#133： Financial Independence Through the Strenuous Life With Mr. Money Mustache
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay talks about how he retired at age 30, and how you can do the same if you're in your 20's or 30's. Brett is joined by Pete Mustache, founder of the blog "Mr. Money Mustache" and author of the book "Financial Badassery."
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now imagine you're in your 20s, a lot of you are actually in your 20s, and someone comes
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up to you and says, look, with your current job, you don't have to be making millions
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of dollars a year, just an average middle class job.
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You could retire at age 30 if you really wanted to.
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And of course, you'd probably say, well, that's crazy talk.
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You have to work 30, 40 years to save enough so you can stop working.
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Or the way you shortcut that is you start a business and sell it for millions of dollars
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So I'm going to put my 30, 40 hours, 30, 40 years in.
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He actually retired at age 30 working as a software engineer, and he wasn't making millions
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And the way he did it was just through extreme frugality.
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And Pete promotes what he calls financial badassery.
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And his big argument is that Americans waste a lot of money on stuff that we really don't
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And if we can get rid of a lot of these luxuries or cut back on them, we can actually save a
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And so what he says is like, look, you just live the strenuous life, do things that are
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hard, and you'll actually save yourself some money that will give you financial freedom
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So today on the podcast, Mr. Money Mustache and I discuss financial badassery and the mindset
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shift that needs to take place in order for you to be able to retire early if you wanted
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We're also going to talk about what do you do when you retire early at age 30 or 35?
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And then finally, we discuss some brass tacks things you can do right now to start saving
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more money to allow you to have some more financial independence.
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So without further ado, Pete, Mr. Money Mustache.
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I'm excited to be here on the Art of Manliness for the first time.
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So I think you're actually my first mustached guest I've ever had on the Art of Manliness
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Well, only in my publicity materials, because actually in real life, I don't always have
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So in that extent, I'm kind of failing in the manliness contest.
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But it'll grow back this winter, and then I'll be real again.
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I know a lot of our listeners probably have readers of it.
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But the story behind it is you retired at age 30.
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So this is about 10 years ago that my wife and I retired.
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And the reason we did that is in order to start a family, we always figured we were such
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workaholics back in our 20s that we want to be free from that in order to concentrate
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So that got us motivated to save through our 20s.
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And we just worked as normal like tech workers.
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And so no magic, not really stock options or any kind of stuff like that.
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It was just we lived sort of like a normal lifestyle, but we earned a little bit more
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than normal, which is not necessary for early retirement.
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But the real key is just not spending everything you earn.
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We spent we lived on a little under half of what we took home and invested the rest and
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just paid off the house, bought normal index funds.
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And when we were done, when we had enough savings, and we're going to get to that later
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in the interview, it was enough to just live off the dividends and capital gains and rental
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And then that was enough to cover our living expenses, which are pretty low.
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And only after we realized that very few people did this, did I feel it was necessary to start
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a blog to explain like, you know, this weirdo did this weird thing that's actually pretty
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So it was just aggressive saving, living frugally.
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We'll get talked about some of the brass tack things you do.
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Before we do that, let's talk about the underlying philosophy, because I feel like it's not so much
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It's the mindset that's the biggest change to do what you did.
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So what's the underlying philosophy behind the Mr. Money Mustache way of finances?
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Yeah, it's a good question, because I didn't even realize I had an underlying philosophy
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But then I realized it's, I think of everything as kind of like a game.
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So some people think you win the game if you get the most luxuries and spend as much as
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your paycheck as you can without getting in trouble.
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Whereas I always thought I won the game for keeping as much money as possible and accomplishing
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You know, like, for example, I always thought, oh, I'm 20 miles from work right now.
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I wonder if I could bike there, or I wonder if I can make the bike trip in the winter,
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or I wonder if there's a way I can get the groceries without resorting to a car.
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So just little challenges and doing stuff, pushing your own boundaries and doing things
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If you combine that with thinking about what makes you more money and what saves you more money,
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and that also applies to working harder and trying to kick ass a little bit more in your
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job, it just kind of automatically, first of all, it makes you happier because accomplishing
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and learning is a much stronger source of happiness than any kind of like big screen TV or like
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nicer pair of golf shoes and stuff is going to provide you.
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So you're happier, but at the same time, you're earning more money and you're spending less money.
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So it's kind of like these three spokes of a philosophy, which I later rebranded and I call
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it bad-assity, which is like the desire to be a bit more of a badass in your life tends
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to make you a lot more wealthy than you'd otherwise be too.
