284. "We’re worth $1.8M, but I feel guilty buying a $78 jacket”

One of my favorite articles in the New York Times was a weekend edition of what this model does on his days off. Now, you look at this guy. He looks beautiful. He looks amazing, super ripped. And on his Saturdays, his day off, what does he do? He does like a seven mile jog. He then does yoga. Then he goes and meets friends for brunch. They showed what he eats. And all of it made it very clear why he looks the way he does. I was blown away. And I loved it. Because finally I could see what it takes to look like somebody like that. He shared all the behaviors he does that I had no idea people do. I'm kind of obsessed with what people who are good with something actually do. Like people who are really good with their nutrition, log into the menu of the restaurant they're going to before they get there so they can decide what they're going to order. What do you do if you're good with money? What are your special behaviors that you do that nobody else is doing? Well, I'm going to show you what those behaviors are so that you can become good with money as well. On Monday, November 16th, I'll show you what being good with money looks like. You can sign up at iwt.com/live to join these special free events. She cried when we put our first offering on the house. But she also true up and she bought her first car. So what? Spending large sums of money freaks me out. $1.8 million in net worth in your 30s. You both told me you don't really feel safe about it. I don't think any number makes me feel safe. I saw this gene jacket that I liked and I tried it on and I was like, "Oh, this is perfect." And then I didn't get it. How much was the jacket? $78. The hell? I'm just scared. Scared of? The rug being pulled out from underneath us. My ticket is absolutely we could retire at 40. There's no way. What a way to go through life. Just finding one way to feel unsafe after another for the next 50 years? I'm not really into it. What do you think? Doesn't sound great. When can I retire? That is a very common question that most people ask themselves at some point in their lives. And it's important. But it's also a layered question that requires a few different answers to determine. Like, how much is enough? What is your day-to-day life look like when you stop working? And I think most importantly, what is your rich life today and tomorrow? That is what we are talking about today. I'm about to speak with Laura and Jason, both 38 years old, married, no children, and a high income. Jason thinks they can stop working soon. Laura wants that freedom too, but she doesn't feel confident about what happens when the paycheck stops. For this episode, sponsored by FASIT, we asked their team to prepare three retirement scenarios using Laura and Jason's financial information. I want them to understand the trade-offs and what each version of their future could actually look like. They want to know if they can retire early, like in the next few years. Before I talk to them, let's open up their monarch account. I'm curious what their numbers tell us. Dining out $1,200, shopping $3,700, treat yourself. They got a massage for $72. Wow. Shall we look at what else? Let's look at their accounts. Okay, net worth $1.8 million. Cash at $132,000. They got a lot of money in checking accounts, savings accounts, $49,000 in a money market savings account. Okay, fine. Credit card $3,900. I'm sure they pay that off every month. Investments at $542,000. Lones at $1.8 million. Question is, can they retire in just a few years? I'm not sure. Here's the clues. They make a very high income. Their fixed costs are low, but they are spending basically five times more than they planned on guilt-free spending. I think the real decision will center on what they envision their retirement to be. Let's talk to Jason and Laura. This episode is sponsored by FASIT. I'm not a member of FASIT, but I have an incentive to endorse them as I have an ongoing fee-based contract for cash compensation based on this endorsement. These opinions are my own and not a guarantee of a similar result. FASIT is an SEC registered investment advisor. Now, Laura, in your application, you wrote something that caught my eye. You wrote we're often unable to get on the same page about financial plans because of the large gap in our incomes and the way that we view and define financial stability. We're on the precipice of making decisions to set a potential retirement in motion, and I'm freaking out a little. Help. Jason thinks we can retire by 40. That sounds like a dream, but I'm not convinced. Laura, when you say you are freaking out, what does that mean? I guess freaking out is never feeling confident in my decisions. My brain will keep going and going at night being like, can we retire at 40? What would that look like? Like, are we even stable enough to be having these conversations? Like this year, we've spent so much money on things that we wanted and needed. Like, constantly feel like if an early retirement is possible, should we be making all of these decisions with our money or should we be saving more? I don't know. Got it. Okay. Jason, what is your take on this question? You know, Laura says, I'm not sure if we can retire, and if so, should we be spending our money differently? What is your take on that question of early retirement? My take is absolutely, we could retire at 40. I think retiring at 40 would take some lifestyle changes to be on a fixed income. But if that's the way we wanted to move, that's definitely a possibility at our current trajectory. There's also the option to work a few more years and have a more comfortable retirement as well. Okay. Have you two talked about that? Hey, if we push this lever, pull this, etc. Yeah. So a lot has changed since I initially wrote that. Tell me. Since then, we've had so many conversations about money and retirement that are not as abstract as they used to be after we did the CSP and got that monarch app and had pretty much complete transparency with all of our accounts. I feel like I have a better picture. We've also paid off, I think, a quarter of a million dollars worth of debt since I sent that. Hold on. Yeah. God, I'm going to get my ass handed to me in the comments. But it's actually not my fault. You're telling me, Laura, in the last two months, you paid off $250,000 of debt? Yes. Tell America. How'd you do that? Okay. I'll tell you. I've had student debt around my neck for a very long time. It has not been fun. Why have I let it sit there for so long? I don't know. But I have. And that's a mistake. But I realize I have this large chunk of money in my savings account. That's just sitting there. And I like looking at it because I'm like, yay, I can see all of my hard work in that amount of money. And then I realized with that CSP thing, I was like, okay, so if I pay off that amount of money on my student loans, my net worth is still the same. It doesn't matter whether it's sitting in a savings account or paying off debt. I think it's important to clarify that the entire $250,000 was not. Oh, that's true. Yeah. That doesn't matter to me. It actually doesn't matter to anyone else. They don't make that distinction. They just see a lot of zeros and they go, "F**k you." That's great. Laura, great insight. The idea that I just sort of had money sitting around in a savings account because it made me feel safe. It just made me feel like there's something there. And I realized, what am I actually doing with it? That is a great insight. And I appreciate you doing that. Okay. I have more questions for you. Are the two of you married? Yes. How long you've been married? Six years. Okay. Laura, I'm curious, even though things have changed in the last couple of months, what were you doing? Where were you and what was going on that you wrote that application? I mean, using words like freaking out. What was going on then? I remember them ordaining. We were sitting on the couch having coffee and we were talking about retirement. It's been a topic of conversation for us for the last couple of years. I'd been slightly obsessive about it, I think. And yeah, that was one of the mornings when Jason was like, "We can retire now or like, when we're 40 if we want it to." What'd you say? There's no way. Then we fall into these roles in our relationship where I'm kind of like a perpetual pessimist and Jason's much more optimistic. Okay. That's interesting. How do you decide to potentially retire early? A series of things happened in life that made me realize that I really don't want to work forever like my dad passed away after like literally on his deathbed. He was like working from his hospice bed and it was like that was tragic to me. Right around that time, my company laid off a lot of people and that was the first time in like my adult life that I had like worked at a company that had mass layoffs and I was like, I felt very unstable and then at the same time our next door neighbor had retired. She was a schoolteacher forever. She retired and like months after she retired, the doctor found a brain tumor and she passed away like within months. The story I told myself after that was like I want to enjoy life now because you don't know how long you have. I don't want to work forever and I want to enjoy my life right now. That's a lot of tragedy. and realizations in a short amount of time. I appreciate that. Sorry to hear about your dad. - Thanks. - It's tough. Jason, how about you? - I'll mean into more of the positive reasons. When we've first started dating, I lived in a van. We traveled a lot. We would take months long trips and we'd travel, do a lot of climbing, hiking, that kind of stuff. And we've kind of built these habits of being able to live well within our means. And knowing that and enjoying that type of lifestyle, we've decided, or multiple times, that a good way of like stopping early is just living a little more simply. And we both enjoy the lifestyle. We're happy to do that. - It's quite poignant that Laura has seen mortality up close and in so many different ways. Seeing people pass away makes you rethink the way that you have approached life. One of the reasons that I love doing this podcast is that I don't want you to have to wait until something terrible happens in order for you to design your rich life and certainly to live it. Now, how much of her decision to retire early is based on a real desire to versus a feeling of running out of time. I don't know, but I do know that it is important to her. It's important to Jason. And therefore, I want to help them craft the kind of life that assuming the numbers justify it, that they can live. And so I can understand why Laura is in a big hurry to live that next chapter of her life. I actually feel for her and I love when people are in a hurry to live their rich life. Sometimes I think that we put up with way too much for way too long. Do you know how many people are on my newsletter and they tell me that they have been trying to start a business or thinking about starting a business for five years, 10 years, 15 years? I'm like, what? 15 years you've been thinking about doing this, you haven't done it. As one of my friends, Julie said, get impatient with yourself. Why do you allow yourself to keep dreaming of this thing? You wouldn't even let a good friend do that. You'd be like, do get your (beep) together and get it going, let's go. But we give ourselves a pass. So when I hear somebody saying, look, this is what I want, here's why I'm in a big hurry. I don't know how to do it but this is what I want. I love it. That's what I'm here to try to help them do. 