The Simple Path Revisited in 2025 With JL Collins | Ep 547
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Hello and welcome to Chooseify. Today on the show, we have an absolute treat. We have the legend JL Collins here on the show, and he's going to talk all things Simple Path to Wealth. And what's really exciting is his book, The Simple Path to Wealth, is

is actually coming out a new version of it, the revised and expanded 2025 edition. From the day we release this, it's coming out tomorrow. So it's coming out May 20th, 2025. And this book has sold and reached over a million people. It's sold a million copies, has reached undoubtedly millions. And it is simply put the most important book in the

Welcome to Choose FI.

JL, my friend, it is always so good to have you here. Thanks for coming back. It's always a pleasure to chat with you, Brad. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, so this is super exciting. You have revised and updated really the single most important book in the FI community, which is The Simple Path to Wealth. You know, I've said this to you before, on any Mount Rushmore of FI,

you are squarely in that pantheon. And your book has changed lives all across the world. I

I know on the new version, it says over a million copies sold, which is just mind-blowingly extraordinary. I think probably one in a million or one in 10 million books sell a million copies. I can't even fathom. I'm just making that up, of course. But that is such an extraordinary thing. And it's a testament to what you've done for our community and what you've done for the world. So just a heartfelt thank you. Well, I appreciate that and all those really kind words. And nobody is more surprised at how...

well the book is sold, especially for a self-published book, as I am. And it's mostly been through the FI community and word of mouth. And a lot of people tell me, and I think you're one of them, that they buy multiple copies to give to family and friends, to their employees if they own businesses. So yeah, I appreciate everybody making the effort to spread the word. Yeah, it is amazing. It's a

And I know I told you a friend of mine has renters and every single renter, she has travel nurses that stay with her. And every single renter that comes through her house, she gives a copy of The Simple Path to Wealth. It's just such a cool thing. These are people who have no real discernible interest in personal finance or FI, but it's just that life-changing of a book. Well, hopefully it's a gateway for them to learn about it, maybe develop an interest. You know, I often think to myself that

It would be a real tragedy to come to the end of your life and broke because you were living paycheck to paycheck and never thought about building a financial future because you didn't realize that your financial freedom was something your money could buy. And I'm keenly aware of the fact that probably most people who come across the simple path to wealth are not going to walk it. It's just counter to our larger culture.

But at least I take satisfaction in knowing that they are now aware that it is an option. They are now aware that this is something they could do with their money. And to me, money can't buy anything more valuable than my freedom. Yeah, freedom is everything. And personally, I'm living that now. I'm living this life where I actually have some autonomy and time freedom.

And it's extraordinary and it's not lost on me. The power of a fi just generally speaking. Right. Right. And B and I've told you this many, many times personally, your book changed my life. Hard stop. End of story. It was probably the stock series predating that, but I'll consider them synonymous in my head. And yeah,

I was someone who was fairly knowledgeable. I am a CPA. I went to a great college, went to a great business school at that undergraduate university. And JL, I had no idea what I was doing when it came to investing. I was that piece of chum that essentially these financial advisors just look to eat up and throw to the wolves or throw to the sharks, I guess. And I mean, I can vividly remember that. I can remember walking into one of the big banks in

as a 23 year old wanting to fund my Roth IRA. And they put me in something that would enrich themselves. That was this heavily fee laden with a front load. I mean, these things thankfully don't exist quite as much as they used to, but they still exist. And because I thought investing was complex and I

And I think when you read the stock series and now, of course, the Simple Path to Wealth, you realize this can be simple. And that's the real beauty of it. It's something that everyone can do. And I'd love to hear you talk about, just generally speaking, what is the Simple Path to Wealth? Why has this resonated with literally millions of people across the globe? Well, I think to a certain extent, you put your finger on it, you know, I

I wrote this starting with a blog back in 2011. This was all information I wanted to get down for my daughter, who was in college at the time because I'd managed to push this stuff too hard when she was young and turn her off to it.

And she is now in her early 30s and, in fact, well on her way to being financially independent. Very close to it, actually. But my wife, Jane, always used to say, you know, she's absorbing more than she lets on. And that turned out to be correct.

And when it first really hit Jessica was when she was in college. And she said, you know, dad, I suddenly started hearing my friends in college stressing about money and having no idea about it. And she said, I grew up thinking everybody heard the things that you were talking about in their homes. And I go to college and I realized nobody does.

So, it's not surprising that even with your formidable education that you didn't. And the biggest kind of answers your question, finally, the biggest compliment I get that I most appreciate comes from people who say, "You know, I've tried to understand this investing stuff.

I've tried reading different books about it and I've just never been able to get it. And I pick up the simple path to wealth and suddenly it makes sense to me. Suddenly I understand it. And that's so gratifying to me because those are the people I'm writing to. You know, people like my daughter who know that getting this right can make a huge difference in their life.

But they're not really inherently interested in it. They have better things to do with their life. They want to go out and teach or build bridges or cure diseases or build businesses or whatever it is. And they read The Simple Path to Wealth and they understand that if you embrace a couple of key principles,

And take a couple of very simple steps and put it on autopilot. You're done. You don't have to think about it ever again. And over time, with your commitment to stay the course, it will make you rich. And every step of the way, it's kind of like going to the gym, right? You're not financially independent immediately, but every day you're a little bit stronger. Yeah.

and a little bit stronger than that. So some of the questions I get occasionally from older people is, well, do I really have time to become financially independent? Well, depends on your savings rate, of course.

If you're saving 50% plus of your income and investing it, you're looking at a 10, 15-year journey. But that's the same 10, 15 years, whether you start at the age of 20 or you start at the age of 50. And I also say to people that if you don't get there 100%,

you're still better off. If you set a goal and say, I want to have a million dollars to retire on, and you only get half a million dollars, it's, well, too bad. You still have half a million dollars. So every step of the way makes you a little bit stronger. Yeah, isn't that extraordinary, right? I think so many people get caught up in FI, and this certainly was the old days of FI, I would say, where it was just zero or one. It was

You're not Fi or you're Fi. And those are the only things that matter. Those are the light switch. Right, right. And I think we know from mutual friends like Brandon, the math scientist, that it's not like you hit some number on a screen and everything is unicorns and rainbows and your life is just all of a sudden perfect. Right. It doesn't work that way. And I think the beautiful part about Fi over the last...

really almost decade since a simple path to wealth came out since choose if I started in early 2017 is there are different flavors of it. Now there are all of these beautiful things like coast. Fi is something that has revolutionized how a lot of people look at fi, but also like you said, even if you don't hit this perfect, Hey, I have 25 times my annual expenses.

