00:00:00 Speaker 1: Welcome to Had of Money. I'm Joel, and today we're talking about a field guide to Wealth and Purpose in your twenties with Jack Reins. So there's a lot packed into your twenties, Jack, Right, you're getting an education, formal or otherwise. You're figuring out what you believe about work, money, relationships, success, and who you want to become. And that process doesn't stop when you hit thirty. But your twenties are especially formative, and there's no shortage of advice aimed at young adults. 00:00:44 Speaker 2: Right. 00:00:44 Speaker 1: There's the commencement speeches, like some of them are tough to watch. There's the career gurus, there's the personal finance influencers. I don't know if I consider myself an influencer or not, but I guess maybe I am somehow. But a lot of the advice misses like the deeper question of what actually matters. And so in a world full of noise, it's just getting harder to separate wisdom from status signaling. That's why today I'm bringing Jack rains On. He's a young guy who young adult young man. 00:01:12 Speaker 2: I'm twenty nine, so I don't need to wear that. 00:01:13 Speaker 3: In New York, I get told that I'm a baby, and then Atlanta I get told that I'm totally washed, so like it's very geographic specific. 00:01:19 Speaker 1: And then how interesting how it happens. I was an intern at my first job, and they the nicknames I got like and I, and that stuck with me for a decade and a half of working there. I was like, they still think I'm the intern. I'm not. But dude, your new book is called Young Money. It's part memoir, part guidebook for the generation coming behind you. And I'm super excited to chat with you today, man, so thanks for joining me. 00:01:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, dude, I'm excited to dig in. All right. 00:01:44 Speaker 1: First question I ask everybody is what's your spoige? What's your craft beer equivalent? What are you spending money on. I know you're not being a complete idiot, and you know, frittering away all the money that comes in, you're saving something for your future, But what are you splurging on in particular? 00:01:57 Speaker 2: Right now? 00:01:58 Speaker 1: Let's bring in a lot of joy. 00:01:58 Speaker 3: So excluding the the thing I'm actually splurging the most on is rent in New York. That's not because that's not because I have a penthouse apartment. It's because I have a studio in the center of Manhattan. But since I now have no roommates and an elevator and a door guy, actually like my rent is like it's it's a little over four thousand dollars a month for a studio. 00:02:17 Speaker 2: We were talking about this earlier. 00:02:18 Speaker 3: It's like the New York rental market is insane excluding necessities I. 00:02:24 Speaker 2: Need to survive. 00:02:24 Speaker 3: If you see in the background, I like build a bookshelf in my apartment. So it used to be a big Kindle guy because it's like ebook. It's like it's it's just easier to take with you. It takes up less space whatever. I have gone full circle and I'm so in on physical books. 00:02:40 Speaker 2: I guess, having now written one, it's about to come out. 00:02:43 Speaker 3: I've bought like fifty or sixty books in the last two months, and I'm probably only going to read maybe a third of them. But I'm trying to fill out the bookshelf. It does yeah, yeah, So the it's one of those like intellectual status signaling. I have a bookshelf, but the most recent splurge has one hundred percent ben like, let's fill out the shelf with physical bucks. 00:03:05 Speaker 2: Ken Will just doesn't look that cool. 00:03:07 Speaker 3: If I'm like having a zoom call in front of my coffee table over there, I want. 00:03:10 Speaker 2: A ton of books in the background. Yeah, so physical books. 00:03:13 Speaker 1: I like it. Okay, physical books and Manhattan rent, which is not cheap, but it's it's a choice, right, and it's a quality of lifestyle choice. And so much of what you're writing about in your new book is kind of how you think about that trade off between finances and quality of life in your twenties. And there is I think some advice that people have given throughout the years that could lead to a twenties where you're being super frugal and you're investing a lot for your future, but you're not necessarily living life to the fullest in your twenties. And you kind of argue for a blend, but you're talking more about really like living your twenties up. One of the I think the first line in your book, you write, everyone, every person should blow up their life at least once, And I'm curious to hear what you mean by that, because i will say I've seen some people blow up their lives spectacularly and it wasn't pretty, and they probably should have thought twice about that. 00:04:03 Speaker 3: Yeah, so so I would like to add one one qualifier. It's every young person should blow up the right at least once. The like the kind of the you know, there's like there's part of the book is like there's some financial advice, career advice, whatever, But the kind of underlying ethos is I think young people should be a lot more risk on and that that includes everything from like career paths, relationships, just like how you make choices, because I think it's you know, I think when people graduate from college, there's a lot of uncertainty. You don't know anything, you're at the bottom of the totem poll, and it's it's very easy to it's almost pattern match off of like what you have seen working with like people older than you for what career. 00:04:43 Speaker 2: Path you should do whatever. 00:04:45 Speaker 3: And I think it's really easy to misconstrue uncertainty for risk and you're just like full of like you don't actually you don't know anything when you're twenty two coming out of college. 00:04:56 Speaker 2: But you think you know a lot correct. Correct. 00:04:58 Speaker 3: So when I say that every young person should blow up their life at least once, a big part of that is, like I think when you're young, like basically forcing yourself to have a pretty diverse experience set and getting out of your. 00:05:10 Speaker 2: Comfort zone is valuable. 00:05:11 Speaker 3: For one, like it just gives you more comparison points of like like things you could be doing with your life, so you're not just in an echo chamber of like people you went to school with what you did with your first career. And two it's I actually think it's a legitimate skill knowing how to lean into discomfort and learn from it and come out on the other side of its stronger. So like it just makes you I think it makes you like anti fragile if you've gone through early in life, like just kind of throwing calls in the wind and doing something different. And to your point on people have blown up their lives and they probably shouldn't have the actual risk of, like I say, blowing up your life. I don't mean like developing like a like a crippling drug addiction or going deep into credit card debt, but like just kind of doing something totally different at twenty four. 00:05:58 Speaker 2: You just have time to recover. Nobody's gonna hold that. 00:06:01 Speaker 3: Against you when you're like twenty six that you took the random startup job instead of the steadier path of the consulting firm or. 00:06:08 Speaker 2: YadA, YadA, YadA. 00:06:09 Speaker 3: Again's much harder to do that when you're thirty five than when you're twenty five. So the whole takeaway is, like, I don't think people time weight life decisions as much as they should, and like you can take bigger shots with like lower risk of loss in your twenties than you can later. Therefore, if you have those shots you want to take, you should totally do them when you're young to your point, so you don't blow up your life at like thirty five and end up divorced or unemployed or whatever that looks like for that person. 00:06:37 Speaker 1: I quit my first job after six months and to take a road trip around the country for three months. And it was like one of the best things I've ever done. And it didn't cost me very much money. I'd saved up a few thousand dollars and that was enough to kind of get me around the United States with like a giant Costco bag of rice and one of those camp stoves. And so yeah, did I eat well? No, like, but I did I see the whole country? I did, and it was interesting. Like a week or two after I left a lot of people where I was working, got let go anyway, and I was like, gosh, this just feels like confirmation that I made that I made the right move. But I'm curious to hear from you. What's the difference between like you only live once sort of mentality and the mistake you can make there or making what seems like an extreme but an intentional pivot. 