Our Rich Journey

Alright, everyone is so excited to have the opportunity to talk to Amana Christina today and the reason we wanted to do this episode is the reason we reached out to them because a lot of people when we did a survey. In our community, many people are on the path to financial independence and are doing so in the context of having a family. Their family accompanies them. His family is supporting this effort. And I think a lot of times when you look at people. that you've seen that I've done there's this character that this is only for single individuals or individuals that didn't have these other restrictions in quotes and I think it just requires a rethink and even more than that.

It requires knowing that there are other people who have been pioneers, who have done this, you are not alone, this is doable, it is replicable, but it may look slightly different, there may be other considerations that you need to think about, so if we can find people who have done this, what can we take from their story? What can we incorporate into our own lives to see similar results? Amana Christina has an incredible story, they recently left their federal jobs, they retired to Portugal with their two daughters, this is a family that has embraced geographic arbitrage, they agreed to, you know, to hack the gala tea house, all these amazing tips and they can bring some of those unique tips to our audience to share with us so that you can take action on it, very excited to see where this conversation goes and help me with this.

I have my co-host Brad here with me today. How do you know friend? Hi Jonathan, I'm doing pretty well. Yes, you certainly covered the whole gamut. We don't even need to record. We're not done. This is an extraordinary story and Phi is for families. I think, like you said, there's this caricature that this is for single people in their 20s and that's absurd and I think I'll move on and Christina will show how she's done. This is so effective, personal and selfish that I am endlessly curious about her move to Portugal. Lisbon is a place that my wife Laura and I have booked as maybe that's a possible future life plan, so it's interesting that that's the place they chose, so yeah, selfishly, I can't wait to dive into this, so with that, Amon and Christina, welcome to the podcast, hey guys, thank you so much for having us, it was such a beautiful introduction, you guys are so happy to be here, though yeah, absolutely.

What's exciting, I wanted to start with your story and in particular, you're on the path to financial independence and you're doing it with a family, but financial independence is you know this metric that you've hit but it doesn't start there and since You are doing this as a family, at what point did you realize this was the goal for your family? That's really what I'm curious about, well, you know, it goes back to an experience. that I had at work and this was about eight years ago I was at work and I had received an award for my time of service with the federal government it was the ten year certificate and at this ceremony there was another person who had received an award for 40 years of service and it was a turning point for me because when I received my award they handed it to me like it was no big deal, I mean, it paled in comparison to someone who had been there for 40 years and I remember thinking, I can't be there. here for another 40 years.

I don't want a piece of paper to represent my life and I would get a better visualization with the story I've been in completely. different, I felt like I had given up a lot of my life in my cubicle, so I came home and Christina really started talking about this idea of ​​retiring early and taking control of our life and that was the turning point, but then That was eight years ago, that's really before much of the modern financial movement, how did you guys have the mental capacity to even think about retiring early at that time?

Yeah, I mean, I think we've always been good at saving and investing. in general, and like you said, there was no real label when we started well, it was like one day on a Monday I came home and said: I want to retire before I'm 40 and it was like, wow! I'd never heard of that, really you know, we'd never seen other people do this and like we said, we have two daughters, so even adding that was kind of like okay, well, what do we do? Plans in place and having this goal in mind and really creating these mini steps of what we need to do to achieve this goal of retiring before 40.

Christina, was it? Oh, tranquility from the first team or like when Amon came home. And hey, I want to retire before I'm 40, what's your first thought? Yeah, my first thought was, "Okay, that's crazy." but you know, one of the things that I really think helped in our relationship in particular is that we always work as a team and the first thing we do when we have ideas and we share them with each other is that the other person can't say no. You know, it's like he says something to me and says, "Okay," that's an interesting thought, well, let's see, let's take this out a little bit more, let's see how we can do it right because that encourages him to share his ideas with me and me to sharing my ideas with him without this thought that it's going to be a blow, we're not even going to try something like that, but I will still say when he came and told me that it was like, oh, that's the biggest one, we don't really even use the word. interesting, so I'm actually curious on a real interpersonal level, like what you guys just said, it reminds me of like a safe place, like a judgment-free zone, hey, I have this crazy idea, in this case it was probably the example most extreme thing you've ever heard, but where did they come up with that?

I think a lot of couples have trouble communicating properly and they're afraid, they're worried that they're going to bring up an idea or mention something and the spouse or partner, it's just not like that, maybe it will fall on deaf ears or, worse yet, there will be some animosity from one another. low level or something and how did you guys get to that point where you could talk so honestly and you really have no zones of judgement? I know Christina and I have been together since we were 19 and we actually met at a barbecue, it was a college barbecue and they were giving away free food and we were both making the most of the food, so I guess we've been soulmates.

We were frugal with each other from the beginning and I think we were just lucky because since we've known each other we've always had this open relationship, I mean, when you're when you're basically getting free food, that's no judge, so I think since That moment we've always had this relationship where we bring crazy, outlandish ideas to each other and we just get: yeah, us. re problem solvers, you know, if we have a problem, we don't use it as a limiting factor, we try to figure out how to solve it and that's always been our position, that's what we teach our kids, it's never about no, It's about being well.

How can we do this? And I think what also helps is that we were like that at the beginning of our relationship as well, and when you're like that and you see the result of being this couple, let's say yes and then really work and then be able to create this almost ball of a ball thing. snow where it's like just brainstorming, just throwing out these ideas and let's make these things happen once you have that as your number one rule as a couple then just keep doing it. and you see the success of that and for us it's who we are, that's what made us and that's what continues to allow us to thrive as a couple, so I really want to come back so that their

journey

spans about a decade.

