More Money Podcast - 331 Are You on Trajectory to Reaching Financial Independence? - Tyson Koska, Founder and CEO of OnTrajectory

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

This podcast is no stranger to exploring the FIRE community and digging into what financial independence means to you. Today, we’re digging even deeper into how to find out if you’re on a trajectory toward financial independence and a program that can help you figure it out. Today's guest is Tyson Koska, the Founder, and CEO of OnTrajectory, the FI financial planning software tool that allows you to see your financial future more clearly. Tyson Koska’s career started when he was a helicopter pilot for the U.S. Army. After he left the Army he switched gears and became a software engineer for 25 years. After experiencing some major life events that changed his own plans for his money he decided to make a program that would be able to take the guesswork out of financial planning. In 2018 he went full-time with his side-hustle, OnTrajectory, and hasn’t looked back since. In this episode, Tyson shares what inspired OnTrajectory and the key features it offers so that you can better plan your financial future.  For full episode show notes visit: https://jessicamoorhouse.com/331 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome back to the More Money Podcast. This is your host, Jessica Morehouse, and this is episode 331. And for this episode, we're going to be talking about financial independence, but also how to figure out when you are financially independent. So I have on the show Tyson Koska, who invented or founded a really great tool for people that are on their kind of financial independence journeys. It's called On Trajectory. I found out about it actually by having a guest on the show, gosh, a few years back. And I thought, you know what, I should have him on the show to discuss all things, you know, tracking and FI and things like that. So I think you're going to love this episode. Now, Tyson started his entrepreneurial journey at the young age of 13,

and he started it with a snowball stand in his hometown. This was his first taste of financial independence, and he was hooked. Now, by 20, he was a helicopter pilot in the army. And although he was making more money than ever before, he was also helicopter pilot in the army. And although he was making more money than ever before, he was also in the most debt. Well, because of the war in Iraq, he was able to pay down that debt. But afterwards, he chose to leave the military, earn a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in philosophy. And this eventually led him to a career in IT, where he spent 25 years in software development for large corporations. Still having though that passion for entrepreneurship, Tyson founded on trajectory.com, which he's now the CEO of. And this is a personal finance tool that I've mentioned before on the

podcast, which is for consumers and professionals. That's a way to help you find out if you are on track to reach your kind of financial independence goal. And so we've got so many great things to discuss in this episode. I know you're going to love it. But before I get to that interview with Tyson, here's just a few words I want to share about today's podcast episode sponsor. This episode of the More Money podcast is sponsored by TD Direct Investing. Every June, TD Direct Investing celebrates Options Education Month with the goal of helping investors learn more about options trading. Throughout the month, they are hosting a number of free virtual events

for beginner and intermediate investors alike. Want to learn about some of the things people wish they knew before they began or build on some of the knowledge you may already have on options, visit td.com slash options education month to register for one of the many live webinars TD Direct Investing will be hosting. Or if you're more interested in getting an introduction to options in the first place, there are a number of on-demand video lessons available too. To learn more and to check out the list of free events, just visit jessicamorehouse.com slash options. Once again, to find out what webinars, masterclasses, and on-demand video lessons are available to view for free, just visit jessicamorehouse.com slash options. Welcome Tyson to the More Money Podcast. I'm so excited to have you on the show to talk about on trajectory, something that I've been aware of for a number of years, so I'd like to kind of

dive in. I'm equally thrilled to be here. Yay. So yeah, like I kind of mentioned before, I hit the record button. I've been familiar with On Trajectory for a number of years. It was a friend of mine, Gwen, who runs Fiery Millennials, and she was on the show a number of years. I will find out what that podcast episode number is, everybody. But she was the one who told me, yeah, she was, you know, planning her kind of Fiery journey, that she's used your platform. And then since then, I've had lots of other Fiery people on my show, and they've also used your platform as well. And I thought it was so interesting because yeah, it's, there's, upon my own kind of investigation, there's not a lot of specific software that will help you do some of the things that, you know, other software programs will do,

but they're, they're usually very expensive and they're meant for advisors. If you're an individual and you're like, I just want to run some projections to actually see when can I retire, when I can become financial independent, There's not a lot out there. So I kind of want to start with what kind of inspired you to make this very specific platform helping a lot of individual investors plan for their financial independence or their future retirement? Yeah, it's a great question. And I want to give a shout out to Gwen also. I know you just did, but she's an awesome person and you should definitely read her blog, Fiery Millennials. I started this software. So I'm a software engineer by trade. I've been in software development for the past

more than 25 years. And I thought this was something that everybody would want. They would want to be able to put in, you know, how much am I saving? How much am I contributing to my 401k? If I have a spouse, how much are they making? If I want to plan for like a nice vacation in a couple of years, or if I have a car payment, or if I, if can I afford a mortgage, or if I change my contribution, like just, you know, put these numbers in and show me a line into the future. And at the time, when I first started looking into this,

