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Hello and welcome to Choose a Vi. Today in the show we have a fun one first. We have our first ever Where Are they now? Segment. So we bring back Andy Hill who is a guest in episode 68. And it's such a fun look at the last decade where his life has taken him. Him and his wife Nicole have built something extraordinary, but it's never a straight line and I think that's what's fantastic. If you're looking for how do I get my spouse on board both ways, I think you're really gonna like that. And you're gonna, you're gonna get a lot of, of what they've been up to and what they've been able to build for themselves and their family. I also start the episode with a whole bunch of life hacks. We talk about the success of FI101 in our St. Louis group and second generation FI. We had David sun take notes during the event just on his own volition. And it's really neat to see the order of operations of investing that he talked about. I also go into building a perpetual money making machine. The fact that you were going to be a millionaire, that's what compounding does. And that there's no secret, there's no person behind the mask or behind the curtain that's going to help you get to FI or help you learn some secret of investing. That's the beautiful part. This is the simple path to wealth. This is we're not selling you anything. This is just you taking action day after day to build an extraordinary life, both financially, but more importantly, in all the ways that matter. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. And with that, welcome to Choose Fi. 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, welcome to Choose a Phi. I'm excited to have a rare solo episode today. So I'm actually recording this on February 9th and we're getting set for our big live event here in Richmond, Virginia. So I just picked up Alan and Katie Donegan from the airport last night and got to hang out with them, which is great. Watch A little bit of the Super Bowl. And yeah, this should be fun. I think these live events and just getting together in person. I know we talk about this really often here, but it just matters. And it's amazing to see what's going on all across the country and across the world. In our local groups, we actually had St. Louis, which is an absolute rockstar group. Kristen Knapp has completely revitalized that group. And they had 70 people show up for FI101. It was a presentation that Alan and Kristin did there, and it was just remarkable. I actually saw a Facebook post and this was a guy named David posted and he said, alan Hansen, this was my son taking notes tonight. And he even underlined invest. And he said, hashtag second generation fi. So this is a picture spiral notebook from elementary or middle school. And David's son wrote, save and invest the rest. And then he had the financial order of operations. And his big question was, where does my next dollar go? So he had. He took notes from this presentation and it was one, start with a small emergency fund. Two, get your 401k match. Three, pay down high interest debt. So it looks like they're saying anything greater than 10%. Then 4 would be a bigger emergency fund, then he has 5. And 6 is basically maximizing your tax deferred and retirement accounts. So he has listed Roth IRAs, 401ks, HSAs, et cetera. Seven would be taxable brokerage. Eight would be prepaid future expenses, which is a really interesting one. And then nine would be basically pay down low interest debt. So this is a really interesting order of operations. And I actually love that that they started with small emergency fund, because I think a lot of us get bogged down in the traditional financial media of you need to do everything possible just to squirrel away a year's worth of expenses or six months worth of expenses where it's 20, 30, $80,000, something like that, and you're not investing that along the way. And I think that's something we've talked about here, where obviously having a net worth is critical, but having this money just sitting there doing nothing as an emergency fund doesn't really make sense, not in this day and age when if you were invested that money, you could still sell it at any given moment and transfer the money back over to your bank. It's in your bank account in one, two or three days and all is well in the world. So I think clearly we're not saying don't have a net worth. We're just saying just rethink the emergency fund in terms of how much money you need sitting there idle doing nothing. So yeah, I really like this. And my friend Gwen actually was in the audience there and she sent me a picture of the 70 people watching this event and it was just really, really impressive. So we're going to start rolling out. We're going to actually use their presentation and give it to admins of every local group in the world. So if you're looking for 5101, ask your admin about it and we can make that happen. That's what's so wonderful about having this worldwide community is we can share resources. So Alan and Kristin put something together. Amazing. And you can be part of it. So just make sure you sign up. I think I haven't done the greatest job with this. Jonathan