Afford Anything - How We Saved $1 Million and Retired at 31 and 32, with Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

#236: Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung achieved financial independence four years ago at age 31 and 32. They saved $1 million and live on $40,000 per year while traveling the world. Kristy and Bryce don’t worry about running out of money, they created new identities after quitting their jobs, and their community has quadrupled in size. Here’s how they achieved this lifestyle. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode236 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, just not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource in your life, like your time, your attention, and your energy. And that leads to two questions. First, what matters most to you? Not what the society say should, but what actually is a priority in your own life? And second, how do you align your daily decisions in a way that reflects that?

Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today, Christy Shen and Bryce Leung join us to talk about how they built a portfolio of $1 million and reached financial independence at the age of 31 and 32. Here's their brief backstory. Christy grew up in rural China. And for a time, her family lived on the U.S. equivalent of 44 cents a day. When she was eight, she and her family immigrated to Canada. And that's where, for the first time in her life, she had enough money to drink a can of Coca-Cola. In her eyes, she'd made it. Christy and Bryce met each other as

university students. They got married, moved to Toronto, and began saving money for a down payment on a home. Thanks to their dual high-paying careers, coupled with a frugal lifestyle, they were quickly able to save $500,000, which they'd intended to use as a down payment on a personal residence. But then they started researching what else they could do with that money, and they decided to invest in the stock and bond market. They began investing roughly around 2008, and their first experience was watching their money evaporate after they would make a contribution in the next day that whole thing would be gone. But they stayed the course. They continued to invest throughout the recovery. And by 2014, when they were 31 and 32, they had built a portfolio of $1 million. The following year,

they both quit their jobs, and since then, they've been traveling the world, living on a budget of $40,000 per year. In today's interview, they're going to talk about how they became early retirees, the mindset, the challenges, the best practices, and they'll talk about how they've structured their early retirement in a way that gives them both security and flexibility. Here they are, Christian Bryce. Hey, Christian Bryce. Hi, Paula. Hi. You guys are in Thailand right now, yes? Yes. We're in Thailand eating all the things. It's one of our favorite places. It kind of feels like a second home to us. And yeah, so we've been here for about a month. It just feels very comfortable. So we tend to come back to Thailand a lot. Yeah, this is kind of where we're avoiding the winter.

Our goal in retirement is to never see snow ever again. That's awesome. You're chasing endless summer. Yeah, it's as awesome as it sounds, especially if you grew up in like a, like we grew up in Canada. You're based in, where are you right now? I grew up in Ohio, so it was also very cold and wintery there. Yeah, so you get it. Right, yeah. Okay, so you get it. You get it.

How old were the two of you when you retired? So I had just turned 31. I was 32 at the time. Nice. And what was, if you don't mind me asking, what was your net worth at the time that you retired? So at the moment that we retired, we had hit a million dollars. And then at that point, we were kind of said, according to the 4% rule, $40,000 was about how much we were spending at the time for our living expenses.

A million dollars is enough to support that. So we're like, I think we're done now. How long ago was that? So we became FI at the end of 2014, and then we started traveling the world in 2015. That's when we actually quit our jobs, packed up everything, sold most of our stuff, and then traveled the world with two backpacks. Yeah, and we've been doing that ever since. One thing that I find fascinating about your story and your journey into becoming

millionaires is that both of you, but especially you, Christy, really started from scratch. Tell us a little bit about your origin story. Yeah, sure. I actually grew up in China. A lot of people are surprised because I actually thought I was born in Canada. But having grown up in China, it gives me a very different perspective from most of my peers. So I grew up in this rural village in China, and at one point, my family was living on 44 cents a day. But what was surprising about that is back then in China, 85% of the population was in poverty. And to go from that to where China is right now is really astounding.

It was perfectly normal to play around in medical waste keeps, digging around for toys. It was perfectly normal to take a bath with a bucket and you heat up a bucket of water. That was just my childhood and other kids were doing the same. And back then I didn't even realize I was poor because when you're surrounded by people living like that, that's just how life was. And it wasn't until I actually immigrated to Canada that I realized I was living in abject poverty because the second I stepped into, another country, I was amazed by everything. Like, I was amazed by running water. I was amazed by electricity. I was amazed by toilets. That perspective showed me that if you have four walls and you have food and the fact that you have that security, it really, you don't really need a lot to be

happy because I had that perspective that it could be so much worse. You were about eight years old when you moved to Canada, right? Yes. Tell me a little bit more about those first eight years. You mentioned that your family lived on 44 cents a day, the U.S. equivalent of 44 cents a day. How far did that go at that time in that context? Because we lived in a rural village, we could actually grow our own food. And sometimes we lived with my grandparents and they grew chickens in the backyard. We didn't really have any money to buy toys. It basically was just you worried about food and you worried about medication and there wasn't a lot of running water.

so you just kind of have to get water from wells, and then you don't really have a, like, running hot water, so you just have to heat it up. And I remember the stove actually being, you actually have to like keep the fire going and you have to heat up everything with coal. So everything would be covered in soot. And I remember the air quality being really bad. But on top of that, I was actually happy because I actually had, you know, my family, I had my grandparents, I had cousins to play with. So looking back now, that seemed like a, very, it seemed like a really difficult life to live. But back then I didn't really, as long as I had food to eat and as long as I had four walls in my family, I didn't really realize that it was

really that bad. It was just from talking to other people that I realized that most people don't grow up like that. Incidentally, what we realize is that if you've seen coal before and used for heat up, it's kind of almost like a marker of like whether you got people. It's like a privilege test. It's like, yeah, growing up in property not like these little like, yeah, I asked a lot of my appears whether they had seen coal before, and they had no idea what I was talking about. And I described it as this kind of cylindrical thing with a bunch of holes in it, and you use a fire poker to put it into the stove. And then once it's used up, it actually turns from black to like an orangey pink color. And then you need to put another one in before you freeze to death. They had no idea what I was

talking about. So yeah, in a way, it's kind of like a privileged test. Have you ever seen coal before? your dad went through quite a bit in order to get you and your family to Canada. Can you share his story? My dad is one of my biggest inspirations because he taught me the concept of chishku, which in Mandarin actually means, literally means eat bitterness. Because the concept is that when you're struggling, you don't really complain about it. It's the concept that you push through hardships without complaint so that you come out a better, stronger person in the end. So he lived through communism and because his parents happened to be on the wrong side. Like my grandfather was a medic for the opposition party. So when the communists came in, my grandfather was basically interrogated for all the activities that he did when he was on the wrong side of the party. And then my dad was sentenced to the countryside for 10 years to hard labor without any access to education.

