Episode 19: The Pandemic’s Effect on the FIRE Movement

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Hello and welcome to Revamping Retirement, a podcast brought to you by Cammack Retirement Group, where we tackle the retirement plan related issues plaguing fiduciaries and plan sponsors. Our host, Mike Webb, has more than 25 years of experience in the retirement plan industry and is a nationally recognized subject matter expert. We hope you enjoy Revamping Retirement.

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Thanks, Karen. Mike Webb here with another exciting edition of Revamping Retirement. This is a very, very special edition for me. We are actually, for the very first time, having a repeat guest on the Revamping Retirement podcast. And for those of you who know him, you’ll know why he’s a repeat guest. He is one of the leading voices in what’s called the FIRE community, which is short for Financial Independence Retire Early, which is an incredible community of people.

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who kind of chase their dreams by sacrificing and saving as much as they can in the short term so that it can be financially independent in the long term. This individual has sold not one, but two financial websites. can’t think of, I mean, there’s other people who probably have, but I can’t think of anybody else. And I mean, it’s hard enough to have one successful financial blog and website, but to have two that have been as incredibly successful as this gentleman has had has been amazing. And I’m.

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very pleased and delighted to welcome back to the Revamping Retirement Podcast, Mr. Jay Money. Jay, how you doing? Hey, thanks for having me on. I’m glad I didn’t scare you the first time around. No, in fact, as you know, we take metrics of these things and you are back by popular demand. Hey, cool. Thank you, everyone listening. means a lot’s happened. October, which is the last time you were on, seems like a decade ago. Obviously because of the pandemic, which we’ll get to in a second.

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But first of all, for those of our audience who might have missed the wonderful first podcast, and by the way, I suggest everyone go to our archive if they’re listening to this and listen to the first J Money podcast. It was super. For those of you who might have missed him, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe a little bit about the FIRE movement if you could? Oh yeah, sure. I’m J Money. I started looking and reading at blogs about 2007, 2008, and got hooked by the

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personal stories that people put out there. They share their net worth. They shared, you know, normal people, you know, chats about money and tips drew me in. And so I said, oh, I could start this blog. I didn’t really never started a blog. not a designer coder person started it. It took off and now it’s about 12 years ago. And I’ve been blogging and in the personal finance space ever since doing it full time for a living. And as you mentioned, I’ve built stuff, sold stuff. And for the first time, actually, in the

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decade plus I’m free of a home. don’t own anything, but I’m still in the space. So it’s always fun to come on the podcast and chat about money because I don’t have a home for it at the moment. So the fire stuff, financial independence, retire early is kind of more of a movement lately. It’s been around for a while, but social media and the mainstream media for the first time in a long time started talking a lot about it. And as you said, it’s basically, yeah, trying to

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Figure out your ideal life early on and then kind of work backwards and figure out how to get the finances and your schedule and everything set to accomplish those goals. A lot of people, even myself starting out, we just like money, right? Like we want to be a millionaire. We want millions of dollars. And that’s all great, but like the real point of it is what you do when you have the money. Like that’s what you should be shooting for. Maybe you do need millions of dollars. Maybe you need 500,000. Maybe you need 100,000, right? Everyone’s lifestyle is a little different, but the lifestyle part is really the focus.

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of fire versus like, you know, never work again and be lazy, right? Which is kind of a con that lot of people like to say. Let’s focus on that a little bit because I think it’s the kind of the opposite of being lazy. It’s a very, it’s a very disciplined lifestyle after you’ve accumulated wealth. As you know, I personally tried to adopt certain aspects of fire in my life and does require the ability to be disciplined. I like to say that I’m like really fat fire, which is one of

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That’s awesome. fire is one of the FIRE stages out there or one of the FIRE flavors. I’m like excessively fat fire because you know, I’m very disciplined in certain things, but not in others. And I think the people who are really successful at this are really, really disciplined. And it’s such a different mindset because turning yourself from a spender’s mindset to a saver’s mindset is just something that we’re not like when we grew up as kids conditioned to do. I mean, I know I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t have any money when I was a kid.

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But if I got money, would be like it was on fire. You know, You know, it would leave my hands that quickly. I can’t tell you how many quarters I wasted on video games that I didn’t even have when I was younger. But I think people don’t learn, I think people don’t learn that in school. And that’s part of it. I’m always in awe of every fire person I come across, because I’m like, wow, they get it. And I’ve seen glimpses of it in my life.

