Andre Nader: What and How Much is Enough to FIRE

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Welcome to the New Retirement Podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Andre Nader, a 30something product growth manager at Meta and writer at Fang Fire on Substack. He's pursuing Fire, which is financial independence retirement early as a tech worker in the San Francisco Bay area. So we're going to discuss the question of what is enough and also look at and discuss kind of an interesting tool he built in his own work about relocation. So how do you factor in different variables when you're considering remote work or changing location to lower your costs? And then after that we'll take some listener questions. So with that, Andrej, welcome to our show. It's great to have you join us.

Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to chatting about this. My favorite topic.

Andrej came to us from our community. That's how we met and it was interesting. I think when we getting started for this, you talked about how you're kind of on fire in easy mode. And so I wanted to kind of get you to elaborate a little bit more on what you meant by that.

No, absolutely. I think it comes back to being in the Bay Area and then working at a company like Meta, especially for the last eight years. The perspective that I'm bringing within that lens, it just feels very different than the traditional financial independence lens that comes across. Oftentimes the financial independence community, it's very focused on frugality and cutting expenses. But when you're in this situation where you're in one of the highest cost of living areas, having that scarcity mindset is definitely valuable, but it's not the thing that really accelerates your path to financial dependence. The savings piece is one part of it, but the income piece quickly dwarfs anything that you can really do to change your trajectory on that path to financial independence. Finding those situations and those solutions of how can I increase my income over my career will very quickly just eclipse how do I do a side hustle? How do I do these things? That side hustle piece is really valuable when the amount of money that you have coming in from your normal day job isn't enough to really snowball you into having enough savings. But when you're in a situation like I found myself in, where I'm working at Facebook and now Meta and having my wife too working at Uber, so two tech companies in the Bay Area with healthy salaries, it didn't make sense to think of how Can I come up with new $100 ways on the side? Or how do I cut down my grocery bill? What really ended up moving the needle is how do I make the best use of the income that I currently have coming in? And then how do I find ways to minimize the number of big mistakes? Because what ends up happening is all these micro optimizations end up not being as important as just minimizing the number of really big foundational challenges that you can run into. So those are going to be the big recurring costs of buying brand new Teslas and letting your lifestyle quickly inflate. And that's one of the things that I've really seen a lot with peers is as you're getting into the tech industry or you're advancing in your career, it's very, very easy to want to keep up with the Joneses. The new Model S plaid edition looks awesome. And once you get to the point in your career that you can afford that and you're seeing your peers in the parking lot of Meta, oftentimes looking like a Tesla dealership, there's that natural tendency of wanting to do that same thing for yourself. And what I found is minimizing those bigger expenses, like not needing that new Tesla and even going without a car for seven of the last eight years, only recently picked up a car because San Francisco has the decent public transportation. And then a lot of the tech communities have their own private shuttles taking us up and down the peninsula. So the need for a car wasn't there. So that's kind of been my high level view of easy mode. It's not about everything is stacked in favor of being able to do financial independence if you want to, within reason. It's just around like minimizing big errors, like self, self errors, unforced errors. If you're wanting to use the baseball terms. Um, and I was, when I was chatting with you before, I was like, it's starting on like third base and you only have one out. So you can make it, make it easy. You can, you can just have a not screw it up, don't screw it up kind of thing. That's kind of like in that situation, it's just like a don't screw it up mentality as opposed to needing to really fight tooth and nail. Cause I feel for, I think it's much harder for fire, specifically when you're making that median salary in the US where the expenses piece is important. Finding ways to cut down and finding ways to really just optimize every little piece both on the how do I get more income? How do I come up with side hustles side of it, as well as how do I get my expenses down to kind of maximize. That's like that. Like I give people a tremendous amount of credit that are able to do that, but I've used my side. And coming in from the tech side, like it's not as hard. Like I just have to. We just have to admit that it's easier for better or worse. And I think that it's just like understanding that privilege and then making sure that we're taking advantage of it and not letting it go to waste.

For sure. Yeah. I think that tech workers have this single point of leverage around their human capital that definitely you can make a lot more money if you choose the right company or the right places to work in or the right areas to work in the right kind of careers. So you mentioned big mistakes. So one of them is not buying super expensive cars and keeping up the Joneses. Any other kind of things that you're watching out for as kind of a person with a young family and thinking about your long term horizon? What are you watching out for?

Yeah, no, definitely. I think the like I moved to the Bay Area with my wife and like understanding that was one of the, like what is that? What is the path of moving from. Move from Austin, Texas. So everyone is going in the opposite direction. Moving from San Francisco to Austin. Now we were going in the Austin to San Francisco route. So it was one maximizing the career value that I have over not just thinking about it in the short term, but what sets me up to be in the best position five years from now, that kind of being one of the big ones. And not optimizing for the short term. Because if I was optimizing for the short term, I think in many cases I would have made different career decisions. But if I was always asking myself what in five years puts me in the best position to reach my goals, financial and otherwise, I was fortunate where both of those laddered up into each other really well. That was one of them. The other one was, honestly, I'm only half of my household. So marrying someone that has very similar financial views, or at least not polar opposite views, has been one of the biggest things for me that has really accelerated my family's own path to fire. Having a partner who is on board with this view and this mindset and willing to save and invest in the long term goes a long way. And moving to San Francisco, being able to have a one bedroom apartment, living that dink lifestyle. So dual income, no kids for the vast amount of time that we've been in San Francisco. Economies of scale of two tech workers in one bedroom makes you just quickly be able to save very quick as opposed to any other situation.

Starting off, yeah, 100%. And did you. This is actually one of the questions from our community was did you have that kind of understanding about shared values around financial independence at the beginning of your relationship or is that something that emerged?

