Afford Anything - Your Money or Your Life -- with Vicki Robin, bestselling author

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

#123: In the 1970's, a woman named Vicki Robin teamed up with a man named Joe Dominguez. They came from different backgrounds: she was an Ivy League graduate with a comfortable upbringing; he was raised in Spanish Harlem on "welfare cheese." But they shared one common thread: a commitment to financial independence, not just as a money management strategy, but as a philosophy on life. Vicki and Joe became partners in both work and life. They united over a definition of "FI" that expanded beyond paying your bills through your savings and investments. They saw FI as a lifestyle that exists in three dimensions: 1: Financial Intelligence -- Your ability to think about money in an objective, unbiased and non-emotional manner. 2: Financial Integrity -- Your ability to earn and spend in a manner that's consistent with your values, and to stay aware of the impact of your earning/spending choices on yourself, your family and your planet. 3: Financial Independence -- Your ability to break the shackles of paycheck dependence, and ALSO your ability to declare independence from limiting beliefs, fears, and the perception that money will solve your problems. In 1992, Vicki and Joe co-authored a book called Your Money or Your Life, outlining the FI philosophy. Their book became a mega-bestseller, selling more than one million copies. It landed on the New York Times bestseller list and spent more than 5 years on the BusinessWeek bestseller list. Oprah Winfrey said: "This is a wonderful book. It can really change your life." Vicki and Joe devoted the next five years to spreading the message of FI. They appeared on hundreds of TV and radio shows, including Oprah, Good Morning America, and NPR. They were written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, and Newsweek. Joe passed away in 1997, and Vicki continued spreading the FI message for another five years, before her cancer diagnosis caused her to take a step back. Today, Vicki is 72, healthy, and still spreading the FI message. And she'd like to discuss a fourth dimension to FI: 4: Financial Interdepedence -- Your ability to live within a flow of giving and receiving. Interdependence comes from our relationship with our communities, our nation, and the natural world. In today's podcast episode, Vicki discusses how we can move from financial independence to financial interdependence. Enjoy! For more, go to http://affordanything.com/session123 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that's true, not just for your money, but also your time, your life energy, your attention, your focus, anything in your life that is a valuable resource. And so the questions become twofold. Number one, what's most important to you? What do you actually care about? And number two, how do you align your day-to-day behaviors to reflect that? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore.

My name is Paula Pant. I'm the founder of Afford Anything.com and the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today, Vicky Robin is on the show. More than 25 years ago, Vicky Robin and Joe Dominguez wrote a book called Your Money or Your Life. The book described how to transform your relationship with money and how to achieve financial independence, which is the point at which your money earns enough money that it can sustain you for the rest of your life without you having to trade time for money. So the book, It Money or Your Life was the foundation of the idea of financial independence in popular culture. It became a mega bestseller. It sold more than one million copies.

And Oprah Winfrey said, quote, this is a wonderful book. It can really change your life. So it's no exaggeration to say that the book, Your Money, or Your Life was instrumental in bringing mainstream American awareness to the idea of financial independence. Well, Vicky has just released an updated, revised version of the book for the year 2018. Her co-author Joe Dominguez has passed away. So Vicky is now taking up this mantle on her own. But she's not really on her own because she is part of the financial independence community. And we talk a lot about that in this upcoming interview.

A couple of quick notes before we get started. During this interview, we talk about the FI community or the fire community. What that means, FI stands for financial independence. So when we talk about the FI community, we're talking about all of the people who are pursuing financial independence and who often talk to one another, either through Reddit, on Twitter, on Instagram, at conferences, at meetups. That's what we're discussing when we talk about the FI community. We sometimes also occasionally refer to the fire community, and that's the same thing. We're referring to financial independence retire early.

Now, the interview that you are about to hear is not typical. I intentionally do not ask Vicky the standard stock questions of tell me about why you wrote this book, etc., etc. If you want to know about the nine-step plan to transform your relationship with money, you can read the book. On this interview, you get what's not in the book. we start with a conversation about death, and then we go into aging. We talk about meaning and purpose and wisdom and adventure. And we discuss the next evolution of FI from financial independence to financial interdependence. With that said, here is Vicki Robin, the author of Your Money or Your Life.

Hey, Vicki. Hi, hi. How are you? I'm fabulous. Thank you. Nice. Okay, so actually the first question that I wanted to ask, so you and I met, just for the sake of everyone who's listening, we met in Ecuador. We had an awesome breakfast together. So since I kind of know you, the first thing I wanted to ask is how is your cat? Oh, well, my beautiful dear cat, Lucy died. And she died three weeks ago in my arms. And I hospiced her. I mean, I knew she was in decline. And it suddenly occurred to me. I kept thinking, oh, she was. She's an animal. She knows how to do this, but it occurred to me, I might have to help her. And that was like, ha ha. So, of course, the first thing I do is I put it out on Facebook, you know, guys, what do I do here? And I got, like, volumes of response. And two friends who are animal communicators volunteered to talk to her and find out what she wanted. That was amazing. And so what she wanted was she wanted to do this with me by herself. So that gave me confidence. And also the other thing that happened is I got this message on a Wednesday or Thursday.