And he thought that his life would be over because he was basically in a labor. labor camp for 10 years. And having gone through that experience, he taught me that whatever happens in your life, always be grateful for what you have because he knows what it's like to be at the very bottom. And he knows what it's like to actually work his way out of it. So the only way he was able to get out of that labor camp after Chairman Mao died, they opened up national examinations for people who actually, because they realized that so much of the population had died from famine, from overwork, that they opened the schools back up. And my dad was able to take the entrance examination and be able to get back to school and get a university education. And that's how he was

able to integrate to Canada. I definitely credit a lot of my mindset to my dad because he taught me that even in the face of hardship, you can get through it. You have to take every opportunity that's given to you, just learning that concept of eating bitterness. And he, one of the things that he likes to eat even now is he likes to eat bitter melon. And I always ask him, like, why do you want to eat this vegetable? It's horrible. It's the most horrible thing you could ever eat. It's just, that's all it is is bitterness. And he says that that literally reminds him what suffering tastes like, because when he was going through the salmon, there wasn't a lot of food to eat. And eating bitterness reminds you that life is full of bitterness. But when you get through it,

it's the sweetness at the end that you remember. It's the hardships that make you who you are today. And sweet potato is also one of his favorite foods. Yes. So there was a situation when he was little. Before he went to the labor camp, he had gone through a famine. What happens is that the government actually confiscates all the food. So one of his experiences was that when he was so hungry that he almost starved to death, his friend had picked up a rotten potato that the government had missed in a field. and then shared it with him. And he says that that's one of the reasons why he was able to continue because he still had his friend.

He still had this last chance to be able to survive on such a small amount of food. So every time he eats sweet potato, he remembers that. It's very difficult to imagine what he's gone through that every time, like when I was little and I had struggles, I just remember that. And it was really like nothing. My struggle was really nothing compared to what he had to go through. And so when you were eight, you and your mom came to Canada to meet. with your dad who was already living there at the time. And all three of you lived in a one-bedroom

apartment. And your mom bounced from job to job. She worked as a seamstress for a while. She worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant for a while. She worked a lot of a series of low-wage jobs. Yes. So my mom actually never got a high school education. Similar to my dad, she was sent off to the countryside to work basically where she was also stuck for 10 years working in a labor camp. So in my mother's case, she struggled even more than my dad because she never really got over that mindset. So yeah, coming to Canada, because we not only had to survive, we had to send money back home for relatives back in China. My mom basically took any job that she could get. She couldn't really speak English. So those were the only jobs that were

available to her. And when you arrived, one of your favorite new possessions when you moved to Canada was a can of Coca-Cola. Tell us about that. Yeah, so growing up in poverty in China, one of the things that within my village was a dream was to drink Coca-Cola, because whenever you see ads with people in the West drinking Coca-Cola, that kind of means that you've made it. Like, you can actually afford this drink. You can actually afford this new can, like pop can that none of us were able to afford. So when I first came to Canada, my dad gave me a can of Coke. My hands were shaking so hard that I almost dropped it. And then when I took that first sip, the sugar rush that had gone to my head

immediately gave me a nosebleed. I finished the can of Coke anyway because I obviously didn't want to waste it. And then after I finished drinking it, I didn't want to throw the can out. I actually thought that that was really precious. And I used it for a toothbrush holder. I used it to roll my hair because it was a symbol that I had made it. It was a symbol of the West of where dreams come true. and it doesn't matter where you come from, you've actually made it. So every now and then when I see a can of Coke, I just think about my childhood and how precious that was to me and how that was the symbol that it doesn't matter where you come from.

You can still make it. Incidentally, during the research for this book, we later realized that this memory of hers of this can of Coke, her dad didn't even get her a real can of Coke at the time. It was this like crappy off-brand R.C. Cola thing for like 33 cents. So like her memory of making you, into the West wasn't even like a real Coke. It was this off-brand, like, you know, fake. It was R.C. Cola. Yeah, that was my thing. But you've talked about how that experience taught you

the value of scarcity mindset. And oftentimes in popular culture, people caution against scarcity mindset, but you see a benefit to it. Can you explain your views on the scarcity mentality? What people don't understand is that when you have the scarcity mindset, that's not something that you end up with because you want to have. It's something that people have because they don't have a choice because there is a scarcity of money. But because I grew up in another country, because I was able to see how bad it could be, like because my dad taught me what it could have been like, like how much worse it could have been, I could actually see this perspective as something positive. Because if it wasn't for the scarcity mindset, I wouldn't have treasured money to the point where I never

wanted to be poor again and I wouldn't be where I am today because that actually helped me realize that you don't really need a lot to be happy because you come to the West and you realize there's so much abundance. There's so much abundance that people take for granted because they don't have that perspective. They don't have anything to compare to. So I think having the scarcity mindset and learning about that concept of true cool helped me realize that you really do have a lot to be grateful for and the scarcity mindset could actually drive you in ways that you never thought possible. Do you think that you still have the scarcity mindset today? I think every now and then it does creep up on me for sure. Now I've definitely become FI. Some of those

fears have been alleviated because understanding how to invest in the stock market, understanding how money works helped me realize that there is a lot more abundance than I thought before that I didn't have to be so afraid of not having financial security. But every now and then it does creep up on me. Every now and then I still worry a lot about the future. So there are definitely downsides to the scarcity mindset that at a certain point, it does become hoarding and you don't really want that to take over your life. I think for everyone who grew up in poverty, they'll understand that every now and then you still wonder whether you're going to run out of money. Every now and then, every single thing that you buy, you kind of think about, do I really need this? Am I going to be secure for the rest of my life?

Could I get it for like a dollar or less or something like that? Can I drink R.C. Cola instead of actually Coca-Cola. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The scarcity mindset, where it becomes from a financial perspective, where it's the most helpful is it causes you to not waste money, right? Because money is when you don't have a lot of it and you're worried about where your next meal is coming from. Scarcity makes you kind of go shop around for the best deal or everything. I grew up in a middle class background, so I'd never got that. And whenever we go shopping for the groceries, she's always the one kind of going,

oh, no, I could get this pound of tomatoes for like 20 cents lower from this other store. So I don't remember the prices to that detail that she does. You can kind of tell the big difference between me and Bryce by how we eat corn. Because when he eats corn, there's like corn shrapnel flying everywhere. And then at the end of it, you see like the cob and there's all this corn still attached to it. But when you look at my cob, when I finish eating it, there's nothing left over. Like every single thing has been picked clean. And I'm like, this is like an immigrant's corn.

