174 : The Simple Path to Unlocking Financial Independence with JL Collins
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Welcome to the Mindful Fire Podcast, a show about crafting a life you love and making work optional using the tools of mindfulness, envisioning, and financial independence. I'm your host, Adam Koyo, and I'm so glad you're here. Each episode of the Mindful Fire Podcast explores these three tools through teachings, guided meditations, and inspiring interviews with people actually living them to craft a life they love.

At its core, mindful fire is about creating more awareness and choice in your life. Mindfulness helps you develop self-awareness to know yourself better and what's most important to you by practicing a kind, curious awareness. Envisioning is all about choosing to think big about your life and putting the power of your predicting brain to work to create the life you dream of.

And financial independence brings awareness and choice to your financial life, empowering you to make your vision a reality by getting your money sorted out and ultimately making work optional. And here's the best part. You don't have to wait until you reach financial independence to live out your vision. Mindful Fire is about using these tools to craft that life now on the path to financial independence and beyond.

If you're ready to start your Mindful Fire journey, go to mindfulfire.org and download my free envisioning guide. In just 10 minutes, this guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free at mindfulfire.org. Let's jump into today's episode. ♪

J.L., welcome to the Mindful Fire podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. It's an honor to be here, Adam. Thank you for the invitation.

It's my pleasure. And for those listening, it is absolutely wonderful to welcome him on the podcast today and to talk about the simple path to wealth and also the power that we all create for ourselves by getting on the path to financial independence and starting to build financial independence. Before we get into that, I'd love to have you start, JL, by sharing with the audience a little bit about you, your journey and what you're up to in the world these days.

Well, I, as you alluded to, wrote a book that published in 2016 called The Simple Path to Wealth. Since then, I put out two more, one in 2021, which was How I Lost Money in Real Estate Before It Was Fashionable, which is just a fun little book of my first real estate purchase, which was a huge education and a major disaster that only now, decades later, can I laugh about.

as of last fall uh pathfinders came out and pathfinders is a collection of stories that come from people who have read the simple path to wealth and adapted it to their unique situations in the world and talk about how it's worked for them and how it's made their life better and richer and more free yeah i love that and yeah obviously the simple path to wealth

is a huge book in the financial independence, retire early community. It changed my life. And I was just talking with someone yesterday in the office and he's like, I was talking about how you were going to come on the podcast today. He's like, oh my God, that book changed my life. I often find myself talking about financial independence to people, especially younger people at work and always recommending your book. Yesterday, it was just top of mind. I had like multiple conversations with different people about financial independence and how it's a superpower.

And I also loved Pathfinders and just kind of seeing how the real application of the concepts manifested in people's lives and how they were able to create more freedom. And so, you know, we're going to talk about, you know, kind of the power that comes from getting on the path in a little bit. And I imagine there's possibly some stories from your own life and that you've heard from readers about how they were able to use the financial independence and the financial security and confidence to actually take

bigger risks or navigate challenging situations. That'll be interesting to explore as well. Yeah. One of the things I love about the stories of Pathfinders is the

Almost from the beginning, when I first started writing about this stuff, which was 2011, and again, Simple Path to Wealth came out in 2016, the pushback that I would start to hear is, well, you know, all this sounds great if you're a white-collar engineer making a big salary and, you know, maybe in Silicon Valley or something. There are certainly people like that.

But that was never my experience of the broader range of people that I'd meet in this community, especially once I started doing our Chautauqua retreats, which began in 2013. The diversity of people who came to these things, across any measure of diversity, by the way, would be at age or levels of wealth, religious affiliation or race or whatever you might. It was just incredible. And so one of the things I love about Pathfinders is...

These are stories from people all over the world, from all kinds of different backgrounds who are adapting these principles. And it really makes clear that, no, this is not a path just for some small privileged segment of the population. It's truly for everybody. Certainly everybody who has

The technology to listen to a conversation like ours. I mean, I'm certain there are people in abject poverty in the world for whom it wouldn't work because of their circumstances. But that doesn't apply to anybody who has the technology. It seems to me to sit in and listen to this conversation. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that was a wonderful realization kind of for me fairly early on. You know, I think that, you know, some of the podcasts like Choose FI do a really good job of kind of

Promoting that this is for everyone, whether you're a teacher fresh out of college or engineer making 500 grand a year, you can save and invest and over time grow wealth, build that confidence and that security and then ultimately the freedom that comes from that.

having a nest egg that's growing and you can live off of. It's pretty cool to see that. So maybe for those who might not have yet read your book, would you mind walking us through kind of the core principles of what you call the simple path to wealth? In the simplest sense, it's avoid debt, live on less than you earn and invest the surplus.

And if you do those three things, you will wind up wealthy. And not just in money. It will make your life better overall. Just to avoid debt, live on less than you earn, and have a surplus. That just puts you in a position of power. It is really that simple. Well, one of the things that I've noticed, Adam, is...

that not everybody wants to do this. So my voice and all the voices in this community are a teaspoon in the ocean of the bigger culture that promotes spending every dime you get and borrowing more money to spend even more to live some mythical life that only spending money can provide and make you happy and what have you. And

That's the tide that's around. So I think people on the simple path will always be a bit of unicorns. I think, and that's fine. I mean, everybody has their own money and their own life, and they can choose whatever path they want. I think it would be tragic to get into your later years having followed the more traditional path without being aware that there is an alternative.

And so my mission, such as it is, is to let people know that there is a different choice you could make. Whether you want to choose that choice or not isn't entirely up to you. And of course, that choice is that of all the things you can spend money on, to me, the most powerful was always buying my freedom.

And the way you buy your freedom, of course, is you buy assets that provide income and ultimately make you financially independent in the sense that you no longer have to rely on your own time and labor to earn money. Your money earns money for you.

But not everybody sees it that way. For me, I couldn't imagine anything I would rather spend my money on than buying my freedom. And that's why I, from the very beginning, in my very first professional job, and this was long before I was aware of any kind of community or even the concept of financial independence, I just arbitrarily said, you know, I know I want to have what I came to think of later as FU money.