and this is early and mid nineties, but at the time, the internet was just starting. And I thought this would make a great site on the internet. I thought at the time, one of the big programs that people used to use was Microsoft Money for budgeting. And I used to use that as well. And I would put my budget in there. And then I would say, like, I was like, say, okay, now show me what this budget is doing

for me. And it would say, okay, in three months, you're going to have this. I'm like, three months? I don't want to know three months. I want to know in 30 or 40 or 50 years where I'm going to be. I want to know, honestly, what I really wanted to know. Tell me the exact day in the exact year that I can stop my day job and I can go work in a bookstore or I can go and take a couple years off and not worry about it and then sweat the difference when I come back. Show me that number. Show me that date. And there's literally tons of programs out there that say, oh, here is your retirement number. You need $2 million or whatever it is. And I'm 100% certain they exist just to scare you. So you pick up the phone and you call Vanguard or you call Fidelity or you call somebody because

you're like, I don't know how to do that. And so anyway, so I got frustrated, literally waited a decade, more than a decade for someone to create this software. As a software engineer, decided enough was enough and started working on some prototypes and went to some friends that are also in technology. And we started working on it, gosh, now, seven years ago. Wow. I'm curious, did you find with lots of the because yeah, everyone knows there's lots of, you know, free retirement calculators out there. And, you know, some were like, Okay, this is fine. But there's a few that I found over the years where I'm like, Oh, like scared me. And I'm like,

what? And I think it was just because of some of them, you know, data that they were using or whatever. But I'm like, I need $3 million. Like how this other calculator said a million dollars. And I think that's also the frustrating thing when people are trying to find like the retirement number is you try a bunch of different calculators, they're all giving you very different projections. So it's like what and also they don't really necessarily share how they got to that point. So I'm curious, when you were kind of looking at other, you know, software or retirement calculators, did you find that most of them were, you know, kind of showing you how to save like too much money or just like totally

inaccurate? What was your kind of sense? Right. So and I feel like everything that you were just saying, and I think the reason is because they don't care. They have no incentive to create accurate software that's flexible enough to reflect a real person's actual financial life. They don't care. They have no incentive. So they're not going to do it. And yes, they're wildly different. And the reason that they're wildly different, by and large, is they ask for a number like, how much do you make right now?

And you're like, well, if you're a couple, a young couple with good jobs, you could be making some pretty good money. And then they take that money, they make an assumption about inflation, and they say, OK, you're going to need the, they basically assume that you spend everything you make. And so you're going to need the equivalent of that from here until forever. And not, you know, not only until you retire, then you need to fund that X number of years of retirement afterwards. So the second you say, oh, I want to retire at 60 or 55 instead of 65, the numbers just go crazy because then you've got five years or 10 years

of not earning. And it's like they don't build into the fact, oh, guess what? I'm going to live more cheaply in 10 years or the opposite. I've got young kids and it's going to be more costly in 10 years. I mean, they don't care. They don't have any way for you to input that kind of information. So they can only take really broad strokes. And depending on the approach they take at that broad stroke, they spit out a number and then hope that you pick up the phone and call them for help. Interesting. So what, I guess, what did you want to implement in your own software to kind of, I guess, counter some of the things that you were seeing? What did you want to make sure that you integrated so you could give more kind of accurate projections to people that used it? sincerely work on On Trajectory as like a real thing, not just as a spreadsheet full of macros, which is what I had before. I was living in downtown Baltimore with my wife. I had a young

daughter. We had one car. We would push the shopping, we would push the stroller to the grocery store and put some things in the basket. And we'd come home and we're both pretty decent cooks. And we enjoy cooking together and having fun that way. And just enjoying that sort of simple one kid life. And my wife came in one day and said, honey, I've got great news. We're going to have another baby. And I'm like, oh, that is wonderful.

We are definitely going to need a bigger house. If we need a bigger house, I probably want to move out to the Burbs. If we move out to the Burbs, you're going to need a second car. If we need a bigger house, I probably want to move out to the Burbs. If we move out to the Burbs, you're going to need a second car. Oh, that means I need another 529 plan. Can I still afford the contributions to my retirement plan if I get another 529? My head just blew apart. Because I had everything sorted.

I had a plan. I had a spreadsheet. And I had something. And I needed to make all these adjustments from this single life event. So the question was, what were the key components that inspired this? And it's really about these key life events that occur. So you've got, here in the US, I know we call them, we have different acronyms and nomenclature. So I'll just try to use basic terms. But we've got things like savings plans for your children's college. I'm not sure if you have that. Yeah, we've got an RESP. There we go. We're going to give you like a

rundown of all of the different accounts we have after this. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm pleased. I hope you mentioned before we started recording my commitment to you. Yes. He said he's going to make this more accessible for Canadians. Very exciting. I absolutely am. So you want to contribute to your kid's college. You want to contribute to your own retirement plan. You might be early in your career. You might have student debt you're paying down. You want to know whether you can afford to buy a new car in the next two years or not. You want to know, or not necessarily can you afford it, but what's it going to do to my long-term plan? Renting versus buying a home. I mean, obviously that's a big thing. It was a big thing back then. It's a bigger thing now. Yeah. And it's complicated, right? And because interest compounds, mortgages are