You can tell, right? Because you have that mindset that's like, okay, I can't waste a single morsel of food. Because you never know when the famine's going to come. You mentioned earlier that scarcity, if it's taken too far, can turn into hoarding. What's the difference between the scarcity mindset and a hoarding mindset? So a scarcity mindset, where it can be helpful to you, is that you can be very appreciative of what you have. And then you don't actually take money for granted. You don't just say, oh, yeah, you know what? There'll always be money coming. Money is not really a big issue. I'll just figure it out

later. But when taken to extremes, when it turns into the hoarding mindset, one of the things that hindered me was that I didn't start investing. And I was terrified of investing at the beginning because I was afraid of the stock market and I didn't understand money. It was very, very difficult for me to let that go and realize that that's what you need to do in order to become free in order to financially independent. So where it could come back to bite you is if you are so obsessed with saving that you just let your money erode to inflation and you never ever learn how to invest because you're holding on to the idea that money is so precious to you that you can't ever fathom losing a single cent.

So scarcity mindset can be helpful in helping you treasure money and not actually waste it, but then it can turn around and bite you if you're so afraid of investing that you just put it into your savings account and never ever learn how. Yeah, we all have to figure out, like all of us early retirees eventually have to figure out how to turn a pot of cash into a self-replicating passive income stream that goes on forever kind thing, right? That's a thing in which we've noticed actually that a lot of couples in the financial independence space, they don't like to talk about this because most people don't like to think of or remember their time in poverty. But as I realize that a lot of the couples and a lot of the

bloggers that your readers are familiar with, as I get to know them a little bit, at least one of them spent some time in poverty. They don't like to talk about it. But the pattern really ends up emerging where one person spent at least some time in poverty and got that scarcity mindset while the other person didn't. And so for us, obviously, Christie is the one that spent the time in poverty. And then I grew up middle class. And it's the middle class person that then pushes them to invest it and turn to an income stream. And it's that combination of those two skill sets that eventually turns into the superpower of fire. Did you also have to deal with that kind of thing when you started investing in houses and like, how did you get around over that fear of losing money in the housing market? I mean, I would say that I was initially unduly risk averse. But I think that I found solace in the spreadsheet.

more than anything. Yeah, that's a very ancient way of doing the things. Speaking of spreadsheets, let's talk about how you were able to build. The two of you together were able to build a million dollar plus net worth. Let's start with how did the two of you meet? So we met in university as lab partners, so it was very, very nerdy. At the time, we weren't thinking about investing. We weren't thinking about money.

We were just thinking about getting through the gauntlet of engineering and getting a degree. After we graduated, we both started working. And again, this whole fire thing, we never heard of it for the most part of our careers. What eventually pushed us towards finding more about this stuff is the housing market. We lived in one of the most expensive cities in Canada, which is Toronto. A lot of your readers who live in big cities like New York or Chicago or L.A. or wherever would also be able to relate. But we kept trying to, like, we were making good money. Not like insane paychecks, but, you know, average for our field.

we were saving money for a down payment and we were trying to find a place to live. We were renting, but we were trying to find a place to buy. And the housing prices just seemed astronomically high and out of reach, right? We kept looking and everything in that city, at the time, even for a small kind of townhouse, it was between half a million dollars to a million dollars. Now it's gotten even worse.

So we kept trying to like find a deal like a reasonable place to buy a house that didn't involve going into massive amounts of debt. And we just couldn't. And it was so front. because every time we saved up, you know, like $100,000, the housing prices would have risen by another $100,000. So it just seemed like this goalpost that kept going and going and going, and we were never seemingly able to catch it. We were living very frugally at the time because, again, we were trying to save up for this massive purchase that we were told that we had to get because that's what our boomer parents told us that was part of adulting. And eventually we added everything up and realized that down payment fund had grown to about half a million dollars.

And at that point, we had gone, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. this is a lot of money. What else can we do with this? So that's when I started going down the rabbit hole of finding Mr. Money Mustache, finding J.L. Collins's blog, finding your blog, and then trying to figure out, okay, there's all these people out there that are doing interesting things with money besides just buying a house and living in it. And it took me a long time to figure out what does it do next? It's like, do we use the stock market? Do we put it into index funds? Do we do what you did? Are we supposed to go out and buy a bunch of rental properties? And we were trying to figure out the correct thing to do.

And what we realized is that in our area, the rental real estate thing, you know, didn't really work because we couldn't get rental properties at the prices that you were able to. But we realized that if we were to do the stock market using index funds, we had two choices.

Either we could keep doing what we were doing and just hand over all of our money to a real estate agent and then be in debt for the next 25 years, or potentially we could put into the stock market, get a compounding at 6% a year, or 6% a year, and then potentially retire it as millionaires

in three years instead of, you know, doing what everyone else did. So at that point, I kind of showed Christy the numbers. And she was, what was your reaction when I said? I said, no, this is wrong. This is a scam. There's no way this is possible. My scarcity mindset was kicking in really hard. She thought it was a scam. Yeah, I was like, no, no, this is not possible. But checking the math over and over again and actually waiting into the stock market and seeing that it actually works, it made me realize that this is how rich people get richer. I had the poverty mindset and I needed to actually switch my mindset from the scarcity mindset to a freedom mindset in order to actually get to FI. And it worked. And not only did it work, we were actually able to quit our jobs

in 2015 and travel the world ever since. That was another thing that was very mind-blowing, is that I didn't know that traveling the world would actually be less expensive than staying at home because we had only gone on vacations where you buy a vacation package. Everything is set up for you, but it's super expensive. So I thought that we would need at least 100,000. a year to travel the world. But every single year, we've been coming in around $40,000 a year, which matches the 4% that is throwing off from our portfolio. So from that experience, it's just been mind-blowing. I still can't believe my life every day I wake up that I went from digging around in medical waste heap to being on top of the Swiss helps. And now, you know,

traveling in Thailand, we've been to over 10 countries this year. And it's like a chess game that you can actually hack. Like life, I didn't know that life could actually be a chess game that you could play to win. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size. But they also have the FinTech hustle that got

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Sale ends December 7th. Let's talk about how you grew comfortable with becoming a beginning investor because you started right before the financial crash. That was when you started investing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Putting in $1,000 and then next day having it disappeared. That's not fun.

