← So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
1967: Mr. Money Mustache Is Back. Ten Years Later. Life After Early Retirement
00:37:49
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:16]
Verizon Advertiser
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- [01:46]
Farnoosh Torabi
So Money Episode 1967 Mr. Money Mustache Returns a decade later. The truth about early retirement.
- [01:55]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
You're listening to so money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Kharabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencer and from Farnoosh herself. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to so money. It was accidental for me because I like what I like and I didn't change what I like in order to be able to retire early. But for me, I happen to enjoy what you might call productive activities rather than consuming. So I would way rather spend my time my Saturday like renovating a kitchen or building a house or building a deck than being on a golf course or going to like the five Michelin star restaurants or showing off in any way. I just love hard work solving problems, preferably outdoors and using my body like outdoor construction is my favorite thing in the world. Always has been, always will be. So that's an activity that doesn't cost anything. It happens to make a small amount of money even when I just do it for myself.
- [03:05]
Farnoosh Torabi
Welcome to Sew Money everybody. I'm Farnoosh Tarabi. I've been so excited to share this interview. It has been in the works for some time. And here we are. It is rare in personal finance that someone comes along and doesn't just offer advice, but completely rewires how we think about money and work and what it means to live a good life. My guest today did exactly that. Pete Adne, better known as Mr. Money Mustache, helped ignite the fire movement long before it was trending on TikTok or debated on the news. His message? Radical at the time. Spend less, live intentionally, invest wisely, and you might just buy yourself the freedom to walk away from traditional work decades early. And here's the thing, Pete didn't just write about it, he lived it. Retiring in his early 30s, raising a family on his own terms and building a cult like following of readers who wanted to do the same. I've actually had a front row seat to his journey. We first met more than a decade ago filming in his backyard in Colorado when his blog was just beginning to take off. And back then his ideas felt almost rebellious. But today they're part of the mainstream conversation. Although Pete has not stood still. And neither has life. In this episode, we catch up on everything. What early retirement looks like after a decade. How his thinking on money, family, and even divorce has evolved. And why, despite having enough, he's still rethinking what a rich life actually means. Take a listen. Pete Adny. Welcome to so money. Aka Mr. Money Mustache. How lucky are we?
- [04:46]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
We'll determine that based on how well the interview goes.
- [04:49]
Farnoosh Torabi
That'll depend on your answers because I have pretty good questions. It's really just. It's on you. It's all on you. It's been a minute. Mr. Money Mustache and audience. If you've Been living under a rock. Maybe you haven't heard of Mr. Money Mustache, the poster guru for the Fire movement. You and I go way back. I remember visiting you in your home in Colorado with the Yahoo Finance team, sitting in your backyard talking about your philosophies on money and spending and budgeting. Do you remember those days?
- [05:24]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah. It was more than a decade ago. And I remember I had a little kindergarten boy back then who is now a 20 year old.
- [05:32]
Farnoosh Torabi
Wow.
- [05:32]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
And you guys were one of the first interviewers that stopped by when the Mr. Money Mustache blog was first starting to just get out there and get unexpected news headlines and interviews and everything. And it was an honor.
- [05:45]
Farnoosh Torabi
It was an honor for us. And I have to ask, your son was such a sweetheart and very talented. I remember he played. He made his own music. Is he still into music?
- [05:53]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, that is still his main thing. He just devotes like 12 hours a day.
- [05:58]
Farnoosh Torabi
Wow.
- [05:58]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
To sitting in front of the computer in this. Actually, this very room that I'm using because he still loves the hospitality of his mom and dad in our two respective houses. They both. He has a music studio in each and he just works all day.
