Financial Independence Forum

John runs wealthygardener.com and has a book of the same name as well.  He writes about lessons about prosperity, having reach six-figures in annual passive income himself and teaching others how to achieve their own Financial Independence too.  Financial Independence was modelled by the conversations he has had with his son, who had instilled into him the lessons of prosperity, FIRE, life-long lessons on wealth and the parables that makes wealth creation possible.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:05)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the financial independence forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets. How to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice in [email protected] my guest this week is John, so Frick, the wealthy Gardner John runs wealthygardner.com and has a book of the same name as well. He writes about lessons about prosperity, having reached six figures in annual passive income himself and teaches others on how to achieve their own financial independence. Financial independence was modeled by the conversation he has had with his son over the years who had instilled into him the lessons of prosperity, fire life on lessons on wealth and the parables that make wealth creation possible. We’re lucky to have John join us today. Welcome to the financial independence farm.

John Soforic: (01:07)Glad to be here, my friend. Thanks for having me.

Eugene / Host: (01:10)I know you’re, you’re a prolific, brighter. It’s, well, you have to have that one book out in audio form, but you also kind of space out the different, different quotes of, of wealth and prosperity in the book. And I’d like to start from lesson one about prosperity. Let’s start there. And what does that, what does that mean to you? What would, what would that word mean to you?

John Soforic: (01:29)Prosperity. Wealth. What does it mean to me? What it means to me is, is the ability to not have to think about money. See, when I were, when I graduated from college, I jumped into the world had first. So I came out of college, I got married right away. I had a $100,000 worth of debt between me and my wife. Within our first year, we had a child. Within three years we had our second. I had my own business. So while all the people were having fun in their twenties I was trying to figure out how to survive. I learned in my twenties that life can be consumed by the worry of money and I did not want that. So for me, a big thing, a big why for me to get prosperity, for me to get wealthy was to overcome any kind of worry, to gain peace of mind and to provide and protect my family. Those were my driving, driving motives for prosperity. So for me, a lot of it was peace of mind and getting away from the edge of [inaudible] vulnerability. Quite frankly, that’s the word.

My guest this week is Miss CRNA on FIRE.   She runs the blog https://crnaonfire.blog.  She’s like many of us, woke up to the journey of FIRE by having a deep desire to have the freedom to work when we want to and to refocus on the family.  Her journey wasn’t always one of frugality, but has now turned to focus on debt repayment, with the goal of paying off their entire mortgage in 7 years. Also like some of out there, she has a dream of FIRE but her spouse doesn’t necessarily share the same plans, but she’s very committed to her journey.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:05)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the financial independence forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets, how to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice and story at FinancialIndependenceForum.com my guest this week is Ms. CRNA. She runs the blog CRNAonFIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).blog. She, like many of us, woke up to the journey of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) by having a deep desire to find freedom to work when she wants to and to also refocus on her family. Her journey wasn’t always one of frugality, but she has now turned to focus on debt repayment with the goal of paying off her entire mortgage in seven years. Also, like some of us out there, she has a dream of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), but her spouse doesn’t necessarily share the exact same plans, but she’s very committed to a journey which we’ll talk about more here today on the financial independence forum. Welcome Ms. CRNA to the podcast.

Ms. CRNA: (01:12)Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on. You’re relatively new to the blogosphere. I think, you know, in looking back at some of the some of the posts, I think you started around, I think it was an August or summer of 2019.

Eugene / Host: (01:27)Is that right?

Ms. CRNA: (01:27)That’s correct, yes.

Eugene / Host: (01:29)Awesome. And so maybe, maybe walk us through a little bit, like, was it, was it around the same time that you sort of found the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community or was it well before that and then you just started the blog just because you wanted to document your journey? Well, I sound FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) about two years ago I came across mr money mustache and it’s kind of just, you know, how a lot of people do you start reading his stuff and next thing you know, you’ve consumed, you know, hundreds of articles he’s been writing for a long time and it’s kinda got into that and loved the idea of it. You know, found Vicky Robin, you know, a lot of the stuff that people get the introduction to FIRE (Financial In...

My guest this week is Bob Haegele, The Frugal Fellow who runs a blog thefrugalfellow.com. He’s a financial independence seeker and his blog is focused on how frugality is an important aspect to shifting and reaching financial independence. He’s making money by different side ventures and different side projects and side hustles, creating additional sources of income on the way to reaching FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:00)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the financial independence forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets. How to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice and story at financialindependenceforum.com.

