Today I have a special episode for you all, and the reason for that is I have a guest on the show. Now, this guest reached out to me on YouTube, and I think you're going to resonate with his story. A lot of people will ask to be on the show, but I often will decline. And the reason for that is I want to make sure that all of you that tune in every single week are getting maximum value. You're going, all right, yep, five, 10, or 15 minutes on this topic, I'm thinking

differently about an early retirement, specifically with Roth conversions or investing a certain

way or making sure that I'm doing all the right things on how I pull income and how to prepare

for retirement. So today, you're going to hear a story from this individual, and I want to give

it away too early, but what he alludes to is the fact that your health is just so important. And he's amassed a good amount of wealth at a fairly young age. And he talks about how he did it. And what he wishes he would do differently because now he does have this good amount of wealth. And now he wants to make sure that can create the life he's always dreamed of. So you're going to hear that from him.

If you want to listen to this video, excuse me, if you want to listen to this episode, you can see

the video on YouTube. So right now, if you're just listening on the podcast app, Apple or Spotify or

Google, that's perfectly fine, but you can actually see us if that's of interest, see our radio

faces, just kidding, maybe just my radio face and Alex's face. You will see that on the episode on YouTube, so you'll see that in the description. You can click right there. But other than that, I think you're really going to enjoy it. I want to keep creating content that I think really resonates with you, so I'm always trying to come up with new ideas, and I'm going to keep doing my episodes. So my solo episodes are still going to come out, which is why I'm not replacing my traditional Monday episode with this. You will still get that on Monday. You're going to get a really fun episode. But I can tell you right now, I wanted you to get this before the weekend. I know some of you are not going to be able to listen to it, of course, this Friday, but I wanted to publish it now so that you can think a little bit differently this weekend about your retirement, more so about what can you do to start preparing for this next stage of life, which, like I say, financial independence retire early, I like to reframe it, financial independence, recreational employment. So I'm going to stop talking so you

guys can listen to Alex. Let's hop into the show. Alex, if you don't mind introducing yourself

with just how old are you and where are you coming from today? Yeah. Hi. So yeah, my name's Alex.

And I'm 41 years old. Dan, I'm a software engineer currently.

I started actively working towards my financial independence plan starting in about

2017.

And yeah, it's been going along pretty well since then.

Yeah, awesome.

Awesome. Well, Alex, we're going to get into it. I'm going to do a few rapid fire questions if that's okay, but I'm going to preface it with when

people talk about the fire movement, a lot of people are like, Ari, what's that stand for?

And traditionally, it stands for financial independence, retire early. And if you guys

have heard the podcast, I have a different definition, financial independence, recreational employment. Most people don't want to do nothing. They want to do

something. They just want it to be fulfilling. So we're going to talk about this today.

But Alex, real quick, what are your total liquid assets today? So not your net worth, but just

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