FI Minded - Financial Independence, Early Retirement & Lifestyle Design

We are closing up on 2023 and I thought it would make for a fun episode to recap some of the top financial news headlines from the year.

Being a fellow money nerd, this year provided many interesting headlines that were fun to follow and watch play out. And looking back at it all, these stories reminded me of an important lesson that I’ll share at the end of this episode.

Key Takeaways:

• The Federal Reserve continues its interest rate hikes
• The new Federal borrowing benchmark
• The impact of the global banking crisis
• Reflecting back on the debt ceiling deadlock
• How the debt ceiling works
• Are tech industry layoffs behind us?
• What you can do when faced with negative news?
• Should I change my investing approach in 2024?

Mentions:

The Best Interest (Does the Debt Ceiling Affect Your Finances? - E57): https://pod.link/1553180943/episode/697707e884c01785b397166817ac6d91

More of The Struggle is Real:

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Today we dive deep into a universal struggle that affects us all: the comparison trap. In a world fueled by social media highlights and curated success stories, it's easy to find ourselves measuring our worth against others.

This happens to me all of the time. I see someone else’s life: the promotion, the new house, a fancy vacation, their business success…and start frantically wondering why I don’t have that yet. Setting aside dismissing my own successes, never once did I stop and think…is that something I actually want?

With the highlight reels and the constant moving of our own goalposts, it is easy to see how our definition of success would start to get muddy. We slip into allowing others to define it for us and fall back into the never-ending loop of the comparison trap.

It’s time to take back control, use comparison as inspiration, not envy, and define success on our own terms. To help us do that is my friend Hayley Dawson, Founder of The Blocks.

Hayley and I immediately connected over many of our shared interests including unpacking the unique struggles of today’s 20-somethings. On top of overcoming the Comparison Trap, we discuss why your goals aren’t timebound to your 20s, why quitting should be celebrated, and how to make decisions based on what matters to you.

Key Takeaways:

• Today’s unique struggles of people in their 20s
• How social media has exasperated comparison and self-doubt
• 5 powerful ideas for overcoming the Comparison Trap
• How to change jealousy and envy into inspiration
• Your dreams don’t have deadlines
• Defining success on your own terms
• The false definition of success
• Why quitting should be celebrated
• How to make up your own mind

Mentions:

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt (https://www.amazon.com/Tenants-Frontline-Britains-Housing-Emergency-ebook/dp/B094DTJLZR)

More of Hayley:

Instagram: @_theblocks

More of The Struggle is Real:

Find show notes and more at https://www.tsirpodcast.com/

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The holiday season is in full swing and I’m so excited to spend the next month celebrating with friends and family. With all of the parties and get-togethers, it will be 2024 before we know it. But before we say goodbye to 2023, I have a few things I want you to check off your to-do list.

In today’s episode, I’m going to give you a financial checklist of 8 tasks you may want to consider doing by Dec. 31 to tidy up your finances. Don’t worry, all of these tasks take 30 minutes or less so you can get back to enjoying the holidays.

So if you’re ready to set yourself up for financial success in 2024, let’s get into the 8 tasks on the end-of-the-year financial checklist.

Key Takeaways:

• 8 easy and essential year-end tasks to complete
• Reviewing your retirement accounts and adding additional contributions where you can
• Rebalancing your assets to stay aligned with your investment strategy
• Creating a debt payoff plan for 2024
• Conduct a year-end tax review to maximize your savings
• Applying tax loss harvesting to offset capital gains
• Completing a Roth conversion to take advantage of a low effective tax rate
• Reviewing your budget and finding areas to cut costs
• Where to get your free credit report and a simple task to improve your credit score

Mentions:

www.annualcreditreport.com

More of The Struggle is Real:

Find show notes and more at https://www.tsirpodcast.com/

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I love big, life changes…said absolutely no one ever.

Significant life changes like moving out of your hometown, changing career paths, or ending a significant relationship are terrifying even if you know it is what you should do. It takes proper planning and a lot of courage to follow through with these major milestones.

These decisions have never come easy to me. I was terrified to quit my first job. It took me over 6 months to pull the trigger on moving out of my hometown. And I don’t even want to talk about the countless relationships that drug on because I didn’t have the courage to end them.

At the end of the day, they were all the right decisions. The only thing I regret is not making those decisions sooner.  I needed some encouragement from my friend and today’s guest Kay Cote.

Kay knows a thing or two about change. Growing up outside of Fargo, North Dakota, she’s learned to embrace these big life decisions. She’s lived in South Africa temporarily, tried RV life, quit her corporate job to become an entrepreneur, relocated to Austin, and most recently, decided to take a chance on a career change by jumping into the music industry.

