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Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Jeff Battack Global Director of Manager Research for Morningstar Research Services.

And I'm Christine Ben's director of personal finance for Morningstar. Our guest in the podcast today is

Karsten Yeska, the founder of the website, Early Retirement Now, and a thoughtful and technically

proficient member of the financial independence retire early community. In 2018, Carston retired

in his early 40s after a career in the financial world. He served as Director of Asset

Allocation Research for Mellon Capital Management from 2008 through 2018, and before that was a

research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta for a decade.

Karsten has his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota and has taught undergraduate

and PhD-level economics at Emory University. He's also a chartered financial analyst.

Carson, welcome to the Longview. Thank you for having me. Let's start with a really basic

question. What attracted you to the financial independence retire early movement in the first

place? It sounds like the financial crisis when you had just moved over to Mellon from the Federal

Reserve Bank of Atlanta was a pivotal event. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so I had worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

from 2000 until 2008. It was a relatively safe job. It's maybe not quite as safe, say,

as a tenured professor position at a university, but it's a relatively safe job. And I moved over

to the financial sector in 2008 right at the time when the global financial crisis hit, right?

...