and I have talked about all the amazing things that he's building, but really, just very simply, all we need you to do right now is just sign up and do nothing else. Sure. If you want to get in there and talk, you can, but it's really not that important right now. If you sign up, just go to choose a buy.com local if you haven't signed up yet or just choose a buy.com login if you have and just put your email address in and pick your local group and sit back and you're going to get email notifications of every local event that's happening in your area. And that's what's. It's really exciting. We're not stuck with Facebook anymore, so. Yeah, so that's a really cool one. I just, I really wanted to highlight this because I, I love the second generation FI thing. I love that people are coming out to learn about FI and we can all get better together. And you know, it reminded me. So going back to picking up Alan and Katie, I wanted to do a couple of random little life hacks that I, I sometimes I do things in my own life and I don't know if everybody knows about these things, if nobody knows about it. So I'm just going to quickly bomb through a handful of these. So first was again, I picked them up for the airport yesterday and I am fanatical about tracking flights. So I just go to FlightAware.com and you can just go to their homepage. You pick flight tracking and then flight finder. And this is really cool. It's a GPS tracker of every flight in the world and you can actually track not only the flight that you're on which frankly doesn't really do all that much because you're on the plane, you know if it's late or not. But you can track the incoming flights. So just put in your airport, put the airport you're going to or just the flight number. And when you click on that flight, you can click, where is my plane now? It's right there in the top middle. And if that plane hasn't taken off, you just click where's my plane now Again. And you can just, you can track back on where that flight is coming from and see if there are any delays. So I do this pretty often to determine when I need to get to the airport. And I know sometimes, oh man, it looks like my incoming flight is going to be delayed. If I have a connection or some such. It's really very convenient. Again, I'm a little fanatical about it, so take it for what it's worth. But I think this is really, really convenient and a lot of people can get value from this, so definitely check that out. Another couple random life hacks. So I was listening to an old episode and a friend of ours named Noah who used to have a website called Money Metagame, I don't know if it still exists, frankly, but he talked about buying discounted gift cards. And I think this is something that a lot of us just totally are unaware of. He mentioned a site called Gift Card Wiki and it still exists. I don't know if that's the best gift card site, but you can just Google buy discounted gift cards. And I think there's like Gift Card Granny and other random sites like that. And let's just say you're going to a store, you're going to purchase something. Very often you can buy a gift card for a discount. It might just be 5% or frankly it might be 10, 20, 30% if it's a more obscure store or something that people want to just unload their gift cards on. You're not going to get a 30% discount on Amazon, of course, but, but sometimes you can get 3, 5, 7%, something like that, which isn't terrible. So that is a really nice little life hack, especially as you're going to buy something. I don't necessarily say go randomly buy thousands of dollars of gift cards in stores. You're not a hundred percent certain you're going to buy. But Noah talked about literally being in a store, getting ready to buy something. And as he was walking to the counter, he went to this gift card wiki and bought the gift card for the item he was quite literally going to buy. Five minutes from then. So that's a really cool one. I mentioned a couple things in my newsletter recently. So if you're not getting my newsletter, basically we have three things going on here. Choose a fight. It's this podcast which obviously you're listening to. My newsletter goes out every Tuesday. It's really short, but I think it's quite high value. So choose ay.com subscribe and then the third thing of course is that local platform so you can get notified of local events. So I, I mentioned that unfortunately I actually almost got hacked with my email, which I have almost impenetrable email passwords and I have two factor on everything, so I'm pretty secure. But somebody was trying to log in. It got triggered. It was an old email address of mine that's through a Microsoft email. So I kept getting triggered with these two factors to approve or deny and luckily I was able to deny them. So there really wasn't ever a major concern. But nevertheless it made me realize that email is one of, if not the biggest attack vectors for most of us. And because it's something that we type in fairly often, a lot of people don't have secure passwords, which is a real miss if you think about it. Most of your financial accounts and services and credit cards and Vanguard and your bank, they're all. The password reset