On board the pod today I welcome Doc G – Jordan Grumet, from the Earn and Invest podcast, and author of ‘Taking Stock’. Doc G specializes in palliative care and unlike most doctors I know, Doc G is pretty amazing when it comes to money. Doc G was incredibly inspiring and forced me to think differently about FI! Jump in!
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Doc G – Jordan Grumet
On board today is Dr. Jordan Grumet, better known as Doc G from the DiverseFI blog and the host of the incredibly popular Earn and Invest podcast, but he’s also the author of the blog, In My Humble Opinion.
Doc G specializes in palliative care and despite reaching FI continues to work in the hospice part-time where he compassionately helps people through the final stages of their lives.
Unlike most doctors I know, Doc G is pretty amazing when it comes to money. He sees it as a tool that we can use to improve our lives and live a more fulfilling life. He even says that becoming a money expert became his second career, and it was incredibly fulfilling to him to help put the veil back around money and help people find their true identity, purpose, and passions in life.
In addition to his award-winning blog and podcast, he has written and published two books with his latest book being titled, ‘Taking Stock, a Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, building Wealth, and Living a Regret Free Life.’ Doc G has observed that as a community, though we’re pretty obsessed with investing, we’re probably not interested enough in our own unique purpose, identities and connections. Although he has helped thousands of people transition from life to death, he says, we don’t actually have to wait for a death sentence before we start searching for meaning and ask the important questions. He wants to remove the hurdle of good money management so that we can all learn to live well today.
Doc G was incredibly inspiring and forced me to think differently about FI! Jump in!
Episode 59 – Doc G – Jordan Grumet
Show Notes
- You can visit Jordan’s website JordanGrumet.com
- Jordan also has his blog In My Humble Opinion
- There’s also Jordan’s site DiverseFI.com
- Jordan has his podcast Earn and Invest with more than 400 episodes!
- You can find Jordan on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE or on Facebook HERE.
- Jordan’s book Taking Stock:
-
Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life- Grumet, Jordan (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 208 Pages - 07/27/2022 (Publication Date) - Ulysses Press (Publisher)
- Jordan’s recommended reading:
-
Sale
The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life- Collins, J L (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 286 Pages - 06/18/2016 (Publication Date) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (Publisher)
-
Sale
Just Keep Buying: Proven ways to save money and build your wealth- Maggiulli, Nick (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 296 Pages - 04/12/2022 (Publication Date) - Harriman House (Publisher)
Transcript
Episode 59 – Doc G – Jordan Grumet
Interview – Doc G – Jordan Grumet
Captain Fi: [00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Welcome aboard the Financial Independence Podcast.
Gday and welcome to another episode of Captain Fire, the Financial Independence Podcast, where I open 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.[00:01:00]
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On board today is Dr. Jordan Grumet, better known as Doc G from the Diversify blog and the host of the incredibly popular Earn and Invest podcast, but he’s also the author of the blog; In my humble opinion, Doc G specializes in palliative care and despite reaching FI continues to work in the hospice part-time where he compassionately helps people through the final stages of their lives.
Unlike most doctors I know, doc G is pretty amazing when it comes to money. He’s very pragmatic about our relationship with money and sees it as a tool that we can use to improve our lives and live a more fulfilling life. He even says that becoming a money expert became his second career, and it was incredibly fulfilling to him to help put the veil back around money and help people find their true identity, purpose, and passions in life.
In [00:03:00] addition to his award-winning blog and podcast, he has written and published two books with his latest book being titled, taking Stock a Hospice, doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, building Wealth, and Living a Regret Free Life Whilst Reading. Taking Stock Doc G gives us some visualization exercises to do when it comes to our life identity and values.
I must admit some of them have been pretty confronting for me, but also a very worthwhile experience. Doc G has observed that as a community, though we’re pretty obsessed with investing and stocks and bonds and probably not interested enough in our own unique purpose identities and connections.
Although he has helped thousands of people transition from life to death, he says, we don’t actually have to wait for a death sentence before we start searching for meaning and ask the important questions. He wants to remove the hurdle of good money management so that we can all learn to live well today.[00:04:00]
Taking stock is a beautiful book. So Jordan, thank you very much for the read. It was a very timely message given everything that’s happened in my personal life recently. And secondly, thanks so much for your time today. Welcome to the pod. How you going?
Jordan: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for this conversation and I’m glad the book got you at a time and a place where it could be helpful because that’s really the goal of any author that what they write can be timely for what people are going through.
Captain Fi: Absolutely, it was timely. And we were just mentioning earlier before we started recording, yeah, it’s definitely hit a lot of chords with me and at some points it’s quite raw. I feel that, since I only recently hit fire and left my full time job I definitely felt a lot of that sort of floating that loss of purpose.
And so, taking stock has been really interesting for me to, as the title says, take stock of my
Jordan: life. Yeah. I have to admit, and you use the word confronting in your introduction and it is meant to be [00:05:00] that way. These are really hard issues. And the idea behind the book is it’s supposed to jostle you a little bit and wake you up and say, look, there are these important things in life and we’re letting our time pass by and not addressing them.
Captain Fi: And at the end of the day, right, that’s what money is for, isn’t it? The point of money isn’t really just to amass a arbitrary amount of investments. It’s really to live a fulfilling life.
Jordan: Yeah, that sounds obvious, right?
But the truth of the matter is, especially those of us who fall into that personal finance of financial independence, rabbit hole is we forget that and we start building these huge goals of wealth attainment and net worth. And we do, we go down that rabbit hole of what are the best stocks and bonds and real estate investments, et cetera.
And as obvious as it sounds, we forget that the purpose of all of this is so that we can do meaningful things.
Captain Fi: I can already tell this is gonna be an awesome conversation. Before we get [00:06:00] stuck in, would you be able to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Jordan: Sure. So my name is Jordan Grumet, and when I was a young kid, my father died when I was seven years old, and he was a doctor, a medical oncologist, which means he takes care of cancer patients.
And he died suddenly when I was seven. And it thrust me into this worldview that what I was supposed to do was become a doctor like him and take his place like I was seven years old. And when you’re that age, you tend to see the world through the lens of you being the cause of everything. And so I went off on this journey to become a doctor, and only realized after I had, after I’d done all that hard work, that it didn’t speak to my soul.
I got really burned out and realized that it didn’t really fit my sense of purpose and identity. I discovered the financial independence world, realized I had enough money that I could stop being a doctor. And as opposed to that, making me incredibly excited. I had a panic attack and became deeply depressed.
And so what I started blogging about and [00:07:00] diversify eventually wrote in my book, taking Stock was my journey out of that depression to realize that the purpose of money is to act as a tool to live lives of more purpose and identity. I originally got there through writing, but got rid of everything in medicine I didn’t like.
And what I was left with was hospice and palliative care, which was taking care of the terminally ill and dying. And while I was doing that, I was also having these experiences, having a blog and a podcast where I was talking to people about money and what it meant in their lives. And I realized that the two mixed together, and in fact the dying could teach us a lot about how to live today and maybe what the role money should be in our lives.
