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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to choose a FI. Today on the show, we're starting off 2026 with a bang and saying this year everything changes. And that shows up in a lot of ways, both for the podcast and for each and every one of us in the FI community. And it starts today. We've always called this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show, and we redouble our efforts starting today. This is your call to action to become part of the community and more critically, for you to take action to make your life better in every way. We're going to provide the motivation and accountability, and we're all in this together. We're moving forward stronger as a community where you can share and then we can amplify everything you're doing in your own life to succeed. From small life hacks to celebrating your frugal wins and then sharing them with the community for us all to learn from. We have the technology in place to make this happen and to make this even more fun, I'm happy to bring back my co founder of Choose a Phi Jonathan Mendonza, to help me not only with this episode, but many to come in 2026. This is going to be a lot of fun, and no matter where you are on your path to fi, you're going to want to be here each and every week. And with that, welcome to Choose F. Before we get started, I keep this podcast entirely ad free for two reasons. First, this is a five 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. All right, Jonathan, how you doing, buddy?
- [01:51]
B
You're gonna come at me with how you're doing, buddy? I say, how you doing, buddy?
- [01:55]
A
Come on, it's been my show for three years. I get to do what I want.
- [01:59]
B
Well, you know, I'm doing quite well, Brad. Doing quite well.
- [02:02]
A
Okay, I hear you. You one of me. 2026. This is pretty wild.
- [02:09]
B
This is the year everything changes.
- [02:12]
A
I like that.
- [02:12]
B
You know? You know, I found that extra bit of gravel after I hit 40. Did you notice that? That's what happens as you get older. It just keeps going. You know who? Anybody need me to do an intro for them in a whirl? Yeah, I got you. You're at the edge of your seat because we're about to talk about the path to financial independence.
- [02:29]
A
Okay. How many old school listeners are like, oh, I remember. I remember that voice. What was it? Spike? Real in a world.
- [02:36]
B
Oh, he was so good. Yeah. I went back to Fiverr to see if I could find him again. I. Maybe he's changed his alias or whatnot, but that man had a powerful voice.
- [02:43]
A
Yeah, it's cool. I actually went back recently. I told you this. I went back and listened to the first like 40 episodes of Choose a Five and it was really fun. It was so much fun to go back and hear those early days. That was nine years ago, Jonathan. Nine years. It's unbelievable. And it's interesting, right? Everything changes, but everything stays the same. Going back to the very beginning, you and I really. Our first event ever was Camp Mustache in Florida, before it was called Campfire. So Stephen Boyer's Camp Mustache in January of 2017. And we are literally nine years later. I'm headed down there next week, which I'm really excited about. And yeah, it's amazing to see how this community has grown. When, when we were there in 2017, he actually had this pie in the sky idea to have a co housing community for the FI community in rural Georgia. And this was something that my actual real estate investments, which is something interesting that we could talk about. I actually wound up buying two properties in this community. And just this past year, in 2025, I actually sold them. So I don't own any real estate anymore, but I sold them to the first settlers of the FI community in Warner Robbins, Georgia, which is really pretty wild.
- [04:03]
B
I love that you started with like pie in the sky ideas because you get to do that. You're allowed to have pie in the sky ideas. You're allowed to manifest things and give it a shot. And if it works, amazing. And if it doesn't, okay, move on to the next idea and you test things, right? You're not all in on one hand, but lots of ideas have merit if only you can have the time to lean into it and you can find others with enthusiasm, you know, to join you for the ride. There's, there's merit there. So. Yeah, that's crazy, man. I, I was going to correct you and you called it Camp Mustache and then you would have corrected my correction because you're right, that's exactly how it started. And now he does what, like 12, 13 maybe? It's, it's, it's a, it's 10 plus camps a year around The United States. I think they're doing one in Spain.
- [04:45]
A
Yes, Spain and Italy actually now. So, yeah, it's. Stephen has done a remarkable job. It's really wild and. And I think. Would you hit on there experimentation? I think that's one of the hallmarks of the FI community. And the path to FI is this is about experimenting with your life. And I think it's about doing something a little bit differently. That has always been at the core of what we're doing. We're living the same middle class lifestyle as you called it. It's the entry level middle class lifestyle that's we're just trying to live live middle class lives, but yet get wildly wealthy at the same time. And it's not a get rich quick scheme.
- [05:23]
B
This.
- [05:24]
A
There's no secret behind the secret. There's nothing like that. It is just a replicable path. And I think the fun part is we get to experiment all the way. This was what we envisioned in 2017, experiments in financial independence. And maybe it didn't go exactly how you and I thought. We talked about the fishbowl and we were going to do all these things and build businesses in public and do real estate and do crowdfunding. Different random things. Never did that. But.
- [05:52]
B
Well, hang on there. Hang on. You're just gonna wash everything. We haven't done anything sitting on our hands over here. Nothing has happened. It just. What.
- [06:03]
A
Timo, tell me more. Dispel me in my.
- [06:05]
B
I would. I would agree with you that what we thought would happen is not what happened. But I would go a little bit further and say in the very best way possible.
- [06:17]
A
Without a doubt. Without a doubt.
