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
Jonathan: Hello everyone. On today’s episode, we are showing our commitment to crowdsourcing personal finance in a way that we’ve never really been able to do before. We have aggregated your voicemails and your feedback. You replied and you crushed it. You absolutely brought it on your part and we are using those submissions for this entire episode. Now we’re going to be looking at goals for 2026, but I promise you, this is an evergreen episode. We’re using where you are currently on the journey to find the detours, to find the talking points, to find those pieces of action that you can incorporate into your life each and every day. And with that, welcome to ChooseFI.
00:00:46
Jonathan: And to help me with this, I have my cohost, Brad here with me today. How are you doing buddy?
00:00:49
Brad: Hey, Jonathan. I’m doing quite well. It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for me here. I went to Camp FI down in Florida, which was absolutely awesome. That’s the one that we went to so many years ago. We went there, I think it was two years in a row and yeah, the place has changed a little bit, but it’s still essentially the same and man, it’s just fun. I mean, we talk about all these local meetups. We talk about in-person events and it just reminded me how important this is. It was really nourishing to the soul. It was really great to see so many old friends, so many people I’ve met in Bali and at other events and to meet a whole bunch of new people. It was really, really a fun time.
00:01:30
Brad: And actually I’m also getting ready for the event we’re holding here in Richmond with Alan and Katie Donegan in a couple of weeks. So yeah, it’s kind of a bookend here in terms of January and February with some big things going on. I’m looking forward to seeing Alan. That man is full of energy and he’s a great presenter as well. It’ll be a great time.
00:01:48
Jonathan: Alan and Katie put on an incredible presentation. They do this extraordinary life workshop that I saw them do both in Vegas a couple of years ago and then in Bali. This is going to be an augmented version of that, which is really exciting to everybody out there. Stay tuned for additional events that Alan, Katie, and I are going to have hopefully throughout the country and world. So as always get on my newsletter, choose a better concept, subscribe. I will always mention when these are coming up. Tickets sell fast, but yeah, should be fun.
00:02:21
Brad: Jonathan, it was really neat. It’s always small world stories. I love Camp FI. Somebody invited me to play a board game, which obviously you and I love board games. The FI community loves board games. It was incredible how many games broke out and we were playing a trick-taking game called Skull King. Have you heard about this?
00:02:38
Jonathan: No, it’s fun.
00:02:39
Brad: It’s essentially a standard trick-taking game at its essence, but there’s some little flourishes here and there. There’s some additional cards and the way you play. It’s a lot of probability based in that the first round through, it’s all based on betting on how many you’re going to win. So you only have one card and then it just keeps going up to 10 rounds where eventually you have 10 cards. So it’s actually really, really interesting. The funny story was the guy who brought it was a guy named Felipe. He actually said he heard about this game in your newsletter, Brad.
00:03:15
Jonathan: Is that right?
00:03:19
Brad: Yeah, well, my girls got it. So I’ve been playing it with my girls and I loved it so much. I mentioned it every so often. I do this segment, I call it what I’m reading, watching, and playing, and playing just includes whatever board games I’ve been up to, etc. I think I put in a couple of old school computer games like Starcraft one time, but yeah, essentially board games.
00:03:37
Jonathan: You know what I’ve learned over time? There are two aspects when you’re picking a game: there’s the game that you want to play and then there’s the more complex aspect of the game for the environment you’re entering into. I will enjoy any game. I will have a great time with incredibly complex games, but not if I’m the one responsible for everyone else’s experience. You need to have a game master, a person that truly understands all the rules that can guide newbies and you into enjoying the experience. You also have to consider the types of people you’re playing with—are these people that identify as game players, or are they casually interested? Will they be intimidated by complex mechanics, or will they get into it? What is the time window we have to do the game? What’s the environment that we’re going to be in?
00:04:44
Brad: And it’s not to say that if all of these don’t line up, you don’t do anything, but you have to take the right game to the right environment for everybody to have a good time.
00:04:52
Jonathan: So as a person deciding what games to bring, this was like, “Well, I just got to buy them all.” Then you’ll be ready for any situation, you know?
00:04:55
Brad: I can vouch for the fact that you have hundreds of games. Just real quick to everyone listening, a couple of games that I think are great because, like Jonathan just mentioned, it is hard to find games for different skill levels, timeframes, etc. A couple of games that I bring a lot of places: Skull King is great. Another one we’ve mentioned is Monopoly Deal. This is not the boring old Monopoly that is mind-numbing and terrible. This is a really fast-paced game. I actually, my girls and I taught Aaron how to play recently. We played a couple of times and then I played with Molly and I timed the game, Jonathan.
00:05:30
Brad: The games took nine minutes, ten minutes, four minutes, and six minutes. So we clicked four games in a sub-30 minute time. That is a great game. Another one is Cover Your Assets, which is very fun and fast-paced. I think it’s one of those Grandpa Beck games, and while it doesn’t require a terrible amount of strategy, it’s really fun. Highly recommend those.
00:05:48
Jonathan: You know, it’s funny having you back on the podcast. Obviously, we talk a lot about ChooseFI and I have all of these random stories built up that I’ve been jotting down. Another interesting frugal thing that I’ve done recently—going back to the very beginning, we talked on the podcast about a friend who wrote in about something he did, which was basically when he bought a car, he emailed every dealership within 50 miles of him and said, “Hey, this is the exact car I want, this is the exact price I want. Whoever offers it up, I will buy it immediately.” He had a response within 30 minutes, bought the car, signed, sealed.
00:06:39
Brad: I always talked about how I’d love to have the guts to do that. Interestingly, I found something, and of course, none of this has any sponsors on this program. I had no financial incentive with this, but there’s a program called TrueCar by US News, of all things.
00:06:54
Brad: So a year ago, when I got a car for my daughter, Anna, it was crazy. She’s driving now, and I literally had my heart set that she’s going to inherit Golden Boy.
00:07:07
Jonathan: I know that’s what she was hoping.