And that’s how the book taking stock came about.
Captain Fi: And it’s a brilliant read. I’ve literally just got it open on my phone now and I mean, there’s chapters and chapters at the end, which is all devoted to exactly that, what we can learn from the
Jordan: dying. Yeah, the point really is that the dying have [00:08:00] this really interesting lens into life because when you’re told that you’re terminally ill and you have at most six months to live, it really removes the veil of all the denial and all the societal pressures and everything we were told we were supposed to be, and allows us to look at our own lives.
And assess, did we become the people we wanted to be? Do we have regrets? Did we do the things we wanted to do? And I found that clarity could be so helpful to the rest of us, right? Not just to the terminally ill, but what if we could start having that type of clarity when we were 40 or 20, or when we were starting to build our career or when we were having families?
If we could use that clarity to start living better now, to think about what would we regret when we’re sitting on our dying bed? And how can we start addressing those things now so that we don’t have that regret, so that we can get to the nitty gritty of what’s really important to us. [00:09:00] And so that’s what really became clear as I myself went on this personal journey.
Captain Fi: Yeah, so you talked a little bit about the, I guess the inception of the fire movement after the sort of post GFC where, there was a lot of tech bros. So sometimes they get called in the in the industry who were a bit disillusioned about their careers and, who had great amounts of wealth, income and information available to them.
And that were really just yeah, becoming disillusioned with their careers. And so I mean, we’ve seen over time the fire movement, financial independence, retire early, has exploded. And there are a myriad of different interpretations and iterations of fire. And I think this is really well explained by Vicky Robin in the forward to your book taking stock.
So I’d be really interested to see what is your take on fire and what does financial independence mean to you?
Jordan: Well, let’s take the easier of the two questions. What does financial independence mean to me? Originally, this idea [00:10:00] behind fire is that you had enough money that you never needed to work again.
Then it evolved into you have side income, side hustles, or other things that provide you a monthly income that covered your needs. So it wasn’t based on net worth anymore. It was based on this idea that you have this income that covers your needs and then you’re financially independent. But what I really evolved to and what I think the fire movement has really evolved to is something more of lifestyle design.
This idea of using your finances to live a life of purpose, identity, and connections, or at least those are the three words I use in my book. Regardless of your net worth and regardless of how many hours you’re spending employed, the idea is can we build these lives that we wanna live? Then create a financial framework that allows us to spend as much of our time doing those important things as possible.
So whereas at the beginning of my evolution, and I think the evolution of the fire movement, we’d say the financial independent is [00:11:00] having enough money not to work. Now I’d say that financial independence is actually doing the work that’s most important to you most of the time. And then building up that financial framework to allow you to do that.
And so I think I’ve evolved. I think the fire movement has evolved and it’s really gotten away from specifically the numbers being the most important thing. And now we’re really talking about, well, how do we design the life you really wanna live and then make the numbers work for you?
Captain Fi: Yeah I’ve often thought about this and I reckon the numbers are like such a small amount and I guess, we talk about the, like the 80 20 principle.
I think, 80% of the outcome is really behavior and it’s the finances, the numbers are actually, quite straightforward. They’re really just quite a small part of it. And it’s really interesting when and it becomes so apparent when people do. Reach [00:12:00] the goal.
And like you mentioned earlier, how actually reaching financial independence was actually a bit of a shocking experience for you. So I’d love to hear a little bit about, I guess, your journey to financial independence and maybe if you’re happy to talk about this kind of mini sort of existential crisis which people can experience when they reach FI.
Cause I know, I certainly felt that way.
Jordan: Yeah. So for me, reaching financial independence was cataclysmic and dysphoric. And what I mean by that is I had been modeled really good financial behavior by my parents. So I always saved lots of money. I always invested in the stock market. I bought real estate at a really young age, but I didn’t have any of the vocabulary to understand that.
And I certainly didn’t know, for instance, what my financial independence number was. And so when I became burned out and eventually went down the rabbit hole of personal finance, I learned all these things all of a sudden and realized, Immediately that I had enough money that I could pretty [00:13:00] much stop working.
And the reason why that was cataclysmic and dysphoria is because it was immediate. Like I learned it within hours of reading a book. And then the second problem was instead of making me feel wonderful, it made me feel lost. And the reason why is once I let go of this identity that wasn’t suiting me, this identity of being a physician, I had no idea who I was and what my purpose should be.
And that was scary. There’s this term out there, we don’t talk about it much, but something called purpose anxiety. It’s this idea that, and I’ve seen data on this, that up to 91% of people at some point in their life feel purpose, anxiety. This idea that not knowing what you were meant to do in life.
Makes us feel lost and scared and instead of, we always talk about how purpose is, there’ve been studies that show that having a sense of purpose helps you live longer, be healthier, be happier, which is all wonderful. But that assumes that you can figure out what your purpose [00:14:00] is, figure out what your identity is, who you are.
And so for me, it was so dysphoric because I had no idea who I was. Now that I was gonna step away from this physician identity, I had nothing to fill the space with. And not only that, the other portion that was unique to me is by also leaving the physician identity. I was stepping away from that. Wisp of a connection I had with my father who died when I was a little boy.
So for those two reasons, it was very hard to just step away. And also imagine that I had lived this life where I had become a high wage earner. So not only did I have this identity as a doctor, but this identity as someone who made a lot of money. And that became somewhat important to me.
So I also had to be willing to step away from that and say, okay, I’m no longer the doctor who’s making all this money, who’s succeeding. I had to say, well, I’m gonna get rid of all these things that had identified for me success and be willing to walk away and reinvent myself.
Captain Fi: Well, yeah, it’s a big thing, isn’t it?
[00:15:00] And I didn’t really realize that until just now when you mentioned it, that of course stepping away from, working as a full-time physician in then in the hospital in full-on fast paced environment that is, That would’ve been savoring that connection to your dad.
And that’s a pretty full on thing.
Jordan: Yeah. I used it to identify myself for so long, right? Like I became a doctor because my dad was a doctor, I was gonna walk in his footsteps. And although I didn’t consciously say that to myself, I think I grew up thinking it. And so to step out of that and everybody has to, right?
At some point, we all have to step out of the identity that our family and our parents made for us. And we have to look at it and we say, well, is this us or not? And if it is not us, then we have to have the courage to step into who we wanna be. And so I don’t think it’s, that part is unique to me. It was unique because my father died and I had built an identity based on that.
And so it was both scary but also freeing in a sense. Cuz maybe for the first time in my life I could [00:16:00] step into the person who I was supposed to be, not a trauma based version of who I had become.
Captain Fi: Interesting. Now, I guess this shapes perfectly. The next question I wanna ask you, but I also just wanna share that I feel like I’ve had a very similar experience with my career in aviation.
Definitely the career choices that I made to become a pilot. I had family members in aviation in particular, my dad, who I didn’t really have a relationship with. He was an engineer and yeah, a lot of his brothers were in aviation. And I felt, yeah, like I definitely built this identity around not only what I thought I wanted to be, but what I wanted people to think of me.
And so stepping away from that was really challenging.