00:07:23 Speaker 3: What you don't want to do is be impulsive, right, Like, I think there's a level of intentionality you need to have. Like my example of this, you did a road trip around the country. I bought one way take it to Barcelona. I've been working for a year and a half, but I was twenty four. I'd saved up a little bit of money, and I was like, I think it would be very cool to go see like a lot of the world that I haven't seen before. But the risk you run with that is, like you don't want to be the guy who spends like five years vagabonding and like never gets his stuff together and then he's just like thirty and it's kind of just been a nomad. Some people do want to do that, that's fine if you do, but like, I don't think that's for most people. For me, I had gotten in a business school. I knew I was going to go to grad school the following year, and it was like, Okay, I've kind of gotten this this finite window of like a d risk year at twenty four where my two options are kind of do another year in corporate finance, which is fine but not really that intellectually stimulating, or go have a lot of fun doing like crazy adventures knowing I'm going to business school and realistically like my career opportunities are going to be downstream of what I choose to do during and after graduate school. And that was the right move, but it was like there was a like finite window where I could do that and had to defind endpoint where it's like, Okay, you want to go take this shot, do it. And I've heard people say similar things about they have like a very like well off job and making five hundred thousand dollars more and they want to go join. 00:08:47 Speaker 2: A startup or try something new or whatever. 00:08:49 Speaker 3: If they have ample savings and they want to do that, it's go take that shot. For a budget out, are you willing to like take that pay cut or cut your savings for one year, two years, try the thing, and. 00:09:00 Speaker 2: If it doesn't work, like go back and do something else. 00:09:03 Speaker 3: But I just I think if you do the planning up front for this is the thing I want to do, and this is the window of opportunity to do it, it's totally fine. What you don't want to do is like fall into doing something that sounds fun and as impulsive and then two muth said, and you're like, this was a total mistake that I shouldn't have done. It's just having a level of intentionality that goes into the decision making that matters. 00:09:25 Speaker 1: I think what you're getting at two a little bit is that, like the stakes are just lower. Right when I've got three kids and I can't I guess I could quite my job and take them on a road trip around the country, But that's just different. Right then, I'm like talking about pulling them out of school, and I mean, there's like a million different logistics, but when you're in your early to mid twenties, there are very few logistics. And it's so it's kind of like, Okay, man, I could even like a get a part time job at a waffle house in a random town if I need it to like those. That's the kind of gumption you can exhibit. 00:09:57 Speaker 3: It's funny you mentioned that because my dad little when I i'd like, taught him about this whole I want to go to Europe and do this and do that. He was like his his line was he wanted to do a road trip around America like right after law school, either after underground after law school, but then didn't do it logistics, whatever life happened. Wish you would have done that. What he told me was like, you can go do whatever you want. He's like, I'm not gonna pay for it, though, and if you run out of money, you do, like you're gonna have to go work at like a waffle house or come work on the we have we have a farm, bat come come work. 00:10:27 Speaker 2: On the farm. Whatever. 00:10:28 Speaker 3: So that was in the back of my head, like I could always go be a waffle house cook. 00:10:32 Speaker 1: For just don't be a freeloader. It's basically what you're saying, like don't do it, but like don't don't expept me to like, uh, you know, Western Union need some money. 00:10:40 Speaker 2: Right. 00:10:40 Speaker 1: One of the things to you you highlighted in the book you found like you were wasting time in your early career, is what you called it. How does someone know if they're if they're like putting in they got this job, they're putting in grunt work to eventually achieve something greater, versus what you kind of seem to allude to as being this like perpetual meaningless toil. 00:10:57 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:10:58 Speaker 3: I think when you're like very early your career, there's there's obviously like every single job has grunt work. 00:11:03 Speaker 2: And I think one of the one of the. 00:11:05 Speaker 3: Bigger disservices that like social media hustle culture has like told young people is that you should be passionate about your work and like that you can just give this completely misguided perception of I should be in love with every minute of what I do, and like every. 00:11:20 Speaker 2: Job has a level of just mundane iss to it that you can't avoid. 00:11:23 Speaker 1: Even the jobs you love, right, And I can attest to that. There's I love my job, and there are days where I'm like, I don't really want to go in. Hey, I want to talk to Jack today, but maybe I don't want to talk to that other guy next week, you know, I. 00:11:34 Speaker 3: Mean, the the amount of is like admin work involved in any job just like sucks. 00:11:38 Speaker 2: There's no way around it doesn't matter what you do. That's a thing. The thing for me was. 00:11:42 Speaker 3: Like my again, like part of my issue was my first job is during COVID, which just sucked because it was like, look, I was not passionate about like corporate Finance FP and A. 00:11:53 Speaker 2: I did like the team I worked with a. 00:11:54 Speaker 3: Lot, but then when you're doing that remote over zoom, you just like that was a big part of the problem was being in the cycle like zoom calls this and that you're never seeing anybody. You don't really know if you're learning that much because you're just not in the mix of people. Like that's not a great feeling. But a big part of it was like that wasn't the world that I wanted to stay in. And I'd also gotten in a graduate school with a plan that I was going to like pivot and. 00:12:19 Speaker 2: Do something else after. So the trade for me was either. 00:12:21 Speaker 3: A keep doing this job for another year, that's not the thing I'm gonna want to do after grad school, or b both go have a lot of fun abroad, which was like objectively the right choice, but also like by quitting my job, I had a lot more bandwidth to pursue a bunch of other like side interest, Like I started writing a newsletter, I started working for a media startup, like I did a lot of different stuff during that period where it was if the thing I was doing wasn't what I want to do long term, and it also wasn't the thing that led to the thing I want to do long term, the correct move was just drop it and give myself the like mental and physical bandwidth to just like lore a lot of stuff. And I think that, like, again, that's a much easier thing to do at twenty four than at like thirty two. 00:13:07 Speaker 1: Well, it sounds like you were experimenting, yes, and you're like, let me try this thing and see if I like it. And hey, actually, it turns out if I stick with this writing thing for a while, people are responding to it. I'm growing like maybe this is a part time maybe it becomes a full time thing. Maybe I write a book. And if you hadn't like stuck with those things and experimented, you wouldn't have figured that out. And then talk to me too about one just trying things out, but like the relationships, what you learn about yourself and then the relationships you built while you were experimenting. 00:13:35 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's funny, Like I'd always liked writing growing up. When I was an undergrad, we had a I went to Mercery University. 00:13:43 Speaker 2: We were the Mercer Bears. 00:13:44 Speaker 3: We had like a finance and economics newsletter called the Bear Market. I wrote for that, like it was. This has always been a thing that I enjoyed. But when like I fly to Barcelona, I start writing a substack and I cover two things I'm writing about. 00:13:59 Speaker 2: I've always thought, like investing in financial markets are interesting. 