Ep 20 - JL Collins - The Simple Path to F-You Money (And Why You Need to Ask Your Boss for a Paid Leave Today)

Market crashes are inevitable.

The trigger is always something different.

They're pretty rare.

If you're going to invest in equities, you have to understand that every now and again, it's going to get very ugly.

If you live in Florida, you have to understand that every now and again, a hurricane is going to come through.

And it's very scary and it's potentially dangerous, especially if you run outside in a panic.

But if you hunker down and wait, the storm blows over and the sunshine comes out and the birds sing again.

Hello, friends.

This is Tyler Gardner, welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing.

So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

Today's guest is someone whose work has quietly and profoundly shaped the way an entire generation thinks about money and investing.

J.L.

Collins is the author of The Simple Path to Wealth, one of the most enduring personal finance books of the last decade.

What JL offers isn't just a strategy, it's a philosophy.

It's a way of seeing money not as the goal, but as a tool, a means to time, freedom, and agency.

Long before the fire movement had a name, JL was already practicing its core principle, that financial independence is not about retiring early, but about reclaiming your ability to say no.

In today's conversation, we go back to the moments that shaped that conviction.

From asking for a four-month leave just two years into his first job, to making what he calls the best purchase of his life, convincing his wife to leave her job while he had no paycheck.

JL has consistently chosen freedom over convention.

We talk about what it was like to live through Black Monday in 1987 as a young investor.

We talk about index funds, volatility, parenting, and why when faced with complexity, his answer has always been the same.

Simplify.

And his advice, total stock market fund and chill, may sound simple.

The thinking behind it is anything but casual.

We'll explore how he arrived at that clarity, why his core beliefs haven't changed in nearly a decade, and what he hopes still holds true 30 years from now.

In a world chasing the complicated, J.L.

Collins remains a voice of radical simplicity and clarity, because sometimes the most powerful truths are the simplest ones.

It is my great privilege to offer you an extended conversation with J.L.

Collins.

Building off of the introduction in the simple path to wealth, mention something that resonated with me when I was only 23 years old.

And you mentioned that to you, the pursuit of financial independence has never been about retirement.

Instead, you say that it's been about having options and the ability to say no.

Can you take me through when that concept first clicked for you?

I had never heard of

the concept of financial independence, let alone FHIR, which is financial independence retire early, until after I started writing my blog in 2011.

I think listeners need to appreciate that when I was doing this, there was no internet in my youth.

There were no computers for that matter.

So I was kind of wandering in the wilderness.

I had no idea that there were other people who thought the way I did.

I wanted to have what I thought of as FU money in the day because I'd come across that term in a James Clavelle novel that I'd read in the early 70s.

I had watched my dad, who was a heavy cigarette smoker, develop emphysema, And he had been a successful guy.

He was self-employed.

But as the disease progressed and it debilitated him, it also debilitated his earning ability.

Our family went from very comfortable circumstances to very uncomfortable circumstances.

My dad was not a saver, an investor, and we paid the price for that.

That's what put in my mind that I never wanted to be dependent on my ability to earn in order to pay my bills.

So that's what I set out to accomplish.

When I came out of college in the 70s, it was a really nasty economic time.

So it took me two years to get my first professional job.

But once I did, I just arbitrarily decided I wanted to save and invest half of my income, which was $10,000 a year in those days.

I knew I could live on $5,000 because I knew people who were doing it.

But moreover, it was a whole lot more than the money I'd been making doing landscaping between graduation and getting that job.

And that was a whole lot more than I'd been living on in college.

Living on half my income was a step up in my lifestyle.

This was not any kind of deprivation.

But even if it had been, it's just a matter of spending my money on what was most important to me.

And what was most important to me is getting that FU money.

And then I don't know how I stumbled on the stock market necessarily.

I had accumulated some money of $5,000, actually.

And I really didn't know anything about the stock market other than it was there.

And I was working in Chicago at the time, just off Michigan Avenue.

