 Welcome everyone to the 53rd edition of Bogle Heads on Investing. Today our special guest is J. L. Collins. He is the author of the best-selling book, The Simple Path to Wealth, and a leader in the fire community. Hi everyone, my name is Rick Ferri and I'm the host of Bogle Heads on Investing. This episode, as with all episodes, is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a nonprofit organization that is building a world of well-informed, capable, and empowered investors. Your tax-deductible contributions are greatly appreciated. Visit BogleCenter.net where you will find a treasure trove of information including transcripts of these podcasts. Today our special guest is J. L. Collins. J. L. has been publishing his blog on jlcollinsnh.com since 2011 and in 2016 wrote the international best-selling book, The Simple Path to Wealth, your roadmap to financial independence and a rich, free life. So far a half a million copies have been sold worldwide. He's also written two other books. One is a book on real estate and the other is to be published in 2023. I greatly enjoyed my conversation with J. L. and hope you do too. So with no further ado, let me introduce J. L. Collins. Welcome to the Bogle Heads on Investing podcast. Rick, thank you for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here. Well, I'm great to finally have a chance to sit down and talk with you about your books and all the work that you've done on Simple Investing and with the fire movement, which we'll get into in a little bit. But before we do that, you and I are close to the same age and let's say that we're, you know, on Medicare. So before either one of us got into talking about investment things and finance things, we did other things. So could you tell us a little bit about your journey and what brought you to this career and what you did before then and your younger days? You're talking about my professional career in my younger days? Your professional life before you became a financial guru. Wow. I cringe at the term guru, but... Oh, okay. Well, I'll take that back. Yeah, just take that. Great time. I thank you for it. That's a nice compliment. No, I was in the magazine publishing business until 2011 is when I finally left my last corporate job in business to business magazines. I started on the sales side and then I became a publisher and wound up my career back in the sales side of things. And you were an English major back in college? I was an English major, absolutely. Well, that certainly comes out in your writing because when I read anything that you wrote, it's so crystal clear, unambiguous. You have a really great talent for writing, making very complex things simple. You're very kind to say that. Actually, I would say that I got my start writing, I suppose, as an English major, but to the extent that I have any ability in writing, I think it was a skill I developed in business, writing business letters and proposals and that kind of thing where you do have to be clear and succinct. And so, yeah, I think that's to the extent that I have that ability. I actually honed it in my decades in business. You wrote The Simple Path to Wealth and you've sold half a million copies and it's still selling strong. I found myself the other day when a client of mine asked me, my young son is just graduated from college, can you recommend a book? The first one that came out of my mouth was The Simple Path to Wealth because it's so easy to read. It's a great book for people who are just getting started. It clears up a lot of misconceptions. In fact, when I read all of the accolades in your book from the various financial bloggers out there, everyone said the same thing, that you were able to take something that was very complex and make it very simple for somebody who is new to all this and overwhelmed by all of the acronyms and terms and all the stuff that Wall Street throws at you. You're able to cut through all of that, just get right down to the bottom line with the way you write and that comes out very clearly in The Simple Path to Wealth, which we'll get into in a minute. Before we get there, I do have some more questions about the earlier background and I'd like to hear about how you ended up coming to the altar, if you will, of index investing and all of the mistakes du jour that you may have made prior to getting there. Yeah, well, the answer to that question is kind of embarrassing. You know, strictly by chance, I started investing in 1975 and that was, of course, the year that Jack Bogle brought out the very first index fund. My excuse for not investing in it right away is that I just didn't know that. But about 10 years later in the mid-80s, a friend of mine who was a financial analyst and I were talking and he was the one who introduced me to this whole concept of indexing, investing in efficient markets and all that kind of stuff. I was a stock picker in those days and by extension I would pick actively managed funds that were run by stock pickers. And actually, I did pretty well. In fact, my dirty little secret is I achieved financial independence doing that, not through indexing. So the key is it's not like picking stocks or active management doesn't work. It's just that indexing works better more easily and it's a whole lot less expensive. So I learned about it in the mid-80s, but I was not smart enough candidly to make the change then. It took me another probably 15 years, probably not until 2000 before I switched over to indexing and, you know, it was a slow transition. I think pretty quickly, once I embraced it, indexing was doing the heavy lifting, but I probably... I'm trying to think of the last individual stock I owned was probably as recently as 2013 somewhere in there. So I had and have the disease. I'm kind