- [06:11]
Farnoosh Torabi
Wow. That's so nice to know that you get the spark at that young age and it endures. Things have changed for you over the last decade. I want to catch up. I want to catch up on the blog. I want to catch up on life. I think maybe we could start with the Mr. Money mustache. When we met at this very pivotal time in your career, you had started this massively popular blog, Mr. Money Mustache, which for those who aren't familiar or want to refresh the foundation of the blog. And you can jump in and correct me, but you were first of all behind kind of a guys, Mr. Money Mustache. No one really knew who you are, so had this aura of mystery. But what you were preaching was very aspirational. People wanted to learn how you were thinking about money and budgeting. The idea of being frugal was a flex. And this idea of living minimally, I remember. I don't think you really drove. You had simple meals, you spent very conservatively, but you were very happy as well. Take me back to Those beginnings of Mr. Money Mustache and what it was really founded on, like what you really wanted people to understand about money and maybe even yourself. Because I think people blog to digest and unpack their own thinking around certain issues.
- [07:26]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, I'm. I can already tell that I have to go into my usual job of myth dispeller, because even back then it was not about simple meals and not driving cars and all this other stuff. It was about just being moderately purposeful about your decisions and making sure that if you do choose to spend money, especially if it's going to be a lot of it, then it's on something that you enjoy. And if you have a choice between two things, like something that's good for you and inexpensive and maybe not so good for you, and expensive, like drinking at a bar is a good easy example, then maybe you choose the good for you option every now and then more often. And if you make these decisions just over time, then it tends to lead to this compounding snowball of massively increased wealth, lower cost of living, and the possible end result is that you can retire much earlier. And that's the path that I happen to choose because at age 30 we wanted to be full time parents so we could devote our time not splitting it between career and child raising. And it just led to a bunch of articles on how to do this exactly in all the different areas of life, whether it's like exercise or housing or your meals or all these other things. And I guess people were interested in that. So it led to an interesting writing career for me. And now we're in 2026 and I've like definitely reduced the writing that I'm doing. And it's really not that I don't have as many ideas to write about, but I just have so much other fun stuff going on in retirement, I'm not willing to sacrifice it and sit in front of the computer and type all the time. So it's a proof that retirement really happens.
- [08:59]
Farnoosh Torabi
Well, I want to talk about your retirement, but going back to those days, and you mentioned myths, what were some of the other misconceptions what you are trying to educate people on?
- [09:09]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, I think everybody sees it in a different lens when they see ideas online. One of the biggest surprises for me was that there were haters to begin with. Like I thought I was presenting these ideas that were obvious and definitely positive. Who doesn't want to be healthier and who doesn't want to have more money? And then people would just come in and chime in with all these different objections and conspiracy theories. Oh, he's just doing this because he's like a sponsored corporate shill for something, even though we don't know what it is. And so people will find problems in anything. And because the Internet is a big place and we have a negativity bias where we tend, as the writer or the creator, to see the Complaints a lot more loudly than we see positive feedback or praise. And that was a surprise to me. And people just attacked everything. Mainly the biggest thing is just your lifestyle would lead to a crappy life. If I tried to save money, therefore I'm not even going to try. And that was always a surprise for me.
- [10:06]
Farnoosh Torabi
If it's any consolation, Pete, when I first started writing about money, I think it was USA Today or US News World Report. They said, hey, Farnish, can you just write like your daily or weekly spending diary or something for us? And I mentioned that I spent, I don't know, 11 or 12 on hangers. I got. I was finished. I thought my life was over. Like, people were commenting the meanest things. I'll never forget. It was one of my bosses who said, for every negative comment on a blog or an article, there's probably a hundred positive people liking what you said, but they just didn't say anything, you know, because that. The impulse is to write something negative. Like how many times you would go to a restaurant, we loved the meal. We never wrote a review. But as soon as we find that hair and that spaghetti or that fly in our soup or whatever, we will take it down.
- [11:00]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah. And it's a good lesson for everybody. Like, even if you think about how many Taylor Swift songs are there about fighting back at the haters and she fights back again. One of her albums is called Reputation because she thought that she had a bad reputation. I'm like, what are you talking about, Taylor Swift? You're like the most popular and beloved figure possibly on earth with the highest positive name recognition. And she still feels hated. And that kind of just shows that you'll only see the negative. And she even knows that, like, everybody screams at her shows and says, we love you, but she still feels persecuted. And that's just human nature. Like, it's really hard to have critics, but it's a real advantage if you learn to put that in perspective. And if you ever look, if you're like a website owner, like we are, and you look at the number of comments versus the number of times something was read, it's actually Even less than 1% of people who ever read or less than 1% of people who read ever leave a comment. And then, of course, about 1%, 1 to 50, depending on Yahoo. Finance used to be famous for getting a lot of negative comments. A lot of haters and grumpy people would read that website.
