00:00:00
Podcast Intro: You’re listening to ChooseFI. The blueprint for financial independence lives here. If you’re looking to unlock the secrets to financial independence and early retirement, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned and join a community of like-minded people who are getting off the Instagram and taking control of their lives in the pursuit of financial independence. ChooseFI, your home for financial independence online.
00:00:00
Brad: Hello, and welcome to ChooseFI. Today on the show, we’re starting off 2026 with a bang, saying this year, everything changes. And that shows up in a lot of ways, both for the podcast and for each and every one of us in the FI community. It starts today. We’ve always called this the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show, and we redouble our efforts starting today. This is your call to action to become part of the community, and more critically, for you to take action to make your life better in every way. We’re going to provide the motivation and accountability, and we’re all in this together. We’re moving forward stronger as a community where you can share, and then we can amplify everything you’re doing in your own life to succeed. From small life hacks to celebrating your frugal wins and then sharing them with the community for us all to learn from. We have the technology in place to make this happen.
00:00:51
Brad: To make this even more fun, I’m happy to bring back my co-founder of ChooseFI, Jonathan Mendonsa, to help me not only with this episode but many to come in 2026. This is going to be a lot of fun, and no matter where you are on your path to FI, you’re going to want to be here each and every week. And with that, welcome to ChooseFI.
00:01:19
Brad: All right, Jonathan, how are you doing, buddy?
00:01:22
Jonathan: You’re going to come at me with how you’re doing, buddy? Come on.
00:01:26
Brad: It’s been my show for three years, I get to do what I want.
00:01:30
Jonathan: Well, you know, I’m doing quite well, Brad. Doing quite well.
00:01:32
Brad: Okay.
00:01:34
Jonathan: 2026, this is pretty wild. This is the year everything changes.
00:01:38
Brad: I like, you know, I found that extra bit of gravel after I hit 40. Did you notice that? That’s what happens as you get older.
00:01:47
Jonathan: It just keeps going.
00:01:49
Brad: You know, anybody need me to do an intro for them?
00:01:54
Jonathan: In a world.
00:01:55
Brad: Yeah, I got you. I got the edge of your seat because we’re about to talk about the path to financial independence.
00:02:00
Jonathan: How many old school listeners are like, oh, I remember that voice. What was it? Spike real in a world?
00:02:06
Brad: Oh, he was so good. I actually went back recently and listened to the first like 40 episodes of ChooseFI, and it was really fun.
00:02:22
Jonathan: It was so much fun to go back and hear those early days. That was nine years ago, Brad.
00:02:30
Brad: Nine years. It’s unbelievable. It’s interesting, right? Everything changes, but everything stays the same. Going back to the very beginning, you and I really, our first event ever was Camp Mustache in Florida before it was called Camp FI, Camp Mustache in January of 2017. We are literally nine years later.
00:02:55
Jonathan: I’m headed down there next week, which I’m really excited about. It’s amazing to see how this community has grown. When we were there in 2017, I actually had this pie-in-the-sky idea to have a co-housing community for the FI community in rural Georgia. This was something that my actual real estate investments, which is something interesting that we could talk about. I wound up buying two properties in this community. Just this past year in 2025, I sold them to the first settlers of the FI community in Warner Robins, Georgia, which is really pretty wild.
00:03:39
Brad: I love that you started with like pie-in-the-sky ideas because you’re allowed to have those. You’re allowed to manifest things and give it a shot, and if it works, amazing. If it doesn’t, okay, move on to the next idea.
00:03:54
Jonathan: You’re not all in on one hand, but lots of ideas have merit. If only you can find the time to lean into it, you can find others with enthusiasm to join you for the ride.
00:04:02
Brad: Yeah, that’s crazy, man.
00:04:03
Jonathan: I was going to correct you when you called it Camp Mustache, and then you would have corrected my correction because you’re right. That’s exactly how it started.
00:04:11
Brad: He does what, like 12, 13, maybe it’s 10 plus camps a year around the United States?
00:04:15
Jonathan: I think they’re doing one in Spain.
00:04:16
Brad: Yeah, Spain and Italy actually now. So, yeah, Steven has done a remarkable job.
00:04:22
Jonathan: It’s really wild. I think what you hit on there, experimentation, is one of the hallmarks of the FI community and the path to FI. This is about experimenting with your life and doing something a little bit differently.
00:04:34
Brad: That’s always been at the core of what we’re doing. We’re living the same middle-class lifestyle, as you called it. We’re just trying to live these lives but yet get wildly wealthy at the same time.
00:04:49
Jonathan: It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. There’s no secret behind the secret. It’s just a replicable path. And I think the fun part is we get to experiment all the way. This was what we envisioned in 2017: experiments in financial independence.
00:05:02
Brad: Maybe it didn’t go exactly how you and I thought. We talked about the fishbowl, and we were going to do all these things and build businesses in public and do real estate and crowdfunding, different random things.
00:05:17
Jonathan: We never did that.
00:05:19
Brad: Well, hang on there. You’re just going to wash everything? No, we haven’t done anything.
00:05:22
Jonathan: We’re just sitting on our hands over here.
00:05:24
Brad: What? Tell me more.
00:05:26
Jonathan: Dispel me of my myth. I would agree with you that what we thought would happen is not what happened, but I would go a little bit further and say, in the very best way possible.
00:05:35
Brad: Without a doubt.
00:05:36
Jonathan: And to elaborate on that for our community, you have these two guys, in our case. I think even now, nobody thinks of us as experts per se. Occasionally it happens, but most people that have spent any time listening to us appreciate that we’ve always been in the role of cheerleaders, ambassadors, and advocates for this amazing community that has been around long before either of us entered the scene.
00:06:02
Brad: And will be around long after.
00:06:04
Jonathan: Anybody that’s talking about ChooseFI has just been here, part of this community that talks about this idea called financial independence. There are maybe flavors of that and individuals and personalities that have their own take on what it means.
00:06:18
Brad: But we always felt like, and we got better at this. When you first start, you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t have the permission. You haven’t given yourself permission to decide what your flavor is, what your core beliefs actually are.
00:06:32
Jonathan: You’re still ingesting this incredible volume of ideas and trying to decide what this path is. But we did, and I think you went really far on this. You were very overt about this. I completely agreed with your position. Very early on, I remember you saying, “we’re not dogmatic about anything.”
00:06:50
Brad: Now, that does not mean that we do not have strong beliefs. Maybe you could say strong beliefs loosely held. You could still convince us that we’re wrong. It is possible.
00:07:02
Jonathan: It has happened.
00:07:04
Brad: It has been documented where that has happened. The idea has merit that we’re not dogmatic about anything. We want to hear the ideas. We want to hear your ideas.