00:14:01 Speaker 3: So I'm writing a like finance blog and I'm writing a travel blog twice a week, just like detailing all the dumb stuff I'm doing abroad, Who I. 00:14:09 Speaker 2: Met, who I went out with. 00:14:11 Speaker 3: My grandma thought I was going out way too much. She was probably right, but I was twenty four in Europe, so I didn't care. But the things that stuck out were one like how much fun I was having just like turning thoughts into stories basically, and then two like how you just never really know where there's like long tail connections are gonna come from from the internet. 00:14:30 Speaker 2: Who's reading your stuff? 00:14:31 Speaker 3: And I just met a lot of super interesting people downstream with my newsletter, and those connections continue to compound over time. It just gave me like firsthand exposure to how valuable like distribution is the connectivity of the Internet, and a lot of people like resonated with what I was saying, and I was like, okay, like all these human like all of my experiences and thoughts and like just all the musings I was putting on the Internet resonated with a lot of people, and it's like a lot of what I'm thinking about at the state in life is these are kind of universal human experiences and that like actually led to the book deal a few years later, but that was a big thing. And then also it was just like it was pretty refreshing to get out of my bubble both physically, like in other countries. 00:15:15 Speaker 2: I met a lot of people from like all. 00:15:17 Speaker 3: Over the US and all over the world where you're like sharing a buck bed in the hospital and this guy's from Berlin and now like we still chat. 00:15:23 Speaker 2: Once a month, but even like online. 00:15:26 Speaker 3: Through the newsletter, Twitter LinkedIn all this, like I just started chatting with a lot of people doing all sorts of random wacky stuff tech world, investing, world media, and It was just like, because for that year I wasn't on a normal work schedule in my office, I had way more time to just engage with different people doing stuff, and those relationships have compounded over time. We can get into this in a little bit, like I work for a venture capital fund. 00:15:51 Speaker 2: Now. Our whole game is. 00:15:53 Speaker 3: Like you try to find interesting people building interesting companies and give them money. Most of my network, which is very value well in this industry, is downstream of I've been writing a newsletter and yapping on the internet for a while, so there's been like so many compounding downstream effects that I just didn't see coming initially, and it's all because I had a year to explore. 00:16:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, I really want to dial in on kind of some of the advice you give around optimizing for money, like in your twenties and you say, you say, and I agree with this, that the worst mistake twenty somethings can make is to spend their first the first decade of adulthood optimizing for money. 00:16:32 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:16:32 Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of wisdom there and and just a lot like there's a lot of pressure, I think on young people to get started and like you've heard about compounding returns being the eighth wonder of the world. And you're like, man, I should have started when I was twelve. What what am I up to? Like I'm already behind the eight ball on this one. But also, like not thinking about money is not a great approach either, So how do you think about kind of splitting splitt in that baby? 00:16:57 Speaker 3: It's it's easy to fall on like the two extreme camps of like you should optimize for saving every dollar because everybody seemed the chart of like if you invest ten thousand dollars at age twenty two, then by retirement it'll be worth like, however many hundreds of thousands, assuming like an eight or nine percent compounding return. Cool, Like everybody knows that, and I also know that, Like a lot of people have trouble actually like following that and putting any money back for retirement. My perspective on this is, like, career slope is so much more important than savings rate when you're early, where like if your first job you're making like fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year, even if you're having an aggressive savings rate, the maxim of money you're gonna put back realistically is like maybe fifteen thousand dollars, which isn't nothing, But the thing that matters way more is like how quickly can you like double and triple your income or put yourself in a position to get equity in businesses that are compounding that can have exits, Like anything that you can do that compounds your skill set or your network or puts you in positions for business ownership where you can just five or ten years down the road would have much higher income streams coming in where your savings rate can increase is way better, Like I it's much better to put back an additional one hundred thousand dollars at thirty two than like eight thousand dollars at twenty two. And a lot of times like over focusing on ooh, I need to like make sure I do a full like wroth Ira contribution, or like cut back on this or that like cuts into the mental bandwidth of thinking through the longer term opportunities. And just more specifically, there's like when you're twenty three, you're probably not making that much money. 00:18:32 Speaker 2: Even if you're in New. 00:18:33 Speaker 3: York and you're an investment banker, you might make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But then if you're paying like three four thousand dollars a month, it's not like you're gonna be saving that much, right, and like a lot of that money's a bonus. But you're at a point in life where you're young, a lot of your friends are young. You want to go out, you want to do fun stuff. 00:18:49 Speaker 2: You're gonna be. 00:18:49 Speaker 3: Really annoyed if your like roth Ira contribution at twenty three, prevented you from having like a fun weekend trip with your friends, like out to the Hamptons. They're doing like whatever on paper, dumb financial decision that you know is going to be a lot of fun you'll be laughing about ten years later. Billtt I was gonna say, there's a term called like memory dividends that Bill Perkins wrote about in his book Die one zero, which I love. 00:19:13 Speaker 2: It's totally spot on. 00:19:14 Speaker 3: Like money, money does compound, but so do memories and life experiences, and you shouldn't over optimize for the former at the expense of the ladder. 00:19:25 Speaker 1: Is that like a do you think that boils down to an improper understanding of risk in your twenties to realize that you're maybe optimizing for maxing out your roth IRA at age twenty three means you're not optimizing for your ability to grow your network, grow your career. Like is that is that a trade off that people are making. 00:19:45 Speaker 3: I think a lot of people have a bit of a scarcity mindset when it comes to money, where there's the Daniel Connoman, like the thinking fast and slow economists, he had the whole thing about like he proved in one of his studies that a loss like financial loss hurts twice as badly as a like the equivalent financial gain. 00:20:05 Speaker 2: Most people are. 00:20:06 Speaker 3: Wired like that where you don't want to lose money. You don't want to be in a spot of like not having enough Like I like, I get that, like being my first year living in New York, I wasn't making that much money and like I was basically living paycheck to paycheck while I'm in business school doing a lot of side stuff And it's not a it's not a great feeling. But yeah, I think I think people just like over optimize on that for me, just like loss aversion scarcity mindset, And what you also don't realize at like twenty five, for example, is that you don't really realize how I think it's tough for young people to really understand what I call the stage specificity of life and that there's like very finite windows for different opportunity sets as you get older, Like you have three kids, you know this, there's like there's stuff that you just like can't do now because you have a full family are taken care of, which is a great spot to be. 00:20:55 Speaker 2: And like, I don't have any kids, I. 00:20:58 Speaker 1: Couldn't be happier. 