Making Working More Optional with $Pro Tanja Hester #076

get us thinking about that a little differently, Joel. But first, I wanted to run a frugal versu cheap by you man, I got I got one for you bring a buddy. Okay, So I applied for a new credit card because I was wanting to get that sign up bonus. This is a sign up bonus. Yeah, it's a It's a pretty good one. And here's why I want to talk about this is because a lot of times people talk about not opening new cards for bonuses like that because it dings your credit. Yeah. I think we had a recent

discussion in the Facebook group about that. Man, It's kind of a constant sort of topic, right, Yeah. But so my question is is it being frugal or cheap to sign up for a new car to get that bonus when it hurts your credit score, what do you think? So? I think it depends on your specific situation. If you're applying for a home loan or a car loan like

literally next week, then it's it's cheap. It's a bad idea to get that five bucks and doing your credit score and potentially hurt these interest rates that you're going to have for a long time on while you're paying down a car or a home. But if you're not in that situation, if you're not looking to finance anything in the near future, I say, doing your credit score and take the cash. Yeah, man, I couldn't agree more. I mean, what's your credit score for? But use it?

I think what happens is a lot of times folks view their credit score as this indicator of just how good they are with money, or maybe their success or just a number of things. But that number is there for you to use it if you have a great credit score, and you can use that to to get great financial products, whether it be a new credit card or especially owns. But in my case, I'm using it

to get new cards to get the sign up bonuses. Well, I'm not looking to have a perfect credit score just for the sake of someday achieving eight fifty like a gold star on a test. Yeah, Like, what's it really matter? It doesn't really matter, you know. What matters is the bottom line for me right now. That's not getting a great rate on a new mortgage, because I'm not looking to get one of those anytime soon, like you mentioned. But the dollar amount in my pocket, Like, that's what

I'm looking at. And in our case, we already had a big expense coming up literally this morning. We actually just paid for our new baby all right at the person center. I told you about that you gotta wait on your delivery for a while, exactly. Yeah, but that's an expense we knew was coming up, and so why not put that on a card and we're gonna pay it off at the end of the month and get

that five off. That's a that's a great deal. But like you said, if you're going to be applying for a mortgage anytime soon, you might want to hold off and know yourself as well. If you think that applying for a new card might cause you to spend more than than you really should be spending, well, don't. Don't do that if you know that you'll be tempted. Yeah,

you're gonna pay for the baby anyway, right, certainly. So yeah, I think too, to your point about how people view their credit score, Matt, there's some people that are obsessed with hitting the eight hundred credit score number, or or even getting above that, and they're like, why isn't my score perfect? And there are all these little things that influence your score. And if you're in that seven sixties, seven seventy or above range, you're in amazing credit territory.

And if you're above seven forty, you're in super super solid territory. And and so I think just kind of look at where you're at. If you have a credit score of seven ninety eight hundred, taking advantage of a new credit card deal with a sign up bonus is going to cost you, in all likelihood ten maybe twelve points. It's not that big of a deal, and it still keeps you in pristine credit range. So don't overthink it,

don't worry about it. So it's important to know, yeah, that your credit score is is helpful for so many things, but it's also something that you can use to your benefit, like you're doing right now. Yeah, so it's important to not get too bogged down with the details when it comes to your credit score. I want to talk about our beer today that we have from land Grant brew Company,

uh and they are out of Columbus, Ohio. Matt. This is a beer in their Quadra Hopic series of I p A S and this one features force specific hops And this was sent to us from listener Kayla, who works for land Grant Brewing. And you know we're always down for a good I p A. So thank you Kayla for sending this one out. We're having some SIPs of this right now, but we'll talk more about this beer at the end of this episode. Yeah, Matt, so

onto the subject at hand. The topic of the day is making work a smaller part of your life, and we're bringing money pro Tanya Hester on to to talk about this. She blogs and a blog called Our Next Life, and she recently wrote a book called Work Optional, And if you stay tuned to the end of the episode,

we're actually gonna give away a few copies to listeners. Um. She also, by the way, hosts the Fairer Sense podcast and she's done so much work which is kind of a funny thing to say, because she's talking about work optional.

She's done a lot of work to think through this subject. Well, she has afforded herself the opportunity she and her husband to make work a completely optional part of their life, and they can work however much or however little they want to based on the way that they've saved and invested and thought about money for a number of years. So I'm really excited to see how we can take this subject with Tanya and make it applicable to listeners

no matter what their current financial situation is. Yeah, Joel, That's one of the things I love about Tanya's story is she's talking about this from a standpoint of authority because she has achieved financial independence, she's retired early, but she wasn't always set in life. She mentioned in her book how until her late twenties she had a negative net worth just from some dumb financial decisions that she made.