00:07:14
Jonathan: One of the things that we said early on was, we don’t want a podcast, right? We don’t want a podcast for a podcast. We want ChooseFI to be an ecosystem to foster and grow this conversation.
00:07:24
Brad: It really is something that we believed could be a modern-day movement.
00:07:29
Jonathan: Without a doubt.
00:07:30
Brad: That’s why we called it from the beginning, the ultimate crowd-sourced personal finance show.
00:07:35
Jonathan: And that has been such an integral part of ChooseFI that the community is everything. It’s everything on our show. It literally is the lifeblood. ChooseFI and our local groups are the lifeblood of the financial independence movement.
00:07:52
Brad: It’s such a wild thing. There are people every single day in hundreds upon hundreds of cities across the world getting together and sharing their lives with other people on the path to FI. That’s just truly extraordinary.
00:08:06
Jonathan: This really is better with FI friends. To take a quote out of Diana Merriam’s Economy, FI is better with friends.
00:08:14
Brad: It’s better with the community. It’s better when we all band together with the incredible knowledge that we have as a community. We share, work, iterate, and experiment.
00:08:26
Jonathan: That word again, experiment. When we experiment together, work towards common goals, and see other people like us succeeding at this, they might be a couple of years ahead.
00:08:38
Brad: Jonathan, I’m, I guess, around six years older than you. I, this whole way, I was a little bit ahead, right?
00:08:44
Jonathan: That’s what’s so neat. People saw themselves in us. You and I are totally different people with totally different personalities and backgrounds, and different parts in the path to FI, different interests, different talents. I know you love talent stacking.
00:09:01
Brad: What’s cool is we still get along incredibly well. There are so many things we have in common. I think that’s the beauty of this path to FI: we find people that we might not find in the regular course of life.
00:09:18
Jonathan: Absolutely.
00:09:19
Brad: We certainly find really interesting people and have fun with and experiment with.
00:09:23
Jonathan: That is a game changer.
00:09:27
Brad: It’s a total game changer. The people that are important to me in my life now are almost exclusively people from the FI community. What a crazy thing. We were all islands unto ourselves 10 years ago.
00:09:39
Jonathan: We just were. That’s how it worked. We were reading blogs.
00:09:43
Brad: It’s funny listening to those early episodes, we talked about, “oh, what blog article did you read?” No, that’s gone the way of the dodo bird. That’s not a thing anymore.
00:09:55
Jonathan: It still kind of surprises me.
00:09:56
Brad: You’re right. I know you’re right, but it still surprises me how quickly things move.
00:10:02
Jonathan: At the time, when I was absorbing my information, I was looking for a blog that had certain amounts of content.
00:10:08
Brad: So here we are in 2023 and beyond, you know, now I guess 2025 going to 2026, but really the point I’m making is we’re in a post-GPT, post-social media, post-community at this type of lane.
00:10:21
Jonathan: And you got a wire hooked up to the back of your head saying, “absorb my contents or absorb information.”
00:10:29
Brad: Oh, I know Kung Fu.
00:11:18
Brad: Anybody, anybody can still do it. All right.
00:11:20
Jonathan: So one of the things I love about you, one of the many things is you are great at naming episodes. This is something that I’ve struggled with for four years now. So I think the happiest part about you being back is that you’re going to name the episodes, but no, just kidding. I love you, buddy. But so this year everything changes and my response to that is, but everything stays the same. I make the title and then Brad goes behind and like undercuts the title and goes back to the opposite. It’s just like a yin yang type thing going on here. I got a kick out of thinking about how you were going to have to come up with titles. I just want to point out, there’s a little bit of devil in me that was just saying, I would ask the guests for help. I swear I would do 300 episodes a year if I didn’t have to title them. Okay.
00:12:16
Jonathan: So everything changes. What do we got?
00:12:20
Jonathan: First of all, I am back, everyone. I’m coming back on the show. Brad has formally asked me to come join him again. He did not actually kick me out for overusing the word unpack. That was not the case. In fact, let me just give you guys a little bit of setup for what’s happened over the last couple of years. Brad and I, we experienced true joy doing those early episodes. We’re chatting, we’re learning the concepts along with you, we’re exploring and we’re making mistakes live and in front of a growing audience and they’re calling us on it. And as a result of us acknowledging the mistakes and iterating the message, everybody got better in a way that was tangible. It felt like it was happening in real time. And as a result, the podcast outperformed anyone’s expectations, becoming probably one of the largest independent finance podcasts in the country by any measure. That was mind boggling. For the first time, financial independence and not a brown banana journalist’s meme of what this community was, was resonating with the entire world. We had a common language that we could speak.
00:13:29
Jonathan: What’s the problem? Well, if you want to harness a movement, you need to have a platform for it, all right? Otherwise, you’re using duct tape and glue. What that means is we’re working on the back of spreadsheets, we’re working on the back of cobbling together no-code solutions, using little Chrome extensions to try to connect various messages. When someone sends you an email, there’s no way you can answer that person’s question. That was helpful for one person and that’s great, but you have a limited number of hours to do everything. And as the podcast grows and more and more great ideas are coming on your plate, you’re just fundamentally unable to facilitate that, to find a way to get that message out to help as many people as possible. And so, you’re constantly dropping the ball somewhere. You might do something really well, but the core idea was we want to help a movement and create an ecosystem for this community so that as many people can benefit as possible. And we want to be able to grow with you.
00:14:20
Jonathan: We want to be able to say, where are you now? This journey is mathematical, but it’s also psychological and it dramatically benefits from connection. You being able to connect with each other and then you being able to connect with the content that you need at the place that you need it. And your journey is changing and you’re also not at the same place as someone else. And that is the beauty of it. Brad and I are not at the same place. This is the benefit, but what does that mean? That means somebody is getting left behind. Somebody isn’t getting the message where they need that. It’s so spread out that as soon as the media decides what the next hot topic is, you’ve moved on.
00:15:11
Jonathan: All right. We wanted to solve this, but here’s the problem. Brad was a former accountant and I was a former pharmacist. Did you hear tech anywhere in there? I remember being fascinated by being able to get an HTML box with a red border on it. That was the extent of my knowledge. We just, we could not do it. Brad, you’re laughing. I’ll give you the floor. It was pretty cool at the time. How did you do that? Do you know what CSS is?
00:15:38
Brad: All right.
00:15:39
Jonathan: So, some of you don’t and that’s fine. It’s not your burden. That’s not something you need to resolve at this point in time, but in general, it just shows you if you’re aware how fundamentally unable Brad and I were to solve a tech problem. And so, as it was growing, we tried to bring on team members and help and people really had good intentions. But even through outsourcing, we could not get the platform and the community to be able to handle what we had in our brains. We couldn’t manifest it.
