The Financial Order of Operations for FIRE (Step-by-Step Early Retirement Plan)

Most people chasingWhat if I told you that most people pursuing fire are doing it completely out of order? The difference between reaching financial independence in 10 years versus 20 isn’t just about how much you save. It’s about when you save it. Today we’re breaking down the exact sequence of financial moves that will supercharge your path to financial independence. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me while Scott Trenches out on paternity leave is my friend Amber Grant. Amber, thank you so much for joining me today.Hello Mindy. I am happy to be here on this wonderful day in Colorado.We are so spoiled. It’s like the best kept secret. I tell people that I live in Colorado, they’re like, Ooh, isn’t it cold there? Sure.Nope. I’m from Ottawa. I know what cold is. This ain’t cold, it’sJust cold. I’m from Wisconsin. That’s like Ottawa SouthBiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are 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 are starting.I think you’re really starting to get the hang of that Amber Lee, another octave lower in your voice and you’re going to be Scott’s twin. Excellent. Alright, let’s get into today’s episode. We want to add a few caveats to this conversation. This episode is for someone who has already started building towards financial independence. So we’re going to quickly breeze through the fundamentals you hopefully already are doing or have done before we get into more tactical steps that you should be taking on your path to fire. So first up, Dave Ramsey’s baby steps. The first three of them I think are really, really great. His first one is build a $1,000 emergency fund. This is where we part ways because I don’t think that a $1,000 emergency fund is enough. However, it’s a great start, especially if you’re starting from a position of no emergency fund whatsoever. I would say three to six months emergency fund unless you have a lot of different buckets to pull from and I’m leaning more towards six months just with all of the economic uncertainty that we are experiencing here in America right now.Mindy, I actually think three months personally there’s something to say about having to tackle some debt, which might come into one of our steps here and three months is a good buffer. It takes about three months for someone to find a new job and I know six months with our current state might be better, but if I were advising someone to save right now, I would say three months and then move on and come back to it.That’s a good plan. Okay, so what would you move on toNext? Free money. Things like matching your 401k or something that you can’t get back. So HSA contributions end when you file your taxes or in April so you can no longer contribute for the year beforehand. Your 401k is a yearly amount. So again, something that once you pass that year, you’re not going to be able to come back to it. So I really think it’s important to try and get free money or things that you can’t come back to within the year, within the next year.Okay, and that would be the retirement savings like your IRA, your Roth IRA, your 401k, the free money. I think you’re talking about that employer match if you have one, if you don’t know if you have one or not, now’s a great time to talk to your HR department. Ask about all of the benefits that your company has, not only if they have a match, but also what kind of 401k options do they have for you? Do you have a rough 401k option? Honestly, I would just ask them what are all of the benefits that come with this job because I have heard of people having health club paid, I have heard of people having reimbursements for college. There’s all manner of benefits that exceed just the 401k and the healthcare.I agree completely and with healthcare, a lot of people don’t realize that maybe a high deductible health plan that comes with that HSA with an employer match or an employer contribution may actually do well for you and your family versus say a plan that you are just paying a copay with. So high deductible health plan versus other plans, it may be a better option. So just take a look into that as well.Yeah, and now’s the time to start thinking about that because at the end of the year is typically when you have the renewal, so do the math now, what would it cost for the current plan you out of pocket, paying your deductibles through your company versus paying, having the higher deductibles. We had a listener do some math on a spreadsheet. It’s in our Facebook group and I will bring that back up to the top of the Facebook group just so you can see what I’m talking about. This was such a great bit of information. He said essentially there is only a very small subset of people where not having a high deductible plan is the better choice based on the amount of out of pocket, the amount of your premiums per month and the HSA benefit so it doesn’t work for everybody. This was even chronic illnesses. There was just a very small percentage where this wouldn’t be the best choice.So if someone’s getting free money, what’s next Mindy?Oh, prioritizing high interest rate debt pay down. Now back when interest rates were really low, Scott and I had this idea that if your rate was 5% or less, don’t pay it off any faster than just the minimum payments. If it was seven or 8% or more, pay it off as fast as you can. So when I say high interest rate debt pay down, I’m talking about your credit cards that are in the double digits. I’m not talking about your mortgage right now. I want to make sure that all of your extraneous debt is gone. Your mortgage, if you have a 3% that’s in that, don’t pay it off any faster than you have to. Category that Scott and I prefer. However, I will say that he has started changing his tune and as you get closer to retirement, he is advocating more for having a paid off house.
