The Truth About FIRE: Is $2M at 40 Enough?

Introduction: Meeting Emily and Kenji (0:00)

Bo: You guys have done the hard work from poverty, from food stamps till now. You’ve made the hard decisions and put you in the driver’s seat where you do get to pick and choose what your future looks like. You just have to make sure you finish the drill well. Don’t exit too early without making sure that you have a plan that will actually get you to that great big beautiful tomorrow that you want.

Bo: Today we’re here with Emily and Kenji. They’re 34 and 36 and they have a $2 million net worth. What brings you guys in today?

Emily: Well, we have this crazy idea of reaching financial independence around the age of 40. That’s 5 years from now. Pretty close. We need help with planning the next 40 to 50 plus years of our life, which is no small task. We’ve done our best to get us in a good place and invest a lot, but now we need the experts. We need the help to see if we actually can retire early or if we’re just kind of out in crazy land.

Brian: I love it. What’s the why for 40?

Emily: We would like the option to be able to work as little or as much as we want at that age. I personally got really burnt out by corporate when I was younger and I don’t want to have to go back to a 9-to-5 job. I never want to feel that pressure to go back.

Kenji: For me, it was just like I had this kind of dreamy idea. First it was when I was in my 20s. I’ll retire when I’m 30. You know, I’m going to go home. And then you hit 30. Okay, well maybe I’ll do it when I’m 40 or something. But then actually in our in our 30s, you know, it started to be well actually maybe we could kind of do that. And I have zero financial literacy. So she takes the full charge when it comes to that thing. And I trust her fully and she’s like, you know, maybe we can actually do this if we set things up right, if we plan it out. And I’m just like, okay, let’s try it. Let’s see if this works.

Background Stories: From Poverty to $2 Million (1:52)

Brian: What are y’all coming from? Like what you mentioned burnout from corporations. So what do you do and give us some background.

Emily: I worked in social media marketing for over 10 years and I mean by trade I’m actually an aesthetician but I didn’t go into that line of work. The marketing route was definitely more lucrative for me and I hit a point of burnout where we were trying to have a family. We were having trouble. I was physically and emotionally just I couldn’t keep up with the corporate demand. And so I ended up quitting and you know we had planned for that and said okay like let’s get you to quit and you know fortunately after that maybe it was coincidence but we were able to start our family and I was like you know I don’t really want to have to go back now like I like being around yeah like I want more time and like more freedom and I grew up in poverty too. So I very much came from nothing. Food banks and food stamps and I mean I only have a high school or I have a GED so you know the stats were definitely against me for sure.

Bro: Well, we’re in a second and look at your net worth and that right there is just an amazing thing. I want I want to hear vocally what you do but I want to hold on to that nugget because what an amazing this is where I started. This is how my journey started. It is not where it is ending. And I think that’s awesome.

Kenji: For me, I went to college. I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I studied anthropology.

Bo: They have degrees for that? I missed out.

Kenji: No, that’s the pipe dream. Of course. After graduating, moved back in with my parents and started looking for like random jobs. I actually was like a teacher at the YMCA for a little bit. And then my friend, he’s like, “Hey, do you want to move in with me?” I just got my own house and I’m like, “Yeah, I want to get out of my parents place. You know, I’m just out of college. I want to do my own thing.” He got me a job. He was working at a grocery store. And so I started doing night crew there.

Bo: Is that like stocking shelves?

Kenji: Yep. Night crew. So it was like 11:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.

Brian: Goodness gracious.

Kenji: Yeah. And then during this time though, because I had moved out, I was like, you know what? I kind of want to start doing this thing called streaming. You know, I had watched people online before. You can watch people like play video games and do stuff like that. I had seen people do it. I was like, I think I can do that a little bit better than they can or, you know, I can do it in a different way. So, concurrently while working at the night crew shift, you know, I would get home, sleep for a few hours, then I would turn on my stream. I would stream myself playing games. Eventually, that started making more money than the night crew thing. At a certain point, I’m like, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to stop working in grocery and I’m going to commit to this thing full-time.” And so, I started a challenge where I streamed every day for a year straight.

Brian: What year are we talking about here? When did this all start?

Kenji: Let’s see. I’ve been doing it full-time for like 13 years. So must have been what 2012, 2013 when I did the full year.

Brian: What’s considered OG in that marketplace?

Kenji: That is basically do you know Twitch TV? That’s the big streaming service. Twitch had like basically just started coming out when I started streaming. So I attribute a lot of it to luck getting in on like the ground floor the very beginning. Yeah. When there weren’t many people doing it. So as a result you know if people wanted to watch something well they had no option. Yeah, it was like a whole lot of choices. Exactly. When when you know when TV first came out, there’s only three channels. So, if I’m one of the channels, then you kind of have to watch me. Yeah. And then I’ve just been doing that ever since.

Bo: So that’s the vocation that you’d like to step away from at 40.

Kenji: I don’t know if I necessarily want to get out of it, but it would be nice to just, you know, put it down. I’m getting older, you know. I can’t keep up with the kids these days with that type of thing. So, I would be able to like to step away if I want to, you know, maybe it’s not doing a video every single day and streaming every single day like I do. Maybe it’s like doing a video once a week or something just for fun.