00:16:07
Jonathan: And a lot of things did get manifested. There’s a documentary that’s out there now that really just did an incredible job highlighting various aspects of this community. Lots of incredible things have happened. But this core idea that was in our head was not going to be able to be solved by throwing more money at the problem. That was not the issue. It required one of us being able to take a step back and just think through every tiny little piece. It sounds like this is very obvious and very linear, and it was just time. There was no guarantee that any of this would work. But I asked Brad, hey, I just need to take a step back, and I need to solve this, and I want to build this. And so, Brad kept the show going, and I just went behind the scenes.
00:16:45
Jonathan: I learned how to build pretty boxes with red borders. Is everybody impressed yet? Oh, good. Good use of your time. But along the way with that, I figured out how to do databases, and I figured out how to do relationships, and I figured out how to do dashboards, and gamification, and tracking, and social media development, and all these types of things that all of us are maybe more familiar with. The idea is financial independence is not something that’s a binary thing where you are just there or not there. It’s a process, and you’re getting little wins every day. And so, the show needs to be a way that we can come together, focus on something, and have a way for us to, if we want to take actions inside of a community, and if we need help with an area, be able to find help and get feedback from other people that are slightly farther ahead of us, and then be able to incrementally grow.
00:17:38
Jonathan: If you think through, I want people to kind of think through what I’m going to call the phases of FI, and I’ve had 20 or 30 definitions. I’ll probably change it next year. This one is the one that I just introduced Brad to yesterday, and it’s as I was thinking about this. But there’s a strong pattern for this belief system that I have at the moment. The first phase of financial independence does not have to do with your bank account. It has to do with discovery. You became aware that this concept existed. That’s massive. You became aware that there’s a community of people that have realized a tangible way to find out their number, and the context for that. You have people, you say, well, I discovered FI, or I discovered ChooseFI, and yeah, that’s it. It’s really that simple. It’s someone saying, here’s the episode to go listen to, and it resonates with them.
00:18:29
Jonathan: At this point, you have a lot of individuals that maybe have these identity statements like, oh, I’m bad with money, or that’s not something that I look at. I think that’s the key. Someone that says, I’m bad at money, that’s another way of saying I’ve never looked. I’ve never really wanted to look. I’ve never really, because maybe there’s angst there, or emotion, or untold stressors, but I’ve been afraid to look. You can solve that piece, that awareness. You could know your number within five minutes of one episode, and Brad, I’m going to give it back to you.
00:19:05
Jonathan: We’ll keep going through a couple of these other phases, but I want to say our goal is going to be to help you discover financial independence, give you an easy way to bring friends and family members and help them discover it, and then have a community to grow from discovery to independence, all the various phases in between, and just win together.
00:19:21
Brad: Yeah, I love that. I think there’s so many things there. You have, and you’re going to get to this, obviously, but you’ve created an amazing platform on our website. I’ll toot your horn for you. You’ve probably spent 5,000 hours over the last two plus years, literally 16-hour days just on end, to create something extraordinary for all of us. We’re finally at the point where it’s real, and it can help every local group, it can help every aspect of the FI community, and it can certainly help the show, and it can help it be that ultimate crowd-sourced personal finance show that we envisioned nine years ago.
00:20:02
Brad: And you and I tried to cobble it together back then. It was fun. Go back and listen to those old episodes to everybody out there. Frankly, we’re going to touch on a lot of these topics. So do this or don’t do it, but just for fun, getting everyone involved, you feel part of something. And when you have questions, we can answer them. We can get our amazing friends who are world-class experts to answer them. We can put them on the show. We can talk through this. We can talk through our little frugal wins of the week.
00:20:31
Brad: Jonathan, I had this fun little frugal win of the week last week, when I had no, nobody to tell it to. And I was like, dude, what are you just, you’re just going to like move on to the next thing. You’re just take everyone. This is our first segment. We’re going to do frugal wins of the week. Brad, what do you got for us?
00:20:45
Brad: Okay. So, you know, the LMNT electrolyte packets. Have you ever, have you ever heard of this?
00:20:51
Jonathan: I do know what an electrolyte is.
00:20:54
Brad: Let’s just, let’s just give me partial.
00:20:56
Jonathan: Yeah, we’ll go with that.
00:20:56
Brad: So LMNT, and this is no shade at them. Certainly they are because I buy these things. They’re very expensive. They’re these electrolytes, salt, potassium, and magnesium that basically every podcast that has ads on it. Obviously we don’t pretty much has ads for LMNT and these things are expensive. They’re like a dollar 50 a pack. So we’re talking like, if you have a couple, it’s $3 a day for just a little bit of salt and some electrolytes. And I was dutifully buying these things because you know, it’s, it’s theoretically good for your health.
00:21:26
Brad: And interestingly, they actually publish their recipe on the website. They’re basically saying like, we’re so good. And what we do is so good that we’re going to even give you our recipe and just dare you to make it. And we took them at their dare basically, and just bought the ingredients off Amazon. And instead of being a dollar 50 per serving of electrolytes, it comes out to about somewhere between three and five pennies, so three to five cents. It’s amazing. It’s the easiest thing. You just grab a little food scale. You dump in some salt, you dump in some magnesium and potassium at…
00:11:18
Brad: Anybody, anybody can still do it. All right.
00:11:20
Jonathan: So one of the things I love about you, one of the many things is you are great at naming episodes. This is something that I’ve struggled with for four years now. So I think the happiest part about you being back is that you’re going to name the episodes, but no, just kidding. I love you, buddy.
00:11:34
Jonathan: So this year everything changes and my response to that is, but everything stays the same. I make the title and then Brad goes behind and undercuts the title and goes back to the opposite. It’s just like a yin yang type thing going on here. I got a kick out of thinking about how you were going to have to come up with titles. I just want to point out, there’s a little bit of devil in me that was just saying, I would ask the guests for help. I swear I would do 300 episodes a year if I didn’t have to title them.
00:12:16
Jonathan: So everything changes. What do we got? First of all, I am back, everyone. I’m coming back on the show. Brad has formally asked me to come join him again. He did not actually kick me out for overusing the word unpack. That was not the case. In fact, let me just give you guys a little bit of setup for what’s happened over the last couple of years. Brad and I, we experienced true joy doing those early episodes. We’re chatting, we’re learning the concepts along with you, we’re exploring and we’re making mistakes live and in front of a growing audience and they’re calling us on it.
00:13:29
Jonathan: As a result of us acknowledging the mistakes and iterating the message, everybody got better in a way that was tangible. It felt like it was happening in real time. And as a result, the podcast outperformed anyone’s expectations, becoming probably one of the largest independent finance podcasts in the country by any measure. That was mind boggling.
