BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 9 Things No One Tells You About Financial Independence

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

In this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, Mindy Jensen and Carl Jensen (our guest host for the week!) break down 9 financial independence (FIRE) lessons most people don’t discover until it’s too late. From the hidden downsides of early retirement to spending, purpose, and relationships, this episode covers what actually changes after you reach FI—and how to avoid the mistakes that can quietly derail your life. Whether you're pursuing FIRE or already financially independent, these insights will help you build a more sustainable, fulfilling life. To go beyond the podcast: Kick start your financial independence journey with our FREE financial resources - https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/ Subscribe on YouTube for even more content- www.youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney  Connect with us on social media to join the other BiggerPockets Money listeners - https://www.facebook.com/groups/BPMoney We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Everybody talks about starting their financial independence journey, investing, retiring early, but there's a lot of things that people never tell you. In this episode, we are breaking down nine things you probably don't know about financial independence that can make or break your journey to financial freedom. And welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And joining me today is my husband Carl Jensen. Hi, Carl. Hello. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? Good. This is my first time on in a long time. And before we begin, I have an important question for you. And it might be an issue, actually. I know Scott's out now, so I'm substituting for him.

But what happens if he listens to this? And he's like, well, maybe Carl should replace Mindy. Are you worried about that at all? You mean Scott might listen to this and think that you should replace me, and it'll be the Scott and Carl show? Yes, he'll be like Carl is so good that he should just continue on, and Mindy is out. Well, I've heard you on podcasts before, so I don't think he's going to say that.

Somehow I knew you would go there, but that's fine. I know my limitations. I am very happy you are joining me today while Scott is off playing hooky. Let's jump into this. You and I went through and talked about things that we discovered through the School of Hard Knocks on our way to financial independence. So let's not make my, not our, my listeners learn these lessons the hard way. I think they're kind of my listeners now too because I'm here talking.

So, and like we just talked about, I might end up taking over for you. Okay, then our listeners, thank you for listening. And here's some lessons you don't have to learn yourself. Carl, what's number one? The actions and mindset that got you to fire might hurt you post-financial independence. What do you mean? So when you're young and broke, money means everything. And saving a thousand dollars when you're 20 means something drastically different than saving

$1,000 when you're 50 because of that compound interest. It's going to do a lot more for you when you're young. Also, you're going to be in a different place in life. You might be able to hustle more. You might be able to have 10 roommates. I don't think in our place in life we would want to have any roommates. Like, how would you feel about that? We have roommates.

They're called our kids. But they're getting ready to leave. And then after we don't have kids living at home anymore, yeah, I'm not getting a roommate besides you. Yeah. And the issue with this is it's hard to break our old habits. We might have been doing these things for two decades. And our inertia is to keep doing them, but we can't because we're not going to live our best life post-five if we keep doing the same things. Oh, I have a good example. So we, in part, reached financial independence due to live in flipping where we, meaning him, did all the work ourselves. And then one day, a couple of years ago,

he came to me and said, what if we tore down the rental house and rebuilt it? And I'm like, no, I don't want to build a house. He's like, well, we'll hire somebody to do it. Oh, okay, maybe. And then he said, well, I mean, I'm going to do the electrical. And I'm like, and I'm back to no. I don't want to do any work on this house. I personally don't. And I also don't want him to do it. And he said, what did you say when I said, you're not going to do the electrical? I said, oh, that's fine. I completely agree with everything you say. Wow. Revisionist history here. So what he actually said was, but we could save $20,000. And yes, $20,000 is a lot of money. But not when you look at our net worth and our amount

of time that we have available. Even though he doesn't have a job, he's very, very, very busy all the time. I didn't want you to do the electrical work. Then our, the builder that we eventually hired has subcontractors to do everything. And their electricians were amazing. I'm so glad you didn't do that. I'm sure Carl's dad was an electrician. Like, it's not like he's just figuring this out as he goes. But Carl doesn't have the time to do the electric work. And it would have taken him significantly longer. How many guys did they have? Like nine? A lot. They had a team that came in. And how tall are our ceilings? Very tall.