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When you’ve seen glimpses of it, you don’t go back. I’ll give you example. The world of automatic savings. You actually turned me on to that. Oh, cool. These websites out there that actually, you know, round up your purchases to save you money or look at your spending patterns and save money based on your spending patterns. Really smart savings. And then I looked at it I’m like, oh, my goodness, I can’t believe I could save this much money so quickly. So once you get hooked, I think it’s very easy to do. But the problem is getting people hooked on it.

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Because it does take that shift in mindset. Do you agree? Disagree? No, no, no, you’re right. And I think going back to the spending or saving, mean, most people enjoy like it’s fun to spend or it’s quote not fun to save. But again, if you’re just saving for the sake of saving, it’s not like it isn’t that exciting. Like we say, oh, save for retirement. Like who wants to save for retirement? Like I don’t even want to do that. But I have money in retirement. But when you think of the point of it, right, like like freedom to do as I please for the rest of my life, that is a lot more exciting.

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than whatever you’re spending usually on a day to day, right? And you mentioned the word sacrifice and that’s mentioned a lot in the fire movement. And I think there is a level of sacrifice as far as you can’t, you can’t do everything like what all your friends are doing. You can’t do every single thing, but I think it’s something to keep in mind is you can definitely do like the fun or the best stuff or the most important stuff for you. And then you quote sacrifice the stuff that’s less exciting. So it’s really not that much of it. And it also depends on how how hardcore you want to get.

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Like if you want to retire in five years, then you are probably going to have to sacrifice. But if we’re talking 10, 15, 20 years, you can live an enjoyable life without giving up that much. It’s not that hard, but you do have to want it really badly in order to be disciplined, like you said. Yeah. And I’m glad you raised that point too. I use the word sacrifice and it probably is the wrong word to use. Because really it’s about taking inventory of what’s really important to you, I think.

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Because, know, I’m just like I said, I’m just learning. I’m a newbie. I’m embarrassed about things I used to spend money on. I mean, cable. I used to spend hundreds of dollars a month on cable. I mean, that’s just one example where that’s been completely and I’m not not watching TV anymore. I’m not sacrificing. Right. You know, but I went to streaming and saved hundreds of hundreds of dollars. I’m embarrassed that I spent hundreds of

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I like it. You should tell your audience everything you’ve done that’s stupid. That makes us feel better. Well, and honestly, that’s what got me hooked in the fire movement in the financial space was it was normal people like you saying, I’m embarrassed of spending this money. I’m like, oh, it makes you feel better. Like now I don’t feel bad, but then it’s more realness. And it’s not like you’re trying to sell us on this product or, know, like it’s just a different, it’s like normal people talking and sharing. And that’s what I love about the community. And really the only reason I’ve been around for so long.

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So yeah, you keep sharing all your bad stuff, your good stuff. You share everything. The more transparent, the better for us. And it’s great that you mentioned the word community because I can tell you all I’ve learned about fire is from people like you. mean, there are fire articles. It was a famous one, you know, in a major news publication last year. It does get that big. But a lot of times I don’t learn from those articles. I’m learning from guys like you. I think every disciplined money habit that I picked up in my personal life.

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is from bloggers, from social media. So I think, you know, people really, if they’re not tuning in to people like you, I think they really are missing out. Even if they don’t want to save 50 % of their income. There’s so many ways that people just absolutely throw away money for no reason. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. And you might think, oh, I’m throwing away 10 bucks a month on here or 50 bucks a month on there. But all that money, and this is what goes back to things like retirement, that 10 bucks a month or that 50 bucks a month is hundreds of thousands of dollars

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when you’re going to use it. Oh, yeah. That money for most people is going into high interest debt because they don’t have an emergency fund instead of going into investment. So it’s like the difference between paying 17 % or 20 % whatever outrageous rate you’re paying on a credit card and earning that much money. To me, it’s just stunning. I think it’s a little harder when you get past like the easy stuff.

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and trying to really hit the home run and say, hey, my goal is I’m 35. My goal is I want to retire by 40. Well, going to be a hard. That becomes a little hard because then you have to go into like the 50%. But for most people, think it’s really it’s really an achievable thing. We’re to talk a little bit about COVID-19 in a second. I think COVID-19 is going to be a catalyst for a lot of people. At least some fire principals because they’re going to be like never again, never again going to be without a job with no emergency savings. You know, it’s just not going to happen.