Yeah, no, really good question. I've always been a frugal person. Just having that natural. Early on, people would describe me as cheap. I don't think I'm allowed to. I wouldn't say cheap anymore. But always kind of that understanding every dollar and wanting to think through and optimize what am I getting for this amount of spend. I'm an optimizer at heart. My day job at Meta is like helping us understand user data to determine how we can be growing faster. And I love that rule because it's exactly how I approach everything in my own life. It's like, this is the income that I have coming in. How do I optimize this to get as much value overall and then kind of like taking it back to relationships? I don't view it as in purely transactional sense of the word, but. But I do think this natural frugality was one where I set the expectations in the beginning just through my own spending habits and early on with my wife. I've been thinking about what are the stages in a relationship for getting on a path for financial independence. And it's been very interesting in the beginning there's that natural courtship period. Um, and I definitely paid for the first few meals, but I think just out of like that natural, like, mostly because like I asked and I felt it was more of like a. The person asking the other person out is the one on the hook for, for dinner. Um, but then over time we, we kind of quickly established this rhythm of like, we're both college students. We met in, in college at the University of Texas. Um, and so we both didn't really have a like job as maybe summer internships. Um, so we're not, we're both in very similar situations to start with. So I think that was also helping and grounding. Um, so we were alternating who would pick up the tab. Just kind of this like back and forth. I get this dinner, you get the next dinner. Um, and that can. That kind of established the regular cadence of kind of like equality on all fronts, including kind of the, the Financial side, it's not one versus the other. It's like a. Like we're both coming at this equally or both have skin in the game, both financially as well as in reality. And then like, that's kind of like that first stage. The second stage is like when we moved in together. Then all of a sudden it becomes very much more real and it's much more. In my case, I ended up making it a little bit more formal. I had a Google form where all shared expenses would be submitted in mostly just from a sense of like, um, wanting to be fair and wanting to like that being kind of like a core tenant in how I approach finances. So it was like kind of the. If she put up with filling out forms and things like that, there should be like, no surprises kind of going in, like dealing with spreadsheets and things like that. And then kind of like over time, it just kind of like evolved from there. There was never like, it was just kind of the naturally always setting expectations and talking about it. And we're fortunate to be coming from. Been in similar situations our entire careers of graduating around similar times and both working in tech and both kind of advancing in our careers in equal amounts. And that's been one of the key things that. I think that's how that evolved.

Got it. So when you, you know, see the shared values, you've always been frugal, you've always been an optimizer. I totally relate to that, by the way. I was trying to optimize things and I. Lots of people in our company are thinking that way too. But, you know, how did you get into. How did you discover fire? Like, when did you get into it? And did. Did that really change things? Did it kind of like kind of snap it into focus? Or you were like, I'm already doing this stuff.

And yeah, no, I think the. So like many people, the like Mr. Money Mustache was kind of like my gateway into fire. So for people that don't know, Mrmoneymustache.com, he's just one of the big voices in the financial independence community and really just laid a lot of foundational content out there before. There was little pockets of communities within different segments, but never one as crisp, at least in my mind, as Hati had done so early on within. I think I found him whether it was like end of college or early on in my career. So I had the benefit of from the beginning, which I think is also one of the things I had. All of my working life, I had been thinking about FIRE and having that as one of the things. And I had always been someone who tracks my finances. I've always been one who has been understanding my spending. I had a mint account, a Mint.com account from the very beginning, prior to being purchased intuit very, very early on. And I think what FIRE really helped me have was setting more objective goals and having a target before. It was always, I'm tracking my finances because that's interesting, but I didn't have really a goal or an objective in mind. I think FIRE helped add some frameworks and just end stage goals that I could then work towards. And I found that kind of really helpful of having I'm very much a goal oriented person and being able to compute and figure out numbers and like, okay, this is like if I get to this amount then I can never have to work again or if I get to this amount then I don't have to save any more and I'll be set for retirement at this amount. So I think that's when I discovered FIRE and how that evolved my thinking from just tracking my expenses and understanding and being frugal, if you will, to having an objective where this frugality will ladder up into this longer term goal. Because retirement when you're 20 and graduating from college is like, it feels like this thing that's an eternity away and that it's not something that you need to think about until later on. And this kind of helped ladder it up. No, you don't need to wait until later on. You're understanding the compounding interest and how important that is to everything and everything that you could do early on very quickly laddering that up and just having those frameworks in place just kind of change the saw the light, if you will, and just kind of exposed how quickly and how achievable these things can be if you start right and don't make big mistakes. I think the one piece that I didn't hit on as much when I was talking about the mistake piece, and this is kind of the optimization side of it, low fee index funds. At the same time I discovered fire, I also discovered the Boggleheads group, which is all the vanguard loyalists where they were some of the first people that were very big into low cost index funds and just starting out that foundation early on, combining with the fire, which I think now they're bleeding into each other really effectively. But early on they were separate communities and found each other over time I think that helped establish my thinking and framing.

I'm going to go to the Bogleheads Conference for the first time live this year. Hard to get into, like, you got to kind of jump on it, like getting a ticket. So we'll see. But that the demographics are totally different. I've always thought Bogleheads was amazing because there's so much incredible content and knowledge in there, but it's kind of kind of buried in there, and you have to kind of know how to access it. And I think the big unlock for them is getting that content out into the hands, especially of younger people. And that's what Mr. Money Mustache did a lot of. Yeah, no, it's kind of like when you're describing this, I was like, it's kind of like winning the lottery. So I think in that the knowledge is like winning lottery. So what we see in our community is a lot of folks kind of come to it and they're like, okay, this is traditional retirement. People like, I have to figure this out. Then they get serious about it, and then they're like, I need to save a lot of money and I need to invest better and I need to really understand this. But they're kind of doing it without the fact the biggest lever, which is time. And so they're optimizing where they can, starting at 50 or something, versus if you figure this out when you're 20 and you're like, I'm going to take and save money for 15 years and invest it efficiently, at the end of the 15 years, you could be financially independent or you could be very close to it, and then you might have to work, which is kind of incredible. Right? Think about who doesn't have to work. Basically, people that win the lottery or they cash out of some IPO or whatever, they inherit a ton of money. But for most people, they figure it out late and they get to it. But it's, you know, they've kind of missed out on that, you know, 20, 30 year working horizon. If they're 50, you know, they've missed out on that. 20 years of like making really good choices. You know, if you've been saving and investing, that's good because a lot of people don't even do that, unfortunately. Okay, great. I want to ask a couple more questions and then move on to kind of what is enough. But, you know, just I'm curious about your take on, you know, we, you know, FHIR and the tech community kind of overlap. Like, you mentioned that there were something like 8,000 people in a FHIR group inside of Meta, and that's out of, I think, 60,000 employees. So that's like 15, 12, 15% of the population. I mean, that's not insignificant. Is it like a big thing?