Brian: What’s the game that got you in? What’s the game that you feel like you had your biggest break and what are you what are you kind of focusing on right now?

Kenji: I’ve only actually played one game basically the entire time. Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually a card game, but they have an online client. It’s called Magic the Gathering.

Current Financial Situation: $2.2 Million Net Worth (6:00)

Bo: Emily, social media marketing is what you did. Kenji, you are currently a streamer and you mentioned, hey, I came from poverty, came from food stamps. Let’s look at where you guys are today, right now in your mid-30s, because it is remarkable. Total net worth of almost $2.2 million. Let’s pause there for a moment. You guys are mid-30-year olds that are multi-millionaires. Did you ever think that you would be in this position?

Emily: I didn’t think I need a tissue this soon. It’s different seeing the number here at this table than when I look at my budget spreadsheet just because it feels more real because we live well below our means. You know, we don’t live the flashy millionaire lifestyle. And so to see that it’s just kind of for me from coming from nothing, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

Bo: I love it. You said it’s a this is a product of small consistent decisions over a lifetime, right? Living below our means, putting I’m noticing on here, like if we walk through this, we’ve got like $31,000 in cash and cash equivalents. You have an investment portfolio of just under $1.1 million. You have primary residence has a million dollar value and then you do have this additional account for your son that has about $22,000. I don’t see any debt on where’s the mortgage. Where’s mortgage? Where’s auto loan? None of that’s on here, right?

Emily: Yeah, we are completely debt-free, including our home. And so I’m a personal finance creator now. And we talked about the trade-offs because our mortgage rate was very low. Like so low I don’t even want to say it. And our goal really has been freedom and flexibility and I knew that we could invest more and like probably earn more if we invested. But with our goal of FIRE, I was like, I don’t want a mortgage payment. I want to have our expenses as low as possible so that we could if we really need to and in times were tough, like we’re not going to lose our home. We could go mow lawns if we needed to and survive like because our expenses are low. And he’s like, “Yeah, let’s pay it off. Let’s pay it off.” So, we did still invest a little bit like we I think we loaded up the like the IRAs, but other than that, we put every dollar to the house.

Income History and Savings Rate (8:23)

Brian: Well, that’s why I want to clarify this. So, were y’all saving and investing at least 25% towards traditional investments or do you think you were doing a much lower number and then paying off the debt?

Emily: During that window, it was probably a bit lower.

Brian: But I see these numbers and I want to know how high has this gotten and where are we at, you know, from a historic standpoint on your income because to pay off a house in three years, there’s some money coming through.

Emily: I want to say when we first got together, we were probably at a combined income of $120,000, like $60,000 each, and then we peaked at about $425,000 for one year, but that was only one year where we were really busting our tails. But I want to say on average it has ranged between like this $250 to like $300 mark. But we’ve always just kept expenses like super low and everything has either gone to investments or the house. So our savings rate has ranged anywhere from 50% to I think one month it was like 85%. So as soon as it hits the account, out of sight out of mind.

Bo: No matter where the income went you guys stayed at a very modest living below your means lifestyle.

Brian: How long has the house been paid off?

Emily: Oh man at least like 3 years, 4 years something like that.

Brian: Any regret on that or do you have any inkling that “Maybe I’d have done that a little differently?”

Emily: I wish I had a magic eight ball back then. I mean who knows what the market’s going to do? I think for us it was really about the freedom that it would bring to be completely debt-free. If I redid it or if we had the chance to do it again and I knew the markets were pretty good, I yeah, I definitely would do probably more balanced approach.

Brain: I think for a lot of people who can’t who don’t have discipline, it’s okay that you need to go hard on the debt because you got a lot of people get themselves in trouble. But I do think for financial mutants that for people who are who are maximizers and don’t struggle with basic discipline so they don’t have to go teetotal on debt. I think there’s a balanced approach to it as I would I love people who can extinguish debt quickly, but typically the maximizing way is that you still go through the steps one through seven where you’re getting, you know, your Roth contributions, you’re getting all your 401ks, all the tax advantage ways that the government’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to restrict how much you can put in this account, so you might as well get while the getting’s good. Load up this stuff because the government’s only going to let you do this much per year.”

Bo: We recognize that money is nothing more than a tool that allows us to accomplish the goals that we have. And you guys have made it abundantly clear that being debt-free, having the mortgage gone was a goal. And so it’s something you pursued aggressively. And so what we have to figure out is when we pursue a goal like that so aggressively, there are other goals that that impacts. And that’s kind of what we want to unpack today because you guys have said going to age 40, you want to be work optional, right? We want to be able to not have to work if we don’t want to. And I’m assuming you don’t ever want to have to go back to work. The idea was to be financially independent and stay financially independent. Walk us through currently how you guys are thinking about your account setup and your savings and how you plan on actually exiting at 40.

The Dual FIRE Strategy: Coast FIRE Explained (11:26)

Emily: We actually have a bit of like a dual FIRE situation going. So the idea was that we have our traditional retirement accounts coasting and we project that those can grow upwards of 3 to 4 million by the time we hit 60. So we wanted to let those grow and be a pile of cash waiting for us when we turn 60.