of a recovering stock picker. You know, it's interesting that you said it took you about 15 years. It's not unusual and I hate using double negatives for someone to hear about indexing and not right away have that aha moment. It took me, I mean, I worked in the industry for eight years before I had my aha moment and prior to that I was also trying to figure out which mutual funds were going to outperform and I had my bout of picking bad stocks and all of that. You know, you hear about indexing. Okay, it's there. It doesn't really mean that much. You kind of go on to the next thing and then you circle back. In fact, I didn't really embrace indexing until I had read every other book out there on investing and finally the last book on the bookshelf at Barnes & Noble was Jack Bogle's book, Bogle on Mutual Funds. And that was in 1996 and then I picked up that book and finally read it and then it finally dawned on me. I had my aha moment. It's like, wow, this is pretty powerful stuff. I was a financial advisor at the time and you must have worked with some financial advisors during your lifetime as well, correct? I don't, never have. Oh, good for you. Yeah. That's one disease I've never had. Okay. Well, you have some things to say about financial advisors in your book and it all centers around the same thing that I talk about. I am a financial advisor, been with it 35 years, but you talk about the complexity of the industry and how that might be intentional. Can you elaborate on that? Well, yeah, I think that just in general, I think one of the reasons that most people are intimidated by investing is that there's a lot of jargon surrounding it and Wall Street is filled with genuinely complex investments. I mean, they've created investments notoriously when led up to the 0809 crash that they didn't understand themselves and they were still selling and marketing to people who obviously didn't understand them either. And these were professionals. And I think that happens for a couple of reasons. One, the more complex an investment is, the more you could charge for it. And the more you can convince people that you just need to go with the program and pay our fees and we'll take care of it and don't worry, you're pretty well ahead about it. But I contend that the vast majority, in fact not the vast majority, I'll go so far as to say 100% of those complex things, you can put your arm on the table and sweep them all onto the floor and leave only that corner with the simple, broad-based, low-cost index funds because that's all you need. I've been asked in the past, why is your advice so specific? And it's because I'm writing for my daughter. This is exactly what I tell my kid to do. It's about what kicked me in the ass and what's worked. You just recently wrote another book, though, on real estate investing and there, harking back to your previous investments, it was titled, How I Lost Money in Real Estate Before it was Fashionable. And you wrote that back in 2021 and it talks about your trials and tribulations in the rental real estate market, buying real estate and as a landlord. Tell us why you wrote that book and what were some of the main points of it. So I wrote that book because it was kind of fun and it's illustrated with some humorous illustrations. So I wrote it to amuse myself, but also the subtitle is a cautionary tale. It's the story of the first piece of real estate I ever bought which was a condominium and it was an unmitigated disaster from the moment I bought it until the moment I finally got rid of it and in that period of time it was my personal residence initially and then for a variety of reasons it was time to move on from there. I was stuck with it because the condo market in Chicago had crashed and so then it became a default rental and there are a few worse ways to get into rental real estate than by default. So it was, you know, hemorrhaging cash every month in what I've learned since it was called an alligator and alligator is a real estate investment that's eating you alive. Real estate can be a wonderful investment done correctly and if you know what you're doing and you operate it as a business cringe at some of the advice that's out there and this common attitude that it is easy and that it's a slam dunk and it's not. Real estate can be deadly to your wealth but if you take the time to learn how to do it properly and you go into it intentionally looking at whatever you're buying as an investment that meets certain financial parameters then yeah, that can work out very well. If you did it the way I did it that first time yeah, not so much and in my defense by the way I did learn from that experience and I continued investing in real estate for a little while and did much better on those things but eventually I decided it was just way too much like work for my taste and I haven't owned an investment in real estate in decades. A lot of people become interested in real estate because they hear that you can get really great returns from rental properties and that it is a diversification which it's true, both of those things are true but when I asked them so do you want to be a landlord? They say no, not particularly and I said well, okay have you ever been a landlord and they said no, never have how good are you at fixing plumbing not at all, right? I said okay, well you might want to think twice about getting into real estate just because it sounds like it's a great investment and there are other ways of doing real estate through syndicated deals and you could do real estate investment trust mutual funds so I mean if you really want to be in real estate there's other ways but I do have these conversations a lot with people who in my opinion when I talk with them I don't really think they should be