Insight with Chris Van Vliet - Retired at age 35: Steve Adcock on how you can reach financial independence

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Steve Adcock is an entrepreneur and a writer who retired from his IT job at the age of 35 with his wife Courtney. He joins Chris Van Vliet to talk about how he was able to retire early (without doing something like winning the lottery), why you don't have to work at a job that you hate, how you can be more financially responsible in your everyday life, what financial freedom looks like and much more! You can find out more about Steve by visiting his website: http://steveadcock.us If you enjoyed this episode, could I ask you to please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcast/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and makes a huge difference in helping to spread the word about the show and also to convince some hard-to-get guests.  For more information about Chris and INSIGHT go to: https://chrisvanvliet.com Follow CVV on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/ChrisVanVliet Twitter: twitter.com/ChrisVanVliet Facebook: facebook.com/ChrisVanVliet YouTube: youtube.com/ChrisVanVliet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, here we go and welcome back, my friends, to another audio adventure here on Insight. I'm Chris Van Vleit, thank you so much for being with us on this episode and on every single episode. If you don't already, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on whatever platform it is that you're listening on right now. This conversation is packed full of, dare I say it, so much insight. And there's also just a ton of actionable things in here that you can start doing in your life today. As you saw from the title of this episode, yeah, Steve Adcock retired at 35 years old. We get into his full story, but basically in a nutshell, he started working at 21, right out of college, like most of us do, realized that he hated his job, which is something that so many people also do.

And he started doing some math to see what he could do to never work again. And here he is, retired and living on his own terms with his wife. Now, I just want to say that this interview isn't just. about retiring young. Steve will tell you that's not for everybody. Although if that is something that you're inspired to do, you're definitely going to learn a ton here. But this is more just about being financially responsible and making better decisions with your money, which is helpful for anybody at any age. You can follow Steve on Twitter. He's at Steve on Speed. You can find me. I'm at Chris Famfleet. You can also check out his website. It's steveadcock.us where he has just a ton of great

articles and a lot of great resources on there. All right, let's dive in to this juiciness. Please welcome my guest, Steve Adcock. Steve, it is such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us. Likewise, I appreciate the opportunity. It's a huge honor. You know, I think a lot of people are going to see the title of this podcast and go, oh, that's great. Good for Steve. He must have won the lottery or something like that. Most people assume I either won the lottery or maybe I got an inheritance or maybe I sold a business. None of those things actually happened. Though I mean, I'll take the money, but yeah, that didn't happen. I did it the old-fashioned way. Yeah, I think the dream for people of retiring at any sort of age seems like just like that.

It seems like a dream. You know, even to retire at 65 seems crazy for some people. That's right. That's right. And I like to say the government should not define when you retire. That should be your choice and based on the decisions and your goals that you've maintained throughout your life. That is really the bottom line for me. I mean, it's pretty crazy when you look at your story. You worked for 14 years and then retired and now you get to do pretty much anything you want. I get to do. I get to wake up whenever I want without an alarm clock and do whatever I want for the rest of the day, go to bed whenever I want, and get up the next day and do it all

over again. I just cannot, I cannot think of a better way to go through life. So what was the genesis for this idea, Steve, that she wanted to retire early? Well, I worked, as you said, 14 years in information technology. So there's a good and a bad there. Obviously, you work in technology. You make a good salary. That part's great. But for me, it also drains the life out of you because you're always on call. Work never really stops. So in my case, I couldn't just, I just could not see myself doing that for the rest of my life. It was life draining. I never got any satisfaction out of that job. So for a while, for like the first half of my working career, I would reinvest that money into my happiness or what I thought was going to make me happy.

So my garage had a supercharged Corvette. It had a brand new Cadillac CTS. Yes, it had a Yamaha R1 sport bike. And I was living like a rock star. But I will remember this day for the rest of my life where I walked out to my garage and I took a look at all my toys, all the things that I had. The things that I thought was making me happy and look successful. And it's like, well, there's something missing here. I'm not happy, but yet I have all of these things.

