Updates & Inspiration for Your Financial Independence Journey

The Power of In Person Meetups I just returned from the FinCon conference full of energy and ideas for how to add value to the ChooseFI Community.  It never ceases to amaze me how much value I get from meeting up with fellow FI enthusiasts and this was no exception. This is a perfect time to remind you of the 3 most immediate ways to get involved in the community: The EconoMe Conference is the biggest FI gathering in the world and I’d love for you to join me in Cincinnati next March.  Diania was nice enough to offer our community 10% off tickets when you use the code ‘choosefi.’ FI Gives Us Choices I received an amazing email from David that I wanted to paste in its entirety: “My 1% better could be 100% better. I was recently laid off from my job the week of my 27-year work anniversary while also experiencing a cancer scare. Wait, what? How is that better? I stumbled across ChooseFI in 2017 after becoming 100% debt-free and looking for options beyond the Ramsey step 7. Choose FI introduced me to the concepts of FIRE including low-cost index fund investing, travel rewards, HSA’s, career

Deep Dive on Social Security Benefits I’ve received a lot of emails recently asking for more in-depth info about social security benefits, so I wanted to highlight an email I received from one of our community members: Here’s what Matt sent in: “I went down a rabbit hole and learned how to more accurately estimate my social security benefit by accounting for future pay raises and using bend points forecasted for the year you are eligible for Social Security. I want to share with the community the following articles I found most helpful. 82 Tips for Sleep Optimization One of the biggest areas where I’ve upgraded my life (and think you can too) is optimizing sleep. Simply put, life is just better when you’re sleeping well. I found this post on Twitter by Dr. Sam Soete with 82 sleep tips he came “up with after being an insomniac for 7 years in medical school.” 82 tips is overkill and I don’t agree with all of them, but that said, this is an amazing list.  Some of the most important on Sam’s list I also found through my own experimentation:  Limit excessive fluid intake 2 hours before bedtime and use the

10 Financial Rules You Need to Know You may remember my good friend Clint Murphy from ChooseFI Episode 438; simply put, he’s creating world-class content at the intersection of psychology and Financial Independence and he’s one of my favorite follows on Twitter. His recent post on the 10 Financial Rules You Need to Know is a perfect example and a great refresher for the FI Community. Here are my favorites: Clint writes a weekly newsletter called The Growth Guide – it’s one of the few newsletters I drop everything to read and I highly recommend it.  Here’s a one-click way to sign up for The Growth Guide newsletter. 32 Things to Know about Following The Simple Path to Wealth The incomparable JL Collins put out a post this weekend on his website called the 32 things to know about following The Simple Path to Wealth and after reading it I knew it had to be included in this week’s newsletter. I can’t really do it justice here, so please click through and read it!  Here are a few of my favorites: This is the perfect time to announce that JL’s new book, Pathfinders: Extraordinary Stories of People Like You on

Quarter 3 Net Worth Statement Every 3 months I take 5 minutes to update my net worth spreadsheet and I think this is the most important thing you can do to track your finances. The 3rd quarter of 2023 just ended and here’s your reminder to update your net worth spreadsheet. If you haven’t done this before, it’s really simple: Track this quarterly and watch this amazing journey to FI unfold before your eyes! Best Cash Back Credit Card Options Julie wrote in: “My husband and I are not really into traveling enough to use the credit cards with travel points. What’s the best point card system that isn’t based on travel rewards?” My response: ​“I would check out CashFreely, which is run by my friend Zac Hood.  It is the best way I know of to maximize cash back on your cards!”(For those of us into travel rewards, Zac also runs Travel Freely, which is a great way to keep track of your travel rewards cards) How Do I Buy a Part of the S&P 500? Titus wrote in an important question for people new to investing: “I have been listening to your podcasts for a little while now

Positive and Negative Energy Audit It’s rare that I find something so good that I paste it here in its entirety, but I found this exercise on Twitter from Tim Ferriss and I think every one of us needs to implement this for a better life starting today: 1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE. 2. Go through your calendar from the last 12 months, looking at every week. 3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns. 4. Once you’ve gone through the past 12 months, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?” 5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the next 12 months. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can

Case Study: Redeeming Rewards Points for NYC I recently took my daughter Molly to NYC for the first time and we booked two great travel rewards redemptions I wanted to pass along. Flights: British Airways is a transfer partner of all the major transferable currencies, so their ‘Avios’ miles are easy to come by. Little known secret: You can use Avios to book flights on American Airlines and it often costs fewer miles than if you had AA miles!  This is known as a travel rewards “sweet spot” where you use an alliance partner’s miles to book travel on another partner’s flights for fewer miles than normal. Avios work best in the US for short, direct flights on AA and fortunately there is a direct Richmond to LaGuardia (NYC) flight we were able to each book for only 15,000 Avios points round-trip. Hotel: There are over a dozen Hyatt hotels in Manhattan and we found the Thompson Central Park hotel in the perfect location and booked it for 25,000 Hyatt points per night. This was a $700+ per night room, so that was a nearly 3 cent per point redemption, which is a big win. All-in this trip cost us