- [06:20]
B
And to elaborate on that for our community, you have these two guys in our case. And I think even now nobody thinks of us as like experts per se. Occasionally it happens, you know. But I think most people that have spent any time listening to us appreciate that Brad and my place have always been in the role of cheerleaders, ambassadors and advocates or this amazing community that has been around long before either of us entered the scene and will be around long after. No, anybody's talking about choose advice. Just been here has been part of this that talks about this idea that we call financial independence. And there are maybe flavors of that and individuals and personalities that have their own take on what it means. But broadcast. Brad and I always felt like. And we got better at this because when you first start, you don't know where you're. You don't have the permission. You haven't given yourself permission to decide what your flavor is, what your core beliefs actually are. You're actually still ingesting all this incredible volume of ideas and you're like trying to decide what this path is. But we did, I think, you know, you went really far on this. You were very overt about this. And I, and I completely agreed with your position very early on. I remember you saying, we're not dogmatic about anything. Now, it does not mean that we do not have strong beliefs. And maybe you could even say strong beliefs loosely held, like you could still convince us that we're wrong. It is possible. It has happened. It has been documented where that has happened. But the idea, I think, has merit, that we're not dogmatic about anything. We want to hear the ideas. We want to hear your ideas. And so one of the things that we said early on was we don't want a podcast, right? We don't want a podcast for a podcast. We want choose if I to be an ecosystem to foster and grow this conversation. And really something that we believed could be a modern day movement, without a doubt.
- [08:27]
A
And that's why we called it from the very beginning the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. And I think that really has been such an integral, such an integral part of Choose a Phi that the community is everything. It's everything on our show. It literally is the lifeblood. Choose a Phi and our local groups are the lifeblood of the worldwide financial independence movement. And that's just such a wild thing. And there are people every single day in hundreds upon hundreds of cities across the world getting together and sharing their lives with other people on the path to fi. And that's just truly extraordinary. And this really is better with five friends. To take a quote out of Diana Mariam's economy is FI is better with friends and it's better with the community. It's better when we all band together with the incredible knowledge that we have as this community. And we share and we work and we iterate and we experiment. That word again. Experiment. When we experiment together, when we work towards common goals and we see other people like us succeeding at this, they might be a couple years ahead. Jonathan, I'm, I guess around six years older than you. I. This whole way I was a little bit ahead. Right. And that's what's so neat. I think people saw themselves in, in us. You and I are totally different people with totally different personalities and backgrounds and different parts on the path to fi. Different interests, different talents. I know you love talent stacking. And what's cool is we still get along incredibly well. There are so many things we have in common. And I think that's the beauty of this path to FI is we find people that we might not find in the regular course of life. And we certainly find really interesting people and really interesting things to pursue and have fun with and experiment with. And that is a game changer. It's a total game changer. The people that are important to me in my life now, almost exclusively, are people from the FI community. What a crazy thing. Like, we were all islands unto ourselves ten years ago. We just were. That's how it worked. We were reading blogs. It's funny listening to those early episodes we talked about. Oh, what blog article did you read? Like, that's gone the way of the dodo bird. That doesn't. That's not a thing anymore. People don't. I mean, maybe at the margin.
- [10:56]
B
Still kind of surprises me. You're right. I know you're right. But it still surprises me how quickly things move. Because at the time it was. It was, it was. And I. And I realize now people say, oh, forums or whatever and. But. But wow, man. You know, 1012 years later, like 2010, 2012, when I was absorbing my information, you were looking for a blog that had certain amounts of content. I mean, that's just where it was. But here we are 2023 and beyond, you know, now I guess 2025, going to 2026. But really the point I'm making is we're in a post GPT, post social media, post community at, you know, type of lane, and you got a wire hooked up to the back of your head saying, absorb by content or absorb information. Oh, I know Kung fu. Anybody? Anybody? Yes. You can still do it. 1997 sandwiches. Yes.
- [11:55]
A
All right, Jonathan. So one of the things I love about you, one of the many things, is you are great at naming episodes. This is something that I've struggled with for four years now. So I think the happiest part about you being back is, is that you're gonna name the episodes. But no, just kidding. I love you, buddy. But so this year, everything changes. And my response to that is, but everything stays the same.
- [12:17]
B
Yeah, I make the title and then Brad goes behind and like undercuts the title and goes back to the opposite. This is like a yin yang type thing going on here.
- [12:24]
A
It works.
- [12:25]
B
So I gotta stuck the kick out of thinking about how you were gonna have to come up with titles. I just want to point out there's a little bit of devil in me that was Just saying. Brad's gonna come.
- [12:33]
A
I would. I would ask the guests for help. I would do everything. I sw. Do 300 episodes a year if I didn't have to title them. Okay, so everything changes. What do we got?
- [12:47]
B
All right, so first of all, I am back, everyone. I'm coming back on the show. Brad has formally asked me to come join him again. He, you know, he. He did not actually kick me out for overusing the word unpack. That was. That was not the case. In fact, let me just give you guys a little bit of setup for what's happened over the last couple years. Brad and I, we experience true joy doing those early episodes. We're chatting, we're bringing your conversation, we're learning the concepts along with you. We're exploring and we're making mistakes live and in front of a growing audience, and they're calling us on it. And as a result of us acknowledging the mistakes and iterating the message, everybody got better in a way that was tangible. It felt like it was happening in real time. And as a result, the podcast outperformed anyone's expectations, becoming probably one of the largest independent finance podcasts in the country. By any measure, that was mind boggling. For the first time, financial independence and not a brown banana journalist's meme of what this community was, was resonating with the entire world. We had a common language that we could speak. What's the problem? Well, if you want to harness a movement, you need to have a platform for it, all right? Otherwise you're using duct tape and glue. All right? What that means is we're. We're working on the back of spreadsheets, we're working on the back of cobbling together no code solutions, using little chrome extensions to try to connect various messages. When someone sends you an email, there's no way, you know, you can answer that person's question. But. And that was helpful for one person, and that's great. But you have a limited number of hours to do everything. And as the podcast grows and more and more great ideas are coming on your plate, you're just fundamentally unable to facilitate that, to find a way to get that message out, to help as many people as possible. And so you're constantly dropping the ball somewhere. You might do something really well. But the core idea was we want to help a movement and create an ecosystem for this community so that as many people can benefit as possible. And we want to be able to grow with you. We want to be able to say, where are you now? This journey is mathematical, but it's also psychological, and it dramatically benefits from connection. You being able to connect with each other, and then you've been able to connect with the content that you need at the place that you need it, and your journey is changing, and you're also not at the same place as someone else. And that is the beauty of it. Brad and I are not at the same place, you know, and so this. This is the benefit. But what does that mean? That means somebody's getting left behind, Right? Somebody isn't getting the message where they need that, and it's so spread out that as soon as the media decides what the next hot topic is, you've moved on. Right. All right, we wanted to solve this, but here's the problem. Brad was a former accountant, and I was a former pharmacist. Did you hear tech anywhere in there? I remember being fascinated by being able to get an HTML box with a red border on it. That. That was the extent of my knowledge. We just. We could not do it. Brad, you're laughing. I'll give you.