Bo: Coast FIRE.

Emily: Coast FIRE. Yep. So we have traditional retirement coasting and then we have the brokerage account for early retirement that would be the bridge fund from age 40 to 60 to get us there. So we were expecting maybe a slightly higher draw down than like the 4% rule since it’s only 20 years. And we’ve been pretty flexible too because like our work has been I think pretty easy for us to pick up and so we have a pretty aggressive risk tolerance as well. So we would be using this early retirement brokerage fund and drawing down from that. And then at 60 that’s kind of where I admit like it starts to get a little overwhelming for me because then you got social security stuff and then we could have a really big pile of cash sitting there and it’s like oh we got to figure out. Maybe it had a great 20-year run and like what happens now, right? So, I guess that’s kind of the two piles of money that we’re looking to use for like early retirement then traditional retirement.

Bo: So, two different piles of money, two different goals to fund. How are you guys saving currently?

Emily: We’re actually boosting up the emergency fund. It’s actually about $40,000 now. Awesome. So, ideally we want to get that to closer to $100,000 to help us like offset the sequence of returns risk once we do retire. So, we’ll have that there and really everything is piling into the brokerage pretty much. We’re going to continually add a little bit to that high yield savings for the emergency fund and then the rest is just going to early retirement which I’m like should I probably put some into like the SEP IRA.

Bo: So, I’m going to reiterate what you say. So, if we think about these two goals that you have, right? We have this one early retirement goal from age 40 to 60, but then there is this secondary goal that’s like 60 to the rest of our life, right? Like it’s kind of what we’re thinking through. And where your mind has been from a saving standpoint is, hey, everything that we’re going to save, we want to save to fund that first goal. We want to make sure we get through that hurdle first. Correct?

Emily: Our complete focus right now has been this early retirement fund.

Brian: Awesome. Annual income. What’s that? Who’s making what currently?

Kenji: That is almost exclusively mine. She has started picking up her side business as well, but mine’s been pretty steady. I would say the last four or five years. It’s been probably between the $200 to $250 mark.

Emily: And then yeah, I’m just starting to ramp up my income.

Testing the Plan: The Bridge Account Analysis (14:07)

Brian: I’m noticing zero to 100. Zero to 100, meaning that y’all are all in on one behavior. Do y’all have I mean, are you open if we figure out that you’re doing a lot of things right? Are you open if we figure out that maybe on or off is not the y’all more binary with the decision while we’re here, right?

Emily: I’m totally open. For me, the way that I work best has always been focus on one thing because it gets really overwhelming for me if I don’t. And then before it was a lot of like invest in the HSA, invest in this, invest in that. And then I’m like, I want to retire early. I want to retire early. So, I’m just going to do this one thing. One thing just get it done.

Brian: Well, let’s Okay, let’s test it. Let’s test the plan. See how that’s going, right?

Bo: All right. So you guys have said, “All right, we’re going to fund all the money that we have, all the savings we’re going to do into this after tax account.” So if we think about it, really from now at age 35 until 40, we’re going to be growing those assets. So here’s what we said. All right, if we have initial starting value of $532,000, we’re going to be conservative on our rate of return. I think 6% is low, but again, Coast FIRE is a pretty risky endeavor. There’s a lot of variables that can affect it. So, we’d rather be much more conservative in our assumptions and things turn out better than we plan for than be aggressive and say, “Uh-oh.” So, 6% rate of return. You guys have let us know that you’re saving about $7,000 a month into that after tax account from age 35 to 40. And then what we said, and we’ve kind of had some back and forth conversations around this what your burn rate is. Again, you said you have a young child at home, two years old, right?

Emily: Yep.

Bo: Lot’s going to happen in the next 20 years just in terms of like what that looks like. And so again, we rather be very conservative in our assumptions as opposed to being overly aggressive, right? We’re doing our 3D glasses. We kind of want to focus on that bottom D, that doo-doo plan. What happens if it’s worse than we planned for? Right? So we said, okay, what if we assume that from age 40 to 60 you have an $8,500 a month burn rate? We want that to increase with inflation every year at 3%. Is that do all those seem reasonable and in line with what you guys have been talking about conversations you’ve been having?

Emily: Yeah, I would say so.

Kenji: She’s been running through a lot of simulations of all the Monte Carlo.

Emily: I would definitely say transparently I would say that I am definitely a pretty optimistic person. So, this is really good though to help I think reality check me. Because I do higher rate of returns. But I think I need this I need this kind of reality check to keep me grounded.

Bo: So when it comes to modeling, you model high rates of return, but when it comes to things like debt arbitrage and paying off the debt, it wasn’t given that there were going to be high rates of, right? I just want to make do you see there’s a tension there, right? There’s a conflict.

Emily: I guess I didn’t really think about that, right?

Bo: You model a higher rate, but if you believe that there really was going to be a higher rate, then paying off a 2.3% mortgage would not have made that much sense, right?

Emily: I guess it’s kind it’s more it’s like a mindset thing for me. Definitely. It wasn’t a math thing.

