On board the pod today is Captain Fi! I was interviewed by Jesse from The Money Pal. This interview was featured as an article on The Money Pal, and I have also released it as a podcast. Jesse and I discuss making money from website businesses, investing, multidisciplinary learning and how Captain Fi started. Jump on board, this is a juicy one!
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Introduction – Captain Fi on The Money Pal
This podcast features Captain Fi! I am interviewed by Jesse from The Money Pal. We discuss making money from website businesses, how I started my financal independence journey, and what inspired me along the way, including the OG Mr Money Mustache and the various personal finance books that have helped build my knowledge. I talk about some financial struggles I experienced, especially when starting out studying aviation and early on in my flying career, and how my amazing mother sacrificed so much for me and my sisters. I share how Captain Fi actually started and some of my best tips for reaching financial independence. I share a bit about my personal investing decisions and my love of ETF investing. Jesse and I discuss investing in general, multidisciplinary learning and talk about how you can educate yourself for free!
Jump on board, this is a juicy one with heaps of content!
Episode 39: Captain Fi on The Money Pal
Show Notes
- Check out The Money Pal HERE.
- You can find Jesse on Instagram HERE
- You can check out The Money Pal on Facebook HERE.
“I’m just your average Aussie guy passionate about making the world of investing easily understood by removing the ‘too hard basket’ stigma that surrounds it. That’s why I started The Money Pal.”
Jesse – The Money Pal
Transcript
Episode 39: Captain Fi on The Money Pal
Interview with Captain Fi on The Money Pal
Captain Fi: [00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard the financial independence podcast.
Get a and welcome to another episode of captain fire, the financial independence podcast, where I opened the cockpit to some of the best and brightest in personal finance, as well as those who have reached or are on their way to financial independence. Before we get started, remember nothing said, here is financial advice, and you should always do your own independent research before making any financial choices with that being said, I hope you enjoy the episode and learn something new.
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Jesse: so thanks for doing this, man I really appreciate your time and I think we’re gonna create something really awesome. I must [00:02:00] say that when I first started thinking about creating The Money Pal page, your page was one of the pages I looked up to in the beginning.
And yeah, you’ve done a really good job with it and your website as well is awesome, packed with some awesome content. So yeah. . Thanks for doing what you do, man. I must say firstly,
Captain Fi: yeah, it’s been really fun. Been a bit of a passion project with mine.
it’s definitely evolved. Like I had started a couple of sites, they didn’t really go anywhere and then I saw some really good success with Yeah, with Captain Fire and it really got me excited. So I ended up making a bunch, so I made another five sites and then bought another one.
And I guess the whole point of doing the sites is all about financial independence. And so yeah, it’s what spawned me off doing that. But yeah, I love it. I probably spent far so much time doing like social media, like chatting to people, but yeah.
When you do it, its coz you enjoy it. You’re happy to spend the time on it .
Jesse: Yeah, a hundred percent. And to be honest, I just recently listened to your podcast with Matt and Liz and that’s what kind of prompted me to follow up so we could get this interview [00:03:00] going, but yeah that’s amazing.
I started The Money Pal website just thinking, Oh yeah, it’ll just be a blog, but I had no idea the power of websites and how you can like literally use your website, just pack with informative articles and turn it into a full on business,
Captain Fi: Oh, absolutely, mate. Yeah. You just put loads of good content out.
Like this example, like you transcribe this be a great article for you. . And then, it’ll have the keywords obviously in the text. Google is getting smarter and smarter if not, they’re not stupid. I don’t know if you’re trying to like keyword stuff or just trying to get to rank one.
But if you you just consistently put out like really good information, give people good value and entertain them. And then, they’ll stay on your page or they’ll click through to other articles. And and then Google knows that and we Yeah. Obviously promote you and then yeah, there’s ways, once you’ve got good amount of traffic to, to monetize
essentially it comes down to marketing, right? Digital marketing,
I wouldn’t call it entirely passive, but. It’s definitely aesthetic .
Jesse: Yeah, it’s true. Literally the past few months, I’ve just been going through all my old articles.
Cuz basically when I started I just thought, I’ll just write on topics that I wanna learn about and [00:04:00] hopefully people can click onto, what I’ve written and learn something too, because yeah, I just got that investing bug and I just wanted to start writing about it. But yeah, tell me, this year I’ve thought myself hold on a second.
If you actually spin those articles in an SEO friendly way, then you can actually get a lot of clicks and then you can turn that into, an actual business. Wouldn’t that be great? Write about things you love and get paid for it.
Captain Fi: Yeah, basically , started out like just the same as you.
And for me it was almost like, know, I was looking up to some of the more like OG guys, like Mr Money Mustache Yeah.. Mad Fientist and, Aussie Firebug and, Dave Strong Money Australia. And I was like, you know what, I’m gonna start writing about this it’s gonna be like, from my experience, from my journey to financial independence.
And it initially, it was not designed to be a business at all. It was more like just to keep me accountable to my goal. So like ETF investing and property investing and all that. But it’s great to. Being able to monetize it and, get a little bit back for the thousands of hours that you spend on it.
Jesse: Yeah. It’s true. I know what you mean. Like my girlfriend looks at me like what are you even doing? What is the point for this? [00:05:00] But, I’m getting there.
Captain Fi: Show her the cheques mate, show her the cheques. My Missus was the same And then I showed her, across the seven sites.
The income being like over 20 K this month. Jesus. And she’s just Oh, that’s why you spend so much time doing it now. I get it. Yeah. That’s it. I,
Jesse: to be honest, I’m really at the beginning of this site hustle, if you could say.
Captain Fi: I love that. I’ve never heard it’d be called that a site hustle.
Jesse: I’m really just the beginning of that. So I’ve just got the one side at the moment, The Money Pal. But I’m really thinking about doing that course with Liz and Matt. If you think it’s worth doing
Captain Fi: it’s pretty good.
Like I pretty much self taught. And I had a friend who did the course, I just kept saying to him what do I, here what I there? And he was basically second giving me the information, the course. And I built, CaptainFi up and I’d had, six months and I built my second site.
And then I was like, Oh I’m just gonna do the course. So I ended up just paying the money and doing it and it’s good. Like a lot of the content for me at that stage, I was like this is [00:06:00] kindergarten content and I’m in high school. . And then, so they have a champions program, which is like their university.
But it’s good to go back over the basics, but the real value that I found was the networking that you get out of it. Imagine. So like when you jump into the group, it’s nearly a thousand people in it and they all run profitable websites and so you can get back links and stuff and you can collaborate your guest post which really strengthens that web of links.
It’s really powerful for seo. Yeah. And I found since joining that network and like it’s literally Sky, I was at DA 20 on, sorry, da, five at six for Captain five when I joined the program. And then now I’m sitting at DA 20, which is just like insane growth ,
Jesse: DA. What does that terminology mean?
Captain Fi: Sorry. Domain authority. So you have domain authority and page authority. So like my definition, Google has domain authority of 100. Yeah. When you start a new site, have a DA of one. And it’s an exponential curve. Obviously now YouTube being owned by Google has a DA of 100 as well.
Which means that the [00:07:00] higher your da, it’s not the be all and end all, but generally speaking, the higher your domain authority, the higher your rank Google. . So for example, there’s a website and it’s like DA 50 and they produce a 500 word shitty, crappy SEO spammy article on Pearler
Which like ranks number one. And I’m like, what google my 10,000 word in depth review of Pearler with heaps of back links is now spot two. So that really pissed me off. But it’s just an example of if you have a really high domain, authority site Google will naturally bias you hire in the search terms.
. The only way to get higher DAs is to get back links. . Yeah. And the only way to do that is to put really good content out there and to network. Yeah. And so that’s where I found the most value of. Digital investors, you can bootstrap and, wait until you get enough income to pay for the course.
Which is basically what I did. And looking back, if I could tell myself just, spend a little bit of money, It’s , the business expense. So you offset that against future profits that, [00:08:00] like I said, yeah. Two months ago it was like 28 grand.
Last month it was 13. This month it was 20 something. And then I didn’t even realize I’ve gotta send another invoice out for 11 grand. So adds up dude.
Jesse: So it’s just all add sense and affiliate links at the moment.
Captain Fi: One of the sites I bought has some downloadables, like eBooks. . So the easiest one is Google Ad Sense, right? People click, they link, you get paid for impression and then, you might get paid like a dollar per click.
. Then the next easiest is Amazon Associates. Where, someone clicks your Amazon link, you get a 30 day cookie. Anything they buy from Amazon, you get one to 4% of Yeah. So say one of my aviation sites is based on like reviewing headsets. Yeah. And I was looking at my, like Amazon Associates report, and I was getting all this money from dog food sales and I was like, What the
and then I realized it’s because people were clicking the link to go, Oh yeah, I might buy this jacket, or Yeah, I might buy this watch, or Yeah, I might buy this headset. And then going ah, no, I don’t need it. And then a week later they’re going, Oh I do need dog [00:09:00] food. So they jump back onto Amazon and your cookie is still, Oh.
So then you get your 4% of the hundred bag of dog food and there’s four bucks and it doesn’t sound like much, but when you have, a hundred of those a month, there’s $400 a month. Shit.
Jesse: Okay. I didn’t realize a cookie. Like I knew that you could get an, like an Amazon affiliate link based on someone clicking on a link on your website, but I didn’t realize that once they make they click, then it cookies with them.
Captain Fi: It’s all about the cookies. So those are the two easiest ones. Once the site gets more traffic as well, outsource both of those to to Mediavine, or Ezoic, Mediavine. Yeah. Which are like ad agencies. , Cause Google basically takes 40% and only gives you 60%.
Yeah. But if you go to, Ezoic you get 80% and then they keep like 20%. So , it’s just a way of negotiating like high rates for you.. . And then your next one is just you, Bespoke affiliate.
Since coming to Adelaide I’ve just been dealing with a whole bunch of medical stuff and spending time with family and I’ve probably let the website staff slip for about three months.
But [00:10:00] it’s just continued to get more and more profitable.
Jesse: . But that’s the cool thing about it. You like listening to that podcast with Matt and Liz. It doesn’t necessarily need to be like a full time gig. Like it can be if you want it to be, but it’ll still keep ticking away in the background.
Captain Fi: The more you put the effort in earlier, the quicker it’ll grow. . But it’ll just continue to grow. And like you look at. Disgusting sites out there and you’re just like, Hey, get a two year old, build that site and they’re making like three grand a month just off like this disgusting text based website.