- [12:03]
Farnoosh Torabi
Man, I had to get security involved one day. Really? Really? Yeah, it was. It was like just a Little like behind the scenes, like sites like that, they actually have, if they're on top of things, they actually have a whole department dedicated to cyber security for the purposes of threats, online threats. If someone ever threatens your life or threatens to harm you, like there is a whole team at the ready to go through the protocols and unfortunately I had to do that once. It just means you're making an impact. Yeah, that's the positive.
- [12:34]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Exactly. There is a price to pay for success in every industry and every job you do.
- [12:40]
Farnoosh Torabi
Now you achieve financial independence very early. As you said your goal was 30. Tell us about what the goal initially was. Remind me, did you achieve it on schedule? Did you actually retire at 30? And then what was on the other side of that? Was it all your dreams come true?
- [12:55]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah. The answer is yes, technically it was just before my 31st birthday and my wife at the time was slightly older, so she was 30. And our goal was to have enough passive income to support our desired level of spending. And we did reach it. And it was all just by having. It was a mixture. In theory, you just have to have a bunch of stocks invested like index funds. But in our case we had a rental house that was a mostly paid off house. So the majority of the rent became cash flow for us. But there's many ways to do it and it's easier if your expenses are lower, of course. So we had a strategically low cost living. It was easy to meet that with just our saved money. And then we did a mixture of being totally retired, starting businesses that made money and starting businesses that lost money. So I like to say that really the retirement cushion was what made it all possible and we could have just not worked. Which is another thing that the haters sometimes get confused is they're like you're a blogger now and you're a carpenter, so you're not retired. The Internet retirement police, as I call them. But really it's just there's a very simple formula called the 4% rule, where if you have this much savings, then you technically don't have to work. And it's pretty much time proven through all different ways you can calculate it.
- [14:11]
Farnoosh Torabi
How much credit Pete, do you give the economy at the time as you are building wealth, people would another maybe criticism not of you, but just of trying to achieve fire. Currently with where the economy's at, the uncertainty mostly of the stock market market, the AI bubble has a lot of people concerned. The job market's already reeling from it. Do you think it would be more challenging, slash different to do what you did back in the early aughts, I said the two. What is it? The aughts. The 2008s. Because you started, like, in the mid-2000s.
- [14:46]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, people ask that question all the time. From the year 2005, when I retired until now, there's always a case for, oh, it would have been easier in the past. First of all, when you actually look at the numbers, that's incorrect. It's usually always about the same. Now, if someone.
- [15:02]
Farnoosh Torabi
Which numbers are you talking about?
- [15:04]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Like, the stock market returns over the previous 30 years, you might expect over the next 30 years. So the real secret sauce in all this, if there is one, is living in the United States. So the United States is probably the easiest place to earn money and then retire early because our salaries are so high here and everything is so cheap, despite what Americans like to think. But the ratio of your income here to the cost of necessities like food, clothing, all your household goods is just off the charts. Compared to Canada, where I came from, or Europe, most wealthy European countries, they still have lower salaries and high cost of living and higher taxes. USA is still great, and it's going to remain great. In my opinion, despite the negative news headlines. It's just an invincible country. But aside from that, I didn't retire at the best time because the 2008 financial crisis happened just three years after my retirement, which is one of the worst times. Early in your retirement, if the value of all your assets falls a lot. And I happen to have a lot of housing. I had, like, a hobby construction company, in fact, at the time. So I lost a lot of money on houses that I was building and trying to sell. Suddenly they were worth half as much. And even then, my retirement survived just fine. And then, of course, we entered a giant stock market Boom. That's from 2010 until the present. So anybody who started right at the crash time has actually had the best savings experience perhaps in history because the stock market has gone up so quickly. So right now is actually a great time to retire because your assets are probably worth a ton compared much more than you expected.