She wasn't one of these high school grads where straight up high school theas she started like an app or you know, she wasn't a genius in college to where she had companies on Wall Street making her amazing offers. She worked for MPR. And I don't know if you've heard, but NPR asked for a lot of money because because they're not very well funded. Yeah, people in radio, I can attest to this, don't typically make too much money.

And I guarantee you most of the folks at NPR aren't making tons of money either, so exactly, And so I love though that she started at that point, um, and I think that's incredibly relatable to anyone. And we'll hear Tanya's five minutes of distilled wisdom about this in one second. But really quick, let's talk about the problems that people have with work, Matt and and we address this a little bit in episode fifty of our show about what a proper view of work should look like.

We mentioned that work is a wonderful thing, but work isn't everything. And those two views have been the main ways that we've categorized work in our culture these days. And Americans work way more than they did in the past, and far more than other countries. So it's no wonder that we are looking for ways to work less and enjoy our work more. And so Tanya isn't approaching this because she hates work, and we don't either. We think

work is an important thing and a meaningful thing. We think that she's kind of helping us find out how to do meaningful work from a position of strength, and having strong personal finances is crucial in that equation. Yeah, and just not being stressed while you are working. She also mentions how like her and her husband are both on boards and they're pretty much busier than ever right now.

But what they are doing is they're spending their energies and their time working on things that they actually truly care about. And when they don't have to worry about the money, well it becomes a joy. It's it's sort of this passion pursuit. And how much more fulfilling is that when you're able to work on something because you believe it, not because you know that. Well, that's how

I get the best paycheck. Um, And that's where she's operating from, and I know I want to operate from that standpoint, and I think a lot of our listeners I would agree, and that resonates with them as well. Yeah. So just a quick reminder that the way these money Pro episodes work is that we bring on our money Pro for five minutes of distilled wisdom, and so, without further ado, here is Tanya's five minutes on avoiding burnout

and making work a smaller part of your life. K Matt and Joel, thanks for having me on to talk about how to make work a smaller part of life even if you never plan to retire early. First, let's talk about why it behooves us all to act as if we're going to retire early, even if early means fifty or fifty five, not forty or thirty five, depending

on how the survey writers ask the question. We know that somewhere between one third and two thirds of people retire before they intend to for a whole host of reasons poor health, badly time, layoffs, needing to care for

a sick loved one, that kind of thing. We also know from New Urban Institute and pro public analysis that more than half of workers over fifty are laid off or let go in ways that irreparably harm their financial health, maybe making the type of retirement they had hoped for impossible more than half more than half of workers over fifty. And of course we all know that automation, outsourcing and shifts within industries aren't ever present threat to long term

job security. What you do now simply may not exist as a job by the time you're fifty. So even if you love your job and have zero desire to leave it before your sixties, you may not ultimately have that say, And you're so much better off if you can give yourself the financial flexibility to weather any setbacks that come your way. But ultimately we're talking about making mandatory work a smaller part of life, which feels like

an almost revolutionary thing to say. In our seven hustle culture, the hustle culture that puts virtually all the power in employer's hands, that puts most of the productivity gains into shareholders hands, not workers hands. The work culture that has us working on average for full time weeks worth of hours more per year than workers did forty years ago. The culture that has most of us checking email on vacation and when sick, if we even take any sick

time at all. This is at hustle culture. It's burnout culture, and it's killing us. But it's possible to fight back. In my book Work Optional, Retire Early, The nonpenny pinching Way, I outlined three possible paths that you could follow to make mandatory work a smaller part of your life. First, there's full early retirement, which is what I did along with my husband Mark, saving enough so that we never need to earn another dollar, meaning any work we do

is now entirely on our own terms. There's also semi retirement, in which you save fully for your traditional retirement and then work just enough in your semi retired years to cover all or part of your living expenses. And finally, there's career intermission, in which you save enough to be able to take a year or two off from work, or perhaps a year every decade, or six months every

five years, whatever feels right to you. But the truth is that you don't even have to achieve any of these levels of financial independence to make work more optional in your life. When we got to a point in our savings that I knew we could both get laid off and be unable to find work for a full year and still be okay, it was incredible how my whole view on work changed suddenly. That daily stress affected me less, the NonStop travel felt less grueling. Honestly, I

felt powerful. I knew I didn't need the job, and while I stayed with it, for several more years, and honestly loved it until we'd saved enough to quit entirely. Knowing I could quit and be okay was one of the best things I've ever felt. It also changed the whole dynamic I had at work. Most of us have