Especially with my mindset, I was screaming and freaking out and thinking that this was a terrible idea. But it really is trusting the math. So having that logical, like coming from that engineering background really helped because you realize that, yes, the stock market is falling and yes, I'm freaking out and having a panic attack. But if you trust the system and you continue buying as it's falling, we actually recovered our money in less than two years. And so that helped me realize that even during the worst possible financial crisis of my life, that money does recover over time. You just have to have the nerves of steel not to freak out and sell everything at the bottom. Going through that experience, I think has really taught us a lot as investors and to realize that if that happens again, we know exactly what to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The modern portfolio theory states that, you know, you have a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds. And as one goes down, you buy more into it. So as a stock market was plummeting, it was telling us, you know, buy more, buy more into the index, which turned out to be the right thing to do. But at the time was probably the hardest thing we've ever had to do. ever kind of thing, right? Because at the time, remember, people were screaming about the collapse of the global economic system. They were like, all banks are going to collapse. The entire credit

system is on fire, and we're all going to go back to like using bartered system soon. It was that scary at the time. Nobody knew when it was ever going to be over. It turned to be a really instructive process because we kind of cut our teeth investing in the scariest worst financial crisis of our lifetimes. So now, whenever the media kind of goes, oh my God, Trump did something crazy. The stock market goes down by 200 points. I'm like, ah, whatever. I mean, like, I remember when the stock market would go down by like a thousand points in like a day. And we still managed to make money during that time. So now whenever a sharp drop happens, we're kind of inoculated from the fear of that because I was like, yeah, we've seen this movie before. We'll be fine.

And a big part of the way that you got through that is that you decided what your target asset allocation was, and then you held to rebalancing. So you were at a 60-40 split between equities and bonds, right? Yes. And you just held that throughout the crisis. Yep. In a stock market craft like that, the stocks drop, but then the bonds go up because money flows from a risky asset to safe assets. So what rebalancing will tell you to do is, okay, sell what's gone up and buy what's gone down, which means sell the bonds, which is the only thing that's not on fire, and then throw it into the thing that's on fire. It's the most unintuitive thing ever, but it's, does work because what that does is it allows you to pick up more units of the same companies on

sale. So as a result of doing that, when the eventual rebound happened somewhere in 2009, we had more units to participate in the upside than we did in the downside. So that's why our recovery was actually a lot faster than the crash. The actual index didn't recover until 2012 or something like that, but we'd gotten all of our money back by 2009, 2010. And about how much money did you have in the markets at that time? Oh, back in 2008. We were just starting out, so we were just putting our paycheck in that at that time. It was probably less than that. It was less than that. And it was getting, you know, small and smaller as it went. But we were lucky in that we were able to experience that with relatively small amounts. So like, you know, 50 grand, 60 grand, that's the kind of

amount of money that we had when everything was like when everything was falling. If that amount was 500 grand or 600 grand or something like that, it'd probably even scare than what we experienced. So you cut your teeth investing during the Great Recession. And from 2008 through 2014, 2015, you watched your investments grow and you aggressively contributed to your portfolio. So you were growing your investments both through rebalancing as well as through new contributions. And so eventually, somewhere around 2014, 2015, your net worth topped a million. Yes. And at that point, you realized that you could both quit your jobs.

What was the thinking around that time period? At that point, I was in complete disbelief that I kept checking the number over and over again to make sure we didn't miss a zero. And I thought that quitting my job would actually be really easy because I didn't really like my job. And not only that there was a lot of insecurity because there was a lot of outsourcing going on, not only that one of my coworkers collapsed and almost died at his desk from overwork. So you would think that it's a no-brainer. I'm going to go hand in my notice. I'm going to run out there cackling and jumping for joy. But it was actually very scary. And this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that, yes, it's great to,

you know, give your boss the middle finger and hand in your notice. But when you've had that identity for 10 years, it's really difficult to step away from that and just think, okay, who am I now? Like, I'm retired. But when people ask me, what is it that you do? How am I going to answer that question? So I had a little bit of a mini panic attack when I gave my notice. And for that entire day, I was just thinking maybe I made a horrible mistake. Like, is this really a good idea? And what if we run out of money? And what's going to happen to my identity and who am I now?

And it actually took a couple weeks to get over that fear. What really helped was us basically taking the action of selling everything that we had, packing it into two backpacks and then traveling the world. at this point looking back like now seeing where we are now every day is free we can do whatever it is we want we can spend more time with family and friends looking back i don't know why i was so terrified but i totally understand that mindset of having to go from developing an identity over decades and then all of a sudden getting rid of that that is very terrifying so i think from that perspective i realize that there's three things that people are going to be afraid of if they choose to to quit their jobs after becoming a five one is loss of money One is loss of community and loss of identity because a lot of the times your network comes from your coworkers. What's going to happen when you don't have that community anymore? I'm happy to report that none of those fears actually were realized. We actually have more money

than when we left. So now our portfolio has gone up to $1.4 million. We have more friends than we have our network more than quadrupled. And we have all these friends from the fire community, from the travel community, even a group of community I didn't even know existed called the world schoolers who travel the world with their kids. And in terms of identity, I'm happy to say that I am an early retiree and a writer and I can do what I love to do because I choose to do it and not for money. So really none of those fears were realized, but it was terrifying at the time when I had to pull that cord. What about for you, Bryce? Was it scary for you to quit your job?