What the hell is going wrong? The interesting thing is a lot of people I think would go, well, I think I just need to switch jobs then. That's what I need to do. I need to switch jobs. And you basically went the complete other way and said, I don't think I want to work anymore. Yeah, how about no job? It's funny you bring that up because I was seriously considering becoming a truck driver. I don't know what it is about being a truck driver. But I had considered just just packing up and hitting the road full time in a cab and just living in life as a truck driver. Ultimately, I'm glad I didn't go that route because I don't think I would have enjoyed that. But that was my very first inkling. Like there's no way I could just retire, never earn an income again. I need something, but I don't want to take my work home with me. Why don't I try truck driving? Never happened. Glad it didn't.

But yeah, that was that was something that I had considered to believe it or not. So at what age did you decide? I don't want to work anymore. I want to retire. Oh, this was probably 30 somewhere around her. No, late 20s, I was like, there's no. No, there's no way. I'm making good money.

That's great. There's no way. But then I never really started to put the pieces in a place until like 30, 31. And then the ball really got rolling when I met my future wife. We combined our resources. And then the snowball really started to build fast. So when the ball starts to get rolling, what are the first steps that you started to take? Well, the very first step has nothing to do with money. For us, it was just talking about our future, what we wanted her future to look like. And we did this every single day walking the dogs out in the neighborhood. So it was always on a forefront or at the forefront of our minds.

And strangely enough, our futures never involved working in a full-time job. It involved travel and adventure and doing the things that we thought was going to be fun. So we really, that, you know, talking about that future goal really kept the idea planted in our heads, that reoccurring theme. And I think that the more you talk about that with your significant other or if you don't have a significant other, just with yourself, understanding what you want in your future, that is going to help you point yourself in the right direction to, you know, make the changes necessary to get to that final destination. I think it's so important with your job, with your finances, with your relationship, in all aspects of your life, it's so important. And you hit the nail in the head here, Steve, to be intentional about what it is that you want and where it is that you're headed. Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Most of us just kind of go through life just assuming that this is what you do. And I did that for the first seven, eight, nine years in my life too. I did the job. I went home. I had fun on the weekends and I did it all over again. I just thought that's what life was about. And I never really thought about what I truly wanted. But once I flipped the coin on its head, everything changed.

Well, I think that if you asked most people what they wanted to do with their life, they would have an answer similar to yours. They don't want to work. They want to travel. They want to see the world. But most people are on what they would consider a fixed income. So maybe they can't retire at 35, but maybe they can start to save some more money. That is exactly the point.

When people hear that I retired at 35, that's, I mean, that's great, but it's also not going to be possible for the vast majority of people. And I completely understand that. But like you just alluded to, you don't have to retire at 35. You don't have to retire at 45. Anything under 60, I would consider early retirement. And the idea is once you start putting, once you have a firm grasp of money and how that relates to your happiness and how it's contributing to what you view your retirement to look like, I think it's going to be a lot easier for you to like wrap your head around the fact that maybe I don't have to take these $20,000 vacations every year or the yearly cell phone upgrade or maybe the brand. new Tesla, you know, maybe I want to retire five years sooner. Maybe I don't need that car. You know,

those kinds of things, those kinds of questions that you ask yourself that will get easier, the more you start thinking about this stuff. It's the idea of like short-term pain, long-term gain, I guess. Like, you know, people always go back to like, do you really need a $5 coffee from Starbucks every single day? I think the answer is obviously no. But then people are like, well, you know, I hate my job. I hate going to my job. This is my one little beam of light in my day. Yeah, and, you know, the latte effect, I'm sure a lot of people have heard about that, those little tiny expenses that over time add up into something that's actually quite significant. But I never like to encourage people to live your life like it's a sacrifice. So if you really like that $5 Starbucks coffee, what the hell, man, just do it.