amortized. It's hard to do this all in a spreadsheet or all in your head or all in a piece of paper. So those are the big things. Saving for the college, paying down student debt, maybe paying off some credit cards, maybe buying a home, maybe contributing to my retirement plan. Those were the pieces. And I was like, if I had a tool that I could just plug in those, which sounds pretty easy, but it's fairly complicated because you've got your income stream, you've got your spouse's income stream, you've got this or that. And that's what I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to write this software. People were going to go, oh, this is great. And everyone's going to, you know, I never wanted to sell people's data. I never wanted to put

advertisements. I just wanted a tool, put a very low subscription fee on it for people that, you know, free version, paid for, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that regular stuff. And people would use it and they would figure out their financial future. And if they decided they wanted to get a professional to look at it or, you know, things got really, really complicated, and people would use it and they would figure out their financial future. And if they decided they wanted to get a professional to look at it or things got really, really complicated, then they would sort of move on to something else. That's what I thought. That's not what happened, but that was the original plan. That's interesting. So what happened? Things kind of went in a bit of a, I love that you had, you're like, this is what I want to do.

And what kind of, I guess, happened? You've mentioned that it's been seven years since you initially kind of built. How has it evolved over time? Well, what happened was I overestimated and I underestimated at the same time. So I overestimated the desire of regular people with fairly normal financial situations. I overestimated that there would be a big desire in the masses for a tool like On Trajectory. I underestimated how insane some people can be about tracking their finances. Oh yeah, people can be really into it. So what happened over the past seven years, we did a year of coding. We did a year of beta. We did a year of free, live but free. We did a year of subscription. We did a year of... Anyway,

so we did these chunks by year. But every year, I was like, well, what's the new feature that I'm going to put into the tool that's going to make this thing explode? That's going to say that all of a sudden now the regular people are going to be like, okay, now on trajectory is at a point where I'm eager to put my data in. I want to see 50-year financial plan in front of me. For me, a little bit more about me, sorry. I was a philosophy major in college. And yes, I was a software engineer for 25 years. But so much of this money stuff is about reaching peace of mind. It's about getting money out of my head so that I can be more present in my life. I can be more in tune with the things in my life. I can spend my money on the things that I value and forget about the things I don't value. There's a real philosophical undercurrent to all of this for me. But I think that should,

maybe, is true of a lot of other people. They just may not realize it, how much money is stressing them out or how much having this notion of, can I afford this? Can I afford this? Can I afford this? How much that actually wears on the psyche of a human. And so I always was looking for what's the next feature that's going to make this attractive, because I really want to help people in that way. I want people to get to reach that sense of financial freedom, that sense of new feature, that new feature and feature, I ended up putting so many features into the tool and responding to the community. Of course, the people that are the loudest are the people that want more and, hey, I want this situation.

I ended up creating a tool that is easy enough for a consumer, a regular person to go in there and play with some numbers and get some results. But now we have financial advisors, financial coaches. We have 401k programs at employers that use us for their clients and their communities, which I never anticipated. So it's exciting. It's really neat that now I'm making a tool that's competing with like major tools in the, in the financial planning space. I didn't that. And that was the part I, I underestimated. I under, under underestimated the, the hunger for more complex, complex features and functions in the tool. I'm curious with, um, because there is other software out there. Why do you feel like, especially with, you know, some of the more institutional clients that you have, what kind of was it, were they attracted, you know, to with your software compared to others?

Like, what's different, I guess? Well, guess what? A lot of financial advisors are also intimidated by financial planning software. Yeah, fair enough. It's not just. I've never found a software that's really user friendly. And a lot of it looks like it has not been updated in two decades. Yes, yes.

So regular, whether you're a regular, I will estimate, and this is a finger in the air, but I will estimate that at least 50% of the professional financial planners that I've talked to either don't use any software at all or use it just because it's a job requirement where they work and they really don't understand or care that much about it. I would say at least half of the planners that I use are in that vein. Now, it might be because they're non-fiduciaries, they're pushing a certain product. I mean, there could be a lot of reasons for that. But even fiduciary, people that have fiduciary responsibility, fee-only advisors, think the software is too complicated. It doesn't add value. And I think that some advisors want to use software that they can put onto a screen in

front of a consumer and say, hey, this is what I made you, and have it in a way that actually makes sense to them. They can show value to the consumer in the software. Or the consumer can say, well, you know what? What if we decide in five years to do this? And the advisor can say, click, click, click, there you go, there's the result. And they can see right in front of them. So a lot of the advisors that use us, they actually use it as not only a planning tool, but as a relationship tool, as a collaboration tool. In some cases, they even use it as a selling tool to get clients to come on board because they can illustrate, show how easy it is to illustrate their financial plan. So, you know, talking about more of like the