Yeah, because I actually liked my job. I actually. enjoyed being an engineer and I got along with my boss and everything like that. So I was really leaving behind what I considered like a dream job. Like I really enjoyed that thing. And we were jumping off into this great unknown thing, but I knew it had to be done because I knew from day two after meeting Christy in university that she would never be happy in engineering. This was not her passion. She always keeps telling people that like in high school, her two worst subjects were physics and computer science. So of course she went into computer engineering. It's like great. idea. So she struggled heavily throughout her program and it was never her passion to say

the least. She hated it. But I knew that she wanted to be a writer ever since she was a little girl and I would just kind of like, okay, we had to give this a shot because I know what it's like to be an engineer and I can do that for the next 20 years and I kind of know what that life is going to be like. But if I continue down that path, she'll never really get an opportunity to really pursue her dream. So it was scary for me because I really was giving up something and taking a leap of faith, I didn't realize that we would end up going down this path of being a writer and being bloggers together. I had no interest in writing when I left, and it was a complete surprise to me how much I ended up enjoying it and learning together how to do it. So being able to

co-write a book together and actually have it come out and do so well, it was like totalizing on the cake. I had no idea that was going to happen. And in addition to this book about financial independence, you also wrote a children's book called Little Miss Evil. What is this children's book? Oh, we're going to get some publicity for living is evil. All right, go, you go. Yeah. So we actually wrote a children's book while we were working as engineers. And it really gave me a lot of respect for authors. Because when we first started, we started when Twilight was really popular. And I had read it. I'm like, oh, maybe it's not that hard to write a book. And then we started writing and we're like, it's so hard to write a book. I have so much respect for every single author that has ever

published anything. When Quit Like a Millionaire came out, we had already had seven years of writing experience under our belt for fiction. And it was seven years of grueling, face planting, getting 200 rejections from multiple editors and literary agents, which helped me realize that, thank God, I didn't actually go straight into creative writing because I would have been homeless. The amount of money that you could actually make in fiction, you don't even have enough money to pay your rent. So from that experience, I don't regret it for a second because it made me realize it doesn't matter what type of career you get into, like any kind of creative pursuit, there's going to be so much failure that comes with it.

But because we were FI, I didn't have to worry about the money part. And the fulfillment part has just been priceless. Right. So when we published Little Miss Evil, which is this screwball children's comedy thriller about this supervillain, this girl who belongs to this supervillain family and her family lives in this evil layer inside a volcano. know, and she has to take over the evil empire and become this evil supervillain that her father always wanted her to be. And she can throw fireballs. Anyway, that book was actually the third,

like the third complete manuscript we had written. We had written two other manuscripts. They had gone nowhere. We had to over have a hundred rejections in our inbox. And we had to like, just take those and just throw it into the garbage. So quit like a millionaire is actually the fourth book we actually ended up writing, but it's only the second one that anyone ever actually saw. So it's like the process of becoming a writer in fiction is so much harder than it is a nonfiction. Let's go back to when you decided to quit your jobs. This is late 2014, early 2015. You've reached a million dollar net worth. And as you were quitting, you came up with five backup plans. The yield shield, the cash cushion, geo-arbitrage, side hustles, and part-time income. Right. Most people are familiar with side hustles and part-time income, so we can set those to the side. But let's talk about the yield shield, the cash cushion, and geo-arbitrage. because those are some of the least commonly discussed strategies for thinking about how to manage your investments at the time that you retire from your work. You're right. It's very seldom discussed because most of the people in the fire space, they go like 90 equity or 90, 10 equity fixed income and they just retire and they roll with the roller coaster of the stock market.

We are probably some of the most risk-averse people in the fire space in that, like, we could never do that. We think of that kind of behavior is very cowboy risky. So as engineers, we have this need to build all these backup plans because that's kind of how you make a system that's stable, right? Figure out all the different ways you can fail and then you create backup plans to hedge each one. And then once you figure out all the ways that it could fail and all the things that could go wrong and then you have a backup plan for each one, then you can kind of say, all right, this system is stable. So one of the first things that we did when we retired is we needed to figure out how to not fail in retirement. So one of the biggest fears of people when they retire is that they're going to run out of money. The technical definition of the 4% rule is in over 30 year periods, if you withdraw 4% of your initial starting portfolio, adjusted for inflation over time, then you have a 95% chance of success.

That's the full kind of definition of what the 4% rule is. but that's still these 5% chance that you could fail, and that will happen if you retire, and then right as you retire, a recession happens. So this is what's called a sequence of return risk. It basically means that if you have really, really bad timing, it's still possible to fail if you have 4%. And we weren't okay with that.

So the system that we came up with in order to hedge against that is we create something called the yield shield. And it's true because it rhymes. So what we ended up doing is we shifted our portfolio from just straight stock, straight bonds into higher yielding assets that are a little bit more more esoteric, but they have a higher yield. And what a yield is, it's a combination of either interest income from bond or bond-like assets, as well as dividend income from stock or stock-like assets.

So we used assets like preferred shares, real estate income trusts, higher dividend-yielding stocks like dividend aristocrat stocks and this kind of stuff, corporate bonds. An example, this is preferred shares. It's kind of like a hybrid between stocks and bonds. A stock, especially in the U.S., will kind of yield a dividend of about 2%. Bonds might be about like three, but a preferred share will yield about like 5%. So we used assets like this. We mixed it into our portfolio and we raised the yield of our portfolio from about

2, 2.5% to around 3.5%. When you have this yield, the stock market is going up and down. Your portfolio is going up and down. But every year, it's still paying you money at about 3.5%. and it just gets deposited as cash into your account. So on a million dollar portfolio, we were being paid $35,000, that's 3.5% a year in cash without ever having to withdraw anything. And that's really, really important because when sequence of return hits you,

the mechanism of failure happens if you're forced to sell at a loss. So, you know, you go into retirement, the portfolio goes down, and then you have to sell stocks and bonds when everything is at a lower value in order to find your lifestyle. If you do that, then when the eventual recovery happens, the opposite of what we discussed earlier happens, where you have less of those ETF units to participate in the recovery and you recover slower up while falling more sharply and then recovering slower up. So by increasing your yield, you avoid that. So that's the first step that we did. So to summarize, by creating a portfolio that had higher dividend yields, you gave yourself the ability to live on the dividend and interest

income out of your portfolio for a larger percentage of the cash that you would need to live on during retirement, which reduces the risk that you might have to sell assets at a loss in the event that sequence of returns risk is not favorable in your circumstance. Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. All right. So that is the yield shield that you created. And by doing that, you boosted the yield on your overall portfolio up to about 3.5%. Yep. Yeah. Did that have an impact on the returns that you expect to generate through market appreciation? Yes.