Yeah. I think the concept of like early retirement is like super appealing to everyone. I think within the tech community there's often like this like, strong sense of wanting to like, work really hard and like being able to enjoy what, like the fruits of your labor and like the. You see around you like this. A lot of us having peers and like newly IPO'd companies and hitting like large amounts of money relatively quickly. And then there's always this question of what do I do with that? And oftentimes the same thing happens with people working at companies like Meta, where there's a lot of new grads, a big portion of the company is new to working at a company like Meta, where they're finally earning large incomes for the first time in their lives and then they're starting to, for the first time have surplus and figure out what to do. And it kind of starts with looking at basic personal finances, but it quickly balloons into people pointing into, oh, if you want to take this, once you've nailed down the basics, what do I do now? I've now met the match of my 401, or I've now maxed out my 401, what next? I have more left. What do I do next? And it has more people in that position where they can keep asking that question, like, what do I do now? Like, what do I do next? So I've been really impressed of having a lot of people really interested because I think they're in the position for the first time in their life to seriously consider it and think through this as a potential path as well as not wanting to waste the opportunities that they have. I think that's kind of been the big things. But I was excited to come in and see the fire community growing right now, leading the internal group. So within Facebook, we use an internal version of Facebook called Workplace. I think it's available now externally. We have a group that he said like 9,000 at this point, all around FHIR just kind of like sharing different strategies of like what are the Facebook or Meta specific things that we can do for fhir? And like tailoring those very specific, like, this is exactly what our 401k has. This is exactly what our after tax backdoor Roth has. And have it so fine tuned and having like 9,000 people with very similar situations being able to give advice to each other, just that kind of very specific advice has been really, really valuable to kind of like just learn from. Just kind of that community just been really important.

Yeah, no, I mean that's one of the big things for us. And you know, it was our Facebook community and we have over 10,000 people in it now. And yeah, it's more traditional retirement folks, but when we think about this, it's kind of. Traditionally financial advice has been a one to one experience where, hey, you've got this wealth advisor and they're the expert and hopefully they're fiduciary, but not always. And they talk to you one on one. And that only works for wealthy people because there's just not enough advisors. So we think kind of one to many like classes or many to many the community, like how do we learn together? How do we learn faster? I saw this to great effect. Bogleheads mushroom running meshes like forums, but also choose a fi which has a huge active community about this, all kinds of people. I think that's actually where you're part of the. I think there's a choose a Fi Stanford group. Right.

The Bay Area ChooseFi group I think is where I had first found about new retirement where um, people are finally starting to ask questions around like, okay, like I think I've reached fire, like, what do I do now? How do I think about like actually implementing withdrawal strategies and like, how do I think about like Roth rollovers? And someone like, oh, you should just check out new retirement. Here's their group. Like, this solves that problem. And I was like, wait a second, let me, let me check this out. So that was kind of my gateway, like through the ChooseFi group was my gateway into the new retirement community on Facebook and then the website and app and everything kind of came from there.

Does Meta worry that they have a big chunk of their population actively thinking about how to retire early? And I know that you individually are not that far away from doing whatever you want to do. Not that we can talk about the general problem, but I mean this is a big thing for companies, this is a big thing for society where I know that a lot of the boomers retired, suddenly our economy has a big problem and then that can get at the micro scale for an individual company. Hey, if 15% of the workforce can actually be done way earlier than they thought, how does that affect their, affect their thinking and does it change the dynamics in there at all?

Yeah, I think they probably do think about it a lot and I think it's one where they've had to think about it for a long time. Because if you think about the so I've been there eight years. So this is after the ipo, but they've already gone through this initial surge of early employees that were at Facebook beyond 10 years plus they went through the IPO. The Facebook stock has increased significantly from the IPO moment and then the later stages of raising capital and IPOing where they had this influx of employees with a lot of disposable income all of a sudden and the ability to be able to retire any moment. And I think that plays into a big role into needing to think about why are employees here in the first place and then needing to make sure that people are excited about working there. Because the financial piece isn't the only reason that they're there. Especially people that have been here 10 plus years. They're not here only because of the money. They're getting personal fulfillment from the work that they're doing and they're able to take that lens and remove the financial aspect of it. There's people that really, deeply, deeply believe in the mission of the company and connecting the world and really fostering the open communities and relationships and just taking that to heart and that being more important, like that mission aspect of it. The financial piece is there. It's definitely one of the compelling reasons why there's a lot of people working here. But that mission being equally as important, especially the further along you are in your career.

Yeah, I can see that becoming a much bigger consideration for lots of companies as hopefully the world's wealth increases and more people get to financial independence. But yeah, this is the benefit.

Yeah. And the benefit too is also we can also push on our own benefits teams because we're plugged in on like, hey, I want to retire early. I see my peers at Google have access to this after tax mega backdoor, like, why don't we have that? Or like Google and Netflix has these funds, like, why don't we have that? And being able to apply that pressure. And the benefits team at Meta has been great around listening to our input and viewing this as a way of retaining employees that are interested in this and making sure that, hey, this is how more and more people at these companies are evaluating the packages across companies and wanting to make sure that we're not missing the boat here and needing to be as competitive as possible on that front as well. So that's one of the ways where I think the feedback loop works in like reinforcing that. Like, hey, we care about this retirement piece. Yes, we're young on average within these tech communities, but wanting to we are thinking about it. We're not willing to accept just.

Only.

The salary without the 401s and without the benefits.