consumer, like someone like me, I mentioned, I signed up for the program because I wanted to fiddle around with it and really kind of get a feel for it. You know, I've just started kind of using it. Like I had the free trial, but I didn't have time to really look into it. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to get the program and really, you know, take some time to, to play with it. So what are some key things? Like if you've just entered the program, how do you use it? What are some key functionalities that you'll want to try out? And, and is it, I'm curious, you know, since you've, uh, this program has been around for a while now, have you seen your customer base kind of expand? Like, I know it's probably, you know, a good portion of the consumers are like, you know, people that are

really wanting to retire early, like the fire community, is it a lot of different people now? And they just kind of just want to like, one thing that kind of really resonated me when you were talking is so much of like what I do is talking, like, you know, you know, do this, do this, do this, but so many people aren't tracking their progress, because there's no easy way to track their progress. I mean, I track my net worth in the spreadsheet every month, which has been helpful. But yeah, when it comes time to like, take a good look at what happened throughout the past year, or to then use your current information to make projections for the future it's really difficult to do so i'm curious like yeah if someone wanted to kind of jump in where would they start i'm glad you mentioned

about progress because that is a part of our quote-unquote secret sauce, because we do have that. But not only am I happy that you mentioned it because we have it, but it is at the heart of getting confidence in your financial future. If I put a bunch of assumptions in and I say, okay, this is the growth that I'm going to get, and this is the contributions that I'm going to make, and this is the bad habits I'm going to make. And this is, you know, the habits, the bad habits I'm going to stop or, or whatever. Um, and you don't do any of them, then you're going to be in a different place. And so let's say, let's say you use a tool that doesn't track your progress, which most of them don't. Um, you go in six months and you put your numbers in and you're like, uh, what did, I can't remember. What did it tell me six months ago? Like, how do I know that I achieved? So I always tell people, and I am going to months ago? Like, how do I know that I achieved? So I always tell people,

and I am going to get to your question about how do you get started. No, no, no, this isn't it. But I always tell people, getting started with On Trajectory doesn't have any value. And that's not what's worth paying for, for having a subscription.

If you want to go in and see where you are and see where you're going to be in 50 years, go in, use our free trial, play around with it for a couple of weeks, get your answer. Don't pay for it because that's not where the value is in the product. The value is when I can see, oh, I achieved X percent of growth in this year and then this account underperformed, but I ended up over-contributing where I thought this, where this cost me less than I thought. So now in year two, I can say, okay, so going forward, I know I can do this at least for two more years. And then maybe, and see everything in On Trajectory is based on ranges. So you don't have, your income stream is

not a steady income stream. It's, I've got, you know, five years of growth because I'm early in my, five years of outpacing inflation because I'm early in my career, I'm getting a lot of raises. Then I'm going to hit a kind of glass ceiling. Then I want to take a year off my wife and I want to travel for a year. Then I want to go back to work. Then I want to, right? So everything is then, then, then, then, then. So that's one thing. So you're not going to know if any of those 50-year assumptions are true unless you can see what brought you here, what's happened in your past. But the beauty of it is once you do and you see that and it's on the screen in front of you, you're like, oh my gosh, I now have so much confidence in where I'm going and what I'm doing

that I can do big, maybe stupid things. For most of the time I was working on trajectory, I had a day job as a software engineer. But then back in 2018, I came home, I said, honey, I've been running all our numbers and on trajectory, and guess what? I'm going to take off a year. And she's like, what? I'm like, yeah, let me show you. And so I put it up in a tool. I showed her all the math. I showed her the projections. She's like, oh yeah. Okay. Do it. Do it. She was completely with me. Now I know if I didn't have this tool and I came to my wife and said, hey, I'm going to quit my six figure income and I'm going to just take off a year and screw around and see if I can make my side gig work. And if it doesn't, I'll go back and get another job.

I have a lot of friends in the industry. I'm sure she would have told me there's no way. Especially, I have two young girls. So it's that. But I literally had 10. So I took all my data from all my old spreadsheets. Of course, I put it into the tool. And I said, look, I got 10 years of data here.

You can see what we did every year. And that's an amazing gift, I think, is having that clarity, having that vision of the future. And that's what I want. It's not valuable when you sign up. It's valuable after you've been using it for a little while. Yeah, I mean. All right, so the sign up. Do you still want me to?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm still interested. But yeah, just to comment on that. Yeah, one one thing that I always kind of share is, for me, you know, I've always been pretty good at, you know, not tracking, but I've always been, since I got into personal finance a decade ago, you know, budgeting and being really smart with my money. It really wasn't until five years ago that I actually started tracking things. And I just do, you know, tracking my spending, my net worth in a spreadsheet. But just even that simple act of doing that has seriously changed my life just because I never had any data before to show like how far I came or how, you know,

what happened with my money, I have no information and no proof. And so just even doing that simple thing has, you know, helped build my confidence when it came to investing and saving and stuff like that so to and that's very just simple i'm just putting like the actual numbers of my account and spending so to have you know even more kind of specific data to kind of uh go with that i think could be yeah super super helpful and again that's like the missing element whenever i talk to people like no one is tracking their data so how do you know how do you know, how can you look back? How can you look forward without that information? I always tell people, like if I have to give an elevator pitch, you know, oh, what's, why should I do on trajectory? I say, there's three reasons. One, you need a plan.