Are you worse off if you have only 10 or 15 times your expenses? Because no, of course not. Because most likely you would have been living paycheck to paycheck.

So applying that intentionality is only going to help your life. It's invariable as far as I'm concerned. You know, one of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Leo Burnett, who was an advertising executive in Chicago a long time ago, said decades ago. And this quote is in the original version of the book, and it's in the revised version. In fact, it's the very first quote because it's my favorite.

And it goes, if you reach for a star, you might not get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. And I think that kind of sums it all up. And if you pursue the simple path to wealth towards FI, you will probably get that star.

Agreed. I definitely want to talk about those key principles you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago. But before that, since we're talking about reaching for the stars, I think a lot of people feel that they need to hit an investing home run, that they need to, in the negative sense, reach for the stars. They have to get lucky in a sense. They have to pick the right stock.

Right. What's your response after all these years, the millions of people you've held? Like, how do you respond to that person who says, but JL, don't I need to get lucky? Don't I need to research for thousands of hours? Don't I need to fill in the blank with any question they have?

Well, the answer is no, you don't. You don't need to get lucky. You don't need to research for thousands of hours. You don't need to get that proverbial home run. In fact, I would suggest that even if you do, it's probably not going to turn out well. So what do I mean by that? Cryptocurrency is big in this kind of thinking, right? Because evidently there are people who, for whatever reason, bought into Bitcoin, say, back in the day when it was...

pennies for a coin or a dollar a coin. And of course, if they held until now, they have done extraordinarily well. That's certainly the very definition of a home run. My guess is that people who acquire wealth that way, who get lucky, where lightning strikes, probably don't hang on to it.

because it's really luck. And it's too easy to confuse raw luck with skill and think, oh, I now have the magic touch. I think it's one of the reasons that a lot of lottery winners go broke is suddenly lightning strikes and they have an enormous amount of money, but no wherewithal or experience in dealing with a large amount of money. And money that's not treated well flees to places where it is treated well.

And so I think while it takes a lot longer following the simple path to wealth to become wealthy, you also learn how to be wealthy and you learn what it takes and you are far more likely to hang on to it.

So I think in our culture, unfortunately, we kind of celebrate situations where people come into large amounts of money easily and quickly. And it's not just necessarily buying Bitcoin or hitting the lottery, but, you know, athletes, I mean, pro athletes who suddenly come from humble backgrounds and are being paid huge amounts of money or even, you know, doctors and lawyers and

And business executives who come from humble backgrounds and then suddenly are in careers where they're being paid a lot of money frequently, they're just not prepared to handle that money. And there are lots of sharks in the water that are happy to take chunks of that away from you. So, yeah, I don't think sudden wealth is something to even look for. Yeah.

or desire and i think it's something that if you stumble upon it you need to be extraordinarily careful with yeah and you talk about celebrating the wrong things i think you just said in there the simple path to wealth takes much longer right but it as you also alluded to maybe five minutes ago essentially the math is the math right if you have a 50 savings rate

It's going to take you probably 12 to 14 or 15 years, somewhere like that. With the market, whether it's the winds at your back or not. Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Of course. But I think most people are going to wake up 10 to 15 years from now and have very little to show for it. Yeah.

Whereas if you say, okay, this is a long-term game. However, I define that, that could be 10 to 15 years. That could be 30 to 40 years. But again, you're still going to be so much better off. Obviously you and I are preaching to the choir here with ourselves, but even just looking at a compound interest calculator, I'm always just staggered by these things. So I just put in just for argument's sake, 40 years of contributions of $300 a month, which

which frankly is not very much, right? So that's $3,600 a year. Let's say your family makes $100,000, right? So that's 3.6% savings rate on your gross income. By no measure is that significant, but getting an 8% estimated annual return, that's going to be a million dollars.

1,047,000 after 40 years, which how many people do you know who wake up 40 years after they graduate college and have a million dollars? It's fleetingly rare. And that's what's so staggering about, and this kind of leads us into the key principles, right? Like we hope you don't stop at 3.6% savings rate. We hope you go dramatically up from there. You save a

$1,000 a month. That's 30 years, right? Right. Yeah. That's the cool thing is if you save more, obviously, and you did work that 40-year period, you're going to end up with just an astronomical amount of money. But it also works that if you save more, it expedites and shortens the number of years you have to work, which is kind of a cool thing to look at. But I say that because, A, I just wanted to kind of hit competent interest again, because this is just, it's one of those things our brains are just not set up

for understanding compounding. And when you see that, oh, wow, I can only save $300 a month. And I'm going to have, by the time I'm 60 or 40 years hence, no matter when you start, I'm going to have over a million dollars. Or right, if I saved $1,000 a month, I'm going to have three and a half million dollars. It's crazy, these numbers. But I think that's the perfect lead-in to your three key principles, because this really is the bedrock of the Simple Path to Wealth.

Yeah. So let me respond to what you were just saying, and then we'll get into three principles. Compounding is one of the miracles of the universe. And it's a hockey stick, right? So for a long time, it doesn't look like it's doing anything. And then all of a sudden, it

It just spikes up and you can see it affecting everybody. If you look at Warren Buffett, who is rightly praised for his investing acumen, no question, one of the richest people in the world at this point. But if you look at a chart of his net worth,

it has a fairly slow growth trajectory, and then suddenly it hockey sticks. And it's not that he got to be a better investor because he was always a pretty good investor. It's just that that function of time works in his favor. And now the man's in his 90s. He's had 70 years, seven decades to compound his wealth. It pays off dramatically. There's this old thing about

Let's suppose you have a pond and over the 30 days of leaves falling on it, at the end of the 30 days, it'll be completely covered because it starts small and then every day the amount of leaves double. And the question becomes, so what day is it halfway covered?

