Afford Anything - A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, with Jordan Grumet

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

#355: When Jordan Grumet realized he has achieved financial independence, he fell into a deep depression. He didn’t know who he was anymore, he says, and he didn’t know what should come next. He learned about how to deal with us by observing his hospice patients. In this episode, Grumet, a hospice doctor, describes how working with the dying has taught him about life. Subscribe to the show notes at affordanything.com/shownotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. The way that you allocate any limited resource is a representation of what you value. And that opens up two questions. Number one, what do you value?

What are your priorities? What do you think is important? What matters and what doesn't? And forget what society says ought to matter. What do you? believe. That is number one. And number two, how do you put that into action? How do you make choices on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis that reflect your values? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore and facilitate.

My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today, a former hospice doctor named Jordan Grummet, joins us to talk about what he learned about money, finances, wealth, values, priorities, about the things that matter and the things that don't. He's going to discuss all of that with the perspective of someone who has spent his career and who is continuing to spend his post-F-I life working in the company and in the service of those who are on the brink of death. Right now, it is the holiday season. It's almost the new year.

It's December, late December 2021. It's a time when we are reflecting on the year behind us and the year ahead. And it seemed to me like this conversation, this wide lens conversation about what matters and how we're going to plan our upcoming year in the context of what matters. This seemed like the best time to have a conversation. that is sometimes hard to hear. You know, discussions about death are discussions that we often like to avoid. Most of us don't like to think about our mortality.

But it is through acknowledging our mortality that we can gain clarity about our limited years on this earth. So Jordan Grummet is a part of the financial independence community. He is more widely known as Doc G. the host of the Earn and Invest podcast. He's in the process of writing a book about what his experience as a hospice doctor has taught him about financial independence, about wealth, about what matters. The book is very much in draft mode. It's not going to get released until August of next year, August 2022. It's incredibly unusual.

I mean, it's unheard of for an author who is releasing a book eight months down the road to come and do an interview about it now. But I strongly felt like this is a conversation that right around the new year, right around the time that we're reflecting on the year that we want to build ahead, this is a conversation that we need to have right now. I learned a lot from it. Most notably, I learned the concept which you'll hear us discuss that money is a tool, not a goal. We'll talk about that in a moment. And I hope that you gain a lot from this as well. Here he is, Jordan Grummet. Hey, Jordan.

Hey, Paul. It's great to be on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come to this show and share your wisdom with the community. Jordan, before you retired, you were a hospice doctor. Is that correct? It is right. I'm a hospice doctor actually currently, although I work much less than I used to.

So I was formally trained in general internal medicine, which is pretty much the adult version of a do everything except surgery doctor. And I did that for many years and practiced pretty much every flavor of it. So I saw patients in the hospital, saw patients at home, saw patients in the office, at their homes, saw patients in the office. And eventually as I started realizing that I was better off financially than I thought, in fact, I was financially independent, I started getting rid of those things in medicine I didn't like. So I started subtracting out all those things that were causing me stress, the late night phone calls, the hospital patients that needed intensive care, all those things that took up my time and space. And what I was left with was hospice medicine. And it was the one part of medicine that I knew that I would do even if you weren't paying me for it. So I kind of got rid of all those things I didn't like.

The hospice medicine was the part that I still felt connected to. And even today, I still practice some hospice medicine. So I cover one team of hospice patients. So it's about eight to ten hours a week of work. And we'll talk about this throughout our next hour together. But through hospice work, you have. have observed and learned quite a lot about the way that people react when they know that they're at the end of their lives, the way that their thoughts and feelings change.

And that formed the premise of a book that you wrote about precisely that topic. In your book, you described the story of a woman named Liz, who was working towards financial independence, and that goal took her in a different direction than what she anticipated. Can you tell us about Liz? Sure. The story of Liz is incredibly personal because I feel like it is so parallel to my own story. Liz was a professional. She was the head income earner of her household.

And she was supporting her family, her husband, and kids. At some point, she did what a lot of us do. She realized that I would rather be working a little bit less and spending more time at home. She liked work but didn't love it. And then she discovered personal finance and financial independence. And she realized, just like a lot of us did, that there was this way that she could set her finances up. She could earn, save, and invest, and eventually be able to leave the workplace or at least go part time such that she could spend more time with the people she loves. So she set off on this quest.

And initially, she felt quite excited about the process. She learned about savings. She learned about being frugal. She learned about putting her money away and investing. She got to the point where her finances were on autopilot and she could see the end in sight. So she had a goal of where she wanted her net worth to be. She had an idea of how much she needed invested. And once she got herself on that path, after a year or two of studying and working towards it, something strange happened.

she found that a lot of the joy left the process. It was like she spent all her time working to this one big thing. And now that it was in sight, it was no longer making her happy. And she kind of spun out of control. At first, it was a loss of interest in things like work. Eventually, she started drinking more something she had never done before. And eventually, she ended up getting into a car accident, a car accident that finally was fatal. I came into contact with her family when she was on life support.