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I mean, but how do you do this when you're surrounded by messaging to do the complete opposite,
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We're advertising, but your friends, your family, they might not do it overtly, but subtly
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You should be living this sort of lifestyle, buying stuff, send your, you know, buy your
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kids nice things, go on that vacation that's really expensive.
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I mean, how do you make this mindset shift when you're being bombarded with messaging
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Yeah, I really like that question because you're kind of speaking of a US perspective and most
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of your listeners and readers and mine too are in this country and it's important to
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realize that we are actually batshit crazy in this country and a lot of other countries
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don't have the same consumption disease that we have.
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So you can get a long way just by doing the opposite of what everybody else does because
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Everybody is out of shape, you know, like a lot of health problems, self-inflicted and
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stuff because we're indulging in like, you know, our momentary desires instead of thinking
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in like a multi-decade plan of like, how can I make my life the best?
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So if you get negative feedback from society, that means you're doing a good thing.
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And of course, I'm saying that with a little bit of a joke in mind because, you know, really
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Like, for example, you know, people in my town, my friends know that I finished working,
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I have lots of savings, but I still ride around on an old bike and they see me carrying
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like a bike trailer full of groceries home from the store instead of having like my servant
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drive it, drive it in the limo and deliver it and prepare my meals and stuff.
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They know that I just like doing stuff the hard way because that's a more satisfying life.
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So you really, I think it's in your mind that people are criticizing you.
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If you confidently like set out to do a new, more badass lifestyle, really you end up getting
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If people see that you're serious about it and you're pretty confident in your own internal
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And then the second part of that is just tune out of TV and advertising.
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Like, you know, TV is designed for nothing but to make you want more stuff like a shiny
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So, you know, I just got rid of TV about 1999 and haven't turned back.
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I'll still watch like great movies and stuff, but just there's just no need to absorb advertising
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You can just wipe it out of your life now that the world is more modern and you get
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to choose the information that's pumped into your head.
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So between those two things, you know, people should try them and come back to me if they
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And you hit on this idea of not being a consumer.
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But I think it's really interesting because we've written about this on the site before,
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you know, anthropological studies about masculinity across cultures.
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One thing that anthropologists have found is that to be a man, what separates men from
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boys and primitive tribes, as well as larger industrial cultures like us, is that whether
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I think I get a lot of joy out of producing stuff.
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Like I'm currently living in a house that I built for myself, for my family, from almost
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It was a 1950s kind of dump when we moved in and then I tore like the whole roof off.
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And producing this house, and I've built other houses in the past, and producing writing
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and producing stuff through my jobs in the past was always where all the joy came from.
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And I find like when I occasionally indulge in consumption, it doesn't really give me as
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You know, like sometimes one time I went to a resort in Cancun and everybody's just bringing
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me stuff and all the buffets are ready for you.
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And all there is to do is just take, take, consume, sit down.
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Like, is there, do these guys working on the hotel need any help?
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Like I was looking around for something to keep me occupied for the week I was there because
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And I think that's a great way to shift the balance of your wealth is to suddenly think
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about producing and consumption is kind of like a necessary thing, but you kind of minimize
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that because it gives you more resources to produce, which is where all the fun really
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And what I love about your philosophy, it's un-American, but it's very American at the
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same time, because what you're advocating is basically what our founding fathers advocated,
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our great, great grandparents, like do it yourself, save as much as you can, produce, don't consume.
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But I guess there was a shift, I guess, in the after the world, second world war where consumption
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And there's still a lot of production going on in the background.
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I think it's a bit of a, people are trying to fool us, you know, like spend, spend, support
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The part, the reason the country is strong is because of all the great stuff that we produce
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and consumption doesn't even have to be quite as much of a part of that.
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If you make the best cars like the Tesla Model S, ship it over to Germany and they're
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buying them instead of BMWs, then you're winning that part of the economic game.
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And the other thing is if you produce stuff that delivers long-term dividends, like for
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example, you build up a big, awesome solar power factor or whatever that delivers energy
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for like the next century, that's the kind of production that is like a long-term benefit
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to society instead of just building a bunch of pickup trucks, wearing them out, burying
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them in the ground, build another bunch of them.
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Like, so there's different kinds of production and consumption that have different long-term
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So I like to move towards the stuff that actually creates lasting strength and lasting wealth.
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So Mr. Money Mustache is playing the long game.
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So you advocate or talk about financial independence and there's lots of books I've talked about
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Your Money or Your Life is one that I read and had a big influence on me.
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How do you know when you are financially independent?
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I think it's just never having to work for money again, which doesn't mean that you don't
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Like I enjoy working every day, but money is no longer a factor.
