MarketWatch FIRE Starter Series

Last year MarketWatch launched it’s FIRE Starter Series which is a compilation of short films highlighting the lifestyles of some of the members of the FIRE community.  Some FIRE gurus included in this series are Grant Sabatier (author of Financial Freedom and blogger at millenialmoney.com), Jillian Johnsrud (who runs jillianjohnsrud.com and the Everyday Courage podcast with the ChooseFI team), Bianca DeValerio (MissMazuma.com), Julien and Kiersten Saunders (creators of rich & REGULAR and soon to be authors), Steve Adcock (founder of Think Save Retire), Jackie Cummings Koski (author of Money Letters 2 my Daughter), among others.  If you follow the FIRE community, you likely have heard of many if not all of these awesome people.

These videos are less than 10 minutes long so they obviously can’t showcase the whole background of each individual / family interviewed but I’ve found these videos to be done extremely well.  If you haven’t checked out these videos yet, I’d highly recommend it and you can go through all of them in less than an hour.

MarketWatch recently launched it’s 10th video of the series and guess what?  It was us!  We are SO honored to announce this week that we were their 10th video and able to be a part of this awesome series. Click the image below to watch our video!

There was also an accompanying article that was more so focused on some of our parenting decisions and how we are able to spend $25,000 as a family of 3. Similar to the above set up, you can check that out by clicking the image below (there is also a link to the video within the article as well).

Wow.  We still cannot believe this really happened.  Thank you MarketWatch for finding us and wanting us on your platform!

I figured we could dig into some of the behind the scenes in this post to go over some of the good, bad, ugly, and hilarious from this experience.  Let’s dig in!

The Good

Back on January 31, 2020 we received a message from a senior video producer from MarketWatch introducing herself, how she is part of the FIRE series videos, and wondering if we could chat that day or the next.  How she found little ole us, I have no idea.

What I’m about to write next is SO embarrassing.

At this point in our very newbie blogger phase we had yet to figure out how to forward any emails that were sent to us via our Contact Us page to our personal emails.  They were going to a different email linked to our website which to be honest we hardly ever checked (at that point it was mostly spam / junk emails).  Well… fast forward to March 10th and we finally saw this email!  Nearly 1.5 months late!!! And she wanted to chat that day or the next day!  Talk about embarrassing.  I immediately responded (ensuring to cc my personal email so I wouldn’t be left in the dust again) explaining the delay and apologizing for it as I definitely thought we missed our opportunity.  Thankfully she was very understanding from the get-go which started our long back and forth conversations to get the video going.  We made sure to be prompt with correspondence going forward!

MarketWatch was EXTREMELY thorough in vetting our story to make sure what we were saying was legit.  Not only did we have to provide all of our incomes over the years, but we also had to have a video call where we logged into ALL of our accounts to prove that the numbers we were reporting were in fact true.  We dug into contributions over the years, growth from the accounts, expenses during random months, etc.  While some may see this as a bit much, I can totally understand where they are coming from as they are a credible source and want to ensure they keep their credibility by portraying accurate stories.  As our story is a bit unique, I can understand that they wanted to see our earnings and expenses over the years to ensure there were no inheritances, windfalls, handouts, etc.  I was not expecting it to be honest, but I’m glad they did this so they know that the content they are producing is legit.

Last but definitely not least, we were SO pleased with how well MarketWatch portrayed our little family.  They captured the main points of our story and also highlighted that spending time together is our top priority.  Which is truly is.

My guess is when many people hear what our annual expenses are they immediately assume that we live in a tent off the grid, eat nothing but ramen noodles 3x a day, and do nothing with our lives in between cooking said noodles (especially those unfamiliar with us FIRE freaks).  But that is SO far from the truth.  We get to spend time TOGETHER as a family either at the parks, playgrounds, mountains, swimming pool, hockey rink, library, parent link centre, etc. doing whatever we damn please with our days.  We are able to actually spend TIME with our child versus having to send her to child care so we can pay the bills.  We are able to read many books each year to expand our knowledge.  We are able to do our errands at 10 am on a Tuesday when most people are in the office (or on a Zoom call).  We are able to spend 60+ days out a Nic’s family’s cabin over the summer.  We are able to travel for extended periods of time together (pre-COVID).  As valuists, we spend our time, money, and energy on things we actually value and care about.  I think the MarketWatch team did a great job illustrating that we don’t just live under a rock doing nothing with our days living a deprived life.