Right. Well, and I think you're showing up being financially literate. So previous generations, people didn't know what, you know, hey, are there. They weren't aware of the fees on their 401ks and like what that load could be. And when your people are like taking a look at stuff if in some companies, if you, you know, you look at the, the fund lineup, you'll be like, oh look, they're charging, you know, 1 2% loads or something like that. It's like, oh, it's crazy. That's insane. But if, if no one knows to ask the questions, then they're just getting kind of raked over the coals. So to the community, look at your 401k and like understand it and what the fees are and ask questions and you know, the people have the power and the benefits.

People are incentivized for that too. Their job is to hopefully help the employees understand, get the most value out of it and pushing on them like, hey, why don't we have any of these lower cost options, like at least having one index fund or one cheap retirement target date fund.

Yeah, 100%. All right, so let's move on to kind of what is enough. So one of the things you wrote about this recently in your blog and we'll link to your substack blog, but I wanted to know if you could expand on that topic. And also you said you're pursuing avocado fire. So what that is.

Yeah, the concept of enough, it's a super interesting one. So Jack Bogle, we were talking about Bogleheads. So he's the founder of Vanguard for those that aren't familiar. And he wrote his book on it was titled Enough. And he also told the story between that Kurt Vonnegut was saying around the author of Catch 22 he was talking about, they were at a extravagant party where it was just extreme wealth and luxury all over the place. And Kurt Vonnegut asked his friend, how do you think about this person in one single day made more money than you have in your entire lifetime of publishing your book. How does that make you feel? And the reply was, I have something that he'll never have. I have enough. And that just that concept and the mental way of thinking just, I don't know, I really resonated with that. I'm someone who. One of the things for me growing up was something I grew up in a household that had extreme wealth changes where I came into. So I came from a family that had a high income earner, but then also made bad financial decisions and went through bankruptcies and stuff like that. So I've had to experience very early on those extremes there and kind of the stability aspect of it. So always wanting and pushing to have more and more and more, but then taking on more risks in order to achieve that, and then feeling the lack of stability as a result. So for me, I was like, okay, that wasn't fun. As a kid growing up, I never want to have to feel these massive fluctuations in wealth or have my family need to go through that. So thinking about financial stability really became one of the core tenets of how I was approaching fire. And one of the reasons even why fire was so compelling. Even if you just do the financial independence piece of it and not necessarily the retirement early piece, having that stability and optionality was one of the things that really drew me in. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do that retire early part, but I knew I wanted that stability, and that always gave me a goalpost to focus on. And then that plays into this concept of enough. What is. What does it mean to have financial stability? And to me, it ended up being like, how much do I need to have all of my needs taken care of, where I no longer need? And the need being the key piece, need to have any more income in order to live the life that I want? And then everything else, then it comes to the question of, do I need more? Why do I need more? Is it. Why am I continuing to do this? Am I getting something else out of it outside of the financial piece that's rewarding to me, and that's kind of thinking through what is enough? And knowing the answer to that was really helpful. And thinking through what that meant was really helpful in setting goals. It's not just putting this arbitrary, throwing a giant number out there. It's like, okay, what do I actually need in order to live the life that I want?

Right. To put a point on that, I mean, I was reading it and you talked about, I want to get to a certain level of income. I also want to factor in no mortgage, and I want to factor in paying for college. I think those were, like, some of the three big things that you were trying to cover. Anything else or any more detail on kind of how you broke that down?

Yeah. So for me, like, the enough. I always come back to my trustee spreadsheets and the different tools that I use in order to do that. So in the traditional fire community it's really popular using the 4% rule, which is basically for those that don't know, being able to take 4% of your investable net worth and every year withdraw that amount and then every year adjust that for inflation and that's how much you can live off of and you can reverse that. How much do you want to spend every year? Multiplying that by 25 will give you that number that backs up into that 4% rule. So for me, starting point on what enough was was how much am I spending, do I want to be spending on a yearly basis and then what is the calculation to get to that base number. So I'm much more conservative than the traditional 4% loyalists, particularly being in that early retirement side of things. Like with the 4% rule being tried and true and tested on 30 year timeframes and having high success rates on longer durations, but still having the five plus percent chances of failure and not wanting to fall in that failure case again because that stability aspect was always central into why I was wanting to do this. So I use a more conservative 3% withdrawal rate. So that was one of the first points of like what is enough? Like first is like I want to be able to spend this amount of money every year and multiplying that now times 33, that's kind of the rough math on getting the 3% withdrawal rate. And then it goes into what else would make me feel that stability. And that was kind of having a, a paid off house and the college funded for my now four year old daughter. I have the income, I have the house piece of it, and then I have the college portion covered. And everything else I think was that to me answered the question what is enough? If I have those things covered, that at least answers the question of that's enough for me. And like in, in detail into like the, the fine tuned like math behind each, each of the different points.

Right. No, it's great to hear also you know, about your story. I think that the family generational part of this definitely resonates. A lot of the folks that we talk to that do well, they definitely come from either less stability or a little bit less money. And then they're kind of like, you know, highly motivated to be frugal and thoughtful and safe. But I think the reverse is true. You know, if you come up with a lot of money and you don't have to think about it, which a lot of families in the Bay Area, they raise their kids, I mean that's what how it is. It's just like, you know, people are printing money and taking care of their kids and everything's taken care of. Da da, da. How do you do you think about that for your own kids and like how are you going to raise them and like having completely instill that sense of financial responsibility and frugality.