You know, is it half covered? If it's going to be covered a day 30, 100 percent. Most people, logically enough, say, well, it'll be day 15. Well, is that true? It's day 29 because day 29, it is half full. And then day 30, it doubles again. And that's how compounding works.

Yeah. And that's, it's funny because no joke, I was quickly Googling Warren Buffett's age now to do almost exactly that same illustration. But your example is much more visceral, right? So on day 29, it's 50% full. On day 28, it's 25% full. On day 27, it's

it's 12.5% full. So it barely looks full on day 27. Exactly. And it's the same with Warren Buffett, right? He's 94 now. Now, let's assume that he just had a 8% annual return. We'll just suspend disbelief now. But that means when he was 76...

which is 18 years ago, he would have had 25% of the worth that he had now. And then nine years later, when he was 85, he would have 50%. And then it doubled again in those last nine years. That's what's so astonishing about compounding. Sure. Another way to think about it is let's suppose you have $10,000 invested and it goes up 10%, right? Well, you now have $11,000, which is great.

Right. But if you have $100,000 and it goes up that same percentage, you've just gained $10,000. If you have a million dollars, you've gained $100,000. If you have $10 million, you know. So the more you have, that percentage gain becomes more and more significant in terms of the number of dollars that are added to your investment, to your portfolio.

So, yeah, it's an amazing thing. Truly. You asked about the basic principles, which I didn't mean to skip over that question. Oh, that was incredibly important, Jaylen. Yeah, circling back. So, I mean, basically it's avoid debt because debt's a ball and chain around your ankle. You're never going to be wealthy if you're dragging that around.

Live on less than you earn because you have to create that surplus so you can invest it. And that's the third principle, invest it. And of course, in my world, you invested in broad-based, low-cost index funds. BTSAX, which is Vanguard's total stock market index fund, is the one I personally use. There are very similar funds from other providers that work equally well. But that's it in a nutshell. And if you just do that,

you will wind up rich and you'll wind up having a much richer and freer life. Yeah, it really is that simple. So right. Spend less than you earn. Invest a surplus. Avoid debt. Yeah. Life doesn't have to be complex. In fact, I've found that I crave simplicity. I move towards simplicity in every aspect of my life. And that seems to be much more the universal truth than life.

complexity giving you any value. I've really yet to find some area of my life where complexity has added value. So I love by its very nature, simplicity. And again, this simple path. And I think it's critically important.

Let's talk about, so invest the surplus. Again, people think investing is difficult, but you just said broad-based index funds. Of course, you have made VTSAX very, very famous in our community. And it's funny because this is one thing where obviously I love VTSAX, let's be clear. But I think a lot of people make

slightly suboptimal decisions because they hear VTSAX over and over again, where they'll actually try to buy that mutual fund at a different brokerage house and they get hit with fees. So it's one of those things.

VTSAX is marvelous. If you're so inclined, go to Vanguard.com, open up a brokerage account, buy VTSAX. But I think my advice now, and it's just, JL, you know this is like a 1% difference, is VTI is like my general advice to people because it's kind of mistake-proof, perfectly.

Because it's the ETF, the exchange traded fund analog of VTSAX, and people won't get hit with fees there. So that's the only distinction that I would give. But that's more just because, you know, I'm talking weekly to a whole lot of people. And I know I've seen people make mistakes with VTSAX. But for all intents and purposes, they are the exact same thing.

fund or ETF. Yeah, exactly. Whenever you buy anything, you have to be keenly aware of fees and commissions and what have you. And if you buy VTSAX or any fund from Vanguard fund from Vanguard, you won't have those.

You might not have them other places, but you might. And so you just have to be careful. But your point's well taken. And if I were to start over, I would probably choose VTI myself. It's the expense ratio is slightly lower. The portfolio is essentially the same. It's a total stock market index.

So it's based on the same index. So yeah, it's the same thing. And as you alluded to, if you're at Fidelity or some other brokerage other than Vanguard, they all have total stock market index funds. And they're all low cost because Vanguard has dragged them kicking and screaming, frankly, into the competitive situation. But those are there. And if you prefer to deal with those companies, then you should probably buy their version of the fund.

The other thing I'll touch on real quickly, because it's a very common question, is people will say, "Well, what about an S&P 500 fund? Is that okay? That's what's in my 401 . They don't have a total stock market index fund. What do I do?" Well, yes, it's great. I mean, that was the fund that Jack Bogle himself owned until his dying day. And

And the S&P 500 makes up about, I want to say, 80% of BTSAX because it's cap weighted. And those are the largest companies. And if you track the performance of the S&P 500 and the total stock market, they track very, very closely. So, yeah, there are lots of variations on the theme. But you want broad-based, and S&P 500 is broad-based.

You want low cost, which defines an index fund, and you're done. Yeah. Isn't it amazing that it really can be as simple as that? And then when you own these things, you know, VTSAX, and this would be true of all broad-based total stock market index funds, and this will change, but it owns about 3,600 companies.

And as I like to say, when I own VTSAX, I own a piece of every publicly traded, virtually every publicly traded company in the United States. And everybody in those companies from the factory floor to the CEO is working to make me richer.

That lets me sleep very well at night. Yeah, that's not too shabby. Yeah, that's the cool thing. I think a lot of people, unfortunately, still look at investing in the stock market. And this is not in our community, but in many communities, they look at it as akin to gambling, which is just they're just trading pieces of paper or the electronic version of little pieces of paper. And it's just going up and down. And that's all that matters. And you and I know

that's not what we're doing here. That's not the game we're playing. The game we're playing is we are trying to accumulate wealth over decades, over the only time period that matters, which is long-term, right? And we are the owners, albeit a tiny little piece of, like you said, 3,600 companies or essentially every single publicly traded company in America. And we're

Having the ingenuity and hard work of 100 plus million Americans working for you around the clock, that's not too shabby. No. And the other thing is that when people think that the stock market is like gambling and trading those little pieces of papers, they're not wrong. That is part of the stock market. And that is, in fact, the stock market that you see on business television programs and in the news. But those people are traders.

You know, traders are people who try to make money on very short-term commitments to things. And then it really is just pieces of paper that are going back and forth.