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Like, you know, this guy's going to pay me more, even though I don't like working for
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You never, no longer sell out your core values.
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And I even call this, I actually changed the word in my blog to being calling it retirement.
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Some people say financial independence, but I really like the word retirement because
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And I'm trying to redefine retirement kind of and say, well, guess what?
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Everybody should keep doing the work that they care about.
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You should quit your job if you don't like it, but you can call yourself retired as soon
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And it's just like a celebration, you know, celebration word, just my own personal preference.
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Um, so, uh, you advocate some serious, a serious savings rate, uh, 50% to 75% of your income.
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And I know for some people, a lot of people who are listening, there's like, that's just
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Um, so how do you do that on a tactical brass tax level?
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How do you save, squirrel away 75% of your take-home pay?
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Well, that's a key thing is first of all, think about take-home pay because when you first
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say like 50% of your income, people will say, wait a minute, almost 50% goes to taxes.
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Like, or whatever you, you got to understand, you're talking about your post-tax take-home
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pay, and then you should be able to work on saving a portion of that.
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And so the first thing is to say, so wipe out the prejudice where you say that's not
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possible because it is, you can live on 10% of your take-home pay.
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If you really got bad-ass about it, you know, people do this.
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People live on $4,000 a year in the U S so, um, and it's a matter of being smart and how
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Now, I never had to go anywhere close to that far.
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Like my family lives on, like we've always lived on at around, um, 25,000 of spending.
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Um, just because that's as much as we can manage to spend without feeling like we're
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Uh, as for the brass tax question though, uh, you just got to think about the main places
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A lot of people spend about 500% what they need to on driving around and not really ending
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So tricks for that include like prioritizing living close to what you do, live close to
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If you have to don't drive a big automatic transmission SUV, you know, get yourself like
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a nice used Honda and make it last for 15 years.
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And, uh, then there's food, cooking your own food, not going out for dinner as much, but
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still keeping it social by hosting dinners and having friends that do the same thing.
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So people end up having more fun at lower cost.
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Like a lot of people walk around, like picking up objects all day from stores or shopping
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And if you just kind of cut that out, reform your days so that shopping isn't really a
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A lot of people end up dropping a thousand dollars a month from their, from their spending
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So thinking of the big three is what gets you to, um, to the 50% or even 75% savings rate.
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And I guess a lot of it's just being mindful of yours.
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I think a lot of people just spend money mindlessly.
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They don't even know where their money's going.
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Like how many people have cable TV, a hundred dollars a month or more.
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Just be like, hello, I don't need cable TV anymore.
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And that's like $1,200 a year compounds into like 15,000 per decade by the time you invest
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And that's just by erasing something that you don't need anyway, because, you know, you should
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be out there producing instead of consuming other people's like reality TV.
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If you like watching sports, go out and play sports.
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So it's a, it's a harsh, harsh thing to say on the art of manliness podcast.
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There's a lot of, a lot of better stuff to do with your time than watching TV.
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But how do you do that when you're married and you have kids?
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Well, kids are, I always wondered that too, until I had my own kid.
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And it turns out they're not as expensive as people say.
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So obviously, like there's a certain amount of healthcare costs with a kid that are somewhat
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But other than that, it's pretty, pretty flexible.
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It depends how much stuff you buy your kid and how much time you spend with them.
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Like, for example, if you're home with your kids, like we were, then that saved a lot on
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daycare, which often costs over $1,000 a month.
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So I kind of encourage my son to do whatever he wants because we can afford it.
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But just because he has access to his parents so much, he's less into like the travel sports
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teams and stuff and more into doing things in the neighborhood.
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It's a little bit more of like a previous generation, the way things run in my town where
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the kids run around in a pack free and they play in the creek and play sports in the park
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I think my son, we've kind of added it up just very casually.
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And it's averaged to under $300 a month since he was born.
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And some people spend 10 times that amount on a per kid basis.
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So it's just, I wouldn't encourage you to cheap out, you know, like deny your kids of
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But if you just think of it in a different way, the expenses tend to melt away.
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Like my son, like our, my son's clothes, he's four.
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We've always bought clothes from friends who had kids and they grew out of them.
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It was like stuff from the Gap, but like we got it for like way cheap.
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Your friends are usually thankful if they can unload their kids stuff to you.
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I didn't even think of clothes because they've generally, until he was a certain age, they
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And similarly, we passed his smaller clothes on to other people.
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Now that he's nine, like he's big enough and growing a little more slowly that he truly
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destroys each item of clothing before it leaves the house.
