BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 104: Cash-Flowing a Series of Mini-Retirements with Steven & Lauren from Trip of a Lifestyle

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Lauren and Steven met in high school and attended the same college. After undergrad, Steven was accepted into the Ph.D. program at UC Irvine. During the first year, he decided he didn’t really want a Ph.D. in Physics, but he really enjoyed working with students. They moved back to Florida so Steven could get his master’s in Education, while Lauren worked her first “real” job. But after two years, they were burned out from working full-time. After learning about financial independence and achieving an incredible savings rate—to the tune of $100K in two years—they decided to take a break. Their “break” was a six-month trip to Hawaii, paid for up front by their big savings account—but repaid by a series of side hustles in Hawaii. While most people spend lavishly to go on a tropical vacation for one week, they ended up $1,000 positive while spending six months there. Re-energized, they returned to Florida for a full-time job for Lauren and a continuing tutoring job for Steven—making more money than before they left for Hawaii. Increased income meant increased savings rate for these two, having lowered their expenses by purchasing a three-bedroom condo, periodically renting out an unneeded bedroom. But after about three years, they felt burned out again. This time their “break” was a trip around the country to visit every national park—all 61 of them—in seven months. Again, they wanted to pay for the trip with income generated during the trip. They cut expenses by buying a compact cargo van and sleeping in it for the majority of the trip. They continued working about 10 hours a week during the trip, rented their condo for seven months, and hit the road. Each time they return from their mini-retirements, they are refreshed, re-energized, and ready to jump back into work with both feet. Their end goal isn’t early, permanent retirement, but several small mini-retirements to enjoy their journey. In This Episode We Cover: Lauren and Steven's journey with money How they managed their money during their college years How they saved $100K in two years Their monthly income and expenses Preparations to go to Hawaii How they managed their cash flow while staying in Hawaii What they did when they returned to the mainland Their strategy for asset allocation Working part-time while on the road How they get internet access while traveling Their freelance business The ideas behind financial independence And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums Mr. Money Mustache The True Cost of Commuting - Mr. Money Mustache (blog) HealthCare.gov BiggerPockets Money Podcast 84: Traditional Retirement: Social Security, Market Conditions, & Managing Expectations with Kyle Mast BiggerPockets Money Podcast 41: How to Find the Best Possible Certified Financial Planner (CFP) for Your Needs with Kyle Mast BiggerPockets Money Podcast 11: Financial Freedom in Less Than Five Years with Joel from FI 180 XY Planning Network Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow104 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast show number 104, where we interview Lauren and Steven from Trip of a Lifestyle and get their story of financial independence, many retirement, and designing the life they truly want to live. Regardless of what choices other people decide to make, everybody's different. They get to make whatever choices they want. At least everyone should consider the question of, am I doing this because it's what everyone else around me is doing? Or am I doing this? this because these things are what I really value and really want in life. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my wonderful co-host, Scott Trench. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else and show you that by following the proven steps, you can put yourself on the road to early financial freedom and get money out of the way so you can lead your best life. That's right. Wherever you are in your financial or life journey, you can begin rapidly moving

towards a position capable of generating a great income, saving a huge percentage of that income, and setting yourself up to make larger and larger investments on your way to financial freedom. So whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big-time investments in assets like real estate or start your own business, will help you build a position capable of launching yourself towards your dreams. Lauren and Stephen definitely have built a pretty incredible lifestyle, like almost the millennial dream. If you talk about launching yourself towards your dreams, they've done that through hard work, clear understanding of their numbers, and nothing extraordinary, right?

Then there's no part of the story that is them getting lucky or taking advantage of a big opportunity. It's just them being knowing their numbers, having a plan, and then designing exactly what they wanted from their lifestyle. And I think you're going to really enjoy the show. I agree 100%. I love hearing their story because, like you said, it's so repeatable. It is so doable if you are just conscious of where you're spending your money. And I think that's one of the core components of their story is, look, we don't make a lot of money, but we also don't spend a lot of money. And that allows us to do what we want to do.

Yeah. And Lauren and Stephen, our guest today, they're going to be starting entering 2020 in a position capable of kind of sustaining semi-permanent retirement at the ages of 29. and 30. And that's an incredible lifetime achievement for them. And I don't know. It's just, it's a great inspiring show to end to close out 2019 here and get started on your goals in 2020. Well, and what's the worst case scenario for their current choices? They have to go back and get a job. Their worst case scenario is your everyday life, Scott. Their worst case scenario is my everyday life. It's everybody else's everyday life to quote Joel from F-I-180 yet again. They're taking a chance. And yeah, maybe the stock market is going to correct. And their net worth goes

down. It's not going to go to zero instantly. And it'll recover. Most likely, past performance is not indicative of future gains and blah, blah, blah, blah. But they have so much time. And what they're doing now is cash flowing their life. And they just, they get to do whatever they want to do. And that's just the best. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going. And more importantly, where your tax refund can make the biggest impact.

Because the goal isn't just to look backward. It's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, including budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with the code Pock. What I personally like is that Monarch keeps you focused on achieving, not just tracking. You can see your budgets, debt payoff, savings goals, and net worth all in one place, so every decision actually moves the needle.

Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code pockets at Monarch. for half off your first year. That's 50% off at monarch.com code pockets. I love Matt, said no one ever. Nobody starts a business thinking, you know what would make this more fun? Calculating quarterly estimated taxes. But somehow every small business owner ends up doing it. Your dreams of creating, selling, and growing get replaced by late nights chasing receipts, juggling invoices, and wondering if that bad sushi lunch with Scott counts as a write-off. Change all that with Found. Found is a business banking platform built to take the pain out of managing

money. It automatically tracks expenses, organizes invoices, and even preps you for tax season without you doing the heavy lifting. You can set aside money for business goals, control spending with virtual cards, and find tax write-offs you didn't even know existed. It saves time, money, and probably a few years of life expectancy. Found has over 30,000 five-star reviews from owners who say, Sound makes everything easier, expenses, income, profits, taxes, invoices even. So reclaim your time and your sanity. Open a found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D-com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank, member FDIC. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined

their finances with Foun. Audible has been a core part of my routine for more than a decade. I started listening years ago to make better use of drive time and workouts, and it stuck. At this point, I've logged over 229 audiobook completions on Audible alone, and I still regularly re-listen to the highest impact titles. Lately, I've been listening to Bigger Leeners stronger for fitness, the anxious generation for parenting perspective, and several Arthur Brooks' audiobooks that have been excellent for mental well-being. What makes Audible so powerful as its breadth. Beyond audiobooks, you also get Audible Originals, podcasts, and a massive back catalog across business, health, parenting, and more, all accessible in one app. If you're

looking to turn everyday moments into real progress, Audible has been indispensable for me over over 10 years. Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP money. Okay, huge thanks to the sponsor of today's show. Stephen and Lauren from Trip of a Lifestyle. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. How are you today? Great.

Doing great. Thank you. I'm so excited to have you on this show. So I've read a little bit on your blog about your story, which I find absolutely fascinating. And I want to know where your journey with money begins and how you got to that point of, you know, the, what was it, the zero dollar honeymoon, the trip around the national parks for, I don't remember how much that one cost, but where did you start out? So basically, we both went to the University of Florida.

We've been together for a long time since, like, late junior year in high school, I guess. But we both ended up going to the University of Florida. And I majored in physics and Lauren majored in journalism. And when we graduated from there, I thought that I really wanted to get a PhD. in physics and like become a professor and all that stuff do research so I got accepted to the University of California Irvine and we moved across the country to California and it was great except that yeah yeah so California was great but it was also very expensive so I kind of also while I was there learned that I didn't really want a PhD in physics as well as well as I was

much as I thought I did. And so while we were there, you know, I was a grad student. I was working as a TA. And Lauren took a full-time job, basically like a secretary-type position at a design company there. And we were chugging along. Everything was okay. But I was kind of just getting really burned out on physics pretty quickly. And we weren't making a ton of money and it was really expensive to live there. So anyway, what I did realize was the part of my job that I really liked a lot was being a TA. and actually teaching students and dealing with students directly. And not so much like the working toward the research and learning more like higher level physics and stuff.

