Is it too Late? | NOTHING Saved For Retirement at 50!

[Music] all right everyone very excited about today's episode tell me if this is you or you know someone who reflects this situation can we still do this is it too late for Becky who are gonna be speaking with today she's starting out with her husband with a net worth of zero at the age of 50 and found a way to reach financial independence by the age of 63 now this is not based on strong financial decisions over their entire life or even over the first several decades in fact she says the first 25 years of their marriage they made poor financial choices leaving him to this place this inflection point at the age of 50 where they're starting from scratch from there a combination of Dave Ramsey choose Fi in retirement manifesto enabled her to effectively accomplish within 13 years something that we've said is is replicable so the reason that this story holds so much appeal to me is encouragement this is simple math and it's not based on when you found it it's not based on the fact that it's too late it's based on the fact that if you take small actions each and every day forward you can transform the trajectory of your life and that of your families so I'm very excited about this episode and help me with this I have my co-host Brad here with me today how you doing buddy hey Jonathan I'm doing quite well and yeah this should be incredible it's never too late right and how wonderful is that it's never too late everyone should take that in and we're gonna learn all about Becky story of course but there's an even cooler little sub story here I was listening to the BiggerPockets Money episode a couple months ago from camp by Rocky Mountain and I'm sitting there listening to this podcast and I hear this woman Becky and I was just blown away by her story so I actually that very minute reached out to Steven Boyer who is the organizer of camp I sent him a Facebook message Mike Steven who is Becky we have to get her on the show and he responds back he's like that's actually Steven hep dig from your team that's his mom how crazy is that right so Steven is the one who is doing our fi 101 curriculum he's also doing a military course through the choose Fi international family and this is his mom Becky it's just it's incredible what a small world and with that Becky welcome to the podcast thank you it's a privilege to be here so you know as I was starting to share it out with our audience where you found yourself at the age of you know at the age of 50 starting from scratch was that an accurate summation and what would you like to add to that just to give our audience a sense for you know what your financial game plan was for the first half of your marriage yeah that was the problem because we didn't have a game plan um Stephen and I met Stephen my husband and I met in college and we graduated and had pretty good jobs with decent salaries and interestingly at that point in time we were actually making more money than our parents were so we had both grown up in households where we had all of our needs met but we really didn't have a lot of extras in fact my parents are children of the depression so they didn't have much of anything and their younger years and that whole era sort of sets your mindset about possessions and money when when I was young their life was a little bit better but not much my mom was a schoolteacher my dad was a blue-collar worker and their incomes were pretty low but we had everything that we needed unfortunately what came out of that was there was no instruction on money they took their paychecks and paid the bills and hope there was enough left for the groceries and you know maybe something else that they might need so when Steve and I graduated college we were literally making more money than they were at that point in time and we had neither one had any training about money so we had great salaries so we felt like gosh we've got a chance now to have a few things that we haven't been able to before so we started consuming and we felt like as long as we could make the payments or if it was something that was really important to us then we would buy it so the my set bin was you buy a house as soon as you can so we had folks encouraging us to not only buy a house but buy the biggest house we could afford because our salaries were only gonna get better well this was in the late 70s early 80s this was oil boom time we were in Houston it's a big oil town so we thought sure our salaries are only gonna get go up things will just get better from here so we bought a house we bought a new car and about three years later we were introduced to sailing fell in love with it and we bought a sailboat and a yacht club membership so we I mean life was good we we were doing great we know had her own place we had great cars we had this hobby that we just absolutely loved and we used the boat a lot sometimes you would see people you would see boats on the pier that you never saw anyone use them but we loved it and we spent every weekend there so it was a big part of our life what we didn't do was any planning for the future we thought about it and knew that we probably needed to do something at some point in time but we thought we're just gonna think about that later we've got plenty of time so we were not living on a budget we weren't saving anything and we did not have an emergency fund so the firm that steepened was working with needed to move someone to Boston and we volunteered for that position because we thought the cost of living difference between Boston and Houston is quite large and they will have to increase our salary and when we come back from this short two-year assignment then they would not walk that salary back and we would be an even better position than we were at that point in time we knew it was skee but we thought it was worth taking the risk unfortunately it did not do anything for our finances the housing market in Houston had really dropped we couldn't sell our house to move to Boston so we rented it for a $300 a month loss the salary bump we got for the increased cost of living in New England wasn't really quite enough to catch up and so we came back actually in worse shape than when we left then about six months later that firm started laying