2014: How to Set Up a Million Dollar Retirement by Age 21

**Farnoosh Torabi** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons? Sorry, you're in the wrong place.

**Freddie Smith** (1:03)
And the worst part is she didn't file my taxes for three years. So on top of siphoning all my money out of my account, I then found out when she disappeared that I owed three years of back taxes with penalties and interest.
So I had a chip on my shoulder of I just didn't understand how taxes work. I didn't understand how to invest. I didn't understand money.
And so that's why I got taken. So I had a personal vendetta of like, I need to learn all this because I'm never letting this happen again. So I started learning in 2016, but I wasn't making content about it. But that was the trigger that got me there. And then I almost was able to get out of that debt.

**Farnoosh Torabi** (1:46)
Welcome to So Money everyone. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. If you ever felt like the math just doesn't work anymore, you're doing everything right, still coming up short on your housing payment, groceries, student loans. This episode is for you. My guest, Freddie Smith, spent nearly 20 years acting, including nine of those years on Days of Our Lives, before a business manager who was supposed to be handling his money stole it and stopped filing his taxes. Then came the pandemic, he lost the show, he moved to Florida and had to rebuild his finances from zero in a brand new career.
That personal collapse turned into a mission. Freddie started sharing what he was learning about taxes, investing, inflation and the Fed on TikTok and Instagram, not as an expert, but as someone figuring it out in real time alongside his audience. And that honesty struck a nerve. He's now built a community of 2 million people in three years and it's now the subject of his new book, Generation F'd, How Millennials and Gen Z Were Robbed of the American Dream and How We Can Fix Our Futures.
In this conversation, Freddie and I get into why he thinks the real crisis for millennials and Gen Z is not financial illiteracy, it's wages that haven't kept pace with the actual cost of living. We talk about his big four, housing, student loans, childcare and health care, why he thinks college needs a hard math test before anyone signs on the dotted line, his wild but genuinely compelling case for how a young person could retire with millions just by investing early and why he's cautiously optimistic that his generation is about to be the one that finally changes the system. Here's Freddie Smith.
Freddie Smith, welcome to So Money.

**Freddie Smith** (3:31)
Well, thank you so much for having me, excited to be here.

**Farnoosh Torabi** (3:34)
I'm so curious about your career, your current mission to educate and help so many people who are struggling in America right now. Gosh, we're going to get into so many of the things that you're learning and they beg repeating, if people already know, times are tough, but you are really kind of in the trenches and you have, I don't know, are you still acting or has this, it's a complete pivot now to economic analysis?

**Freddie Smith** (4:07)
Yeah, I mean, I acted for nearly 20 years and once the pandemic happened, I just moved to Florida to kind of take a break and my intention was to just go back and act and this whole new thing kind of fell in my lap and I just started to become very passionate about it and I was going through a tough time myself, so I was able to really relate to the people coming out of college even though I was 10 years older than them because we ended up going broke and had to rebuild from scratch after the pandemic and it's way harder after the pandemic to start from scratch than it was when I was 19 in LA.,
one of the most expensive cities. So it was supposed to be just a temporary thing and I became super passionate about it. I've always created content, I've been creating content for 12 years and I just shared my life and it just so happened this is what was going on and I was able to diagnose a few things and paint a picture of why the economy is hard for typical American workers and we just built this community of like 2 million people in a 3 year period. And I've just been so passionate about it because I wanted to learn myself. So it wasn't like I was an expert coming in like an economist from Harvard for 30 years and telling people how it is. I was learning and sharing every day on TikTok and Instagram what I was learning about stock buybacks and super PACs and how inflation works and Federal Reserve. And so it was passion of me learning that day and being like, hey, did you guys know this? And it just started taking off and we're just all learning together. And it turned into a book. So I'm pumped about that. Yeah.