Who wants to become a millionaire within four years?
There is one couple that has done this, Mr. and Mrs. 1500.
In today's video, you are going to learn the five steps that Carl
and Mindy took to become millionaires within just four short years. Or in other words,
within fifteen hundred days. And retire at age 43,
and I'm just going to say, you definitely don't want to miss out on step 5.
The very last step because this one is really powerful,
but people forget about it all the time.
I am Tiffany Thomas with wealthytiffany.com
and I achieved financial freedom and I became a millionaire.
If you are looking to do one or both of those things,
hit that like button and hit the subscribe button and we're going to dive right in.
Alright. Carl's and Mindy's story starts with Carl being at work and having a horrific day,
which I'm sure we can all relate to,
but he was just thinking that he didn't want to work at this
job until 62 or 65, whatever age people retire.
And he was only 38 at this time when he was thinking I don't really want to be here,
another 20 plus years. So he was really inspired by the idea of retiring early.
So they vowed to build a portfolio worth 1 million dollars and not have any debts.
And they were going to do this within fifteen hundred days, about four years.
And they actually achieved their goal even earlier than they thought they would.
And as they talk about on their blog. They say that
all it takes is smart decisions, along with intelligent saving and investing.
So I think this is possible for all of us. So,
let's dive into their five steps.
Their first step was to figure out exactly how much money they needed to retire
comfortably. And this is where we should all start.
We need to know exactly what it is we are working toward, how much money
we're going to need in order to live comfortably.
So they started analyzing all of their spending habits.
And the way they did that was to write all of their expenses in a book.
Every time they returned from shopping or paid a bill,
they logged it. And for me personally,
I don't like writing down all of my expenses,
so, I like to use a free app it is called Personal Capital.
You can hook all of your financial accounts to Personal
Capital and then you can see your full financial picture in just one place.
So you can see all of your expenses and all of the income that you have coming in
in just one place. So, if you did take a shopping trip, and you used one credit card,
you would see that transaction in Personal Capital.
And then, if you took another shopping trip later on and used a different credit card,
you would also see that in Personal Capital.
So you don't have to log in to a bunch of different accounts
or write down every time you spend money.
So that is something that I find really convenient.
If that's something you're interested in, I will leave my referral link below in the description.
You can click on that to set up a free Personal Capital account
If you would like to. Once they knew all of their expenses,
then they needed to figure out what amount they really wanted to live on,
that would be comfortable
for them. And they specified they could live on twenty-four thousand dollars a year,
but they wanted to be safe,
so they added a six thousand dollar cushion
and bumped that up to 30,000 dollars a year
and then they used what is called the 4% rule to figure out the total amount
they would need invested in order to retire early.
And I've actually talked about the 4% rule in another video.
So I'll leave a link to that above and below.
But essentially, if you take your annual expenses and multiply that by the number 25,
that is going to give you your financial freedom number.
The amount of money you need to have invested in order to retire early
so that you can live off of your investments only.
So for them, that number is eight hundred thousand dollars,
which would Include having zero debt,
but then he thought, you know what? I want to help my children go through college,
so he decided to bump that number up to 1 million dollars.
Comment below and tell me if you have figured out your financial freedom number yet.
They figured out exactly how much they would need to put
aside each month in order to reach this goal.
So they committed to putting two thousand dollars a month toward their investments, which
when they started this they were at five hundred
and seventy thousand dollars invested.
And if you do want more details about how they created that initial
investment amount, that 570,000, they do have more details on their blog,
which is 1500days.com.
So definitely check their blog out. Now that they had the exact number
they were working toward in order to retire early.
They moved to step number two, which is to track their expenses and cut their spending.
Since they had already established that they would invest two thousand dollars a month.
They immediately looked for ways to cut back on their expenses,
and they also recommend writing down each of your expenses.
So that you can really see how much you are spending and where you can save your money.
And like I mentioned before, you can also do that electronically if you want to.
And then they were surprised by what they found.
They said, wow we spent that much on groceries.
What were we thinking? After you do that,
evaluate every one of those line items and see how you can cut those down.
And I think this is really true. Once you start tracking your spending,
you are going to have those thoughts of. Oh,
I spend that much on eating out, or on shopping,
whatever it is, and you might even realize that you have some
subscriptions that you aren't even using.
So you can immediately get rid of those subscriptions and cut your costs.