So fell in love with teaching, got this email from the University of Central Florida that said they would give me free tuition if I came back to Florida, as long as I would be a public school teacher for one year. So we packed up and we moved back across the country again, back to our home state of Florida, Orlando area, UCF. And I did that program to get a master's degree in education. And I worked as a teacher. I ended up

working as a teacher for two years. And Lauren also took a job, which you can tell you about that, I guess. Yeah, I just, I did marketing for a small financial firm in the greater Orlando area. But it was kind of our first foray into like real adulthood. We both had full-time jobs. I mean, I was working full-time in California, but this was like a first titled position and felt very official and fancy. And, you know, we were living in a one-bedroom apartment and trying to save as much money as we could. And actually in California, I think, is when we started kind of being first on our own out of college, where we're thinking, okay, what's the next step? We can work and earn money.

But then what, what do you do with your money? And that's kind of where we first started kind of getting interested in learning more about personal finance. Yeah. So by the time, like, we got to Orlando, I think we were like pretty interested in, we're going to save as much money as possible. And we had just started reading Mr. Money Mustache and like learning a little bit about financial independence and stuff. Yeah, Lauren sent me the link to that one day when she, I guess, was bored reading some

stuff at work. Oh, Lauren found it first. It did. And yeah, so we were really into it by the time we started this whole adventure in Orlando. So we spent two years working full time there. And I was a public school teacher. Lauren was making just under my salary. So we both had pretty similar.

I think we're around like 40K a year, just under 40K a year each. And in those two years, we were able to add over $100,000 to our net worth by just living as simply as possible. And after those two years, is when we decided to do that whole Hawaii honeymoon thing. So in the period prior to moving to Orlando,

it sounds like you attended college, got an advanced degree at UC Irvine, right? I did not complete a degree there, but I did go there for nine months. Fair enough. Did you come out of that experience with negative net worth or student loan debt or anything like that? Or how did you kind of manage your money in that time period? Yeah.

Okay. So going back a little bit to college, right? In college, neither one of us came out with any student loan debt. We both have different stories on that. My story is pretty simple and not very impressive. My story is I focused on school and my parents basically helped me through college and paid for, I had a scholarship that paid for my tuition, actually, and then my parents paid for my basic living expenses. So I was able to graduate debt-free. I didn't have a lot of money, but I was debt-free.

And Lauren actually worked her way through college all on her own. She had the same scholarship that I had for tuition in terms of living expenses and stuff. For the majority of college, she worked as a server at Chili's. I worked with the local paper and I worked at Chili's and then kind of throughout college, I started being able to switch into more in my field. It was kind of scary to like let go of what I felt was really steady and like good income from waiting tables. At least it was more predictable than knowing like what news might happen that day that I would be able to write about or take pictures of and get paid for in the local market.

And so that was kind of, you know, a little unnerving. it did work out and you know I graduated also without any debt I had a few scholarships and the one Stephen was talking about is like statewide in Florida if you're getting good enough grades and stuff you get you used to be able to get most of your tuition covered and so that's what we both did and then for grad school with physics yeah a lot of times they will cover your costs because it's like a not common degree that they want people to be doing in general in science when when you go for a PhD, you work as a TA or a researcher, and that stipend covers your tuition, plus a very small salary, like 20K a year or something like that.

Got it. So you move back to Orlando. You got no student loan Zets because you've navigated this path successfully. How do you go about saving $100,000 in two years on $80K and income combined? That's really impressive. That would love to hear that story. Thank you. Yeah. So basically, for the last, like, honestly, forever, since then, last like seven or eight years. We've shared one car between the two of us. So that's been like a really big boon to our finances, not having to deal with depreciation and insurance and gas and maintenance on a second vehicle. So we've always very strategically chosen where to live, including back then in Orlando, to live as close as possible to at least one of our jobs,

if not both. So that's allowed me to ride my bicycle to work everywhere we've lived, several different places for the last seven or eight years. So that's one huge thing that makes a much bigger difference than you might think. The other thing is just sort of in general, we were pretty fresh out of college still there. We had very limited income with very high expenses in California. So kind of by necessity in California, we just learned to continue that college lifestyle into adulthood.

You know, like even after you get your full-time job, you just kind of keep living like a college student, share a one-bedroom apartment, and eat cheaply, cook at home, that sort of thing. And if you do eat out, it's like Chipotle, not like a real, restaurant or whatever. So we kind of continued that lifestyle, honestly, indefinitely, because I think we both- Still kind of live that lifestyle. We do kind of still live that lifestyle, because I think just neither one of us is really unhappy with that at all. It doesn't really

cause us any stress or anything. So just sort of living as if we were college students, I guess, you would say. We had all the same furniture from college. Yeah, we kept our college furniture. And if we bought something new, it's usually from IKEA and, you know, that sort of thing. We're not too picky about possessions for the most part. So I think just like those general things helped a lot. And I would say, I don't know, it just comes down to a lot of little small things. But the biggest ones for sure are choosing a small place to live that's close to work. And then sharing one vehicle between two people would be the biggest ones.

And then we did do some side hustles too. We've always, including now, shared like a photography business together. So that's brought in a little bit of extra income, shooting like weddings and portraits and stuff like that. and we do a lot of random little stuff, like selling things on eBay and all kinds of little random things to bring in a little bit of extra cash. But for the most part, our income source has been full-time jobs. What was your kind of monthly income and expenses in that period?

And did it change throughout that period? Did you get better and better as you went through those two years? It hasn't really changed drastically over the course of the last seven or eight years. Our total annual expenses between the two of us has always ranged somewhere between like eight. and $25,000 combined. And I would say just recently, that has increased significantly

because we're having to buy private health insurance plans on the healthcare.gov marketplace instead of having like work-sponsored plans or whatever because we're sort of transitioning into like part-time work now. So only recently that has kind of shot upward because of health care costs.

But other than that, yeah, between like 18 and 25K a year combined for expenses. And back at that time, You know, our salaries combine around 80K combined together. And then we had some side hustles that probably added up to, I don't know, maybe $10,000 a year or something like that. I don't know exact numbers, but yeah. Perfect.

Okay. So you have about 90K in income and you have about $20,000 to $25,000, $18,000,000, expenses, you said. So what are you doing with the cash that you're accumulating? Are you putting it in 401K? Are you investing it? stock playing a savings account or what was the use that that money went to? Yeah, we both had work-sponsored retirement plans that we contributed in just enough to get the full

match. So we did that. And then obviously there's a lot of extra cash building up because our expenses were dramatically lower than our income. So the rest of that was maxing out two Roth IRAs every year and investing those funds into mostly just low-cost vanguard index funds, like VTI, stuff like that. And then even still after maxing those out, there's additional cash, and that just went into a taxable brokerage account. And so we bought more total stock market index funds, basically. It's pretty boring, to be honest with you, but that's what we did. But it was constant and easy and worked. No, I hate this so much because no one can repeat this story, right? Everything you did here is completely secret that we, you know, that never uncovered before

a secret, you know, that you guys pioneered. No, I love it. That's fantastic. You learn the formula, you follow the formula, and you're not doing anything crazy. You're both working very normal jobs, and, you know, you're obviously spending some time hustling, and you're living an intentional lifestyle and clearly know your numbers throughout this period, right? Definitely. Top of mind. What's like the next turning point in your financial journey after that 100K? So the next turning point, I guess, was that after two years of full-time work and saving really hard, I know it sounds kind of silly, like, oh, two years. We both felt really burned out on full-time

work. And I think that's really just a product of being, you know, like 24 years older or however old we were. I guess we're like 24-ish. It just seemed like an eternity for like full-time work. And it's not that I didn't like being a teacher. I liked it. And I don't think Lauren had any big problems with her job either, but it just seemed like, man, five days a week, for real, we have to wake up at 7 o'clock in the morning and go to work. And I actually, my work was a little bit further, so I had a little bit of a commute. And so just like every day driving and getting to work and then driving home. And our schedules were a little bit off too, because as a teacher, you got off work at 3 p.m.