I am still going to always keep my 3% mortgage for as long as I can because it’s 3%, but again, high interest rate pay down, so anything over 8% that is not your mortgage, I would focus on paying that off. Now there’s two ways to do that. There is the debt snowball and the debt avalanche. The debt snowball is you make a list of your debts from lowest amount owed to highest amount owed and you don’t pay any attention to the interest rate. You pay off the lowest amount. You make the minimum payments to everything but the lowest amount. You take every spare dime you have and throw it at that lowest amount. The idea is you get the mental win that you have paid off a debt and then you attack the next debt in the same fashion. The debt avalanche takes into account highest interest rate to lowest interest rate debt.
So you kill the highest interest rate debt first and then move down to the next highest interest rate debt. The problem with the debt avalanche is that it could take a long time to see that first win. I like a hybrid. If you have multiple debts, make both lists lowest to highest amount owed and highest to lowest interest rate. Pay off that lowest amount owed first. Really attack that, get the win and then move over to the other list and start attacking the highest interest rate first. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Ultimately you just need to pay off the debt.Agreed, it needs to go.My dear listeners, we are so excited to announce that we now have a BiggerPockets money newsletter. If you would like to subscribe to this newsletter, go to biggerpockets.com/money newsletter while we take this quick break. Thanks for sticking with us. Okay, Amber Lee, let’s say that we have an emergency fund. We are contributing to get our employer 401k match. If there is one, we are making our HSA contributions If we have one and we don’t have any high interest rate debt, where would you tell somebody to go next?Well, first I’d give them a high five and then I would say track your expenses. This is my absolute favorite thing to tell people. It’s annoying, but there are a couple apps out there that can really help you with tracking your expenses. Things like YN Monarch money, even an Excel spreadsheet. That’s what I get people to do so they can really feel it and see what they’re doing. And I love a three month expense tracking, so I like to go three months back no matter what those three months were and to put down every dollar that happened in that month and see what comes out of it and categorize it. People are always so bewildered with how much money they spent and they’re always like Amberly, but I planned a vacation in February and December was Christmas and I’ll be like, great. And March is another big expense.
There’s always a bunch of big expenses and for me tracking some sort of three month time period and averaging it out is probably pretty accurate. The thing I also recommend for you guys to do before you actually track your expenses is take a guess. I love when people tell me, oh Amber, I only spend about $2,000 a month and then we track it for those three months, see the average and I guarantee it’s going to be 50 to 100% more than whatever number you told us. So track your expenses whether again that’s an app and you do it over a year period or just in an Excel spreadsheet for a couple months.So I love absolutely everything you said, and I’m going to go a little bit further. When I first started tracking my expenses, it was on a notebook paper on the kitchen counter right where I always walked in and it was a physical reminder, oh, I have to write down what I spent and I know that I went to the gym this morning and on the way back I went to the grocery store. So I would write that down and then the next day I would come in from the gym and oh, and I also went to the grocery store and Target and I started seeing face in front of me within two weeks where the big hole was in my spending. So if you aren’t going to fill out these expense reports and these well not expense reports, these the tracking expense, you know what it is an expense report.