- [16:00]
A
It was pretty cool at the time.
- [16:02]
B
How did you do that? Do you know what CSS is? All right, so some of you don't. That's fine. It's not your burden. That's not something you need to. You need to resolve at this point in time. But in general, it just shows you, if you're aware, how fundamentally unable Brad and I were to solve a tech problem. And so as it was growing, we tried to bring on team members and help, and people really had good intentions. But even through outsourcing, we could not get the platform and the community to be able to handle what we had in our brains. We couldn't manifest it. And a lot of things did get manifested. There's a documentary that's out there now that really just did an incredible job highlighting various aspects of this community. Lots of incredible things have happened, but this core idea that was in our head was not going to be able to be solved by throwing more money at the problem. That was not the issue. It required one of us being able to take a step back and just think through every tiny little piece. And it sounds like this is very obvious and very linear, and it was just time. There was no guarantee that any of this would work, But I asked Brad, hey, I just need to take a step back, and I need to solve this, and I want to build this. And so Brad kept the show going, and I just went behind the scenes. I learned how to build pretty boxes with red borders. Is everybody impressed yet? Oh, good use of your time. But along the way with that, I figured out how to do databases and I figured out how to do relationships and I figured out how to do dashboards and gamification and tracking and social media development and all these types of things that all of us are maybe more familiar with. But the idea is financial independence is not something that's a binary thing where you are just there or not there. It's a process and you're getting little wins every day. And so the show needs to be a way that we can come together, focus on something, and have a way for us to, if we want to take actions inside of a community and if we need help with an area, be able to find help and get feedback from other people that are slightly farther ahead of us and then be able to incrementally grow thinking. If you think through. I want people to kind of think through what I'm going to call the phases of FI. And I've had 20 or 30 definitions. I'll probably change it next year. This one is the one that I just introduced Brad to yesterday. And it was as I was thinking about this. But there's a strong pattern for this belief system that I have at the moment. The first phase of financial independence does not have to do with your bank account, has to do with discovery. You became aware of that this concept existed. That's massive. You became aware that there's a community of people that have realized a tangible way to find out their number and the context for that. And you have people, you say, well, I discovered FI or I discovered choose a phi. And yeah, that's it. It's quite literally that simple. It's someone saying, here's the episode to go listen to. And it resonates with them. And at this point you have a lot of individuals that maybe have these identity statements like, oh, I'm bad with money, or that's not something that I, you know, look at. And I think that's the key. Someone that says I'm bad at money. That's another way of saying I've never looked. I've never really wanted to look. I've never really. Because maybe there's angst there or emotion or untold stressors, but I've been afraid to look. Because you can solve that piece, that awareness. You could know Your number within 5 minutes of 1 episode. And Brad, I'm going to give it back to you. We'll keep going through a couple of the other phases, but I want to say our Goal is going to be to help you discover financial independence, give you an easy way to bring friends and family members and help them discover it and then have a community to grow from discovery to independence, all the various phases in between and just win together.
- [19:51]
A
Yeah, I love that. And I think there's so many things there. So right you have. And you're going to get to this obviously, but you've created an amazing platform on our website. I'll toot your horn for you. You've probably spent 5,000 hours over the last two plus years, literally 16 hour days just on end to create something extraordinary for all of us. And, and we're finally at the point where it's real and it can help every local group, it can help every aspect of the FI community and it can certainly help the show and it can help it be that ultimate crowdsource personal finance show that we envisioned nine years ago. And you and I tried to cobble it together back then and it was fun. Go back and listen to those old episodes, to everybody out there, frankly. We're going to, we're going to touch on a lot of these topics. So do this or don't do it, but just for fun, getting everyone involved, you feel part of something and when you have questions, we can answer them. We can get our amazing friends who are world class experts to answer them. We can put them on the show. We can talk through this, we can talk through our little frugal wins of the week. Jonathan, I had this fun little frugal win of the week last week when I had no, nobody to tell it to. And I was like, what are you.
- [21:07]
B
Just, you just going to like move on to the next thing? You're just. Everyone, this is our first segment. We're going to do frugal win of the week. Brad, what do you got for us?
- [21:14]
A
Okay, so you know the element electrolyte packets? Have you ever, have you ever heard of this?
- [21:20]
B
I, I do know what an electrolyte. Okay, let's just, let's just give me a partial.