And I went out of my office one day and walked up Michigan Avenue where there was a storefront brokerage.

And I walked in and I told the receptionist I wanted to talk to somebody about.

investing.

And she put me together with this stockbroker.

And he asked me some questions about my risk tolerance, and to which I replied, I worked really hard for this money, so I don't want to lose it.

And so anyway, he wound up suggesting that I buy Texaco and Southern Company was a utility.

Texaco in those days was an oil and gas company that's since been bought out.

And I didn't know anything about those companies, but in RestroShuck, looking back, given the information I gave him, those were two really good recommendations on his part.

But I immediately messed it up because

I obsessively started watching the prices of these stocks in the newspaper because in those days that's where the stock tables were, right?

And it would make me very nervous seeing it go up and then see it go back down again and then see it go back up again.

And so I wound up selling them after a relatively short time at a profit, but not anything extraordinary.

Because I just didn't understand how all this stuff worked.

So it took me decades to figure that out and to finally figure out what has become the simple path to wealth.

One of the other favorite stories of yours that always had stuck with me is that you reflected on how much you wanted this F you money and how that had stuck in your mind.

And then after just two years at your first job, you do.

I think you know where I'm going with this.

You did something that even today, most people I know would shy away from, which is you asked your boss for a four-month paid leave to, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, to travel Europe.

And that's a relatively bold move, again, even today, especially a couple of years out of college.

Can you walk me through how that conversation went and what inspired you to ask for that at that point in your life?

Well, first of all, it's probably not as bold a move today as it was back then, because today I think people asking for time off has become pretty common, but it was totally unheard of in those days.

days.

And also, it took me two years to get this job, and I liked it.

I really enjoyed what I was doing.

But I wanted, as you correctly observed, to go backpacking around Europe while I was still in my 20s.

And I was wrestling with whether or not to quit the job and take a year off, because again, I'd accumulated $5,000, which in those days would have been more than enough to spend a year in Europe and then come back with a little bit of cushion until I could find another job.

So I wrestled with this back and forth and back and forth in my head.

I was looking at options about going to Europe, and I came across this special airfare, and I forget which airline it was, that they were offering.

It was really cheap.

Took you to Luxembourg from Chicago.

And the caveat was you had to leave on a certain day and you had to come back on a certain day four months later.

So I thought, this is a compromise.

And so I went to my boss, Carl, who was a curmudgeonly old guy, probably a couple of decades younger than I am now, talking to you.

Well, I can picture it.

Yes.

Yeah, but when I was in my mid-20s, he was a curmudgeonly guy.

And I asked him if they'd give me a leave of absence so I could go do this.

And he looked at me like I had two heads and he said, no.

In those days, I didn't realize things were negotiable.

I was young and naive.

And so I thought, okay, I asked.

My boss said no and I thanked him and I walked out of his office.

And so I kicked that around in my head for another week.

And then I went back into Carl's office and I said, I'm afraid I have to resign.

And he said, why are you quitting?

And I said, I really want to go to Europe for a year.

And this was not a negotiating point on my part.

Because again, I didn't realize that was possible.

And he sat back and he looked at me and said, don't do anything rash.

Let me talk to the owner of the company.

This is a very small company.

And I was a little bit shocked and stunned.

I said, sure, okay.

And a couple of days later, he called me back into his office and he said, if you can promise that you'll be back in four months, we'll hold your job for you.

I said, but what we would rather do is let you go for a month now, and then we'll give you a month's vacation every year.

That was huge in those days.

In those days, you were lucky to get a couple of weeks.

As I said earlier, I didn't know things were negotiable when I started, but I'm a reasonably quick learner.

So the first thing I said was, how about six weeks in the first year?

And he said, done.

And so that's what we did.

And that got me to Ireland where I rode my bicycle around Ireland for a month and around Wales for a week.

And then met my girlfriend at the time in London for a week.

So it was great.

That is outstanding.

And then I came back to a job I liked.

Yeah.

And did you have a newfound confidence of, oh, okay, wait a minute.