- [16:40]
Farnoosh Torabi
My daughter asked me the day, when do you want to retire? She's nine. I don't even know if I knew that word when I was 9. But I guess she listens to the podcast and she and I said to her, I think I'd like to keep going. I call it beast mode. I'm in beast mode right now, Pete. You know, like, just working, working. But I love what I do. But I think I'd love to offload some of that work. Probably starting at 55. I'm 46. I could.
- [17:07]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
So long in the future you're gonna work an entire career on top of a career that you had just worked.
- [17:13]
Farnoosh Torabi
I just started a new business.
- [17:15]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Wow.
- [17:16]
Farnoosh Torabi
Do you ever get that inspiration to start something really big? Because you could do, correct me if I'm wrong, you could do anything you want. Right. You have the resources.
- [17:26]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Sure. Within reason. I can't start like a semiconductor fabrication company or something that is like $300 billion investment. But you could.
- [17:34]
Farnoosh Torabi
There's, I mean, yeah, there's a path.
- [17:36]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
I could become like a tech CEO again, I guess. Like I'm still pretty good at technology, but I very much prefer my leisure. Like I'm, I'm big onto like the slow flowing lifestyle. Like you wake up and go for a sunrise walk and have coffee and do all the, all these pleasant morning activities. I'm not in, I'm not in it for business.
- [17:54]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah. I think what I'm learning, what I've learned about your approach to personal finance is that a lot of your success too is inherent to your kind of tendencies, your personality. You're not an impulsive person. You, as you just explained, you like the sort of simple pleasures in life. Can you talk a little bit about that and how your personality was a perfect match in some ways to this approach to money and building wealth in the way that you did?
- [18:24]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
That's a good question. It was accidental for me because I like what I like and I didn't change what I like in order to be able to retire early. But for me, I happen to enjoy what you might call productive activities rather than consuming. So I would way rather spend my Saturday like renovating a kitchen or building a house or building a deck than being on a golf course or going to like the five Michelin star restaurants or showing off in any way. I just love hard work, solving problems, preferably outdoors and using my body like outdoor construction is my favorite thing in the world. Always has been, always will be. So that's an activity that doesn't cost anything. It happens to make a small amount of money even when I just do it for myself. And if I wanted to make a business out of that, I could make medium amount of money. You could have maybe a $300,000 income if I ran a little contracting business in my neighborhood. So I definitely encourage that in my writing too. Not everyone has to be a carpenter, but if you think about activities and what you enjoy, there's going to be some that are productive and are good for you. And they're going to be some that are purely consumption, passive luxury travel where you're just being served by everybody all the time. And one of them costs a lot more than the other. And I would argue that most people get satisfaction from creating and solving problems and expressing themselves, even if they've never done it before. They might have done passive tourism and sort of enjoyed it, but maybe they'd like being a tour organizer more. Because then you're the boss and you're using your creativity to give experiences to people and meeting people. And there's just always ways to flip something to make it more. More productive and more satisfying, which also usually makes the financial side of it better, too.
- [20:05]
Farnoosh Torabi
I remember when we were in Colorado, you lived outside Denver, right?
- [20:09]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
I did at the time, yeah. In Longmont. And now I actually live in Denver. Cause I made a little move.
- [20:13]
Farnoosh Torabi
But yeah, we'll talk about that.
- [20:15]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
We'll talk about that subject.
- [20:16]
Farnoosh Torabi
I want to learn about your new single lifestyle. But you were ra. Raising your son, you and your wife at the time, and you were like, kids are not expensive. You can just. They live off pizza. It's easy. And people would differ on that. People are not having kids because of the financial fear of that toll. What do you want people to know about the affordability of raising kids? And I want to just say, affordability in the U.S. i get you, but it depends on where you live in the US like, where you lived outside Denver, far more affordable than, say, where I live outside New York City. That's a choice. But tell me about kids and money. What have you learned about the. The cost of that and how to save?