The Bad

If we pause to consider the timing of everything, we started our conversations with their team in mid-March.  And as everyone knows, that’s right when the world pretty much shut down, millions of people lost their jobs, the stock market tanked, and travel came to a halt.  So the idea of having MarketWatch’s video team fly to another country to be on site to film was out of the picture.  Which meant ta-da we became amateur videographers.  All the filming you see in the video was done by us.  On our iPhone.  With our tripod.  We were instructed to take 10-15 second clips of our normal everyday lives.  The more the better.  We uploaded around 100 clips over the course of ~4 weeks when we were compiling footage.  While we did not mind the experience, we learned that we spent too many hours thinking about what to record, how to best shoot the scene, what the best time of day to do X would be for the sake of lighting, etc.  I do not envy all the behind the scenes planning that go into video producers jobs!

We are far from skilled, but I’m very happy with the results.  While some people may view this as a negative, I actually see it as a positive as we were able to learn new skills to add to the talent stack.  The only true downside was the time it took for us to upload the files to a shared Dropbox folder.  The short 10-15 second clips were quick and easy.  The arduous part was trying to upload the interview.  What you see in the finished product is a 10 minute video.  What you don’t see is that the original recording of the interview part was close to 2 hours long.  How they figured out what to cut and what to keep I do not envy!  Again, because of COVID, we were recording this ourselves.  How so?  On our iPhone, again.  We were on a video call on our laptop recording a bunch of questions and our responses.  But instead of MarketWatch recording from their end across the screen, we had our iPhone sitting right on the screen of our laptop recording the whole thing for better quality.

Trying to upload a 2 hour video is damn near impossible.  Instead, we clipped the recording down into 8 smaller 10-15 minute clips which still took forever and a day to upload.  We also had to be cognizant of when we were starting / stopping these shorter clips to be at the end of responses for easier editing.  Sometimes the clips would fail right at the end and we’d frustratingly have to start all over.  We also learned they loaded the best when the Dropbox app was up and the phone was not in sleep mode.  This meant constantly having to tap our phone to keep it awake.  Joyous.

Of course, in a typical environment, these negative moments regarding the filming would NOT have been on our hands as their team would have been filming from the start without the need for us to upload anything.  So this is not a knock on MarketWatch by any means.  This is more a “the show must go on” attitude from the MarketWatch folks showcasing how we all can be adaptable during strange times to continue to produce content.

The only other negative from our end was how all our figures were illustrated in USD.  I get it.  MarketWatch is a US based company and most of their readers are from the US.  And our story consists of living in both the US and Canada where we earned / spent in both USD and CAD over the years.  Personally, we don’t like converting our USD to CAD as we view it as a hedge in our withdrawal strategy to stay below a 4% withdrawal thanks to the favorable USD / CAD exchange rate.

That said, we now live and work in Canada and have no plans to leave this beautiful country so we view our FIRE number in CAD not USD.  So our liquid assets of $890,000 USD around the 1 minute mark in the film is equivalent to $1,163,000 CAD and our monthly / annual spend of $1,639 / mo and $19,668 / year around the 4:45 mark are in USD and the equivalent is $2,156 / mo and $25,703 / year in CAD.  Of course the math all works out to be the same when it comes to our withdrawal strategy but I think seeing an annual spend of $19,668 USD is a bit misleading as in reality we are spending closer to $25,000 CAD up here in Canada each year.  Spending only $25k / year is already low and hard for many people to imagine so converting it to USD makes it seem even more bare bones.

The Ugly

Ugh.  I told myself I wouldn’t read the comments but I couldn’t help it.  I knew there would be trolls. Some of the comments in the article were disheartening to read.   Some people truly do not get the overall concept of those of us pursuing the FI life which is totally understandable.  (And for those who are still unclear, the overall goal is to create OPTIONS.  It’s to give yourself the CHOICE to decide to work or not.  We now have CONTROL of how we spend our days.  And no, we are NOT living deprived lives.  We just figured out that in this crazy consumeristic / materialistic world we live in, the truth is that a simple life really can be a happy life.  Simple does not equal cheap which does not equal unhappy.  Simple means understanding that the little things in life are the big things.  Frugal and cheap are two very different things.  No one cares how big your TV is or that you have the latest phone.  Stop trying to prove your worth by what you wear or the car you drive.  Show your worth by what’s in your bank account and by being a compassionate and giving human being.)  I know I should not even be wasting my time trying to prove ourselves to others.

To flat out bash us without taking the time to dig a little further is saddening.  It seems many people who read the article immediately jumped to conclusions and did not watch the accompanying video to get a better picture of who we are.  On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of comments from the video portion have been very positive (and we have been commenting back there).