I can have this leverage going forward, and there are things that I can do with employers.

And did that change the relationship you had with them?

Absolutely.

It was an epiphany because I had originally started this to have money to protect me in case something went wrong with my health or I got laid off or whatever.

But it could also

allow you to step away from a job periodically when you wanted to.

And then that's how I spent the rest of my career.

As I said earlier, I liked working.

So I don't think I would have ever retired early, but I didn't want to have to work all the time.

So sometimes I would just get tired of a job that I was in.

Sometimes I would come across something I wanted to do differently for a while, usually related around travel.

But because I had this growing pile of FU money, I had the resources to be bolder in those kinds of decisions.

When you had enough FU money, not just to change your life in a certain context, but when your daughter was two, I believe, you were at one of those points where you weren't earning a paycheck.

You were enjoying sleeping in as late as you wanted and staying up as late as you wanted.

But your wife was working at the time.

You convinced her to leave her job.

And from that day, you have called it the best purchase.

you've ever made.

And that inspires me daily to also make enough FU money that I can buy freedom for other people from this type of grind.

Can you share a little bit about how you came to that decision to offer this space for her and for your family and what the process was like for both of you?

That time period you're talking about was in the early 90s.

So I want to say in 89, I left a job that I had at the moment.

And this turned out to be my longest break from work.

It lasted for five years.

And about a year into that, our daughter was was born.

And as you alluded to, my wife was still working, and I was actually trying to buy businesses at this point.

That's what I was doing with this sabbatical.

So I was not making any money, but I was a pretty busy guy.

So we tried the daycare thing to begin with, and

it wasn't terrible, but we didn't love it.

We didn't love the experience that we felt our daughter was getting.

It's not like we were worried about mistreatment or anything, but we just didn't love it.

So we started talking about Jane being a stay-at-home mom.

And Jane, like me, started working when she was very young, and she'd always worked.

And she was very reluctant to quit her job.

And as we talked about it, all of a sudden, I came to realize that it wasn't that she didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom because she did.

But it's because she felt if she wasn't working, she wasn't contributing to the financial well-being of the family.

And once I figured that out, I said to her, we have enough money to pay our bills.

So

what is it that we could possibly buy with the extra money you're bringing in with your job that would bring more value to us than you getting to stay home with our daughter?

Because we had a perfectly nice house.

We were driving a perfectly nice car.

There was nothing that we could spend that money on that would have been more valuable to us than her staying home with Jessica.

And so that's the framework that allowed her to be comfortable enough to pull the trigger and do that.

And it worked out stunningly for, I think, all of us.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

Especially as we age and it comes so quickly for so many of us, time truly does become the asset that we all want to buy and that we all want to repurchase.

I also want to turn to the inspiration that your daughter has had on not only your life, but the work that you've done and on the writing you've done.

And the book, The Simple Path to Wealth, originated as a series of letters that you were writing to her as first early ideas behind investing and finance.

Could you share a little bit more about how has your relationship to her evolved?

When she was very young, I started pushing this financial stuff on her way too hard and and way too soon.

And

in my defense, the reason I was doing it is you probably already gathered from our conversation in the book.

It was so clear to me at that point in my own life, and again, seeing what had happened to my dad, that if you get this money stuff right,

your life is far better, and you have far more opportunities and you live a rich, free life.

And of course, like all parents, I wanted the best possible life for my daughter.

But it had the reverse effect of turning her off to all things financial.

These days, my daughter likes to tease me because I came to think of her as the little girl who wouldn't listen.

And Jessica says to me now, Dad, if I'd listened to you when I was young, there'd be no blog.

There would be no Chautauquas, which were the events I created to take people to cool places in the world to talk about this stuff.

There'd be no simple path to wealth.

And Tyler wouldn't want to interview you.

And she's absolutely right.

So I owe all of this trajectory for the last almost 15 years to the fact that my daughter wouldn't listen to me.

Now,

I'm happy to report she's in her early 30s now.

Not only has she listened, but she is well on her way to her own financial independence.