Eugene / Host: (00:31)My guest this week is Bob Haegele, the frugal fellow who runs a blog thefrugalfellow.com. He’s a financial independence seeker and his blog is focused on how frugality is an important aspect to shifting and reaching financial independence. He’s making money by different side ventures and different side projects and side hustles, creating additional sources of income on the way to reaching FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Welcome Bob to the financial independence forum. You named your blog, the frugal fellow. Maybe let’s start there. You know, what, what does frugality sort of mean to you and how has it meant to you in reaching, reaching financial independence?

Bob / Guest: (01:13)I’m kind of always been like naturally frugal, but I haven’t really I didn’t really necessarily have a mission with my frugality kinda when I was you know, growing up and things like that. But I, I guess I’ve never really been like a shopaholic or anything like that, you know, I don’t, I don’t really have just kind of naturally never gone out and spent a lot of money. So that’s just kind of the way that it’s been. And now more recently I’m kind of giving that an actual purpose and using it to kind of really reduce my expenses. So, you know, in addition to not buying things that I don’t need and all that. Now I’m really like reducing my expenses and I have roommates and things like that. So really trying to cut back and just like I said, kind of gets down to the bare minimum. So that I can work toward financial independence.

Eugene / Host: (01:59)And, you know, you mentioned that you were always kind of frugal, like do you sort of remember influences that made you that way or are you, you were sort of always in that mindset even pretty young memories of that?

Bob / Guest: (

My guest this week is Kim who runs a blog called TheFrugalEngineers.com.  Her mission on the site is to make personal finance easy to understand. Her Engineering background makes her uniquely skilled to understand the world of personal finance through math and how to apply math to optimize for financial stability, financial literacy and financial independence.  Her story into FI started when she and her husband diligently paid off 200k in debt with the plan of becoming mortgage-free.  She also made the leap from a being a full-time professional to freelancing with a plan to retire early at 35 with her family in Wyoming. She’s also an expert of geoarbitrage having lived in 35 places already.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:02)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the Financial Independence Forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets. How to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice and story at FinancialIndependenceForum.com My guest this week is Kim who runs a blog with her husband called TheFrugalEngineers.com. Their mission on the site is to make financial, personal finance and financial literacy easy to understand with her engineering background. She is uniquely skilled to understand the world of personal finance through math and how to apply math to optimize for financial stability, financial literacy and financial independence. Her story into FIRE started when her and her husband diligently paid off $200,000 in debt with the plan of becoming mortgage-free. She also made the leap into being a full time professional, do freelancing with a plan to retire at 35 with her family in Wyoming, which she is just on the cusp of being able to do. She’s also an expert in geo arbitrage, having lived in 35 places simply on days with 35 so we’ll talk all about that. So welcome to the Financial Independence Forum, Kim!

Kim: (01:26)Thank you. And nice to be here.

Eugene / Host: (01:27)Yeah, let’s throw, there’s so many different topics that we would love to talk about. I think to arbitrage having lived in various different places. Maybe we’ll start off somewhere in the middle and then we can kind of go backwards and forwards. But maybe we could talk about maybe freelancing, which is I think one aspect that a lot of people thinking about financial independence or FIRE are interested in certainly, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about why you switched from sort of full time to freelancing and then the benefits of freelancing from that point?

Kim: (

My guest this week is Robert W Baillieul. Robert is the Editor-in-Chief of IncomeInvestors.com. Robert started out as a Risk Analyst at one of Canada’s leading banks and has been a contributor to publications such as Slate.com, MarketWatch, The National Post and The Motley Fool.  Robert is an advocate for a group of publicly traded companies he calls his “Forever Assets.” These forever assets comprises of higher-quality, dividend-paying stocks which at their core are businesses that have created wealth not just over weeks or years, but for generations.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:05)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the FinancialIndependenceForum.com. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets. How to better invest your time, invest in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice and story at financialindependenceforum.com

Eugene / Host: (00:31)Pleased to have Robert value as a guest on the show this week. Robert is the Editor-in-Chief of IncomeInvestors.com. Robert started out as a risk analyst at one of Canada’s leading banks and has been a contributor to publications such as Slate.com, MarketWatch, the National Post and the Motley Fool. Robert is an advocate for a group of publicly traded companies he calls his “forever assets”. These forever assets comprise of dividend paying stocks which at their core are businesses that have created wealth not just over weeks or years, but for generations. This week is Robert, so welcome Robert to the FinancialIndependenceForum.com.

Robert: (01:09)Hey, thanks for having me on Eugene. Good to be here. Maybe you could tell our audience a little bit more about what incomeinvestors.com is and what you’re working on with with that right now.