But that doesn't mean you're going to spend, you know, $15 on dinner and then another $20 on lunch or something. expenses add up. So you just got to be honest with yourself. Spend money on the things that truly make you happy, but be honest with yourself about the things that don't make you happy and maybe cut back on those things a little bit. And that's going to make this way, way easier. I always say vague goals get vague results. And when you listen to your story, you had a very specific goal and you got a very specific result. Retire by 35, but was 35 always the goal for you? No. In fact, originally it was 40 because we just didn't think that it was going to be possible before 40. And this was the awesome thing about this. Once we really started to go down that path, it actually got easier. It was way easier than we thought it was going to be because my wife and I were both on the same page. And that is absolutely critical. If you are not on the same page as your spouse, it's going to be way more difficult. It just is. But when you're both on the same page, we start. started saving so much of our money, 70%, that 70% of both of our salaries combined,

that money adds up so, so quickly. And we really started to accumulate this wealth and through investing and compound interest. We were really started, I mean, this was a snowball that was building faster than we thought. So the first goal was 40. The second goal was 37. And then it's like, let's do this at 35. And that's what happened. What were some of the things that you cut back on to save 70% of your income?

It was, we tracked every single dollar that we spent to the point where my wife could tell you how much we spent on sweet potatoes over, over like a year. So we were really anal. You don't have to be quite that anal, but we were that anal. But we cut out, I mean, cable TV was easy. Magazines, we never really did that. We never took expensive vacations. We would do things so we didn't live like like we had nothing. We didn't, you know, we'd still enjoy the nicer things in life, but we budgeted like 50 bucks a month for restaurants.

That's it. And for a lot of people, that would be one restaurant visit. And then you're pretty much done. But a lot of those, the recurring expenses that maybe you have on automation, like they're just funded in the background. They just come out of your bank account or your credit card. you don't know about. We sat down and we looked at our statements line by line and we cut out the things that we thought, well, we're either not using them or they're not making us happy. So all that added up to something that was like, I don't know, several thousand dollars a year

that we would invest and through compound interest that really adds up. So where were you investing the money that you were saving? Well, both of us, by the end of our careers, we maxed out our 401Ks at work. Both of our companies had company matches, 4% company matches, and that is literally free money. That is literally free money. And we also max out our Roth IRAs, and we opened up a Vanguard brokerage account for even more investing. So we invested every spare penny that we can. And, you know, the market's been doing great lately.

So, I mean, we have way more money now than we did when we retired. And neither of us have set foot in an office since 2017. I mean, I think a lot of people are listening to this and going, that sounds amazing for Steve. Congratulations to him. I just don't think that I can do it. I don't make enough money at my job right now. I'm living paycheck to paycheck. That is a common concern. And I totally get that. So we're not all. going to be able to save 70%. But I think I would encourage a lot of people that if you don't like what you're doing and you're not making a lot of money, there's several things that you can do. You could one, look to increase your income or two, decrease your expenses so you have more available cash each month. It's more fun to increase your income, of course. You could ask for

raise, maybe, you know, switch jobs, go to another company, maybe work on a side hustle, start a podcast, write a book, whatever, those kinds of things. things can generate a pretty good monthly income for you. Or you could take a look at your expenses and really decide what's what's making you happy and what isn't things that really you can cut out of your life. Easily you have that HBO package. You spend 20 extra bucks a month, but you never seem to watch it. You know, those kinds of things, I mean, a lot of us, me included, spent on the, we all

spend on those things. It's not a fun process, but just going through that bank statement and the credit card statement and understanding exactly where every one of your expenses are going and where your money is being lost effectively. I think that will add up to something that you could be proud of. And at that point, you can say, okay, I have an extra 300 bucks this month. I could either go out to eat for a nice restaurant or maybe I invest it into something that's going to make me $1,000 by the end of the year. Well, I think a lot of people don't think about like the potential gain or the potential earnings that they could have. They go, oh, this is $300.