And that's the most important thing to me. So I'm going to divert 50% of my income to buying that one thing, because that was so important to me. And that's what I recommend people do. And I get a lot of pushback on that 50%. You know, there was a review of my book I saw the other day where it was overall very positive, but he said, but you know, there's some things in here that are just laughable, like saving 50% of your income. And I'm thinking, well, well,

It's laughable to you, but to a lot of people like me, the pushback is 50%. That's nothing. You know, I save 60, 70, 80%. It all depends on how motivated you are to reach that financial independence thing. On the other hand, you know, I meet people who say, yeah, 50%, you know, I want to spend more of my money now. I'm young, and so my savings rate is lower. And that's personal choice, but at least you know that

Some of your money can be diverted into buying your freedom. And of course, the sooner you start and the greater the percentage you divert to that goal, the quicker you'll get there. Yeah, I don't think there's ever some point we're going to get to where just like everyone's going to be early retired and, you know, everyone's going to be turning their back on the consumerist society we live in. It's all around us.

Right. And like, even honestly, even myself knowing this and being naturally frugal, it's easy to just be like, oh yeah, whatever. Like, let's just spend on this and that, and let's go on this vacation. And, but also I've already,

already done the groundwork to ensure that, you know, the snowball is rolling and picking up steam. Yeah. One of the really interesting things to me about that is that, you know, this is the simple path to wealth. And so if you pursue this path, you will become wealthy. And that puts you in a very different situation than when you are pursuing it in those frugal ways.

uh, inclinations are really working in your favor because you get to a certain point where the frugality, unless you embrace it simply as a better way to live, really doesn't serve any purpose anymore because your money has become so powerful and in what is throwing off. Give you a great example of that. Mr. Money Mustache, the great blog, if in any of your

listeners haven't come across it, the guy who writes that is named Pete. Anyway, Pete and I were in Ecuador and had a shtok when we were walking to a bodega to buy some wine. And he'd been there before. And as we're walking there, I said to him, so, you know, how much is the wine at this place? And he says to me, it's free. And I said, Pete, you know, I know things are inexpensive in Ecuador. I get that.

but it's not free. The shopkeeper is going to want some money before we walk out of his store with the wine. So how much, how much is it? And he kind of laughed at me. He said, no, no. He said, you misunderstand me. He said, JL for, for people like us at this point in their lives, everything's free.

What he meant is that our money at that point is earning so much money that anything we wanted was easily affordable. I can't afford private planes and yachts and that kind of thing, but truly anything reasonable that I would want, it's no longer a financial choice. If I want to buy a new shirt,

Technically, it costs money, but reality is it's free in the sense that that money will be so quickly replaced by what my other money is earning. There's a book called The Richest Man in Babylon that talks about having a purse that when you follow these basic principles,

begins overflowing with gold coins. And no matter how much you spend, the purse keeps overflowing with more gold. It's the same concept. And that's what we're talking about. And for people like you, and for my wife and myself for that matter, who were fairly frugal, which is how you have a high savings rate and get there, it can be a tough transition to realize that you don't need to do that anymore. And there's really no purpose to doing it.

And we still, you know, there's just not all that much that we want out of life in terms of material goods. But every now and again, you know, we'll turn to each other and one of us will be thinking about buying something and we'll say, well, it's free.

And that becomes your reality if you that's where the simple path to wealth will take you. It's interesting that you mentioned that. And it's a cool way of thinking about it, because I've thought about, yeah, like, you know, if you have significant invested assets and you look at your net worth, I'm

on any given day, it is up or down thousands of dollars. I actually thought about this. I went on vacation and this was a vacation that I was like, it's kind of expensive, you know, rent a house for a week by the beach. Like it's pretty expensive. We got young kids. It's worth it, whatever. And it's,

It was wonderful. But when you get to the end of the week and you look at your net worth and your net worth's gone up by 20 grand and you spent five grand on the house, it's like, I'm making money. Not to mention I was also getting paid while I was on vacation. That's a nice feeling. You know, it's actually how I figured out that I was financially independent back in the day, although I still had not come across that term, but

I enjoyed my career. I was never interested in retiring early. I'd never heard that concept either. But one of the reasons I wanted to have FU money was so I could step away from working whenever I chose for extended periods of time for sabbaticals, because while I liked working, I didn't like doing it all the time. And the longest period that I did that turned out to be five years just because it

was a long time before another job rolled into my lap. And I was always terrible at looking for jobs, so if they didn't roll into my lap, it didn't happen. But anyway, about three years into that five-year stretch, and our daughter was born in that same time period, I was sitting down. This is before the days of computers. This would have been the early 90s. I was

at least computers for me. I was sitting down with my pen and paper, as I did at the end of every year, and sort of tracking where the investments wound up and what our net worth was. And my wife had also quit her job at that point because our daughter was born. So we had no income coming in. And I noticed something remarkable, that we'd lived the same life that we'd always lived in the same house. And we had a new baby, which of course was some new expenses

my net worth was higher than it had been at the beginning of the year with no income and spending all this money. And I thought, that's kind of interesting. And again, I didn't have any concept of FIRE or FI or any of that stuff, but I was curious. So I went back and I looked at the year before and saw that the same thing had happened. I just hadn't noticed it. And the year before that, the same thing had happened. And of course, I didn't have a word for it. The

That meant that I was financially independent. But not only did I not have the word or the term for it, I didn't even put two and two together that, oh, this means I don't have to work anymore. I just thought, well, this is kind of a cool thing. Right.

So, yeah, you come to that point. It's a nice thing to start to notice, right? As you get significant net worth, I think a lot of people talk about it as like that first hundred thousand. Then it kind of really starts to grow and you start to see the growth in a more substantial way. So you mentioned this term FU money a few times, and that's definitely something I wanted to chat about. And, you know, this is probably a part of this conversation. But one of the things that I believe you've talked about in your book is just like,

It's not just when you reach financial independence that you get all the benefits. As soon as you start walking the simple path, there are benefits. I would love to hear you talk about from your own experience and from others, like what can someone expect if they're just like, oh man, it seems so far away to reach a school. But like, what would you tell that person about what benefits they get just by being on the path? Yeah, that's a great question. And it comes up

For two reasons. One, as you just alluded to, sometimes if you're starting from zero or even if you're starting from being in debt and you have to unwind that debt, the idea of being fully financially independent seems like it's so far in the future it's discouraging. Or the second time it comes up is when people first come across this at a later point in their age.

50 or 60 or even 70 and saying, you know, is it too late for me? And what I try to get people to understand is this is not an on-off switch.

The moment you start saving and investing money or even paying down your debt, you start becoming financially stronger. It's just like going to the gym, right? The moment you go to the gym, the first time you work out, you become a little bit stronger. You're not going to be able to bench 300 pounds the next day. But ultimately, if that's your goal, you will.

