BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Why This “Physician on FIRE” Ignored the 4% Rule & Delayed Early Retirement w/Leif Dahleen, MD

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Why do many wealthy people wait so long to retire? Despite earning a physician’s salary, living frugally, and saving what most would call “more than enough” money, today’s guest worked for another four years before pulling the trigger on early retirement. Is he on to something? Does the four-percent rule no longer work in 2024? Stay tuned to find out! Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast! Leif Dahleen, MD, the “Physician on FIRE,” was already financially independent when he discovered the FIRE movement. But rather than calling time on a successful healthcare career, he continued to beef up his nest egg. Why? Leif had determined that he needed forty-to-fifty times his annual expenses to feel comfortable walking away from his nine-to-five. Do more FI-focused folks need to follow Leif’s formula to account for the unknown? We’ve all dreamed of what a day in the life of an early retiree might look like. Leif had his own expectations, but in this episode, he shares what he discovered when his schedule was suddenly clear. You’ll also learn about the mindset high-income earners need to avoid squandering wealth, and why putting down roots in a low-cost-of-living area could be the difference between fast-tracking retirement and keeping up with the Joneses! In This Episode We Cover Why most people DON’T retire on the four-percent rule (even though it works!) Fast-tracking the path to early retirement in a low-cost-of-living area How to actually leave your W2 job once you have enough money to retire Why earning a high income doesn’t guarantee FIRE (and common pitfalls to avoid!) Choosing the right retirement withdrawal strategy for your financial situation Why Leif won’t adjust his retirement lifestyle as he continues to build wealth And So Much More! Links from the Show Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggerPockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Join BiggerPockets for FREE Email Mindy: [e-mail] Email Scott: [e-mail] BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group Physician on FIRE Buy Scott’s Book “Set for Life” Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area See Mindy and Scott at BPCON2024 in Cancun! How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? (00:00) Intro (01:58) Leif’s “Unfair” Advantage (06:33) Leaving the Medical Profession (12:42) Funding His Retirement (15:09) Does the 4% Rule Work? (23:37) Adjusting Your Retirement Lifestyle (29:23) Retirement Expectations vs. Reality Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-569 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a career that's hard to walk away from? Whether it's because you've invested time and money into your education or took the time to climb the corporate ladder to finally be at the top, can you really walk away when you hit the 4% rule? And should you? We will break that down today. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen.

And with me, as always, is my CEO on fire co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Minnie. always great to be here, doctoring up someone's financials here. Looking forward to it today. Bigger Pockets has a goal of creating one million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting. We are so excited to have Leif, physician on fire, here on Bigger Pockets money today. And Leif, of course, for those who know him, started in a great spot to approach fire. He is a doctor earning a very high income and

spent very little out of the Midwest. No surprises that he was able to satisfy the financial independence equation and do that between the frugality and the very high-powered offense on the income front. But we're also going to talk about his business success, which he started while working full-time as an anesthesiologist, and how that's parlayed into the ultimate early retirement and incredible options. We're also going to get into the mindset of actually retiring and how you might really have to go well beyond the 4% rule in order to pull the trader. Before we get into Leif Story, we want to thank our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Connect Invest, Real Estate Investing simplified and within

your reach. Now, back to the show. Leaf Delene, physician on fire. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you. This should be a lot of fun. I'm, you know, overdue to join you on a podcast. And so I'm glad we could be here.

I'm glad Scott was able to join us, and this should be a lot of fun. This will be a lot of fun. For those of you who do not know, Leif is the man, the myth, the legend behind the physician on fire blog, and also, not just a clever name. He is actually a physician. So Leif, you have an unfair advantage that we, that's a phrase we use here on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. And your unfair advantage is that you make a boatload of money because you're a doctor. how did you go from being a doctor to being financially independent? I mean, it doesn't seem like it's that big of a stretch.