- [20:57]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
The answer, I think, is that much like taking care of yourself as an adult, raising kids is entirely your own decision on how much it costs. And it's funny because you, when you read these surveys, it says, how much does it cost to raise a child? And it's always broken down by income. Like, where the richer people spend way more on raising their kids. I'm, like, surprised. It's because they're choosing more expensive stuff for their kids. And if you can afford it, and if that's what you choose to spend your money on, that's great. Like, it's super fun to do the $10,000 trip to your Europe or whatever. But you also don't have to do that. Like, kids do not need your fancy adult stuff in order to have a prosperous, creative childhood. And in fact, you can in some ways suppress it if you don't let them do what they are really made to do, which is explore and play creatively in their world, their own world. That's how humans were made to learn. Inspired exploring an environment and seeing how it responds. Like ideally in a natural environment like a forest or something so you can have a great childhood that doesn't cost much. It costs nothing to go to the forest cause nothing to play with Legos almost to play with your friends and the more you schedule them up, the more you're going to spend. But I don't think you're actually making their lives better by creating that stereotypical rich kid, maybe east coast type of childhood.
- [22:13]
Farnoosh Torabi
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- [23:24]
Verizon Advertiser
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- [23:54]
Commercial Narrator
you felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by Hers. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals, and hers now offers access to an affordable range of FDA approved GLP1 medications, including the Wegovy Pill and the Wegovy Patent. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP1 options, hers makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget. If eligible, you'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit fourhers.com eligible to get personalized affordable care that gets you that's F o r h E-R-S.com eligible forhers.com eligible weight loss by hers is not available in all 50 states. WeGovy is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk as To get started and learn more, including important safety information, WeGovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit fourhers.com refresh the rooms you love for spring with Pura. Our collection of floral, citrus and fresh scents brings a light, airy feel to every space, like opening the windows on a first warm day of the season. From soft blooms to bright citrus, each scent is designed to capture the energy of spring and make your home feel renewed, effortless and alive. Learn more@pura.com
- [25:20]
Farnoosh Torabi
before we were recording, we were talking about comparison culture and I was reminded of that because of what you just said about raising kids and how you could spend all the money on raising your kids. And I think part of that is you get sucked into this, these expectations of what it means to be a quote unquote good parent and providing for your kids. Social media is not helpful in that department, which again I think speaks also to your own ability to stay strong in those moments of pressure. But have there been times in your life, Pete, where you have been drawn to temptation or your curiosity has led you to paths that surprised you, that might have even cost you some money?
- [26:02]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Is this still like a child raising question?
- [26:03]
Farnoosh Torabi
Are you thinking about it's more for your own life? Yeah. Have you ever been a victim of temptation of your own temptations?
- [26:11]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah. I like to think of it as an experiment and everything in life is an experiment. If you haven't tried something before, then absolutely try it and then evaluate whether or not it's something that makes your life better. And of course, if you can afford it, that's always a factor as well. And so I've done, I tried various luxurious things throughout my Life, including before and after retirement and always settled at what works best for me. And that's one of the reasons like people think that fire and my particular story is all about being cheap and trying to retire as quickly as possible. But it wasn't really like that. Cause I was lucky enough to have a very high income career and I was married to a high income person, so. So there was really no shortage of money. It was more like money was easy for us and we just settled at a level where we thought it was plenty and then just didn't go beyond the level of plenty. So anyway, yeah, it was just also to have a really expensive taste. As I mentioned earlier, the idea of producing saves me from wanting to buy a big motor yacht and just float around in Chicago harbor all the time. Because like that's not really creating anything. It's just burning gas.
- [27:21]
Farnoosh Torabi
What was your childhood like, Pete? Did you have. Have a similar upbringing in terms of life experiences like running in the forest, like all that? Yeah, yeah.