this massive power imbalance with our employers. They have the money and we want it, so we'll do pretty much whatever they ask of us, even if it's unhealthy and unsustainable, even if it destroys our relationships and gives us no time outside of work to pursue our own passions. When I knew I didn't need my job anymore, it flipped how I saw the whole arrangement. It was no longer me speaking to an omniscient being who held my fate in its hands. It was too economic equals. We each

have something the other wants. I want your money, and you want my skills and talent. Knowing I could walk away was what made it possible for me to eyes to that equal position in the relationship and to push for what I wanted, like better projects and teams and better terms for those working under me. I didn't have to get anywhere near early retirement levels of savings and investments to feel that power just enough to know that I could quit any time, and that's something that's within

reach for most of us. So where to begin. I'm a big fan of starting by mapping out what your ideal life would look like, both so you know what it costs and so you have a vision that will

motivate you to save over the long term. Then get tactical track your spending, figure out how much you can currently afford to save and how you expect that to grow over time, and then put automated systems into place to help you save, like having your paycheck split so a portion goes to savings without you even seeing it, or working toward maxing out your I RA A or four oh one K. I offer a saving sequence in the book that helps you think about tackling a bunch

of financial goals in sequence, whether it's paying off debt, saving to buy a home, or saving for early retirement, or some combination of all three. You don't have to be a super saver or a high earner to give yourself the power to live a work optional life. You just have to be willing to get started. I hope this has giving you something to think about. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts guys, Tanya, thank you. This

is awesome. There is clearly such a wealth of wisdom that Tanya has, and it's no wonder that she's written multiple books stroll um. I'm looking forward to diving into all that she had to say right after this break. All right, Matt, we'll back and man, I so love but Tanya had to say and the perspective that she has,

like where she comes from. One of my favorite things that she said was at the beginning of For five Minutes when she said that it's better to act like you're going to retire early, even if you don't think that you're going to. And that was such an awesome

and powerful thing for me. And I think the reason why is because many of us think that we control our own fate, that even if we're a good employee, that we're assured of a job in the future, and especially in today's corporate culture, that's just not the case. And I love the idea of acting and treating our finances like we're planning to retire early, saving a whole heck of a lot more than we are now, even if we don't necessarily want to to quit work at

an early age. I think that's so powerful and so important. Yeah, Joe, because, like she mentioned, there's a whole host of reasons why you might actually have to end up retiring early, whether they be personal or industry specific, depending on the industry that you're in or your specific company. Um, I'm I'm with you though. The fact that she mentioned focusing on doing that early, it's sort of this overachiever mentality, and honestly, that's just a better way to live life. I'm not

habitually late by any means. I don't think I am am I late all the time? No, not usually, I don't think so. But I can probably count on my hand the number of times I was early to something last year. But when you are early to something, just think about how much better of a position that puts you in when it comes to the quality of life that you have. You're just less stressed. You're not rushing

around to make sure you're there on time. When it comes to opportunities, like you show up early someplace, you're just kind of hanging out, like you can find ways to help out. You have more options when you have time. But then also like the quality of your work improves. Imagine showing up to an interview ten minutes earlier versus right on time. You're probably gonna perform a little bit better if you had ten minutes to sit there and

think about it. So, just in general, when it comes to your finances and reaching a point of financial stability, a little ahead of time, a little bit early in a similar way that you see that benefiting you in real life, like social or work situations. And there are a lot of aspects of our life, Matt, that we

don't have control over. Right We might, like Tanya said, have some sort of bad health outcome or or get laid off, even if we've been doing a good job, and there might be a need for us to care for somebody else in our life. Maybe somebody else that we love and care about deeply get sick, and who knows what that may bring to your life time wise

and money needs. So even if you love your job, even if you think and you plan on working till age sixty five or seventy, well, unforeseen circumstances could prevent that, and you just have to be prepared. And Matt, for example, the company I work for my day job they have announced that the radio station I work for is for sale, and that could mean a whole host for sale. By like there's a sign off front there is yeah, and I was like, I'll buy it, and they're like, you

don't have enough. I'm sorry you can't, but yeah. So there's such an element of fright in the building when an announcement like that gets made, and you can just tell that so many people haven't thought at all about what life might look like if something like that were

to happen. There's just been zero planning. And I understand that, like I have pity for that, Like I I completely know that there are so many other things to take over our lives from just the day job, the grind and and kids and all the other things that are going on in our lives. But if we don't pay attention to our finances, an announcement like that gets made and people are freaking out. And for me, I mean, I like my day job, it's really fun, I like the people I work with, I like what I do.

