You can afford anything. You just can't afford everything. Every choice that you make carries

an opportunity cost. Every choice comes with a trade-off. And that doesn't just apply

to your money, it applies to your time, your energy, your attention. It applies to any

resource that you manage. And this leads to two questions. Number one, what do you value?

Number two, what choices are you going to make as a result of those values? Answering these

two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore. My name

is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Affordable Care Foundation podcast and I am recording this

from a hotel room in Tokyo, Japan. It is currently September 2019 and if you've been a long

time listener, as you know, I am taking the month of September 2019 off from producing

new podcast episodes. I'm referring to this as my September sabbatical. So I'm taking

this month off from creating new episodes. And instead, I am re-airing some episodes

that we originally aired a while ago, episodes that many of you may have missed. And so today's

episode is one that we originally aired almost exactly three years ago. We originally aired

this in August 2016. This episode that you're about to hear is one in which we talk about

the seven stages of financial independence. Now what does that mean? In the financial independence

community, many people, when people are having conversations around this concept, people tend

to talk about FI as a binary yes, no, you've reached it or you haven't. That's the concept

that a lot of people have around it. I really disagree with that framework. I view financial

independence as a spectrum or a dial or a set of stages or steps. And so the interview

that you're about to hear, which again was originally published in August 2016. This

interview that you're about to hear is one in which our guest, Joshua Sheetz, talks about

what he refers to as the seven stages of financial independence. And what I love about his

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