- [21:24]
A
Yeah, we'll go with that. So Element, Element. And this is. No, no shade at them. Certainly they are because I buy these things. They're very expensive. They're these electrolytes, salt, potassium and magnesium that basically every podcast that has ads on it, obviously we don't pretty much has ads for Element. And these things are expensive. They're like a dollar fifty a pack. So we're talking like if you have a couple, it's $3 a day for just a little bit of salt and some, some electrolytes. And I was dutifully buying these things because, you know, it's, it's theoretically good for your health. Right. And interestingly, they actually publish their recipe on the website. They're basically saying like we're so good and what we do is so good that we're going to even give you our recipe and just dare you to, to make it. And we took them at their dare basically and just bought the ingredients off Amazon. And instead of being A$50 per serving of electrolytes, it comes out to about somewhere between three and five pennies. So three to five cents. It's amazing. It's the easiest thing. You, you just grab a little food scale, you dump in some salt, you dump in some magnesium and potassium at the exact ratio that they put. We'll, we'll put the link in the show notes here. We, I put in a couple little flakes of stevia and a couple drops of lemon juice and boom. I have my nice element and it is four pennies as opposed to a dollar fifty.
- [22:51]
B
This episode brought to you by Element Life. Follow through by going to Google Drive slash link.
- [22:58]
A
Yeah, I think obviously we don't do advertising but, but I don't think elements ever coming around but.
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B
Well, not now. Thanks Brad.
- [23:04]
A
Not now.
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B
We can, we can, we can work this, we can, we can edit it and post. It's fine.
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A
But they, I mean they're great. I've been, I've been a customer for years. But yeah, it was just, that was just a really cool thing. And anyway, that's such a tiny little thing, Jonathan. But that's minimum $3 a day. It's a thousand bucks a year that I just saved which is not nothing. Right? That's $25,000 less I need in my Phi. In my Fi pot to reach fi.
- [23:27]
B
But I mean Brad, that's the cool thing about life hacks when you have, when you're limited. And that's the really cool thing about crowdsourcing a show which was our earliest mandate was this has to be a crowdsourced show was through lens of Brad is an expert. Well that means that you're going to get what Brad knows and basically limited to what Brad knows and the people that are closest in his sphere of influence. Same with Jonathan if that's the case. But because of the mandate early on for crowdsourcing personal finance, we were inundated with ideas that we had never contemplated or considered and it allowed us to go to places that were not traditionally considered personal finance. Which is fine because we viewed this through the lens of life optimization. Right? We viewed this through the lens of what if you can reclaim your most precious non renewable resource, your time, what else opens up for you? That was powerful. And I think it was a fresh approach to this. Because if you think about it, if we're taking you through this process of saying, all right, discovering financial independence, there's this community, here's how you calculate your financial independence number. And by the way, maybe someone is listening to this for the first time. They're like, all right, well, come on. What, what, what? All right, here's how you can calculate your financial independence number. And then you can just, you can check us out, you can move on, go to the next thing. Here it is, the way you calculate your financial independence number checks, notes. Yep, here it is. It's take your expenses on a monthly basis or you can do annual, but if you go monthly, you'd multiply it times 12, all right? And then multiply that number times 25. And that gives you a number that people would generally call a financial independence number. Now, there's a million tiny little caveats and things that you'd want to put on and immediate questions that would come up which are all very, very right. But that number, that very simple mathematical calculation is what the vast majority of our community would be, would consider a rule of thumb, starting place for figuring out what is my number and what does it mean? I'll give it back to you, Brad. What does it mean that you know your number or that you have a number? What is a financial independence number? Once you calculate it.
- [25:39]
A
Yeah. So the beauty is that this is your North Star, okay? Whereas I think what's so powerful about Phi is that you control your life, destiny, it's in your hands. Because when you hear in the general ether, in the personal finance space, for whatever that's worth the Susie Orman's of the world, you can never retire. You hear a drumbeat of negativity, it's impossible. You're going to need 10, 15, 20 million dollars because healthcare or some nonsense.
- [26:11]
B
You know, Brad, without the Suze Orman's of the world, we wouldn't be able to talk about the Susie Orman. She's really doing us a great service.
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A
She is a good foil. Yeah. Thank you.
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B
Thank you, Susie.
- [26:22]
A
But seriously, it's what's so nice about Fi, and I think this, to me was the very first thing that turned me onto Phi, was, wow, I have something to shoot for and I control it. So what it Means really simply is when you reach that number, and like Jonathan said, at its essence, it's your annual expenses multiplied by 25, okay? And this is agnostic for what your expenses are. We're not here to say you need to live on $10,000 a year or 40,000 or 80 or whatever it is. It's whatever your life cost, you multiply by 25 and that's your fine number. So really simply, if your life expenses cost $40,000, your fine number is a million. If your life costs 80,000, your fine number is 2 million. And this just works really simply. And ultimately what we're doing here is we're getting you to a point where work is optional, okay? Because you have now built up enough of a net worth that you can pull out 4% of that every single year and live off of that amount. So really simply, this is the 4% rule of thumb. If you are, if you have a $2 million net worth, investable assets net worth, you can pull out 4% of that each year. So just go back to high school math, right? 2 million times 0.04, that equals 80,000. So if your life costs 80,000 or less, in that case you are at financial independence. You do not need income in that year because your assets kick off enough that you can sell them and, or whatever the dividends, et cetera. But in essence, you're selling assets from your net worth and that is covering what your life costs. And at that point, work is completely optional.