dollars in my pocket right now, I might as well take it. Exactly. It's instant gratification. And yeah, I mean, we live in a very instant gratified society. I guess I'll put it that way. But I mean, if it's easier said than done, but the ability to delay gratification is so, so, so critical in early retirement to the point where I will back into parking spots just so I can pull out really easily at the end of, you know, whatever it is, whatever it is I'm doing. I really believe in delaying gratification because it's going to be that much sweeter once you get to that point. That's a great little tip to put into your day, back into the parking spots. Then when you go back to your car, you know, 10 minutes later, a few hours later, you can go,

I don't need to back out now. Exactly. You have way more situational awareness in the parking lot when you first get there. So spend the extra five seconds. seconds it takes to back in when you first get there, then you have an easy job leaving. You don't have to worry about somebody, you know, whipping around the corner. It's just a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. Steve, what's something you wish you knew when you first entered the workforce? Well, when I first entered the workforce, I had assumed I was working with the best of the best, that my competition

was going to be high. I'm going to have to be a top performer to get anything done in this world. But after the first week, like, it took me five days. And I'm like, this is it? I mean, yeah, I'm not working with dumb people here. But my competition really isn't that great. It doesn't really take a lot to look good. You just show up on time. And I really do believe showing up as half the battle. You show up on time. You're in your seat. You're doing your job to the best of your ability. That's going to put you above half of your coworkers will take two hour lunch is come in late, whatever, calling sick. If you could just manage to do the basics going through life, just the basics, that's all you have to do. And you're going to look better

than the people around you, which means you're going to get more opportunities for advancement, for promotions, for raises, for a new job. Those things are going to come way easier for you. If you put yourself into the position to get those things and just showing up is often all you have to do. It reminds me of that quote that I love. It doesn't take talent to show up on time and hustle. Exactly. I firmly believe that dedication outperforms intelligence or like sheer ability over the course of a career. I firmly believe that I've seen it myself in myself and also other people who quite frankly have been way smarter than I have. But I just did the extra things to put me in a place to become their manager. And I love managing people.

who are smarter than me because they do well and they also make me do well and everybody wins that way. You know, the stats are like astonishing. Something like 90% of people like do not enjoy their job and something like, I don't know, like 60 or 70% like hate their job. At what point did you realize you didn't like the career path that you had chosen? Oh, about a week after I started. Literally, I graduated from college, all gung-ho. It's like, okay, I'm finally a professional. I'm making money. I'm in the workforce. But then like I said, I took a look at everything around me. I was like, this is it.

This is what you do. This really isn't, this is nothing what I had expected. Obviously, I had no concept of early retirement right after college and I started working. That came way later. But yeah, my late 20s and early 30s was when things really came to a head. And it was like a fork in the road. I told myself, I didn't know what the solution. was, but I knew I could not do this for the rest of my life.

I feel like you've hit on some of these points, but like what do you think are three things that people can do right now? If they want to follow in your footsteps, retire at 35, 40, 45, whatever, early retirement. What are three things that they can do right now to help them on that path? First things first, talk about what you want in your, you know, for your future, what your retirement looks like. If it's just you, then decide, if it's you and a spouse, decide to decide to. what your future looks like. Because if you don't have that goal, that target, that horizon to

shoot for, you're, you'll have no idea what changes you have to make to get to that point. So the first things first, understand what you want. And number two, start putting those pieces into place. Now, whether that means, you know, cutting back your expenses, or maybe upping your income through side hustles or flat out asking for a raise at work if you haven't gotten one for two or three years and you've been doing a great job. Maybe you muster up the confidence, just go into your boss and ask for a meeting and lay it out there. Just ask for more money. That's a great way to earn more. It's very, well, I hesitate to say it's very simple because it's not necessarily, but it is a great way to earn more money. Just ask for it. And number three,

I would say is understanding that your present happiness is important, but that future happiness is going to make you way, way happier at that point. So like van lifers, for example, they're living great right now, right? I mean, great in their world. They love what they're doing. They may not be making a lot of money, but they're out there in a van. They're adventuring. They're having fun.