00:13:48
Jonathan: For the first time, financial independence and not a brown banana journalist’s meme of what this community was, was resonating with the entire world. We had a common language that we could speak.
00:14:06
Jonathan: What’s the problem? Well, if you want to harness a movement, you need to have a platform for it, all right? Otherwise, you’re using duct tape and glue. What that means is we’re working on the back of spreadsheets, we’re working on the back of cobbling together no-code solutions, using little Chrome extensions to try to connect various messages. When someone sends you an email, there’s no way you can answer that person’s question.
00:14:36
Jonathan: That was helpful for one person and that’s great, but you have a limited number of hours to do everything. And as the podcast grows and more and more great ideas are coming on your plate, you’re just fundamentally unable to facilitate that, to find a way to get that message out to help as many people as possible. And so, you’re constantly dropping the ball somewhere. You might do something really well, but the core idea was we want to help a movement and create an ecosystem for this community so that as many people can benefit as possible.
00:15:11
Jonathan: And we want to be able to grow with you. We want to be able to say, where are you now? This journey is mathematical, but it’s also psychological and it dramatically benefits from connection. You being able to connect with each other and then you being able to connect with the content that you need at the place that you need it. And your journey is changing and you’re also not at the same place as someone else.
00:15:40
Jonathan: And that is the beauty of it. Brad and I are not at the same place. This is the benefit, but what does that mean? That means somebody is getting left behind. Somebody isn’t getting the message where they need that. It’s so spread out that as soon as the media decides what the next hot topic is, you’ve moved on.
00:15:56
Brad: All right.
00:15:57
Jonathan: We wanted to solve this, but here’s the problem. Brad was a former accountant and I was a former pharmacist. Did you hear tech anywhere in there? I remember being fascinated by being able to get an HTML box with a red border on it. That was the extent of my knowledge.
00:16:07
Jonathan: We just could not do it. Brad, you’re laughing. I’ll give you the floor. It was pretty cool at the time. How did you do that? Do you know what CSS is?
00:16:21
Brad: All right.
00:16:22
Jonathan: Some of you don’t and that’s fine. It’s not your burden. That’s not something you need to resolve at this point in time, but in general, it just shows you if you’re aware how fundamentally unable Brad and I were to solve a tech problem.
00:16:37
Jonathan: And so, as it was growing, we tried to bring on team members and help and people really had good intentions. But even through outsourcing, we could not get the platform and the community to be able to handle what we had in our brains. We couldn’t manifest it.
00:16:46
Jonathan: And a lot of things did get manifested. There’s a documentary that’s out there now that really just did an incredible job highlighting various aspects of this community. Lots of incredible things have happened. But this core idea that was in our head was not going to be able to be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
00:17:07
Jonathan: That was not the issue. It required one of us being able to take a step back and just think through every tiny little piece. It sounds like this is very obvious and very linear, and it was just time. There was no guarantee that any of this would work. But I asked Brad, hey, I just need to take a step back, and I need to solve this, and I want to build this. And so, Brad kept the show going, and I just went behind the scenes.
00:17:38
Jonathan: I learned how to build pretty boxes with red borders. Is everybody impressed yet? Oh, good. Good use of your time. But along the way with that, I figured out how to do databases, and I figured out how to do relationships, and I figured out how to do dashboards, and gamification, and tracking, and social media development, and all these types of things that all of us are maybe more familiar with.
00:18:10
Jonathan: The idea is financial independence is not something that’s a binary thing where you are just there or not there. It’s a process, and you’re getting little wins every day. And so, the show needs to be a way that we can come together, focus on something, and have a way for us to, if we want to take actions inside of a community, and if we need help with an area, be able to find help and get feedback from other people that are slightly farther ahead of us, and then be able to incrementally grow.
00:18:38
Jonathan: If you think through, I want people to kind of think through what I’m going to call the phases of FI, and I’ve had 20 or 30 definitions. I’ll probably change it next year. This one is the one that I just introduced Brad to yesterday, and it’s as I was thinking about this. But there’s a strong pattern for this belief system that I have at the moment.
00:19:05
Jonathan: The first phase of financial independence does not have to do with your bank account. It has to do with discovery. You became aware that this concept existed. That’s massive. You became aware that there’s a community of people that have realized a tangible way to find out their number, and the context for that. You have people, you say, well, I discovered FI, or I discovered ChooseFI, and yeah, that’s it. It’s really that simple.
00:19:30
Jonathan: It’s someone saying, here’s the episode to go listen to, and it resonates with them. At this point, you have a lot of individuals that maybe have these identity statements like, oh, I’m bad with money, or that’s not something that I look at. I think that’s the key. Someone that says, I’m bad at money, that’s another way of saying I’ve never looked. I’ve never really wanted to look. I’ve never really, because maybe there’s angst there, or emotion, or untold stressors, but I’ve been afraid to look.
00:19:56
Jonathan: You can solve that piece, that awareness. You could know your number within five minutes of one episode, and Brad, I’m going to give it back to you.
00:20:06
Jonathan: We’ll keep going through a couple of these other phases, but I want to say our goal is going to be to help you discover financial independence, give you an easy way to bring friends and family members and help them discover it, and then have a community to grow from discovery to independence, all the various phases in between, and just win together.
00:20:31
Brad: Yeah, I love that. I think there are so many things there. You have, and you’re going to get to this, obviously, but you’ve created an amazing platform on our website. I’ll toot your horn for you. You’ve probably spent 5,000 hours over the last two plus years, literally 16-hour days just on end, to create something extraordinary for all of us.
00:20:45
Brad: We’re finally at the point where it’s real, and it can help every local group, it can help every aspect of the FI community, and it can certainly help the show, and it can help it be that ultimate crowd-sourced personal finance show that we envisioned nine years ago.
00:21:01
Brad: And you and I tried to cobble it together back then. It was fun. Go back and listen to those old episodes to everybody out there. Frankly, we’re going to touch on a lot of these topics. So do this or don’t do it, but just for fun, getting everyone involved, you feel part of something. And when you have questions, we can answer them. We can get our amazing friends who are world-class experts to answer them. We can put them on the show.
00:21:28
Brad: We can talk through this. We can talk through our little frugal wins of the week.
00:21:32
Brad: Jonathan, I had this fun little frugal win of the week last week when I had no, nobody to tell it to. And I was like, dude, what are you just, you’re just going to like move on to the next thing. You’re just take everyone. This is our first segment. We’re going to do frugal wins of the week. Brad, what do you got for us?
00:21:45
Brad: Okay. So, you know, the LMNT electrolyte packets. Have you ever heard of this?
00:21:51
Jonathan: I do know what an electrolyte is.
00:21:53
Brad: Let’s just, let’s just give me partial.
00:21:55
Jonathan: Yeah, we’ll go with that.
