All right guys, we're in the studio today. It's Monday, but hopefully you're excited like I am. We're talking to a physician on fire

And as usual, we're talking about financial independence

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Alright Brad, we're back and today we got physician on fire. He's going to be talking to us obviously about financial independence, but we're going to be dealing with this specific framework of the high income professional in the context of financial independence. And I'm excited just to get a chance to go through the information that he's been creating over the last several years and explore what this particular framework actually looks like.

Yeah, agreed. This should be a good episode. Our good buddy Carl over 1500 days was the one who hooked us up with physician on fire and it's nice to meet another blogger and especially someone who's focusing on high income professionals. So I think that's a different perspective than many of the guests we've had on. And I think it'll it'll really add to the audience. So yeah, very excited.

Alright, POF, welcome to the studio. How you doing today, buddy? I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here chatting with you. I think the audience that you speak to with your blog is maybe different than the audience that Jacob from ERE speaks to and I think that that is awesome. Yeah, definitely I'm not trying to show people how to live on less than $10,000 a year. You know, my budget's more of the for us maybe 60, 70, 80,000 a year, but I know my audience they spend up to 200,000 or more. So yeah.

I definitely have a slightly different perspective and some of the others. I think it makes for a very interesting story because when you take someone that on an average day without any intentionality is spending close to 200 or $300,000 a year and you start talking to them about the possibility of what a 60 or 70,000 a year lifestyle might look like. That's got to be an interesting conversation. I mean, that's one that I want to be a fly on the wall for. Right. And I think it starts at well, I couldn't.

You don't want to or you're so used to what you're doing right now, but on the other hand, when you look at a little closer how we're spending our money, we've got certain ways that I say that we cheat essentially because I no longer have a mortgage payment.

So I have a nice house, but it's paid off and we have a little second home and that's paid off to I've paid off all my student loans. We no longer have term life insurance no longer pay for disability, which is 300 to 500 a month for most physicians.

You know, we do a little bit of travel hacking. Our kids are in public schools and even our donation money. I track that separately because that comes from our donor advised fund, which is something I'm building up from our investments.

So again, there are quite a few categories where we've just knocked that spending down to essentially zero.

So when you have the conversation with fellow physicians who are spending 200 K plus a year, how does that go?

What do you actually talk about as these are the first items change does it even get down to change or is it just here's what we're doing and it's going to enable us to X Y Z retire early or have financial independence. However, you want to frame it.

I'm just really curious what that conversation actually mechanically looks like.

Right. And I haven't had this conversation in person in real life too many times. Most of the talking I do is in the form of writing on my site, but I was talking with a friend of mine.

And I kind of told him what our spending was and he was like, wow. And I was like, well, yeah, there are certain things you can do and where we live. You know, I'm kind of in a rural area and upper Midwest. And there isn't as much pressure to spend a lot of money. The parking lots not full of luxury autos and we don't have competition for the best private schools because we only have a couple of perennial schools.

And so I think there's more pressure in bigger cities, big, a bigger spender than there is where I'm at. But yeah, in real life, I haven't had that conversation too many times. And I don't think it would go that well to be honest.

Well, it probably does help that in some cases because you've created this platform you're sharing your story. They're coming to you as opposed to you imposing your own belief system on somebody else. These are people that are looking for another way.

Right, I'm not going around prosoletizing trying to convince every surgeon I work with it. They should start changing their ways because frankly, I'm a living, live kind of guy like, I'll do what I want to do. And you can do what you choose to do. But if you happen to, like you said, stumble upon my site and think, oh, well, that's, that's interesting. That's something I hadn't really considered this whole financial independence world.

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