They're making new people. But what's going to happen at the, eventually you're not going to be able to do that. Eventually, you're going to want to retire. So I respect what they're doing now. But without that, I guess really was what I'm coming back to here is without the ability to delay your gratification. I think it's going to be a very disappointing transition from like your younger years into your older years. Because then you really start to think at that point. like, well, what about five years from now?

Maybe I don't want to do this anymore. I have very little savings. What's going to happen here? Maybe I wasted some of my life in the past. So that, I mean, really my third point is understand the virtues of delayed gratification and be willing to accept that concept. The United States Soccer Federation presents the U.S. soccer podcast. My name is David Goss, and I'm joined by my co-host, Megan Klin. And now we're giving people an inside look at the World Cup.

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Follow and listen on your favorite platform. When you started telling your friends and your family members in your early 30s that this was your goal, did they think that you were crazy? luckily I have a very supportive family and very supportive friends. In fact, my dad retired at 49. So I guess it's sort of like in my blood, this whole just do your own thing. Don't worry about what society is doing. So I guess I kind of have that in me.

My friends, I don't have a single friend before early retirement that followed my path. they're usually, you know, they live a traditional life. And that's fine. They respect what I'm doing, but I also respect what they're doing. Early retirement's not going to be for everyone. I totally get that. So to answer your question, no, I really didn't get a lot of pushback from my friends and family. They may not have, they may not understand it, but they at least respected it. And that's great. What was that fateful day at work when, I mean, you go into quit, but you're 30, I mean, you're 35 and you're retiring. So you tell him you're retiring.

You tell him you're quitting. I worked for a really cool boss, luckily, and I gave him six months notice that I was going to be quitting at the end of the year. It was December 23rd or 2016. That was my last official full-time workday. And giving him notice, that alone was incredibly freeing, especially because the meeting went so well. He didn't say, fine, just don't come in tomorrow.

We don't want you. I knew I had the next six months to work and just kind of finish out my career without a lot of stress and a lot of pressure because I knew that I had an end date. So that was great. But that last day, December 23rd, the best Christmas present I could ever give to myself. It was surreal, like nothing that I've ever experienced before, especially being so young. It's like, I don't have to, hopefully I'd never have to work again for the rest of my. my life. This is, this is crazy. What am I doing here? But he also had enough confidence to know that I was going to work out. But it was also very surreal at the same time. So you're coming up in

five years. Five years of retirement. Congratulations to you, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's, it's been, it's been a wild ride, but I've loved every single minute of it. So where are you living now? What are you doing with your days? Yeah, we're out in the middle of the Arizona desert. And we call this our off-grid recession-proof house. Because part of our story is we didn't retire with $10 million. We're not filthy rich here. We have enough to sustain our lives, but we live in a off-grid house. So we're not connected to utilities whatsoever. We have solar on-site. We collect our own rainwater. We are installing a well, hopefully, this year to help with that. We have a septic system on site. So we are

completely self-sufficient, which means we have zero, no utilities other than, I mean, we have property taxes, but we don't pay any monthly fee to live here. And that's been, that's been wonderful for us. It's really helped us keep our, our expenses down. And I spend my day, you know, writing, going on Twitter, doing podcasts, just kind of living it up. I mean, we run a YouTube channel too. So it's, I get to really experience. the creative side that I never got to really, I know, investigate, I guess, when I was working a full-time job because I just didn't have time for it. I think that what you're hitting, you know, what you're really hitting at here is that jobs suck the life out of a lot of people.