If you’re not going to fill these out in real time, then you have to go back at the end of the month and do it, which A can be daunting and B doesn’t stop the problem in the middle of the month, I was two weeks into checking my expenses and I was like, oh, look at that. I go to the grocery store every single day and I only go in for one thing, but do I come out with one thing? No, I come out with a lot of things. So that was very easily a way for me to fix the hole in my budget because we were absolutely, oh, we only spend $2,000 a month. Where did all of our money go? We are only spending $2,000 a month. Well, that’s not true at all. We were spending so much more than $2,000 a month because we weren’t tracking it.We have to take one final ad break, but when we’re back, Mindy and I are going to dive into what options do you have when you are nearing your FI number? Thanks for sticking with us.Okay, Amber Lee, let’s move on to the next level. Let’s call it 80 to a hundred thousand dollars in income and you start to see that you have a little money left over at the end of the month and you want to achieve FI in 10 to 15 years. What kind of options should we start looking towards?We got to calculate your fire number. If you have no goal to work towards, then what are you doing? So we just talked about you’re tracking your expenses so you can actually see what your expenses are today and then we take that times it by 25 and that is your fire number. So if you are spending about $40,000 a year, your fire number is $1 million. You need $1 million to cover all of those expenses. Should they not go up over time?Have you calculated your fire number? AmberlyMindy? I’m the worst fire person in the world. Yes I have, but I have to get clear on what my spending will be in retirement. So my fire number I think is a little higher than it probably needs to be, especially because I have some rental income. But let’s just say for the sake of this, my fire number is for sure $2.5 million. I need a hundred thousand dollars to live to maintain the lifestyle I have todayAnd I think that that is valid. I want to stop you right there and say you’re not the worst fire person ever. And there are some people who get a little, and I don’t know that this applies to you, but get a little embarrassed by how much they think that they will need in retirement. Oh, I’m going to need a hundred thousand dollars. Okay, then own that. You need a hundred thousand dollars. Great, that’s 2.5 million. That’s doable. I caution people who say, oh, I need 10 million in retirement. Really, why do you spend that much now? And these are people that I know are not spending that much now. So you’ve got this great big goal, you could potentially retire earlier than this $10 million pot. So I think it’s really important to know your fire number, to see where you’re going.I agree and I think some people have complicated situations like me where it’s real estate and investment, so I get to kind of dabble in both worlds, meaning my investments don’t have to be 2.5 million to make a hundred thousand dollars a year If I’ve got real estate income, which I dunno, am I retired then? I don’t know, but let’s move on.Okay, Amber Lee, Scott and I have had a difference of opinion on traditional versus Roth accounts. Where do you come in on that?For IRAs, I say Roth IRA, all the way from the time that you start earning money, I think you should put all of your money into a Roth IRA. Even if you are a low income earner or a high income earner, the $7,000 discount in a sense for taxes isn’t going to be enough for me to really move a needle, but that bucket needs to be filled and we need to fill different buckets for retirement. So I say IRAs need, well in my opinion should be a Roth IRA and let that baby growAnd I am right there with you. I am contributing to a traditional 401k because I am trying to reduce my taxable income. But again, if you’re younger, perhaps the Roth option is better and that is going to send you back to the HR department to ask them if a Roth option is available. I know that BiggerPockets didn’t have a Roth option for a while and I believe Scott was the one who got us the Roth option because that’s what he wanted to do. Amber Lee, let’s remind our listeners that the Roth IRA has income limits for contributions for 2025.