Yeah. And it’s like a 12 year old site or something it’s just the older they are back links they get.. So they’re your first three. Another one is, guest posting. Yep.
So I started making money on for example CaptainFi, Aviation side, the cooking site doing
guest posts. I don’t typically do paid Guest posts on Captain Fire cause it’s kinda like my baby and I don’t like anyone else riding next. It’s like my reputation and my identity is so wrapped up in that one.
But the other site to be honest, those other sides just exist to make money. Yeah. So I’ll charge anyway, some of the smaller sites, like a hundred US dollars, some of the biggest ones, bigger [00:11:00] ones, a thousand US dollars per guest post.
And that basically allows someone to come in write a post that’s relevant to the niche, keeps value to the readers and then they get a link. They can basically put a link in. So it’s like a sneaky way to sell backlink, which Google hates by the way.
Jesse: So you charge them to write an article for your website basically? .
Captain Fi: Yeah. So early on, early in the day, in the game, when it’s small site, you are the one who’s asking to do this. Yeah. And you’re paying for these. Yeah. But then once you get some domain authority and traffic credit, people wanna leverage that, so they’ll be willing to pay for you.
Another thing is review. On one of my sites, I got contacted by a gaming company and they wanted me to do a review of their game and posted on social media. Yeah. And they offered me a hundred US dollars and I said I’ll do it for 500 US dollars. Yeah. And they came back and they were like, Oh, we can’t quite do 500, would you do $250?.
So then it was like, Yep, [00:12:00] done. , there’s an X hundred 50 in the pocket. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Just I guess knowing your value, your worth. . Because a lot of these big corporate businesses, they’re not savvy. They’re so clunky. There’s so much red tape. They don’t care. Like they’ve got these marketing budgets to spend and they think that they just throw money as the problem will go away.
And everyone’s smart, efficient about how they use it. Yeah. Yeah. So you could certainly do that. And then, another way could be yeah, and I’ve done this on CaptainFi is. Sponsor posting on Instagram and Facebook. So like you essentially will, review their product and you talk about their products.
And you can post that up. And I do that and I charge, depending on the site and it be anywhere from 20 up to $500 a post. And then the beauty is sometimes you can even have your affiliate link on that as well. So Yeah. You get paid the money for the what the posting.
Yeah. And then you also get your affiliate link, which is like the cream on top. And you very careful though, because you’ve gotta always say, I don’t want it any of my sites to be spammy. I want to give [00:13:00] really good user experience. And the algorithms Google, Instagram, Facebook they’re not stupid.
Like they know if you are just constantly posting sponsor links or you’re not declaring the sponsor they’ll penalize you for it and you’ll lose followers and stuff. So yeah. So you gotta be careful with it. And then, probably last one is just tape downloads.
So you just sell up a digital product, like an ebook. Yeah. And sometimes, anyway between, five to $20. Yeah. It’s usually pretty good. And, always try working US dollars. Pretty much everyone works in USD so so then yeah, obviously you get that extra 30. Based on the currency exchange rate at the moment. So Yeah, it’s true.
Jesse: I thought, Oh, I’ll just raise it with him at the start.
Cause I’m like this world is insane and it’s just opening, it’s like opening its doors to me all within the past few months. So I wanted to have a chat with you, to be honest, when I first reached out to you I didn’t even know this world existed, but it’s all come to the fore in between when I first reached out to you and now.
So I thought, oh, it’s not in the actual interview, but I wanna have a chat to him anyway about it because it’s,
Captain Fi: there’s this Iranian refugee or migrant, and he’s a really [00:14:00] nice guy. His name’s Al Borz. Yeah. And he wrote a blog about cars. . Yeah. And over 10, 10 or so years, Yeah. He kept writing about cars, Got to the point where car manufacturers would ask him, Can you please test drive my car?
Can we give you this commodor? Yeah. And and you drive around for a week or two. Yeah. And then you write a review and put it on your site, if you’d rank one for all of the cars and everything Anyway Channel nine, I think it was Channel nine or maybe a news corporation bought him out because it was a competing with their media.
Yeah. They’d pay him 67 million. What? For his car review website. For his car review website. Yep. Yeah. This is this. 100% true. And Matt, Liz, go into this and actually Al Borz comes in on the conferences and he like rolls up his Lamborghini. He basically, I don’t know, obviously he gotta pay some tax on that sale.
Yeah. I don’t know how many workers he had when he sold the business. I think he had maybe 30 writers working for him. And he says on the [00:15:00] interview in the live webinar, Yep. I sold the site. Basically what they wanted to do was take all the content, gut the site and, it was like a hostile takeover, right?
And didn’t want him to be a competitor. So then he went, Yep, no worries. Sold the site, took his money, went hired a couple of dozen more writers and just replicated the site, under a new name. And within, I think within a couple of years, he said on the last conference was only last month, he was up to something insane, like 900,000 views, a month
and so like that, those are, that’s 10, 10 billions of dollars sites like maybe even a hundred million dollar site. Incredible mate. Incredible. And this guy like, just has so much money and it just shows that if you want to take it to that level, you can. But at the same time, like I’m in the dilemma now, what’s not really a dilemma, but it’s almost do I keep pushing this and buying more sites and growing it, multiplying it or do I just chill out, grow my garden and have a family now?
And so that’s what I wanna do. I just wanna buy a block of land in the Adelaide Hills. [00:16:00] Yeah. Aren’t a big orchard. Get 40, 50 acres and have lots of kids. That’s where I want go with it.. Yeah.
Jesse: But that’s honestly, that’s the beauty of it all, because you just have that choice and therein lies is the purpose of all of this, right?
Captain Fi: Yeah. It’s good man. But Anyway, Icebreakers mate. So let’s get in
Your coffee order. Yeah. Okay. So look, I, a big break from caffeine is really is really messed me at the moment. Yeah. So if I do order coffee, it’s usually decaf almond cap.
Or tea. So I drink a lot of herbal tea. Tea. Yep. And I like growing herbs on my balcony and using those to make the teas up, cool.
Jesse: Sounds good, mate.
Captain Fi: Yeah. So two cats or dogs? . Both, but cats have to be inside just because of the destruction that they do on native wildlife.
But I probably do s sway slightly more towards dogs. Just, I know, I just love how physical they are and, you can like rough house with them, playing with them, especially big dogs. So that’s always bit of fun. Yeah.
Jesse: They’re always happy to see you too, which is cool.
Captain Fi: Yes. Whereas the [00:17:00] cats just eh, go away. Yeah. . I’ve had very affectionate cats in the past as well. Like we’ve had Toms and they almost act like dogs. But yeah. Really interesting thing, right? , I saw this online. Yeah. And it’s said people that don’t like cats or dogs.
They said it’s actually an issue about consent and cuz cats you can’t like force a cat to do something so it’ll just piss off. Whereas a dog will be obedient and you can control it. Yeah. Some people that don’t like cats, it’s like do you have a control issue?
Yeah. But anyway, so yeah. Someone said Cats are a lesson in consent. I thought that resonated with me, so Makes sense.
So three early riser or night hour? Definitely an early riser, but I have done my fair share of late nighters, late nights. When you get into the groove on like website and you were writing and you’re just so passionate about it.
Like you can be like a one 1:00 AM and you’re like, Oh my God, I still haven’t finished writing this article. Yeah. And then, yeah, especially being in aviation, with night shifts sometimes doing red eyes and stuff. Oh, I’ve done my fair share of both. But in a early retirement [00:18:00] aspect with my choice, I choose to go to bed early and then wake up early.
Sounds good. And no alarm. .
Jesse: No alarm. That’s like goals made. I’m trying to get to that point, but it’s really hard. .
Captain Fi: Next one was pretty difficult, Jesse. Yeah, it was , Three people you invite for dinner. Dead or alive. Yep. So one, I’d love to have dinner with with Mr. Money Mustache. The OG Yeah, the OG. I reckon he would be awesome. . Yep. . Vicky Roberts. Okay. I’d love to have dinner with her just to see her perspective on online.
And then my third one, it’s really interesting cause there’s so many people to choose from. So many really influential people in the world.
But, this is probably gonna sound a bit cheesy back. I’d love to go back and chat some of these early scientists, Neil War or Einstein, like physicists Hawkins, Like some of these people just really blow mind. So I can’t answer for the last one.
Would definitely be , some one really influential, physics engineer and the product.
Jesse: Yeah. Someone who’s really helped shape the world as we know it today.
Captain Fi: [00:19:00] Absolutely, man.
Jesse: Just that second one, did you say Vicky Roberts. Vicky Roberts, Yeah.
Captain Fi: Oh, Vicki Robin. So she wrote book I think it was like the late eighties or early nineties called Your Money Or Your Life. What Vicky did was she really helped bring to the forefront of like modern, pop culture. Yeah. And she wrote this book and it’s amazing and very well written. She basically talks about money as being time. People say time is money.
She was no, money is time. And money is actually life energy. It’s your human capital, it’s your labor. And we all know, yes, you need to convert some of your human capital, your labor, your time. It’s money at the start of your life, depending on how you choose to spend that money determines the rest of your life.
If you spend, from age 18 to 30, working and saving diligently, building a business and investing the ages have 30 to a hundred. You can do whatever you want. Yeah. True. If you spend your entire life consuming and spending your whole paycheck, then contributing to society, but it’s debt taking [00:20:00] you’re gonna work until you drop dead or until you can get onto some form of, social security, or welfare.
. So Vicky’s book is really cool. And if you wanna see Scott Reikins from playing with Fire Documentary he’s a really awesome bloke and he really recommended you watch that. , he interviews Vicki for the documentary and also he’s got an amazing YouTube channel called Playing With Fire.
where he Hosts all of these , short videos, five to 15 minute interviews that he’s done with a lot of these very influential people. And yeah, Scott Reikins Mr. Money Mustache and Vicki Robin have all worked together and are fairly sure Mr Money Mustache has written a, forward or preface to her book now.
She’s amazing woman. And yeah, I think she’s been retired for a better part of her life now. . She just lives this beautiful life. And yeah, she’s probably helped so many people that, she doesn’t, maybe doesn’t even know the billions of people’s lives that she’s changed.
So in very inspiring for me.
