Choosefi | Financial Independence Podcast For The Stealth Wealth Community

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan sit down with Paula Pant, author of the ebook Escape and creator of the blog and podcast Afford Anything. As a group, the trio discuss the current landscape of the housing market, whats different between it now and 14 years ago, some tips and ticks for buyers, and whether or not the current housing market is in a bubble! Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Sign up for Paula and Jonathan's Live Event on 6/28! Want to start your own journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan take a look at popular portfolios in the financial independence community and lay down a structure of comparison for them in a fashion similar to that of a horse race! Join us during the longitudinal study to find out which of these various investment strategies is the right fit for you! Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation All The Hacks with Chris Hutchins Level Up Your Dividend Strategy and Optimize Your Portfolio JL Collins Paul Merriman Paula Pant Want to start your own journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!  

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan discuss investment strategies with Brian Feroldi, a seasoned veteran of the stock market and author for The Motley Fool. Brian shares with Brad and Jonathan some insight into the current landscape of the market, why some stocks perform the way they do, and why it is important to take a look at the business behind the stock and not just the value of that company's shares. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation ARK Fund Brian's Checklist and Early Book Access Want to start your own journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan are joined by Alan Donegan, an entrepreneurial guru and host of the "Rebel Entrepreneur" podcast. Together, the trio discuss their own entrepreneurial journeys, tips and strategies for up and coming entrepreneurs, and where entrepreneurship could fit within your FI journey! Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Salesforce 5-Day Challenge ChooseFI Facebook Group The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris Millennial Revolution Mr. Money Mustache Want to start your own journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan take a look at the ways in which people aren't properly marketing themselves. By running through a thought experiment, Brad and Jonathan uncover skills, abilities, and valuable traits that may be absent from your resume. They also discuss imposter syndrome and how it can lead to selling yourself short.   Resource from the episode:   Salesforce for Everyone

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan reexamine the stages and checkpoints of Financial Independence. In our community, many people are just trying to figure out where they are on this path to FI. While every individual's journey will be unique, when you can gamify the process, the journey can be more rewarding and enjoyable. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Raising Your Money-Savvy Family For Next-Generation Financial Independence Subscribe to Brad's newsletter, The FI Weekly The Simple Startup Summer Challenge Clothing Shop Online Want to start your own Journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!  

In this episode, Brad and Jonathan reexamine the stages and checkpoints of Financial Independence. In our community, a lot of people are just trying to figure out where they are on this path to FI, and while every individual's journey is going to be unique, when you can gamify the process, the journey can be more rewarding and enjoyable. Want to start your own Journey to Financial Independence? Sign up for the free 5-Day FI Challenge here!  

Curious about cryptocurrencies? Is it investing or is it gambling? It's a topic the community has a lot of questions on, so in this episode we create. framework for the conversation and explore the nuances. In the US, we generally want for nothing and true scarcity is something we haven't recently experienced until this year and suddenly being presented with it creates some interesting psychological reactions. It's good to position yourself to be ahead of the game and be prepared when you hear reports of activities that might affect the supply chain. You don't want to be doing something at the exact same time as everybody else. See trends, think outside the box, and make your moves ahead of time. Colonial Pipeline paid to resolve their ransomware attack with a cryptocurrency, specifically, Bitcoin. Gas pumps on the east coast may be getting back to normal soon, but there's an ongoing pump and dump issue with crypto. The stories of insanely high levels of return from crypto are all over the news and social

Dennison, a member of the FI community and recent Salesforce success story, joined the guys today for a special interview. He expressed to us that being adaptable and willing to change your world viewpoints on the fly (especially in the face of the COVID pandemic) has allowed him to achieve great financial and personal success. Resources Mentioned In Today's Conversation Talent Stacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge ChooseFI Episode 117 Making the Case for Part-Time With Bradley Rice

What You'll Get Out Of Today's Show Picking back up with our ChooseFI Households of FI family, Zach and Marilyn to hear about all of the incredible progress they've made since their last episode. Like most people, the last year has turned Zach and Marilyn's life upside down, only their's has been positive. Following their conversation with Paula Pant in Episode 247, they were felt encouraged to move forward with a real estate investment when the numbers made sense rather than waiting for a property that met all the specific criteria. Within two months of their conversation with Paula, they purchased the home they are currently living in. Since then, they have put money in renovations and just rented out the basement apartment. Although the original plan was to do a live-in flip, they are now house hacking after taking out a mortgage with a 2% interest rate thanks to their excellent credit, making their new mortgage the same as the mortgage on their previous home that was half the size. Plus, the basement apa

The nature of work has drastically changed over the last year. Has its impact on you been negative or positive? And does that impact your choices on the path to financial independence? As a result of these changes, how we do work is something we can now question and work to make it align with how we want our weeks and months to look like. The concept of a Red X month is something first introduced to us by Vincent Pugliese and one that has been sacred to the Barrett Family. Brad puts a big red X through the month of August each year so they can spend the month doing whatever they want. The ability to do that is a benefit of FI. In order to spend more time with family, this summer, the show will move from its standard two shows a week format, to just once a week. What is your why? Brad says the words "enough" and "balance" pop into his head. We are driven to get to the point of financial independence but it can sometimes be difficult to find balance or understand when it's enough. Success isn't how much mone

What You'll Get Out Of Today's Show Do you want to give your children the tools they need to guarantee their path to financial independence? If you give them the right skills, becoming a millionaire can be a mathematical certainty. Achieving the objective of becoming a millionaire isn't nearly as important as the process of getting there. Success is in the journey. For many of us, we made a lot of mistakes before finding the right information and learning that there is a better way. When you understand the power of compounding, you know how plausible it is to become a millionaire, and what you need to put away each month to get there. Much of the journey comes down to mindset, empowerment, and believing that you can make changes to better your life. It starts with the little changes that make your life 1% better. It's time to stretch the tactics we use and apply them to a different age bracket. We generally talk about investing timelines starting around the age of 20. But how early could you really get sta