That's a really subtle kind of observation that you made in that the more current income that your portfolio makes, the lower long-term gains that the portfolio is going to have. So the yield shield strategy is not meant to be something in which you just retire at and then you just stick with that portfolio forever because what's going to happen is you're going to underperform the general index. What we're doing and what we advocate other people to do is that you do the yield shield thing for the first maybe four to five years of your retirement, because that's the most dangerous part of your retirement, the first four to five years. If the recession happens then, you're going to

be in trouble. Over time, as you pull out of that danger window of sequence of return risks, it's important to return back to indexing because all of the 4% rule research was done with a purely index portfolio. So if you stray too far away from that strategy, then the 4% rule doesn't really apply as much over the longer period of time. And it's interesting that you mentioned that because just now we're in our fourth year of retirement. And we have successfully pulled out of the things of return risk. We had a bit of a dip in 2000, like the first year retirement when the oil crisis happened and caused the stock markets to crash a little bit. The yield shield really saved our butts then. But now we're in the fourth year retirement and we are starting to divest

ourselves of our yield shield assets coming back to the index. So later today, actually, I'm going to be rebalancing our portfolio and getting rid of some of the higher yielding bonds, getting rid of some of the per first shares. And I'm going to be going back into just the general index VTX and like these kinds of ETFs, index ETFs that we all know and love. We'll come back to the show in just a second. But first, that's the U.S. Child strategy. Tell me about how you paired that with a different strategy that you refer to as the cash cushion. Right. So the cash cushion is just the idea of keeping some amount of cash outside of your portfolio, uninvested, as in just a savings account. How we calculated this is that, you know, a lot of people think that cash question means, okay, if you want to store

a couple years of cash of living expenses outside your portfolio, you have to store the entire year's amount. So, for example, if you wanted to store three years' worth of living expenses and you lived on $40,000, you need to keep $120,000 out of the market. And that's a pretty big significant chunk of your portfolio, just keeping cash. And what we realized, when we pair this with the yield shield is that you don't actually need to keep the full amount of how much cash you need to weather a storm. You only need the difference between how much cash you need to live on and what your yield shield is providing you. So for example, we advise that in order to withstand five years of recession, you want to keep between three to five years of cash cushion. But for us,

what that meant was our living expenses was $40,000. Our portfolio is yielding $35,000. So in order to keep enough cash to survive off of, you only need $5,000 per year that you want to save up. So for us, keeping five years worth of cash reserves is only $25,000. So what that would allow us to do is we would be able to withstand five straight years of recession. And each year we would harvest a year of the yield shield. Then we would take one year's worth of that cash cushion, you know, 35,000 from the portfolio, 5,000 from the cash cushion. And that's what we've used to live on so that we don't have to withdraw anything. So in bad years, that's what we would do.

And in good years, when the stock market goes up, we would replenish the cash cushion and sell off some assets that have gone up and then get our cash cushion back up to, like, you know, five years' time. So the two strategies kind of interplay off of each other. The yield shield does make the portfolio more complicated because you're adding these assets in that you now have to have other indexes for. But the advantage of it is that it allows you to keep far less cash outside of the portfolio in order to be safe during a recession.

Right. Right. So that makes sense. So if you plan on living on 4% of your portfolio and you derive 3.5% of that from dividend and interest income, then it's only the remaining 0.5% per year that you need to maintain in cash. Right. You got it. Yeah. Where did you locate these assets in terms of your mix of taxable brokerage accounts, tax deferred accounts and tax exempt accounts? How did you locate your dividend and income producing assets during the first few years of your retirement when you're trying to manage for. sequence of returns risk. Oh, great question. Well, these are way more detailed that most reporters give. Thank you. This is because you're another fire person. You really understand all this stuff with the detail. Most reporters are just kind of like, so how does this whole retirement thing work? Yeah, so great question. So it depends on each asset and the type of distributions that they give.

So, for example, preferred shares normally pay in qualified dividends, which are very tax efficient, which is tax efficiently. So those assets you would keep inside your investment brokerage account because that gets taxed at zero percent tax rate for Americans and Canadians as well for the first like, you know, $70,000 of dividends. For something like REITs, which are real estate income trusts, which basically own apartment buildings and shopping malls and administer those and then pay you the money from the landlords, sorry, the landlords administer it and then pay you distributions in a form of rent. That's tax as regular income. So you would want to keep that inside of your 401k or your Roth IRA or for Canadians, their RSP. So what you have to do is

for each asset class, you have to go and see how the income is treated as a taxation basis, and then put that in the right account so that you basically don't pay any taxes on it at all. It's not complicated, but it's just you have to understand the rules and knowing which account should go where, and that's just kind of how that works. And so as the two of you embarked on early retirement, building this cash cushion and reallocating your portfolio to bias towards dividend and income producing assets, at least for the first few years of your retirement. Those were the two ways that you defraid sequence of returns risk at the beginning of your retirement and therefore gave yourself a little bit more of a backup plan in addition to

the 4% withdrawal rule, which is what you plan on living on throughout the remainder of your retirement. Yes, that was what we started with. that was kind of like me gaming out how to arrange the finances in order to make this work. What we didn't expect, however, was the fact that travel itself can be another backup plan. Chrissy, do you want to talk about that a bit? Yeah, so the thing with travel is that when people think about travel, they've been kind of duped into thinking that travel is expensive because the travel industry will tend to sell you these

prepackaged travel vacation packages so that you don't really have to think about it. And when you're working, the only time you can actually go on vacation is you have to leave on a Saturday or Sunday and they come back on a Saturday Sunday. So you're traveling at the same time that everybody else is traveling. But when you're actually financially independent, you can travel at any time. So you can take advantage of flying out on a Wednesday when nobody else is really able to do that because they're at work. And you can go to obscure places. Like one of the places we went to was Lithuania or Latvia, places that you never really talk about. and it's very underrated, the cost of travel kind of acts like a portfolio in that if you

balance expensive places like the UK or Denmark with inexpensive places like Thailand or Poland, it's actually pretty easy to live on $40,000 a year while traveling the world because you're not just going to England and then buying a package and it's costing you like $6,000 for a week. And at the same time, it gives you the option of actually dropping your living expenses if you need to. So right now we're in Thailand. In Thailand, it is entirely possible to live here for about half of what we were living on back in Canada. So annualized the amount of spending that we're doing in Thailand and places inside Southeast Asia, we could easily live very comfortably on $20,000, $25,000 a year.

So when you combine that with the yield shield in which the portfolio was paying you $35,000 a year, that creates another backup plan on its own because in the event of a recession, we could just go live in Southeast Asia for the year. drop our expenses to the point where it's actually below our yield shield, which would allow us to actually live in Southeast Asia, lying on a beach, and we'd actually be making money every day because our portfolio is paying us more than we're spending every single day. Without selling any assets. Without selling any assets. So by combining these three systems that we made up, it's actually possible to, in a recession, go travel, live on a beach,

and make money during the recession. So, I mean, like when you combine all these, rather disparate concepts and put it together, it almost becomes a superpower because nothing can take you down anymore. No recession can take you down. No housing crash can take you down. You just arrange your life so that you're always making money no matter what. And once you figure that out, or once we figure that out, we're kind of like, whoa, we stumbled across something amazing here. We should write a book about it. Yeah. And the thing is that one of my fears before leaving at work was that there was instability because there was outsourcing. But if you think about it, using the power of geographic arbitrage, we've actually turned that system on its head and we're outsourcing ourselves.