Yeah, no, definitely. And I think this is one that I think is super interesting topic because oftentimes within fire there's talking about, especially people in the Bay Area. It's like I'm going to retire and then I'm going to go to a super low cost of living area or go super rural in have a cabin in the woods type situation where my expenses are super low. And to me it was always around, wait a second, now I have this four year old. I want her to have the same opportunities that I had to put herself in the situation that I find myself in now where I have this ridiculous opportunity to be thinking about this at all. So I don't want to make decisions or sacrifices that would jeopardize her ability to do that in the future. So it's like that kind of factors into moving to a low cost of living country even, which is a popular retirement strategy or even fire strategy. Let me go to somewhere like Thailand where the cost of living is lower and me having only $50,000 a year, I can live a really good lifestyle in a lot of these different countries. But then now thinking into the generational aspect of it, will my daughter have the same opportunities that I had and needing to just layer that in much more intentionally. That's kind of how I've been approaching it. But it's also one too where if I actually pull the trigger and retire early, how do I communicate to. Or is the reality of what will she think if like what is dad doing all day? Or what are her parents doing all day? And I think that's a fascinating piece because you want to instill that same sense of, I don't know, I had the extreme wealth changes that kind of put this fire underneath me. How do I instill that same fire without needing that volatility at the same time? So I think it's that balancing act of being able to, I don't know, just help them see the purpose and find meaning in what they're working on and have that financial piece as a part of it, but not need it to be the only piece that they're focused on.

I mean, what's crazy is most people that achieve fire, well, one I think many of them keep working and they kind of keep piling up more money and they tend to maintain these habits. Not like you're going to crank it up and then at like 70, I'm now going to take my consumption to the moon and burn it all to the ground and then leave my daughter with nothing. I mean, maybe you give it all to charity, who knows? But if you are sustainable and then you pass that legacy onto your family, theoretically they could be independent from the get go or very early. And so that would create a different dynamic. I mean, I definitely, I have talked to some friends that have this situation. They're more traditional folks, but they're like, yeah, I don't tell my children what is potentially in their future because I think it will screw them up to know that they might not have to work at 30.

Yeah, no, it's a really interesting thing. So I naturally come from that kind of like that frugality view. And I'm always been kind of a very much a like optimizing from that lens. And sometimes that can be taken to that extreme where you're getting too cheap and too frugal and having all these aspects. One of the books that helped pivot my mindset here is one called Die with Zero. So this is the opposite aspect where the goal here is to die with $0 and make sure that you're spending the money that you have while you're living. And he had this concept of like really optimizing for life experiences and making sure instead of having a bucket list in the traditional sense, thinking through how do I maximize my enjoyment of different activities relative to my life. So I love skiing. I'm not going to be able to ski as much in my 50s and 60s, so I'm not going to be able to get as enjoyment. If I have unlimited time at 50 to ski, it's not going to be as enjoyable as if I had that in my 30s. And it brought this shift in mindset of when do I want to have experiences in my life and when do I want to do it. In terms of the generational aspect, one of the things that I found really interesting is on average people that do receive inheritances from their parents, oftentimes they're in their 60s or 70s already. They're already on the footsteps of their own retirement. It doesn't incrementally change their situation that much. And one of the things that they were pushing on with I was here. If the plan is to give money to that next generation, asking yourself when can this money be the most high leverage to change the situation that they're in. And it was pushing more towards, hey, when they're in that late 20s to 35 range, that will materially change. Can they now buy a house when they couldn't? Can they now make different career decisions with that flexibility? Can they have their student loans paid off and be able to enjoy the different things? So that kind of was really helpful just thinking about, like, okay, not just saving it up, building this big thing, and then when I'm gone, then it shifts over, but like, okay, how can I be more intentional throughout the life to maximize both my own personal enjoyment, but also the next generation's enjoyment? I thought that was a good counterbalance to the natural. Let me be frugal and let me accumulate. Let me get this number within my account to be as large as possible.

Right? Yeah, exactly. I think there's a lot to be said for that. You only live once nothing is promised, and you can work really hard, get financially independent and then kick off or get sick or whatever and get cancer.

Cancer next year. I don't have any. You can only control what you can. And there's so much outside of the. Outside of it.

Well, I think that maybe you should think about Bezos's regret minimization framework, right? He's like. He projects. Everything in the future is like, all right, if this plays out and I end up having 5 million bucks at 38, but I died at 39, would I be happy? Or maybe. I don't know.

It's a great way to think about it.

I wanted to kind of go to the relocation part of this thing. And this also ties into another question I had for you, which is, so you thought you built this cool tool to help you kind of think about, where could I move and have a good life and also, you know, solve against, I guess, high quality of life, you know, various different variables, but low cost of living and all that other stuff. I think this also ties into, like, once you are fi. Like, how do you see your life changing? Like, you know, what would you do and how would you spend your time, and what would, you know, be your purpose and stuff like that?