MANY people assumed we had external financial help from family to pay off our student loans or mortgage for us.  This is very likely because they could never imagine being able to do what we did.  Well I’m here to clear up that misnomer.  Nope, nope, nope.  We paid off our respective $70,000 and $40,000 student loans in 2.5 years each.  Without assistance of others.  We also paid off our first mortgage in Florida in 2.5 years which funded the purchase of our current townhouse.  Many people assumed we are making $400,000 incomes (nope!) or had to have received an inheritance to be able to do this (nope again!) so I think a future post outlining both of our incomes over the years is in order to clear things up for all the naysayers of the world.  Haters gonna hate.  I just wish some people would be a bit more open minded to actually consider how we were actually able to do this.

Yes, of course lady luck was on our side with the stock market doing its damn thang since I started my job in 2009 but we were not the only ones privy to investing in the stock market.  Yes, of course we recognize our MANY privileges in life.  But we also recognize that we think about life differently and don’t want to keep up with the Joneses (they’re broke).  We realized at a young age that we wanted to be in control of money and not the other way around.  We realized that you could design a happy and fulfilling life without spending your entire pay check.  In fact, life is pretty grand when you have a lot of money in the bank (imagine that!).

To end this on a much more positive note, we were VERY surprised and happy to see SO many positive and / or neutral comments as well.  It’s amazing to see that on a platform such as MarketWatch, which is being viewed by many people outside of the FIRE community, that people actually get it and admire it.  It may not be for them (and that’s totally fine!) but they at least think we all could learn a thing or two from us super savers.  So THANK YOU to all the people who took the time to comment and defend our lifestyle.  We were very hesitant to show our story and numbers to a main media platform for all the backlash we knew we’d get so it was very refreshing to see all the positive responses as well.

I’ll wrap up this section with some of my favorite quotes:

“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.” – Vicki Robin

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

“There are many things money can buy, but the most valuable of all is freedom.” – JL Collins

“He who is contented is rich.” – Lao Tzu

“Spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.” – Ramit Sethi

“Real wealth is not about money.  Real wealth is: not having to go to meetings, not having to spend time with jerks, not being locked into status games, not feeling like you have to say ‘yes’, not worrying about others claiming your time and energy.  Real wealth is about freedom.” – James Clear

The Hilarious

I had to end this post on a good note so here goes.

Not sure if anyone picked up on this (highly doubtful and if so major kudos to your keen awareness of things) but at the 2:15 minute mark of the video, there is a picture of Nic and I from 2012 in front of our Florida townhouse.  I am wearing the SAME purple t-shirt in the interview portion of the video… filmed 8 years later!  It is still one of my favorite shirts and you can likely see me in it in 2028 as well 🙂

Did anyone see Finn’s ever so graceful landing off the slide at the 7:00 minute mark? She’s something…

And did anyone notice the deer in the background while Finn was climbing at the playground at the 7:35 minute mark?

Well there you have it!  Thank you again MarketWatch for having us on.  It was a ton of hours but totally worth it and again we are so honored to have been on your platform.  Our blog traffic has exploded this week so clearly some people are interested in learning more.  Hopefully we can continue to spark the FIRE in others to reach financial independence as well.  We’d love to hear your comments below after you’ve had some time to check out the video and article!

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If you liked this article and want more content like this, please support this blog by sharing it.  Not only does it help spread the FIRE, but it lets me know what content you find beneficial.  Writing is NOT my strong suit and it honestly takes me hours to write each post so the more encouragement the better!  Engaging in the comments below keeps me motivated.  You can also support this blog by subscribing to receive emails anytime a new post is published.  Thank you FImily!

We believe in stacking up life hacks to keep your enjoyment levels to the max without depleting your bank account.  Here are some ways to further educate yourself and save thousands of dollars over your lifetime by making some simple adjustments:

• Investing Newbies: Check out our free Investing 101 Series.
• How much are you paying for your phone plan?  Canadians, learn more about Public Mobile, and see how we are paying $3/mo for our cell phone plan.
• How much are you paying for internet?  Canadians, learn more about the various Independent Service Providers out there to see who services your area so you can lower your monthly bills.
• How much are you paying for home insurance?  We were able to reduce our rates by 25% by switching over to Square One Insurance.  If you live in BC, AB, SK, MB, and ON, check out Square One for your home insurance, landlord insurance, and/or tenant insurance.  Use this link to receive an extra $15 off your quote.  (Note that you must use this link to start the process to get the $15 off even if you prefer to pay over the phone.)
• How much are you paying for your monthly utility bills?  See how you can likely save on this monthly expense.

 

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