She just quit her own corporate job last fall.

Amazing.

Yeah.

But even more gratifying to me is one of the reasons the new edition of the Simple Path to Wealth exists is her enthusiasm for doing it.

I had a publisher who was really enthusiastic about doing it.

I was very reluctant, candidly, to undertake the task of doing it.

But Jessica not only wanted to see it done, she wanted to participate in the process, and she did.

So she, along with Madeline, my publisher, did a lot of the heavy lifting right next to me and in some ways, even more.

And

working with my daughter on this was enormously gratifying and fun.

And it also demonstrated to me how deeply she understood this work.

I knew that she had implemented it because she shares her numbers with me, but turns out she had gone far.

beyond that in embracing understanding the work.

And my wife used to tell me, even when she was young, she'd say, JL, she's absorbing more than she lets on.

And I said, well, that must be true because she doesn't let on that she's absorbing anything.

She was keeping me in the dark.

So anyway, we've always had a good relationship.

But this part of it, of course, for me is very gratifying to see her solidly on the path and also to have had the enthusiasm to.

work on this with me.

And you say that one of the biggest kind of overarching ideas for you was teaching her and encouraging obviously many others now to get the money stuff right early on.

And one of the privileges, and I know it sounds weird to call this a privilege, as you'll see in a second, but one of the privileges you actually had early in your own investing career was being exposed to Black Monday.

And for those who don't know, Black Monday was October 19th, 1987.

And I believe the Dow lost 22% in a single day.

The SP ⁇ P lost 20% in a single day.

And you were invested during this time.

Can you reflect a little bit about what that experience taught you as an investor and how that has shaped what you've tried to pass on to others about investing?

You described Black Monday accurately.

The only thing I would add to that is that was then and...

till today still the single biggest drop day one day drop in the market's history it was worse than anything that happened in the Depression, for instance.

That's how bad it was.

So

it's impossible to overstate how terrifying that was and

how deeply it roiled the markets.

And in those days, I had yet to embrace low-cost broad-based index investing.

I was still a stock picker.

I was still investing in actively managed funds.

on Black Monday.

And again, this is before the days of the internet and computers and what have you.

I'd been really busy that day and news just wasn't instantaneously available.

And at the end of the day, I decided to call my stockbroker because in those days I still had one, but I just didn't have any particular reason other than to see how he was doing.

So I call Wayne up and he gets on the phone.

Now, this is probably five in the afternoon, so the markets are closed.

It's the end of the day.

I'm sure he was having a great day.

I had been having a great day.

So he answers the phone and I very cheerfully am like, hey, Wayne, man, how's it going?

And there's this silence and he said, you're joking.

And I could tell by the tone of his voice.

I said, no, why?

What's going on?

He said, you don't know.

And I said, no.

He said, man, we just had the worst day in market history.

He said, my phone's been ringing off the hook with.

angry and panicked customers.

And he said, I figured you were one more.

And I said, no, man, I had no idea.

And so that's how I heard about Black Monday.

I knew at the time what I should do.

And that was nothing, that I should just stay the course and wait for the market to recover.

I knew that.

And in fact, I did that for the next couple of months until probably December.

And after Black Monday, as you may or may not recall, the market continued to grind steadily lower.

And I finally, in December, I lost my nerve and I sold.

I went all cash.

And if I didn't pick the absolute bottom, I was close enough that I ought to get the award.

And of course, the market, as it always does,

began to recover from that point.

And I sat on the sidelines watching it recover, not quite believing.

in the recovery and as it relentlessly marched back up until a year later it

was higher than it had been when it crashed, and I'm on the sidelines.

So by the time I bought back in, I have to pay more to get back in the game.

Horrible experience and expensive education, but a profound one.

Because while I knew that intellectually, that what I should have done was nothing,

I didn't really embrace it in my gut.

And now I do, because whether the market makes you wealthy or leaves you bleeding at the side of the road depends mostly on what you do when it drops.

