Last year, I published a podcast with one of my favorite financial writers, Morgan Housel.

You may remember that the episode was a recording of a Bogleheads meeting and the interview was actually conducted by my buddy, Gouri.

Well, Gouri recently invited me to join the Bogleheads to talk about life after FIRE and today’s podcast episode is a recording of that discussion!

Big thanks to Gouri and the Bogleheads for making this happen and hope you enjoy it!

Listen Now

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Download MP3 by right-clicking here

Highlights

How your views on spending change after you retire
Why you should treat FI as a spectrum rather than a finish line
How to plan for all aspects of post-FI life
The unexpected benefits and challenges of early retirement

Show Links

Full Transcript

Mad Fientist: Hey, what’s up, everybody. Welcome to the Financial Independence Podcast, the podcast that gets inside the brains of some of the best and brightest in personal finance to find out how they achieved financial independence. You may remember last year, I had an episode with Morgan Housel, and Morgan’s one of my favorite financial writers, and it was a great episode.

And you may remember that I actually didn’t do the interview. It was my buddy Gouri who interviewed Morgan as part of a Bogleheads meeting. And Gouri’s big is big in the Bogleheads. And he actually invited me to join that same sort of discussion for the Bogleheads group that he was running. So that’s what today’s episode is.

And if you don’t know who the Bogleheads are, they’re a group that are dedicated to Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard. All the index fund investing and everything that talked about on the Mad Fientist, that’s a group that really goes in depth in that philosophy of investing. So they have a fantastic and very active forum.

They have these local meetups that, you know, Gouri is part of and it’s a really great organization all around. So if you’re interested, definitely head over to bogleheads.org to check it out. And obviously I’ll put links to that in the show notes. So I sat down with Gouri and a bunch of other Bogleheads on a zoom call and we had a great chat for a couple hours.

What you’re going to hear today is the interview portion of that. And the interview is fantastic because as always Gouri did a ton of research beforehand and asked great questions. So without further ado, this is my chat with Gouri for the Bogleheads.

Gouri: We’ll begin with something that you often end with on your podcasts, which is you ask your guests who, you know, are leaders in the FI space, or often the self-improvement space.

You ask them what’s one piece of financial advice you would give towards financial independence. So I asked you that question.

Mad Fientist: Yeah, that’s a question I love to ask because there’s so many different answers I’ve gotten over the years, but for me, I would say experiment, which, you know, in the Mad Fientist, I probably wouldn’t have said that when I started the Mad Fientist.

So it’s not me just saying that because it fits with my science theme or anything. But it’s really the truth because if I’ve learned anything over the past 10 years of doing this and like really thinking about it hard, it’s that we’re really bad at knowing what we really, really want. And the only way to find out is to try things, hopefully them at a low cost, low commitment sort of situation so that you don’t, you know, get yourself into a situation where you can’t reverse that choice. But it’s really about experimenting because especially like for me I’m naturally frugal guy. Spending has been a big focus of mine recently.

And you know, after post-FI to figure out like, what is the best use of money? And now that it’s not as tight anymore you know what, what’s actually going to make me happier and what’s not really going to move the needle and things like that. So, yeah, experimenting and just realizing that you don’t have to be right, right away, because you are probably pretty bad at actually figuring out what you really want to do or what you want to be here, what you want to spend your money on.

Gouri: Excellent. Yeah, it’s so great to hear. And there’s so much there that I’d like for us to follow up on. One is when, you know, you say experiment, try it out there. There are tons of people that we hear about who, whether they’re planning for financial independence, early retirement, or just retirement in general, they dream about this next phase of life.

They plan, they plan the savings part of it, but then when they get there, they’re kind of absent the social structure or interaction or meaning. How do you, how do you suggest people, you know, building on what you said about experimenting? How do you suggest people fill that void in advance?

Mad Fientist: So like, I’m sure a lot of people out there are probably similar to what I was, where I blamed my job for the reason I wasn’t living the life that I thought would make me happiest and wasn’t doing the things that I thought I really wanted to do with my life. Like it was such an easy scapegoat and only after leaving the job and then trying to do all those things that I thought I wanted to do, I realized it wasn’t my job holding me back. I was very lucky. I was a software developer and the technologies I used allowed me to be very productive, very quickly so I could get my work done in, you know, a quarter of the time that some other teams that I worked amongst were able to do it. So my time scales were never tight and I had plenty of free time. So it was only once that I removed that easy scapegoat did I realize that actually I could have been doing all of these things with the job and, you know, I would have been not had to also try to figure out all these crazy post-FI things that come up that you never even expect because I would have still been working.

So, yeah, I would say one just try to remove the easy scapegoat of your job and start trying to do these things that you really think you’re going to do post-FI, because one, some things aren’t big enough to really get you out of the bed in the morning. Like I remember I thought like, oh, I’ll learn a new language and then that way, when we traveled to wherever in the world, I’ll be able to know this new language…it’s going to be amazing, but you know, like when you don’t have anyone forcing you to get out of bed in the morning to conjugate verbs it’s hard, it’s hard to, to force yourself to do that. And you’re not exactly leaping out of bed to do that either.

So the more you can get started on these things while you’re still in the grind, the daily grind, I think. The way better off, you’re going to be, because one, you’re going to have momentum. You’re going to sorta like come across these challenges that have nothing to do with your job earlier and start to work throu...