Teacher Retires Early at 45 Thanks to Strategic Living (FIRE in Paradise!)

Teachers aren’t known for their high salariesWhat if your biggest money fears became your greatest strength? After watching her family’s financial security disappear overnight, today’s guest spent decades building a six-figure nest egg as a teacher living abroad. Yet the money fears from her childhood remained until the fire movement came in and showed her a new path. Then she adjusted her portfolio and followed the simple steps to reach financial independence. Her journey proves that financial independence isn’t just about building wealth, it’s about breaking free from the money fears that hold us back. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my never been to Bali co-host Scott Trench.Oh, that sure wasn’t nice. Mindy, wait. Didn’t direct introduce me. BiggerPockets as a goal of creating 1 million millionaires, you’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.Amy Mickley is a dear friend of mine. In fact, we just got off a cruise boat three days ago and I am so excited to have her on the show today to tell her journey of turning her teacher salary into financial independence through geographic arbitrage. Amy, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to talk to you today.Thank you Scott and Mindy, I’m so pleased to be here and really honored to be on your podcast. I’ve been following you for years and appreciate all that you’re doing to advance financial literacy in the world.Well, Amy, we could not do it without people like you who are willing to share their stories. Let’s talk about your beginning, your financial beginnings. I know you grew up with some financial insecurity. What did that look like growing up?Sure. When I was a kid, my dad was an attorney and I had three older sisters who were much older than me. I was the surprise child later in my parents’ life, and so I did have financial security as a child, but then when I was 12, my dad ran off kind of typical midlife crisis, ran off with a younger woman, bought a sports car and he wasn’t paying child support. So my three sisters were all in college at the time and it was just me and my mom at home and that really deeply impacted me. I didn’t know my parents outwardly. I didn’t know that there were any problems in the marriage. They seemed to get along well and so it really was a shock to me. And then my mom, we had to sell our family home. We moved to a different state so my mom could go to school and be near the rest of her family.
She was frantically reading finance books. She didn’t really know anything about the finances, had never finished her college degree, and I really saw that money and security in her being dependent on a man and I became almost like her trusted friend or almost like a spousal role in a way. And so a lot of those money fears were passed on to me and then I had to support myself a lot more than my sisters did as far as paying for college, paying my rent, everything really fell on my shoulders during my college years. So I really learned how to pinch pennies. I lived in the crappiest student apartments and I was an RA for some years, so luckily I graduated debt-free, but it took me five years and I was always working two jobs and hustling, so I learned a lot about budgeting during that time, but I also had a scarcity around money and I also didn’t feel comfortable spending, which wasn’t always healthy either.So I can identify with that last comment very much and I think it’s really impressive that you graduated college, you had to work two jobs, it took you five years, but you graduated debt-free. And we hear so many stories of people who graduate with 50, a hundred, $200,000 in student loan debts and then they’re like, oh, now what do I do? So I think you had a much better approach even though maybe the reasoning behind it was scarcity and fear. Once you graduated college, what did you study in college?I studied history, which didn’t really give me a lot of options, but it was something that I loved and I thought I was interested in teaching and my sister had lived abroad briefly and so my first plan of action was to go abroad to Japan and teach English and I taught in Japanese public high schools, which were super fun. They used to bow to me before class and they were just such fun kids they’d say and they’d bow in so much enthusiasm and I just had such an incredible cultural experience there. I mean the Japanese government flew me over, it’s called the JET program, so they paid my rent and I didn’t make a huge salary over there, but it really opened my eyes to possibility. I never imagined that I would live so many years abroad. I’ve lived 23 years abroad at this point, but I thought I’d go just for a year or two and then I’d come back to the US maybe get a doctorate PhD or something and do the history route. But I discovered I really loved teaching and then I learned about international schools and that was the ticket really to save more as an educator I had to go back and get my master’s in the US and then really target international schools primarily in Asia because they do pay better than other international schools in other parts of the world.Just to be clear, do international schools pay better than US schools and you have subsidized things like housing and other benefits that go along with it or is it just one of those in the overall impact is increased ability to save?Yes. I mean international schools can vary quite a lot. So many different qualities of international schools and types of international schools, but there are, especially in Asia, a lot of the top tier schools pay extremely well. So they will ship your things over, they will pay for annual flights home, they do pay your rent, and so that fast tracked my ability to save. All I had to really cover was just my food expenses and travel and I was frugal anyway, so even when I traveled, I was used to doing the backpacking style of traveling. So it definitely, and a lot of times they’ll put into your social security as well, depending on the school or they’ll do incredible matching programs. And so some of the top tier schools are harder to get into and I had to work my way up starting at a more entry level school and it took a few years, but definitely they pay better, especially the Asian schools.Just one question or observation here. Are you saying that in Asia top teachers get paid more, way more than teachers that are not, can’t get access to those same jobs in there? Unlike in the usYes, they do. And I mean teaching salaries vary a lot state by state. So I mean I know teachers in New York make more than teachers in a lot of other places in the country, but yes, definitely without a doubt and when you factor in all the other benefits as well, like the free housing, the free annual flights, the matching programs and all of that, there