But every day, every time you go, you become incrementally a little bit stronger, which means you are better off than if you had never started before. So I tell people, if you start down the simple path, paying off debt, saving, investing, you will always be better off than if you hadn't done that. And even if you never achieved the mathematical number that says you're financially independent, you will be better off than if you hadn't started. So for instance,

If it takes a million dollars for you to be financially independent and you start, when you hit $10,000, you know, you're not financially independent, but you're better off than when you had zero or you had debt. When you reach 100,000, you're not financially independent, but you're a whole lot stronger than you were at 10%.

The power of compounding is amazing. So the old saying is the first hundred thousand or the first million or whatever it is, is the artist. And that's true. And people really I don't think our brains are constructed in a way to really fully appreciate compounding without actually seeing it in effect. And so.

It's always kind of amazing to people when they're going along and it feels for a while like there's little or no progress. And then all of a sudden, they'll hockey stick. And one day they wake up and, you know, I'm financially independent. When I used to do one-on-one sessions with people at Chautauqua's, one of the most common conversations I'd have is they'd bring their numbers.

And they'd say, okay, this is how much I have. And their question to me would be, am I financially independent? Well, it's real simple math. And almost inevitably, not only were they financially independent, they were a couple of notches beyond that. And I used to wonder, how is it that this is a question for these people when the arithmetic is so simple and the answer is so obvious, and these are such smart people, but

And the conclusion I finally came to is they can do the arithmetic and they can see the results as clearly as I can. They just can't quite believe it because it hockey sticks in a way that suddenly it just explodes on the upside. And one of the ways to think about it is.

Why is the first $100,000 the hardest? Well, you know, because you're starting from zero. The second $100,000, you know, all you have to do is increase your net worth by 100%. And now you got $200,000. And then the next $100,000, only 50%. And, you know, so every $100,000 becomes a smaller percentage of your total net worth until at one point,

$100,000 plus or minus in your portfolio is a rounding error. And that might be more than you made in your day job in the huge debacle in 07, 08 when the markets collapsed.

I remember reading Warren Buffett, his portfolio was down something like $60 billion. And I would irritate my friends by going around saying, gee, I wish I was down by $60 billion. And, you know, the market's down 50% or whatever it was that implies that I've got another $60 billion. So that's another one, the market takes its inevitable plunge and

And as markets do, and it's a natural part of the process, it's fun to think,

It's pretty terrible. I'm down a hundred thousand dollars, but that implies how far I've come, how much I still have. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it is interesting that, yeah, like the math is very simple and yet people put myself in that camp, right? Like I'm not retired yet. And I think that a lot of people find themselves in that position. So it's not really a math problem. It's more of a emotional and like mindset challenge, right?

Yeah, I think it's something that a lot of people wrestle with. And I sort of did and I didn't because my goal was never early retirement. I was 61 when I quit my last corporate job and with the intention that I was never going to get another one. So that's hardly early retirement.

But at the same time as my net worth crew, this compounding effect amaze me as well. It continues to amaze me because the, you know, the bigger your net worth gets, the more magnified the, well, of course magnifies the drops as well. So you have to, you have to learn to take those in stride, but it magnifies the gains. You know, if the market goes up,

10% and you have $10,000, well, you're up $1,000. If you have a million dollars, you're up $100,000, right? And of course, if it goes down 10%, the same thing. So it is kind of an interesting thing to wrap your head around. And I still had not really done that in an effective way until peak that day in Ecuador.

turned to me and said, everything is free. That had never occurred to me that I don't have to think about whether or not I can afford to buy a shirt or a bottle of wine, you know, or, you know, should I get the $30 bottle of wine instead of the $40 bottle of wine? Because your money is generating so much. That's a real mental adjustment. And particularly for the people

who have the discipline and the mindset and the interest in saying, no, I'm not going to spend every dime I have on all this consumer stuff. I'm going to spend a fair number of those dimes on buying my freedom. At a certain point, you've accomplished that. You have your freedom. You bought it. You don't have to put more dimes towards it. You can start reaping the benefits of it. And I think

That happens a lot sooner than a lot of people realize. A lot of people wind up accumulating much more than they ever dreamed and probably not enjoying it as much as they should have, although I hesitate saying that because...

Contentment and enjoyment in life is not tied to how much you spend. It can be. I think money is wonderful and it relieves you of money-related problems. And that's a very large thing. People who are living paycheck to paycheck, money-related problems are a huge drag on happiness and satisfaction.

But once you get past that, simply buying more stuff doesn't necessarily make you happier. And there's lots of research that indicates that. So there is a point of enough. And you have to kind of decide for yourself what that point is. And especially as it relates to whether or not you want to stay employed. I would meet people and have conversations with them who would say, you know, I'm financially independent, but I love my job. I don't want to quit.

Doesn't mean you have to stop working at a job you love. It means you can do whatever you want to do. So if you want to continue working at that job, then by all means, continue. By the same token, I've had conversations with people who say, you know, I'm in this soul crushing job. I've got a million dollars invested.

And using the 4% rule, that implies that I can pull out $40,000 a year to live on. But I need $50,000 a year for the lifestyle I want. But the idea of continuing to work to get the assets to make up that next $10,000 is just soul-crushing. And my reaction to that is, well, quit. Like tomorrow.

For a couple of reasons. One is that a 5% withdrawal rate, which is what 50,000 against a million would be, if you look at something like the Trinity study, also has a very high likelihood of success. That is not running out of money over an extended period of time. That's where the 4% rule comes from. Well, 5%, you know, I think 4% is something like 96% of the time it's successful and

5% is 88% or 87% it's successful. If I'm at a soul-crushing job, I'm going to take those odds and I'll pay close attention to what the market does in the early years. What's called sequence of return risks is a technical term for that. And if the market turns against me, then I'm going to have to rethink this and maybe change

do something else. But the second question I'll ask people like that is, you know, if you were to quit your regular job, do you think there is something you could figure out how to do during the course of a year that would bring in $10,000? And I've yet to have anybody say, no, I don't think I could do that. Now, remember, I mean, if you're in a position to have accumulated enough money to even think about retiring early,

You've got a lot going for you. And so, yeah, you could probably figure out how to pull in another 10 grand a year if you had to, but you might not even have to. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's kind of what I was thinking. It's like,

If you've already accumulated a million dollars, you've got some skills that you can put to work to make 10 grand in a year. You could just drive Uber like one day a week and make 10 grand in a year. There's all kinds of things you can do that would throw off 10 grand a year. Exactly. That's the thing that I think that sometimes people forget or don't even don't realize. It's like you don't have to replace all of your living expenses with your investments to make money.

a move to make a change in your life if that's what you really want to do. You know, if your life costs, like you said, $50,000 a year and your investments can throw off $40,000, you just need to find something to do that pays $10,000 or that you can earn $10,000 on. And then you can design the life however you want and just build in something that allows you to make $10,000 in a year. And you can have that life now. An interesting thing, the acronym FIRE, of course, stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.