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Yeah, when I started following blogs, it was around 2007, 2008, and that was when that other crash was going on, the housing crash, right? And so I think I started a blog accidentally at the right time because everyone was searching how to budget, how to save. Even right now, that’s still the case too. People are scrambling now, right? And of course, in the moment now, we can’t say, oh, you should have saved more because we’re in it now, right? But now you know for the future, let’s say for the future event or future whatever.

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But yeah, like from 10 years ago, I mean, even myself, like that was a big eye opener and even for investing, because I accidentally started investing then too. And it was everything was low. Right. And then of course, over the 10 years that went super high. Right. And so like you see, like once you get glimpses of these, these parts are exciting to see a bank account or investment grow. Like that’s really exciting where then you’re mentally like, okay, when you go to buy something like, ah, should I invest this? Should I buy this? Like, what do I want more? Right. Like.

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cash or more cash or this item in my hand. know, and you mentally, once you start going down that path, you really, it affects your whole life. It affects your money, it affects friendships, business, a lot of different stuff, because your mind is working on being productive and kind of having a better future you, if that makes sense. And let’s hit on two of those points you made about the, we can get a little more of the COVID-19 effect now. The first one, like you said, because you know, one of the last great downturns we had is

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For people who can figure this out now, can figure out a way to save when they don’t have a lot of money. And let’s face it, a lot of people have a lot of money right now because of COVID-19. If people can figure out how to do it now, I think it presents a tremendous opportunity for them because if they can figure out how to save in an environment where they don’t have as much money and when they’re actually paying attention to this, they don’t have any money. Imagine what they can do when things get back. Hopefully they’ll get back to normal again.

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Yeah, you know, imagine what people can do when things get back to normal, because if I can save, let’s say I can save even 10 % of my income now when things are bad. Well, when things are good, I should be able to save even more than that. Isn’t that isn’t that right? Yeah, yeah, no, totally. You know, and I think I think the trick is, yeah, everything else goes back to normal, but your spending patterns don’t go back to normal. Right? Like the lifestyle inflation. That’s what that called, right? Like

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And I did too when I get a job or a higher paying job. Every time I got more money, magically I started spending more money when I was perfectly fine without it. But again, if you get your mindset right and you’re committed to it and you start seeing the progress early on, you are more motivated to stick with it and kind of, it’s kind of like a challenge to yourself. And I think going back to the people who chase fire, it’s a challenge. Like, yeah, they could live off a hundred thousand a year.

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but the fact some of them can live off 20,000, 30,000 a year and some with kids, which blows my mind because I have three and I can’t do that. But like they’re so into challenging themselves and pushing the limits. And I think that’s like where the real gains happen, you know, and they’re really good at money, right? And I should point out too, like, and this is, you know, something that comes up a lot because we’re always talking about money all the time. And some people say, oh, you guys are obsessed. Like all you do is want money, right? And there’s a difference between

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You know, like people like to say, like, self worth isn’t net worth. So like we are good at money, but the important thing is we’re sharing not to like brag or sharing to help, obviously, but to also remember just because you’re not good at money doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or you’re not good at a million other things, right? So I think that’s something too, when you’re looking at the scene and you’re seeing people share their numbers while it does help. Remember like, we’re in different stages.

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And B, net worth is not self-worth. just something, especially in these times, like people get down on themselves for lots of things that are not in their control. Sorry to throw that in there, but. No, that’s great. We’re not obsessed about money at all, Mr. Money. literally money in my name. And that’s just my take at the beginning. If you go back to read some articles on BudgetsAreSexy.com in 2008 , 2009, I was hardcore earn earn, want to be a millionaire. That’s so cool. Earn, earn, money, money, money.

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And then if you read my stuff towards the second half of the decade, it was more lifestyle and minimalism and helping and charity. was a different mindset, even though financially I’m way better off than I was back then. But once you figure it out, all of a sudden you have these epiphanies, like, wow, how can I improve my life and my friendships and my career? You take what you learn from the money and you apply it to other areas in life. And it’s a really, really cool thing to see when people start.

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getting excited about the whole picture. Yeah, and you mentioned the word earn and I think we’d be in this podcast, I think we’d be negligent if we didn’t talk about the earning side of the equation too. We’ve talked about the savings, but I think earning is a really cool one. think one of the examples I use is decluttering. To me decluttering can serve two useful purposes. One is you don’t buy as much because you can actually find your stuff. I was so bad at cluttering, Jay, and I think I’ve shared this with you. I was buying stuff I already had.