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So there's no more hand-me-downs and stuff, but that's, you know, clothes are just amazingly
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So as long as you're not in, in a fashion competition, you're not going to spend more
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than like a hundred dollars or $200 a year on kids stuff.
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So are there any things you're doing like to have proactive conversation about money
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Cause I'm, I kind of hope he ends up with the same luck that I have with, uh, with not
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Um, so first of all, there's living by example, which seems to work.
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He, he sees what his parents do with money and he sees how we're not really into buying
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And, uh, whereas other friends of his, where the parents still do have to work might have
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like multiple BMWs or big SUVs, but there's other stuff, not having TV, I think really helps
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him because he's not, he's not barraged with a lot of kid advertising all day.
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We don't take him around to shopping malls cause I just pick up the necessities just
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through Amazon and everything gets delivered to the house.
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And, uh, the final part that's been kind of cool is that he gets his own money now.
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So if he wants something like a toy or a video game, he has to fund that out of his
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own account and we keep his money in a spreadsheet that I call just the bank of dad.
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So anytime he gets some money, like earns it or gets it from a birthday present or
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whatever, from a grandparent, he puts it into the bank of dad.
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I give him 10% interest, which, you know, kind of updates automatically every month and
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So now he has an incentive to leave the money invested, which is just how it should be for
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It was like, well, I could burn $50, but then suddenly I'm making $5 less per year
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He's generous with his little buddies, but he's not going to blow it all on just nothing because
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Like if I'm going to, if I want to fork over $100,000 for a Tesla Model S, I have to realize
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that a hundred is no longer going to be working for me for the rest of my life.
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It's going to be sitting in the driveway depreciating.
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And that's one of the biggest things that keeps my spending in check is just realizing I'd
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like to keep the nest egg in there working so that kids can actually get that concept
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Well, besides saving, spending less than you earn, what else do you do or what else do
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you advocate that people do to supplement their income, like support a family while not working
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Well, that's a, that's a nice shortcut because first of all, it is possible to just save so
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much that you never have to earn another cent, but most people don't do it that way, especially
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if you're, you're fairly early in the financial independence and you quit your main job.
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So for me, I really like doing carpentry, just like pro casual pro level carpentry around
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So even over these last 10 years, I've still done different sizes of jobs, just kind of
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like when my son has taken a nap or when he's in school, just go over and do some work for
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After she quit working in software, she got a real estate license, which is a fun thing
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She did some house selling and now she has an Etsy shop that she, where she's making
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like a kind of neat handcrafted bracelet and necklace kind of stuff.
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So people never lose their desire to produce after you quit the job.
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So you're probably going to make money even after you retire.
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But that just to expand your question a little bit, I also think if you kind of get focused
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about this and you get excited about challenge and hardship and, you know, the focused mind,
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you can often earn a lot more than you'd think in your regular career as well.
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So I was always trying to think of my job as the number one priority while I had it as
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And I think that helped me earn more than I otherwise would, which allowed my career to
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So I think people should, while you're still employed, you should really pour it on and
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And a lot of people can make a lot more money than they currently do.
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I know it's probably not, you're not going to have a specific answer, but roughly how
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much does someone need to save in order to retire early?
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Is there like a rough percentage of your income that you get?
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And because the financial companies, you know, like Fidelity or whatever, they often confuse
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you by talking about how much of your income you need.
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What you need to do is figure out how much you're spending and then you need 25 to 30
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times that amount invested and that will generate passive cash flow that you can live off more
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So if you spend $10,000 a year, just because it's a round number, you'd need $250,000 of
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investments to reliably deliver you that money forever.
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And then this is where the rubber meets the road because a lot of people, higher income
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people will build up a lifestyle for themselves that costs $100,000 a year.
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Well, it turns out to fund that you need between $2.5 and $3 million invested to keep
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that kind of cash fire hose going, which is pretty hard to save up that much money unless
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So I optimize on both sides, trying to earn more, trying to design an efficient lifestyle,
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$25,000, if you have your house paid off, which is how I do things, is more than enough
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to fund like a family of three or four in most U.S. areas.
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So in that case, you need about $600,000 plus pay off your house.
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$600,000 to $700,000 is enough to retire on plus the value of your house.
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It sounds like a scary number if you're a beginner at saving, but once you get into
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these 50% savings rates, the numbers really start to crank up unexpectedly and suddenly
00:24:35.280
you're dealing in six-figure changes instead of three-figure changes in your wealth each
00:24:40.860
So is this money that's not – they're in index funds, but they're not in a retirement
00:24:47.040
Well, I would encourage you put as much as you can into the retirement account because
00:24:52.580
But there's ways to get that out earlier or you could spend your post-tax money first
00:24:57.180
and then gradually work into your retirement money as you're older.