people off and eventually closed their doors so that combined with the fact that I had quit my job and was a stay-at-home mom when we started having children had really put a dent in our income Stephen had several jobs with small he's a commercial architect he had several jobs with small architectural firms over a few years and it just never really went anywhere and all along this period of time we felt like we were only making enough money to to continue life the way we had it we still weren't thinking about the future and about saving anything we had saved anything for college or even an emergency fund which really was a problem later on so I want to hop in here I want to ask you a question because you've gone from making both incredible incomes to now one of you earning income to now that industry you know for a time just disappearing or getting punched in the face and going into retreat and your husband being laid off and then now having to work look for work on his own to supplement I'm curious were you along with all of these setbacks were you because you hadn't you hadn't been looking at your budget before you'd never had two you two always been able to keep up but now all of the income has dried up and you still have the sailboat the Yacht Club membership you know and I'm just curious did you respond quickly enough to the change in income we did some we sold the sailboat let the Yacht Club membership go so we reeled in our spending to a point but we had not reeled it in to the point where we were saving anything my husband worked for himself for nine years and his income at that point in time was not great it was typical you know work for yourself kind of thing some years were good some years were not so good and we would adjust our spending accordingly after a few years of him working for himself they there were two clients that decided they didn't need to pay him and it equal to about a year's worth of salary and that was the event that really sent us over the cliff we because we had no emergency fund so we didn't have any income he still had engineers that had contracted to him that he owed money to and he was determined that he was going to pay all of those bills so we found ourselves with no income no emergency fund and buying groceries with credit cards and at that point in time fear really set in for me the amount of debt we were in at that point in time was fifty five thousand dollars it doesn't sound like a big number now but that was several years ago and can I also clarify in terms of type of debt is this credit card debt that we're talking about some of it was credit cards some of it was business debt and probably there was a car loan in there okay I was looking at the the amount of debt we had wasn't that big compared to what you hear today but I didn't see any way of getting out of it we were everything that we needed we were buying on a credit card so I felt like we were digging a bigger hole every day and at that point in time our kids were junior high and maybe going into high school and so we knew that college was gonna be facing us in just a few years and we'd also save nothing for that so what what I was living with was this idea that this is just going to keep getting bigger this snowball is going to keep getting larger and I'm not gonna be able to get out from under it so Becky I'm really curious about the psychology of really this entire journey right so you come out of college you're making this incredible salary between the two of you and you're spending freely but you are thinking about finances a little bit which is kind of interesting because you mentioned this grand scheme to move to Boston and to make more money and I'm thinking this isn't just someone or a couple who are just completely unaware you were thinking about finances on some weird micro level but yet you weren't saving any money and then you have these lean years and you said you're really set in for me I'd love to hear about your internal thought process as this journey is going long because I think to me that's what's so intriguing are you thinking about money at all when you're 22 when you're 30 how does this involve we thought about money but the problem was we were only thinking in the moment we were never projecting out - what are we going to need in our 40s and 50s and 60s we we just kept kicking the can down the road of we'll think about that another day like you said we we took this job in Boston thinking it might and improve our situation but that was still thinking about improving the current situation not the future okay so that increase in income would have in all likelihood been spent right probably it's interesting only thinking in the moment I think that is what typifies probably 250 million Americans right we don't think long term I mean I don't want to jump ahead obviously but but did that begin to shift during these dark periods when you're spending on credit cards like were you thinking about college and retirement and and things in the longer term at that point when did this start to shift ultimately I say that I don't ever want to go back and walk through that pain that we were experiencing at that point in time but unfortunately it took extreme pain to change our mindset it really wasn't until we were in those dark days that we started thinking we have to do something differently we can't continue on the path that we're on now and not only was it painful emotionally as you can imagine it caused a lot of difficulty in our marriage if things had not changed I think there was a real possibility that this issue could have taken our marriage down and I know that many issues are one of the big causes of divorce in America but it was it was very very unpleasant and it took that pain for us to realize that we had to do things differently at that point in time we didn't know what that was but we knew something had to change who's interesting as you were saying that one of my thoughts was you know the reflexive fear that you felt for the first time was actually you know in many probably this awakening moment and and it strikes me that if you had gotten the raise if you had just been able to get by if you hadn't hit the wall you would not be where you are right now you would not reach this level of fun