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[00:00] Pull back into yourself, stop running, because wherever you go, you take yourself with you. There's a version of retirement planning, and I hear it constantly. If I could just get to the place, if I could just reach the number, then I will be the version of myself I'm trying to get to. And I'm here to tell you, that is not how it works. Hello friends, this is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. Before we get into today's episode, I am genuinely thrilled to share this with you. After three years of listening to your questions and locking myself in a room to answer as many of them as I can, I decided it would be slightly more efficient to write a book. So I did. It's called Real Wealth, published by Norton out December 6th of this year. Yeah, the kid whose parents thought he might be illiterate till he was 21 and whose high school English teachers passed him on the condition he never took another English class. And I'm dang proud of how it turned out and what I believe it can and will do for all of you. Here are three quick reasons to pre-order right now. And I'll tell you exactly how at the end. One, you'll actually finish this book. I know, low bar, except it really isn't. I've spent two decades watching people's eyes go blank the moment I said asset allocation. I took that personally. This is my response. You know the look, and I refuse to be the cause of it. Number two, the number one comment I get thousands of times is, you left something out. You're right. I'm making 60 second videos about topics that deserve 60 minutes. This is my answer. Everything in one place. No countdown clock, no algorithm cutting me off. And number three, what I'm most excited about, every month through December, I'll be releasing an exclusive pre-order incentive, and April's might already be my favorite. Pre-order this month and you're automatically in for a free two hour live event on Wednesday, May 6th, where I'll be expanding on some of the ideas present in the book and answering some of your most commonly asked practical and theoretical investing questions. This will be exclusively for people who pre-order. Here's all you need to do. Go to tylergardner.com, pre-order the book, then click the button on the page that says you've pre-ordered. Two minutes, you're in, and I genuinely cannot wait to do this with all of you. Real Wealth, December 6th. Your future self will appreciate having it all in one place. And now on with the show. This week, I'm going to do things a little differently, and it's a bit of an experiment. I want to share some more personal money, finance and life lessons this week, instead of the usual textbook lessons. So, I'm 43 years old, I have a financial podcast, I have a book coming out in December that I'll share more about later, a wife who is extraordinarily patient and amazing, with my posting daily cringey videos of myself walking through the woods talking about investing, and a bloodhound who has made our lives better than anything money could ever buy. And this past winter, for the first time in my life, I became a snowbird, as some of you know based on the change in background from the forests of Vermont to the desert trails in Sedona, Arizona. For those unfamiliar with the term, a snowbird is someone who leaves the cold weather of their home state to spend some part of the winter somewhere a little bit warmer. It's a lifestyle associated primarily with retirees, people who own linen pants, and individuals who have discovered that their joints now have opinions about the weather. I am none of these things, well, maybe the joints part, but we did it anyway. We packed up the car, loaded the hound in the back seat, where she immediately arranged herself in a way that suggested the entire vehicle was hers and we were merely permitted to operate it. We drove from Vermont to Sedona, Arizona. We would be there for two months, new landscape, new life, or so we thought. I want to tell you about five things that two months of snowboarding taught me, and I want to tie every single one of them back to money, because this is a financial podcast and I have a reputation to protect. But I also want to get to something at the end of this episode that I think is the most important lesson of all. Something a very smart Roman said about 2,000 years ago that turns out to be just as applicable to your retirement relocation fantasy as it was to ancient philosophy. As always, a familiar ask, if the show has proved helpful in any way, or you've ever forwarded an episode to a friend, if you would consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, please know I'd be eternally grateful as it helps more people find the show, and it helps me appreciate that this daily endeavor of creating free financial literacy is not performed in vain. Back to the snow burning, let's start at the beginning. Lesson 1. Saving time is only valuable if you know what you're saving it for. Or what cooking dinner actually means to me. Before we left Vermont, my wife and I had an ideal vision of what Arizona would hold. Not a dramatic one. We were picturing ourselves on yachts, especially as we were heading to the high desert. More of a quiet, domestic vision that I suspect a