- [28:14]
B
Did you notice that as you know, Brad was pointing that out and he was going through that calculus that actually income wasn't a factor? Right? What you make wasn't a factor. Now here's what's really interesting to point out. Go look at every single other non financial independence calculator and specifically go look for retirement calculators on the Internet. They're all going to ask you for your income. And it makes it sound, and even, you know, Susie in this case makes it sound like unless you have a specific income, you're not going to be able to retire. And expenses do not determine your financial independence number in any way. It's an expense driven calculation. Now we can go farther and we will. And actually I'm going to hit this really hard. Some individuals will rightly point out, well, how do I account for Social Security or how do I account for a pension that I'm expecting in the future, okay. And how do I account for the fact that maybe I'm paying off debt and so my expenses right now are going to decrease. And I'm going to be talking extensively about a topic that I'm calling effective need. Right. And that's borrowed, really, I think, from like fafsa, other calculations, but I think it works for us in that financial independence is a static number that gives us a North Star. Effective need is a true reality in terms of a projection. And that's something we want to move to. But I'm going to say this now, going back, and you're going to hear in a way that we've never done before, and I'm going to give myself permission, and I hope you understand the reason. The tech stack that I've been working on, the community app that I've been working on, is now a core part of this podcast. It is an essential core part because it is the place where you can take the single actions. It is the place where we can build the case studies. It is the place where we can go into the numbers. It is the place where whatever we say on the show, and it's very challenging to make math the story, very challenging and so much easier if we can work with similar tools and even if those tools need to be tweaked or optimized. So now you can, yes, you can go do that rough financial independence calculation, the very easy one that we said, and you could do it on a calculator, too. So I'm not like blowing your mind with that. But it is on our community app, but even more than that, that we have a financial independence plan tool that will start moving you towards this concepts of effective need. Now, it's still in beta, but I say that it's a very strong beta. There's still some tax logic that's happening at the moment that's being wired in, but there's now 20,000 users on this app over the last year as we go, and that was our beta year. And now it's ready to kind of, you know, be talked about, be tested. We're going to start doing validation this year, but we're going to start building our financial independence plans together. All right? Now, it's your information, it's your data. That's, that's all fine, it's your stuff, but it has a community aspect right next to it. So when you have a question about something, when you have like, I'm stuck on this or how should I do this? Or what does this mean? The natural questions that come up right next door, right next to it, you're going to have an easy place. You're going to be Able to go and get that, troubleshooting, that feedback. And while all of that sounds good, what takes us to the next level is the local groups. The local groups is what is going to take all of these ideas and you're going to start hearing people talk about how the fire is spreading in 2026. So when we say this is the year, everything changes. These local groups have happened because people care about helping others start to understand money rules. Not to make money off them, not to profit off them. But we just see that there are people that are struggling, whose lives would be easier if they had a little bit of the information that a lot of us have started taking for granted. All right, what does that look like when you started being able to have a way to take friends and family member and without dogma and without controversy, being able to take them to a place where they don't have to worry about being sold something. There's no agenda, it's just learning the money rules that have underpinned this entire game the whole time in a non judgmental way. You can start going through these phases of discovery to now for the first time, awareness. I know my number. If you did that very simple calculation, you're already basically in awareness as long as you kind of understand the why of it. And then now after that, and this would be within two sessions control. I have a plan. For the first time, I have a plan. I, I'm not. It's not saying you're going to be there tomorrow or that you're at financial independence. Some of you might be two years out, some of you might be 15 years out, some of you might Be 20 years out. But I, for the first time, I have a plan because I know where my North Star is and I understand the rules of how to get there. And from there, that's where the community starts. The joy really starts to come in because now you start to have things like FU money, which we could talk about later. You could also just call it optionality. You have options long before you reach financial independence. And you're starting to have the luxury of thinking about things like optimization, right? Do you see how powerful this is? That within a matter of weeks someone goes from discovery to optimization and inevitably to independence. That's why this changes. Where does it happen? It starts on the podcast, but that goes to the local groups. The local groups is where a movement happens. And how do you, how do you harness that in a way that they get the support they need? It's this community tool. Local groups will now have A consistent platform to be able to have consistent presentations, consistent resources, calculators and tools that move along with the flow of what we're talking about on the podcast and what's being talked about in the local groups.
- [33:59]
A
Yeah, it's super powerful. There's no doubt about it. And you and I, I've been adamant about creating an event invite system for our local meetups because I, I want meetups. And we've, we've always used that term, but this can just become a part of life. And we've had, in our Richmond local group, we have people who are taking morning walks together. We have people who are getting together for lunch or coffee. And even me, when I go to a meetup, I went, I went to the last two case studies, which are really just extraordinary. And I hope if you haven't been to a case study, if your local group isn't doing a case study, that again, is something we can all share together. We can share the templates for these case studies, we can show you an example of them, and they are remarkable. It's truly powerful to have an entire group of people come together and share ideas and answer questions and work through someone's financial life. And we all learn. We all learn together. But at the most recent one, somebody talked. Hey, we got together for coffee, six of us. I'm like, I would love to go. How did I not know about this? And that's something, Jonathan, that, that is going to be posted in our local events and we're all going to find out about it. You've created something where we get a weekly digest email that just comes out. It's real simple. It shows you what are the events that are happening in the next couple of weeks in your local group. What are some of the conversations that are going on on this app? What are some new member introductions? Go say hello to somebody. We just had somebody from where was it Denmark or Finland that, that just joined. And what a cool thing. Like, I want to pop in and say hello. And it's, it is really something special where we can now know about these things. We can get emails. I got an email two days ago. I'm going to miss the next local event, unfortunately, because I'm going to be down in Florida, which I'm thrilled about at this campfire. But I got my email a couple days ago. Oh, yeah, there's a, there's a local case study this coming Sunday. Like, that was just really neat. This is what we've envisioned for years and years and years. And you talk about. We've talked for years about taking action. FI is about taking action. You've done it, but this also becomes very micro. Right? Forget our app, forget everything. Like we said, everything changes, but everything stays the same. FI is about taking action to make your life better. And that starts. I'm still, I'm doing this myself. It's December 30th as we're recording this, just a handful of days before this episode comes out. And I'm putting together my net worth statement for 2025. Like you said not 20 minutes ago, one of the important things to do when you get started with fi, but even every step along the way is know your fine number and also know your net worth and know what does your life cost? I do this. I've been, I've had this podcast for nine years. I've been in the fight community for 15. But I still do this every quarter because it's important. And when we can remind ourselves, when we can talk about it on the show. Jonathan, like, all this stuff perpetuates. And this is why this community is not just for people getting started, certainly. And it's not just for grizzled old veterans. This is for everybody because it's a living, breathing organism where we all learn. And we jotted down a few of these segments that we want to do. And these are things that now everybody's going to be able to contribute in this app. And just a few of them, I'm going to rattle them off real quick because they're, they're fun, Frugal wins of the week, Life hacks, travel rewards questions. The old hot seat that we used to do, which I just loved. Timely news, real people's budgets. I actually, I sent this out of my newsletter a couple of weeks ago asking for people to send in, and I sent them a template of their actual budgets. And we're going to do a couple episodes on that because it's going to be fun. Or even just a segment here or there, 10 minutes. What does your life actually cost? Because a lot of people don't know, even going back to your cell phone, what are you spending on your cell phone? What are you spending on your term life insurance or your umbrella insurance? There are some people who are spending $200 a year. I've seen somebody post on her Facebook group that they're spending $700 a year. And it's like if we all knew this, if we shared it together, it really means something. You actually, you're armed with knowledge, right? Just. And just real Quick, we, we have all of, all of our friends and experts who can answer questions we can have. I think you talked about the phi yell, right? The old I've reached Fi. You could do. We could do something. Sharing in people's wins, obviously, episode feedback and, and just things like this. There's so many things that we can do and it's not just limited by us. Jonathan.