And it sounds like you're living your best life now. I really am. Yeah, maintaining a full-time, some people love their jobs. And that's cool. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. earlier retirement is not going to be for everybody. However, financial independence needs to be for everybody because being financially independent, not having to work that job means you can up and quit tomorrow if you want it to. Somebody brings in a new boss and you just can't work with that boss. If you're financially independent, you can quit in two weeks and be done with that. If you're not, you kind of have to endure it or find a new job as quickly as possible. So financial independence gives you options, even if you have no interest in actually pulling the plug and retiring full-time.

All right. Well, we talked about three things to retire early. What are three things that people could do right now to start to work towards financial independence? Start tracking your spending. That's the biggest one, but it's also the toughest one. It's not a very sexy thing to do. Nobody wants to go through a line by line on their bank statement or credit card statement. But you need to get past that initial, I guess, developing a baseline of where your money is going. You absolutely have to do that. Because then once you have that done, you have the pieces in place where you can start making some changes and some better decisions with how you spend your money. And that's really my second point. Once you've gone through your bank statement, once you have started to

track your expenses, you can begin to cut out those things that, quite frankly, you may not have remember that you're still paying for. I had that a lot. I subscribed to a magazine. I never knew I had and like six months down the road, I haven't read a single issue, but I'm still paying for. That happens so much. And those things add up. So that's really number two, cut out expenses that really don't make you happy. And number three is look for ways to increase your income. Over the course of my 14 year career, I switched companies five times. And every single switch came with a 15 to 20% raise right then. So you can't move around companies too often because then your next company might think that you're just going to bail in two or three years. But yet moving around is a

perfect opportunity to make more money, to start building your network with more people, start exposing yourself to new technologies and new ways of business. All of all of those things add up. to more money, more skills, and more experience that you can use to achieve financial independence. So if you and your wife, Courtney, were driving towards this goal, retire by 35, you hit that goal, you're doing it, you're living it. Then what's the next goal that you guys are, you know, searching after? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. In fact, we were talking about that the other night during happy hour. It's like, what's the next main thing? Yeah. And I mean, we had considered international travel, but with COVID now, that's kind of put on the back burner.

I think what we came up, the next goal is to maintain two separate residences. One in the desert for the fall and the winter. Fall is beautiful out here. And maybe a house on the lake up in Idaho or something for the spring and summer. That's what we're working towards. That's going to be an expensive kind of thing. But I think it'll be, it's, it's. It's a good change of pace, I guess, to just live in a couple different places based on the season and really get to enjoy more of the country more often during when you, you know, quite frankly, it's hospitable to be there.

Yeah. Do you have some passive income right now? Yes. I do occasional like IT contract work just to keep my, you know, some skin in the game. I don't need the money. I don't work because of the money. I work because it's fun. it's entertaining. I'm learning new things.

It's probably pretty easy for you too. Exactly. It's very, it's like part time 10, 15 hours a week. It's it's nowhere near a full-time gig, but I mean, pay is good. It's good beer money. I used to write for a national publication. Got paid a little bit for that, but really not, not too much. So little things in YouTube, we make maybe a few hundred a month on YouTube. So it's nothing we're getting rich on. We've already done that. This is just, kind of icing on the cake, I guess, keeping ourselves busy, doing things that we enjoy doing. I feel like over the past year, a lot of people got like a taste of what retirement could be like. You don't have to drive into the office anymore. You don't have to deal with traffic on that commute. And I think a lot of people go, I think there's two camps here, right? I think there's a lot of people that go, I love this working from home thing.

This is great. I can wear whatever I want. I can walk the dog whenever I want. Then I think there's another camp that goes, I need to be in an office to be motivated. So I think for that first camp of people, they're going, man, I love what Steve is talking about here. Sign me up for that. Yeah. And at the very least, if you like working from home and your company has an official, you know, made it official that you could just always work from home.