lot of people share. Which is this. What if we never had to figure out what to cook for dinner again? You know the moment I'm talking about. It's 4 or 5 p.m. You're tired. You open the refrigerator and stand there with the door open for longer than is reasonable, as though something new is going to appear if you look long enough. Your spouse is somewhere behind you, aware that dinner is theoretically your job tonight, and you're both having the silent standoff where neither of you really wants to be the one to say, I don't know, what do you want? Because that sentence has never led to anything useful or productive. Who's cooking? What are we making? We have to go to the store. Nobody wants to go to the store. Is the dog staying home or coming with us to the store? It was fine. We were fine. So when we got to Sedona, with a Whole Foods one block away, DoorDash available, I don't know if you all know how novel this is at a rural Vermonter, every kind of restaurant within walking distance, we made a decision. We were done with the 4 p.m. refrigerator standoff. We were going to eat out, order in and reclaim all of that time we had been losing to the ancient exhausting ritual of feeding ourselves at home. And for a while, this was genuinely great. The novelty of it, the ease of it, the way an evening could just begin without the negotiation, the analysis paralysis or the dirty dishes. But somewhere around week three, I noticed something a little bit uncomfortable. We had all this recovered time, the time we used to spend cooking, shopping, planning. And I started asking myself, what are we actually doing with this time? The honest answer was that we were doing approximately what everyone does with reclaimed time. We were filling it with things that weren't particularly meaningful. More phone, more television, more scrolling through things we didn't need to scroll through. The time hadn't become something. It had just become more time, which is not the same thing. And then one night, it just dawned on both of us. We missed cooking. We missed thinking about what we were going to make that night. We missed talking in the kitchen with music on. We missed spending those two hours deliberately making a meal and deliberately making time mean something. So the next night, I cooked salmon and rice. It took me about 15 minutes. We stood in the kitchen together the way we used to, one of us handling the fish, the other handling the rice, and we talked. Actually talked. The way you do when your hands are occupied with something purposeful and you're creating something. We laughed into the night, and as per usual, we stayed at the table long after the plates were cleared. And I realized cooking was never the thing I was trying to escape. The 4 p.m. paralysis was. Those are different problems with different solutions, and I had been conflating them for years. So here's the financial and life lesson I want you to sit with. Time is only as valuable as what you do with it. We spend so much energy and increasingly money trying to buy back time. Meal kits, delivery services, short cuts of every kind. And I'm not against any of them. I use many of them. But I want you to ask yourself, before you automate or outsource the next thing, is this actually a bad use of my time, or is it just time that feels inconvenient in the moment and meaningful in retrospect? Cooking dinner together is a good use of time. It is connection and routine and a shared project that takes 30 minutes and produces something real with ingredients that you can actually pronounce. The paralysis was a planning problem, not a cooking problem. And in Arizona, we learned that we were trying to solve for the wrong thing. Some of the best things in life are not time efficient. This is not an argument against them. That is sometimes actually the point. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. You know you've made it in this business, when a brand reaches out that you've already been using for years. Not because someone told you to, not because they sent you a free box, just because you found it, used it, and kept buying it. That's Momentous. And when they got in touch about sponsoring the podcast, I said yes before they finished the sentence. Here's my situation. In my 20s and 30s, I was an endurance guy, running, cycling, swimming, completely addicted to the suffering and the endorphins, thought I was invincible. Turns out, I was just young, which are two very different things, and one of them has an expiration date. I haven't run in five years, not because I don't want to, because I spent two decades building my cardiovascular system, and approximately zero minutes building the legs and hips that were supposed to carry it. So now, and I say this with the hard-won wisdom of a man who has had several humbling conversations with physical therapists and orthopedic surgeons, I strength train, daily. I work on mobility, and I am obsessive about what goes into my body before and after I do it, which is where momentous comes in, creatine and protein every day. My older siblings are using it, my nephew, who I watched go from a four foot two kid I could literally pick up, to a six foot one varsity athlete who could now pick me up, is obsessed with their creatine shoes. And in a supplement industry with the regulatory oversight of a middle school bake sale, what actually matters is testing. Every momentous product is independently certified by NSF for sport or informed sport, tested for contaminants, heavy metals, and banned substances. Momentous uses grass-fed European dairy and the whey protein, and the purest form of creatine monohydrate. No fillers, no artificial sweeteners. If it doesn't meet the standard, it simply never ships. And right now, Momentous is offering my listeners up to 35% off your first order with promo code Tyler. Head to livemomentous.com and use promo code Tyler for up to 35% off your first order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code Tyler, and I promise, your hips will thank you in advance. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. As most of you know, I am a raging introvert who lives in the Vermont woods. I work from home, I hike alone, well, with my dogs, and I consider the grocery store a mild form of psychological warfare. Fluorescent lighting, too many decisions, 14 syllable ingredients I have to google while blocking the aisle like a confused tourist who wandered in from a farmer's market and cannot find the exit. Thrive Market solved this for me in one sentence. High quality, pre-vetted healthy food delivered to your door. That was the pitch. I didn't need the rest of it. But the rest of it is genuinely good. They've restricted over a thousand ingredients before anything hits the site, so the label reading anxiety is already handled for you. 90 dietary filters mean you only see what actually fits how you eat. And membership is $5 a month, which most people recoup in their first two orders through member pricing alone. Up to 30% off, free delivery on qualifying orders, no per order fees, no tip math. And my favorite part, every paid membership sponsors a free one for a family in need, a teacher, a first responder, or a veteran. $5 doing way more than one thing, and that is my favorite kind of $5. My last order contained the following, Yellowbird Habanero Hot Sauce. If that's not in your breakfast burritos, you're genuinely missing out. Aloha plant-based protein shakes in chocolate sea salt, obviously. Ambachi's Bakery beef liver freeze-dried dog treats because the bloodhounds would have been absolutely livid if it was all for me, as they have yet to miss a podcast even though I'm still waiting for them to leave a review. Go to thrivemarket.com/tyler and get $20 off your first three orders plus a free $60 gift. 30-day risk-free guarantee on the annual membership, so there's no reason not to try it. That's thrivemarket.com/tyler. Lesson 2. Every Airbnb is a life experiment, or what I like to call a path dividend. Here is something I believe for the first 42 years of my life. Hotels are great. Clean sheets, someone else's towels, a little wrapped soap that makes you feel like your hygiene has been curated. Growing up, a hotel was a treat. It meant vacation or a hockey tournament. It meant something was happening. And so when I was ultimately tasked with planning our road trip out to Arizona, I was only too thrilled to book suites each night at the world's finest, the most luxurious, La Quinta Inns. Hey, there aren't too many chain hotels that take a hundred pounds of bloodhound a night. And now that I've officially experienced driving cross-country for 7 days, spending 6 nights in La Quintas, I would like to formally revise my position on hotels. Now I want to be clear that I hold no personal grudge against La Quinta as an institution. Every staff member we met was fantastic and friendly. The rooms were clean and the breakfasts were... Well, the staff was nice and the rooms were clean. But traveling with a bloodhound reveals things about hotels that the brochure does not mention. For instance, every hotel, regardless of price point or star rating, is apparently located directly adjacent to the most heavily trafficked road in that particular metropolitan area. There's no quiet hotel near a good walking path. That hotel does not exist. What exists is a parking lot, a drainage ditch, a six-lane road, and a median strip that smells like a truck stop, and that is where you and your dog are taking your evening constitutional while semi-trucks blow past at 65 miles an hour, and your bloodhound, who has the nose of a forensic investigator and the impulse control of a golden retriever puppy, is attempting to document every cent within a quarter mile. And because we had a dog, and other people in the hotel had dogs, our bloodhound slept approximately zero minutes across the entire trip. She was up, she was alert, she had intel. There were other dogs on this floor, and she needed us to be aware of that. Loudly, at 2 a.m., then at 3 a.m., and also at the precise moment we had finally drifted off to sleep at 4 a.m. And if it would have helped to take her out on a walk, I would have, but see above for what that walk looked like in each location. Not to mention, as we drove west, the ground got more and more sharp. Just know that, as you move from New England to Arizona, if you have pets, you will need to start picking sharp items out of their feet somewhere just south of Missouri. So, needless to say, on the road trip back from Arizona, we committed to