- [38:45]
B
Well, I think what you just described was when we find the most joy recording episodes, it's. Those are the things that we're doing. And so when Brad and I, you know, kind of level set at the end of 2025 to say now, all right, you know, what do we want to do? Or are we ready? Are we ready for this? If we're going to do it, we're not just doing it to do it. We're doing it because we think we have the pulse of where this needs to go. Right. And that's why maybe it took longer for us to get here than maybe, you know, either of us would have wanted was exactly that. Yes, we think it's not that we're there. I mean, what's going to happen? And this was the magic of before. We're building this in front of you, and maybe we will fall flat here and there, but we're going to fall forward, right? So maybe not flat before we're going to fail forward and we're going to keep building. And so one of the things that I want to do is I want to channel the work. If I'm going to spend this insane amount of time developing, I want to do it for this community with this ultimate goal in mind. And if Brad, you're mentioning my cadence of things, there's no reason that needs to be an isolated thing. I think one of the first things individuals need to do after having a number is they need. We just said it's all expense driven. We need to do an expense audit. We need to do an expense audit, and we need to do it, you know, once a year. I don't think an expense audit. There are budgets and there are very compelling reasons to have budgets. And there are people that absolutely need budgets. And I would say, you know, I, I could give you, I'd be happy to give you a recommendation. I think YNAB as a budgeting tool is probably as good as it gets. You could maybe say Monarch Money is another one. I think Dave Ramsey has some other thing that's out there as well. I'm not sure if you'll be able to pay for it with A credit card. But I think if you need a budget, ynab is your best bet. But often the financial independence community is kind of past that point. They don't. It's not that it don't. Do not feel guilty if you need to budget. In fact, many of you would probably be helpful. But if you recoil at the word budget, it doesn't excuse you from needing to know where your money is going. Doesn't mean you need to watch it as closely if you're in the control phase and you're in the optimization phase. But I think if our financial independence number, our North Star, is based on expenses, we need to make sure that our expenses are aligned with our values, that there's alignment there. And if you're spending on something. If you're spending money on something that doesn't align with the outcome that you want, you should really double check yourself on that. And, Brad, I know one of the notes you have on here is just the sheer value or the power of. Of cutting a recurring cost. Should I give you that soapbox just for.
- [41:26]
A
I literally was going there already. That's absolutely hilarious.
- [41:29]
B
I don't care what you said. That was about to happen.
- [41:32]
A
Yeah. And I love that expense audit. I think that talk about a call to action for everybody is. It doesn't matter how long you've been on the path to fi. This is something that's really important. I think frugality has its place, but it's not frugality for being a miser or depriving yourself. It's for cutting to the essence of what do you actually value in your life? And there are plenty of things that I spend money on freely, but there are many things that I've cut ruthlessly, and I'm really happy about that. Frankly. I'm good on both sides. I'm good spending money on things that I value. I spend a ton of money on my health, just flat out. I have no qualms spending on my health. But I drive a Hyundai Elantra. I cook my meals, 21 meals a week in my house, and I gleefully do that. I don't own practically anything. It's incredible. And I think it's important because really, there's two sides of saving money. Okay? So, Jonathan, every hundred dollars we cut out of our budget, okay, a hundred dollars a month out of our. Out of our recurring expenses is a full $30,000 less you need in your five pot of money. All right? So again, isn't that crazy? 30,000. But it doesn't stop There, that's the most important thing is you're not just sitting there. That money isn't evaporating. That money is then being invested and most likely it's being invested in low cost, broad based index funds, something like an s and P500 or total stock market fund. And on average that's going to grow at we'll say roughly 8%. Okay, that's back of the envelope over 20 years, which is really.
- [43:18]
B
Can I see this envelope? I just want to see the back of it, see what it looks. I feel like it has a lot of notes.
- [43:22]
A
It has a lot of notes. A lot of notes. I've got multiple envelopes. Stupid accountant speak. I can't, I can't get rid of it. Ten years after I left my accountant job, I can't get rid of it. So over a 20 year lifetime, really, 20 years is a 5 lifetime. That's what we think of really for most people can do it quicker. But I think 20 years is a fair summation of a fi investing lifetime. You invest that a hundred dollars a month that you just cut out of your budget, then you're sitting after 20 years with $60,000. So, Jonathan, this is not just, oh, I cut 30,000 out of my need, I now have an additional 60,000. This is a $90,000 swing. When you cut $100 out of your monthly budget. Like if you're, if that doesn't give you chills or realize like how powerful that is, I honestly don't know what can, frankly. Wow.