Talking about the relocation piece, like, I wanted to originally be that person who went to the Bay Area for three years, came back to Austin, and then complained about how cheap everything was. And I thought that I was like, okay, that's my plan. And I had a house back in Austin originally that I was just going to go back to. But what ended up happening when I was in the Bay Area is. I kept saying, I think I have three more years here. I think I have three more years. But it was never, I'm going to be here forever. It definitely evolved from, I don't want to necessarily go back to Austin, but there was still kind of this piece of the Bay Area. It's one of those places, it's so expensive, and there's so many different challenges that it has where thinking long term is always one of the more challenging aspects. So in my head, I never thought I would be one. I never thought I'd be here now, coming on eight years. But I still. I always say, like, okay, I have one more year, one to three more years left in the Bay Area. But I didn't have an answer of where do I go to next. Originally, it was going back to Austin. But I loved being in the Bay Area so much, it had me questioning, what are the chances that the best place for me long term is the place that I just happen to be in? Because I grew up in Texas and that was the college town I went to, and that was where my first job was. What tells me that that's where the most optimal place for me long term. And it started opening my eyes around like, okay, where else can I live, if not San Francisco, where would I spend my time? And it kind of went to that. It started from that fire lens, where after I reach my enough number within San Francisco, where will I go? Because my enough number. Having an enough number in San Francisco is very different than having an enough number everywhere else. The number would need to be much higher just because your base expenses and housing costs are way higher. So that was one of the pieces of it. I'm able to achieve fire much sooner if it's not in San Francisco. Or do I like San Francisco enough that I want to work five more years or 10 more years, depending on things. And that was the lens that I always had. So I started doing what I always do and coming up with different spreadsheets around, comparing different places. And it starts with the basic, here's the median housing cost in these states. Here's the average public school systems in the state. Thinking more in the future for my daughter and then going in at the city level and then layering in, what is the natural disaster risk? Is this going to flood? Are there tornadoes? Are there hurricanes? What is the political climate? All these different factors that I thought would be important to able to have a cost benefit for. And this was all originally from the lens of when I Retire, where will I live? But then Covid happened, and I think it completely changed the math on this, especially for many tech workers and even outside of tech, where people can now work remotely for the first time. So originally it was, where do I go to fire? But now it is, oh, I can work remotely from anywhere in the US Why do I need to wait till I'm fired to live in that area and get myself established? Then all of a sudden I had a lot more calls and it was kind of like, okay, what is the change in salary based on being in a different location? What is the tax obligation for being in this state versus another one? What are the property taxes? Because that's one of them. It's very easy on paper to be like, okay, Texas, Florida, Washington, all have no state income taxes, but they have very different approaches to how they do get money from you. And among the no state income tax states, Texas is very popular. But when you're actually doing the numbers, especially how housing is appreciated, they get you on the property taxes. So just having all of those different weights in place was really the forcing function behind this. And I originally made this for me personally, but then people started asking me more questions as I was talking about it and thinking through different things, and I ended up changing it and making it more applicable more broadly to more people and ended up creating this tool. And one of the pieces that I forgot to mention as being the central factor of what was one of the important elements was the weather. That was one of the things I loved about San Francisco so much was the lack of seasons and me trying to find what is the equivalent city that doesn't have extreme seasons. Where's that Goldilocks City that has San Francisco weather without the high cost of living? Um, and I found some articles on like, average number set on how he defined, and this is how many Pacific coast, um, and there's a huge monopoly on nice days in California. Um, especially as you're going into Southern California. Um, they just like, whatever methodology that, that it used, like, it's just like that is the ideal that, like San Diego weather, um, which lack of, lack of extremes, I think is kind of the, the thing that played really, really well into there. I mean, for me, like, I wanted to kind of the balance, like I was always indexing away from the cold. So I wasn't thinking at all about like, people that are going to New York or Chicago or all these like, very cold places. But being able to know, like, okay, how many days of freezing weather would I be able to put up with. Like, if I. If it's a handful that, okay, all of a sudden, like Nashville is now in the picture. If it's even less than, all of a sudden it's going further and further south or to the different coasts. And that was kind of the impetus of putting together the tool and then having more and more people be interested in it. And then all of a sudden the COVID piece, everyone all of a sudden being able to relocate. That kind of. I saw the, like, I don't know, more people were asking me about it. So I decided to more formally put it together in a more plug and play way to have more people get value out of it.

I could see integrating it into. I mean, we allow people to kind of run the numbers on move, relocating and stuff like that, but we're not kind of doing all this more qualitative stuff around nice days and factoring all that stuff in and letting people do that. That's interesting. Are you yourself thinking about working remotely now?

Yeah, actually today I just got the email that I'm fully approved to work remotely at Meta. My current plan is still staying in San Francisco, at least for the next year. It's always living one year at a time. And right now I think the current plan, again, my lease in San Francisco is up at the end of May, and being year to year, it's always within that. Once I send that lease, I know what I'm going to do, at least for the next year. So the plan still is in San Francisco, but then that also lines up really well with next year. My daughter will need to be starting elementary school and then where things, I think, start getting a little bit more real. Whereas a common, a common hard line. When people with young kids in San Francisco, that's the deciding line of what happens next. Do I go to the burbs or do I go somewhere else? Or do I play the lottery system that they have in San Francisco to determine which public school you go to? Which is always a fun game of optimization in a different way.

Yeah, and I've lived that journey. I mean, we were in San Francisco with kids and then opted to move to Mill Valley where we live now. And know, I mean, we got lucky in terms of buying a house here. But yeah, I think that the whole calculus of living in California is really largely based on whether you own a house and can you afford to continue doing that and did you get at the right time. But you know, it does. It's. There is a wealth creation engine through real estate in California that doesn't exist in other places. Whether that that will continue is to be determined. But historically that's been pretty true.

Absolutely. And for me, I think on the housing, housing is always one of the largest expenses that you could possibly have. And I think in most cases, if you are certain you're going to be in an area for seven plus years, the math for owning, even without the housing appreciation that we've seen over the past decade becomes just more favorable. Just building that equity is important. And being able to get the full value of the equity from just the amount of the small percent that you need to put down makes sense. I could never, with a lot of confidence say I'm going to be here seven years, five years out. I'm always saying two to three years. Three years, three years.

One thing that's interesting about you is that in your story is that I think when I think about what makes people successful, one is a high savings rate in terms of like how do you get to be financially. So you gotta have a high savings rate. And that's from the guy, Doug Norman, actually. I asked him this question on the podcast and he's like a kind of military fire person. And I was like, what's the single, you know, biggest thing is like high savings rate because it implies lots of things, right. Expense control and everything else, behavioral management and all that stuff. But then investing dollar cost averaging with low index funds. And I think the big, the third thing is the time, like having a long time horizon. So yeah, with everything else you have a long time horizon. Right. And all the investment stuff. But on the housing side, because you're not sure about what you want to do, it constrains your thinking to a shorter amount of time. So which might be ultimately, I mean, who knows if it's going to be good or bad.

