After a while, sooner or later, we all get miserable doing the same thing over and over again.

And so one of the keys to financial freedom, I think, is to figure out when you will be miserable.

Forecast your misery so that by the time you are miserable, you have the financial cushion and your passive income to do what you want and have those options.

Welcome to the real estate and financial independence podcast. I'm your host, Chad

Carson. You can also call me coach. And this is a show all about helping you get out of the financial grind so you can do more of what matters.

Whether you're a brand new listener or a long time listener, thank you for being back for another episode.

The title of today's episode is Financial Freedom Sooner Than Later. This is an interview with the Financial Samurai.

In real life, he's known as Sam Dogen. He has been blogging

since 2009 about financial topics. He's a former investment banker, worked in the financial

services industry, kind of talks about his own story of trying to escape from that. It was a really

kind of soul-crushing type job and he wanted to get out of it, used his financial smarts to save

money, to invest.

And he talks on his blog all about his strategies and real life studies.

And what I really like about his approach is a lot of examples.

It's a lot of charts.

He's an analytical person, uses spreadsheets, but also gets into the psychology of money.

And so that's what we talk about in this conversation is the journey to financial freedom. How do you do it sooner than later? What are the fundamentals of that? What was his story? How did he do that? But then also, how much money do you actually need to live off of? And so we have that kind of back and forth in discussion. And what another thing I like about Sam is his approach to not just being a real estate investor. He loves real estate. That's his primary investment. He's a small and mighty investor. But there's also a case for having other asset classes, including stocks, including bonds, including some alternative investments. So we go into why that is and what his approach is to these alternative investments. And then a little bit more just about lifestyle and life after financial freedom. So I think you'll really enjoy this conversation with the financial samurai. He's also recently written a book that I read and really enjoyed. It's called Buy This, not that. I'll have a link to that in the show notes as well. Before we get to the interview, I want to restart a segment that I did a lot earlier this year on the shows where I go behind the scenes and share something that's going on with me and my real estate investing, my finances, my business, or does they thought that I think would be helpful for you? And today's thought is something called the 70-30 rule is a decision-making tool that actually Sam talks about in his book a lot and on his

website a lot, and we didn't get into it until the very end of the conversation and really didn't

go as in-depth about it. But I want to share it with you because this is something that I've

been doing on my own for many years, not necessarily with this kind of formula per se, but using

statistics or probability and your own estimation of probability to help you with decisions and to help you get unstuck when you're feeling like you can't make a decision because you want to be perfect or you just want to, you don't want to screw something up. So if any of you've been in analysis paralysis or you have a really weighty decision, something that's important and you don't want to screw it up, this is something that might be helpful for you, both the small things and the big things. And the idea, and I'll explain it, kind of summarize it from the way Sam uses it, the 70-30 approach says that any decision you make, you want to make sure you take a path that you feel like you have a 70% or better chance of success. So let me give you at like one extreme. If you look at you're going to run a race and as a marathon and you haven't trained for the marathon at all and you're just not good at running, maybe you could finish that race and just kind of get it out, but there's less than a 70% chance that you're going to do that either finish it or do it without hurting yourself, right? So you would say, no, let's not make that decision below the 70-30 threshold. The same with an investment. Maybe there's a deal that has a chance of doing it. It's in the path of progress. It's going to do really well. But, you know, the cash flow is not so good. There's neighbors that might have, you know, there's issues there with a big barking dog next door. You know,

small chance that deal could be successful, but is it 70-30? Probably not. So you can look at deals,

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