And I didn't get home until 6 p.m. And then we're losing this time together. And it's kind of snowballed into like, what are we doing? And in that time, we also got married. in 2014 in November, middle of the school year. So we decided to kind of figure out a different plan for our honeymoon. Yeah. So that, I guess, is the turning point really. As we got married, we thought about what do we want to do for like a little break, you know, for a honeymoon. You're supposed to do that, I guess. So most people, you know, will take like a week or two off work and use the vacation time and then go somewhere exotic and have a good time. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when we thought about it, we were like, well, gee, you know, like to go somewhere for a couple weeks

might cost us several thousand dollars depending on where we go. And that's just a huge amount of money compared to when you're used to spending 20K a year on two people or whatever for two weeks. So it was like, wow, how are we going to spend that much money in such a short period of time? That doesn't really make sense. So our idea was, what if instead we were to move somewhere, like on a semi-permanent basis, like for maybe six months or something like that, keep it open-ended, and sort of turn it into like an extended vacation

and maybe even do a little bit of work along the way that didn't feel like work because it was just like a small amount of part-time work and try to just like cash flow and pay the bills just barely instead of saving, you know, 75% of our income or whatever it may be. And so we said, you know what, we've never been to Hawaii before.

Everyone says Hawaii's awesome. I don't really know anything about it, but let's do this. Let's let the school year end, which was still like, I don't know, I think like eight months out or something like that at that point. Let's let the school year end, finish off the school year, and then let's just fly to Hawaii and just say, we live here now. And try not to work, try to work as little as possible while we're there and stay as long as we feel like, let's say roughly six months, something like that.

That's what we did. We went to Hawaii and we hung out there for six months and we cash flowed it. We worked very little, maybe like 10 hours a week or so while we were there. And by the time we got back, our net worth had actually gone up a teeny tiny little bit, like $1,000 or something. So it basically costs us nothing. It's the way we like to look at it.

That's awesome. What preparations did you do to go to Hawaii? Because it doesn't, the way you said that doesn't make it sound like you did a lot of preparing. We did not. We did not do a lot of preparing. We literally moved. We had a friend whose parents lived on Oahu, and they were gone the week that we were getting into town. And so they're like, you can stay in our house. Well, to be clear, at that point, we didn't even know which island we were going to be living on. So we landed in Honolulu, and we stayed at their house for like a few days. And that was just to see, like, do we like Oahu as an island or not? We had some ideas about.

Like, we had heard good things about the Big Island, Hawaii, but, you know, it was also mixed with, oh, it's really country and, like, you might not like it. And we're like, how could it be? You know, we're from Florida. His family's from Georgia. Like, how country could it be? And so we went to the Big Island. We loved it. It was open spaces, tons to explore. Wasn't crowded at all. It's a lot cheaper, too. A lot cheaper than a lot of. And lower population density and stuff. And it kind of gave us a taste of what we've been working for the past two years. You know, we kind of had this notion of financial independence now. We had this goal that we had been saving toward and, you know, taking this little break was like, this is what life could be like. This is why we're kind of been doing this, having these self-directed days where we wake up and say, what do you want to do?

You want to drive across the island and go explore some waterfalls today? Like, that was really encouraging for us. And then the fact that we came out of it, you know, plus $1,000. Yeah, but in terms of the planning, though, like, it was actually a pretty funny story because, like, we got to Oahu, no idea that we were going to, whether we're going to live on that island or not, decided not to check out the big island, loved it. And then we didn't have a place to live there. Like, we didn't know anyone on that island or anything like that.

And so you would think, like, the natural thing to do would be like, okay, get a hotel for, like, a couple weeks and, like, sort of figure out your life or whatever. They're still expensive on that island. But yeah, hotels are expensive. And like we were, again, we were used to like, we spend $20,000 a year like on our whole life. So that seems like a lot of money. We're not going to do that. So we got a rental car, a Nissan Versa note, which has like, it's like a hatchback type thing.

And so bottom line is it's big enough to sleep in. And so, yeah. Every couple of days we would get a hotel room, but we split the difference by staying in the car because it was a lot cheaper that way. you could explore a little bit easier too. Yeah, so we slept in the back of a rental car while we frantically searched for an apartment to rent and a car to buy. And so eventually we found an apartment that was two bedrooms,

which was much bigger than we needed. We didn't really want a two bedroom, but it was really cheap. It was like, I think, 965 a month, something like that. And it was literally across the street from the beach. Like you could hear waves crashing from the front door, which was pretty crazy. And so we snapped that up as fast as possible,

and then we ended up buying used car, A little Mazda Miata was at 2,000. And we paid $4,500 for that. When we left the island six months later, we sold that thing for $5,600. So we made $1,600 on our use car. That's our positive. I was going to say there's your net worth up charge. That's the net worth uptick right there. Yeah, that's right. So at the very least, you have $965 rent and you got to eat, right? So how are you cash flowing the rest of this while you're there? Before we left town, I mean, Stephen was working as a public school teacher. So there wasn't a lot of flexibility in his position. But with my company, I was working for a small firm. And I told them pretty well in advance about our plans. And I said, you know, there's a lot that I do day to day that can be done remotely. And if you'd like me to continue to do any of my responsibilities in Hawaii, like I will make that work. I'll wake up. It's five hours of difference between the two. So like, I'll wake up whenever you need me to and do the work.

Like, it's totally fine. I'm doing. whatever I want, so I can do that. And that actually worked out. And I did maybe about 10 hours a week of work for them while we were on the island as a contractor. And then we booked some photography gigs. Stephen did pick up some private tutoring clients. Yeah, so since I was a teacher, I couldn't like transition my job to remote. Like that's not really a thing. But that's when I kind of got into private tutoring. So I had a couple of clients that I was already working with, like remotely via Skype. And so yeah, just transitioned that and picked up a couple more. I even tutored some people locally and basically did that maybe 10 hours a week.

And so between those two things that totally cash flowed our expenses, I think our total expenses on the island while we were living in Hawaii, it was about 1,800 a month for everything combined. We also ate a lot of rice to keep costs now. We bought like a, I don't even know, 20 or 30 pound bag of rice on day one at Costco. And we did actually almost finish the whole thing by the time we left. Were you able to save anything in Hawaii or did you just come out net zero?

So what we mainly focus on is our total net worth. And our total net worth change was about plus $1,000. And that includes everything altogether. And in terms of investments, just to be clear on that, because you know, you'd think, well, is some of that made up by just the market going up while you're there? I think our portfolio return was about negative 1% while we were in Hawaii. So we actually lost money on our investments over there.

So it was really legitimately just our 10 hours a week of work, cash flowed our $1,800 a month in expenses. Yeah, that was 2015, like from probably July, June, July through December. I think we left like the beginning of January, 2016 from Hawaii. And you got to live in Hawaii. Yeah. Yeah, it was really fun. It was cool.

And we have a lot of pictures up on our blog from that and stuff too. in terms of mentally getting ready to leave your job and kind of go to Hawaii and just see what it was going on for six months. How important was the grind that you would put in for the two years previous to that? Was that really what gave you the confidence to go ahead and make the trip? Do you think you would have been able to, that you could have just done it without ever going through that in the first place? So I think the answer is yes and yes. Like, do I think we could have done it with $0 in the bank, not zero, but let's say we had $10,000 instead of $100,000, right? Yes, I think we definitely could have done it.

