Today we're talking with a couple who mastered the fundamentals early. They graduated debt-free,

house-hacked early on, and maintained that strategy even after leaving their careers. But here's

what makes their story different. They didn't just reach financial independence and stop there.

They leveraged their flexibility to pursue Canadian citizenship as a way to hedge their bets

against rising health care costs. Five years ago,

they both walked away from their jobs in their 30s. Today, they're living proof that fire

isn't about deprivation. It's about intentional choices that buy you freedom.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my stateside co-host, Scott Trench. Hey, Mindy, great to be here. We're so excited to be joined by Carolyn and Sam today. They've got an amazing five story, and we're going to be talking about their journey and the hockey stick trajectory of their net worth today.

I'm sorry, I couldn't, I couldn't resist.

Without further ado, let's welcome Sam and Carolyn.

We're so excited to be here.

Yes, yes indeed. Thank you.

Let's start from the beginning.

Can you give us a little bit of a description about what led up to your discovery of fire?

What was your situation leading up to when you decided to pursue financial independence?

So we got married in 2011 and even before that we had bought a condo together. We'd been living

together with his roommate as a brother and we were pretty frugal. We didn't even realize that

was like house hacking. We just thought like why would we have an empty bedroom in a So we, like, got off on the right foot with just not having debt, not having a lot of

bad spending habits, not having credit cards.

I was really afraid of credit cards just from like vaguely hearing like Dave Ramsey in

the car on the radio as a kid.

And like, they're just being scenes and movies where credit cards ruin

...