is a huge upside to teaching internationally in Asia, but those schools definitely require you to have your master’s in education more teaching experience. It’s not something that just with my history degree I could have gotten initially.So it’s not hard to then build a picture of basic frugality and smart money management would allow after a decade or more for a substantial pile of wealth to be accumulated in there. But I do have a question about how you mechanically invested because I’ve heard that that can be difficult for folks who are living internationally to purchase things like index funds for example, in the same way that we take for granted here on the mainland. Is that a myth?No, I didn’t find it hard to purchase index funds. I wasn’t able to take advantage of 401k programs, but because a lot of times I was living tax free, I worked in New Delhi, India for four years and they paid my taxes so I was getting that benefit anyway, or in Singapore when I lived there, there’s kind of a reciprocal tax agreement. I was paying Singapore taxes but not US taxes and at the time it was 7% Singapore taxes is what I was paying. So I was able to invest in Vanguard index funds, but I wasn’t able to take advantage of a 401k or some kind of retirement product like that.Do you have access to a Roth IRA because you do have earned income, but it’s not American earned income?No, you’re not supposed to invest in a Roth IRA if it’s not US earned salary income. And because my salary, because I was filing the 25 55, which is a foreign income earned exclusion act, I’m not being taxed on my US income, so therefore I couldn’t take advantage of a Roth. Now I do have a Roth for all the years that my early life, because I saw my mom reading investing books when I was young. There were some years that I was able to invest in a Roth, but not a lot of years. So a lot of my index investing was just in a regular brokerage account.Scott, Amy’s not going to find herself in the middle class trap here.Yep. Love it. A couple more things on this it sounds like, and there’s a whole bunch of other things I’d love to get into here after a beer or three in terms of how schools work in Asia compared to America, but just to get an idea of this, and I could be completely wrong, so let me know how out of touch this is, but I would guess that a teacher, let’s call it in somewhere in the south like Tennessee or Alabama, might make 75,000 a year after 10 years in the profession with a pension accruing, something along those lines and someone in New York, maybe closer to 90 at that same level, is that close and what would be the comp for a teacher who really got into one of the top schools in Asia?I’m not honestly very I’m sure about teaching salaries in the us. I’ve never taught in the US other than my student teaching. I was lucky once I graduated with my master’s degree, I ended up getting that job in Singapore just because I knew someone who worked there. I was really very lucky. I’m grateful to him, but I would even think that that might be a little bit high if that’s a starting salary, I would think that would be very high. I think most teachers earn much less than that. I think when I left Bangkok, I was earning around 90 KA year, but I was also saving 90% of my salary because I had a furnished, I mean they gave me a furnished housing situation also. It was covid O and I was feeling really burned out and I had discovered the fire movement at that point, and so I really wanted to exit quickly and so I was able to fast track my savings, just paying for food and there wasn’t a whole lot of travel during the covid days, but I know not everybody has the ability to save that much and I’m grateful.
I didn’t say that every year that I was an international school teacher, but I’m grateful for my time doing that. And I guess I would encourage listeners if they are teachers. I also knew a lot of teaching couples who went abroad and they really fast track their finances. They were getting doubled, the salary one housing allowance and often some of their kids can go to school for free or partial subsidy and these international schools are incredible, so there’s a huge benefit and their kids are in the class with nationalities from 20 different countries. There’s maybe 80 nationalities in one school. So it’s a great opportunity for families and for listeners who aren’t teachers, I mean I would always think about is there a way if you’re interested in taking your job abroad, there are a lot of opportunities, a lot of different fields to earn more and save more abroad and the cost of living is often lower. It wasn’t for me necessarily in Singapore, but it’s still because of the free housing and all the other benefits, it still made it a huge dent in my savings.Okay, now we need to take a quick ad break, but listeners, I am so excited to announce you can now buy your ticket for BP Con 2025, which is October 5th through seventh in Las Vegas, Nevada. To score the early bird pricing of $100 off, go to biggerpockets.com/conference while we’re away. Welcome back to the show with Amy Minkley.Can I ask one more question about that? So someone’s paying for your housing and they’re paying you a top salary and they’re providing a lot of other benefits and flying you back to the US on a regular basis. That can’t be cheap. Who pays that? Are these elite private schools where parents are paying premium tuitions or are they public schools over Asia?Yeah, they’re private schools mostly. A lot of the clientele are foreign business owners or government. I mean we had a lot of embassy kids, sometimes people, kids of UN WHO, those kind of, so sometimes it’s part of a package if someone’s moved abroad and that’s what they’re getting as part of their family package by the company.So we have a very low expense profile, especially later on in the years of the journey we have access to kind of traditional investments. And it sounds like you just invested in index funds for the most part as you got going with this?So mostly index funds. I did a little bit of syndications with my sister. She had a company, so I was doing some with real estate, but primarily index funds.Awesome. And when did you discover the financial independence concept and how did that change, if anything, the way that you were approaching wealth building?I discovered it quite late, so I had taken three sabbatical years, one after I left Japan and I traveled for a year and then I went back to grad school and then after working in India for, and I worked in Singapore for six years, so I’d been teaching internationally for 10 years and I took another two sabbatical years and I would’ve thought that I would’ve discovered it at that point I was living among expats and Bali, but it wasn’t until I went back to my job international teaching and I got a job in Bangkok and I was really burned out at that