and you would still be paycheck to paycheck in your 60s without the level of pain that brought this awareness it's just kind of interesting to contemplate that and realize that like in a vacuum where everything's just barely working where you're sustaining or you're just even you're sliding that kind of lifestyle a shouldn't carry you up by the time that you do realize you know by the time you that fear point the sooner you can have that fear that awakening I can get you to make some serious changes which is you know it's cool to watch that play out in your own life yes yes I agree with you if we had not experienced that I honestly don't know when we would have changed our mind about planning for the future and when we would have stopped living paycheck-to-paycheck yeah it's amazing how these negative events you can really use them as the impetus to move forward and your story is the perfect example but I want to talk about this moment you're at this precipice really you're talking about a precipice financially you're talking about it with your relationship things can really go different ways at this point they could have went very differently with your relationship if you just kept kept butting heads and arguing but how did you come together as a team I think that there's this point where you got the stressful point in your life but the two of you came together as a team and move forward do any recollection of conversations or how that happened because honestly this is a true inflection point I didn't just love to hear about it one of the things that helped get us out from under the extreme pressure was that my husband Steven closed his business and went to a w-2 job it was difficult for him to do that because he loved what he was doing we loved having him at home even when even with the years of income that were not so wonderful he was able to go to every school events every whatever that the kids were doing and he was in a little more in control of his time because he was working there at home and when he had to close that it was difficult for him because he felt like he had failed he felt like he had failed at business and that he had been a failure too as the provider for his family so it it took a while for him to reach the point where he could go out and look for another job and obviously as soon as he got a w-2 job then that eased some of the pressure on our finances and on our relationship and we knew we needed to change something but we still didn't know what that was going to be and honestly what changed us was someone introduced us to Dave Ramsey we someone loaned us cassette tapes believe it or not that I listened to in my car and I brought the information to Steven and I said I think we need to check this out so we checked out the DVDs from a library and went through the class ourselves and that was the pivot point where we saw that there is a way to take control of this and we had actually gone to some before that for for financial information some financial literacy but they talked more about the concepts of money rather than giving you step-by-step instructions on what to do when we listened through Dave Ramsey and and understood his baby steps that made sense to us it's stuck with us we could do step number one and when you get done with that then you go to step number two so that was the thing that really turned us around and brought us out of the the dark times that we were in Becky can you please us I guess in your time of life at this point and where you were financially so I guess debt wise I think I'm hearing it's fifty five thousand dollars is that the number we're talking about specifically and roughly how old were you just give us a sense of of where you were in time and place and financially at this point yes the first deputy job that Stephen took was in 2006 so we were in our late forties at that point and he worked at that job for two years and in those two years than we were able to pay off all of our consumer debt with the exception of a car that we had so we paid off the credit cards we paid off the business debt and we're down to the mortgage in one car okay Becky so so this is around 2006 and this is when things start getting better but before we move on I wanted to talk about maybe these darker years where the income wasn't great where you were putting everything on a credit card I mean you said you had three children right and at that point they were in middle school and high school and we're talking about college in the future I'm curious about the impact on them and you think they were aware of these issues did you and your husband Stephen actively try to hide it from them I mean clearly family dynamics are so important and I think a lot of people don't really talk about this with others and it would help the audience dramatically if you can talk talk us through that ultimately obviously you and your husband Stephen we're dealing with this but you had three other nearly adults at that point in the house and what was that like for them we did not hide it from them we of course we tried to soften the conflict between the two of us a bit but the the kids were aware of our financial situation there was a point when I actually sat them down and said if you can't eat it we're not buying it so don't ask and later on I actually wondered if maybe I had been a little too hard on them a little too harsh with my approach but but we didn't hide things from them they they understood that the things were not great but I don't think that in the end I don't think they were affected that much by it in fact I've actually asked them recently what they remember from that time and if it affected them and their answer was that they didn't really remember you know anything awful they they weren't aware of that I if anybody has more than one child you know that your children they're all different with different personalities I've often wondered if those financial hardships made an impact on them as adults one of my three kids has turned out to be extremely frugal and I don't know if that's personality or if that has was affected at all by by what we went through but I think it's valuable for your children too to see mom and dad struggle with an issue and find the solution for it work together as a