And every vet on Whidby Island who could have put her down was on vacation. So there's nobody on Whidbey Island who could do it. And so I took total care of her down to the very last breath. Oh, it was so profound. It was the most relational thing I've ever done. And somebody gave me a booklet about animals dying, about hospicing your animal, which is, you know, most people don't think they can do that. And one of the things they said, and I think it applies to humans as well, they said, do the grieving before she dies. Do the grieving with her because she's grieving too.

You know, she was grieving, leaving this very cool life, you know, where she was the queen of my heart. And because of that, I feel so at peace. And then I went on a wild hunt for a new cat because I'm not going to live without a cat, without a pal in my house. And he just came yesterday. His owner delivered him to my house, drove two hours, came on Whidbey Island, delivered him. And now my animal communicator friends are saying, just talk to the cat and find out what the cat's name is. And I think, I can't do that. But I think his name is Sam.

Really? And he's hiding. Anyway, so that's the story of my darling cat. And that whole process, when you are willing to bond, you have to be willing to grieve. So anyway, thank you for asking about my cat, first of all, because it puts me in this sweet, sweet space. Wow, thank you for telling me about that. That's beautiful. It's a story of passing that's somehow very hopeful.

Yeah, because look, I mean, I'm 72. I'm going on 73, right? And, you know, I'm of an age where people die. You know, it's not a tragedy. It just sort of happens. I'm of the age where you start to read obituaries to see if you're still alive in the morning. You know, and I could last until I'm 90, but I could go any minute.

And it's a different feeling from being in the middle. of your life. It's a different feeling. And actually, with regards to money, because this is what we're talking about, I mean, this part of your life, it's really difficult for financial planning. Because you don't know if you're going to live 20 years, 10 years, one year, you don't know. And suddenly, the enough that was sort of a pattern of existence, you know, you're loping along. it's just the right amount, you start to wonder, well, I have enough money to be myself, but do I have enough money to be disabled? Do I have enough money for that part of my life? And I refuse to default to the insurance industry. I refuse to pay like some godly,

ungodly amount every month so that I can be warehoused in a place that just is simply depressing because everybody is old. And, you know, and, you know, people you befriend could, you know, literally they could die tomorrow. And they're not people you know. It's like surrendering your cat to a shelter, you know, suddenly the cat's not at home with all the familiar things. It's just a little prison. So I just didn't want to do it. So I've really focused. And if you want to talk about that. Yeah, I do. I do. Tell me about how you're working through that and how do you approach it. Well, first of all, I recognized I was going through bag lady fear. I recognized I was getting terrified and I hadn't been terrified about money in my whole adult life. And it was this fact that,

you know, when I thought ahead to when I was thought 80 was really old now, it doesn't look as old to me. But, you know, when I was like 90, when I looked ahead, I had no idea how to take care of myself at that time. actually a friend of mine talked to me when I was 60 and she said well you know between 60 and 80 we're going to be okay but after 80 and it's like what I hadn't thought about it and so she induced this fear and I actually convened a group of friends to talk about it was very interesting we met every few weeks or maybe a month and talked about it and during that time one of the people in the group their daughter almost died, you know, so it was really, really worked on it. And I finally admitted, I said, I'm just so scared. I mean, like, if my money disappears and I'm not well, I don't know how to manage this. And this woman looked at me and she said, Vicky, if your money disappears, everybody's money will disappear and we're going to figure it out together. Oh, that's cool. And I thought, duh. So the first thing is, I am not alone. And when I, when you think

I am not alone. You actually, in not an instrumental way, but in an emotional and spiritual way, you go like, okay, who are my people? You know, and so there's a habit in the FI community of separation. There's like, I'm going to get FI and then I'm going to travel and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and I, I, and we don't think about community as wealth. We don't think about community as what will actually see us through, some modicum of money, but a lot of community.

Another thing that happened a year ago, I had a hip replacement. And as I came up to it, I have a lot of friends, but I didn't know if they were like, they'll show up for me when I'm like strapped to a bed for a couple weeks. One of my friends said, don't worry, I'll organize it for you. So she organized morning, noon, and night, people to come over, make food, you know, like do my laundry and stuff like that. And it was like, and I have people not even signing up for the list, but saying, oh, you're having hair replacement. I want to help. Wow.

It's like, wow. You have great friends. Yeah. And so it's because I've settled in a place and I've made myself useful in this place. I treat this place like my place. It's not just a place. It's not like I bought a house somewhere and I use the community. I shop at the store and I do this and I do that.

No, no, no. This is my relational field. But that surgery tested it and it was really, you know, stress test and it actually worked. And not only that, you know, everybody's so busy. But when they came over to feed me and stuff like that, we would sit and we'd have these long conversations. And so it was actually a time of deeper bonding. And now it's like, oh, hey, I want to go help somebody else because everybody's zipping around this world. And so if they need something, if I can help them out, then I might get to settle in.