point. I think taking two years off and going back into the hectic teaching world where I felt like my job was never done, I was always taking home grading and planning and even though these schools have great benefits, I am a bit of a perfectionist and so I just spent a lot of time on the weekends and the evenings working a lot and I really saw that I didn’t want that for my life anymore. So it wasn’t until 2019 when I went back to working that I discovered the fire movement.And how did you discover financial independence?I stumbled across it one night. I was just really burned out and tired of and I had been an aggressive saver my whole career, and so I was googling how much money do I need to retire? I ran across a video of Pete and then I went down the rabbit hole of his blog and I got so excited. I was like a fire evangelist, went in and saw one of my friends from work and told her about the fire movement. She said, my friend, he’s taken a year off. I used to work him in Santiago at an international school. He’s coming through next week, you should meet him. And it turned out that was Scott Barrett, Brad Barrett’s brother. And so when I met Scott Barrett in the parking lot in Bangkok, he said, listen to this Choose Fi podcast. And so then I went down that rabbit hole and so that really saved me. I was really struggling with thinking I didn’t know how much money I needed and I really, the fire concepts learning about the 4% rule, realizing I was a lot better off than I thought, gave me a lot of hope and I had already spent two sabbatical years in Bali and so I knew how much that life cost me and I realized I don’t have to continue to do this job for so much longer.When you were thinking about this as well, did you pay into social security with this international employment on there? Is there still eligibility for that or was that not factored at all into your fire calculation? ItWas when I was in India because that school is, it’s an embassy school that was set up by the US government in the fifties, and so that was part of the payment package is they paid into social security for us. But when I worked in Singapore, when I worked in Japan, when I worked in Thailand, that was not factored in.Okay, so how did you think about that component? I think a lot of fire folks are like, well, I’ll also have some social security later in life if things go really poorly there, but that sounds like that’s not in your calculation. Were you more conservative as a result of that or did anything change because of the expat international status?Yeah, I was more conservative. I mean, I will get some social security later and I’ve done my 40 credits or whatever, but it’s not as much as someone who would’ve stayed in the US for the whole time, but I think the overall benefit in other areas outweighed it.I’m going to jump in and disagree with Scott for a second because I think that the majority of adherence are not counting on social security. It’s like a safety net that they don’t think about. I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about the social security as a whole, the program as a whole. I have vocally, is social security even going to be around when I’m retiring? Yes, it is probably not in its current iteration, but it’s still going to be around. But there’s so many people who are before me where I didn’t understand how social security worked that I think there’s a lot of people in the PHI community who aren’t counting on it. I don’t have it included as part of my FI number, so it’ll just be a bonus when I get it. But I think there’s a lot of people in Amy’s situation, even if they have been working in America, you retired age 25, 35, 45, you don’t have all that time that you’re not earning or you’re not paying it to the social security system, so your benefits withdrawals are going to be a lot lower To begin with,Amy, how long into your career, how long post-fire and how old were you when you retired?Yeah, I fired at 45. I’d been teaching abroad for 16 years at that point.Okay, so this is not, yes, you were a great teacher and earned went into these elite schools, but this was not an elite income generation story. Even with those items there, there were some good benefits. There was essentially no benefits that were at play in terms of long-term planning. There’s no pension involved here, there’s no social security component coming or whatever. This is all just basically cash for the most part that you accumulated and then invested in order to begin living off of this internet is what sounds like a wonderful international lifestyle. You’re recording from Bali right now, is that right?Actually I’m not. I’m in the us so Mindy and I just got off the FIN talks cruise and I came to spend some time with my mom. She just turned 84 yesterday, so yeah, I’m in the US at the moment. Happy birthday, Amy’s mom. Thank you.Well, could you tell us a little bit about this portfolio? What did the mechanics of it, how did you set it up to enable the fire lifestyle?Yeah, initially I invested in target date funds because I read Andrew Hallams book. This was before I knew about the fire movement and that seemed very easy. It just becomes more conservative as I age. But since learning about the fire movement, I’ve mostly done V-T-S-A-X or VTI. I’ve done a little bit of a small cap and a little bit of international mixed a few things in to diversify a bit, but mostly I’m in, I’ve still got some target date funds and my VTI, those are my biggest holdings. I’ve never tried to stock pick other than doing a little bit some syndications with my sister. I’ve never done as much real estate. I’ve sometimes regretted that in a way, but it always seemed quite complicated since I was living abroad and I’ve never purchased a house in the US at all. So yeah, that’s my portfolio. It’s pretty simple.Is it essentially all in stocks or is there any bond component to your portfolio?Yeah, because the target date naturally has bonds built into it as well, right? It’s got some international and domestic bonds and then I purchased some of my own, just a total bond index as well, but I feel pretty confident. I mean also I don’t have children and so I probably am a little bit more of an aggressive investor. I have a smaller bond allocation than sometimes they say 110 minus your age, that kind of thing. I have have a more aggressive allocation than that. I think I’m more like 80% stocks or index funds versus bonds, but then I’ve got a pretty hefty cash allocation too that I’ve got in a high interest savings account, which I kind of consider like a bond.Ooh, okay. Why do you have this cash in a, why do you have this cash?I think I felt like it was just similar to a bond in a way. So it gives me security to know that if the market drops, that I’ve got that there and then also I need that in a way. Well, I’m about to purchase a property in