trying something different. And my wife took over the planning. She booked us 6 Airbnbs in 6 awesome locations. And as we moved from one state to the next, coming back east and experiencing the Airbnb culture in Santa Fe, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Asheville, Charlottesville, and Easton, PA, I know that last one was a little random, but it's because we liked the restaurant, The Bayou, that's located nearby. And if you haven't tried their cornbread and shrimp and grits, do so immediately. Anyway, on our trip back, something unexpected happened at every single stop. Every place taught us something different about how we want to live our lives. The Casita in Santa Fe reminded us that you need virtually zero space to be comfortable. It had a kitchen, a bed, an electric fireplace, a small TV, and it turned out that was just as cozy as we needed. Oklahoma City surprised us with big, awesome open night skies and a modern downtown architecture scene that neither of us expected and both of us loved. Memphis gave us extraordinary barbecue, a beer on Beale Street, Monday night musicians who were better than any other city's Saturday night musicians, and a fond appreciation for not having to have four locking mechanisms, two layers of bar doors, and private property signs on my own house in Vermont. Each place handed us a small piece of information about ourselves and what we want to spend money on when it comes to where we live. I want to tell you specifically about Asheville, North Carolina. We had just come from Memphis, and see above, we might have been seeking something, well, a little less chained up pit bull in the yard next to us vibe. By the time we pulled into Asheville and found this place, 10 acres, fenced in yard, a porch that looked directly up at a sky absolutely loaded with stars, the smell of spring already in the air, I nearly wept. Truly, the couch was comfortable. The dog ran and played. We sat on the porch and did nothing, and it was the best nothing I had done in years. Then came Charlottesville, Virginia. This one looked incredible in the photos, and even in person, there was a music room, coffee room with actual guitars on the wall, looked like somewhere a very cool person lived, and I kind of wanted to be a cool person. We were excited, and when we sat down, the couch was terrible. Structurally unsound in a way that suggested it had been selected for its appearance, and never once sat on. The coffee table was approximately the height of a standard dining table. So if you wanted your morning coffee, you were either standing or doing a mild core workout. And the guitars were apparently only decorative, which I discovered only after attempting to play one, which I can't do, but that's not the point. But here's what I want to tell you about the Airbnb experience that I didn't fully appreciate until we were back home, and I was thinking about all of it. Every single stop taught us something invaluable. Not just about what we wanted in a house, though it absolutely did that, but about how we might want to design a room, lay out a bathroom, a landscape, a yard, light a kitchen, what type of city we might like to spend more time in, what a neighborhood feels like at 6 a.m. when you're walking a dog and there's nobody watching. Asheville told us something about porches and acreage. Santa Fe told us something about sufficiency, about how little you actually need to be comfortable. Charlottesville told us that photography lies and aesthetics are not the same as livability. This is what I've named in my upcoming book, The Path Dividend. The idea is simple. Before you make a major life decision, and I mean a really major, the kind that involves square footage or zip codes or retirement timelines, go try someone else's version of it first. Rent it. Live in it for 24 hours. Sit on their couch. Walk their street at dawn. Let their life teach you something about your own. Hotels can't do this. They can only teach you that you probably shouldn't plan a one-week road trip staying at hotels with bloodhounds. But Airbnbs can because you get a really cool glimpse into a possible life and into what money can or doesn't have to buy in each one of those places. The financial translation is direct and I want you to hear it clearly. The preview is always cheaper than the purchase. Most people skip this step entirely. They see the photos, they picture themselves in the music room with the guitars they don't play, and they sign on the line. Six Airbnb staves gave us a graduate seminar in our own preferences. What we want, what we don't want, what we thought we wanted until we sat on the couch and realized we just want something comfy. That information cost us about 150 bucks a night and will save us from buying the wrong house or redesigning the wrong room with the wrong furniture for the rest of our lives. So, try the couch first, especially if you have a dog. The couch tells the truth. This episode is brought to you by Facet. I want to read you two messages I get every single week. First one, Tyler, I'm retiring in two years with about a million dollars saved. What should I be investing in right now? Second one, should I take Social Security at 62 or wait until 70? I genuinely don't know what to do. And I want