Brian: You know, the thing is Kenji said, “I’m giving you a lot of control.” So we just want to make sure your blind spots are accounted for, too. You guys are doing incredible things. We just have to make sure that we protect you from those blind spots so you don’t get yourself in a pickle of a situation. If you do all the planning off of the dream, man, life is going to -you have a 2-year-old- so you already know that life has a sense of humor. It’s up to creating the three sides of the plan to make sure that nothing derails you through this.

The Bridge Account Results: A Reality Check (17:37)

Bo: If we’re starting with $532,000 of after tax assets, we’re going to save $7,000 a month. By the time you get to 40, it turns into a really substantial sum of assets, right? Again, this is assuming 6% rate of return, fairly conservative. Just your bridge account, just that first account is going to be about $1.2 million. Okay, let’s pause there for a moment. That’s pretty awesome. Yeah, I think that’s exactly the number you’re shooting for. A million dollars in after tax assets at age 40. Is that the number that you were shooting for?

Emily: Yeah, I a big question mark for us was healthcare subsidies. And so that’s kind of in flux right now. So I think if there were more subsidies, I think 1.2 was around that number, but without them like 1.4 or 1.5 would be a little bit safer for us. So that’s not too far from the range.

Bo: So in line, great. We have these two different goals, these two different bosses on the game of life. We’re trying to beat boss number one and then big boss number two.

Kenji: Now I get it.

Bo: When we get to age 40, we want to think about what do your three buckets look like at that point because again, we’ve let the other retirement assets just kind of coast at least for the next 5 years. And so when we get there, your tax deferred, your pre-tax bucket will be about $570,000. Your tax-free or Roth bucket will be about $235,000 and then your after tax will be $1.2 million. Now, what we did is we assumed the after tax only grows at 6%. We again be very conservative with that account. But for your retirement accounts, we did say we’ll grow them at 7.5%. That’s even still a little conservative, but for you guys, you’re young and if you’re checking out and you’re gonna do Coast FIRE, you want to be conservative in the assumptions to make sure that you’re not overly rosy.

Brian: Does any part of y’all like twitch a little bit that some of the Roth and stuff is not getting maximized? Does that bother you at all?

Emily: Yeah. Well, I guess that was a question I had for you is that I was nervous that the pro-rata rule applied to us, so I didn’t do any conversions. And especially with the tax bracket that we’re in right now, I also wanted to be double safe. So, I think for me, I see that tax-free number and I’d like it to be a lot higher, but I was just concerned about getting hit with a huge tax bill if I did something wrong, right?

Brian: We’ll walk you through that. Spoiler alert.

Bo: Okay. So, if this is what we have to work with, $1.2 million. We really need that account to bridge us from age 40 to 60 because we can’t technically get access to these other retirement accounts until 59 and a half. So we said, okay, well, how’s this play out? If we’re going to be withdrawing $8,500 a month and we’re going to grow that with inflation, you know, $8,500 today won’t be the same as $8,500 10 years from now. How does that play out if we just think in linear terms? And again, you already mentioned Monte Carlo. Obviously, the way that you would want to do this is run it through a Monte Carlo simulation with a number of variables, but just conceptually, we want to show you sort of a linear illustration of how this looks. Well, what you can see is if you have $1.2 million and you do have that higher withdrawal rate that you’ve already acknowledged, right? If you’re pulling out $8,500 a month, it’s going to be like an 8.5% withdrawal rate on that 1.2. What actually ends up happening is that by age 52, the bridge account’s empty.

Emily: Okay.

Bo: All right. Let me pause there for a moment. What do you guys think about that? How do you feel about that?

Emily: I thought the number would be closer to like a maybe like a 6% draw down, but even still that might just push us out a few more years. So, I think we need to maybe not be so aggressive or optimistic and be a little bit more conservative because I don’t want to be 52 and then be like, “Oh, Kenji, go back to streaming.”

Finding the Solution: Supplemental Income (21:08)

Brian: You’re hitting. That’s the hard conversation. Your instincts are spot on because this assumption we went like Bo mentioned earlier, put on your 3D glasses. We’ve gone full doo-doo here and the fact that this is assuming you’re spending all of this and not actually putting any money in the background to offset this, right? We know that and that’s the part but you’re in conflict in the fact that you create this great income from something you love doing, but you are kind of the servant to content. By the way, we resemble we love it is the greatest job in the world, but you man, you do you feel under the thumb that you have to keep creating because the machine gets mad if you don’t create.

Kenji: Oh, that’s for sure the case.

Brian: So you just you said something earlier is that I would love to do it because I want to, not because I have to, but it is still a big threshold decision if you ever dial down the quantity because we know that our overlord algorithms, they don’t like it when you dial down the content amount. So but we can probably put some assumption that there’s going to be something coming in.

