Afford Anything - Mic Drop! ChooseFI's Brad Barrett Interviews Paula Pant

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

#501: Drop the mic! ChooseFI's Brad Barrett takes the host role in this special episode, interviewing Paula Pant about the financial independence community. This episode was recorded LIVE at a comedy club in Brooklyn, as the final installment of the Episode 500 and 501 celebration. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode501 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything. What you are about to hear is episode 501. This was recorded back to back with episode 500 live at a comedy club in Brooklyn. So if you didn't hear episode 500 last week, I would recommend that you actually go back and listen to that one first. Both episodes 500 and episode 501 feature a special guest, Brad Barrett, the host of the Choose F podcast. Now, for those of you who are new to the community, ChooseFI stands for Choose Financial Independence, financial independence being the point at which you have enough investments such that you know you could be secure for the rest of your life. Brad Barrett, the host of the Choose

FI podcast, was amazing enough to come all the way to New York City from Richmond, Virginia, to record and celebrate these two episodes with us live in front of a crowd. For a Our first taping, episode 500, I interviewed him. And so for this second taping, which you are about to hear, episode 501, he interviews me. And after that, we turn the microphone over to the audience and take audience Q&A. By the way, as we were recording, we had some technical difficulties with the microphone. So the audio quality might not be our usual standard. And by might not be, I mean, it isn't.

This is going to be a sonic adventure. Do not fear because the content is still fantastic, and we will be back to crystal clear audio next time. Also, if you'd like to watch this visually, you can find us on YouTube. Just go to YouTube.com slash afford anything, where you can see Brad and I on stage, surrounded by our incredible community. With that said, here is the live recording of episode 501, featuring ChooseFI host, Brad. Brad Barrett.

Thank you all so much for coming out for the 501 episode of the F-WR-Everthing podcast. Guys, please go to the stage right now. Paula Pint and her guest, Brad Barrett. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to episode 501. Fred, you are the host of today's show. I am the interviewee, the guest. Take it away.

All right. So, yeah, no pressure, obviously. We have a Columbia train job. journalist here. And hand the show over to Brad. So now this is 501. So literally 500 episodes down. I'd love for you to take us back to the origin story.

I'd love just to recount, like from in your words, what was the origin story of a Ford Anything began in 2011 as a blog? Prior to that, I'd been working as a newspaper reporter. And I quit my newspaper reporting job with 25,000. saved up and flew to Egypt on a one-way ticket. And then for the next 27 months, I lived out of a backpack and just traveled full time. When I said that to my friends, basically every person without fail said, oh, I would love to do that, but I can't afford it. I just heard that refrain over and over and over. But these were all friends who I knew made more than me, but they also

spent more than me. They had like these fancy. apartments with stainless steel appliances and cars that were leased and, you know, they were sending $15 on a fancy cocktail at the bar. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the message that I wanted to put forth is that if you sit down and you really consciously think about, right, I only have enough money to do one or the other. I can either have this like fancy lifestyle or I can travel, but I currently don't have enough income to do. do both, if you sit down and you really think through that decision, and you consciously decide, I want the fancy lifestyle, that's more important to me. Great. I applaud that, no problem there,

right? But that is, I choose not to, which is very different from I can't. The idea that I wanted to challenge was this notion of I can't afford it. You know, I wanted to really extend to people the idea that you can afford it, you just can't afford to travel and to live in an apartment with stainless steel appliances and and lease a car that's less than two years old and buy a hundred dollars worth of cocktails at the bars every weekend and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, yeah. So anyway, so I started that as a blog. So this is 2011. I started to afford anything at the time as a blog. And over in the span of the next five years, the blog, the blog, audience grew. And eventually, enough of my blog readers started asking me, like, when are you

going to start a podcast? So if you think back to 2014, that roughly 2014, that was when Serial came out. And Serial was like the podcast that put podcasting on the map. Because prior to serial coming out, a lot of people just didn't know that podcasts existed. And that was also right around the time that Apple Podcasts became native to iPhone. And that was also a game changer for the world of podcasting. And so because of those two things, my audience started asking me, when are you going to start a podcast? And I was like, well, I guess I got to do it.

So then in early 2016, afford anything was born. So you can afford anything, but not everything. That is beautiful. Where did I come from? You know, so I was actually in Bali when, so it wasn't the model. know anything but not it. But the phrase afford anything, like the brand name, came to me while I was, it was during those 27 months of travel when all of my friends were like, I'd love to do that, but I can't afford it. So I was already during that trip, percolating on like, oh, I think I want

to start something. I want to start a blog. I want to start something that that empowers people to know that they can afford the things that they want. They just have to make the tradeoffs. And I remember I was in Bali at the moment that like it just, the name. afford anything, like popped into my head. And as soon as it popped into my head, I was like, that's it. That's it. That's what I'm going to call it. And then the motto, you can afford anything but not everything. It was just the most succinct possible explanation of what the name meant. Because, you know, if you don't know what afford anything means, it's easy to conflate it with afford everything. Oh, I think somebody, some like imitator actually bought afford everything.

and made like a parody website. Years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And they were even like writing all these blog posts about buying rental proper. So like the untrained I might have actually thought that it was me. Yeah. It was weird. That was happening a lot back at the time. Our friend J.D. Roth had this blog called Get Rich Slowly. And someone made like an imitation site called Get Rich Not Quickly. Yeah, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Right, but going back to the beginning of the podcast.

So, Serial, 2014, and Native Podcast House for those lucky enough to have Apple. You can afford Apple. You were the co-host, right? Is that part of the 500? Yeah, yeah, that's part of the 500. So the first 36 episodes, we were not called the afford. podcast at the time. We were the money show.co. I still

own the domain. I'm thinking about giving it up because I'm tired of paying the registration fees. But I do still currently own the domain, the moneyshow.co. I started with a co-host, Jay Money, who is a blogger behind Budgets Are Sexy. So we did the first 36 episodes together. Jay Money is

great, but like I wanted to really build this out and make it a... I was like, I'm in. Clearly, we're here at episode 501. And Jay was like, I've all these other things I want to do. So, like, we, we split ways peacefully at episode 36, and it's been great. So, I guess, what, 465 episodes you've done without Jay? Yeah.

That's, uh, and it's... Good mental back. All right. What's 72 minus 17? I'm going to pass that. Um... Fifty-five. I'm actually surprisingly good.

I've got that, actually. But now I'm forgetting my question, so not so good enough. So I actually, it's funny, I listened to you guys way back in the death. So I told you this last night. I told you this story that you wanted me to. So the first time that I met Paula, it was at a financial conference called FinCon. It was circa 2016. So this is like the end of 2016.

So before Chuseyvye started, I had been following and listening to Paula for years. And obviously, if you've listened to her show, you know, she's brilliant. And, you know, I wouldn't say intimidating, but ever so slightly, like, she's a one. Yeah. She's intimidating me brilliant, I would say. So we're in San Diego. And I see Paula across the way. And I had been following Paula for years at that point.

And I'm like, I'm trying to, like, muster up the courage. to say hello to Paula. I finally, I'm like, okay, what would be the hook? Like, what could I, what could I think to even say to her? And I just listened to one of her recent episodes. I believe it was an episode with Gretchen Rubin, and she wrote, she's written a number of books. I'm like, oh, Paula, I love your podcast. I just listened to the episode of Gretchen Rubin, and I thought that was especially great. I'm essentially slinking away, like, you know, that's all I can come up. And Paula immediately turns around in her very journalistic way, oh, what did you love about it? Are you freaking kidding me, lady?