Your modified adjusted gross income for single filers must be less than 150,000 and for married filing jointly, it must be less than 236,000. I can tell you one year I put I maxed out my Roth IRA on January 2nd. I was so proud and then December 30th I’m like, oh, oh, how do you do a claw back? It was such a complicated math problem to try and figure out how much did you put in, how much did it grow? You have to pull all of that out because I made too much money. Now let’s be honest, this is a great problem to have.I agree that problem is a great problem and that’s actually why some people recommend not maxing it out at the beginning of the year and instead waiting until you’ve either done your taxes or you get a good idea of where you stand if you might be on the cusp of that. So if you’re making $80,000 a year, this isn’t for you. If you’re making 145 with maybe some additional income and your modified adjusted gross income is going to be teetering on that balance, it might be a good time for you to wait and then do it later.Or if you have not yet maxed out your 401k, pull that income down so that you can contribute to the Roth. But let’s say that I make way more money than I could ever possibly make. How can I contribute to a Roth anyway?Backdoor Roth, Yahoo. If you don’t know what this is, it took me a year to figure it out because for some reason my brain just didn’t understand how to do this. There are fantastic guides, literally step-by-step based on the institution you invest in on how to do a backdoor Roth. Essentially what it is is you can have, you don’t want to have any IRA specifically traditional IRAs. It’s the easiest way to do this. So blank slate. When it comes to any IRA, you open a traditional IRA, you put your $7,000 into it and then there’s a button normally in Fidelity and in Vanguard that says Convert to Roth and you want to do that. They sometimes say wait three days. From my understanding, the IRS doesn’t really care, but this is, you might vary in regards to how this works for you, but you can do it within a couple of days. You try to not have gains on that amount, but you transfer the entire amount into your Roth IRA and then it can grow tax free from there.You are paying taxes on Roth contributions no matter what. If it’s traditional, if it’s a regular Roth flat out, you don’t have to do the back door. If it’s a backdoor, you’re still paying taxes on that money. So it’s not like you’re doing anything different. You’re just getting more money into your Roth account.Exactly.So now that money is growing tax free, what’s so great about the Roth is you pay the taxes now it grows tax free. When you withdraw it, you are paying $0 in taxes on thatAnd again, you’re filling another bucket that you can pull from later on and we’ll talk about that in just a little bit.Hey Amber Lee, we talked about the high deductible healthcare plan. Do you have one?I do. I have done the math with two babies having two children at two different years. High deductible health plan still made sense.That is amazing. I actually had babies before the high deductible healthcare plan came into my life as an option, but that is really awesome that you did the math and it’s still the HSA, the high deductible plan won out. I’m going to say the guy in the Facebook group did the math and I can’t remember exactly what scenario it didn’t work in, but almost every scenario it works in. So I’m going to encourage you to talk to your HR department, look at what the current premiums are and do the math, how much because the HSA is, it’s even better than a Roth plan because it’s triple tax advantage. With a Roth, you pay tax and then it grows tax free and you pull it out tax free with an HSA, you don’t pay the tax, it grows tax free and you can pull it out for qualified medical expenses tax free.
Now what I know a lot of people in the PHI community do is they just cashflow their medical expenses unless they have a big expense. They cashflow their medical expenses, save their receipts, and then once they retire you could start pulling that money out. You can pull it out all at once. You can pull it out a little bit to kind of supplement your income. I had two kids braces, so I have at least $12,000 in bills that I can pull out once I retire. Plus I keep all of the bills for the random prescriptions. We pick up the random doctor visits. You can’t use HSA money for healthcare premiums, but you can use it for any other expense. There’s a lot of expenses that aren’t even like medical expenses really, like contact solution or band-aids or things like that. There’s a whole list of what is it, like 130,000 different products that qualify for HSA and FSA money. So investing within your HSA, this is a super awesome plan. I encourage you to find a way to max it out every year, but please note that you have X number of dollars to put in there. If your employer contributes on your behalf, that just reduces the amount that you can put in because it’s a total, it’s not an employee match. Does that make sense?Makes perfect sense to me.Amberly, I know you’ve been listening to the BiggerPockets Money podcast for a long time. You’ve heard Scott and I talk about the middle class trap. We want to make sure that our listeners who are somewhere in the middle of the path of two financial independence are not falling victim to the middle class trap. One of the easiest ways to avoid the middle class trap is to have after tax brokerage investments.Yep. I actually learned this from talking to my retiree, early retiree friends who got stuck not having cash for today in their early retirement because it was all in their 59 and a half 60 plus accounts, and so they’d have to take a penalty or Roth conversions to get to it and that was really difficult for them. So I learned about three years ago that I need to start splitting up some of that cash into a brokerage account and that’s what I started doing and it’s