They had to make the decision whether to stop the machines or not because the CAT scans and the EEGs and everything showed that her brain activity was minimal. They thought that she had fallen asleep while she was driving because she hadn't been sleeping much at home. And this story really drove home to me something that I had found in my own path that when you, you start concentrating on money is your overall goal, something I had really done. I was finding myself burnt out myself and being a doctor. And I had set all these goals up. And then when I really learned about personal finance and financial independence, I found out that I was exactly where I wanted to be. And I was jubilant for all of a minute. And then I became quite depressed and anxious. And I think Liz and I shared a similar problem is that we hadn't spent a lot of

time thinking about what it meant to not have to be worried about money anymore. Like money had become such a big issue in our lives and it had become such a big goal that I don't think either of us ever really thought about, well, what happens afterwards and what does a good life look like. I know for me and certainly for Liz, a lot of that look like spending time with family, but I think spending time with family can only go so far because our loved ones, like our spouse and our children, also have their lives of their own. And at some point, you have to decide what you want to do with your life. For me, and I also think for Liz, that was something that was really well defined by our jobs. And so we kind of both realized that we didn't love our jobs, but it was very

disconcerting to think about a life without those jobs because we had placed our identity central in what we spent doing from nine to five. How did you first encounter, Liz? Did you know her prior to the car accident? Did you know her through the personal finance space? No, actually, I came in contact with Liz as I come in contact with all hospice patients through the hospice referral system. So I ended up being the hospice doctor taking care of her. But what often happens when you are a hospice physician is you sit down and talk to the family. And so you get a lot of the backstory. You find out what was going on in their life, what happened with them. So we get a call saying there is a young woman on life support who's been declared brain dead. And they're thinking of withdrawing the life support. They'd like hospice service

to help do that and to do that process. And then we come in and we talk to the family. And a lot of what happens if a patient is able to, a lot of time they talk to us, but otherwise we talk to their family and we do a lot of life review. So we talk about a person's life, what their wishes were, what was important to them, what they would have wanted for themselves if they could speak at that moment. And so during that life review process, a lot of this came out. I spent a lot of time talking to her husband. And the sad part about it is, you know, at the end, her husband, you know, at one point said to me a week or two after I called him to see I was doing, you said, you know what, I would have gone back to work, you know, like I would have gladly worked the rest of my life to have her back. But at that

point, I think for her, it was just such a goal to be done with work and to do other things that she didn't realize that there were costs. And one of the costs was that she wasn't ready emotionally to kind of move to that next place. The goal of getting to where she needed to be financially overcame a lot of her working on who she was as a person and what gave her meaning. And I think that led to depression. And I've seen that multiple times actually in the financial independent space and I definitely felt it when I went through it. Tell me more about that depression. Tell me about it when you went through it and also what you've seen. So my story is interesting because my father was a physician and he was an oncologist and I worshipped him, right? I was seven,

eight years old. He was exactly what I wanted to be in life and he died suddenly from a brain aneurism. So one day he went to work and then he never came home. And in a lot of ways, I, because I was a little kid and little kids, you know, we don't know any better, I felt responsible. Like, I did something wrong. My eight-year-old brain said, if you were just a better kid, he wouldn't have died. And that was a real source of tension in my life at that time. The answer I finally came up with, the thing that made me feel like this was all right was I decided that I needed to take his place. As an eight-year-old kid, I decided he was a doctor, he died, I need to grow up and be a

doctor and take care of all those patients that he never would get the chance to take care of. So this idea of being a doctor was deeply ingrained in my mind. I can't even think of a time where I ever considered anything else. And in fact, at that time, I also had a major learning disability. I had trouble learning how to read. I was, when my friends in second grade were doing reading in their first books, they had me on a coloring book because I couldn't read. So I had a major learning disability. But even at that time, I was like, I'm going to be a doctor. And I was like, I'm going to be a doctor and that's what's going to happen. And so that idea really carried me through my childhood.

I got over the learning disability. I eventually learned how to study like a maniac, like all of us who do, who go into these major professions. I became a doctor and then something happened. I realized that I didn't love it as much as I thought I would. It wasn't what I thought I signed up for as opposed to being the joy of rushing in the room and saving lives. a lot of doctoring was paperwork.

A lot of it was dealing with agitated and angry patients. A lot of it was facing the fact that patients were dying and you couldn't fix it. So I got to this point where I knew that my longevity and medicine would only last to some point that I needed to get away from this. I started building up passive revenue streams. I started buying real estate. I did all these kind of things because I knew that they related to getting to a point financially where I didn't have to work anymore. But I didn't really have the vocabulary or understanding of what that was. And then something interesting happened.