Wow, you make a lot of money, you don't spend a lot of money, you save it up, you invest, and then you retire. But there's a lot more to it, especially for somebody who is in an occupation that is so closely tied to your personality and your person. Sure, Cheryl. You answered part of the question for me, earned a lot, saved a lot invested, and lo and behold, we had enough money to do whatever we wanted, including retire. But I think one of the big challenges is the fact that there are expectations,

you know, from society, maybe from family, from friends like, oh, you're a doctor, you're a rich doctor. And it starts when you're in medical school, right, which is many, many years for becoming a poor doctor and maybe decades away from being a rich doctor. So the the expectation to, you know, drive a particular type of vehicle or live in a certain neighborhood. It's definitely there. And so I think for me, just, you know, my identity was, yeah, somewhat tied up in being a position. But I looked at it more of, you know, that's my job. That's a career, but it doesn't define me.

And it certainly doesn't need to define how I live my life. and I found it quite easy to save, believe it or not, and I was making $300,000 to $400,000 a year. But I certainly know many, many, many, many physicians who had similar earning power and were not saving because this delayed gratification that we all kind of deal with in our 20s often leaves to an explosion of spending in our 30s. And I feel like I was pretty well able to avoid that. I married someone who you have both met and no. We're relatively frugal compared to our peers,

even if we might look like spendthrift compared to the average American household. So I think that that is the point that I want to kind of dive into in this episode is you had to make different choices. I mean, you said it yourself, oh, I was making $300,000 or $400,000 a year. on earth that I retire so early, I guess we'll never know. Like, you know, it's really not difficult to see, you know, the facts, but there's a lot more nuance to it. Like you said, doctors drive fancy cars. They don't drive HHRs, except they do sometimes.

And did you ever feel like fellow doctors were kind of looking down on you when you were making these choices that didn't align with, you know, the traditional rich doctor vibe? I can almost guarantee maybe looking down isn't the right term, but questioning and being curious and wondering why I hadn't yet upgraded to something better to drive. But the fact is I didn't care that much what I drove, and it certainly helps to not care too much about what other people think. Like in rural Minnesota, rural Michigan, very few people drive really nice vehicles. And if you do, that might get you some envy. It might get some weird looks. Like, who does he think he is kind of thing, right?

You know, I'm not in Miami where I'm trying to, like, you know, valet park my little Chevrolet when there's Lamborghinis and Ferraris all around, right? You know, the nicer cars in the, you know, doctor's parking lot might be a Ford F-150. Maybe we've got the Raptor version or something. But it was not, you know, the Midwest. as you know is not as showy for lack of a better word. It's some other places in the world. So living in relatively low cost of living areas and places where modesty is a virtue

certainly makes it easier to live the way we did. I think that there's not a lot of, you know, like that it makes sense, right? Like mid six figure salary, middle class lifestyle in the Midwest, numbers are going to work out. You don't have to be a great investor, although I know that you are a great investor. and, you know, because you index fund, you have some index funds. So you're a great investor. Pretty easy to be great. Yeah.

You know, there's a big bull market. So, you know, not hard, I think, to understand how you achieve, you know, fire at the highest level. All that needs to pass is a couple of years. And the wealth will begin to compound really nicely in that front. But I don't think a lot of people set out to become doctors so that they can retire early. That's not, that's not really the general life path there. I think there's more to it around fire in the concept of being a doctor that is more of a mental challenge.

Can you walk us through how you think about actually leaving the medical profession once the numbers make sense? Yeah. And I want to clarify, and I don't think you really made that accusation or whatever it may be, but I certainly didn't enter their profession with the goal of retiring early from it. Oh, of course not. It just, you know, it was one of those things where I was good at science and math and graduated top of my class. And my grandpa was a doctor and my dad and his dad were dentists. We had to have health care in the blood. It was kind of, I don't want to say, obvious decision.

But it was one of those things I knew I could do and chose to do. And it was a good, stable career. and so I found my way into anesthesiology and about 10 years into it, into my career, that is, after college, after medical school, after a four-year residency, you know, and then 10 years in, I was at a place where I like my job all right, but I always like my days off even more, my weeks off, even more than that. And I guess the question is, how do you stop me? making that $400,000 a year and be okay with it.