But I also know that when this announcement got made, not much changed in my mind because I know where I'm at financially. I know that I have the ability to weather any storm like this, and that just gave me a lot of confidence that I don't have to worry about what happens if they call me tomorrow and say it got sold, and we don't need your position anymore.

Like I'm in a position of length to be able to say, Okay, I can take a year off, or I can work to find something else as quickly as possible. But I just don't have to fret about it. And that is such a nice place to be. And I know that that's just a rare position for people, but it's an important one to think about now before that announcement gets made at your work, right. I love that you are in a position of of strength to a

certain extent. Here is not to say that you're financially independent right now or that you're you know that you've retired early, but you have, but that I could because I can't. Yeah, but you do have some margin, you know, I've we've talked before and you've mentioned how you could maybe take a year off, and you know you could get by things will be all right. We're maybe in

a similar position. I don't think we could take a full year off, but that's something that we're working towards to have that financial margin to be prepared to whether the different storms like that. And again, it's not saying that we don't enjoy work. We're just looking at ways to make mandatory work a smaller part of your life.

And so in order to do that, though, you have to push back against the standard work culture where the power is in the hands of employers and time you mentioned that, because when you're overworked like that, that's what leads to the and out, when you feel that you have to say yes to every single thing that's being asked of you. Sometimes it may not even be the most upstanding request, but you think, oh, we'll shoot, I'm

counting on a paycheck to come in next week. Kind of held to this carrot, you know, being dangled in front of you and there's a requirement of you to perform to a certain extent. And that's the view and attitudes towards work that we're trying to get away from. Matt.

Let me give another just quick example. And part of the reason that I've created this level of financial security in my life comes from what I experienced as a kid in childhood and my dad lost his job when I was pretty young, and he had this great middle management job, and my parents were kind of living at this place where where they could meet their monthly obligations,

but they weren't putting anything aside for the future. And I guess the assumption for them, just like so many other people, was that things would continue on the way they were indefinitely. And so when when my dad's company got bought by another company, he was laid off, and that created immense amounts of financial tumult in our lives.

And I love what Tanya is talking about with making work a smaller part of our lives, because even when you lose your job, if you don't have a small amount of financial security, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have any options when it comes to your next place of employment. To a certain extent, you're pretty much at the whims of whatever the market has to offer at that moment in time. Okay, let's talk now about how Tanya that she mentioned how there are three

possible paths towards working less in your life. There is full early retirement, and you know, that's financial independence where all work is optional. That's sort of the pinnacle of when it comes to retirement and your savings. And really that just means that whatever you have in investments, whether its torntal properties or uh in your retirement accounts can cover your living expenses so that you don't have to work.

That's right, man. And the next she mentioned semi retirement or partial retirement, and this is where you can save fully for a traditional retirement, but then you continue to work some to cover your day to day living expenses. You know, honestly, I think this is a great option if it's hard for you to imagine life without work personally, Semi retirement or partial retirement is my goal because I just see work being a large part of what I do. I I want to continue to work. I want to

be able to continue to create things. You know, we're working hard at creating this podcast. It's a lot of fun and for our family as well. I know what the next eighteen years are gonna look like. It's gonna look a lot like that prototypical American family where the kids go off to school in the morning, they come back in the afternoon, and and we're gonna have dinner

together as a family. You know, Kate and I have talked about how that's a goal of ours, like we want to sort of create this maybe overly idyllic sort of life, but that's the kind of life that we want to lead right now at least. And so because of that, work fits into that very well, Like there's a reason maybe why kids go off to the school while your parents are off working. It just kind of

fits together. And so for me to feel less stress about my job to where I feel that it has to be able to produce a certain amount of money every single month because I'm on a variable monthly sort

of income, that would be amazing. Yeah, I think the draw of something like semi retirement is kind of like you were saying, that you can get in a nice full day's work while the kids are at school, and then when they come home, there's no more work, right, You only have to work that night if you want to, and you can work on the things that you're interested in.