And if what you do when it drops is panic and sell, it's going to lead you bleeding by the side of the road.

It is absolutely essential that you stay the course, that you stay invested, that you ride it out.

And that you understand, by the way, that nobody can predict when these things are going to happen.

or when they're going to be over, which is why you can't try to dance in and out of the market, as Warren Buffett once said.

You have to stay the course.

And if you're not going to do that, if you're going to panic and sell, then you don't want to follow my advice, will lead you bleeding at the side of the road.

In fact, you probably don't want to be in stocks at all.

You have to know yourself.

And I hope that my writing, my book and my blog and doing interviews like the one we're having today, Tyler,

allow people to learn this without going through their own Black Monday experience where they do exactly the wrong thing.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe you have to go through the trauma yourself to really embrace it.

I don't know the answer to that.

I hope not.

I hope people can embrace it just reading my book.

I hope so too.

I really, it would save us all a lot of

pretty expensive lessons.

And let's turn to the book for a minute because one of the things that continues to be perhaps the single most elegant component of the simple path to wealth is, and I know this sounds ridiculous to say in this way, but is its genuine simplicity.

I've read many books that call themselves simple, and by page seven, I'm reading about beta and non-correlated asset classes and alternatives.

And I'm going, okay, I get this, but I don't know if this is as simple to many as it might sound.

Whereas throughout your entire text, you guide people, at least the majority of investors, to invest in one total stock market fund and call it a day.

And obviously it's not advice.

We all know that, but it's a guideline of look, when in doubt, VTSAX or whatever equivalent of a total stock market fund works for you should be enough to accomplish the majority of your investing goals.

Is this still your guidance today?

Yes, absolutely.

First of all, I, again, have to give my daughter some credit here because I remember when she was still in college, which would have been, I don't know, say 2012 in that general timeframe, she came home to visit one time.

And of course, I immediately launched into one of my lectures about this stuff.

And she stopped me and she said, Dad, I get it.

I know this stuff is important.

I just don't want to have to think about it all the time.

And that Tyler was an epiphany for me because it made me realize that I'm the odd one out here.

I love this stuff.

But most people have more important things to do with their lives.

They have diseases to cure and bridges to build and classes to teach and what have you.

And like my daughter, these are very smart, successful people, but they don't want to spend their life thinking about this financial stuff all the time.

They understand, like my daughter, that

it's important.

But if

you just understand a couple of key concepts and you implement a couple of key steps and strategies,

then you're done.

And not only do you not have to tinker with it anymore, if you do tinker with it, you will probably get worse results over time.

So that's what drove the direction of the blog from that point on.

And then ultimately, the Simple Path to Wealth.

And the biggest compliment, not the biggest compliment, but the most meaningful compliment are the people who say to me, Jail,

I've tried to understand this financial stuff

and I've tried to read financial books and it just confuses me.

And when I read the Simple Path to Wealth, suddenly I understood it.

And suddenly I realized that it doesn't have to be as complex as a lot of those other books make it.

And that.

is so meaningful to me because that was my goal.

I know you reflected briefly on the fact that that part of the desire to revise, or shall I say, maybe lack of desire, it wasn't that much fun to do, but part of the revision process is making sure that the numbers are updated.

Is there anything beyond the numbers that has evolved for you since 2016 about how you approach this?

Are there any lessons that you might have changed a little bit in the new edition?

So, there is new context, but philosophically, the simple path itself is unchanged.

So if you've read the original book, you might want to pick up the new edition simply to enjoy the new content.

You don't have to pick it up to continue to follow the simple path to all.

Philosophically, nothing has changed.

And that's probably the biggest question I get, particularly in times of uncertainty in the market, is, is it still applicable?

Does it still apply?

And while I understand that that's a fear-driven question, and I appreciate that, and I always try to answer it, it always makes me chuckle a little bit because the simple path to wealth is designed to be implemented over decades.

My daughter is going to be on the simple path to wealth for the rest of her life, for the next 50 years.