You know, one thing that makes my case just a terrible test case, a terrible case study is the fact that when I did discover financial independence and that's what 2014, 2015, I realized it was, you know, a whole area of study that I had kind of ignored. I knew enough to invest in mutual funds and not to buy whole life insurance, but I didn't know all that much about personal finance or investing. And I had never heard about financial independence until I discovered, you know, these fire blogs. And I knew that other doctors were in the same boat because I probably had more of an interest in it than most people in my profession. And I still didn't know much. So I decided to start a website talking about it.

You mentioned it in the intro position on fire. and I've since moved on and sold the site to a couple of enterprising physicians who are doing a good job with it and they've had it in their hands for the last almost a year and a half now. But what makes my case study terrible is the fact that I made additional money doing that while I was running it and then when I sold it. But the truth is I discovered financial independence, or let's say 2015, added my investments realized at the time spending about 70,000 a year. Now this is after our mortgage was paid off, after my student loans were paid off, all of that.

Pretty, you know, our expenses were pretty modest. 70,000 a year, seven years ago, probably closer to 100,000 a year now. But we're financially independent when I learned about it. I just did the numbers, like 25 times that. Yeah, that's about where we're at. I worked another four or five years in anesthesia, and so I would have been, between the additional money I made and saved during that additional four to five years and the investment returns on our nest egg, which was already about 25x, you know, I even without the website, we're retired with probably pretty close to double what I would need to be a financially independent. And then the earnings from running fairly successful online business and then selling it, you know, even another level beyond that.

So financially, the decision was easy to make. You said after you discovered the concept of financial independence and you'd learned that you were financially independent already, you continued to work for four or five more years. Why did you continue to work? I liked the job, you know, it really did. I just would have felt, I don't know, to me, irresponsible to just walk away as soon as I had, you know, the money in my hand. I liked where we were living. I just didn't really want to make a drastic change. And part of starting that blog and writing about it and putting my thoughts out there for the world to read and react to and respond to was a good way for me to work through the finances, the psychological impact, all of that.

It really helped me kind of solidify what I wanted to do, you know, where I was at and got, you know, quite a lot of good feedback, other people in similar situations, how would they approach, you know, choosing retirement versus working part-time, which I did the last two years. And so I kind of eased into it. But it wasn't so much part of my identity that my ego would suffer if I wasn't working as an anesthesiologist. And so I learned that over the course of those three to five years by thinking about it, writing about it, and even practicing some mini-retirement style. trip. Stay tuned for more from Leaf on why the 4% world didn't work for him and why most people don't use it today. After a quick break. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people

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slash BP money. Welcome back. We're here with Leif Dahlene. Let's jump back in. Mechanically, how do you fund your lifestyle? Is it from dividends from your portfolio? Is it from these other types of income streams? Like, how do you actually pull money from your investment portfolio to fund your lifestyle whole time? Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. The plan I had was, like you mentioned, dividends from taxable investments, which are primarily index funds, a real estate fund or two. And then I would sell lots that have the least amount of gain to minimize my capital gains taxes.

And I have been collecting on a 457B account, which is a deferred compensation account that I grew to, again, multiple six figures to repeat that phrase, over my 13-year anesthesia career. And so I get a few thousand a month from that. So I kind of had it all planned out. And then I sold the blog and I self-financed a significant portion of that. And so I get a check every month that covers our expenses. And that will last for quite a while.

So again, terrible test case. I did have a plan and it was working. But now I don't really need that plan. have this plan B. So when you started the blog, did you start it with the idea that you were going to sell it eventually, or did you start it just as something fun to do? I didn't really think about an end game or an exit plan. And my, I mean, if you would have asked me back then, like, do you think this will make

money? But like, well, I mean, if it makes, you know, a hundred bucks a month, that would be really cool. But I did not expect it to do way, way, way better than that. I guess I did realize maybe a couple of three years in that this truly is an asset that someday could be sold. And when you have a business that's very much kind of one person focused, you want to, if you think you might want to take that exit someday, kind of have to pull yourself back a little bit from the focus and make it more about the reader, which I kind of always tried to do. But once I realized, oh, this is a business time to stay blog,

I tried to make sure that my focus was on the reader and not just an online diary or here's, here's me, here's what I'm doing. This isn't about me. This is about you. You know, one of the things that has bugged me for fire and for countless BP money listeners is this concept of nobody actually ever retires on the 4% rule. It is the math of sound. It's, you know, we've exhausted that.