In 2014, I got a phone call in my office. And my secretary said, hey, Jordan, there's this guy on the phone. He just wrote a book. He wants you to write a review of it on your blog. Now, at the time, I was doing a medical blog. I was writing about medicine and what it feels like to be a doctor. The guy on the phone was Jim Dolly, and he had just written the book, The White Coat Investor. I had never heard of him before, but at that time I was like, oh, you're going to send me a free book?

Great, send it over. I will review this book and write something up on my blog. The White Coat Investor taught me the words, vocabulary, and calculations necessary to understand my personal finances. I had always done a great job of it because I grew up with really smart parents who were always financially savvy. So I was going through the motions, but I didn't understand the why behind it. When I read Jim's book, I knew immediately I did the calculations. I could have told you within an hour that I already was financially independent. I had enough money.

And there was literally those five minutes of being so excited because I could leave this job that wasn't giving me joy anymore. But quickly after that, I entered a very deep depression and had a huge, amount of anxiety. Part of it was I didn't have any other identity outside of being a doctor. This is the identity that connected to me to my father who died when I was eight, this little wisp of him I still had left. I didn't know who I was. I had no idea what purpose looked like in my life. I had no idea of identity other than being a doctor, which by the way never fit me very well. Like I didn't never had a huge number of doctor friends. I didn't hang out in the doctor's lounge. When I was in public, I used to shrink at parties because I dreaded getting the

question, what do you do for a living? Because I always felt like when I told people I was a doctor, it changed the way they interacted with me. So I immediately went from, I wish I could not be working anymore to guess what you could quit your job tomorrow and that disconnect was just difficult i had no idea who i was i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life i knew i wanted to spend time with my wife and kids but they had lives of their own like i had to figure out okay what's my purpose now i'm 40 something years old and i have no idea what i'm supposed to be doing tomorrow What's unusual about your story is that you built financial independence in hindsight. Did that immediately lead to the thought, all right, I am going to leave this profession,

given that you weren't happy with the profession? No. I knew that the current situation I was in was bad. And yet, I'd love to say that I suddenly knew that I could leave it and build a different identity and be a person who was more connected to what I really wanted to be. But at the time, I didn't have any of that insight or foresight. All I knew was there were parts of my job that were intolerable. So I did two things immediately. One is I started ruthlessly subtracting from my life, especially my work life, things that were difficult forms of friction, right? So I didn't like being on-call

24-7 to my home patients because I was doing a concierge medical practice at the time. So the first thing I did is I said, okay, I'm going to get rid of my concierge medical practice because I don't want to be on call 24-7, but I'm going to still do nursing home work. I'm going to still do hospice work. And I did that for a bunch of months. And then I said, hey, you know what, I'm getting called at two in the morning every morning because these nursing home patients are sick. And you know what? I don't want to be called at two in the morning anymore. So then I got rid of my nursing home patients. And I said, well, I'm financially independent. I can do whatever I want.

I still like this hospice stuff. Let's do that. And at some point, I even realized, you know what? In the hospice job, I don't like working nights and weekends. So I ended up being a consultant for the hospice where I work five days a week. I do a lot of my work over text. I actually don't see patients. I manage teams that take care of patients now.

And so I slowly subtracted out all those things I didn't like about my work life. And that's what led to a career. career, that's what led to activities that truly were part of that identity of being a doctor that I still liked. So there was a lot about being a doctor that I now know I don't connect with that identity. But the little bit that did, I was able to hold on to doing the hospice work. And as I always say, I knew that this was part of who I wanted to be because I would do this work even if they stopped paying me.

So that was like a flashing light to me that I should keep doing this. So that was one thing I did is I ruthlessly subtracted everything out of my work life that I didn't like. The other thing I did is I really spent a time that's probably six months to a year of deep contemplation about who I am. What do I want and what do I do about it? And in fact, that's when I started writing about personal finance. I started a blog called Diversify.

I wrote almost every day, and it was a public, very, very public diary of what I was going through emotionally and physically in my attempts to extirpate myself from this profession that had become so much part of my identity that I couldn't escape. And yet I didn't want to be there. And so I had to do both those things. I had to subtract those things out of work I didn't like. And then I had to really do some deep thinking and writing and journaling and diarying. about who I am and what a good life looks like. And that kind of led me to the life I live now, which is a heck of a lot more enjoyable.

You mentioned that you went into a deep depression, and when you told the story of Liz, it sounds like she had the same experience. Do you think that the depression comes from that lack of identity? Or do you think there are other factors that beyond lack of identity that also fuel that depression? So it's something that in my book I call the money mind meld. We get so caught up in the goal of having enough money.

