# Valuable Lessons from My Eighth Year of Freedom

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Mad Fientist
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW9ezHg3pVc
- **Дата:** 03.09.2024
- **Длительность:** 19:06
- **Просмотры:** 5,893
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/45849

## Описание

In 2021, I decided to stop doing annual updates.

At that time, I thought I had FI figured out and was just living a “normal” life (so no need to talk about it anymore).

Well, a lot has changed since then.

Turns out, I didn’t have everything figured out :/

I explain more in today’s short podcast episode!

HIGHLIGHTS

- How the pandemic changed my outlook on the future
- Why my post-FI life is drastically different from what I imagined it would be
- Learning how to use money for the first time
- The reason I’m focusing more on other investments (and what those investments are)
- Why stock picking isn’t great, even when your stock picks outperform

SHOW LINK

https://www.madfientist.com/eighth-year-of-freedom/

## Транскрипт

### Intro []

I'm blinding you hey what's up everybody Welcome to the financial Independence podcast so 3 years ago in 2021 I decided to stop doing my annual updates and if you've followed the podcast for a while you know every year since I left my job in 2016 I've done an annual update talking about what I learned over that last year and when it got to 2021 I felt like I was really just living normal life and I was getting bored making the annual updates cuz I didn't really think much had changed and I didn't know if I was actually giving any sort of meaningful advice to anybody by just talking about what i' had been doing for the past year so I decided to stop doing them and it's amazing how much has changed since then so one I don't have it all figured out and I've learned a lot over the last 3 years so I figured I could share what I've learned over those last three years and maybe start doing these annual updates again if I continue to learn things but I've also realized that things are going to get really weird with AI over the next decades and content is going to be able to be created instantaneously by computers and really the only thing I have is my human story and that's the most important thing in my unique experiences that I can share and the lessons I learn through actually living this sort of Lifestyle so both of those things combined made me realize that hey I should maybe do another one of these at least and then maybe continuing to do these in future years if I have some interesting things to share so anyway so this is my eighth year of Freedom post and I can't believe it's been eight years that's absolutely insane and it was actually August 1st that I left my job but I'm not really on a good schedule these days and so this is over a month late but hey better late than never anyway I hope you enjoy it and this is valuable lessons from my eighth year of freedom

### Money [2:00]

so the biggest thing since 2021 is really that I feel like I'm actually using money for the first time my entire life has been saving money investing money hoarding money pretty much and I don't think I've ever even Tred to use it because using it was always the last resort and if I was using it that was a mistake because now that money can't grow anymore and it's been a huge mental shift to now try to use it when I've just spent my whole life accumulating it but it's been a lot of fun and I have a article coming out soon if I can get around to writing it talking about learning how to spend and actually enjoying it while I'm learning how to do it and I think that's been the biggest change and particularly we bought a house last year our last house I think we sold in 2014 and we've just been renting ever since and Renning has been great but now that we have a son and we want to settle down and we don't want to have to move every year if we don't want to I know my wife never wanted to move every year but I was always uh Keen to try something new but now that we have a son in the picture just having a stable place that we can put all our stuff and as parents out there know you have a ton of stuff when you get a kid cuz grandparents just keep buying them stuff so we decided to buy a house and that's been a great purchase and this is actually the third house we've owned we owned a house in Scotland back in 2005 and then we bought a house in Vermont in 2011 but this is actually the first house that I've enjoyed owning for anybody on the path to fi out there who is like me and was just like very motivated to get there as quickly as possible I don't think I should have owned houses back then because any unexpected expenses that came up I would stress about them and yeah owning a house is nothing but unexpected expenses so I think yeah if I was doing it again I'd probably rent most of the time that I was on the path toy and then buy after because now I can actually enjoy it and I am enjoying it is a luxury it is a splurge and it's a great Splurge because I'm talking to you from my perfect home studio that I've spent months and months designing and building and I love it so much and yeah if I was as tight with money as I was back in my five days I wouldn't have this studio and I would have been stressing about all the unexpected expenses that have already popped up over the last year and a half so home ownership has been amazing and again if you would have told me this eight years ago that I'd want to be a homeowner again after the horrors of my previous two home ownership uh stints I would have said you're crazy but that just shows how much changes as you get older and as your priorities change and the other big thing that I would be surprised about back then that I am loving now is stuff so even though I just was talking about being overwhelmed by too much kid stuff buying stuff for the house has been a lot of fun and it adds to my daily Joy so yeah I didn't think stuff actually increased my happiness but it really does and I think it's mainly because I've gone so long without any good stuff so as we were renting we would always have furnished rentals and since we moved so often I hated packing up boxes and moving so I just limited the amount of stuff I had so that was that just meant that we used all the rental houses kitchen stuff and whatever TV was on the wall and sound system was there we just use that but now that we have our own home and we know we're staying here for a while I bought nice things that I really do enjoy so anything from the coffee grinder that I've talked about many times on this show and on other shows to just like really nice mugs to a great sound system for the TV and speakers in every room that make music sound so good and I can just turn it on instantly and just have music following me around the house and then obviously the studio is just kidded out with everything that I've Ever Wanted um speaking of the studio I've set it up so that I can do video from here now so if you want these podcasts to be in video form in the future go to Matt fest. com youout and follow me there and if I get enough YouTube followers I'll start to make the effort to do video which would require me to actually shower before recording these which today I that did not happened so I'm glad this one's audio but if I get enough uh followers on YouTube then I'll start doing these in video and I'll give you a little tour of my home studio which is incredible so go to mti. com youout to follow me on there so those are two big changes my