00:20:59 Speaker 3: But that road trip you took, you're probably glad you took that when you were twenty two twenty three ish, versus like, like that's a thing you're glad you did that you can't do now, and it's not that you would want to do it now, but as you're glad you did that at like an earlier stage in life. And I just think that, like it's very easy to continually push off interesting things like that that you would want to do for the sake of I need to like build up a higher level of stability, nest egg, whatever you want to call it. 00:21:26 Speaker 1: But I'm also really glad Jack that I was really intentional with investing in those in those early and mid twenties, because they've set me up at this point where I have a lot of flexibility, a lot of choice about when I work, what I do for work. Yeah, do I the trips I want to take now? And here's here was like my one thought as I was reading your book, maybe the place Well, I don't even know if we disagree, but it was just in my experience. I was like, Dude, the great thing about your early to mid twenties is that you could do so much of that fun stuff and spend so little money doing it, Whereas, like now, my expectations a good trip are they're higher. Like you were talking about staying in a hostel when you're in Europe. That's the kind of stuff like maybe goat got you know, find the cheapest flight, even if it's to stop right instead of NonStop. Who cares about business class? Stay in the hostel, get the experience, but just don't feel like you have to you have to live it up like the influencers do, because you can have just as much fun, if not more, by by pulling it off on a shoe string budget. 00:22:25 Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I know, I totally agree with you on that. I mean, the kind of point that I'm hammering home is that you there's some sliding scale of like you're only going to earn so much money in those first like. 00:22:38 Speaker 2: Three four years of your career. 00:22:40 Speaker 3: Realistically, to your point, the amount of money it takes to have fun and have an enjoyable experience is also lower. But there's like only so much margin between like once you cover your living expenses, taxes, whatever, and like say you make your like roth contribution, Okay, there's like only so much money left over to put back toward additional investing that would also be spent on, like call it life experiences. 00:23:05 Speaker 2: And everything's subjective. 00:23:06 Speaker 3: It depends on the person, depends on like what city you're in, whatever, But you can it's kind of the like I think if like over indexing on the whole like fire mindset, the like like focusing on like financial freedom over everything is just like I think, it's a. 00:23:23 Speaker 2: Little bit of a thing. 00:23:24 Speaker 3: It's a little bit of a mental illness where it can lead people to just like depriving themselves of life experiences. Like I agree, like when you're young, you should not be like bawling out dropping like thousands and thousands of dollars on a trip you could probably do for a couple hundred bucks, but you shouldn't skip the trip entirely because you feel like you're violating some like financial code you set with yourself. 00:23:45 Speaker 1: All right, I want to dig more into some of the specifics of how you think about which priorities are which financial priorities make sense in your early twenties. And also I want to you called fire mental illness. Well, I gotta follow a question on that. We'll get to that right after this. How we're back still talking with Jack Rains. We're talking about wealth and purpose in your twenties, and okay, I want to talk about fire, Jack, But I'm just curious. We you know, commencement speech season was not that long ago. Did you hear any really awful advice aimed at young people? And you were just like, that is so often, Mark, that is so not what you know twenty or early twenty somethings need to hear. 00:24:26 Speaker 3: So it's not even like any one particular speech. But the thing that's like in vogue right now is like the whole. And this also like I live in San Francisco for a year, I'm still very much in the AI tech world, but the everybody's so worried about AI taking all the jobs and permanent underclass and blah blah blah. I mean, I think the I wouldn't even call it advice, But just like the idea that's being parroted a lot right now, especially in the tech bubbles, is just like everything is getting blown up. 00:24:53 Speaker 2: AI is going to displace jobs. I don't buy into that at all. 00:24:56 Speaker 3: I actually think like the worst take in general is having a pessimistic out look on like humanity, your career prospects or whatever because of this tech trend when in reality, like AI labs are really big and they need a certain narrative out there of like AI is going to eat everything to justify trillion dollar valuations for AI companies. But like the best thing a young Like should young people use AI tools, Yes, But like should you be pessimistic and have a doomer mindset no, Like there's there's never been a better time to be a young person, like experimenting with different stuff because the barrier to testing things out now between both like the internet being able to put your voice out there, but also just these AI tools are very. 00:25:36 Speaker 1: Cool, easier to start a business, correct, you know, correct, it's and that's the thing that we that that we miss. There's so much opportunity right now to start a business that it's I don't know of a time I've asked some some really smart business business owners, people who have started Fortune five hundred businesses about it would it be easier to start that business now than it was. It's all always yes now, Yes, now would be much easier. There's just so many tools at your disposal that didn't exist yeah, thirty forty years ago. So I tend to agree with you all right to go back rail on the fire movement. For me, I'm just curious. I think you said it was like a mental disease, and gosh fire, I feel like there's been so many pivots from the fire folks trying to make it sound not as extreme as it actually as it actually is. And I always thought the retire early thing was like pretty ridiculous because we're as humans like built to work, and let's actually maybe spend a little more time trying to find something that lights us up, even though, like we said, it's not going to be like walking into the office is not going to light you up every single day of your life. But what does the fire movement get wrong? And Why is that sort of like delayed gratification to the ultimate degree. Why is that so ridiculous? 00:26:48 Speaker 3: I just think that, like, if your relationship with your career is that you don't like this thing and you need to make enough money to escape it, then I think you're going to be sorely disappointed. Where two things happen. One if you again, this is for like people who like hyper hyper optimize. There's whole subreddits of people that are just like fire or bust, feel like hyper optimized. For that, Okay, you are gonna have to skip out on a lot of like life experiences when you're younger to like maximize savings rate one and then two once you finally, like say you hit fire at thirty eight, Like, two things happen where if you're like you no longer have an income stream, your ability to like maintain your lifestyle is somewhat dependent on market fluctuations, which like you don't have control over, and you're just gonna find yourself somewhat empty from like to your point, we're kind of wired to work. And something that people don't discuss enough is if you are in your peak earning years, like call it thirties and forties and everybody around you and your social group is working, like the other parents of your kids at school, You're going to be increasingly less able to relate to all the people around you and get alienated. Where where I fully get burning out and taking like a year long sabbatical like that can be a phenomenal move. But having this idea that like, the only point of working is to earn enough money to not work like it just alienates you from a lot of human experience, is both in your capital accumulation phase and in your retirement phase. 00:28:15 Speaker 2: Nobody else is retired. 00:28:17 Speaker 3: I think a much healthier move is just like, do something different for work, where again you don't have to love every day of everything you do, but like you can certainly find something tolerable or interesting to work on where you can, like the savings rate ideas of fire of like, contribute enough to be able to retire comfortably is very sound advice. 00:28:36 Speaker 2: I'm not gonna act like that's wrong. 00:28:37 Speaker 3: It's the it's treating the accumulation of money as both the means and the ends instead of just the means is problematic. 