Bo: If this is the strategy that you guys wanted to perpetuate, you wanted to do this thing where we focus on this first boss, this first goal, this first hurdle first, what would be required to make it work? And we said, well, obviously the thing that would be required to make it work would be some sort of supplemental income. And so we just kind of did some reverse engineering to say, okay, how much income would Kenji need to be bringing in in order for this plan that you guys currently have in place to work? And the answer is $4,250 a month. And we said again to be conservative, let’s just not even inflation adjust that. So even though our $8,500 monthly need is increasing with inflation, we just assume that every month from age 40 until 60, you could generate about $4,250 in income. Does that seem reasonable?

Kenji: Yeah, I think so for sure. Especially since I think her stuff is going to start taking off a little bit as well. So, you know, even if mine goes down, you know, I think she’ll also offset some of that.

Bo: This again, what we’re trying to do is we’re reverse engineering how to make your plan work. And if the plan that you have right now in place is the one you want to stick to, this would be a way to possibly make that work. Now, what it does do is it actually ends up depleting your entire taxable account. So, when we get to age 60, when we just conquered first boss, when now we get to the big boss, this is what you have to work with at that point. Again, assuming a 7.5% rate of return, your pre-tax, your tax deferred assets will have grown to about $2.5 million and your Roth assets will have grown to a little over a million bucks. So, here you sit with like $3.5, $3.6 million. Give me some thoughts on that. How does that feel and sound?

Kenji: When I’m 60, that sounds great, right?

Emily: I mean, I’m sure inflation adjusted, it’s not going to feel as much as it does now, but still, I mean, that feels and sounds like a comfortable number to me.

Bo: I want you to bottle up and say “that feels nice and comfortable.” Yeah, this seems like it’s going to shake it and this seems like it’s going to be great.

Alternative Strategies and the Second Boss (24:25)

Bo: Now, I do want to be clear. What we’ve tried to lay out here is okay, what would be required in order for the plan that you guys in place to work? Now, we’re going to have tons of people in the comments. We’re going to have tons of people that are acknowledging, no, no, no. You’re part of FIRE, when you’re part of FIRE, there are other strategies available than just the after tax account. And so we’d be remiss if we didn’t just briefly mention, right? Yes, there are some different strategies you could carry out. You could during this period from 40 to 60, you could do Roth conversion ladders where essentially you convert some of your pre-tax assets into Roth assets to create basis that you could access. Now, there’s going to be a tax cost to that. So, it’s going to cause the taxable account to wane even more quickly. But that is an option. The second option we could potentially look at is 72(t) Distributions, which is a special part of the tax code where you can take substantially equal periodic payments from your retirement accounts if you structure them a certain way. So, if you needed to create income from pre-tax accounts, technically you could do that and not have to pay the 10% penalty. So, that’s an option. Okay. And the third option is you do have some Roth assets and we know that when it comes to Roth, we can pull basis out penalty-free and tax-free. So again, if you depleted that after tax account, there are some ways for you to do that. But all of those everything that I just laid out kind of has you sort of pulling away from your second boss to conquer the first boss. Because when we think about this visually, you have this first goal, you have this first hurdle you want to make it over, getting to age 60, and we can celebrate that and be like, “Yes, we did it. We made it right. But in our view, getting from 40 to 60 is not nearly as significant of a hurdle to have crossed over than getting from 60 to all the way through the rest of your life. If you live to 90, 100, 100 plus, whatever that number may be for you guys. Because it’s likely going to be easier to go back to work between 40 and 60 if something goes uh-oh. Between 60 and 100, it might be hard to go back. It may be hard to be.

Emily: Are you saying a 60-year-old couldn’t be a streamer?

Brian: We could come up with a whole new thing. Believe me, I’m closer to this 60 and I can tell you nobody wants to see me playing streaming. That’s not where my income is going to come from.

The Reality of Retirement Income (26:42)

Bo: So, we acknowledge there’s this second goal we have to make sure that we appropriately account for. You’ve already laid out for us. You have this personality trait where when I have a goal, I get fixated. I want to solve that. And what we want to be careful of is you don’t just solve the first goal of what I’m going to call your sabbatical or pre-retirement retirement at the cost of the second goal of the bigger one. So let’s talk a little bit about the second goal, the second boss we have to beat. We’ve already laid out for you what your retirement assets will do. They’re starting with about what half a million dollars and if they just grew at that 7.5% by the time you get to age 60 it’s going to be worth about $3.6 million, which sounds you remember I said bottle it up. This sounds great, sounds amazing, sounds awesome. If we were to then just assume a 4% withdrawal rate, you know, reasonable withdrawal rate on that sum of dollars and then we were to bring those dollars back into today’s terms, we feel comfortable that $3.6 million for you guys at age 60 could generate about $70,000 a year.

Emily: That’s about the lifestyle we have now or maybe a little less. But I think I would want a little more comfort in traditional retirement.

Bo: Well, what we laid out, remember, was that during your 40 to 60, you were living off of $8,500 a month. But y’all had told us internally $7,000 a month or close to $85,000. So, we’re still, even with y’all’s optimistic number because we felt like we wanted to be conservative, there’s still a spread there of $15,000 a year. As y’all know, life, do you want to go less or do you want to maybe have a little cushion or margin? Because there’s no going back. Because once you cross this threshold and you know, it’s hard to get the water back up the hill. I mean, it’s a big decision.