team and then come out the other side into a better life and and on a better path I know that they learned from our mistakes they're all grown and married so they are late 20s and early 30s now and they are in much better shape than we are and my hope is that they learned from our mistakes and that's also my hope my desire to put my story out here in a format like this is we experienced that pain and I would like to save others from doing the same thing if anyone can learn from the mistakes that we made then that's wonderful and I don't have any problem telling my story for that reason so you know it's actually interesting I'm thinking maybe Steven works with us here to suffice oh we can actually have him on the show to do a little bit of you know what his take on this was and kind of see if we can bring some stuff out I don't know we'll try it well I can't promise that but we'll give it a shot but even if we can't do that Brad I know that you told him this interview with his mom was coming up and I know he was sending you some messages why don't you go ahead and read what he sent over to you yes Steven has actually been blowing up my phone today it's actually really fascinating because he's an active-duty military officer and he's deployed and he's literally sending these to me from across the globe and he said they kept us in lots of sports as kids even when we were broke and that probably was a major aspect to us not realizing we were broke and he said I'm not sure how they did that whether it was by sacrifice by cutting things or if who's continually putting things on the credit card and I think Becky that's a valid question Steven has for you I'd love to hear it would have been a combination of all of those probably we did cut back so that the kids could have what would look like a normal life we put some things on credit cards we had some help from from Grandma I know that there was a semester when our daughter did some ballet classes and grandma paid for that we we actually received help from some of our friends we'll get into this a little later but one of the things that's very important to Steven and I now is our generosity and how we practice our generosity and we've actually been on both sides of that coin we have been givers of help and we've been receivers of help there were times in in those years where things were so bad that some of our neighbors and our friends at church knew the situation that we were in and we would find an envelope of money on our chair at church or a neighbor would come by with a Kroger gift card and which allowed us to buy groceries or gas so it was a combination of a lot of things and a lot of support from our family and our friends and that is an area where we're very intentional about trying to give back pay it forward that's incredible and I want to kind of take I want to take a look at this next chapter here honestly we've spent a lot of time I mean almost probably the majority of the show actually talking about what got us here in this inflection point now and I want to keep our audience in mind like that one of the reasons we're excited to tell this story is this 13 year transformation for your financial future that you and your husband and your family have been on we're kind of right here we're starting to see the threads you had this light bulb moment largely and dude this Awakening due to this fear reaction it caused you to look outwards and you and you started you know you took Dave Ramsey's course where you'd listen to Dave Ramsey's because that tapes at the time and you get a plan like what did the plan what did you do well where we started was learning how to do a budget and we used Dave Ramsey's envelope system I mean literally I had white envelopes with cash I know that there are people who are budget people and others are anti budget I'm a budget person I had never lived on one I'd never used one before I didn't even know how it worked but we sat down and put a budget together and that was the mechanism that gave us boundaries literally those cash envelopes would keep us from overspending in categories so combining the budgeting and the information that we learned with Dave Ramsey which included a total 180 shift in our mindset because I had been a very spendy person my my personality is a spender not a saver and Jonathan I identify with you and then I'm a reluctant frugal listener we do what we have to and I appreciate Brad's take on things as the value aestethic that's now what I have become is a value is but we we reigned in our spending and a combination of that and a good salary for Steven at this point in time when when he took that first deputy job he worked there for two years then he switched to a different firm it was actually an architectural firm that he had admired for many years and was able to get a position there and so that's where he worked in that he worked there for ten years so from 2008 to 2018 and he had an amazing salary and even with everything that we had learned and all the changes we had made the way that he was paid in this particular job was still an advantage to us he had a large salary we didn't get it all in his monthly paycheck the majority of it came in bonuses his actual salary level was pretty moderate and so what it forced us to do was live on his salary and the bonuses were what we used to to basically make the huge change that we had and you have to remember that not only where he's saving for the future but at this point in our lives were saving for college and we're saving for weddings so we had a lot of demands on the cash that we had but the salary that he had and the change in our mindset allowed us to make the difference and that's something I wanted to say to folks who do find themselves in this position in their 40s and 50s you may not retire early like a lot of the guests that you have on your podcasts but when you're in your 40s and 50s that is when usually you have your best earnings ears so in some cases folks who find themselves in this position that need to make a change will have a decent salary to work with I mean we ended up with a huge shovel to to accelerate our savings rate because we did do it in a pretty short time but that's part of how we got there so Becky what about the other side of the equation