00:07:08
Brad: My girls did not want Golden. I heard you mention your new car being like, you know, an Avalon or something.
00:07:12
Jonathan: I don’t remember exactly what it was, but something like that.
00:07:14
Brad: I was like, where’s Golden Boy? What happened to Golden?
00:07:17
Jonathan: I didn’t hear about this.
00:07:19
Brad: Not only is Golden Boy gone, but the Honda Civic that I had after Golden Boy is now gone. I have a 2020 Hyundai Elantra. I haven’t changed my stripes too much. For everybody out there, just Google TrueCar by US News. It was exactly that— “Hey, this is the car I want,” and you basically get offers from all the dealerships within a certain range.
00:08:07
Brad: I was going to buy this car from the Volkswagen dealer here in Richmond, and I found this service, and it literally took over $2,000 off of what I paid just for signing up. This dealership from Fredericksburg, Virginia drove the car down to me an hour away. I saved like $2,500, and they delivered the car. I didn’t even have to sit in the dealership for four hours and sign papers. They did everything for me. It was the greatest thing ever. Highly recommend it.
00:08:11
Jonathan: So Brad, I’m trying to figure out where to place this. Historically, my last car was relatively expensive, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to buy brand new off the lot, so it was a new-to-me used car. I’m just curious as a point of comparison when I’m buying a used car. To be honest, I just go to CarMax. I’ve been pretty satisfied with the price curve and that sort of thing. I look at my various options and it is simple and easy, but I’m aware that I’m not necessarily getting the absolute best price.
00:08:53
Brad: So I use this for a new car. Interestingly, I got two cars around the same time. I wound up buying a used car for myself—the 2020 Hyundai Elantra that I mentioned. I actually went through Hertz Auto Sales. Hertz sells some of their old rental cars, and I wound up getting a really good deal. I did the price comparison on CarMax and I got it for $4,000-$5,000 less than I would have paid for a comparable car at CarMax.
00:09:24
Brad: Grant it was a rental car, but it didn’t have a lot of miles on it in the grand scheme of things, so it seemed like a risk worth taking.
00:09:36
Brad: Yeah, I went that route for my car, but for my daughter, to be perfectly honest—this is an interesting conversation at some point—my daughters are my most precious things in the entire world, and the safety features on a new car were worth it for me, especially for someone who has resources.
00:10:02
Brad: So like we’ve talked for so many years about used cars, used cars, used cars, but it’s a totally different thing when your 16-year-old and the most precious thing you have in the entire world is driving a car. So yeah, we wound up buying a brand new Volkswagen for her, and yeah, I went through TrueCar and like I said, it saved me about somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 over what I would have paid at just the dealership that I walked into. Now, in all fairness, could I have negotiated down to that if some other dealership within 60 miles was willing to pay in at my local dealership? Probably. Was I actually going to do that, Jonathan? No, I was not. Because we both talked about how that is the least comfortable thing. You walk in for the lot looking for the person that you’re going in to go, “Oh, I’m excited for this. I woke up, I had my Wheaties for breakfast. It’s time to negotiate.” Yeah, definitely not my thing.
00:10:52
Brad: So anyway, it’s a cool thing for people like me, especially who are not looking to negotiate. They negotiate for you. And yeah, it was really, really great. So a bunch of frugal wins buried in there, for sure.
00:11:02
Jonathan: Nice. Well, you know, you don’t normally steamroll me, but I was going to respond to the whole board game thing, but I am very excited about your frugal win. I think it’s a great life hack as well. I guess I’ll just store my little notes here about games for another day, but there it is. TrueCar, TrueCar. This little segment is not brought to you by TrueCar, but there is possibly savings for those of you looking to get a better price on a new car.
00:11:29
Brad: All right, so today we’re going to be rolling out our goals episode. And I think it’s really important to say that this episode, more so than maybe any episode that we’ve ever done up to this point, shows our intention and commitment to crowdsourcing personal finance. When we started at the beginning of this year, we said that this year changes everything. And we followed up by just kind of rolling through a table of contents for financial independence. We had a goal of getting to 100, and I think we covered 10 or 12. Last week we tacked on a few more, but I think what we decided—we’re actually kind of enjoying the rhythm of that and we’ll probably keep trying to do that. We’re going to try to weave them in in any way that you guys want.
00:12:10
Jonathan: So as you leave us voicemails and comments and messages that tie to things that are on the, what we want to cover next, we’re going to just kind of pick and choose from our table of contents list and go through them. And based on the feedback that we’ve gotten on the last couple episodes, most of you appreciated that approach. Now, we do both recognize that we could get more facts out there, more list of things that you could do, but I think most of you recognize that the value is actually from the commentary on those items. It’s from the nuances, from the conversation. And so we are going to not speed up, but we are going to try to be very intentional about covering the entire playbook of Financial Independence on the ChooseFI podcast, your home for financial independence online.
00:12:56
Brad: So with that cutaway, Jonathan, why don’t we go ahead and kick into this and we’re going to start off with a voicemail. And this first one is from Sam. This is the first voicemail that we’ve played on our podcast. So congratulations. There’s got to be some sort of achievement there for that. I appreciate you. Here it is.
00:13:13
Sam: Hey guys, this is Sam in Alexandria, Virginia. I love the idea of a voice recording. Jonathan, like you said, this is a radio show. Let’s have some callers on. One of my goals for 2026 is to be more involved in my local FI community and actually to make some FI friends. I’ve only got a couple and they kind of predate all of ChooseFI. So I’m excited to get to know some more folks in the local area. Not too many of the local area group events have fit with my calendar. So I decided to put some on there myself. I kind of copied the Richmond walking group idea, Brad, and put four walks on the calendar up here in the DC metro area. And we’ve already got 14 people signed up. So we’ll see how it goes the next month or so. And maybe we’ll start ourselves a little tradition up here. So thanks for what you do. And thanks for having the call to action function added. It’s a cool feature.
