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FI Weekly – March 30, 2021

Choose FI has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Choose FI and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities. American Express is a ChooseFI advertiser. Disclosures.

What Was Your Best Decision Ever?

Dr. Peter Attia asked Steve Levitt, Ph.D. the co-author of Freakonomics on Episode 154 of ‘The Drive’ podcast, “What’s the best decision you think you’ve ever made?” and Steve’s response was insightful: 

“I don’t know if you’d actually call it a decision, but the decision to not care what people think about me…I somehow just made a choice to just not care what other people thought about me. Which was a big choice for me because like most high school kids all I cared about was what other people thought about me, and at some point, I just broke with that and was happy to live with the consequences and it’s just a great way to live. It just frees you up from so much burden. I think all of my best decisions are ones that relieved burden.” 

Do You Know a Young Entrepreneur?

We released ChooseFI Episode 308 yesterday with Rob Phelan from The Simple StartUp and I love Rob’s starting point of: “Do You Have A Budding Entrepreneur at Home?” 

If you do, you’ll want to help them explore the concepts of business building so it becomes part of their everyday language and thought-process. Rob came through with 2 great resources that I highly recommend: 

ChooseFI Community Taking Action This Week

  • Sara said, “I’m excited to share that our 1% for this week/month/year is that Hubby and I have just paid our last non-mortgage debt payment! We had been snowballing for the last 2 years to eliminate all debt outside of the mortgage. With the $750 additional we now have to direct onto the mortgage it should be paid off by 2024!” 
  • Daniel said, “Our lives got 1% less stressful this week after trading in our $750k term life insurance policies (we had 10 years left on original 20 yr terms) for $1.25M 10 yr term policies for pretty much the same premium we were paying. Nice to know that if the worst happened, the other one of us would be able to pay off the house and still have the $1M to be FI. Thank you Policygenius and ChooseFI ;)” 
  • Luiza said, “We had already done some small changes even before discovering Choose FI, but your podcast is giving us more fuel to continue on this path. My first “1%” was to reach out to our bank and renegotiate a fixed rate for a year for our mortgage which will save us around USD 900 (depending on the FX rate as we live in Sweden) for the next 12 months. This was a couple of weeks ago. Last week we cancelled our HBO subscription as we haven’t used the service in a while so another saving of USD 150 per year. I also downloaded your family cookbook and can’t wait to try some new delicious and cheap recipes. 🙂 Thanks, Laura! More great changes to come.” 
  • Bonnie said, “My 1% weekly betterment: I not only read the FI Weekly email completely, I took notes and scheduled follow up research! That feels good!” 
  • Maryorie said, “I’ve been collecting 1% improvements for a while so here is a summary of what Pedro and I have been working on:
    • We had documented conversations with our managers to line ourselves up to transition into remote roles by the end of 2023 which will put us closer to our families in Puerto Rico, which will also allow us to move to a non-income tax state with much better weather :)! 
    • We’ve taken on a side project to turn our SUV into a mini camper, which will allow us to explore the outdoors while saving on hotels, which also makes us feel much better about the car payments. 
    • Pedro is 2 payments away from slaying his student loans which will open up $1200/month which will go straight into a Roth IRA. 
    • We downloaded the Barrett cookbook and have used it in combination called WHISK which combines all of your recipes and shopping lists in one place. We found it to be more updated than Paprika, so please let Jonathan know to check it out! 
    • I could go on but I’ll try and use this newsletter as an accountability partner who is checking on us every week. I’ll close by saying that I finally got through all of the episodes (yes, ALL OF THEM), I started listening back in fall 2019 but because I’m such a Type A I wanted to climb my way out to the present which took me a long time. Thank you for everything you put out for the community. Talk to you guys on Stereo!” (Brad note: Maryorie has sent in multiple voicemails to us on our LIVE Stereo recordings Tuesday nights. We’d love for you to join us!) 

 

Choose FI has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Choose FI and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities. American Express is a ChooseFI advertiser. Disclosures.
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Effective Giving for the FI Community | Rebecca Herbst & Jack Lewars | Ep 483

Is it better to give to charity in a lump sum versus incrementally? What are the tax implications of donating? What are the benefits of using donor advised funds? This week we answer these questions and more with the help of Rebecca Herbst and Jack Lewars as we discuss charitable donations and effective giving while on the FI journey. A large part of FI is taking actionable steps to improve your life, but this journey also opens up opportunities to improve the life of others. While navigating donations while on the path to FI can seem tricky because we are so focused on attaining our FI numbers, there are still many ways you can give back and make a difference. Creating the habit of effective giving can help you leave an impact on yourself and the world at large! There are many resources available that can help calculate what you can give while remaining on the FI track, as well as help you see how your donations are making a difference! 

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