And that is such a super cool thing. And we realize that that's that's a hard thing to come by, that's not an easy thing, Like that's my goal, that's a goal for future for us, right, and even if you don't have kids to be able to work while your friends are working, because it's hard to live a sort of quote unquote normal life where your friends are working all day and then sometimes even into the night, and for you to maintain those friendships, right, Like, how

do you maintain in a friendship or how do you maintain sort of a regular life when when your friends are working all day and you know you're kicking back because you're basically, you know, fully retired. Well, that's that's kind of difficult. Instead to be able to continually challenge yourself to to create new things, or to challenge yourself to learn a new skill, finding ways to contribute, Like all these are great reasons to continue to work, but

just without that stress. Yeah, and I think that ideal of semi retirement allows you to Let's say you are pulling ten hour days right now. Let's say you're a prototypical American and you're working more than forty hours a week, because most Americans are, There's there's just a lot of work going on in our society. We've become highly productive people. We we get a lot more done with a lot fewer human resources. Each individual American is so much more

productive than they used to be. Thirty years ago, but we're working a lot more in order to make that happen at the same time, and so we we feel that pole that we can't go on vacation, we're gonna let our co workers down. We feel the poll that we can't take time off or even calling sick because

there's too much to be done. And the great thing about aiming for something like semi retirement is that you can cut back, and you can cut back to the point that feels reasonable and normal, because, to be honest, I would imagine a lot of you feel this pressure out there who are listening that you can't miss a day and that the demands in your daily job are

just a lot. And having this kind of goal set out to reach something like a state of semi retirement where you can make some income from the stuff that you care about, uh, and the rest of your income is covered because let's say you've invested well in rental properties and you have great recurring monthly income from a few of those uh, something like that. It kind of

changes the game and it changes our goal. Is our goal is not necessarily to retire from the company we're working for at the age of seventy with like a

gold watch on our risk. But our goal is to exit earlier than that and be able to do more of what we care about, you know, Joel, I'll go ahead and readily admit though that this approach, like the semi retired or the partial retired life, might sound a little boring to some folks to think that, oh, yeah, my goal is to live a standard average American life, at least on the service, right, Like, obviously there's much different things going on underneath the service when it comes

to the finances of it. But maybe on the service, it's like, oh, he takes his kids to school and he works all day and then he picks his kids up, Like, how is that that different? I think for a lot of folks that might not be very sexy, right, And so for those folks. The third approach that time you

mentioned taking a career intermission. I think that's an incredible path and approach if you are more of maybe a high octane person, like where you're used to working hard, earning a lot of money, but you don't exactly know what you want to do with yourself once you achieve

financial independence. In creating these these intermissions, these sabbaticals throughout your career that allows you to take some time off and think about what it is that you do truly want to do, Like, what is it that I really do want to do when I don't have to work anymore, when I don't have to clock in every single day. Those periods can give you some time to meditate. It's like creatively brainstorm, you know, like be creative, like think

about the things that truly make you happy. Yeah, it's a way to kind of enjoy I think the fruit of your labor now as opposed to continually saying that you're going to do it when you eventually retire. And I think for a lot of people, retirement is this vague notion pie in the sky thing. I know it's gonna happen someday, but why am I saving all this money for the time when I'm seventy and not living

life now? And I think, you know, that's what we stress in this show to Matt is Toliver rich life now on less money and a career intermission is kind of a cool way to do that. And so two quick examples. I kind of took one of these really really early on in my career. I took three months off I had in turned at a radio station, and then I got my first job at one and I worked there for five months. And it turned out, uh, and you got burnout and you're looking for a break, right,

It wasn't It wasn't quite that bad. It wasn't burnout, but just wasn't the right fit for me. In particular, I knew that that wasn't a place where I wanted to spend any more time, and so I gave plenty of notice. But what I ended up doing, I had saved five thousand dollars, which was a high savings rate for me at making very very little in my first job. I'd saved a bunch of money. And I bought a really,

really old station wagon with my best buddy, Travis. Sorry you're my best buddy now, but yeah, old buddy, Yeah yeah, still a good friend. Though. We loaded up. We we uh. We drove across country for three months. We saw the coolest stuff. For instance, we had a beer recently from tell Your Ride and I talked about going to tell you. I saw so much of the country doing this. It was so wonderful and it was worth the thousands of dollars I had set aside to travel the country for

three months. I knew that it was a brief career intermission. I knew it wasn't going to be extended, one because I didn't have the money to make it an extended one, and two because I knew I wanted to get back to work. I was young in my career, but I knew if I took three months there, that I didn't have too long of a gap in my resume, and that I could have the most amazing time and see the most amazing things that I wouldn't be able to see.