to help. That's why I do what I do. But those questions will never have a universal answer. They only have your answer. And your answer depends upon your health, your other income sources, your tax situation, your spouse, your timeline, and about 40 other variables I cannot responsibly address to a general audience of over 4 million people. Those questions deserve a real answer from a real professional, not a guy on the internet speaking generally. A CFP who sits down with your actual numbers and builds a plan that is specifically yours. That is exactly what FACET does. CFP professionals, flat annual membership fees, not a percentage of your assets, not a commission, none of the fee structures I've spent years telling you to avoid. Your Social Security question, your million dollars, your plan. If retirement is close enough that the stakes feel real, this is the conversation worth having today. FACET helps you bring your whole financial life together. Social Security, Medicare, long term care, Roth conversions, RMDs, all of it. So head to facet.com/tyler and see how their team can help you answer the questions you're already asking. That's facet.com/tyler. FACET is an SEC, Registered Investment Advisor. This is not advice. All opinions are my own and not a guarantee of a similar outcome. I'm not a member of FACET. I have an incentive to endorse FACET as I have an ongoing fee-based contract for cash compensation, as well as a percentage of equity in FACET based on this endorsement. This episode is brought to you by Anthropic. I want to tell you about something I use every single hour I'm awake. But first, a quick story. I have a best friend who has spent decades as a CFA charter holder and a financial modeler. Not a guy who reads financial models, the guy that companies hire specifically because nobody else can build what he can build. Twenty years of expertise, a genuinely elite skill set. The kind of person who makes the rest of our finance group chat feel like we've been doing arts and crafts. Last week, he texted the group chat four words. Well, Claude did it. He had run a complex financial model, Claude matched him, and he was not entirely sure how to feel about this. Personally, I was delighted. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. I've been using Claude Max for over three months now, and it's not just good. It's better than anything else I've tried, especially for long form content where you need context, nuance, and an AI that won't hallucinate some statistic that makes you look like a complete ding-dong on the internet. So, if you're a creator, writer, or just someone ready to tackle bigger problems, get started with Claude today at claude.ai/tyler. That's claude.ai/tyler, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. That's claude.ai/tyler. Lesson three, keep it special or it won't be. Here's the part of the story where I have to tell you that we almost bought a house in Sedona. I say almost generously. What I mean is after two weeks of being there, we got a realtor, we toured properties, and we stood in a $2.5 million home with unobstructed desert views feeling, if I'm being honest, like people who had completely lost the plot. Let me back up. The original plan was exactly what I described in the path dividend lesson. We were going to try on Sedona. Two months, see how it felt, gather data, be thoughtful, intentional adults about a major life question. Should we move from Vermont to the high desert and learn more about how crystals and vortexes can help heal my lower back pain and my traumatic childhood? And for the first few weeks, it felt extraordinary. The red rocks, the light, the stars, which are the kind of stars that make you feel like you've been looking at a rough draft of the sky. Your whole life, and this is the final version. We met genuinely great people. The food was outstanding. The weather, 65 and sunny, every single day, felt like something we had been owed by the universe in exchange for every Vermont February we had ever survived. I called every single family member who was still living in New England, who were all under about 14 inches of snow and suffering through weeks of below zero temps. And I may have been slightly insufferable about my current experience. And so, somewhere around week two, the rational, let's try this on experiment, started quickly becoming something else. We started spending time with people who lived out there. People with beautiful, large, modern homes on the Red Rock, and something shifted in our thinking, the way it does when you're immersed in a different context long enough. We stopped thinking, isn't this a nice place to visit? And started thinking, what would it look like to stay? We got the realtor, we went big. We stood in this $2.5 million home, looking out at 50 miles of desert, and waited for the feeling to arrive. The only thing, it didn't. The house was beautiful and cold. Ultra modern, all clean lines and white surfaces, the kind of design that expresses itself by removing things. I watched our bloodhound take four steps toward an extremely expensive white sectional, and watched my wife and I make the exact same face at the exact same moment. We could picture being impressed here. We could also picture impressing others here. What