We get so caught up in this idea that once I have enough, I'll be okay, that we forget that money is just a tool. It's like potential energy. It's something that we work towards that gives us the opportunity to do other important things. But a net worth goal, it's like low-hanging fruit. It's something that's easy to strive for. It might not be easy to attain, but we kind of know what to do, right? I need more money so that I can stop working. I can work more, get a higher-paying job, I can save, I can be frugal, I can side-hustle. Like, there's these easy answers. And because it's low-hanging fruit,

it's much easier to focus on those kind of things than the much deeper questions, right? The deeper questions are, why am I here, who am I, and who are those people that I'm most connected to? I think we sometimes avoid those deeper issues because it's easier and focus on money instead. The problem is, at some point, you may reach your money goal. And when you do that, unless you've been working on your own purpose, identity, connections, those deeper issues, you've all the sudden had this mirage that had been the thing you were working for towards years pulled out from under you. And all you're left with is yourself. And you're not exactly sure who you are. One thing that really connected me to understanding this

concept is, you know, I saw it often in people who got a life limiting diagnosis. As a hospice doctor, I was often the one who would walk into a room and say, okay, you have this illness, we can't fix it, you have six months or less to live. You know, and something funny happens at that point in people's lives. Yes, there is sadness and they mourn the passing of their life. But the next thing that happens is they realize I have a set amount of time to accomplish everything I want to accomplish, to make amends with whoever I I want to make amends with to do whatever I need to do, there is now a clock ticking. And because of that, I can tell you now with certainty that almost no one who I've watched die tells me when they've been told, okay, you have six months left.

Almost no one says, how am I going to make more money? In fact, often money has nothing to do with the conversation. They need enough to make sure that they can, you know, provide for themselves so they can get the care that they need. But otherwise, it's much more about what are those things that I haven't accomplished that I want to accomplish? Who are those people I want to spend my last six months with? Money all of a sudden is removed from the equation.

And it's one of the few times in life where money becomes a secondary or tertiary concern. And so it made me think a lot about people who are going through what we're going. through here. We in a very similar way all of a sudden have the mirage of money removed. When we become financial independent, we say, okay, we might worry about money here and there, but we've put this line in the sand and said, this is where we are comfortable with our money. But like people who have just been given a terminal diagnosis, all of a sudden we're stuck with, okay, what's important? I think dying people have this real urgency of now, right? They don't have time to get really depressed because there's a limited time to get done what they need to get done.

But when you do that to someone when they're 30 or 40, you become very disconnected. And then you really have to work through things. And I think it makes you think of mortality a lot. Concentrating on money is easy, again, because it's definable. When you start looking at who am I as a person, what is my purpose? Now you're talking about something that there's a time limit towards, right? All of a sudden you're like, okay, I have a set amount of time in life. I have these goals that may define my purpose and I may reach them or I may fail. And I think that's really off-putting to people. I think it's much easier to think about money and just focus on that as opposed to focus on some of the more hard things.

There's a line that you wrote that really struck me. You said, quote, I see the same issues arise for the newly financially independent as the ones that surfaced from my hospice patients when they're conducting a life review. The only difference is that for the financially independent, these issues are occurring much earlier when the individuals are young and healthy. And that echoes what you just said. Yeah, yeah. I think when you get to that point in your 30 or 40, you're like, okay, I've now got the money thing handled. Who the heck am I? And I think it's actually a good exercise for people who are nearing financial independence. When you start thinking about who am I and what do I accomplish, what are my meaning and purpose in

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Talked about how money is a tool, not a goal, but it gets confused for a goal along the way. People believe that money is a goal. They will set a certain income goal, a certain net worth goal. But once that goal is achieved, emptiness follows. And that's largely because the tool has been confused with the goal. Is there a way that both can coexist simultaneously, that a person, the people who are listening to this, could be on the path towards financial independence or even just improving their net worth generally, path towards debt payoff, path towards million dollar portfolio? You know, those are monetary goals. Can you have a monetary goal without conflating it for a tool and then experiencing that emptiness?

I definitely think we can. And so the trick is I think we need to lead with purpose, identity, and connections. And once we at least have started that process, then we can put an economic framework in place to support those things. So I'm not saying financial goals are bad. I think financial goals have become better when we make them knowing that those financial goals are potential energy that will allow us to do the things that enhance our sense of purpose, identity, and connections. And this is one of those places where I disagree with Maslow, right? So Maslow is big on his pyramid.

