Transcript
Speaker: Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr makes every stage of the podcasting production process, from recording to distribution, so easy.
Speaker: Use the link in the description to access discounted subscriptions. Hello and welcome to Rest and Recreation, the work-life balance podcast from Abbasida.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward. Today, Angela Tipton from FireYourCareer.com. is going to be helping me to understand how to live within your means so that you can live life on your terms.
Speaker: Angela is based in Oregon in the western United States. It is not a place that I have been lucky enough to visit, but if I ever am lucky enough, I will make my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club.
Speaker: Because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases. You can also access those trade prices on travel by joining the Ultimate Travel Club. And to make that easy, there is a link in the description which has a built-in discount.
Speaker: Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of Rest and Recreation that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: As with every other episode of Rest and Recreation, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, Angela.
Speaker: Hello, Michael. How are we today? Doing great. How are you doing? It's great to be here. butra It's great that you're you're able to join me all the way from Oregon. It sounds very much like the best westerns were made in Oregon. it's Wide open spaces and lots of fresh air, I should imagine.
Speaker: It is. It is a place to be for outdoor activities. You have the ocean and you have the mountains. It's wonderful. bit of everything then. That's great. Please, could we start by you explaining a little bit about your career and how you ended up doing what you're doing now? Happy to share. So I'll i'll start with my career at the beginning. When I had started my educational journey, i I knew for a very long time. It's funny that I knew back then because I ended up changing, but I wanted to be a scientist. So I decided that I wanted to pursue a bachelor's to degree in biology after changing my mind a few times. And I got into the field and I worked in a few roles from research and development. I eventually worked my way up to becoming ah a QC lab manager and I worked for a number of
Speaker: Fortune 500 companies as well during that process. And at a certain point, I decided that you know I wanted to do something different. Originally, I had set in mind that I was going to pursue either a master's in science or a PhD. But ultimately, I ended up changing my mind, and I instead decided to pursue an MBA. And I instead got into business, and I made a pivot into marketing. And what this allowed me to do was really gain increases in my income, and which was very fortunate and very helpful because I was paying back large amounts of student debt. By the time i had graduated from my graduate studies between my husband and myself, we had something attuned to about $130,000 worth of debt, which we didn't really pay a lot of attention to initially. We just paid our monthly bills like like anyone usually does without paying it much attention. But there was a ah time period where I was in my accountant's office and here in the U.S. we're only allowed to write off a certain amount of student loan interest every month on our taxes And I held a piece of paper in my hand that described how much I had paid and how much I was entitled to write off. And it was a pretty large number. um i can't remember now. It's been a number of years since then, but it was several thousands dollars ah thousands of dollars worth of interest that I had paid that had just poof, gone out the window.
Speaker: And i I realized that if I had instead spent that money on something else, say, you know, trip, something I could have done so many other things with that money. I I was wasting that money and it was just going out the window. and I decided that i working for the tax man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just going to the tax man. And it it wasn't a fun feeling to realize that I had done that, but at the time it didn't really feel like I had another choice. And, uh, but that was a wake up moment for me. And I decided that something is going to change.
Speaker: What did you decide to change? I decided that we were going to do everything that we could to pay that off as quickly as possible. So by the time we really committed to paying as much as we possibly could into our student debt, I think it had gotten down to about $105,000. And this is around the time that we started our vision board. our vision board was...
Speaker: anything and everything about our dreams for the future, what what we wanted to achieve, trips we wanted wanted to go on different accomplishments we wanted to have, new experiences, in any of that. But one thing that I knew was that was standing in the way or that would help us get there to achieving our goals faster was paying off that student debt. So one of the things that we did was we created a ah chart that showed our balance on a month to month basis of what our student loan total balance was. And so it was about 105 when we started tracking it and it it took a while for us to pay it all down, but
Speaker: At a certain point, we consolidated our student loans, which for us was good because it allowed us to bring the interest down on our our total student loans. So the money that we were paying every month went more to the total balance rather than just the interest. But then we also took on extra jobs and we really made some sacrifices with our lifestyle so that we could put as much money as we could into our student loans. And at first it didn't go down very quickly, but that last $85,000, we paid off in just 18 months. So I still have a ah picture of that chart to this day.
Speaker: And it does, it starts really, really slowly being paid off, but then at the end it it just gets... annihilated And we did have to make some pretty big sacrifices to to get rid of it. But that alone allowed us to achieve so much more financial freedom. It gave us so much relief from not having to pay off that monthly balance. And we were able to do so many other things with our money after that.