And of all the people I've met over the years who have retired early, what that really means is that they quit their first job, their corporate job, so to speak, right? I've yet to meet any of them who just spend the next decade sitting on a beach doing nothing.

which is, I think, the common image of being retired. Every single one of them has gone on to do interesting and productive things, and almost inevitably, some of those things are going to throw off money. That makes what Mr. Money Mustache once coined as internet retirement police ballistic.

because they'll be like, you're doing a blog, you're not retired, or you're doing whatever, you're not retired. And okay, that's probably true in that sense of retiring means sitting on a beach and doing nothing else. But that's not how most people want to spend their time. That's, I don't think how, certainly it's not how human beings who can get to that point of having that option are wired. I mean, when I left my last corporate job in 2011, and I've been

doing all this stuff since. And so I guess I'm not retired. I had a friend of mine who recently adjusted that acronym. And I don't know if it's original to him or not, but FIRE could also mean financial independence, recreational employment. And I love that definition because it's

That's kind of me. I left my corporate job and now I've been recreationally employed. And I also notice for not everybody, but a not insignificant portion of people, that recreational employment sometimes turns out to be more lucrative than what they had been doing. So another reason I encourage people, especially if they're like right on the cusp and a little afraid to take the step is,

to go for it. I mean, you'll be fine in terms of surviving, and you might even find yourself a whole lot better off

With your recreational employment. It's super interesting. I've met many people who have had that experience as well. And I have another acronym that I like is financial independence reprioritize early. You know, it really gets to the fact of what this podcast coins is like making work optional. Love the book work optional as well by Tanya Hester. And, you know, just this idea that it's like you can do whatever you want. You want to work great. You don't want to work fine.

My, my vision of pursuing fire and my goal with it is to basically be able to pursue entrepreneurship and build businesses that are interesting to me and that I can do, you know, when I want to and in the way I want to with the people I want to, but not having to worry about this has to work or I can't put food on the table for my family. I just want to build and

and create and connect with people like yourself and just do cool things. And, you know, I want to I want to make some money doing it because I enjoy creating value and earning money and things like that. But I don't want it to be something that I need to force and that I need to work at all the time. And and I want to do it in my own way and in my own time and not have to worry about, you know, this needs to be huge or whatever. It just needs to it just it can just be whatever I want it to be.

It really changes the dynamic. And if you have a family and you want to roll the entrepreneurial dice, you're not just doing it with your life and your financial future. You're doing it with your families. And that can be a little unfair because they didn't necessarily sign up for that journey.

You know, we always hear the stories of the people who did that and it worked. But the truth is that most entrepreneurial ventures don't work. Most businesses do fail. Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that before they succeeded, they had multiple failures.

that they learned from and led to that success. Yeah, I think if you can do it being financially independent or even having FU money, so you have a cushion, you are doing it from a position of strength. If you do it without any FU money, then you're doing it from a position of weakness. That puts you certainly at greater risk, but it also probably makes you less effective in pursuing whatever that dream is because in the back of your mind,

You know, you have this sort of Damocles hanging over your head. I am getting a masterclass in the power and importance of FU money and also kind of paired with having a clear vision of what you're trying to move towards. You know, I had a chance to take a break from work, I guess, earlier this year, and I went on a leave due to a very challenging situation at work.

And one of the things that I was doing during that time, obviously like resting and kind of creating some space for myself, but also looking at, okay, let me work on this business and try to like

Try out this vision of this life that I think I want where I'm creating and doing it in my own time in my own way. But what I found was as soon as I was off, I was like right back into that grinding mode like this has got to work. And I realized like.

Four days into that first week, I was like, this sucks. This is terrible. And I realized I just replaced my horrible boss with myself as the horrible boss. And it was like, oh, you're not doing enough in the day, this and that. And it was like that inner critic was going wild. And fortunately, I have the skill of mindfulness that I've been cultivating for a long time, which allowed me to bring that into my awareness and be like, oh, wait,

This is not it. This is not what I was going for. You can step back from that abyss. Yeah, exactly. And so like over that period of time, I think it was three months over that period of time, it took me weeks and weeks to just settle into this like kind of rhythm of like creating. And like part of me was like I was like writing these emails for my email list. I was like writing for hours. I'm like, what have I even accomplished? This is total waste of time. And then I was like, there's another way to look at this.

Now I have all of this that I can then edit down into multiple emails. And so it was just like, I started to find myself getting into this more intuitive pace. And to your point, like,

I was very ineffective when I had was putting all that pressure on myself. And that was even when I knew that I didn't need the money. When you add that being from a place of like financial insecurity where you are betting it all or you just are pursuing it, you don't have money.

A cushion to fall back on. You're not going to be showing up with the most creative ideas, the most openness to opportunities like you're going to be forcing it. You know, when we've all had times in our life where we're trying to force something doesn't go so doesn't go so well. You know, my life has been the more I relax, the better things tend to go.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, you have to have a calm and relaxed mind to be effective. I mean, you learn that in martial arts, right? If you're panicked and tense and what have you, you're not going to be very good at meeting whatever the oncoming threat is. But if you're relaxed and focused, then you can be.

You need to give yourself whatever tools you require personally to have that relaxed, focused attention. And some people, by the way, don't need that financial cushion. I mean, some people are just indifferent to

to the fact that if this doesn't work out, I'm destitute. And I think that's a wonderful way to be if that is you. It's not me. I know people like that, and I envy them to be that disconnected from that concern. I would say if you have a family, then...