I'm not a trader. You're not a trader. I'm an investor. An investor means that I'm accumulating shares through thick and thin, good times and bad times for the long term because I know those shares will go up steadily over time because the stock market, while it's very volatile, always rises. And the analogy I use is a mug of beer, right?

So if you're an investor, what you care about is the beer, the beer being the actual operating companies that produce products and services and hopefully makes a profit in doing that. And to the extent that they make a profit and grow the company is the extent that we as owners benefit.

The foam on top of the beer, that's all that trading that's going on day to day. And that's what makes day to day stock prices volatile. You know, if you if you look at especially take a company like Tesla, which has really been volatile in recent weeks, Tesla can be up or down 10, 15 percent in a day.

That's the foam. There is an underlying business of Tesla that makes electric cars and robotics and self-driving and all these other things. But there is a lot of speculative foam that drives the traders.

And then you really are essentially in a casino if that's the game you're playing. So when you hear people say, oh, the stock market is just gambling. Well, one part of the stock market is absolutely just gambling. And that's the phone. And that's what most people see on TV because...

It's boring for somebody to get on TV and say, you know, what you want to do is invest consistently over the long term. But if somebody is up there and saying the market's going to go down tomorrow and dramatically or this stock's going to skyrocket and, you know, sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, buy. Well, that's not good investing. That's probably not even good trading, but it's probably good television. Yeah.

That is very, very true. And yeah, Tesla is an interesting example, right? Because I think a lot of us look at a company like Tesla as akin to a meme stock to a large degree, albeit there is an underlying business. And unfortunately, because it's such a large market cap,

It does take up a significant amount. All of the VTI or VTSAX we buy has a couple percent of Tesla, which is tough. But as you always said, these markets, these funds are self-cleansing. I think that's something that has always stuck with me. I'd love if you could talk about, and not in relation to Tesla, certainly, but

the market being self-cleansing, these funds being self-cleansing. Can you talk through that? Because I think a lot of people get worried about, oh, what if this company does terribly or goes out of business? What happens? And I think it's kind of comparing and contrasting individual stock.

which can go out of business versus a fund that has 3,600 companies in it. Yeah. Self-cleansing is a term I coined, so I'm pretty proud of it. And we can use Tesla as a proxy for that. So I have no idea what Tesla is going to do in the future. I don't know if it'll continue to prosper or if it'll go the way of other companies that have fallen to the wayside.

And you're right that it is in the index. And because it's in the index, I don't have to really care. Because if Tesla continues to do well, and Tesla, to be clear, has done very, very well over the years, if it continues to do well, then I'll benefit from that because the index fund owns it and holds it. If it falters, it'll become steadily a less and less large percentage of the index that

And if it were to go out of business or even, it didn't even have to go out of business, if it just falters down to the point where it's no longer on the index, then it just disappears and it will be replaced by whatever new aggressive company is on the way up. That applies, by the way, to entire sectors. So,

So right now, technology kind of rules the S&P 500 and the Magnificent Seven most people have heard about. And some people say, well, that's the problem with these index funds is essentially they're technology funds.

funds. Well, that's true at the moment. I mean, that's a valid point, but it was not always true. There are times, and one of the few advantages of being an old guy is I remember a lot of different market cycles in the 50 years I've been investing. There were times when financials dominated the index. There were times when energy dominated the index. There were times when consumer staples

So that rotates as well. And again, I don't have to wonder how long technology is going to dominate because as long as it does, I'll benefit. And if it starts to fade and something else starts to replace it, I will benefit from that too. If I own Tesla, the stock,

Now I have to worry about whether the company is going to prosper or falter. And I have to be thinking about at what point do I want to sell? You know, if it goes up, at what point has it gone up enough that I should take my profits? If it goes down, at what point should I sell and get out and cut my losses?

Because the index fund continually cleanses itself, I never have to think about when to sell. My holding period for VTSAX is forever and actually beyond my death because it will go then on to my heirs who will be instructed to hold it forever because you never have to change it because of this self-cleansing property of it. You never have to worry about those kinds of things. Yeah.

So many amazing quotes here, JL. I'm not a trader. I'm an investor. My holding period for VTSAX is forever. And these are so important for people to really internalize because this is not short-termism. It's the exact opposite. And I think that's the next thing that I wanted to talk to you about was you told me one time, quote, the simple path to wealth is something you implement for decades. And just the way you phrased that just really, really hit me. And I

I know we're recording this at the end of April, 2025. There's been a whole lot of craziness going on in the world the last couple months and people are fearful. People are scared. They're uncertain. Maybe the biggest thing. And, and,

In periods of uncertainty, people usually look for safety. They sometimes do crazy things like sell everything and just sit on the sidelines. I'm curious your response to people who say like, oh, this time it's different or does this simple path to wealth still work in 2025 or in filling whatever age, right? I'm not picking on this one. It's just this is the most recent one. Right.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that question. Does a simple path to wealth still work? Because as you mentioned, this is the path you're going to implement over decades. So if current events were going to derail it, then it wouldn't be a very good path, right?

And whenever current events begin to roil the stock market as they are at the moment, people begin to think this time is truly different. And the best example of that in recent history, of course, was COVID.

And I remember when COVID hit and the market, although very briefly, amazingly briefly, which of course nobody predicted, including me, but it dropped about 33%. And my inbox and my social media was flooded with people telling me, you know, JL, this

This time is different. This time you have to acknowledge that the simple path isn't going to work because this time it's a pandemic. This time the entire economy of countries is being shut down. This time people are dying.

And my response to that was, yes, this is a tragic situation and it's a scary time. But anytime the market crashes, the trigger is scary and feels like it's the end of the world. That's why the market crashes. So I don't know what the market's going to do in the current times. I personally think that tariffs are a terrible and dangerous idea.

But that's a moving target as to whether or not they're going to unfold at all. And if so, how the market is, we're recording this is down, I don't know, 8%, 10%, something like that, which is pretty minor, all things considered. But if in fact it gets considerably worse and drifts into a crash, well, this will be the trigger.