Jesse: Insane. Yeah. I’m just looking at her book now. I’m gonna buy it as soon as we get off this call.[00:21:00]
Captain Fi: Okay. Pineapple on Pizza?. Yeah, sure. Why not, man? I’m pretty easy going. I eat pretty much everything. Yeah. Except mushrooms cause I’m enough of a fun guy. , I’m actually experimenting grow some mushrooms at the moment. I figure if I grow them then I can eat them and I’ll try and Get over my food aversion, but usually I don’t really have any food aversion, so I’ll, I’ll try anything. Yeah. Coriander? Yeah. Love Coriander. Really good in Vietnamese dishes and salad stuff. Some people say it taste like soap. I don’t really get it
Jesse: . I don’t get that either. Like I can have coriander for days, like on anything. It’s fantastic. The next one I just added in before we , get into the body questions is favorite plane.
I’d be interested to see what your favorite plane model is.
Captain Fi: Ah, yeah. Easy se 1 72. Cessna 1 72. It is like most manufactured aircraft, like if you discount the mass produced ridiculous ones in Russia that fall apart . Cessna hands down. The best plane ever. The most forgiving plane.
The most docile plane, the most versatile plane. Easy to fly. [00:22:00] Easy to land. , easy to navigate. Two miles a minute. Easy. Just beautiful plane. You put the Continental 360 or whatevers like having 360, one 50, even up to a 200 horsepower inch unit. The fuel consumption’s very low,. It’s just to go anywhere, do anything. Land short, take offshore. Beautiful plane. You can fit a constant speed propeller to it. You can put retractable gear on it. I dunno why you bother, but Yeah. You put a climb crop on it, a cruise, depending if you’re, using it for training and the around the airport,
Without, having the facts in front of me., I’m fairly sure it is credited as being one of the most the most highly manufactured plane.
Jesse: Fantastic. So they’re still making them.
Captain Fi: Yeah, absolutely. I think Cessna tried to build like a, I think it’s called like a one 60 something which was supposed to be like a light trainer, but that kind of flocked.
The thing is there are 1 72 s in Australia that are 40 years old and still going strong. I’ve had in my career four or five engine failures, three of which is single engine aircraft, one in Cessna, 1 [00:23:00] 50, 1 in Cessna, 1 72, 1 in a NA chain. And thankfully those three aircrafts have quite low wing loadings.
, again, like the Cessna, has a very long wing, beautiful wing very low wing loading. So it’s, and its beautifully, and, in all of those cases, I was able to safely glide down to a landing. Twice actually into an airfield and once off into a paddock. . Yeah. And actually the one off landing into a paddock, I landed a cow paddock.
And even with, gliding with the dead engine in the Cessna , it was just easy to control all the way down. Just, it was things about 65, 70 knots speed trim out distribute out to the normal cruise attitude. That’s how planes are designed. The glide attitudes same as the normal cruise attitude.
And so I feel very safe anytime I’m in a Cessna.
I love introducing people to aviation in a Cessna 172 it’s just hands down my most favorite plane.
Jesse: I love hearing about this, aviation obviously work in the space.
I’m not a pilot obviously, [00:24:00] but yeah, working Melbourne Airport you get to learn about all the different commercial aircraft, but hearing about Cessnas is all new information to me. Obviously you don’t get too many Cessnas coming into Melbourne Airport or not really any aircraft coming in nowadays, back in the dayday.
Captain Fi: I’ve flown into Melbourne Essendon, Avalon. Oh, you have? Wow. And Tullamarine yes, fair few times. Crazy in large transport aircraft and Cessnas as well. ,
Jesse: Oh, awesome. That’s so cool. So the next few questions are more investing based.
So I’m just wondering if you can share your story behind why you chose to get started investing and if anyone in particular inspired you on the journey.
Captain Fi: It’s a really interesting one mate, and I kinda fell into this. Yeah. So I grew up in a single parent household. My mum’s absolutely amazing, big family. My dad was not in the picture. He didn’t support her financially. And she struggled and with her health issues and she was, at one point she hit by a car, Geez cycling to work. And so yeah, she’d had some health issues and rehab issues and, was basically only able to work [00:25:00] 0.5 or 0.4.
And raising a big family on a 0.4 salary as a teacher was a struggle. And, we grew up below the poverty line we never really had a lot of money. So I think that’s a, that’s just a really core important thing to keep in the back of mind as I explained.
This is. I’ve been very used to, trained to not spend money and to live very frugally from a very young age. . So fast forward to high school. I had a lot of trouble in school. A lot of behavior issues. I think I went to 17 schools, or 20 plus if you count childcare centers and everything I was booted from.
And when I got into my last two years of schooling, like I had a pretty amazing teacher who was Hey mate, do you realize, you are on a path to destruction and you better have a long, hard think about yourself and look in the mirror about what you want, where you wanna be, because the way you’re going is, nowhere.
And I just brushed off. I was like, Oh yeah, whatever but it did stick with me. And I thought, Oh shit, I better get my shit together. So I worked really [00:26:00] hard in year 11 and 12 studying. And, I should point out that my schooling was quite sporadic.
So I, like I was put up years, I was held back years. I spent a lot of time, either being homeschooled or through like behavioral centers. Where when you get excluded from a certain number of schools, they ban you from the schooling system. You have to go. Basically go it’s not Juvy you’re not like locked up or anything, but it’s just like a behavioral rehabilitation center.
So I missed a lot of schooling. So for example, like when I was in year 11, I was learning polynomial division in special mathematics. I had no idea how to do long vision and that’s like a crucial sub step you need to know how do long division. Yeah. And I saying to my teacher I have no idea what long division is.
He just looked at me like, what? Have you not gone to school? And I was like, no, I’ve missed so much school. So he was amazing and worked with me to catch me up. And then, yeah, so I ended up doing really well. Got basically perfect scores which enabled me to get into Uni on a scholarship.
And so basically I got a full ride. So everything [00:27:00] paid for tuition. My books were paid for and that was really only possible cause my mom was amazing and she kind of
like
Captain Fi: sacrificed so much and, she’d support us. She’d spend any money she had on stationary books and I remember the day she bought me like this big corner desk to my bedroom so I could spread all my books out. It was just amazing. She’d spend hundreds of dollars on this.
Yeah. Giant desk. And I, I, so I wouldn’t have been able to do it without her. Yeah. Sounds like an amazing woman. Yeah. I come from this an amazing position of privilege that she basically sacrificed for us. Yeah. And my, my girlfriend at the time actually, she suffered from domestic violence at home with her mom.
And she actually moved in with my family and my mom did the exact same for her and enabled her to study. And she ended up getting perfect scores. A couple of subjects as well. She was very bright. So yeah, so my mom’s a lovely, amazing woman. But, so I guess that takes me to, to uni now where I’m studying engineering and I’m getting paid and, I’ve always wanted [00:28:00] to fly and be a pilot, but, I got rejected so many times from like Cadetships rejected from yeah, pretty much everything I’d applied for
I realized that the only way was gonna happen is if I paid to get my training. And when I was like 14, my mom. saved and saved and bought me a flying lesson at Parafield airport. And that was just amazing. To go up in a plane and do the effects and controls. I was like, I know I need to be a pilot. And so yeah, so I basically started spending all of my money on flying. And I continued to live my frugal lifestyle that I grow up doing.
Yeah. Did spend my money, worth extra side hustles jobs. Like I buy cars, fix them up, do to YouTube or the get online, get the hangs manual. Yeah. Change the plugs you needed, change the oil, detail the car and then sell it. And you could easily make a thousand, $2,000 flipping a secondhand car.
Same with motorbikes, . Used to do like a lot of eBay back then. Just any money that I could [00:29:00] make would go into flying lessons.
Yeah. And study engineering and. Being quite good at academics getting through that. And as long as I continued to get like, good score, they would continue to pay me and everything. And yeah, basically went out and got like my private license, recreational license and my private and my commercial.
And yeah, sort of job costs a lot of part-time jobs. Realized that sort of engineering desk job wasn’t for me went and did a few more different jobs non-flying related jobs. And then yeah, went paid for my ATPL course up in the Sunshine Coast where everyone , Does it
. And a few more qualifications I even learned like how to do crop dusting, all sorts. It was getting to point where I was just like spending money on ratings that probably didn’t need. Just cause I thought, oh, so hard to get a job.
If I had all this ratings then I’ll be able to get a job. But yeah, eventually I finally landed a job which was amazing. So I did the training course and then went through know, I did all the simulator training and everything and the check to line and yeah, it was basically [00:30:00] international transport pilot for quite a few years and absolutely loved it once I got qualified, once I was in that program though.
All of a sudden, like I still had the money coming in and I wasn’t spending it. Yeah. Because I was still continuing to leave that frugal lifestyle. And so I started to accumulate money and I was like, I need to do something with this money. And I probably already knew that when I was doing my training.
And then I’d accumulate my 20 grand and I go, Cool. That is a multi engine rate. Or I’ve got 30 grand Cool. That’s my instructor license. Yeah. Or just stupid shit. I knew I should have been saving investing, like buying a house. Everyone kept telling me, Oh, I know. Buy a house.
Buy a house by house. In fact, I tried to, but the agents sorted me around a bit. It was like some aggressive negotiations, which made me really anxious. So I just pulled the money off the table and said, No, I’m not doing it. Yeah. And then just spend that money on aviation training.
And so yeah, it wasn’t really until I started flying full-time that I was like, Cool, I’ve gotta do something with it. I was in a mutual fund.
And it was performing terribly. Yeah. Like when [00:31:00] the market was doing like 10 plus percent returns, I was getting like 4% returns. And they kept sending me like glossy brochures telling me how much money I was making. And how smart I was to be invested with them. Yeah. But when I was like, crosschecking everything in an Excel spreadsheet, because, having an engineering background I loved to look at the nuts and bolts of the mathematics.
It just didn’t add up. Yeah. So I withdrew all my money and I had it just sitting in cash. I looked at buying another property, couldn’t find one. And then I think I’d read The Barefoot Investor and I was like, All right, let’s buy some AFIC.
Which I thought was a concreting company. I didn’t realize it was a listed investment company.
Yep. So I literally bought was $28,000 worth of AFIC stock. Thinking that it was like a construction company. How stupid was, so I think one of your questions was like, what’s the money mistake you’ve made?
Yeah. And that’s probably it. Cuz I bought that without any proper due diligence. So I, I bought it. And yeah, went online and I signed up, I think the Barefoot Blueprint. [00:32:00] And then from there that sort of got me interested in reading about finance and investments. And then I realized after getting into the blueprint that AFI wasn’t actually like a concrete company.