the expense side did things change dramatically after finding Dave Ramsey and after your husband Steven got this new job or did they stay fairly constant on the expense side and then the increased income was what made up most of these changes in your path towards Phi now we we changed our spending habits also we became more frugal and basically learned that we could still be happy with less consumption we still were purchase things that meant something to us but we got rid of anything that was frivolous we had always bought brand-new cars you know we were of that mindset I wanted to want to buy somebody else's problems and and so we realized that the world won't end if we buy a used car and so we did change a lot of our consumption habits we were talk about how you're just now starting to think about personal finance and you're kind of start anything about in rudimentary form but as you lean into this for long or longer you become you know more sophisticated at it you're introduced to new tools to make that process and more tactics to make that process easier and speed up the reason I say that is that you projected your retirement to be at the age of 66 or 67 you reached financial independence at the age of 63 what sped that up actually it was being introduced to you guys we had greatly improved our situation but we we knew how to save and we knew how to be frugal we didn't know how to invest in fact we tried picking mutual funds on our own at first and that was an epic fail so we went with a an Edward Jones adviser and he helped us a lot at the beginning because we didn't know anything so he he was useful in our path to financial independence he was the one who actually projected that we would retire at a normal retirement age of 66 or 67 and so things were rocking along pretty well at that point in 2017 our son Stephen that works with you guys introduced us to your podcast I had never listened to a podcast before at that point I didn't know how to download one so he helped us get it all set up and we started listening and basically what happened was y'all's information took what we had learned and what had made huge changes for us in the past and it put it into overdrive we we had the basics but we didn't have the graduate level and we felt like that's what we got from you guys so within a few months we fired our financial advisor and started following Jim Collins simple path to wealth ideas and moved all of our money you know we had reached a point where we thought okay the kids are out of college they're all married well actually two out of the three at that point we're married but the kids are all out of college we've got the wedding's funded and we're at a point where we can loosen the purse strings just a little bit we can stop being so tight with the budget and you know enjoy the fruits of our labor for the next few years until retirement and when we started listening to two's fi we realized that wait a minute if we if we keep on the way that we are now and we make these other tweaks that will even improve what we're doing then we can exit the workforce a little earlier and so that's what made the difference and it helped us shape three years off the retirement so Steven retired at 63 instead of 66 because of the foundational information that we got from you guys so Becky that's amazing and obviously you set me up right there for my next question what were these tweaks these posts choose fi tweets what did you do to shave off those couple years right there at the end part of it was moving our investments to Vanguard and to stop paying those fees and part of it was to continue to live the frugal life that we had gotten used to instead of you know letting go and and being a little more free or with our spending and then hearing Fritz from retirement manifesto on the podcast really made a big difference for us we got on his website and pulled out his spreadsheet and we had tried some other spreadsheets before that and they were helpful but weren't really conclusive and Fritz's spreadsheet really helped us a lot it it was easy to use it had all of the the you know buckets that we needed we've plugged our numbers in and that's really what made us realize that if we stuck with the current game plan that we could drag that retirement date forward so Becky I wanted to ask real quick about the simple path to wealth and your strategy so your son Steven again he sent me this litany of text messages today this is a family affair and he said they are one of the few people I know that is really doing the JL Collins simple path to wealth they had no real estate no business income no side income none of these things and he said you guys have the vast majority of your net worth in broad-based low costs and next funds we we are using the bucket strategy and we have 80% BTSA X 10 % vb TLX and 10% cash so tell us what your bucket strategy looks like for yourself now how like I mean you're refreshed for our audience in terms of your mapping out where your finances are gonna come from in the next you know 2 or so to 3 years you know in the market could do anything you in the market could be softening the market go up from here how do you and your husband mentally prepare and financially prepare for the next several years using the bucket strategy well we're living off the cash in fact we actually just started making withdrawals from Vanguard in August I would I believe and I have to tell you that we have planned this inside out upside down every way that you can think of and we know that the plan is solid but I have to tell you that the first time you pull money out of your investments it's like stabbing yourself in the heart it was so easy to spend it when it was just cash coming in cash going out but now it's yours it's been sitting for ten years like so but so we spend out of our cash bucket we have I think it's about three years worth of cash in that and and you know we I still live on a budget I mean I don't have my white envelopes anymore but I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to let go of the budget because it it's it's the guardrails for me and it it helps me to know where I am right now we we have a we have our own spreadsheet where we keep all of our budget information and I have a section of