And if you look at Maslow's pyramid, the beginning layers of the pyramid are things like safety and security. and physiologic needs, and the top of the period is self-actualization, I think Maslow has it slightly wrong, and the reason why is, especially in doing hospice work, I've met lots of people who did a lousy job on those first few rungs of Laslo's pyramid, and yet I would look at them and say they were pretty self-actualized, and then I saw lots of people who had wealth up the kazoo, people who are rich enough to own their own hospital wing, and yet got nowhere near the personal connections or sense of self-actualization. So in a sense, I think we have to flatten Maslow's pyramid a little bit. I think the goal is to start working on not just your

physiologic and monetary needs, but work on self-actualization, what I call purpose, identity, and connections, to work on them all at the same time. And I think, think that's the mistake we make is we put we put those higher level quote unquote functions off in order to get to economic stability so how at a practical day-to-day level how could a person work on i mean connections is a little bit more obvious that's relationship building but how can a person work on purpose and identity i think we can split them out separately right so working on purpose a great way to start is that exercise i just mentioned take some time sit alone in a quiet room and contemplate what would be important to you if you just got a life

limiting diagnosis and were told you only have a year to live. It's a great way to really think about what is important. What things would you want to accomplish? What things have you always been too scared to try? What things do you know you would be good at, but you never had the time to pursue? What people have you had relationships with that you were always unhappy that it didn't end out right and you've stopped talking to? Like you can go through and list all these things that if you knew you only had a year left, you would want to pursue. Why don't we do that every year? Like, why isn't that part of our yearly routine that we start thinking about that? And that's a great starting place.

the other starting place is to just start saying yes to everything. So let's say you're like, I have no idea what my purpose is. That's the time to start saying yes to people when they call you and say, hey, let's go do this thing, this thing that you would have never done before. It's the time to try things that you've always been afraid of. Try things you think you won't like. It's the time to be open to the universe and see what the universe brings to you. I don't think this is easy.

And I also don't think our purpose has to be the same. Like, for me, it was very purposeful in my life to be someone trying to achieve the goal of getting into medical school. And in many ways, that did provide me with a very real sense of purpose throughout my younger years. But then it changed. And so I think your purpose can pivot. I don't think your purpose has to be the same consistently. I think you can pivot from time to time. But the key is that you start searching for those things.

You start trying to find what has true meaning for you. And you start doing that now. I think then you start moving towards identity. And my favorite exercise for identity, again, these are all thought or mind exercises, is to sit down and continuously say the statement, I am and then fill in the blank. I know for me, whenever I started with that, I am a doctor. It was like the first thing I always said, right? So often the first thing you'll answer is the thing you do for a living.

After doing that for a while, I started answering relationships. I'd say, I am a father. I'm a son. I'm a husband. And that's great, but relationships are only a small part of who you are. I had to dig deeper and start saying, well, what really am I? Eventually, when I kept asking myself that question, I started saying things like, I am a communicator. I'm a public speaker.

I'm a writer. I'm a person who loves to have deep conversations. It didn't happen immediately. And this goes back to that whole year of writing and really journaling and putting down my thoughts. What I eventually came to is I am a person who likes to interview people. I love having deep conversations. Like I feel most alive when I'm asking people about their lives and asking the deeper, tougher questions. And so I thought that my identity was a doctor.

I now think much more of being a communicator. And I think of my purpose much more is creating great conversations to enjoy myself, but also for other people. That took time and it took a lot of thinking. But I think those are the ways you kind of start. The connections part flows generally from the purpose and identity. So when you start thinking and figuring out what your purpose is, you start getting in contact with what your real identity is. You know, the connections naturally flow from it. I always say that I never felt comfortable being a doctor, so I never made doctor friends.

But let me tell you when I first got involved in the personal finance space and I went to a camp five, I knew immediately that I had met my people. It was the first time in my life that I had felt so comfortable around other. people, it was a life-changing experience, but only because for the first time in my life, I had a true sense of purpose and identity. And without having those, the connection part had continuously been lost on me. So purpose and identity are precursors to connection. I believe so. I mean, again, I think none of this has to specifically be done completely in order, but it certainly helps. Tell us about Jason. He's another person that you wrote about. So Jason is a common trope I see in personal finance.

And Jason, to me, is very much like Liz, but a little bit of a precursor. It's before the tragedy happens. If you ever troll Reddit, you will occasionally see people just like Jason. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've encountered this. It's all like I got into financial independence. I started automating everything. I got a plan in place. everything was in order.

And all of a sudden, now that I see the end in sight, I'm just not feeling excited about anything anymore. And so there's this loss of excitement very similar to Liz, very similar to what I felt when I was going through my own financial independence journey. I think it's a common story. I think there are many people who get lost in this huge, audacious goal and then realize that it only fulfills. a small part of their needs.

Do we need to have challenges? Are we happiest when we're challenged? I think that's a good question and a good point. One thing that I struggled with personally is being someone who spent a good part of the first half of my life becoming a physician and then building all these huge financial goals, I became a little bit of an achievement junkie. The thing about being an achievement juggie, I love to talk about the Hidon, treadmill, right? This idea that we buy things because it makes us feel good, but then ultimately,