00:14:07
Jonathan: Man, that was awesome. Sam, you’re winning in 2026. Brad, doing a walking group in DC.
00:14:15
Brad: Yeah, I love it. And this is the neat thing about the platform that you built, Jonathan. It’s anybody can create events. That’s the best part. So if you’re listening to this, chooseevent.com slash login, create your account, join your local group, create events. If there’s not an admin there, step up and be the admin of your local group. Just create events and make it happen. That’s the beautiful thing.
00:14:36
Brad: Jonathan, I sent this to you. We always go through our different platforms and such. And I saw this came in from Cliff. And he said, Portland, Oregon, monthly meetup, 18 strong. First time posting the meetup on both Facebook and the ChooseFI app. And it doubled the attendance, putting it on the app. And that is just absolutely fantastic. We’re seeing this all over the country. And yeah, it just makes it easier.
00:15:00
Jonathan: Well, I think there’s something really huge about this. I think a lot of people will probably say, “Facebook, it’s where all the people are.” But Facebook goes out of their way to promote algorithm-y type stuff. You understand that? This group, people have to make a choice to be inside of the ChooseFI community. That takes a little bit of additional work. And when you’re there, you’re there for a very specific reason. And so I’m not at all surprised to see that. And I expect fully that we’re going to see more of that in the future.
00:15:28
Jonathan: In fact, one thing that I’d like to do, and this kind of goes to that whole, “wouldn’t it be cool if” idea for our community. Like Sam, he’s doing a weekly walking event, right? So that’s the sort of thing, for that you probably don’t need to send out invitations for something every single week. It kind of misses the point. But what you’re doing is you’re forming an actual community. And that actual community would have probably a group calendar that they could sync any way they want and have this overlay on their personal calendar to see events that the FI community has highlighted and been interested in.
00:16:04
Brad: Jonathan, you brought to my attention how Liz from Frugal Woods pointed out that when she was living in Boston, a lot of people would think Boston was an expensive cost of living area. But she made the case that it was actually quite inexpensive through the lens of how many free things there are to do. Wouldn’t it be cool if that could be something that a community could crowdsource as a community calendar to have awareness around all the incredible opportunities that are being offered for those that are paying attention?
00:16:30
Jonathan: Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. That episode going all the way back to episode 12 with Liz from Frugal Woods, that’s one of the best episodes I’ve ever heard on frugality anywhere on the internet, on podcasting. And yeah, she said exactly that. And it’s so counterintuitive based on what we know, quote unquote, right? But realistically, there are free things everywhere, especially in big cities. There are free things everywhere, let’s be clear. But you just have to open the aperture up and find them. And yeah, Jonica, like you said, we can crowdsource this. Every local group should be crowdsourcing these things. Everybody should be mentioning, “Hey, I’m going to such and such. Does anybody want to join me?” Like, these things are easy and they’re obvious. And they exist, we just have to find them.
00:17:13
Brad: And the cool thing is, you know, in the absence of this community, you gotta find them on your own. But in many cases, individuals in this community have already found them. So I stumbled into Ron, the admin of the Richmond local group. I stumbled into him at the farmer’s market here in Richmond. Not surprising, farmer’s markets are incredible and they happen everywhere. But there’s some that are better than others. But Ron was there with his band, right? He was there with his band playing a gig on the weekend and caught my attention, caught his attention and had a nice chat there.
00:18:05
Jonathan: Five community members find interesting opportunities in there because they have more time, right? They have more time. What are they doing with it? Ron is doing something very interesting. That’s a choice that he makes with his weekend. Brad, I can see you. You’re lighting up. You can have it, man. Go for it.
00:18:19
Brad: Ron plays the ukulele. So yeah, he’s doing something very interesting. Needless to say, I love that. So love this win from Sam. And Jonica, let’s queue up the next one.
00:18:05
Jonathan: So Brad, the next one we’re going to read, this is from community member. Their username is, I’m doing quite well. I wonder where that came from. My word for 2026 is preparation. I’m planning to dig deep with a 70% savings rate while simultaneously saving for a home. It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m grateful to be in a position where this kind of aggressive saving is even possible. I’m treating 2026 as the year I earn my freedom, setting the stage to buy a home and potentially retire from my physical therapy career in late 2027.
00:18:44
Brad: Wow. This is incredible, Jonathan. There’s a lot of change and a lot of intensity into something that I’m doing quite well is targeting as a very focused year. You know, effectively a sprint where a lot of things are going to pivot if they can pull this off, but they believe based on, you know, information they have that we don’t right now that this is entirely possible.
00:19:06
Jonathan: Yeah, that’s incredible. This gets to the heart of saving money. Saving money isn’t deprivation, right? They are saving money very intentionally to buy their freedom, and that’s an incredible thing. This is not—I always get so caught up when people think that what we’re doing is something negative in some weird way. Like there is nothing negative about the path to FI. When done properly, this is about reclaiming the only thing that matters, which is your time, and I love this.
00:19:33
Brad: Preparation is a great way of putting this, and I would throw this out. I actually had something written down, Jonathan, that I was going to run past you, which is something akin to a money challenge, and this goal is the perfect example. What if you did something that you didn’t think was possible? Like, could you take your average credit card bill and cut it 10%? Okay, what about 30%? Could you do that? Like, is that a money challenge worth taking on? Is there something that, if you sat down and applied some intentionality and prepared, you would find that this is gonna make a material difference in your path to FI? Is that something you could do? It would be really interesting to have almost like an after-action report and say, how did this impact me? Did I even feel it? And I suspect, I suspect really strongly, you wouldn’t even miss that spending one iota and you would supercharge your path to FI just like this community member.