the spreadsheet for what we call long term accruals so that is car insurance and house insurance when I'm gonna spend this year for Christmas taxes you know all the things that you do once a year and so we we keep track of that on a probably on that spreadsheet every two or three days just to keep track of where we are so that I don't lose control again yeah let's say I'm sorry I just think this is that someone's listening to this there's there's multiple people that are getting value from from this story there's individuals that are listening to saying that's me I'm starting to late is there still hope yes yes there is yes yes second individual listen to this is someone that's within a few years of now needing to implement the bucket strategy is saying someone that's drawing down what are you doing and in a person like me that's kind of you know learning this as they go you're a relatable person what are you doing you just said I withdrew money from Vanguard for the first time and it was like stabbing myself in the heart so this who's this for someone's saying this is a person they're relatable they're like me they're doing this now and I think for them I think it'd be pretty cool to walk through what you and your husband have decided like Howard you've got some money in cash and you're now for the first time doing your first drawdown what have you guys what are you starting to map out how are you accessing this money and like what what you know in terms of when it will be used what do you have in mind we are drawing out a vanguard I believe the way it looks is that we'll be drawing out once a month we we still are keeping track of every penny that we're spending and we plan on drawing out of the cash on a monthly basis and then once a year we will be rebalancing between the bond and the stock bucket in refilling the cash bucket so when you're when you're bringing from your investments to a cash bucket right so you have this blend in your in your investment vehicles of stocks to bonds you just mentioned this rebalancing Act and then you have three years of cash you use one year of cash so now one of those buckets is empty and you're and you're drawing out are you drawing out of bonds are you drawing out a blend of both like how are you guys bringing the money from Vanguard over my probably it's going to be coming out of bonds but at the point will we still need to pick a point in the year where we're going to rebalance but we'll see how our what am I looking at the percentages well we'll look at how the percentages are at that point of time and see if we need to move stocks to bonds or bonds to stocks or what we're gonna pick up to put it back in the cash bucket I would love to I'd love to one connect you with Fritz at some point so you guys can chat about the bucket strategy that are you using and then to just check in with you every so often maybe yeah you know just to see how you how your bucket strategy is getting more sophisticated what have you learned to make yourself more comfortable to slowly ease that stabbed in the heart sensation was just getting repetition and I think finding individuals that are actually in the process of drawdown that are dealing with market volatility that has been baked into their calculations that's incredibly valuable for the community it says they're simultaneously dealing that with you would you be open to kind of oh absolutely absolutely I mean we we're experiencing some market volatility there was some what a couple of months ago and literally the day we're recording this the last couple of days things have not been very pretty and but you just have to as you do when you are accumulating you have to stay the course you can't panic whether you're in the accumulation phase or the drawdown phase all right Becky so at this point you and your husband are at five and I think to me one of the most poignant aspects of what you mentioned earlier is generosity and I kind of got goosebumps earlier honestly when you talked about your community helping you and now in turn it being really important for you to give back to your community and I'd love to hear about what you think about generosity generally what this looks like in your file life maybe what your file life just looks like in general just tie it all together for us because this is really the final aspect of your story what is your life look like now well we are learning how to be retired luckily I heard a few other people say that that it is a learning process we picked up our life we had lived in Texas we picked up our life and brought it to Colorado so we have a new house a new neighborhood and new climate a new altitude new friends everything has changed but circling back to the to the generosity that is something that's very important to us and I would encourage everyone to find ways to be generous even when you're in the the wealth accumulation stage even if things are not going quite so great and and your come isn't large you can still find ways to be generous we our lives are enriched when we are generous with our time and our talents and our resources one thing I'm passionate about is to try to help people not walk through the same pain that we did so after we found Dave Ramsey we were facilitators for several years we taught his class we even had a this was interesting my daughter is our youngest and when she was in high school and her peer group was high school and college age kids we saw what student debt was how it was going to affect these kids in the future and how it can just be an aunt a weight around their ankle for decades possibly so we had a class with about ten of her peers so we're talking high school and college kids we went through the first four lessons I believe of Dave Ramsey which takes you through the the debt reduction and how to get on a budget and how to have an emergency fund and so the basics of what he teaches we we brought these kids together at a friend of ours house and has sort of a boot camp weekend and went through these classes and just taught them this information so that they could hopefully create a better life for themselves the age the book ends of our age group was the youngest was a sophomore in high school the oldest was a sophomore in college the bookends of financial position