Salary Negotiation and FI The Financial Mechanic joined us in Episode 454 to update her 7 Step framework to negotiate your salary and other benefits. Listening to this episode is one of the most important things you can do this week – it’s that valuable.  Here are some highlights: Appreciating the Full Value of Your Money Here’s an email from Ben with a great perspective on Financial Independence: “You’ve talked about reframing the FI message as spending on what you value (including investing) rather than only saving every penny for later. I had a thought: Maybe FI isn’t the right term for this, but really the imperative thing – the message that everyone needs to hear isn’t just to budget, invest, and become financially independent. What’s most important is to realize that you could do that, so that you appreciate the full value of your money. Then, to look mortality in the face so you truly see the limits and value of your time, relationships, etc. Once you have that perspective, you’re equipped to make intentional decisions about what you want to prioritize. You will understand the tradeoffs of taking on debt, purchasing something nice right now, or sacrificing spending

2023 Gift Tax Exclusion The 2023 gift tax exclusion is $17,000. This means you can gift anyone $17,000 and: This $17k exclusion is per recipient and for each person gifting, so let’s say you’re married and you have two children.  You and your spouse each can give $17k to each of your children this year, so they each could get $34k in gifts ($68k total) without any tax consequences (or filing requirement) for anyone. If you want to go deeper here’s an article from Smart Asset.   Time Savers From The Community Continuing our recap of time saving strategies from community members: Credit Card as a Debit Card Strategy When I met Bob Sharpe, he told me about a YouTube video he published to show how he uses his credit card to earn rewards points, but tracks the spending in his digital bank register as if it were a debit card. Every swipe of the credit card gets deducted from his bank account tracking as if it were a debit payment.  That way there is no chance he can overspend his account. If you came from Dave Ramsey, or had issues with credit card debt in the past, I think

Time Saving Tools From the Community Last week I asked you to write in with time saving tips and tools and wow, did we get an amazing response! Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to share many of these gems: One of the most interesting ones came from Lina: As a mom of 5 kids aged 10 and under, this one hack saves me hours EVERY SINGLE WEEK: I don’t sort laundry, and each person’s laundry gets washed in its own color-coded mesh laundry bag. Why mix things that then need to be separated? Just always keep them separate! All you have to do is zip the bag, and toss it in the laundry with another bag or two (depending on how full they are). I did a huge amount of research to find the perfect bags, and we use these AMAZING mesh zippered laundry bags from Texon Towels, which college sports teams use to do their athletes’ laundry at the same time. To get the largest size, which holds about a week’s worth of laundry, the 24″ x 36″, you need to contact the company directly to get a quantity less than 12, but their

Crowdsourcing Time Saving Tools A few weeks ago, we talked about “money rules” that Ramit Sethi made up for his own life and that prompted Sean to write in with the following ask of you, the community, to come through with a crowdsourced list: “The money rules that talk about time saving made want me to ask if we can crowdsource a list of purchases that are time savers? For example, I have Bluetooth tracker tiles on all my car keys and our wallets so we never have to search for them. About $40 for never having to search for your wallet and keys again is worth it to me. With thanks, Sean” I’d love it if you hit reply to this email and give an example of a timesaving product or service that you’re using in your life that you’d recommend to the wider ChooseFI community. Recap of Episode 451 with Jillian Johnsrud on Mini-Retirements David wrote in after last week’s email and said: “The real value for the newsletter for me, as someone who doesn’t have time to listen to every ChooseFI podcast episode is to be able to glean information through your summarized bullet points. The last

Negotiate Your Salary One of the enduring lessons from our podcast is this: “Everything is negotiable.” I was reminded of this essential lesson by the Financial Mechanic, who I just recorded an episode with that will come out in early September. She gives us an update on her ‘7 Negotiation Tips and Scripts’ for salary negotiation and really dives into the lessons that she used to double her salary and negotiate an international work arrangement. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about getting a new job and don’t want to leave money on the table or want to negotiate your salary in your current job, these are the 3 essential ChooseFI episodes you must listen to: A Family Taking Action I received an amazing email from Rick that I wanted to paste here in the newsletter for your reading enjoyment. This is a remarkable tale of action in a short time period they’ve listened to ChooseFI and I hope it’s inspiring to you: First, thank you! I found this podcast probably about 6 months ago and its now a must-listen for me every week in addition to running through all the great historical content. I didn’t think it was possible to feel a

I Bonds: Best Time to Sell? Sean Mullaney and I discussed ‘I Bonds’ on Episode 447 and just after we published that episode I came across this short, but amazingly thorough article from the Doctor of Credit website called ‘When to Sell off Our I Bonds’ thanks to a post in our ChooseFI Facebook group. This is the article you are looking for if you purchased Series I Bonds at the height of their interest rates in 2021 and 2022 and want to know the best time to sell so you minimize the interest lost with the 3-month penalty (you lose the last 3 months of interest if you sell your I Bonds within the first 5 years). Capital Gains Taxes 101 Two weeks ago in the newsletter I included a section on income limits for the 0% Federal Tax rate on long-term capital gains, and my friend Jesse from The Best Interest blog and podcast sent me an email with his excellent article on Capital Gains Taxes 101 that I think will be really valuable for many of you to read. This is truly a FI 101 topic that is foundational to understand what capitals gains are and how they are taxed.  We’ll all