I mean, our upfront costs were a $4,500 car and, you know, one month of rent or whatever, right? So would we have felt comfortable doing that or responsible in any way doing that? No, I don't think so at all. So I think that knowing that we had set financial goals for ourselves ahead of time and more than accomplished them and done really well for the previous two years and felt like, wow, we put in some work. We're making very fast progress toward financial independence, made us feel like, hey, this is not an irresponsible thing for us to do. And there's really no way to fail. Because even if you multiply, even if you call it $2,000 a month times six months, right? I mean, we could have paid for the whole

entire trip out of pocket, even if we made $0 while we were there. So it felt completely safe and doable the whole entire time. And I credit that. entirely to the savings and stuff we put in beforehand. So I would not have wanted to do it any other way. But is it possible? Yes, it is definitely possible to do it. Great answer. So what did you do when you returned to the mainland? So, you know, that was something that we talked about while we were there, you know, as the, because we had a six-month lease on that place across the beach. And, you know, we talked about it a lot of like, what are we going to do next? You know, what are those next steps look like? And we love our college town.

We love Gainesville. It's a pretty low cost of living place. Our best friend lives there. You know, it was, it's not too far from family. Our family's all in the Tampa Bay area. So it's about two and a half hours away. And we're like, you know, what if we went back to Gainesville? You know, there's obviously there's the college there.

So there's going to be opportunities for Stephen to do tutoring stuff, teaching stuff, whatever. You know, there's a market. And we kind of decided like, why don't we, you know, let's go back to work. I don't feel like we're done. Like we could probably keep living this life. and never get further ahead than we are today. I mean, we could work harder, but it's a little bit more difficult in Hawaii.

There's not a ton of opportunities in the fields that we specialize in. So let's move back to the mainland. Let's figure out how to do that and get right back into it. And we actually ended up looking for houses, and we bought a condo in Gainesville, about two miles from the university, really close, easy to bike to. Yeah, we paid $71,000 for a three-two condo. in Gainesville a few years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. You have a sweet bedroom condo and you paid $71,000 for it? Yeah. To be fair, we have high condo fees, but. Gainesville is a very affordable place to live. I think our condo now is worth a little over $100,000 a few years later. So definitely a little more expensive now. I mean, everything's been going up.

But yeah, it's a very affordable place to live. That's one of the main reasons that we decided, hey, that would be a good place to head back to because I think we were both still very sold on the idea of financial independence. We weren't going to just call it quits and say like, oh, we have $100,000. Let's just live paycheck to paycheck and be beach bumps for the rest of our lives. So I think we came back from that trip, really re-energized, and we had enough money to buy a house for cash. And that's what we did. And so our expenses dipped even lower because of that.

And then we both ended up landing jobs that paid more than we were making before. So I actually started out just continuing that private tutoring thing that I was doing in Hawaii. And instead, I just went really hard on it. Like, I made business cards. I went and stood outside classes at the University of Florida, handed out cards to every single person, and, like, built up this rolodex of, like, tons and tons of tutoring clients and stuff. And I made that, like, a 40-plus hour a week job. And Lauren landed a full-time job with, like, a digital marketing company in town.

So we were working full-time. I ended up getting picked up by a private tutoring company that I still work for today, actually. And so we were able to save at a significantly faster rate for the next three years or so. When we kind of felt a little burned out of time. Well, I guess we saved for about two and a half, something like that years. When you say significantly faster, are you saying significantly faster than prior to when your trip to Hawaii? Yeah, yeah. So before Hawaii, I was a public school teacher and Lauren was making roughly the same money.

And now we found ourselves, you know, increasing our incomes. And so decreasing our costs. We decreased our expenses, yeah. Because we bought the condo. Because we had a house-pading cash. So we actually, we didn't really experience any lifestyle inflation. And we moved to a very low cost of living area. And I continued to ride my bike to work.

We shared one car and did the whole same deal over again with higher incomes and lower expenses. So it was very fast-tracked. Very fast-tracked to financial independence. Yeah. Do you do anything with those extra two bedrooms? said that the two-bedroom in Hawaii was too much space and then you came and bought more space. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Honestly, we felt that. We were told. And I'm not judging.

I'm not judging. I'm just. Well, you know, when you're shopping for a house, we ended up actually getting a realtor because it was difficult to get in contact on our own with realtors to like go see houses and things like that. We found it actually a little challenging more so than I thought it should be. but everyone always tells you like, oh, you want more space. And if you have guest rooms, people will come and visit you. And that's not necessarily true. At least not as much as you would think, like not worth the extra space and costs involved with having a larger place.

But we did. In fact, we had this extra space and we're like, why do we have this extra space? And we actually rented out the room to two different friends at two different times throughout that two and a half year span. Yeah. So we were able to turn one of those rooms basically into an extra 500 bucks a month. for some of that time. We actually didn't rent it out all the time. And currently nobody's living there. We still live in the same condo and it's just us. And the place is way too big for us. And we never,

ever set foot in one of the rooms. And the other ones used as an office that's probably unnecessary too. But the truth is, we just got the place so cheap that it was like, why not? Like, it's not that big of a deal. And then we could tell people that they can come visit us because we've got the extra room. That's what the whole, that's what they tell you. Anyway. But definitely buying a place that's bigger than you need and renting out a bedroom. is a big boom to your finances. I mean, even if we had like a 30-year mortgage on that place, just the rent from one room could probably pay that mortgage, you know, based on how cheap it was. So over this three-year period, you guys are earning more income. You're somewhat partially offsetting your housing expense for some of the time, at least. What do you do with the money at

that point? Do you continue to take your match? Do you max out your 401K? What's your strategy for asset allocation? Yeah. So my job does not offer any benefits. methods of any kind, no health care, no 401k, none of that stuff. Lorenz did offer like a normal retirement plan and health care and stuff like that. So she, again, just grabbed the full match on her retirement plan. And then we continued every single year without skipping a beat to max out two IRAs. We did end up switching to a traditional IRA at some point because it was more advantageous tax wise.

But we max out IRAs, two IRAs every year. and actually just this year we got to max out an HSA for the first time because we had to buy a private health plan, which not really a good thing, but extra tax advantages. And then all the extra money just went into a taxable brokerage account and Vanguard Index funds. Pretty simple approach, same deal that we've always done, and that's worked out really well for us.

Awesome, and it sounds like there was another milestone about two and a half years into this cycle. Is that right? So can you walk us through that change? Yeah, so as we kind of alluded to, we go through these like patterns where we're working really hard, saving hard. I mean, we also were still doing our photography business in this new full-time higher earning gigs that we were in. So, you know, a couple years in and you're, again, feeling a little like, all right, what are we doing? Why are we doing this?

It's a lot. Maybe we need a break, come back renewed again, feel refreshed. And so we're kind of looking at it like, a Hawaii worked out really well. what could we do? We have this house, so we don't, you know, we're not going to just like sell it right now. Like, what could we do that would make sense? You know, and we've been to some national parks just in general and traveling in Hawaii. And we were like, it might be nice. You know, how many are there? Could we do a trip where maybe we went to all of them? And so we did a little bit of research looking at Google Maps. There's 61 parks. You know, how spread out are they? How much could we, you know, do? And how much time could Stephen step away from his job or I except away from. from my job, will we tell our employer. So we kind of had this like checklist of things that

whether we fell into or not in Hawaii, we knew we should like figure out on our, for our next adventure. And so we kind of settled into this. I think it could take, you know, six to eightish months to do all the parks on the kind of schedule that we would like. And then how do we make that work? And so that's kind of what we did. We went to all 61 national parks in seven months. And there are a lot of things that went into that to make it work. But that was the reason being is we were again kind of burned out and ready for another like break another fun experience. And we have the same goals. Yeah, to try to work out a way to pay for that trip in its entirety while on the trip without really feeling like we were working. And so yeah, that's what we did.