getting into that industry and a lot of them do have to back into it and there's a piece of property that didn't get sold usually in a different city sometimes in a different state and they're trying to manage this piece of property and it can be very difficult to do Yeah, that wound up being exactly my case with this condo, you know I also wound up for job career reasons moving away from Chicago so suddenly I owned this thing that at the time was unsellable and you couldn't even get a real estate agent to take the listing or anything about real estate you know that real estate agents all over themselves take a listing but condos in Chicago were so depressed in those days that they wouldn't even take the listing What you just hit on with the fact that the market and real estate was so bad that you couldn't even get a real estate agent to take the listing you know you write a lot to the fire community and they're generally younger investors people who are you know in their 30s, perhaps 40s even their 20s and they're looking to become financially independent not necessarily retire early but they hear the stories and they've seen only really a bull market in real estate for the past 15 years after the financial crisis and haven't really seen what you saw where there are real estate markets where there's no market You're absolutely right you know and of course what you typically hear out there from people touting real estate is the places in the country where it's done really well obviously if you bought San Francisco 10 years ago you've done well if you bought Detroit not so much and there have also been times in history like Chicago back in the late 70s when I had this condo where the condo market in particular didn't exist younger people don't necessarily have the experience or even the awareness that that has happened in the past and can happen in the future Let's move on to your writing you started your blog in 2011 and it was because you were trying to give your daughter good financial advice but why start the blog though to do that What was the first piece of paper? Well, handing her a piece of paper or more specifically a series of piece of paper was actually the plan I had managed to turn her off to all things financial when she was young I just pushed it too hard and too fast because it's so important if you get this stuff right your life is so much better it's so much easier in our modern world your life is real hard so obviously like every parent I wanted the best for my kid and I just pushed it too hard so I found that she stopped listening to me and I had started to write this stuff down so it would be available to her even if I wasn't at some point in the future when hopefully she would be able to hear it and a friend of mine that I shared it was you want to put this on a blog and share it with your friends and family and I'd never actually seen a blog before I'd heard of them so I kind of knew what they were but what appealed to me was not sharing it with my friends and family although I did that this is a great way to archive this information in a way that will be readily accessible to her, to my daughter when the time comes so that's why I chose to put it on a blog in my wildest dreams did I think that people who didn't know me would become my audience for this material you know I sent the link when I put the blog up I sent a link to it around the friends and family and of course none of them cared but then you know it started to develop traction with the wider world and I still am amazed by that but it's been a very gratifying journey well yeah your followers many of them from the fire movement as I said earlier financial independence retire early you and I are alike I think that financial independence is so important but retiring early not so much important I mean you're still working I'm still working but you know the fire movement like we said are a lot of younger people and they took everything you wrote and they adopted it and they just added some fuel to the fire pardon the pun how did they find you I mean all of the people who wrote comments in your book were all young fire enthusiasts like Mr. Money Mustache and so forth and they found you and they started touting you and publishing you or republishing and telling people about you it must have been interesting for you young people when that was all going on yeah it's been wonderful you know I now have friendships with many of these people and I don't think there are very many people my age who have friends who are in their 20s or 30s or 40s so it's been an incredibly gratifying journey it's also led to my third book which I just finished the manuscript on a week ago and that's Pathfinders oh talk about later but if you want sure but yeah it's been an incredible journey one that I didn't anticipate I think the main driver of the blog developing an audience was when I started writing my blog I started paying attention to some of the other blogs that were out there and I came across Mr. Money Mustache and I liked his work and I would make some comments on some of his posts and evidently he liked the comments because one day he reached out to me and he asked me if I would do a guest post on his blog and to give you an idea of how ignorant I was of blogging and the whole concept my initial reaction to that was I didn't say this to him but I'm thinking of course not if I'm going to write a post I'm going to put on my blog I would have posted put on your blog I know that displays an appalling level of ignorance but there you go and that's where I was but finally I reached out to him and I said what exactly do you have in mind and he said well you know you're older than most of the people reading this and you've already walked the path and you know