We've talked to the originator of the 4% rule, the Trinity study, Bill Bingen. We've talked to Michael Kitsis, who has expanded on that work and refined it and polished it, made it really shiny. You know, so we've talked about it. We're not questioning the math, but nobody ever actually acts on that. You know, again, if you find that person who is truly a 4% rule, early retiree with no other income streams, no large cash cushion, no social security, please refer them to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. We would love to interview them.

We have never found that person, and I don't think we ever will. What is striking about your situation is not that you're abnormal, but that that is, you know, every early retiree we've talked to has this that's actually living the early retiree lifestyle and is not working generating income has these aces in the hole. Something else beyond that. Like a massive real estate portfolio or a large cash position or a pension or a business or a side hustle or they work, I went back to work or their Wi-Fi. That's a popular one too. But I'm more curious about getting into your head here and thinking, you know, how do you think you would have been able to retire on the 4% rule and make that leap? And when I was blogging, I wrote up an investor policy statement. And in that, I said that I would retire with 40 to 50 X hour spending.

And why so much? Right. That gives me a 2 to 2.5% withdrawal, which is quite a bit lower than 4%. And there are a few reasons. I figured I wanted that cushion to allow myself to spend more, to allow for inflation, to due to the fact that I still kind of enjoyed working, it wasn't like a hardship or a travesty to continue to work. And since I already had 25X, well, if that goes up 10%, that's another 2.5. and I was making a multiple of our annual spending so I could set aside about three X per year.

So every year that I worked, I might be adding about five years worth of spending between my investment returns and my earnings, you know, when we were spending so little. So it just seemed like, yeah, it seems well worth it to continue on another four to five years in what at the time was a fairly new job while my kids were young and going to be in school. So yeah, without, you know, I can go back and look at that and that was written with no assumption of any online income and say that's where I would have been comfortable. So we're in that two to two and a half percent withdrawal rate based on what our spending was then. But also understanding that in retirement, that can change. You're going to, you know, in our case, travel more, which is more expensive than staying home. we're going to potentially regret the cars that we drive, right? You never know.

And we probably, yeah, I guess we have upgraded. We bought a first new car in retirement, right? So, you know, just knowing that there are many unknowns, you know, and it's the unknown unknowns that I wanted to have that large cushion for. Do you believe in the 4% rule? Do you believe that 4% is a withdrawal rate that is sustainable? You mentioned 2.5, and I know that leans more towards Big Earn and his thought process. And the 4% rule is originally meant for like a 30 year timeline. And you, God willing, will be a much longer timeline, which is where Big Earns advice and recommendations towards the lower end. Yeah, excellent point. That's another reason. Yeah. But I do. I think the 4% rule can work for sure.

And then for some people, you know, they're not adding four or five years worth of spending every year that they work. They might be adding a half years, you know, worth of spending every year that they work. And so, boy, to get that far beyond 4% might be a hardship. It might be a decade or more. And so, I mean, you can look at the historical data a million different ways, like Kitsas has, like Baker and has. like Bill Beggan has in the Trinity study, all of that. I've certainly looked at all of it. And yeah, it is sound for a 30-year time frame.

There's a very, very, very good chance that you will not run out of money. So yeah, I guess my answer is I do believe it can work. But I thought it would be easy enough to just work a little longer. One more year, four more times. And yeah. That's it. That's the thing, right? Is, you know, again, I think what's super valuable for people listening here is here's a guy who's actually retired.

Yeah, 300 bucks, time in the track meet the local high school. And who knows the math as well as anyone? You literally ran the website, physician on fire for years, which is a great fire website that talks about the 4% rule on these types of things. Yet your policy statement does not allow you to retire on the 4% rule. By the way, neither does mine. Mine's posted publicly on the Bigger Pockets website around that. I ain't retiring on the 4% rule on that and nothing else because I've interviewed too many people to know that nobody's mind actually works that way with just that level of wealth.