20 feet in some cases. And we're putting lights in the ceiling. So, no, you don't have that time. But 20 years ago, we had more time than money. And therefore, it would have been a better choice for us to DIY. In fact, we did DIY a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Or all of it.

You hit on something critically important there. And the key word there is time. When you're young, you have a lot of time, right? You come home. I remember coming home. I was single. I had like nothing to do in my life. I would come home and sit on the couch and watch TV or do whatever for the next six hours.

Fast forward, 30 years, two kids, jobs, all this other stuff going on. Time becomes much more valuable. And the whole point of this point is you need to realize that and elevate time to a higher level and diminish money. It's worth buying your time back. So one exercise that I want to give to our audience, our audience, our audience, our listeners, is to determine the time value of their dollar. How much is your time worth? Is it worth $10 an hour?

Then if you're contemplating doing a job that would cost you $100 an hour, it's worth it for you to do it yourself. If your dollar value for your hour is $1,000, and it would cost you $100 to hire it out, it's a no-brainer to hire it out. Give somebody else the job and save yourself, the time. And also be honest with yourself, how long is it going to take you? Carl thought he could do all the electric in a week. He didn't do any of the electric, but I promise you it would have taken more than a

week. How much time did it take our team of nine? It took them a week or two. But if I would have stayed up and worked nonstop, I probably could have done it in a week. Stop. Stop talking. We're done. So number one, the actions and mindset that got you to FI will probably hurt you after financial independence. So evaluate the dollar value of your time to make sure. that you're spending your time wisely. One question for you, do you still look at the price per ounce of cheese or whatever when you go to the grocery store? I look at the price per ounce of everything for everything.

I still do too. And that brings us to point number two. It is hard to spend money. If you've pursued five for decades, maybe you've house hacked, maybe you've had hustles. You've probably been really good with money and really trying to save and invest. Now you might be a millionaire and you don't have to have to be a millionaire and you don't have to do that anymore, but good luck with that. Yeah, it's funny to hear you say that because what was that about you wanted to do all the electric to save $20,000? Do you know what the dollar

value of your time is? No. No, because you've never contemplated that. So you should listen to my show more. It is hard for us to spend money. We have been frugal our whole lives. We were raised with frugality. If you listen to that episode of the Rameet podcast, you heard. us struggling. It's, it's less of a struggle. We just got back from a five friends travel trip. And how did we get there, Carl? Did we fly coach? No, we flew in the big fancy seats in the front of the plane. My first time ever doing that. And was it the same price as coach? No, it was a little bit more. Yes, it was a little bit more. It wasn't like significantly more. We actually got a really smoking hot deal. One of our friends, Mark Troutman from Mark's Money Mind,

has a formula that he uses for traveling. He says, my baseline is economy plus. I don't even look at the price of economy. I want to sit in a nicer seat, so I look and I book the economy plus. And then I look and see how much more it is to fly business class or first class. And if it is less than $100 per travel hour, then I book it. Instantly, no brainer, those are my travel rules. And so I think it was like $400 more to fly the first class, but it was an eight-hour trip. So that's $50 per travel hour. That made it a no-brainer. We have adopted Mark's travel rules for upgrading to the lie flat seats and business class.

We have some of our own travel rules. And I think that creating rules around things like this are really helpful to get you, to, like, you're not making the decision anymore. I've already made the decision that I don't fly on a trip that leaves before 10 a.m. from our home airport, unless it's the only option is it leaves at 9 or whatever. So now I don't even have to look at the 6 a.m. flights. And just one caveat, you said my podcast, if I happen to take over because Scott and what we talked about, I will still buy you the first class seats as you bought mine for

international travel. We don't need to do that domestically. That's ridiculous. It's so strange, right? You sit there, the seats go out. You can actually lay down up there and they bring you like champagne when you get on and then like food and those wet towels. Like what even is the purpose of the wet towel? Are you just like, I'm unsophisticated as you can probably tell.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry that he's not cool and doesn't know what you're supposed to do with a wet towel. You wipe your hands. You wipe your face. You just like get a little refreshment. Okay. It's kind of strange, but whatever. Okay.