maybe just sort of talk about that and the title of my guest post was it's never been about retirement to our previous thing because for me it never has been about retirement and I think that guest post well I remember I said to him and I said is this kind of what you have in mind and he said yeah this is great I'm going to put it up on Sunday and this was probably on a Thursday and I emailed him and I said great and then Monday it suddenly came oh I wonder if Pete ever put it up on his blog and I logged onto my blog well my traffic had exploded haha okay and then suddenly I realized why it's a good idea to do guest posts on really popular blogs if you're offered the opportunity but yeah I think that was the beginning of my blog getting extended traction in the wider world and then you had more and more followers and grew and grew and then you decided I had enough material I need to put together a book and so what was the idea of this paperback book what was the idea of doing that I think the idea behind that was twofold one and my overarching goal for all this is to have this information available to my daughter so I I had a lot of this information on the blog that it kind of developed organically and I thought wow I do have the material for a book and I can pull this book together and make it more concise better organized polish the writing a bit and now I can have a book that I can hand her in addition to access to the blog and the other factor was I'd always harbored an ambition to write a book probably since my days of being an English major at university and suddenly I had the subject and the material to do it so there you go yeah it's great books that are personal finance books tend to maybe sell if you're lucky and copies and you've sold I know at least a half a million I never dreamed it would be as well received as it was I was just hoping my daughter would read it so have you sold the movie rights yet no and nobody's offered to buy it okay I hope to sell the movie rights because Brad Pitt keeps bugging me to play the lead role and I keep telling Brad just because we look alike doesn't mean you're the right okay and preparing for the podcast of course I go back and take a look at all the notes that I took and as I started to redo the book again I realized I didn't have to go very far I mean you very conveniently put the key information in the first three pages which I really appreciate but do you not want people to read this book because all I have to do is read these pages and it tells me everything at the end of the bookstore and read the first couple of pages this is not good marketing I'm not supposed to do this I'm supposed to wait till the last chapter to find out what the conclusion is and as I read through these it occurred to me very clearly that your ideas and the Boglehead's ideas are very much aligned with with everything starting out right from the beginning we have this 10 10 things that make you a Boglehead and you can see it on video on Boglehead.org website on Boglecenter.net it's just these 10 things and all 10 of those things are in your list so we are right in line with thinking but the first thing you have and I just want to go over a few of these and you could elaborate on them is there's a few key things that make you good with money and I think that the very first one you put up here is spend less than you earn invest the surplus avoid debt now there's three different things there comment on your first point and then we can go to all the points that's the formula and I say in the book that if you do just those three things you'll wind up wealthy and not just in money you'll wind up wealthy in life if you live below your means invest the surplus and avoid debt and of course avoid debt is the first step but yeah that's the formula and then put something in here that needs to be said although a lot of people would never say it I think the benefit that we have of being in our Medicare and overage is that we can say things and people let us get away with it right but you put here avoid fiscally irresponsible people never marry one or otherwise give him or her access to your money that was brilliant I mean I don't know even today if I would actually say that but I guess I could given my advancing age but tell us about this you know so first of all I appreciate the comment that it's brilliant to me it just seems painfully obvious and the idea that it would be controversial to say it is but you're not wrong I have gotten pushback on that very comment there was one woman in particular I forget what format it might have been on my blog or probably was a comment on the blog but she said something effective you lost me immediately the only reason to get married is for love and money should have nothing to do with it or something like that she was very incensed is that if there are problems in a marriage money is most often the most common of all causes of that if you and your spouse are not on the same page when it comes to how you spend and invest your money it's going to be an incredibly difficult path and if God forbid you're married to someone who squanders your money that's a leaky bucket you're never going to be able to fill I said it I stand by it certainly it's the advice I give my daughter and it's the advice I would give anybody but it's not advice that everybody wants to hear or agrees with the next one is something that I agree with even though I am one and I've been one for 35 years it says avoid investment advisors too many have only their own interest at heart and then you go on to say by the time you know enough to pick a good one you know enough to handle your finances yourself it's your money and no one will care for it better than you absolutely true I mean you're not