So what did that look like? Yeah. What did you do during the trip? Sure. So first off, just to keep expenses super low on that trip because that's, you know, part of paying for it, is you say, well, where am I going to stay? I'm going to be in a different town practically every night. We're going to 61 different national parks and there are all kinds of different places. So how can we keep the expenses low? That's really the first question. And so to keep the expenses low, the main thing we did was we bought a little tiny van, a Nissan NV200 and we put a bed in the back of it, really not fancy. It's just big enough in the back for this full-sized bed, like literally corner to corner. Yeah, we basically built a wooden platform in the back and threw a bed on top of that.

That takes up all the space. There's no like, it's not like an proper RV or anything like that. But it's enough to sleep in. So we slept in that van for probably six out of the seven months in total. So that probably saved us $15,000 in hotels or something like that. And we tried to stay in free locations too. Like we didn't necessarily camp in campgrounds because those usually carry a $20 to $30 cost to rent that space out. we often were at travel centers or Walmart parking lots to keep that accommodation costs low. Yeah. So we did the trip super cheap in a lot of different ways. And, you know, one of the ways it was really cheap is that you don't pay for entertainment when you're traveling around to national parks.

I mean, you buy one $180 national parks pass and that's all the entertainment you really need. Like you're not feeling the need to do anything else that's expensive or whatever. So that was pretty cool is that, you know, you don't really have to spend anything on entertainment. just like gas and travel and food and stuff like that. And we slept in the back of a van. So that's how we kept the expenses low. And then in terms of income, like how did we, still there were significant expenses. So how do we pay for all those expenses? Again, we tried the same deal. So this time we both had jobs that we both felt at least had some components that could be done remotely. Lauren's entire job practically could be done remotely. Mine, some of it could be done

remotely and others couldn't. So we both gave our employers probably about six months of notice. before we were going to leave on this trip. So, you know, we already had it in our minds. Like, we're in a financially good place. If they say no, we're just going to quit the job. It's not a big deal. But we gave them like six months of notice and said, hey, we're going to go on this trip.

And if you'd like, we could work part-time for you while we're on the road and maybe even come back full-time afterward. So would you be game for that? Like, what do you think? So my boss was into it. He was like, yeah, let's do that. Sounds good. So we worked out a deal.

and I had about 10 hours a week again of work to do on the road that could all be done remotely. And Lauren got into a conversation with her employer about it. They didn't say no, but ultimately it came down to they wanted to cut her pay, her rate of pay, for the fact that she would be remote instead of in person. And she just didn't really feel like that was a good deal. So she actually declined that offer and she put the job. And then on the road, kind of halfway through, A, we started our blog that ended up not making any money while we're on the road, obviously in its infancy, but it was fun to do. And Lauren

picked up a freelance gig doing marketing for like a small non-profit. So that brought in a little extra income as well. And a few other things that I picked up along the way since then. But yeah. And I mean, we also the house. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's true. So we have this condo that's paid for and it's just sitting there. So we moved all our stuff out of it into a friend's loft. And we rented that thing out on a seven-month lease for our seven-month trip. That story is interesting. though. Yeah, that's true, actually. So you guys like real estate. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. We listed that con. We had never been landlords or done really any kind of real estate investing type stuff. Other than our friends living in our. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's true. Yeah, I guess if you count that.

But so, you know, we were new to this, but we're very like do it yourselfy about a lot of stuff. So we said, all right, well, we're going to try this landlord thing like all on our own, no help. We're going to list the condo on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. They're free. Pay for no advertising. See what happens. Let's do this. So we listed them up.

Had plenty of bites, but no one that wanted the period of lease that we wanted. Obviously, like seven months is like an odd term. And then like people who, you know, were qualified to actually rent the place. So we showed it to a bunch of people. Not a lot of success. It was kind of discouraging. They all wanted to move in like that day or they wanted to live in it forever. And we're like, we're probably coming back.

So no. Yeah. We wanted to be honest with people and tell them, like, listen, yeah, we probably are coming back here. So I don't want to tell you you can live here for the rest of your life with your family or whatever. So we were kind of discouraged. We couldn't find a place or a renter. So on the very last day, like the day we were- It was the weekend, I think.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it was the night before we left for our road trip. I dropped off the keys to our condo with a property management company, and we're just going to take the 10-plus percent hit on all that and let somebody else handle it, and maybe it would be vacant for a month, and who knows, but whatever, it is what it is. Something is better than nothing. So we dropped up for keys with the property management company,

and then one more guy called us, like the night before we left on our trip, and was like, will you show me the place? So I was like, yeah, sure, I'll show you the place. We were still there. It was empty. And then he turned out to be a good lead, and we actually rented to him, drove back the next day, took our keys back from the property management company

and gave him to this guy, paid zero fees. He paid ahead of time every single month and left the place in decent enough shape when we came back. And honestly, it was a very good landlording experience. I don't want to say that's what's

going to happen every time we ever try this in the future, but we had a really lucky and good experience with that and he rented it for exactly seven months and paid everything on time. So that was pretty cool. He only called us once and it was to have the shelving reinstall. In the closet. It costs me $50. So the expenses were very low on that.

Did you screen this tenant? Did you run his background and do a credit check and all of that? Yes, we did. Okay. Okay. Very quickly in the middle of the night, learned how to do that. Well, we had done some screening of prior. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We kind of had some idea of what we wanted to know about potential tenants. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like

Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going, and more importantly, where your tax refund can make the biggest impact. Because the goal isn't just to look backward, it's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, including budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with the code Pockets. What I personally like is that Monarch keeps you focused on achieving, not just tracking. You can see your budgets, debt payoff, savings goals,

and net worth all in one place. So every decision actually moves in Edle. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all in one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code pockets at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off at Monarch.com code pockets. just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire the right people quickly. Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page where your ideal candidates are looking. And it works. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored posts.

The best part? No monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And speaking of results, in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 people just got hired through Indeed worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash bigger pockets. Just go to Indeed.com slash bigger pockets right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash bigger pockets. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you. you need. When you want more, start your business with Northwest registered agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest registered agent has

been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides, who are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Northwest makes life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business. They give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements, meeting minutes, and thousands of how-to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business.

And with Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data, and all services are handled in-house, because privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money-free, and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered. agent.com slash money free. So going back to your trip and cash flowing it, can you give us a brief rundown of what the

expenses were? You said that there were still some significant expenses. And then Mindy and I both have the same question here, I think, which is, how did you get internet in these national parks to use, do your jobs remotely? Yeah. So regarding the expenses, the national parks trip was very, very expensive for us. It is not what I would call like a super frugal vacation or whatever. So the total trip for seven months of living, and this includes everything we paid for it. It includes private health insurance. It includes the gas, the depreciation on the car, our cell phones are posting for our blog. It includes like every single thing we paid for. We included every penny of expenses. But the total came to about $37,000 for seven months,

which obviously compared to living on 20K a year. That's a crazy amount of money for us. us. But to put that in context, though, I mean, if you look at like an average middle class family, you know, spending $37,000 in seven months equates to how much in 12 months, like 50 or 60K in 12 months, that's still like compared to the typical middle class family. It's actually very doable, right? I mean, comparing those numbers, just to put it in context, but it was a lot of money for us. It also included some of the most expensive type of travel that you can do. I mean, in Alaska, for example, there are eight national parks. Five of them are not on the road system.

You have to charter your own plane to take just you into the national park. So you're buying a pilot in a plane for a few hours, and it's very expensive. And that's just Alaska. We had to go to American Samoa, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands. Those flights were all pretty expensive. And if you take out those... And you can't sleep in the van there. You have no van.

So these are expensive hotels and exotic places. So the fact that we were absolutely insistent on reaching a goal of doing all 61 national parks cost us dearly. Like that was a huge amount of money. So we paid for that. Yeah. And I don't regret that at all. But if you wanted to do a cheaper version of this trip, you would just go to, go to everything that you can get to in the van and sleep in the van and the trip is much cheaper. We did the cost on that, actually. It was how much percent? We did. It was 41 percent less money to skip the, I think, Eight most, or 12, 12, no. It's five in Alaska and three more.