Speaker: Yes, it's amazing how when you say that you want to do something, you can say you want to do it and you're working towards it. But once you start writing down what your objectives are and then creating something like a vision board where you can actually see the pictures of what you are doing. So you're working towards an objective. if You've got some sort of chart or graph that shows your progress towards that. And you've got images of all the things that you're planning to do when you have achieved that objective, but also the things that you're prepared to sacrifice or the extra things that you're doing in order to achieve that objective. If we want to live debt-free, we are going to have to do all these sorts of various different things.
Speaker: I use ah an app called YouRoutine, which does something very similar in that I can create my online vision board with my various different objectives, build a routine around getting towards those objectives. And if I choose to, I can share my objectives and my progress towards them with people that I know who aren't actually with me all of the time so a brother or a cousin on the other side of the world can be supportive of my endeavors I suppose is one the the best ways to describe it but the power of writing down describing an objective increases your chance of actually achieving that objective Agreed. It really does make such a difference when you're trying to figure out your path forward. For instance, I'm pretty deep in the community of FIRE, which stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.
Speaker: One of the things that tends to be a bit of a challenge is that People will get to retirement or they'll get near retirement. These are very ambitious people that are very focused in their careers and working hard. So sometimes you get to this point where you've reached your goal and then the question then is, well, what's next?
Speaker: And I find that a vision board, it really helps you understand your objectives so that you know with that what's what's next far before you get to that point.
Speaker: But then it also helps keep you motivated along the way. And we we experience this, my husband and I experience this on our journey to pay off our student debt. We face some setbacks. We had some unexpected expenses that came up, things that were frustrating and not did ah create challenges for us. But by keeping our vision alive and having our vision board in a place that we could see it, it really helped keep us focused and keep us motivated, even as things were becoming challenging. Yes.
Speaker: I'm remembering a time when I was working in a high tech business as the HR manager for the sales and marketing team and the vice president of sales.
Speaker: wanting to explain to me the type of people that he wanted in his sales team. one of the things he said to me was, I don't want people who want to earn lots of money without a purpose.
Speaker: Interesting. I want people who have a reason to earn lots of money so that they're actually going to be spending it on something. So he was looking for people who had a hobby. I like that.
Speaker: Find out what their hobbies are. The more expensive the hobby, the better. But there had to be a reason but why people worked. There had to be a reason why they did a particular job. There had to be a reason why they wanted to earn a particular amount of money. And it couldn't be that they simply wanted the money or that they wanted other people to be impressed by by them. It had to be that they had something away from work which needed money in order to finance, whether that was their own lives or being a proud parent of someone who was very good at something and needed support in order to fulfill their potential. But the whole sort of
Speaker: being able to visualize why it is that you are doing something, why it is that you were sacrificing, not doing the things that friends would, would have been doing so that you could live debt free essentially.
Speaker: Yeah. I think that is so important because I i will be honest that This journey is is not for everyone. It it is hard and you do have to make sacrifices and you have to decide for yourself that those sacrifices are meaningful and worth it for you. And it it really does start with that vision, that that why, understanding why you're doing that and it is It is a hard journey. it's It's one that not everyone can fully commit to or on the other side of it, sometimes you commit so fully into it that you lose your reason for why. And when you lose yourself in that journey and you lose your why, it it really can
Speaker: be difficult to to re-find it it's not impossible you certainly can but really being clear on your why why you're doing this why you're on this journey really helps feel that and helps keep you going because otherwise it it is it's It can be a difficult journey. You have to make certain sacrifices. And when you're seeing that your neighbor is buying this nice new car or that your friend is going to this really high-end restaurant and you want to go, you need to be able to make those mindful choices and say, yes, this aligns with my vision for the future or no, it doesn't. And this is a cutback and a sacrifice that I agreed to make in favor of this So really what it comes down to is making mindful choices about where your money is going. And now now it doesn't mean that you need to live off of rice and beans forever.
Speaker: I'm not a rice and beans kind of person either. But it does mean that you're very conscious about how you're spending your money, where it's going, what you're committing to and what you're deciding to say no to as well.
Speaker: Yes. When you talk about seeing a neighbor or a relative buying a fancy car or having a social life that involves things which include spending a lot of money, I won't use the word jealous, but I will use the word envious or this fear of missing out type of approach. It's almost as if that expression, keeping up with the Joneses, doing something because someone else is doing it. You made me think as you were talking there that it's not so much about keeping up with the Joneses as keeping up with your vision, keeping up with your why, keeping up with the
Speaker: The vision for how you will live your life on your terms, which is the same as your why, I suppose. Living your life on your terms is fulfilling the why you are doing things, why you want to live a particular way.
Speaker: It's switching the focus. So many people are trying to impress people that they don't really like. know. I know it it seems ironic, but it's true.
Speaker: Yes. We ask children what it is they want to be when they grow up and we're thinking about jobs, but ask a parent what they want for their child in the future and it will be, well, I i want them to be happy and I want them to be healthy.
