Hey, what's up everybody. Welcome to the Financial Independence Podcast. This episode's a bit different today because I just realized a few days ago that the Financial Independence Podcast actually turned five years old, which is crazy to me. So in celebration of the five-year-old birthday I decided to

re-release the very first interview I ever did which was way back in May of 2012

with Mr. Money Mustache. So before we dive into that classic episode I figured I'd give you a little

backstory about how it all came about. When I launched my site back in February of 2012 I knew I wanted

to do a podcast at the same time because I wanted to have an excuse to call people who had already achieved financial independence to find out how they did it.

And Mr. Money Mustache was one of the main people I was reading at the time, since he was a software developer like me I figured

you know that'd be a great person to talk to. I don't think I realized how big he was at the time

and if I had I probably wouldn't have asked him to do it so I guess being

naive is good in some situations so yeah just send him an email and surprisingly he said

yes and we've become good friends over the years and probably about

three years after the interview I actually asked him I was like why did you

even say yes to me because at the time I think I had like three really mediocre posts on my site. I had one good one that

was showed some promise but the rest were pretty mediocre. I had no readers whatsoever because

I didn't even tell my mom that I was writing a blog so you know

those early blogs that just their mom reads it like my mom wasn't even reading it so

I really had nothing to to offer him and so it just really surprised me that he said yes but when I asked him

he was like well it's because you're the Mad Finitist so I guess he liked the name or the logo

or both and he just decided to take a chance on me,

which has been really instrumental in the success of my blog actually because there were

so many times throughout the years that I was doubting myself and I was like who am I to write about all these like really complicated tax plans when I'm just a software developer like I have no financial background and you know it's it's

a lot of work and sometimes I was like man I should just quit this would just be much easier to

quit and during those times I would think like no I can't quit because Mr. Money

...