Eight most expensive national parks to skip the eight most expensive national parks out of 61 reduces the total cost of the trip by 41%. I'll try not to quote too many numbers because we have this whole cost breakdown on our blog. It's really detailed and it's better to look there than to listen to my memory or either one of our memories. But yes, you could do this trip a lot cheaper if you wanted to. How awesome were the eight parks you had to fly to get to? They were awesome. Really cool.

Really cool, yeah. I mean, you don't see like an after a volcano like just here and land. Yeah, absolutely. And American Samoa is like practically like a foreign country. I mean, it's technically part of the United States, but it's just, it's completely different than. 98% native population, I think. Yeah, it was a totally different culture and you got to like really just see what life is like completely somewhere else. It didn't feel like the United States at all.

So that was just totally unique. and different. That place is twice as far from California as Hawaii is. So it's like practically across the globe. It's in the southern hemisphere as well. It's closer to like Australia, New Zealand than it is to us. Yeah, so it was definitely worth it. Those experiences were awesome. But if you're looking at this and saying, how could I do it on a smaller budget, you absolutely can. You just have to skip those places that require these crazy flights and hotel stays and rental cars and whatever else. And we did have to get some hotels some of the time because of weather. occurrences. So we left for this trip in January. We're from Florida, so we don't know anything about

the winter. And we started driving and winter happens a lot and it stays there just, you know, hangs around and there's snow and ice. And if it's below like 25 degrees, it's a little too cold to sleep in the van. So there were a few nights during the winter where we just had to get a hotel room. I mean, the van doors are like frozen shut. We couldn't like, it wasn't doable. Yeah, one night I literally could not access the van because it was frozen shut. So it's nights like those that we were like, well, we'll get a cheap hotel room. Why didn't you start the trip in like April? Part of it was for Stephen's job.

So he had to be back for the fall semester because of the way the university runs. So we left in January with the seven months. And then by the time we got back to the southeast, it was July, which was really hot, also not. comfortable for the sleep in the van. So there was a little bit, if we had all the time in the world, we could have made it where we never had to get a hotel room. But due to the time constraints and because we were being completest about it, there are a lot more costs. And that's great. And regarding like cash flowing the trip and doing work while you're on the road and stuff. Oh yeah, we didn't answer that at all. Yeah. So I think like we definitely learn

something on this trip about ourselves and about work in general, which is like it's really easy when you're at home working 40 or 50 hours a week to get burned out very quickly. Like, as you can see for us, we're getting burned out like roughly every two years of work. Like, so we're going hard, right? But while we were on this trip, we're actively doing really fun outdoor stuff every single day and like getting exercise and like being in wide open spaces and all that every single day. So you might think like, well, do you get tired of that? And the answer is yes, you do kind of get tired of that to some extent.

So what we kind of ended up doing was almost. like an inverted work schedule where instead of five days of work and two days off, it was like five days of fun and like one to two days every week sitting in a Starbucks in a city with accommodations and stuff and just like working an eight hour day at a computer or whatever. And what we found though was like that was not miserable at all. It was actually. It felt really good to be productive. Yeah, it was fun to say like I'm sitting down.

I'm earning money. I'm getting some work done. I'm having a rest. I'm grabbing a cup of coffee and this feels good. Like my job actually feels good again. And so this lifestyle like it could have been indefinite. And actually that we're kind of like toying with the idea right now. So we're at a little bit. Like why don't we do that all the time? It just feels good. Like we're not the type of people who want to like fully retire like not do any work or earn any money for the rest of our lives. But like if we can not touch our investment, whatsoever, just working 10 hours a week, and it feels good and it's fun to do that work.

And it keeps your life interesting a little bit with variety. Why not do that? So we're kind of starting to look at that idea, actually, like for next year maybe. That's awesome. Okay, so you finish this trip and it's amazing and you go your cash flow in it and you've discovered all these things about yourself. What happens following that? Yeah. Well, we came back. Stephen, you know, had worked out with his boss, part of the negotiations for him being on the road. he would come back full-time in the fall. So that was the plan. For me, it was a little open-ended. I kind of mentioned previously that I had picked up a few different gigs at this point. And it's still pretty part-time work in terms of the amount of work that I'm doing. But for a couple different

companies doing freelance stuff and then running the blog and then Stephen being full-time. And so my schedule was a lot more free, but Stevens wasn't. And for him, it kind of got right back into that five days a week working, two days a week off. And, you know, we're like, this isn't as fun, especially with only one of us being more flexible than the other. And what are we doing? And actually, Stephen just ended up negotiating for this year to have a more flexible schedule. And he's now part-time starting in January. But when we came back on the trip, we thought it's going to be just like Hawaii. We're going to come back to our home. And we're going to get right back to the grind. But what we found on the trip that worked so

well was we didn't touch any of our investments. They kept growing and we cash flowed the trip and we were still saving money somehow. You know, maybe not on the trip, but being back. Yeah, when we say we cash flowed this trip, I mean, honestly, the rental income from our house plus the work that we did paid for the full $37,000 of the trip. But on top of that, the market has been significantly up during that period. And our nest egg is a lot bigger than it was back when we did the Hawaii trip. So we actually increased our net worth but a lot while we were on the National Park trip. So I think part of it is we came back from that and I went back to full-time work. And we both were kind of just asking ourselves like, why exactly are we doing that?

Like we're actually in a very good financial position now. And it's like, should we slow down on saving a little bit? like, do we really need to hit like the exact calculated like financial independence official number? Or should we like slow down, taper off a little bit and enjoy what we've built so far? Yeah. We don't have to be going to every national park. We could be doing whatever we want. We could be visiting family more. We could be going, finding out which beach in Florida is the best because I don't know the answer of that.

You know, little things like that that we could just enjoy more of the day to day as opposed to why are we buckling? back down and working so hard again when we don't really need to. So bottom line is I think in 2020 and onward, we're probably both indefinitely part-time employees for conceivably forever from this point forward. So as a part-time employee, can you still contribute to your 401Ks? Can you, or do you have to switch over? I don't have any benefits at my job and I never have had any benefits at my job. So there's no health insurance, there's no 401k, there's none of that to worry about anyway. I was responsible for all of that on my own. Lauren, since she quit her job entirely before we went on the National

Park trip, she has replaced that with like three or four different freelance gigs in addition to our blog as like what she's doing sort of part time now. So neither of us has access to any kind of like 401k or any kind of employer benefits at all. So we're paying for private health insurance out of pocket, which definitely has increased our living expenses. And we're just contributing to two IRAs and an HSA, maxing all those out every year. And the rest goes into taxable brokerage account. Okay.

Are you employed by this company or are you a contractor for the company? Starting next year, I'll be a contractor. I have been an employee, a full-time employee, but with no benefits. Okay. Oh, that stinks. Yeah. So your next life in, is how do I say this without sounding snotty?

Because I think it's awesome. It's like a cobbled together income streams. You've got multiple income streams. Definitely. Yeah. And in addition to three or four different freelance gigs that Lauren has, we have our photography business. We have my contract work for my company.

And then we also have this investment portfolio that's significant in size now and actually is turning out to be a real source of income that counts for something. versus in college, it's like, oh, we made $10 this year on investments, you know, but... Oh, just out. When did you get back from the National Park trip? What year? This year, August. So this year, we did the trip from January to August. You finished the trip, and then now you're looking at the next thing already because, okay, sorry, that clears up some timeline. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it kind of, it just happened and the experiences that we had are still very fresh,

and we're trying to figure out how to capitalize on that. You know, we have. had this great experience. We love this, you know, work feeling fun and, you know, kind of fitting it into fitting work into your schedule instead of fitting your schedule around work. Yeah. I think we're trying to hit that sweet spot of like how many hours of work is a fun amount of hours of work and just sticking with that forever. While still covering expenses. Yeah. So I like what you just said. We're fitting work into our schedule instead of fitting our schedule around work. You know, back on, I think it was episode 11, Joel from FI-180 said, what's the worst that could happen? My worst case scenario is I have to go back and get a job.

