Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder travels to NYC to meet with one of the leaders of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, Millennial Money’s Grant Sabatier.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Hello everyone, I’m Jeff Snyder. I’ve devoted over two decades of my life helping Americans across this country save and plan for their financial future. I’m starting out on a journey to educate Americans and help get people in this country saving.
Join me as we go on the roads to retirement. This is the creator of the Financial Freedom Podcast and certified FIRE expert, Grant Sabatier. No, he’s not one of those scammers who conned rich partygoers onto a Hack Island music festival.
FIRE refers to the growing class of young entrepreneurs who are financially independent and retired early. We caught Grant in Little Italy in New York City just before his world tour to promote his new book, Financial Freedom. I am joined by author and creator of the website Millennial Money, Grant Sabatier.
Grant, how are you? I’m great. It’s good to see you, Jeff.
It’s good to see you again. And thanks for coming on. And I should say that Grant is out with a new book.
It’s called Financial Freedom. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about your story because you have this awesome, compelling story that I think the audience is going to love.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
I graduated college with a philosophy degree. I bounced around a lot of different jobs, never quite found the right fit, and then basically ended up getting laid off twice and having to move back home with my parents at the age of 24 and literally sleeping in the same bed that I slept in as a seven-year-old kid. So I had $2.26 left to my name. Fast forward five years and three months later and I’d saved $1.25 million and reached financial independence at the age of 30. Financial freedom is really that journey and each step that I took to become financially independent by 30 and then what I would have done differently if I was starting today. So I wrote the book for my 24-year-old self.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
When I came out of college, you know, the thought was just get a job. You work for a job for 10, 15, 20 years, maybe to retirement, but now it’s a lot different.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
Now when younger people are graduating, they have a plethora of options and it’s really enticing of course to want to be an entrepreneur, to want to go and be your own boss. The fact is it’s actually never been easier in history to make money. The challenge with that is that it requires a different rule book on how you optimize and get a full-time job, how you launch a side hustle, how you scale a side hustle.
And the paradox of the gig economy is that even though it’s never been easier to make money, that also makes it more competitive and a little bit more challenging. So doing things differently than other people is ultimately the way that you’re going to be successful and doing it in a way that ultimately helps you live the life that you love.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
People in this country at least tend to be a little bit more materialistic. They want things and so they buy today and put things aside for tomorrow.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
So I think money only matters if it helps you live a life that you love and that’s one of those things. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank. If you’re stressed out at your job and you don’t like the life that you’re living, that’s a problem.
I mean, life is way too short to have a boss that you don’t like and to not enjoy it. And so we live in a world that asks us, how much money do we need? And the real question, the first question before you ask that should be, what kind of life do you want to live?
And then how much money do I need to live that life? And when I did that, eight of the ten things that actually make me happiest, you know, walking my dog in the park, having a glass of wine with my wife, reading a book, you know, those things are either free or very inexpensive.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I love the fact that you’re saying, live the life that you want on your terms. Because I can tell you from my own personal experience, oftentimes I lived my life to an image. You know, I wanted to be Gordon Gekko or Charlie Sheen’s character in Wall Street.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
It’s a great movie. It’s a great movie.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
But you know, I think what you’re talking about is so important is that you’ve got to find what’s in here and what’s in here and what’s going to make you happy.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
It’s always easier in life, you know, like the Gordon Gekko way to chase the next dollar or the million dollars or the job promotion. What’s much more difficult but ends up being incredibly rewarding and more rewarding is taking some time to go inside and really get to know yourself better and try to maximize your opportunities to grow as a person, not just make more and more money. This is one of the things.
Money itself, you should think of it more like a friend, you know, and it’s one of those things where the more time that you spend with it, the more comfortable you’re going to get with it. And that’s why I do now what I call my morning meditation, my money meditation. I open my Mint tracking app.
I look at my net worth. I spend about five or ten minutes a day with my money. I look at how well I’m doing and that actually changes my perspective throughout the day.