00:20:27
Brad: Okay, well, I think what you’ve teed us up for is our next call to action, Brad. We are going to roll one out. It’s gonna be a 30-day challenge; it’s gonna be a money challenge. It’ll have two parts. Individuals that wanna participate in this challenge on the ChooseFI podcast, you go to choosefi.com slash login. You’ll say, I’m taking the challenge. I’m going to identify 10% savings. And these are maybe the areas that I think that I can do this. You’re going to initiate the challenge, and then at the end of 30 days, when the challenge is over, you’re gonna have a second option to tell us, did it work? Did it not work? What was the feedback? What was the outcome? What did you learn from this? And this is how we’re going to tee up a whole show around a community that took action on this show and found 10%. That’ll be our money challenge. Brad, what do you think?
00:21:15
Jonathan: Oh, I love it. Well, I just teed you up for some work. Of course, that’s how we do this. But I sandbagged you and maybe you kind of like, well, yeah, but I knew you would take it. I got you first.
00:21:24
Brad: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I think that’ll be great. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how much people can actually save when they apply some attention on. But to our community, this is how, when we say there has never been a podcast like this, right? This is why we said this year, everything changes. This is the direction of the show. We don’t want you to just hear ideas; we want you to take action on the ones that you know at some level that you’ve already been wanting to do. You just needed somebody, an external force, to give you a little push to remind you that it actually makes a difference. And, you know, we’re going, if you want the accountability, we’re here to provide it for you. Take the money challenge. Go to choosefi.com slash login. It’ll be open. Once you initiate, it’ll be like a 30-day window, and then we’ll follow up with you and get your feedback on that challenge.
00:22:14
Brad: All right, like you said, we’re a radio show. Let’s, we got a bunch of voicemails. Let’s play another one.
00:22:17
Jenny: Hi, this is Jenny. For 2026, I have some financial goals and I also have some personal and health goals. My financial goals include saving $50,000 for retirement and putting some money aside in a sinking fund to save for a car. Also, my oldest is going to head into his freshman year in high school. So I want to actually move a quarter of his 529 money from investments into cash so that it’s ready if he does go to college. For my personal goals, I want to read a hundred books, which I did last year and want to continue this year. And my sister is getting married and I’m her maid of honor. So my goal is to plan the best bachelorette party ever. For my health goals, I want to meal plan more and meal prep with my sons, who have recently become interested in eating healthier.
00:23:06
Brad: The community is bringing it today, Brad. This is a pretty epic goal on multiple fronts. First of all, we have an incredible savings goal just from a dollar amount perspective. But then on top of that, we have some tactical moves with regards to actual savings and investing horizon, that sort of thing. It’s time to get some money ready to actually be used. You don’t do the 529 just to do the 529. You do it to grow and get some help, and then at some point, you’re going to need to move to a more conservative posture because now it’s time to actually use that money.
00:23:33
Jonathan: Yeah, agreed. This is a great one from Jenny. I love your goals. And yeah, I think really the low-hanging fruit in terms of saving money in our general budgets is the grocery bill. I think for people who apply some intentionality to their grocery bill, you could easily save $100 to $500 a month. I really do. I think it’s just about meal planning. It’s about thinking ahead. You can’t scramble after the fact, right? If you’re just doing this with some planning, like Jenny plans to with her kids, I think it’s just an absolute slam dunk.
00:24:07
Brad: And really, Jonathan, we talked about the big three expenses, right? It’s housing, it’s car, and it’s food. And for a lot of people, there’s just a lot of fluff in the food category. And yeah, this is really cool. You know, what’s interesting is when she said that her sons have shown an interest in eating healthier. I just experienced for the first time the other day; I’ve been trying to go to the gym each morning, roughly around these days, the jet lag is now over, so I’m kind of back to around 6:30 or so. But my son is always up like a bolt of lightning at 6 a.m., man, he is just ready to go. And he’s eight years old, about to be nine. He says, hey, dad, can I go with you to the gym? And I said, not quite yet. You gotta get a little bit older so we can get you there. And a little piece of me, a tiny little piece of me, was thinking, oh, this is my time. But the secondary part of this was thinking, that’s gonna be pretty cool, man. He’s getting pretty close. I gotta start thinking about doing this. And I don’t know if I’m gonna wait till he’s officially the gym age to go; we gotta start doing more workouts in the garage. You gotta say yes to this. And so it’s just kind of cool to think about your kids coming up next to you and absorbing some of your interests and doing it along with you.
00:25:15
Jonathan: I love that. I absolutely love that. And yeah, final note, a hundred books? Give me a break. That’s amazing. That was my first thought and then I got distracted by the other stuff. What books are we reading here? Yeah, that’s so cool. Jenny, thanks for calling in. Really appreciate it. All right, Jonathan, what do we have next?
00:25:31
Jonathan: All right, Brad, next we have a call-in from Dan sharing with us an upcoming transition.
00:25:37
Dan: Hi, this is Dan from outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’m 45, and although I’m very close to FI with 23 times my annual spending saved, only 3X is currently saved in the taxable account. Another 3X is represented by the Roth contributions I’ve made over time. So 2026 is a year I direct more of my savings to taxable accounts, and I try to figure out if this is the year I can find a way to take a break, maybe shift to barista FI and maybe start doing Roth conversions. Regardless, I plan to keep listening to ChooseFI.
00:26:19
Jonathan: That’s awesome, Dan. I appreciate that being one of the goals for 2026, but really you gave us a lot to work with here. There’s this interesting point in time where you’re past the basics. You’re now in the middle, well on your way, and you’re starting to think about the glide path. And really for the first time, the buckets and the tax treatments of where your money is going to dramatically affect the options that are available to you.
00:26:45
Brad: And so with regards to things like a Roth conversion ladder, right? Something like that, doing Roth conversions, well, that’s typically gonna happen after you leave the workforce, but how are you gonna cover your living expenses for the period of time that you’re doing these conversions? This is not something that you wanna wake up the day before you retire to figure out. You need to think about it ahead of time, and you’re clearly doing the right thing. Brad, I think we’re not trying to move on, so I wanna give you a chance to respond to that as well.