really exciting for me because it means that I can retire early and not get stuck with all of my money being in a house or somewhere else. Something else is real estate, making sure that not all of your money is going towards your primary residence, so you’re not maybe paying that down super early if you have a low interest rate, but also again, making money on the side using your real estate to actually get you money. Things like house hacking. We talked about flipping, maybe investing in different properties, but making sure that your primary residence maybe isn’t your only real estate holding.I do like real estate as an investment strategy and Scott very famously in January of 2025, sold 40% of his index funds and turned it into cash flowing real estate in Denver. I’m going to caution people. We are Amber Lee and I are both in love with real estate. Scott loves real estate as an investment strategy. If real estate is not something that you want to do, don’t listen to this episode and say, oh, well I guess I have to invest in real estate. There are other options such as the after tax brokerage account. You don’t have to go into real estate, but it can be a really great way to generate income, generate cashflow so that you don’t fall into the middle class trap.Agreed. Number one thing you should ask yourself, if you’re listening to this episode and you’re not quite sure if you want to have real estate, do you want to be a landlord? If the answer is no, maybe just move on to step two side hustles. I have friends who have made some really good money off things like Rover. I don’t think driving for Uber or Lyft is actually all that profitable anymore, but I know that things like dog walking, dog sitting because you can get a hundred dollars for a night to watch people’s dogs. What other side hustles have you heard of, Mindy, that actually cashflow? Well,I have a friend named Nick Loper who has a whole podcast about side hustles. It’s called Side Hustle Nation and he has some pretty amazing side hustles. One of the biggest side hustles, one of the best side hustles that I’ve ever heard from him and we subsequently had Mark Wills on our episode 74 is loan signing, being a notary and when you bought your house, a notary came to your house and you signed all the papers. You didn’t have to go any place to buy the house or when you refinance and it’s not as popular now, it’s not as lucrative now as it was in 20 21, 20 22, even 2020 when we had covid and you weren’t going into the title companies to sign your documents. That was a really amazing side hustle. But Nick has a ton of awesome side hustles. We also interviewed Jackie Mitchell on our episode 470.
She was in the middle of a 100 day, $100 a day side hustle challenge and she had some really great side hustles. One of them was some sort of AI thing. I don’t understand ai, our listeners already know that I’m not tech savvy, but it was translating and correcting AI documents and she was making quite a bit of money from that one. She has a great outlook on different side hustles and she has some side hustles that she would never do again because it just took too long to make that $100. But episode four 70 is another great one.When you’re within two years of retirement, it’s now time to start upping that cash. You’re going to want one to two years of cash in some sort of high yield savings account and you might be thinking, oh man, amberly two years of cash sitting there not making any money and not working for me. But the thing is, it’s not supposed to be working for you today. It’s supposed to help you in case something happens during retirement where the market takes a downturn and you need to pull cash instead of your investments. So you want to make sure that you’ve got something, some sort of reserve for that first few years of fire.Amber Lee, I think that fire adherence are really, really focused on optimizing everything and with cash that’s not optimized, that’s not investing, it’s not growing. It’s just sitting there in my high yield savings account making very little return. And I want to point out that your responsibility for that one to two years of cash is to preserve the value of that cash. It is not to put it in the stock market and try to make it grow one to two years. You could have a super event where you take that two years of cash, you put it into the stock market and then it goes down for two years. You’re selling when the market is down. That’s the worst time to sell is when the market is down. So I just want to point out the cash is not losing money. It’s not not a bad investment. It is preservation. So it gives you options. You can make a decision based on time and thinking, not snapshot decisions and split second decisions that you have to make because oh my goodness, I don’t have any money at all. Alright, now let’s get into what happens when you actually retire Amber Lee. Let’s say that you are retiring today. What’s your first order of operation?Start your Roth conversion ladders. You are now in a either extremely low tax bracket, so you can start doing this. Mindy, do you want to talk a little bit about what this is?The Roth conversion ladder is when you pull money out of your 401k and you roll it over into a traditional IRA. That is not a taxable event, but then you take that IRA and you turn it into a Roth IRA. That is a taxable event. So you want to make sure that your income for the year is going to be such that this makes sense for you. This is why people do this after retirement because you are paying taxes on that conversion. You are converting to bridge any gap between the income that you already have and the actual expenses that you have. So let’s say you’re going to live off of $40,000 and you cannot access your retirement funds and you’re going to take all $40,000. You would pull $40,000 out of your 401k, put it into an IRA, convert it to a Roth, and then you let that sit.