Exactly. Yeah, that's how, that's exactly how we feel because I'm 29, Lauren's 30. Like, we have time ahead of us. So everyone always says like, what will you do if the market crashes and you lose all your money and all this? And worst case crazy scenarios, it's like, well, then in that case, we won't be any worse off than, you know, most other 29 and 30-year-olds, really. I mean, we'll just go back to work and do what we have to do. It's okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, and what are the odds that all of your investments will suddenly plummet to zero? Of course, astronomically low, especially since we have never taken any kind of leveraged position. So we don't have a mortgage. We don't have a mortgage. We don't have debt. I mean,

if you have zero leverage in your portfolio and, you know, the market. market crashes. I feel like worst case scenarios, maybe minus 50%, something like that. And you just weighed it out. And then, yeah, I mean, you don't need these retirement accounts until you're retired. And you just said you're 29 and 30. So I don't like the word cobbled together, but it's kind of cobbled together. We've created the life that we want. You enjoy tutoring some. Exactly. Some. That's exactly. I mean, I chose this profession because I love doing it. Like, I really do love teaching physics, but I don't want to be doing that 40 and 50 hours a week, you know. Well, and I would assume that there's an opportunity for extra work around midterms and finals.

Absolutely. If you needed, you know, if somebody needed some extra physics help right at the end. Oh, sure, I can work 20 hours this week instead of 10. So that's the other thing that I learned. When we first came back from Hawaii, I actually didn't have a job. I cobbled together my own full-time job with about 40 hours a week of private tutoring clients, just one-on-one that I gathered myself from handing out business cards and stuff. And what I learned during that time was very empowering,

which is at any moment, if I need extra income, I can go back to that. I can go hand out some business cards outside after everyone got done taking a big exam, and I can gather together a whole bunch of tutoring clients and make $60 an hour, whatever it may be. And that you can turn that faucet of clients on and off too. Yeah, you can take one client or 10. I mean, it is completely variable. So finding a skill that's able to be dialed to any specific work amount that you want, like tutoring is a really good example of that. It's really valuable. So, you know, I'd encourage people to look at like freelance gigs that are scalable, I guess, like scale back, scale forward, however much income you need. You just take on that much work. I have a

kind of different type of question with this last one. When you started out in your careers, you're both making $80,000 a year combined plus the side hustles. Do you ever think back to some of the peers that you were working with at that time and the different choices that you made there? And like, what do you think the reason is that your outcome is the rare outcome? And maybe other people are not able to accumulate net worth and not able to enjoy lots of the lifestyle, the crazy lifestyle adventures that you guys have had. Yeah. That's a great question, and it's a question that we're very interested in answering because we really do want to help other people do the same thing. And as an educator, I think my automatic answer is education. Our K-12

education system really doesn't talk at all about finances or taxes or investments or anything like that. I think it's a major, major problem. And, you know, some of it is education. Some of it is probably marketing. You know, we just live in like sort of a consumerist culture where you're constantly being bombarded with like perfectly tuned psychological advertisements to get you to buy as much stuff as possible and the biggest house you can possibly buy and as many cars as you can afford to have in your driveway and all that stuff. So I think our society is very much set up to make you consume as much as possible. So the ideas behind financial independence are kind of rare in our society. So I don't think it's that our outcome is rare because it's almost impossible to attain

or anything like that. I think it's rare because the ideas behind those outcomes are very rare to come by. And so that's a huge reason why we started our blog and why we want to like get these ideas out to as many people as possible is just to say like, hey, these ideas changed our life. And we we hope that at least some of these ideas, maybe not all of them apply to everybody, but at least some of these ideas can change your life too. And I think, you know, a big part of that too is even if they have been exposed to certain good measures that they should be taking in their lives financially that they don't necessarily believe that it's worth it. So what, if I save for retirement, what does that even mean?

They can't really quantify why they should be doing the things that they're doing. And I think that's part of the reason that we try to lead with the fun stuff that we've done is because I think it helps give people more of a reason. Like, why should you do this? Well, because it can be really fun and you can do the things that you want to do. And it's not just buckle down and save really hard and deprive yourself of all the fun stuff. No, you can have fun along the way. And that's, I think that's a really big part of what we try to, especially when we talk to our friends, but on our blog too is convincing people that it's worth

the slight effort that it might feel like in the beginning. Yeah, that's honestly kind of the hidden secret behind our story, I think, is we tell these stories about, we get people to listen to us by saying, we went to all 61 national parks. It's so cool. We live in Hawaii for six months. You should listen to us. And then the real message we're trying to get across secretly is all of this is only possible through, you know, making sometimes tough, but overall definitely worth it, financial choices. And that you can do it too. Yeah, I think also part of that is really that grind, right? You said you use that word several times to describe your story, but that two-year period where you spent $18,000 to $24,000 and earned $80,000, right? And, you said, you used that word several times, describe a story. And

it kind of burnt you out and it was kind of hard after a while is I think maybe the price of admission into this into this lifestyle. I think, you know, almost everybody that we've had on the show that's in kind of this age bracket that you guys and myself are in and are experiencing this kind of fie lifestyle has paid that price in some form or other, whether it's on the income or expense or both or whatever side. Yeah, I definitely think the working full time and selling your time part is really the price that you pay. I would try to emphasize to people that once you get into it, and once you realize the why behind what you're doing, the keeping your expenses low part turns out not to be a price that you pay. It turns out not, at least for us, to be something

that we dread or regret or have to take a break from. So repeatedly we keep saying, well, we work for two years full time and then we really felt like we needed a break, right? But we didn't need a break from was the low expenses part. We found that, like, for me, you know, just something as simple as like riding my bike to work. At first, it's like, really, after ride a bike to work every day, like that seems like a huge sacrifice. And I'm going to do that indefinitely for the rest of my life or whatever. And then I tried it and I'm like, okay, getting exercise, burning calories every day, keeping my heart healthy, I am way more awake when I get to work and added benefit, I'm getting rich because of it. Like, a lot of the things.

that you find yourself cutting back on make you reevaluate like what's important in life. And it turns out the cutting your expenses part, I think turns out not to be a sacrifice at all. It's really the selling your time part that I think is the main sacrifice. Well, and I think that your peers are also burned out after two years. But the choices that they make don't allow them to take a six month break to Hawaii. So is it worth it to? And I know this sounds super judgy and it's my podcast so I can be judgy. You know, is it worth it to have the new car and the, you know, fancy clothes and go out to dinner

every night and all of that when you can't take like your, their break is a one week vacation. Earlier you said that some people take a one or two week vacation honeymoon. I don't know a lot of people that took a two week honeymoon. I know a lot of people that took a one week honeymoon. Yeah, that's true. And because you can't have, you don't have that kind of time. You can't take two whole weeks off of work in a row, Stephen. Yeah, you're right.

My bad. Yeah, I think regardless of what choices other people decide to make, everybody's different. They get to make whatever choices they want. At least everyone should consider the question of, am I doing this because it's what everyone else around me is doing? Or am I doing this because these things, are what I really value and really want in life.

And if you come to a different conclusion than me about what you really value in life, that's okay. It's not a big deal. But you should at least consider the question, right? Consider the alternatives. So that's what we're trying to bring to the table is. What are the alternatives to what everybody else is doing? I think it's fantastic.

Great advice. And yeah, this is, I don't, I don't, I think we understand why, we don't, like, the four of us understand why everyone isn't going down that path and why many people seem to be kind of just wandering, not saving, investing, working long hours, and not really having to find these things. Answer those questions and then go out and make it happen.