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Again, that's wildgrain.com/remete40 or use remete40 at checkout. What's the time in the last few months where you two have not agreed on money? Right after we filled in the CSP spreadsheet, I was sitting on one side of the couch, canceling subscriptions because I was like, we don't need all of these. And then I noticed Jason on the other side of the couch, and I was like, what are you doing? Like I'm looking at best buzz on Facebook Marketplace. And I was like, we're such different people. That's not what I would be doing right now. Is that what you said to him? I think at that point, we had been talking about finances for like two hours straight. And I was like, I'm just going to let this one go. Laura, do you feel like you are good when you spend less? Kind of. OK, and Jason is nodding his head with a smile. Yeah, I know. And would the contrary be true as well? You are bad when you spend more. I see it as a negative to spend on like frivolous kinds of things. What's frivolous? Well, the only thing I think of right now is vehicles. But like-- What about that jacket that you saw that you were like-- OK, yeah, this one's going to say, like a bunch of clothes or like-- Let's talk about the jacket. What is this jacket? What happened? Two big smiles. I don't know. She even knows what jacket I'm talking about. No, I don't know what jacket I'm talking about. She knows. Go ahead, Laura, what is the jacket and what happened? We were at a store and I saw this jean jacket that I liked. I've been talking for a long time about getting a jean jacket that put a bunch of patches on because I think it'd be funny to write a vest around like a jean jacket with patches. And I tried it on and I was like, oh, this is perfect. And then I didn't get it because like I said, we've had a very expensive year. And it's had the time. I didn't know that she didn't get it because of money. I thought she just didn't like the jacket. Otherwise, I probably would have talked her into purchasing it at that time. Ah, a lot of kind of like counter signalling or pre-avoidance. I don't want to have this conversation. So I'm just not going to bring it up. How much was the jacket the whole time? Before we go on, look at Jason's big smile. He's like, just wait, Remy, go ahead, Laura. How much was it? 78 dollars. Wow. Wow. For everybody watching, I'm only smiling because I've seen their CSP. So 78, would that be, where would that fall in your wardrobe? Like, most expensive, middle expensive. Where would that fall? Middle. Middle. Okay. And did you ever end up getting it? I did not. Okay. How does money work in your household? We each kind of control our own money. She has around savings, around checking. I have my own savings. I have my own checking. And then if you buy up yourself, you just use your own money. And-- What about the joint stuff? The joint stuff. We'll talk about it. We don't have large conversations about a lot of this stuff, to be honest. It's usually pretty easy, I think. And so you start getting to about 10,000 or above. Then we start getting more in the weeds, for sure. Give me an example. So we recently bought a new van and built it out to be like a camper van. And the total cost for us on that project came out to about 25,000. And I think everything over 10,000, I had to scrape and crawl out of Aurora. Got it. Laura, what was your experience talking about the spending on the van? Really succinctly, this is usually how big purchases like the van go. Well, agree that yes, we want to buy a van and build it out. They'll be like, what do you want to spend? And then I'll throw out a number that's not based on anything other than vibes. And then inevitably Jason will be like-- And then I'll maybe up it a little bit. And then that's how we arrive at a budget, which is probably not smart. Do you guys like this? No. I think, honestly, I like some aspects of it. I'm a lot more impulsive than Laura is. So without her, if it was just me, I would have spent easily $70,000. I would not have built it, I fell. You enjoy the back and forth in negotiation because as you put it, you're impulsive. Laura, do you enjoy it? I wish initially, at the beginning, when he was like, what's your number? I felt more confident and I knew what number makes sense for our budget and what [BLEEP] costs, you know what I mean? Laura, in your application, you wrote something else you wrote. Large expenses are more of a financial drain on my income, but we split everything in half instead of equitably. What do you mean by that? I make good money. He makes more. And that was just like a nod to that. One of the other things I had-- changed a lot since I initially wrote this. It's like that quarter of a million dollars that we paid off in debt. Two hundred thousand of that was from Jason. So I think it's important to say things are split in half even though he makes a lot more than I do. But at the end of the day when big things like that come up, he'll pay it off for like when we bought the current house that we live in, he put a lot more towards a down payment than I did. So like in that moment, for example, I felt like splitting things 50-50, like why are we doing that? And then kind of as time goes on, I'm just like maybe it evens out in the end. No, I paid off the he-block and then Nora put money down towards your student loans. Okay, that's an interesting approach. I can see exactly why it feels a bit challenging day-to-day. If you are splitting things 50-50 that can feel really expensive for you, Laura, if Jason's earning way more because proportionately you're paying more. But then again, then Jason is you're coming out, Jason, and paying off huge joint expenses. Okay, I get it. It's interesting. It's challenging. I like it. It's different. I haven't encountered this before, but I like a good challenge. Okay. What was it like to do the CSP together? That was the least amount of fun I've had in a long time. What? I'm sorry. Yeah, it wasn't that fun. Well, both brutal. This is like a- I'm glad we did it, but it was not. Like I feel like our money and our shit is just like all over the place and tracking it down felt hard, but once we did it, I felt like I had a better grasp on what's going on. So it's awesome to me. Hold on, one second. Okay. Good job, Rameed. So I guess that's the point. I W T dot com slash CSP for anyone who wants that. All right. We're going to look at your CSP right now. Let's do it. Jason, can you read off the words in bold and the numbers next to them for this entire box, please? Asets 3.1 million investments 530,000 savings 117,000 debt 1.89 million total net worth 1.857 million. All right. Cool. What do you think about those numbers? I think the portfolio is real state heavy and everything seems very dependent on markets and policy, which makes me feel slightly uneasy. Okay. Laura? Yeah. Same. It makes me feel like a little perplexed. I feel like the net worth number looks good on paper, but I also feel like yeah, it's a lot of dependence on like things going right and not falling apart. Anybody feel good about the seven figures you have in net worth in your 30s? Yes. I feel good about it too. Yeah, absolutely. Sounds depressing to me. I'm just scared. Scared of like the rug being pulled out from underneath us and things going haywire and how much do you need to feel safe? I've wondered that many times. I don't know. Maybe an extra 50,000? I think I feel safer if we didn't have as much debt. Okay. Maybe if we cut your debt by half? Yes. And where would the money go? Let's just say you sold off something. Where would you put the money? It's a great point because we probably put it in the stock market, which is just another risk. That's good to say. I don't think any number makes me feel safe when it's invested. I just I have such little trust in our investments. Like one 2008 and I will lose 50% of our net worth. Another 2020 and we're going to lose, you know, under money based off of our other investments. I've just seen so many things that I don't know. I just never feel safe. Okay. It's not 50,000 more or even 500,000 more. It's not moving money from real estate to the stock market. Why don't you just sell everything and put it in your checking account? Would you feel safe then? No, inflation will take care of that one. I think what does make we feel safe is I do have one source of income that is cola based. It's 4,000, 300 a month. Wait, wait, wait, we're getting to income in a second. We'll get to. Okay. 1.857 million dollars in net worth in your 30s. And I'm trying to find out what would make it feel safe if anything at all. Can I ask you both a question? What do you get out of not feeling safe? I guess it's motivating to keep making more. I think that's a really honest answer. Capitalism. Right. Right. We've been living it and breathing it and now it's all we know. And so we got to work. We got a grind. Okay. Little ironic for a couple that met living in a van, but okay. And wants to retire in like a few years. I'm not going to lie. When you were like, what would make you feel safe selling everything and putting in a checking account? I was like, yeah, kind of. You want to do it? Because this could be a very short conversation. I'll watch you log in and we could do it right now. I don't think it's a good idea. But do you truly believe that would make you feel safe? I don't know. Think about this. You had that money sitting in a checking account or savings account or whatever for your student loans, right? How often did you log in and look at it? Anytime I would log in to my finance app, I'd be like, Oh, that's that's nice. I like the best. Yeah. Okay. So basically exactly that you logged in. You felt something. And then do you want to just do that forever? What's the cost of keeping money sitting in your checking or savings account? Inflation. 4% annually. Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. Inflation, you're actually losing money every single day because it's not growing. But you have to take a little bit of risk. I'm trying to understand how you both think about money. That's what I'm trying to understand because the numbers are quite large and they will become larger and larger to a point where this is what's going to happen. This is what happens with people who have high incomes and/or high networks. They start off and they go, I don't feel safe. I have only $20,000 in the bank. Okay. You can make the argument. But then it becomes $200,000. And then they still make the same argument. I don't feel safe. We're going to need more and then this and that. And then the number becomes 2 million. Even day as they say it out loud, they're like, this sounds crazy. I can't even say this out loud. So they shift their feeling of being unsafe to something else. They go, what about the kids? Or we're going to have to buy a new house. Or what about retirement? And then what's the final trump card in America for wealthy people who want to perpetuate their feeling of insecurity? What do they say? I'm not a tax policy. Nope. What about healthcare? Because in America, nobody can argue against the price of healthcare when you're 89 years old. Now all of these can be realistic. Maybe you are going to have children or a house or help an ailing parent or what all these can be true. But what a way to go through life. I don't know. What do you think? Doesn't sound great. You came to me, I think, because I talk about a rich life. And I talk about how to feel good, especially in your situation where you are earning and having a lot of money. So let's let's try to figure out how 1.8 million dollars we haven't quite resolved what would make you feel safe. But we're starting to get some clues. Let's go into the income. Laura, I want you to read off your combined gross monthly income. 