You have to consider them as well as your own ability to disconnect. But that's a very powerful thing. But I don't think there are a lot of people like that. And I'm not sure it's something you can particularly develop. At least I've not been able to develop it in my sense. So for those of us who aren't like that, having a financial cushion, and again, it doesn't have to be full FI. Mm-hmm.

just having a little bit of FU money can make the difference. And by the way, I should say that, you know, my definition of FU money is not the same as the broader definition. So,

I think of financial independence as being that point where you have enough money that your money is earning enough to cover all of your living expenses, your daily needs, and then a little bit extra beyond that. FU money to me is the amount of money you have that you accumulate on the journey to ultimately being FI. So that goes back to our conversation, the moment you begin, you get a little bit stronger.

So, you know, FU money begins with dollar one. That's a little bit of FU money, and it just continues to get stronger and stronger. It takes actually, in my experience, for me anyway, very little FU money to embolden me to make bolder decisions and more aggressive decisions. And it really changes the dynamic of how you approach your day job. And it's what allowed me to take a series of sabbaticals throughout my career long before I was retired.

FI before I even realized it was FI. So that's how I think of it. But a lot of people, you know, FU money is the equivalent of financial independence. And that's fine. You can define it any way you want. But for the purposes of this conversation, it's, you know, FU money is the interim steps as you get to FI. There is so much power to having

Financial security, and it starts with having a plan and working the plan right and getting on the path and starting to save money and invest that money and watch it grow. And that really gives you.

confidence and boldness and allows you to take more risks and not get so caught up in the people pleasing that exists in like the corporate environment where it's just like, I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to stick my head up. You know, this kind of goes back to all the layoffs we've been seeing over the last several years. You know, the first time Google did layoffs, they laid off 12,000 people in the middle of the night.

And I just think about all these people that live in the Bay area and they have $3 million houses. We're talking regular, nice, but regular houses. And they have these mortgages that as soon as they lose their job, now they are, they're screwed. Their ability to afford the life that they've created is gone or extremely threatened and they need to find a new job. And so I was like, man, that's terrible. But for me, I was like,

I'm good. I'm not worried about it because I have this FU money that helped me navigate the fear. And I could feel it around me with the other people I was working with and just like people like not wanting to take any risks. And that's kind of how the culture has become. It's like everyone's just trying to do their thing, stay below the radar and not be the one to get laid off in the next round. And it's not just Google. It's happening all over the place. And I'm like,

All good. If I get laid off, fine. If I don't get laid off, fine. It's all, it's fine. Well, and that's what I, when I talk about doing things from a position of strength, that's what I mean. If you're

living paycheck to paycheck, and it doesn't matter how much money you're making. The amount of money you're making is really not a factor because you can create a lifestyle that will use up all that money and then some, almost no matter how much it is. It's how much are you accumulating and how much FU money do you have that gives you that strength? Because paycheck to paycheck, no matter how big that paycheck is, is a very vulnerable position.

And this is nothing new. This has happened. This is just a natural part of the economy, right? Sometimes the economy hits a slump and the company you're working for may have to cut back. Doesn't make them a bad company. Doesn't make you a bad employee. That's just a natural part of the economy we live in. But we seem not to recognize that, at least in the way we're encouraged to spend every dime that we get. I'm always kind of amazed when

you know, a recession will happen. Inevitably, you'll be watching the news and they'll put somebody up there and they'll be saying something like, you know, I work for this company for 20 years and

And I just got laid off and, you know, middle management. I'm a month away or three months away from losing my house. And that's tragic, but I can't help to think, wait a second, you worked for 20 years in a management position and you're going to lose your house in three months? I mean, what were you thinking?

I mean, why were you not prepared for hard times? You know, this goes back to the Bible. You expect seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, and you store grain during the seven years of plenty to offset the seven years of famine. I mean, these concepts are thousands of years old, and yet people will live paycheck to paycheck in poverty.

Then be surprised when they hit that bump in the road and it's, this is in your control. This is something you should be paying attention to. It's not a flaw in the system. It's the way life has always been. Life is insecure. Yeah, absolutely. And you need to be prepared and you can be prepared. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And okay. So, so JL, I mentioned earlier that I am now getting a masterclass in psychology.

the power of FU money and the power of having a strong vision that I'm working towards. My vision is really, you know, pursuing financial independence, but ultimately, as we talked about with the goal of building a business and the business is around teaching people to connect with themselves and connect with their biggest vision for their life. Having this clear vision paired with the FU money is,

has allowed me to navigate this extremely challenging situation at work where, to summarize, basically I had a boss who, for whatever reason, wanted to get me fired and was building a case against me.

to do just that. And, you know, basically in a very challenging situation where the pressure is on and I have been able to navigate that challenging situation because I know that I don't need to take what the little severance that they offered me in exchange for giving up all the things that I had been creating and the good work that I had been doing and the relationships that I had been creating over these many years at the company.

for just because I was afraid of losing a paycheck. I already had the FU money in the bank to allow me to say, you know what? My work here is not done. I'm not going to just run away from this problem. I am going to stand my ground and continue pursuing the things that I want to pursue. And so one of those things is that I have been envisioning that I'd like to create

create a role where I do these envisioning workshops with clients and executive teams. You know, we have these things called executive summits where Google will bring in the C-suite of a particular Fortune 100 company or whatever, big advertiser. And I want to create a space where they can think big about their vision for the future and their partnership with Google. And so I had this goal of pitching this idea to people

My former VP, who is now in charge of all of the large customer sales advertising for Google in the Americas. And so I.

Had this vision and I was like, you know what? I'm not done yet. Even if I end up getting fired for whatever reason, it's still worth it for me to take this risk. And so that really comes from having that clarity of vision and the FU money in the bank to say, I can take this risk. It makes me very proud to see how much I've been able to navigate this with resilience and.

and clarity of focus. And then ultimately, like I pitched him, he's interested. Now I have a meeting with one of his VPs who's in charge of this area. And on August 1st, I'm going to be talking with them about actually making this a reality. And so while I'm in this most challenging time of my career, I'm also taking the biggest risk, also doing great work in my core role, which I was doing beforehand, but I'm also now even leveling that up

So it's been it's just been really interesting. And as I said, it's been like a masterclass in the power of FU money. And, you know, I thought it would just be, oh, like I have the money. I don't need to deal with this. In essence, it's also like I can navigate this. I can.

I've overcome this because I have this goal that I'm working towards and it's still worth it for me to go through this and to deal with this because I have that vision. And look, if I get to that meeting and they're like, there's no way this is going to happen, then I know I did everything I could. And now I have F you money and I can go and I can build my business on the outside. It's no problem.