You have no idea how much courage it just took to ask this, you know, the first thing. And then I got over my nervousness and I realized just how wonderful she is. You do have to be on your toes because, again, she's, she asked just really insightful questions, which I think is why we were just saying before on episode 500, Paul. Paula interviewed me in our first session here at the live. And that was simple for me. I could yap, you know, essentially about myself for 10 hours if I needed to. And this second one, I have to think of questions to ask Paula, which is just such a high bar.

What you've described in that story is like, I think you've just described the inner life of introverts in a way that I never really appreciated. Because to me, as an observer, I had no idea that it took you so much. courage to just come up to me and say something. And so, of course, it wasn't my intention to put you on the spot. To me, it's just like, oh, that's great. What'd you like about it? Which is perfectly natural. So let's talk about asking questions.

Because I think this is what you are known for, whether you know it or not. I think you are extraordinary. And I think in talking to other people who listen to Paula show, other podcasters, I think Paula stands out uniquely. as someone who asks truly insightful questions. You have a significant background in journalism, and you've had a lot of different hats, right? Real estate investor.

You have a foot and change in the five community, obviously, two feet. You have been a podcaster and blogger now for 13 years. How do you think about yourself? When Paula thinks about how do I conceptualize myself, of all those hats, is it a mix or does one stand out above the rest? I think there's a distinction between the public-facing work that I do and the day-to-day behind the scenes of it. The public-facing work that I do, I mean, if I had to describe it succinctly, it would be, there's like a sprinkling of financial journalist or economic journalist, but like mixed with content.

It's like the Venni diagram intersection of financial journalism. content creation. I am a content creator, but like, but what is the distinction truly between a journalist and a content creator? I try to sort of tread that line, wherever that line is. So in terms of the public-facing work that I do, I would say I'm like, I'm somewhere at that hybrid between financial journalist and content creator. But then, as we were talking about yesterday, that behind the scenes, so much of the work is the unseen part of it, right? Like what the public sees is the podcast episodes that come out, the YouTube videos that come out, the social media, the public sees public-facing content. But behind the scenes, there's like planning and there's

admin and I am garbage at that, like absolute garbage at all of that. It's just answering emails, I don't know how y'all do it. I am incapable of answering an email. I'm terrible at all of that behind-the-scenes stuff. And so much of the time I feel like, you know, afford anything has succeeded in spite of me, you know, not because of me, but almost in spite of me. I've recently come to peace with the idea that I can't be a superstar of everything. And just because I'm good at the financial journalist content creator piece of it, that just means that I need to surround myself with other people who are good at all of the other elements of it that are necessary to make it flourish. Yeah, I'm almost picturing like the iceberg, right? The little piece that's above

the water is the forward facing. But there's so much that goes on. I suspect, because again, you're such a good question asker, you don't really talk about yourself all that often. I think people would be interested in like day in the life. What is like a day or a week in the of afford anything and Paula look like. So most days, I'm like very wedded to my coffee and skincare routine. I was going to say, there is sunscreen.

You're going to hear a lot of, there's so much sunscreen. Yeah, I'm a little bit obsessed with skincare. Oh, and I put salt in my coffee, by the way. Try it. Salt from a shaker or? So there's this element.

Yeah, element. LMNT. They have this chocolate. salt, put the chocolate salt in your coffee. You will never go back. At this point, I'm disappointed by coffee that doesn't have salt in it. And then I try to get in some sort of a workout, not like super early in the morning, because the first hour or two after I wake up, I just, I'm not ready yet. But like, in the late morning, I get in some kind of a workout. And then it just depends. It depends on, do I have interviews that day? Today, I did an interview with Dr. Mary Murphy,

who is a professor at Stanford. And so today I like spent probably about an hour going through her book, looking at all of the notes that I'd already made from a few weeks ago, like the pages that I had dog-eared and the parts that I'd underlined and just kind of mentally getting in the space of being ready to interview her. We asked our guests to come 20 minutes prior to when we start taping. So she and I then sat down in a conference room and we talked about what the narrative arc for the interview was going to be.

then we went into the studio. The interview lasted for an hour. After that, I walked her to the elevator, walked her out, met with the rest of the people in the office. We talked about some of the stuff that's coming up in the next little while. They're in the process of building out like an even better studio, so we had to go look at that and, you know, made some comments and remarks and blah, blah, blah. And then after that I ate a burger and then I came here.

Yeah. But that's on a day like today where I had a mid-afternoon interview followed by two recordings and the evening is very different from a day where I don't have any interview. You know, there's certain days where I just don't have any interviews. And the whole day is spent doing like admin backstage behind the scene sort of stuff. There's a woman who has worked full time and afford anything for a number of years. And next week or two weeks from now, she and I are going to meet up, she lives in Indiana. She and I are going to meet up in person in Texas so that we can have a week long like planning retreat.

where all of these things that are just a little bit meatier, it's like media enough that it's hard to talk about them on Zoom. We're just going to like sit down in person. So we've set aside a week where I'm not doing any content creation at all for that week so that we can really do some long-term planning. Yeah, that's very interesting. I wonder, one thing I've always been curious about is, so your preparation for an actual interview.

So this author that you interviewed today, do you prepare the questions in advance? No, never. Never. Zero. I usually, I have the opening question in my head. Other than the opening question, I have nothing else. But I prepare the narrative arc, which is different than the questions.

On Chusify, we think of it as three parts. Oh. That's generally how Jonathan always, narrative arc was very important to him. Yeah. He's a genius. But how do you think about narrative arc of each episode? Or does it differ depending on the guests? Yeah, it differs depending on the subject matter.

Some of our guests will write books. where the narrative arc just flows so well that I'm like, all right, I'm just going to trace the narrative arc of the book that you wrote because this just works. So for some of the guess, it's really easy. For others, not so much. As I'm absorbing the content that I'm about to engage with, I constantly ask myself the question like, how does this tie into personal finance, financial independence, building wealth? Basically, how do I make this relevant for our audience? because oftentimes I'm interviewing people who are in adjacent verticals. So recently we had Charles Duhigg on the show.

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize winning a reporter who he wrote The Power of Habit, which was a very widely popular book that came out several years ago. He recently wrote this book called Super Communicators, all about how to be more effective at communication. Now, obviously, that has a lot of application to anything that we do in the world of money management, right? Anything ranging from negotiating with your boss for a raise to having better relationships with clients and colleagues at the workplace, to talking to your spouse or your partner about money, explaining to your family why you're quitting your job at the age of 42.

There's so many, like communication is just relevant in every facet of life, including personal finance and financial independence. But I needed to find a way to to make that link more relevant. So as I was, like, thinking through how I wanted to arc the interview, I had that at the top of my mind. But I also knew, for Charles Duhigg specifically, there was one section in his book. It was like two-thirds of the way through the book. Because I'm always thinking about, like, what is my opening question? That, to me, is really important.

And two-thirds of the way through the book, Charles Duh-Hig says he talks about how his father passed away six years prior. and people are often really uncomfortable with death, and they're very uncomfortable with uncomfortable topics. He was thinking about his dad and his dad's life a lot, and he really wanted to talk about it. And he was like, I would have given anything for someone to just ask me, like, hey, so what was your dad like? Tell me about your dad.