Emily: That’s totally fair. And I think like actually seeing it laid out and you know, we also want to be I mean I won’t speak for Kenji. I’ll let you speak for but I want to be really generous with our money too. And so it’s not necessarily about like just having all these luxurious things. It’s like I want to give a lot too. I want more money for that as well to be able to be more generous. So I mean what does that number look like for you Kenji?

Kenji: I mean I could live in a shack as long as I have internet. I mean I guess I want to you know I want to travel a bit more and stuff as well. So I would expect, you know, the difference between our yearly expenditures now and, you know, when we’re older is I think it would be kids are curveballs.

Brian: Kids, education, things, activities. I would probably lean more towards the conservative that there’s going to be things that are going to actually squeeze on that back pocket more than you’re probably realizing.

Kenji: Maybe we want our annual cash flow, you know, closer if it’s like $85,000 now, we want it close to $100,000 plus, you know.

Emily: And I think I probably I’m sure you will both get to it, but I probably need to check those blind spots, start investing a little bit more in the traditional retirement account.

The Optimized Solution: Working Until 43 (29:48)

Bo: Well, so that’s where we went with this. We said, “Okay, this in our opinion, this does not get you there, but let’s again reverse engineer.” That’s the beautiful thing about I love your numbers. It’s almost like we coordinated this. It’s almost like we have a crystal ball ourselves because look at what we’ve done. We built it up to $102,000. So if we just reverse engineer and say that’s the standard of living you would like to have $102,000. So that way you’re not essentially taking a pay cut when you go from first retirement to second retirement. You live the same lifestyle. In order to do that, we think the pot of assets you would actually need to grow to by age 60 would be closer to like $5.3 million. Okay. Right. So $3.6 million is kind of what you’re on track for. $5.3 million is what we’re saying you should probably shoot for. Let me pause there for a moment. Does that sound daunting or difficult or something like oh man that’s like a whole lot more money. How are we going to do that?

Kenji: I mean it sounds like a lot but I realize or I understand that you know the compounding interest and stuff.

Emily: I tried to teach him. I tried.

Kenji: Oh yeah. It sounds like a lot but I guess from $3.6 million to $5.3 million maybe is not as much as we think. It’s a course correction. Little decisions have big results. I don’t know what that course correction looks like, but I know it’s probably not as bad as your mind first.

Emily: I thought it was a trick question, but I was like, it might not be as much as we think.

Bo: Here’s what we said. We said, okay, you know what? Let’s not cause them to start eating beanie weenies and let’s have the same cash outflow. What if they were going to save the same amount of money, but we just wanted to save it a little bit differently? Optimize. Right now you guys are saving $84,000 a year, $7,000 every month going into the after-tax account. Well, if instead of doing that, what if we maximized our retirement opportunities available to us? That is where we can talk about things like doing Roth contributions or maybe backdoor Roth contributions, looking at a solo 401(k) because that might be a great solution to have in place for you guys that would remove some of the pro-rata rule stuff that you’re concerned about. Okay. What if we could save $45,000 to the retirement account and still be saving $39,000 into the bridge account? So, we’re still saving over $3,000 a month into that after tax account. So, we’re still growing it at the same level of cash outflow. How would that change the plan? What concession would we have to make? Well, as we lay that out for you guys, instead of stopping at 40, if you could do that until age 43, what that then allows your retirement assets to do is go from 35 at $553,000 to by 43 when you actually start your coast, instead of starting your coast at 40, starting at 43, you have about a million and a half dollars in assets in retirement. If you let that million and a half dollars in assets in retirement grow to $5.3 million, you don’t have to add anything else to it. You don’t have to keep saving. It has you working for three additional years.

Emily: That’s only putting like the $3,000 something in the early retirement.

Bo: But also three years, but only because remember, if you work for an additional three years, that’s three years that you’re not having to live off the bridge account. That’s three years that you’re creating income. So when we actually look at how that plays from sort of like a bar chart standpoint, what you can see is instead of exiting at 40, you actually build your bridge account. It still gets to $1.2 million. Even though you’re saving less, you’re just doing it for three more years. You’re still able to draw that down. $8,500 a month, assuming that you still have the supplemental income of $4,250 coming in. And then at age 60, you still have after tax assets left over.

Emily: Well, I’m gonna be honest. This sounds a lot better than the other charts you showed me. And honestly my initial personality trait was $3,000 in the early retirement thing isn’t going to be nearly enough. It’s going to take so much longer. And then when you’re like, it’s only 3 years.

Brian: But that’s why it’s important to actually do the planning is because it’s back to that mentality even of debt crusading is that you are thinking well let’s just do this and it’ll all work out and that’s great but you quickly find out this is the power of compounding interest. Those small little decisions do have huge results. Don’t sleep on the little stuff because we’re using the same dollar amount of money. It’s just different decision matrix and that different decision matrix is going to lead you in a completely different direction.

Emily: I love how optimized this is because I’m very frugal by nature, so I’m all about value and optimizing. So, I’m very shocked I haven’t addressed this yet, but I feel good about that.

Kenji: There’s still there’s a little bar at 60 as well. It’s not It’s not empty.