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That’s crazy. Wow. I mean, we got it. We had an example where my son needed a glue gun and we had one, but I went and bought one anyway because I couldn’t find it. So, you know, that woke me up to, hey, you know, a lot of people and I’m not the only one have way too much stuff. Yeah. And to me, that’s been an epiphany too. And I think, you know, relating it back to retirement because this is the revamping retirement podcast.

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I think retirees miss out a lot and people getting closer to retirement, and I’m throwing this idea out there because I do it, miss out a lot on the decluttering part of this. I think the cluttering is a great way to earn. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. I have found that to be the case over and over and over again. I cannot believe people that will buy stuff that I consider to be absolute garbage.

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Yeah. Like I said, it accomplishes two things, both on the spending side, because again, you don’t spend as much because you can see everything. I made a vow to myself the last time I moved and I had to clean out two acts in a shed that I was not going to ever do that again. Just like people are going to make that vow, I hope in this pandemic that they’re never going to be caught without emergency savings again. Started selling stuff and I’m still going I think I have enough to do until I’m like probably die. That’s life.

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Well, and the third thing you miss too is mentally. Like mentally, it frees up your brain. It frees up maintenance. It frees up. So like I love minimalism. Like I’m, I’m, I call myself a wannabe minimalist, but my wife points out that I’m always trying to get rid of stuff or pare down my minimal stuff already. And I have kids and kids’ toys are everywhere. So I’m the only minimalist in our house and I haven’t figured out that side of the equation. Um, but mentally I feel so free.

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You know, even selling my blogs. Part of the reason I wanted to sell everything was to be completely free and and to be able to do as I please without mental clutter, right? When you own stuff, you know you have to maintain when you own websites. You gotta market. You gotta do accounting. There’s all this responsibility that comes from it, even though we’re just typing our thoughts out, you know on a computer. So the mental thing is really exciting too, and the more you tend to get rid of the more you you know if you can get in the snowball, it does affect other areas of your life. So I agree.

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And even going back to fire, so really I know a lot of people when think of money or especially budgeting, it’s like, I got to give up stuff. I got to not spend as much, which is true, but that’s only a half of the equation. that you could only cut down so much until you are miserable in your life. So once you figure out whatever kind of makes you happy, only you will know what that number is, then if you want to speed it up, the only other option is to earn more.

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right, whether it’s selling your stuff, whether it’s taking on side hustles, whether it’s trying to raise up in your career or switch careers. But the people that are super successful are the ones that are, you know, living on their their lowest, lowest expenses possible that doesn’t affect their major quality of life. And then they’re focusing on income for the rest of the time, you know, and it turbocharges it. So income is definitely important. And there’s I mean, there’s people in fire. I know I spend 100, 200, 300 thousand a year in expenses.

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And you think, oh my gosh, how could you talk about money? You’re crazy. But then they’re making millions of dollars a year. In perspective, and they very consciously choose, I am going to spend this because I am making a butt ton of money and I’m going to enjoy my life. Whereas I’m like, well, if I can get down to $40,000, a year, then I don’t need to earn that much. And I could have a lifestyle right now that’s easier for me, for me to try to earn millions of dollars. That sounds really hard.

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I’m like, I’d much rather cut down my expenses. That’s a lot easier and faster. But it depends on your personality. again, and you mentioned fat fire, right? Like people that are good and fine with spending lots of money, but then you just need a bigger nest egg in order to retire. So really, mean, this movement or this mantra really can work for anyone, but you just got to figure out internally where your sweet spot is and then try and work towards that. And I think I always summarize

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anything fire related as income minus expense equals gravy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that’s where you really need to think about it. And unfortunately, for a lot of people out there, it’s the other way around. It’s expense minus income. They literally have more expense. it’s sad. know. it’s expense minus income equals nothing. I know. It is tough. Yeah. And again, I think if you are in that spot of going

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negative every month or even zero net worth, right? So whatever you save and what if your debts are they even out? So you’re technically quote worth nothing. I think what’s important to realize is a like you’re in a, you know, it doesn’t even matter really your age really, but you’re in a phase where like, okay, I realize that I need to change things, you know, and so you’re on day one of realizing that versus thinking, oh, it’s take me 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years to do this. I’m a failure, but you really haven’t actually actively tried.

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Hard, you know what I’m saying? Like everyone wants money and everyone wants to be retired. Everyone wants this stuff, but there’s but really they talk about it, but they don’t really want it until something like snaps. You know, so as soon as you snap or you have that epiphany count that is day one. So that way you don’t worry about your past and you’re like alright, this is my first week actually caring like let’s do it the right way and that’s like where you should be focused on. You know, I know it’s hard to compare to others and all that, but in the perfect world that that would help you.