But he was like, but nobody ever asked me that question. Everybody was like, oh, sorry, man, that, I'm sorry to hear that. let me know what I can do. You're in my thoughts. You know, I'm like, no one knew what to say. And that just made the experience even more alienating. I was like, well, there's my opening question. So then I opened with like, so Charles, tell me about your dad.

And then he laughed because he knew exactly what I was asking. And then he answered the question. And then we could pull back. And I was like, all right, now, for the listeners who are wondering why I just opened with that question, here's what, you know. And so it was a great way to like. place the audience it right into the middle

of the subject matter and then arc it from there. I do want to kind of shift gears a little bit because you talked about managing money. Right. You, at least to my eyes, became well known as a real estate investor in certainly the beginning of a four-down anything.

Where does real estate fit into your financial life today? My redefinition of fire is financial psychology investing, real estate entrepreneurship, F-I-R-E. The letters happen to just be in exactly the perfect place because you start with financial psychology.

That means start with mindset. If you don't have the right money mindset locked in, none of the rest of it matters. And none of the rest of it is going to work. Like you can't get the ire of fire unless you first grapple with like money mentality. So the first piece of it, the foul. foundational piece is the F, the financial psychology. That's the first and most important piece. And then after that, you have the ire of fire. And so within that, the ire, investing real estate entrepreneurship, it's actually spaced perfectly because real estate, as I see it, is a little bit of a hybrid

between investing and entrepreneur. So it's kind of perfect that the R is nestled in between the I and the E. The whole acronym is just. It works out so well. You know? Wow. It's like you made it up and planned all. So that's how I see the entire journey. And I never meant, I never intended to become known as a real estate person.

I started blogging about personal finance. Like before I ever knew what financial independence was, I was a personal finance blogger. And as a journalist, I was a personal finance freelance writer. Do you remember about dot com? Remember that? I was the About.com guide to budgeting and personal finance. They paid $800 a month. It's quite a claim to fame.

I don't like to brag. They were one of the first clients that I landed, and I would write these Internet articles about, like, how to budget for About.com. And then I would write for AOL Daily Finance, and I wrote articles for, like, for, CFP's or financial planner websites. So I would write like content for the websites of private businesses. So yeah, I just, anyway, all of that is to say I started out writing about personal

finance. And one of the many topics that I wrote about was real estate. These days, it's like everybody invests in real estate. But the aftermath of the Great Recession back in 2011, nobody was writing about it because everybody was scared because we'd just come off of this housing crash. And so I was one of the few people at the time that was writing about it. And so I just got a ton of questions about it. And so I very quickly became known as one of the voices because I was one of the only voices. And then there was this guy, his name was Brandon Turner, and he had a blog called Real Estate in Your 20s.com. And like, then there was this other dude named Josh Dorkin with this little blog called Bigger Pockets.

You know, I remember like Josh was like, I think I'm going to hire Brandon. because Josh wanted him to stop working on real estate near-20s.com, you know, and Brandon was like, man, I'm sad that I have to give that up. These were like the early, early, early days where nobody was writing about real estate. In those very beginning days, I made the decision. I was like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be moving in the direction of bigger pockets. That's not what I want to be and that's not what I want to be known for. Like, I am personal finance. I'm not real estate.

And I feel like it's actually taken years of like swimming upstream to break out. of that pigeonhole. I think the Susie Ormond interview did a lot to like, really, truly, like that interview was one of the first interviews where finally I was being talked about for something other than real estate. What was the question you asked? Good on, Suzy. So Susie, I, as my opening question, again, that power of the opening question, my opening question to Susie Orman was, what do you think of the fire movement? And she said, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And that set the tone for the rest of the interview. Good old, good old Susie.

I like your new fire acronym. What do you think about somebody who is not pursuing either entrepreneurship or real estate, but just the old school, if you will, five-path? Yeah, I think that's great. If your motivation is FOMO, then that's the wrong motivation. If you're like, oh, I should invest in real estate. and also have a side hustle because everybody else is doing it. I'm the only person who's not.

Like, that's a terrible, terrible reason to do it. If that's your motivation, then don't do it. There's like nothing wrong with, if you love your job, like work your job, put a bunch of money in index funds, latherins repeat. You can have a wonderful life and build a high net worth and build financial independence doing that. the FI financial independence is the core of it, right? And the RE is optional. Like, you need financial independence, right?

Everybody, I think everybody should aim for financial independence. But once you get financial independence, you don't necessarily have to retire early. Taylor Swift is financially independent, right? That doesn't mean that she has to stop making albums and stop going on tour, right? Warren Buffett is financially independent. Lots of people who we think of as conventionally wealthy are financially independent. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have to retire early. So the RE is optional.

Same thing in this acronym. Look at how that worked out. I just figured that out in real time on this stage. As you almost jumped out of your scene. We kind of figured you. Yeah. Yeah, the F and the I are the cornerstones and the RE are options. Wow.

That works? Yeah, that's true. Put that acronym. That really fits. You know, the mission of afford anything and choose FI is to spread the message of financial independence and to teach financial literacy and to make that accessible to everyone at no cost.

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You obviously have been in this world, like you said, since 2011. Talk me through what you've seen as the evolution of personal finance. So the first thing I'll say, in 2011, a lot of people said at that time, they're like, you're too late. You're too late to the game. This is in the world of personal finance blogging. And so this is because in 2006, 2007, there are these blogging platforms like WordPress is a blogging platform. And you don't have to have any kind of technical ability. You just type some stuff into a computer and hit publish and WordPress takes care of it for you. Before the development of WordPress, you had to hard code every blog post.

So very few people were blogging. Katie Roth wrote a blog called Get Rich Slowly. Back in the days when you had to hard code every post, he was blogging at that time. So he and this guy named Harlan Landis and this other guy named Jim Wang, the three of them were the early, early, early personal finance bloggers. Those three were blogging back in like 2008 or so, or 2009. They had like sold their blogs for literally millions of dollars. Like J.D. sold his for an undisclosed amount, but like, we all know it was in the million, you know. So there was this pervasive attitude at the time where people were like, oh, you started too late. You no longer have first mover advantage, you know. So if you're starting in 2011, you're starting way too late. You should have started back in 2008. It's too late for you. It's, isn't that funny? That is wild. Right? Because we actually heard the same thing about choosing. of high. When we started, so we started essentially at the end of 2016, there were so many five

podcasts at that point, is what we heard. There's no way you can convene. And there was essentially nobody. And now there are dozens or hundreds of five podcasts. And it's, I think it's a larger message of you always hear, even with investing. Right. Is it too late? Are we at all time highs? Is it too late for me? Right. You hear this, this drumbeat constantly. It's interesting. interesting to see that through what. Yeah, in the last episode, we asked the question, what changes, but also what doesn't change? And I think one thing that doesn't change is that no matter when you start doing anything, whether it's starting a business or real estate or investing in the stock market, no matter when you start, there are going to be voices, both external and internal, that say

it's too late. You started too late. And I feel like that's, that is just a universe. universal constant. You know, so in 2011, there were all these voices saying, you started, you're starting five years too late. You don't have the same first mover advantage that, that J.D. Roth had. So why even bother? You're just way too late to the game. I tell my audience this all the time, because I constantly hear people say like, well, the stock market is at all time highs. Is it too late? I should have started investing five years ago or ten years ago or, you know, I should have bought Nvidia two years ago, you know, or whatever. Two months ago.