Bali, a 25 year lease, so that’s part of the reason. And then I’m running retreats in Bali as well, which requires a lot of upfront cash, so that’s part of the reason.How much is this cash position in terms of your annual spending?Good question. I would say over a year of annual spending, probably more like a year and a half, so I probably need to get some of that invested.Another question here, have you sold stocks yet to fund this early retirement in the three years since you’ve retired?I haven’t funded. I haven’t sold much yet. Primarily, well, my father passed away this last year, so I got a little, he didn’t have a huge retirement, but I got a little bit of money from that, so I haven’t needed to sell at this point and because I had it a heavy cash cushion that helped as well.What point do you think in terms of annual or monthly spending do you think is enough cash and you can start investing or six months or nine months or a year, and then anything over that you would invest or when it gets below that, you would start stockpiling cash again?I think a year, for me personally, I know it’s often said six to nine months for your emergency fund or whatever, but because I don’t have a job, I like to have a year in cash, honestly, and as long as it’s invested in a high interest savings account, it’s still earning, mine’s earning a little, I think 5.1%, something like that. So it’s not that much difference. I mean of course it is, but for me it gives me the peace of mind that I can sleep well at night. I’ve got that cash sitting there, and of course I’m going to need to deploy some of that soon for the house or the villa and the rice patties that we’re about to sign on. So yeah, I think a year it makes me feel safeAnd there’s no wrong answer. I’m just wondering. We find that when we’re interviewing people who are entrepreneurs, they tend to have a larger cash cushion and people who are traditionally employed or well over their FI number tend to have less of a cash cushion because it seems like it’s just because they have so many different buckets to pull from, but ultimately you have to be able to sleep at night. If you took that whole one year of cash and threw it in the stock market because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and then all of a sudden the stock market went down a little bit, you won’t be able to sleep at night. What’s the point? Have it in cash.I mean, another thing I’m saving for is just this. I’m planning to get Australian permanent residency and that’s a big expense as well. So I think I’ve kept some money out for that.Okay, my dear listeners, we have a request. We want to hit 100,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel and we need your help While we take a quick ad break, can you please hop over to youtube.com/biggerpockets money and make sure that you are subscribed to channel. Stay tuned for more after this quick break. Thanks for sticking with us. Are you planning on moving to Australia? I know their real estate is super expensive.It is, and not anytime soon. I mean, we’re signing a 25 year lease. You cannot buy a property in Bali. It’s always going to stay in the ball in his hands. So we’re signing a 25 year lease on this fill in the rice patties, but we do want to eventually when we’re much older, retire to Australia when we’re maybe in our eighties or I don’t know when, but the healthcare is very good there and so I think it’s a good investment to get my permanent residency and my partner is Australian, so that’s kind of part of our plan as well.I watched a Steve Erwin video recently where he discovers the top 10 most dangerous snakes, and luckily for him, all 10 of ’em are right here in Australia. I was terrible, but that’s definitely a risk factor I think that’ll tell you aboutA lot of dangerous animals, but at least they’ve got good healthcare stuff. If something happens, you’re covered.Going back to your portfolio and the design here, so you have a year of cash, you are de-risking your housing for the next 25 years with what sounds like a large upfront payment. And what, in terms of your annual spending, are you right at the 4% rule or do you spend considerably less or more than that amount?I spend more like 3% a year roughly. I would say last year I lost track of it. I mean, last year I had a horrible year. My father passed away. I’ve been very meticulous about checking my spending and tracking every day, but last year I completely lost track and I spent way more money than I normally would. But yeah, I would say on average, if you don’t consider last year, probably more around the 3%, three and a half percent range.When you are in Bali and you’re not having the other craziness you had to deal with last year, for example, what does Tuesday look like for you?Well, Tuesday I wake up often and we have a beautiful place. We had lived in this villa in the rice patties before, so I know exactly what that’s going to look like when we move into it. We’re renovating it as soon as we get it, but it’s such a beautiful environment. So just to sit on my mount balcony and have a cup of tea and look out at the cranes flying across the rice patties, I’ll often get on my scooter go to. I love hot yoga. It feels so good. So even people say you do hot yoga in Bali, but I’m like, yes, I love you. It just feels so good to sweat it out. So I’ll often go to hot yoga. There’s so many events going on every single day, so I never get lonely. A lot of entrepreneurs who have moved there from Europe, from the us, Australia. So there’s such a dynamic inspiring group of people around me. I feel like it’s the perfect place to fire in a lot of ways. It’s a very nice lifestyle and the quality of life I have and the quality of friends I have is so good. So mostly I’m doing something in the evening, I’m meeting with friends for dinner or I love to play games, so there’s a weekly games activity I go to. So there’s a lot to do.Amy, you mentioned some sabbaticals when you were still working. What led to you taking them and what did you do during your sabbaticals? How long were they?So when I left Japan, I’d been working in Japan for four years and I think I had $20,000 saved. So this was 2005. I spent mostly time in Southeast Asia and India backpacking around. I was taking the second class sleeper train across India. I had the best time. I was budget traveling, but the memories I created were incredible. How much it opened my eyes to the world was phenomenal. I did also spend about a month in Europe during that time, so it was about eight months and then I went back and started my grad program and thankfully because of the $20,000, it went quite far. I was frugal and then I was able to pay for part of my grad school with some money leftover from that. Then I also got a job as a graduate student teacher, so I was able to, that helped pay for part of my grad school as well.