- [27:32]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
It's probably that really helped me because I had what I thought was a really great childhood. I look back on it really fondly and of course that reflects on what I want for my child or wanted. And now he's grown up too. But I tried to recreate that as well, make it. Facilitate it for him. And it was just a small town, not very high income. I come from a somewhat big family. There's four of us kids in the family, so I have a brother and two sisters. And we just. Our parents were relatively laid back. They just let us do whatever we wanted, which means we went out there and explored the town and found friends and rode bikes and swam in the river and did well in school because there wasn't really much else to do. And it was also in the era before social media and computers weren't even much of a thing back then because I'm that old. So it forced kids to do something else. There was nothing really to entertain you. TV sucked back then. There wasn't like we didn't even have the ability to call up any movie to watch instantly. So the relative boredom of outside entertainment, of course, just to have our own entertainment, which I thought was very enriching.
- [28:38]
Farnoosh Torabi
Wow. Yeah. It's just such a different world right today. It's. There's so many headwinds. And since we last spoke, I want to transition now to your life today. You've hinted at a few ways that you're living your life today. You're living in Denver. Your family dynamic has changed your Son has grown. You wrote about your divorce. What were some of the big financial takeaways from those life pivots? Well, let's start with your divorce. That was probably not something you had written into the plan. And I read too, that it split your assets. How did that impact your financial life, but also your view on, like, saving and money in marriage and all that.
- [29:12]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, first of all, I got very lucky in the divorce department. My former wife was a wonderful person to be married to and a wonderful person to be divorced from. Like, we maintained really good relations the whole time. And my sympathy is it doesn't always work out for people that way. And that's when divorce gets expensive. In our case, we just. We had plenty between us. So when we split up our assets, we were both equally well off. Because you're. You don't have as a higher cost of living. Of course, if there's just one person instead of two. Other than your housing. Right. Like, I bought myself a new house, and so that reduced my savings by the price of the house at that level, it's not really a huge effect because we're relatively wealthy, having had all those years to save. And the harder it is, divorce is harder when there's a scarcity of money because there's more to fight over. And of course, also if the people happen to be really mad at each other and they just want to inflict harm on the other person, that makes it really horrible, too. So definitely be very careful about who you get married to. I think people do that tend to do it a bit early and capriciously in their young life. They don't think about what will this look like in the likely event that we part ways someday. And would that be an amicable parting? Because if not, you probably shouldn't get married in the first place because it's very likely that you'll want to go your separate ways someday and you want that to be a positive process that you move on from. And that's what we've had. And our lives have been separate but close, still in the same neighborhood. And really great. That was more than eight years ago. And I've. It forced me to do a lot of new things in life that I wouldn't have done, which helped me live a more full life. So it's really. It's been positive, I think.
- [30:51]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah. Tell me about some of the choices you've made. I'm on your blog right now. One of the latest posts, although I don't know if you wrote it that recently, about your Unexpected Journey to Hormone Replacement trt.
- [31:03]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Oh, yeah.
- [31:03]
Farnoosh Torabi
Thanks for writing that. I think that's a really important thing to share.
- [31:08]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, that was like, that's certainly not the normal stuff that I write about, but I just share anything that's useful and as getting to be towards middle age and having a partner now who is a physician who's like, really knows a lot about aging and hormones because she is a fertility doctor at them. It's just something I felt like, hey, a lot of my readers are around the same age group and they might not know the same stuff that I have stumbled into. So I think I thought I'd share it. Some people got mad at me for writing that article, but. But why in general? Because some people just don't like the idea of medical intervention maybe, or they thought it was like a sales pitch, which it wasn't. I'm not making any money off that article or anything. And that's also like hormone replacement gets painted with a sketchy brush. Because there's also, you know, a lot of online scams built around it get jacked or sexual performance enhancing stuff or whatever. Really, it's just a very natural thing for people my age is if your hormone levels drop up, there's like a cheap and reliable way to replace it for women and men that your own doctor can help you with that. It shouldn't be expensive, it shouldn't be a sales pitch. And basically it just gives you an extra 10 or 20 years of feeling young and having a young body. So for the right people, it's just good. It's just a nice invention.