68,235. Okay. Just so everybody knows that's monthly, which means that annually your gross income as a household is $818,820. By show of hands, who knew that number? Jason, after we filled out the CSPA. But not before. Okay. Jason puts his hand up. Laura does not. So trutus statistics, even couples earning almost a million dollars a year, 50% of couples tend to know their number, although I think it's a little higher for higher earning couples. Laura, what do you think you made as a household? Like 400,000, 450. So am I hearing this right? You thought that you made 400 and something thousand. The actual number is 800 and 18,000. To be fair, and to stand up for a lot of them, money gets directly straight into investments, and it doesn't go to any bank account. I don't care where it goes. It could go straight into a freaking arcade. I don't care. That's $400,000 a year off. Do you feel safer knowing that you make $818,000 a year? I mean, the way you're saying that, I feel like I should. Yes, but do you? I don't because I know that a lot of that is like income from our rentals that just goes to paying a mortgage, which is debt. Maybe if it was like two million a year. No, I think maybe if the house was paid off or something, and it was like actually income that didn't straight up just go to pay off debt. That's possible. And I think when you have a bit of a complex financial situation, it can all just feel a little unwieldy. And part of what I can help you do is cut through all the noise. That's why the CSP is actually designed the way it is. Because even for a couple in your somewhat complex financial situation, you really need to know like a few key numbers. Number, you make $800,000 a year. Yeah, some of it goes here and some of it goes there, but just on its face. What does that tell you, Laura, that you make $800,000 a year? - That were very high earners. - Yeah, Jason, what does it tell you? - That's since a lot of it's W2, it's highly taxed. - Jesus. - Oh my gosh. - That's the first thing you notice about $800,000 is it's highly taxed, that's it. - $800,000. - Where wealthy comes out? - Yeah, but that comes out to like 400 some gross. - Wow, that's a real tough hit. It actually comes out to $497,000 a year. So $500,000, that's gotta be tough. How do you make it work on only $500,000? - Did you say it was tough? I'm not gonna fight that. I know it's not tough. - I love it. I love (beep) with high earners 'cause like, they all, they play the boo-hoo game with their other rich friends and then they come here and I'm like, you're (beep) rich. - Please. - I think Laura thinks it's tough. I know a little more than I do. - I don't think it, - Ooh, Laura, get him back. Go ahead, fight me. - I don't think it's tough. The reason I wanted to be here was to make sure that it's like enough for retiring very early. I feel like it's a very like lucky privilege thing to be able to do if we are able to do it. So I just wanna know if we make enough to do that specifically. - Totally hear you. All jokes aside, it is great to hear you. Both the knowledge that you do make a lot of money. You do. What are the two of you do for a living? Jason, software engineer, okay. Laura. - Marketing at a tech company. - Okay, great. Laura, you make $20,000 a month gross. So like 240K, which is an awesome income. And Jason, you make $48,000 a month. So this is big money, right? It's great. It's awesome. I love high earners. Nobody trips and falls into $800,000 of income. You have to be very, very good at what you do. So I totally appreciate that. And Laura, your question is apt. Hey, it's great that we make this much money, but we're trying to do something highly unusual. Retiring in our early 40s. Can we actually do it? We'll walk through the numbers. We'll find out if you can. But I wanna encourage you to also add another element beyond just a math. Because if it was just a math, honestly, I feel confident you could have figured it out on your own. I will help you do it, but it's not just a math. What if you were able to mathematically do it and you retire in X number of years and you spend the rest of your life feeling scarce about money? - That would be very unfortunate. - Yeah, that's misery. Misery. So we have to account for that part. And that's why I want you to start thinking about the way you feel today is a very good predictor of how you're gonna feel tomorrow unless you rewire the way that you interact with money. - I think in all of our conversations about possibly retiring really, like I think we've grossly underestimated how difficult it will be to leave stable jobs. I don't really feel like it's realistic to be like, I will leave my job when I'm 42 or whatever. Not when I feel this way. - Good. I hope everybody is listening right now. What you just said, Laura, is strikingly honest, which is I can be at a household that's earning $818,000 a year. I can have a supportive partner and even still, my money psychology probably will not allow me. Even if the math justifies it to retire and have a healthy outlook unless I make some changes. The feeling of safety with money is one of the most elusive feelings there is. And we actually don't even know how to understand it. Many of us come up with these fast-ciler responses. Like, oh, I just need $50,000 more. Then we find out after going through their CSP, they actually make $80,000 more than they thought. And I go, you feel safe? They go, no, I don't know why. I f*cking don't know why. Because the way you feel about money is not connected to the amount in your bank account. That's what we think though. We come up with these easy answers, but we actually don't know why we feel this way. But it's gotta be mystifying for you watching this episode and seeing a couple making so much money and not able to answer the question, what will make me feel safe? Don't get mad. Don't become infuriated, get curious. Say, wow, if this is a very reasonable couple making almost a million dollars a year and even they can't figure out how to feel safe. What does that say about me? Maybe it's not about the numbers alone. Maybe we've got to totally change and transform the way that we think about money, the way that we behave with money and ultimately the way we feel about money. Maybe there's a level to this podcast that I haven't been aware of. I've been looking at the numbers and getting mad because I don't agree with the way that they distribute their investments. Maybe there's something much deeper. That is what I want to challenge you to find in each of these episodes, including this one. Let's take a look at your two-do list. How many things are on there that you've been putting off for nine months or more? I'm talking about important stuff, like booking doctors appointments and getting your estate plan in order. We can knock them out in about an hour. You can get your estate plan handled today, for example, with help from Trust and Will. Trust and Will offers affordable, attorney-designed estate plans online that you can create in minutes. Everything is state-specific. 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Find and book the right doctor with ZockDock. Head to zockdock.com/remeat to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's z-o-c-d-o-c.com/remeat. I want to go through the rest of your CSP just so we can get a comprehensive look here. So again, we have gross income of 68,000 a month. Net is 41,000 a month. And if we look at your fixed costs, what is that number, Jason? - Forty-one percent. - Forty-one percent, some of the lowest numbers I've seen, I have no comments. If you want to spend money on whatever it is in here, go ahead. Do you rent or you have a mortgage? - We have a mortgage. - You have a mortgage. It's approximately 18% fine. And that's $12,500 a month. Great. I love it. That's awesome. Moving along, investments are ahead. What's that number, Laura? - 54%. - 54%. And of course, I want to scroll up to your 401Ks, which not surprisingly, you are, it appears close to maxing them out. So you're putting a lot of money in there. It's 40,000 a year. Plus $8,000 a month in your taxable account. And then $13,000 a month additionally. That's $22,000 a month you're investing. Plus your 401Ks. What do you think about that? - I think it's great. We're saving a ton of money. I think it's good. - It's great. That's exactly how it should be. Listen up, everybody. I know the vast majority of people are not going to earn $818,000 a year, but you don't need to. Here's the point. When you make a lot of money, bread still costs the price of bread. You're making more like in a super linear way. You're making way more than your fixed costs. Therefore, what should you do? You should be saving more. Investing more. And yes, probably spending more. So already, I like what I'm seeing. You're investing super aggressively. When you're making a huge amount of income, this is the way you want to treat your investments. All right, let's keep moving along 'cause I'm excited. Savings at 2%, that's only $1,000 a month. I already know why, because if we scroll up, your savings are at $117,000. So you notably said, hey, we already have like six, seven months. of savings here, we don't need to put more in savings, right? - Yep, right. - That was the conversation. - Great, perfect. Personally, I would do a little bit more 'cause when I have a super high income, I'm like, let's just check every box, I'll make it 12 months. - We've discussed this, we're gonna get it to 12 months. - Okay, I know you can, it wouldn't take much. And then let's go down to guilt free spending. What is this number? - 3%? - Is that true, you're spending 3% on guilt free spending? - I don't know if that's highly accurate. - What do you guys do for fun? - We go to plays, comedy shows, go out to dinner. - Sounds great. - Concerts. - Camping a lot. - I think maybe you miscounted. We're gonna look at your actual spending in Monarch. But so far, what do you take away from the CSP? - Then we have a lot of money and we save a lot of money and invest a lot of money. - I agree, what else, Jason? - We can spend more money on fun stuff. - If the guilt free spending number is true, then yeah. I mean, 3% is like way under spending. What else do you notice? I mean, are you in a healthy financial position? - Yes. - Good, I agree. I have no comments. This is an incredible CSP, incredible focus. Even though you are indeed spending way beneath what you make way beneath your fixed cost of 41%. Looks like you have a really nice life. Just based on your mortgage, looks like you have a nice place. - That's the mortgage or including our rentals as well. - So how many properties? - It's a single triplex. - So we have a triplex and then we live in a single family home. - Okay, can we look at some of your actual expenses like line by line 'cause you worked with our partners at Monarch, you imported your information. We have access to your accounts and transactions. Did you happen to log in and look at any of it? - Oh, we log in a lot. - Great, no, I love that. And what did you learn as you went through Monarch and looked at the transaction level? - I think what I learned is that we spend around four to $5,000 on like a typical month. Again, this year has been very atypical 'cause we've been spending a lot. - That would be like your guilt free spending number, right? - I think so. - Okay, like eating out plays concert, that kind of thing. - No, that includes groceries and utilities and yeah. - All right, well, let's look. So you planned to make 41,000, but you actually made 48,000 that