So our advice to you, if spending is hard for you, is to experiment. don't jump off the 6 a.m. multiple stops flight journey and instantly go to first class to go 100 miles down the road. But what do you value? I value being able to sleep in or not having to set an alarm. So I don't fly before 10 a.m. I don't want to get home at midnight and then be a wreck the next day. So we don't fly on a plane that lands after 7 p.m. again unless there's no other options. And if there's no other options, we might get a hotel near the airport because we live an hour away. This is an experiment that we've done that works and we're completely fine with it. Stay in a better hotel.

Have you ever stayed in a motel 6? Oh, I've stayed in much worse than that. Yes, they'll leave the light on for you. But so will all the other hotel chains. So see if there's a hotel chain that you like better. We used to stay at a lower tier hotel chain and now we stay at Hyatt and Marriott or better. And the pillows are nicer. The bed is more comfortable and we're actually able to get a better night's sleep, which enhances

the vacation. Experiment with your spending. Try the better cheese at the grocery store or try the better vacation. Try the better hotel. See what works and see what doesn't. If you don't like it, then you don't have to do it anymore. We've decided that if we are flying domestically, we're probably not going to upgrade a first class, unless it's the same price, which it never is. Because we just don't need the space.

What if I take over the podcast? If I flew first class, since I'm bringing in the money and you sit back in the coach seats, would you be okay with that? No. Okay. Nice try, though. Point number three, making money is addictive. At the point when you reach financial independence, you're probably really good at making money. Carl, are you retired?

Yes. Am I? Kind of. Kind of. Yes. I am partially employed as a real estate agent and as the host of this podcast. You're supposed to say for now. For now. For always. We are really good at making, well, I am really good at making money. He's retired. He's not making any money. I could quit. We are financially independent. We don't need any more money coming in.

But it's hard to stop. And I have another point to this. Do you remember when we did our first live and flip? And I'll back up a second. We made the core of our nest egg through live and flips. And I remember, remember, we had a condo in the city and the toilet started to leak. And when it did that, it was like an emergency alarm bells are going off in my head. I had no idea how to fix this. And this was pre-internet. So you just had to try to go to this big building called a library. They had books there that told you how to do stuff like this. But it was like, in my head, it was the end of the world. And since I've probably swapped on 100 toilets. I could do that all

day long. I could do it by myself. The first one probably took us multiple hours and we probably screwed it up. We weren't so good at the live and flips when we started by But now we're great. But now we don't really need the skill anymore, but it's so addictive because you see these houses. And you can do the calculation instantly. Oh, wow, that house is 400. I could spend 100 on this. And then we could sell for $200,000 more.

Make all this profit. We'll live in it for two years. And then, boof, we make all that money. But we don't need it. But we're so good at it now. And that's what makes it addictive. And that applies to anything. Like, you might have been okay at house hacking or being a real estate agent or whatever

you did to make your money. But at the time you reach financial independence, you're, you're not. you're better at whatever you did to get there than any other time in your life. So, man, it's hard. I still think about stuff like this. Look at houses around our neighborhood. And man, if we got that, what we could do with this. But it's the wrong attitude.

Yeah. Easily made money is a hard spigot to turn off. But money isn't the goal. Living a good life is the goal. Define your goals. Work to accept that those are the goals. And then figure out how to trust the math. and turn off the spigot.

And do as I say, not as I do, because I still really like being a real estate agent, although I could work a lot more than I do. I choose to work with one client at a time. And if it takes me a long time to help that one client find a house, still be it. I'm not going to take on other clients just so I can have this steady pipeline. It's just I don't want to work that much. Should we go on?