Jordan: And again, as we talk about how challenging that is, I always push people to say or think, All right. Well, if you were on your deathbed and had to look back at your life, would you regret not having the courage to make that jump? And then when we frame [00:17:00] things that way, it becomes easier to take these really difficult things, right?
These things, we grew up with these things that were modeled for us and really ask, well, are they serving us? And I think it’s really hard to do that in normal life until you are pushed or as you said, confronted. And that’s why this imagery of death and dying, putting ourselves for a moment in the shoes of people who are going through it, becomes so powerful because it makes that confrontation obvious as opposed to as difficult as I think it is in normal life.
Captain Fi: Yeah, well look, for me, it definitely came to a. An apex like a crux I’m trying to find the right word here. I think the universe really shoved me. And I, it’s something that I could have and probably should have thought about a lot more deliberately, a lot sooner. But it reached a point where the metaphorical pot was boiling over.
And [00:18:00] yeah, the universe really did force me, I guess, to, to step away from my career. And part of it was to care for my mom, but a lot of it was also for me and my own mental and physical health. I mean, to lose a father when you’re that young is heartbreaking.
And and I really do feel for you as someone who also grew up without a dad. I mean, my dad was alive, but he was just not in the picture. And as someone who, I recently lost my mum, , I really can appreciate that profound loss and I can’t imagine how difficult it would’ve been for you, at that age in taking stock.
You talk a little bit about how the loss of your father shaped your self image and, choices in life and in your career. And you said you felt like you had to follow his legacy. Can you talk a bit about this experience how this influenced your childhood careers I guess your self-image and perception of money.
Jordan: It definitely did. And the reason why is money just didn’t matter to me. Now, granted, that also comes from a place of privilege where we always [00:19:00] had enough money, right? My dad was a physician, made a reasonable amount before my dad died. My mother went back to business school and had a job with a top accounting firm just as my father was dying.
So there was this privilege of not needing to worry about money, but because I had become so singularly focused on this purpose, this identity based on my father dying, money didn’t matter to me. I never really thought about money. And because there was always enough there to survive, I didn’t stress about it.
It really became very secondary. And therefore, even when I became a physician, my parents had modeled such great money behavior that I did lots of good things with money. Like I saved lots of money and I invested and I was really doing all the right things, but I was almost doing them mindlessly.
Like I didn’t understand my finances. I didn’t understand financial independence. I didn’t understand even this concept that money could be used as a tool to reach our true and deeper goals. [00:20:00] I was a little bit blinded by this singular focus on becoming a physician, which is quite necessary. Right. In your younger years, I mean, I had to study hours on end when my friends in college were going to the football game.
I was in the library Saturday morning by myself studying like I needed that singular focus to get where I wanted to go, which was to get through college, medical school and residency. That clouded most of my thoughts. And certainly there was no identity that I had where either money mattered or I was savvy at managing my money to meet my goals.
That was not even part of my perspective. Until that flip switched when I realized that I was so burned out, that I better understand my money or I’m gonna be trapped in this profession that’s no longer serving me.
Captain Fi: Yeah, and look, I can totally relate to , that feeling of burnout as well.
And you talk about this in your book about, and I’m, I’m not using the right words here, but for want of a better term, people becoming annoyed and [00:21:00] switching off in their careers versus maybe. If they can make some changes and it can still be a useful purpose for them.
, and this is something that you’ve done. So you’ve gone from, having some pretty extreme burnouts and some horrible nights, and I think you said in your book, like one time you’re walking outta the hospital swaring, saying, I’m never gonna bloody come back to this hospital. And then having some time to think and calm down and reflect, you’re like, no, this is my passion.
This is what I want to do. So, even though you reached financial independence, we said, you went through this, a bit of turmoil and had to do some inner work on what that actually meant. You continued working part-time as a palliative care physician and it was something that you needed for your purpose, identity, and connections, and you were able to make subtractions to turn this.
Career as a doctor from something that was burning you out and something that was using up and wasn’t sustainable and you’ve turned it into sort of a work [00:22:00] environment that really matched your internal
Jordan: desires? Well, one thing I realized is that I wasn’t ready to go cold Turkey. I had spent my whole childhood and early adulthood becoming a doctor, and I don’t know if I could have just walked away and said, I’m never doing this again.
For one, I had no idea who I wanted to be or what felt purposeful or what my true identity was. So I knew I couldn’t walk away from medicine, and yet I knew medicine was burning me out. And so the answer was the art of subtraction. This idea that, well, let’s start by getting rid of those things in your work environment that aren’t working for you and see what’s left.
And since I had the financial backing to do that, I. I knew I could. So I got rid of my general practice, which was taking a lot of money and stress. Then I got rid of nights and weekends. I was working in a nursing home, which also became very stressful. So I stopped doing that. When I started subtracting the things out of my workplace, I didn’t like what I was left with, was something that I would do even if I wasn’t [00:23:00] being paid for it.
And that’s how I knew. I was like, well, I’m not gonna throw the baby out with the bath water. Although being a physician I no longer identify with, there’s this portion of it that still is really important to me. And so I got rid of or subtracted everything else. And what I was left with was a part-time, 10 to 15 hour work week.
No nights, no weekends, no call, no real stress. But I really enjoyed it. And so when I did this, I had the kernel of the beginning of a new identity. An identity in which being a hospice and palliative care physician was important, but it was a small portion. The benefit of subtraction is it opened up my emotional and.
Physical energy to then start figuring out, well, what do I wanna pursue with the rest of my week? So now I have 10 to 15 hours where I’m gonna be busy doing something purposeful to me. So for once I had really narrowed down my professional activities to things that just spoke to my soul, but now I’ve got this extra 30 or 40 hours a week, how [00:24:00] am I gonna build activities into that time that feel much more reaffirming than what I was doing?
And that’s how I developed my voice as a public speaker, as a writer, and as a podcaster. Cuz I had the joy of starting to fill that time, not with things that made money, not with things that society or anyone told me I had to do. I could actually start filling my time with activities that spoke to me.
And you know what, when I really thought about it, I realized that there were always these activities that spoke to me. I just never felt I had the time or energy to pursue them. So I had been writing for ever. But I was always fitting it into these little gaps. When I wasn’t busy at work, I’d be quickly writing a blog post at lunchtime or staying up after the kids went to sleep, to plan a talk that I was gonna give for the next conference, but only on my off time, because this is not what you did to make a living.
So I gave myself that excuse not to pursue those much more [00:25:00] deeply meaningful things. When I’m only working 10 to 15 hours a week, I no longer have that excuse. And so that’s how I then started adding back in activities. But these new activities were much more self-affirming than those that I was doing as a physician that were no longer speaking to me.
Captain Fi: I love it. So, because it’s so hard to find out what we actually want to do your technique is to start by subtracting the things that we don’t like, cuz I mean, most people know what they don’t like. And so a couple of big ones I heard you mentioned were shift work and being on call. And like nights, like those are three big ones that, that used to really get me as well.