- [32:24]
Farnoosh Torabi
Good return on your investment. You said you mentioned you bought an apartment or a house. Was that unexpected? Did you imagine you would be doing that at any point? Post fire Yes, I did know that
- [32:35]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
because I've always loved houses and I actually enjoy. I'm one of the weird people who enjoy moving. So I've moved. I've had many houses and lived many places in my life. And I'd settled in Longmont for a long time for the stability of child raising, but to celebrate my son's 20th birthday and the fact that my social life has moved south to Denver. And Longmont is out in the sticks. It's like a. It's a nice town, but it's 40 miles from Denver so you end up driving back and forth a lot if you have friends in Denver. So I decided to buy a place in this neighborhood that really works for me in Denver. It's like a super, super walkable, gorgeous paradise little neighborhood and it costs a bit more here because mainly because the houses are bigger on average. I'm like doubling my living expense in a way, my housing expense. But it was worth it to me and it was just a decision because my savings and investments have gone well over the years and I can afford to spend a bit more now than I expected. And this is happening to a lot of us in the fire movement, by the way. Most people over cheap and underspend and they're like overly conservative. And then you get through your 40s and you're like, darn it, I got about twice as much as I expected. So what should I do? And it's nice to decide purposefully if you do want to spend more money on something that's important to you. Sometimes the answer is no and you just go on as it is. But you should always be questioning yourself and questioning your old assumptions. And that's what I did here. And I came up with this idea of, yeah, I'm going to buy this house. It has a bit more room for me and it's in a bit of a nicer area. And I think it was the right decision. I've lived here a month now and it's like quite a joy.
- [34:12]
Farnoosh Torabi
Awesome. It sounds like you're in a really great place. It's been so nice to catch up. I want to ask a little bit about your son too. And now you said he's turning 20. What does he know about the Mr. Money mustache brand and impact? And what do you think he's taken from that, if anything? Kids, they observe mostly. It's not even so much we have to tell them anything. They just watch us and they learn.
- [34:37]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, I think that's been really interesting because I just lived, and his mom too. We just lived our lives according to our values and some of those have passed on to him. But he's also so independent that you can't really tell him anything, tell him what to do. He'll take that as a maybe piece of feedback and probably not necessarily adopt it. But he did turn out to be quite frugal, like sensible. But he's generous, more generous than I expected. He'll often buy things for his friends, for example, even though they're all young adults. He's a bit more well off than they are. And he likes to share, which I think is a great value. And he's a really kind person, very considerate, like un. Almost like uncannily kind for. Because people make fun of 20 year olds for being self centered.
- [35:22]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah.
- [35:23]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Somehow he's turned out this really generous, thoughtful guy, so I'm really happy for him. I think he's got a bright future ahead of him and it's going to be very independent. I think maybe the independence is one of the things that really wore off is I never subscribed to normal social narratives. It was like, do consider all the options and then do and try things that might be right for you rather than just follow the path that someone tells you to do. And that's very much what he is. How he seems to be living his life, too.
- [35:50]
Farnoosh Torabi
How do you think about generational wealth? Do you want to leave him your wealth or do you have other thoughts on that? Because it's.
- [35:59]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
It varies and very controversial, I think. I'm not in favor of generational wealth and I kind of subscribe. I think Warren Buffett talks, talked about this too. But I think it's a real gift for people to make their own way in the world rather than just know that their future is going to be provided for them automatically by wealthy parents. And that's what happened to me, right? Like, I didn't get any money from my parents. And for a while there was actually like a reverse flow. Like my siblings and I have helped our parents in the past in certain financial situations just because we were all fortunate to have these great careers. And to me, that felt great to build my own wealth from pretty much nothing and then to have access. And I would love my son to do that too. I like the idea of the generational wealth being there to support them if there is a problem, like a disability or an emergency or something. It's nice to have stability, but just to hand down and create a family dynasty, that's not my thing. And I don't think my son would particularly have wanted big inheritance from me either. But we'll see. He's so young down. Things probably change as he gets older.