Oh, well, you might not have to if Scott chooses me. This is a gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, this is the joke that never ends. Scott's like, we will never have him out again. 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 Registeredagent.com slash money-free. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. From public records and compliance to your website, email, and phone number. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business. You start with a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. Northwest makes

life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business. They give you all the free tools you need after you form, like operating agreements, meeting minutes, and thousands of guides that explains all the ins and outs of running a business. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free. When the change season hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized, and that's great. If that's you or if it's not you, either way,

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Okay, what is point number four? Point number four, money will fix money problems, and it won't do much of anything else. And I know this from personal experience because I wasn't super happy in my job. And I thought, as soon as I reached financial independence, I will quit. And it'll rain beer and there will be unicorns and there will be rainbows and everything will be awesome. And then you quit and you feel pretty much how you did before. So after this happened, I started researching happiness. And it turns out, this is from Sonia. Do you know what to pronounce her last name? Liu Bumirski. That's perfect pronunciation. She's a psychology professor from Stanford, I think.

So that's very impressive. So I think what she has to say is true. And here is what she has to say. 50% of happiness comes from genetics. Like, you know, some people are just naturally happy. They're smiling all the time like Ned Flanders on the Simpsons or Ted Blasso. Yes. Yes.

So there's people like that. And that is not me. 40% of happiness comes from within. And this is stuff like gratitude, the perspective. You see the world. The filter you see the world. And there's a lot of genetic stuff to this too because you have to work at this. The really interesting part is the remaining 10% comes from circumstances, and financial independence is a circumstance.

It's a really great circumstance, and it's a circumstance that will allow you to work on happiness. But that's why just quitting won't make life instantly better for you, as I found out. Yeah, and this is the knob that most people try to turn. They upgrade their house. They upgrade their car. Or, you know, insert your favorite material possession here. You need something more, and that'll make you happy. and it makes you happy for a minute, and then it doesn't anymore.

I have a brand new car. It's new to me. It's not brand new. It's super old. I love it. But do I love it as much as when I bought it? No, because it's not new anymore. Tasing that new thing all the time is not really part of a successful financial independence journey.

So financial independence is a circumstance. It's a really wonderful circumstance, but you need to figure out how to move the needle on your happiness outside of that circumstance. Because if you are miserable before you reach financial independence or just not happy, you will also be miserable or just not happy after you reach financial independence. So our advice is that money won't make you happy, but while it won't make you happy, you can use it to work on yourself to see what will make you happy. Make a list of things that you enjoy and do them. Maybe you think you're going to enjoy it and then do it and you just ever, oh, you know what, that wasn't so great.

Stop doing it and go find something else to do. I'll throw one small caveat into here. Your money to buy me, the nice seat on the plane does make me happy. Yeah, I bet it does. It's short-term happiness, though. I do like that you said your money. So my money is mine. Until I run this podcast.

Done things change, then we'll have to revisit everything. Okay, Carl, point number five. Financial Independence might expose other problems. This one's a fun one. Let's give a personal example. Remember when you quit your job and I hadn't quit my job? So actually, let's back up a little bit. I was a stay-at-home mom for the first eight years of our oldest daughter's life.

And then I went back to work at Bigger Pockets when our youngest daughter was five. She was just going into kindergarten and we decided that I would go back to work. I loved my job. At the same time that Carl was kind of like, I don't really. love my job, I want to quit. We had reached financial independence, the number that we had set for ourselves. But we had one more year syndrome. We discovered after both of us working for a year that our family didn't really know how to function when both of us worked. And because we had reached our financial independence number, both of us didn't need to work anymore. I so wanted to

work. I mean, you got to play for health care. And we had two small children. You can't not have health care when you have two small kids. So we made the decision that he would leave his job and I would stay at mine. Now that you had all this newfound time on your hands, you discovered all these little things that should be done when I was a stay-at-home mom. I did the cooking and the cleaning because he was working outside the home. And he would, well, this needs to be cleaned. Yeah, well, you don't have a job. You can clean it. Do you remember that? Sort of. Yeah. Oh, Sort of. Oh, look at this revisionist history coming up again. And we just needed to adjust what was going on in our household. And it's hard to make these changes. But you have to work on these changes. You have to work on adjusting them. When you both have a full-time job, there's a lot of conversations you just don't have time to have. So financial independence will expose other problems. You need to have open communication with your partner. well in advance of both of you leaving your job so that you can figure out how your new dynamic is going to be.