It was actually like an investment company. And yeah, so I felt stupid, but I was also reassured by the barefoot community that, it was a good thing to do. And I did. I held that stuff for a long time for years and years. But as I got down the rabbit hole, discovered Mr.
money Mustache started reading, read hundreds of books about finance, personal development, investing. Yep. And the ones that really resonated were like all around the whole financially independent, retire early, or as Lacey, Filipich Money school. Yeah. Financially independent time rich..
Yeah. And, it’s not about I don’t have to retire early and go and watch TV all day and then play golf and just play bridge or whatever. Like it’s, it’s about doing the things you love. Absolutely. So yeah, so early inspirations, obviously I barefoot Mr.
Money mustache mad Fientist [00:33:00] JL Collins . Seth. Yeah, Seth Ram. I’ve got him. , he wrote, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Yes. Yeah. . Which is actually really funny cause I was like a very fierce Stashian Camp Mustache. Yeah. And Mr Money Mustache wrote an article about him saying its kind of bullshit.
Ramit is telling you that you can become rich by spending all your money and only saving 20%. . So I was very against Ramit’s book initially. I was really defensive reading it and I was like, Oh crap.
But the more I learned about business and actually focusing more, there’s two sides to the equation to financial independence, right? One is spend less and the other one’s earn more. . Ramit more focuses on earning more. Whereas, Pete is definitely spend less, Yeah.
Or not just spend less, but just spend more meaningfully. So I think there’s a compromise between the two. But yeah, more and more been enjoying Ramit’s. Philosophy and, he’s got great Instagram page, he posts a lot of really great stuff all the time as well Yeah.
And he does interact with you as well, if if you challenge him, , he’ll reply. Not always, but, it’s tricky I guess when you’ve got such a large following. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We talked earlier [00:34:00] about Vicky Robins and the concept of not time is money.
The concept of money is time. . So that really resonated with me. And then when I started going down I guess the rabbit path of increasing the income side, I started looking at ways to produce businesses for me and my friend. We started so many businesses, mate, and a lot of them failed. We started Airbnb business before Covid, and that just wiped it out.
We’ve tried property development, which has just staying, a very long and painful process. Tell me about it. . Yeah. We’ve done all sorts. And then yeah we got onto digital business or all of my business and somewhat spurred on by reading the four hour work week.
Yep. Just an awesome book. I’m just having a mind blank of the author now. Tim Ferris. Tim Ferris. That’s I really love the Four Hour Work Week.
This concept of building a scalable online business, earning in US dollars and then living in,
you know,
Captain Fi: and he sees Pesos which is basically introduced me to this idea of geographic arbitrage. And the [00:35:00] Frugal Woods talk about that a lot.
They earned living at a high cost of Living city. They moved to like the Woods Center, Vermont. , and they have a farm and they raised their daughters there. And by the way, Frugal Woods follow Instagram. It’s just amazing. They daughters are gorgeous and they should post pictures of them in the garden helping,
Sometimes , I don’t think they’re really helping.
It’s bloody adorable. And it’s beautiful to just watch their family grow and see how financial independence. Has allowed them to transition their lifestyle. Amazing. So honestly, I’ve missed so many big influences on my Journey already, but there are so many more, and I wish I could have them all, those are just a few that sort of come to the forefront.
Sorry. Very early on, Rich Dad Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki was a fundamental mind shift for me. Yeah. And it actually took me, I’ll be honest, it took me years to fully digest and understand that book, the concept of paying yourself first. Okay. Which I’ll just save everyone the effort, pay yourself first means invest as soon as you get your [00:36:00] money, and then spend what’s left over on your, the cost of living.
So say your paycheck is $3,000 a fortnight, go ahead and invest $1,500 Fortnight and then live off the other 1500. Yep. Make your budget work on 1500. And if you can’t live off that 1500, get a side hustle. Do some extra overtime. Do whatever you need to do to make ends meet. But that’s what pay yourself first means.
Or at least that’s what it means to me. And it took me years to figure it out. I read that book so many times being like, this is shit I don’t understand. It hasn’t told me how to do it. All it’s told me is that I need to buy assets. I don’t know how to buy assets. So I got quite frustrated reading that book after reading it a number of times.
It really helped me. He had a board game called Cash Flow Quadrant. It’s no longer being produced. If you could buy that on eBay or secondhand, buy it, spend up to two or $300 on it, it is amazing game. You could play with your friends and family and with your children, and it teaches about moving from, being an employee to [00:37:00] being self-employed, to being a business owner, to being an investor.
So he book Cashflow Quadrant is also quite good. Now Kiyosaki did sell his image or sell his brand, and so there’s been some , I think seminars with Questionable causes sold under his name. But those two books in that game are just a gold mine. Yeah. And he’s actually a really nice guy.
Like I’ve never personally spoke to him, but I’ve spoken to people who have interviewed him and they say he’s actually genuinely a really nice guy. Really likable guy. Yeah. And yeah, so his book is awesome.
Jesse: That’s amazing. And honestly, listening to your story and it’s a really great one at that, it just makes me realize how a lot of people in this community have come from a similar background and their stories are similar in certain ways.
Obviously the, intricacies of each person’s story are different, but just starting from like beginning your life under some sort of financial duress either direct or indirect, leads you down a path to get to a point where you are now. And like I’m nowhere near as advanced as you are, but I can [00:38:00] see the similarities between my story and yours, like Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book that I first picked up off the shelf.
Then I went into a few different business ventures, haven’t worked out. And here I am now just learning about digital businesses. But just starting from that period, like that point of financial duress can be so powerful. And I found that like after interviewing a few different people, that kind of was the key point for people to go down this path and Yeah.
Just insane to hear your story as well.
Captain Fi: And look, I’ll be honest, like its trauma, Like it’s childhood trauma. Yeah. I can imagine. And so for me, I’m seeing therapist to like you to spend more freely now you, I still feel I’ll call emotional pain when I buy like a cup of coffee, a cafe.
Cause I get hang on, this cup of coffee is 20 cents worth of milk and beans. Yeah. I can have this at home.. , why am I paying $6 for that? A hundred percent at a cafe. And so that’s something I’m getting over. . I think, yeah, like some of this like childhood trouble or uncertainty about finance in your early upbringing can certainly be like a really big driver.
And look, I’ve seen people go the [00:39:00] other way. . So I’ve got a friend who he was in very similar situation , but he does the opposite. So any money that goes to his hands spent straight away. Because in his mind, this money could be taken away at any minute so I may as well spend it. And so there’s different ways it can manifest with people. And I give you another example my ex partner Yeah. From Sydney. Yeah. She was raised into a very wealthy family. Yeah. And, it would’ve been very easy for me to have just tried to marry into that family for money and then never have to worry like, very rich property developers lot of money behind, own a lot of business.
, multi billionaire. And she always had everything she needed. So to her, she of didn’t really understand Captain Fire. She didn’t really understand frugality because she’d never really had that childhood trauma. She’d never really had that wanting something and not being able to afford it.
Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of people that are raised. Healthily, I would say. Cause I would say that is a safe, healthy upbringing for a child. There’s no need or desire. They don’t feel that it’s going to be taken away. So I don’t know. I might be [00:40:00] generalizing here and , and I’m sure there are people that have had healthy upbringings that have come into the FIRE community seeking a bit of a change.
Maybe they’re sick of their monotonous job or they’re, wanting time out for a family. But yeah, I noticed that in my experience at least, like people that tend to have healthy upbringings, they don’t seem to really be that interested in it because they’re fairly well programmed that we’re always gonna be financially secure.
You can just get a job or have your business and money will never be an issue. Yeah. And so they, they don’t really see the need to have those extreme sort of 80% savings rate..
Jesse: No, you’re right there. in my experience, money was always a conversation and most of the time it was kind of negative and i, I didn’t grow up beneath the poverty line, but at the same time, I still have that anxiety around money because there was always arguments about money in my household.
And I know you use the example of coffee there, like as a teenager, all my friends would go to Pancake Parlor and I’d hate going to pancake Parlour because I knew it was just flour, sugar, and milk. And they were gonna [00:41:00] charge us 16, 17, $18 for two pancakes and a bit of ice cream. So I can totally resonate with that.
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Jesse: So question two your website is loaded with some awesome content for both experienced and new investors.
So why are you so committed to helping others improve their financial futures?
Captain Fi: Okay, so really interestingly, like Captain Fi, [00:42:00] actually the main reason I started the site was for me to learn about investing. So I started posting my experience with finance on Captain Fi so that I could be critiqued by the community and so that I could be accountable to myself about my process to financial independence.
And I wanted to document it and I wanted it to be so that if anybody else was in a situation, they could read my blogs, the, reviews and follow along and hopefully that might help them make some choices. But really what I was hoping to attract was the bigger fish that were smarter than me that could say, Hey mate, don’t waste your time on that.
That’s not efficient, That’s crap. Let’s move on here. And as an engineer, I’ve been always wanting to find like the optimal solution and sometimes I’ve gotta remember Pareto’s Law, like the 80% solution is good enough. That’s the 20% of efforts give you the 80% of results and, okay.
So I started doing that and then I started Putting out my experiences with certain products services, and I’ll be like, Yep, I [00:43:00] use this. I thought this x Y were good. I thought A, B and C was shit. . And I upset quite a few companies. I got a lot of emails asking to take things down or, threatening me with legal action because I’m like defaming them or whatever.
So yeah, I just thought look, I’ve done all this research and effort to try and figure out what is the best solution for me.
So I put that up to try and save everybody else the time. So I would do reviews of things, hopefully that would save everyone else the bother. And then they would give me the favor in return by being like, Yep, okay, this is correct. Oh no, that’s actually wrong. , this is wrong.
Have you considered this, you can set up up portfolio construction. Yeah. Or asset allocation , I post up, Okay, this is what I’m doing, what’s everyone else doing? Am I doing anything wrong? And then I’ve got so much feedback from that, it’s been amazing. And then the more I do it, the more it snowballs.
Yeah. And I start getting really emotional, personal letters and feedback and like fan mails and holy shit. This is amazing. It’s changed my life. First I got an email I almost cry was like, tears in my eyes, [00:44:00] I was like, I cannot believe that people are like writing me this.