we couldn't picture was spending our Sunday mornings here. We couldn't picture filling the house with dogs, as we have always been and will always be a dogs are allowed on the couch and bed at all times type of household. But here's the part I want you to focus on, because I think it's the more universal lesson. We were lucky that we stayed for two months, because had we just stayed for three weeks, we might have come back to Vermont with a longing sense of regret that we didn't buy, or an ever increasing desire to buy. And that might have led us to do something rash from afar. But after a few weeks, somewhere around week four or five, something happened that would have been invisible in a two-week vacation. The 65-degree weather stopped being remarkable. It was just the weather. I caught myself one Tuesday morning looking out at another flawless blue-sky day and feeling nothing. My baseline had moved, and the thing I had driven 2,000 miles to experience had become ordinary. And with that, something else shifted. We started reaching for the next thing. I already told you we didn't want to cook when we were out there at first. So we were ordering tons of takeout. And we also gave ourselves permission to dine out constantly. Not the careful, intentional dining out for a special occasion, but reflexive, fill-the-evening dining out. We were booking spa treatments, taking days off from work for no particular reason because we were on an extended vacation. Sort of. We were spending like people who had decided money was the experiment, and it kind of was, like we were method actors playing wealthy retirees who would earn the right to stop keeping track. Which we did. And you know what happened? I'll say this as truly as I could ever say anything about money at this point in my life. Spending money lost its pizzazz almost immediately. The spa treatment that felt indulgent and wonderful the first time was just an appointment the third time with some stranger awkwardly touching you with weird sticky oils that I kind of just wanted off my body as soon as possible. The nice restaurants we had been excited about became choices on a rotation. The days off blurred together because when every day is a day off, none of them feel like one. This is the hedonic treadmill in full operation, and I want you to understand it deeply because it's the engine underneath almost every lifestyle inflation mistake I've ever seen. We adapt, we always adapt, faster than we expect, more completely than feels fair. The upgrade becomes the baseline, and then we need the next upgrade. And the thing that was supposed to make life better has simply become life. Unremarkable, and once again, in need of replacement. The financial lesson is this. Keeping things special is not a matter of willpower, or gratitude, or having the right mindset. It is a structural decision. You have to protect the contrast. The spa day needs the regular day to be a spa day. The nice dinner needs the Kraft mac and cheese to be the nice dinner. The vacation needs the routine. Without the contrast, you don't have a treat. You just have a far more expensive normal. So we were lucky to have two full months in Sedona. Because six weeks in, when the luster had worn and the math was adding up, and the desert dust was getting into everything, and the tourist crowds on the main street were starting to feel less charming and way more claustrophobic, we knew this wasn't our place. We missed the woods. We missed the winter. We missed the weather changes. And we missed water. And we knew it in a way that a two-week vacation never would have shown us. So, keep it special, not because special things are rare, because special things require ordinary ones to exist at all. Lesson four. You always think about what you're gaining. Very few of us think about what we're leaving. There's a very human tendency when imagining a major life change to spend most of your mental energy on the problems it will solve and almost none on the problems it will create. The bigger house solves the space problem. The warmer climate solves the weather problem. The new city solves the starting over problem. The blank slate problem. The wouldn't it be interesting to live somewhere completely different problem. What we almost never ask, and what two months in Sedona forced us to ask with some urgency is what we are leaving behind. Let me be specific, because I think specificity is what makes this lesson actually land, instead of just sounding like something a financial advisor puts on a slide deck right before pitching their whole life policies. We had been in Sedona for about six weeks. The initial novelty had worn. We had stopped pretending we were going to become different people there. And I started noticing the texture of daily life in a way I hadn't when everything was still shiny and new. We didn't know anyone's name at the coffee place. Not because the people weren't friendly, they were. But because we hadn't been there enough times yet. We hadn't been anywhere enough times yet. Every interaction was a first interaction, which sounds exciting and is for about ten days, and then becomes slightly exhausting. There's a specific kind of tired that comes from being new everywhere you go, from having no shortcuts, no