And then you’re able to use the time to add back the things that really bring purpose and
Jordan: meaning for you. Yeah. And that’s a process, right? This is not something you do overnight. And that’s another reason I was really thankful that I didn’t just walk away from medicine but that I allowed myself some real [00:26:00] time to think about, okay, is there still some value here?
And if it is, what part really holds the most value for me? And then transition slowly into doing things that were just much more deeply meaningful. And for every person, what is deeply meaningful, what they decide to add in after they subtracted is gonna be different. For some people, it’s gonna be big audacious goals improving the world or becoming politically active or those kind of things.
But it can also be things that are selfish, hobbies, interests, things that bring you joy. Whatever that meaning and purpose aren’t nearly as important as the fact that you’re now paying homage to them, paying attention and starting to work on those things that make life feel more livable.
Captain Fi: Yeah.
And another of the concepts that you raise in your book, which I coincidentally. Really want to ask about this next question is that you don’t necessarily have to reach this arbitrary goal of like financial [00:27:00] independence to start doing that as well. You can really take, as with the story you give, you can take the middle brother journey and you can actually do a bit of both.
Jordan: Yeah. I mean that’s what’s fantastic is when you start really figuring these things out, who am I and what’s important to me? You realize that yes, one pathway, which I call the pathway of the eldest brother, is to put those things off in order to get incredibly financially secure and then live a life where you spend most of your time doing those things.
And that is one pathway, but that pathway doesn’t work for everyone. It would’ve never worked for my dad who died at the age of 40. So there are these other pathways in which we can start designing a life in which we bring those things in much earlier. And then you start seeing that money is a tool, but it’s only one of many tools and we can use some of our other tools.
To start enjoying these purposeful things now, not waiting until you get to some financial independence number. We wanna be savvy when it comes to money, [00:28:00] but that doesn’t mean that your path to financial independence has to be the fastest. It can be a slow and deliberate path in which you’re taking lots of breaks and doing the things you really wanna do.
Or better yet, maybe your path is made up of things that are purposeful. Maybe your job, the thing that makes you money, the thing that gives you extra money to save. Maybe that’s actually something really purposeful and meaningful to you. There are lots of different paths, and I think we’ve in the past, really focused on that one narrow path, which is the path of the eldest brother, which is grind it out, being unhappy till you get to where you wanna go, and living a perfect life afterwards.
And realizing that’s a really old school idea and a newer better version might be. Building the life we wanna live in today while also building our finances at the same time and realizing that might take us a little longer and that’s fine.
Captain Fi: [00:29:00] Yeah. And even once you’re on that path, I guess, there are this, always these forks in the path cuz life is always about choices.
But the cool thing is once you’ve started and you’ve got these investments and some passive income behind you, I think it, it really frees you up as well. You can actually take stock and go, well, all right, if I continue on this path, I can achieve it at a certain date. Or maybe you can adopt maybe more of a coast fire technique and you really can scale back a little bit earlier.
So it frees you up with all these choices that you don’t have to really keep flogging yourself to get somewhere.
Jordan: Yeah I love this idea that we don’t have to stay on one path all the time, but we can jump from path to path. So when you’re in your early twenties and just got outta college, that’s a great time to be, in a sense, an eldest brother.
Grind it out, make lots of money, work the long hours, but then wait. Maybe you meet a spouse, maybe you then have children. That’s a great time to slow down and become a middle or youngest brother. Spend more [00:30:00] time on life and be with those people and do the important things. And then, you know what? Maybe after your kids go to college, now you’ve got a lot more free time.
Maybe you can grind it out a little while longer. Make a little of those extra funds, better prep yourself for that traditional retirement. Like you can jump from path to path, depending on what’s going on in your life. The idea, again, is to build that life you wanna live. Use our financial knowledge to do what we wanna do.
And that means at times we have to pivot and that’s totally fine.
Captain Fi: We will get back to the show in a moment, but for now, I wanna ask you a question. Do you have a side hustle? And if you do, is it scalable? My side hustle is building and running websites a form of digital real estate. Now, it might sound tricky to make money online, but really they’re just small online businesses that have low overheads, high margins, and which you can easily scale by outsourcing.
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Then it can be viewed potentially millions of times and easily updated by my editors over the years to remain relevant. If you want to learn more about this lucrative side hustle and retraining for the Digital Workforce revolution, then check out my article about making money online and read my review of the E-Business Institute and their online self-paced courses.
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I’m quite glad that you did your pivot and, went down to a part-time workload, which enabled you to write a couple of pretty amazing books. One of which you were kind enough to give me a copy of, which was taking stock a hospice doctor’s advice on Financial Independence, building wealth, and living a Regret Free Life.
I know we’ve talked a little bit about it and some of what’s in the book already but can you give us a bit of an overview about your latest book and what are the kind of things that readers could learn, I guess, especially around this concept of building identity, purpose, and connection that we’ve been talking about?
Yeah,
Jordan: so there are really three big points in the [00:33:00] book. The first is that instead of starting with our finances, we should actually put our finances aside for a moment and focus on purpose, identity, and connection. So the beginning of the book really talks about those things. There’s a bunch of exercise that especially helps us get in touch with our sense of purpose.
Once you have an inkling or you start understanding what feels like purpose, identity, and connections to you, then you get to step two, which is building the financial framework around it. That’s where we start talking about the path of the three brothers and the three different ways to build up wealth and how they speak to us differently as different people, but also at different times of our lives.
And the last part of the book, we focus more on time, but really, I. There’s this idea that no matter how much you know, your sense of purpose, no matter how well you’ve built your financial framework, there’s still one essential question that all of us face, which is, do we spend money today? Like we only live once and [00:34:00] time is precious and you might die early like my father.
So you don’t wanna pass up the chances to live life. How do we balance that between Yolo? And deferred gratification. One day we might retire, we might not have a lot of income. We need to defer gratification today, put a lot of money away, save and invest wisely so we have money for tomorrow.
So the last part of the book really focuses on this idea of how we choose between YOLO and deferred gratification. And a lot of that has to do with asking ourselves one basic question, what scares us most? Are we afraid that we’re gonna die young and wealthy or old and broke? And if you can ask yourself that question and decide what scares you most.
You, then can start looking at the YOLO deferred gratification continuum and decide how to spend today. And the reason why we have to ask ourselves that very difficult question is because no one knows when they’re gonna die. If we knew when we were gonna die, we could plan out our financial future beautifully so that we died with zero, just like the Bill Perkins book says.[00:35:00]
But since we don’t know when we’re gonna die we need some type of proxy. And then asking yourself that question, what scares you most acts as a proxy so we can decide how to spend today versus tomorrow. So that’s kind of the three parts of the book, defining your sense of purpose, identity and connections, number one.
Number two, building a path to financial independence. And then number three, asking you what scares yourself most.
Captain Fi: It’s a bloody awesome read. And it’s funny cuz people often say like when they’re talking about, oh, how much, retirement planning, they do often say, well, when do you plan to die?
Because if you know when you’re gonna die, you can reverse engineer how much money you need. But and it’s crux, it’s really managing uncertainty and and I think having a read of taking Stock is a great way for people to take first step in, in managing that uncertainty in their fire journey.