From this great idea to now it's been about a decade and I want to start with the fact that one of the things that is very interesting to me is your

journey

to financial independence on the income side of the equation that happened in what I think most people would consider an average salary. I think I work as a federal worker. This wasn't one of those jobs where you make several hundred thousand dollars a year. I think you're making 60-70k somewhere on that. Range and Christina, I think you were in school for a pretty decent percentage of this, so this is a family that is letting you know a good income, a solid income, one that you have bandwidth with, but not one of those mega incomes you hear about. where someone might just dismiss your story as being for the ultra-

rich

right, so I'm curious when you have this great idea and you have this income that you have, what did that plan, that problem solving, let's get down to it, how.

For this to work, you know what strategies you were formulating. You know the solution to generating more income was to take advantage of what we had and take advantage of the real estate sector because we couldn't work more hours in an hour at our jobs, so we had to calculate. look for other forms of income, so one of the things that we were considering in order to retire early was that we started to focus on real estate and generating rental income, so the first thing we put together was the idea of ​​​​living in a house, changing it and moving to the next house this idea of ​​living and changing and then using that money to be able to retire eventually, so that's where we started and I would also say that you mentioned for three years that I was in law school, so we lived off that salary and we had to even being creative about how we lived, so we made this video about how we lived rent-free and mortgage-free for over ten years and one of the The way we did it was at UCLA, we were resident advisors, so we lived in family housing for UCLA graduate students and we got free housing because we are resident advisors, so we are always trying to think of what we can do to save. making money or making money in some other way other than just a salary because we wanted to speed up this process to lay off and be Ras, live rent free in that area and then just try to think about other side issues, that's what we really helped.

We'll, you know, speed up that process and be able to fire you much quicker because we actually thought it would take 10 years and it ended up taking eight years. Yes, certainly, if you can eliminate your housing expenses, that will drastically change the equation. how far your savings will go and what that savings rate will be like. I'm curious, since it sounds like you found multiple ways to live rent-free. I mean, you actually did several of these tactics from Ras, the house, performing live and flip, etc., how did this change when you moved from Amman and Christina to Amman and Christina with two daughters?

Oh yeah, that's very interesting, you know, because we did several ways, like you said, on how to live rent-free and mortgage-free, and one of them was brilliant afterwards. We graduated, we got this lease option on a 3 bedroom apartment and we rented two of the rooms and that was before we had kids, so now that we have kids we don't feel like that was an option that we didn't want to rent out. buying extra rooms in a house, having children with us and living with strangers, so we had to think of different ways, like living like Ras or being a property and living in a smaller property and finally what we did was move to the abroad and we work abroad, our employer paid for all of our housing and all of our utilities, we have it completely covered, yes this is fascinating and because your job is a federal employee and in particular by linking it to Geo arbitration , there is a massive spike in both.

You talk about your path to dismissal, but also now where you ended up. I'd like to explore that a little bit more so Christina knows that you were and you just said that you were in law school and who you worked for. The federal government tells us a little more about your career choice and how that influenced this path to financial independence. Yeah, you know, I didn't specifically choose my career choice in terms of layoff. Just for me, I was thinking about what I could do. doing that seemed interesting to me and we had been living in Spain before we started law school and I wasn't working at the time either and I was just thinking about, you know, at some point we had the idea that we wanted to come back to the United States and I thought what that would be like if we came back to the United States and that's where I started thinking, you know, I really want to go to law school.

I had been thinking about it for a long time and the girls were five years old. and three by the time I started law school and I thought it was a good age for me to go back to school, so we went back to school because of my interest in it, but it really opened a lot of doors for me. So in the end what we did was we went back overseas after I graduated, we lived in the Bay Area for about two years, a little less than two years, and then a mom had been working for the federal government since she graduated. from the university and this opportunity opened up. for us to move to Japan Amman received a job offer and at the same time there was a positionof a lawyer available in the same place in Japan and since I had just graduated from law school and had been practicing for a while, we had this opportunity that opened up and in terms of our fire trip it was perfect for us because again we were both able moving across the sea, this time we paid for all our housing. and now we have two incomes that will help us invest more money so we can say goodbye much faster, so I'm curious about the decision to go to law school, obviously you said that This was always something that they would have thought about, but there is a huge cost to law school, not just in terms of actual tuition dollars and so on, but also in opportunity costs.

I'm curious to know that you were the first on this path to fly at that point. What does that discussion look like in terms of? Does this make sense? Sure it was, it could have been a dream, but does this make sense for our family now? I'd love to hear both that thought process as well as the actual practicalities. Bolts of Wow law school typically costs $60k a year. How do you work? Yeah, you know, we ran the numbers and, for me, we were very fortunate to be able to pay for most of my law school through scholarships. and then just through UCLA in general, so it didn't really have the same impact as someone taking out sixty thousand dollar loans or $60,000+ loans to be able to go to law school, but it does play a role as I.

I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to get these scholarships. I'm writing all my scholarship essays. I'm getting people to write letters for me, but that's definitely something very important to keep in mind if you go. go back to school and you're on this fiery trip, it's the same as Hustlin trying to figure out what scholarships I can apply for that will help me pay for this for this law school, so I'm not going to take out all these loans etc. that I can still chase the fire in the time frame that we want to do it and I'll just add something else because the idea of ​​going back to school we went back to school with the goal of Christina graduating and making more money that could support our fire trip , so yes, she was taken out of the job market, but when she came back on the market, she was making a lot more money and this was money that we could put toward our financial independence goals so that you I know it was just an analysis that we did and in the end it had It made sense for her to go back to school due to the increase in our income and in general.