familiarity, no place that knows your order. Our doctor was in Vermont. Our neighbors, the ones who have a key to our house, who we've called in an actual emergency, who know our dog by name and wave from the driveway without it being a whole thing, were in Vermont. The friends we have accumulated over the years, the ones who require no performance, who you can sit with in comfortable silence, or call at an inconvenient hour without it being weird, they were in Vermont. And here's the thing nobody tells you about building community from scratch. It takes years. Not months. Years. The research on social connection in relocated retirees is sobering. It takes an average of three to seven years to develop the depth of social ties in a new place that most people leave behind when they move. Three to seven years of being the new guy. Three to seven years of first interactions and learning the coffee place and figuring out who to call when something goes wrong. Some people get there. Some people find at year four that they are still fundamentally strangers in a place they chose for the weather. And then there was the work situation, which I want to address separately because I think it deserves its own moment of honesty, especially for anyone who's currently telling themselves the story that they can or want to be able to work from anywhere. I have a studio at home, a real one. It's dialed in. The lighting is right. The acoustics are right. The set up is exactly what I need to do what I do. In Sedona, my recording and video call situation was as follows. There was one room in the house, private enough for professional purposes. It was a child's bedroom. It had bunk beds. It was decorated with an enthusiastic commitment to a space theme. Planets, rockets, the works. The Wi-Fi in that room was, to use a technical term, aspirational. It reached that corner of the house in the way that ambition reaches most New Year's resolutions, with enthusiasm, and then not at all by February. I was conducting calls with my publisher, professional podcast interviews, business conversations, seated in a bunk bedroom surrounded by glow in the dark stars, cutting in and out of Wi-Fi, repositioning my laptop every four minutes in search of a signal that existed somewhere between my current location and the router in the other wing of the house. There's no glamorous spin on this. It was absurd, and it is a useful corrective to the beautiful lie of location independence, which is this. Yeah, you could technically work from anywhere. But technically is doing enormous heavy lifting in that sentence. You can work from anywhere the way you can technically sleep on any surface. It's true, and it's meaningfully different from sleeping well, and after a few weeks, the difference becomes hard to ignore. I came home to Vermont, to my studio, sat in my chair, I'm sitting in it right now, and once again, nearly wept. The financial lesson here is one I want you to apply to any major relocation decision, retirement or otherwise. I want you to make two lists. The first list is what you're gaining, the things the new place solves, the problems it eliminates, the life improvements you're moving toward. You will not need help with this list. You will write it quickly and enthusiastically, and it will be long. You've been writing this list in your head for years. The second list is harder. It is what you're leaving, not just practically the doctor, the neighbors, the coffee place that knows you, but socially and professionally, and in the 10,000 small ways that a life assembled over years is more load bearing than it looks. Write that list with the same care you gave the first one, and now price it honestly, and then decide. Yeah, the grass is genuinely sometimes greener, unless you go to Arizona where there is no grass, but the roots you're pulling up to get there are also real, and they take a long time to grow back. Lesson 5. Wherever you go, there you are. Or the person I imagined I was going to become in Sedona did not show up. I want to tell you about the version of me I expected to meet in Sedona. Sedona Tyler, as I had imagined him was going to be different, not dramatically different. I wasn't going to arrive and immediately buy a turquoise bracelet and start talking about energy fields, though that did happen within about a week, but meaningfully different. The kind of different that happens when you remove yourself from your context and give yourself space and hope for something different. Sedona Tyler was going to read more. I had a serious stack of books, literary fiction, long form history, and at least two that had been on my list for an embarrassing number of years, and that I had been blaming my life in Vermont for not getting to. Sedona Tyler was going to meditate. I had a nap. I had good intentions. I was going to be someone who woke up before sunrise and sat quietly and did the breathing thing and came out the other side a calmer, more centered person who was harder to rattle. Sedona Tyler was also, for reasons I can't entirely explain, going to get a full sleeve tattoo. I have no tattoos, and if you knew me, you'd know there's a reason I have no tattoos. But something about the desert made it feel possible. Sedona Tyler felt like a tattoo person. And Sedona