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Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Ben's, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

And I'm Jeff Patak, Chief Ratings Officer for Morningstar Research Services.

Our guest on the podcast today is Paula Pant, host of the popular Afford Anything podcast.

She's also the founder of Afford Anything.com, a personal finance website.

Paula is a frequent public speaker and is a leading voice in the financial independence retire early movement, better known as fire. She's a graduate

of the honors program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Paula, welcome to the Longview.

Thank you so much for having me here. We're thrilled to have you here. So we want to talk

about your journey and the fire movement. In contrast with a lot of other people in the financial

independence retire early movement, you didn't attain financial independence at a young age

by banking a big share of a high salary. Can you discuss the key steps on your own journey

to financial independence? Sure, absolutely. So first of all, when I started this journey,

I did not set out for a goal of financial independence. I wasn't familiar with that terminology,

with that concept. So when I began, I was quite honestly,

very scared, very anxious, and I wanted to build a financial safety net for myself, such that

in the event that I couldn't find work, or I had some sort of medical emergency, or some

family issue come up.

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