00:21:58
Brad: So LMNT, and this is no shade at them. Certainly they are because I buy these things. They’re very expensive. They’re these electrolytes, salt, potassium, and magnesium that basically every podcast that has ads on it. Obviously we don’t pretty much has ads for LMNT and these things are expensive.
00:22:20
Brad: They’re like a dollar 50 a pack. So we’re talking like, if you have a couple, it’s $3 a day for just a little bit of salt and some electrolytes. And I was dutifully buying these things because you know, it’s theoretically good for your health.
00:22:43
Brad: And interestingly, they actually publish their recipe on the website. They’re basically saying like, we’re so good. And what we do is so good that we’re going to even give you our recipe and just dare you to make it. And we took them at their dare basically, and just bought the ingredients off Amazon.
00:23:04
Brad: And instead of being a dollar 50 per serving of electrolytes, it comes out to about somewhere between three and five pennies. So three to five cents. It’s amazing. It’s the easiest thing. You just grab a little food scale. You dump in some salt, you dump in some magnesium and potassium at the exact ratio that they put.
00:23:20
Brad: We’ll put the link in the show notes here. I put in a couple of little flakes of stevia and a couple of drops of lemon juice and boom, I have my nice element. And it is four pennies as opposed to a dollar 50. This episode brought to you by Elementy Life. Follow through by going to Google drive slash link.
00:23:40
Brad: Yeah, I think obviously we don’t do advertising, but, but I don’t think elements ever coming around.
00:23:45
Jonathan: Well, not now, thanks Brad.
00:23:47
Brad: Not now. Elementy, we can, we can, we can work this.
00:23:52
Brad: But they’re great. I’ve been a customer for years, but yeah, it was just, that was just a really cool thing. And anyway, that’s such a tiny little thing, Jonathan, but that’s minimum $3 a day. It’s a thousand bucks a year that I just saved, which is not nothing, right?
00:24:10
Brad: That’s $25,000 less. I need my FI in my five pod to reach FI. But I mean, Brad, that’s the cool thing about life hacks. When you have, when you’re limited and that’s the really cool thing about crowdsourcing a show, which was our earliest mandate was this has to be a crowdsource show was through the lens of Brad is an expert.
00:24:30
Brad: Well, that means that you’re going to get what Brad knows and basically limited to what Brad knows and the people that are closest in his sphere of influence, same with Jonathan, if that’s the case.
00:24:39
Jonathan: But because of the mandate early on for crowdsourcing, personal finance, we were inundated with ideas that we had never contemplated or considered. And it allowed us to go to places that were not traditionally considered personal finance, which is fine because we viewed this through the lens of life optimization, right?
00:24:57
Jonathan: We viewed this through the lens of what if you can reclaim your most precious non-renewable resource, your time, what else opens up for you? That was powerful. And I think it was a fresh approach to this because if you think about it, if we’re taking you through this process of saying, all right, discovering financial independence, there’s this community, here’s how you calculate your financial independence number.
00:25:22
Jonathan: And by the way, maybe someone is listening to this for the first time. They’re like, all right, well, come on. What, what, what, all right, here’s how you can calculate your financial independence number.
00:25:32
Brad: Checks notes. Yep.
00:25:33
Jonathan: Here it is. The way you calculate your financial independence number…
00:25:38
Brad: You take your expenses on a monthly basis, or you can do annual, but if you go monthly, you’d multiply it times 12.
00:25:47
Jonathan: All right. And then multiply that number times 25.
00:25:51
Brad: And that gives you a number that people would generally call a financial independence number.
00:25:54
Jonathan: Now there’s a million tiny little caveats and things that you’d want to put on immediate questions that would come up, which are all very, very right. But that number, that very simple mathematical calculation is what the vast majority of our community would consider a rule of thumb starting place for figuring out what is my number and what does it mean?
00:26:10
Brad: I’ll give it back to you, Brad. What does it mean?
00:26:14
Jonathan: You know, your number or that you have a number. What is a financial independence number once you calculate it?
00:26:19
Brad: Yeah. The beauty is that this is your North star.
00:26:22
Brad: Okay. Whereas I think what’s so powerful about FI is that you control your life destiny. It’s in your hands because when you hear in the general ether in the personal finance space for whatever that’s worth, the Susie Orman’s of the world, you can never retire, you hear a drumbeat of negativity, it’s impossible.
00:26:37
Brad: You’re going to need 10, 15, $20 million because healthcare or some nonsense. You know, Brad, without the Susie Orman’s of the world, we wouldn’t be able to talk about the Susie Orman’s.
00:26:49
Jonathan: She’s really doing a great service.
00:26:50
Brad: She has a good foil. Thank you.
00:26:53
Jonathan: Thank you, Susie.
00:26:54
Brad: But seriously, it’s what’s so nice about FI. And I think this to me was the very first thing that turned me on to FI was wow. I have something to shoot for and I control it.
00:27:06
Brad: So what it means really simply is when you reach that number and like Jonathan said, at its essence, it’s your annual expenses multiplied by 25.
00:27:16
Brad: And this is agnostic for what your expenses are. We’re not here to say you need to live on $10,000 a year or 40,000 or 80 or whatever it is, it’s whatever your life costs.
00:27:27
Brad: You multiply by 25 and that’s your FI number. So really simply, if your life expenses cost $40,000, your FI number is a million, if your life costs 80,000, your FI number is 2 million.
00:27:37
Brad: And this just works really simply. And ultimately what we’re doing here is we’re getting you to a point where work is optional.
00:27:44
Brad: Okay. Because you have now built up enough of a net worth that you can pull out 4% of that every single year and live off of that amount.
00:27:55
Brad: So really simply, this is the 4% rule of thumb. If you’re, if you have a $2 million net worth, investable assets, net worth, you can pull out 4% of that each year.
00:28:06
Jonathan: So just go back to high school math, right? 2 million times 0.04, that equals 80,000.
00:28:12
Brad: So if your life costs 80,000 or less, in that case, you are at financial independence, you do not need income in that year because your assets kick off enough that you can sell them.
00:28:23
Brad: And or whatever the dividends, et cetera, but in essence, you’re selling assets from your net worth. And that is covering what your life costs.
00:28:30
Brad: And at that point, work is completely optional.
00:28:36
Jonathan: Did you notice that as you know, Brad was pointing that out and he was going through that calculus, that actually income wasn’t a factor, right? What you make wasn’t a factor.
00:28:42
Brad: Now here’s, what’s really interesting to point out. Go look at every single other non-financial independence calculator and specifically go look for retirement calculators on the internet.
00:28:54
Jonathan: They’re all going to ask you for your income and it makes it sound. And even, you know, Susie in this case makes it sound like unless you have a specific income, you’re not going to be able to retire and expenses do not determine your financial independence number in any way.