Well, look, can we talk about that for a few minutes? Multiple aspects for one. Christina, before you know when you were in your original job, your original role, what were you doing before you made the decision to go back to law school? Well, before I went to law school I was earning zero, we lived in Spain and I didn't have a job and that prompted me to think, well, we're going back to the United States, what should we do? And then when we were before that, we were in Japan and I was working as a contractor and I was making maybe like 35, about $35,000. full time and that was a cut as a contractor so I didn't get any of the benefits of, you know, free housing or utilities or anything like that, the 401k match you didn't get, you didn't get a lot of those. a lot of those other benefits, yes, but also, oh, go ahead, no, no, but well, the reason I wanted to say that's what you did is extraordinary, so there's an observation that a lot of people make about that, once you do it, it's very difficult to do. the choice to go back to school after you had that right space and then the fact that you were able to do that and then you were able to work your way up and get these scholarships.

I really think there's something useful there because those scholarships are often based on activities that you've done and kind of this kind of linear progression to have that space where you're then documenting to get that. I'm curious to know that mechanically you have this gap between your Bachelor's, you've been, you've been out of the workforce for a period of time and now you're saying I want to go back to school and also, I'm not going to pay, I'm just going to pay the sticker price. is, I'm going to find a way for you to know some of that covered through scholarships and you said MIT UCLA, how did you formulate that package?

I mean, you know how to use this word at a granular level the first day you're doing it. Choosing to return, you have done the return on investment analysis and you make the decision. Yes, this is three years of my life, but I'm going from there. You know, I'm not thinking about anything right now. 35 years ago, what would it look like? I would like it to do twice as much as this path will probably be. You know, I understand the logic on that end, but now you still have to do it. You're looking for a way to cover this.

It looks like you did it successfully. How did you put it? this plan together, I think it's really about focusing on well, for law school you have to take the LSAT, so if you get a high score you can get performance-based scholarships based on that, so my goal when I was in I studied Spain a lot. For the LSAT I didn't take any additional courses to help me, but it was like buying all these books and understanding how the LSAT test went and what it would look like so I could get the best score on the LSAT.

I could and that definitely helped, but also in terms of performance, you know, for law school I had taken, I don't know, maybe 10 years off from grad school, taking a long break and then going to school. of law. and law schools actually look at people who have taken a long break and developed personally and socially, they actually like that stuff because it shows that you come back with a purpose versus someone who just graduated from undergrad and is going straight to law school, so I had the advantage of being an older student. I also had the advantage that you know there are a lot of scholarships geared towards specific people, so being an older student, being a woman, being a minority, there are all these different areas that I focused on, in addition to having an LSAT score really high, so getting into UCLA is like one of the top, I don't know what it's ranked right now, maybe top 15 law schools in the entire country and being an early decision, I found that out, I think that even in November or December I got in where people usually don't find out until several months later, so that really helped me formulate my plan, get all my scholarships to understand that yes, I got into UCLA, yes, I have the money to finance this. and this is something that we can accomplish and we're always looking for these practical tips and leverage points on how the community can hear something and someone is definitely thinking about law school and just hearing that about the LSAT so now I'm the second person telling me this, but basically the LSAT counts dramatically more in terms of getting scholarships to law school, so if you have an LSAT score, that rate is correct, so I'm guessing it's over 180, so if you do You are, You are in the 170+ range, which is obviously very difficult, but let's get to your point, if that's where you spend your time, if you understand the test, if you can increase your score, just that couple of points, maybe you could be in the top five or ten. law school, but it's very competitive and those law schools want to rank higher, so you'll be able to get almost a full ride, at least from what I've heard from the top, you know, 25 or 50 law schools. for a tee again, you're the second person to tell me this, so I'm curious if that matches what you've seen in your own experience, where that couple of points and spending that time correctly, we're looking for leverage, are you looking for leverage? does that do?

It makes sense if you're in the 165 range to spend dozens of hours and maybe beat that magic number. Oh, absolutely, I mean, I think your LSAT is incredibly important. I mean, there are other things that are important too, but the LSAT is something that can be compared between all applicants, so it is very important to spend time on your LSAT and then for us it was like we were living in Spain, so that the idea of ​​getting the highest LSAT score you can get so you can get to the school you want to go to and find out ahead of time, like we like, I said, we found out in November and December, shortly after applying, that I got into UCLA and that we could really work our lives coming from Spain. and having all that time to determine what our lives are going to be like at UCLA, that's another benefit of not only the scholarships, but also being able to prepare your life in law school and what it's going to be like because you have several months in to make the necessary arrangements to taking this big step towards law school, so one of the interesting things when I think about your story is that you have achieved financial independence and I know you are living in Portugal, we will come back to that now, but in terms of where you live, that is an important factor in terms of calculating how much you need and, as an extension, what your number will be.

One of the interesting things to me is that when you calculate your financial independence number, you're calculating that based on your cost of living in the Bay Area and as we know, it's an incredibly expensive place to live and that will affect this number as well. which I'm curious as we start to think about this last end of your journey, where it's kind of you that you're living this and you're making the decision we're going to do this here we're going to go abroad like you tell us a little bit about this already. you know, seeking financial independence in this more expensive cost of living Well, I'm glad you asked that question because we understand that a lot because the Bay Area is very expensive.

You can really get away from this idea of ​​achieving financial independence when your expenses are so high, but for us we had to do it. Be very, very creative and I'll give you an example when we were looking at real estate in the Bay Area in 2013 and the market was very active in 2013, it was very competitive, it was difficult, it was difficult to find a So you would get involved in these wars. of offers with people, so we had to come up with a different way to approach the process of buying our home, so we talked about this in some of our YouTube videos, but we came up with the plan that allowed us.

To go after houses that no one else was looking at for us to look at during the holidays, we closed three of our properties in the Bay Area, either at Christmas or New Year's, when no one else was looking at properties, so we employed strategies. like that and then once we found a property we would DIY and do the renovations ourselves because it was out of the question to try to hire a contractor in the San Francisco Bay Area to help us with any of our moves Olivia, so we did it. We do all the work ourselves and we find materials at very cheap prices.