So by being location independent and not having to live in a very expensive major metropolitan city because we need the job, we can easily arrange our lives so that we don't have to sell anything. We're actually making money by sitting on a beach. So outsource yourself if you're worried about job security at work. We're coming to the end of our time. My final question to you is, what are you looking forward to next? Oh, so many things. Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

This year has just been crazy. Like every year that we've been retired, every year after that just gets crazy and crazy and crazier. So this year was the launch of our book. We're just getting over that. 2020, God, I don't know what's going to happen. What do you have? Yeah, one of the things we're looking forward to is Chautauqua. Right.

There's also the Financial Freedom Summit that we're going to be keynote speakers at. There's also a lot of, surprisingly, by traveling the world, we've actually kind of built up a little bit of a traveling commune, where other people who are either on their path to FI that we've met through Chautauquas or have just become FI and sold everything to travel the world with us are kind of coming with us. So the idea that we're never going to have community again because we don't have work, it's actually quite the opposite. We've actually been able to meet more people.

And this whole thing has become a traveling adventure with people that we like to hang out with doing projects that we love. Yeah, there's a combination of like all the conferences that are running the Chautauquas, FinCon, the Financial Freedom Summit that Grant Sabatier is running, we're able to meet all of our heroes through these things. We met Money Mustache. We met Matt Finders. We met you at FinCondis. And then now we know all these people all over the world. And whenever we drop in anywhere, there's always this built-in group of friends, no matter what city that we're out in the world that we know, that it's just, that's the most fun part about this whole retirement thing. Like our friend list hasn't shrank. It's grown and it's grown so much more than we ever thought possible. So

that's been the most rewarding and interesting part of it. Thank you, Christy and Bryce. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are six. Number one, use the scarcity mindset to your advantage. Oftentimes in the financial media, you'll hear people talk about the importance of adopting an abundance mindset and letting go of a scarcity mindset.

And what people typically mean by that is that it can be beneficial to train your mind to look for opportunities and to recognize ways to bring more abundance into your life. But that said, the scarcity mindset, according to Christian Bryce, also has many advantages. When harnessed in a healthy way, a scarcity mindset in which you think of money as scarce is a mindset that compels you to not take money for granted and to not be wasteful of it. The scarcity mindset from a financial perspective, where it's the most helpful is it causes you to not waste money. Because money is when you don't have a lot of it and you're worried about where your next meal is coming from, scarcity makes you go shop around for the best deal or everything. According to Christian Bryce, maintaining the perspective that money is scarce will help you be more conscious of wastefulness and as a result, waste less.

And so that is key takeaway number one. Harness the scarcity mindset to your advantage. Key takeaway number two. Stay consistent as an investor regardless of what's happening in the overall markets. Christy and Bryce began investing at the worst time. They started investing when the recession was beginning. And so they watched a lot of their money disappear during the financial crash. Fortunately, they'd set their asset allocation.

They rebalanced consistently throughout the crash. And they continued making contributions, as scary as it was. They stayed the course. They didn't try to time the markets. They didn't try to outsmart the markets. they simply consistently invested from every single paycheck and held to their asset allocation. And as a result, they came out of the recession strong. It really is trusting the math.

So having that logical, like coming from that engineering background really helped because you realize that, yes, the stock market is falling. And yes, I'm freaking out and having a panic attack. But if you trust the system and you continue buying as it's falling, We actually recovered our money in less than two years. And so that helped me realize that even during the worst possible financial crisis of my life, that money does recover over time. You just have to have the nerves of steel not to freak out and sell everything at the bottom. And so staying the course, staying consistent is what helped their portfolio recover so quickly.

It led to a faster recovery. And so in that regard, the key to sound long-term investing is to ignore the noise and just keep on keeping on. So that is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three. If you plan on quitting your job, taking an early retirement, or making a career change, recognize and reduce your fears around that transition. Both Christy and Bryce were afraid of quitting their jobs. Bryce enjoyed his job. And so he felt some element of, well, why would I want to quit if I enjoy it?

And Christy, who has worked very hard for her entire life, recognized that stepping away from what she's built, stepping away from her identity, from her community, that would be hard. As the two of them outline, loss of identity, loss of community, and the potential loss of money are three major things that people are afraid of when it comes to quitting your job. I realize that there's three things that people are going to be afraid of if they choose to quit their jobs after becoming a fly. One is loss of money. One is loss of community and loss of identity.

Because a lot of the times your network comes from your co-workers. What's going to happen when you don't have that community anymore? What they discovered on the other side, however, is that they now have the freedom to form new communities, and they now have friends all over the world, and their individual. and their investments are continuing to grow. They now have $1.4 million rather than the $1 million that they started with. And by the way, the reason that I asked them

about their fiction book, Little Miss Evil, is because I wanted to underscore the idea that not all people who retire early go on to write blogs and books exclusively about early retirement. And so the fact that they wrote a fiction book, a book about the daughter of a supervillain who lives in a volcano,

that's a perfect example of, pursuing a new interest, a new passion, and potentially a new career in your retirement. And as they outlined, it's relieving to be able to write a fiction book and know that your income as a fiction author is not your sole source of income. You don't have to rely on it to buy groceries and keep the lights on. And so that is the third key takeaway. Key takeaway number four, consider building a yield shield for your first few years of retirement. Now, as Christy and Bryce outlined, your first four to five years of retirement are critical because those are the years in which you have maximum sequence of returns risk.