00:29:06
Brad: It’s an expense-driven calculation.
00:29:08
Jonathan: Now we can go farther and we will, and actually I’m going to hit this really hard, some individuals will rightly point out, well, how do I account for social security or how do I account for a pension that I’m expecting in the future?
00:29:18
Brad: Okay. And how do I account for the fact that maybe I’m paying off debt? And so my expenses right now are going to decrease and I’m going to be talking extensively about a topic that I’m calling effective need, right?
00:29:30
Brad: That’s borrowed really, I think from like FAFSA calculations, but I think it works for us in that financial independence is a static number that gives us a North star. Effective need is a true reality in terms of a projection.
00:29:44
Brad: And that’s something we want to move to. But I’m going to say this now, going back and you’re going to hear in a way that we’ve never done before.
00:29:52
Jonathan: And I’m going to give myself permission and I hope you understand the reason.
00:29:56
Brad: The tech stack that I’ve been working on, the community app that I’ve been working on is now a core part of this podcast.
00:30:03
Brad: It is an essential core part because it is the place where you can take the single actions. It is the place where we can build the case studies. It is the place where we can go into the numbers.
00:30:12
Brad: It is the place where whatever we say on the show, and it’s very challenging to make math the story, very challenging. And so much easier if we can work with similar tools.
00:30:23
Jonathan: And even if those tools need to be tweaked or optimized, so now you can, yes, you can go do that rough financial independence calculation, the very easy one that we said, and you can do it on a calculator too, so I’m not like blowing your mind with that.
00:30:34
Brad: But it is on our community app, but even more than that. We have a financial independence plan tool that will start moving you towards this context of effective need.
00:30:43
Brad: Now it’s still in beta, but I say that it’s a very strong beta. There’s still some tax logic that’s happening at the moment that’s being wired in, but there’s now 20,000 users on this app over the last year as we go.
00:30:52
Brad: And that was our beta year. And now it’s ready to kind of, you know, be talked about, be tested. We’re going to start doing validation this year, but we’re going to start building our financial independence plans together.
00:31:04
Brad: All right.
00:31:05
Brad: Now it’s your information. It’s your data. That’s all fine. It’s your stuff, but it has a community aspect right next to it.
00:31:14
Jonathan: So when you have a question about something, when you have like, I’m stuck on this, or how should I do this? Or what does this mean?
00:31:22
Brad: The natural questions that come up right next door, right next to it. You’re going to have an easy place. You’re going to be able to go and get that troubleshooting, that feedback.
00:31:30
Brad: And while all of that sounds good. What takes us to the next level is the local groups. The local groups is what is going to take all of these ideas.
00:31:40
Jonathan: And you’re going to start hearing people talk about how the FI is spreading in 2026. So when we say this is the year, everything changes.
00:31:47
Brad: These local groups have happened because people care about helping others start to understand money rules. Not to make money off them, not to profit off them, but we just see that there are people that are struggling whose lives would be easier if they had a little bit of the information that a lot of us have started taking for granted.
00:32:07
Brad: All right. What does that look like when you started being able to have a way to take friends and family members and without dogma and without controversy, being able to take them to a place where they don’t have to worry about being sold something, there’s no agenda.
00:32:22
Jonathan: It’s just learning the money rules that have underpinned this entire game the whole time. In a nonjudgmental way, you can start going through these phases of discovery to now for the first time awareness.
00:32:32
Jonathan: I know my number. If you did that very simple calculation, you’re already basically in awareness as long as you kind of understand the why of it.
00:32:39
Brad: And then now after that, and this would be within two sessions control. I have a plan for the first time.
00:32:44
Brad: I have a plan. I’m not, it’s not saying you’re going to be there tomorrow or that you’re at financial independence. Some of you might be two years out. Some of you might be 15 years out.
00:32:51
Brad: Some of you might be 20 years out, but I, for the first time, I have a plan because I know where my North star is and I understand the rules of how to get there.
00:33:00
Jonathan: And from there, that’s where the community starts. The joy really starts to come in because now you start to have things like FU money, which we can talk about later.
00:33:09
Brad: You could also just call it optionality. You have options long before you reach financial independence and you’re starting to have the luxury of thinking about things like optimization, right?
00:33:19
Brad: You see how powerful this is that within a matter of weeks, someone goes from…
00:32:51
Brad: Discovery to optimization and inevitably to independence, that’s why this changes. Where does it happen? It starts on the podcast, but that goes to the local groups. The local groups is where a movement happens. How do you harness that in a way that they get the support they need? It’s this community tool. Local groups will now have a consistent platform to be able to have consistent presentations, resources, calculators, and tools that move along with the flow of what we’re talking about on the podcast and what’s being talked about in the local groups.
00:33:31
Brad: Yeah, it’s super powerful. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been adamant about creating an event invite system for our local meetups because I want meetups, and we’ve always used that term, but this can just become a part of life. In our Richmond local group, we have people who are taking morning walks together, getting together for lunch or coffee. I went to the last two case studies, which were really just extraordinary. If your local group isn’t doing a case study, we can all share together. We can share the templates for these case studies; they are remarkable.
00:34:20
Brad: It’s truly powerful to have an entire group of people come together, share ideas, answer questions, and work through someone’s financial life. We all learn together. Recently, someone mentioned getting together for coffee with six people, and I thought, how did I not know about this? That’s something, Jonathan, that will be posted in our local events, and we’re all going to find out about it. You’ve created something where we get a weekly digest email, which shows the events happening in the next couple of weeks, the conversations going on in this app, and new member introductions.
00:35:00
Brad: We just had someone from Denmark or Finland join us. What a cool thing! I want to pop in and say hello. We can now know about these events and get emails. I got an email two days ago, and I’m going to miss the next local event because I’m going to be down in Florida. I received my email a couple of days ago, reminding me of a local case study this coming Sunday.
00:35:39
Brad: This is what we’ve envisioned for years. We’ve talked about taking action. FI is about taking action. You’ve done it. It also becomes very micro. Forget our app; forget everything. We said everything changes, but everything stays the same. FI is about taking action to make your life better. I’m doing this myself. It’s December 30th as we’re recording this, and I’m putting together my net worth statement for 2025. One of the important things to do when you get started with FI—and every step along the way—is to know your FI number and your net worth. I do this every quarter because it’s important.
00:36:54
Brad: This community is not just for people getting started; it’s for everyone. It’s a living, breathing organism where we all learn. We jotted down a few segments you’ll be able to contribute to in this app, like frugal wins of the week, life hacks, travel rewards, questions, and real people’s budgets. We’re going to highlight what life actually costs because many don’t know. Sharing this knowledge is powerful.
