The Current State of the Financial Independence Movement

Robert Brokamp (0:03)

Catching up with the leading figure in the financial independence community this week on the Saturday personal finance edition on the Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast.

I'm Robert Brokamp, though my nickname around here is Bro, so don't be surprised when you hear people call me that. And you know, we all want to eventually get to the point when work is optional. But some people may get a goal to get there much sooner, perhaps even by their 30s or 40s. And one fellow who knows an awful lot about how to do it is Brad Barrett. Brad is a CPA and the co-founder of the ChooseFI website and the co-host of the ChooseFI podcast. Brad, welcome back to the show.

Brad Barrett (0:45)

Oh, bro, it is so good to see you. It's been a number of years, so this is great.

Robert Brokamp (0:48)

It's great to see you. It'll be great to catch up. You have been on the show a couple of times, but it's been a while.

So as a refresher for newer listeners, give us the brief version of your financial-dependent story.

Brad Barrett (1:01)

Okay, so brief version. I graduated from college in 2001, which makes me pretty old at this point. I went to work for one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. That was the CPI, Arthur Anderson.

Enron scandal happened. Arthur Anderson didn't exist nine months later. So craziest thing that had ever happened. And I realized how impermanent work could be, even when you go to work for what's the biggest and most acclaimed accounting firm in the world. So I just realized that at that young tender age, even though that was a bad thing that happened, it actually turned into something really positive because it made me realize I need to take matters into my own hands. And the only way that I knew how to do that at the time was to save money and just live below my means. And without any knowledge that other people were doing this, without any knowledge that there was an end point to saving, that there was some financial independence number, I just saved my money. And I basically just, like I said, live below my means for about 12 to 15 years. And, but while still living a normal middle-class life, I had two daughters, lived in a nice four bedroom house in a great part of Richmond, Virginia, but yet I was saving probably somewhere, depending on the year. And again, you know, life intervenes, but 30 to 50% of my income. And when you do that for an intermediate amount of time, there's no get rich quick scheme, but when you do that for an intermediate amount of time, you wake up and that money is compounded into something significant. So, you know, that was my kind of standard path to FI, but then my journey got inextricably linked with entrepreneurship. And I built some websites around travel rewards, which are using credit card rewards points to travel. And that's a fun way to save money also, not on not having to spend many, thousands of dollars a year on travel.

And yeah, I started this podcast about a decade ago. So it's been an interesting journey of chapters.

Robert Brokamp (2:58)

So if I remember correctly, you gave your letter of resignation in 2015, and you were first on this show in 2018 and again in 2019 And back then, and maybe a few years beforehand, my impression was there were a lot of stories about the fire movement, fire standing for financial independence, retire early. I think to a certain degree, society was kind of fascinated by it. But nowadays, you don't hear quite as much as you used to.

And like your podcast and website, many people seem to have dropped the RE and are focusing on the FI. So what would you say is the current state of sort of the financial independence universe?

Brad Barrett (3:38)

Yeah, I think people were equal parts fascinated and equal parts appalled by the fire acronym.

And I think frankly, that's why a lot of us, and Jonathan and I, my co-founder of ChooseFI, we realized this pretty early on, that the RE wasn't what we were aspiring towards. We were aspiring for something. We weren't running away from a life that we hated. We're trying to build a life that we loved. And I think the financial independence aspect of that is what's so important. So yeah, it's interesting because over the last decade, and probably since Mr. Money Mustache came around in the early, I think 2013, thereabouts. So we're coming up on 13, 14 years. The community worldwide has grown dramatically. So you don't hear as many stories about it, but honestly, I think it's because it's not as sensational anymore. It's much more mainstream to a degree about, okay, look, for most middle-class people, these are not people with silver spoons. These are not people making millions of dollars. For most middle-class people, there's precisely one way to get ahead financially, and it's to live below your means. And obviously, as Motley Fool knows, it's to invest wisely. And I think for a lot of us, that's low-cost broad-based index funds. But of course, it can be individual stocks, it can be real estate, it can be whatever.