Robert: (01:19)Alright. Yeah. Income Investors.com is a project that I spun off with during my time working with Lombardi Publishing. One of the things that we noticed right away is, you know, with interest rates so low right now with a lot of people are struggling to generate a anywhere near decent investment income from their portfolio. And, and that, that became a big part of what I was looking at when I’m through across my investment career, kind of noticing companies that, you know, paying out dependable dividends steady growth, you know, seem to be the ones that we’re, we’re doing the best performance and doing the best job for shareholders. And that became kind of the focus of my investment research kind of the stuff that I wanted to, to focus on. So working with my business partner, Michael Lombardi we decided to create this project.

My guest this week is Carolina Nucamendi who is starting a fintech company.  She started her first career by moving to Los Angeles after college and began a career in entertainment, a few failures and the need of a reset led her o business school, got MBA at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina and moved back to Los Angeles to begin a career in the intersection of Technology and Entertainment at Sony Pictures.  Sony gave her a stepping stone to City National Bank, a bank based out of Los Angeles, CA focused on high net worth clients and it was then that I started this journey. Her experience in Wealth Management propelled her to want to start her own tool to help people to holistically manage their finances to connect the various financial decisions we make and that’s how Elemnt Financial (3rd E is omitted) was born. She’s currently part of an incubator program, Startup Launch and the LA Chamber of Commerce.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:05)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the Financial Independence Forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods, and mindsets. How to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice iand story at financialindependenceforum.com. Hi, my guest this week is

Eugene / Host: (00:33)Carolina Nucamendi, who is starting a FinTech company, but her journey started in her first career when she moved to LA after college it to begin a career in entertainment and a few failures and a need to reset. Led her to business school, got her MBA at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. Then she moved back to LA to begin a career at the intersection of technology, entertainment, Sony pictures. Sony gave her a stepping stone to city national bank, which is a bank based out of LA, California, focused on high net worth clients in the wealth management industry and it was then that she started to holistically think about her journey. Her experience in wealth management propelled her to want to start her own tool to help people manage their finances, to connect the various financial decisions we make. And that’s how Elemnt Financial, which is their current startup was born.

Eugene / Host: (01:20)She’s currently part of an incubator program, Startup Launch and the LA chamber of commerce, welcome Carolina Nucamendi to the Financial Independence Forum Podcast. Thanks for joining this week. So you know, and even in the preamble as we were talking about and in the intro it sounded like you had a lot of different career paths and different, different things that led you to helping people with their personal finances. Maybe you could go back a little bit before we had to talk about Elemnt Financial, about your interest in your career, entertainment, you know, take us back a little bit about, about when you, when you started on that.

Graeme Hughes is an accredited Financial Planner with 23 years of experience in the financial services industry. He runs themoneygeek.info is a blog about helping people find financial independence through better financial literacy. During the course of his career he completed hundreds of financial plans and recommended and sold hundreds of millions of dollars of investment products. He believes that financial independence is a goal anyone can aspire to and is passionate about helping others to live life on their own terms.

Eugene / Host: (00:05)Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Eugene Ting and this is the Financial Independence Forum. This show is an open ended exploration of stories, methods and mindsets, how to better invest your time best in yourself and invest your money. You can learn more and please contribute your voice and story to financialindependenceforum.com. I have here today, Graham Hughes.

Eugene / Host: (00:35)He is an accredited financial planner with 23 years experience in the financial services industry. He runs themoneygeek.info and it’s a blog that helps people find financial independence through better financial literacy. During the course of his career, he completed hundreds of financial plans and recommended and sold a hundreds of millions of dollars of investment products. He believes that financial independence is a goal that anyone can inspire to and is passionate about helping others live their life in their own terms. Welcome Graeme to the program. Thanks Eugene. I’m really glad to be here. I know we were chatting a little bit before about you know, just to preamble about different things. You started themoneygeek.info you mentioned about six months ago and you have, so I feel like there’s a lot of depth of the articles and it’s already very filled out, so it’s incredible. Some of the things that you’ve, you’ve talked about, about financial independence and you mentioned something in our preamble about how you arrived at the domain name that you have. Maybe you could share with our audience a little bit about that story too. It sounded like there was something there, so I thought I’d start with that.