Yeah, you cross the threshold to fire, but you're not actually retiring early on that level of wealth, even if that's what you do all day long and that's your, and you know the math as well as anybody in the industry. And that's the phenomenon that fascinates me here on Bigger Pockets Money. is it's the five the four percent crossing the four percent will threshold is the starting point now the journey to actually retiring begins and that often takes people a several years of transition or comes with so much abundance that it's kind of like what the heck did I go to work for today which we occasionally have crossed on finance Fridays where the guy's job was clearly just holding back and was a waste of complete waste of time relative to the overall financial position I can't say

that I won't ever truly work again right I mean something might, you know, just cross my plate that sounds like really cool or it might be something that I start independently on my own. I'm 48 years old today and tomorrow. So I've got plenty of time and youth and the sound mind, I think, to, you know, to do something different if I choose to. Right now, it's still pretty fresh. I'm a little more than five years retired from. medicine. I'm about a year and a half retired from blogging. And I spent most of that last year building this house, moving into it, you know, making it our own and traveling in the summer and being a stay-at-home dad married to a stay-at-home mom. But it's all very fresh. And at some

point, especially when we're in an empty-nest situation, maybe I'll feel differently about being retired and staying truly retired. So if, you know, I come back on the show in five years, you know, maybe I would have a very different perspective. And I, I never try to make long-term plans, you know, more than about a five-year plan because, you know, man plans, God laughs, right? It's like going to be very different, no matter what I think it's going to look like in five years. whether, you know, whether due to exterior, you know, circumstances or internal motivations and, you know, you change your mind and who knows? So I'm not saying I'm not going to announce anything.

I don't have anything to announce, but I know enough to not, you know, say that here I am, I am retired and I'm never going to work again because that's not how they're from. This is the soft launch of smaller pockets from Leaf, 2027, that we just heard here. So love it here. We have to take one final break, but more from Leaf on life after FI when we're back. 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 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.com for half off your first year.

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Let me ask you another question here that relates to this question around the 4% role and why I think very few people actually stop working at the 4% rule. Let's say that my goal is, let's use $100,000 in the annual spend. And the goal is 30 times that number. So it's $3 million in wealth. And then you have a year like last year the year before where the stock market, you know, goes up 20%ish from that point. So now it's, now you get $3.6 million, which 36 times. And maybe you're well past it.

Maybe it's been five or six years since that point. And there's so much more than what you had intended at your retirement, which I think is actually going to be a normal. Because the 4% rule, again, is so conservative that most scenario is in the wealth being much greater. Right. You've started at that 100,000, right, adjust for inflation, not adjusting for your portfolio at all, you know, if you're doing it by that. That's right. If you're just in stocks in that portfolio, that's a very, that's happened to everyone who fired five, six, seven years ago, for example, from a relative wealth perspective, even after accounting for inflation around that. And so how does that change the perspective on life and time and money at that point? Does, you know, do you feel like an obligation to some degree to do more travel, upgrade things to a fancier level, buy the nice car?

Like, how does that change your perspective when, what I think is that the average outcome for folks in your situation that have retired five, six years ago transpires over a couple of years. Well, I guess what you're saying is that anyone who retired, like in my cohort of that, you know, five to six years ago, four or five, six years ago, we've seen, you know, tremendous stock market returns over that time frame. And what we've done essentially is survive the most critical period where a negative sequence of returns can really make the rest of your financial life a little more difficult. It makes it less likely that your money is going to grow over the 30-year period. Because if in that five years and the most important years for, survival of your portfolio is about two years before you retire to about five years after.

There's that seven, maybe 10 year timeframe where if the stock market goes down each of those years and you are spending now it's going to be a bit more than 4%. Maybe it's 5%. Maybe it's 6% if you're going by the book, starting with 4% of the initial balance and adjusting with inflation each year and ignoring the actual value of the balance of the portfolio. then you're actually spending a larger and larger percentage. Now, in that situation, a human might say, I'm not going to stick with this, by the book, 4% of what I started with,

adjusted for inflation. I can see that I have 28% less dollars than I did two or three years ago. I'm going to spend less. We're going to take one less vacation. We're going to postpone buying a new car to replace the used car. And so you're asking kind of about the opposite. Well, we are no longer really at risk of succumbing to a poor secret of returns. And I think you're right that we could choose to spend a bit more than the formula might suggest.