But if I didn't have the FU money and the clarity, I would have probably taken the money and run when they offered it because I wouldn't have wanted to deal with the nonsense that I'm dealing with. So that's a long story. Any thoughts on that and kind of this manifestation of FU money? Well, it's a great story and it's illustrative, it seems to me, of a couple of things. One is it

Your FU money has put you in a position of power in dealing with this struggle that you're having at work and also the idea of making this transition. You know, if you didn't have that and you were worried about paying the mortgage with the next paycheck, it'd be a whole different framework and a whole different dynamic when you're talking to these people, right? Because...

People can tell whether you're operating from a position of strength or position of weakness. It's an instinct that I think we tend to have. And operating from a position of weakness does not put you in a strong negotiating position. But the other thing that's interesting to me about your story, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that things were going wonderfully well for you at Google until you got this new boss.

And I talk to an awful lot of people who will say, well, you know, I get it. And, you know, but I don't need this FU money. I don't need to, you know, to go for financial independence because I love my job and I want to keep doing my job, you know, until I'm 90. And my response to that is that's great. That's wonderful that you love your job, but things can change.

And you are one boss change away from that doing a 180, as you have experienced. And it's hard sometimes for people to realize that the situation they love so much is

isn't set in stone. It's actually very fragile and something can happen to that company. They can change direction. You know, the person you're working for can change direction. Some key members of your team can move on to other places and be difficult to replace. There are a lot of things that can upset that trajectory that you're so comfortable on. They may never happen.

And you may work at that job you love until you're 90, and that's wonderful. But the odds are kind of against it. So I think for that reason alone, even if people have no interest in retiring,

Well, that's great. As we talked about earlier, most people who quote unquote retire this way go on to doing other productive things. That's perfectly normal. But you can do it from a position of power, and that's what it's all about. If you're doing it from paycheck to paycheck, you have no power.

It kind of goes back to what we were talking about before with regards to the economy and layoffs. Like this is all a normal part of life. There are downturns in the market. There are downturns in companies and layoffs, even the best companies, even Google, which is making money hand over fist for the last 25 years. They have downtimes too, and they need to make adjustments as well. And.

Things are constantly changing with bosses and roles and things like that. And so to expect that that never is going to change and that you're not going to prepare yourself for that, it's just, it's foolish. There was a commentator by the name of Andy Rooney. He's long passed away, but he used to do a segment at the end of 60 Minutes. He had a great line. He said, don't expect too much from your company, even if it's a good company.

And I think that's important to keep in mind. I mean, even if you're working for a good company, don't expect too much and certainly don't expect guaranteed employment for the rest of your life or always a work situation that you're going to enjoy going to.

Right. That's not what companies are designed to provide. Great point. And so one of the questions that is kind of shifting gears a little bit. One of the things we talked about is, you know, this idea of, OK, I'm reaching financial independence. Now it's time to move into the next chapter. I talk a lot about about vision and having a clear vision for the next chapter of your life and building that vision as you're on the path so that it's kind of a seamless transition.

I'm curious about like, what was your transition like when, you know, I think you said about 10 years ago or so you made that shift into, you know, knowing that you were not going to be working full time anymore and you weren't going to be looking for another job in the future. Like what was that transition like for you? If you go back to the late nineties, and this kind of relates a little bit to our, our conversation from a moment ago, kind of my own experience along the lines of what you were describing. I,

At the time, I was working for the advanced technology division of a publishing company. Publishing was my industry. And I was a group publisher of a couple of the magazines they had. And of course,

Technology was rocking and rolling in the late 90s, and so we had a strong wind at our back as the division, and we just blew the doors off. I don't remember if it was 99 or 2000. I'm losing track of it. But we just had an incredible year. I got a bonus check that year that was more than I'd ever made in a single year before, just in my bonus. Everybody in our division was doing great.

At the end of the year, the president of the division, a guy named Adam, coincidentally, took me out to a wine-soaked lunch and, you know, talking about the great future I had for me and for the division. And so it was great. Within 12 months, I was kicked to the curb because, of course, we had the tech crash. And our business evaporated overnight. And everybody in the division was

with except a skeleton crew, including my immediate boss, Adam, who was his boss, just incredibly talented guys and best job I ever had. We were all on the street because the business just went away. But I was financially independent at that point. And I just thought, well, this is the universe telling me my career has come to an end. I would have been

50 at that point, 51, something like that. And now we're in the early 2000s. But I sort of figured that was it. And I was a little bit of loose ends. Because I hadn't thought about this. I hadn't planned on it. No, no.

The guy who used to work for me stayed with the company we both had worked for at the time and gone up the ranks. And he lured me back to sell advertising space, which was my first job in publishing. And it was a lot of fun. Joe and I had been friends when he was working for me. We'd stayed friends over the decade. He was a great guy to work for. But the company had become a terrible company.

And I did it with Joe because I liked him. I liked the team he put together. I liked our customers for about six years. But the company would do such stupid things. It just, it finally got to me. And after I told Joe I was leaving, I said, it's not like I'm going to another job.

So take your time finding somebody, which was the wrong thing to say to Joe, because he took that as if I'm not leaving. So this dragged on for months. But at one point I was in the, in the booth in a trade show and a guy named Bob, who was Joe's boss was in the booth with me and we were talking and he was trying to persuade me not to leave because I was the star sales guy they had. And I hesitate saying that, but there it is. And, uh,

At one point, he said to me, he said, you know, he said, the company really cares about you. And I said, Bob, the company doesn't care about me. And moreover, the company doesn't care about you either. I mean, let's be clear about this. And he sort of laughed a little bit and said, yeah, I guess you're right. You know, I said, I mean, I understand that when the company does something silly and it costs me a dime because I was working on commission, they don't care.

I would think they would care that that same thing crossed them 90 cents. I would think they would care about that, but evidently they don't see them. But so anyway, that was what kind of took me out in 2011. But I, again, I didn't have any, any great plans, but I had started writing letters to my daughter about this financial stuff because I wanted it to be available to her when she was ready to hear it. And somebody said, gee, this is kind of interesting. You should put it on a blog.

I only thought that'd be a great way to archive the information. Never occurred to me that I would develop a readership, jlcollinsnh.com. And one of the reasons that my blog doesn't have a creative name like Mr. Money Mustache or, you know, any number of wonderful blogs out there with great names is because I just wanted my friends and family to know who it was.