00:28:48 Speaker 1: I think sometimes too, like at the beginning of your career, maybe I think of it as like working working more in those early years. Maybe it's starting to taper that off a little bit as you enter midlife so that you have a little bit more balanced and you have more time to if you have a family and kids, like you can like I'm coaching my girls cross country team. That requires some time, right, but it's like the best thing I'm doing right now, and I'm loving it. But like if I had some fifty hour work week job, I would I wouldn't be able to make that happen, right, And then I think, as my kids get older, I'm probably going to ramp up my work later on down the line, just because like I like it and I'll probably want to pour some more time into it. But I think it's one of those things where if you develop enough money flexibility, then you can kind of like turn that dial up and down depending on kind of where things are at in your life. Instead of like this fire approach, which is like man, work as hard as you possibly can for ten twelve years and then don't work at all. That to me seems like not the best advice for most humans now. 00:29:46 Speaker 3: I mean, the only reason that like a move like that makes sense, I think is like if you're I don't know, if you're like if you're an entrepreneur who started a company, you raise outside money whatever, and you just kind of have this Okay, I'm just gonna have to spread this for like five to ten years and see what happens. 00:30:02 Speaker 2: Great, like like do that. 00:30:04 Speaker 3: But if you're I don't know, I just I think it's like I think it's a very tough game to play where it's one thing if like you are building me thing and like you own the equity and you're full in control of it, like it like this entire entity is like downstream of you as a person and you have to go all in on it for a short period of time. Fine, if you're like an employee at a job where you're just treating it like I just have to like trade money for time over and over again until I can get. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: Out of the game. 00:30:29 Speaker 3: You're a free agent, like you're allowed to just take other jobs that don't suck. Like there's like it is the labor market is an incredibly liquid thing. So I'm it's just I think it's I think it's the wrong solution to a legitimate problem and that people aren't happy with work. Don't just force yourself through that thing until we can leave it, Like your job doesn't have to suck. 00:30:51 Speaker 1: How did student loans impact how you think about your early twenties post graduation, because like some people have, I mean that's like that's like a little bit of a mortgage around your new for for so or at least like a car payment for a lot of people. 00:31:02 Speaker 3: No, it is, I mean my my my take on student loans in general, Like, look, I I was like like an undergrad. I had like academic scholarships and I played football, Like I I went undergrad for free and then for graduate school. 00:31:14 Speaker 2: I was fortunate. 00:31:14 Speaker 3: My parents had saved up money for college and I went to undergrad for free. So like college money can go to business school, but I still had to Like in grad school, I was working part time the whole time, like paying for all non tuition stuff. So I'm I kind of sit in a middle point of I was very fortunate, but also not detached from the reality that, like I have friends that took out like a lot of student debt to go to business school. My take in general is like if you're going to like if you can get into an IVY league, undergrad and you have to take out student debt for that. You should totally do that. It's like it's worth it, the network's worth the job opportunities are worth it. If like I went to I went to Mercer University, and I love my I love my university. It's it's the Harvard of making Georgia. A lot of people are saying Mercer was great. I would not have gone, like, I don't know what today's tuition is there, would say it's fifty thousand dollars a year. I just would not have gone two hundred thousand dollars in a debt. You go to Mercer, don't. I don't think the roi's there on that. So on the student debt thing, one like, don't go to a school or enroll in a program where you aren't confident you'll make the money to pay it off. If you go to like Yale undergrad and you go like and you take out student loans for that, fine, Like you're realistically gonna have job opportunities to make hundreds of thousands of dollars like pretty early in your twenties, and then you just have to budget accordingly. And that makes sense. The trap people fall Intoho is taking out loans for like, like if you go to a mid tier law school, now there's kind of a like an abundance of lawyers and the wages aren't great outside of like top law school graduates, but everybody's paying high tuition. So I think like having an honest conversation about will I be able to earn enough to pay this off? 00:32:54 Speaker 2: But we're so wired to like. 00:32:57 Speaker 3: Go to school and get degrees and price tag equals stige that I think a lot of. 00:33:01 Speaker 2: People don't do the math on that upfront. 00:33:03 Speaker 3: It's such a if the exit opportunities are right, it's fine. If they're not, you can really put yourself in a tough spot. So it's much easier to solve that upfront than deal with it after. But yeah, like if you have a bunch of debt, disregard everything I say about like spend money, have fun whatever, Like especially if it's like if the interest rate sucks, like pay off the debt, like that's that's kind of a non negotiable. 00:33:23 Speaker 1: Well, and that's when you're talking about going to school. I think some people are still living like it's nineteen ninety five or two thousand and five. In terms of what a degree gets you and in terms of how much a degree costs, and the ROI factor on a college degree has changed significantly. And it's not that college doesn't make any sense, you just it makes sense for a lot of people. Still, I think you just have to be even more careful and cautious about where you go and how much you spend, because it's if you graduate with ten thousand dollars worth of debt versus ninety thousand dollars worth of debt, that makes a big difference in your future and the degree the school you got the degree from probably probably not always, but probably matters a lot less than you think. So I would take the Mercer degree, you know, with a ten thousand dollars worth of dead then like the fancy or school with the one hundred thousand dollars. 00:34:09 Speaker 2: Worth a dead Yep, yep, yep. Agreed. 00:34:11 Speaker 1: Okay, what about the habit of investing? How important is that? Because even if you're not doing it, like you've got your first your starting salaries thirty nine thousand dollars, you're like, man, I don't have a lot to contribute, but maybe I can at least get the four to one K match, and you know that's that's given me a fifty percent return on the first six percent of my paycheck that I put in there? 00:34:32 Speaker 2: Is it? 00:34:33 Speaker 1: How important is that one to get the match at least to not give that up? And then is there just value in investing something because you're developing a habit? 00:34:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean on the on the match specifically, that was a thing that like I've I've always invested at least to get the company match because that's legitimately free money outside of like really extreme circumstances. If you have a four oh one K match, it's just stupid not to take that. You should and there is value on like investing to get the habit in. I mean, my general take on all of this is you should have an amount that like once that amount is removed from your bank account, you're still comfortable in making your bills and like having some money going into a checking account saving this account and like have like. 00:35:13 Speaker 2: A little bit of like a safety net. 00:35:16 Speaker 3: But you should just have it like auto deducted, like the It's it's so much easier to actually like start investing in compounding when it's automatically pulled out before it hits your account and like goes directly into like an index fund, versus if the full check is hitting your like Wells Fargo account every month, and then like you Jack Rayin's is like, oh now I need to put five hundred dollars into like. 00:35:36 Speaker 2: An index fund. 00:35:37 Speaker 3: Well, then it feels like you're like having to take money out of the pod. It is just a pure psychological thing. 00:35:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, but pay hoping out with Wells Fargo, Jack, we can remedy that if you're so. 00:35:47 Speaker 3: It's hilariously And I've had a Wells Fargo checking account since they sign me up my freshman year of college, and it's just like I use Mercury for like my business stuff, LLC all that, which is great. 