after you buy something, the happiness only lasts so long until you're on to the next thing to buy, right? We become very used to whatever we have, and so purchases no longer bring us happiness. I think the same thing happens with achievement. I think there's such thing as an achievement treadmill. And in the book, I call it overdrive, we get to this point where we think we want to reach this one place on the mountain, and once we get there, we look over and realize that we're only on the first of many peaks, and there are a lot more peaks to climb. I think that can be really bad when it comes to money, and one of the reasons people do get depressed when they reach their financial independence goals is because all of a sudden they're there, but then they want to make more, because they're so used to being on this achievement treadmill. It's hard. to stop. One more year syndrome? Yeah. The one more year syndrome is a real common problem in this group of people. I think happiness, true happiness actually is being engaged in what I call the climb, right? So I think making continuous progress towards an important goal is a huge

part of being content in life. The way we do that, again, is we find and search into what our true purpose, identity, and connections are. And then we start looking for goals that are consistent with them. And then we start the climb. And I think the climb is what brings us happiness. I'm thinking, as I hear you talk about a comment that Jeff Woods made, he was a guest on our New Year's Day 2021 podcast, which we just recently replayed earlier this month as a rewind episode. He said that the purpose of a goal is not to achieve said goal. The purpose of a goal is to turn you into the type of person who could achieve that goal. It's to give you the parameters or the guideposts around the type of person you want to be. To use fitness as a simple

example, overtly you might set a goal of losing 10 pounds, but that goal turns you into the type of person who wakes up at 6.30 a.m. to get to the gym by 7. And it turns you into the type of person who is attentive to how much water you drink throughout the day. And I like that because I think it connects to something that I've heard you say before, too, is, you know, it puts the power directly in our hands of those things we can control. Like, I can become the kind of person who likes to be a communicator and who makes a podcast. Those are things I can control. I can't control how many people listen to that podcast. I mean, I can do some things, right? I can do some marketing. I can do some of those things. But ultimately, one of the wonderful things I think about doing the

climb in a self-affirming way is that you can set goals that you have intimate control over. Right. What's within your locus of control versus what is not. Your effort is within your locus of control. The results are not. So release your attachment to the results. Even though the results overtly may be the goal, release attachment to results because what you can control, what you can directly influence is only the effort. And so let's put this. into the framework of thinking about, again, our finances, I think we all get so caught up in getting financially where we need to be that we forget to focus on all this stuff from the beginning. And I think if we focused on the things we truly wanted to do in life and started

setting up the climb from day one, maybe we then could make a much more reasonable stab at our finances to help us achieve those goals. So I'm not saying that we should give up on financial independence. I think it's very important. And I think there's several ways that people can get there depending on who they are. But the beauty of financial independence is actually fitting it into that goal framework you have, that framework of what are my true purpose identity and connections, that self-actualization, as Maslow would say.

it's working that financial independence plan so that it supports the more important work that you should be doing from the beginning. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Get you and your crew to the big shows with Go Transit. Go connects to all the main concert venues like TD Coliseum in Hamilton and Scotia Bank Arena in Toronto. And Go makes it affordable with special e-ticket fares. A one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel across the network on any weekend day or holiday for just $10. and a weekday group pass offers the same weekday travel flexibility from $30 for two people and up to $60 for five. Buy yours at go transit.com slash tickets.

You mentioned that with your hospice patients, you do a life review or with their families. You do a life review. What goes into that life review? Can you describe it? Sure. So a life review is where a patient sits down and can be with a doctor, a nurse, or a chaplain, or social worker. Pretty much everyone in hospice is trained through this process. But basically, it's a chance for a person to look back at their life and go through that,

which was important to them, right? So they talk about their successes and they failures. They talk about their goals. They talk about the people who were important in their life. It's also a space to mourn, some of those things that maybe they didn't accomplish, or some of those big goals that they were too afraid or didn't have the courage to try towards. And lastly, it's a chance to come to terms with the fact that life is finite and that there is a certain amount of time left and they may or may not reach those last few goals that they want to do. So it's really a time for someone to look back at their life as well as forward to what little future they have and put their life in order.

We like to say that in hospice, we try to help people have a good death. And I think part of that good death is helping them come to terms with their life. And that's what we try to help people achieve. What resistance do you see when people go through that exercise? Basically almost everything you can imagine. It's a painful process. For one, in order to start that process, you have to actually accept the fact that, yes, I'm dying because we almost never want to think about all these things until we're dying.

So I advocate we should be thinking about these things on a much regular basis. But the majority of people don't want to think about these things. So it's much easier to deny their possible death coming in the future sometimes than it is to say, okay, I'm dying now. I have to take a real look at my life. All the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think there's that initial resistance. I think after that, it becomes a lot easier.

Once people open up and start talking about their lives and themselves, they start to realize that we all need to tell our story. I think it's a big part of being a human being is we go through life's ups and downs and life's traumas and they have profound meaning to us. But often a lot of people don't, besides us and maybe our very intimate family, don't know those stories. So it's a chance to finally set the record straight and tell their story. And again, that can be painful and difficult and tearful, right?