Emily: You can get a new streaming computer. This looks amazing.

Additional Variables and Homework (34:32)

Bo: There’s a number of different variables that you guys get to change. Like we showed the one where Okay, what if you save the same amount, but you just work a little bit longer. There’s another scenario that we didn’t model. This is homework for you guys to do. Hey, what if we just save more? If we still want to leave at 40, how much more would we need to save to be able to do that? You guys have done the hard work from poverty, from food stamps till now. You’ve made the hard decisions and put you in the driver’s seat where you do get to pick and choose what your future looks like. You just have to make sure you finish the drill well. Don’t exit too early without making sure that you have a plan that will actually get you to that great big beautiful tomorrow that you want.

Emily: Oh, I don’t want the tissue again. This feels this is exactly what I was hoping for, like coming here and talking to you and I’m so proud of like both of us of being able to build this together and like thank you for trusting me to help manage things. Of course, we always talk about and like you, but still it’s just the fact that this actually could be a reality and we’re pretty close and I love the optimizing. It’s just it’s like overwhelming. It’s Wow.

Kenji: I turn in the homework to the teacher and the teacher’s got graded by her directors or whatever. This is good. This feels really good.

Tax Planning: Solo 401(k) and Backdoor Roth Strategy (35:53)

Bo: The planning is not done. In our view, the planning for you guys has just started. We wanted to lay out because obviously you have an affinity for this. You’ve been doing your own Monte Carlo. You’ve been doing your own analysis. What questions can we answer for you guys that’ll be helpful as you go back to do your own planning?

Emily: Where I get the most wary is taxes and I don’t want to make a mistake there. So, we currently have a SEP IRA for him. These traditional retirement accounts like which one do I choose? Like what’s right for us?

Bo: So, let’s look at your net worth statement again. Let’s look at how your accounts are currently structured. So, when we look at you guys right now and Kenji, I’m going to just use your accounts. You have a traditional IRA that has $56,000 in it. You have a SEP IRA that has $74,000 in it. For your entity, for your enterprise, for the work you do. Do you have any employees? No, it’s just you, right? So, that’s how you’re able to do a SEP contribution. And every year, you’re able to contribute 20% of your net operating profit depending on how you’re structured and how you pay yourself, you’re able to make that contribution. One of the beautiful things is if you were to have a solo 401(k), and these days, solo 401(k)s and SEP IRAs aren’t all that different. They still allow you to accomplish some of the same goals, but solo 401(k)s don’t just allow for an employer contribution. It also allows for employee contributions. So, you can do salary deferrals up to $23,500 plus a profit sharing component. So, you’re able to save in a really healthy manner inside of Solo. But where it opens up additional planning is once you have that account open, and you can open it any of the major custodians. You can open it at Fidelity or Vanguard or Charles Schwab, wherever you guys like to hold your assets. You can then consolidate some of his pre-tax accounts. You can move his traditional IRA into the solo 401(k). You can move the SEP IRA into the solo 401(k). Once you’ve done that, all of your pre-tax assets are now held inside a 401(k) account. There are no more outside IRA assets. So, the pro-rata rule for backdoor Roths does not apply anymore. So once you move those two accounts into the solo, then you can start doing backdoor Roths every single year. Put $7,000 in a traditional after tax. Don’t take a deduction. Convert it to Roth. Do it again next year over and over and over and over.

Kenji: We’re going to need this in writing.

Emily: You guys should do this for a living. You’re pretty good. You’re pretty good at this. That’s exactly the kind of direction that I was looking for because I’ve been so paralyzed by fear of like if I do something wrong, all of a sudden we’re going to get this huge tax bill and we’re in this, you know, higher income tax bracket. Like I don’t want to mess it up, so I’ve just left it. Just to like clarify, so you said that we could move his traditional IRA to the solo 401(k), but then we could also move his Roth IRA somewhere?

Bo: Leave the Roth alone because that’s every year. So, you’re going to move a traditional that’s $56,000 into the solo. Okay? So, a traditional will have zero dollars in it. Okay? You’re going to move the SEP in there, too. So, that’s going to have zero dollars in it. Every year, you’re going to put $7,000 into that traditional. You’re not going to take a tax deduction. It’s going to be an after tax contribution, and you’re going to convert that into the Roth IRA. So, it’s going to move from the traditional account into the Roth IRA.

Brian: The pro-rata rule exists because there’s IRA assets. We’re going to this structure that Bo is laying out removes all those traditional IRA assets out of your portfolio.

Emily: So, we’re clearing we’re cleaning out that traditional IRA and now we have a beautiful place to do conversions.

Brian: That’s right. Exactly. Right. For your stuff that you are now ramping up. Do you have any employees?

Emily: No, I’m just generating income from it?

Bo: Yes. So, right now you could also do the exact same thing with a solo 401(k) for yourself. So you could have a solo 401(k) for your business and you could have one for your business and you can implement both strategies in the same way to open up backdoor Roths for both of you guys.