00:35:58 Speaker 2: But yeah, I'm still a Wells Fargo guy. 00:36:00 Speaker 3: But if you want to like move into something else, whether it's whether it's whether it's a sponsor of the show, it's the bank you like more, I'm like, I'm very down in chat. 00:36:07 Speaker 1: Okay, uh okay, are you one of the other the other things I've felt reading your book, And I'm curious to hear your take on this. Are you throwing shade at just kind of normal life? 00:36:17 Speaker 2: Right? 00:36:18 Speaker 1: Because in my estimation, and I feel like this is different kind of what you're getting at too, with like the stages of life. Some of the greatest joys for me have come from being rooted deeply in a place right and having having kids and having growing a community and having deep relationships. And I think that that kind of maybe in the some of the lifestyle you're advising in the in the book, it it doesn't really point to that, and and it makes me think of a difference between type one and type two fun. And the type two fun is sometimes like doing hard stuff like people are like running a half marathon that sounds terrible and it's like kind of is, but it's kind of like one of the greatest things you could ever do. Also, there's something you learn about yourself in the process and that you whip your body into shape and it's pretty rad. So is talk to me about that maybe, And is it just like an agent stage thing and like, actually that's something that you really desire later on or is this and this is just kind of a or what role does that play in your twenties? 00:37:10 Speaker 3: No, I think it's I think it's very much agent stage, Like the I have probably been a fairly extreme example of like, look, I'm I'm from South Georgia. 00:37:18 Speaker 2: I'm from Tifton. I love it. 00:37:19 Speaker 3: I went to college and Making Georgia, and then I lived for a couple of years in Atlanta, Georgia, like I was. I was a resident of the state of Georgia until I was twenty five. 00:37:27 Speaker 1: And we miss you down here. 00:37:28 Speaker 3: Just I come back occasionally you and I can get waffle House again to get time I fly down. My take on all this is like it is such a like life stage. 00:37:39 Speaker 2: Like I do not I do love New York City. 00:37:42 Speaker 3: I mean on the like on the whole community aspect, if the if the financial has made sense, I would stay in Manhattan for like a very long time. 00:37:49 Speaker 2: I love it. 00:37:49 Speaker 3: I love everything about it. I realized my friends are here now aren't going to be here forever. And it's but that's also kind of part of it where I view it, like New York off a like life stage development cycle probably plays out three to four years behind Atlanta, which plays out two to three years behind like South Georgia, where like people in New York get married later like early maybe mid thirties. 00:38:12 Speaker 2: Blah blah blah. 00:38:14 Speaker 3: If you're on the spot where like you have a bunch of like random different stuff you want to try and do, which is like that's just how I was wired, especially when I was a little bit younger. You should go do that early, and just like you should just stack those experiences in your twenties. 00:38:28 Speaker 2: And that's that's kind of the point I'm. 00:38:29 Speaker 3: Getting at, where like like I would like to get married, have kids all that. Like I even compared to when I was twenty four, Like when I was twenty four, I wanted to like live in a hostel. I flew to Argentina with like like dude I'd met in Portugal and we lived down there for three months. It was just really unhinged stuff. It was super fun. I would hate doing that now. Like I still like to travel. I still like, you know, get like like go on vacation for like a week. It's awesome, but like I have very little desire to go like live in Australia for two months. 00:38:57 Speaker 2: Four years ago. 00:38:58 Speaker 3: I felt totally different about that, So like it's I kind of set it without saying it. 00:39:04 Speaker 2: But like most of the stuff that I am. 00:39:06 Speaker 3: Either explicitly or implicitly advising on, like go do all this differentiated, interesting, somewhat risky stuff is just because your appetite for that type of experience is going to realistically change a lot. Like, I think it's very normal humans to desire stability as you get older, and like the people in your peer group are also having more stable lives. You don't want to be the one guy who's just like, didn't seem to get his stuff together. 00:39:30 Speaker 1: But oh, Jack's at the casino again. 00:39:32 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's just not that. It's like nobody wants to be that guy. Like you don't want to be the degenerate uncle when like your sister has kids or whatever, like that's that's not good. 00:39:40 Speaker 1: But I think that's like this this is one of the the reality that what we want changes as we get older is a crucial thing to recognize even in your twenties, and to realize that the things you want right now might not be the things you want down the road. And part of what you want to allow yourself is some future freedom and margin. And that is kind of when it comes to starting investing earlier, even if it's a little bit, whether it's building the habit and also building up just a little bit of cash reserve so that that snowball is starting to build. Like, I think you're right. People put a lot of pressure on themselves. They read about the fire movement and they feel like they've got to save and invest thirty forty percent of their salary starting at like twenty three. That's ridiculous. There's too much pressure to put on yourself. And ultimately, yeah, you've got you can make up for some of that time down the road. But the truth is too that like a lot of people have they get into their their thirties, they get married, they have kids, they buy the house, and they're like, I have to work at this job. I don't like because I didn't even think about what future me was going to desire in my twenties, Like I wasn't even like cognizant that I would want different things. 00:40:42 Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, I mean I think the like the bigger through line beyond like oh you should do this job or take the shot, or like move here, move there or whatever is just being like everything in life is a matter of opportunity costs, and if you go to do thing in your twenties, that causes you to have a lower saving grade early and that's going to lost you some level of optionality in your thirties, assuming you don't take actions to like reaccelerate your income growth. 00:41:06 Speaker 2: At that point. 00:41:06 Speaker 3: And it's you just kind of have to be very aware of the trade offs you're making when you make them. 00:41:11 Speaker 2: And like the bet that I made at. 00:41:14 Speaker 3: Twenty four to twenty five is like I'm going to do one year of having a ton of fun, I'm going to go to business school for two years. So that was three years where I was. I was still making money in that window, but there was like an implicit pay cut compared to what I would have been making if I was fully employed the whole time, and then I will need to like make up four and compensate for that from call it twenty seven through thirty five or whatever, right, And I was okay with that trade. And I'm like, I just turned twenty nine a couple of months ago. I'm like, I like my job. I have a good career right. 00:41:42 Speaker 2: Now, blah blah blah. 00:41:45 Speaker 3: But the trade was like I'm doing this now and then like on the other side, I will probably have to like work a little bit harder in this like next window. And I was okay with that. If it's like go all in on the fun stuff in this period and like work hard in this period. Cool, That's how I'm gonna do it. But it was like it was like an intentional decision on my part, And I think the like being aware of the opportunity cost of the choices you're making and being like very intentional about how you're going about those decisions is kind of the most important. 00:42:12 Speaker 1: Thing one hundred percent. No, I think that's I think that's wise. Got a few more questions I want to get to with you, man, I include I just want to talk about like generational differences. As a I'm a millennial, you're I'm a grandpa millennial. 00:42:22 Speaker 2: In fact, I'm a wait, what is grandpa millennial? 