And yeah, I mean, when you can kind of work out which brother do you need to be at which point in your life. So it’s definitely given me time to pause and reflect. And I’m really glad that you gave me a copy. So thank you very much.
Jordan: Yeah, you’re welcome. And like you were saying, we have no idea when we’re gonna [00:36:00] die.
And on some level we only have so much control of how much money we’re gonna make and what’s gonna happen in the stock market and what our financial trajectory is gonna truly be. But the one thing we do have control of is when are we gonna start to live? And so I hope this book wakes people up and gets them to start living today because that’s something we can work on.
Captain Fi: Absolutely. So look doc, how did you get involved with blogging? And also podcasting cuz you obviously run the amazing podcast diversifier. I actually, only recently discovered your podcast and I’ve worked, I’ve got over like 400 something episodes that I can binge through.
That’s pretty amazing achievement. How did you discover this as one of your passions in life?
Jordan: So, it’s a funny story. When I was in residency, I. I had bought a house and I was looking at decorating that house. I was at a local mall and [00:37:00] I saw an art gallery. And in this art gallery I found these beautiful paintings that I wanted to put in my house.
But the problem was they were thousands of dollars each, and I knew I didn’t wanna spend that much money. This was the early two thousands. eBay was this like big new thing. I went on eBay and I eventually found a bunch of sellers selling the same artwork for a lot less. And of course my business mind, was tweaked.
And I said, well, wow. I could go to a gallery and spend thousands of dollars, or I could buy the same painting for $500 online. What’s going on here? I eventually befriended and called a bunch of these eBay sellers and learned how to get into the secondary art market, and started a business selling art.
Now again, this was early 2000. A big part of selling art for me was setting up a website. So I set up this website and my brother Andrew, who is really on the cutting edge of everything, internet looked at me and he said, well, you can put up a website, but people have to find that website. And there’s this [00:38:00] thing called search engine optimization.
And the way people find your website is through search engine optimization. He said, well, you know what you need to do is you need to have changing content on your website. It can’t be static. It has to keep changing, and that way the search engines will find you. And he said, well, the easiest way to do that is to start a blog.
And I’m like, what the heck is a blog? And he is well, it’s like an online journal or diary, and you attach it to your website and it’ll draw the search engines there. So I had a website selling artwork. So I started writing about artwork and I was horrible at it because I just didn’t have nearly as much passion for that as other things.
But one day in the earlier days of Google, I said this is interesting. I’m writing a blog about art and I put into the Google search engine medical blogs. When I did that, I found a small community of medical bloggers who were writing about things that were deeply important to me, the experience of being a doctor, the stress, the trauma, the [00:39:00] joys.
And so from that day on, I started blogging about medicine, which led to a life of creating content as a communicator, writing about medicine, eventually doing a lot of public speaking. When I fell down the rabbit hole of financial independence, I started writing about financial independence, which was diversify, or Is diversify the blog.
And then from there it was very natural to go into podcasting. So my content creation really was spurned from this side business of selling artwork. And I started creating online and just realized that I loved it.
Captain Fi: It’s awesome. I thought you were, for a second, you were gonna mention with the art, the scalability, like maybe they were just selling copies of the same artwork.
Jordan: No. So, in, in the art world there are original paintings, but then there are high quality reproductions that are signed and numbered by the artists. There’s lots of different techniques they use to make these, but usually the artist produces not just one image, but [00:40:00] images three or 400. And so they’re still very limited.
But they are high quality reproductions. Sometimes the artist themselves goes and embellishes and they sign it in hand and all that kind of thing. And so I kind of learned my way into the secondary art market where I could find people selling this art for a lot less in bulk and would get a piece of that.
Maybe I’d work with some of the big buyers who’d buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of secondary art market artwork, and they would allot 10 or 15 or 20 paintings for me, and then I’d get them at a super reduced cheap price and then I could sell them out. So that was kind of how the secondary art market worked.
Captain Fi: Wow, you’re a man of very many
Jordan: talents. Well, I was always looking for the side hustle even younger before I, I learned about financial independence. I was brought up by parents who were really innovative and my stepfather who is the CEO of a big healthcare company, had a side hustle. He loved collecting coins, and he had a [00:41:00] shop that he sold coins at.
It wasn’t a physical shop, it was a virtual shop. And so even in the, like 1980s, 1990s, he was buying and selling coins. So like I had great modeling financially for all sorts of things, including kind of that passion induced side hustle. That was something I learned at a young age. And I loved selling artwork.
I mean, there was a time when I was a really little kid when I was selling baseball cards. So there’s, I was always busy kind of pursuing these different entrepreneurial ventures.
Captain Fi: Look, I mean, one of the things that I’ve stumbled across and it came out of a passion for blogging about financial independence, and as I , we were talking earlier, kind of latched onto this fire.
Movement, fire mentality as a way of coping with, I guess a bit of a stressful career and trying to manage burnout and that kind of stuff. And and yeah, , I stumbled down this rabbit hole of, websites and online business and end up running far too many websites. And I care to admit starting to scale back now just focusing on the passion sites.
But it’s really [00:42:00] interesting cuz at one point I’d kind of swapped, potentially swapped like this full-time career as a pilot for this full-time career as a web master. So really it’s ironic you would take my own advice and just you scale back. Now look the Earn and Invest podcast, which as I mentioned, it’s got over 430 full length episodes.
You’ve spoken to some pretty amazing guests. So what could you tell us about the Earn and Invest podcast and what can people learn from tuning in?
Jordan: So, the Earn and Invest podcast is very much the 2 0 1 conversation about finances and life. So there’s tons of people out there telling you how to invest, how to build up your retirement accounts, how to even start a business, and I find all that talk incredibly engaging, but there are people who do that better than I can.
The idea behind Earn and Invest is we really wanna get to that next level of why and how does this serve us and how does this help us build. A better life. And so I speak to anyone and everyone, people who run [00:43:00] businesses, content creators, authors, writers, other podcasters, and we’re really searching and going down deep into the why and how these things serve us.
The idea is once you start figuring out how to amass the wealth, what do we then do with that wealth to live a better life?
Captain Fi: Yeah. And as Vicky said, and it’s just springing to my mind she famously said that financial independence, was only the beginning, and I don’t think I really appreciated what that actually meant when I first read it, because I was , that elder brother, I was like fixated on the climb.
I was so goal-oriented. But now after that destabilizing reaching it, I can really understand how much weight actually is with that saying.
Jordan: Yeah, I mean, I really think ultimately what we wanna do is get to a place of connections, community and service. And when I talk about purpose a lot, especially in the book and on the [00:44:00] podcast, it almost sounds selfish because I’m not saying you need to go change the world.
I’m saying, find what lights you up, whether that’s a hobby or whatever it is, and pursue it. So it almost sounds selfish, but what I’ve really found in the world is when people find things that light them up, it eventually leads to service one way or another. It leads to community and connections.