month. How's that? - One of the rentals is a short-term rental with variable income per month, though. - That's extra income from the rentals. - It's great. I'm starting to already gather clues. I think I see what's going on. Let's continue. Look, you made 7,000 extra in a month. That's fantastic. Let's go down to fixed costs. You planned for it to be 17,000, but it was actually only 11,000. So your debt payments, you paid extra towards your debt. That's basically the extra money you made. And miscellaneous, okay, this actually made me laugh because this is when I knew I was dealing with a couple that is pretty diligent about their money. Our CSP gives you 15% for miscellaneous spending. You actually only spent $7 untract, which is hilarious. That's like the lowest amount. I spend more for a coffee. So let's look at what you spent $7 extra for. Your massage place was $1. What is that? Probably some pre-authorization charge or something. - Yeah, that's something like that. - Then fees, $5. I hate financial fees, but in this case, okay, $5.75 for some ATM fee or something like that, whatever. Other fixed costs, you spent a little bit more on transportation than you thought. What happened? Yeah, we're road tripping this month. Okay, great. Here's the thing. You all can easily afford all this stuff. You have so much flex room that I think it's amazing. Let's look at your guilt-free spending 'cause I think this is quite illustrative here. So you had planned about $1,000. That's what we saw in the CSP. But actually, it was $5,764 that month. So approximately five times more than you had planned. So then the question is, what did you spend on? During this road trip, we did go to the nicest restaurant. It's like one of the most expensive restaurants we've ever been to. Okay, so you spent more on eating out, fine. Let's just actually look now at the overall spending in shopping because I think this also tells us a lot. We can see here that for the last several months, just shopping alone, which is part of your guilt-free spending, was $4,000, $2,000, $2,700, $3,000. So I think obviously you miscounted on your CSP. Let's just put it at $6,000, okay? Watch the number here. That 3%, it's gonna tell us everything we need to know. At $6,000 a month, you're at 14%. Typically, I recommend you spend 20 to 35% on guilt-free spending. You are at 14%. What does that tell you, just in general? Then we have room to spend more. I love my life. Like we do a lot of cool fun together. We're like, if I died tomorrow, I would not regret something that I didn't do. Why retire in your 40s then? Because if we had more time, if we traveled, we would stay somewhere for like a month and get to do all of the things we wanted to do instead of like come home to go to work. Never have the Sunday scariest. I think it's pretty cool that you built the potential to retire. And we will definitely look at some scenarios so that you can decide on what sounds right to you. But where I am right now is even though it's not $1,000 you're spending on guilt-free. It's $6,000 a month, which is a really healthy amount to spend at that number. Because of your high combined income, you're still under even the lowest recommended amount for guilt-free spending. To me, that's pretty cool. It tells me I've room to play with if I'm you. Let's keep looking. So we have shopping, treat yourself. That's a good category. 400 bucks a month on treat yourself great. Wonderful. I have no comments. I think it's great. Let's look at your accounts. So here we have a net worth of 1.8 million as we saw. Cash, you got $132,000 in cash. We sort of talked about that. That's fine. Credit cards, $3,900. I assume you pay that off every month. Yes. Yep. And investments at $542,000. So we have a taxable account. That's because you maxed out all your other stuff. And then you have 401K, equity stuff, et cetera. This all looks fine. No comments. Back down to loans. So you have $972,000 for one mortgage. And then you have $55K for the student loans. And $830 for another loan just called account. What's going on here? That one's awesome mortgage. OK. Real estate, you have two properties for a total of $3 million. Assets, yeah. All right. Who decided to get into real estate out of the two of you? Who do you think? Yeah. But she also threw up when she bought her first car, so-- You did. What? Why? I'm also sorry for putting you in my blast. I love you. No, it's OK. Why'd you throw up buying a car? It was like my first car. It was just like the first time I took out a loan for a lot of money, and it was just scary. This is a curious. Because I know that making a huge purchase can feel uncomfortable, but throwing up and crying, all jokes aside, it's actually like a really interesting clue of what's going on here. And it tells me that even though your income has certainly grown by multiples since then, still some of the same feelings are there. And that's what I want to get to the root of. Laura, take me back in time. What do you remember your family saying about money when you grew up? My family didn't really talk about money when I was growing up, grew up in Suburbia and Southern California. I had the pretty idyllic childhood, and then didn't really think about money until 2008. Like, my parents lost their house. I think the first conversation about money that I ever had with my parents was my dad being like, we can't pay for your college. And I was like, that's fine, still no loans. It is fine. Where were they when they had this conversation with you? And what was the tone of the discussion? Oh, my dad was like distraught. He wasn't like crying or anything, but you could just tell that he was just like kind of a shell of himself. He was just like upset about it, obviously. And I know he was upset about it until he died. Because when I was talking to him, when he had cancer, I was like, I really wanted to milk the last couple months I had with him. And I was asking him, do you have any regrets? I wanted to learn stuff from him, and one of his main regrets he had was he told me, I wish I could have paid for your college. And I was like, that's such a sad thing to be thinking about. It doesn't matter. Why does it not matter? I mean, in the grand scheme of things like paying for somebody's college is not a good deal. It's just like, you're not the only father that wasn't full of the pay for college for their kids after 2008. That's not a failure on your part. Yeah, why do you think it meant so much to him? He wanted to give us everything we wanted and to care for us. And that was something he took a lot of pride in. Yeah. Do you see any connections to your own relationship with money and how your dad felt about money later in life? I mean, the main connection I've always drawn between what my parents went through with money and what I went through with money is it made me realize that things can go south very fast and it's not a failure on your own part. Laura, you said that was an interesting thing for him to almost fixate on because in the grand scheme, college doesn't really make sense. - Couldn't I say the same thing about a car? or a gene jacket, or a van that you both bought. - Yeah, that's an astute observation. - Part of why I wanted to talk to you was to be able to help see money in a different way, to be able to put things in a different perspective because when you grow up in a certain way and when you make money and then make a lot of money and then have a partner who makes a lot of money, you actually have to change the way you think. Otherwise, you will be living the same way you kind of grew up and it's actually a shame, it's playing small. So that's what I'm hoping to be able to do. - That'd be great. I feel like Jason historically has been very good at that. Like when we first started dating, we were not making this kind of money. Like I actually remember a conversation I had with him where I was like, I think like at most, maybe in my career I'll be able to like pull in $80,000 a year and he was like, no, that's not true. Like you should dream bigger. She always just seems to know that things can be bigger and better and it's, I don't know why I don't have it, but it would be great to get into that. - Okay, that's good to know, I appreciate that. Laura, is your mom still alive? - She is, yes. - Okay, how's she doing with money? - She's on social security. When my dad passed away, he didn't leave like a ton. So when we think about like retirement and stuff, like that's part of it, I want to make sure that she's obviously like okay. And like, yeah. - Talk to her about money? - Yes. Not in the same way I'm able to talk to like Jason about money though. She doesn't want me in her business a lot. I don't think that feels great to her. - Okay, great. Jason, what about you if you rewind back to your childhood? What do you remember your family saying about money? Not having it next. So I started out with a single mom, two kids who didn't, she didn't have a lot of money. And then later on, and like she married a military guy and we got as much money as like a good enlisted military person makes with supporting a family of four. So we got a house into suburbs for my teens and it was good. And then college wasn't something that was really ever an option. So did not go to college and then join the military. - Oh, you didn't go to college, you joined the military. Did you join the military because of your stepdad? - Yes. - Got it. Okay, how long were you in the military? - 14 years. - So what's that like until like your early 30s? - Yeah, I got out in 2020 and that's when I went to school. - What kind of degree did you get it? - I got a degree in design with a minor in software engineering. - Nice. All right, wait. What was your income trajectory? Just give it to me year by year, this is crazy. - So I was making probably about 80k when I was in the 80. From getting out to now, pretty much double or triple that every year since, I've done wealth myself as an engineer from way better than the Navy, let me. 80, that's year one, 160, 320, 640. There we go, basically that. - Yeah. - That's insane. - But I do know that that was a very, not normal pass. - Yeah. - And takeaway, I would like to actually give is never put yourself into a career with, that has a roof, that has a ceiling. Like you can only make but so much when you're in something like the military, like it doesn't matter how hard you try. - You will not make more money. I don't believe in limiting yourself like that if you have the ability to not. - This actually very powerful wisdom. That idea that if you believe in yourself, if you believe that you can perform at a high level, then why would you put yourself in a career or a role where there is a natural, unbreakable cap? Amazing. That's really valuable. - I'll say I'm really proud of him. That lesson for Ham was so hard to learn. He was agonizing over the decision of like, should I stay in the military? Should I get out of the military? - And I would have never got out if I didn't have Flora as my breadwinner at that time. So I was able to get out and go to school while she was the breadwinner for the new years. - That's sweet. I love the way that the two of you compliment each other and recognize each other. That's really cool. It's really beautiful. Laura, you just really growing your income beyond what you ever thought possible. Jason, going up, single mom, going to the Navy for 14 years and within four years making this kind of money, again, does not happen by accident. Lot of hard decisions made, a lot of luck, a lot of hard work, and what you just shared is a lot of partnership as well. It's like, wow, a lot of things had