But it too, just like COVID, won't last forever. It will pass. Now, to be clear, there have been times in history, and there can be, there probably will be again,

when the market goes down and it can have a bad decade. The last time was between 2000 and 2010. You know, 2000 was the tech crash when the market lost 48%. And then in 08, 09, you know, we had a financial debacle and it dropped, I think, 56%. So for that decade, the

The market, on average, returned, I think, a negative 0.63%. I mean, not even a negative 1%.

But that's as opposed to the past 50 years where on average it's returned slightly over 12%, which is a pretty stunning number. Anyway, for that decade, it was down. But if you're following the simple path to wealth, you are adding to your holdings and you have a decade in that case where you're buying shares at a bargain price. It was a golden opportunity if you stayed the path because you

When that decade finally ended, well, the last 15 years have been extraordinary in the market, the present turmoil notwithstanding.

So that's what makes it a long-term prospect. So, you know, I've been through stagflation in the 70s, early 80s, the 1987 Black Monday, which was the biggest single-day drop in the market in history, worse than anything in the Depression. The tech crash in 2000, you know, 08, 09, COVID.

And all of these things are scary. And I had to learn the hard way to stay the course myself. But they always pass and the market always goes up. And if anything, if you keep buying on a regular basis with your earned income, you're

They provide awesome opportunities. I say, if you're accumulating wealth, a stock market crash is a gift, assuming that you don't panic and sell. If you panic and sell, then you'll be left bleeding at the side of the road. But if you stay the course and keep investing as you were before, it's a gift. It's an absolute gift.

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we're talking about adding to these investments. So let's say every single month somebody has, of course, with the principle, spend less than you earn. So therefore, there's a savings rate. Therefore, there's money left over, let's say, after every paycheck or every month. What does one do mechanically with that money then? Well, again, this is the simple path to wealth. So the answer is going to be very simple.

In the case of what I've done and what I've advised my daughter to do is you buy VTSAX. You buy as much as you can whenever you can and you hold it forever. And by the way, VTSAX for our listeners is a proxy for a broad-based low-cost index fund that is either total stock market or S&P 500, right? So I use VTSAX just as a proxy and that's because what I and my daughter both personally do

But as you alluded to, you're going to have an aggressive saving. If you're really serious about reaching financial independence, you're going to have an aggressive savings rate because you are going to understand that there is nothing more valuable that your money can buy for you than your freedom. And the way you buy your freedom is by owning assets. So you're going to set it up that a significant portion of your monthly or weekly or whatever the time period you get paid on

automatically goes into VTSAX. In my world, when you're building your wealth, that's the only investment you need. I get a lot of pushback on that. People say, well, you know, you're not diversified.

And I say, well, I own 3,600 companies. I think I'm pretty diversified. Now, it's fair to say I'm totally in equities, totally in stocks. And there's an argument to be made that that's not diversified. And that's true. But stocks are the most powerful wealth building engine of all. Now, they're also volatile. But because of what we're doing, which is investing a portion of our income every month, let's say, that volatility works in our favor.

Because when the market drops, we are picking up shares for that same dollar amount. We're picking up more shares. So I don't care about the volatility. Now, when you come to live on the portfolio, you might want to think about adding a total bond market index fund.

Yeah. And I think for those people who asked you that question, maybe with an incredulous nature of how can you just buy U.S. companies, I think clearly there is a home country bias when it comes to investing generally. Now, this is worldwide.

And you hear people... I know Alan and Katie Donegan have talked about this with people in the UK, and they have a disproportionate amount of money, again, with that home bias, in a total UK index. You see it the world round. Now, this is not to say...

America, rah, rah. I'm not talking like randomly like, hey, let's be pro-America. America's wonderful. Obviously, let's be clear. But just the simple fact is American companies, many of them, and their largest companies are these multinational corporations that have people

pieces of business in countries all around the world. So to imagine that this is just on the shores of America is just simply a misunderstanding of how many of these companies work. So I think I sleep well at night. And of course, JL, this is not advice to anyone listening. It's just how I think about it, because I think what your book has done for me is help me sleep well at night.

And I know that it's done that for so many people. Why I'm personally fine with just owning VTI or VTSAX or whatever equivalent of that is because I know I'm exceedingly diversified. It's not just on the shores of America. It's, hey, I own 3,600 companies.

of which many of them have operations all across the globe. So I think the home country bias is mitigated significantly when you do happen to live in America. So that's kind of my two cents. But nevertheless, it is something people are concerned about. And they do, I'm sure, ask you, hey, should I have international funds? Hey, like you said, should I have bond funds? How should I think about this? But I guess

Your advice to your daughter, Jessica, who's the person that you do give advice to, is in the accumulation phase, as you just said. All equities is perfectly fine, and it's advised in your case. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with what you said.

And home country bias is a real problem if you're in any country other than the United States. And that's not, I'm not being a jingoist here saying, as you put it, rah, rah, rah, United States, although we're very fortunate to live in this country, I think. Certainly, certainly. But simply because the United States is so dominant in the world economically.

You know, the United States accounts for something like 60% of all equities in the world. There is no other country for which that is true. So if you live in any other country, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, China, any other country,

It is a huge mistake to invest only in that country or largely in that country, not because you shouldn't have pride in your country and not because they're not good places, but simply because their markets are not large enough and dominant enough to give you the kind of broad-based coverage that you're looking for. The United States is the only country in market where we can get away with that, so to speak.

And you said it very well when you point out that the largest companies in the United States, which make up the bulk of a total stock market index fund, are inherently international company. And they get a lot of their sales and revenue internationally. I'm a believer that the

world is going to continue, all the world, including the United States, is going to continue to grow and prosper as it has since World War II. And probably as that process continues,

the portion that the United States has will begin to drop. It has actually dropped since World War II. I mean, after World War II, we were the only country not in ashes. And so the world economy was pretty much entirely the United States. And we set about rebuilding the rest of the world, our allies and enemies alike. And that paid huge dividends for them, of course, but it also paid huge dividends for us.

And as that process of the rest of the world becoming more and more prosperous continues, I can foresee a time when maybe the U.S. won't be dominant enough where you should be comfortable investing only there, just like you shouldn't be comfortable investing only in England, even though 100 years ago, England, you know, the sun never set on the English empire. So things change. Things go in cycles.