I think more about opportunities to optimize my money and all of a sudden it’s this thing that I’m controlling instead of it controlling me. You can control the relationship that you have with money and what it ultimately means to you. So if you always think that you have to trade your time for money, you’re going to make tradeoffs that you really don’t need to make.
Going into each earning opportunity and making sure that you try to make as much money for your time or at least realize what you’re trading off.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
The financial services industry doesn’t necessarily have to have a monopoly on finance and saving and investing. You learned philosophy in college. You taught yourself the basics of finance and budgeting.
Anybody can learn this. All they’ve got to do is set themselves out to do that.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
Money is not complicated. It’s how much you make, how much you spend, and how much you save. I mean, it’s three levers that I talk about in the book.
And we’re not talking about you have to spend thousands of hours reading money books like I did. You should literally sit down and read my book in three or four hours or listen to the audio book and you’re going to learn. It might be a lot to take in and you might have to read it again.
But actually I encourage that. I designed the book for you to read it once a year as you grow, as you change, and your relationship with money actually changes.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
What are the top five things that people can take away from your great book?
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
This entire book hinges on a simple idea of increasing your savings rate. If you can increase your savings rate from 20% to, say, 40%, you’ve gone from 25 years down to 15 years or less. So number two, the question is, how do you increase your savings rate?
So we live in a world that tells us to budget, to cut those small purchases, but in reality it’s those small purchases that often give you the most joy. So in the book I have something called The Only Budget You’ll Ever Need. The simple idea is that Americans spend 70% of their income on three things, housing, transportation, and food.
So in the book I talk about how I moved from a $1,500 a month apartment to a $700 a month apartment. And yes, it wasn’t as nice of an apartment and it was in a different neighborhood, but I was able to save $800 a month that compounded over a three-year period. Now I’m over $300,000 wealthier because I saved that $800 a month and I’ve invested it over the past eight years.
And just making that short-term sacrifice, which in reality was more like an opportunity, I’m now literally $300,000 richer and I can’t even imagine how much money that’s going to be in another 10 or 20 years. Save on your biggest expenses, housing, transportation, and food. Number three, a lot of people want to be an entrepreneur.
The first thing that you need to do is optimize your full-time job. So where you’re currently making money, a vast majority of people in the United States believe that they should be making more money. And in fact, they should be making more money, but they simply are too afraid to ask.
Figure out how much money your company’s making off of you and what your market rate is and how to negotiate a raise and the best time to ask, which is Friday before noon over coffee with your boss, just FYI. So this is tip four. A side hustle is any way that you make money outside of your full-time job.
Basically, you look at your hobbies and your interests and your skills and you look for overlap between the two. So start a side hustle, get your feet wet, start making a little money on the side and I can tell you what, you’re going to get really excited because you’re going to have made money on your own and it becomes a little bit addictive. And then number five, make sure that all this extra money that you’re making, you’re investing as much as possible and you’re tracking what I think is the most important number in personal finance and that’s your net worth.
What matters is, is your net worth going up and your net worth is just your assets, anything that you could sell for money minus your liabilities, things like debt. Just seeing it go up a little bit each day, it gets you really excited and then money starts to feel like a game and you go out and you start trying to make as much money as possible. You’re going to see money making opportunities literally everywhere and your mindset is going to shift from just being an employee, maybe who’s stuck and stressed out about money to money being something that you get excited about and you look forward to and you realize that it’s a path to freedom and then that life that you’ve always wanted, you realize that you can get there because you’ve figured it out.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Grant Sabadier, author of Financial Freedom and the founder of Millennial Money. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Grant Sabatier, Millennial Money
Yeah, Jeff, it’s a real pleasure. Thank you.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Thanks. As busy as Grant is, he’s figured out the secret to being happy busy and how to let money work for him. Our mission is one of the same, sharing our experiences and insights so that many others can navigate onto the good road to retirement.
As Americans, we put so much of our energy into our families, friends, and pursuing our passions, often living for the moment to the detriment of our futures. What’s clear to me is that we’re all on our own path, but it’s so important to balance today with being mindful about tomorrow. I hope you enjoy these conversations.
I’m Jeff Snyder, and I look forward to meeting you on the roads to retirement.