- [44:18]
B
Yeah. And what you're highlighting there is it's the aggregation of marginal gains. And we're not just saying, you know, cut the latte, to cut the latte, whatever that means. What we're saying is you have a North Star, you have a. Why you're not running from something, you're moving aggressively towards something. You're moving toward options. And it's not like you have to get to that end, Mark, to realize the benefits of that choice. You get those options all along the way. You're going to find so many awesome detours and unexpected little paths and opportunities. Brad, I saw somewhere on your notes way back in the day something about just like luck and surface area.
- [45:02]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [45:02]
B
What you create for yourself is just you create opportunity. When you do this, when all of your economic output, all of your energy, all of your toil is locked up in stuff that hasn't been calibrated and aligned around your values, you've limited your ability for luck to strike. You've limited your ability to get an exponential return. You've locked in one path without exploring all the other incredible opportunities that are out there. And you were born to do more than pay bills and die. Oh, yeah.
- [45:38]
A
It's so true. And that is what most people do. Sadly, people are. They're sleepwalking through life. They wake up at 60 or 70, and maybe they have a vacation every year to show for it, but that's about it. There was so much stress along the way. I think that is the beauty of FI, is we are accruing the power on our side of the ledger. Every dollar we save, we are more powerful. We have more autonomy. We have more freedom. This is about freedom. This is about choice. This is about optionality. We're living the best lives we can live. That's why we're saving money. Not to deprive ourselves, not to miss out on a latte or avocado toast or whatever other nonsense people throw our way. This is about controlling the only thing that matters, which is our time. And it's exceedingly powerful. There's nobody else. Kings of yore couldn't live the lives that. That you and I are living. That we are living, all of us listening to this podcast, because we have power and we have time, freedom, and we have the ability to do what we want. With decades of our lives, there is nothing more important than that. We are saving for our freedom.
- [46:56]
B
Brad, I just got chills, man. So this is it. That's the show I want to be a part of. I hope if you're listening to Community, you realize with. I'm not saying we've pulled it off yet, but with what the possibility of what could happen this year. You are a part, and you're contributing to a show that is unlike anything that. That has ever existed. It might become a pattern in the future, I don't know. But. But this is a show the idea of which is exciting to me. I want to be around that conversation. That's why I'm like, yep, we got to do this, Brad. Yes. Carve out the time. We'll figure it out. We have to have more of these conversations. And the key is, you are the conversation. Your path to financial independence has always been the conversation. If we're just limited to my path or to Brad's path, we're done after episode three. It's the community's collective and individual journey to financial independence. Because even when it doesn't exactly mirror every episode, doesn't exactly mirror our own life, we can see a shade of it in that individual or collective episode. We can see the piece of it that we can eat. We can start to appreciate the nuance. And we need to get as much of that as possible. It has to be collaborative between us and you. That is what we're going to, you know, if you're going to die on a hill, that's the hill we want to die on with the show. That's what we want to do. That's what we want to be a part of. That's why this year everything changes. Because we're not trying to figure out how to be any other show, because that show has never existed. We're creating something that has never existed. And we're inviting you and asking and pleading with you to join us to build that. So what does it look like? How do you even do that? Here's what happens. I need you to create an account on the community app. If you want to be a part of the community, I need you to be a part of the community. So you're going to go to choose a five.com local, you're going to set up your account, and then here's the magic of this. We're always going to be running a little bit behind what we're talking about, right? Almost by definition, we're building this in front of you. So the next thing I'm going to say has just created work for me. Hey, Jonathan, could you find out a way to complicate your life a little more?
- [49:18]
A
Can you sleep, Jonathan? Can you sleep less?
- [49:21]
B
We're talking about something you've already built. No, no, no. As we build this together, it's always going to be the next thing. We're always going to be chasing the next thing because the next thing is going to improve this idea that we're trying to build. And the next thing is we need your feedback right now. I love the emails, I love the comments. You take the time to send them to us and it's. It's great. We have a radio show. We need. We need your voicemails. So you please, you know, I mean, you know, if you're going to either do it or not do it, please just do something. Send us your feedback. But if you can hear the emphasis, we want to feature your voicemails on this show. We want to converse with you via this asynchronous style and feature your voicemail and be able to talk about those ideas, share your wins with you. And so when you create your account on your dashboard, you are going to now see an option that says, contribute to the community or contribute to the show, be a part of the show. I haven't figured out the exact copy yet because after we get off this call, I have to start working on it. But regardless, when you're logging in on your dashboard now, you're going to see an option to contribute to the show. And once you do that, you're going to start seeing a list of the episodes where Brad and I have put a call to action out to the community. We've taken time to talk about it and here's why. It gets a little bit nuanced sometimes. We're specifically asking you for your feedback because we want your feedback to be part of an upcoming episode. And obviously that's a time sensitive thing. And so we'll be collecting feedback for a window of time and maybe you're listening to it two years later, but. But in that context we will have notes about where you can follow up and get the answers to what it will have, the continuity. And by the way, I know that sounds obvious. We've never had that before. Do you realize how many things have happened three years ago where you get excited about something, you track it through and it's now a dead link, you know, frustrating. It is. I get it. I'm with you. We're going to close the loop. If you take the time to follow through on something and you realize the window's already passed, we're going to go back and we're going to update you so you can track down what happened. But if it's open, leave us a voicemail, give us the information that you want to share with us so that we have a window to share it on an upcoming show. And then the second aspect and why I can go in different places is sometimes we're asking you to do something not for us, but