00:42:25 Speaker 1: That means I'm like at the oldest edge of it. So I'm forty two, which and I think the oldest millennials are like forty four, So geriatric millennials. I think what we're termed as those last few years of it, so in your gen z. So we'll talk about kind of what that generational divide looks like and how we just think differently about money. Right after this, I we're back still talking with Jack. Raine's talking about wealth and purpose, in your twenties and just what it looks like to live a good life, and part of that is getting your finances in words, But my goodness, it's obviously so much more, so much more than that. I want to talk about just kind of generational differences for a second, Jack, Like, can you give me a peak behind a degenerational divide of how we think about money and freedom? Like what has changed on average in your opinion, how differently does gen Z like think about money and investing and life experiences compared to their parents and then compared to like millennials who are kind of somewhere in the middle. 00:43:27 Speaker 3: So I think, I think one of the big chiefs, and I actually think like I'm very much in the camp of COVID was such a just like generational divide and a lot of stuff. I'm like the either ninety six, nineteen ninety six or nineteen ninety seven, it was coutar of the first year of the gen Z. I was born in ninety seven, so I'm like, I'm an elder gen Z and we're all coming up. I'm like late, Like the eldest gen Z is like twenty nine ish. That's all what I am. I graduated college December twenty nineteen. COVID heads Like, right then, I'm in an office for a week and I'm fully remote because of COVID, and the world just goes crazy blah blah blah. So my enthire, like cohort of like peers, grew up in a world where work remote is like while not like fully remote isn't necessarily a thing for everybody, remote is a much more normalized thing. 00:44:16 Speaker 2: Job hopping is more normalized. 00:44:18 Speaker 3: Like I I honestly think the biggest difference is optionality is valued a much more of a premium for younger people than it used to be, where you won't to be able to like leave this job, leave that job quickly. 00:44:29 Speaker 2: It's not even just job stuff, Like. 00:44:31 Speaker 3: I think that, Like, like people talk about the total fertility rate going down, it's because like the simple cause is less people are getting married and they're getting married later. 00:44:39 Speaker 2: And that's a little bit this optionality thing too, Like. 00:44:41 Speaker 3: There's younger people just prioritize optionality more than older people. 00:44:48 Speaker 2: Whether that's good or there's like good. 00:44:50 Speaker 1: And bad parts pros and constantly. 00:44:53 Speaker 3: It's like on one hand, like everybody's a little bit more individualistic and that can be good. But on the other hand, like it's the whole value of optionality is like figure the figure out what's worth doubling down on and then doing that. So like I think it's fine and that people might have more autonomy and agency and making those decisions. But if like, on one hand, going all after like going all in on fire can be bad because you're mistaken the means with the end. People can do that with optionality too, Like New York is the biggest optionality city on the planet, so I see it firsthand. I'm somewhat of either indulgent or victim of it, depending on how you look at it. 00:45:28 Speaker 2: But that's I mean, I. 00:45:29 Speaker 3: Think that's kind of the biggest thing is like people will like hop from Like younger people are more inclined to hop from thing to thing quicker across like all aspects of life. 00:45:39 Speaker 1: What's lost in that in your opinion. 00:45:42 Speaker 2: Like roots and community. It's like if you know, like if. 00:45:47 Speaker 3: You delay getting married, or delay buying a home, or delay like sticking with a certain whether it's the same company or just a certain like career track, you just like you miss out on compounding. It's the same thing, is like just spending all your money versus putting it in the market. It compounds over time, and it might not be obvious for five years, but twenty years later you have something very cool. Like relationships are like that, whether it's a romantic, personal, professional, whatever. And I think, on one hand, it's a very bad mistake to like commit to the wrong thing too early, where you have like negative compounding is a thing too right, Like you know, whether you like live in a place you hate, double down on a career path, it seems like a dead end. Like I think a lot of people probably like marrying the high school or college girlfriend a boyfriend just from almost like a we've been together long enough and this is fine. But the flip side is if you just keep cutting cord on things before they start to stick, you just never hit that like level two and level three version of the thing. 00:46:45 Speaker 1: So which again, going back to that cross country thing, I've got. My girls are on the team, and they were like, Dad, don't make me run. This is terrible. I hate this, and then like like running for a couple of weeks and then after the first practice they were like, hey, this is kind of fun. I was like, yeah, you know, like you think there's there's a lot of truth that you got of all got to get over a hump to see whether or not you like something. And if you're if you're leaning to into the optionality, you're missing out on a chance to see if you like something. 00:47:09 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:47:10 Speaker 1: There's also there seems to be like a generational divide between how we think about the nine to five existence. And there have even been those like videos that have been widely mocked of. You know, let's say a young girl saying like, man, I don't have any time to do anything because I commute an hour, I commute an hour home, and I work eight hours. I can barely like put food on the table sort of thing, and and some of that's like ridiculous, But but like I don't know, how do how does what's the generational difference in how we think about kind of work and and even just like putting in an eight. 00:47:39 Speaker 3: Hour work, I mean, I think social media has just been like a total like desire. It's just like a cancer to like people's expectations of life, and that the the the. 00:47:49 Speaker 2: Truth of the matter is, there's actually never been a better time. 00:47:51 Speaker 3: To be alive for me, Just like you can argue that, oh no, like stuff's expensive, whatever the amount of just like human surplus or consumer surplus you get out of, like we have cheap cell phones, cheap internet, air conditioning, blah blah blah. The normal base case of being alive now versus any point in history is very good. 00:48:11 Speaker 2: But the issue is. 00:48:13 Speaker 3: Like pre Internet, especially pre social media, you didn't really have that many people you were comparing your current existence to, so you were kind of compighaninst like people in your office, your hometown, your college, whatever, Versus now you can compighainst anybody, and everybody knows somebody who like they joined the. 00:48:29 Speaker 2: Right startup, or they bought the right stock, or. 00:48:32 Speaker 3: Like, everybody knows someone who, whether they got lucky or were skilled, is better off than them financially. And I think that that's actually the underlying issue is everybody, like everybody's like aperture of comparison is so broad and deep now that you feel like you're like, like there's people making hundreds of thousands of dollars feeling like they're totally falling behind because they're compying it somebody making three times as much as them, And it's like I think that's when to people like I feel like I'm trying to do all the right things and like I'm not getting what I want. It's, well, the thing that you're viewing is your base case of like what you should be getting out of life is actually like such a far right tail. 00:49:13 Speaker 2: But like we're all just kind of normalizing this thing. 00:49:16 Speaker 3: So I actually think it's like I think there's this like underlying anxiety that stems from people's like like internal comparison groups are just so far removed from reality. Like if you look at the like median household income and then like people are comparing to that whatever it is, like sixty thousand dollars fun meeting household income fifty thousand, something like that, but everybody's copying it something way higher than that. And the other thing is like. 00:49:41 Speaker 1: And no matter what you're into, someone's doing it better than than you are, right, Like the home Steading family even you follow on Instagram, Well, their chicken coop is like super sweet and they've got fifty chickens running around and that's what I'm into, But like, man, they're doing it better than I am. And look at me over here, just like schlipping it with my six chickens and my tiny coop in my backy. 