Yeah. Maybe they'd be open to letting you work from home. If not all the time, just maybe on Fridays. And then maybe that turns to Thursdays and Fridays. You just kind of, you build from there and you really make it a point to do your best work when you're not in the office. And that might encourage your company to let you work from home more, which gives you the freedom to not only be at home, but maybe travel a little bit more as long as you have an internet connection. You could theoretically do your work from anywhere. So that the element of location and dependence in this whole scenario, I think is equally attractive to a lot of people. You realize how terrifying that idea of going through your financial statements line by line is for most people?

That's kind of like, it's kind of like therapy. Like nobody wants to go to therapy, but then after you're done, you go, oh, man, I'm really glad we talked about that or figured that out. I feel like it's the same thing with going through your financial statements. It really sucks. It's like you want to be a football player, but yeah, you got to go through the drills. You got to run 10 laps. You got to do sprints at the end. Those things that you just hate doing are also the things that's going to prepare you to achieve your goal, whatever that happens to be. In this case, it happens to be financial. But really in a lot of life, in a lot of ways, you have to do uncomfortable things to get to where you want to be. And quite frankly, there's a lot of money to be made by doing things that other people don't want to do.

Like this is the idea that if you're an athlete and you're really good at shooting three pointers, it's fun to get out on the court and shoot three pointers all day because you're good at it. You're going to drain them all. But you've got to work on the stuff that you're not going to. good at to become better. Exactly. Exactly. If you can dribble as well with your left hand as you can with your right, I mean, that, that alone is going to make you a way better basketball player to put you in the position to even make yourself open for a pretty high percentage three point shot. Those things you don't really think about, but all of it just kind of, it's, it's tangled together in this web of just, I don't know, if you do it right, you, you, a web. A web.

of excellency. That's the way I'll put it. That should be the title of the book of this. The web of excellency. You know, again, I want to reiterate, this may not be for everybody, but there are definitely some nuggets in here and some tips in here that everybody can apply to their life no matter how old they are and no matter what they do for a living. That's right. That's right. And like I said before, early retirement may not be for you, but financial independence should be because it gives you options and we all love options. And those options let us design our lives exactly the way that we want them to be designed. You just got to know what that is. And that should be the goal. The goal should be waking up every day, excited for what you're going to do that day, and then at the end of the

day, being proud of what you've accomplished. That's right. Whenever I do interviews or podcasts, I actually like to downplay the early retirement side because some people are going to love it, but a lot of people aren't. But like you've been saying, and like I've been saying, this really isn't about not working. It's not about not commuting into a job or doing a full-time work. It's about designing your life in a way that makes sense for you,

whether that means working or maybe something else, the freedom to really take your life by the horns and design it in the way that works best for you. That is all we can possibly ask for. It's also, you know, stating the obvious here, which I think a lot of people don't want to hold that mirror up and realize you don't have to work a job that you hate. You don't have to. There are lots of options out there. There are. There are lots of options. And I think the more you move around, the more you're going to see and you're going to have a better feel for really what works for you. I think it's, I think it's crazy that we have to pick our profession when we're like 17 or 18, go to school, pick a degree. And that's what we're going to do. for the rest for the rest of our lives. I mean, that's, it's just, it's just absolutely great. If to, to some degree, we kind of have to do it that way. But on the other hand, when we're seven, when we're teenagers, we don't really know who we are. We know who we think

we are, but that's not necessarily going to be the case. And I think the more we experience, the more jobs we do, um, the better prepared we're going to be to really understand what works for us and what doesn't. There has been so much knowledge that you've dropped during this conversation, Steve. Thank you so much for this. You are very welcome. I hope that I'm able to inspire somebody to make a change in their life. And that's really why I do this.

That's why I put my story out there. It's not to brag. I never knew about financial independence until I read somebody else's story. And that is when the light bulb went off in my head. So the least I can do is try to do the exact same thing for other people. So the light bulb goes off in their head and they start making some changes to design their life in a way that makes them richer, happier, and way more healthy. And maybe there's a lot of people listening to us right now that will save an extra 20 bucks this week. Well, 20 bucks this week is 80 bucks this month.