Two, you need to track the plan. And if you do one and two, you will reach peace of mind, financial peace of mind. It's that easy. It's one, two, three. That's it. That's the whole thing. You just make a plan, track your results, and you will reach peace. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people think that in order to especially reach a crazy goal like retiring earlier, so many people I talk to, they're like, I was able to reach financial independence in my 30s. You think that it has to be really complicated, you need a really crazy strategy. But honestly, as I've talked to lots of those people, no, you don't. I have yet to meet someone maybe I just haven't had them on my show that did something kind of radical or speculative

to get to that point. A lot of people it is just about having a plan, tracking the progress over time, making some adjustments as your life changes. And that's kind of it. That's the magic. It's so simple. And it really is. Yeah, you might have heard, because this is very popular in the FIRE community, Mr. Money Mustache's article, the ridiculously easy math of financial independence or whatever. It's called something like that. And what's really important, though, I mean, I think everyone needs to keep in mind, financial independence does not mean never working again and sailing around in a yacht for the rest of your life. That's not what financial independence is.

No, most of the people I know in the fire community just quit their jobs so they can do something that they love, which for me, I'm like, cool, I did that before. Like I just quit their job so they can do something that they love which for me i'm like cool i did that before like i just quit my job and then you know started doing the thing that i liked and stuff like that but a lot of people like that kind of safety net of knowing that they don't need to earn money but uh you know but that's kind of when they feel comfortable to to then pursue maybe their their long lost passion or something like that but yeah it's i think it's so important that i have yet to honestly meet anyone from the fire community who is actually retired in the traditional sense, like going on a beach. Because honestly, I think we all kind of recognize this. Going on a beach vacation is fun for two weeks. You don't want to do it for like decades. That sounds so boring.

I could not imagine. That's boring. You want to do something. You want to have something to do every day, right? And also, I guess the other important thing too is everyone, depending on what they think financial independence, they'll all have a different number. I think a lot of people, and this is what I see common in articles and lots of those calculators, they get very like, oh, you need this amount of money or you need to withdraw the 4% rule. But I'm like, these are so strict rules and they may not actually work for you. Maybe withdrawing less or withdrawing more is what you need. But I see too many people on Instagram like, oh,

you want to reach financial independence? All you have to do is take your salary and times it by 25 and then you just withdraw 4% and you're good. And I'm like, uh, so everyone that's going to apply to everyone in the world. Like, come on, we need to, that's why it's, it's important to take those as, and with a grain of salt and then do your own personal calculations. Exactly. Exactly. Well, and the other thing about these, these calculators is, you know, they say, Oh, you know, what are your monthly expenses? Well, if I've got a mortgage right now and my mortgage and my expenses are X, and then they're just going to assume that's, those are my expenses for the whole rest of my life. Dude, I mean, come on, a mortgage? Yeah. Hopefully I will have that paid off eventually, you know?

Yeah. And then when I do, I'm also going to have a big asset at the end of that as well. And they don't, they don't take any of those, those things into consideration. And those are easy things to deal with. Absolutely. Okay. So going back to my initial question, if someone wanted to get started, because even me when I was logging in, for any kind of new software, you're like, okay, this is intimidating. There's a lot of buttons and a lot of things. What's the first kind of thing you want to do? Or where do you start as kind of a new user? So we try to keep the barrier of entry incredibly low. And what we do is we ask you four questions. I think we're going to be changing it soon. We're going to ask you five questions, but the fifth question is going to be very easy

to answer. The first question is, what year were you born? Everybody knows what year they were born. Easy question. Two, how much do you make per year before taxes? Top of my number, easy. Everyone can spit that out. Three, about how much have you saved in your life? Now, this can be harder. Like, oh, do I need to go and look up my last brokerage statement and I got to go to this? And do I count equity in my home in that number? So we try to keep it easy, but we just want to round, it's a very round number. I've got

a couple of grand, that number. That's probably the hardest number. Now, the fourth number that's necessary is about how much you spend, but people don't know how much they spend. They don't want to know how much they spend, but they do know if they're putting some money aside in their retirement plan or if they're sticking a little bit in a college savings plan. They know that number. They know I'm contributing $100 here and $500 there. And so I know that. Well, if I know how much you make and I know how much you save, I can figure out how much you spend. It's easy. So I can do that. So those are the four questions. Now, the fifth question that we're going to start asking is, are you married? And only because that matters because then we can set up a second income stream for you.