to go right in order for that to happen. - Very much so. - Yeah, I'm so happy to hear it. I would like to take my positive feelings about your stories and I'd like to almost pass it along to you in the way that I would like for you to feel really good about money. Really good. You know, I grew up middle class family, my parents, immigrants, and I always felt I would be like financially successful and it happened. And I'm really grateful for it. I would like for the two of you together to be able to say like, damn, look at the journey we went on. Each of us and then together. And like, gosh, for us to be able to buy a van or to be able to retire or to even be able to talk about retiring, what an amazing position that we are in. In order to get there, probably your money needs to become a little simpler. Probably you need to change the way that you think about money and talk about money and ultimately feel about money, but you have the right raw ingredients for sure. What is the vision for your rich life in retirement? I know you told me about being able to travel and stay here in there for a month and kind of do what you want. I appreciate that. What are some of the options that you might be willing to go through in order to retire early? We have a lot of different ideas about what we could potentially do from like, let's sell the house we live in and just live in the van and be on like an extended road trip for like a year or two. Everything from that to let's like move to Spain for a couple of years. The vast majority of scenarios, almost all of them include selling our current prime by residents and downsizing a bit. I think we've come to a green set. We don't need this many bedrooms for a retirement home. Where would you live? San Diego is one option, but it's very expensive. Nevada is another option. Spain is another large option. And then part of what she said before about driving around in the van that would be like the pre-retirement of driving around and trying to decide where to settle down. Got it. What about the rental property? It's a great home and we can live in it in one of the units and still just ran out the other two. And to me personally, I would like to hold it forever as it makes me feel comfortable. That's one of those things that I'm like, with this, I am comfortable. We can lose everything, but if we have this and just a small amount of extent of that, I'm kind of guaranteed then we can survive anything. And that's my safety net. Great. Just a lot of options. Yeah. What does it feel like when you think about the objects? Does it feel great? Does it feel overwhelming? Got one. It's the overwhelming one. Because when you retire, when you pull that trigger, you don't go back. It's not like, I'm like, oh, I'm just going to go back to my old company and just come back in real fast. And not saying it's possible, but it's difficult. And Laura, what about for you? It feels amazing to even be able to talk about something like this. Like, never would have dreamed this. For myself in my 20s. But like I was saying before, I don't want to do that unless I'm 1,000 percent sure that we can. If I can just ask this question, what if this were not an irreversible decision? Like, what if you could lower the stakes of this decision? Because right now, it feels existential. It does. I was just thinking like in a lot of different scenarios that we've talked about when we talk about retirement, I always say, I don't mind getting a part-time job at a bookshop. And then Jason's like, no, the feats inside your purpose. But to me, I'm like, it's like a transition. I can work at a job that doesn't feel super high stakes. And then you transition into living a different life. I like that. That's a great example of lowering the stakes. Lowering the stakes could be, hey, instead of doing this burn all the boats, we are going to do it more gradually. We are going to take a one-year sabbatical or three-month sabbatical. We are going to travel for two years. We're going to give ourselves a very generous amount of money. And then we are going to regroup. And we're going to answer these five questions. Do we still like it? Do we still not? And if we aren't loving it, we're going to go back and get another job. Understanding that we may not make as much as we are currently making, but maybe the possibility is we both go, or one of us goes back to work. Speaking of which, another lowering the stakes approach is one person stops working for a while. I don't know if this applies to you or not. We'll play with some scenarios. But existential is scary. I always ask myself for big questions. How do we lower the stakes? It's just a good framework to interrogate these big life decisions. OK, so you want to know, can you retire in your early 40s? That is the primary reason that we talking today, right? All right. Well, I told you I'm going to give you some crisp answers to it. I am. Laura, in your application, you wrote, quote, it seems like we're living in two different realities. We'd like to know whose version is closer to the truth and come up with a retirement plan based on what is actually possible. Is that we and it was just me? Right. We are living. It's now hearing best. All right. I did want to help you see some different realities, some different scenarios. So we shared your financial details with our partners at FASIT. We gave them your CSP, your cash flow assets, investments, liabilities, and rental information. And I'm going to show you three different scenarios. I'll give you a lot of details here. FASIT found that all three are financially viable. All three. Okay. Laura, I see the look on your face. What does that look? Happy. Before she goes, she's like, one of the things she expected us, we're going to, we're going to meet us on me and it's just going to go, you're crazy. There's not a chance that you could ever retire. That's like, Laura, that's not going to happen. Laura, I noticed that you're tearing up here. Take a second. We're in no rush. Take as long as you need. Ham. I don't mind you crying. I appreciate it. Well, what are you feeling right now? It's like joy and just very like, and like for relief. Relief. Yeah. What's amazing is we haven't even gotten to the scenarios. But it's just, it seems like it seems like just hearing that three scenarios are possible really reached you. It affected you. Yeah. I also feel like a little bit kind of bad because this is stuff that Jason has been telling me like, he's like, I engineered this thing for like retirement scenarios. Like we can do this. This was quite a moment. I haven't even gotten to the three scenarios that facet prepared for this couple. All I have said is facet found each of the scenarios financially viable. And she cries. It's such a beautiful moment. It's also so revealing. This idea that there's been so much tension bottled up, so much that finally somebody comes along we're sitting in different cities and somebody you've just met a couple of hours ago and he says all three scenarios work and you cry. It tells me that just hearing you're going to be okay is such a powerful message. It also tells me, fortunately or unfortunately that sometimes hearing it from your own partner doesn't work. And although it's usually a man who agrees with me, here we have Laura a woman who agrees with me even though her partner has been trying to tell us for years, I don't want to see people bottling up anxiety. I actually don't want to see them bottling up anything. If you want to cry, cry. I love it. If you're angry, be angry. We've got to be able to express the way that we feel and it feels kind of surreal for a guy like me who was not taught to express my feelings to be saying that now. That's part of my journey. That's why I love what I do because I grew up. Go look at my old videos. I had no emotion. This is how I talked. Why won't you put me on TV? I'm so happy right now. I have no emotion. It took a lot of self work to be able to communicate how I was feeling. And so I do love that Laura cried. I love that she expressed herself going forward. I would love to see less bottling up of emotions and more expressing them consistently over time. Y'all follow these people on TikTok. Somebody will post a picture of them behind a blade of grass and a white background. And they go find me. And then this person on TikTok will locate them, geo map, Google map, all this stuff. They go, this is where you live. This is the angle of the sun. This is who you are. I'm watching this stuff like what? This pretty scary. If someone can find you online from just a little bit of information, imagine the damage that a scammer with your actual personal data can do. That is why I pay for and use delete me personally. Delete me is a subscription service that continually searches for and removes your data from the internet. I'm talking about things like your full name, email, phone number, address, even your parents' names gone. They've been the leading expert in personal information removal for the past 15 years. They use their own technology so your data is never outsourced to third parties. And they were named wire cutters number one data removal service for a reason. That's why I personally use this service because I care about my privacy and I think you will love it too. You'll get 20% off all consumer plans when you go to join deleteme.com/ramith and use promo code remith at checkout. That's join deleteme.com/ramith code remith for 20% off. I want to thank our new partners at Monarch for setting up our couples on their platform to see their exact conscious spending plan categories. Monarch is a private personal finance app that brings all of the household's accounts, checking credit cards, loans and investments into one clean dashboard on your phone or computer. One of the biggest reasons I chose to partner with them is that Monarch is built for couples. You can add your partner or even your financial planner at no extra cost so everyone can see the same financial picture with shared goals. This turns your monthly money meeting into calmer check ins where everyone is on the same page. One thing I love about Monarch is it allows you to save up for your rich life goals. If you want to save for a wedding or an amazing vacation and emergency fund, a house, a baby, college, retirement, Monarch makes it really easy. You set your goals up, you tell it how much you want to save towards that goal every month. Monarch lets you see your progress visually along the way. Try Monarch for free today and get 50% off your first year of Monarch's core tier with code remit at monarch.com/remit and when you sign up with my link only, you'll get your Monarch account customized with my exact CSP categories so you can see how you are stacking up to your plan each month. That's monarch.com/remit with code remit. So I appreciate the trust you've given me. I do want to walk you through some of the scenarios and I would like you to know again, all of these scenarios are financially viable. It's actually up to you to choose which one feels right to you. There is no right decision. It is what is right for you. So here are some of the assumptions that they made. You can always change these assumptions on your own, but I'll just give it to you quickly. They assume that income and expenses increase 3% annually. Spending is based on your current CSP, including $3,000 a month for travel. That's great. Student loans 576 a month paid off by 2045. Early retirement healthcare is $1,200 per person per month until 65. Before 59.5 retirement is funded through rental income and taxable investments. Jason's pension begins at 65, Social Security at 67. Investments grow and