- [37:11]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, I read a book, interviewed the author, Die with Zero. Really interesting perspective. Yeah. Flips this whole idea of culturally. And I don't think it's just here in the States, but this idea that you build, save, and then you leave it all to your heirs or whatever. But what if you gift it all while you're living? Because the idea of being 60 and inheriting money from your parents, hey, no one's going to argue with that. But it would have been maybe more helpful to have gotten some of that Support in your 30s or your 40s when you were starting to start the business or trying to buy the house or Whatever. And you are healthier. So that's that author's thought on that is like why are we just. Because this way too we have more of an ability to not influence, be more selective about how that money gets allocated as we are alive and our children or whoever we want to give the money to can benefit from it.
- [38:08]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
It.
- [38:08]
Farnoosh Torabi
It's just another thought for sure that
- [38:10]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Bill Perkins has a great point there. Gifting while you're younger is good. And again, it's still a slippery slope in my opinion where you don't want to make things so posh and easy for your kids that they're denied this wonderful satisfaction of the hardship and the struggle and then the achievement to build their own wealth. But everyone might have a different perspective on that. But it's also you can do creative tricks around the edges. Let's say you have grown children in their 30s and you become a grandparent. They have kids. You could gift them the fact that you travel to see them and help them out with their kids so that they can have date nights or vacations while you do the hard work of taking care of these kids. Or you could buy a vacation home and maintain like a really fun place that's within a short drive, an easy weekend visiting place like a lake house or something. Create family memories. So you're subsidizing them in the fact that they might not have been able to afford this cottage, but as a grandparents you do it. And so that's a way of using your wealth to create memories while you're still young. And I think that's still a win. Win.
- [39:09]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, I love that. Okay, I knew I said I was gonna say goodbye, but I do have one more question is have you changed your investing strategy at all over the years or more recently? Even if it's just like I'm getting older and my risk tolerance has changed so I'm not entirely in equities 100% or whatever that is. And I think two if you have any concerns about the current state of the world and people are like The S&P 500 is not as diversified as it was because it's majority these tech companies that are also very leveraged with AI so that you need to actually be more diversified than that. So what are. I just want to know where you're at, where your head's at right now with investing your portfolio.
- [39:49]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Yeah, I've always been a relatively unemotional and numbers based person. So I've always been comfortable with like nearly 100% equities just index Funds. And so I've never been like carry much bonds or anything like that. I don't like cash because I trust the system. Like, I don't mind volatility. Some people do mind volatility. And for those people, having a broader asset allocation is a good idea. But if you think about just like this last 10 or 12 years, a lot of people in my situation would have been like, okay, time to protect what you've earned. Time to sleep well at night, let's diversify into tons of bonds. And then I would have missed out on like the biggest stock market rally in history. So my only compromise is I tend to keep my houses mortgage free. So it's like having a bond that pays your rent for you. And I'm only getting the equivalent of whatever I would have paid on a mortgage for doing that. So that's one way to balance it a little bit. But in general, I just, I like stocks, I like holding a lot. Not everybody feels that way. But on average the numbers tell you you'll come up further ahead the higher your percentage of equities over time. And for me, I go, I generally make my decisions on numbers based on emotion. I'm more of like a robot slash spreadsheet. Spreadsheets make my emotions rather than news headlines. And that's the other things I don't read. The news I avoid as much as possible. I don't worry about what this president or that president is doing or whether the world's going to hell, because it's not. I just maintain a permanent at optimism, which for the last 250 years has been the best strategy for an American. That's how you get ahead is assume everything's going to be great and invest accordingly.
- [41:27]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, hope for the best plan for the semi worst. Pete Adney, thank you so much. Just want to say your writing in your voice and your presence has been such a real gift to the community, our personal finance community, even though controversial at times, but controversy is good. It gets people talking. And that's what you have done. You've gotten people to really think more critically and honestly about their money. I appreciate all the candor on the show today and let's not go another like 11 years. Let's keep in touch and you're welcome anytime. Thank you.
- [42:03]
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache)
Sounds great. I hope to be around for a long time and continue to be out there trying to help.
- [42:10]
Farnoosh Torabi
Thanks so much to Mr. Money Mustache for joining us. His blog is still pretty active. He tends to write from time to time. You can check it out@Mrmoney mustache.com thanks for tuning in and I'll see you back here on Friday for AskFarnouche. I hope your day is so money.
- [42:39]
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