00:37:48
Brad: We have all of our friends and experts to answer questions. We could do something sharing people’s wins or episode feedback, and there are so many things we can do that aren’t limited by us, Jonathan.
00:38:00
Jonathan: What you just described was what brings us joy in recording episodes. When Brad and I evaluate where we’re headed, we’re doing it because we feel we have the pulse of where this needs to go. Maybe it took us longer to get here, but we will keep building. If I’m going to spend this insane amount of time developing, I want to do it for this community with this ultimate goal in mind.
00:39:11
Jonathan: After having a number, we need to do an expense audit. We need to do it once a year. There are budgets with compelling reasons to have them. YNAB is a great budgeting tool. The financial independence community tends to be past that point, and even if you recoil at the word budget, you still need to know where your money goes. Our financial independence number, based on expenses, must align with our values. If you’re spending on something that doesn’t align with what you want, you should reconsider.
00:40:47
Brad: I love that expense audit; it’s a call to action for everybody, regardless of how long you’ve been pursuing FI. Frugality isn’t about depriving yourself, but it’s about identifying what you value in life. There are things I spend money on freely, but I’ve cut many expenses ruthlessly, and I’m happy about that. There are two sides to saving money.
00:42:10
Brad: Every hundred dollars you cut out of your budget means you need $30,000 less in your FI pot of money. And it doesn’t stop there; that money gets invested. That investment could grow by about 8% over 20 years. If you invest that $100 a month you cut from your budget, after 20 years, you could end up with $60,000, creating a $90,000 swing. If that doesn’t give you chills, I honestly don’t know what will.
00:43:48
Jonathan: What you’re highlighting is the aggregation of marginal gains. You’re not just cutting to cut; you have your North star and a why.
00:44:05
Jonathan: From something you’re moving aggressively towards something you’re moving toward options. And it’s not like you have to get to that end mark to realize the benefits of that choice. You get those options all along the way. You’re going to find so many awesome detours and unexpected little paths and opportunities. Brad, I saw somewhere on your notes way back in the day, something about just like luck and surface area. What you create for yourself is just, you create opportunity when you do this. When all of your economic output, all of your energy, all of your toil is locked up in stuff that hasn’t been calibrated and aligned around your values. You’ve limited your ability for luck to strike. You’ve limited your ability to get an exponential return. You’ve locked in one path without exploring all the other incredible opportunities that are out there. And you were born to do more than pay bills and die.
00:45:12
Jonathan: Oh yeah, it’s so true. And that is what most people do. Sadly, people are sleepwalking through life. They wake up at 60 or 70 and maybe they have a vacation every year to show for it, but that’s about it. There was so much stress along the way. I think that is the beauty of FI; we are accruing the power on our side of the ledger. Every dollar we save, we are more powerful. We have more autonomy. We have more freedom. This is about freedom. This is about choice. This is about optionality. We’re living the best lives we can live. That’s why we’re saving money—not to deprive ourselves, not to miss out on a latte or avocado toast or whatever other nonsense people throw our way. This is about controlling the only thing that matters, which is our time. And it’s exceedingly powerful.
00:46:25
Jonathan: There’s nobody else. Kings of your couldn’t live the lives that you and I are living, that we are living—all of us listening to this podcast—because we have power and we have time freedom and we have the ability to do what we want with decades of our lives. There is nothing more important than that. We are saving for our freedom, Brad. I just got chills, man. So this is it. That’s the show I want to be a part of. I hope, if you’re listening to the community, you realize, I’m not saying we’ve pulled it off yet, but with what the possibility of what could happen this year, you are a part and you’re contributing to a show that is unlike anything that has ever existed.
00:47:01
Jonathan: It might become a pattern in the future. I don’t know. But this is a show, the idea of which is exciting to me. I want to be around that conversation. That’s why I’m like, yep, we got to do this, Brad. Yes. I’ll carve out the time. We’ll figure it out. We have to have more of these conversations. And the key is, you are the conversation. Your path to financial independence has always been the conversation. If we’re just limited to my path or to Brad’s path, we’re done after episode three. It’s the community’s collective and individual journey to financial independence.
00:47:56
Jonathan: Because even when it doesn’t exactly mirror, every episode doesn’t exactly mirror our own life, we can see a shade of it in that individual or collective episode. We can see the piece of it that we can need. We can start to appreciate the nuance and we need to get as much of that as possible. It has to be collaborative between us and you. That is what we’re going to, you know, if you’re going to die on a hill, that’s the hill we want to die on with the show. That’s what we want to do. That’s what we want to be a part of. That’s why this year everything changes because we’re not trying to figure out how to be any other show because that show has never existed.
00:48:55
Jonathan: We’re creating something that has never existed and we’re inviting you and asking and pleading with you to join us to build that. So what does it look like? How do you even do that? Here’s what happens. I need you to create an account on the community app. If you want to be a part of the community, I need you to be a part of the community. So you’re going to go to choosefi.com/local. You’re going to set up your account. And then here’s the magic of this. We’re always going to be running a little bit up behind what we’re talking about, right? Almost by definition, we’re building this in front of you.
00:49:35
Jonathan: So the next thing I’m going to say has just created work for me. Hey, Jonathan, could you find out a way to complicate your life a little more? Can you sleep less, Jonathan? Can you sleep less? We’re talking about something you’ve already built. No, no, no. As we build this together, it’s always going to be the next thing. We’re always going to be chasing the next thing because the next thing is going to improve this idea that we’re trying to build. And the next thing is we need your feedback, right? Now, I love the emails. I love the comments. You take the time to send them to us. And it’s great. We have a radio show. We need your voicemails. So please, you know, if you’re going to either do it or not do it, please just do something. Send us your feedback.
00:50:31
Jonathan: But if you can hear the emphasis, we want to feature your voicemails on this show. We want to converse with you via this asynchronous style and feature your voicemail and be able to talk about those ideas, share your wins with you. And so when you create your account on your dashboard, you’re going to now see an option that says contribute to the community or contribute to the show, be a part of the show. I haven’t figured out the exact copy yet because after we get off this call, I have to start working on it. But regardless, when you’re logging in on your dashboard now, you’re going to see an option to contribute to the show.
00:51:07
Jonathan: And once you do that, you’re going to start seeing a list of the episodes where Brad and I have put a call to action out to the community. We’ve taken time to talk about it. And here’s why it gets a little bit nuanced. Sometimes we’re specifically asking you for your feedback because we want your feedback to be part of an upcoming episode and obviously that’s a time-sensitive thing. And so, we’ll be collecting feedback for a window of time, and maybe you’re listening to it two years later.