Yeah. And to be clear, this is all on me if you couldn't tell by that. Oh, no, no, no. Some of it was me too. I really appreciate your cooking. If it was up to me, we would have SpaghettiOs every night. And when we went on for a fancy meal, it would be Taco Bell on down. Which is why I do all the cooking. I also really like it. She's a wonderful cook. I am extremely sub-accomable. No, limited in his abilities. And I love it.

So that's a dynamic that we have discovered. I like doing it and I'm good at it. He doesn't like doing it and he's not as good at it. Yeah. But I'd be serious for a moment. Like us, I had a full-time job. It was a very demanding job. Sometimes I'd work 60 or 80 hours a week.

And at the same time, we're doing a house flip. We have two kids. I'm writing on a blog. And then all of a sudden, a lot of that goes away. A job in being super busy can bury. a lot of other problems. And then once you have this vacuum of time, you start paying attention to it, and it's up to you to figure out how to adjust. I can actually think of two people. I'm not going to name names that I think they probably got divorced because of financial independence. All of a sudden,

these people were around each other all the time, and they realized that they weren't as compatible as they thought they were. So, yeah, this is, tread very carefully here. I think we've adapted pretty well, not perfectly, but it's a big adjustment, right? I think quitting your job is equivalent to it's not as big as getting married or having kids or a job change, but it's up there. It's a huge, huge change and don't underestimate the work you have to do to adjust successfully. Yeah, it requires a lot of communication. And I think the communication should start at least a year before you quit your job. Yeah, we navigated it. We had some bumps in the road, but we came out on top on the other side. So, yeah, tread carefully is a really good bit of advice. Now I want to know who these people are that

got divorced. Thank you for not throwing me out. And if you continue doing the podcast, I will take over more of the cooking. I'm going to go to the grocery store and stock up on SpaghettiOs right after this. I think they're like $5 for $4 right now. Yeah, no. Okay. Point number six. Fire life could be lonely. Fire's great, right? Yeah. I mean, if fire wasn't great, you would not be listening to this right now. You wouldn't be pursuing it.

You know that not trading so much of your time for your job in the future is going to enhance your life. But many don't handle it well. Male traditional age retirees lead the league in suicide and loneliness is a key factor. Loneliness and social isolation, lots of friends from work. You build your whole life around the people that you're spending the majority of your waking hours with. And then all of a sudden you're not there anymore. You're the only one, especially if you are an early retiree. You might be the only person in your friend group who doesn't work anymore. And what are you going to do? How are you

going to socialize? We build our lives around our careers. I do think that early retirees can be better equipped to handle the change. But at the same time, they have a bigger change. Because when you're 65 in retiring, there's other 65-year-old retirees. When you're 40 in retiring, there's not that many. One thing you can do is move to Longmont. Again, I'm a real estate agent in Longmont. You want to come live in Philandia. Come on over. I have a real quick story about all this. I remember my first day off. I had quit work on a Thursday. And on Friday, I went walking around Roosevelt Park, which is this big park near us. And I'm looking around and who do I see? There were two groups of people there. There was younger ladies pushing baby strollers and senior citizens walking around the park.

I'm like, I'm introverted enough. I'm certainly not going to. These people are not in my my Venn diagram of like I'm not going to talk to anyone to be clear, but especially I have little in common with either of these. The old people would probably be suspicious and the ladies would probably call the police. So I'm like, wow, what happens now? how do I, I don't have my coworkers anymore to talk to for eight hours a day. It is a change, but thanks to the internet, as you said, there's so many resources to build a nice, healthy social life post-fi. Yeah, start now, start right now, even if you're nowhere near financial independence and make some FI friends. The Facebook group ChooseFI has a whole lot of local groups.