So people are constantly, constantly worried that it's too late. But then fast forward five years, like, what are you going to be saying in 2028? You're going to be looking back at 2024 and being like, I should have done it then. I hear that with real estate constantly. like in 2015, 2016, people were like, there were so many good deals coming out of the Great Recession. I should have bought back in 2012. Now it's 2016. All the good deals are gone.

It's too late. Why bother? Right? I heard that in 2016. I heard that in 2017. I heard that in 2018. I heard that in 2019. It's like it just never stops.

Yeah, it's amazing. I wanted to go back because I think we're talking about psychology, right? So in your new fire acronym, it starts with financial psychology. What do you think is the hardest aspect of the psychology of money? Oh. Okay. So the first answer that immediately comes to mind, overcoming scarcity mindset, the fear of not having enough is pervasive and it's really hard to shake.

Frugality in my 20s came from a place of, constantly being anxious and afraid of not having enough. And my fear of scarcity was motivating me to like clutch onto every penny that I could. But I spent so much time just clutching onto pennies that I wasn't really thinking about making more. Or like, or I was willing to make more, but not at the expense of saving. So I would make more unless making more interfered with like saving what I already had, in which case, it's like the difference between playing offense versus playing defense. I would only play offense to the extent that it wouldn't interfere with my defense.

Defense came first. I wanted to talk about financial scarcity, since you said that that's something that plagued you. I know that was an issue of mine as well. And the intersection, I think of like the sleep well at night test, that's like what I always think in my head. It's like it's okay to be suboptimal, if you will. to pass that sleep well at night test. It sounds like that might have been something that was important to you years ago.

And I'm curious if the financial scarcity still kind of rears its ugly head today, or do you think that is something that, based on where you are in life and where you are financially, that it's not an issue? Oh, no, it's definitely still an issue. It's not as much of an issue.

And it probably, I think it manifests in different ways these days. For me, the issues that were there in like early childhood will probably for me always to some extent be there. It's not a matter of eradicating it. It's just the matter of managing it. And so that that pervasive fear of scarcity, the fear of not having enough, that's something that I think I'm always going to have to really consciously manage. But as life changes and as circumstances change, I think that fear manifests in very different ways. In my early 20s, it was like, consumer-based frugality, right? Like the coupon clipping kind of equivalents, these days, it probably manifests in like a reluctance to aggressively grow the business, wanting to like be really, really, really, really careful before I hire somebody new or before I'm committing to an ongoing,

recurring expenditure. It manifests more in those sorts of ways. Yeah, that certainly makes sense. And so talking about growing the business. So you recently, announced that you're going from essentially one episode a week and plus your the one bonus Friday to now two a week. Yeah. That's something you know something about. It's on top of it. Yeah, I mean, that is a massive change.

Yeah, it's double. Yeah. That's all man. What's the thought behind that? Is it impact? Is it something about like you don't feel that you were able to. convey all the messages that you want or speak to all the people that you wanted with the confines of, I guess, 60-odd episodes because it was, you know, little more.

So it's a couple of things. Number one is we are living in the age of TikTok where everything is short form. I am a believer in long-form content. Short-form has its place. I love Instagram as much as anyone, but not everything can be or should be TikTok. And I think that some of the deepest, most thoughtful, most nuanced learning that can come about comes from long-form content. It comes from podcasts, from audiobooks, from written books, print books, long newsletters or substacks or blog articles. I think that long-form really gives you the space to explore a topic with depth, with nuance, with layers, like to peel back the layers of the onion in a way that you can't with quick hits. So I want to lean into that, right?

I want to create more of that, especially in an age where long form is becoming, in some ways, a bit more rare or a bit more maligned. That's part of it. The other part of it is simply the format of our show is every other episode is an interview and every other episode I answer questions that come from the community, from the audience, along with Joe Saul-Seahy. Right now, with us being a weekly show, it means that there's a two-week gap between every interview that we publish. And likewise, there's also a two-week gap with every Ask Paula and Joe episode. And so by going to twice a week, now we can publish an interview every single week, which means our interviews can be more timely. If we're only publishing functionally two interviews per month, because there's on average 4.3 weeks months. It's hard to like publish timely interviews versus if we're doing an interview every single week, we can make that happen a bit more. I would love to be able to have the leeway to just

have more interviews on the calendar so that the next time that the Fed is meeting eight times a year, they just met and they held interest rate steady and they're going to be meeting again many, many times throughout this year. I would love to have some interviews related to that, that we can time to come out. Yeah, that makes sense. I think for me, just to give a little insight into Chisabaya, and I suspect Paula deals at this as well, is it's this interesting balancing act of you, obviously, you have this publishing schedule. And every Monday at 1 a.m. Eastern, people are expecting a new Chusavaya episode. So I feel like I constantly need to be ahead because, like, that anxiety of, oh my goodness, it's the Thursday before I don't have a Monday episode. That's not something I want to deal with. So I'm usually like a couple of months recorded out in advance. Same. Same. Right. And that's wonderful. But then you lose the spontaneity of being able to respond to things. Right. For years, we published two a week. So it was 104 episodes here for the first five years, essentially. And then we went away from that. Because it was just, it was punishing just to every,

every single week, week in, week out. But I lost that ability to be able to put out timely content or we used to do these roundups or, hey, I just had an episode on Social Security and there are 27 questions that came in and people want more clarity. Now, if I'm months out in advance, what do I do at that point? So I'm actually recently starting to add in a couple extra episodes on that as brave as you and saying I'm going to do an extra 52. That's kind of crazy to be honest. But every now and again. And so it's almost like the intermittent variable rewards, like a casino. Hey, you never know when you're going to go to Friday episode.

So there's that. Yeah, so I get so nervous about the possibility of not having anything prepared. I usually have like some reserve of interviews that are evergreen that I know that we can sprinkle it. So I have a confession. So I interviewed mad scientist in November. But the interview is totally evergreen. So we have that, like, in reserve so that we can just schedule that whenever. Except I just realized, I was thinking about this the other day, the one part of it that's not evergreen is at one point, Brandon's like, oh, yeah, my son is 14 months old.

And by the time we publish this, that his son's going to like be in college. Yeah, I realized the other day, I'm like, oops, oops, that's the one non-evergreen piece of this episode that only like a random, a small handful of Mad Fiendist die hearts or. going to catch that. The ones who do are going to be like, what year was this? I think we should move to Q&A. All right. Let's do it. So we do have a microphone. Stephen, that's not putting you on the spot for number one. I saw Paula, congrats. But also, I know that you spent quite a bit of time recently at Columbia. You don't need that necessarily to like start a new career. And so we were curious. And what did you take away from your time in Columbia? Like, is there anything that you really brought into your podcasting and interviewing for?

from that time and kind of the value of going and getting education and your passion without a career on the backside of it. But just to like make you better at what you're doing currently. Yeah, I think a lot of people were a little confused as to why I did that. Because of the cost of higher education, a lot of people will go back into higher ed specifically if they need the diploma for a specific purpose. Whereas I and I had a fellowship that paid for everything, so it was zero out of pocket cost to me. I was going back just learning for the sake of learning, which is wonderful, but it kind of like caught a lot of people off guard, I think, because they're like, wait a minute, why are you going back?