gradually become more conservative as you age. Plan runs through age 95 and therefore I would like to show you three different scenarios. Scenario one, retire at 45, move into the rental property and travel via van. Let's go through it. You move into one of the units. Laura's mom moves into one of the rental units, which would reduce the income. You would cut your spending by $3,500 per month and your net worth at age 95 would be $3 million. Which means we would have too much money because I plan to add in the 90s. I would like to have $0.0. Yeah. We want to always have a little healthy buffer, but if you're telling me $3 million is too much to end up, okay, I totally respect that. Yeah. The trade off here is you would retire, you would retire earliest and you would support mom, but you would have less spending flexibility. Okay, that's option one. Scenario two, retire at 47, sell your current house, move to Vegas. So in this case, you work two more years, sell your house by a $600,000 Vegas home outright. Keep your rental, including one unit for Laura's mom. You could increase your spending by $3,000 a month, which is a total of about almost $25,000 a month in spending. Your net worth at 95 would be $4.69 million. The trade off here is you'd work two more years, but you'd have a lot more spending flexibility. Are we able to adjust these with like large things? Yeah, of course. These are scenarios given based on the assumptions that facet ran, you know, but you can totally change these and play with them on your own. Let's go to scenario three. So you work until 55 while maintaining your current lifestyle and property setup, including support for Laura's mom. You could increase your spending by $5,000 a month, which translates into about almost $32,000 in monthly spending. Your net that were that nine. would be $9.4 million, and the tradeoff here is you would have the most financial freedom, but you would have 10 more years of work from scenario one. Okay, so Jason shaking his head already. Here's some questions to ask, just like rapid fire. Is retiring at $45 worth cutting $3,500 a month in spending? How much did you say that the monthly spending would be? Good question. In scenario one, you would have about $18,000 of monthly spending. That's spending after that mortgage is paid. Regardless, $18,000 a month is $216,000 a year. I think that's a fine amount to live off of. And honestly, higher than anything that I've been projecting for us. Yeah. I've been putting this up roughly 170 for our projections. That's great. That's a lot. That's more. You currently spend roughly $6,000 a month on guilt free spending. Would you be willing to reduce that number in certain areas for several more years? That's a question to ask. And does it actually feel like your rich life? What do you think? I think yes. I think my rich life is like not really about spending more money. It's just about having more time together and more time to do the things that we actually want to do. And a lot of those things, honestly, don't cost a lot of money, like going to the mountains and climbing doesn't cost money really. Our favorite thing to do is just be together to be honest. And typically that's free. And like she said, I'm his more important us, I think. And I would willingly cut a good amount to just have more time. You know, I really love your answer. And I love it because the two of you are aligned, you have a clear vision of what's important to you. And I think sometimes people think that I am the guy who tells people you need to spend more money. But what I love is you have calculated a trade off. You're like, look, we could accumulate more money. But actually most of the stuff we enjoy is being together and just having time. That's a very clear vision. It's actually so rare. You're starting to come across what is enough. And I can see the way you two talk about it. You don't just need endless amounts more of money. I think so awesome, so revealing, so rare. So this is great. Your vision is coming through. I really love it. Laura, what would it mean for you to be able to provide your mom a place to live? If she needs it, I would like to be able to like give that to her because right now it's kind of like, it's a question mark. I don't know what she'll need. I don't know where she'll want to go. It's an option. You know, you might talk about and say like, hey, we'd love to be able to provide housing. Maybe the rental unit isn't the place we want to put her, but we can get another place. There's so many different ways you could do it. But just to put an end to the question and feel confident and feel good. Yeah. So much of feeling good about money is just taking these open questions and actually being decisive to come up with an answer. Laura, what comes up for you when you hear working until 47 versus 45? I'd rather stop working at 45, I think. Good to know. Oh, that's a hard note for me, dog. So 45 for you, you want earlier? I think 45 is right now at the top end of my limit as well. Wow. Great. Okay. You both are quite aligned. This is interesting. But just to play the other side of the coin, hey, what if you ended up with $9.4 million in your 90s? What would that mean to you? I don't really want that. Yeah, I don't want that to do. You're honest. It's interesting. When you have people who haven't really planned their retirement out at all, you talk about what would it mean to have $3 million in your 90s or whatever? They go like, oh my God, that would be a dream. But when you actually are high earners, when you've been planning retirement, maxing out your 401k and some of these numbers become more of a certainty rather than a dream, then you start to look at it in a different way. You know, for a lot of people correctly, they're like, it would be a failure if I was in my 90s and I had like $15 million. That's a failure of living my rich life because it means I did not spend money effectively along the way. It means I wasn't generous. I wasn't adventurous. It means I worked years extra to have more money that I didn't even need. And what am I going to do by the time I'm 92? What's it for? Right. That's what I'm hearing from the two of you. We are not like going to have anybody to leave that to here. So the time is more valuable than money down the road. And to some extent, even money now, that's really a powerful realization. Yeah. Okay. I can tell from talking to you that working 10 extra years from 45 to 55 is like out of the question. We already know that. That actually is a relief to close a door. Which of these feels right to you just to put a button on it? I'd say 45 and like my remaining questions are just like, how do you do that? Like, I don't know how to turn off that part of my brain that's like, must go to work every day. And I'm also like, I just don't think I don't get like, where's the money coming from to support that? But like, if we stop working, you know, we'll talk about that. Those are great questions. The mindset and the day-to-day logistics. Those are both great questions. It can be challenging to nail all the logistics of retirement, knowing when to take social security, knowing which account to draw from first. Just being able to say, how have other people done this? And how much can we afford to spend on travel every year? For some people, they are going to want to use a flat fee advisor, like facet. Our friends at facet have helped lots of listeners of the Money for Couples podcast. They are the ones responsible for creating today's three scenarios. And if you are looking for a little help with your retirement scenario planning or other complex topics, I would recommend you check out facet. Jason, what about for you? What comes up? Realistically, I think about 42 is the number that I and a land on. So earlier, spending less than projected, but earlier than 45. I don't think we'd have to spend less than projected. I think we can give roughly about the 45 projection at 42. How? Like, we don't have to pay for healthcare. We have free healthcare for the rest of our lives. So that's like a big one that helps out a lot there. Well, early retirement healthcare, $1,200 per person per month until 65. That's a huge amount. Massive. So you're right. If you have healthcare already covered, then that changes the game in your favor of retiring younger. I'm sure you can calculate all of this and tweak it, no doubt. And in fact, I will put you in touch with facet so that you can run any of your scenarios by them. Happy to make that introduction for you. They're great. And you can run everything by them for a second set of eyes. So 42 to 45, we're kind of centralizing around there. That's kind of right around the corner. Absolutely. And big comes with a lot of emotions for sure. Like, as we discussed earlier, I'd like to apprehension of how does one just stop. It's kind of reminiscent of when I got out of the military. Yeah. I know I can still work. I can get another job, but the job I have now is very good. And stepping out of that door and knowing it's not a revolving door is definitely scary. Yeah. A lot of people, especially men find retirement very difficult. It's their source of meaning, is their source of purpose status and they become extremely uncomfortable at seeing their financial number only go down now. That is incredibly scary. And so often you'll see them start to like become really overly frugal. Even though they have all the money they can, this is classic for retirees. They'll only go to a matinee. It's like, why are we talking about $5, $10? We do that now, but just people are old, I think. Okay. Well, we got larger issues to talk about. But okay, I liked it. You are already thinking about what happens when you start to take the money and use it and not just grow it. How do you think you could make your transition in just a few years easier? Like right now, you both have paychecks. Those paychecks are going to vanish. How do you think you're both going to feel when those large paychecks vanish? Not great. Like I literally don't know what to do. Okay, so Jason, what do you think? I said, this is something I've actually already started preparing for. So I have my paychecks from my job, go directly to my savings account and my checking account is only populated by my current pension check. So I kind of have already started to like being like, okay, this is what it looks like to get this and on a much money per month. And I kind of try to stick to just my checking account if possible. Great. Lord, what's your take on that? I guess I do kind of do a similar thing. But like when I get my paycheck, I transfer most of it into savings out of checking and I give myself like a budget for each month. Like I'll keep a thousand dollars in my checking account or whatever. Maybe something like that. I think that's pretty good. I think it's a great start. When the paycheck stops for you, Laura. How do you get a pay for stuff? I guess. So it's just with, I guess with the Jason's Benchip. I think we'll just use the credit card for everything and then I would pay off the credit card. I think that's pretty much everything with transition. You could mechanically that would work, but can you see Laura's discomfort here? Because she's like, I actually don't know. This is where the two of you can actually come together and start to simulate what's going to happen. Doing this, especially now would actually be really beautiful because you have a vision. You know what's coming approximately four or five years from now. You know it. You're going to run your calculations. You're going to talk to facet and you're going to be like, okay, this is the approximate date that we are