Speaker: yeah And yeah what is instead of asking people what type of job title that they want when they're growing up, we should be asking them perhaps what is going to make you happy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I agreed. and And getting to your point, Michael, too, i believe fully that if more people could live life on their terms, whether it's following this journey or some semblance of it, I think the world would be a much better, happier place. I think people would feel more joy. They would feel more happiness. And and again, getting to your point about pleasing people,
Speaker: I also consider myself a bit of a recovering people pleaser because it it is just such an easy trap to fall into. you you want to make this person happy. you want to you want to please your parents. You want to do all of these things. But it is a very easy trap to fall into. And some of it is for valid reasons. We are people that are generally very community-minded. And we want to fit in with the community. We want to be part of that, whatever that means. But sometimes that means... that if your community is sharing things with you or setting examples that aren't healthy for you, and and not everyone does, but just just for instance, if a lot of people around us tend to live at or even above our means, and if you have a lot of those examples in your life, it it forms forms as this reference for you in a lot of ways, and it can be hard to make a choice to live differently.
Speaker: It just is. And you have to be really conscious about that. um But it's, it's a choice that you have to make. And if you're the community around you, the people around you aren't making those choices, you might find yourself having to justify the choices you're making. You might have to tell someone why you can't go to this fancy high end restaurant if they go to to, something nice every night or whatever it is.
Speaker: And that can be a painful thing to do. It's, it's uncomfortable. it's It's something that stretches your comfort zone. You don't necessarily know that because those are the people that you associate with.
Speaker: Yes. I've seen statistics which say that the majority of people are about three months away from not being able to pay their mortgage or their rent. Yeah. Which is a scary thought, but it it does bring home the idea that people are living beyond their means. And that's this it's not 100% all of the time wrong.
Speaker: What it is, is though it has to be for a reason. And if that reason is to keep up with the Joneses, I would suggest that people go off and find the Smiths. Absolutely.
Speaker: You know, it is not worth um putting your, you know, it's not worth living a life that other people want to live if it's not the life that you want to live.
Speaker: You you said, yeah, you mentioned that, you fire your career is stands for financial independence, retire early. And so I want to make sure because I think with retirement, that is the a happy retirement, a happy, healthy retirement is the outcome from a career.
Speaker: that's That's why we're working so that we can have a long, happy and healthy retirement. So you know financial independence where you're not actually owing people any money means that you can retire early. Is that right? That's right.
Speaker: Yeah, so so that's ah the basis for Fire Your Career. And really what the platform aims to do is empower more people to live life on their terms. And what I teach people on Fire Your Career is how you can grow a very traditional career to gain financial freedom so that you can make the choice to retire early, if that's important to you. Now, I've worked with a number of very ambitious people that have a hard time envisioning retiring early, which I get and I completely respect. Some people are very satisfied with their careers and just don't want to retire early. However, What I will say is that that RE, the retire early portion, is very optional. What it's very what it's really about is that financial independence so that you have the freedom to choose. So that if at some point, five, 10 years down the road, however it is, if you decide you want to make a pivot in your career, you have that flexibility because you're not tied to your income necessarily. Now, maybe
Speaker: you decide that you're happy in your career up until the traditional retirement age of 65, then by all means, continue working as long as you're satisfied with it. But what it's really about is giving you the choice so that you have that freedom to choose. So I teach people to how to build up their careers, how to gain increases in their income to really help leverage that early portion of financial independence so that you have the income you need to build up your savings and your investments so that you have that freedom to choose. And like I said, it's ultimately about having that choice. And that vision board can help you understand what that vision for the future is.
Speaker: Maybe it is retiring early. Maybe it's deciding to make a career pivot Maybe it's leaning into a passion project that you're really excited about. Maybe it's volunteering or're traveling the world. Or maybe it's just to spend more time with family and relax on the beach and enjoy a traditional retirement. But Fire Your Career really empowers you where you're at and and following a traditional career so that you can gain that level of financial freedom over your life.
Speaker: Yes. When income gives you choices, how you use your income will impact the choices that you have now and the choices that you have in the future. And you've gone through that process of paying off a very large amount of student debt, you and your husband.
Speaker: Can you share some of the things that you did? You mentioned taking on extra work, extra jobs. What sort of things do you do you put into place to make sure that you can... pay off the debt as soon as possible. Yeah, absolutely. So yes, taking on extra jobs and we did also consolidate our student debt, which allowed us to bring our interest rate, which varied. We had a collection of lots of student loans that varied anywhere from 6% interest to 10%. And then we were able to bring that down to roughly 4% for mine and 3% for my husband So what that meant when we consolidated is it meant that a lot less of the money we were putting in every month was going to the interest and instead it was going towards a total balance. So that's one thing we did. We also made some cutbacks and some sacrifices. We didn't take a vacation for number of years. We didn't invest in new projects in our house. We didn't go out to eat. So We really did for a period of years make some pretty serious cutbacks, but that vision for us, that vision for the future made it very worth it. And it was hard. And I'll be honest that there were some times where I thought, you know, maybe we're pushing too hard. Maybe we're working too many hours.