We have this video where when we renovated our entire kitchen for about a thousand dollars and it was because we knew we had this problem in front of us, how are we doing? We are going to renovate our kitchen and save money and we came up with the solution, so before starting the YouTube channel, you leaned on YouTube to get answers to some of these questions. How do I know? Because I just had a friend. Contact me and said this contractor wants to charge me all this money to install ceiling fans so why would you have a contractor that can do it yourself?

You know, go to YouTube and watch a video. Unfortunately, I'm not a right guy like me. I don't want to get electrocuted, so why would I think about putting in a ceiling fan? But you're absolutely right, you can learn anything. Did they have those skills to the point of even contemplating a living somersault like we are to me? That scares me, what kind of me did you have? Did you have experience fixing up houses? and learning the kind of attitude, so we had this idea and said, "Okay, if we do this, how is it going to work?" Christina is really great at making plans, so she literally came up with a step-by-step plan on how we could live. in this house and change it at the same time and we just followed that plan.

The things we couldn't do ourselves, of course, we outsourced, but everything we could do ourselves to save money we did and I think you know a man has this confidence. because he says you know you can learn anything on YouTube look up how to remove a table look at how look at how to install a sink you know these things he has this brain for and he has the confidence that you know we can do this, it's not that hard, like this which is almost like I make the plan and he says, oh, this is exactly how we do it, we do this, we do this, we go to the store and buy this, it's like a combination of two things. they were both good and then combined into one thing to really make it work.

I love that it sounds like such an amazing team and this is truly more than a team. They are right. This is a family. You have two little daughters and I. I'd love to hear what you think about this reverse scenario, likeFor example, how does that work? People look at you and say, oh, how can you do that with two little kids like me? This sounds like an adventure, but I'm sure you get some pushback too, yeah, you know, we haven't had any pushback in terms of the twists. In fact, I love doing the turns and attracting girls and then being able to watch this process.

I think more as a woman. I love showing this to our girls because it's not to go on a tangent or anything like that, but I think normally people think that doing construction, working on a house, is more for the masculine side and it could even be the same to invest, you know, there is this. concept that men are better at investing than women, for whatever reason, there is a stereotype, so the fact that we have two young girls and we can take them on this trip with us we could show them how we are changing the house that you can see before, during and after.

They can see how we're doing in terms of real estate, but also how we're doing in terms of our real estate portfolio, by talking to them. how we are generating money how our portfolio is generating money by investing money for them and how they see their portfolio grow. I love that we're able to show this to girls at such an early stage and we haven't had any pushback in terms of them learning this stuff I think it's been a great experience, yeah, I actually wanted to ask you a little bit more about when you're doing these projects.

DIY. I had two questions, in fact, one of them was if they ever had any questions. You were furious because you couldn't find an answer and you finally had to give up and bring in a contractor and what was that? Oh my gosh, you know there's a tool lending library in the Bay Area, it's like a club, well, anyway. you can go to the library and there's a group of DIY enthusiasts at this tool lending library and you can ask them questions and I think I once had trouble installing a sink and I went to this place and just hung out just hanging out I'm talking to people and I'm presenting this problem to everyone and I found a solution just by being around these other DIY enthusiasts so yes they would challenge me but there are so many resources available that if you can't find them on YouTube.

I would go hang out at Home Depot. I would go hang out in DIY stores. I could always find an answer, so I guess that comes with being frugal, right? We think we should wait if we pay someone to put in this sink. How much will it cost us? It's like we figured out how to do this, but there are other things you know, like there's something that requires a wall to be torn down. There's not like eight of us, we can do it ourselves, you know? pay a contractor to do those things, but if they're just, I mean almost anything else you can imagine on a house, it's like we can figure out how to do this because we've gotten cost estimates before and how much it would cost.

The cost of doing everything we wanted throughout the house is the properties we want to do and just seeing that estimated cost for us is like we're not giving up. We had a cost to dispose of our kitchen debris. It was only $1,000. To take it to the dump I rented a u-haul, loaded everything up and did it myself. I only got like a hundred dollars, so yeah, my frugal size is a big inspiration for a lot of what we did right. You may have given us a little bit of information, but I wanted to get back to those two things, one of which was actually the acquisition cost, so you said we can renovate our kitchen for very little money, but I feel like every time that I personally take on a project, there is a new tool that I will need for this job, a tool that you will use once and I'm curious that you mentioned the tool lending library.

I had never heard of that before. It's a concept that seems familiar to me. I'm just curious, as a frugal person, you want to redo the bathroom floor but you're going to need a tile saw, you want to redo the kitchen or you're going to need some kind of air painter or whatever you can think of, whichever tool you choose depending on the project, do you? How can a seeking person do the job? You are willing to get the job but you don't want to invest thousands of dollars in it. the contractor equipment that you would need for this and that you will use for this, maybe one or two projects and then you will only be responsible for storing it, how did you get involved with that?

Well, luckily, we in the Bay Area have the tool. lending library where you can go and you can borrow a tool for basically any particular job, so I was able to find that early on we started going down that path of buying all the tools and even when you run that analysis. Buying the tools is still cheaper than hiring a contractor, so that's something we would have had to take into account, but we were very fortunate that our community had a tool lending library and, you know, this is a network which, if you don't have it in your own community you can create something like this.