That sits for five years. That $40,000 has now become contributions and you can withdraw your contributions at any time. You do that every single year and you are paying much lower income tax on just the conversion versus if you converted a million dollars, you’re paying taxes on the million dollars. So you need to do a little bit of math for this, but it’s a great way to have buckets to pull from five years after you do your first conversion. Another opportunity in early retirement is the 72 T. We have had Eric Cooper on to explain how he has done his 72 T and I know that Darren and Jolene were also on the Life After Fire YouTube series. They have also done a 72 T essentially. It is similar but different to that Roth conversion. You’re taking a chunk of your 401k, your pretax 401k, and you are converting it into an IRA that IRA now funds.
Your 72 T 72 T is also called SEPP or substantially equal Periodic payments. Every year you have to pull the same amount out of that new IRA that funds your 72 T. So let’s say you’re doing $50,000 every year for at least five years or until you turn 59 and a half, whichever is longer. You have to pull that money out during the course of every year. So it’s a great way to get access to your 401k before you have traditional timeline access to your 401k money. You’re not paying any penalties on this, but again, it is a taxable event, so you are paying taxes on this.Those are some pretty high level things to be doing once you’ve retired. So definitely look into the different episodes that Mindy mentioned. Something that’s a little less difficult is just pulling money from your portfolio. So we know that you should have a bucket of a brokerage account that doesn’t have anything to do with retirement, so you can start pulling from that. You can obviously get cashflow from your rental properties if you did end up going that route. And when we’re talking about pulling money from your investible assets, something we want to always think about is the 4% rule. So you can pull 4% out of those. Again, investible assets essentially into perpetuity. So without pulling down that principle. So you can essentially use that money over and over and over again at 4% every single year at least for 30 years with a 96% success rate. And of course in down years maybe you pull a little less and in really good years you can obviously do a little bit more. There’s a big debate in the fire community of whether or not you should even change that 4% or go to 3.5%. But I believe personal finance is personal and sometimes we will buffer that 4% with cash and sometimes we can just take less from our portfolio.Yeah, there’s a lot of different options to help you preserve your portfolio when the market is down. I think that I was actually having a really great conversation with a friend of ours, Amber Lee, and he said, it’s not like you’re going to get to a position of financial independence, retire early and then never look at your portfolio again. You’re going to continue to look at it, you’re going to continue to check in and if that isn’t your plan right now, make it your plan, check in and see what’s going on. Because on a year that you’re 22% up, yeah, you could probably take more than 4% on the same year when you’re 22% down, maybe you look to that cash buffer on that 22% up year. Maybe you just pull out a little bit more and replenish your one to two year cash buffer so that on that 22% down year, you can just step back a little bit and I’m making these numbers up.
Of course the 22% I am going from I think wasn’t 2022 down, 22% or something. It was down a lot. And then 23 we came up or maybe 23 was down. I don’t know. It’s so hard to remember all these numbers, but either way, if your portfolio has gone up significantly, you can use those funds to replenish your cash so that when the market goes down, notice I said when not, if the market goes down, you can either not pull out that money or pull out less and live off of some of that cash until the market goes back up again.For me right now, I’m actually not even close to this part. I’m going to do these high level parts. I’m actually just still stuck in that what should you be doing when you’re in the accumulation phase? So this is really helpful for me just to start planning what my future is going to look like in the next five to 10 years because I want to keep this in mind so that I can start learning about it and making my portfolio look the way it needs to look to get to complete retirement.Emily Guy Birkin has a really great book out called The Five Years Before You Retire, which is more of information about planning your future retirement before it’s too late. So that’s also a great book to check out. Alright, Amber Lee, I think we’ve kind of covered it. We’ve given our listeners things to think about, lots of opportunities to make changes now during their path so that when they get to the end of the path, they are financially prepared for their retirement.Yeah, Mindy, this is a great conversation. I learned a lot. Thank you.Thank you for joining me. Alright, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. She is Amber Lee Grant. Amber Lee. Where can people find you online?You can find [email protected]Or BiggerPockets.Yeah, you can email me at [email protected].Alright, and I am Mindy Jensen saying See you round bloodhound.