So I've been talking a lot. And in the New Year money or life, I talk about community as currency. I talk about the ABCs of wealth, you know, that actually we think of wealth as money. But the A is your abilities, the things you can do for yourself. You can do for other people. And you could do for money if you needed to. It's your competencies. It's your grounded, practical relationship with the world.

When we're so focused on our jobs, we become habituated to spending money for everything. From house cleaners to handi men, to yard workers, to accountants. I mean, we just outsource so much of our lives to other people. because we really don't have the time or the interest to learn new things. But for me, on the FI path, the financial independence path, one of the cool things that happens is that people start to realize I could pay somebody $45 to come over and replace a faucet washer. I could spend 10 cents at the hardware store, learn, you know, like watch a YouTube video and do it myself. And then do it for other people and, you know, eventually if I have to make some money, I can do it.

I mean, I just wrote to one guy I met at one of the Chautauquas who was impressively brilliant about tax planning. I mean, in his presence, I felt like, oh, God, I should be doing some of this. Yeah. And he's like selling this and buying that and, you know, and working the margins and stuff like that. And he's wondering, like, can I, a lot of people wonder, when can I pull the trigger? You know, when can I get FI? And I told him, dude, you have a brilliant skill. I've never met anybody who's as good as you are.

Don't worry, because that's going to be in demand. So the A is abilities. You become a more vigorous human being. B is belonging. That's the people who will show up when you have your hip replacement. Those are the people who claim you as their own. And for some people who have really great families, that's your family. But for me, who's family is down to a nubbin, you know, I just really don't have

many people who are in my family, blood family, and they all live elsewhere. My friends are my family. And the friends who show up, those are really my family. So it's that showing up for one another, you know, and belonging is so important. A sense of belonging is so important. We're tribal people. And I think some of our nervousness in this world is that many people don't have anybody to talk to. Many people don't have anybody who would claim them as their own. And then the sea is for community, and it's the place you live on earth. It's the social services, you know, that come from government, but it's also those webs that get built in a community of place. It's a food bank. It's a, you know, we have, in our community, we have something called

hearts and hammers, where once a year there's big work day. like 400 people show it for this workday. So people apply, you know, if you're older and you can't fix your rotting porch or you can't like retrieve your house from the Blackberries, a team will come to your house on that workday and do it for you. So that's, that's a homegrown mutual aid. They don't have to be your belonging people. They just, you know, because you're here.

And also there's, the other part of community is I include the, the natural world. Can you forage? What's the soil like? What's going to happen in climate change? You know, is your house going to disappear as the tides come in higher and higher? So that's what I mean by community as currency. And so that's been a big lesson for me in aging.

People talk about aging in place. When you're based on money, then that doesn't actually make any sense. But when you're based in community as currency, then that makes a lot of sense. You know, you can be instrumental about it and you can offer service to a lot of people who are younger than you. Just like, okay, they're going to be there for me. And I'm, you know, I'm building an intergenerational family here. How do digital or online communities fit in with this? Well, I mean, they can't wipe your butt.

You know, they can't calm them cookie food. but they can. I mean, some people abhor Facebook, but I've arranged my Facebook so there's only people. I have a subgroup that are only people who I want to follow or who respond to my posts with, you know, sweet little kisses or whatever. So I am like with my cat, I could say, I don't understand how to do this.

How do I do this? And suddenly all sorts of people show up. They show up on Facebook. They show up at my house. They grieve. I think it's possible to strengthen your community in this way. One of the people who helped me out when Lucy was dying, she was telling me while she was over here that she had a challenge. She had a living space challenge.

And I said, oh, I have a motor home. Like if you need to live in my motorhome, you could live in my motorhome, you know, during your transition time. she just contacted me and said she might need it and I said of course you know it's like I have an asset that I can actually provide for her because she provided for me so I think there it's this blend of online you know and at a distance and then how those friendships that form online like you don't know I didn't even know so and so and so and so and so and actually tracked my life actually cared about me So you start to learn who cares about you. So I think in terms of a knowledge-based support when you're making a decision or you're grieving or you have a curiosity about something and you put it out and people can respond to it.

What do you think of this, Paula? You know, community is something that I've been thinking about a lot more. Community belonging and emotional support is something that I've been thinking about a lot more in the past. six months or so. And all of that is really a subset of being the most mentally and emotionally healthy person that you can be. Because I think there's a lot of attention that's given to physical health. And we have debates about what exactly that means, what foods are quote unquote good or bad. Like, sure, we have debates about those smaller things. But I think there's broadly a large awareness about physical health. There's really less of one about what

creates emotional and mental health in a person. And having a strong sense of community, having a strong sense of mission and purpose and contribution, those are really key. And I guess coming at it at the selfish perspective, the thing about being of service and the thing about being of contribution is not only that it helps the other party, but you yourself, by virtue of being the giver, get so much from that. It's like those, those, those stickers, those bumper stickers on the back of vehicles with animal rescue where it's the sticker in the shape of a paw and it says, who rescued who, you know, and what they mean is like with animal rescue, it's very obvious to see that, yeah, we are quote unquote rescuing these dogs and cats who are in bad situations. But really, they're also rescuing us because they provide us with so much warmth and love and support and encouragement. You know, when we're down, We have our pets. You bet.