In fact, they've got, you don't even have to go on Facebook to find them, go to choosefi.com. com slash local and you will see, what do they have like 500 and something local groups around the globe. If they don't have one near you, email Brad. Brad at choosefi.com and he'll help you set one up. It's a great low cost or no cost way to meet local people who are interested in financial independence. You can start to make friends. And by the time you are able to retire, you already have people to hang out with. other FI groups available. There's Meetup.com has financial independence groups that host meetups locally. Phi Friends Connect is a traveling group. They travel around the country. I'm sorry, they travel around the world doing different fun things with other people who are also in the same

path. Why am I drawing a blanket all these five things? Oh, shoot, Camp Fi. There's a CampFi.org. There's a, there's probably a campfi location near you or close travelable. distance to you. That's a great place to connect with people in all parts of the spectrum of financial independence. Oh, there's economy too. And it's so interesting to go to these things because I'll back up a second real quick. When I first discovered financial independence, I thought I would dip in and out of this community. I dip into it, learn how to become financial independent, get my money straight, and then retire. And then I would move on with my life. Instead, it took over our lives. Like, what did we just get back from? A river cruise in Europe with 38,

Phi people, Phi friends travel.com. Shout out to them. Shout out to Kristen. At first I thought, what's the matter with me? I'm only spending time with these retired people, but it makes perfect sense because the people who have jobs can't take a three-week trip to Europe or do some of these other things. And additionally, you're probably going to have a lot more in common. Money informs a lot of the other values in life. So it's worth engaging with the five community. Even if you're an introvert like me who is terrified of people, the five people are less scary. Yeah, I will say that a large portion of the people in the FI community call themselves introverts, but they have a lot of conversations. They have a lot of, they get energy from the people

in the community because we have so much in common. All right, Carl, point number seven, you have to reinvent yourself and probably more than once. God, I'm going to do some quick math, which is probably a mistake, but let's see, 16 times seven. That is 100. 102? No, 112. And that is about, do you just seven times 16? Yeah, 112, I think. Never do math live. That's a mistake.

First rule of podcasting. So 112 hours is how many hours you are awake if you sleep eight hours a night. If you have a job, your job takes up over a third of those and maybe more if you've got a commute or a demanding job. All of a sudden, you've got this vacuum to fill. you're no longer doctor, whatever, or software developer, whatever, you are whatever you decide to make yourself be. And this takes work. This is another thing I screwed up. Just about every mistake in financial independence I made after I retired. Like, I thought life would just come to me, and there'd be always amusing things to do, and people would come out of the woodwork, and life would

be glories. And it turns out none of those things happen on their own. You have to make them happen. And so you need to reinvent yourself. You have to figure out what you're going to do post-fi. Establish a routine. We could probably have a whole show just on this because it's very simple and complex all at the same time. Yeah. Let's look at an example. When you were working, you were the frugal guy.

You didn't go out to lunch with all of your coworkers. You brought your lunch. Maybe they even called you cheap. Once you retire early, all of a sudden you're the, oh, my goodness, how did you do it, guy? no one can connect the dots on how you were able to retire early. If this isn't the person you want to be known as, change your narrative. How do you want to be spending your days? Have a plan before you leave your job so that you are forcing the narrative.

I am the fit guy now, or you are the fit guy now, because you spend your days working out in the morning. You go to the gym every single day. You are the hiking every Thursday guy. You are the, yeah, I can help you move. that couch on Friday morning guy because you don't have a job and you have become very helpful. You become very fit. You're also the always there at school drop off and pickup guy.

I have a real interesting story about that that connects to it. So great segue. I didn't even tell you to say that. My point with this story is do not listen to what anyone else tells you or thinks about you. The only thing that matters is you. So I retired and I was I think I was talking to a friend who also was tuned into this community. but I'm like, hey, I'm going to go pick my kids up from school. He's like, don't you feel a little weird doing that?

I'm like, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it the drive line? Like, why would I feel weird about that? He's like, well, how many other guys are there? I'm like, I don't know. It's probably like five out of a hundred. It's mostly moms, I guess. He's like, that doesn't make you feel weird.