Just had no vision beyond that. My friends and family didn't care, as it turns out, but it began to get traction out there in the broader world. And of course, that led to doing the Chautauquas and then ultimately the books. And so here we are, but none of this was a grand plan. It's not like I was becoming disenchanted with the job, corporate job, that I was, okay, I'm going to go on and

and create this blog and event and book writing gig. It was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. So I'm not sure that I'm a great model for that. I would never recommend that people leave their job with no idea of what was coming next, which is what I did the first time when I was kicked to the curb. And that can be excused because they didn't expect that. But the second time I had been

planning to leave for quite some time. And so I should have done a better job of planning, but it's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other in my experience. And here we are.

So I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask that question of. Well, it's interesting, you know, because you did have like a little project you were working on, right? The letters to your daughter. Yeah, obviously that's not a full-time gig. It was something that you were working on, but it doesn't sound like, oh, this is something I'm going to be doing afterwards. It's like, this is just something I'm doing. Very small at that point. Right, right. I mean, what became the blog most famous for the stock series, which I think is now

35 posts. My original concept for that was just the first five posts. And the rest of it came out of feedback from readers who would ask questions in a

say, well, what about this or what about that? And would say, yeah, that's a good point. I should talk about that and lay that out. And of course, ultimately, that became the framework for what became the Simple Path to Wealth, which is, you know, there's nothing in the Simple Path to Wealth not on the blog. It's just, it's more concise, it's better organized. The writing is a little more polished.

But that's where the book came from. There was no great plan. And the only person I've ever tried to persuade of any of this stuff is my daughter.

And by the way, mission accomplished. She is well on a simple path herself. But yes, I'm still a little amazed that my work has had the impact in the broader world that it's had. It's interesting, you know, you mentioned that because, you know, Carl Jensen, who introduced us, also known as Mr. 1500, when I asked him about his blog, he's like, yeah, I just love

Never thought anyone would read it. I just was putting it out there for me. I was just like getting my thoughts out and putting it out there. And it's like interesting how like many, many, especially the early blogs, like that was really the whole point. And then some of them caught traction and and became big things that help a lot of people. So it's pretty cool. I think the irony of that is that's probably Carl didn't think about that, I'm sure. And I certainly didn't.

That's probably the key to success. I see a lot of people starting blogs now and there's all this strategizing about what should I write about that's going to appeal to the most number of people and what's the SEO formula that's going to make it. I don't think that's the key to success. I think, you know, write about what you know and what's important to you.

And, you know, if it gets traction, great. If it doesn't, there's satisfaction in having done that for yourself. Yeah, kind of gets back to the trying to force something or kind of relaxing into just what you want to be doing. Yeah, I think it also creates a certain authenticity. And again, this was not strategic on my part, but

I've had people comment that in the Simple Path to Wealth, my advice is very specific. In fact, when I gave my Google talk and Rachel, who had come to one of the Shatakwas, and that's how she invited me to do the talk and she was doing the interview, one of her questions was, why don't other financial advisors, why aren't they as specific as you are in the advice they give? And I said, well, I can't get into their heads.

But my advice was so specific because I was giving it to my daughter. This is precisely what I was telling my kid to do. She was who I was writing for. And I had no idea if anybody else was ever going to read this or care. And the irony is that I think is one of the keys behind the success of the book.

because I'm writing for somebody who's very important to me in my life. I think people pick up on that, but I wish I could say I was clever enough to have done that strategically, but I'm not. You did it for that reason and you achieved that goal and everything else was a side benefit afterwards. And by the way, this, you know, this carries over because, you know, every now and again, somebody will

send me an article and, you know, that has a different point of view than mine, or that maybe even specifically is disagreeing with me. And they'll, you know, they'll say something like, tell me why is this person wrong? And you're right. And I'm like, well, no, I'm not. I'm not the least bit interested in convincing you that I'm right. And that person's wrong. I mean, I've expressed my ideas as clearly as I know how to express them.

I assume that this person has expressed their ideas as clearly as they are able to. You can read both points of view and others if you like, and then you choose. I don't care. Take it or leave it. It doesn't make any difference to me. It doesn't affect me. I cared about what path my daughter took. If you don't think the simple path to wealth is the right path for you, I don't.

I don't mean to sound callous, but I don't care. A fairly large number of people, evidently, the path I lay out resonates. I think that's wonderful. I think that's great. I'm a little surprised that it's resonated as well as it has. But if it doesn't resonate for anybody, it's, you know, I don't care. We can still be friends. I have friends who don't even know I've written these books. I don't talk about it in the real world.

Love it. All right, Joe, let's shift gears now into what I call the mindful fire final four. You ready? Probably not, but let's go for it. All right. So the first question is about envisioning. I'm curious, like, what is your big vision for this next chapter of your life? And big, you know, I put big in quotes, like, it doesn't have to be like some world changing thing, but like, I guess like, what's your vision for this next five years or so of your life? Is there something that you're working towards or creating? First of all, you need to understand I'm an old guy.

So, my vision for the next five years is to try to make it through, right? So, if at the end of five years you and I can still have another conversation, then in many ways it'll be a mission accomplished. Yeah, but a little more seriously, as I'm, you know, I'm well into my 70s now, and I noticed that my energy levels have slowed down considerably, and

And that's fine. So I don't really have the energy to do a lot of things I used to do. And I don't particularly have the inclination. Having said that, again, I've always been a guy who just put one foot in front of the other. So, you know, we have this beach house on Lake Michigan that I was thinking we were going to tear down and build. We've decided not to do that. So,

Right now, I'm in the midst of getting a lot of delayed work done. You know, I mean, you just had a part of the roof repaired because why repair the leaking roof when I'm going to tear it down, right? Delayed things like that. And then there's some cosmetic things we're going to do. I do have an idea for another book, whether I develop the ambition to actually make that happen or not remains to be seen. I've always wanted to take a stab at writing fiction.

which I find, and I've tried in the past, I find that a lot more difficult than nonfiction. So I've been playing around with that a little bit and feeling a little better about the results. So I would love to be able to get a novel out there. I've written a couple of short stories I've shared with some friends and, you know, they seem to be working pretty well, but that's a tough one for me. So those are the kinds of things that I'm fooling around with and whatever time I have left.