Tyler was going to be more social, more extroverted, going to wander down to the main street and fall into conversations with interesting people and build some kind of casual desert community the way people in movies do when they relocate somewhere scenic. Here's what actually happened. Regular Tyler showed up. Regular Tyler, who apparently travels everywhere now because it turns out he was in the car the whole time. I read one book. It was good. I also spent an enormous amount of time on my phone, which I had planned to use less, and which I used exactly as much as I always do, possibly more, because I was in an unfamiliar place and my habit loops had lost their handholds, and I kept reaching for the familiar. I meditated approximately twice. Both times I thought mostly about what I was going to do after meditating. No tattoo. And the socializing, here's something I learned about myself in the desert at 43 years old. Something I apparently needed 2,000 miles of travel to understand. I am an introvert. Not profoundly, not clinically, just genuinely, actually someone who finds large amount of social interaction draining rather than energizing, who walked down the main street of Sedona, looked at the crowds and felt absolutely no pull toward them, and then came home and felt immediately better. I knew this about myself. I just hadn't let myself fully accept it. There's a version of personal development culture that treats introversion as a problem to be solved, a limitation to be overcome, a setting to be changed if you just work on yourself enough. Two months in the desert clarified for me that this is completely incorrect. I'm not broken. I'm just wired a particular way, just as an extrovert is wired a particular way. And that wiring did not update because I changed zip codes. Now, here's the Seneca line that I promised you and I want to leave you with because I've been building toward it, and it is 2,000 years old, and is relevant as anything I've read in modern personal finance, and because I was recently told that I couldn't have a podcast as a middle-aged white man if I didn't read a quasi-useless Seneca quote every third episode. Pull back into yourself. Stop running because wherever you go, you take yourself with you. There's a version of retirement planning and I hear it constantly. I hear it from listeners and readers and people who come up to me at events that goes like this. If I could just get to the place, if I could just reach the number, if I can just relocate to the warmer climate or the mountain town or the beach community I've always imagined, then I will be the version of myself I'm trying to get to. Then things will feel different. Then I will become the person who meditates and reads and is comfortable in their own tattooed skin. And I'm here to tell you, having gone to and come back from the Red Rocks of Sedona, the US capital of spirituality. That is not how it works. Jim Carrey said something to this effect that has always stayed with me. He said, I hope everyone gets rich and famous as early as possible so that they can see it's not the answer. It's not going to solve the big problems. I'm not saying don't move somewhere beautiful. I'm not saying don't snowbird. But the gap between your financial life now and the one you're working toward, that gap is not where you're going to find yourself. You already are yourself. You're doing it right now. And the self you are is the one who's going to show up in Sedona, or Palm Springs, or Sarasota, or wherever the plan eventually lands. So the real work, and this is the financial work and the life work, and I genuinely don't think they're separate, is knowing who you actually are before you build the plan. What do you actually want when you're not performing wanting? What's the couch you actually want to sit on? What's the dinner that actually makes you feel like yourself? What's the life that actually fits? Answer those questions first, then build the financial plan toward those answers. Because a plan built toward the right life is one of the most efficient financial instruments there is. And a plan built toward the wrong one is just an expensive way to eventually find out who you are or, more aptly, who you aren't. That's it for today. Thanks for bearing with me with a kind of experimental episode. As always, if this gave you something to think about, please consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify. It genuinely helps the show find people who need to hear it. I will see you next week and until then, know thyself. It's free. Everything else is not. Thanks for tuning in to Your Money Guide on the Side. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to visit my website at tylergardner.com for even more helpful resources and insights. And if you're interested in receiving some quick and actionable guidance each week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter, where each Sunday I share three actionable financial ideas to help you take control of your money and investments. You can find the sign up link on my website, tylergardner.com, or on any of my socials at socialcapofficial. Until next time, I'm Tyler Gardner, your money guide on the side, and I truly hope this episode got you one step closer to where you need to be.