After four years of talking about the aggregation of marginal gains and the idea of getting 1% better, ChooseFI has accumulated quite a lengthy list you can stack together. If you can invest a little bit of time to fix something, you'll never have to invest that time again. Brad recently decided to move away from paper files and bills to join the digital age, while Jonathan has been using a subscription service to stop the paper junk mail sent to him. Chris Hutchins shared a final hack with Brad after the end of the last episode that didn't make it into the recording. Chris uses a browser extension to view book availability at his local library and borrow or place a hold on it. Brad and Jonathan selectively pick from the list of 100 ways to get 1% better with your finances, starting with #3, Reading (or Listening) to One New Finance or Investing Book Each Month. Jonathan thinks this tip could be expanded to include non-fiction books that improve you in some way. #4 on the list is to learn a new skill. It c

Life gets busy when you have a new baby, so Chris Hutchins is on a quest to learn all the hacks, optimize his life, and share what he's learned with you in his new podcast, All the Hacks. The goal of the podcast is to help listeners upgrade their lives by living more exciting, fulfilling lives without spending a lot more money and optimizing it all along the way. Life hacks tend to fall into one of three camps. It clicks with and becomes second nature, you find a way to automate it so you don't even have to think about it, or it's too much work and you never do it again. If you can find where optimization and excitement intersect, it's a huge win for you and your family. When Chris thinks about life hacks, he thinks about different aspects of his life and what the important parts are, such as family, work, finances, shopping, travel, and self. Categories may also be broken down into multiple subcategories. Jonathan says the idea of life hacks and living his life in a slightly more optimized way is what led h

Back in another installment of ChooseFI's Households of FI series are Troy and Lindsay. In episode 241, Brad helped them calculate their FI number, but Lindsay is a teacher with the potential to earn a pension. In this episode, they touch base with Grumpus Maximus to discuss the health of their pension. While the conversation is geared toward the health of the Virginia Retirement system, others who are eligible for pensions will learn where to access data about their own pensions and interpret it to assess its health. Linsday is 32 and in her seventh year of teaching under the Virginia Retirement System. Troy is 34 and an IT professional working on government contracts and does not have access to a pension. Troy and Linsday have a young son. Grumpus Maximus is a retired military officer who lives in New Zealand with his wife and two kids. Grumpus experienced a post-traumatic breakdown around year 16 of his military career that had him calculating whether or not it was worth staying in the military for the

In last week's Facebook Live episode with Frank Vasquez, he pointed out that we are in the Golden Age of Investing. In this episode, we explore what that means and if we appreciate how good we have it. In an ideal world, we would all like to maximize investment returns while reducing volatility. Holding uncorrelated assets helps to prevent catastrophe. But what is the goal of investing? Although it's a broad question, Brad believes the ultimate goal is to accumulate wealth. Investing itself is a very broad term, but it is essentially when the money you have saved is working to produce additional income for you. Financial independence is getting to the point when you have saved and invested enough to get to the point where working can become optional. In the last 20-30 years, investing has become fundamentally easier. Even Brad's first investing experience 20 years ago under the old system was a negative one, where he and his lack of knowledge were taken advantage of by an unscrupulous advisor. Back then, you

The Households of FI series continues! In this episode, we touch base with Kristi, the single mom from Minnesota who. New to FI, Kristi is working to get on the path but has questions about her company's Price-to-Earnings (P/E) Ratio and the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). How to evaluate what a company's stock is worth is not something many of us index fund investors know a lot about, but it's good to be familiar with it. Individual stock selection is something that Brian Feroldi gets excited about, making him the perfect mentor for Kristi and her ESPP questions. The only individual stock Kristi owns is her company's stock. She is able to buy her company's stock for a 15% discount with up to 10% of her income. She has been buying this stock since beginning her career six years ago and has accumulated a lot of it. Because she didn't know anything about investing prior to finding the FI community, she nows calls this her biggest financial mistake and has finally started selling a bit of it. She origina

The goal of diversification is to ensure access to a lot of upside without being exposed to an unacceptable downside. But are you as diversified as you think you are? Long-time community member, Frank Vasquez says there are three roles bonds have in your portfolio, income, stability, and diversification. The Holy Grail Principle focuses on what the concept of diversification really means. It doesn't mean different, it means uncorrelated. Investors can use online websites to calculate the correlation of two assets that results in a number ranging from 1 to -1. The closer the number is to 1, the more highly correlated they are. A number close to 0 indicates the assets are uncorrelated and move randomly with respect to each other. A negative result means the assets are negatively correlated and typically go in opposite directions. Why would an investor want assets that are negatively correlated if that means while one is doing well, the other is not? In the accumulation phase when an investor is trying to bui

In 2008-2009, the American dream of a home with a white picket fence turned into a financial nightmare, sending many families underwater for a decade. After looking at the numbers, there's an ongoing debate over homeownership. Owning may not be the right decision for everyone. Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen from BiggerPockets join the show to discuss home buying and their new book, First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes. Even if you've already purchased a home, Scott and Mindy's book is a masterclass to help you rework the process during your next home buy. According to their book, "…a smart home purchase will not only give you a place to live, but also offer flexibility, financial stability, and the chance to recognize and increase in that home's value over time". Is purchasing a home a good investment? Mindy says, "Maybe". Housing is an expense whether buying or renting. The more you buy, the more you are spending, and the less wealth you will have. Don't ask how much can