Very cool. Well, yeah. You know, when I say big vision, right, it's interesting because I talk to a lot of people who it's like, well, let's think about what's the next chapter. And when I say big vision, big vision for someone could be, you know, I want to be a VP and speak on the stage at Davos about economic empowerment. Or it could be I just want to slow down and be present and positive.

home-cooked meals and learn how to cook delicious meals. Like it really is unique to each person, which is why I asked the question. And I love hearing kind of what people are looking forward to. Yeah, or maybe just

Making it through the night and being able to get out of bed the next morning. Yeah, that's, you know, that's that's step one for all of us. The second question is, what piece of advice would you give to someone early on their path to financial independence besides reading your book? Well, so I'm going to presume that they've read the book or something else that has put them on that path.

If you are living on less than you earn and you're investing the difference and you're avoiding debt, the advice I would give is relax. It's going to work out. And it's probably going to work out.

far better and far more dramatically than you can possibly imagine because of that compounding effect that we talked about. I'll give you a quick story along those lines. There's a young couple I know, and they had just moved to a different state. They wanted to put down deep roots in a rural community, and they found a great property to do that, and they had a couple of very young kids at the time.

But the state they chose was a high-tax state with an inheritance tax. There was a state next door that had very low taxes and no inheritance, and essentially the same kind of living available to them. And I said, why didn't you choose the other state? Taxes don't matter to us. We don't have that much. We're not making that much. And they said, well, that's true now, but you're on this path to wealth.

And it is going to work. And you are going to wind up being wealthy people.

And you're going to wind up having a significant amount of wealth to pass on to your adult children when the time comes. And if you're putting down deep roots in a high tax state, that is something that you might want to think about. But even though they were on the path, they just couldn't envision fully where that path was going to lead. And so this wasn't part of their calculations. So I think my advice is to realize that if you start on this path and you stick with it, it's

it's going to produce a result and probably a far more dramatic result than you anticipate. So relax and enjoy the journey, but also think about where you're putting down your roots. Great advice. Yeah, I think, yeah, that kind of cuts kind of full circle to what we were talking about at the beginning. It's like,

Trust that the math is going to work and relax and enjoy the journey, but also know where it's going to take you. And so start thinking about what you want once you get there and what kind of life you want and obviously like where you want to live and what that means from a tax standpoint and all the all the lifestyle factors as well.

Yeah, people today have such an enormous advantage because all of this information is out there. When I was doing it, you know, when I started investing in 1975, there was none of this.

And I was wandering in the wilderness trying to figure this out. I didn't even know there was no concept in my mind of being financially independent or retiring early. I, you know, I just wasn't even aware that was a goal. I just knew that I wanted to have a few money so that I could operate from a position of strength. And that was enough. And that's pretty powerful in and of itself.

But so much better to know all these other goals and techniques and approaches that are available today. Yeah, absolutely. And because you can then feel confidence in the plan, you can implement it and know that it's going to work and let it do its thing. And you can also figure out what your level of enough is.

where you really don't have to work for money anymore unless you can just work for whatever other reason you want. Then money becomes incidental. Yeah, exactly. All right. The third question is, what piece of advice would you give to someone getting started with meditation and or mindfulness? Well, again, I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I have tried to meditate in the past and I have been unsuccessful in doing that.

I see value in it, which is why I've tried, but I've just not been particularly successful in it. I don't know that I've been particularly successful in being mindful either, although I am aware of the concept and I appreciate the value of it. And that is something that I have tried with pretty modest, if any, success. So when it comes to those two things, I'm about as basic a novice as you can get.

But I think they are, you know, obviously I see value in them where I wouldn't, uh,

As ineffective as I've been, I still pay attention and try. Got it. And you also recorded a meditation. Back when, what was that, at the beginning of COVID and the market tanked, you recorded a guided meditation about basically staying calm, staying the course. And so I'll link that in the show notes. But, you know, you certainly have recorded a meditation.

You know, that's interesting. I think it actually, and I forget the timing, I think it was before COVID. It was, okay. Yeah, and there was, and I have forgotten her name, but there was a woman who came to Chautauqua when we were talking about it, and she was the one who suggested that I do such a thing. And I thought it would be kind of fun. And so we were actually traveling in Europe at the time, my wife and I, and we were in Bruges.

in a hotel room. And I had written out the script for the guided meditation. It was a bit of a lark and almost a little bit tongue-in-cheek. So I wrote out the script, and then I recorded it in this hotel room. And my daughter, Jessica, was the one who put it to music and created the images and created the actual meditation that appears. And it's interesting to me because in my mind, it was a little bit of tongue-in-cheek meditation.

meditation calling out the fact that market declines are not something you should be worried about. They are best ignored. And some people reacted to it as a tongue-in-cheek piece, but a lot of people also reacted to it as a genuine meditation. So it seems to work on that as well. That's kind of the origin story of that. But I'm happy regardless of how people respond to it.

I kind of saw it for the tongue in cheek, you know, just kind of like a funny thing. Like, stay calm, like you're creating a meditation because like that helps people stay calm. And then you're also teaching them like this is also normal, like this is to be expected. Yeah, it has a genuine message about how to deal with market drops. But I also had people tell me, you know, I use that to go to sleep.

Like, oh, great. I've created something that literally puts people to sleep. I've gotten that as well, as you could probably imagine with all my meditation. So I'm like, OK, cool. Whatever works. All right, JL. The last question is, how can people connect with you online? Follow your work? You know, where can they find you online and where can they find your books?

The easiest place to start is the blog, which is JLCollinsNH, which stands for New Hampshire, where we lived at the time that I was creating this. JLCollinsNH.com is the blog. And then from there, you'll find links to the books. You'll find, obviously, all the work I've done on the blog. You'll find links to the books. You can find all three books on Amazon.com.

The last one, Pathfinders, I actually did with Harriman House, the one and only time I've used a publisher, which was a great experience, by the way. And so my understanding is that one is pretty easy to find in bookstores and even in airports and that kind of thing. So people see that one around a little more. I think Simple Bath and Wealth, for instance, or How I Lost Money in Real Estate before it was fashionable, if you go to a bookstore, they're not going to have it on the shelf.

If you ask them for it, they'll be happy to order it, but probably just as easy to go to Amazon. Very cool. Well, I will put links to all of that in the show notes so people can go and access that very easily. But JL, thank you so much for being here. Well, it was my pleasure, Adam, and I appreciate your inviting me and I appreciate Carl making the introduction for us. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as I have.

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