00:27:13
Brad: Yeah, honestly, I’d love to follow up with Dan and maybe we could do a case study on this because what jumps out to me, so he said he has 23 times his annual expenses saved. So, right, we’d say the FI is 25X in general terms. And he said he only, quote-unquote, has three times in taxable accounts and another three times in Roth contributions. So that’s actually really interesting because, yeah, that Roth IRA conversion ladder, I think we’ve always said you basically need five years of expenses in your taxable accounts. But realistically, I think Roth contributions count as the exact same thing because those can be pulled out tax and penalty-free at any time.
00:28:02
Jonathan: Yeah, it’s an interesting way of looking at it. It’s almost like, and I agree with you. So you’re saying he has 6X that’s not in a pre-tax bucket. He has three years of living expenses inside of a taxable account and he has three years of living expenses that are contributions, not to be conflated with total balance inside of your Roth, it’s contributions. And so when you’re thinking about all right, I need to figure out how I should keep just throwing everything into the 401k? And Brad, you and the FI tax guy and Cody have really been beating the drum of like, RMDs aren’t the thing to be worried about. It’s not the RMDs. But I think what does still stay needs to be top of mind is if you’re really thinking about doing something like a Roth conversion ladder, the one big thing that you need to get in front of is when you step away and for the window of time that you’re going through this conversion process, you need to have five years of living expenses to keep the whole thing going. Five years or more to keep the whole thing going. And so it sounds like Dan has that part sorted unless I’m misunderstanding something.
00:29:07
Brad: Yeah, I totally agree.
00:29:08
Brad: So yeah, I would actually challenge Dan that I don’t think he needs to move away from pre-tax contributions at all. I’m a massive fan of pre-tax contributions. I think anybody in the FI community who understands the value of that and the fact that we can most likely pull our pre-tax money out almost tax-free, maybe very likely tax-free, depending on our expenses. It’s why we in the FI community don’t believe as strongly in Roths as traditional personal finance people do because we have these amazing strategies to get this money out. When you put it in tax-free and you get it out tax-free, you’re pretty darn close. So yeah, I mean, Dan, of course it’s impossible to give you advice based on just a paragraph, but I think you really need to rethink that.
00:30:00
Brad: And everybody else listening, there’s a lot of talk about Roth, but man, there is really something special about what we can do with FI strategies with these tax-deferred items like the 401k and the traditional IRA. I think there’s a real high likelihood you’re going to pay no tax on that ever. So if it were me, I’d just keep on pumping that money in. He also says part of this is he’s trying to figure out a way to slow down, to take a break, to shift to barista FI. It would be kind of cool, as we’re thinking about table of contents and throwing things out there, just to talk about some of these things that have popped up. They have cute names, and the names change over time. One that I think is here to stay is certainly this idea of coast FI. Barista FI, I like that as well. I remember there was fat FI and lean FI and all these. It doesn’t really matter. But the point is, financial independence and the path to financial independence, it’s not binary. You start and then nothing happens between now until you get to the finish line. Most of us know this at an intellectual level, but we don’t slow down to realize the options that are available to us in the middle.
00:31:02
Brad: And so Dan’s thinking about that right now. Do I really need to wait till I get to 25X? What does it mean that I slow down? How do I slow down? People in the financial independence community tend to, either due to nature or just due to patterns that they built over time, end up becoming high performers. A high performer that’s used to getting results sometimes struggles with the concept of doing less. So that’s a mindset shift. When the performance has gotten you the results, are you allowed to do less? You see people that are really good at academics struggle with this. Is there a point of diminishing returns? Well, what happens if I just slow down a little bit? Certainly when it comes to life, there could be a real value as you start to reclaim more of your time. You realize that you want to put your time into different things and not all of them return monetary rewards, and that’s okay.
00:32:07
Brad: So with that in mind, coast FI is probably one of the most popular frameworks. The idea behind this is at some point, your money is generating more returns for you than your contributions. And there’s a point in time that you can calculate. Coast FI basically says, if you could hit a certain dollar amount in your investment accounts, whether it’s pre-tax, post-tax, et cetera, and then you identify the age you are, and then you just stop, would that money on its own, just through average market returns and projections, generate enough for you to, by the time that you’re 65 or a regular retirement age, hit your financial independence number? There are all sorts of ways to tweak the calculations, but the basic idea is if you work really hard early on and you have a horizon, then there’s a case to be made. There’s a point in time where you could just stop making contributions and you could just be paycheck to paycheck, but because you did the front load of the work, you’re already going to be fine. In fact, you’re going to be far better positioned than anybody else in your sphere of influence.
00:32:55
Jonathan: Totally agreed. Yeah, I think coast FI to me is absolutely revolutionary. I joined Jess and Corey from the Pioneers on their coast FI Summit live event a couple of months back. It really is just something cool where basically you’ve saved enough money that that money is compounding in the background, and you can just coast on into FI. It works whether you want to reach FI in whatever timeline suits you. Knowing, again, another thing on our list of 100 is the rule of 72. This is how quickly will my money double, in essence? You take the number 72 and divide it by your expected return. We always say 8% annual return. So literally, you just take 72, divide by 8, and it comes out to 9. So that’s the number of years it takes for your money to double.
00:34:00
Jonathan: For instance, let’s say your FI number is a million dollars, right? If you currently have a $250,000 net worth, your annual expenses naturally are $40,000. If you have $250,000 and you say, okay, I’m going to coast on in, that money is going to double in the background every nine years. So after nine years, it’s 500,000, and after 18 years, it’s now a million. Essentially, you’re going to reach FI in 18 years if you can just cover your $40,000 annual expenses. Instead of needing a job that pays you a high amount with taxes and savings covering your expenses, you just need to cover your life expenses. That’s the beauty of coast FI. It enables you to maybe take some more time off or take a less demanding job.
