BP Money Podcast - Financial Independence

I had the honor of being interviewed for the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. In the episode I talked about my wife and my journey to Financial Independence. The interview lasted for over an hour and a lot of things were cut to tighten it up. There were some things such as "tips" I've learned that I thought would be helpful for other's as well as some of my personal mantras that I thought could be helpful for others.

So, below you'll find the full Bigger Pockets Money episode via YouTube and my tips and mantras below in text. I hope you enjoy.

Push Play on the video below to play interview

Some Simple Tips

We travel quite a bit as a family and I travel several times a year on my own, which this blog showcases - my solo adventures. Here are some things we've learned in order to make travel go farther:

1. We use the platform HomeExchange.com to share our home with others while we travel. In exchange we can either 1. stay at their home 2. Have them stay at our home for points, which we can then use to stay at other people's homes on the platform. We've been doing this for almost 4 years now and have done over 20 exchanges with excellent results. This allows us to travel more frequently and for much less as accommodations can eat up a bunch of your travel budget.

2. We use travel points from credit cards to pay for our flights. We leverage big sign up bonuses and have a plan that we follow to continually get new travel points which we use for almost all of our flights and sometimes for car rental as well. Travel points plus home exchanging cuts our travel budget down by at least 1/2 for each trip.

3. 401ks, Roth IRAs, HSAs are all great, but don't forget the taxable brokerage account. We focused a lot of our investment dollars around 401k and taxable brokerage as we knew we'd need to tap the taxable brokerage funds before the 401k since you can't really draw down easily (without doing a 72T or taking the 10% penalty on withdrawals) until you're 59 1/2 so the taxable brokerage was a great plan for us and allows us to avoid, "the middle class trap" that they talk a lot about on the BP Money Podcast.

Some Mantras

I believe there is power in our thoughts. I believe that we can manifest things in our lives by focusing thought, energy and action towards those things. Here are some of the manta's I tell myself and have had incredible results making these ideas a reality in my life.

1. "Life is simple" - when things feel stressful I always revert back to this thought.

2. "This is happening, it's not happening 'to' me." - when something bad is happening I remember that the universe is not conspiring against me in some evil plot, but it is simply happening. This allows me to stay calm and move forward without unnecessary stress.

3. "Money comes easy to me." - every time I focus on this, good things come of it.

4. I'll add more here as I think of them...