Speaker: And there were some times that we were very exhausted from working the extra jobs and bringing in that extra income. So we were very thoughtful about that. I think,
Speaker: If we were to do it again, i think we would make most of the same choices as we did. i might have us work a little bit less or maybe not quite as many hours because some of those did take a toll on our mental health to some degree. But in the in the end, it did empower us. It gave us so much more financial freedom. We were able to put so much more money into our investments and our savings after that and In the years that have followed, we've been able to really make our investments skyrocket since then, which has been ah really empowering to see. and's It's been and exciting, although at times stressful journey, um but it's been well worth it for us.
Speaker: Yeah, so i suppose when you make the decision to create the vision board of the life that you wanted to lead, the or the life you wanted to have, and then you put in the activities that you're going to do to help you facilitate that lifestyle,
Speaker: When she got to that sort of point of the debt had been paid off, some aspects of that lifestyle had become habits. And that then fosters the ability to do more in the life after the initial objective has been fulfilled. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So it's it's a win-win all round. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it it is. To your point, Michael, it it did allow us to hone in these habits that have really empowered us moving forward. We're very disciplined, for instance, with our savings and investing approach. We are very, very cautious not to take on debt. For instance, we do not take on credit card debt. Now we are in a luxurious position where we don't have to because we've gotten to this point with our finances. And i I know that not everyone is there. But we've been able to avoid just really, really bad debt that would keep us shackled for the long term.
Speaker: Yeah. But I think also one of the points is that you don't have to be wealthy to be able to adopt this type of approach. Not at all. You can do it on any budget. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker: any budget, regardless of what your income is, it's the principles that you apply to how you use your income and how you make your income that create the better chances of your financial independence and retiring on your terms, living, working and retiring on your terms.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. i have heard a number of stories of people that have lower incomes on, say, a janitor or a teacher's salary. that are still able to gain this level of financial independence. Now, having that higher income may help you get there sooner, but what it really comes down to it is that discipline. And it it does not matter where you start from. What matters is how you are mindfully choosing to spend your money that you are mindfully choosing and not just absentmindedly. spending your money in different places, it it really comes down to those choices and consciously choosing to live below your means and not at or above, like like many people do.
Speaker: like most people do, I think, is the vast majority of people are either on their means or very often above their means. And it's it takes a while for understanding how to get back out of that into a more reasonable situation. If someone's sort of interested to find out more, what's the what's the next step for someone to do? Is there a website that they can visit?
Speaker: Yes. Yes. So you can visit my website. It's fireyourcareer.com. It's spelled just like it sounds, F-I-R-E, yourcareer.com. I usually recommend starting with, I have ah a free ebook called Seven Ways to Fire Your Career, which is a really handy guide to help you get started. If you're a little bit further along in your journey, maybe you've already done a good job of negotiating your salary in your career and you're looking for the next thing, whatever that is. I also have a handy resources page. If you go to the start here page on my website, there are a series of articles and you can just select the one that is relevant to you right now. Maybe it is negotiating your salary or maybe you're trying to find a new job or you want a remote job, whatever that is. So I have a series of different articles that can help you wherever you're at.
Speaker: That sounds great. You know, Angela, it's really interesting to have this conversation with you. I do appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. It's been great to have a chat with you.
Speaker: Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of Rest and Recreation, I have been having a conversation with Angela Tipton about how to fire your career and live within your means so you can live on life on your terms.
Speaker: You can find out more information about both of us at abbasida.co.uk. There's a link to that website and also to Angela's website in the description. Of course, when you're living life on your terms, you want to be healthy. And one of the best ways to stay healthy is to know the risks early. That is why we recommend the health tests from York Test and especially the annual health test.
Speaker: The annual health test from York Test provides an assessment of 39 different health markers, including diabetes, cholesterol levels, various vitamin levels, organ functions, and includes a full blood count.
Speaker: The annual health test is conducted by an experienced phlebotomist who will complete a full blood draw at your home or workplace. Hospital standard tests are carried out in a UK AS accredited and CQC compliant lab. You can access easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes anytime by your secure personal wellness hub account.
Speaker: There is a link and a discount code in the description. I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of Rest and Recreation as much as Angela and I have enjoyed making it.
Speaker: So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abusida. is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
Speaker: Until the next episode of Rest and Recreation, thank you for listening, and goodbye.