And then step number three is really impressive because I feel like not
everyone is willing to do this. They downsized,
once they made that decision to retire early,
they sold their 5,000 square foot lake house in Wisconsin
and bought a 1400 square foot Fixer-Upper in Colorado.
So they made a pretty drastic change going from a huge house that was on the lake, which
was a great setting and then moving to a completely another state and downsizing
quite a bit. But it was totally worth it because now they had a lot smaller mortgage.
And Carl even says that the added 3,500 square feet added
absolutely nothing to my happiness.
So that just goes to show that spending a lot of money isn't
always going to bring you more happiness
and also they bring up a really great
point because if you are focusing on the largest expenses that you have,
which is usually your housing, transportation, and food.
Those are going to drastically
cut your costs because they are such huge expenses.
So if you focus on those three in the beginning,
you are going to make really big wins
really quickly. And they say one of the reasons they moved to Colorado was
because the cost of living is lower there.
So that would make it easier
for them to retire in their 40s rather than living in an expensive city like San Francisco.
Take a minute and think about where you live currently,
how high is the cost of living there?
And would you be willing to move to a different place?
Where the cost of living would be a lot lower so that you could save a lot more money?
And then step number four, and this one is pretty popular.
They decided to increase their income.
The ways that they were able to do, that was through the blog that they have.
And Carl also fixes up homes and writes smartphone apps.
And then Mindy, who was previously a stay-at-home mom landed
her current job as a writer for a real estate investing
website through their blog. And they both plan to continue working on the side in retirement.
Also, they made some smart investments along the way,
including buying that fixer up home
for a hundred seventy six thousand dollars, that they now estimate is worth over 400,000.
And since this article was published a while ago.
It's probably worth a lot more now. They also invested in the stock market
and while they don't recommend picking individual stocks, but they did luck out
with Facebook. But they now recommend investing in a low-cost index funds,
which I definitely do. And if you want to know my favorite fund,
I do have a video for you. I'll leave a link above
and below. And they also know that
whether or not you invest in real estate,
or the stock market, or neither the point is that focusing on increasing earnings is
just as important as saving.
So you don't want to be increasing your income and then increasing your spending.
That's not going to do you any good and it will not help you get to financial freedom sooner.
So make sure when you are increasing that income,
that you are, either keeping your expenses
the same. Or even lowering your expenses. Comment below
and tell me if you have a favorite way that you've been able to increase your income,
whether that was starting your own business or doing a side hustle or even just working overtime?
I'm curious to know different ways that you've been able to increase your income.
And this brings us to step number five, which is very powerful.
They were able to change their mindset about money.
Mindy says, I learned that you don't need a lot of money.
My quality of life is not changed since we became laser focused
on cutting out our expenses. I don't need the cable TV.
I don't need a super expensive phone plan.
I don't miss all of this stuff because it didn't really add to my life.
And this is really powerful, because a lot of people forget about this.
They think that making more money will make them even happier
but really happiness comes from within.
And yes, there is a certain amount of money that you can make in
order to bring a certain amount of happiness,
and I do have a video about that. So I'll leave a link for you above and
below. But it's not about continuing to increase your income
and just make more money and then spend all of that money on
things that aren't even really important to you
and just trying to fill some sort of void, or avoid the real issue at hand.
The real problem that someone has. Money is a tool.
It is a resource. And if we use that tool wisely,
then yes, we can be happy. But if that is our main focus,
we are going to have a lot more problems than we think
and you can really tell that from their story where she says
that she doesn't miss all of those extra things.
They weren't even bringing joy to her life.
So, make sure that you have the right mindset about money.
And I can see how people can get caught up in,
making more and more money. And that is their main focus.
I mean, we see that all the time on social media, on different Instagram accounts,
how much money people are making
and the luxurious lifestyles that they are living. And then we can get caught up and think,
oh, I want to live in a beautiful big house like that on the ocean and then we kind of forget,
oh, well, is that really important to me?
Do I really want a big large house that I have to clean all of the time?
And do I even like living by the ocean? Maybe I don't even like
hearing the waves all night, or having sand everywhere.
So try not to get caught up in all of the hype
and just making more money thinking that is going to bring you more and more happiness.
Focus on what is really important to you, on your priorities.
Comment below and tell me which of these was your favorite step to becoming
a millionaire and retiring at age 43?
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Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video.