I mean, I wouldn't be too shy to go to my neighbor and ask him for a hammer and if he has a tile cutter, I'll ask him for that too, but if you create a community of people who are also interested in doing this, you can start yourself. It would be clear that we had our own hammers, but this tool lending library had all these important tools, like you said, if you only use them once, you don't want to go out and buy this new tool that you use once, but we were very lucky that they had all these important tools in the library we went to and they had several so I'm not sitting around waiting for someone to return something to get it but there are also several sites like you go to Craigslist there is a site called Free Cycle org where you can getting free stuff from people in the community, there are all these avenues. that you don't have to buy, even if you don't have a tool lending library like ours, you don't have to buy something new and a lot of times, if people buy something just to use it once, they can rent it. or they could sell it at a loss to just get rid of it and get some of that money back, so it's really just thinking creatively about how you can work on this project and save money on the cost of the tools, yeah this is great.

I had never heard of these tool lending libraries before, but I googled them while we were talking about it and we have one here in Richmond, actually yeah, it's amazing, Jonathan will be living there now, right now, it's a great place to visit. that you can go ask. I could certainly ask questions, but yes, there appears to be a website for a local tool organization that has a complete map of the world here of these two lending libraries and yes, we have a VA tool library for Richmond, so yes, very very cool that's so cool thank you all your travels both for work and your own personal adventure of taking you around the world and you've been to Spain Italy Portugal France Singapore Thailand Japan maybe more and I'm curious what Don't be cheap, just the sticker price.

Taking these plane trips for our family of four would be a bust for most people and would certainly slow down their path to financial independence. I know I was a big fan of travel rewards here at rusev, but I'm curious what tactics and strategies you employed to be able to go on these amazing family adventures solve that problem without breaking the bank oh, by far, they're travel rewards, you know? , I don't know how we stumbled upon this concept, but it has been a game changer. especially when you're on this path to financial independence and you're trying to be frugal, a vacation can break the bank at some point, so for us to be able to discover travel rewards and take advantage of them on our trip, it really is We made our way and you know, a very fun adventure because we've traveled to a lot of places taking advantage of those bonus points, you know, meeting the minimum spins and then and then and then using the bonus that comes with that to plan. our next trip and we had to be very strategic, so even though all those places that you mentioned we had to plan, you know, months sometimes a year in advance and kind of put together our rewards list to be able to support those trips, but I'll do it.

Also say that you know travel rewards are an amazing find for us, especially as a family of four, so if you think only one person knows how much they can save, think about a family of four going on an international trip anywhere . Associated with a flight in a hotel alone could break the bank, but the idea that we can offer travel rewards and our entire family of four gets free flights and hotel is just an amazing game changer because we always love to travel . but we didn't like the expense associated with it, so we limited our trips or tried to choose places that fit the budget, but with travel rewards it opened a whole new window for us in terms of traveling, yes, that's amazing, this has changed the game my entire life and we actually have a free travel rewards course here at choose Avaya, choose a Viacom travel and one thing I want to ask about when it comes to families.

Travel rewards for families, especially a family of four. I know a lot of people have a hard time finding award flights and I'm curious if you had any strategies for me? I usually advise people to be flexible, be flexible in terms of a little bit. can be built into this, so if you want to be flexible with the timing, that's usually the most important aspect, hey, we want to go to Japan next fall, well that's a hell of a lot easier, so we have to go to Japan on the 10th. October and coming. home on the 17th right, so that's one aspect in terms of destinations that we want to go to in Europe, we don't need to go to Brussels and then Rome and then you know Paris.

I'm curious how you mentally approached travel rewards for a family of four knowing that sometimes it's hard to get award flights using points, yeah, I mean, I think flexibility is definitely key and I'll give you an example too because the Last winter it was a year ago that we went to Spain. Italy and we went to Portugal or sorry, Spain, Italy in France, all sort of a round trip and we used points for that, but in terms of flexibility, it was okay, which direction and which place should we fly to first? ? Where can we get the best deal in terms of our rewards if we go to Italy, France or Spain first?

What does that look like? It's definitely about flexibility and you know, I would even say if you have a trip planned, say you want to. making two trips during the year that is flexibility too because maybe going to Europe the first at the beginning of the year and to Asia in the middle of the year does not make sense and you can exchange it because you are more flexible in terms of where you can go, then you can use your points of Rewards that way so you can tell your power partner that you are on this journey together and that you figured out a way to take this great idea and make it a reality.

It's super inspiring, so I want to talk about dialing your number and getting out of your cubicle. I'm in it, you've been in this cubicle environment and you're leaving. I'm just curious about that interaction with you know, with your employer, you know like. You were walking around, if there was something there, what was it like taking that retreat? I'm just curious about your contact, how does that feel for you? This turned out to be a horrible decision for your life and it's full of regret, so just help us frame, you're moving away from what those conversations were now that you might have.

This lack of identity simply helps us place our audience at that turning point in their life. You know, when we were planning our announcement, our early retirement announcement, and we were going to tell our employers that we had actually built this up in our mind while we were. You know, this is very exciting and we were going to go into the offices and tell people we're getting out of here and all that kind of stuff, but you know, we really liked the people we worked with, so we didn't go into I worked with the idea that we were going to tell him off and leave in a blaze of glory.

We felt really bad going to work because we liked the people there and believed in what we did, but our lives were more than just our federal jobs. I mean we were giving up a lot of things that we like to do as far as our passion projects, so when we came to work and when we told people they were completely shocked and then the next question they had was like well. What are you going to do with the next 30 years of your life? And to me I think it was a very strange question because it was almost as if they were saying that this job was supposed to define the next 30 years of my life, but the next 30 years of my life, what I'm going to doThe next step is to redefine it, we'll define it on our own terms and so moving to Portugal, you know, that's all part of this new journey that we're on, we're redefining our lives. we are starting a new journey ahman, I love the quote, our lives were more than our jobs, right, isn't it surprising that you come in?