goes to your email address. And that is a major security risk, especially if you don't have a secure password, if you don't have two factor authentication. So this is something that you really, really need to lock down. I think all of us should have a password manager. I know one that a lot of security experts recommend is Bit Warden and you definitely want to Google that directly. Make sure you're going to their official site and that's something where they can help you create really almost impenetrable passwords and save them. And you just need to remember your master password and that is a massive security way to increase your or decrease your likelihood of getting attacked, let's say. So I actually after this happened, I reached out to my friend Tom, who is a former FBI special agent and expert in cybersecurity. He was actually on the podcast a couple of times. He was in episode 515 and 3 97. I asked him what I should consider doing about this and he said that there are a lot of two factor authentication methods, but there's a physical device called the UB key. So, so it's Y U B I K E Y. And he highly recommends it. He says to use that Wherever possible. And this is what he said. I'm going to quote him as far as email addresses go on essential accounts. He said, I use a specific ProtonMail email address for all my financial stuff. Nothing else uses that email. And both for that and my Gmail, I have them tied to my Yubikey and then I have an old email that I use for unimportant things. So basically what he's doing, he's. He's opening a new email address that is solely used for these essential logins. Okay. So don't put newsletters on there, don't put even like your frequent flyer mile or something. Just the absolute essential things. Some other people responded to my newsletter and said another thing you can do is put an alias in which Google has alias ability as well as protonmail something. I'm not going to go in and explain this, but you can literally make not only the email address but make it very specific for each individual account by just adding a plus sign. It actually doesn't undo your email address. You can add email address and then whatever, Vanguard or Wells Fargo or Bank of America, whatever it is. And it allows you to basically have a unique email address for each one, but it's still tied to that one email address. So that's something that's really nice. And another nice security option that also somebody else wrote in for me is called Google's Advanced Protection Program. So you can put this on your Gmail and this is something that yeah, Google has added as a benefit and it's just, it's pretty easy to set up and basically makes your email not hack proof. Nothing's hack proof, but this is something a lot of us have Gmail accounts. So I would highly recommend Googling that. So yeah, Google's Advanced Protection Program and yeah, just quickly rounding out the little life hack edition here. So annualcreditreport.com the. This is something that I feel like a lot of us should know. I know most of us are able to get our credit scores now for free through our banks. I know Capital One offers this with a credit card that I have. And it's all well and good to get your credit score, but you actually want to check your credit report as well. So there's the three main credit bureaus, there's Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. And if you go to annualcreditreport.com you can get these credit reports absolutely free. And there is some ambiguity. So it used to be that you get one of each of these reports for free every 12 months. So this was. Federal law allows this. So this website, which looks like it was made in 1997, but it's legit, it's annualcreditreport.com this is part of that federal law that allows you to get a free credit report every 12 months from each of the three reporting companies. Okay. So what I would do is I would make. And this is actually my next and final life hack for today is my task list, which is called todoist. So T o d O I S t and I have a recurring task for every, basically every four months. But I put three different tasks in. So check Equifax report every January 1st, check TransUnion every May 1st, et cetera. So four months later. So every four months I'm checking my credit report and actually I had an issue. It's funny because I have a pretty good online security in general, but you just, you never know when you get hacked. And I got somebody open up a credit card in my name. I don't know what their plan was, but maybe it was just like an initial foray. But I was able to shut it down before anything happened. I was able to freeze my credit score, which was really, really easy. And what's nice now it seems like that these credit reports are possibly available as frequently as every week. Now it's. It's slightly unclear when I'm on the website. It's. It looks like it might be available more often than once a year from each of the bureaus, but even at the very worst, it's just log in every four months, get the next one, and just do a quick glance at your credit report and see if, if there's any issue. So I think that's a really nice one. And yeah, like I said, finally, that Todoist app, this is something