So that was an eight months traveling mostly and then partially getting ready for grad school. And then my second sabbatical, I left India and I planned to take a year off. I was planning to go around Africa traveling and I went to Bali for a personal growth course and it really changed my life. I had been single in Asia for over 16 years and I that work helped me to heal a lot of my relationship with my father. I mentioned earlier my father left when I was 12 and I really had a wound there just not really trusting men, and I always kind of felt like I’m strong and independent. I can go anywhere in the world, I can travel second class labor, as I mentioned, I am a tough independent traveler, but it was a way to keep myself guarded. And that personal growth course helped me to realize that deeply I was also lonely.
And through that work I was able to release a lot of that unhealed relationship with my father and build trust for men again. And I called in a partner, I met my partner there. So I ended up staying two years in Bali. I never went to Africa and traveled around as I planned and I realized what I wanted instead of being on the go, seeing new places all the time, checking things off my list, that wasn’t appealing to me anymore. So you asked about travel earlier, Scott. It’s like I’m happiest when I’m in Bali. I’ve got my routine, I’ve got my friends. I love having a sense of home and I still do love travel, but I’m not as interested in being on the go all the time. So those two years I was assisting that woman who was running retreats in Bali and just living my best life really.That’s how I feel about travel as well. I’m happiest at my home in the suburbs of Denver that backs right up to the mountains and I can go running on trails and biking around there. It’s always whenever I leave home I’m like, ah, I’m going somewhere. That’s how could it be quite home on there. And I think it’s just different, but for a lot of folks who do dream of that travel for me, it’s just different. Maybe it’ll change in 10 years and 20 years and I’ll be like, Nope, that’s not what I want anymore. But love that perspective on there about it. And it sounds like you also got plenty of travel in like you described earlier in life.Yeah, every time I leave Bali I think I don’t want to go. I mean even though I’m coming, I’m excited to come home to see family or those kind of things. There’s a part of me that’s like, I’m really enjoying my life in Bali right now. I don’t really want to go. So yeah, it’s a good problem to have. Really.Yeah. You live in paradise. Why would you want people go there on purpose? Why would you want to leave there to go to other places that are like Paradise Light?We have hot yoga in Denver too. I just have to go indoors for it.Yeah, all yoga and Bali is hot yoga, there’s a lot of yoga in Bali. That’s a good thing. It attracts people coming for mindfulness and yoga. And so it is a really healthy lifestyle there. It attracts a lot of healthy people. So it’s not so much a drinking culture unless you go to the southern beaches that are party places, but generally it attracts really good people trying to optimize their life.You reach PHI in 2019 or no, you discovered PHI in 2019. You’ve been retired for three years and that kind of coincides with when you started putting on the Phi Freedom retreat in Bali, but you were Phi you won. Why are you starting to work again? What made you want to put on the Phi Freedom retreat?I think I wanted a sense of purpose and community is so important to me and I think when I was in Bangkok and I was really facing burnout and in the pandemic, I was really feeling lonely for community and I was hearing about all the great events in the US and thinking there’s such a need for that in Asia. There’s nothing on that side of the world related to the fire community. So I knew how much living abroad had changed me and opened my eyes to see how other people live. And so I wanted an opportunity to build a fire event in that side of the world for people who lived on that side of the world to be able to easily come to. And then I also wanted an event that people from the US could come to and see what it’s like to live in Asia and maybe open their eyes to possibility to seeing how good life can be. And it’s not perfect. I don’t want to oversell it, but from my perspective, the quality of life I have there is incredible. So it was a desire for community, really a passion project more than anything.Awesome. Where can people find out more about that?Yeah, they should go to phi freedom retreats.com. So that’s Phi Fi Freedom retreats with an s.com and the last, so I usually put on one event per year. So I got one event in early September, 2025 that sold out when I launched it in eight minutes. So I couldn’t believe that there were a lot of people who said I was on the website ready to buy and I couldn’t buy it. So I went ahead and opened up a second event this year, which is happening in late September the 26th through the 30th. And that will launch on March 1st. But if listeners are interested in attending, I would recommend that they’re on the website at the time that tickets launch so they can make sure they get a ticket. So definitely check out the website and note that time and calendarize it. They will go fast, I anticipate.Awesome. Is there hot yoga involved?There is no hot yoga. There is morning yoga, there’s a lot involved. I wouldn’t subject everybody to that. It’s my thing, but it’s not everybody’s thing. But there is an optional yoga session every morning before the retreat starts, and I mean it is longer than most FY events. It’s also smaller than most FY events. A lot of people come over early, so they’re hiking the volcano, they’re biking through the heartlands of Bley. We go rafting afterwards. We go to an island afterwards, we go snorkeling, we get scooters. You can take scooter lessons and get scooters and ride around the islands together. So the event is five days long, but in reality