Yeah. And honestly, if I didn't have a. Having a child, I think changes it too. So it's like the value in having the stability piece of being able to go to school with the same peer group, obviously the people with lots of different backgrounds, especially military families. I grew up in San Antonio, so I had a lot of friends with families in the military and they had that natural built in moving every couple of years, going from different bases or different cities. And I saw them thrive too in different ways. But having that core set of peers to grow up with, I think there's a lot of value in that and trying to get to a point where I can do that. That's what's that long term view And I think for many people too, it comes back to where do I have my family, where did I grow up? And for me, my family immigrated from Brazil. I was born in Brazil, my family's all from Brazil. I don't have a tremendous amount of extended family in the US So there's not this central home base that I think a lot of people have is like, oh, all of my family lives in X. And I think that's a natural anchor for a lot of people when they're thinking of where do I want to end up. I do have. My mom is now in St. Pete's Florida, which I just got back from visiting for my daughter's spring break. And that's a big poll of where your family is. That's another element within everyone's of calculus of where do I want to live long term, where is my current family living? And then recently my brother moved up to Marin actually, so just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. And that kind of changes the math. All of a sudden you have more family nearby. It changes the weights and distances of where people are 100%.

So you now can work remotely, but you're still like, ok, one more year and then we'll figure it out.

That's the plan. One more year and figuring it out. And I think one of the big factors is how much longer I want to work versus when I want to retire. It's one of the things I built into the relocation tool is how many years are you planning on earning an income in this state versus how many years are you planning on being retired in the state? Because that drastically changes the math. Because if there's a state with a high income tax rate while you're working, that will be at a detriment to you. But when you're retired, that no longer becomes an issue. And then the high property taxes in Texas all of a sudden become much more of a. It just hits you a lot harder. So, okay, if I want to work three years and then want to then stay there for 15 years and needing to do that. And it's really interesting once you do that, all of a sudden Colorado all of a sudden becomes a really favorable location because it hits that middle ground of taxes and property taxes and housing values where if you're earning, maybe there's higher taxes up front, but then over time it smooths down. But if you're planning on working for a longer period of time, it's tough to beat those no state income tax states like the Tennessees and stuff like that in my head, I really like a lot of the aspects of the in North Carolina, like the Raleigh, Durham area on paper, the Chapel Hill area on paper hits a lot of the boxes that I'm really interested in. But then if you're adding in working a longer period of time, all of a sudden what happens if I just go get to the other side of the border in Tennessee and then all of a sudden you're thinking of, do I care? You can actually be like, am I willing to spend $40,000 more per year to live in a Raleigh versus a Nashville? Do I care? You can get down to that level of detail and asking those trade off questions. Obviously that math is not perfect and there's so many intangibles for different cities and how do you actually weigh them against each other? But the financial piece is when you can calculate, you can think about that piece.

I'm sure a lot of our traditional retirement audience people are rolling their eyes. They're like, okay, so this person is in his early 30s and he's talking about retiring. Should I retire in the next few years when I'm like 35 years old or whatever age around there, Most people are like, I'm 55 or 60 and can I retire at 65? Is that even doable? It's just such a different mindset. But it's interesting. To your point about what's going to happen next, I would say the data is that people who retire, quote unquote, retire that are white collar workers, they find themselves doing something volunteer consulting startup back at the job. Within two and a half years on average, I would estimate you will end up doing something that probably involves making money.

That's the thing. I think it's super important, what are you retiring to? And I think that's one of the things within the subreddit, the financial independence subreddit. One of their key mantras is making sure that you're retiring to something and not away from something. Not running away from. I'm retiring because I hate my job or I hate working. And then you retire and now what? Now what are you going to spend your time doing? And I think that's an important element of it. And for me too. I don't have a firm, crisp answer of exactly what I'll be retiring to. What I found is when I've had periods of not needing to work, I'm still doing things. Now I'm even on my days off, often writing content on financial independence just because that's what interests me. I think I would have a very hard time just sitting around and playing video games all day and doing nothing. I would love some aspect of being able to do nothing for periods of time because I think that's novel. But I think it comes down to that existential question of what is the purpose of life? Why are we here? And it just removes that hard monetary aspect of I need to earn a living to have my basic necessities taken care of. Once that's gone, now what? Now what are you living for? I think that's an important piece. I think that they've even shown the people that live into their 90s and their brain health. It's like they're constantly learning, they're constantly working, they're constantly volunteering and doing different things and finding what those passions are and being able to spend more time on those. I think it's important. I think it's not doing nothing. I think that the ability to do nothing is one aspect of it. But I think it's going to be spending time doing things. Like you said, maybe it's consulting, maybe it's angel investing, maybe it's, I don't know, becoming a fishing guide on a river in North Carolina, who knows? I do find it hard to think that I would never earn another dollar spending time doing anything. Just people that put themselves in the position to retire early. It's hard to turn that off all of a sudden the like working hard and being in a competitive corporate world, competitive tech world. I don't think you can just stop. I think there's that natural built in the people that index towards that. There's something inside of us that I don't think many people can just fully turn it off.

Another question from Sherry, which is what is the single biggest factor that you attribute to your success in pursuing fire?

Yeah, I think one, starting early and then two, marrying someone that has similar point of view in terms of finances and I was lucky to also have similar earning power. Just being able to again, having two people working towards one goal is just kind of a game changer. Especially when you're able to just the economies of sharing that one bedroom in San Francisco just completely shifts things of. Just like you're able to save so much more so, so, so much sooner.

Yeah. Awesome. And you know, actually you mentioned your family a little bit. Do other people in your family like your brother and your, your, your parents, are they like pursuing, are they? Well, you told me a little about your parents story, so maybe not. But like, you know, does your brother think similar ways you Do.

Yeah, I think the. I think I'm the only one in the family that that is fully thought in that sense. I've tried rubbing off on them and giving them things. I don't think anyone, they give me the same questions that other people would give. So what are you going to do? I don't believe that you're actually going to retire. You're just going to keep working. I think that you're just going to have, you're going to keep saying it and keep talking about it, but not actually pull the trigger. I think it's interesting too, that view. We all have very similar upbringings, but we ended up in different situations, all with lots of flexibility and good paying jobs. But being able to have that, what we're working towards and what those outcomes are different. I think they also have. I have one child and then he has three and then my sister has two. It kind of does change the. I think children just change everything. I think of all the planning pieces of it hands up being like a big factor. And early on I hadn't fully appreciated that because I was dual income without any kids for so long. That hadn't been a big element. And I think having a child changed a lot of it and added those, okay, I want 18 years of stability. At some period of time, being able to have that school or having that college cost taken care of, it kind of reframed things a lot more than when I originally started.