You have done something extraordinary. I mean, people don't ask you how you did it. How can I continue? How can I do something similar? The question is what the hell are you going to do with your life? not many people have heard about this, I mean, more people are hearing about this, but when you tell someone, I'm 39 years old and I'll never work another day in my life, it's like people say, well, What are they? You're going to like it, it's like I said at the beginning, when we first started talking, when a guy told me he wanted to retire at 40 and it was like, oh, this is weird, but let's see how we can do it right, but other people have done it. .

I have never heard of fires that haven't figured out all the steps to achieving financial independence and retiring early. They just stopped at the oh, that's strange, they don't do it, they don't go any further, it's like you don't have it. anything else to do for the rest of your life, you know, but part of the fire is really understanding how you can achieve the fire, how your investments can help you achieve early retirement and also considering what are the things that you are going to do in early retirement, like our goal isn't to just retire early and sleep on the couch all day and you know, eat ding-dongs or whatever we don't even have things on, can we get a visual, corn curls , cheese puffs, Cheetos or always, there you go, but I mean, it's like having this idea too that we knew what we wanted our life to be like in early retirement, we wanted to spend more time? with our girls every day we get up early we don't sleep until late we get up at 7:00 in the morning we prepare breakfast for the girls we accompany them to school every day now we start exercising, which was not part of of our daily routine at least it definitely wasn't for me when we were working because it was like I'm really tired at the end of the day when I'm working and then we wanted to spend time with the kids at the end of the day when we work so it's all these things different things we can do now that we are retired the ones that really wanted us to take this step to retire early and that's why people ask us what we would do and what we would do. everything, we'll do whatever we want, yeah, I mean, you've got everyone right and you have financial resources, it's so absurdly limiting that people wonder what you're going to do with your time.

I can explore. I can learn. I can be a better person like you said we are defining life on our own terms what a great quote that is and I think that is the counterpoint and this is how I feel. I see an aspect of this in my own life. I'm not surprised if you say this, but you get some space and think: how did I ever have time for a nine to five? Never go back to that. Let's talk about where they landed and hit. you're a good number and in terms of what it would cost you to stay in the Bay Area, but you landed in Portugal and we just talked about all these places that you traveled to, why Portugal, why you did it, why it's there where your current landing pad is located. well, Portugal kept coming up, so when we talked about our financial independence number we said it, we said it for the cost of living in the highest location we were considering, which was the San Francisco Bay Area, so everyone was while we were on this trip, you know, we were passing through all these different places that we could retire to early, like when we got to Thailand.

They were like, oh, we could retire now in Thailand, but no, let's focus. We wanted, we want to establish it. for the highest point so that when we retreat we're not stuck at maybe the lowest point that our fire numbers were based on, but as we were doing research and traveling the world, Portugal kept going back up, I mean. when we look at healthcare when we look at crime when we look at overall quality of life Portugal is by far the best location yeah that's awesome you guys have a video of the top ten reasons we retire in Portugal and I love that anumana.

By the way, I love the Star Wars t-shirt, oh yeah, right, yeah. I mean living somewhere abroad with a family. Many people get nervous. Oh, will this be the right decision for my children? Will they fit? How are they going to learn the language? 'I'd love to know how your daughters have really adapted to living in a completely new, foreign country. Yes, I mean, our girls adapt very well and we had lived abroad, in Japan, and we have also lived abroad, in Spain, so this is it.' It's not their first time abroad, but even for families considering moving abroad for the first time, the children adapt just as well, as if our girls went to a private Portuguese school, so it's a smaller school and it is taught in Portuguese, but all its teachers also speak.

English, so their teachers speak to them, help them learn Portuguese and speak to them in English and Portuguese, so they are adapting very well in terms of the language and they are learning the language much faster than us, but our girls are also involved in sports, so our oldest daughter plays basketball and our youngest daughter is a swimmer and we already have them on very competitive teams, so they are already making friends at school of course, and then also through their sports, it's like if they had done it. They didn't even miss a beat, they're doing great.

Our oldest daughter just returned last week from an excursion she had to go to Spain. I mean, it's all these opportunities to meet new people and learn about a different culture and girls. They are only 11 and 13 years old, so we love that they are living this experience. Our YouTube prioritizes language learning. Her children are at school. They are a total immersion, but they don't have to go to a job they don't depend on. With particular providers, you can outsource or automate the vast majority of things that would force you to be immersed, especially when that would probably be uncomfortable because you don't know the language.

How do you prioritize that immersive experience? Well, it's been a really high priority for us. I will say that unfortunately I'm the slowest learner in the family. I mean, my daughters dream in Portuguese and I can barely speak a cup and say a couple of words, but what we do is go to a class two hours a day three times. per week we also have a private tutor and you know we don't live in a tourist area of ​​Portugal, we try to immerse ourselves in the culture and therefore we have a lot of interactions in Portuguese, which forces us to learn the language.

I mean Portugal is an amazing country the people here are so patient with you you know they will work with you if you just try they will help you and we have gotten into situations where we are stuck and there would be someone we are not even dealing with it, there will be someone next door who also speaks English and will come and help us in the situation to say: you know what, let me be your translator, let me help you set up. use your cell phone or solve this particular problem, so learning the language in Portugal we could have chosen a better country to learn it.

Unfortunately, Portuguese is very difficult, but we will get it done. I mean, it's hard, but I'll give you an example. We went for coffee the other day and we thought we were going to do this in Portuguese, not English, and we went in there and ordered it in Portuguese and then we didn't have enough sugar, so Aman was like, oh, me. I have to ask if they have more sugar and the way he said it was I have more sugar and she understood her, she said yes here is a little more sugar and then she also spoke in English so he said: as I did? and she said, well, you.