was we had one student that had been told by his parents ahead of time that he was going to be responsible for part of his college education that they were not paying all of it and he and his brother had a lawn mowing business that they had to run for several years and he already had $20,000 in the bank saved the other end of that spectrum was one of the college kids that was a believe a sophomore and he already had $40,000 in debt and the the thing that warms my heart and that energizes me is seeing how they took the information that we taught them and applied it in their lives even the kid who had $20,000 in the bank already assumed that he would not get out of college without student loan debt and he has since graduated has a great job and he graduated with zero debt so I felt like that what we had done at least helped a few people yeah and I can say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree right your son Steven is really creating a great resource for the world honestly I mean he's creating this fi 101 for choose fi he's creating a course for military financial literacy I mean it's very obvious that you've taught your kids these amazing lessons so thank you well thank you it's it's still our passion to to teach these principles and I'm excited about the class that y'all are coming up with because there is information out there but I don't feel like any of it is really complete and and I'm I'm excited about what you guys are doing because I want to continue to to help to mentor to teach other folks this information and y'all's resource is going to be great it's gonna make it easy for us Becky someone's listening to this and they just want to connect with you they want to find out more about your story they want just more information there's some bit of this that they want to figure out how to incorporate into their own life what is the best way for someone to connect with you well I'm on facebook under Becky hep dig and I've actually just started a blog so I'm a baby blogger and my blog is started at 50 comm oh my goodness I hope everybody goes there today hi that's amazing well the only thing I have up there so far is my story my goal is to to put out some basic financial information I I'm not trained in this the only and the only training I have was my own experiences but I can talk to people about the basics of yes you need to you know look at where you are figure out where am I starting and get out of debt if you need to and so it's just some of that basic information and a lot of what carried us along to where we are now is knowing that is is what's helped us to get where we are now was basing our financial decisions on biblical principles the Bible actually has quite a bit to say about money and so that's something that I'm going to explore on the website also let me ask you this we're going to title this episode is it too late and someone's going to be listening to this and they have that question and they just ask you just point blank is it too late for me have I missed it what do you say it is not too late it's never too late to improve your situation now what you need to do is start now don't put it off any longer but you can always improve your situation and what I suggest is to evaluate where you are and forgive yourself for your past mistakes and you may even have to go to some of your friends and your family members and ask forgiveness for them you your bad financial choices may have spilled out onto other people but forgive yourself formulate a plan and move forward you may not retire early but anything you do now any additional savings that you can accumulate now will make your future less stressful and more comfortable and as I said before a lot of people are in their their peak earning years in their 40s and 50s so you may have some great tools to work with and it is definitely not too late to improve your situation oh all right well you know most shows I think that would be the end of the episode but come on Becky on the show we've gotta tackle the hot seat are you ready for this in a world drowning in debt and rapid consumption trapped by the chains of lifestyle inflation these questions highlight the secrets of those who have broken free welcome to the choose fi hot seat [Music] you all right Becky question number one what is your favorite blog podcast or book of all time well I'm gonna take some freedom here and name all of those I couldn't narrow it down to just one favorite blog is retirement manifesto and my husband actually reads France and I I can't sit still long enough to read very much but but my husband loves Fritz at retirement manifesto it helped us a lot and my favorite podcast you may have heard of it before it's these two guys Brad and Jonathan they're pretty cool my favorite you guys at Sue's if I because we learned so much and made were able to make some significant changes in our situation because of the information that you guys have put together and I also want to give a shout out to Paulo pant and afford anything I really enjoyed listening to hers also and then are you doing the trifecta okay I have to plug Jim Collins books simple path to wealth nice it's it's made a huge difference in fact I keep a bag of books in my car and in that bag is copies of simple path and Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and if I find anybody that I think is open to the message then I give them a book that's awesome all right Becky question number two an inflection point in your life that was especially memorable or meaningful well I'm gonna take a little freedom with this my inflection point or my memorable moment is actually not anything financial we have a list of core values for our family and when our kids were little we even typed them up frame them and put them on the wall and the core values can be boiled down to integrity honor and service and it is so cool now to see my adult children they're all married now so they all have their own families and it is awesome to be able to look at them and see them living out those values of integrity honor and service and so that's my inflection point that's amazing yeah it's hard to go wrong with integrity honor and service that's amazing I love it all right Becky question number three what is your favorite