I've talked to friends and family about very recently. So it's top of mind. It's. I don't have to do's floating around in my brain anymore. I can't describe how much this has transformed my life. It is absolutely mentally freeing. And this is. This has been almost a decade now. And I can't even imagine a life without a task list app like this. And todoist, there's nothing especially special about it, frankly, but it works for me. I'm able to put in tasks, I'm able to make comments. I'm able to make recurring tasks, which is really, really nice. Okay, so this is something that I just, I put everything in there. I mean, literally down To. I have an electric toothbrush and I want to charge it every month. So I have charge every fifth of the month or whatever it is, or every four weeks and it just. It recurs. I have a special mailing box, PO Box for choose if I mail. So I have that on a recurring task. Every little thing, groceries. I have a running grocery list. And down to things that only happen once a decade, like renew my passport. And when everything is out of your head, and I'm talking everything, this has to be done 100%. But when everything is out of your head, you are mentally free in a way you almost cannot even imagine. So I highly recommend this. I cannot recommend it more. More highly. Essentially just give it a whirl. And I think the app is free to use at first. I think there's like some nominal fee if you want to add a couple little features. But frankly, I don't even know if they're really worth it, to be honest. But yeah, that's. That's a big one. So those are my life hack Life Hack edition for the day, which hopefully there's some value in there. I think at least one of those is going to add value to your life. And I wanted to talk about a little interaction that I had in real life. So one of my real good friends, really bright guy, he has been pursuing the path to fi, kind of outside of the FI community, but he's. He's at a point where. Where he's reached fi, and he was talking about investing. And I think it's easy to get bogged down in. There's some secret, there's some knowledge that you don't have. There's some other level, and you just have to find it. You have to spend the time, or you have to do the research, or you have to know the right people. And it was fascinating because I was listening to an old episode with J.L. collins, the original episode he did on choose of I, about the simple path to wealth. And of course, since then, he's subsequently sold well over a million copies of the book the Simple Path to Wealth. And so, yeah, it was interesting to hear it as the book was coming out and knowing. Knowing the success it's had. But he basically said he's like, look, if I thought there was some secret, if I thought there was some way to improve my. My return, I would do it. I would spend the time, I would do this because I know how little things matter, right? The difference between an 8% return, which you probably can get in the market, and. And a 9% return, when compounded over 30 or 50 years, is enormous. And it's worth the time, it's worth the effort, obviously. But there's nothing to suggest anywhere that there is some secret and certainly net of fees, and the fees we pay on buying expensive mutual funds or hiring some financial advisor, it makes it almost impossible to beat the market. And that's why I, I told my friend, I'm like, look, if you want to take 10 or $20,000 and just play around and have fun, just do that. Think of it as an education. I mean, this is someone who thankfully is at 5, so that type of money is not going to make a difference. And find out for yourself. But also keep in mind that the only term that matters is the long term. So I don't doubt that somebody just almost by sheer luck can beat the market over a quarter or a year or even five years. But if you think that you're going to just find some secret somewhere, it's just highly, highly unlikely. There are people throughout the decades who claim to have some secret. And that's why, I mean, we even look back, think about a guy like Michael Burry who called the big short and I mean, that was a genius, genius thing. But he's been prognosticating for the last 15 years, and we still look to him as a genius because he got one thing right. That's how hard it is to do. To get one massive thing right is almost impossible. That it almost doesn't matter what your track record is. After that, people will still look to you. There should be alarm bells going off in your head that, wow, this is almost impossible. There's no world where I'm going to beat the market, certainly not net of any fees. And it just, it's a bad bet. I think that's, that's one of the biggest things people don't look at. What is my highest likelihood of succeeding? Okay, here's the secret. You are going to be a millionaire. You are going to. You're going to be probably a multimillionaire. You are building a perpetual money making machine. That is what FI is. You are building an asset base that spits off money to you every single year and just works as this perpetual money making machine. That's just such a beautiful visual, right when you think about it. You buy front, loading the effort by