For me, at least in the animal rescue scene, it's very easy to see that. And it's within the last six months that I've begun to take that out of just animal rescue and really apply it to contribution and service and community in a much bigger sense. Well, your poster child for that. I mean, you know, your podcast, you have a large audience who is being served by your writing, your inquiry, your knowledge. And it must be very rewarding to have people write in and say the changes that they made because they heard something from you or they read something from you. It's got to be, you know, it's officially called the Helpers High. I mean, there's scientific

studies about the Helpers High that actually you get happier when you're helping. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got a message on Instagram the other day. A lot of people will write to me and tell me about financial improvements that they've made. But this one stood out to me because it wasn't specifically about financial improvements. It was from someone who had just lost her significant other. And she said that I really helped her through that. And we had never communicated before.

You know, she only has experienced me through my public-facing works, through my writing, my podcast, my blog, my podcast, my social media. posts. So it was our first direct one-to-one communication. And to hear that I had played a role in her life at a time period like that, it goes back to emotional support, which lately I've started to come to consider as one of the most important things. Previously, I suppose I had thought, take care of these other things so that then you have the time to work on your emotional self. And now I kind of feel the opposite. Now I feel like work on your emotional self. so that you can bring that strength into everything else that you do in your life.

Right. Also, I mean, this is one of the lessons of aging is your need of others goes up. And if you are addicted to being the helper, then it's very hard. And most people I know, it's very hard to ask for help. Maybe from an expert, maybe from a therapist. I mean, there are people who are professionals that you might turn to. But to ask for help from friends is a big challenge. And you have to remember that when you helped somebody, you got the helpers high.

So that when you ask for help, you're actually giving somebody an opportunity to contribute to you. You're sort of softening that boundary of, I've got it handled. I can do everything. I'm superwoman. You're softening that boundary that people bounce off of. They want to get closer to you, but they can't get through that independence, self-reliance. But when you need others, then you open that boundary. And that's what I did last year.

And it was just stunning. And it didn't diminish me. It just brought in more friends. So it's just interesting to. think about the whole flow of giving and receiving. If you're only the giver, then you're actually infantilizing the receiver. Like,

I've got something that they want. So, you know, you're starting to render that person not capable. But when you are in a flow of giving and receiving, that's actually love. You know, and we experience it.

We hope to experience it with our mates. But, you know, it was like the formation of community, a lot of it people in my community who really become community heroes and heroines you know the community points to these people as this is an example of who we are they're people who have both given and received so i mean that's the thing i think about also i mean i realized a couple weeks ago maybe a month ago i gave a little talk at a conference and because i'm getting more honest every day I tell people like, look, you know, I am not an expert in finances.

I'm an expert in resources, the flow of resources. That is love, that's money, that's help, that's underutilized resources and unmet needs. I'm making markets all the time. Making markets is incredibly human. Financial systems are sort of an add-on to humanity, but humanity is always, come to the marketplace for that kind of exchange. And the marketplace itself becomes a community. It becomes where you show up, you gossip, you see your friends.

And so I love that. I love connecting underutilized resources and unmet needs. I love doing that. And actually, how I stay afi is because I do that all the time. Like my house, when I bought my house, I had sold a house that I co-owned with other people in Seattle and suddenly I had a lot of money in my bank account. And it started to create some pressure on me. Like, what am I going to do with this?

Because I wasn't like super eager to just, you know, squirrel it away. And I realized, oh, I have enough. I could buy a house in the community I live in. So I found the house I lived in now of what I call a plain brown people box. You know, it's a split entry house. there's a million of these houses in the United States. We all know them. You know, you go up a half flight of stairs and there's the great room and then there's the three little bedrooms and downstairs there's a garage and a family room. And I looked at this thing. I thought, that is like way too much

space for me. So I had this thought. I said, this place, if I get it, has to be a site of production, not a site of consumption. Yes, you said that in your book. That exact line. I remember that line because it was so, I highlighted it. It was such a beautiful line. Yeah, so the family room became a mother-in-law apartment. And then a couple of years ago, the garage became another one. So I turned this house into a triplex. And of course, the guest rooms was an Airbnb. So suddenly this house is a third of my income. And it's all because resourcefulness is really, I think that's the most admirable thing is somebody who is not the most, but I mean, I think that's a piece of.

what this ABCs of wealth is. It's the kind of recognizing that this thing isn't only something you're going to buy, use up, and throw away. It's not something that's going to pass through your life. It's going to be a resource. You're going to be in relationship with it. And it's going to serve you while you're serving it. This whole idea of giving and receiving, you know,

and this idea of mutuality and reciprocity, that's way more important to me than even if I. When I'm in that flow with people, that makes all the difference. That's joy. Because the world becomes an object that you consume in a consumer society. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors.