What that means is that if you retire and then as soon as you've retired, the market tanks and your portfolio suffers tremendous losses, if during that time you're relying on that money and you therefore have to convert paper losses into real losses by selling off some of your assets at a loss, well, that can have a huge downstream negative consequence on the health of your portfolio in the long term. So how do you mitigate some of that risk? Well, an asset makes money in two ways. There's the value of the asset itself, capital appreciation, but then there's also the dividend or the income stream that that asset produces. And so Christian Bryce took the approach of biasing their portfolio towards high dividend investments during the beginning of their

retirement. By doing this, they were able to get an overall dividend yield of about 3.5% from their portfolio. What that means is that even if there is a market crash, they don't have to sell out of any of their positions at a loss. In other words, they don't have to convert paper losses into real losses because they can simply harvest the dividend income, harvest the interest income without selling out of any of their positions. And by holding dividend forward assets during the first four or five years of retirement when sequence of returns risk is highest, they're able to hedge against a lot of that threat. When sequence of return hits you, the mechanism of failure happens if you're forced to sell

at a loss. So, you know, you go into retirement, the portfolio goes down, and then you have to sell stocks and bonds when everything is at a lower value in order to find your lifestyle. If you do that, then when the eventual recovery happens, the opposite of what we discussed earlier happens, where you have less of those ETF units to participate in the recovery, and you recover slower up while falling more sharply and then recovering slower up. So by increasing your yield, you avoid that. So consider temporarily reallocating your portfolio in a way that,

biases towards dividend and income-producing assets for the first four or five years of your retirement if you plan on living off of the proceeds from that portfolio as your primary source of income during retirement. That is key takeaway number four. And key takeaway number five, build a cash cushion. The other way that they hedged against sequence of returns risk is by building a cash cushion, an emergency fund that represents the different. The different between the dividend and interest income generated from their portfolio and the amount that they need annually in order to pay their bills. So, for example, if you need $40,000 a year to live on and the dividend and interest income from your portfolio generates $35,000 a year, then that

difference that you would need to save in cash would be $5,000 per year. And you would then multiply that by however many number of years you would want to have your emergency. Fund represent. For example, if you wanted to store three years' worth of living expenses and you lived on $40,000, you need to keep $120,000 out of the market. And that's a pretty big significant chunk of your portfolio, just keeping cash. And what we realize when we pair this with the yield shield is that you don't actually need to keep the full amount of how much cash you need to weather a storm. You only need the difference between how much cash you need to live on and what your yield shield is providing you. And so building a cash cushion that represents

the difference between your dividend and interest income and your cost of living. That is key takeaway number five. And finally, key takeaway number six. Embrace travel as a money-saving method. There are many countries in which the cost of living is significantly cheaper than the cost of living in the United States or Canada. And so if you want to, even temporarily for six months or a year, reduce your cost of living, while maintaining a great quality of life, then try relocating to a place where both the cost of living is lower

and the dollar goes a lot further. The cost of travel kind of acts like a portfolio in that if you balance expensive places like the UK or Denmark with inexpensive places like Thailand or Poland, it's actually pretty easy to live on $40,000 a year while traveling the world because you're not just going to England and then buying a package

and it's costing you like $6,000 for a week. And at the same time, it gives you the option of actually dropping your living expense if you need to. Christy and Bryce were in Thailand when we recorded this interview. In Thailand and in many other countries in Southeast Asia, a couple can live comfortably on about $25,000 a year, as Christy and Bryce are doing right now. And so especially if you're living on your portfolio and there's a market downturn or there's some type of unexpected expense that threw your budget off

and you're trying to steer your portfolio back towards recovery, particularly in those circumstances, consider the role that travel or geographic arbitrage could play in your early retirement. This tip, by the way, reminds me of one of my favorite quotes came from J.L. Collins. He's the author of the book A Simple Path to Wealth. He's also a former guest on this podcast. He was our guest in episode 31. He has this great quote in which he says, flexibility is the only true security. And in fact, he has another quote that I also really love that says, as the winds change, so will my withdrawals.

And so this tip that Christy and Bryce shared about embracing the flexibility to go live in Thailand for a year, if there's a year in which you want to try to get your cost of living down from, let's say, from 40,000 a year down to 25,000 a year, embracing the flexibility to think creatively and think globally about how to do that, that's a perfect illustration of flexibility is the only true security. And so those are six takeaways from this conversation with Christy and Bryce. If you want a written synopsis of these takeaways, head to Afford Anything.com slash episode 236. That's where you'll see notes from today's episode, plus a summary of these key takeaways.

While you're there, sign up for our email list. It's free, and once a week we will send you. the show notes for every episode so that that way you'll have notes from all of our episodes. You can archive it in your email and then reference back to it at any time. If you want to pull something up or reference back to something, it's a great way to have a record of these episodes that you've listened to. So again, afford anything.com slash episode 236 to see the show notes for today's episode and to sign up for our email list to get all of our future show notes.

I want to thank everybody who left us a rating or a review in whatever app you're using to listen to this episode. I particularly want to give a shout out to Desert Jan for their amazing review. They said, quote, life-changing. Paula Pant is insightful, kind, authentic, and funny. She is sunshine in the fog of personal finance. What was once vague and confounding is now tangible and clear. After listening to afford anything, try not. to improve your decision-making about how to spend your money in time. I dare you. Thank you,

Desert Jan. Sunshine in the fog of personal finance. Wow. Thank you. And huge thanks to everybody else who has left us a rating or a review. If you haven't done so yet, you can always go to afford anything.com slash iTunes. That will redirect you to the page on the Apple Podcast website, where you can leave us a review. It is right now the beginning of the year 2020. It's January 2020, and we have a free challenge for our community. It's called One Tweak a Week a Week. And this challenge is a series of 26 simple, actionable tweaks that you can make that taken together add up to some significant improvements in your financial life. And so with one tweak a week, we send you one tweak that is designed to take less than an hour. Some of them take less than five minutes.

So that's one tweak that you can do each week for the first six months of the new year. We also have an e-book that outlines all of these tweaks plus an online community that's going through all of this together. And so you can take part in the challenge, get the e-book, get the emails, get all of it for free at afford-anything.com slash 2020 kickoff. That's afford-anything.com slash 2020 kickoff to take part in our one-week-week challenge. Big thanks to our sponsors for today's episode, beta brand, fresh books, radius bank, and framebridge. If you'd like to see a complete list of all of our sponsors, plus the deals and the discounts that they offer,

had to afford anything.com slash sponsors. That's where we list all the promo codes. Finally, if you enjoy today's episode, please share it with a friend or a family member. We love word of mouth recommendations. I hear from so many people who tell me that they were introduced to, not just afford anything, but to the concept of personal finance and financial independence by somebody, a friend, a cousin, a coworker who shared an episode with them that resonated with

them and that got them hooked. So if you know somebody who's interested in how to save more money, how to invest more, how to retire early, please share today's episode with them. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast. I hope you're having a great start to 2020, and I will catch you next week.