I'm supposed to say: Do you have more sugar or not? I have more sugar and you know, it's just trial, trial and error, it's just making sure we practice. I love this and let me tell you in terms of what you said, you know this idea. financial independence and early retirement. No, not many people have heard of it. You are making a huge and enormous effort to spread this idea. I want to talk about your YouTube channel just for a second. Here is a great trip as indicated. The goal of this episode for daca is your channel's stated goal of documenting the unique ways you as a couple and your family save, invest money, and within a year of starting your channel, over 50,000 people have joined subscribed to your channel and That's when I first heard about you.

I was starting to see it since then, in the last two months, that has doubled. I think they have over a hundred thousand subscribers on their YouTube channel, over two million views right now on YouTube. and it's amazing and I think at the core it's because you're authentic, you're actually living this and I think if you go back to the beginning of your story, where you guys came together, you had this great idea, you had this plan and you're like wow, it's a great idea. I have to go to the other room, but after you have a chance to think about it, you start formulating it and once you formulate it and it really works, I think this is the place you guys come to. financial independence and now you're talking about how you did it and why you wouldn't do it.

This is incredible. No one else you know has done this. You created a plan and it worked. It would be criminal not to tell everyone that. You know it personally and to anyone who is interested. I love what you are doing with the channel. I think our audience will love it too. What has been the most surprising part of having this channel to share your story and yes, just give it to our audience? a little insight into what you guys are doing on our

rich

journey, oh gosh, I think the most surprising part is probably how well it took, like you said, to have over a hundred thousand subscribers, it's like, wow, that's what I want to say about our history. it really resonates with people, but what we really like also is the interaction we have.

I mean, we live here in Lisbon and people come up to us and say, "We're in Lisbon next week, do you want to meet us?" We're meeting someone, Nick, or tomorrow we're meeting someone else next week and it's all because we have this channel. I mean, people we would never be able to communicate with were able to do this because I created this channel so you know this is happening often, we meet people on the streets who are from all over the world. The other day we met someone from Germany and he said, "I watch your channel and now I'm saving fifty percent of my income and we thought, "This guy was 24 years old and in the army and we were amazed.

Don't know. I think it's about visual learning when people can see you doing something and seeing that example on a screen I think it resonates with people and then the people who are watching our journey see us open our bank accounts, see how we invest, see how we renovate houses, it really resonates with people and and they think to themselves if those two can do it I can do it hmm amazing well I tell you I'm inspired by you I hope everyone who listens to this subscribes to your channel I think it's worth your time and while on most shows that would be the end of the episode Amana Christina on this show we would love to give you the opportunity to board the hot seat are you ready for this yeah infamous hot seat infamous hot seat okay question number? one, what's your favorite blog, podcast or book of all time?

I think our favorite podcasts of all time, besides you guys, this podcast is definitely Planet Money. We love the stories you have on Planet Money. They know it's a fun way to Talk about money is interesting and amuses me. Awesome question number two. A turning point in your life that was especially memorable or significant. Oh, that's a good one. I would say that I think the most significant thing we did was the first one. At that point we decided to move abroad and live and work abroad, so that was in Spain. I was there before we had kids, but I think at that point the door really opened and, like I said, we talked about these points in our lives where we could.

I just said no we're not going to do something or yes let's move on and see where this takes us and moving abroad to Spain opened a lot more doors. We live in Japan and finally decided that we could live in Portugal because we have already lived abroad and we have had that experience. Do you think Portugal is your definitive home? Do you have a schedule for how long you plan to be there? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think it's our forever home, although that's with a caveat, so I think there may be a time when we return to theUnited States for about four years and it depends a lot on our girls because if they decide that they want to come back and want to go to college in the United States, for example like our oldest daughter is talking about wanting to go to Stanford, and if she goes there, if our oldest daughter, if our youngest daughter also goes to school in California, then we might decide to come back to the United States for a couple of years and be closer to them and then we all go back to Portugal again, but that again goes back to that point of choosing a five in a higher number in a place where you can live and ultimately, if the girls return to the United States and return to California, we will be not limited because we decided to choose a fire number based on living in the Bay Area, yes, that gives you a lot of flexibility.

I mean, you literally chose one of the most expensive places in the world as a base for your good number. alpha, so you have this flexibility, I mean, I can only imagine the fraction of the amount you're spending in Portugal compared to the Bay Area, much more than that, Brad, I mean just for our audience that maybe there isn't achieved that. connection if you have a good number that's based on one thing and you're looking at roughly this four percent safe withdrawal rate and then you end up in a place that requires a fraction of that, I mean, that changes the numbers dramatically at this point in time. inflection where they can then return to this our cost of living area, so your safe withdrawal rate currently.

I'm just curious, are you guys using a 4% safe? Are they currently okay? What are they doing? Not us. We're under 4%, which is great because you know the less we take out, the more we can say or the more can stay in our investment accounts and grow, and the more likely we are to never run out of money. right money because Trinity studies is where this 4% rule is where everyone talks about this 4% rule and the idea is that if you withdraw 4% from your investment portfolio, for example, you have a good chance of never running out. money. but if you can take out even less than 4%, that probability of running out of money becomes even stronger for us in terms of never being able to run out of money because we are taking out less than that 4%, so living in Portugal is fantastic for us and, At the same time, we could always go back to California and live there.

I'm so glad, Christina, that you took a second to explain the 4% rule, so we're not just talking jargon to people, but for people who want more of that episode 35 of our podcasts, we talked to big ern about early retirement, now we delve into that and to add just one additional fact to that Trinity study, it's kind of interesting, so when we talk about Trinity study whether or not you will run out of money over a thirty year period , but regardless of that, they are considering failure or success, but the crazy thing is like choosing this absolute number to rely on.