00:25:00.480
Or you might end up earning more money as a carpenter or whatever after you retire anyway.
00:25:04.300
So you don't worry about those details other than put it in there.
00:25:07.840
And yeah, index funds is the easiest way and it's a safe way.
00:25:11.820
If you're at all interested and skilled in rental house management or income properties,
00:25:16.580
you can get a higher rate from that than you can from stock investing in general.
00:25:22.600
But it's not an easy – you do have to know a little bit.
00:25:25.020
You have to be somewhat motivated to learn and understand why it doesn't work in San
00:25:29.880
Francisco very well and why it does work in Oklahoma pretty well because of the price-to-rent
00:25:34.740
ratios being more favorable in some different areas of the country.
00:25:40.100
And yeah, the whole paying off the house thing, there's like two sides of that debate.
00:25:44.360
Some people say you shouldn't and some people say you should pay it off early.
00:25:47.940
Why – because I've heard the argument you shouldn't pay it off early because there's
00:25:51.040
But I've never understood that argument because you're basically paying the bank money so
00:26:00.680
You can't really go wrong as long as your other alternative isn't buying a boat with that
00:26:05.280
If you pay off your house, you're getting a 4% return or whatever your mortgage rate is.
00:26:10.180
And a compromise to make kind of the best of both sides of the coin might be to leave
00:26:18.360
So max out the index funds while you're working and your income is high, especially if you have
00:26:23.500
an expensive house because you're going to be up in the – above the standard deduction.
00:26:28.080
So you'll actually be really benefiting from the mortgage write-off.
00:26:32.260
And then once you quit, your income will be a lot lower because you're just living off
00:26:35.720
investments instead of your massive doctor or lawyer salary or whatever.
00:26:40.520
And then you could transfer some money to pay off your house.
00:26:43.060
And that really lowers your monthly expenses a lot.
00:26:45.720
They lower your cash flow requirements, which just makes people relaxed.
00:26:51.400
It's a 4% guaranteed fixed kind of yield, which you can't really get anywhere else right
00:26:57.980
And it protects you from fluctuations in the stock market because you'll always have
00:27:05.640
You'll just be paying property taxes and that's it.
00:27:07.620
So what's the one thing that someone who's listening to this podcast right now, what can
00:27:13.640
they start doing today to start on the road to financial independence?
00:27:18.000
Well, you could start learning about other people who have done it.
00:27:21.820
Or you can just start taking action, like make sure you have a good working bike and start
00:27:29.020
I like that as a psychological bridge to better money management because it's a challenge.
00:27:34.180
It saves you money, but it's also getting you more physically fit and it's changing your
00:27:40.120
mindset so that suddenly you are active instead of passive and you're figuring out how you're
00:27:46.180
solving problems in the world instead of just relaxing and pressing the gas pedal.
00:27:50.140
So I like to use the bike as both like the figurative and the literal model for the first
00:27:55.960
step to a financially prosperous life because it's kind of the perfect example of the stuff
00:28:00.480
you have to do if you really want to get ahead of everybody.
00:28:04.240
So do hard things, like find something that's hard and do it.
00:28:07.440
And if you, I would say the bike is a perfect, you know, that can be the hard thing unless
00:28:14.100
Well, Pete, where can people learn more about your work?
00:28:16.260
There's only one place, just my blog, mrmoneymoustache.com.
00:28:20.180
And it's showed up on a lot of other stuff like newspapers and podcasts and stuff recently.
00:28:25.460
So you can poke through those in my media section too, if you want more of these big picture
00:28:30.180
interviews, but really if you want to just crank through some of the early articles and
00:28:34.420
then see if they, if you take a liking to them.
00:28:36.860
And if you do, then there's, there's a never ending chain because I've been writing this
00:28:41.500
So there's a lot there to, uh, to have fun with.
00:28:44.880
Well, Pete, mrmoneymoustache, thank you so much for your time.
00:28:53.780
He's the owner of the blog, mrmoneymoustache, and you can find out more about his work and
00:28:58.060
some more advice on personal finance by badassery at mrmoneymoustache.com.
00:29:03.780
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:29:07.040
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at
00:29:11.400
And if you enjoy this show and you're getting something out of it, I'd really appreciate
00:29:14.600
If you would give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it is you use or listen
00:29:18.300
to the podcast, uh, that will help us get some feedback on how we can improve the show
00:29:21.860
as well as get the word out about the podcast and more people, the more the merrier.
00:29:26.920
Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly, to stay manly, to stay manly,