going to hurt my feelings go ahead and tell me about investment advisors well I think that pretty much summed it up you know one thing I will add is during that the big crash in 0809 one of the arguments for investment advisors that I've heard from investment advisors not surprisingly is that well okay you know maybe we're expensive maybe we're not offering investments that you couldn't do less expensive on your own but boy when the market crashes you know we're going to be the one holding your hand and telling you to stay the course and keeping you from making a mistake well absolutely yeah you better pay us a lot of money to do that but it turns out at least statistically speaking that's not true investment advice investment advisors actually annexed more readily than their clients I am shocked so yeah I so now I'm going to go a little bit positive on investment advisors if you have a specific issue that you're dealing with and you want some professional advice then an advisor can be useful I think you should find one that charges by the hour and pay for the advice that you want that was not a paid advertisement not a paid advertisement at all I've had a lot of advisors tell me you know J.L. this hourly thing is you know that's a good idea and maybe that's best for the clients but the clients don't like it because they see that when I send them the bill you know if I'm charging them a fee that comes out you know that's they put a lot more money for me but they don't see it and they're more comfortable with it so I sort of understand with the advisors saying well you know I can go for this I can charge fees that the customer really doesn't see that put a lot more money in my pocket or I can charge an hourly amount that's less money to the customer but that they do see and that they're going to complain about I mean I can kind of see it from the advisors point of view too but I'm not writing for advisors I'm writing for the clients well sure you're writing for individual investors and by the way I mean the whole bogal has is about you know individuals managing their own money basically although there are some who will use an advisor and some who need an advisor for various reasons because they need to have a professional by the trust document or whatever particular document is driving those investments or maybe they've come of age where they can no longer manage their own portfolio you don't feel comfortable there might be some cognitive decline there and they're worried about their spouse or their family managing the money so they find an advisor that is reasonably priced maybe a flat fee advisor who'll manage the money for a low fee you know using the same ideas that they have so and most people probably listen to this podcast they're going to do it themselves but there are reasons why people hire an advisor but they do need to the one that fits their need right let me go on to the next thing you own the things you own and they in turn own you now a lot of people talk about boats but I think you're talking about a lot of things right you elaborate on that one owning things takes time and energy and the more things you own the more of your life they they occupy and you know the title of my book is the simple path to wealth I believe in simplicity in life you know in organizing my finances the way I have when I pass on it will be a lot easier for my wife and my daughter because I don't have a multiple houses I don't have boats I don't have all this stuff I had a friend of mine who was a client of mine actually back in the day and you know he liked to go out and pick things and buy things and he had a a barn that was just full of stuff that he found and bought in the store and I remember I said to him at one point do you ever selling this stuff and his reply was theoretically and I said what's going to happen when you die by the way he has passed away since when you die I said well you know what's your wife going to do with this you said well that's their problem but it is a problem I mean so I just I want my life as simple as unencumbered as possible now having said all of that I know people who own lots of stuff and as far as I can tell are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement it doesn't seem to bother them at all maybe they don't know how they do it it would drive me up the wall but yeah I think that when you own things then they're part of your life and they wind up owning you so I saw a cartoon recently and it was a picture of an older gentleman standing in front of a storage unit and the storage unit was open and all of this junk was in the storage unit paper and books all this stuff flowing out of the storage unit and it's clearly just junk and he's talking to his son and he says to his son some day son this will all be yours and this is a look on the son's face as he's looking at all this you could have all of this stuff when you're alive but please get rid of it before you die because it's going to end up just creating a real mess for whoever has to clean up your estate very good anyway next thing you put in here savings rate and you talk a lot about savings rate in your book and you wrote try saving and investing 50% of your income with no debt this is perfectly doable and I'm assuming you meant 50% of your after tax income you put down the beauty of a high savings rate is two fold you learn to live on less even as you have more to invest so comment on a high savings rate and the extra benefit of a high savings rate so first of all this is another thing that I got a lot of pushback on I mean I've had people say that I don't put any credence in this book the simple path to wealth he lost me the moment he said nobody can possibly say 50% of their income so there is a contingent of people