we’re spending more like two weeks together and the relationships go so deep because it’s a smaller group, it’s an international group. We get a lot of people from Australia, New Zealand, the uk, Canada. So it makes it really fun to meet people from different parts of the world in the PHI community and doing all these fun adventures together. It’s just naturally a bonding experience. And then I really want my event to honor Bali as well, so I show them we go to unique things in Bali that you wouldn’t necessarily see as a touristAnd this event sold out and would sell out otherwise here. So what I want to call out and observe here is, well, you’ll talk to a lot of PHI people and they’ll have something like this twice a year. You put on an awesome event. Does that disqualify you from retirement by the early retirement police that are all over the internet talking about this? I believe no, you just really love that and you put it on a couple times a year and you’re compensated for it. It’s a lot of work for it, but it’s not really the end story. Many if not most people who fire will after a period of years do something to that end, I believe over time. And that’s just a byproduct of the reality of being phi. Just an observation I wanted to make here because I don’t think we’re not coming on here to promote an event that would otherwise not sell out for this. This is an actual piece of your PHI story that is very common to a lot of people in this space.Yeah, it definitely gives me a lot of purpose and part of my purpose is also just to benefit the Bolognese people. So I know Mindy knows about this and you and Carl generously donated, but we were raising money for a domestic violence shelter there in Bali and I was just incredibly impressed with the PHI community and just so honored. I raffled off a free ticket last year or for the first event and we raised $22,000 in two weeks for this domestic violence shelter or this woman, she’s phenomenal and I have her speak every year. I always want to have a ese speaker there. But when you hear her story of what she’s been through in her life and then how she’s used that to help, and this makes me emotional, but how she’s used that to help so many women and children escape domestic violence, it’s so inspiring. So whatever I can do to bring people together to create an incredible life-changing transformational experience that people are going to remember for the rest of their lives and then also to really honor and benefit the bolognese people and culture, this is part of my purpose. I would get bored otherwise. There’s only so many hot yoga classes I could do.Well, this is why I get so passionate about what we do at BiggerPockets of Money is because folks like yourself that go on to become financially independent typically are creative, smart, disciplined, have a decades long time horizon. And once retirement happens, there’s an intent to live modestly and well. And then the itch to somehow give back or create good in the world creates surprising, really positive societal benefits. Exactly what you just described there, which is so awesome. That’s really, we dangle the Bali and the margarita on the beach thing out there as the carrot. That’s what it gets people motivated, they want to leave their job and do that, but really the reality is that as decades progress and people become ate, they, they tend do much more of the things that you’re talking about here on an overall basis. And it’s just so wonderful to see that. So I love it and grateful for all you’re doing. I’m in that part of the world. You said you had a really hard year last year for this. Can you tell me a little bit about how financial independence eased that or made it more? What was it like to go through that as someone who was fired? What would it have been like for someone who wasn’t? Have you ever thought about that or have any thoughts in response to that question?Yeah, well, just to give listeners a little bit of a context, it was a lot of tough things that kind of piled up at once. So mentioned that my father passed away and then I was in the US a lot of time caregiving before he passed away and then dealing with his financial matters and his personal belongings and funeral and grieving and all of that. So I got back to Bali with two and a half months to plan a wedding and I thought, well, I’m an event organizer, I can do that. And then my mom decided with my dad’s death she wanted to come, but she’s 84 and chronically dizzy and rheumatoid arthritis and that was going to be a really difficult journey for her. So I was already anxious about the wedding and then her coming at it a lot, I spent a lot of time trying to get her in business class, get her a mobility scooter and all of those things. And then I got dengue fever before the wedding and I wasn’t yet done planning the wedding. And then I think there were some things going on with hormones as well because perimenopausal, so there was just a lot of things and I wasn’t sleeping and I basically had high anxiety attack, so I had to cancel the wedding right before my mom flew During that, it was really a dark night of the soul, really, really the most difficult year of my life.
Fire. Just knowing I didn’t have to go into a job was huge. It was huge. And I’m so grateful to the PHI movement to being financially independent because it’s helped me on two occasions when my father had a stroke and when I was able to walk away from my job in Bangkok and say, I’ve saved a lot these two years, but I want to go back and spend more time with family and have location and time freedom. And then during this mental health crisis to not have to go in. I physically couldn’t have gone into a job. I wasn’t sleeping for prolonged periods of time. And I think part of the anxiety was also it was like I couldn’t show up for my own wedding and then I worried about can I show up for my retreat that had sold out quickly last year, but I thought maybe I can’t even show up for my retreat.
So even after the wedding passed, I was still thinking, when is this going to end? Because it was hard for me to know in that dark place if I would ever come out of it. And I’ve never been in a place that low where I wasn’t able to actually function in a lot of ways. So it was really challenging. So I think having that financial security, I was doing a little bit of tutoring online before and I had to let that go, but just knowing that I didn’t have to worry about paying my bills and I was in Bali and I had all these incredible, it’s the number one place in the world for personal growth and development. So I had a lot of amazing therapists from all over the world there and I was able to get help and just throw money at the problem and not have to worry about a wedding that I fully funded that I couldn’t attend. So it wasn’t expensive year for me last year. So I’m really grateful to PHI for that. It would’ve been a lot more challenging without that money.So many people that I’ve spoken to about the concept of financial independence and hey, you can retire early or you’re saving in advance for your retirement to give yourself more options. They say some variation of, I love my job or I don’t want to put restraints on myself and my spending. Or even I’m young, I’ll think about retirement early. And they’re so missing the point. You are not even close to the first person that I’ve talked to who said, there’s no way I could have gone back to a job while I was dealing with this particular situation if I hadn’t been financially independent. I don’t know what would’ve happened. And the point is not to retire so that you never have to work again. The point is to give yourself so many more options in the future. And I hate that you had all of that, everything piling up on you at once. And then at the end, how about one more thing, I didn’t even know you got denay fever, yikes. But to keep piling and piling, and I don’t want to make it sound like you’re the only person that’s ever had to deal with a lot, you’re not. But then on top of all of that, you have to go to a job every day or risk the income that you have that allows you to live your life. So I just think that financial independence is so much more than just quitting a job you don’t like.I’m totally unapologetically profi for the reasons you just discussed there. And when people say live your best life, all that even Ramit’s thing, live your rich life. The fact that if you’re making smart decisions and piling up a lot of money over here gives you the option to defray future risk. I mean that could be way more valuable to someone than whatever that 10 or 15% or 20% extra spending right now could mean. So I think there’s a lot of advantages and very little risk for future regret to pursuing relative to what some of the mainstream pundits have begun to say. And I think Amy, your outcome here is it’s so important from several different angles here. I mean it made the worst year of your life less bad. It makes most of the days way better. It allows total freedom and optionality you are giving back to the community, you and you are allowing your creativity and your passion to come through with what is essentially now a very small business that could, if you ever wanted to probably be much bigger at some point. And so I just think it’s awesome to hear your story here, the good and the bad for inspiration for other people.Thank you. And I guess I would just say to listeners, no matter where you are on your financial journey, whatever you do to build up your emergency fund to save your first 50,000 or first a hundred thousand, you are giving yourself so much more freedom and flexibility. We always talk about the sexy side of five, maybe travel or time freedom or location freedom or all those kind of things. But it is really for the tougher times in life and I am so grateful for this community, for all the support I’ve been given. This is the most caring, supportive community I could ever imagine. Just really people who think outside the box and they’ve sat down and looked at my spreadsheet with me and helped me with my numbers, and that’s given me so much more assurance and feeling of security around my numbers coming from a place of scarcity and childhood.Do you feel secure about your numbers?I do a lot and I honestly have to say I’m grateful for everything that happened for me that happened to me this year. I’m grateful for that mosquito that bit me and gave me dengue fever because one thing was I learned a lot about my psyche and I really had to dive into, I guess I put it in perspective. I’ve always been so frugal, but when I was really just trying to survive and I didn’t really even know what was going on with me, I couldn’t even articulate there for a while. I totally cut myself off from everybody. I felt so much shame I could just throw money at the problem. And so I did. I threw a lot of money at the problem and it really was good for me. So yeah, I feel like I did a lot of work this year. I spent a lot of money this year, so I wouldn’t trade it.You spent a lot of money because you had the money to spend and you got such a reward out of it. And that’s another aspect of five. When you are living paycheck to paycheck and you don’t have anything saved up, you can’t handle an emergency or a crisis or any of this. You just have to keep, go, go going and hope for the best, but instead you have the ability to stop, put everything on hold, even if you lose your deposits, even if you lose money while you’re doing this, now you can focus on you. And that’s really the best part of this whole journey.Yeah, thank goodness for fi, that’s all I can say in this community. Thank you for all that you do as well.Thank goodness for fi. It’s absolutely the best choice I ever made was to not spend every dime and instead start investing. Amy, what is the biggest mistake you have made on your financial independence journey and what advice would you give to others so that they could avoid that same mistake?My biggest financial mistake was probably being so obsessive about my savings and investing and looking at my monthly net worth. I mean, I had an unhealthy relationship with money for a lot of years and I think there were things I missed out on. I mean, luckily I still traveled a lot, but there were a lot of things that I didn’t do that I wish I would’ve done. So I think I would encourage listeners to balance more. And even if it takes more time to get to, if you’re enjoying the journey, I think that’s more important than getting to fi faster.I love it. And also feel way seen there, Amy. So thanks for calling me out too.I didn’t mean to call you, I was calling myself out.No, that’s probably one of my biggest mistakes as well, is not having a healthy relationship with money. And I think as more people talk about that, the more people realize, yeah, that’s me too and let’s start changing that because that doesn’t go away overnight. Did your financial relationship go away overnight? Did you all of a sudden embrace spending money?Definitely not. And I think it’s taken me some time really to be fired, to see like, oh, my money still grows, even though I’m spending more on eating out and going to more events and traveling, coming back and forth to us and Australia. My money is still growing all the time. My net worth is increasing. So yeah, it takes time.It takes time, but you’ll get there. Alright, Amy, this was super fun. Thank you so much for your time today. I really, really appreciate you. And where again can people find more about you and your five Freedom retreat?They can go to five freedom retreats.com. And again, tickets are launching on March 1st, so if they’re interesting coming, would love to have them. They can go and watch videos of what we’ve done on the previous retreats. It’s a really, really fun time together. Great peopleIn-person PHI events are so important to helping you stay on the journey or explore what your life after you’ve reached financial independence looks like, based on conversations with other people who are in it, who speak the language, who understand all the things that you have had to go through and just want to help you out. It’s such an encouraging community. Alright, Amy, thank you so much and we will talk to you soon.Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Mindy.See you later. Okay, Scott, that was Amy and that was her amazing financial independence journey As a teacher. What did you think?Well, Mindy, I think that the internet retirement police should go to town in the comments of this YouTube video because she was single income no kids. And because she did it internationally, because she had some benefits there and because well after she fired without any plans whatsoever, this relationship with her estranged father came into play back into play and allowed her to get a small inheritance and no, come on, this is the best this is, this is fire. This is what it’s all about. This is someone who is a great example of a creative, interesting approach that was different. You have to take a different path. The person who is earning a median income with no advantages in a high cost of living area who does not have the ability or means to invest is not going to achieve fire. Every fire story or almost all of them will have a unique path that they’re charting and many of them are highly compatible with lots of fun lifestyle engagements, lots of fun opportunities and lots of creative ways to find yourself in your end state, in your retired state, like in a place like Bali.
So huge inspiration, love the fact that she lives what sounds like an awesome lifestyle. Love her Tuesday, and the fact that she’s involved in the community starting to give back and starting a small business that’s just a passion project for her. I mean, it’s just perfect. If we can make this outcome more achievable for even just a few more people, the work we’re doing here will be worthwhile at BiggerPockets money.Yes, and Scott, you make a great point. I love that she’s honoring the Beese culture and including the Balinese people in her retreat to kind of introduce people who aren’t from Bali into what Bali is all about and what makes Bali so amazing. But yeah, her story is super incredible and totally repeatable. She’s teaching English as a second language to schools in Asian countries. You can do that with adults, you can do that with kids. This is a repeatable path. You are taking your housing expense out of the equation. Isn’t that the biggest expense people have is housing. Now you’re just food and travel. But if your housing is provided by your employer, you’re probably going to be really close to your job where you could walk, you could take low cost public transportation, you could ride a bike, you could do something to get you there. Very low cost. So now out of your three big expenses, Scott, you’ve taken away two and you only have food. But again, you’re in Southeast Asia is a lower cost of living place. So now you’ve got that is kind of like in half. Well, I should have done that with a different finger. I can’t show my thumb halfway, but you’ve got so little expenses, you can just take all the money that you’re making and plow it into your investments. Amy discovered the concept of financial independence in 2019 and two years later she was retired.One of the things that was going through my head is just like how replicable is that story for a US-based teacher who earns less income, likely doesn’t have the same benefits there. I mean, I think it’s way harder, Mindy. I mean, I think you can bridge to it with some smart planning. Maybe if you incorporate real estate, for example, in the summers or some sort of side hustle that can get going there. But wow, it does seem like at least four of those who are capable of getting the jobs in that kind of elite tier, these elite private schools potentially abroad, that is definitely a game changer there and something worth considering for some folks.Well, how does American based teacher repeat this? Simple. They repeat it, they move to Bali, they move to Japan, they moved to Singapore and they do the same thing that Amy did. American teachers are criminally underpaid.Yeah. Well I do want to challenge that one. I think that that’s another, a good one for us to investigate with future episodes with teachers in the US because I think you can do it. I think it’ll just be much harder and you really have to supplement what’s going on with the base case with some extracurriculars in the summers and during some of those, the break periods that are available. But yes, it will be harder for a US teacher, but there’s also a potential pension that vests after 10, 20 years. So around that same time, 43-year-old age mark, maybe there’s an opportunity to create a similar outcome. So just food for thought. Something I want to explore with us teachers that are pursuing Fire, reach out [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to share your story or think through some of those things because we’d love to learn more about how teachers in the US can do that. But if you have a problem with Amy’s story specifically, I think Mindy cited the email address we’re creating for that. If you want to report her to the internet retirement, please. You can email. I don’t care at don’t bother me.com, right? Is that it, Mindy?Yeah. Or I don’t [email protected].Yeah. There you go. That’s it. Thank you.Alright, Scott, should we get out of here?Let’s do it.That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Eddie Jensen saying So long King Kong.