And then if I waited until I was seventy and did the normal thing and funneled that five thousand dollars, let's say into my four oh one. K I know that's going to grow, and I'm missing out on compounding growth and all that stuff, But it wouldn't have been the same. And so I would suggest a career intermission to lots of folks. For instance, Matt, we had Chad Carson on our show about small time real estate investing, and he and his family took seventeen months to go

to Ecuador. That was a career intermission for him. But such an amazing experience and so wonderful to hear the way he recounts it. And I think a lot of people can aim for something like that that seems doable. Right. Yeah, I know the benefit of a sort of career intermission like that is you're able to prove it to yourself that that is actually what you're gonna do. Like you said earlier, Joel, like, how there's this pine in the sky goal, this lofty pinnacle of financial independence, and once

I achieve that status, then I'll take the vacations. Then I'll do this thing that you know I said I was gonna do. But having these sort of breaks in between, it really does give you a chance, not only maybe to prove it to yourself, but me to prove it to your family. If you are just constantly being frugal and finding ways to be smart with your money and sacrificing now with the promise, oh, someday we're gonna do this, or you know, we're gonna do this vacation and it's

gonna be amazing, or we're gon we're gonna travel the world. Well, being able to stop right now and to actually try it out and to prove it to yourself that you are willing to do it. I think it's huge. It's and and it's a huge learning opportunity as well, because you might have in your mind that you want to do all these things, and you know what, you might try it for six months and you may not like it, and all of a sudden, you know, your cheese is moved.

What's my new goal? If that's no longer what you're seeking after? What is your new goal? What what is the new thing that you're gonna strive after? Because there's a huge paradign shift that's just happened. I feel like you're giving a mouse Trappic reference here. Well there's a book as well where it's, uh, you know who moved my cheese? And it's all about goal setting and figuring

out what it is that you're actually seeking after. And I'm just kind of touching on that briefly, but like, that's what's happening when it comes time to taking those breaks and if you realize that you're not cut out for that sort of lifestyle, well you need to figure

out what will truly motivate you. And so after the break, we're gonna get to sort of the way that you think about work and how that can change your attitudes right now, as well as the steps that you can take to start working down that path towards working less in your life. All right, Matt, we're back and today we're talking about making work a smaller part of your life.

And it's kind of funny how when you start to think about work in a different way and creating a financial support system to make sure that work isn't the end all be all, how it can actually make the outlook on your current work change the current job that you're doing right now and the way that you view it when you walk into work at nine am on a Monday, or you know, whatever your schedule is. It's amazing how having your financial ground game together can change

everything in that way. Yeah, so when you are financially stable, that power dynamic, but you know, and your options like that changes. When you don't need to have your job anymore, you have that confidence to ask for what you want and time you mentioned, you know, working on projects that you really care about or advocating for it is under you. Like those that work for you, you can work for

better options for them. Man, it just gets me pumped, right, What an incredible way to put together a team where you can fight for not only your own pay and your own salary, but but those who are working on your team. You know, and you can't do that if you're in a position of weakness when it comes to your own finances. When you're set financially and not set as in you can retire. But you know, when you have some margin there, when you are in a healthy position,

you can go to bat. You can make these requests. And yeah, certainly that power dynamic has completely flipped. Yeah. Man, I think when you have a decent amount of savings built up, when you have started investing well and you kind of begin to see your net worth kind of boy a little bit, right, it grows. It gives you that confidence to one I feel like, ask for pay

according to what you're worth. It gives you the ability to be a little more bold in the request that you make when it comes to how you spend your time at work. And I feel like also it gives you the opportunity to kind of explore ways that you can be more creative in your job that might benefit your employer, but that you've been nervous to ask about. To to use your skills in kind of a different way.

I think your whole outlook on work changes, not just from the potential fear of hearing that the business that you work for is closing its doors or selling to another business, or if the economy takes a nose dive, you know your job might be at risk. It certainly helps you in those scenarios as well, but it helps you in the day to day to figure out, you know, how you can hone in on making your current job a little more of what you actually wanted to be

versus just going in and getting the work done. And so I think, yeah, your savings has an impact on what your job looks like right now, which is kind of cool where even if you're in a situation man like I am, where I'm self employed, I don't have

a boss, you know, I am my own boss. Like there isn't that omniscient being where you're kind of going to battle against like Tanya mentioned, but there's even still a similar dynamic when you have enough savings set aside, you can take risks when you see an opportunity and something that might be perceived as slightly more risky, well that's something that you can go for or even if

it's as simple as raising your rates. So I know in the past, when Kate and I were considering raising our rates, if we weren't in a healthy position financially, that would have been a much scarier proposition because we would have been asking ourselves, well, what if no one hires us? What if the what if the emails start

drying up? And then these are fears that you kind of have regardless when you own your own business, But you know what, those things are amplified when you are in a position of weakness when it comes to your finances. And when you're in a position of strength, you feel courage. You know, you have a little bit of runway there to try something new, You have a little bit of cushion to kind of fall back on in case things