That's something where there's lots of tissues at the bedside. But it can also help them come to terms with the process of dying and that they don't have forever anymore. I think we do a lot in our lives to try to avoid realizing that time is finite. I'll also ask the opposite question. Are there any elements of the process? We just talked about resistance and we talked about the reluctance to accept the fact that life is finite. Are there any elements of the life review process that you've been surprised to observe that people are unexpectedly open to, perhaps more open than you would have initially supposed? I'm amazed that people are often willing to talk of their failings. They're willing to talk. They're willing to talk

about what in their life didn't work well, people can be incredibly open because if you think about it, sometimes we've been carrying all this baggage, all of our lives. And knowing that you're going to die often gives people permission. It gives them permission to talk about the things they're embarrassed about, the things that didn't work well, even to admit when they were wrong. We see that a lot. You know, people as they get closer to their deathbed, realize that arguments problems, issues that they've had, more were their fault than they were willing to admit before. So it can be a real time of being open with yourself. And that always surprised me, because I always thought that human nature was relatively stubborn,

but I think it's slightly less stubborn as people get close towards death. Do you see people go into guilt or shame spirals as a result of that? You can. I always tend to say that people die the way they lived. So if guilt and shame spirals were a normal part of their life up to this point, then often what they go through in those terminal stages is going to be similar. So for those people, you might see it, but a lot less than you'd think. Again, this idea that you're going to die frees you from some of the normal things that hinder us

throughout the rest of our lives. And it frees you to admit that you're wrong and to put it out there and then let it go. because time is short, and that gets back to this whole idea of the urgency of now, when you can no longer deny or put off because tomorrow isn't guaranteed. As a hospice doctor, how has your experience shaped the way that you relate to the dying process? So dealing with people who are dying on a regular basis has changed just about everything I thought I knew about dying. For one, the truth of the matter is, I almost never fear that it'll be painful, right? So I think one of people's biggest fears about dying is that it'll hurt, that they'll be short of breath or uncomfortable.

Most of the people that I've watched or helped or been around when they died have been fairly at peace. And in fact, I would say that the grand majority of people die peacefully and quietly. So in a lot of ways, being a hospice doctor has helped allay a lot of my fears about what it is to die. It's also helped me realize that I think you have to decide what's important to you earlier in life and start putting the building blocks together for your own happiness and sense of connection to your family or those people who are important to you. My dad died when I was eight, and I see people all the time,

both young and old die. We don't know when our time will be. We can guess we can put it off because we don't want to think about it. But it is what it is. What we can do is start building that life of fulfillment as close as we can come to it now, which again gets back to that point of,

I don't know if we really have time to wait until we're financially independent to start putting our life in order. Like, I think we need to really work on that now. And so it's made me very thoughtful about my life and what order it is in. And if I were to be unlucky enough to have something bad happen and for me to die tomorrow, how would I be leaving my family and friends? What would be my personal legacy? Would I feel like I accomplished what I wanted to in life?

And watching the dying has really made me thoughtful about that. that and made me want to stop being afraid of things that I normally wouldn't do because you can only put off important things forever. Like, you just got to jump in, even things that scare you, because you don't want to be that person who's on their deathbed saying, I really wish I had the courage to do whatever it is, and you were too afraid. And so it's made me be much less afraid of life. Hmm, death has made you less afraid of life.

For sure. Wow, that is a beautiful note. We will end it there. Thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to hear more of you? The best place is earnit and invest.com or I am rebranding my own website of jordangrummit.com. By the time this goes out, that will probably be up, which will connect you to my financial site, my medical blogging site, as well as information. about my book taking stock, which will be out in August of 2022. So you can find everything either

at earn and invest.com or Jordangrummit.com. Thank you so much, Jordan. What are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are three. Number one, run to something, not from something. This is a common mantra within the financial independence community, but it bears repeating. If the objective is to quit something or leave something, to quit your job, to quit your career, to quit the thing in your life that's making you unhappy. If that is the driving motivation, then what's left on the other side of that is nothing. It's questions. It's feeling unmoored. Because when the focus becomes what we don't want, rather than what we want, then when we reach the point where we are able to cut ties with the albatross, we don't know what to do next. And there can be

tremendous insecurity in that a level of insecurity and uncertainty that can trigger maladaptive behaviors and depression. Ironically, it is sometimes when we reach financial security that we open the floodgates to emotional uncertainty. This story really drove home to me, something that I had found in my own path, that when you start concentrating on money is your overall goal, something I had really done. I was finding myself burnt out myself and being a doctor. And I had set all these goals up. And then when I really learned about personal finance and financial independence, I found out that I was exactly where I wanted to be and I was jubilant for all of a minute.