Through Kay’s story and her PIVOT method, by the end of this episode, we’ll be feeling equipped to say yes to that hard decision and embrace the change that comes with it.

So if you’re ready for that, let’s get into it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the minimalist, storm-chasing fanatic, and shuffle dance queen…Kay Cote.

Key Takeaways:

• Building the courage to move out of your hometown
• Communicate without verbal language
• The benefits of moving to a new city or country
• Breaking out of the mundane
• Building confidence and independence by moving
• How to use the PIVOT method when thinking through major changes
• How to get more opportunities by staying open-minded
• Using reflection to figure out what you want to do with your career
• Nothing in this life is permanent

More of Kay:

Website: www.kaycote.com

Instagram: thekaycote

More of The Struggle is Real:

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Do you currently feel like you’re stagnant in your career? Like you haven’t learned a lot lately and are living the same work day over and over?

Or maybe you want to expedite your professional growth as you’re looking to take the next step?

Well, this is the episode for you because we are going to be talking about how starting a side project can solve these feelings and 8 ideas for projects that you can start today.

Key Takeaways:

• 3 reasons why side projects are helpful
• Using side projects to foster learning
• Building a network through your side project
• Finding a sense of identity outside of your 9-to-5
• 8 ideas for side projects you can start today

More of The Struggle is Real:

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What kind of impact would it have on your career if you could be mentored by Tim Ferriss, Brene Brown, Cal Newport, Oprah Winfrey, Les Brown, Ryan Holliday, James Clear, and Carol Dweck?

This is a handful of the top thinkers from the last decade and the great news is, we can receive their mentorship.

No, unfortunately, they don’t have a special lottery program where you can enter to win a free mentoring session but they do have something even better, a book.

Yes, all of these top thinkers are also authors and they’ve condensed the knowledge they’ve gained from decades of experience into an organized format that costs less than $20 even free if you’re savvy about it.

Today we are talking about the power of books. My friend Nick Hutchison from BookThinkers is going to teach us how to boost your career through effective reading. Nick and I get into all kinds of reading techniques like note-taking strategies, how to read faster, finding time to read, and when to stop reading a book that isn’t serving you.

If you’re ready to take your career and life to the next level by reading impactful books, then this episode is for you.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with the creator of BookThinkers a massive online community of book lovers and the author of the newly minted book, Rise of the Reader…Nick Hutchison.

Key Takeaways:

• How to make time to prioritize reading books
• One easy shift that will allow you to read 26 books in a year
• How to get access to books for free
• The importance of reading wide when you first start reading
• Why it is critical to set an intention before reading a book
• Note-taking strategies to maximize retention
• Short-hand note-taking strategies
• How to read faster
• A mathematical framework for deciding when to stop reading a book

Mentions:

$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No (https://www.amazon.com/100M-Offers-People-Stupid-Saying/dp/1737475731)

More of Nick:

Personalized Book recommendation: DM Nick at www.instagram.com/bookthinkers

Buy the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/c9dE0ln

Learn more about Nick: www.nickhutch.com

Learn more about BookThinkers: www.bookthinkers.com

More of The Struggle is Real:

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In this current series, we’ve been deep-diving into blueprints for how you can take control of and accelerate your career with various professional growth strategies.

Assembling a personal board of advisors and reading books are amazing avenues for taking steps forward in your career but we also want to be playing defense and ensuring we aren’t taking any steps backward.

We don’t want to be putting all of this hard work in only to be paddling upstream. Over the first decade of my career, I’ve noticed 3 career-killing habits that can set young professionals back regardless of their talents.

If you want to ensure that you aren’t slipping into one of these habits and what to do if so, well, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• The line between arrogance and confidence
• Specific examples of arrogance in the workplace
• What to do if you find yourself slipping into the habit of arrogance
• How complacency can flat-line your career
• Recent trends show concerns about complacency in the workplace
• How to break out of complacency
• Why a negative attitude at work will isolate you
• How to correct negativity and become a coworker people like to be around again

More of The Struggle is Real:

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Have you heard of this concept before? A personal board of advisors. I think it is kind of interesting.

Many companies have a board of directors who help advise and guide them on key decisions. Why shouldn’t we have a similar group to rely on?

Especially as early career professionals, we face many critical questions about career pivots, job opportunities, work-life balance, purpose, leadership moments, and more.

When I started thinking about it, assembling a personal board of advisors is a must for high-performing professionals. We can’t do this all alone. We need guidance and support from a diverse group of professionals.