So we can just do some simple things inside the tool that are easy, low-hanging fruit. So four questions, possibly five questions coming soon. And then what we do, and now here we are a little bit U.S. focused in that the initial assumptions we make about tax, income taxes, are based on U.S. tax charts. And we do make a broad assumption about our government retirement plan called Social Security. Now, these are line items. These are discrete line items in your plan. So everything about On Trajectory is above the fold. You get to see, here's my income. Here's my assumption about Social Security. Here's the tax rate. Here's the expenses. Here's my

expenses in retirement. Here's my growth. So there's three tabs, income, expenses, and accounts. And you see everything. You see everything that goes into the big, what we call the trajectory graph, which is basically the financial trajectory of your entire life out to age while we default to 90. Now, sometimes because we ask so few questions up front, we don't ask you, you know, do you own a home? Or we don't ask, you know, there's a lot of things we don't, so that it might go negative. And that bums people out. They're like, oh, I'm already, I'm already screwed. I'm hopeless. So we're looking at ways to sort of, instead of showing people like,

oh, this is how in debt you're going to be when you die. Instead of showing it that way, we're going to start doing things like, hey, if you want to make sure you have money throughout your life, you should think about saving, you know, the $300 per month and then you'll be okay. But right now it's not that way. Right now we're just going to show you, just show you reality. And then we have a list, kind of a to-do list that says, hey, think about, you know, do you have a spouse? If so, enter in that income. Do you have this? Do you have that? But it's very DIY. If the person doesn't have a little bit of interest to peel back the onion a bit, they're not going to get a whole lot of value. So even

though we keep it literally as simple and easy as we possibly can, in order to bridge that gap between the, oh, I answered four questions and now you showed me a line, to how do I tailor this thing and really make it fit my own personal life? That still has a little bit of self-starter needs to be in there. A little bit of a, and we're always looking for ways, you know, to create little tutorials, create videos, create how-to articles. We have that stuff, but you got to read the article or you got to watch the video, you know? So, and we're always looking for ways to make that easier, make that more fun, make that

more engaging. But that's how it is. That's the state of things as they are today. The only other thing I'll mention is that when you want to add in an income stream, or you want to add in an expense stream, or you want to add in a different kind of an account, we never ask you questions about that stuff. We never say, okay, now how much do you have in tax deferred? How much do you have this? How much do you have that? I remember using some tools, and they would literally ask you 50 or 100 questions. And then they were asking me questions that I didn't even know what the terms meant. So I knew whatever information I was

putting in, since I didn't know what the term meant, I knew I was probably doing it wrong. And so I know upfront, I'm putting wrong information to the tool. How can I trust anything that it says afterward? So the way we structure on trajectory is that you pick. If you've got a college savings plan for your kids, you go to the list, you say, drop in a college savings plan, and then I'll, I'll put the information in about it. So you only use and leverage what applies to you personally. That's good. Yeah. I think that's a part of the reason why I like on trajectory. It's like, well, a, the cost is actually like so much lower than honestly any software I've seen around, but it is more for DIY people. And so that's the

thing. It's like, if you want to go this extra step and do this, yeah, you're going to have to be a bit of a self-starter. But then just like we kind of mentioned, if you get into the habit of doing this and using the tool, tracking things, that's what builds your investor confidence and just your overall confidence in your own financial picture, which then gives you peace of mind, which is really key. It's, it's one of those things where it's like, I know it doesn't sound super fun at first, but then when you do it and then you get that number and then you understand how you got to that number. And I feel like that's like the biggest issue I have with just being like, oh no, I'm just going to hire someone. They're going to take care of it for me. It's like,

but you will not understand how they got to certain conclusions. So how does that really give you peace of mind? Just like taking someone's word for it. I think it's important. And that's why, I mean, that's why people listen to this podcast is they want to learn how to do this on their own. So then if they do in the future want to work with a professional, which I think is fine, you understand what they're doing. Because then you can also be like, oh, actually you missed this thing. Or, you, or you just understand where they got to certain conclusions. I agree 100% with everything you just said. I'm sure you've heard the term compound interest is among the most powerful forces in the universe. Well, I believe something is also true, not just about money, but about happiness. And achieving this kind of peace of mind, this financial happiness factor,

I think you build equity in it. I think it compounds over time. And that you can really, honestly, by just shedding these money stressors, getting it out there, understanding where you're going and as you said, why you're going, why you're on that path, that you just open yourself up to a completely different kind of life where you can enjoy things on a different level altogether. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's not like I'm a rich person, but I don't worry about money. And that's because I understand what's going on with it. And I think that was the biggest reason that I started a blog 10 years ago and kind of continued down this path and now run a company that's all about educating others about, you know,

personal finance is it really does give you so much. Yeah, just peace of mind or just like, I don't, you know, no worries. I mean, everyone I know, is anxious about money. That's like the biggest stress in people's lives. And so, you know, what's the counter to that? What's the solution is to, you know, learn what you don't know, and realize that, you know, what's the counter to that? What's the solution is to, you know, learn what you don't know and realize that, you know, financial education is for everyone. And the people that kind of try to make you feel like, oh, no, this is too complicated for you are 100% trying to sell you something. Yes, that is, that's a great, that's a wonderful point. If they're telling you it's too complicated for you, don't take advice. No. No. There's something. They've got something up their sleeve. I mean, again, it's like I was self-taught for a number of years before I started taking some traditional courses just to see, you know, what were the advisors learning and stuff like that.