I talked earlier about being a financial journalist. The word, the other word that I had in my head that I didn't say out loud was economic journalism. And I don't necessarily think of myself as an economics journalist. The people at Planet Money, they're great economics journalists. The indicator is like one of my favorite podcasts. not just learning economics, but learning specifically the skill set of economic journalism, which is kind of a unique skill set that's right at that Venn diagram intersection of economics and journalism. That to me was really critical. You know, learning how to talk about the Fed, how to talk about inflation, how to talk about China, how to talk about all of these things that are happening in the world, and how to make it accessible. easily understood, entertaining, how to make it something that you want to hear about.

Like, you have the option to be watching, like, the Golden Bachelor. You're choosing to tune into this instead. So I've got to make it both informative and interesting, right? And so that was a really big piece of what I learned there. And I'm just starting to incorporate it in most of our recent First Friday episodes. I've done like a monthly economic recap. It's only once a month, but I'm like, this past month, here are some of the headlines and here's how we can contextualize this.

And then here's what it means for you. And here's how it applies to your life. And recently there was, there's all this stuff going on with the National Association of Realtors. Like, there's just, there's so much that's happening in the news right now in economic news. And so learning how to tell those stories, bringing those stories into afford anything. Again, it's that there is that like evergreen versus timeliness component of it, but creating more, more content that's timely based on like what's happening in economic news right now. That's a big piece of what I got from it that I'm bringing in to afford anything. Oh, flip.

Make sure. Flip it on. Hey, Brad. Hi, everybody. Hey, Brad. Hi, hi, Paula. I first was introduced to choose FI from Dominic Cortuccio, who you interviewed. I was part of the men's group.

Very fantastic stuff. And then from ChooseFI, I got on to afford anything. I love the group work that ChooseFI puts together, definitely. Talk to me afterward. But my question is reflective towards both of you, whoever wants to take it, in terms of how do you view yourself and your audience in terms of the relationship? How did that originally start? And how has it transformed, molded?

Lastly, how do you plan on seeing that throughout? And as it continues evolving, how do you hope for your audience and your relationship to the audience? to change. I think that my audience, I hope that my audience trusts me as the nerdy big sister kind of a role. Like I want to be down to earth and relatable. I think I do that just by like basically just like being myself. Down to earth and relatable, but without dumbing it down. You know, like I want to maintain a conversation that is elevated, that is intelligent, that is nuanced, that is layered. A conversation that cares more about how we think rather than what we think. That cares more about the process of thinking than any specific conclusion that we reach.

Those are the type of ideas that I'm bringing in. Like I like to say that Afford Anything is a show of. about critical thinking and decision making, a show about metacognition, about thinking about how to think, told through the lens of money. That's a very elevated conversation. But just because it's elevated doesn't mean

that it needs to put on airs. I can have an elevated conversation while also personally being really down to earth. So that all plays into the nerdy big, you know, I'm your nerdy big sister. That's the relationship that I want to nurture with my audience. Yeah, I think for me, I've always wanted my community, which is the way that I think about it, is we are a community. And I never wanted to be the expert.

I wanted to curate information. I wanted to provide clarity and ask those questions that I know people out there in the community want to ask. A lot of people are afraid to look silly or stupid, for lack of a better word, and they don't ask the simple question. And I feel like if I have the question, almost invariably, many, many other people are thinking that same thing. And unless you can actually understand it, you're not going to feel comfortable moving forward and taking action, which is the entire purpose of Choose FI is to get you off the

couch and take action just to make your life better in any way you see fit. So I am always thinking from like that white belt mentality of if I were someone just approaching this for the first time, what would I want to know? What would be the questions that I'd ask? And even if it means like I've actually gotten and I shouldn't look at the reviews for the podcast. I really, I try so hard not to. I really genuinely do. Like somebody basically saying like, this guy's a bozo. Like he just asked these silly questions. I'm like, that is literally the whole point.

That is what I'm going for. Thank you. That's five stars. Please, you know, append it or amend it, I guess. That is what I'm going for because I want to ask the questions that people are looking for answers to. And that is not to say that I think of Chusify as only elementary information. I was having this conversation with Stephen earlier, which I think, frankly, and I totally get this, your time is finite, etc.

I think a lot of people look at a show maybe like ours and say, okay, I've learned it all. I'm going to move on. I don't know where you move on, but like, I'm, you know, I'm going to go do my thing. I think, like, the last 15 episodes that I've done since the beginning, certainly since the beginning of this year have been maybe the best stretch of 15 episodes I've had in the entire run. And it's like because of little pieces of information. I had an episode with Sean Mullini recently about, hey, how can you access your money before 59.5? And I suspect you see that title. Okay, maybe I probably know all these things.

And there was one little piece of information about the 72T and how it's recently become updated since I guess 2022. And he provided some like this one. And I'm going to leave this here as a dot, dot, dot, dot. But one piece of information that was just phenomenal. And it was like I feel like I've heard it all with personal finance. And I didn't realize that you could split IRAs. And with this 72T, you can keep doing this as like this iterative process. And it was a total game changer.

And that's something if you think you know it all, I think there are times to check in. So I'm constantly thinking about my entire community. And it's hard. there is a wide range of people listening to each of our shows. And I think if you, I'm, I love Tim Ferriss. I've followed his, I probably listened to every single episode he's ever put out. And he said something to the effect of, if I hit 10% of my audience with each episode, and only 10% like it, but they absolutely love it, I'm doing something right.

And that's a really interesting way to look at content creation. And I think, I don't think I've fully taken that to heart, but I think, I think there is a piece of that. And it's finding these little, like just super interesting things. Like I just recently had an episode on effective altruism. It was a total game change. I've had people literally write me emails since it came out saying, hey, I took a giving pledge.

And now I'm giving 1% of my income forever. It's like, that is remarkable. Like that's, I am creating the show so people take action. And I think it's just, it's fun. It is really genuinely fun to find all these pieces of information from the far corners of not just personal finance, but health and wellness and just different aspects of living a better life. Because I think if FI was merely about the nuts and bolts of money, we all kind of would have wrapped up shop a long time ago and, hey, we've figured it out to some degree. But it's really, it is, it's kind of like a Trojan horse for. or not Trojan Hors, but they lead domino for living a better life.

And that there is truly an endless amount of content for. And I think it's fun. I mean, I'm almost 650 episodes in and just keep on rocking and rolling. So, yeah. This question is for Paula. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the five movement is that we hear about people taking action and sometimes drastic action to live in like lower cost of living locations, et cetera.

We're all in New York and we're all pursuing financial independence. And I know that you moved to New York. So my question for you is, what are the unique advantages of pursuing a financially sound lifestyle in a high cost of living space? And what were some of the motivators for you to make this choice to afford living in New York as part of your FI journey? I've always loved New York. And I've always wanted to live in New York and I've never had any reason to do so. Like my only reason for wanting to live in New York was that I wanted to live in New York. But there was never any actual logical reason to do so.

And there were plenty of logical reasons not to do so. It's expensive. It's cold. There's high taxes. There are rats everywhere. Like there were all these logical reasons not to. And so I could never like, quote unquote, justify or rationalize the decision to move to New York. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I left like the minute I graduated from high school, moved to Colorado, did my undergrad there, graduated, wrote for the Colorado Daily. I was a newspaper reporter at the Daily for a couple of years. I enjoyed Colorado while I lived there, but that was never going to be like my forever home. And then I wanted to live in New York, but again, there was no reason, specific reason to do so. And so I tried living in Atlanta. I lived there for five years. And it was great, but it wasn't for me. And then I moved out to Las Vegas because I've always liked the desert Southwest.