Yeah. And particularly like single moms writing into me, and that’s like my little soft spot because my mom was a single mom and I’ve got a lot of friends who are single moms and I’ve seen the power that financial independence can have on families, particularly single parent households and single mom households.
So I love it and I love talking about it. I have just become a total money nerd and I still don’t think I have the right answers. I’m not perfect. I think I’ve got an 80% solution. It’s good enough. Yep. And it seems to be working for me, so I’m happy to just keep working by it.
Jesse: Fantastic. Beautiful answer. Again, the parallels are there. , in my own experience like you went a step further and started thinking about how, you could get feedback from others who are more experienced and more advanced than you. And Yeah, that’s just a great way to look about it.
And probably something else, like considering personally as well. For me it was more around, I wanna write about this so I can learn about it and hopefully help others out too. But in your experience, it seems like you took that next step so you get more feedback from [00:45:00] others who are more experienced than you.
. Next question I wanted to ask you. So you became financially independent before 30, which is a massive achievement and congratulations for that. But can you reveal any of your secrets to how you got there for readers who kind of wanna be like you, I guess financially independent?
Captain Fi: Yeah, sure. It sounds sexy. Doesn’t before 30. I was like 29 and a half I just it’s a bit of a throwaway line, it’s a bit of a sound bite, It’s a little bit click baity, so I love saying it. Yeah, it’s true. Look, , there’s not really any secrets. The secrets there’s no get rich quick, like I had my first job when I was 14 or 13 or something.
Yeah. Stacking groceries for Foodland. And, when I was a kid, even younger, I would buy lollies from like a discounted lolly store where they had like expired Chupa Chups whatever. I’d take them to school and I’d sell, undercut the canteen,
so I feel like I’ve always had this need for financial security and a desire to make money and maybe have a little bit of an entrepreneurist streak. Just wanting to look at alternate ways of producing [00:46:00] some kind of income but you can only do that when you correct value, right? Yeah. So the secret is you can get whatever you want as long as you help people get what they want too.. So that Zig Ziglar said that he’s a very famous salesman. . And look, so the secret is, it’s hard work. It’s sacrificing the short term pleasure for long term gain.
All right? So not entering yourself into stupid debt, not like having, paying a balance on a credit card. Look, I acknowledge that it could be smart to finance a vehicle and I’ve had like really long discussions with Vince Scully from the Life Sherpa who by the way, amazing bloke. And he’s got a really good business and a really nice blog as well.
I’ve had a lot of discussion with him about, financing cars versus not, and he’s empirically proven I think mathematically that, , it is a good idea to get a car loan and for a variety of reasons. , but still even I see the maths and part of me just can’t believe it.
I’m like emotional aversion to it. My car’s 15 years old, but I’ve looked after it. It has 120,000 Ks on it, and it looks brand new and it drives brand new. Fantastic. Yeah. it saves [00:47:00] houses. Just people say, Oh, it’s not air cap rated now, cars have improved..
I said, Okay, don’t drive as much. Then the most riskiest thing you can do is drive your car. So build a lifestyle that we don’t need to drive a car. . build a lifestyle where you are close to work. If you can work online. Like I think Covid has shown us that a lot of jobs can actually be done online remotely.
I would just say question everything, that’s the secret. Question everything. Spend time getting your bills down as low as possible, and then keep it simple. Broad Index fund investing you can invest in all sorts of different things and everything has their pro and cons.
For me, I found the simplest thing has just been total market, broad index stock, ETFs. And this is not financial advice, This is just how I’ve personally done it. I’ve also done, investment, property and that’s good whilst you earning, if you want to be able to negatively gear it and stuff all sorts of different strategies.
But I’ll tell you, you need a strategy, you need a desire, and you just gotta stick with it. And it does get boring. There’s this boring part of financial independence where you’re like come on. Like why aren’t I a [00:48:00] Millionaire already? No, there’s no get rich quick get. Yeah, . Once you’ve got all of that hard work and the savings and the investing.
Automate it. Automate it so that automatically happens. And the only way to get rich quick, quicker, cause I won’t say get rich quick, I say get rich quicker, is to increase your income. . Okay. So you basically just at the end of the day, you have to be able to get a raise. So negotiate for a raise, get paid a better rate, switch to a better job, change careers to something more lucrative or start a business, so I think starting a business is a way people can accelerate their earning potential and there are a lot of tax advantages to having a business. So yes, that’s the secret. So for me, I was well on my way just through earning a flying wage, saving and investing, and I pretty much reached my like, single fire or lean fire numbers.
And then through online businesses I was able to generate a bit more income which I can then either, spend the income on my lifestyle or what I’m actually choosing to do to scale the business, take that money and use it to buy [00:49:00] investments, reinvest it. Yeah. So ultimately the secret is that there is no secret.
Yeah, it’s all widely available for free online. Not just my blog, but everyone else’s blog. YouTube, the Skype mate O’Brien, he talks about quite a lot. Yeah. Graham Step is another really popular YouTuber. He has some really good content as well. Brendan, the new money, I forget what he used to be called.
Aussie Wealth Creation. Aussie Wealth Creation, Yeah. New Money. Did a really successful rebranding. He’s really inspirational to, to listen to as well. Yeah. Aussie money man, he does a lot of really good review content, so the secret is just learn, educate yourself, jump online. Aussie Firebug has an amazing catalog of podcasts.
Literally go through, read them all listen them all Fire and Chill podcast that’s Dave Strong Money Australia and Pat the Shuffler, listen to their blog, their podcast.. Like it’s amazing stuff. The content is all out there. Yeah. And it’s all free. You don’t have to pay a cent.. Yeah.
Jesse: Just as this article will be, and it’s like turning out to be an amazing one so far. I, I [00:50:00] really think that the points you made around delayed gratification and good investing is boring. Are ones that are really difficult to understand and wrap your head around. But once you do, it all just falls into place and it makes a lot of sense.
So changing gears, cryptocurrencies have been a hot topic of conversation this year. I’m curious to see what your take is on the crypto craze and if you’re a believer?
Captain Fi: It’s pretty exciting. So I was very negative. And very dismissive of cryptocurrencies initially, I was a bit of a nonbeliever and I sort of think the central banks really control everything. I mean,
We can for hours about the way society is designed to transfer wealth and how capitalism is designed to steal the labor of workers. And you know how our fiat monetary system is designed to keep the ruling elite in power? Cryptocurrency is fundamentally trying to level the playing field, right?
So we could talk about, money being fungible, being limited store of value. By the way, the secrets of money on YouTube. Go and check it out. Just be aware that it is a business that’s trying to sell [00:51:00] you silver and gold. So just, maybe ignore the whole them trying to advertise commodities to you, but literally just Hidden secrets of money Awesome.
YouTube series. And they’ll talk to you about what is money, and I think that’s some essential background for cryptocurrency. And then just get online and do some reading on Crypto, right? Look, I totally missed the vote on crypto and got mad FOMO, and I bought in when it was pretty hot. I did some interviews with some pretty smart crypto guys.
Stefan Li vera Quin Max here, and I think Andrew Fentan, worked from the Coin Telegraph. I spoke to him. Actually, I can send you links to these as well if you wanna put something in the show notes. Sure. And, these guys really helped shift my mindset, the fact is, I think the technology is behind the blockchain is pretty cool.
The ledger has the ability to allow people to transfer value without a middleman. Okay. So the central banks, the government, the monetary system doesn’t like it. I suspect they don’t like it because it gives them less control. Okay. So there’s gonna,,, I personally see there’s going to be some kind [00:52:00] of kickback or aversion on behalf of the status quo because, hey, like people in power, they’re like, Is this gonna stop me being in power?
Is this gonna change the way we trust act? And yeah, probably will I guess watch this space. Was it I can’t remember which country. She Recently just adopted Bitcoin as a national currency. I couldn’t tell you. Yeah. It is one of the South American countries. And it’s happening.
It’s happening now and I’m not gonna go and slap down $100k on Bitcoin, I think that’s risky, I’ll look to get 1% of my portfolio in. Cryptocurrency. . And I’m thinking maybe , one to 5% might be something I look at. Look, I’m not rushing out to buy loads of crypto
mm-hmm.
Captain Fi: but I am slowly dollar cost averaging and getting some side by Bitcoin at Ethereum, they seem to be the two biggest ones. Yep. Again, I not very well educated on this. Yeah. Just to avoid the FOMO, I’ve just dollar cost averaging a little bit into it. Yeah. It reminds me of a quote though. Okay. So, During the Gold rush in 18 hundreds in [00:53:00] Australia, the way to get rich was not buying, it was not to discover gold.
Yeah. You know what I’m about to say?
Jesse: It was to sell the picks and shovels.
Captain Fi: Sell the picks and shovels. Yeah. So I’ve met a couple of people through my online community Yeah. Who, they have crypto review sites , and people sign up to their crypto review exchanges , or they basically go to their crypto news website and are displayed with Google Adsense or other affiliate products.
And so they’re making so much money out of Bitcoin just from talking about it. Interesting. But they don’t actually hold the Bitcoin. And there’s this one girl I know who she gets, a lot of these exchanges will give you $10 worth of Bitcoin for everyone who signs up. Yeah. And across her website and across the 12.
Different Exchanges. I think she was, getting a couple of hundred signups per exchange per month. And by the time she like cashed them all out, it was over $10,000 US per month. She was making literally selling picks and shovels, metaphorically speaking. Yeah. Rather than just holding the crypto. When you think of that as a store of value, whether you believe in the technology there are ways [00:54:00] to invest in crypto by investing in like the technology companies that are the backend.
Yep. Tech companies tech manufacturing companies that produce the technology that enables the blockchain and enables computing. And, Matt and Liz Raad talk about how they like to invest in companies that are enabling this cyber revolution. Like the multiverse, this online gaming, this multi micro transactions cryptocurrency.
It’s all backed by something. Yeah. So yeah I would say, look, I do think it’s a really interesting topic. I think there’s gonna be a lot of growth. I’m cautiously optimistic. So , I’d say I used to be flat out, like no way. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard now, I’m like, I’ve got a toe dipped and I’ll keep.
Trying and dollar cost averaging. and , we’ll just watch this space.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea of looking at it from a holistic point of view rather than just trying to analyze it as an asset class is the right way to go about it. Like you mentioned, looking at it from the picks and shovels perspective, looking at it from the brokers to the different businesses associated within [00:55:00] crypto as well as the underlying tech is a good way to think about it because I was quite similar to you.