And I think that’s ultimately what we want, right, is we wanna live a more connected, fulfilling life where we feel like we’re touching the people around us. A
Captain Fi: hundred percent. I’ve gotta say I can’t remember who said this, I read it somewhere that one of the best things for our, mental health and happiness is like unplanned social connections with our community.
And that’s been so true for me. I’ve found by, like inadvertently I’ve come into the fire community and it’s been such a welcoming. Awesome, happy, collaborative space. And yeah, all these sort of like unplanned things happen oh, someone introduces you to someone, [00:45:00] or you, there’s a meetup or Oh, someone wants to be interviewed or someone wants to interview you.
Its a lot of fun, really. And I think for a lot of people the fire community provides like this awesome sense of community and connection. It, especially when we start going to the I R L meetups, it’s a bit scary at first when you start going out and meeting people and the veil of anonymity is lifted.
But it’s actually a lot of fun and quite rewarding.
Jordan: Yeah. And for me it took me so long to realize why am I not making those connections? Cuz I wasn’t making them as a physician. I wasn’t connecting with people. I didn’t have lots of physician friends. I didn’t like to hang out in physician oriented places like the doctor’s lounge in the hospital.
And then I discovered the personal finance world and I would go to these conferences and meet people. And I felt more close to someone I talked to for five minutes than doctors I had known for decades. And that kind of really clued me in that when you’re acting in a way that is consistent with your identity and your sense of purpose, those connections just [00:46:00] naturally come because we feel bonded with those people who find importance in the same thing we do.
And I think that’s what you experience when you go to these meetups, is you’re meeting people whose sense of purpose aligns with yours. And so your identities latch onto each other. And that’s a really positive, affirming thing.
Captain Fi: It’s beautiful. Now Doc I usually like to ask guests about, whether they had a fire number or a particular passive income that they were working towards.
But I think, in your case, I think I have a much better question. Would you be able to talk a little bit about the fallacy of enough and how I guess the money meld might cloud someone’s judgment when it comes to setting fire goals when ultimately they just want to feel secure?
Jordan: So this is something, a trap we all fall into when we think of money as a goal instead of a tool, it becomes a mirage.
I call it the money mind meld our brain. Get stuck on this [00:47:00] idea that once we get to a certain net worth number, everything is gonna be better. And it really shields us from working on the other important stuff. Who are we and what do we need to do in life? So we just focus on this money number. And the problem is, once you get there, which hopefully all of us will get there, we get to that net worth number we wanna get to.
We realize that we’re lost because it doesn’t really solve any of life’s problems, except the problem of not having enough money. It doesn’t tell you who you are or what life’s about, or what the rest of your life is gonna look like. How are you gonna negotiate the world in a purposeful way? And so when people tend to get to that net worth number, they do one of two things.
They either find themselves upset because they reached a goal and they don’t know what to do with it. So they just double the goal. Well, now I want my net worth to be 3 million instead of 1.5 million. So then they just jump right back on the treadmill and start going towards that 3 million , even though they don’t need that extra money, it’s not gonna make their life any better.
But because they don’t [00:48:00] have any other goal, that’s what they shoot for. That’s one problem. The other problem is something called loss aversion. We get to this point where our fear of losing what we have is almost double our fear of never getting there in the first place. So it’s very common for someone to reach that FI net worth number, and then you get petrified.
What if the stock market goes down? What if I have an unexpected expense and all of a sudden I fall below? And that causes a real amount of anxiety. So if money defines what enough is to you, you’re never gonna feel like you have enough. Enoughness ultimately has to do with living a life that’s more consistent with who we wanna be, and specifically filling our time with activities that feel purposeful and align with who we are.
And so when you base enoughness on money, you generally find yourself wanting and unhappy in the end. And that’s something that I had to learn. It’s certainly something that a lot of us [00:49:00] learn, and that’s some of that dysphoria people have around realizing their financial independence is you then have to transition away from this idea of enough is something you can measure on a ledger or in a bank account and realize it’s a lot more complicated and enough has more to do with a feeling of connection with the world by doing important things.
Captain Fi: Very well said doc. I feel like everyone needs to listen to that, everyone that’s on the path to fire. Maybe you should be teaching this stuff in
Jordan: schools. Well, , you try. The problem I find with young people and teaching about personal finance or any of this is.
It’s really hard to be engaged when you’re young. That’s just not where your brain is, so my brain wasn’t there in high school. And even in college, you start to really contemplate these things as I think you reach some of those later decades, thirties and forties. Maybe you had kids, maybe you’ve been working for a while and have started to feel some of that drudgery of doing something you don’t like to do.
It’s really hard to get young people to [00:50:00] connect to these things cuz they haven’t had the experiences yet.
Captain Fi: Yeah, it’s like the catch 22. They haven’t had the experience to trigger these conversations and learning these skills. But , I guess the irony is that if they did as you mentioned, in your twenties, it’s a good time to be working really hard and investing really hard.
You can potentially become financially independent in your early thirties or forties. And it can have a profound impact on your life.
Jordan: Most definitely. Yeah, most definitely.
Captain Fi: Now, look Doc, this wouldn’t be the Financial Independence podcast. If I didn’t ask you a little bit about your finances, are you okay if I ask a couple of questions about your investments?
Sure. Okay. So first up what do you invest in and
Jordan: why? So for me, I am definitely an index investor. Broad based indexes, total stock market indexes, some bonds. I’ve got a decent cash allotment. And then above and beyond that, some real estate investing. And obviously [00:51:00] the house I live in, et cetera. I don’t do many alternatives, although for the fun of it.
I’ve been thinking about going back to something I was passionate about as a kid, which is baseball cards, cuz I loved collecting baseball cards when I was a kid. So I’ve thought about maybe taking a percentage or two of my portfolio and putting it towards buying some investment grade baseball cards from the long distant past.
But that’s more of a passion project than it is a financial one. But yeah, I have a very vanilla portfolio, very straightforward, very low cost, very low maintenance,
Captain Fi: efficient. Maybe that’s just what the doctor ordered. Now I’ve got some Pokemon cards sitting in the back of my cupboard and I’m quietly, I hope that one day they’re gonna be worth a lot of money, but I’m not sure I’m too scared to, to crack open the box and actually find what’s in there.
Jordan: Yeah the problem with things like baseball cards is now there’s so much of a stress on grading them, which means little cracks or creases of these things that as kids we never cared [00:52:00] about all of a sudden greatly affect their values. So that’s the only sad part for me because to me was a kid, the joy was in the player and in the history and in the story.
It wasn’t so much what shape the exact card was in. Things
Captain Fi: have changed. Ah, yeah. Oh, I think they used to come around with me in my pocket. So,
Jordan: exactly. That’s good for making money on collectibles. Unfortunately. That’s a big no-no. Yeah.
Captain Fi: It’s funny, I’m just having this memory right.
As a kid, I got in trouble and I wasn’t allowed to , have money because I used to do very irresponsible things with money, and so I got banned from money and I got banned from. Pokemon cards and it built this, like I had this black market of Pokemon cards. Yeah. And I used to like, use them as currency and and yeah, God, I haven’t thought of this in so long.