It's all you guys have done twice now. Well, three times, yeah, it looks like. One of the hardest parts of my life is not preaching to people that I see making what I consider mistakes in their finances. It was a sign of maturity when I finally said, I'm not the boss of the world, but I really want to be. And I just want to show people, you can do it. Whatever fixed income is in your life that you can't get over, you know, things like health care issues. I know somebody who's a diabetic and their costs are $11,000 a

year. That's a fixed cost forever. So that's just part of your expenses. But that doesn't mean you can't become financially independent. Absolutely. But you have to make this step. You have to take the steps to become financially independent. And I hear a lot of people saying, oh, well, you should just increase your income instead of reducing your expenses. Well, okay, that's a great choice. It's not always available for everybody, although I think that there's a lot that you can do, you know, side gigs and things like that. But everybody I know can reduce their expenses. Everybody I know, including me, has some pretty not necessary expenses in their balance sheet.

So, you know, when you live on less, you have to do less to have the same lifestyle. I just. And I feel like. Yeah. And I feel like one of the things to that doesn't get talked about a lot. Even in like the financial independence community, you know, there's a lot of focus on reaching like this end goal. But, you know, your number. But I think that there's something to be said for temporary measures.

You know, people want to maybe move to a particular city and live there. because they feel they identify with it. That's where they want to be, right? Well, if you can't afford to live there right now, what if you scale back? You don't have to live in Kansas forever, but you could live there maybe two years in a low-cost living area, get your stuff together

and figure it out, figure out a way to make that work. I mean, another part of our messaging, too, is for us getting started, I mean, right after college, we got into personal finance. We didn't want to make any missteps because, you know, we both have seen how that can severely mess you up, down the road if you just make once, you know, you make a few, a couple mistakes here and there with your finances and how it can snowball as you get older. And so we were really excited to figure out

the right steps, those steps that we wanted to take that made sense for us. And starting young really helped, I mean, right out of college, we got to it, you know, and it was easier then, too, because our line for acceptability, like, what is good? Our furniture was fine. We didn't need $7,000 kitchen table that's made of oak. We don't need that. We don't want that. And we can't afford that. And that kind of helps if you have that line lower and you kind of keep it low.

And that's part of what has been successful for us. And I think reaching young people who are open and interested in getting their stuff together, figuring it out. No one wants to work forever, I don't think. And even if they're passionate about something, at some point, you're going to be 50 years old and saying, like, is it over? Can I take a break? Nope.

Makes perfect sense to me. Should we move on to the famous four? Sure. Okay. It is now time for the famous four questions. These are the same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Lauren and Stephen, are you ready? Ready.

Okay. And you can answer these individually too. It doesn't have to, you'd have to come to a consensus on what is your favorite finance book. You can each have your own. We gave it some thought before. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we would say, a simple path to wealth by J.L. Collins. Yeah. Oh, nice. He was over last night. I had Friendsgiving last night and he's in town visiting. Oh, that's cool. That's awesome. Nice. Great. Great book. Everyone exists. Everyone should get that book and everyone should listen to the audio book. Because he has a very soothing voice. All right, what was your biggest money mistake? Here you go.

Biggest money mistake? Yeah. Ironically, I think our biggest money mistake was seeing a financial advisor. So when we lived in California, right out of college while I was in grad school, we had just started to really save, you know, and we had like $10,000 saved up at one point, and we said, you know, we know what we're supposed to do with this. We're supposed to invest this money. So we don't know anything about investing. So let's go down to our bank, Chase Bank. Let's go see an investment advisor and see what they have to say. And this guy sold us into this actively managed a bond fund that had a huge load fee on it and a high expense ratio. I'm not even sure why we were in a bond fund at age 22.

Because it paid him a lot of money. Yeah, no, that is the answer. I guess I am sure why. And it did pay him a lot of money and it didn't perform well. Even if it did perform well, it would have been still the wrong thing, like, without that prior knowledge. So, yeah, that was our biggest mistake, I think. It didn't cost us that much. in the long run. I mean, we were only investing $10,000. And, of course, you can sell those shares

down the road, which we did and buy the right thing. So it didn't cost us that much money, but it just felt like a big mistake because I felt like, you know, we put our trust in someone and kind of... Authority figures, someone who's supposed to know, you know? Yeah, I don't know. It just felt bad. So that's what I would consider our biggest financial mistake. And if you're listening, you know, you're not saying necessarily that the biggest mistake was seeing a financial advisor, but I think it was probably seeing a financial advisor that was not a fee only financial advisor. I definitely think there's advantage to seeing one that is,

that is like a flat rate fee type of situation where they're paid to give advice, not paid to sell you into a specific type of fund. I definitely think there's some advantage there. We ended up not ever doing that. We did our own research and reading, but yeah, I definitely think that's a better path to go if you're going to see a financial advisor. And I'm sure there's tons of really good financial advisors out there. We're not dissing the profession necessarily. We're just saying that particular guy. We kind of are financial advisors.

We're telling people financial advice. So we're definitely not saying you're bad if you're financial advisor. But yeah, the whole commission-based financial investing advice industry, I think is a flawed system fundamentally. I don't think it makes sense. It's a dying greed as well. Yeah. I hope so.

I hope so. Because commission-based is not acting in your client. best interests, you're acting in your own best interest. And that's kind of douchey. So, sorry, but it is. So on episode 41 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, we interviewed Kyle Mast, who was unbelievable. He dropped so much information about fee-based financial advisors. He gave you a place to go look for a financial advisor, the XY planning network. And I want to say that's XYPlanning.com. And then he came back again in episode 84 to give advice for people who aren't necessarily early retirees.

They're more normal aged retirees. But his advice in that first episode was just go to a financial advisor and show them what you have. Pay for an hour or two of advice and consultation. They can look at what you have, where you want to be and say, hey, here are some options. And when they're fee-based, they're not going to steer you into a bond, actively managed bond fund at age 22. No, that definitely makes sense. I think it's common sense when you think about it. We were just young.

You didn't know any better. If you don't know, then you don't know. For sure. What I don't know about physics, it fit into the Grand Canyon. It's not rocket science. I don't know anything about rocket science either. Okay. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out besides don't start investing in an actively managed bond fund? Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you're ever struggling to sort of figure out where to get started, the place to get started is definitely in your mindset.

And so our main advice to people is to think about, when you think about money, think that money can buy two things for you. It can buy things, possession, or it can buy freedom. And so once you make the switch in your mind, that money is able to purchase freedom, purchase your time back in the form of when you invest that money, it pays you forward for the rest of your life and you don't have to go to work as a result of that. Once you realize that money can buy freedom, you start realizing that when you're giving up something that you would normally purchase, you're not just giving it up for some weird, like ethereal concept or whatever.

You're giving it up to buy something that you want more, which is your own freedom and your own self-direction over your own days going forward. All right. Now it's time for the most difficult question of the Famous Four. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? Okay, so recently I was at my friend's daughter's birthday party. she's, well, it was the two-year-old's birthday party, but they have a five-year-old as well, and they both love dinosaurs.

So I asked them, what do you call a sleeping dinosaur? Oh. A Tarana snorous Rex. Oh, nice. It's good for five-year-olds, we promise. Yeah, they really like it. Yes.

And it's great for the listeners of Bigger Pockets Money. What can people find out more about you guys? So our website is, of a lifestyle.com. We also have an Instagram, a Facebook, Twitter is a little bit different. It's T-O-A lifestyle because of character limits. And it's just a trip of a lifestyle on Facebook and Instagram. And we will include links to all of the things we talked about here, including that article where you have all the graphs and all the charts and all the everything from

your trip around the country at biggerpockets.com slash money show 104. Lauren and Steve Thank you so much for sharing your story today. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having us. We really enjoyed chatting with you guys. That's great. And Stephen, when my daughter gets into physics in high school, I am calling you because I am not qualified to tutor her in anything.

Sounds good. Hit me up. Awesome. Okay. Thanks. Have a good day. We'll talk to you soon. You too.

Thank you. Bye.