who come across that idea and just dismiss it out of hand as being impossible by the same token especially in the fire community I have people routinely say to me 50% that's way too low I've saved 60% 70% 80% you know I mean it's way too low JL you know so it's certainly 50% is absolutely doable I've done it there are lots of people who tell me that it's much too modest because they're doing something considerably considerably larger percentage it's just a matter of how you organize your life and you know when I got out of college and I got my first professional job in these I was making $10,000 a year and I thought to myself you know there are people out there living on $5,000 a year and there's no reason I can't do that and that's what I did and I had a perfectly good life doing it not as extravagant as some of my friends who were spending all their money but it was I had a great young adulthood and then I invested the rest of it and then as my income grew and I was making $20,000 now my lifestyle had also doubled because I'm spending $10,000 and my investments doubled so I think 50% for me is a sweet spot but again I get it from both directions that nobody can do that at all and nobody should only save 50% they should be saving much more so I'm caught in the middle okay so I'm going to deviate a little bit from this list and talk about how much is enough so you're saving 50% it's accumulating you're putting it in index funds it's growing you're reaching this FI financial independence stage but how much is that well that's a very individual thing so as you mentioned as you know when you're talking about the savings rates one of the beauties of having a high savings rate is you learned that you're living on less and you figure out at least I did that you can have a very enjoyable life let's say you're making $100,000 a year so you're spending $50,000 you can have a very enjoyable life spending $50,000 I did back in those days and that also means that $50,000 is now if you want to continue having that same life that's the amount of money you need in retirement and it's a whole lot easier of course to have enough money to generate $50,000 than it is $100,000 the basic formula is what's come to be known as the 4% rule which says if you have enough money that you can live on 4% of that drawn each year then you are financially independent so if you have a million dollars and you can live on 4% which is $40,000 you have enough you're financially independent or you turn the math around and you say I'm living on $40,000 how much do I need you multiply that by 25 you get a million it's the same thing so that's the basic formula let me ask you about social security I'm not taking it yet but you are there and you're married so your wife is getting social security also either on her own or a spousal benefit I believe social security is going to be around for us who are Medicare age and older but a lot of young people have a belief that it won't be there it's going to be non-existent everything that we paid in is just going to be a tax or it's going to get cut so considerably that I can't even factor it into my retirement program I think that's a little overstated how do you feel about younger people saying it's not going to be there or it's not going to be enough to make any difference in my retirement so I actually wrote a post about this a number of years ago and it's a chapter in the book so my post was had to be before 2016 and I would say the same thing today that I said in that post which is when I was young I also had no confidence that social security was going to be around and I invested my money assuming that it wouldn't be and if it was that it would just be kind of a nice benefit well now I'm drawing social security as is my wife so obviously it is around and I'm surprised candidly at how generous it is and you were never intended to do social security by the way but we have a pretty modest life we do a lot of traveling if you pulled that travel off and we have a paid for house we probably live on social security without a problem so I'm kind of stunned that it was how generous it is in my retirement my advice to young people would be I guess I'm kind of conservative to invest assuming that it's not going to be around but my bet would be that it will be in some format because doing away with social security would be such a politically different thing difficult thing to do because you know old people vote oh yes absolutely and you know politicians the thing that politicians care about is their keeping their position staying a politician staying a politician and you know because those are pretty sweet gigs yes and most politicians don't want to give them up and you know if you start talking about doing away with social security or severely cutting it even if that's the right fiscal thing to do for the country you're going to lose your job or there's a high likelihood of it so that means that my guess is somehow we're going to figure out how to keep social security going but so my you know my advice is hey assume it's not going to be there my guess is like me when the time comes you'll be pleasantly surprised I agree with what you just said and I believe that number one for at least for people who are say over the age of 50 social security is not going away oh absolutely it may changed a little bit but not much for many people in this country who that's all they have is social security so it's not going anywhere but for younger people if you want to calculate in a 20 or 25 percent reduction and what you would get today I think that's reasonable but I work with a lot of young people and they put down zero you know none we're not going to get any and I think that's I think that is a little unrealistic you are going