00:51:43
Jonathan: But in that context, we will have notes about where you can follow up and get the answers to what will have the continuity. And by the way, I know that sounds obvious. We’ve never had that before. Do you realize how many things have happened three years ago where you get excited about something, you track it through, and it’s now a dead link? You know how frustrating it is. I get it. I’m with you. We’re going to close the loop. If you take the time to follow through on something and you realize the window’s already passed, we’re going to go back and we’re going to update you so you can track down what happened.
00:52:33
Jonathan: But if it’s open, leave us a voicemail. Give us the information that you want to share with us so that we have a window to share it on an upcoming show. And then the second aspect and why I can go in different places is sometimes we’re asking you to do something not for us but for yourself, for you. Document a part of your journey. We are, as a group, going to get into a cadence. It’s kind of a tri-prong approach, but here’s a really core aspect of it. Individually, we’re going to have the opportunity to go through various exercises. So Brad talks about his net worth audit. He does it quarterly. That sounds like a pretty good amount.
00:53:16
Jonathan: We don’t need to be looking at our numbers every single day. It’s probably, Brad would argue, it’s actually going to make you suffer, I would say. You’re probably going to not perform as well if you’re watching it that closely. But that doesn’t mean that we should never look at it. It’s a motivating thing. It’s an exciting thing. It’s something that you can do as you start navigating the boring middle and you start thinking about opportunities to optimize. It’s a productive thing. So, we’ll have exercises like, hey, can we do this together?
00:53:52
Jonathan: And another one that I’m very excited about, I hinted at it, was the expense audit. I would like, as a community, we’re in various places around the world, we can do an expense audit and we can track. This is not a budget, but this is a cash flow expense audit. We can track things like our expenses, our food budget. And Brad just asked, he’s sending it out to the community as a, please do it in Excel. We don’t need to do that. We can do it in a way where we can actually track it and we can track our expenses at the individual level year over year so we now have a way to monitor our personal inflation rates in various categories.
00:54:44
Jonathan: Does your expense number hold if you’ve actually just run wild in this category? Well, it’s a way for you to kind of safety net check yourself but at the same point recalibrate, realign your expenses with your values—not to be confused with a budget; it’s just an expense flow audit. And then on top of that, now for the first time, we’ll be able to have the opportunity to talk about aggregate numbers, cost of living in various areas, what is a reasonable amount to spend on food in a family in San Diego, California versus Virginia or these sorts of things. These are the sorts of numbers that you crave, that I crave, that make an interactive show that allow you to talk about things in a way that you’ve just never been able to do before, never been able to see before.
00:55:43
Jonathan: And we’ll have a million variations of that over time but all of these can help move you towards your goal of financial independence. Yeah, I love this. This is real-time. You’re part of the show. You’re part of the community. This is helping you. This is helping all of us. We’re learning together. We’re growing together. And also, like we said, send in your feedback on the episodes. Send in your questions. Send in your wins, your life hacks, your travel rewards questions and join the local group. Be a part of this. Get involved. Send this in.
00:56:21
Brad: This episode is coming out January 5th, 2026. So like I said, my big action for the week is I’m putting down my net worth. You should do that too. Do it along with me. Let me know that you did it. Jonathan, one of the big things we want, and this is going to be featured on that when people log in, is what are your big goals for the year? What are those goals? What are you shooting towards? What is this? If this year worked out perfectly, what does your—and not just money—what does every aspect of your life look like? What are you aiming for?
00:57:03
Brad: Jonathan, we do the year-end wins episodes and newsletters at the end of every year. And it’s so incredibly exciting. It’s so motivating, but I think we can motivate each other along the way. Not just at the end where we read about what are the wins, but along the way. And we root people on. The beautiful part about what you’ve built is we can have member blogs. We can have forum threads where people just update. My Mike, who writes into me every single week, back to my newsletter, gives me an update. Bill Powell, who’s been on the show, sends me an update on what he’s up to in five different areas of his life.
00:57:58
Brad: We can do this real-time. We can all do it together. We can root each other on. We’re in this together and we’re all sharing, learning, and growing together. So Jonathan, what people are going to see, so January 5th, right? You log in, you’re going to see these options to contribute. You’re going to see these options to send in questions. You’re going to see this option to send in, what are your big goals? Please send in a voicemail.
00:55:27
Brad: But like Jonathan said, if you can’t. Us being cutesy, you can send us a comment, send us, yes, yes, we’re going to do that.
00:55:36
Brad: So next week, we actually have Sean Mulaney and Cody Garrett coming on the show to talk a little bit about Roths, and that’s going to be great.
00:55:45
Brad: But two weeks from now, so January 19th, Jonathan and I are going to pick up with this new show with you involved. This is the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show, and this is our call to ask you to get involved.
00:56:01
Brad: So Jonathan, I think that’s where we leave it for today.
00:56:04
Brad: This was a joy to create this episode with you, man. This was a lot of fun.
00:56:09
Brad: Yeah. This was so much fun! We have been having a ball behind the scenes, just you and I brainstorming and having fun and iterating.
00:56:17
Brad: And because of the skills that you’ve built, we can put anything into action. You’re extraordinary. You do this in 24 hours, 48 hours, sometimes less, Hey, we have this idea. Let’s do it.
00:56:29
Brad: So to everybody out there, this is not perfect right now. We need your feedback. We need you involved. We can build anything, and this is for us by us.
00:56:41
Brad: This is the FI community in real life. Let’s build it together. Get involved starting today.
00:56:47
Brad: To the individuals that have actually already created an account inside the community app over the last year, they have gone through some bugs. Our founding members are just, we were starting this year with just about 20,000 members.
00:57:05
Brad: And I think I’ve closed something like 500 some odd tickets out. And I just want to say that sounds bad. It’s actually really good.
00:57:10
Brad: Right. That’s 500 drops in logic, frustrated experiences, things that weren’t quite there, directionally accurate, good ideas, but attention to detail.
00:57:23
Brad: And I’d probably have to give a shout out to probably 10 to 20 people, which I won’t, but you know who you are inside the community that have put in relentlessly.
00:57:34
Brad: And at times I’m like, but I just want you to know, even when I’m going, Oh, another ticket, I appreciate you. I appreciate those tickets because we have something, I’m not saying it’s perfect yet and it never will be, but it’s something that collectively has been built to meet what you have asked for.
00:57:51
Brad: What you’re asking for has always been very close to what Jonathan and I wanted for this community, and it’s magical. So it’s getting there.
00:58:00
Brad: And I know this is going to be a year unlike anything that any of us could have ever imagined for this community, and I am so excited to be able to close this episode and say, yeah, you know, the FI is spreading my friends.
00:58:17
Brad: We’ll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled.
00:58:22
Podcast Extro: You’ve been listening to ChooseFI Podcast, where we help middle-class America build wealth one life hack at a time.