Like I just wrote it off basically after hearing Warren Buffet talk about it and basically saying that it does not produce any cash, therefore it is worthless. And like you, that kind of idea stuck with me for a while, but when you look at it from a holistic view like you are thinking about it, it makes a lot more sense to pay attention to it.
Yeah, agree. What’s one share market myth that you’d bust for readers without any investing experience?
Captain Fi: Oh, easy. You can’t beat the market. , You cannot beat the market. Let me just say one more time. You cannot beat the market.
Jesse: Sounds good. Any reason, Any rationale? Why do you think that?
Captain Fi: Okay, look, I’m pretty smart guy. I tried and I couldn’t do it.
Jesse: Yep, fair enough. So you went out there, looked for individual businesses, did the fundamental analysis and couldn’t get anywhere near the returns of the market.
Captain Fi: Yep. Absolutely. And I even used to say, Oh, I got around the same Yeah.
To try and justify it to myself [00:56:00] psychologically. . I even used like stock picking services, like the Barefoot Blueprint, and I realized that those are really just media agencies. They make their money from subscription services. And if they were so smart at picking the market, stock picking, they wouldn’t be sharing that information with you.
So the people that can make money stock picking are like insider traders and maybe statistical anomalies like Warren Buffet. And , there are papers out there that have, shown that Warren Buffet could have just been a statistical anomaly and if you flipped a coin the right amount of times, you could’ve copied what he did.
Now, I dunno, I don’t wanna discredit anything from Buffet cause I think he’s a brilliant man and I love reading his books. And as well the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham that’s a bit of a rite of passage. I think everybody should read that book. Absolutely. And it does have forwards from Buffet in it.
The later editions, which are great. It’s a bit of a hard read. But after you read that, you’ll basically come to the conclusion that you cannot beat the market. And someone else on the other side of the [00:57:00] trade is smarter than you. And whether we’re talking about ,
The Flash Boys read a book. Flash Boys. Okay. It’s talking about how institutional investors were able to beat mom and dad investors by building fibre optic cables closer to stock exchanges so that they could undercut transactions and they would buy and sell a stock and under cut you by, maybe a percent or half percent or 10%, but over time that would really happen up. .
So look, you can’t be the market. A lot of people try and you just look at the stats, so the best thing you can do is just not buy into all the bullshit. Yeah. Don’t try and beat the market. Just be the market man just be the market.
Jesse: A hundred percent. I wrote an article recently on this topic and basically I got some information from s and p Global’s Biver report, and they basically revealed that 86 odd percent of Australian equity funds.
So these are experts. Trying to pick stocks failed to outperform the index over a 15 year period. So these are the people actually trained to [00:58:00] pick stocks. 86% of them have failed over 15 years. And I can send you the link if you want
Captain Fi: I’d love to read it, man. And the thing is as well who has time to research all these individual companies? So I got to a position where I had 20 stocks that I’m reading their shareholder reports. I’m trying to look at their books. I’m reading like the Deloitte, the kpmg, the, different for accounting firm, and I’m trying to like, suss out Ok, assuming you buy Equity.
All right. That’s the one side of the transaction. Now, when do you sell it? When do you sell it, Jesse? Yeah. Gives you anxiety because a good stock, I guess you should hold forever, but if you hold a stock forever and it doesn’t, provide you a dividend , at some point you’re gonna have to sell it to get the money, to use the money to live or retire , So Yeah.
I found impossible. So with an ETF and the index fund, I’m basically saying I can’t beat the market. I’m just going to be the market. Let the index do all its work for me, and I’ll just get some dividends from that. Yeah. And also I’ll sell off small portions [00:59:00] of that. Yeah. And that way there’s never a good time to buy., I should,, There’s never a good time to sell. There’s never a bad time to buy. There’s never a bad time to sell.
Jesse: And , you’re dead right there because there’s a common misconception that the market’s return is average. Like quite often the market’s return is tied to the word average, but really the market is far from average.
When you compare how people try to perform against the market, in actual fact, the average return of the market is actually better than what most people get in their super fund or any retail fund or trying to pick stocks themselves. So yeah, like you mentioned, it might just be anomalies who can actually beat the market.
So yeah. Great one. I haven’t had that come up as a myth before, but yeah, you make a really valid point. And then getting onto the last few questions. So what advice would you give to someone brand new to investing, but overwhelmed by all the financial jargon and just looking for a place to start?
Captain Fi: Yeah. Okay. So you just ignore all of the noise. I’ve said obviously you do need to educate yourself. Yeah. But I would say there, there are a few [01:00:00] steps to financial independence. Yep. And I just do a selfish plug. I have got an article which is financial independence for beginners, and it goes through the steps Yeah.
That I think people should take. But honestly get some skin in the game. Like maybe don’t do something as silly as I did and invest 28 grand, into a stock you know nothing about. Yeah. But I would say. Do some micro investing Okay. There are a plethora of MicroinVesting platforms. So many take your pick, right? Any of them is fine.
Go ahead and invest a very small amount of money. Get some skin in the game and just see how it goes. Yeah. Okay. Once you made a small investment, whether that’s $50, a hundred dollars, or say 500 through more conventional broker into an index fund you’ll become interested in it. Naturally.
You’ll want to learn how your investment’s going. You’ll start reading about investment, but until you’ve made an investment or a micro investment, you probably won’t really care. So it’s about motivating yourself to become educated. . Yeah. So dipping toe is [01:01:00] important. And really starting with a, like a beginner book is important as well.
So if we’re talking about advice to someone who’s brand new to investing that is overwhelmed by the jargon, look, just jump on a micro investing platform and give it a go. Okay. If we are talking about trying to give some advice to someone about financial independence, okay. There is some difference between investing is a part of financial independence, but financial independence is different read The Barefoot Investor, for example. If you just read that book or Dave Ramsay’s Total Money Makeover they’re basically the same book. Just reread those that will get you interested in starting to think about money. Just normalize it’s okay to talk about money. Yeah.
But specifically about investing Look, I would just say jump in buy an ETF buy broad market etf. I gotta be careful this is NOT financial advice. Definitely not, but just say, a very small amount just so that you can start learning and that’ll help start your snowboard.
Jesse: Yeah. Fantastic.
Captain Fi: And if you don’t have the money, sell something. Yeah. [01:02:00] Sell something in your house. Sell you gotta surfboard, you never use, sell it. Yeah. You gotta snowboard. You never use sell it. . I guarantee you, you can make a couple hundred dollars selling shit in your house that you don’t use and you can do a micro investment with that and you can start the process.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. It all just comes down to that idea of opportunity cost, right? Yeah, . So I’ve thrown this question in here and feel free not to answer it because you probably haven’t had time to prepare for it, but I was thinking about it this morning and thought I might ask it because you may not have been asked this before and I thought it’d be an interesting one to ask you.
But anyway. So as some readers may know, you’re a trained pilot, are there any skills you’ve taken from your flying experience that you can translate into your investing practice?
Captain Fi: Yeah, so look, Flying’s a really interesting one, Jesse. It really changed me a lot and I developed and grew a lot. For example, spending time years working in general aviation I became quite good at, I was at Schedule A maintenance.
So I learned how to change windscreens, change tires. I swept hangers,[01:03:00] helps strip paint off of bloody planes, did all the shit jobs.
But what I gained from that was a really good learning about the mechanics behind how engines work. And, good thing is that airplane engines, like piston engines work the same as cars. And so I was able to , work on my cars and I don’t take my car to a mechanic anymore.
And I was able to save money and that enabled me to invest more. Flying in itself is all about like risk management. And I guess, ah, it’s tricky cause like the flying career, you really do need a long term focus to get , where you want to go. You don’t just walk into becoming a captain of an A three 80.
A lot of people will spend 40 year careers in aviation and never make it to captain on, a super jumbo. You really need to have that long term focus. But just in terms of the day to day stuff, I guess the risk management CRM aspect has helped my, I guess my emotional intelligence and helping me to control my behavior rather than react to stuff.
I try and be proactive and I guess just in terms of risk management [01:04:00] owning individual shares for me is the most risky thing I could do. And look, I’m not gonna lie, I do it. I have MicroVest in shares in Tesla. I think I have a Tesla share. Yeah. Which isn’t a lot. But then I have what, 400 k in index funds?
. For me, like in terms of, it’s just translating that like kind of risk management approach. Yeah. As a pilot, especially as pilot multi crew transport aircraft, we’re not flying like really long sorts. You become quite, you just talk shit all the time. That’s all we do. Like we just chat in the cock pit mostly in our money and finance and business. And so I’ve learned a lot of lessons from assisting captains I flow with like other coco pilots fas and staff and even backing crews. You learn a lot from them, like about their mistakes they’ve made, but also like just how to fit in and be social and like the whole emotional intelligence and social skills.
Yeah. Cause that kind of stuff’s like really important in business as well. Absolutely. And knowing how to interact with people and socialize has helped me in my business ventures, my online business. Cuz at the end of the day, like when you are buying one of these websites [01:05:00] or your writing, like you need to be able to relate and talk to people so that, that kind of those softer CRM skills or human factor skills have definitely helped me.
I guess some of the more physical skills about maturity, decision making delayed gratification, that’s also helped me. Like probably, I guess one of the bigger things as well is, traveling the world and seeing different cultures and seeing how some people live , some of these places are absolute culture shock there, like flying, particularly around the Middle East, southeast Asia, and when things go wrong or when societies aren’t functioning the way they do in Australia.
Like it’s pretty confronting man.
Jesse: Yeah, I can imagine.
Captain Fi: And it gives me this huge appreciation for the opportunities that we have in Australia. And, I’m spending better part of half a year in Dubai, working outta Dubai and just working all the time and not really having any friends over there and always working to try and stack as much cash as possible and barely seeing anything green.
Finally coming back to Sydney and it was just like, Oh my God how amazing is Australia ? [01:06:00] And it just reinforced to me that we live in this amazing country and all we have to do is not spend all our money and invest a little bit of it. And you can reach financial independence.
But of course, probably the most single, most powerful thing that I have taken away from my career is pilot into investing is use of automation. , when we’re flying like light aircraft, okay, some of them don’t have auto pilots. A lot do. And learning to use the automation safely really improves safety flight and reduces the number of accidents.
So by using an autopilot we use a threat error model. Threat error management, using the autopilot to counter a threat that can prevent errors from happening, which prevent undesired aircraft states. Whether that be heading deviations, how student incursions or something as serious an accident, or a crash we can use automation safe to our advantage.