But yeah, we used to trade them at school and I’d what was it? Like a Venus or something would be worth X amount of Mars bars or, I mean they really were like a currency even back then, which is hilarious. Look, just getting back to your investments, so you mentioned [00:53:00] stocks and bonds.
Do you have a preferred ratio that you keep of say, growth assets to defensive?
Jordan: So I am very growth oriented at this time in my life for a few reasons. One is I have plenty of money and yet I still have income, right? So since I still have income and my wife actually has chosen to keep working as opposed to retire, she still has income.
So we make. More money than we spend. We don’t have to draw down at all from our portfolio. So I’ll continue to be fairly aggressive in my allocation until we get to that point where we need to start spending down. And I’ll plan obviously some time in advance, but then I’ll probably move much more to a bond holding and less to an equities holding.
But right now we’re about 90 10. So 90% growth equities like the total stock market index and 10% is right now is a Vanguard Bond fund. But that will change as I see income decreasing at this point in my life. [00:54:00] There’s no reason not to make money because I’m getting paid to do things I love doing. So as long as that’s happening, I can’t imagine Being as careful as I need to be with my allocation.
Captain Fi: Yeah. Solid choices, man. Very similar to as well, j l Collins famously wrote the Simple Path to Wealth and I think very similar strategies. Tried . And tested and it works. Low cost index fund investing. And during the accumulation phase, like obviously going very heavy on the growth.
I like it. It it also makes me feel validated cause that’s my approach as well.
Jordan: Good. I’m glad. We all agree. And when you find yourself agreeing with J Collins, generally you feel good about it. So,
Captain Fi: oh, the Godfather. Yeah, it was awesome . It was great to be able to chat to him. I was very starstruck.
So look Doc what do your current expenses look like? So you mentioned that you’ve always had really good financial behaviors modeled and you are still able to create income. So with that being said, what are you looking to spend a year and actually , do you have a planned withdrawal rate for if you ever chose to stop working?
Jordan: [00:55:00] So we are different, I think, than most FI or financial independence oriented people cuz we spend tons of money. I’ve always had great financial behavior models for me. In other words, I’ve always saved a lot of money, but we’ve always made a lot of money. So as opposed to giving you specific numbers, I would say that I am probably in the top 98% of spending for people in the financial independence community.
We spend lots and lots of money every year. I don’t like being careful with money. We don’t spend a lot on big things, but don’t pay much attention to spending on small things. And the reason why is we don’t really have to. So I like not paying attention to money very much.
And in fact, I pretty much almost never consider the cost of something when I buy it, or rarely, especially small things. When we get into bigger purchases we do. But we’ve leveraged high incomes in order not to. Worry about such things. So we spend a lot of money safe withdrawal rate. Right now, my safe withdrawal rate is zero.
And that’s because again, we make enough money to cover it. I assume at some point[00:56:00] we will probably have to draw down and when we do, I assume , my safe withdrawal rate will be somewhere around 4% or a tiny bit less. I don’t think we’re gonna have much of a problem because I suspect where we are right now, that spending as much as we wanna spend every year, we’ll never get past 3%.
We’re just not gonna spend that much money. And assuming the stock market goes up over the next 10 to 20 years will probably be even better than that. So I don’t worry about spending, and in fact, we spend, like I said, we spend more, we’re thinking about doing a house remodel, which is gonna be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So we spend, I don’t worry too much about it. We’ve built a life in which we don’t have to really measure our pennies nearly as careful as we used to.
Captain Fi: Yeah that’s brilliant. For me, definitely learning how to spend is I’m having to like deliberately focus and put effort into, spending freely.
And there are a few things that I’m, that I love that I can do now, which is, as you mentioned, I think in your book and on, on your blog, being able to go to a [00:57:00] grocery store and not look at the price of Yeah. The groceries that you’re buying. That is wonderful. That’s something that I’ve previously personally stressed about quite a lot and I’ve always, tried to find the cheapest per unit of whatever it was.
That I was buying. So now it’s awesome. And even I love shopping at Aldi because I’m naturally a frugal person and I think why pay more when you don’t have to? But we live closer to some specialty shops and it’s awesome to just walk down the road and grab something and not, have to hold off and wait for our weekly shop.
So, it’s awesome that you guys have built a life like that. And also note that you’ve mentioned you rarely pay full price for things cause you are quite a savvy shopper as well.
Jordan: Yeah I think we built good habits in, and so we don’t stress about what we spend our money on, but also I think we naturally buy things at good prices and we naturally think very seriously about whether we need something before we buy it.
So, for instance, we have enough money to buy mostly what we want, but. My [00:58:00] wife loves to shop at secondary and thrift shops. She loves to get used clothes, those kind of things. You can find some great deals and in fact, she enjoys getting a good deal, makes it part of the fun of buying the thing. So I think we’ve built some good habits in which allow us not then to even stress about which grocery store we go to or if we decide to eat out an extra night, a week or whatever.
That thing that costs us a little extra money is, if you have great habits to start with, there’s a lot of room to also splurge, which is really nice.
Captain Fi: Yeah, that’s brilliant. So, I mean, the way you talk about it, it feels like it’s come a bit natural to you guys, but is there any work that you’ve had to do I guess with your mindset to deliberately become that way?
Or has it just been more of a natural thing for you?
Jordan: I think it’s both mostly been natural. I think actually the hard thing for me is big purchases. So whereas I don’t even think twice, about $50 here, a hundred dollars here, if you’re talking about buying a 30 or [00:59:00] $40,000 car or buying, a million dollar house, the big purchases are the harder things for me.
That’s where I struggle and sometimes I’ll look at our finances and go, oh, we want this thing and we totally can afford it, but because it’s a bigger purchase, it feels naturally very uncomfortable. So that’s, I think something that’s always gonna be there. The big purchases are hard, the little purchases, I don’t think twice about it.
Yeah.
Captain Fi: Awesome. So I guess that’s a good segue to housing. So are you team pay off the mortgage team, keep the mortgage or team rent vester and why?
Jordan: So we own a house, although, me personally, I love this idea of having as little responsibility as possible. So I love not to own a house or have a condo or something really small.
But I don’t think that’s gonna happen with our lifestyle. We still have a mortgage. We could have paid it off a long time ago, partially cuz of tax benefits, partially because the interest rate is so low and partially just cuz of laziness. We never bothered to pay it off and it doesn’t really affect our lives very much and so we don’t [01:00:00] think about it.
So I haven’t paid it off. There’s just never been a reason to per se. I think you have to do whatever feels good for you, right? So the numbers would tell you if you have a low interest rate mortgage, that you shouldn’t pay it off quickly that you can still in the US benefit from some tax issues.
But you have to measure that versus emotionally. Some people just feel happier when they don’t have that debt. And so I think either is fine. I think the step that we all need to make is being thoughtful about these things to then start working towards a better financial future. You can get there either way, paying off the mortgage quickly or not.
The mistake people make, the real big mistake is not thinking about it at all.
Captain Fi: That’s a good one. So Doc I usually ask people, what early retirement might look for them, but it sounds like , you’ve already got it sussed. You’ve taken stock and you’ve designed a life that you love.