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All the workouts, the nutrition information, and the support, totally free. Again, just text Paula, P-A-U-L-A to 30-30-30. Again, text Paula to 30-30-30-30. What else would be on your tombstone? Life is either a great adventure or it's nothing, Helen Keller. Why that? What does that mean to you? Because that's what my life has been.

That's been a motto for me for a long time. When you think about Helen Keller and maybe not everybody listening knows who she is, but she was born, deaf, dumb, and blind. I mean, you would predict that somebody like this would be locked into their physicality and unable to relate to the world, unable to speak to hear. So she had a nurse or companion who helped her figure out how to communicate. If somebody like that could say that sentence, could consider life a great adventure with all of those impediments, who am I to not take that on? The other thing about it is that I really do feel that.

I mean, my quest, I have this, I'm like a moth to a flame when I take an interest in something, when there's something that's in the edge of what I know. that I know is, I don't know, I just, the other thing I say about myself is I'm terminally curious. You know, I'm the, I'm the thing that's like always sniffing at the edge of the fence, you know, and digging and trying to find my way underneath it. You're a cat. I'm a cat. Yeah, so I have learned so many things in my life. And every one of them has been an adventure all the way from how to butcher a deer to,

I rebuilt the engine in my car. I built a motorcycle from a box of parts. I've learned how to make wine out of beet skins. So that's some of my survivalist things. I've learned how to grow food. I've learned how to forage. I've learned how to write a book or two. You know, I mean, I'm right now, I'm like 72 and a half and I'm learning how to do podcasts.

You know, I'm not, I never stop learning. And for me, learning is the adventure. When I don't know something, I'm willing to be the idiot in the class, you know, ask the dumb question and, you know, completely get, I'll be the lowest status person like, how could gee say that? But I'm a learner. And so that's the great adventure is learning. I've also, I lived for 10 years on the road in campgrounds and doing service in communities where I would. go. And so I realized that, you know, life is a, you know, life is a journey. You know, you can stabilize somewhere. There was a period of time where it said, I'm not going to live

anywhere that doesn't have wheels. This makes no sense to me. So living someplace that's anchored to the ground. I completely don't think that anymore. But yeah, so I've actually, I'm someone who's gone through phases, who's gone through philosophical changes. I had cancer. 13 years ago, I guess, 14 years ago. And I gave up everything that I thought, where I lived, what I did on a daily basis. I just dropped it all. And it called cancer my hall pass. You know, well, I don't have to show up for who I thought I was. I can see who else. I ask, who else in this body wants to live, who hasn't had a chance to live? And who else? Yeah, what did you find? Who was that? What I found was I had become quite ideological about

financial independence and about, you know, the approach in your money or life. And I became like an avatar for frugality. And actually underneath the surface, I had an inner spender that was really not being fed. I had a, you know, I wanted to do more things. I didn't want to just be that person. And yet there was so many people who counted on me to be that person that I didn't have any room. And so I did a lot of inner work on who else is in here. And that's when I moved out of where I lived. I quit all my roles of leadership in groups and organizations. I moved to the village I live in now. I spent my first year singing in a choir, doing ecstatic dance on Sundays and painting. And I knew that if anybody from my old life saw me, they would like, I don't get it.

This isn't the one person I knew. And the fourth activity was going to the dollar store and buying stuff for my apartment and the thrift store. You know, so I just really, I know what I like according to what I think is right, but I don't know actually what Vicky likes. I don't know what this body likes. I don't. So I really went from living out of my head to, living out of my gut, out of my intuition, you know, this sort of semaphore that seems to have opened up in my belly that knows a lot more than what I know with my head. And you were always, you went to an Ivy League school, right? You were always cerebral. Yes. And I still, I love learning. I mean, I still, you know, for me, the, putting ideas together,

that's like sexy. Yeah. But yes, I was raised that I had a head and then I had ambulatory appendages that hung off my head. Right. Yeah, your body is just a vessel for your mind. Well, yeah, it's just a carrier. It's just like carries your mind around so that your mind can go do things. Exactly. Yeah. I was raised with the same idea. Yeah. Anyway, we're going far afield love, but this is. Oh, this is great. This is exactly why I love for conversations to unfold organically, right? Because I'm sure you've done a million interviews that have been like, so tell me about what was the inspiration for your money or your life. Okay, give me the brief bio of Joe. Like you've you've said it a million times. And if people want to know that, you've said it a million times that that information is out there on the internet already in many forms, which is why I intentionally did not.