And then I became quite depressed and anxious. And I think Liz and I shared a similar problem is that we hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to not have to be worried about money anymore. Like money had become such a big issue in our lives and it had become such a big goal that I don't think either of us ever really. thought about, well, what happens afterwards? This is why, as you are on the journey to building your net worth or to reaching whatever financial goal you've set for yourself, it's critical to focus on what you are running to

rather than what you are running from. So that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, money is not a goal. Money is a tool. And this was a big aha for me, because, through most of my life, particularly my 20s, my goals revolved around reaching a certain net worth, reaching a certain number of rental properties, reaching a certain level of passive income, reaching a certain portfolio balance.

I saw that as the goal, as I think many of us who are listening can relate. We set financial goals. But Jordan makes the point that money is not a goal. money is a tool that enables us to reach other goals. And so if we do set a financial goal, that financial goal itself should be contextualized merely as a goal that plays a supportive role or ancillary goal to some greater goal. We get so caught up in the goal of having enough money. We get so caught up in this idea that once I,

I have enough, I'll be okay, that we forget that money is just a tool. It's like potential energy. It's something that we work towards that gives us the opportunity to do other important things. A net worth goal, it's like low-hanging fruit. It's something that's easy to strive for. It might not be easy to attain, but we kind of know what to do, right? I need more money so that I can stop working. I can work more, get a higher paying job, I can save, I can be frugal, I can side hustle.

Like there's these easy answers. And because it's low-hanging fruit, it's much easier to focus on those kind of things than the much deeper questions, right? The deeper questions are, why am I here, who am I, and who are those people that I'm most connected to? I think we sometimes avoid those deeper issues because it's easier and focus on money instead. So do not conflate the tool with the goal. Money is a tool, not a goal. And to the extent that you set financial goals, remember, they are ancillary goals, not primary goals. That is key takeaway number two.

Not the type of thing you think you'd hear on a personal finance podcast, right? But that's the end result of a decade of thinking, reading, writing, talking, interviewing about personal finance. These are the types of insights that emerge from that level of immersion. All right. Finally, key takeaway number three, no one who is told that they have six months to live responds by saying, all right, well, how do I make more money? And I'll let Jordan explain the significance of that.

one thing that really connected me to understanding this concept is, you know, I saw it often in people who got a life limiting diagnosis as a hospice doctor. I was often the one who would walk into a room and say, okay, you have this illness, we can't fix it, you have six months or less to live. You know, and something funny happens at that point in people's lives. Yes, there is sadness and they mourn the passing of their life. But the next thing that happens is they realize I have a set amount of time to accomplish everything I want to accomplish, to make amends with whoever I want to make amends with, to do whatever I need to do, there is now a clock ticking.

And because of that, I can tell you now with certainty that almost no one who I've Watch die tells me when they've been told, okay, you have six months left. Almost no one says, how am I going to make more money? In fact, often money has nothing to do with the conversation. They need enough to make sure that they can provide for themselves so they can get the care that they need. But otherwise, it's much more about what are those things that I haven't accomplished, that I want to accomplish, who are those people I want to spend my last six months with?

money all of a sudden is removed from the equation, and it's one of the few times in life where money becomes a secondary or tertiary concern. You know the old cliche, what would you do if you only had a year to live, or what would you do if you only had a week or a month? Every time I heard someone say that, I would always give this tongue-in-cheek response of, well, I'd stop contributing to my 401K. And obviously that's meant to be a sardonic response, But Jordan's comment illuminates that joking about money probably wouldn't even enter my mind.

Like, joking that the salience of money is on my mind now because of the fact that I believe that I have a solid 60 years ahead of me at least. But it might not even occur to me to make that joke. money might be so far from the forefront of my mind that the punchline might not even occur to me because that's how little money matters when everything comes into sharp focus. So what would you do if this next year is your final year? It's not a thought that we enjoy thinking about, but there are things that are easy and enjoyable, and there are things that are hard,

worthwhile. This thought exercise is the latcher. Thank you for spending this time with us. For being part of the Afford Anything community throughout 2021. I look forward to the continued growth and flourishment and success of this community in 2022 and beyond. Happy holidays, happy new year, and please show your support for this community by sharing this episode with a friend or a family member that's the single most important thing that you can do, share this podcast with them, encourage them to hit the follow button in whatever app they're using to listen to this show. And if you're enjoying it, also please leave a review. This is how we spread the word about what matters, about a more nuanced way of thinking about money,

and about using money as a tool as a mechanism to represent and enable, your deepest values, your most cherished priorities. That's what money is. It's a physical manifestation of what we hold most dear. The way you allocate any limited resource, your money, your time, your energy, your attention, and of those, money is the only physical representation. Physical resource.

That allocation of limited resources is a reflection of what we value. And so, throughout this holiday season, throughout the new year, take the time to reflect on what you value and how you will bring that into your life, into the lives of the people around you, into this world. Thank you so much for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast.

You can have conversations about this podcast with other people in this community by going to Affordanithinging.com slash community. And you can subscribe to the show notes at Affordanithingcom slash show notes. Thanks again for being part of the journey, and I will catch you in the next episode.