Either you run out of money or with the other alternatives you end up with double or triple what you need in the end. It's something absurd. These little things that happen, you know, can send these two numbers in drastically different directions if you're able to do it. controlling your spending in any way due to geographic arbitrage or being able to taper and ramp up if you can affect these first few years these first five years of retirement significantly by taking out less than you really need, it's actually crazy what that affects to his future net worth projection, so I'll tell you what that didn't do justice to in terms of really explaining to people what they need to understand.

If you want to understand more about safe withdrawal rates, listen to episode 35 of the podcast to learn more. and I think you guys have an episode about that too that we can link to in the show notes for additional information. Okay, let's move on to question number three. His favorite life hack. I think our favorite life hack, I would say, is to rent. and mortgage free because if you think about it, if you look at your expenses, your expenses can represent maybe I mean, for living, your housing expenses can represent maybe thirty percent of your overall budget and if you find a way to live without rent or mortgages. in fact, you can take that 30 percent that you would normally spend on housing and start investing it and for us it was a huge game changer to be able to not only do this but do it for over ten years and do this in multiple different ways, just finding ways of living rent-free and mortgage-free and then taking all of our extra money and investing that's incredible, that's over ten years of you living rent-free and mortgage-free, yeah, and they were all different ways of doing it, I mean, we.

I talked before about this idea of ​​having kids and there are some things that we did before in terms of living mortgage-free, like getting roommates to pay for our housing, that we wouldn't necessarily do at this stage in our lives, but we did different kinds. of things and you can do it as a family or you can do it as a couple or as an individual, but there are all these different ways to create these savings that you can then use to invest because that's what it's about, you know, it's about the fire. finding ways to save more money and finding ways to make more money and when you can make huge drastic cuts in your spending or your budget that just helps you get the fire going a lot faster yeah what I love about your story in terms of Earn more and earn more only for the latest times, for people like you, it is not limited to just one like you.

In the beginning when they started it was all about cutting their expenses and they kind of had this slightly above the median income and then towards the Put an end to all these investments that they made recognizing that they are not limited to spending less. They know they are talking about making more of a decision to go back to college. They didn't pay off immediately, but at some point they could. to surpass that six-figure income mark during the last few years of your journey and was also able to impact earning more so you don't have to choose just one, you're not locked into one strategy, you can take a balanced approach and where you are in the snapshot from this moment in time is not where you're going to be five years from now eight years from now if you're paying attention and you're building a plan for it, so I think your story really sums up the heart of that well, question number four, your greatest financial mistake oh my gosh it had to be our BMW x5 it's buying a BMW SUV that was definitely our biggest mistake and this was before we were intentional about financial independence and You know we had a little money and we wanted show that and it was just a bad thing, not only was the car expensive but maintenance was expensive too.

I mean, an oil change was like a hundred and fifty dollars new tires were worth like a thousand dollars there it was just a snowball of bad decisions when buying that car this episode presented by Honda Civic what is the Civic like? It's worth it, question number five, the advice you would give your younger self. I think the advice we would give to our younger selves is really to create your goals, you know, create whatever you want in the future and keep that in mind, so when we were younger we were saving, we made some investments, we made our retirement accounts. in real estate, but it wasn't really with a purpose, so we retired.

I am almost 39 years old. I'm 41 when we retired and I think when we were younger, if we had this intentional goal of retiring at any age, maybe we would have. younger saying we want to retire at 30 or 35 or whatever year it was or whatever age it was if we had this goal in mind, I think we would have taken more intentional steps to get there and we could have gotten there even earlier, okay guys, we have an additional question: what is the purchase you have made, say in the last 12 months, that has added the most value to your life and I say this with the caveat that?

I've seen your amazing video about your minimalist house in Portugal, so I don't know if there's an answer here, but I'd love to hear you talk about travel rewards, so that's cool. I think our best purchase was, this might seem a little funny, but it was getting our tickets to fly here to move and retire in Portugal. I mean, we love this place, it has been by far the best decision we have ever made and we are very happy to be here in early retirement and we are living in Lisbon so I definitely have to say the best buy is those tickets for fly us here to Lisbon, you know?

And I have a feeling that after listening to this episode, our audience loves that with you maybe this is the episode that prompts them to be a little more creative, maybe at this point you haven't even considered moving out of your zip code. You know, maybe you anchor yourself to this idea that you can live anywhere in the world and if you want to. Your zip code is great, but why think about that? I mean, maybe there are other places that could provide incredible benefits for you and your family and would be wonderful places to live.

I know our audience may be desperate to know more about your story. and connect with you guys, what's the best way for someone to hear this, just want to follow along and figure out the steps that you took to get to where you are now, what's the best way for people to know more, yeah and we. Share all the ways we make money, invest money and save money all on our YouTube channel called our rich journey and then we also have an active Instagram account and you can find us on Instagram at rich journey amana christina thank you very much for joining us on today's show this has been a lot of fun thank you so much for having us that's great guys if you're listening to the episode if you've gotten value from the show obviously please subscribe if you haven't already. but tying it back to this episode, you know that Imana Christina actually said in this how a big part of the travel rewards of her trip was how she allowed them to travel the world almost for free.

If you're curious, you can definitely listen to the episode. 9 of our podcast where we laid out at the time what we were doing or, honestly, at this point, a great way to learn exactly how to implement a travel rewards strategy that will allow you to go ahead and go to some of these countries that they mentioned. just go choose fi comm slash travel all the information is right there it's a free course that really guides you step by step exactly what to do to be able to travel yourself your family your friends like honestly this is probably the easiest way to start your travel rewards trip you made it to the end you've been enjoying the content I know because you made it to the end go ahead and ring the bell hit the subscribe button on YouTube just let YouTube know you want to be here when we produce additional content new content every Monday and Friday every Monday and Friday new content talking about achieving the stated goal of achieving financial independence from my friends, the fire is spreading, see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled