Ditch Corporate! Start Taking the “Slow” Path to Retirement

The “death march to FIHello, hello, hello my dear listeners, as you may or may not know, my husband Carl and I have a new YouTube series on the BiggerPockets money YouTube channel called Life After Fire. And as a very special bonus, we are going to be airing episodes here on the podcast on Wednesdays. Without further ado, let’s get into it. We are so excited to slow down today. We are joined by the financial tortoise Tae Kim, and we are so excited to chat through the lead up to Tay achieving financial independence and what life has looked like for him afterwards. Let’s get into it. Hi there. I’m Mindy Jensen,And I think I’m Carl Jensen.You think this is the Mindy and Carl, he thinks on Life After Fire, where we talk about what happens after you reach financial independence.Why do we call the show Life After Fire?Because we’re talking about and talking to people who are living their best life after reaching financial independence. We also want to shout out to our listeners who may have come to know this series as the Living a Fire Life series. We are changing the name of the series to Life After Fire. Unbeknownst to us, there was another creator named Justin who had started a blog with the same name. So if you are interested in following his story, please go check him out at Living a Fi Life. And he spells Fi, FIGH like hi, but with an F. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kim. How are you doing today?Well, thank you guys for having me.I want to jump right into it and get a little bit of an overview of your story. What was your profession before you retired and how long did it take you to reach retirement once you discovered the concept of financial independence?I was a finance director for about 10 years, so this is in any corporation, pretty typical role. You have the finance department. So my role was financial forecast, projections, budgets. So in any company, whenever the budgeting season comes around, you have that guy that comes around and says, Hey, you can’t spend that. Or Hey, what are you projecting for your sales this year? Let’s see if we can increase that. So that was that pesky guy that used to go around everyone’s office and nobody was looking forward to having a meeting with me. So I did that for about 10 years before that. So I got my MBA and my pathway was I wanted to become a CFO one day. That was my aspiration coming out of business school. So that was the path that I went towards. I decided that I wanted to become an expert in financial projections, just budgeting and all of that stuff within the corporate world.
I did that for about 10 years, and then I think maybe about halfway through your goals change because your life circumstances change. So once my wife and I, we had kids, we started to give ourselves permission to ask, Hey, that initial plan that we set out when we’re 30, now that we’re in our mid thirties, we’re getting close to 40, has that changed? And for me, I think what I realized was it did change. And what I craved more wasn’t to reach the corner office, but I wanted more control. I wanted more flexibility with my life. So that’s when I got introduced into a lot of the FI concepts through Choose Fi, through BiggerPockets money, through just so many other great resources that are out there. And I had a good fortune meeting Carl at Chatauqua in UK back in 2019. At that point, we’ve been kind of following the FI principles of just living below our means, saving as much as we can.
So we were pushing ourselves at one point, saving half of our income. So essentially both of us were working, so try to live off of one income and save the other. So we were following those principles, I think right around 20 21, 20 20 when Covid hit. I think that’s when I started to get a little bit more itch to transition. So this is when I was also getting some exposure to the internet business world, the YouTube world, and I had this inclination to, Hey, maybe I can put my head in the lot and try to become a YouTuber or a personal finance YouTuber. So at that point, we hadn’t reached FI from a traditional perspective of 25 times our expenses. I would say we were Coast Fi and we had enough cushion to be able to take some time away if we wanted to. In discussion with Monica, who’s my wife, we decided that, hey, what’s the worst that can happen?
This thing doesn’t work out. And I just go back to what I did before. That’s a great place to be at. It’s the American dream. Both of us were well employed, we were able to fund our living. We weren’t financially struggling. So that was the American dream. We kind of mapped things out where we saved up about two years worth of cash, and we were doing that before, and essentially we said, Hey, I’ll give myself about two years to see if I can make this work, because we didn’t want to tap into our investments if we could. And then again, if worse came to happen, I would’ve taken a contract job or just gone back and gotten a full-time job. But I started a YouTube channel Financial Tortoise, and then it just kind of worked out. So then thankfully, I’m able to generate enough income that covers our family’s expenses. So I’ve at this point become an accidental digital nomad.So I have a funny story about your YouTube channel. I had started seeing your name a lot, and at the same time, Carl and I had met up with a friend in Denver. His name is Roger. He’s a mutual friend of ours, and he said, oh, I’ve got a friend who’s got a YouTube channel. You should talk to him. And in my mind, I’m like a friend with a YouTube channel. I bet he’s going to be really awesome. And then it turns out he’s like, yeah, his name is Take Kim. He’s the financial tortoise. I’m like, I’ve been trying to get him on my showNow. Here I am.This was actually a couple of years ago before you had been on the BiggerPockets Money podcast, but it was just so funny that he was like, I’ve got this friend with a YouTube channel. I’m like, okay, I bet that’s going to be great. Now we need to take a quick ad break. Dear listeners, we really want to hit a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and we need your help while we take a quick ad break. You can go on over to youtube.com/biggerpockets money and make sure you’re subscribed to the channel. Stay tuned after a break for more. Welcome back to the show. What did the process of actually leaving your job look like? That’s something that I think a lot of people on the path are a little scared about.Yeah. Yeah. So I would say mean if I was to kind of put a pin on where that, I guess the percolating of thoughts, idea generation or even sparking the idea came about was probably five years before I left my job. And one of my big roles was to present our projections for the next quarter to the board members. And then in our board meeting, I would be sitting right next to our CFO. So I was the finance director. I had the team that we would run all the forecasts, make all the slides, and then she would be the one presenting the big numbers. And then if she had some questions about certain small numbers, she would reach over and ask me and I would be like, I point it out on the slides. And then I had this realization that I was like, oh my goodness, if I work really hard for the next 10 years and if I stay in this pathway, I would just move one seat over.
And then I would be sitting in her spot and I would be pointing at the finance director and be like, Hey. And I was like, is that what I want? So I think that was the first time where I asked myself, gave myself the permission to be like when I could see exactly clearly where my future was going to be for the next 10 years, I think in a way that kind of scared me. And I was like, Hmm, should I give myself the permission to imagine something else? And that’s where I think this idea of starting a YouTube channel was terrifying. I mean, I’m a middle-aged guy. I’m like, why am I start a YouTube channel? That’s what these young hip cool kids do, I think. So then that’s when the idea started generating, and that’s when I went to chatauqua and I think I got exposed to the financial independence concept and I was like, oh, okay, this could be a lever that could help me to take new chances and new risks in life, try new things, because it’s almost like you’re operating with a safety net.
It’s like, what’s the worst that can happen? I just go back to what I was doing. So then it was kind of like, let me try this thing, and then it’s not even if I fail in it, there’s nothing. There’s nothing wrong. I learned something new about myself from a financial perspective. This is where I think my wife and I, following a lot of the financial independence principles, we would look at our numbers and be like, I think we had worst case scenarios. We would say, okay, let’s say two years out we spent all of our cash and then we had to start tapping into our assets. What would the first one be? I think we can tap into this one first and then we would be like, dude, we have enough to last us for the next five, 10 years. We’ll be fine. And then again, we’re probably not going to pull that lever because being conservative, we’ll be like, we’ll probably go find something else to cover the gap to generate more income because we have career capital that we can leverage.
So I think when we mapped all those scenarios out, we’re like, only thing that’s holding me back is just my own fear, just the familiarity with the path that I am heading towards. And that was the other fear too, is this is all I knew. I came out of business school, every one of my friends are following these pathways in different functional areas. It could be marketing or finance or hr, but we’re all following this pathway. And for me to be like, I’m going to try something different, was kind of a new concept for me. So I think all those things percolate in my mind. And then I would say from start to finish, from the day I left, my job was about a five-year process, both mentally getting myself ready and then getting ourselves financially ready so that we had these kind of like, okay, what are the levers that we can pull as we go down this journey?You said a lot of very important things here, but I want to reiterate a couple of them. For one, it corrects me up that you had this ambition to become a CFO. So you were a very ambitious person. Like, oh, I ever wanted to do was stay in my Cuban code, but I was happy with that. So you wanted to be a CFO, and then you discovered financial independence and then you work your way into becoming a YouTube influencer, which cracks me up. But you said one line I think, which was super cool, you said I gave myself permission to imagine something else. I think this is so neat. The other thing you said is my worst case scenario was I could go back to whatever I was doing. I could go back to becoming, I would go back to being a finance director. On the other hand, the world is open to you that the possibilities are limitless and endless. So it’s okay if I fail. I’m just back to what I was doing before, which was still pretty great. You made a great career for yourself. On the other hand, I’m going to experiment and try things, which is super cool. I think if most people did that and just took that little leap that they would probably never go back to whatever they were doing before. Yeah, I think that’s super cool. When did you realize you had made it and you were not going to go back to becoming a finance director?Again, it was a hypothesis when I first started the YouTube journey. So I think I as in the process of learning about financial independence and the process of envisioning something new for myself, I think I was looking at a lot of different avenues and I landed on YouTube as this, I guess vehicle in which there’s a lot of traffic already coming in. And I think within the personal finance space, I mean, we all know there’s a lot of really smart bloggers within the personal finance space, people who can write about all the backend analysis that’s been done in the 4% rule, and they can explain it all in a written format really well. But I didn’t see a lot of that in the video world, in the YouTube world. So that’s where I was like, I don’t mind talking in front of the camera. Maybe this is something that I can kind of make a niche, but I knew it was going to take time.
So I kind of committed myself to saying, I’m going to make two videos a week, rain or shine, and then a lot of this is going to be a learning process because I just don’t know the algorithm. I don’t know how, I’ve never filmed myself ever before. I’ve never owned a camera so that I bought my camera literally in the same month that I left my job and then just learning how the thing worked. So then a lot of it was the learning process, but then after about two years, I would say, I think at that point I created 150 videos. That’s when I started to see some traction within YouTube where there was actually people watching, not just friends and family members, and then it was able to generate revenue, starting to generate some revenue. So I started to see some potential. So yeah, two year was kind of like, okay, I could see, it’s kind of like the Rubik’s Cube at first.
I don’t know what I’m doing. And after a little while you’re like, oh, I think I could see it. So when I started to see that pathway, I was like, all right, I’m going, this is head first. I’m doubling down on this. But again, that first two years, it was still a limbo. I think I was giving everything I could to the YouTube game. However, I never left my day job with any bridges burned actually, when I left, I gave a seven month notice. I hired my own replacement. A new team members kind of trained everybody. And then I always kept that back door open because I was like, well, there could be a chance that I might need to come back. So managing all my risks, and I didn’t really tell anybody what I was doing, but I think I wanted to make sure that if I ever needed to, I wanted that assurance.It’s pretty neat that you stuck with it for 150 videos. I wonder how many potential bloggers or how many potential YouTubers or podcasters or whatever did 10 and gave it up and all they had to do was give it a little bit more time and have a little bit more tenacity. One of my favorite quotes is Overnight success is usually proceeded by years of hard work or something like that. True. I think very, very few people do something and become immediately successful. There’s a lot of hard work to either build up the skills or to build up your audience or maybe to hit the algorithm. So kudos to you for sticking with it.I mean, I think that was the motivation. And the other motivation was like, I do not want to go back to what I was doing before I got to make this work. That was the thing I was in back of my mind. I kept the back door open, but I was like, this is only crack open. At the worst case scenario, it’s like break glass, only an emergency. I do not want to break the glass.I love that mentality because that is how you succeed. You said, I’m going to make two videos per week, rain or shine. When Scott Trench and I were starting the BiggerPockets Money podcast, we reached out to Brandon Turner who had been doing the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast for so long. We’re like, what advice do you have? And he said, if you want to start a podcast, make an episode and release an episode every week for six months with no gaps ever, ever, ever. And I was like, oh, totally easy. And then there’s that one day, that one week when you’re like, oh, it’s Tuesday afternoon. I got to record something for Thursday’s release, but I also still have to have it edited and all these other things. And it takes tenacity, it takes commitment. And I like how you say, after 150 videos, I started to see traction.
All the people that are out there making 10 videos and giving up, it’s not an overnight thing. You’re never going to have overnight success. There’s that one kid that did the one thing and instantly it blew up. That’s already been used up. You’re not going to be able to do that. You have to do what sets you apart. You are, you have said this, I’m not calling you a middle-aged man because I’m older than you and I don’t consider myself, but you say you’re a middle-aged man who wants to watch me. Well, you know what? There’s a lot of other middle-aged people who want to learn from somebody who has some sort of background, some sort of credibility, I’m sorry, 25-year-old YouTubers who are life coaches. I don’t really take the same level of trust with what you’ve got to say versus take him who worked in corporate America finance for 10 years. I think that maybe a little bit more about finance and maybe that 25-year-old is some wunderkind who is going to just blow my mind with all this stuff. But there’s people that are watching them for different reasons, and there’s people that are watching you speak to people that they won’t speak to.Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that I realized about YouTube is that it is kind of becoming the new mainstream media, and then everyone is, my parents are who are in their seventies are watching YouTube, and there is a content about everything and anything you could think of. So it’s, I think it’s easy to get because of the algorithm. We only get served up certain type of content that might be more aligned to our watching habits. But then there’s so many other people out there with different interests in different age group, different life stages, and there is a need and desire for those kind of content. So it’s like, yeah, that’s been fascinating to me. I made one of the most interesting video I made mean not interesting. One of the most interesting insights I saw about YouTube Watch Habit was I made this video about backdoor Roth ira.
It was the most boring thing ever for 15 minutes. I’m literally all this guy’s backdoor Roth ira, let me kind of walk you through logging into my Vanguard account, and you click on this and then like, oh, you notice how you got to make sure you fund your traditional? And then I went through the whole thing for 20 minutes. I was like, I’m going to make this super long. And then to this day, there’s I think 300,000 views on it. People are watching how to do bto Roth ira. I’m like, it fascinates my mind. I’m like, who are these people? So there’s an audience for everything. Yeah, that’s what I realized. You just got to, like you said, you got to be consistent. You got to show up. You have to think about your audience. Just serve them. You don’t have to be like Mr. Beast. You don’t have to be like all fashion your let your personality shine, let your expertise shine. And there is an audience that will appreciate thatWe have to take one final ad break, but we’ll be back with more after this. Thanks for sticking with us.8 billion people on Earth, I think, and probably most of those having access to the internet. There’s someone for everyone. You could probably have the most ridiculous channel in the world. You could have a thing about porcupines and purple porcupines.There’s an audience for that. Yeah.So I’m kind of curious, before you left work, did you have any ideas or thoughts of what life posts? And I want to say I don’t know, even though if retired is the right word, and I actually hate the word retired. It’s stupid. No one, if you look it up, it means to cease work, no one should cease work because work is where all our happiness and purpose and meaning comes from. We just have to do the right job of defining the work we want to do. So I’m not going to say retired. What I’m going to say is life post formal job. Did you have ideas in your head of what life would be like and has it been what you expected or different? And if so, how?Yeah, I think for me, and I think for a lot of people, it comes down to control, being able to control your life more. I think that was the biggest thing I realized I was craving was I had interest that I wanted to explore at work, but then the constraints, the job description of the work kept me in this box. There’s things I want to learn, things I want to explore, things I want to grow, but I’m only going to grow to the limit in which my job description allows me to. I think one of the exercises I actually did was before I left was if I could kind of envision what my ideal day, ideal week would look like, I kind of mapped it out, and I think that really helped. I was like, okay, I would be in full control of when I drop the kits off, I get to work from this time to this time.
I get to go work out at whatever time I want to. I get to pick up the kids. We can go have dinner. I think I mapped that out and that became my man. If I could do that, that would be amazing. Because to your point, Carl, I think work is very important. I think being productive, adding value, creating something growing I think is such an essential component. I think for me personally, if I didn’t have the YouTube channel where I have the ability to do cognitive work where I’m looking at a lot of data, synthesizing it and then packaging it and then sharing it to the world, I’m hoping that is helpful to the world. I don’t know. I feel like there would be this gap in my life, this vacancy. So I liked the idea that I have full control over my life.
So yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the biggest, biggest benefit. It wasn’t like aversion to work. It was more like, I want to control my life more. I want to control what I’m working on more. I want to pursue my interests and desires. If I want to read about this article, I want to go deep into this. I don’t want to go through the routine of having to write reports that no one’s going to read or synthesize data that no one really cares about. That didn’t really excite me that much. So I think that was the thing. I think that was the biggest thing, was the ability to have control over my life.Yeah, I think that’s so important. And one thought I frequently had is, I’ll turn it back on myself for a second. I actually liked what I did. I loved writing code. I liked the thoughtful aspect of it yourself in these puzzles, and I thought that was great. But then all the other stuff that goes along with it, you don’t have that many vacation weeks you have to work with. And for difficult people, you have to be there. You might have to be at a location, you might have to endure a commute. You’re going to be there for a certain number of hours. You might have to start at a certain time, and we’re starting to close. It’s all that stuff that goes around the job that, but I think a lot of us probably do our core work, and if we could do it on our own terms, which isn’t really realistic, but it’s an interesting thought exercise, if nothing else. So it goes back to exactly what you said, having control and having the autonomy. We’re all still doing work. We’re just doing it on our own terms with our own rules.And I feel like I would say if I’m comparing how much I’m working and the intensity, I feel like I’m working way more than I did before in my corporate job. And I think the intensity that I have, I feel like is a lot more, but it is self-motivated and self-driven. So then I’m like, I want to work on this, and then this is really interesting to me, but I feel like the amount in which I’m growing is at so much faster pace than when I was in my corporate job.How many hours do you spend working now versus when you were working in your corporate job?So I think a typical 40 hours a week was in my previous job, but then the actual actual work. So I think this is the other thing I realized after kind of moving up the corporate ladder was I was spending less time on the work itself, and I think I was spending more time on the politics, and this is a joke around financial planning, financial forecasting. The accuracy of the forecast wasn’t as important as did everyone feel good about the numbers that we’re forecasting and projecting. So then I would spend more meetings before the final presentation, meeting with all the stakeholders, making them feel like they got their inputs in, they all feel good, so that by the time we get that final meeting, it’s not contentious that everyone’s like, oh yeah, the forecast looks good, whether it’s accurate, no one cares. Then next quarter, next board meeting.
So I think that was the other frustration I was feeling was the amount of time that we spent on trying to nail in these numbers wasn’t as much. Maybe some people enjoy the politics side of it. I personally, I think that was also what was getting to me after a little while was I felt like I was massaging egos more than actually digging into the analysis. So that’s one of the things I kind of really enjoy about the current YouTube job that I have in a way, is I get paid to just read books and articles all day and then synthesize. I get to delve into what I’m interested in and then be able to, in a way, I feel like every YouTube video I make is kind of a term paper that I’m writing. So then I get to produce the content I like, and then I get to really spend my energy on the things that I want to focus on. So I think that’s been the real satisfaction that I’ve been able to really enjoy with my new job.In terms of annual spending, how much income is your YouTube channel generating?It’s a little flux right now on the road. So I’m talking to you guys from Bali, Indonesia, so it’s hard to say. I would say it ranges from low end to maybe 70,000 to maybe high end, 120,000. That’s the baseline expenses for family of four. In Europe, it was costing probably a little bit more, like 120,000 hundred 50,000 maybe even at times. And then here in Bali, Indonesia is maybe half of that. And then, yeah, YouTube channel. I would say my first year, top line revenue, I think it was, I’ll say the numbers. The first year I got zero. I think I made $0. Second year I made 16,000. That was a breakthrough year. I was like, oh, I’m making money online. This is crazy.Look at how rich you are.I know. And then third year, I think I was maybe a hundred something thousand a little bit over. I think right now it’s around between two 50, 300,000. Yeah.Okay. So it’s covering your expenses.Yes, yes. Yeah.Even if you decide to travel around Europe,It does, thankfully. Yeah, it does. And then I think one of the benefits of traveling right now is that we get to have a little bit more flexibility on if the cost seems a little too high in one place, we can travel to a different place.And then do you touch your investments, your retirement investments or your PHI money, or do you just live off of the YouTube stuff?Yeah, thankfully we haven’t had to. I mean, that was one of the levers that we had in our sequence of levers that we had to pull, but thankfully that we didn’t have to pull that. So we were able to, the first couple of years, my wife, she actually, she was a former nurse, so she went part-time and then that was enough to cover the first year and then plus our savings, and then we able to stretch it out to the second year. So thankfully, it’s just kind of like our cash position. All of that kind of worked out for the transition where my revenue started to generate enough income to cover our expenses.Are you still saving for retirement or have you kind of stopped that?Yeah, I mean, so I have a solo 401k. I have an HSA because I have a high deductible healthcare plan. We still have a Roth IRA. So yeah, I try to put away, I wouldn’t say I’m maxing it. I mean the first 3, 2, 3 years, we weren’t maxing it out. But I think I’m trying to put in as much as I can based upon the sequence of what’s most optimal. So yes, the desire is, I can put away more down the line because I think the other part of the FI is I think as long as you maintain your lifestyle expenses, as long as you manage your lifestyle expenses, I mean you’re going to have extra income to be able to put away. So yeah, desire the goal we’ve been putting away and the desire is to put more away down the line.I think you’ve done a really good job building a great life, and I don’t see many people who fail in phi. I have seen a couple who have gone back to their jobs. They just can’t figure out anything to do with themselves, and I think that’s kind of sad. I think there’s a lack of imagination there, but you on the other hand, you’ve built a really cool life as we’re talking. You’re on the other side of the world showing your kids, you’re doing the world school and you’re giving them awesome experiences, so you’ve really built something cool. What advice would you give someone who’s about to reach financial independence but might be nervous or apprehensive about leaving work?Yeah, so I think there’s two parts to, I see when people are thinking about transitioning. I think there’s the financial part, and I feel like with most people who are interested in the financial independent space or FI space, I feel like that becomes a less, I don’t want to say important, but determinant. So I feel like, yeah, you should look at your finances to make sure that what are the levers that you can pull in order to design a lifestyle that could imagine your future differently? I think the second part is more of the identity and the emotion part. I think I spend more of my time doing that because if you asked five years before I left, my day job is like I had this identity built for myself. I went to business school on this pathway. When someone asked me, it’s like, what do you do?
That’s the first question we asked each other. I’m a finance director. I want to move up and I want to become a CFO one day. That’s kind of my aspiration. And you find satisfaction in that. You find a sense of purpose in that. And for me to be able to be like, okay, what do you do now? And then first couple years after I left my day job, that was hard emotionally, I think, because people would ask. It’s like, what do you do? It’s like, oh, I don’t know. I’m just a stay home dad. Or I was coaching my son’s soccer team. I was like, oh, I coach my son’s soccer team here and there. But then I was still struggling with that identity. But I feel like I would encourage people to be okay with that struggle because that is part of the process of reinventing and redefining ourselves that we’re not defined by the one identity of our career.
You will live multiple lives, especially in today’s world. Opportunities are a bound, and you don’t know what you don’t know. So I think it’s okay to struggle, I would say for me was the biggest thing was just giving myself the permission to be like, okay, if I’m not this, then what am I? I don’t know, but let me try. We don’t know what else is out there. So then I think that’s the other part is the last three to four years after I left my day job is being more comfortable without that prior corporate identity and then redefining myself. I call myself a financial YouTuber now, but five years from now, I’d probably be something else. And that’s okay. And that’s part of life, and I think we should get comfortable with that. I think the finances, the financial independence, the money, it’s like the superpower you have that enables you to do those things, to take chances in life that most other people would just dream about.Tey, I want to thank you for your time today. This was so much fun. Let’s remind people where they can find you in the financial tortoise online.So I have a YouTube channel. You could find me if you just Google Financial Tortoise. So I try to post, right now I’m down to one video a week. That’s the template I’m maintaining. So you can see my videos there. I also, I just started a Instagram Instagram page, so if you want to see some of my personal travels. So I’m not doing any algorithm there, it’s just more just posting family pictures of us in Bali. So if you want to see some of that, you can go to my Instagram, which is just Instagram slash financial tortoise. But yeah, I mean, my main platform is a YouTube channel. And then if you want to learn about some pretty boring index fund strategies on how to build wealth slowly, you can find me there.Awesome. Tey, thank you again for your time. This was a lot of fun. And if you’d like this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more inspiring fire videos, just like Tate’s.Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Life After Fire. And with it, Mindy, and I say goodbye.