In 2019, I knew that was my fourth year of living in Vegas. And I was like, this, this just isn't right. And at that point, I'd spent four years in Vegas by that point. And then five years in Atlanta prior to that, like, it had been 10 years of me, like, really trying, a city and just like, man, it's nice, but this doesn't feel like me. So I get to 2019 and I'm like, all right, it's time, I know it's time for me to leave Vegas. I don't know where I'm going to move next. I was thinking about what makes sense.

And I was like, maybe Texas. Like maybe I'll move to Austin. Everybody moves to Austin, you know, at some point. It's like a right of passage. Maybe I'll move there, right? It's warm. There's no state income tax. I had a bunch of friends who were there.

I was like, okay, great, it checks all of these boxes, but I still wasn't that excited about it. And then 2020 came around and COVID hit. I became symptomatic on March 20th. So I got hit with COVID in the early, early, early days. And this is like, this is March of 2020. So this is before we knew anything. You know, this is the beginning of COVID. And there were, there were these days, you know, with 103 degree fever.

I was alone in my apartment, but I was just profusely sweating. I was exhausted. I remember there was one day when I changed my shirt, like my shirt was just dripping wet with sweat. And so I took my shirt off and I put a new one on. And that was my big activity for the day. And like I was so tired. I had no energy. Like after changing my shirt, I had to take like a nap to recover from that. And I remember thinking, especially because it was so early COVID, when we didn't know anything about it at the time, I was like, this might be it. Like, this might be the end of the road. I traveled to 40 countries. I'm happy with the work that I've done and the impact that I've made. I was like, I'm happy with most of the things in my life. But I don't want to die in Vegas. I don't want my tombstone to be like,

Born in Kathmandu died in Las Vegas. And I could imagine, you know, a tombstone that says, born in Kathmandu, died in New York. Like, I'd be happy with that tombstone. And so that's why despite the high taxes and the high cost of living and the rats, that's why I'm here anyway. I'm here for no other reason that I want to be here. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I think very tactically, we had, so Liz from Frugalwoods, this is way back in early 2017,

don't quote me, it was either episode 12 or 13 of Chiesify, and she actually had like an interesting retake or rethink on what is it, is it truly that expensive to live in a city? In their case, it was Boston, but, you know, kind of same deal essentially. Obviously, the rent is significantly more expensive than living in Richmond, for instance, where I live, or pick any number of places. But there are thousands of free things going on, especially in New York City, every day. So I think it's opening the aperture to what exists. And it's stepping outside of your comfort zone and saying, oh, wow, I've literally the greatest. city on earth at my fingertips here, how can I explore? How can I maximize this? What can I find

that's not just in the normal day today? And I suspect there are dozens of, again, we're not the frugal community anymore, the ultra frugal. So it doesn't have to be free, frankly. But I guarantee you, if you look in the next, you know, spring is coming, then I'll be it slowly here in New York, right? find one or two free things that you've never explored before in New York City in the month of May. That would be my challenge to you. I guarantee you're going to come back and say, wow, that was really cool. I'm glad I did that. What does it look like when I do this in June and July and August?

Because, again, this is New York City. There's everything in the world here. Just go out and explore. This is a little bit more about your process when you're interviewing people. I know sometimes you do ask difficult questions and how do you, I guess I won't make you reveal anything, but I'm sure there are some of the people have never, they're like, forget it. I'm not answering that or their PR people were like, don't ask them this. But how do you, if you ask a difficult question, how do you kind of recover from it or just

make sure that the rest of the conversation continues to flow and that they are still open, even though you've kind of broached a difficult topic? How do you work through that? I think the way, so the way that I do it is I'm always asking. asking questions from a place of curiosity and from a place of wanting to like really understand. And so the spirit of the question is never like a gotcha, whereas there are other reporters that practice like gotcha journalism. But for me, the spirit of the question is like, hey, help me understand this. You said X, Y, Z, but I'm also noticing ABC. How do we square the circle?

And so I think it comes across to the guest that I'm not asking a challenging question. Like I'm challenging them with the question, but not in an aggressive way. You know, I'm challenging them in a way that like is asked with a spirit of curiosity. And so I think the guests can just sort of pick that up, particularly because they, if they're a guest on my show, they've done 30 other interviews. And so they've seen the whole range of interviewers that are out there. And I'll say probably 80% of interviewers haven't really done their homework and they haven't prepped. And that comes across.

And so they're just repeating the same stock talking points over and over because they're talking to an interviewer who like doesn't know their material. And then there's a small sub segment of, of interviewers who are not exactly got, maybe some of them are gotcha ing, but some of them just have like a predetermined, there's an outcome that they want. There's a certain set of answers that they want the guest to give. And so they're like pushing the guest to give those answers. And so then the guest has to like push back to, you know, and so then they're like fighting

over what the answers are going to be. So like by the time the guest has come on my show, they've done all of those other interviews. And what they get from me are questions that challenge. them for sure, but that come from a place of like, no, I really want to understand what you're saying. So help me get this. Hi. This question is for both of you. So if you look at the landscape of personal finance and, I guess, financial media, are there certain topics or subjects you think that are overtold and you gladly don't think we need to cover them again?

And on the flip side, are there topics and subjects and stories you feel we really do need to pay a little bit more attention and care too. You know, anything that disempowers people, I think is dangerous. There are narratives out there that are basically like, woe is me, this sucks. Initially it was like, millennials can never get ahead. And now it's like, Gen Z can never get ahead. And soon it's going to be Gen Alpha can never get ahead. Basically any type of narrative that makes people lose hope or that disempowers them, I don't see what good that's doing. I don't see how that's helping anybody.

So I'd like to see less of that and more of like, hey, here's what you can do. Here's, here are all of the opportunities that you do have. Here's everything that's working in your favor. I'd like to see more of those. Yeah, I think also, frankly, that's what makes our podcast. podcasts listenable. That we, there's a different locus of control as opposed to there's some elusive they holding you down.

We always talk about how can you take action to make your life better. And instead of the retirement calculator saying, or Susie Orman of the world, you know, good old Suez, saying you need $10 million and maybe you'll be able to retire, we changed that entirely and say, this is under your control, right? It's based on what does your life cost? And then we just do a simple multiply by 25 and there's the 4% rule of thumb and, you know, we're not going to argue about that tonight. But it gives you that North Star, right? It gives you some certainty as opposed to like Paul is saying, there's all this doom and gloom. Doom and gloom sells, sadly. But empowerment is what inspires. I think that's why you guys are

I think that's why you listen to our shows because it makes your life better. It just simply does, right? And to actually answer your question, my particular pet peeve is the, oh, those fire people, like, that was always bound to fail or, oh, I tried the fire movement and it just didn't work for me. Or, you know, just all this nonsense, just to vilify, in essence, the fire movement. And they always focus on that RE. And it's such a distraction. FI, in my estimation, is a universal good.