So the idea that anything

is going to derail it easily is it wouldn't be a very good, reliable path if that were the case.

The best example that's clearest in the River View Mirror at the moment was COVID.

But I remember when COVID hit and the market took a very, probably the shortest term bear market in history, it had dropped, I want to say 33% and then immediately turned around, which is very unusual.

The turnaround is not unusual, just the speed of it.

And I remember, though, my Social media and my blog comments were lighting up with people saying, JL,

this time is truly different.

This time it's a pandemic.

This time people are dying.

This time entire economies in countries around the world are just being shut down.

The Simple Path to Wealth can't continue to work through this.

And my response was,

this time is not different.

It's never different.

What's different is the trigger.

So yes, the pandemic, we hadn't seen one of those in 100 years.

That trigger is different.

The trigger for a market crash is always terrifying.

It always feels like the end of the world because that's why the market crashes.

And it never is.

And if one day I'm wrong about that, things will have gone so far off the rails that your investments won't make any difference.

I'm old enough to remember, although I was a young kid at the time, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which as far as we know is the closest we ever came came to nuclear war, a worldwide nuclear war, which would have been a civilization-ending event.

And the story goes that there were a couple of investors talking about the probability of that.

And the one guy is saying, wow, this is going to be really bad for the market.

I better sell and get out.

And the other guy said, no, this is when you buy.

So what are you talking about?

He said, one of two things is going to happen.

We're either going to have the nuclear war, in which case nothing matters, or we're not, in which case the market's going to come roaring back.

I have found no better way to immediately start a fight in the comments of social media than to tell people that this time is not different because it continues to be so attached to politics and so attached to some of our deepest fears of what is next.

One thing I've learned is nobody can predict the market.

But this is one of the reasons I make the point that when people say this time is different, in one sense, they are always right because the trigger is always different.

But the end result,

until it is that end of civilization event, like throwing nuclear bombs around,

the end result is always going to be the same, which is we will get through it.

The market will go down to wherever it goes down, and then it will recover and come back.

And there is no predicting that.

A number of the listeners to this type of space are obviously currently going through a little bit of emotional volatility as we respond to these things.

Is there anything else that you would suggest someone think about today beyond, obviously, all of the wisdom you just shared for someone who's sitting on more cash than they had originally planned on sitting on at this point in their lives, but is extremely intimidated or terrified to get back into the space of equity investing?

I suppose it would depend on why you're holding the cash, but if you're holding the cash just because you're afraid to invest in equities, you need to understand that we're investing for the long term.

And when I talk about the long term, I'm talking about decades.

So my favorite investment is VTSAX,

which is Vanguard's total stock market index fund.

Any total stock market index fund from another company is fine.

The ETF version, VTI, is fine.

It's just VTSAX is what I happen to own.

I'm going to own that forever.

It's what I have my daughter invested in.

She is going to own that forever because it is self-cleansing.

I never have to worry about when to sell it.

So if it goes down in value, let's say we do have a market crash and last market crash we had was in 08-09.

The market went down 56%.

If something like that happens with VTSAX,

okay.

But five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, the market will be higher.

The market will go back up because these things are temporary.

And if I'm investing and adding to it, I will have had a golden opportunity to pick up even more shares at a lower price.

Market crashes are inevitable.

The trigger is always something different.

They're pretty rare.

They're traumatic.

I understand that.

But it's like hurricanes in Florida.

I mean, it's a natural part of the process.

If you're going to invest in equities, you have to understand that every now and again, it's going to get very ugly.

If you live in Florida, you have to understand that every now and again, a hurricane is going to come through.

And it's very scary and it's potentially dangerous, especially if you run outside in a panic.

But if you hunker down and wait, the storm blows over and the sunshine comes out and the birds sing again.

And one one thing you mentioned in that response, too, that I don't think as many people get, and obviously it's not as simple, but I would love it if you could just extend on this.

Tell me what you mean when you say the market is self-cleansing, because I know a lot of people would appreciate learning this, and many don't know about this.