going to do it. What are the things we need to do to feel really good? I, Laura, I don't even understand how it's going to work in terms of income. Like, let's say we're going to retire on January 1st. January 2nd. How am I paying for groceries or like we're going on a trip? Like, how am I putting some money in there? Oh, I've realized that we don't actually have a joint account that we use. Let's do that now and let's start simulating. So, money comes there instead of your individual accounts. You can transfer it here and there. Great. Okay, this is working a month or two. We both feel good. We ironed out a couple things and if something goes wrong, we still got years. Okay, suddenly, Jason's pension is going into the joint. You can transfer some money in from your savings to simulate what will happen from your investments that you're going to draw. Let's just say 2.5 or 3 percent from. You can do all this stuff and you can simulate it and you can be like, hey, let's talk about it. Here's what happened. Here's a diagram of how everything flows and you already know what's going to happen January 1st, XYZ year. Laura, how would that feel? That would feel bad. I haven't even ever thought about the logistics of withdrawing money when you don't have a paycheck. Most retirees have no idea how this works. Why would they? They spent their whole life accumulating and saving and now they have to de-accumulate. So, I think starting off just simulating it with plenty of time to go is an awesome way to start and to feel really good. And then over time, you can get into some of the more complicated things like tax advantages and which account you draw from and things like that. I've no doubt you'll be well advised. Fass it and others can advise on that kind of question. I think if you did that, it would actually bring you together right now. Jason, what do you think? Yeah, I think that's one of the things I do the most around research on, like getting money out of the 401k, converting a Ross and moving Roth IRAs and all that stuff. Adding more things on to it just starts giving me overwhelmed. Do you want to do it yourself? I do want to do it myself. I don't want to give people money to manage my money most of the time. Fair enough, yeah. Listen, for most people, I think they can manage their own money and they should. I think that some people in certain situations, high net worth, etc, it might make sense to get help. You know, my philosophy, if you're going to pay for help, it's fine. I've hired a financial advisor myself before. I just don't believe in paying AUM, so I believe in flat fee, hourly fee, etc. But I think it's worth thinking about if it starts to feel like overwhelming or like, God, this is a lot of logistics and I sure would like a little bit of help. Just reminder, the same as I reminded Laura when we're talking about her gene jacket, is the two of you make $820,000 a year. You certainly have the money to get some help for anything that's important to you, especially over the next few years. So if you want to, I would encourage you to. Laura, what about other ways of feeling good? What do you think would help you feel confident, competent about your finances? I feel a little bit better after like getting monarch and doing our CSP because I know like the shape of our finances, but I just, I feel like my knowledge is very minimal. It's like, I know how much we have in what investment accounts beyond that. I'm not well versed in. Have you read this? Have it. Okay. That's okay. I'm not here to blame you, you know. I think it's just a very clear answer. I think you're right. I think that if you don't understand how money works, especially with the kind of numbers of zeros we're talking about here, it just starts to feel really overwhelming and onerous. But if you understand the basics of money, then you will become so much more competent, which is going to make your confidence go way up. Yeah. I still feel like I might have a lot of reservations about like, am I making the right decision with this withdrawal or love? I don't know. I think that's probably true. If I were you, this is how I would be looking at it. Based on what Jason and I discuss and talk to facet, we are going to retire in approximately five years. This date, we're both going to know that it feels good. We're going to have the money. We're going to do it. How do I want to feel by time I get there? Confident and competent and in control. Nice. How do you want to feel when it comes to like, should we go to Greece or should we go to whatever? All of those same things. Yeah. You want to just basing it on vibes? Yeah. Yeah. So you want to feel good. You want to feel confident, competent, in control. You want to feel good about these things. I want to know when I say yes, why I'm saying yes, and if I say no, why I'm saying nice. Nice. I love that. And Jason, how about you? How do you want to feel? Everything she said just sounds pretty perfect. Can I second that? That was good. You can second that. How do you want the two of you to interact? Because right now, notice the dynamic that you mentioned, which is Jason kind of comes up with an idea of like spending money. And then Laura goes, I don't know. Let me give you a lower number than that. And then let's haggle over it. And let's do that for the rest of our life. I don't love that dynamic. I don't want it to change completely though. She keeps me in check. Look, when you say she keeps me in check, I know it's funny, but it actually puts her in a bad position. It puts her in the position of having to be the the naysayer, the person who says no, and it actually is not serving Laura. She's actually been in that role for a long time. I think Laura, you would admit, you're not quite sure sometimes why you are like feeling uncomfortable with these things as you put it. It's vibes. But Jason, I think that by joking about it and suddenly putting her in that position, it's actually not serving her or how the two of you want to be. The two of you have a lot of money. You're making a super bold move. You're able to justify it because of the hard work that you've done and good luck. To me, I'm like, why not rewrite our story and actually be super crystal clear about what's important to us? And when one of us proposes something, as long as it fits within our guidelines and our rules, the other should be like, this is awesome. Let's do it. That feels good. My wife came to me and she goes like, hey, let's go on this long trip. I said, how long? She goes, let's go for like three or four months. I was like, I'm in just like that. I'm in. I don't know where. I don't know how. But when my partner gets excited about something, unless it's like unsafe or something I'm diametrically opposed to, I'm in. That's my philosophy. Wouldn't it be nice to be like that knowing that you know your numbers? Yeah, I think the first thing was knowing the numbers. So yeah, there we go. Knowing the numbers, Jason, you've got to really listen to what Laura's saying. Laura's saying, hey, I don't feel that I know enough about money right now, which is fair. Read the book. Do a little book club. Go through it. Do it together. Amazing. You'll be way more competent. I think Laura might also be saying like, I don't want to have to be in the role that is like saying no. I would love for Laura to be like, hey, let's go to Greece. Let's do this. Let's do that. I want to get this jacket. I bought it yesterday. How would that feel to you, Jason? Oh, it's definitely the larger things in that that she keeps you in check for. I would love for Laura to say, hey, that sounds really interesting. Let's sit down and show me the math. Oh, man, this is a good point. This actually kind of what brings us here. I 1000% showed her the math and I showed her the math for months and months and months. And soon later I did win out. We bought the house. It was a fantastic financial move on up on our part. And it was great. But she did not believe that. So then now when I'm like, we can retire. And like, here's all the math. I've literally built models on this. And then she's like, I don't know. And then you're like, hey, you can retire. And she's like, oh, my God, it's true. It's got to be frustrating. You've built all these, I don't know how many hours you freaking smoke coming out of your computer. And then I come along. I say like five words. I'm like, yeah, it's all good. She's like, oh, my God. And the tears start coming. I know that's frustrating. Let me ask Laura. Laura, why didn't you believe Jason when he showed you his models? I know our net worth. I know our fixed costs. I know all the lines on that spreadsheet. But he has a better handle on how our money actually works. Okay. I don't have that knowledge. Now, let me try to make Jason's argument for him. Tell me your reaction. He might say, but I showed you all the math. What's your reaction? Showing the math and like, having a deep understanding of the math are two different things. Well, what is the difference in and what I did and what remedied it. They didn't even show you the math, they just said it. - I think the difference is a while back when we first started talking but I was always just so abstract. And like, what if we could do this? Like if we went to Spain and came home, we could like, God, wouldn't it be so cool? Like we're retired and we could stay as long as we wanted. And like we talk about like, what would we do with our time if we like weren't working eight hours a day? But we weren't talking about like how to do it. You'll see what's going on here. - No. - Most people for their entire lives, this kind of stuff is all just a dream. It's just a fantasy. What if we could go to Spain? What if we could go to Disneyland for a week? And it's just a dream. They don't really know how to talk about it in a way that is a plan. And so you've been doing the same thing, even though your income and net worth has been skyrocketing. So you're in many ways still living like most people live which is just like, oh, wouldn't it be nice? It takes real skill to accept we can do almost anything we want to do. So when we talk about this stuff, we need to both find a way of bringing it up in a way that like, first of all, am I even serious? Do I really want to do this? The other partner has to learn the skill of how to receive that and the two of you have to talk about it as if it's an actual possibility. Because right now I think the way that you have been discussing things for a long time is just like this abstract thing. What would happen if you go through the rest of your life doing it like that? - We'd never really do it. - Yeah, you would do cool stuff. You go, you know, go camping. That's awesome. You two have told me you enjoy it. That's amazing. I think you should. That's fantastic. But what about all this stuff you could do? When my wife and I were talking about money early on, this was during when we were talking about a prenup. My vision was like, I want to be so generous that there can be no question that I'm trying to like, quote, get one over her. I go there, I've prepared all this stuff. I felt so good. And I was shocked at the response. I was taken aback. I was surprised that I felt like I wasn't really being heard and my wife felt the same way she wasn't being heard and we started to get in arguments, disagreements. And this went on for a long time. And I was like, look at the math. This model is so beautiful and what I didn't realize at the time and appreciate was when she finally said, like, we should go see a therapist because this is not good. And we went out of our apartment and we went to this therapist's office and she asked us this