to get something it may not be exactly the benefits that are given today and they are quite generous as you said especially if you have a spouse who doesn't have a work history and can get a spousal benefit it's kind of amazing you look at it I get my regular social security and my spouse who isn't didn't work enough quarters to get it herself she's going to get 50 percent of my full retirement amount when she hits full retirement age where does this money come from she didn't put any money in I didn't put any extra in where does it come from so it comes from other people if I make one final comment and this is probably going to be germane to the sort of people who will be listening to this podcast and I think it's a little bit of bad news my best guess is the way they will solve social security in the future is if you are wealthy they will take it away from you and so the kind of people who listen to a podcast like this and who read my book and what have you are probably going to wind up pretty wealthy when they retire because these approaches work and already if you look at what they do with social security and I feel this myself if you have been successful in your life your social security is going to be taxed so you are going to give back some of this money that was your money that was put in they are going to confiscate from you in the form of taxes your Medicare payment will be adjusted depending on your income if you make more money if you have been successful and you go into your retirement you are going to pay a whole lot more for your Medicare which is taken right out of your social security than otherwise and I expect that that is the trend that will continue and it could be very likely that people like you and me 30 years from now hitting their retirement might indeed have no social security because the law will be written in such a way that if you are too rich quote unquote you know we are just going to keep your benefit and distribute it to somebody else well it already is a tax for many people who are let's say reach the point with the amount of money they paid into social security and the amount of years that they have paid in where they are maxed out because it doesn't matter how much you pay in there is only a maximum amount that you can get out it is like $4200 a month if you wait till age 70 now so no matter how much you put in after that it is not going to change how much you get out and so it is just a tax after that right so you are working on a new book Pathfinders I have to tell you you have some great titles for books Pathfinders is something I would just pick up and start reading because gee I want to find my path it is like the book what color is your parachute when you are looking for your career right it is like just a title that attracts you to the book and you read the book because the title is so good I think Pathfinders is a great title so I wish you luck but tell us what is in Pathfinders so the subtitle of Pathfinders kind of answers that question the subtitle being extraordinary stories of people like you on the quest for financial independence ever since I started writing the blog but even more so once The Simple Path to Wealth came out people have shared with me their stories about how they have adapted the principles to their own unique situations and lives and I wrote this book as we mentioned earlier in the conversation for my daughter now my daughter is an American and she is at the beginning of her financial journey and The Simple Path to Wealth kind of reflects that but most people who read that book are not at the beginning of their journey they are not in college or about to come out most of them are in their 20s 30s 40s they have already followed other investment ideas and paths or maybe they have gotten themselves into debt or a lifestyle they need to unwind to pursue financial independence many of them I have an international readership so I have a lot of readers who are not in the United States who have different investments available to them and different kinds of investment vehicles and I have always been fascinated how all these diverse people with their unique situations have successfully taken the concepts in that book and created work for them and so this has been an idea that has kind of tickled around in the back of my mind ever since I came out with The Simple Path to Wealth and a year ago a little better than a year ago Harriman House the publishers of Morgan Housel's book The Psychology of Money a great book by the way and they were the publishers of that and they reached out to me about doing something and we started kicking around an idea that was not quite as fleshed out as what I just described it took us some time to get there but then they were very helpful in that process and so anyway last year we came to terms and in the spring I set out a request to on the blog to my readers and said hey you know we have this book together and if you have a story you want to share and we got a huge response I saw that post that you made asking for people to contact you we got a wonderful response and some incredible stories which we then edited and I think we've done a really good job of keeping their voice while editing it for space and content and so it's a collection of just under a hundred of those stories interestingly and I'm going to be putting up a couple blog posts come January samples of these we have a story from a guy in Ukraine that's about how do you stay the course on the simple path to wealth when your country is at war and it's been invaded and we also have a story from a guy in Russia who's like how do you stay on the simple path to wealth and stay the course when your country's become a pariah in the international community I'm going to