Brian: The only curveball you’re going to run into, Emily, is your traditional IRA is a much bigger account. Yeah. And the only catch with solo is realize these things were set up by the government to incentivize small business owners to set up retirement savings vehicles that was very similar to what Fortune 500 employees could have. The limitation is once they get over like $250,000, a lot of the tax filings, the 5500s and other things that they exempt you out of now start showing back up on the scene. It’s not a deal breaker. It just means you have to actually now start complying with some of those things. So, if you did this, you just want to make sure you’re going in with your eyes fully open so that you stay compliant on the process. It’s not hard. It’s a box you have to check. Like most things, this is remember what I always talk about on the show is we can tell you everything because building wealth is actually pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean that complications don’t just start showing up as the success shows up. You realize it is so hard for us to create content and data on a 5-year, 20 year, 40-year because just so much of life is going to happen. What I get so excited about with you guys is if you were like a client of the firm, every year we update all these things and we course correct. So every one of those 1% differences that we’re changing the direction that are creating huge results, we get to in real time adjust that for you guys on your personal situation. So everything is not maximized on a 5-year basis, not on a 10 year, 20 year, but every year we figure out what tweaks we need to do to give you the best version. So that way we can figure out, do y’all need to save more or do we just need to change the restructure of how we’re funding this. That’s where the magic stuff happens. It really is. We take very successful people. You guys are super successful and we get to tweak it and get you the best version of it.

Emily: And you know, honestly, like I’ve been asking myself that is like are we at a point now of wealth where maybe we should consider working with a financial fiduciary or somebody to help because this is starting to get into like the hard mode of the game, right? Like you said, like more money, more problems or more complexity. And so I have been like talking to Kenji too. I’m like, you know, like there’s a point at which my knowledge extends and like ends. And I think this could be an opportunity for like you’re saying like getting more of that real-time help of like course correcting and I don’t want to just set it and forget it and then 10, 20 years from now I’m like but man I wish I would have.

The Cheat Code and Final Thoughts (42:06)

Brian: My favorite video game growing up was Contra. They came out that if you went up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A they give you 30 lives. Do you realize it was a cheat code? Because it now allowed what I couldn’t do in three lives I could do in 30 lives. You realize you’ve only got one financial life. So if you screw it up, you got the three. You don’t even get the three. You get one. No cheat code. So if you don’t know, we are the cheat code because we have done we are the up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A because we give you do you know because we’ve done this hundreds of times. We know where all the pitfalls are and all the struggles are. So that’s what I know you’ve been doing boss and all these other but I kept going man the Contra code has to come in here somewhere because that is the way this kind of works financially as well.

Kenji: I want to make the best play is what they say. The play that gives you the most chance to win. You can make you can make the best play and still lose, right? Because that’ll happen sometimes in life. But as long as you did what was going to in theory give you the best chances, then I’m happy. So, as long as we get that plan settled in motion.

Bo: There’s actually a third boss, and it’s not really a boss. Once you’ve beaten the game, then you get to do some pretty fun stuff. And we thought a visual representation of this would get you excited. Once you get past the first hurdle, and then once you get past the second hurdle, flag, then you get to actually do the stuff that you mentioned at the very beginning. Hey, I want to be generous. I want to leave a legacy. I want to do other things. I need to make sure that I make decisions with my money so that I can solve the problems that I have. But once I’ve solved those problems, then I get to do what I want, when I want, how I want, and have the impact that I want to have. And that when you get to that part of the journey, that’s when the game gets really, really fun.

Homework Assignment (43:59)

Brian: Here’s your homework. You ready, guys? Ready. Number one, we’re going to give you copies of all this. Everything we’ve gone over, we’re gonna send to you. We want you to rework the assumptions. Work the assumptions based on what you feel comfortable with and do it in sort of a 3D fashion: the dream, which you’ve got down, the down to earth, which is probably even a little better than what we’ve laid out, and then the doo-doo, what we’ve kind of laid out, very conservative. We then want you to take this and either do it yourself or consider finding a professional to help because once you have the assumptions in, then you want to do the Monte Carlo test. We’ve all done linear straight line assumptions. What we’d really want to do is run a Monte Carlo simulation saying, “Okay, what’s our probability of success with this group of factors? Okay, what if we change this? How does our probability change and continue to iterate through the process? As you’re doing that, we want you to optimize. You guys should do some research around, hey, should we be doing solo 401(k)s? If we do solo 401(k)s, does that mean that we can then consolidate our IRA assets? If we then consolidate our IRA assets, does that mean that now we can start doing backdoor Roths and really starting to optimize? You guys are in a great spot. You are in the driver’s seat.

Emily: You had me nervous for a while. Well, I was thinking like, but wait, there’s more.

Bo: You guys are great. You’re in an awesome, awesome spot. And I think there’s a lot of people out there are going to look to you guys say, “Man, I want to be able to recreate and do what they’ve been able to do.”

Brian: Bo, if others want to know how to do exactly what Emily and Kenji have done, where do they need to go?

Bo: Yeah. If you’d like to be a guest on Making a Millionaire, you can go to moneyguy.com/apply. Or if you’d like to check out any of our free tools and resources, you can go to moneyguy.com/resources. Thank you so much. I’m your host, Brian Preston. Mr. Bo Hansen, Money Guy Team out.