question, what does money mean to you? I was like, it means growth. So obvious. And then to her money met, safety. And I looked at her like, what? What does that word even have to do with money? Because it hadn't meant safety to me in like 30 years. I've been earning since I was 14 years old. But it dawned on me as we were talking in that little office that we just saw money completely differently. And that really began that evolution of not just the math part, which is important, but also the softer part of talking and painting a vision together and all of that stuff. A lot of that has happened on today's call even though you may not realize it. Because the two of you are just talking naturally about your own life, which is my favorite thing to do. But think about all the little subtleties that happen today. Joking with the two of you. We're laughing. We're having fun. Asking you about your childhood, validated. Saying, look, we don't have to do it all today. Some of it, we can deal with later. You can talk to facet, you can do this stuff. So much of that is the skills that I would encourage you to build over time. Because you actually don't have something that most Americans have, which is scarcity about money. You can do what you want to do. That's incredibly empowering and a little bit scary because very few other people have that. But I think it's just awesome. I just think it's so cool. So Laura, tell me what you might be able to do in let's say the next 10 days to start having a more positive relationship with money. And the next 10 days, I can learn more about how our money works beyond just how much of it we have. What do you need from Jason? I think it would be cool if I sat down with Jason and actually looked at what he's created. Instead of just having him tell me about it, that might make it more concrete for me. I think that's really cool. I bet you he would love that. I know that I loved it when my wife started asking me about what compound interest calculator do you use? I was like, go to my website. The real interest is awesome. You know, Jason's put a lot of work into this. I think that's awesome for you to get curious about it. I think you're right on the money, that's amazing. What could you do in the next 10 days to have a, let's call it healthier relationship with money. And then what do you need from Laura? Why do we let's call it healthier relationship with money? I'm confused shoes by that framing. Great questions. That's an excellent question actually. Why am I a little bit hesitant? I think Jason, you have a pretty healthy relationship with money actually. The only thing that I've noticed that is a bit of a flag, not even a red flag, but a flag is that you have mentioned a couple of times that you're the optimist, which I love. And also sometimes you like for Laura to maybe keep you in check, which I don't love, right? The area that I mentioned is really about creating a culture where Laura feels confident, competent about money, while Laura takes on the responsibility of also becoming competent and confident with money. You two do that. You're like, you're gonna not only live an awesome life, but feel great doing it. I want to sit down and answer any question she has and I want to be a wealth of knowledge for her, but I don't want to be pushy about it as well. So there's a lot of things I want to do, but I'm struggling on thinking of an actual step. Here's some of the things I might consider doing if I were in your position. I might make a visual diagram of how our money flows, and I might say like, hey, I'm gonna leave this here and let me know if you'd like to talk about it in the next few days. I'd love to walk through it with you. Next up, I might say like, hey, I've been thinking about our conversation with Rameet and I've realized, as we get closer to retirement, I just think it'd be cool to write down some of the things that are really important to us. I made a draft. I'd love to know what you think. And right at the top or in the top three is provide for your mom so she's always taken care of, right? - Man, Lauren loves a pros and cons. - Yeah, I have a whole system. - There you go. So it's recognizing some of the things that you already know that are on her mind and just proactively saying, hey, here's what I'm thinking. What do you think about it? Those kinds of things go a long way. One other thing is I might say, let's go back to that store 'cause that Gene Jacket's been on my mind and I really want you to get it. - I'm chucked laying it because there is a repeat thing with this particular store whenever you're finding something you'll like it and you're like, oh, awesome. I'm gonna think about it for five months. And then five months later, she's like, you know what? I'm gonna buy it and then go there and our buddy Brian's like, it's old. - It's gone. - You've been doing this. - It happens to me a lot. - That's hilarious. And Laura, I think probably a healthy relationship with money at your income level is if you see something you like below X thousand dollars, you get it. And you feel great doing it. - Yeah, it's a good sweater. - Yeah. - It's beautiful. The way that we did that in our household is we created a worry-free number. Anything below this number we don't worry about. As your income and as your network goes up, that number should increase. For some people, it's 100, 500, 10,000 dollars. Whatever the number is, we just simply do not worry about it. We get it and you adjust it every year based on your finances. I feel like it'd be a really good idea to pick that number. I know that $79 fits in there. I know it. Philosophy for the rest of your life should be we're going to enjoy it. We don't get any benefit from playing small. We certainly don't get any benefit from suffering. We're going to have an awesome life and we better feel good about it. And I think based on today, I have total confidence that you can. Laura, what surprised you about our conversation today? - I guess that I don't actually have to do all of this worrying or like pinching pennies about like little things that I want. And instead, you can, what? - Stay yes and like get a thing if I want it, although like I do think that's going to take work for me because even saying that felt like a lie to become such a mess. - You know, in exercise, we do in our Rich Life program. We have a number of people who are starting off in their financial journey and they want to know how to spend money more easily, more meaningfully. So we have this thing called the $100 challenge. Can I give them roughly 48 hours? They have to spend $100. They have to spend on something they love. They cannot spend it on a spouse, a kid, a dog. It's just got to be something for themselves. And when they buy it, they're sitting there and they're buying something they probably normally would not buy. I tell them to really monitor how they feel. They're going up to the register, they're going online and all these things are going through their mind. Oh my God, I could find this cheaper. Oh my God, I could build this myself. Oh my God, am I going to derail my retirement? And I just encourage them to just feel it. Don't shut it down, listen. And after they buy it and they receive it, it's really appreciated and. Connect that to their money and realize that $100 did not change their life trajectory at all Not one bit Something I'd like to ask you to do in the next two days. Can you do it? Then the hundred dollars. Yeah. I'll go see that Jack. It's still there But I feel like it's good great great perfect and if it's gone You got to find something else something that you love okay cool all right I can't wait to see the photo you send. I love to see whatever it is you choose to get that'll be awesome It's very lovely to see the two of you talk to each other and about each other. I really enjoy it My dreams for you are different than other couples who come on here You know a lot of times they may be in serious debt. They may be overspending You're not like that. I knew at the moment that I saw your Miscellaneous expenses in monarch and it was $7 I knew it I said this is a much more advanced couple. I'm a treat them accordingly and What a beautiful thing. We did not have to spend two hours Mired in the weeds about some random expense But instead get to talk about the big picture You want to retire early great you can do it is it 42 or 43? I don't know run the calculations again and talk to facet But it's somewhere in there great most importantly How do you feel good about it? How do you both get on the same page understand money and just start to feel Really good becoming skilled at Spending money meaningfully that to me is so exciting because you already won at the game of earning money You're doing well at the game of managing money the new game is the game of spending money meaningfully I have a lot of confidence with this couple. I like Watching the two of them talk. I love the way they interact with each other There's a lot of love. There's a lot of mutual respect to me that is more predictive than almost anything else They could be making Much less money and I would still feel confident Because of their energy because of the way they talk to each other because of their Understanding of the numbers at this point But also they make $818,000 so a high income solves a lot of financial problems. Don't let anybody tell you that's not true They want to do something really special something remarkable. They want to retire in their 40s. That's something almost nobody does Because of the work that they have done because of their high income. I think they have a very good shot at it What will get in their way? Well, I think that Mathematically they're going to be able to retire. I have no doubt about that. I think that the one thing Could be that they don't actually change the way they talk about money and the way they feel about money And so they continue this trend of you know, he's the optimist and she's the pessimist and they kind of go through life in that pattern I think that would be a tragedy But I think today actually shine the light on that dynamic and I think they have a very good chance of changing that I want for them to feel Good about money. I want for them to feel a sense of ease with money And if they work hard and they practice it they can definitely do it I want to give a huge shout out to this episode sponsor facet if you're thinking about your own retirement and you want specific Scenarios on what your life might look like or you're dealing with a complex portfolio go to facet dot com slash Remete what you saw today helps make these huge decisions more concrete like when could I retire? How much can I spend what would my life actually look like? As of the date of this recording facet is waiving their enrollment fee for new annual members and for my audience Facet is offering $300 into your brokerage account if you invest and maintain $5,000 within your first 90 days Head to facet dot com slash remete to learn more about which membership option is best for you Offer ends December 31st 2026. I'm not a member of facet But I have an incentive to endorse them as I have an ongoing fee based contract for cash compensation based on this endorsement the facet Developed scenarios are for education purposes only are not advice and do not guarantee a similar outcome They are based on industry standard assumptions and inputs provided by Laura and Jason as of the date of this recording Laura and Jason are not members of facet nor were they compensated for their appearance These opinions are my own and not a guarantee of a similar result facet is an SEC registered investment advisor