And there's so much free information and now tools that are super accessible that you personally can use. There's kind of no reason. Nothing's stopping you. But yeah, it's, you know, part of it is like taking that first step and opening yourself up to some kind of difficult questions. And I mean, I think the hard part is really taking a look at your numbers and making some adjustments and realizing that, you know, sometimes you do have to like, cut back here or save a bit more there. But, you know, just life happens so quickly. I feel like I've been saying that over and over on the podcast the past year,

just as I'm in my mid-30s now. I'm like, oh gosh, you blink and you're like 10 years later. When you start these things as soon as possible, you're going to thank yourself. Like for me, I'm like, I am so glad I took that first step and made that first budget and started making my auto contributions to my savings and investments at 25.

Because even though it was like a little amount of money, because I really didn't have any money. Now, 10 years later, I'm like, wow, those things do compound, but also just like the habits I instilled in myself and things that I learned and the confidence and peace of mind that I got. It's invaluable. It's really invaluable. Now, before I let you go, I mean, I had so many questions written down. I think we touched on a lot of them. I'm curious. You have a course called Filosophy. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Filosophy.

Filosophy. That makes more sense. Tell me a little bit about that. I'm curious. Is it like a course that's about financial independence, how to do it, or what's it all about? Right. So I did mention earlier that I was a philosophy major.

Yeah. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Philosophy. Yeah. So it's basically so many times I would come across one of my favorite things to do when I was in college and whenever I was reading about existentialism or I was reading about different modern schools of thought. Like, of course, now I can't remember the specific schools, empiricism or rationalism, right? These big guys. My favorite thing was to pick out things from real life and tell people about philosophy, why philosophy is so awesome, but then be able to use real things in real life and show how smart these guys in the past. Because if you start reading philosophy, you almost never get that.

You're like, what the hell? This is crazy. That's why I only took one philosophy course in university. And I'm like, not for me. I don't get it. Yeah. And that's my biggest beef with philosophy is like, why can't you just make it easier to understand?

Which is why the ancient Greeks are real great. Socrates is pretty understandable in comparison to Nietzsche. But so the whole idea for the course was, let's take empiricism, rationalism, existentialism, ancient Greek thought, Eastern schools of thought, Zen and Taoism, ancient Greek thought, Eastern schools of thought, Zen and Taoism.

Let's take these big schools of thought and tease out the lessons that we can about money, about attachment, about good habit building, about reality. There's serious lessons in here about becoming financially independent that we can draw from our 5,000 years of philosophy. So it's Phi-losophy. Oh, I like that. I'm going to have to check that out. So where can people find it? Is it available?

So it is available, but I wanted to throw a caveat out there because we've recently just completely overhauled our user interface. And the course is built on the old user interface. And so while I would love people to purchase the course, I mean, it's not expensive, $49, but I would recommend for the moment holding off until we update all the videos in the course. Do you know when it's going to be updated? When it's going to be updated? In the next few months? Longer than that? Yeah. What I might do, what I'll probably do, 95% chance I'll make it free until the videos are updated.

So if you are interested in the philosophy angle, because those lessons are universal. So the course is structured a little bit about philosophy, then a little bit about personal financial modeling in the tool, and then a close out, a couple of final thoughts at the end. Anyway, so that's what that course is all about. But you know what? I'm making that free. I'm doing that. Ooh.

All right. Cool. And yeah, that's it. That's it. F-I-philosophy.com. Perfect. And I guess, where else can people find you and, you know, check out? Because I know there's a free trial for On Trajectory if people want to poke around.

Where can they find information about you and the program? So that's ontrajectory.com. I'm very easy to reach, ty, Ty, at ontrajectory.com. And we also have a very, i always encourage people to take advantage of our help desk because we have people that are ready to answer your questions during your free trial how do you do this how do you do that uh so that's just questions at on trajectory.com but you can also get to it inside the tool uh so i can also be reached there if you forget my personal email you can say hey i want to talk to ty uh so

yeah that's uh or linkedin oh linkedin hey yeah no one ever promotes their link never heard of that one no one ever does i'm always on linkedin but i think that's because i used to work in you know corporate so that's i'm very much on linkedin um well thanks so much for taking the time to be on the show sharing uh all of your your. And hopefully this gets people excited to kind of take that next step on their, you know, either, you know, financial independence or retirement journey and actually finding some tools to kind of help them get there instead of just being like, I would love to retire by, you know, 30 ish or something like that, which to me, I'm like way past that. So, but I think this will give people some ideas

and like what's something different I can do to kind of get myself to that next level. So I appreciate you being on the show. It was a real pleasure. Thank you, Jessica. And that was episode 331 of the More Money Podcast with special guest Tyson Koska. Make sure to check out On Trajectory.