publish those two stories separately as blog posts because they're ripped out of the news it's just incredible and so yeah that's what Pathfinders is all about pre-orders are going to be available in the very near future and I'll be announcing that and then the book itself will come out in October of this coming year well that's great the book that I've been working on for a long time is called A Few Good Funds The Majesty of Simple Investing and I break down the way in which you get to a simple portfolio as having the philosophy which is what you write about in your book you know low fee indexing philosophy but the second part of that is strategy and what strategy is using the philosophy as you wrote in your book how do you apply it to your situations which sounds exactly about what this book is about how do you create a strategy based on where you are and what you have available to you say the person in Russia the person in Ukraine they have very different things available to them and what they have available to us here in the United States so how do you take the philosophy and apply it to your situation and that is your strategy and then the third thing is discipline which is to stay the course so those three things have the philosophy come up with the strategy and then stay the course it's really going to be interesting to read that book because it's all about how each one of us has to come up need to go but at least you have a north star a guiding light to follow this direction the other thing that I find inspirational about reading these stories is we've talked about this a little bit earlier in our conversation people who say it's just not possible normal people can't do this and then you read these stories and you realize that it absolutely can be done and you know you don't have to be a tech engineer to do it people from very modest circumstances from very difficult circumstances are able to do this and so it just really drives home the point that there's no excuse other than you choose not to do it and that's fine I mean if you choose not to move towards financial independence it's your life it's your money and I have no problem with that choice if you tell me it's not possible to do it I have a problem with that assertion because it's absolutely possible and I can guarantee that anybody who says it's not possible there's somebody who has a much more difficult road than you who is currently doing it or has done it so one last question and this has to do with getting it on we at the Bogle has a very big on education as a non-profit organization we are trying to educate people and a lot of times parents are trying to educate their children or aunts and uncles are trying to educate their nieces and nephews and they're trying to introduce them to this idea then it's difficult because they don't want to listen to you or they have other things on their mind or maybe they just bought bitcoin and it went up 5% in one day and they sold it and this is how you make money so as the reason the whole purpose for your existence on the internet with the books is to educate your daughter who did not want to listen after a while who heard too much of it could you pass on some advice to the parents and the aunts and the uncles who are trying to help their younger generation understand this oh you know I don't feel like I'm qualified to do that because the whole reason that the blog and the books exist is because I did such a poor job of that myself my daughter likes to tease me now she says if I'd listened to you when I was young there'd be no blog there'd be no books he's absolutely right if I had been more skilled at delivering the message to her when she was young so she could listen to it without being turned off then you and I wouldn't be having this conversation I would not have started the blog I wouldn't have started the books so I guess my only advice would be don't do what I did which was to push it too hard to get it fast yes one of the things that's very gratifying to me and his parents will tell me all the time that they are gifting the simple path to wealth to their kids and obviously I'm gratified by that I don't know candidly how many of those kids wind up reading it what's even more gratifying is when I hear from young people themselves who say that they have read the book and that it's it resonates with them and you and I talked about how long it took us to come to indexing I'm hearing from people in their late teens and twenties who have read my work and the work of other people who are investing in their index funds now at that age and I think to myself of all the decades I wasted sounds like the decades you wasted sounds like probably a lot of listening to this the huge advantage that it's going to be to these people coming out in their late teens or twenties who embrace this stuff early and don't wander through the wilderness making the mistakes that I made so that's what's really gratifying when I hear that jail thank you so much for joining us on bogelheads on a vest and we greatly appreciate your insights and your stories and you're a wonderful writer and a great storyteller you're very kind I appreciate it and I'm honored to have been asked and it's been a lot of fun chatting with you today well thank you very much and good luck with the new book coming out Pathfinders thank you this concludes this episode of bogelheads on investing join us each month as we interview a new guest on a new topic in the meantime visit bogelcenter.net bogelheads.org the bogelheads wiki bogelheads twitter listen live each week to bogelheads live on twitter spaces the bogelheads youtube channel bogelheads facebook bogelheads reddit join one of your local bogelheads chapters and get others to join thanks for listening