There is no one that I can think of that has pursued financial independence, not even reached. Because the reaching, we can put that aside, it's pursuing financial independence. I think your life is invariably better by pursuing financial independence. Hard stop, end of story. You know, again, I'm not like an anti-mediate person by any means, but it's easy to vilify people in their 20s and 30s laying on a beach doing nothing. But that's not what we aspire to. That's not what our community is about. Our community is about changing the power dynamic in your life to accrue more power in your life so you can enjoy life on your terms.

And it's not just about money, obviously. We wouldn't be here. This would be boring if it was just about money. It's about living a better life. And I think that is a message that really resonates with people all across the country, all across the world. And I think that is what I focus on. That's the message that I would love to see more of. Hey, guys.

So this is more a question for Paula. So you mentioned you've been doing this a long time, and you also mentioned you're an immigrant yourself. Just kind of putting some things together. You've been doing this a long time. Obviously, you've had to network, Brad, choose if I. Joe Saul Seahyai from Sanking Benjamin's. I heard you on a mad scientist. That's how I actually came to you.

How did you as a young immigrant woman overcome not just a scarcity mindset, but also like some type of imposter syndrome is what they kind of go together when you went into these spaces like the campifies or the fin cons to be able to grow and extend your brand to what it is today? I don't know if the imposter syndrome ever goes away. I just keep doing it in spite of the imposter syndrome. I think the imposter syndrome, for me at least, speaking for myself, the imposter syndrome is always there. But I've just learned to not listen to it. Like I've learned that like this is a little voice in my head.

Just because I think it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I've learned not to believe a lot of the things that I think. When I get that voice in my head, the imposter syndrome voice. I've learned to tune it out. I can't fully tune it out, but like to just like, later. We'll talk later. You know, we're talking to shower.

And then I just focus on what I can do. And I focus on the next step ahead. Then it's just like, all right, what is within my control? What is the next step forward? You know, one day at a time, one relationship at a time, like one step at a time, one next project at a time. Is there a moment in an interview, like recently, that you've been able to look back on how far you've come as an interviewer

that you're particularly proud of? I recently interviewed Cal Newport, and this was maybe, I think, the third time that I interviewed him. So he is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he is written eight books. So I recently interviewed him. He had a new book come out. And I was in D.C. And so I interviewed him. He has like an in-person podcast studio. And so I went to his studio in D.C. I was thinking about the distance between the first time that I ever interviewed him, which was six or seven years ago versus now. And six or seven years ago, going back to the

imposter syndrome, I was like, I can't believe I've interviewed. I'm. interviewing Cal Newport. Like, I was like beside myself at the idea that I would be able to get somebody like Cal Newport to come onto my show. Whereas when I went and interviewed him in D.C., it was just like talking to an old buddy. I was like, Cal, you know, like walked into his studio and I'm like, and it was our first time actually meeting in person face to face. And I was like, Cal, oh, finally, like, took forever.

I can't believe we haven't met each other face to face. And we sat down and we chatted for a long time. It was like talking to an old buddy and we collaborated together on the open and how the open would transition into the rest of the interview. And so it was like having a collaboration with a friend. And so seeing that contrasting the two, that was a big moment for me. Paula, first and foremost, congratulations to 500 on 500 episodes. My money's on the over to pass choos if I in like the next two years. So anyone I want to take gambles on that, I'm open to that.

I wasn't aware of your background. So to hear that afford anything was in the works for a decade plus, 13 years total is like a huge milestone in and of itself. I figured that there's a lot of obstacles that came along the way that I guess no one prepared you for or you might not have seen. I wanted to ask if you could speak on those obstacles, whatever boundaries that you were trying to surpass or those things that looking back on them now, they might have been glaringly. obvious as a fellow creative such as myself that we may not have seen in the moment. Can you speak on

some of those? If you could like speak to yourself back in 2011 when you're just first starting out, what would be the, the precautions that you place upon yourself as to like what the things that no one tells you about that became glaringly obvious, the more expert you became? Yeah, that's a great question. All right, if I could talk to myself back in 2011, a few things. one is that I was told, listen to your audience, take feedback from your audience. And there's a certain truth to that. But when on the internet, there are a lot of like comment trolls, commenters, yeah. There are a lot of trolls.

And so on the internet, every troll is technically also part of your audience. And if you listen to them, you drive yourself crazy. And so I spend way too much time listening to the. trolls for years and years and years because there was part of me that was like, well, maybe if I overlook the delivery, if I ignore the delivery and focus on the actual content of their message, maybe there is something constructive within the content of their message. And so I would read the troll comments, try to ignore the delivery, and try to see if there was some type of constructive element within the content.

But honestly, sometimes there is. honestly, sometimes there isn't. And also, a random smattering of internet comments is just not a good feedback mechanism generally. Because it's not a representative sample of what your audience really is thinking. So even if you try to take the kind of mature, high-minded route of like, what constructive nugget can I pull out of this? Even that can still lead you astray. There were people who would post on my Instagram who would be like, we want to see less of you and more pictures of houses. That's fundamentally a comment that's like, we know what your content should be better than you do.

What you're posting, we don't like. Here's what you should be posting instead. And there are a lot of people who will tell you that you should listen to that feedback from your audience. And I'm here to actually tell you like, no, you shouldn't. Because your real audience, your true audience, like if you're genuinely going to listen to feed you, back from your audience, send them a survey. Have a newsletter, like have an email list and send out a survey and say, hey, here's a Google form. Tell me within this survey, what do you want to see more of? Or even on Instagram, put out an Instagram poll or something or on YouTube. Do it like that.

Don't just like read the comments because that's going to lead you astray. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. reading the comments, it's like, it's soul crushing. I mean, like, truly soul crushing. And it's interesting how the human mind works that no matter how many emails I receive of something to the effect of like, wow, my life has changed for the better dot, dot, dot, dot after finding, it is very hard to tune out the one out of 200 that's negative, even slightly negative sometimes. It's like, that is what your mind focuses on and it never goes away. So I think it's not it's hard because there's no I I have yet to find a good answer. Have somebody else read all my emails if there's something

negative just get it out of the way or something. But like my mind focuses on this. I mean even as recently as this week I got this email and it was like it wasn't even intended as negative probably as I took it but I was like oh something about this just really bothers me. And I It was stuck in my head for over a day. And I'm like, this is just taking up mental space that I should not allow it to take up. Even if you get 99% positive and the 1% negative is what you're going to focus on, it's very, very hard to continue creating when if you allow yourself to focus on any type of comments. And I think that's maybe going back to the, you know, in the trademark.

new fire is like psychology. I think everything comes back to psychology. And this is why I kind of asked Paul about the sleep well at night test. I think personally for me, it's okay to be suboptimal, if you will, in a lot of respects in my life, if it passes that sleep well at night test. So that is what I'm kind of optimizing for at this point.

And I'm okay. if that means I have a little extra money in my checking account or a lot of extra money in my checking account because I don't want to have to deal with it. I want my, I want everything to just operate without me stressing about it because I know my default state is an anxious state. I think it's okay to just give yourself a little bit of grace of, all right, look, I have to understand how my brain works first and foremost.

and I make decisions accordingly. And at the margins, I think that's perfectly defensible. And I think it's not just defensible, but I think it's a smart strategy. Hi. So hopefully this detracts from whatever negative email you got. But I do want to start off by saying that I started listening to you both around 2018 and you have quite literally changed my life for the better. This is very full circle.