But right now, and for this foreseeable future, I think you can very comfortably and very profitably own just the United States. Now, to be clear about something else, this year, interestingly enough, for the first time in a long, long time,

Asian and European markets are outperforming the U.S. market pretty significantly. I think last time I looked, Europe is up 15% or something on the year, and we're down 6% to 10%. So that's a huge, huge difference. I don't know if that's going to last. It could. And there have been times in the past when...

Europe has outperformed for extended periods or Asia. So that's not unusual. So I'm not suggesting the United States will always be the best performing market over time. So to be clear about that, even though for the last, I want to say 15, maybe even 20 years, it has absolutely crushed the rest of the world in terms of how well it's done. I mean, it's kind of amazing. The economy of the United States until recent months where we've hit a really rough patch has been just extraordinary.

Yeah, it certainly has. And yeah, I mean, that certainly makes sense. And I guess I'm sure people ask you this. Is there anything now? Again, the simple path to wealth is a path for decades. Right. But is there anything that would cause you to rethink a total U.S. stock market fund?

Let's say. And now, of course, you're not chasing performance as you just spent the last few minutes waxing poetic. So I heard loud and clear. But is there anything or is there anything you could foresee in the next decade, two decades plus that would cause you to change that investing allocation?

Sure. So as I already alluded to, I think the entire world's getting steadily more prosperous. And I would anticipate that the percentage dominance the United States enjoys today will diminish with time. And that's something that I don't see.

see happening in my lifetime. And, you know, I'm in my seventies. So to give you people a timeframe, but something I talked to my daughter about that she ought to pay attention to, because at some point you might be better off owning a world fund. And in fact, you know, when I have these conversations and people say, well, yeah, I understand what you're saying, JL, and it makes sense, but boy, I would just feel more comfortable being invested everywhere.

then you'll get no pushback from me. If you think a world fund is what you need to be doing now, I think you're probably ahead of the curve, but probably where the world is going. I think if you are living anywhere else in the world other than the US, you probably ought to be in a world fund. I'm not sure that I would be investing exclusively in the United States if I were a citizen of another country because

because the World Fund can work very well. And also, I don't know, I probably feel uncomfortable if I were a German or an Englishman or a Japanese investing entirely in a different country. But yeah, you'll get no huge pushback from me on that score. In terms of things that could change that more abruptly, things that concern me a little bit, I'm very, very concerned about our national debt, which is growing at a stunning pace and unchecked.

The interest on that debt is already, I think, the third biggest budget item, and it's rapidly going to be the largest budget item. So I think that's a big concern that doesn't seem to be being addressed, although I think Doge is trying to address it, but it's a real uphill battle. I worry a little bit about, depending on how these tariffs unfold,

that that could unseat the dollar's position as the world's currency. And that is a very, very powerful asset that the United States has. And I think if we were to lose that, that would be a game changer. I don't see us losing that because I don't see any viable alternative out there. You know, China doesn't have the depth of trust of the rest of the world, even though they're a growing economy.

The euro has some potential, I suppose. But again, they don't have the dynamic capitalist engine that we have in the United States. That's another thing. If we were to lose that dynamic capitalist engine, that would concern me. So it concerns me. The whole anti-immigrant drumbeat concerns me a bit. To be clear, I'm a proponent of capitalism.

borders and controlled borders. But at the same time, I think one of our great strengths is immigration and coming here legally is just an enormously difficult process. So I think we should want to encourage that. If you look at a lot of the companies, the very successful companies in the United States, a lot of them are founded by immigrants.

and run by immigrants. And so we want that talent. The idea that we have people from all over the world coming to our universities, graduating with advanced degrees, and then we kick them out is insane to me. I mean, it makes no sense. Somebody once said, you know, if you get an advanced degree in the United States, it ought to come with your green card stapled to it. You know, so I think if we shut that flow of talent down, we're very, very fortunate.

That this is a place where everybody in the world wants to come to realize their dreams. That's an extraordinary asset that we have, and we should be encouraging that. So, yeah, I mean, if that were to be shut down, if we were to lose our capitalist edge, capitalism in this case, by the way, is unprofitable.

It's kind of become a loaded word. It shouldn't be, but capitalism simply means that individuals have the right to own property. They have a right to own a house and a car and shares in a business or to start a business and own it and benefit from the ownership of those things.

If we ever lose that, then, you know, the game's over. So those are the kinds of things that concern me. But again, I don't see those things. I think there are things that we need to pay attention to. I don't see those things derailing our position in the world anytime soon. Yeah.

No, that's totally fair. And I hear you about capitalism. And I would add to that the rule of law, which is kind of inherent in your definition of capitalism. You're not saying these things are happening imminently. You're saying these are, hey, what I would tell my daughter, Jessica, to look out for over the next couple of decades. And it's just...

As always, I think intelligent people need to look at the world as it is and not get freaked out about things that most likely will never come to pass, but also realize that things do change sometimes and we need to be aware of that. So it's real simple, right? You just keep aware, keep your head, don't get freaked out over nothing and move on.

move forward intelligently. And then the only, I mean, if you listen to me talk about these potentials and you say, well, you know, JL, you're sanguine about it, but I think these are real, real dangers that are, we're on the verge of going over those cliffs. Well, I disagree with that, but if that's the way you feel, then go to a world fund. I mean, because the solution, if we, if we do run afoul of some of these things, it's going to be a world fund because the

just like VTSAX is self-cleansing when it comes to industries and companies, well, World Fund is self-cleansing when it comes to the economies of countries, right? So if you really think the U.S. is at a tipping point in a negative way, then, you know, you probably want to embrace that. And if it turns out you're right and the U.S. begins to become a smaller and smaller, rapidly become a smaller and smaller part of the world economy, well,

Well, you'll be out of the card if you're wrong. Well, world funds today still are 60 percent U.S., so you'll still do just fine. Yeah, I mean, that seems to be a good middle ground solution for people who are worried. I like that. Again, we don't give advice to individual people here, but that is something to really, really strongly consider. And then on the same topic, you know, there are people and I have some friends of all this category who think that civilization is going to end.