00:34:49
Jonathan: The other one, Dan, you’re just teeing up the table of contents, right? You threw out barista FI. What if the idea of no work actually wasn’t your goal, but it was just work that I could do regardless of what I was making? It’s work that I enjoy—like at the library, a scuba shop, or as a yoga instructor. I might not be making a killing, alright? But it’s my passion, and I don’t want to sacrifice my financial independence goals. What number would I need to hit if I was planning on having some nominal income? You could limit it to minimum wage or part-time hours, and then everything else needs to come from my investment accounts. How does that change the number you’re targeting? Especially if where you are right now is draining you, does that offer you more options to move to the work you love even if that work isn’t compensating you enough?
00:36:39
Jonathan: You are giving yourself these off-ramps by starting now instead of waiting 10 years and saying to your future self, why didn’t you start 10 years ago? You could have just done this. Go get that job and do the thing that is barista FI.
00:36:46
Brad: We just covered coast FI and barista FI and brought them back up as a reminder of the official lexicon. Do we have an official lexicon? Is there a dictionary of financial independence, Brad? I guess we could make one.
00:37:01
Brad: All right. Wouldn’t it be cool if?
00:37:04
Brad: Next, we got a call-in from Lottie.
00:37:05
Lottie: Hi, Brad and Jonathan. I am so excited to be leaving you this voice recording from the UK. This year, we’re working towards hitting our half FI number, 50% of the way there. We’re about 10 years in, and we’re fully coast FI. Frankly, we’re probably lean FI, but we’re going for a bit more of a fat FI number. We’re also going to be working towards enjoying spending the money that we’ve allocated to spend because we don’t just want to fall off the edge of a cliff when we hit FI and not have built up any muscles in spending and enjoying money. The first thing we’ve done is book a trip for ourselves and our three kids in February to go to a cottage on the beach for my youngest son’s first birthday.
00:38:10
Lottie: What do I hope will be different a year from now? I’m hoping that I’m going to have become better at saying no to things. I feel we have the resources emotionally, physically, financially to say no to more work and social obligations that we just really don’t want to do and don’t serve us. Also, I hope we will have said yes to more things that bring us a lot of joy. What feels exciting, challenging, or even a little scary? I’m trying to optimize my health. I’ve been doing a lot of work on fitness and nutrition, and that feels quite scary. It also feels scary to put myself out there and make my voice known in the ChooseFI community, so this is my first scary thing that I’m doing right now. Thank you for all the amazing work you do. It brings me joy to listen to the podcast every week and to laugh and learn about the American tax code. Who knew it was so fascinating?
00:39:05
Brad: To laugh at the American tax code, that should be said as well. I respect the fact that she held that in reserve. She could laugh at the American healthcare system too while she was on it. Oh, so many humorous things.
00:39:15
Jonathan: First scary thing. How cool is that?
00:39:16
Brad: Let’s do more scary things.
00:39:20
Brad: First, enjoying spending money is really important. The skill of spending is an interesting thing on both sides. You have to get optimized with your spending at the beginning of your FI journey before it can shift to thinking about what you actually want to spend your money on that adds value to your life. I think that skill of spending is a continuum.
00:39:32
Jonathan: She actually added another piece of lexicon in lean FI. We’re hitting them all!
00:39:41
Brad: They are coast FI—50% of the way to their FI number. As we said, you would expect in roughly nine years for that to double assuming $0 of additional savings. Lean FI is everything where essentially, if you cut out all the extras in your budget and just focused on the essentials, what could you actually live on in a year? That’s your lean budget.
00:40:29
Brad: Now, is this going to be the perfect life for me? No, probably not. But could I live on this? Yes. Multiply that amount by 25. That’s your lean FI number. So Lottie is saying that she’s probably lean FI and about 50% of the way to true FI as she, or the fat FI that she probably wants. You find that individuals who are stating things out loud are usually drastically underestimating their progress on things. As I’m reading this, I’m thinking to myself, Lottie could probably never earn another dollar again for the rest, you know, and they’ve hit it. I don’t mean that, that’s a good thing, but I’m just saying in general, when we’re thinking about where we are, most of us tend to say we just need a little bit more. Even those of us that recognize that the one more year thing is kicking our butts, we still kind of build in a little buffer. My point is not so much that you should abandon the way you’re feeling right now, because that’s amazing, but just recognize you’ve already made it. Give yourself the freedom to say you’re there, right? Enjoy this next phase that you’re entering into. Thank you for sharing with us. It’s really exciting to think about the financial independence movement just being a worldwide thing, and agreed. Some of you aren’t dealing with the same tax code. When we say Roth, you’re like, all right, skip 30 seconds, you know, that sort of thing. But the process, the mentality, lean FI, coast FI, these off-ramps, these shifts in mindsets, the way that you’re going to find the 10% savings, things like that. Some of them have direct translations.
00:42:01
Brad: Some of them, you’re going to find your community that’s going to tell you things like, for instance, here in the United States, the standard deduction has just gotten to be a bananas number. For those of you who are thinking about doing things like itemizations, it’s almost to the point it’s so ridiculous that it’s just like, okay, or you could just do the standard deduction every year. The more extreme example of that would be staggering donations, taking advantage of things like donor-advised funds, et cetera, or front-loading a lot of giving and then passing it off to the intended beneficiary over the following years while claiming the standard deduction. This strategy translates to most countries. Most countries have a version of this where you can do more donations in one year, and then you can take the tax benefit from that in the single year. You just have to think about the way your tax code is structured. If money is fungible and you’re in a place where you can balance out your cash flow over three years, is there a way that you can front-load some spending here to capture an increased benefit over a longer period of time, a short to medium-term horizon?
00:43:14
Jonathan: Yeah, I would jump in and say two quick things. First for all of our non-U.S. listeners, we have listeners in over a hundred different countries. ChooseFI is probably 95% universal for everybody and then 5% U.S. specific. So just ignore that if you want to chuckle like Lottie does. The standard deduction is actually really interesting because somebody asked us in our ChooseFI app feed about basically saying, “Hey, I paid off my mortgage. What am I going to do now for deductions on my tax return?” As if the mortgage interest was a really integral part of that. Realistically, now with the standard deduction being so significant over the last handful of years, this has changed dramatically with some new tax law. The standard deduction for 2026 for a married filing jointly is $32,200.