want to ask the typical questions that. Yeah, it's interesting because I'm, of course, through this fire movement, I'm connected with a lot of people who trying to figure out when to pull the trigger, you know, when they're at their number and after their number, and can they pull the trigger? Because, you know, this passage from one's whole identity, community, creativity, challenge, everything is in the bucket called earning money. my job. And then you take the job away and it's sort of like taking a clam out of its shell, you know, or taking like, let's say a hermit crab that has gone into a shell. You take that shell

away and the hermit crab is naked. Like, where am I going to go and get all these needs met that were nicely met by a job? But I am living testimony. I've been like FI for over 40 years. life never gets dull. And the more relational you are, the less money you need. So, I mean, I've been saving ever since. I just, my bank account keeps filling. So I'm doing a lot of local lending now. We have a network of lenders who want to lend to local businesses,

and then businesses will put in a proposal, and then whoever is attracted to funding that can make a deal with that business. So I've created myself to be a revolving loan fund in my community. And I, you know, pet store, you know, two restaurants, a flower shop, solar installation, some farmers. So I just keep accumulating money. And then I keep thinking about how do I want my money to express my values? what will make me happy about where my money is doing its work. You know, so the apartments in my house, the local lending.

So life is either a great adventure or it's nothing. And to me, like the post-up, once you get used to like, once you get your sea legs, you know, post-FI, you know, you start to feel like, what's this ship like? You know, how do I balance here? There is an endless amount of things in the world to pay attention to groups to participate in, issues, hobbies, interests, everything. There's so much I don't understand how anybody has time for a job. Exactly.

Honestly, Paula, this is the freedom that comes not only with age, but with surrendering a presentable story, surrendering the narrative that you wear like a costume. to go out in the world, having a looser grasp on your identity because you don't have to keep it together for a job. And these are things people can do at any age. So it's, this is not per se my message. I could turn all this into a message. I could be like a clever little monkey and go like, oh, I said that to Paula and I said that to Paula. And maybe I can write a blog post about it or whatever. But what I found with the FI community, with the fire community, is that I'm an elder in a community I didn't know existed. I've met people like you and Brandon and Pete and

Grant and, you know, the whole nine yards. And who hold your money or life, at least in high esteem and me as the author, I find that that gives me a lot of room to think about the wisdom aspects of this path, not just the mechanics or heroics, but the wisdom. And not even just like the social change, like, what would a world be like if everybody was if I? I mean, I think about that stuff, but I think there's a spiritual teacher. He was asked, what is a saint? and he said somebody who's really peoply or in Yiddish, it's a mensch.

You know, I think that's the big opportunity is not to be a big deal, but to be a mench, to be real, to be kind, to be permeable, to be relational. You know, love, sweet love, that's what the world is made of, you know, that's what we need more of. All these songs are about love. and yet we don't have a time for love. You know, our jobs occupy so much time and brain space. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute.

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So don't wait. Go to Shipstation.com, S-H-I-P-Station.com. And before you do anything else, click on the microphone. at the top of the homepage and type in Paula. That's shipstation.com, enter Paula. Ship Station, make ship happen. Has there ever been a time that you have not been peopley or have not put such an emphasis on relationships

and what did that do to your life? I live by myself. You know, my primary relationship is with myself. I wake up in the morning with myself. I don't think I could live. I don't think I could be relational if I weren't relational with myself, if I didn't have a lot of a long time. And I think that's another thing that changed when I had cancer

because I made myself just totally available to anybody at any time for decades of my life out of a sense of wanting to be of service. Since then, I have understood that it's not even understanding with my head. Like, I spend days on end by myself. And it's very nourishing. And I don't do it in order to. I'm in relationship with myself. I'm in relationship with my cat now.

You know, my new cat. I'm in relationship with my garden. I'm in relationship with my house. It's, I, I think I have been lonely. I have been, there's been times in my life when I've been very disconnected from anything that's meaningful. I felt lonely and bored and out of place and confused. I felt all those things.

I've been through times of depression, which is definitely like you unhook from the world. And it's extremely uncomfortable to not be able to reach out of yourself and touch anything. So it's not like I haven't had those times. I wouldn't have called myself a workaholic in my like 10 years of promoting your money or life and thinking we're going to save the world. But I do think I hollowed myself out somewhat. You know, I had a lot of repair to do afterwards. That to me, even though I was surrounded by people, disconnection from self, I think, is the problem. So I'm very connected with myself and I spend a lot of time alone.

and I do not suffer fools gladly, as they say. And it's very hard for me to spend time in chit-chat, you know. I don't have much capacity for there's women in my community and probably men too, you know, older people who are not partnered, who form these gaggles of older women, you know, and I just don't have much capacity for it. lunch type of a thing. Exactly. And nothing wrong with it. I mean, I sort of wish I did have the capacity for it, but I don't. And so, I mean, I'm a pretty high bar friend. You know, it's like people who befriend me know that there's going to be this focus. But yeah, I think disconnection

is loneliness. And that can happen alone or with people. Yes. You can absolutely be lonely in a group of people. Yeah, feeling at odds, sixes and sevens, as they used to say. And when I was younger, I thought, oh, we're going to change the world and we're going to do it before I die. I thought it was actually going to be done by the year 2000. And I don't think that now. I just think I'm one being among almost eight billion beings and I'm doing my part. It interests me. I mean, And it keeps me engaged and meeting people who are fascinating and stuff like that. So can you keep a sense of mission and purpose when you see yourself as one in eight billion? Yes.