What I mean is if you buy an individual stock, let's suppose you buy Tesla or you own Tesla.

And I pick Tesla because Tesla has been extraordinarily volatile in these this year

with all the stuff that's going on.

The moment you buy any stock, but the moment you bought your Tesla, you need to start thinking about, okay, when do I sell it?

Because companies have a life cycle.

Tesla's been a very powerful growth stock for a long time now.

Is that trajectory going to continue?

Presumably you think it is if you own it or you bought it.

How long is it going to continue?

Where is it going to peak?

And if Tesla hits hard times, and there have been Tesla's gone down like 10% in a day in recent weeks, is that the beginning of the end?

Or is that just a temporary drop?

So do I sell or do I buy more?

So you have all these ongoing dilemmas when you own individual stocks or an actively managed fund for that matter.

But when you own a broad-based low-cost index fund, It is self-cleansing in the sense that if Tesla continues to do well,

because the fund is cap-weighted, which simply means the larger, more successful companies are a greater percentage of the fund, if Tesla continues to do well, it will continue to be a large portion of my VTSAX and I will benefit.

If Tesla, on the other hand, is on its downward slope, and this volatility is just the beginning, I don't have to worry about that because as Tesla drifts away, it'll become a smaller smaller and smaller part of VTSAX.

And whatever new aggressive company that's coming up will become the bigger and bigger part of it.

So I never have to worry about when to buy individual stocks or, more importantly, when to sell them because the index is doing that for me.

And that applies, by the way, not only to the individual companies within the index, but to the sectors.

For quite some time now, VTSAX and and the SP 500, for that matter, have been dominated by technology companies because those have become the largest, most successful companies in the market.

That was not always the case.

I can remember one of the few advantages of being an old guy, and I've been investing for half a century.

God, I hate these.

Half a century.

That's wisdom, JL.

That means you're a sage now.

That's a good thing.

Thank you.

I'd rather be young and strong, but I appreciate the compliment.

But anyway, one of the few advantages of that is I can remember a time when it wasn't technology that was dominant.

It was energy or financials or consumer staples.

So these things also go in cycles.

So I don't have to worry about how long is technology going to dominate and when's it going to drift off and what's going to replace it?

Because that will all happen automatically as the fund continues to this process that I call self-cleansing.

It reminds me of one of the truths that I've inherited from writers like you and others is that one of the true privileges of wealth and of FU money is the privilege to not have to think about money ever again.

Is that once you have that money, it gives you the freedom, not just from work, also not having to think on a daily basis, what am I paying for?

Why am I paying for it, a budget, et cetera.

That proponent of that, I share a little story with you about another one of the huge benefits, achieving financial independence.

I mentioned Chautauquas earlier, and I used to do them in the early years in Ecuador.

And Mr.

Money Mustache, who's a pretty famous blogger, was the very first speaker,

first person I asked to be a speaker at Chautauqua.

And he did it for five consecutive years, for which I'm very grateful.

Pete and I were in Ecuador in one of these things back in the day, and we were walking to a bodega to buy some wine.

And

Pete been there before, and I had not.

And as we're walking there, I just casually said, So, how much does the wine cost?

And Pete said, It's free.

And I said, Pete, I understand things are inexpensive in Ecuador.

I get that.

But the merchant's going to expect us to leave some money behind before we walk out with his wine.

And what I'm asking is, how much money are we going to have to leave behind?

And Pete says, No, JL, you misunderstand me.

He said,

For you and me, everything's free.

Well, I really leaned back and looked at him.

It's like,

I don't know about you, man, but I'm all still paying for stuff.

He said, no.

He said, when you achieve a certain level of wealth, critical mass, let's say, everything becomes free.

Because no matter how much money you're spending, your investments are generating more money to replace it.

And essentially, that makes everything free.

That was an epiphany for me

because he's right.

I'm not in a position where yachts and private planes are free, to be clear.

But I'm in a position where when I go to the grocery store, I don't have to worry about do I buy the 80% lean ground beef for the 95%.