00:44:03
Brad: You don’t get a lot of mortgage interest, do you?
00:44:06
Jonathan: Yeah, right. I mean, you would need a lot of mortgage interest. You’d need a lot of everything, basically state taxes and charitable contributions. For single individuals, it’s half that at $16,100. Realistically, the IRS reports that 91% of people use the standard deduction. So unless you have something really interesting happening, you’re using the standard deduction. All of those other things like giving to charity should be for that purpose, not because you’re going to get some tax deduction. Even if you’re over the $32,000 threshold, you’re only marginally benefiting.
00:45:00
Brad: So it’s very important that people understand the tax code in our community and what you think you’re getting in terms of tax deductions. That might’ve been the case seven, ten, or twenty years ago, but it’s really not the case now.
00:45:16
Jonathan: There are some advanced strategies. For instance, I know you tied to your church and that’s a significant amount, right? Doing two years of tithing in one year, in January and December in essence, plus your state taxes, plus some mortgage interest, that might get you appreciably over the standard deduction.
00:45:35
Brad: I’m really thinking about doing that. I’ve realized now that going each year is costing me money. I’m thinking about what the return would be for front-loading. This is money, so I’m thinking about moving into two to three-year tranches going forward just because the deduction has gotten so ridiculous.
00:45:50
Jonathan: It’s great. It’s a wonderful thing. I’m not complaining about the deduction. I’m realizing that by doing regular pacing of my donations each year is in aggregate netting out. There might be a real benefit to grouping them together. I’ll have to think through it and what the savings will be. I’m not a hundred percent convinced because you have to think things through, but I’ll be making the donation either way. So, what’s the best way to do this?
00:46:30
Brad: You don’t want to let the tax tail wag the dog unless you fully appreciate the picture.
00:46:33
Jonathan: Agreed.
00:46:37
Brad: All right, Jonathan, what do we have coming in next?
00:46:38
Jonathan: This next voicemail we got is from Wilson. What I love about this one is that Wilson is going to highlight for us the fact that you can just start over. If you made a choice as an uninformed 16-year-old that sets you off on a toxic path, and you’re miserable with that choice, some people think they have to keep their head down, maybe because of student debt, etc. This voicemail from Wilson really highlights that.
00:47:14
Wilson: Hey, Brad and Jonathan. My name is Wilson. I live in Southern California. I really enjoy the content you guys are putting out. I’ve been an avid follower of ChooseFI for about seven or eight years. Last year, in 2025, I was able to negotiate a layoff from my company, leaving my corporate career after about 15 years. I’m looking forward to the next steps in 2026. A lot of the reason I did this was to be home a little bit more with our littlest who turns two this year before we send her off to daycare. I’ve gotten the personal finance itch, so I recently completed a CFP course and I’ll be looking to make a career pivot into financial advising, hoping for my first role this year. I love what you guys are doing this year on the podcast, making it more community-like. Looking forward to more conversations like this.
00:48:06
Brad: Huge congrats! As a former pharmacist, I know that Wilson’s career choice is tough. There’s a lot of other ones like that, and you usually have to get through a long path before you’re on the other side, which can lead to an identity crisis and some heartache. It sounds like Wilson has navigated this and is making this transition in a wildly successful way.
00:49:05
Jonathan: We heard some really awesome goals for this year, so there are exciting things coming up. We have many more responses and replies, which we’re going to share in the show notes for this episode so that you can give feedback and encouragement to various individuals on this path wanting accountability for this year.
00:49:30
Brad: One big thing we’re doing is creating a town hall, a town center for discussions each week. The show is better when you interact with it. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about cell phones. We had some excellent feedback on that and additional mentions for various locations and options in the country. So if you hear something sparks your interest and you want to go further, you can interact with us to ask follow-up questions in the discussion for the weekly episode.
00:50:10
Jonathan: That’s inside the community, and you’re also gonna get rounded out information from many active community members participating in these conversations.
00:50:19
Jonathan: So again, to do that, you can just go to choosify.com slash login to access the community there, and it’s very easy to find the latest podcast episode when you do that. But I will just say, Brad, we asked for other people’s goals and I think it would be interesting to go ahead and prompt you, do you have any goals that you wanna share with the community for 2026?
00:50:38
Brad: Yeah, I definitely do. So I have it split up here, I guess, into personal, choosify and money, we’ll say, which is, I guess, personal. So start with the money side. And so, as I’ve mentioned on the podcast, my life has changed fairly dramatically in the last couple of years. And now that I have my solo finances, I’m really trying to get a handle on exactly what I spend, exactly what my life costs. And I’m really gonna redouble my efforts to get everything on paper and get a real sense of what does my life cost, track everything, go back to the basics, really, Jonathan. It’s something, because I’ve been on autopilot for so long, it is something I haven’t done in a while. So this is really scrutinizing, even down to the money challenge of looking at my credit card bill and seeing, can I cut things? Are there things on there that I’m not even aware of? I’d like to think there aren’t, but I think that would be pretty naive. So yeah, I’m gonna do that.
00:51:32
And also getting my daughters more financially savvy. You would think they’re the daughters of somebody who podcasts –
00:51:40
Jonathan: The world’s greatest accountant, former accountant.
00:51:43
Brad: Yep, we’ll go with that. You can find him at haironfire.org. Yeah, you know, you know. But yeah, so I just took them to the bank, each of them to get a checking account. So I want them to have more autonomy over their finances. They’re both growing up. They’re not little kids anymore, like when we started the podcast. So as they get older, I want them to have more say in their own financial lives and see when they spend, see it come out of their bank account. And can they pay for things? Hopefully would even set them up with a credit card each and have them understand how that works, set up autopay. So I really, really like their own personal finances to be their own, as opposed to it being commingled with my finances. So that’s a big goal for sure.