And you think, okay, if we can automate our investing and take the human out of the loop, you can remove your emotions, you can focus your effort elsewhere, and you can just allow your investments to [01:07:00] grow and compound. All on their own.
Jesse: Yeah. That’s amazing. Great answer. And look, to be honest, the reason I asked you that question is because I’ve been following Morgan Hausel recently and he did a podcast with Rask Australia and he talked about the idea of multidisciplinary learning and how you can apply it to different facets of your life.
And basically he’s reading a book on the ecology of trees at the moment. And he talked about the best way to grow an oak tree. And basically, in short, the best way to grow an oak tree is in the shadows of another oak tree. That way its roots grow strong and then it can flourish into a large, healthy oak tree in the future.
And the thing with that is, though it takes a lot longer to grow, but the other way to grow an oak trees outside the shade of another oak tree, and if you grow an oak tree that way, it’ll grow really tall really quickly, but it’s roots won’t be strong and it’ll easily get blown over or destroyed.
And basically he using that concept and translating it into his investing practice to talk about the idea of compounding, starting slowly and consistently, can help your investing portfolio flourish into the future, rather than just trying [01:08:00] to chase short term opportunities and short term bets that’ll have you blown over in the wind really easily if you let them.
So yeah, thanks for that answer. And yeah,.
Sorry. You had an analogy you wanted to mention.
Captain Fi: Oh, yeah. Interdisciplinary learning. . Gardening has been a long, passion of mine. Long hobby. We never had a lot of money. But one thing we could do is gardening. I always had a veggie Patch ever since I can remember. And learning about how things grow always interested me.
And even now, , there are so many parallels that can be drawn between gardening and investing, as you mentioned with the oak tree analogy. I like to say, say you’ve got an orange tree that’s producing oranges. If the price of oranges goes down, or the price of orange trees go down, do you really care?
Are Are you gonna go and sell your orange tree or chop it down? Just because the prices of orange trees have changed. No, you’re gonna continue to grow your orange tree in your garden and eat oranges from the orange tree. And so when teaching like kids to invest, I always go with something [01:09:00] tangible like the garden.
So I’m teaching my nephew about gardening, planting fruit trees. Planting annuals and perennials. Even like tomatoes are good, radishes are some of the best because radishes you can eat them within 30 days and so they can see the growth. Same as like mushroom kit, Like they can see the growth.
So obviously there’s the investment to buy the seed or the seedling and some of the equipment. Then, you need to water it and care for it. It needs sunlight and it needs time to compound and grow. And then eventually , after that investment, after you’ve looked after it and you’ve continued to like, make small contributions to it you then reap the benefit of whether it’s, picking the radish or a bit later we’re talking about a fruit tree picking , the fruit or the bananas or whatever it is off of whatever you’re growing.
It’s a really powerful analogy because investing is the same thing It is literally the same thing.
Jesse: Yeah. Great way to put it. . It really is the same thing. And you mentioned the same thing, but it’s also the right way to [01:10:00] invest as well, like the right way from what you’re explaining, it seems like the right way to manage a garden is the right way to manage a portfolio.
Captain Fi: Exactly. , you’re not just gonna dig up your orange tree Yeah. And sell it to someone and then go, Oh, sweet. Just made 10 bucks. Flipping my orange. I’m gonna go grab myself lemon now. Yeah. My lemon two weeks. Yeah. Oh, the price of lemon tanked. Yeah. I’m cut my, I losses this rule. . Dig up. the lemon tree and sell it. .
I think I’m gonna go into Apples.
Jesse: It’s just the fact that we’ve added a market aspect to equities that makes people view it differently. But if you take the market away and think of it like maintaining a garden, it just makes so much sense. Yeah. Great analogy.
Captain Fi: Yeah. Ignore the noise. . And reap the benefits for years and years to come. And , , it’s gotta be this long term focus the same as websites and business. Yeah. It’s gotta be this long term focus. If you are just doing cheap, shitty, scammy stuff trading derivatives on the daily or flogging off shitty products on your website, or spamming users with hundreds of popup ads.
It’s all the same thing to [01:11:00] me. Like really, I want a good sustainable, long term business. good, sustainable long term investments, and I want a good sustainable long term garden and a good garden. A good permaculture principle is biodiversity and interplanting and polyculture.
So we talk about a food forest. A food forest is not a mono crop. We don’t just plant acres and acres of rapeseed or acres and acres of barley or wheat. No. It’s a multiplicity of species. Yeah. Yeah. You might have 10 mango trees or 10 avocado trees and, but they’re all interspersed and there’s natives and there’s spawning and there’s bamboo, which you can crop and, produces organic matter. You’ve got the biodiversity, you’ve got worms, you’ve got the fungi, you’ve got bacteria. In an index fund, you’ve got that diversity as well. You’ve got the big caps, you’ve got the midcaps, you’ve got some other small caps.
And look, I understand most typical index funds are obviously heavy, heavily weighted towards some of the larger stocks. But there are ways of know, there are some different products which allow you to have more exposure to the smaller caps. . But at the end, the day, [01:12:00] does that become more like stock picking?
I don’t have all the answers. . All I know is this is what I’m doing and it seems to be working for me quite well. Yeah. And as I said earlier in the interview, if anyone who’s smarter than me knows more than me, you can come and constructively criticize and say, Here’s your blind spot Captain Fi?
You haven’t thought about this? . Did you want to include this in your portfolio?? I’m more than welcome and open to change and hearing those critiques. . And like the first principle of permaculture is to observe , that nature and see what works, emulate natural processes. And so I I like to translate that into my investing and that means slow down look, think long term and, try not to , chop and change it.
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Jesse: Look, my next question and I think I’m not gonna ask you to answer it because I think you’ve answered it already with your response just then, but it was what your own approach is to your own personal investing style, and do you follow a certain strategy? But I think people can grab that from your website.
What I might do is rephrase that question into the concept of multidisciplinary learning and how you relate your gardening practice into your investing practice. Does that sound okay to you?
Captain Fi: Yeah. Absolutely. And I guess to summarize, I would say that my investing philosophy . Is like a core satellite system.
So the core being [01:14:00] diversified investments and, that’s not just equities in stocks. I have an investment property that I’ve been building I have a. Online business and a bunch of websites, and I diversify that by having multiple websites and multiple monetization strategies for each website.
. So it’s diversity. One thing that scares me a little bit is with the property investing is that it is so un diversified, I don’t know what the word is for un diversified, concentrated, In that it’s one property, in one suburb in one state, and , so there are like REITs that you can get in, but , personally, the only reason I invest in property is for leverage.
. I don’t think I’d own a property if I couldn’t have a mortgage against it. And obviously my superannuation and annuity are other parts of that diversified core. And I do satellite investment, small little steps here, there, we talked about crypto earlier. , now, crypto, it might go to zero.
Bitcoin might go to zero, it might go to 10 million. Who knows? Yeah. But I think there’s a thing called the ASME risk profile. Yeah. Or the upside at the [01:15:00] moment. I believe the risk upside for me personally is worth taking the risk. . Look my crypto is like just under $5,000.
. So it’s not like it’s a huge amount of my net worth. And so remember keeping in mind anytime you see people online blogging or talking or. Celebrities or politicians talking about like their investments and they say, Oh yeah, I just invested a hundred grand in this I invest hundred grand in that.
Think about it as a percentage of their total portfolio because again, it comes back to our risk management. Someone who has a network of 50 grand and goes out and , buys a hundred grand at Bitcoin on margin , that’s just the dumbest thing you could ever do. . Yeah. But someone who is a billionaire who goes off and buys a hundred, is it Mark Cuban?
Didn’t he go out and buy a hundred k of Bitcoin or Ethereum or something?
Jesse: And the thing is right he’s into NFTs as well,
Captain Fi: . And they’re just so minuscule fractions. That’s like a normal person. Yeah. Going out and investing 20 cents in Bitcoin. Yeah. And then boasting about it. But remember, they’re often doing that [01:16:00] to either manipulate the market or as we said, to sell shuffles.
, they’re either connected to the exchanges or they have some kind of vested interest. So I guess my approach to investing is to be skeptical is to have a core approach of diversified investments. I property stock business super. And then I have some satellite investments and things like crypto.
I do own like a share Tesla. A few other investments in like I buy, I’ve got Hack, which is a, an ETF that’s got a bunch of tech companies in it. . Very small amounts, I do the microinvesting. And, I also have actually some good net portion money about 30,000 in six Park and Stockspot, which are Robo advisors.
Cool. So it’s all about spreading my investments . As widely as possible,
Jesse: spreading the capital around. Cool. Yeah. Love it. Again, you’ve already answered these next two, but , maybe I’ll just put them in as bullet point in the interview, but what’s your go to resource for finance or business related content?
So like podcast websites, et cetera
Captain Fi: Oh, yeah. Okay. Two of my [01:17:00] favorite poddies. . , I’ll be honest, probably the only two that I really care about listening to Aussie Firebug podcast. Yeah. And the Fire and Chill pod. I think those three guys that, from those podcasts, they’re actually just really nice, genuine, good blokes.
Yeah. And it’s quite informative. There are a bunch of other podcasts that I do listen to as well, but those are probably my two, big favorites that I really like. . I also really enjoyed the Mad Fientist podcast. . So Brendan, I think he’s a Canadian
his podcast was really cool as well, but , because it was for a primarily like a Canadian American audience some of the stuff like the philosophy and principles are the same, when they’re talking about, Oh yeah, max out your Roth 401k, IRA commercial letter, I’m like what is that?
, with the Fire Chill pod I just love how ruthless Pat is. Like they just call shit out as they said it. Yeah. And Dave is just such a lovely guy. Like he’s really happy, positive all the time. I haven’t met any of these guys in real life, but had a chat to him.
Some of them have come on my pod as well. Cool. And you just chat like with Dave, I just get the impression he’s [01:18:00] just like this real chilled out happy guy, like Aussie bloke, like nothing faces him like cool as a Cucumber. Yeah. Pat maybe Pat’s a little bit more highly strung back.
He’s an engineer as well. And he just has no time for bullshit . I love Pat’s rants on the fire and chill. And then, yeah, obviously Aussie Firebug, he’s really good, really humble and like when he does his pods, it’s about him learning and he’s facilitating the information
for people to learn from. And so he’s learning from it, everyone who listens to that episode learns from it as well. And that’s why I wanted to do that with the podcast as well. So I try and do the same sort of thing, emulating what Aussie Firebug’s done, And then I get to learn from the guests and I get to share that knowledge around as well.