Do you think personally, I mean, since you're a high income earner, so you reach fire and you don't need to work, but if every year costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars or something like that, that opportunity cost of making that money, does that affect your thinking at all?

It's definitely a trap that I see a lot of people fall into. And people call it the one more year syndrome, where it's always like, oh, I just do one more year. Because what happens when you're working in these jobs, every year you get a refresher of equity and oftentimes that equity vests over four years. So every year you get another pool of that equity that vests over four years. So it's always like, okay, I'm next year at my vest date. That's what I'm doing. Oh, but now I have this new pool or maybe you get a promotion and it's like, okay, now the numbers are even higher and the opportunity cost of leaving is there. That's why I thought it was important for me to write down that enough number for myself. To be able to know okay, this is what I need in order to be enough. Anything beyond that is, isn't going to satisfy this piece but it has to be satisfying some other element that gives my life meaning and purpose. And what I'm deriving out of this needs to be not only on the financial side, but it's also one I think about too. I think there's. What is that equation in terms of every year you're saving x amount of money? There has to be some kind of way and calculation of at what point if it's only adding 10% more to your spend every year or reducing that, I think the diminishing returns of every additional year. I think there's a way to calculate that. Definitely something that I've been interested in working out to be. When is the optimal time to actually fire given your enough number and it becoming okay, no longer worth it. But I think tech salaries are to the point where it's. It's hard to do that sometimes and I think it's drastically changes and even now one year to the next, I think everyone especially talking fire, we've had the benefit of coming through a 10 year bull market especially within tech, seeing incredible wealth accumulation. And even within this year 2022 when we're seeing a lot of shifts down, I think this will a lot of people have drastic shifts in their take home pay and I think being able to factor that in I think ends up being important. I think it's a good gut check too around where is my spending relative to the amount of income that I can control or my savings, where is that my risk tolerance? Because I think this is, I don't know there's a lot of people that have never seen any recessions or bear markets and I think that's one of the criticisms that many people get of FIRE is very popular. When markets move up and to the right when there's a lot of stability or volatility, it ends up changing. That's why I graduated in the Great Recession and felt that early on. But it's all been big bull markets since then. So I think having that starting from that volatility there too influences the timing going forward of how to think about it 100%.

Well one of the things you said was interesting. So everyone thinks about wealth in terms of like what they have like their number, they don't. If they thought about it more in terms of income then all the math around the visualization changes. So yeah as you're older that it might be a big number that you make, but the impact to your income could be much lower than a smaller number like 10 or 15 years earlier when you're earlier in your career because it has more time to compound and turn into income later. So that would be. It's an interesting way that you describe it, maybe that we can frame it up better in charge for folks, but I want to give you a chance to give any shout outs for any resources you like. We'll link to your substack and stuff like that, but any podcasts or books or whatever that you found useful and I'm not trying to get to talk about us, but anything else?

No, definitely. I'm a big fan of adding logging into your own personal lives to be able to understand what your enough number could be. That always starts off with knowing how much you're spending today and knowing what your discretionary pieces are. So tracking my finances is a big element of my personal finance toolkit and I use a number of tools that I've been on Mint since they've started in the beginning, but I found that they haven't evolved like many other tools have over time. I use you need a budget so YNAB for short, for very explicit budgeting purposes and just being very intentional with knowing where your spending is going. I think this is really important. I think I definitely encourage people if they're trying to come up with how much they're spending today, to at least do a year of using you need a budget because it's intentionally manual at times, but it helps you really understand what is my discretionary spending versus what are my fixed costs to really give you a sense of how much I need to save long term to have it. I like their approach of every single dollar that you have in your account needs to have a job, whether that job is simply the emergency fund or it's now going towards covering your rent or your mortgage. I find that framework really valuable at least to start having that conversation of how much you need. And then in terms of other tools, I'm a big fan of the tools that help with visualizations on long term projections. Cfire Calc was really good for being able to run simulations on withdrawal rates personal capital for investment tracking. Huge fan of their free toolkit. If you can put up with them calling and upselling you on managing your funds, it's definitely well worth the occasional phone call. Like the toolkit is really popular, really, really powerful being able to say like okay, I want to retire at this point, I want to pay for college at this point all these things, and that kind of plays into all of these tools are really effective in the accumulation phases. What I found new retirement really valuable for is what happens next or what is the process after I hit that number, what do I do next? And I really liked new retirement for that. Being able to think through, okay, if I'm going to stop earning an income here, at what point does it start making sense to make those Roth conversions, like getting money out of my traditional and into my Roth as I have no income or low income, the tax sequences end up making. Just having those calculations end up being really, really important and valuable and timing of it as well as just thinking through long term. Eventually we're going to get into like Social Security and there's going to be required distributions that I'll run into. I'm in my 30s now, but eventually I don't want to all of a sudden have to pay huge taxes in my 70s because I wasn't thinking about it. So thinking about it early on and being able to plan there. And that's where I think the new retirement Facebook group has been really helpful in addition to the tool, because I've been able to be exposed by people going through that more traditional retirement path. And I found the same problems that they're going through are going to be the same problems that everyone on the fireside will have to go through as well. There's more things in common that I think are different and being able to learn how people that are actually retiring are processing these things and going through these different challenges and being able to bring that lens into how I do my own planning. I think that's my main toolkit is those sets of tools in addition to kind of just like spinning up my own spreadsheets every now and then to get what I can't find from the tools.

Thanks, Andre, for being on our show and thanks, Dotto Robeson for being our sound engineer. And for everyone listening, hopefully you found this useful. If you've made it this far, I encourage you to definitely check out Andre's site@andre nader.substack.com and we'll link to that. And then also feel free to check out our site and planning tool@newretirement.com and the Facebook group that we talked about. And then finally, we're trying to build the audience for this podcast. So any reviews are welcome and any sharing is also highly appreciated. So with that, thank you and have a great day.