saving money. You are building this thing that is going to spit off more return for you each year probably than you've ever earned in a calendar year while doing no work. That is remarkable. That's what we're building here. We're building this perpetual money making machine. You are going to be a millionaire. Just think about, think about somebody who has a hundred thousand dollar income, okay, which is reasonable for a family, even a single, certainly in this day and age. But even, just saying a very middle class income, two people making $50,000 each and they have a 12% savings rate. I think a lot of us, if you check out Mr. Money Mustache's, the shockingly simple math behind early retirement. You can see what really it looks like when you have a 5 savings rate of 30 or 40 or 50 plus percent. But even just on a hundred thousand dollars income, you save 12%, right? So $12,000, this is on the, the gross income. You save a thousand dollars a month, right? Throw that into a compound interest calculator, throw in for 30 years at an 8% return, you're saving a thousand dollars a month. Your net worth is $1,500,000, $1.5 million, okay? You save $0 from there on out, that money's gonna double every nine years. Nine years later, at 39 years in, you have $3 million. Then another nine years later you have 6 million. I mean, this is absolutely crazy. That's what we're talking about here. That's a 12% savings rate on the gross income on a hundred thousand dollar income, which I think a lot of couples can really very easily do. And you start getting into five savings rates. You talk about 30%. You talk about 50%. 50% is more than four times this. So you're talking an enormous, enormous amount, right? $4,000 a month. I'm plugging this in. Yeah. Obviously the math is pretty, pretty simple. It's $6 million after 30 years. It's $12 million after 39 years. These are real, real amounts, okay? You are going to be a millionaire. That's what we're doing here. And this compounding is going to work in your favor. You're building something remarkable, okay? And don't ever lose sight of that. We are doing something remarkable here in the FI community. And really you're putting in, in most cases, about 10 years, 10 to 15 years of concerted savings. And you are making every subsequent day of your life easier and better. That's what you're doing, okay? This is not just playing around. You are transforming your entire life, transforming it. Think about how fast a decade goes by. Think about the last decade. It's, it blinked by. So I would posit that the next decade for most people is going to blink by. And that for people who are saving nothing, they're going to wake up 10 years from now, they're going to have the same negligible net worth and they can't get that decade back. Or you can follow the path to fi, you can save and you can transform your life forever and maybe make it generational. That's. It's not hyperbole. And that's the thing again, nobody's selling anything in the fight community. This is the simplest thing ever. It's live below your means, it's save money, it's invest in low cost funds and ETFs. Something like VTI is what I put all my money in. Vanguard's Total Stock Market etf. And again, I'm not trying to sell you a secret. There is no secret. There's nothing. It's just that it's live below your means. It's try to build an extraordinary life. It's experiment and play around and have fun and, and spend time with people you love and learn new things. How can that be anything but an unmitigated good, right? It can't be. It just simply can't be. Our upcoming guest here I actually am doing the first ever where are they now? Segment. So this is Andy. Andy was on episode 68, way, way back, seven plus years ago in 2018 and he taught Financial Peace University classes. He really, him and his wife Nicole got on board and it wasn't a straight line as he's going to tell you. They certainly had some issues and they worked through them and FI helped make them stronger and they had these budget parties every month and really built a life together. And if you want a story of where your life can go in a decade, I think Andy's story is really going to be interesting. So I'm very excited to bring this to you. So this is our first ever Where Are they now? Segment. All right, so we're trying out a fun new segment called Where Are They Now? And way back in, I think it was March of 2018, episode 68, I had my friend Andy Hill on and the episode was basically Financial Peace Graduates, what's next? And this was a really fun episode where Andy talked about getting his wife Nicole on board and their budget parties that they had and lots of just different interesting aspects of the beginning part of the journey to fi, when it was just the two of them trying to figure it out, try to talk about their dreams for the future, trying to work together. Their entire lives were ahead of them, which is so amazing. And where is Fi going to take them? And I think this is one of the fun parts about having a podcast that's lasted nearly a decade now is we can touch base with people. So this is now almost eight years later to the day since we recorded it. Andy Hill, welcome back, my friend. This is awesome.