And if you think there is a civilization ending event in our future, then it's not going to matter where you're invested. Right. Right. I die again. I don't think that's going to happen. But let's suppose there's a one percent chance that it will. Well, my world is I'm going to invest based on the ninety nine percent chance of what's going to unfold.

Not against the 1%, but if you disagree with that, then you shouldn't be buying stocks or mutual funds. You probably ought to be building a bunker and stocking it with shotguns and canned goods. I was going to say guns and ammo, MREs, and medical supplies. Again, this is the zombie apocalypse argument. If you actually believe that, then yeah, buying one stock over another or a different fund over a different... You're not being serious, right?

Yeah. So if it turns out, you know, it would take something of that magnitude to derail the simple path to wealth completely. And at that point, nothing else is working either, you know, other than guns and ammo and meals ready to eat. Oh, man. Well, that is...

Definitely a funny way to end our conversation about the book. But I want to talk about the revised version. So you and I are recording this at the end of April, but the book is coming out May the 20th, 2025. So this is the revised and expanded, updated version of The Simple Path to Wealth. Let's just talk about that for a couple of minutes. Tell me, somebody who has the original version, why would they want this? What's changed? What's new and exciting about it? Just tell the audience.

Well, let's start out with why you don't need the new version, right? So if you've read the original version and you've embraced the simple path to wealth and you're walking it, there is nothing in the core philosophy or approach that is different from this book to the former book. So the simple path to wealth remains the simple path to wealth.

What's changed is all the data points inside the book have been updated. You know, when I talk about IRA regulations and 401k contribution limits, all that stuff's updated. All the what-if analysis that runs through the book is updated to now cover a 50-year period. You know, when I wrote the original, I...

picked a start point of 1975 because that was the year that I first started investing. And that also coincidentally was the year that Jack Bogle brought out the first S&P 500 index fund. So that was kind of a nice benchmark.

And that gave me, when I was writing The Simple Path to Wealth, which took me three years, but the last year of writing and refining it was 2015. And there was a nice, clean 40-year period of time to look at. And now I've got a 50-year time period to look at. And then the books expanded a little bit. There's more material in it. There's a section called Toolkit.

One of the coolest things in Toolkit is an FAQ, because over the last 10 years since the book has come out, I've gotten lots of questions that were not addressed in the original version and in some cases are still not addressed in the updated version because I just didn't see a role for them other than in the FAQ. So some of the questions in the FAQ, when I answer them, I'm also referring people back to the section of the book that addresses it.

but some of them like cryptocurrency, which is a question that I've gotten a lot, as you might imagine in the last few years, my take on that's answered in the FAQ, but not in the revised copy of the book. One,

One of the cool things, and I'm kind of, you know, you're testing my memory with this book, but there was one case study in the original and now there's two. And the second one is probably my all-time favorite case study from an actual friend of mine, a guy by the name of Tom, who was a business client of mine back in the 1990s. But everything in Tom's life, financial, went wrong. He went through multiple expensive divorces.

He went bankrupt. He lost his house at the age of 62.

He was an advertising executive, and that's an industry that favors youth. And so he found himself unemployed, bankrupt, homeless, with no ability to get a job in his industry. He had a small pension from one of the companies he'd worked for, and he took Social Security at 62, which is not an optimal financial decision. But if you need the money, it's the only decision.

And then he went out and he got a job that he absolutely loves working outside. And Tom is in many ways one of the least financially successful people I know and probably the single happiest. And I love that story because one of the things that is striking to me in our community, in our community is money.

Much more financially savvy than the broader population, I think, or rapidly becoming that way because they're part of our community. They are probably the segment of the general population that has the least to worry about financially, who has the highest odds of it turning out splendidly.

And yet I hear so much worry about, do I have enough? Will I have enough? You know, will it last? And so the thing I love about Tom's story is that, you know, even when the worst happens, money isn't everything. I love that. So that's new in the book. And I, uh,

I'm kind of excited to have it in there. Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm probably missing some things, but that's probably enough to tease people anyway. Well, I'll add one more that I really liked was as part of the toolkit, you had a punch list of, I think it was easily a dozen items. 14 was the number I had, but I think it might be more than that of basically the three key principles. And you actually add a little flavor to those three key principles and have this punch list. So that was a cool addition to the toolkit that I liked.

I should send you out on the road to interviews as my proxy. - Yeah, I'll butter up the crowd for you. I like it. - Your memory is better than mine. - I don't know about that. J-Hel, this was fantastic. You know I always love seeing you. My longtime friend and just having you on the show. I've told you this, your original episode way back when in early 2017 is still the most downloaded episode

we've ever had. This message just resonates with people. It's obvious, right? Is that still true today? I believe it is still true. The last time I checked, it might be episode 100 now, but it's pretty close. After all the episodes you've done and all the success that Choose FI, that's, well, I feel great about that, obviously, but that's kind of amazing. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, 700 plus episodes, 70 plus million downloads, and

Yeah, your episode is still number one. Or at the lowest, it's number two. I haven't checked all that recently. And I honestly don't remember how many times have I been on the show now. Oh, goodness. I don't know. It's easily a handful. It's five to ten, I would guess. Yeah. Well, it's always fun. You know, I love our conversations in the real world when it's just the two of us. And I love doing these podcast interviews with you. And in a lot of ways, they're the same conversation. Yes, they really are. You know?

truly are, which is amazing. And that's what's so beautiful, again, about this message and about FI, right? Like, there's no secret. There's no, hey, this is when you get into the upper echelon of whatever, you find out some secret. No, it's the same. It truly is the simple path to wealth. That is what the FI, our entire FI journey is. So there's no secret. There's no surprises. There's no complexity.

This is just, it's the three principles. It's that simple. It's spend less than you earn, invest a surplus, avoid debt, wake up wealthy. That's it. I mean, JL, that is it. A number of years ago, I did an interview with a woman who always said,

ended her interviews with the same question. And I knew that because I hadn't done an interview with this person before. And in that case, I always try to listen to their work to get a feel for the interviewer and what have you. And I noticed, so I knew this question was coming at the end of it. And the question was,

If somebody suddenly gave you $100 million, what would you do with it? And based on the few episodes I listened to, most of her guests talked about the things they would buy. Oh, I'd buy my mother a house. I'd buy myself a mansion. I'd buy this car or that yacht or whatever.