for yourself, for you. Document a part of your journey. We are as a group going to get into a cadence. It's kind of a tri prong approach. But here's a really core aspect of it. Individually, we're going to have the opportunity to go through various exercises. So Brad talks about his net worth audit. He does it quarterly. That sounds like a pretty good amount. We don't need to be looking at our numbers every single day. It's probably count. It's probably, Brad would argue, it's actually going to make you suffer. I would say you're probably going to not perform as well if you're watching it that closely. But that doesn't mean that we should never look at it. It's a, it's a, it's a motivating thing. It's an exciting thing. It's something that you can do as you start navigating the boring middle and you start thinking about opportunities to optimize. It's a productive thing. So we'll have exercises like, hey, can we do this together? And another one that I'm very excited about, I hinted at it was the expense audit I would like. As a community, we're in various places around the world. We can do an expense audit and we can track. This is not a budget, but this is a cash flow expense audit. We can track things like our expenses, our food budget. And Brad just asked, he's sending it out to the community as a. Please do it in Excel. We don't need to do that. We can do it in a way where we can actually track it and we can track our expenses at the individual level year over year. So we now have a way to monitor our personal inflation rates in various categories. Right. Does your expense number hold if you've actually just run wild in this category? Well, it's a way for you to kind of safety net check yourself, but at the same point recalibrate, realign your expenses with your values. Not to be confused with a budget. It's just an expense flow audit. And then on top of that, now for the first time, we'll be able to have the opportunity to talk about aggregate numbers, cost of living in various areas, how, what, what, what is a reasonable amount to spend in food, in a family in San Diego, California, or in versus Virginia, or, you know, these sorts of things. These are the sorts of numbers that you crave, that I crave, that make an interactive show that allow you to talk about things in a way that you've just never been able to do before, never been able to see before. And we'll have a million variations of that over time. But all of these can help move you towards your goal of financial independence.
- [54:01]
A
Yeah, I love this. This is, this is real time. You're part of the show, you're part of the community. This is helping you, this is helping all of us. We're learning together, we're growing together. And also, like we said, send in your feedback on the episodes, send in your questions, sends in your wins, your life hacks, your travel rewards questions, and join the local group, be a part of this, get involved, send this in. This episode's coming out January 5, 2026. Right. So like I said, my big action for the week is I'm Putting down my net worth. You should do that too. Do it along with me. Let me know that you did it. Jonathan, one of the big things we want, and this is going to be featured on that when people log in, is what are your big goals for the year? What are those goals? What are you shooting towards? What is this? If this year worked out perfectly, what does your five? And not just money, what does every aspect of your life look like? What are you aiming for? Jonathan, we do the year end wins, episodes and newsletters at the end of every year and it's so incredibly exciting. It's so motivating. But I think we can motivate each other along the way. Not just at the end, but where we read about what are the wins along the way and we root people on we. The beautiful part about what you've built is we can have member blogs, we can have forum threads where people just update my Mike, who writes into me every single week back to my newsletter, gives me an update. Bill Powell, who's been on the show, sends me an update on what he's up to in five different areas of his life. We can do this real time. We can all do it together. We can root each other on. We're in this together and we're all sharing, learning and growing together. So, Jonathan, what people are going to see. So January 5th, right? You log in, you're going to see these options to contribute, you're going to see these options to send in questions, you're going to see this option. Just send in, what are your big goals? Please send in a voicemail. But like Jonathan said, if you can't.
- [55:58]
B
Us being cutesy, send us a comment. Send us. Yes, yes, we're going to do.
- [56:04]
A
But anyway, so the next week. So next week we actually have Sean Mulaney and Cody Garrett coming on the show to talk a little bit about Roths. And that's gonna be great. But two weeks from now, so January 19th, Jonathan and I are gonna pick up with this new show with you involved. This is the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show. And this is our call to ask you to get involved. So, Jonathan, I think that's. That's where we leave it for today. This is Brad.
- [56:35]
B
This was a joy to create this episode with you. Man, this was a lot of fun.
- [56:38]
A
Yeah. And what's so much fun is we have been having a ball behind the scenes, just you and I brainstorming and having fun and iterating. And because of the skills that you've built, we can put anything into action. You're extraordinary. You do this in 24 hours, 48 hours, sometimes less. Hey, we have this idea. Let's do it. So to everybody out there, this is not perfect right now. It's not. We need your feedback. We need you involved. Jonathan can build anything. And this is for us, by us. This is the FI community in real life. Let's build it together. Get involved. Starting today.
- [57:19]
B
To the individuals that have actually already created an account inside the community app over the last year, they have gone through some bugs. Our founding members, we're starting this year with just about 20,000 members. And I think I've closed something like 500 some odd tickets out. And I just want to say that sounds bad. It's actually really good, right? That's 500 drops in logic, frustrated experiences, things that weren't quite there. You know, directionally accurate, good ideas, but attention to detail. And I'd probably have to give a shout out to probably 10 to 20 people, which I won't. But you know who you are inside the community that have put in relentlessly, you know, and at times I'm like, but. But I just want, you know, even when I'm going, oh, another ticket. I appreciate you. I appreciate those tickets. Because we have something. I'm not saying it's perfect yet and it never will be, but it's something that collectively has been built to meet what you have asked for. And what you're asking for has always been very close to what Brad and I wanted for this community. And it's magical. So it's getting there. Right? So next year is going to be a year unlike anything that any of us could have ever imagined for this community. And I am so excited to be able to close this episode and say, yeah, you know it. The fire is spreading, my friends. We'll see you next time. As we continue to go down the road less traveled. You've been listening to Choose Episode radio podcast where we help middle class America build wealth one life hack at a time.