00:52:29
Personally, I am finally, I’ve been talking about this on the podcast for almost nine years. I’m going back to Japan this year. That is going to happen. So that is, that’s a big goal of mine. Still in the planning process. I think it’s a 99% chance, but that is a big goal. I wanted to hike to the top of Mount Fuji since 1998, when I studied abroad there and saw it in the distance and was just wowed. So that’s going to happen.
00:52:56
Yeah, I have some general health goals. I don’t know if honestly, it’s funny because I wrote this in my newsletter. I said, I plan to go to the gym basically five times a week, which is 250 times. I would like to do strength training three times a week. I’d like to do more of like a zone two cardio once a week and then more of a high-intensity interval training once a week. So I think that’s very, very doable. And I’m going to start tracking it and make it happen.
00:53:22
And then, yeah, just on the choosify site, I really want to see every single local group have their events in our new choosify community platform. I think this is, as I said earlier with Portland, we’re seeing this at Richmond. I know we got a message from my friend Noah who went to the most recent case study and said they had to bring extra chairs into this massive library room because it was overflow at the case study. Because people are posting these events and Ron and all the other people here in Richmond are posting events in the app that you created. And I really want to see that in every local group. So I know you’d love to have some automated way to do that, but I think it’s going to be pretty hands-on for me. So I’m dedicated to making that happen. So yeah, those are my big goals in different aspects of my life.
00:54:10
Jonathan: Nice. All right, so I just made some notes here. So let’s see. So for my actual financial independence, tactical tax optimization related stuff, one of mine is actually looking into and making a decision one way or the other on strategic charitable contributions, likely using a donor-advised fund. And just trying to see what is the tax benefit for front-loading contributions to then capture the standard deduction on the other side. So that’s the one that I’m doing the deep research on this year.
00:54:45
From like my own personal talent stack side of things. So I was able to get us a choosify app into the App Store and into the Google Play Store and that sort of thing. And that was a Herculean lift. And that was one of my goals for last year. And I was able to get that done. I’m not like over the moon excited about the app. It’s good. I mean, it’s great. But my stated goal was, I don’t want you to have to log in through a browser. I want you to be able to just access it through the App Store. People are like, what is a web app? All right.
00:55:14
So I’m going to be learning React Native. So I’ve decided after circling the wagons a bunch of times and trying a bunch of other things that the approach that I want to do is React Native. So I’m going to be learning that, adding that onto my talent stack. It would be starting over because I don’t know how to do anything in React Native, but I do have a pretty good approach to learning new skills. And I’m excited to see at the end of this year if I can’t do that. So I’m saying it out loud, I’m going to do it regardless, but I’m just letting you know that is a thing for me.
00:55:39
The other one that’s related directly to the platform, and I worked on this last year with the goal of getting it out. I did get it out, but it’s in beta, but we got to go farther is this financial independence planning tool. And as of right now, it’s in beta and it does a couple of things really, really well. It will allow you to differentiate between a static financial independence number, which is based on expenses. And it’ll start to differentiate into what I’m calling effective need, meaning you have some expenses that are going to roll off and you have some income that’s going to be starting. These happen on a timeline. And so what you actually want to target is your effective need. What is your effective need number, which often will be less than your static financial independence number. You could think about things like a pension, social security.
00:56:31
I made this incredibly more difficult by trying to also stack on a world tax engine on top of this, just because I’m an idiot and I don’t know why. I was like, well, let’s just make it work for all the tax codes. I’m going to have to do it all for you. Let’s just do it for all the tax codes. And so that means that everything just takes longer. And so not only do I have to get the US tax code right and get rid of all those validation errors, but now I also need to incrementally start doing it for the countries where our members are. So I’m thinking kind of in order of people that have taken a stab at this, I’m thinking Canada, Australia, UK, and then in descending order from there, just by members and who’s showing actual interest. So that is going to rob me of sleep.
00:57:08
So that is on the choosify side. I said the last thing is just kind of on the personal and relationship side of things. This one’s kind of funny, but it’s also serious. Like it’s a real thing. And I made a commitment to my wife. I’m really trying to focus on not having to always be right. And I say this in jest, but I’m very serious about it. It’s a very real thing. I find it often when I know I’m right. And that’s completely different than actually being right. But when I know I’m right, I want to make sure the other person knows it. And even more than that knows why they’re wrong. And that is not a good character attribute in aggregate over long periods of time. And so when you’re winning, when you’re proving that you’re right at someone else’s expense, it just doesn’t go well. It doesn’t age well.
00:57:50
And I’ve been reflecting on as I get older and more entrenched in my own opinions, and it probably doesn’t help that I have a podcast where I get to talk about my opinions out loud. So please hear me people. I’m not a bad person for this. This is just something I’ve recognized about myself. I’m course correcting. And I’m saying, even if you think the other person is wrong, really validate in your own mind whether or not you need to let them know. And just be a little bit more humble. So that’s just kind of a relationship thing. I am not a person to speak to other person’s relationships, but in the spirit of goals, if I think I can do a better job with this, I think that my relationships in aggregate will be a lot better. So that is kind of my goals for 2026.
00:58:30
Jonathan: I like it.
00:58:31
Brad: All right, guys. Well, I tell you what, I wanna let you guys know a little Easter egg here. Most of our best titles come from you, all right? And so probably what you’re gonna see us doing is identifying something in an episode. It won’t always be the next episode, but identifying something that somebody said in this episode that leads to a future episode. Sometimes it’ll be obvious, sometimes it won’t. But over the next two weeks, one of those two titles, I guarantee you, you will not be surprised by. In fact, I bet you can even bet what it’s gonna be. You’ll see it come up. Well, in the episode, by just reminding you, join this conversation, join this community, go to choosify.com slash login.
00:59:09
The fire is spreading, my friends. We’ll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled. Let’s get going. See you later.
[FINAL TIMESTAMP] Podcast Extro: You’ve been listening to ChooseFI Podcast, where we help middle-class America build wealth one life hack at a time.