life hack my favorite life hack there's two of course I can't narrow it down to just one my favorite life hacks are credit card rewards which I was not aware of until I started listening to you guys and so that's a bit awesome and personally it's having a bullet journal my my middle son introduced me to a bullet journal and it has really helped me just keep myself organized follow-up question on that I've tried to do it twice and it never sticks like I realized there's a leaning in process to all these things but you have to be taught how it works you don't just you know so like for you what resources did you use to learn a system you know enough that it would actually stick I can't remember off the top of my head the name of it but my son that introduced me to the concept sent me some links for some YouTube videos that he watched and so I've been doing it since the beginning of 2018 and so again it's one of those things that you just have to start because I have worked into how it works for me how I'm going to use it that it's beneficial to me and the way I use it may not be the same as the next person all right question number four your biggest financial mistake you've made well there's so many to choose you have to choose one on this one get one it was my biggest financial mistake was not starting sooner and not having an emergency fund and I think we had no safety net yeah absolutely I mean this is kind of paired so I'm just gonna tie these together and I think honestly this this episode is that advice but if there's something that stands out question number five the advice you would give your younger self I would say to start now because you can start small the amount of money that you can start with is not going to really be a big burden on your budget and we just never thought of it that way you can start with a hundred dollars and that will make a difference and then increase it as you go you're not gonna want to stay with that but just start early so Becky normally we have this bonus question that we threw out a purchase that you've made over the past twelve months that's added the most value to your life but I actually want to pivot this slightly going back to something that you said earlier you know we decided when we decided to pursue financial independence that we weren't gonna let our purse strings loose you know we're gonna hold onto our frugal backbone and we weren't going and and it to me you know I'm like yes but on the other end I'm also looking for like is this the future you want and so I'm curious have you ever loosened the purse strings do you guys are you able to enjoy the toys to some varying degree like what does your life look like now in the context of having reached financial independence what are you guys doing with that freedom yes yes we have made a few purchases like I said before we we try to be value Asst so we are frugal in certain areas so that we can enjoy the hobbies that we have in other areas and so our large purchase is that we have two Porsches we own two racecars these 2019 Porsches they are not from the beginning from the beginning well my my husband well we drive race cars but we don't race it's a very subtle difference if you were standing on the edge of the track and watching you really wouldn't know the difference but we don't race we we drive on the track with other cars and we are basically just keeping track of our own time so we're not racing again to the other people on the track we drive under very strict rules of wind where and how we can pass another car and so it's all about safety but my husband drives in 1987 911 Carrera so he has a classic car and then I Drive a 2006 Cayman s you guys are amazing like are you allowed to do that I mean are used to allowed to have these sorts of adventures absolutely I try to never say I'm too old and we we we started I mean like I said we we sailed we loved sailing we can't do it where we live now but we've we've always had some some big adventure type of hobby and and I have to say I have enjoyed even though it didn't always it wasn't always friendly to our budget my husband and I have always had hobbies that we do together we both enjoy the same things and that has been a real marriage enhancer actually so do you feel deprived has this been a life of deprivation no no I don't I I wish I could have avoided the pain but I don't feel deprived Becky I have no words but thank you so much for joining us on the show today and sharing your story I can't tell you what this is gonna mean to the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people they're gonna listen to this in future years I mean it's just really on behalf of Brad and myself thank you thank you for sharing your story with us thank you thanks for giving me the opportunity and thanks for everything that you guys do we wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for y'all all right everyone is it too late the answer is definitively no it's never too late for you to improve your situation so excited for Becky join us on the show to share this story with us are my friends if you got value from today's episode and if you've been getting value from the episodes up to this point just take a second press subscribe button on YouTube and hit that ring the bell it just says YouTube when you guys would release a new content I want to know about it and we will continue to find stories that serve you where you are unbelievably excited about how this episode came out all right my friends the fire is spreading we'll see you next time as we continue to go down the road less traveled [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: ChooseFI

Views: 42,712

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: catching up retirement savings, retirement planning, is it too late to retire save for retirement?, retiring late, planning for retirement in your 50s, how can i retire at 55, No plan for retirement, Becky Heptig, ChooseFI, Retiring late, late retirement planning, retirement planning at 50, retirement planning at 40, no retirement savings, no retirement savings at 50, nothing saved for retirement, no retirement savings at 60, no retirement savings at 45

Id: FA40xllqAgk

Length: 62min 14sec (3734 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019