You can find that at ontrajectory.com. You can also follow them on Twitter at On Trajectory. You can also find Tyson on LinkedIn. Where else can you find information? Oh, yeah. Another place you'll definitely want to check out is Tyson's course on Filosophy, which is fi-losophy.com. Of course, I'm going to link to everything in the show notes. So just go to jessicamorehouse.com slash 331 to find all of those details. Okay, I've got things to share with you as always. So do not go away. Here's just a few words I want to share about today's podcast episode sponsor. This episode of the More Money Podcast is sponsored by TD Direct Investing. June is Options Education Month, and TD Direct Investing is hosting a number of free virtual events

throughout the month to educate both beginners and more advanced investors about, well, their options with trading options. Or if you want a full walkthrough of options trading for beginners, there are also a number of on-demand video lessons that will walk you through what options are, common option terms such as calls and puts, and what the difference between in-the-money and out-of-the-money options are. To learn more and to find out what free events you'd like to check out, visit jessicamorehouse.com slash options. Once again, to find out what webinars, masterclasses and on demand video

lessons are available to view for free, visit Jessica morehouse.com slash options. Okay, so thanks to share with you. So just a reminder, we are almost close to wrapping up this season 14 of the podcast we only have next week, and then the following week. So this will wrap up June 15th and that'll be on a little summer hiatus. Hopefully you will be too enjoying the summer. And then I'll be back in September with a full new season. Very excited. Even started recording some episodes for next season, getting my head started. So very excited about wrapping things up. We've had a really good season, lots of episodes. But to remind you, because a lot of the guests on the show have been authors and have new books out,

I'm giving away a ton of books and there's still a few weeks to enter. I'm probably going to wrap up the contest and pick a winner the end of June or once June wraps up. So you've got some time still if you haven't entered, just go to jMorehouse.com slash contests and you will be able to find all of the books giving away. I think there's like 12 or 14 or something crazy, like probably the most books I've ever given away in one go. It just seems like everyone I've had in my show is at a book. So I'm gonna give them away. So make sure to check it out. Also, if you, you know, always check out the episode show notes for my show, or just go to the podcast page on my website, well, you will notice a thing or two, there has been some big changes of late. So really big changes. I've been teasing this or kind of, you know, sharing a little bits and pieces throughout the season. But I've been working

really hard, honestly, since November, on getting a new website done. And I'm so excited it is finally done. There are some tweaks, as always, you know, once you launch something, you're like, Oh, wait, this, this isn't working or da da da. So honestly, too, if you're like going around the website, and you see anything, please let me know so I can fix it. Because you know, I, you know, sometimes I'm just in my little tunnel vision, and I just used to it. So if you see anything, just let me know. But hopefully you like it. I'm pretty excited about it. With the new colors and new headshots that I got recently and you know, new podcast page, everything. So hopefully you like it. You can find it at JessicaMorehouse.com. And with that, because that's off my list, I'm so excited for just and also with the podcast kind of

wrapping up, I'm excited to have like a little breather for the summer and see what I can kind of put my attention and energy into over the next couple months. And I'm hoping I can focus more on, you know, Instagram and creating new YouTube videos. And of course, enjoying myself during the summer, not all work. And hopefully, let's just, I mean, fingers crossed, because I know talked about this this time last year. I have to take another exam as I am, you know, share I'm on the slow path to become a CFP. And I've got another, you know, exam that I tried last summer didn't work out, gonna have to take it again and need to take some time to study. So that's what we're gonna do this summer. And we're gonna put some good vibes out there this time. Because this is

the first time I've actually had to retake a financial exam. So I guess that's not not not terrible. You know, stats, but that's what I'm going to be spending some time on this summer studying. How fun. With that said, though, if you also want to study this summer, not really study, but if you want to take this summer, take advantage of some more free time that you have, maybe watch a little less TV and do something for you, highly recommend you check out my very much updated Wealth Building Blueprint for Canadians course. So if you're a longtime listener, you know that I launched this in February 2021. And I've made a huge overhaul of the course making things lessons and plans even more comprehensive and meaty and there's so much good stuff in it.

And it is a course specifically about passive investing or index investing for Canadians. So if you're Canadian, and you want to, you know, I talk a lot about on the show, you know, passive investing, how to do that. And it is very different than in the States. This is why I built the course so I can show you not just the how to but also the background, the why and just also provide you tools so you can actually do it yourself. And then you'll realize how simple it is once you understand kind of all the moving parts and puzzle pieces and how they all kind of fit together. So if you want to learn more about that and how to apply, just go to jessicamorehouse.com slash course. That is the new landing page. Again, if you go to the old one, jessicamorehouse.com

slash WBB, it'll take you there. But there's a brand new landing page for my course. So take a look. Hope you like it and apply. So that would be my two cents for you. I think that is it for me at the minute. So thank you so much for listening. A big shout out to my wonderful podcast editor, Matt Rideout. And I will see you back here next Wednesday with a fresh new episode of the More Money Podcast. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.