So I guess I’ll ask what does the future hold for you?
Jordan: So at this point in time, I plan hopefully [01:01:00] to keep on doing the podcast as long as it speaks to me and is a pleasure. I am working, hopefully on starting on a new book. And then we’ll see, I’ve got a child who’s about to go off to college and then another one in high school.
So I would expect that at some point we live in Chicago, which has really cold winters. So I’d expect at some point that we’ll probably spend our winters somewhere else, a little more tropical. But I think I’m gonna keep creating, and I’ll probably keep doing hospice work as long as I can, right?
So I work for a company, I’m a consultant. So the problem with anything in medicine is we’ve all become, Pretty much pawns in the corporate chill game, right? Because most of medicine has become corporate. So I will work as long as I can until some rule or some ethical thing or some payment issue makes it untenable.
But I’m hoping to continue keeping my toe dipped in medicine for as long as I can and then doing these passion projects, these things that just speak to my soul
Captain Fi: well I wish you all the best, man. I’m [01:02:00] looking forward to listening to your future episodes, and I already can’t wait , if it’s anything like taking, so I’m really looking forward to book number three.
Jordan: Well, thank you very much. And yeah I love this idea that I could spend the next decade or so writing books. I’d love to do that.
Captain Fi: So I guess speaking of books one of the best things that we can do on our sort of self-education journey is to look at what clever and successful people are doing so we can emulate them.
And I think it’s especially true when it comes to self-education. So with that in mind, do you have any favorite resources that you’ve had like books, blogs, or podcasts that you’ve found particularly useful?
Jordan: So this is always a hard question for me cuz I have tons of them and all these people are my good friends, right?
So how do you not mention your good friends? So I’ll say that there’s some great books out there that I think are timeless. Like J Collins book, the Simple Path to Wealth like Grant SI’s book, financial Freedom. But I’ll tell you the book that I’ve been most impressed with recently is I just interviewed Nick Majuli, who wrote [01:03:00] a book called Just Keep Buying and.
It was a wonderful book, and the problem with personal finance books is it’s really easy to write a me too book, right? A general finance book that tells you how to accumulate wealth and deal with your credit scores and buy real estate and all that kind of stuff that we’ve seen or heard before. Just keep buying is a unique take on personal finance and really speaks to, I think, some of those commonly held beliefs that may or may not be true.
So, if you’re out for a recent good book, especially if you’ve read some of the real, basic or stock financial books, this is a nice twist.
Captain Fi: All right. Yeah, I haven’t read that last one. And I’m gonna put that on my list and I’m really looking forward to
Jordan: it. And yeah, for, in, for instance, he even goes into one chapter.
He goes into why credit card debt might not be as bad as we think. So you’ve never heard any other personal finance people.
Captain Fi: Oh, yeah. That’s spicy.
Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Captain Fi: Cool. And hey, I mean, geez, with over 400 episodes of your [01:04:00] podcast, I would just say that I think people should go and have a listen to earn and invest.
And no doubt you’ve, in, you’ve interviewed a lot of other podcasters, so that definitely can get people chasing down rabbit holes if they’re looking for podcasts
Jordan: to listen to. Yeah, we always coming up, hopefully with new episodes, interesting people, and interesting conversations. Again, this is the 2 0 1 conversation.
What do we do with all this knowledge we’re accumulating? How do we use it to make our life better? Love it.
Captain Fi: So look if you didn’t like the previous question, you gonna hate this one doc. Everyone hates the last question, right? If we could distill, I guess, your financial message into three sound bites or three pieces of advice that you could give for someone pursuing financial independence, what would you say to them?
Jordan: Three sound bites. Put purpose before money to build a financial framework. And then three, use money as a tool to live your [01:05:00] goals.
Captain Fi: Love it. Purpose before money. Build a financial framework and use money as a tool. Brilliant. Doc, thanks so much for coming on today. Before we finish up is there anything else you’d like to mention today that we might have missed and where can listeners find out more about you or contact you?
Jordan: No, I don’t think we missed anything. I think this was a wonderful conversation. The best way to learn about me and all the content I put out there is go to Jordan grumet.com. That’s j O r d A N G r u m e t.com. That will connect you not only to the book taking stock, which if you were stimulated by this conversation, maybe you’ll pick it up, as well as the other ways in which I create content.
There are really three of them. The first is a medical blog called, in My Humble Opinion, I don’t write there anymore, but there are literally years of blog posts there. The second is a financial blog called diversify.com. And last but not least, the Earn and Invest podcast. You can find that [email protected].
Awesome.
Captain Fi: [01:06:00] I’ll put the links in the show notes. So if anyone’s listening today and they wanna see Jordan’s blog and listen to the podcast, earn and Invest just head onto the website in the show notes, just above the transcript. There’ll be links to all of Jordan’s websites. And , are you on social media?
Do you have Facebook and that kind of stuff?
Jordan: I am. So Twitter is at Earn and Invest. No D though. E A r n a N i, NV e s t because Earner and Invest was taken, same with Instagram at Earn and Invest. And then on Facebook, because I couldn’t go by my moniker, which is Doc G and at the time I was anonymous they made me pick a name, so I picked Doc Green.
But there’s the Earn and Invest Facebook group is there too, as well as I’m at Doc Green.
Captain Fi: Okay. And it’s funny, I’ve been through the similar things trying to set up social media for my blog as well, mate. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll put the links on there, so definitely jump on the site. Check it out. Jordan, mate, it’s been an absolute [01:07:00] pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate everything that you’ve done, especially in your professional career and in your second career becoming a financial expert. Mate, you’ve already given back so much to the community and I’ve really enjoyed the stuff that you’re producing. So really deep felt thank you very much.
From the bottom of my heart, mate,
Jordan: it’s my pleasure. Thank you for the great conversation. I
Captain Fi: look forward to keeping tabs and having a listen to new episodes as they come out. And yeah, looking forward to this third book. Can you give us a teaser? What’s it gonna be on?
Jordan: So there are two book ideas I’m really working on right now.
One is completely off topic, which is our healthcare system. What’s gone wrong with it and how do we fix it? The one that may be more likely to be written will be a follow up on taking stock, which really focuses on purpose and how we get purpose wrong and why it causes purpose anxiety as opposed to why it’s helping us live a better life.
And last but not least, why getting purpose right can leave a [01:08:00] legacy that lasts well after we die. Wow.
Captain Fi: Yeah. I’m looking forward to reading them. I think they sound like they could be pretty powerful topics. That’s my hope. Yeah. Awesome, dude. Well, once again, thanks very much for your time. Really appreciate it and hope you have a wonderful day mate.
Jordan: Thank you. And thank you for having me.
Captain Fi: Thanks for listening to another episode of the Captain Fire Financial Independence Podcast. To read the transcripts or check out the show notes, head over to www.captainfire.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 or get in touch through the socials. I’m active on Facebook and Instagram, as well as a number of online finance and investing forums. And finally, [01:09:00] remember the information presented on the show and the links provided are 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.