On the flip side, boom times tend to be followed by bust times. There's a lot of volatility over the years. And so you don't want to go hog wild. they don't want to do a reset after they run up of 50% or 100%. You don't want to get, okay, now it's 4% of the 3.6 million because the 4% rule does account for good times and bad times, but if you've only seen good times and you do a reset, now, again, you are at risk of sequence of returns going downward, which they probably will in the not too distant future.

Okay. So the answer is the don't move the goalposts. That's it. And the pile gets bigger and bigger, which just continues to keep things very stable. But you just don't move the goalpost. And that just gives you more and more and more security long term. And it sounds like the other part of it is you're just content with exactly what you have from a lifestyle perspective. And there's also probably not that pull to withdraw more than what you have. Is that, are those factors coming in? Yeah, that's good. I'm not saying that you should never spend your investment returns because most of us who are following, you know, not even the 4% rule, but something less than that, are going to end up with piles of money when we die unless we give it away while we're still alive or choose to spend a lot more. And I think the younger you are, the more cautious you should be because I still know that I could have a 50-plus-year investing time frame. But my parents who just came to visit, they are in their late 70s and their investments have done well recently. I'm not going to tell them to forego that $30,000 chip to South Africa that they took or whatever it might be. right? Like, they're at a point where they don't need to worry about 50 years, 20, 25. That's a possibility. But 50 plus, no, it's incredibly unlikely. Unless there are scientific advances that are coming and coming soon, that will blow us all away. What is the biggest difference between what you thought retirement was going to be like and what reality actually is? I think I probably assumed I would be more, quote-unquote, productive.

And, you know, do you know Parkinson's law? I don't. Yeah, Scott. I believe that's the one where a time, or the time, a task will swell to fill the time that you allotted to it. Exactly, exactly. So when you have unlimited time, the things that you want to accomplish have an unlimited time frame and no deadline. And so I find it's much easier to procrastinate, you know,

and things I might have gotten done in a weekend because I had the weekend and that's all I had. Well, I'll work on it and I'll putz around for an hour or two here and an hour or two there. But there's much less urgency in many of those things that will all get to it eventually. So I guess I thought it would be more productive in certain ways. and I think I have found a balance where I like to do different things throughout the day and not just focus on one thing all day long. Yeah, the productivity aspect, I am not retired, but my husband is.

And I have seen him, like as soon as he was done working, he's like, this is my time now. I have to run everywhere and be so fast all the time and just produce, produce, produce. And I was like, or you could take a break because now you're retired. And now he's morphing into the, it takes a lot longer to get things done because there's, I don't want to say there's no sense of urgency. And I'm certainly not throwing him under the bus. Probably a better sense of balance, right? Yes, it is okay to read a whole book that doesn't teach you anything.

It's okay to go and run a marathon, if that's, your jam, which it is not mine, but I hope you win. Yeah, no, that's, that's definitely, definitely true. Yeah, before the, we started recording, we were talking about what we did on the weekend. I was like, gosh, which days were the weekend? Oh, yeah, let's see, we had a family gathering and I made a bunch of pizzas, and then I watched football the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday, too, and that's okay. I enjoy football. Didn't get a lot done this weekend. Yeah. But also, what else do you have to do? Talk to you. Talk to Scott. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's perfectly

valid to take your time and enjoy your life. I make dinner most days. Yeah. All right. Well, Lee, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story with us. Thanks for share a day in the life of retirement looks like and, and being so open about the actual reality of getting way past it from a financial standpoint before making a leap. Super interesting. Congratulations on your fantastic retirement and your multi-marathon, your mornings. You don't even run the full marathons on there. That's just trading for you. It sounds like at this point.

So congrats on that. And I can't wait to see what the next couple of years bring for you. And last, super excited for the launch of smaller pockets. I got to check that before you do. If I log off quick, you know why. Domain name.com. leave it was great to talk to you thank you so much for your time today and we'll talk to you soon sounds good thank you mindy thank you scott we'll see you soon that wraps up this episode of the bigger

pockets money podcast he of course is the scott trench and i am mindy jensen saying take a bow highland cow