And that's a wonderful space to be in.

And it's become a touchstone because my wife and I are both pretty frugal people, and we grew up thinking about what things cost before we buy them.

We still do that.

And when one of us falls into that, the other will turn to them and say, it's free.

And we kind of laugh.

And

so it's a beautiful place to be in.

And it's one of the great benefits of achieving FI.

I think you know this, and I've mentioned this, that you are one of the writers that I have not only looked up to, but learned a great deal from over the years.

And probably a decade ago, an English professor shared with us that he truly believed that writers and artists were responsible for passing truth from one generation to the next.

And so obviously I think about that when I think about your relationship with your daughter and passing the letters down the line, but who were some of the writers who you had originally learned from or some of the books that had originally inspired your getting into the space of writing and passing down truth to others?

To be perfectly honest, I...

I wasn't reading a lot of financial books when I was figuring this out.

It was more hands-on kinds of stuff.

So I can't really answer your question the way you're asking it.

I can tell you, although I didn't read his books either until after I was writing my blog and my own book, but Jack Bogle,

who is the guy for many listeners who don't know, he's the founder of Vanguard.

He's also the guy who created the first index fund available to retail investors, which is ordinary people like you and me.

And that was in 1975.

And unfortunately, that was the same year that I started investing.

Unfortunately, I didn't know about this at the time.

And I wouldn't have been smart enough to embrace it at the time either, because I know that for sure.

Because when I finally found out about index investing and Jack Bogle in 1985, it still took me over a decade to finally embrace it.

But I think Jack Bogle, he's a fiscal saint.

What he has done to the benefit of us individual investors is extraordinary.

And one of the highest pieces of praise I get is some people choose to mention my name in the same sentence as his.

And while I'm extraordinarily flattered by that, I always feel like I have to make this correction and say that if I have lit a candle in the darkness, Jack Bogle is a white-hot son.

And I just write and talk about the things that he created.

To try to actually answer your question, the book that

probably had the most influence on how I lead my life was a book I came across in the early 70s.

And as I mentioned, when I started this path, there was no internet.

I had no way of knowing if anybody else thought the way I did.

Nowadays, you can...

find people all over the world.

You have 8 billion people.

Almost no matter what your interest is, you can find a community.

But there was nobody in my day-to-day life who thought the way I did, who was saving half of their income, for instance, to buy investments.

And so I always felt out of step and I always had lots of doubts around this.

What am I doing wrong?

And I came across a book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

I think it's out of print, but it was written by a guy named Harry Brown with an E on the end of Brown.

And basically, in reading that that book, it's an ode to the advantage of thinking differently.

And not only is it okay,

but it's desirable.

And that was a concept I hadn't come across.

I had felt up until that point that

my out-of-the-box way of thinking was somehow wrong, and it made me uncomfortable.

But this book opened my eyes to the fact that, oh, this is a good thing.

You should be thankful that you think this way.

And of course, it's turned out very well for him.

Even though I appreciate that you might be humble to the point of not wanting to mention your name with the likes of Bogle, I will happily do it for you and say that as I put together my lists of just people who I've looked up to and people who I know, to use your own words, have really helped light their way forward and really simplify the steps they take.

I promise you, your name is mentioned in the likes of Bogle in many circles right now.

And And so I just, I do want to thank you for spending the time with me today.

I know that the listeners will have gleaned a lot from this conversation.

And I appreciate your taking the time to help me learn more about what I can do for the next 30 and 40 years to continue on my path to hopefully one day F you money and hopefully one day buying my family's freedom and everybody's freedom.

So we can enjoy and continue just to write and pass it down the line.

Thank you for ending with those very kind words.

And Tyler, thanks for the invitation to be on the program.

I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for tuning in to your money guide on the side.

If you enjoyed today's episode be sure to visit my website at tylergardner.com for even more helpful resources and insights.

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Until next time, I'm Tyler Gardner, your money guide on the side, and I truly hope this episode got you one step closer to where you need to be.