Yeah? Yeah. Because I'm one. You know, I'm filling my existence with good stuff. It used to require that I thought I would change the outer world. I thought I was going to be able to pull the rug out from under the consumer society without it even noticing. But that had a lot of I, I, I, I, I, I in it. That had a lot of, like, heroics in it.

And I feel like I'm here. I've located here. And so I'm somebody who is doing my part here, knowing that there are millions of people in this world who are. doing their part where they are. I'm so inspired by them. I'm no better nor worse than people who are doing their part in other places. And some people are doing their part through their jobs. Their jobs are their work. You know, I'm not like dissing jobs. But I'm actually living in the world that I want to be living in, not through a fiction or not through promoting my ideas and trying to get them through so that everybody does them,

I'm simply living like a mensch, you know, and showing up for the things that I care about. And that may just be age, you know, age starts to do that to you. You're less attached to your persona and your inflation of your importance in the world. And that goes back to what you said earlier, finding wisdom, not through tactics, not through heroics, but finding the wisdom in all of this. I think that's it. And thank you because I have not articulated this in this way ever before.

Thank you, Vicki, for that incredible interview. By the way, we're doing a book giveaway. Three people will be able to win a free copy of your money or your life. So stay tuned for the end of this episode where I give details about that. But first, let's talk about what some of the key takeaways were from today's episode. Number one, that it's not about financial independence. It's a lot of financial independence. It's a lot of. about financial interdependence. There's a habit in the FI community of separation. There's like, I'm going to get FI and then I'm going to travel and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and we don't think about community as wealth. We don't think about community as what will actually see us through. True sustainability doesn't just come from your investments. It doesn't just come from the money that you spend.

It also comes from your social currency. the value of the connection that you've made with others, whether they're the people who are physically present in your neighborhood or the people that you've met online. And this requires investment. Building community requires an investment of time. Two and a half years ago, I moved to Las Vegas, a city where I hardly knew anyone.

And for the first year of the time that I lived in Vegas, I was gone for at least 50% of that time. For me, that's quite normal. I travel a lot, so I was already in the habit of not being at home. for between one-third to one-half of my time. But being in a new city and not being home for such significant amounts of time, that experience made it clear that I was not spending enough time at home to be able to invest in my community. I was not spending enough time to be able to go out and make friendships and be part of the neighborhood and get involved

in the fabric of the area. And so at the beginning of year two, and now I'm also at the beginning of year three, that's a much bigger priority for me. And that means that the tree, and that means that the trade-off is that I'm not traveling as much. And it's extremely hard to communicate that because so many people when they talk to me, they're very excited about travel, right? And they're like, where are you traveling next? Where are you going next? And whenever I tell them, actually, I'm trying to slow down and not travel as much. They don't understand. They're like, why? And it can be very hard to communicate. Well, it's because I also want to be part of this community. And that requires time. It requires energy. It requires a trade-off. I'm not saying I'll never travel.

But I have not spent 30 consecutive days at home for the entirety of 2016 and 2017. So you know what? In the year 2018, I'd really like to do that. A lot of people just don't understand that. And that's fine. I eventually reached the point where I accepted that many people wouldn't get it. And so I stopped trying to explain it. Now when people say, where are you traveling next? I answer that question literally. And I just tell them the next flight that is slated on my calendar. because at times that's easier than trying to express the idea that while travel is amazing and important and purpose-driven, it is not everything. And if your home life does not include relationships with your neighbors or involvement in your community, then there comes a point at which that does take priority. Because that is also part of FI, community as currency, as Vicki Robin says.

So that's key takeaway number one. It's not just about financial independence. its financial interdependence. Key takeaways number two, three, and four are the ABCs of wealth. The A of wealth are your abilities. We think of wealth is money, but the A is your abilities, the things you can do for yourself, you can do for other people, and you could do for money if you needed to.

It's your competencies. It's your grounded, practical relationship with the world. when we're so focused in our jobs, we become habituated to spending money for everything. Your abilities are what you have to contribute to the community. And sure, they can be a professional skill. They could also be the fact that you're a good listener. The fact that you validate people and make them feel good about themselves, the fact that you don't gossip.

There's a very natural line between your abilities and your contribution. And that is part of the ABCs of wealth. The B of wealth is belonging. Be is belonging. You know, that's the people who will show up when you have your hip replacement. Those are the people who claim you as their own. And for some people who have really great families, that's your family. But for me, whose family is down to a nubbin, you know, I just really don't have many people who are in my family, blood family.