00:49:57 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:49:57 Speaker 1: You just anything you can compare yourself to, you're gonna find you're disappointed because someone's doing it better. 00:50:02 Speaker 2: Yep, yep, yep. 00:50:05 Speaker 1: At the end of the book, you say, am I having fun? Is the most important question to ask? Having like fun is a nuanced term, So I guess, like dig in on that for me a little bit, like am I having fun? Why is that the most important question to ask? And like what can we learn when we ask that question? 00:50:18 Speaker 3: So I think that like the fun, like anything else in life, is very stage specific, and like what I found is to be fun at twenty two, or like especially twenty one in college is like much everyone I find fun at twenty nine. I think the like experience of like having fun or getting like a sense of like enjoyment and actual joy out of like the thing you're doing with your life is a really good barometer. 00:50:39 Speaker 2: For if you're doing the right things. 00:50:41 Speaker 3: For example, the college version or like fresh out of school is probably much more thrill seeking than it is ten years later versus like, I'm much more motivated by like entrepreneurial endeavors and like interesting business and career opportunities now than like six seven years ago. And that's like I think I'm prioritizing because like making more money matters to me more now than it did back then, right, And like like having cool opportunities pop up for me is like that's like like an invigorating experience versus when I was an undergrad it was like, let's go to the bar and like I want to get like six beers and my like fraternity brothers or whatever. 00:51:20 Speaker 2: And that was awesome. 00:51:20 Speaker 3: And it's like I still like going out with my friends now, but you're not optimizing for that thing. 00:51:26 Speaker 2: Is like this is the thing that matters in the stage of life. And I think. 00:51:31 Speaker 3: The way that I've experienced it is like if you chase the thing that like used to be fun and find yourself getting more anxious or unsettled going after that thing now, it's a very good sign that like the thing you should be going after shifts where you just feel this like like when I say fun, it's almost this internal peace or alignment where like your goals and your actions and your desires are all very aligned, where you just feel unsettled if you're going after the wrong stuff and you feel like. 00:51:55 Speaker 2: You're having like a good time. 00:51:56 Speaker 3: Or like when I played football in college, a lot of it sucked, but I had a very like rewarding sense of exhaustion at the end of the day, or like at the end of the season because it was like fun. 00:52:07 Speaker 2: It was hard work, but it was fun work and it was the right work. Right. So I think that like we all. 00:52:13 Speaker 3: Have this like almost like under the surface, subconscious like right wrong sense of fun that should like I really do think that it's like having fun is a good north star for whether or not you're doing the things you should be doing at whatever stage of life you're in. 00:52:26 Speaker 1: There you go have fun. I like it fun. And you know what, we live in a in a culture sometimes where fun is looked down upon. Man, I think fun is like fun is where it's at, Like we should be having fun. Are you having fun? Is a great way to kind of end. 00:52:38 Speaker 2: Life's too short to not be having fun? 00:52:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I'm with you, dude. Love the book Where Where Can How the Money? Listeners find out more and purchase the book. 00:52:46 Speaker 3: Listen go free order your copy. It's called Young Money. A Field goide to wealth and Purpose in your twenties. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you buy books. If you like hearing me talk on a podcast. I am recording the audiobook too, so that will be available upon release. But yeah, it's Young Money Jack Ranes. Look it up anywhere you can buy books. Outside of that, you can follow me on Twitter. You can follow me on substack also Young Money by Jack Rains very easy to remember. 00:53:12 Speaker 2: LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm on basically every social media platform, but go well. 00:53:17 Speaker 1: Linked to the substack too, man, Like you've I've been been following your stuff since you've really launched the blog back in I don't know if they. 00:53:24 Speaker 2: Did, you're like day one. 00:53:26 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like twenty twenty one. So and that's again you talk about meeting interesting people through internet ventures, like that's that's how we That's how we met too. So appreciate your work, man, and thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me all right, man, what a good catchup combo with with Jack Reines and hey man, yeah, his his blog on substack. Young Money has been one of those I think guiding lights for a lot of people in their twenties when it comes to handling handling their finances and what does it look like to live intentionally care about your money, but also like live a life right. And that is why kind of when Jack talks about if you buy too heavily into the Fire movement, it's almost like some sort of mental disease, I think, is what he said. And I think there's a reality of that. Man, there's something that just knee jerk was so I was so averse to when it came to the Fire movement, and there's a lot of there's been a lot of pivots in the space, and there's been a lot of people trying to make it sound more palatable and approachable and less extreme. Great well done, I'm glad that the movement has developed, but it's also like that sort of financial independence at any cost is is a turn off to a lot of people. And it also I think it tries to make it seem like these are dueling purposes that like enjoying those decades that matter that you know, your twenties and early thirties and actually being able to have financial freedom, those are not at odds. And I think that's one of the things that Jack is saying in this book and in this conversation. And one of the things that to me, the big takeaway here is that it's a legitimate skill to lead into discomfort. He said, don't be impulsive, be intentional, And I think intentional discomfort for the sake of experimenting and trying new things and seeing what you like and realizing through that, like in the network that you're making what it is you ultimately want to do well, you don't. You don't get there right without taking some of those risks. And it's easier to take some of those risks in your twenties. And the book that Jack just wrote would not have happened had he not tried to start a blog. And guess what, the travel blog. I don't know how well that's doing. I don't even know if he's still doing it anymore. But the fact that he just wrote a bunch and met a lot of writers, met a lot of other people in the personal finance community led to the fact that he just got paid to write a book, which is cool, right, and he's doing other stuff too, But like this is I love how we said to be aware of the trade offs you're making, be wide open, have your eyes open about what it means to give up maybe a little bit of investing in your twenties for more flexibility and know that you have to You're going to have to increase your contributions in your early to mid thirties or something like that. But yeah, life is and this is not a one size fits all prescription from Jack or from me here either. Everybody what makes a fulfilling life? Like you get determined that for yourself. Part of what will lead to I think more happiness is not being stressed, not being freaked out about money and knowing how to handle it, whether your savings rate is eight percent or twenty percent at the age of twenty two, right or twenty four. But I think his book is at least kind of offer some helpful advice in wisdom from someone who has now reaching the end of their twenties. Hey, did I do it right? How do you think about money, living life while simultaneously caring about personal finance at the same time. So recommend his book. We'll link to it in the show notes that'll be up on the website at Howtomonday dot com. We'll see you back here on Friday with a fresh Friday flight. HTM is back in the saddle guys. As always, thank you for listening, thank you for your time and attention. Until next time, Best friend out,