### Spending Money [6:43]

love of home ownership and love of stuff but going back to the initial point where I'm actually using my money for the first time I realized that's a big mistake I made on my journey to fi was just disregard the fact that actually one day you are going to spend your money and if you're not really practicing how to spend it you're not going to be that good at it so this has been like a three-year journey of trying to get better at spending money and trying to reframe it as something that does get used and you use it to increase the happiness in your life and the one thing I keep saying to myself is something that I heard in the die with zero podcast that I published a few months ago with Chris hin and that's when Bill Perkins said when's the party and I keep saying that to myself in my head because that's true when's the party because even if you don't spend your money you're going to give it away at the end of your life so there's a party at some point and somebody's going to benefit from it so you can either use it during your life and give it away during your life or at the end of your life it's all going to be given away and somebody's going to have a party and it may be a charity it may be your heirs if you want to be a part of that party then you need to figure out how to spend it or give it away your life and that's something I'm really focused on so in that same sort of vein as using money for the first time I feel like this is the first time I'm appreciating all my past Investments it feels like all my investments are really paying off so for example like to buy this house I used my portfolio to do it and that was just eye opening cuz you're saving for fi and it's all just this theoretical thing it's not like you all of a sudden take out all your money give it to the five person and give you all the freedom it's not like you're actually using it to buy Freedom you are obviously but you're not clicking a button to do it it's just theoretical thing like okay yeah my bank account says I have this much in it so now I don't have to work anymore but it doesn't really feel like you're utilizing that money whereas when I bought the house I did just do that which I clicked a button and pretty much bought a house which is a crazy transaction that I'm going to write an article about in the future as well hopefully next year cuz it was just the most insane amazing financial transaction I've ever completed in my life but so anyway so that was like the first time I was like whoa okay so yeah I did save up a good amount of money and it can be used to buy amazing things like this big Stone housee in the