But I have so many questions about how to actually execute this concept. Who should be on my board? How do I ask them? How often do we meet? How do I make sure it is meaningful for my board members too?

So I invited my friend Pete Schramm to the podcast to tell us how to assemble a personal board of advisors and to get all of our questions answered.

Pete is the CEO and Founder of Latitude, a software company focused on employee connection, and the author of Pathfinders, Navigating Your Career Map with a Personal Board of Advisors.

This is a really powerful concept so I am hoping you take what you learn today and run with it.

Key Takeaways:

• How a personal board of advisors differs from a group of mentors
• How a personal board of advisors can help guide you through a career transition
• 10 different seats and functions you can recruit for your personal board of advisors
• SMARTY goals
• Why one individual shouldn’t be responsible for multiple seats
• How often do we meet with our personal board of advisors
• How to ask someone to be on your personal board of advisors
• Pre-qualifying questions to make sure someone is a good fit for your board
• How to get an easy yes from a potential board member
• What’s included in your career map
• How you can add value to your board members

Mentions:

Episode 108: 7 Local Events Where You’ll Meet Your Next Boss, Mentor, or Business Partner www.tsirpodcast.com/108

More of Pete:

Book: Pathfinders, Navigating Your Career Map with a Personal Board of Advisors

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-schramm-pmp/

More of The Struggle is Real:

Find show notes and more at https://www.tsirpodcast.com/

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We are kicking off a new series called “Your Map to Professional Growth.” The goal of this series is to give you ideas for how you can take ownership of your career. Each episode will center around a different blueprint for growing professionally.

But all of these tools are useless, just like a map, if you don’t know where you want to go.

With that in mind, it seems fitting to kick off this series with a conversation about setting professional goals for yourself. In particular, there are 3 types of goals that we are discussing to help you give clarity to your career and define your Northstar.

Having a sense of your professional goals and what you want from your career, at least in the near term future, is going to give you a starting place when implementing the strategies that we will be talking about in the rest of this series.

So if you’re ready to get serious about your professional growth, understand the map ahead, and pick a direction that is going to get you excited, let’s get into it.

Key Takeaways:

• 3 types of professionals goals to set for yourself
• 4 questions to ask yourself to decide what skills you need to focus on
• Deciding on the next stop of your career path
• Putting numbers to your financial targets

Mentions:

E117 - The Career Conundrum: Follow My Passion or the Money www.tsirpodcast.com/117

More of The Struggle is Real:

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I have to admit, this is one subject in the personal finance space that I don’t have much experience with. I’m so impressed with my friends who get free airfare and hotels through credit card points and I think it is time for you and I to do the same.

I just get overwhelmed and I’m not really sure where to start. What cards should I have in my wallet? Which card should I use on what? Are cards with annual fees worth it?

These questions and more are all going to get answered in today’s episode and to give us those answers, I invited my friend Danielle Desir Corbett who is the creator of The Thought Card, a travel and finance blog and podcast.

Danielle is quite the expert when it comes to traveling cheaper through credit card hacking. My approach up until this point with credit cards has been pretty elementary. I take my 1% cash back and call it a day but Danielle has me really excited to move up to the next level and start getting more from my credit card provider.

I thought this was an excellent capstone episode for our series on Mastering Money at Work. We’ve covered 401(k)s, asking for a raise, employee perks that can make you money, HSAs, and most recently the passion versus paycheck conundrum. If you missed any of those episodes, download them now so you have something to listen to after this one.

Key Takeaways:

• Why are credit card companies giving away such lucrative deals
• The potential risks of credit cards
• Criteria for what credit cards right for you
• How to maximize your spending categories
• Should I use a free card or an annual fee card?
• Danielle’s favorite credit cards
• An app that helps you determine which credit card you should be using at checkout
• A DIY approach to keeping your credit cards organized
• How to make sure you always get the sign-up bonus
• Earn and burn mentality
• Creative ways to boost your points
• Popular brand partnerships to link your credit card to
• How to stretch your PTO to take more vacations

Mentions:

CardPointers: https://cardpointers.com/

Rakuten: https://www.rakuten.com/

More of Danielle:

Thought Card Blog and Podcast: https://thoughtcard.com/

Blog: 7 Easy Ways To Earn Thousands of Points and Miles a Year

Blog: 6 Travel Hacking Mistakes To Avoid

Book: Traveling With a Full-Time Job

Book: Affording Travel: Saving Strategies For Financially Savvy Travelers

More of The Struggle is Real:

Find show notes and more at https://www.tsirpodcast.com/

Follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tsirpod/