don't quite work out. Yeah. I love what Tanya said that once she and her husband had built up that one year mark, you know, getting to that one year mark of savings, And I don't even think you have to get to that extent. If you have three months worth of savings, that can be huge in the mental

battle of how you approach your daily job. But the fact that you know Tanya is at this point where she's financially independent, but even just getting to that one year mark was this big mental sigh of relief that she said, you know what, I can approach my work in a completely different manner. Now I can make it

more of what I wanted to be. And I felt the same thing at different small points along my career path that when I had a certain amount of income coming in from rental properties that assured me that I could cover some extremely basic needs, it made me think, Okay, cool, Well, I love my job. I want to keep going, but I feel like I can ask for more responsibility or more money, or an ability to take on something that I wasn't previously allowed to take on, or a team

that I wasn't on before. It just gave me that ability to ask, and I think I wouldn't have done that if I had not had some of that financial

security coming from somewhere else. Awesome, Joel, I'm glad you kind of are gravitating towards that one year thing, right, because I see that as an amazing stepping stone towards financial independence, Because honestly, as great as financial independence can be for somebody, it is such this large, massive thing, and it's really hard to identify exactly how much do you really need and what's the market going to be doing down the road, and there's just a lot of considerations,

so where it's this really fuzzy thing that you can't quite grasp. But you know what, it is very easy to figure out what you're annual expenses are. Just look at last year, you know, and you can quantify exactly how much it's gonna take to live for a year. And because of that, it's a very clear goal. And we all know that clear, identifiable goals are going to be able to be achievable, right, And so I love that she felt that power shift even when she did

have that one year's worth of expenses saved up. I love that it's measurable and it's attainable, whereas financial independence can sometimes feel like this massive elephant. Well, that first one year's worth of expenses like that's that first bite of that elephant. And I think that's an incredible goal for folks to have. Just don't bite an elephant. They

can really upset. And yeah, it's awkward, but let's talk about the how two's matt When we are trying to kind of get started, and we've got, of course, just a lot of previous episodes where we tackle a lot of specifics when it comes to cutting your monthly bills,

saving on your cell phone plan. That's what this podcast is, right, Yeah, a lot of those nuts and bolts, right, And this is kind of a little higher level, like we're thinking, we're trying to reframe the way that we view work and how can we actually make it where we are able to work less our lives and not just when we hit the age of seventy. So, Matt, how do we practically start to change some things so that we can actually start heading down that path towards making work

a little more optional in our lives. Yeah, well, before you get too into the nuts and bolts of it, she still starts out pretty big, and she says to start by mapping out your ideal life. Again, this kind of goes back to the whole idea of thinking about retirement that can be so overwhelming because you don't exactly know what you want to do in retirement, but instead map out your ideal life. And for me, what that means is starting with like what do I want my

days to look like? Because Once you can start identifying what you want your days to look like, well, then you can start putting your weeks together. Weeks, you know, lead to years, and all of a sudden, you have an ideal life in your mind that you're trying to design like a lot of this comes down to designing what you want your life to look like and being

intentional and proactive with your own life. And for most of us, a certain amount of our life is when we do map out what our ideal life looks like, is gonna look kind of like work. It's gonna look like something like writing or serving other people, and there are ways that you can do that right in the more profit and the nonprofit sector of our society for sure.

Just know that this is not an effort. While you're mapping out your ideal life to probably just binge watch Netflix eight hours a day, it is likely going to look like some amount of doing something productive. And that's why we're not saying the goal is to get away from work. It is truly just to make work a little more optional in your life, not to kind of get rid of it all together. The next step, then, and how to, is to get tactical track you're spending,

and Matt, we have mentioned that before. It's such a crucial part of starting to get your money game together. Even if you feel like you do have a good savings rate, but you want to get to a place where work is a little more optional more quickly, Well, you need to track your spending. You need to know what's incoming, what's outgoing, because there might be auto pay bills or ways that you're spending your money that don't necessarily align with your goals and that are preventing you

from making work a smaller part of your life. And that might be a bigger goal that you have that seems like it's going to take longer than you want it to, and that's probably because you're not tracking your

spending very well. And so that is one way to start in order to kind of find out how much you need to save in order to make this a possibility and in what time frame schedule and that time frame, like that's so incredibly important, right because you are trying to achieve something within a set number of years most likely, and what you're looking at is performance. And so I'm gonna analogy I'm gonna use is like running sure you

can go run because you want to stay fit. You enjoy it, fresh air, stress, relief, right, all the different things that comes with running. But if you have identified a goal and say with for running, maybe that's running like it's in k and forty five minutes or something, you start timing yourself if you're going to run, because if that's the goal you're trying to achieve, you can't