Graeme Hughes: (01:40)Well, it’s not, it’s actually interesting just in the fact it’s kind of pathetic. The sign of something that I’ve had on my mind for years and years and years. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but the challenge I had, when you’re, when you’re licensed, you’ve got so many restrictions. So I worked for the charter banks was a financial planner for them, licensed to sell mutual funds, license to sell securities at one point. And all those organizations are very tight rules about what you can and can’t do online. So website just wasn’t ever going to happen. But then when I left the industry, you know, I’d had this thing percolating around in the back of my mind. And so for months, literally months,

Mr. CC is in veteran in worked in the oil and gas industry for many years and also a veteren 9 to 5er’s like the rest of us but aspired to be Financially Independent and FIRE, with the goal of achieving in their 30s.  ClippingChains is also a treatise on climbing and generally outdoorsy types and is an interesting intersection of climbing culture, financial freedom, self-exploration, introspection and entrepreneurship.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:02)This is Eugene from the Financial Independence Forum tonight. I have here Mr. CC just a brief intro about him. Him and Mrs. CC runs clipping chains.com. Mr. CC Is a veteran that worked in the oil and gas or is working in the oil and gas industry and has been for many years but is also like many of us, the 9-to-5ers inspired to be financially independent and also to retire early. I’m with their stated goal of doing so well in their way. In their thirties. ClippingChains.com Is also a treaties on climbing and generally outdoorsy types and as an interesting intersection of climbing culture, financial freedom, self-exploration, introspection and in entrepreneurship. There are pet owners and their dogs name is called stickers. Welcome Mr. CC to the Financial Independence Forum.

Mr CC / Guest: (00:54)Awesome. Eugene, thanks for having me. One clarification. My dog’s not really names. Snickers, like we came up with a better name, I think, but I’m probably more tight knit on her identity than our own. So we stuck with that cause she needs a lot of, that’s great. That’s great.

Eugene / Host: (01:12)And, but is it chocolate bars that she’s particularly fond of?

Mr CC / Guest: (01:16)Oh, she’ll eat anything. She’ll steal your food. She doesn’t discriminate.

Eugene / Host: (01:23)I think that we have in common is I also have a, have a mutt as well adult that we adopted at seven years old who’s a, who’s a poodle terrier mix. So

Mr CC / Guest: (01:36)[inaudible]

Eugene / Host: (01:42)Yeah, so, you know, one of my favorite podcasts, I think we were sharing before the recording that we’re, we were both fans of, of podcasters in general. One of my favorites in the past couple of years that I&...

My guest this week is runs a blog on Freedom101.ca with her partner Mike.  Achieving FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) came about organically and they took sensible steps to think about retiring early.  First they diversified their income streams and built that foundation to allowed them to truly consider early retirement at 33 & 34 years old.

Podcast Transcript

Eugene / Host: (00:00)Awesome. Okay. So for live. Okay. that’s great. So yeah, so I, I have here today, Phia, she runs a blog on Freedom101.ca with their partner Mike. She achieved FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) (Financial Independence, Retire Early). They issue FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) kind of in an organic way, and they took reasonable steps and sensible steps to think about retiring early. Firstly thought about diversifying their income streams and they built that foundation, which allowed them to truly consider early retirement at age 33 and 34 respectively. So, Phia, welcome to the Financial Independence Forum podcast.

Phia: (00:40)Thanks so much for having me on Eugene. It’s great to be here and we’re here today.

Eugene / Host: (00:44)Awesome. Thanks so much. You know, one of the things that you know, we try to do in the forum is we try to bring people into and share their experiences and to tell their stories. And the first thing that I as I was going through your blog and thinking and reading about your story, that we actually have a few things in common. We both live in Canada. And some of the posts that you had had written about that you and Mike had written about where a lot of interests that are common to ourselves, like I think you had a couple posts about how to sleep better. I’m thinking about how to eat better and tried and tried different diets that I I’ve also tinkered with myself and and also a post about like personality tests as well and doing different things. So maybe you could, you could start by me, tell me a little bit about yourself because it seems like some of those areas are are kind of complimentary to, you know, finding yourself, but also figuring out what works for you.

Phia: (01:49)Yeah, for sure. I think for Mike and I, we kind of stumbled into our journey to FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). It wasn’t a, was wasn’t really a full blown movement when we decided to that we’ve wanted to make a change in our lives. And so we really started that process by looking at debt and how to pay down our debt. But we really didn’t start with that kind of big picture idea of where we wanted to end up. We thought this is great. We just want a lifestyle, more choice and more freedom. But there wasn’t a point where we sat down and said to each other, what do we want to do? Do with that freedom? What do we want to do with that choice? So for us, we kind of just figured it out as we went along. And when we finally reached financial freedom, it was amazing.