Absolutely. And we will certainly be adding additional segments. So it's not just going to be limited to those two, but that's. We're rolling out right now. So yeah, choose a vet.com login. This also doubles as the local group. So whenever you want to log into your local group, when you create an account, you will get email invites for all the local group events, which is absolutely critical. We have been hamstrung by Facebook for eight or nine years now where only a tiny percentage of people, thanks to their ridiculous algorithm, get notifications. Now you get an email notification of every local group event. Jonathan, we've seen 30 to 50% increases in local group attendance since admins have started using your platform. And it's really, really remarkable if you don't for some reason. Remember, choose a Vet.com login. You could just go to our main homepage. Choose a vet.com in the upper right. There's sign in, you can go there. That doubles as the same thing, but just really simply. If you wanted that nice, simple thing, choose a comm slash login.

[Jonathan]

All right, my friends, the fire is spreading. We'll see you next time. As we continue to go down the road less traveled.

[Brad]

Sam.