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along the journey for sure. think we’ve hit a lot of excellent things here. We’ve talked about my decluttering and your decluttering, kind of your decluttering your life with selling the website. If I had been in your business and I had sold not one, but two websites because they were so successful, I’d be like, well, I’m done. I Right. This should be a big story. know, Jay Buddy retires from public life, but that’s not really right. Talk about what you’re involved with now, what you’re doing now.

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Yeah, so I’m doing a couple of things I’m doing. I’m kind of like, I guess it’s called consulting. Like since I’ve bought blogs over the years and I’ve sold my own stuff, I’m helping people broker blogs. So if anyone has a blog for sale or want to buy one and get started, I help broker that on the side. I consult with some fintech companies. Basically, I get paid to talk and give advice, which is really, really fun, right? And it’s other people’s projects. you’re kind of like me. Yeah, and that’s it. Yeah, yeah.

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I’m working so the company that bought my site, my site BudgetsAreSexy.com is the Motley Fool. Great team, really cool culture. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so they want to start kind of doing more personal finance stuff. So I’m working on a project with them and we keep it keeps changing and morphing a little bit so I don’t. I can’t even say enough of when it’ll be live or what exactly it’ll be, but we are working on something on the side and then really the last couple weeks. I for some reason really been into like.

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financial t-shirts and hats and sweatshirts. I kept coming across it, and so I just made this site called pfswagger.com. It is basically like a curation of all the best merchandise in the financial space. Mostly apparel skewed, I found out that I think I found as much apparel as I can, so now I gotta find other cool stuff to put in there. But anyways, if you like wearing shirts that say invest or I love budgeting, nerdy financial stuff, but with style, I think.

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And that’s a site you can check out. But yeah, to your point, mean, yeah, technically I probably could quote retire and not work and all that. But like there’s like you said, like usually if you’re motivated and especially online, like when you build something, you get this like inner thrill, like even PF Swagger. It literally gets hardly any traffic. It makes zero dollars. But for some reason, I’m driven every day to spend an hour to adding something to it or whatever. Like it’s just exciting for me, you know? And when you reach that level of, you know,

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freedom-ish with finances, you can spend your time poking around stuff, right? Even if it doesn’t make you money, and maybe one day it will make you money, you know? I mean, to me that seems kind of a way to give back to the community, if you will. Oh, sure, yeah. Well, yeah, you’re right, because all of the stuff we feature are from bloggers or creators or small business owners in the personal finance space. So you are right, it does share, yeah, literally all of their stuff. It’s none of mine.

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So yeah, that is that is a fun way. I’m glad you brought that up. Thank you. didn’t think about it that way before. have, but you know, I mean there’s like so many cool things when you build a project. Any project you know, but that’s the thing. Like if once you build some and I should I should point out too. You mentioned a couple of times that I’ve been successful in two sites. Keep in mind I probably built 10.

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and the rest failed. I’m being serious. I’ve probably built 10 and you haven’t heard of them because they didn’t take off. So don’t let it fool you like, oh, you can just build sites and be successful. Like it’s hard, you know. I can’t tell you, Jay, how great it’s been to have you back again. I’m people got a lot of nice tips about the fire movement and how to save and how to increase their income today. I know we can find you on Twitter. That’s where I find you.

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If you go to the letter J, then money.biz, JMoney.biz, that’s like kind of my online portfolio and talks about projects I’m on and all the services I offer and that stuff. And then on Twitter is where I kind of chat mostly during the day, especially now that I don’t have a blog or anything. That’s like where I hang out. And that’s just at Budgets Are Sexy on Twitter. Yeah, if you want to learn more about this, I highly suggest you check out J Money’s work. It is really a revelation. was a revelation to me when I first stumbled upon it a few years ago.

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Kara McCauley and Jay Money and our entire Cammack production team. I’m Mike Webb and this has been another exciting episode of Revamping Retirement.

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The content in this podcast is for institutional investors and plan sponsors. The information is intended to be educational and is not tailored to the investment needs of any specific investor. All examples of investor gains and losses are hypothetical and intended to illustrate the importance of early saving and consistent retirement contributions over time. Investment decisions should be based on an individual’s own goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance. Nothing in this content should be considered as legal or tax advice and listeners are encouraged to consult their own lawyer.

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accountant or other advisor before making any financial decision. Thank you for listening to Revamping Retirement.