And then extrapolate that out over this year and the next year and the next five and 10 years, that's a lot of money you didn't have before. Yeah, compound interest. I mean, those who understand it enjoy compound interest, those who don't really, they just pay it. I think Albert Einstein had a quote similar to that. I don't remember exactly how it went, but compound interest means your money grows on itself. So $1,000 at 10% this year means you have $1,100. And that $1,100 is what's growing, not the $1,000 starting in year two. And the slope is a, it's more of a curve. It's exponential. It's not a straight line. And that is the magic of investing. I looked up the quote. Albert Einstein said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it. He who doesn't pays it. Pays it. Oh, I love that quote. I love that quote because it's absolutely true. Steve, I end every conversation talking about gratitude. And I'm curious to know what are three things in your life that you're grateful for? right now. I am incredibly grateful for my upbringing. I had very, very loving and supportive parents.

And I can guarantee you I would not be where I am today without that upbringing and that support. Number two, I'm incredibly grateful for meeting the love of my life just seven years ago. And we eventually got married in 2014. Without that support, I wouldn't be where I am to day either. So that's been incredibly, incredibly great. Incredibly, I guess, helpful in my life. And number three, I'm just, I'm grateful to have the opportunities that I've had throughout my life. Opportunities to do amazing things and go to amazing places and experience really amazing experiences. And it's really helped me grow as a person. It's really opened my eyes to how different people live, even within this country.

There's a lot of areas where you had, I mean, you might mistake it for a third world nation to be perfectly honest. And when you stick in, when you're just in your little bubble wherever you happen to live, you may not know that these things are happening in your own country. So a lot of the opportunities that I've had to move around and see different things, I think has made me a much more well-rounded person.

How can people find out more about you or how can they read up about you? Well, I spent a lot, a lot of time, probably too much time on Twitter. My handle is Steve on speed. I made that handle back when I drove my Corvette. So hence the OnSpeed part. It has nothing to do with drugs. It's just a Corvette and I like to go fast. I also have a website at steveatcock.us and I have an ebook called Big Money and that brings you through this entire.

scenario, the life cycle of going from, I want to retire early to the very end, I quit, and all the details that go between that. And we've talked about some of that stuff here today. This has been fascinating. Steve, thank you so much. You are very welcome. Like I said, it was an honor to be on your podcast. I appreciate the opportunity. Well, there you go. And again, I'm not saying that you need to follow in Steve's footsteps and retire at 35. But There's just, there's so many actionable things in here that you can definitely start doing in your life right now to be more financially responsible and just to have a better quality of life. Big thanks to Steve for taking the time to do this.

Of course, a big thank you to you for being with us on this ride. Yeah, say it all the time. But without you, I'm just a guy standing here in my bedroom right now talking into a mic. And that be it. So I'm so glad that you're on this ride with me right now. whether you're driving to work, whether you're at work, working out, walking the dog, cooking dinner, whatever you're doing. Just thank you so much.

Snap a screenshot. Let me know what stood out for you the most from this conversation and tag us on social media. As Steve mentioned, he is at Steve on speed, which has to do with like driving really fast. And I'm at Chris Fam Fleet. As the late Terry Pratchett says, if you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. Be great. Be grateful. Hope you enjoyed this one. We'll see you on the next one for some more insight.

The Hammer Alley podcast, an 80s flashback mockumentary. Back in the 80s, there were a thousand bands trying to make it in the world of rock. But there was one band that had it all. Hammer Alley. Whatever happened to Hammer Alley? How did they go from top of the rock? I'm looking for a music video. They're a band from 1987.

Hammer Alley. Ever heard of them? To Rock Bottom. Dude, I was born in 1987. I can't believe he's doing this. Hammer Allie. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.