And what I like about you guys, to your point, in some of your answers is that you do create content that you want to create and that your little niche of the audience of the internet wants to listen to and wants to hear. And I really like that you tell me what I can do, not what I can't do. There's so many personal finance creators and a lot of them do focus on why you can't do things. So anyway, I think a lot of people come to you guys for what's a 401k. How do I maximize or optimize my 401k? And we really stay because we love hearing about the bottom line, which is the life that we're all trying to build. Like, how are we building a life that we want to retire to? So I know, Paula, you're doing some things like you

moved to New York and you went back to school, right? And that's you building the life that you want to retire to. And I'm curious, what are you doing right now? Anything like super recent that is in line with that goal. Yeah, I know this was a just to Paula, but this is actually the perfect example of what I'm doing is I'm really trying to, after so many years of really not going to events, I'm just trying to travel more. I'm trying to say yes to things. For so long, my default has always been no. I can't do that because I have young kids or I feel guilty about being away or whatever, whatever the answer is. And I think it's just sometimes just really fun to say yes. And this really started for me.

I've talked ad nauseum about the book Die Was Zero. So if you've listened to Episode 500, I spent a lot of time talking about it. So sorry about this. But I think that has reoriented how I look at life and how I look at seasons of life. And it was something I needed. And I read it at the right time. And just like this literally last year, I've taken a whole. bunch of trips, just like spontaneous trips. And if you know me for my whole life, for my whole life,

spontaneous is probably the last word that you would ever use to describe Brad Barrett, like literally the last word. And actually, my buddy from elementary school was here for the earlier session. And like, and we were talking about, I came last year to New York for a sub 24 hour trip. I wound up seeing Bono. It was a pseudo book. tour slash concert slash one-man play was a super interesting thing. That's a once in a lifetime thing. And the reason why I'm not going is because A, I always say no. And B, it costs some amount of money. Those would have been the old stories that I ran in my head. And this time, it was, yes, how can I make that happen? And that felt fantastic. You know, again, my buddy who is here, he's like,

I've known you for a very long time. This is the only spontaneous thing I've ever seen you do in your whole life. But I'm trying to do more of that. I'm just, again, trying to say yes. So I'm going to Vegas next week with the Donagans. I'm going to Bali in the fall with Amy Minclays Five Freedom Retreat. I just went to Cincinnati. I'm here.

Paula asked me. And it was a no-brainer. Yes. Not, do I have to think about it? What are the logistics? like everything that my brain would normally default to. How am I going to get there? How many nights do I have to stay?

I can come up with every excuse in the book. But the answer was just yes. And it feels really, really, really good. So that's kind of where I am right now. And I would say, having gone back to school, during that time, I was basically on hiatus from Afford Anything. I was still putting out a podcast episode every week. But that was literally all I was doing.

Even though that's the most public-facing element of what I do, it is like the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the management and the, look, the everything else that goes on behind the scenes. I was essentially on break from Afford Anything for that year. To me, that was actually really telling because during that entire year, I had all of these ideas for things that I wanted to do with Afford Anything. But I just couldn't do them because I was in school. By the time graduation hit, I was like chomping at the bit to come back because I had all these ideas of things that I wanted to implement, which for me was a really good sign of like, cool, this is really what I want to be doing because when I was nine months, 10 months away from it, I was just thinking about it all the time and I really wanted to come back. So that was a really good test. In terms of afford anything, for the last eight years, we've prioritized the audio podcast, but we haven't really put any effort into YouTube. up until about six months ago, the bulk of our YouTube video, videos were audio only with a static thumbnail.

And so it's only in the last six months or so that we've started putting actual videos on YouTube. And as part of that, recently in the past two, three months, we've started insisting that the bulk of our interviews are done face-to-face in studio in person because we get richer, video. Our audio audience versus our YouTube audience is like a ratio of 20 to one. A very small audience on YouTube compared to our audio audience. But I'm not letting that scare me and I'm not letting that stop me. Like it's one of those you've just got to be okay with being a beginner again. And so we're sort of a beginner at that medium. But cool. I'm down with being a beginner again. We're also talking about doing more, you know, right now we only have one course, a year for rental property.

We want to build out more courses. We want to build out more, in addition to courses, workshops, both like digital and in person. We'd like to start doing trips, like week-long trips with the audience. So there used to be this thing called the Chautauqua. And that has pretty much gone away. And so we want to kind of step in and fill that space. and do week-long trips outside of the country with our audience. So all of that is like all of those ideas are percolating behind the scenes.

And that's all like just new and exciting. And then in my personal life, so travel has always been really important to me. I've been to more than 40 countries, just just over 40 countries. And for me, I don't count myself as having been to a country unless I've spent a minimum of one week there. because that's my commitment to making sure that I'm always doing what I call slow travel. I don't just want to touch down in a place and check it off the list. I want to commit to minimum of one week so that I can make sure I'm really absorbing it. And when you do that, you find that like a week is really not even that much time,

but it's at least a minimum for me. I've been thinking about like the next decade, what are my travel goals? I've actually never said this publicly. So I've set the goal of I'd like to travel to 100 countries in total within the next 10 years. And so, which means basically about just shy of 60, like 57, I need 57, 58 countries within the next decade, which is an average of what, five to six countries, we'll say six countries per year, which is really a commitment of six weeks per year. You know, and that's an average. So I'm sure there's going to be some time where I take like three months or four months off. And I'm like, all right, I'm just taking these four months and I'm going to do nothing but travel for four months. So yeah, in 2034, hopefully I'll be sitting on this stage or a stage somewhere. And by that point, hopefully, if all goes according to plan, I will have been to 100 countries. Episode 1500, give a take.

Yeah, something like that. Thank you for listening to episode 501, which we recorded live at a comedy club in Brooklyn. And a huge thank you to Brad Barrett from the ChooseFI podcast for joining me for these incredible episodes and just this incredible celebration. It was so special to be able to share this milestone with not just him, but with all of you, with everyone in the Afford Anything community. And I want to say thank you to everybody who would. there as well as to everybody who wrote, who emailed, who DM'd, who left comments saying, hey, congrats, I can't be there physically in person, but as a long time member of this community, I'm there in spirit.

A huge, huge heartfelt thank you to everybody who reached out and shared in the joy of episode 500 with us and episode 501. All right, we will be back to our normally scheduled programming on Friday with a first Friday episode that is an economic update. There is an enormous amount going on in economic news right now, so we have a lot to cover. Make sure that you are following this podcast in Apple and Spotify so that you don't miss that episode. Check us out on YouTube. You can watch today's episode on YouTube, see us live and in the flesh. And while you are on YouTube, just search for Afford Anything on YouTube.

While you're there, please subscribe to the podcast and hit the notification bell. If you enjoy our show, if you get value from this show, please share it with a friend or with a family member. That's the single most important thing that you can do to spread the message of financial literacy and financial independence. If you want to chat with other members of our community, go to afford anything.com slash community in which you can talk to other people in the community about anything that's on your mind, whether it's index funds, debt payoff, real estate investing, retirement planning, world travel, whatever it is that's on your mind, you'll find like-minded people at afford anything.com slash community completely free. There is no cost to you. We make this available at no cost because digital communities matter. Finally, subscribe to our

newsletter. Go to afford anything.com slash show notes. There's you will get not only synopsies of every episode, but also longer deep dives that we take within the first principles newsletter. Again, that's afford anything.com slash show notes, and we also make it available at no cost. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pan. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.