So those two are my favorites. Podcasters. There are heaps of good forums online, so Aussie Firebug has got a Facebook group, which is awesome. I think there’s well over 10,000 people in there. Wow. So that’s good
you have questions? Who else? There’s , My Millennial Money . Glen James. Yeah. He’s got really good pod. That’s probably like really good for [01:19:00] beginners as well. So I guess I really like the Aussie Firebug and I really like fire and Chill because they tackle more advanced stuff.
But the Glen does some really good stuff. Beginners. It’s really helpful for people that are wanting to start on that financial education journey. And I’m pretty sure he was actually like a financial advisor, right? I think so. And she’s on the money.
He’s a really good resource. Obviously aimed at young women like, 18 to 30 year old women. Yep. And my ex-partner discovered she’s on the money and I guess I encouraged her to listen to it more. And I was really proud of her for discovering that and getting interested in money through Victoria’s pods.
That was really awesome Cause there are these kind barriers, to finance, especially with females. So to see like Vic breaking down those, it’s awesome.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. And things like the gender pay gap. There’s a lot of great work she’s doing in that space. That’s awesome.
Captain Fi: Yeah. And I forget the name. There’s a channel called Her First 100 K. Tori Dunlap Tori is basically operating in a really similar space to what Vic’s done here in [01:20:00] Australia, but she’s first she’s American.
. And she’s got I’m pretty sure it’s like number one finance podcast, she’s really good. She focused a lot on trying to cut that pay gap down. . How and it’s not just beneficial for women.
I listen to her stuff because it helps me as well. Yeah. And I know it’s primarily designed for a female audience, but there’s a lot that, guys can still learn about, how to negotiate better in like job applications and Yeah. Basic stuff about investing
so Tori and Vic have both great resources for everyone and Yeah. For especially young women. . Setting some really good examples. , so those are probably like the podcasts in terms of blogs oh my god, there are so many. So many. Yeah. I feel like I need to maybe just email you a list.
Strong Money Australia. Obviously Aussie Firebug. Life Long Shuffle, Strong Money Australia Captain Fi Mad Fientist go carry Cracker Early Retirement Extreme. I’ve got a huge list, I, and I apologize. Any awesome blogs that I’ve missed?
Cause there are still heaps that I’ve missed, but I’ve got a big list of them on my website. We can link to that or something.
Jesse: [01:21:00] Yeah, , sounds good.
Last question. So I know you’ve mentioned a few books already, but more of a specific one.
Do you have any must read books you can recommend to beginners just wanting to start off on their investing journey?
Captain Fi: Yeah, I definitely can mate. So I’ve probably got a couple of core books that I’d recommend. , the real beginner ones Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape..
Yeah. Or Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. So they’re probably two of the beginner books that everyone should read them. They’re like the Bibles in personal finance. Yeah. And they’re very similar books. . Probably the next one I’d recommend people read is Rich Dad Poor dad.
Robert Kiyosaki .. Again, you might be a bit confused about it, but it’s like fundamental foundational reading. Then I’d have a read of Your Money Or Your Life by vicki Robin. That’ll start to put things in perspective. All right? And now you’re gonna be thirsty and you’re gonna be like, how do I actually do this?
So then you jump onto The Simple Path to Wealth by JL collins JL Collins’s book is for free on his website, like he’s bought his articles, or you can pay like it’s a couple of [01:22:00] bucks. He’s coed them into an amazing ebook and put pictures and stuff. after that when you really wanting to accelerate your journey to fire the four Hour Work Week, as we discussed by Tim Ferris.
Really cool talks a little bit more about how we can increase that income side of the house. Again, I will teach You Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Again, that talks about how to increase that income side. Then the China study by Dr. Collin C Campbell . Now this isn’t strictly a personal finance book.
It’s a book about health. And it talks about. Eating a mostly whole food plant based diet. Yep. And it talks about the implication of our diet on our health. And just on that, there’s a book called In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan his tagline is Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not too much.
We talked again about that interdisciplinary learning . This is all linked. Okay. Cause when you’re eating a plant based diet, you’re healthier, you have less medical issues, you spend less on medical costs. Yep. Your food bill are lower. You’re gonna have more energy, You’re gonna feel better for the planet.
It links back to you have more money to invest. . You can make the world of better place. . So those are probably like my [01:23:00] top, What’s that? Six or seven books that I would say are important? We’ve mentioned a couple of other really interesting ones. , such as The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.
Yeah. That is a hard read. It’s a bit of a rite of passage. I recommend anyone please try and get through it. It’s really good. Yep. And then honestly can I listen more? Is it too many books
Jesse: Whatever you like, Go for it.
Captain Fi: Okay. Other awesome ones.
You can negotiate anything by Herb Cohen. Yep. Beautiful book. Warren Buffet’s letters. So he does shareholder letters that he’s been writing to to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders for decades. . Peter Thornhill is an amazing Australian investor.
I’m pretty sure he has like an income stream of half a million dollars in dividends and he talks about investing in industrials and listed investment companies. His book Motivated Money is amazing. We often have this debate between ETFs and LICs. I started out with a lot of LICs and I’ve moved to ETFs, but I still really like, , Peter Thornhill [01:24:00] and his principles.
So that’s a really cool book. Just rehashing The Barefoot Investor for Families. Again, awesome book talks a little bit more about financial education for kids, where we talk about, the Give Spend Save jars the growing the plants, helping parents to give age appropriate jobs to kids.
So this is gonna be a bit of shock. Thomas Stanley, he has a series of books called The Millionaire Series. The Millionaire Next Door um, and all of his how to think like a millionaire, all that kind of stuff. . A couple of small, little biblical tales. The Richest man in Babylon on Think and Grow Rich.
Yep. And acres of diamonds. Now I don’t think they’re specifically biblical tales, but they are like parables.. .
They’re fantastic books that you can take some really cool stories. . Away from. And I’d say like those are some like fundamental ones about like investing, in terms of the more I read, the more awesome stuff about lifestyle and mindset, I really opened up the fact that I deserve this lifestyle and I deserve financial independence.
And so [01:25:00] reading books like, Steven Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People obviously people get annoyed when people recommend that book because it’s almost a throwaway line, but it is actually a really important book. And probably my favorite principle of that is sharpening the score and self care and selfcare is so important.
I just finished reading How to Do the Work by Dr. Nicole Lepera and that is a fantastic book about overcoming trauma and, being more your authentic self. So a lot of these books on psychology and self improvement wonderful and have really helped me. Another great one about investing is Dan Riley’s Predictably Irrational.
. And he’s great. I’m pretty sure. He features in the movie The Big Short, Get Him to Explain Derivatives he playing with Fire by Scott Reikins. . . That’s awesome. He’s got that as the documentary and a book Meet the FrugalWoods I mentioned earlier Elizabeth and her husband how they moved to the Vermont that’s a really awesome book.
Quit Like a Millionaire by Christy Shen, Yep. That’s actually got, JL Collins has participated in that as well. . That one’s awesome.
It can be super overwhelming to hear this list and go, [01:26:00] Shit, I’ve got months worth of reading . But you just, you can borrow these from your library. You can listen to them for free online . There are these websites that do book summaries. Yeah. So you could literally just go to these book summary websites and get a short summary and take away the big points.
But I don’t think anything could really beat having a physical book and reading it in the park under a tree.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really impressive list firstly, but what I’ll do I’ll break it up into different sub headings so get started, mindset advanced, et cetera.
That way people can read the list in a more palatable way. But I think it’s definitely worth having all of those books listed in the answer to that question. 100%. That kind of brings us to the end of the formal questions and I just really wanted to say thank you for your time, mate. Like you went over and above everything I expected.
So yeah, I really appreciate your in depth answers to the questions and I’ll do my best to have a draft of this article ready within the next couple of weeks or so, and I’ll shoot it over to you before posting obviously, but yeah, just a [01:27:00] massive thank you.
Captain Fi: Yeah, no worries mate. It’s been great. It’s always nice to connect with, like minded people and love spreading the good word about, financial independence and just the power it can have to change people’s lives. Particularly vulnerable people single moms who are struggling to look after their family.
If they can, get ahold of any debt and start getting into the surplus start getting some passive income streams. . I think it can really change people’s lives. . And it certainly changed my life and I’ve seen just a few of the people that I’ve coached privately.
My friends and family through this kind of stuff. , I’ve seen huge changes in their life and their attitude. And so yeah, I’m really passionate about the topic. So more than happy to , to spend the morning chatting.
Jesse: Yeah. Sounds good. I’m just overwhelmed with the breadth of your knowledge , after this, I’m just gonna sit over and listen to this conversation again before getting it on paper.
But yeah, thanks again mate. And yeah, have a good day and we’ll definitely stay in touch. I have a lot of, I know if you’re open to helping out, I have a lot of questions about websites and stuff cause I think I’m definitely gonna spend some time looking into this space and try to optimize my own website initially and then possibly look at expanding the [01:28:00] portfolio like you’ve done.
Captain Fi: Yeah, man, no worries. Yeah, just send ’em through I’m usually pretty active on social media or probably addicted to Facebook and that. Yeah I’ve a group as well online, the Financial Independence Australia. And yeah, there’s a couple of thousand people in there, which is cool and
so that’s a good forum I guess for asking questions specifically about website stuff. And look again like it’s a pretty cool interview. We went over a lot of really good stuff.
Jesse: We did. All right, you have a good day. And yeah we’ll chat soon. Thanks again.
Captain Fi: Cheers . See ya Jesse. .
Cheers.. Bye.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the captain fire financial independence podcast. So read the transcripts or check out the show notes, head over to www. Captain fi.com for all the details. If you have a question for the captain, make sure to get in touch, you might even make it on the airwaves.
You can reach me online through the captain fire contact form. Get in touch through the socials. I’m active on Facebook and Instagram as well as a number of online finance and investing forums. [01:29:00] And finally remember the information presented on the show and the links provided for general information purposes only they should not be taken as constituting professional financial advice.
You should always do your own research when making any financial decisions and make sure it’s appropriate for your personal circumstance.
Captain FI is a Retired Pilot who lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is passionate about Financial Independence and writes about Personal Finance and his journey to reach FI at 29, allowing him to retire at 30.