I'm like, no, why would it? And I thought that was the weirdest thing to be judged on or even think about. I mean, what do you think about this? It was like one of the weirdest conversations I've ever had in my life. Like, even if they did care, why would I care? Okay, that's hilarious because when I was the mom dropping kids off at school, I would notice the dads because there are so few dads. And my first thought was, oh, I wonder what they do for a job that they can drop off their kids.

What a sexist thing for me to think. Wow. Yeah. Maybe it was you who made this comment, although I, you didn't make it, but you were thinking it apparently. But, I mean, it's probably five out of 100 kids are getting picked up by their dads and everybody else is getting picked up by their moms. I know one kid that got picked up by his dad because his dad worked at the building around the corner.

So he'd pick him up, bring him to the building, and then the babysitter would come and pick them up from his work. Because drive line's awful. Drive line is awful. Drive line is awful. Yeah. So you are going to have to reinvent yourself. start thinking what you want to be known as.

Yeah. And then work towards that. All right, Carl, number eight. Yes, jobs are underrated. I'll bet you didn't see this one coming. No. So there's a phrase I heard. I think it might have even been Warren Buffett who said this.

And it went something like, people love the cages that bind them or something like that. And what he meant by that is a lot of people just like being told what to do. They like having a routine. They like having a structure in their life. that's imposed on them by other people. And a job gives you all that. It gives you a lot of what you need.

It gives you a routine. It gives you money. It gives you friends. It gives you purpose. And once you retire, you're going to have to come up with all those things yourself. Their output does that. Like, you're staying at this job, not for the money because you enjoy doing it, correct? Yes.

I love talking about money and finance and real estate. And this job gives me a platform to do that. You know, if you are looking for somebody to tell you what to do, I'm happy to tell you what to do. Well, no surprise there. So maybe your wife, if your wife, like me and your wife is bossy, like some wives are, assertive. Your wife will assert your routine. But I think this is probably why, like I think of people like Pete is very independently

mine, Pete, Mr. Romney Mustache and a lot of other five people don't enjoy routine. And they don't like being told what to do. And I think that might be the number one thing that makes people both go for FI and then become successful post-fi. Because they do whatever they want. Yes, they don't want a job. They don't want that cage around them. Yeah. So our advice is in retirement, you're going to have to figure out how you are going to spend your days.

Your boss isn't going to make you be there at 8 o'clock in the morning so you can sleep in if that's what you want to do. If that is what your body allows you to do, mine doesn't. If you want to stay up late, you can. If you want to go on a hike every single day, you can. But start thinking about how you want to fill your time. What I like to say is what you do on the weekends is what you're going to be doing in retirement. So on the weekends, if you get up at the crack of noon and you watch TV for eight hours a day and then you go to bed, that's probably how a lot of your retirement is going to be. If that's not what you actually want to do, start thinking about things that you've.

can fill your time with. Ooh, and now we come to the big number nine, the very big one. Before we get to this, I'm going to ask you a question and then I'll lead into this. Why do people like travel, especially in the, I think everyone loves travel, but especially in the financial independence community, it's such a, I don't know, values the right word, but it's such a thing that many of us like to do. Why do people enjoy it so much or why do they strive for it? Is it the freedom to just see new things and experience new places?

I don't think it's quite the freedom. I'm looking for a different word here. I don't know. Yeah. So I think it's the novelty of it. You're doing something new. You're going to a place you haven't done before. I think we've got this term hedonic treadmill.

And number nine is you never step off that hedonic treadmill. What I was getting at with that is what lights you up today and what is interesting for you now eventually gets boring. And that's why people like to travel. There's challenges involved. There might be a language difference. you're in a new place. You have to figure out how to navigate the transportation, housing, all that stuff. So I think travel allows people to get off that hedonic treadmill. And this is yet another one of the big challenges of FI. Like my life is completely different than when I retired like nine years ago.