just run willy nilly and expect to maybe hit that. Well, sure you might if you run hard enough, but if you don't have those numbers, if you aren't able to quantify it, well, you don't really know where you are before you get to that point. And guess what, if you're looking at retirement or semi retirement, you need to know the numbers. You have to know what your expenses are, you have to know how much money you've saved up until that point, because from there you can make confident

decisions based on the numbers that you've been tracking. Yeah, and one of the practical tips that Tany gave that I think is so freaking helpful for people is to automate it. To start splitting your paycheck maybe and taking of that and having it automatically funneled into another savings account that you don't really think about basically paying yourself first, and a forced method of that is to automate it.

Most of us, once the money hits our bank account, we are not very good at parsing it out and funneling it towards our retirement accounts, and so finding ways to make it easy and to prevent yourself from even

touching it in the first place is huge. Broadly speaking, on this show, every week we we were either talking larger concepts like this where we're broadly sort of thinking about money differently, or we're diving into the nuts and bolts, right We're like, we're finding ways to widen that gap between what you're earning and what's going out your expenses, and then with that difference of money between your income and your expenses, making sure that you are investing that money,

that you're allowing that money to grow into the full potential of what it could be by the time you do reach retirement, regardless of what type of retirement you're seeking after, whether that is full on early retirement or you're considering, you know, a partial sort of retirement that would allow you to switch to some work that you would find more fulfilling. So, Matt, I feel like, actually, kind of what we're going through right now are kind

of our final thoughts. Those are our final thoughts by by default, right. So one last thing I wanted to say though, was that it's really important to at least save just enough to give you that extra boldness to know that if something does happen at your work or in your own business that you owned and run, uh that if if you have a bad month or your employer does have a round of layoffs, that you're not completely nervous because you have no level of financial stability.

So get started and save enough to make sure you have a certain level of confidence and boldness to be able to make decisions that are going to benefit you in the long run. That is how you're gonna be able to make work a smaller part of your life, maybe now, maybe in the near term. But it also gives you that kind of light at the end of the tunnel that you don't have to work like most Americans do so much of their work week can assistantly you can actually cut back and spend more time on

the things that are more meaningful to you. That's Rachel. Let's now go ahead and get back to our beer this week, which was the Quadra Hopic series. I p a thanks again to Kayla for sending us this beer. It's got four different hops. This is getting kind of nerdy, but I love the names of the different hots. Dude, Columbus, Simcoe, Amarillo, Chinook. They're all hops, but they all they've all got like the different cool names, and I like seeing them all

written here on this can. Yeah, and they've all got different flavors. So I was at a bar the other night and I had a single hot beer and it was really interesting because you really do taste like, for for instance, this beer Quadropic, four hops from Land Grant Brewing. By the way, this beer was really cool. It had flavor notes from each one of the hops. I'm certainly not an expert enough in hops to know what each one tastes like, but it was really interesting. Yeah, yeah,

we'll get there. I want to get that good someday. We will. But yeah, I had one the other day, like I said, that was a single hop and it was really fascinating to taste that one and see what the flavor profile of that one hop was. And I feel like I got to know that hop a little bit and it was yeah, kind of intimately nice, just a one on one you and that hop exactly. Yeah, So it's cool. And this this beer, the Quadra Hopic series I p A from Lame Grant was was really nice.

So I enjoyed getting to know the four hops at one time. To me, this one drink more like a West Coast I p A kind of had more of that sort of great fruit bitterness going on, where's delicious and juicy, but at the same time it drinks like pretty dry, which is which is a nice change of base. We've been drinking a lot more the New England style I p A s lately, where it's very cloudy and juicy.

It's almost like you're drinking orange juice. It's good to go back to more of a West Coast I p A and to enjoy one here that's a little more traditional, Yeah, but still lots of happy goodness. All right, And since we already did our final thoughts, Matt let's piece out of this episode, all right, Thanks again to Tanya for

coming on the show. We really appreciate it. If you want to find out more about her work, you can check out her blog Our Next life dot com and you can check out her new book Work Optional and Matt. We're going to give away four copies of this book. All you have to do to enter in for this book giveaway is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and if you're not an Apple user, you can leave

a review on Stitcher. Either way, that's totally cool, and then just send us an email at how to Money pod at gmail dot com with the user name that you left your review under, will enter you in and give away some of these copies this coming week. Just make sure to send us that email by Friday afternoon. We'll close off the entries Friday at five o'clock. As always, you can find our show notes up on our website to all of our episodes at how to money dot com.

And until next time, Man, Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,