And they all live elsewhere. My friends are my family. A lot of times, particularly within the financial media, there's this massive emphasis on family. People will often say things like, oh, I'd like to quit working so I can spend more time with my family. Or they'll say, oh, I'd like to improve my financial situation so that I can help support my family or be of greater contribution to my family. People often talk about family. And while that is important, that is not the only group to which you can belong. And I think that message is particularly meaningful for people who either come from.

from dysfunctional or broken families or who just don't have much family. You can still find belonging within a group of friends, and your friends are the family that you choose. So with regard to the ABCs of wealth, invest time, energy, attention into those webs of belonging. Because when push comes to shove, when you have the hip replacement, or when your cat passes away, when you go through the events that life brings to you,

those connections, that belonging is what. will see you through. And then the sea of wealth is your community. And since we've already talked about community a bit, I want to focus on one missing piece of the definition of community. The other part of community is I include the natural world. So can you forage? What's the soil like? What's going to happen in climate change? Is your house going to disappear as the tides come in higher and higher? Community references the infrastructure of the local area. It references the natural world.

It references online communities through which you can share knowledge and support and understanding. And all of that is encompassed in the ABCs of wealth, abilities belonging community, which is part of this greater fabric of financial independence or financial interdependence. Now, I realize that this conversation may sound light or fluffy and there may be some of you who are thinking, well, yeah, this is great, but where are the conversations about advanced asset allocation strategies. But the reason that we are having this conversation, the reason that Vicky and I talked in the way that we did is because financial independence is not just about finance. I am not an expert in finances. I'm an expert in resources. The reason that Vicky Robin has been able to be

financially independent for 40 years is because she is creative about resources. Financial independence isn't just about money. It's about resource management. And, really, that's what we talk about. When I say that you can afford anything but not everything and that that applies not just to money but also time, energy, attention, those are all resources. Everything that we do here, everything that we discuss fundamentally goes back to resource management. And in order to manage your resources, you first need to identify what those resources are. And yes, money is a resource, but your abilities are also a resource, your community is also a resource. And your ability to live interdependently with that is, in the words of

Vicky Robin herself, even more important than FI. Oh, this whole idea of giving and receiving and this idea of mutuality and reciprocity, that's way more important to me than even FI. Can you believe that the author of the foundational book about financial independence has said that there is something that is even more important than FI, Vicky Robin herself, the author of Your Money or Your Life, says that there is something more important than FI. When she says that, it's time to listen. Vicky has spent her entire life promoting the idea of FI,

but there's something that she says is even more important than FI, and that is that flow that comes from relationships. Two more key takeaways I want to cover. The next lesson is to quote Helen, Keller, life is either a great adventure or nothing. And when I asked Vicky what that quote meant to her, how it applied to her life, she gave a fascinating definition of what a great adventure means to her. When I don't know something, I'm willing to be the idiot in the class, you know, ask the dumb question. I would be the lowest status person like, how could she say that? But I'm a learner. And so that's the great

adventure is learning. The great adventure is learning. It is through learning that adventure can be found. And that makes sense because that's how we push our boundaries. That's how we explore the unknown. And perhaps a big piece of the purpose of life is to keep learning, be a lifelong learner. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here because if you are the type of person who listens to podcasts and who has made it this far into a podcast about financial independence, I've got to presume that you are a lifelong. learner, so congratulations. You are on the right path. And the final takeaway that I would like to leave you with is one about the richness of life. It's sort of like taking a clam out of its shell, you know, or taking like, let's say a hermit crab that has gone into a shell. You take that shell away,

and the hermit crab is naked. Like, where am I going to go and get all these needs met that were nicely met by a job. But I am living testimony. I've been like FI for over 40 years and life never gets dull. Life never gets dull. Thank you, Vicki, for spending this time with us and thanks to you for listening and being part of this journey and part of this community, part of the afford anything community. As a way of saying thank you, we are giving away three free copies of the revised updated version of your money or your life. In order to win, please go to Instagram and follow me. I'm at Paula Pant.

That's at P-A-U-L-A-P-A-P-A-N-T. Now, once you're on Instagram, you'll see a picture of the book, Your Money or Your Life. Please like the photo and then leave a comment of anything related to this episode. You can talk about your own journey to financial independence. You can talk about the concept of financial independence versus interdependence. You can talk about anything that you can talk about anything that you can talk about. you want that came to you from this episode, whether it's a thought, comment, question,

something that resonated, something that didn't. Share your feedback with the community. From that, we will pick three respondents who will be mailed a copy of this book. Now, the official rules are as follows. The deadline for entering is Monday, April 16, 2018, at 11.59 p.m. Pacific. In order to win, you must be based in the U.S. or at a minute you must provide a United States address for the book to be mailed to. Voidware prohibited, no purchase necessary, yada, yada, yada. So again, to enter this contest and have a shot at getting a free copy of your money or your life, head to Instagram at Paula Pant.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Coming up on future episodes, we have Morgan Housel, a former columnist for the Motley Fool and the Wall Street Journal, to talk about money, investing, and decision-making. have Dr. Brad Clantz, a financial psychologist, who talks about the hidden scripts that we have with money and how that affects our relationship with money. And of course, every other episode is an episode in which I answer questions that come from you, this community. So all of that is coming up on future episodes of the Afford Anything podcast. If you enjoyed today's show,

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