It's completely different from what I was doing a year ago because we've got this house project going on. But I love it. I'll back up and say one more thing and I'll let you talk. When I was younger, I remember having these performance interviews at a job and the person would be like, where do you want to see yourself? Where do you see yourself in five years and 10 years? And I kind of like those questions because I liked planning and I liked knowing exactly what my life would be like. And since then, I've completely changed course, done a 180 because my favorite part of life now is I have no idea what we're going to be doing in two years, especially after the youngest baby bird leaves a nest. It's so neat that those chapters are completely blank. We might be living in Portugal. We might be living

here. Who knows what we're going to be doing? And I really like that. I think doing the same thing would be so boring. I can't imagine being in a cube for four decades. I mean, I was happy with it at the time. Then you remove yourself from that cage and you see what life's like on the other side. Yeah, you don't miss the cage. I think that's a good point. The newness of everything. You're constantly looking for something new and the world is huge and you can find a lot of new things. How many countries have we not been to? What are there? Like 280 countries or 180 countries? Yeah, we still have a lot. Yeah, we've been to like seven.

Have we been even to seven? Yes, we have. Does the country we live and count? Yes, it's a country we've visited. We have visited the U.S. Check. But not all of the U.S. I still have two states.

Yeah. And this kind of number nine here goes back to our reinventing yourself. You're going to have to do that frequently. You can't just do it once after you quit work. You're going to have to do that as soon as your hobby or whatever you decided to do. post-retirement gets boring. Yeah, but you do need to work kind of consistently to define and redefine what it is that you love. Yeah.

So my favorite part of fly life is I have a routine. I work out every morning. I do a little bit of writing. So I've got the routine in my life, but then I have novelty too. So it's nice, at least for us, for me to have these touchstones, the things you do every day. But then there's variety in every day, too. Like when I go for a walk, I try to do it a little bit differently every time and try to notice new things. I think we should do the bonus one too. Okay. This is one of my favorite ones.

What's the bonus? The bonus one is, and I'll back up a second, I'll tell a little story too. When I discovered financial independence, I had a bad day at work. I discovered the Mr. Money Mustache blog, and I thought, this is like the best thing I've ever read, but this is amazing. I could quit my job. We were already savers. We weren't quite ready yet, but it just blew my mind. So the first thing I thought is, I'm going to tell all my friends and family about this, and they're going to They're going to think the exact same as me. They're going to think this is the best thing ever, and they're going to do the same thing. And then it'll be great.

We all go on vacations or ride our mountain bikes together. And then you tell all their people, how do they react usually? No, I don't want to do that. I'm young. I don't want to save my money. I want to spend it while I, while I'm young enough to enjoy it. And it's kind of shocking how many people are opposed to this, not just, that's not for me. They're like adamantly opposed to the idea of saving a little bit more money now so that you can retire early.

Yeah. Or my favorite response, do you have a terminal disease? Is there something you're not telling me? No, you don't have to work. No, I like my job. That's another good one. I really like my job. Great. Then work there because you choose to, not because you have to. So this bonus point, no one will understand financial independence. I'm something. might, but they're very few and far between. I'm trying to think, have we... Convinced someone? No. We... I mean, on this podcast, maybe. Yeah, we might have convinced random strangers on the internet, but there's that saying when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. They were already set. They just needed someone to give them the message like Pete, Mr. Money Mustache did for me. So yeah, and I've realized the

best thing to do is just lead by example, like, have a great life. And then if people are curious, inquisitive, they'll ask you about it, and then you can talk nonstop for eight hours about the loveliness of fire life. And then they get a restraining order. That's only happened a couple times. And I think they've expired. I'm good now. I'm in a better place. Well, Carl, thank you so much for stepping into Phil Scott's shoes while he is gone. You don't need to come back. It'll be my show, still, not yours. For now. For now, for always. If you, my darling listener, would like more financial independence information, head on over to biggerpocketsmoney.com to sign up for our newsletter, which I send out once a week on Wednesdays. We also have free resources and calculators that Scott

has been furiously typing up and templates to help you accelerate your FI journey. That's biggerpocketsmoney.com. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I am Mindy Jensen. He is Carl Jensen. Thank you so much for stepping in again. And we will see you later, Alligators. 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. 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. Build your business identity fast with Northwest registered agent and get access to thousands of free

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