And my response was, I'd put it in VTSAX. And I'd spend the dividend that it threw off. And she was a little surprised. And I didn't say this, but it went through my mind. We'd just been talking for an hour. And I said, did you hear my conversation? But literally, that's what I would do with $100 million. That's what I would do with a billion dollars. It would be in VTSAX.

because this idea that when you have more money, you certainly, when you have more money, you will have more and more people presenting you with more and more options to invest that money. But there is nothing more sound, at least as your core is BTSX. Now that I've achieved a certain level of wealth myself, shamefully, it's not a billion dollars or even a hundred million, but

But there are a couple of things that I've invested in beyond VTSAX, mainly as an angel investor backing some very early stage entrepreneurs that I have some faith in and with the keen understanding that most,

Like most of those situations, it's probably going to fail. And the money is my friend, Doug Nordman, does this and he refers to it as angel philanthropy. So it's essentially giving money away with the possible chance that it'll pay off, but unlikely chance.

So it's like, I don't want to call it charity because I don't want to diminish the people that get it. But that's kind of how I think about it. I don't really expect. But these are people and situations that I think are worth backing. And if it works out, great. And I haven't done enough of it long enough to know whether any of it's going to work out. But, you know...

That's the same reason I give money to charity. It's doing good in the world in a sense. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. And yeah, it's interesting to just as a closing comment on that $100 million, right? So this is actually yet another five principle is the 4% rule, which in that case, if you had $100 million sitting in the bank, you could withdraw $4 million per year, which comes out to $333,000 and change every single month.

And there's a very high probability that you're never going to exhaust that money or even touch the $100 million principle. In many cases, in many scenarios, that'll continue to grow. And that's what's so astonishing, right? So in that case, most of these people are talking, they're going to blow through their fictional $100 million by buying

$50 million of real estate and a jet and whatever. And in your case, you get to live off of $300,000 plus a month in perpetuity. So I think that's really the fundamental distinction. I'd have to cut back a little bit, but I could scrape by. You'd find it in your heart. Along those same lines, I was in a doctor's office, I don't know, six months ago, and I was reading, I think it was an old copy of Time magazine. Doctors always have old copies of magazines.

I think it was an old copy of Time, maybe five, six, seven years old or whatever. And there was an article about Jeff Bezos, his former wife, Mackenzie, I can't think of her last name. But anyway- Mackenzie Scott. It was Mackenzie Scott, yeah. So when they got divorced, she walked away with, I think it was $40 billion, some very large amount of money. And

she has ever since been trying to give it away with various charitable causes. And the irony is that as aggressively as she is trying to give this, and of course, she's trying to give it away in a responsible fashion to organizations and people who will make good use of it and what have you. So it's a challenge to give money away effectively. And she's evidently trying to do that. But

The power of that amount of money and the way it grows, as much as she's given away, and she's given away billions and billions of dollars, she's worth more now than when she started. And that's kind of also a function of the simple path to wealth. I have pretty modest needs, to be clear. But as Mr. Money Mustache, our mutual friend Pete, once explained to me, you know, at our level of wealth, everything's free. And what he meant by that, of course, is that almost no matter what we spend...

our investments are replenishing that and then more. So we're ahead of the game and that's a beautiful place to be. Until he framed it that way, that was an epiphany for me. I'd never thought about it that way, but I think it's absolutely true. So now my wife and I, you know, that's kind of the joke in our household whenever we're thinking about buying something, you know, we really need that new pan, you know,

You know, well, everything's free. Isn't that amazing to get to that point? Right. I think that's, yeah, that's a cool look. I like that. I need to be clear. If I wanted private jets and yachts, everything wouldn't be free. Would not be free at all. But for everything that I care to have, it's essentially free.

And of course, for people who are early in the path to FI, I think this is something we've gotten away from, maybe to the community's detriment, is frugality is still important. So JL and I are not saying anything to the country of that, but these are stages of FI.

And clearly, Jael is at a stage where this is what resonates and this is important. And frankly, so many of us are very frugal that getting to a point where spending more freely is actually a challenge. And it sounds like, Jael, that you've overcome that. So that's a really wonderful frame on this. Well, again, I guess I've overcome it in the sense that there is nothing that I want that I deny myself. But on the other hand, there's very little that I want.

Because I've never been enamored with material things. And I do push back a little bit this idea that's in some places in our community now that if you have money, you have to spend it. And if you don't spend it, you're not living fully and what have you. And

And happiness and spending money are not related. Yes, there are times when spending money can make your life better. And if I identify one of those times, then certainly I will spend the money. But I'm not going to go out and spend the money just because I have it. Right. And so frugality is I don't even like the term frugality. I have always frugality.

From when I was poorest to now, spent whatever money I had from a position of power, by which I mean I never overextended myself to buy something. I always bought what I could easily and comfortably afford.

And again, when I was building my wealth, the single most important thing to buy for me was my freedom. And that's why I spent 50% of every dollar that came into my possession on buying assets. I love that. That frame of spending, spending the money on your assets is so critical. You're buying something. It's not deprivation.

You know, I also hear people say, oh, the simple path to wealth come, you know, but if I got to save and invest money, that just feels like deprivation. And it's, well, no, you need to think about why are you doing that? Are you doing it to buy your freedom, to get yourself to the point where everything that you might want to buy is free and especially where your time is your own? I mean, to me, I can't imagine anything my money could buy that would be more important than that.

And that's not deprivation. That's spending my money on precisely what's most important to me. I wholeheartedly agree. JL, my friend, thank you for being here. If people want to get in touch with you, of course, your website is jlcollinsnh.com. And the revised, expanded 2025 edition of Simple Path to Wealth comes out May the 20th.

2025, but it's available for pre-sale. This comes out the day before this episode. So it's definitely available. You can find it on Amazon. We will include a link in the show notes, but you don't need to go through our link. You can just find it. Just Google Simple Path to Wealth. It'll be the simplest thing to find. Right. Wherever books are sold, as the saying goes. Yeah. Love it. Love it. All right, my friend. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Brad. Always a pleasure.

Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first, subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player, just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand.

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