### Future Investments [9:15]

countryside but I also feel like other Investments are also paying off so my focus on health over the last decade and now I'm in my early 40s and I still feel like I'm 20 and I'm very thankful for that especially having little toddler to chase after and pick up and throw around so I feel like yeah those past decisions are starting to uh bear fruit and like my friendships I get to go home to the states and see some great friends that I've had for you know decades and we pick up exactly where we left off and it's we've just never stopped hanging out which is fantastic my 22-year investment in my relationship with Jill has produced the greatest human to ever exist in the entire history of humanity so that investment is paying off in ways I wouldn't have even imagined and so it's making me think of my future Investments and now the money investment is all on autopilot and locked down and I'm not worried about that it's focusing on those future Investments so again maintaining health so that's a huge Focus because I am an older dad but I don't want to act like one so I want to be playing ice hockey and skiing with my son and hopefully doing it for the next 40 years rather than just the next 10 or 20 so health is a huge focus and I know that investment pays off but it's one of the most important ones so that's the one I'm focusing on most and I'm trying to think about ways to increase the investment in my friendships that I've built over the last few decades and figuring out ways that maybe money can help that by maybe renting an Airbnb where my friends live for a month and just being there rather than just coming in to town for a week and seeing everybody quickly just like actually living there for a little chunk of time every year so that we can just uh pick up where we left off and continue to build those relationships that I value so much and then the biggest investment investing in my son which has already paid off in so many ways and has been the biggest gift to fi being able to be there and spend all this time with him and all this quality time as he's been growing up and to be there for all the big Milestones so to continue investing in him and enjoying every minute of it along the way so again it's thinking about ways that money can contribute to that and help that so rather than focusing solely on the money investment I'm again trying to reframe it and think about how I can use money to increase these other Investments that are far more important at the end of the day and are the ones that really bring a lot of happiness and the other big thing that I've been thinking a lot about over the past few years is something I think the pandemic taught me and that's there's a risk to putting things off and I think back pre- pandemic I always just thought yeah I can save all this money and then in a few years I'll do this but the pandemic showed us that this period of health and peace and free travel we've taken it for granted because it's all we've known and that's not guaranteed to continue so when I think about whether we should take a trip to the States this spring or if we should just put it off to the summer or fall I'm less inclined to put things off these days and I think yeah the pandemic was the thing that really brought that to the Forefront of my mind we were trapped in Scotland for a couple years and I couldn't see my family and friends and I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do and we couldn't travel freely so that's been another motivation to use my money more now rather than letting it sit there and accumulate more so that I could use more later so those are the real big things that have been at the Forefront of my mind over the last few years since my last annual update and it is a huge mindset shift but it's one I needed to have and I'm glad that I'm having it and I'm glad I'm in the position that I'm in to enjoy it while it's happening so a lot of the future content I have is going to be based around that so again I'm going to have a big article about learning how to spend because I've learned I think my list is up to 14 things that have really been helpful in that regard so I'm going to publish that soon hopefully I'm also going to do a perfect life version 2. 0 I have a post called the perfect life that I wrote even before I reached fi and I haven't read it because I want to read it rate before I Rite this new post but it's going to be funny to go back to that and see how different I'm living life now than I imagined I would have lived it back when I wrote that article and it's going to be fun to write a new version of it to see what the future perfect life is going to be looking like now that we can build exactly the life we want and I feel like we're doing that and we're getting very close to our ideal lifestyle but here we are 8 years in and still experimenting a lot and still trying to figure it out so it's yeah it's definitely not as easy as it you assume it would be so the only other minor thing I wanted to chat about is stock picking because it's obvious what the downsides to stock picking are when you're wrong you lose money or you make less money than you would have if you weren't trying to pick individual stocks but I just wanted to touch on two success stories that are still uh not ideal so even if you pick the right stock there's two examples I have for you and the first is I bought Nvidia back in 2012 so for anyone out there who knows what nvidia's stock has done since then that was very early and that money would have grown to an insane amount of money had I held on to it but that's the problem with picking individual stocks back then I was a software developer and I could see that Graphics were going to be more important in future years and I thought okay investing in the best graphic Processing Unit producer would make a lot of sense so I invested and sure enough I think it went up maybe 20 25% and I sold it and I thought I was a genius and yeah looking back on it yeah it was a good investment whatever but had I not sold it would be up thousands of percent so even though it was a success there's still a lot of regret there cuz I sold way too early so that's one example of stock picking going right but still feeling like a failure and something that you should have done better and the second example is probably around the same time I think Apple was trading at around its cash value so ignoring all the intellectual property it had and all the products and everything it just was pretty much trading for what the cash it had on hand was so I had some money lying around at that time and I was like okay I don't see anything else good to invest in so I'll just put it into apple and so I've just left it there and the dividends have just been reinvested up until recently I turned that off because I was like this is just getting too big of a chunk of my portfolio this was in a taxable account too which is silly back whenever I did that so I have this huge unrealized capital gain so I'd ideally not sell it because I would pay a lot of tax on it and yet it's just becoming an increasingly bigger and bigger part of my portfolio so even though I want my little fund portfolio size to be 5% Apple alone is already bigger than that not even including Apple's portion of all the index funds I own so anyway so that's another example of stock picking going right but then ending up in a sort of difficult situation where a single stock is now a bigger percentage of my portfolio than I want it to be but if I was to pair it down then I would be hit with a lot of capital gains taxes so there's just two examples because like I said at the beginning of this it's easy to see how stock picking is bad when it goes wrong cuz you lose money or you make less money than you could have but when it goes right there's still complications and that's why I'm so glad that the majority of my portfolio is index funds that I plan to never sell and that just makes life so much easier you just let it keep compounding it keeps doing its thing you're not switching in and out you're not watching it it's just growing and it's just a much easier way to invest and it's no doubt it's going to be more beneficial than me trying to pick stocks even if I pick winners which again I don't always those are two examples of winners but even then it comes with complications so anyway that's what's been happening with me for the past few years expect some more detailed and actionable posts about some of the topics I discussed today coming up uh maybe not this year maybe early next year but if you'd prefer these updates to be in video form in the next few years then just head to mfs. com youout to follow me there and if I get enough subscribers there I'll just start doing them there but yeah I hope you've been doing well and one other thing that I've been thinking about over the last few years is just how grateful I am for the mad fitist and for you it's amazing that I can just go months without publishing anything and then I send out one email and I get all these lovely replies and suggestions and intelligent people to communicate with and it's incredible it's just another investment that seems to now be paying off so all those past decisions of putting the reader and listener first and not trying to sell some garbage thing that you don't need or trying to put ads all over the place I'm happy I made those decisions because now I feel like I've built up this relationship with you guys and I'm so thankful for it so thank you for listening thank you for all your feedback and for being kind internet people because I'm not sure who else out there can send out an email to 100,000 plus listeners or readers and then just get all these nice replies and none of the normal internet garbage that I think a lot of people have to deal with so thanks for listening I hope you enjoyed it and I'll catch you in the next one