ChooseFI with Brad and Jonathan
ChooseFI with Brad and Jonathan
I have an exciting November scheduled for all of you! I’ve decided to focus the entire month around the topic of Financial Independence. I’m going to speak to people who are pursuing it, people who have achieved it, and everything in between.
This topic is one that is near and dear to me. The idea of Financial Independence completely changed my concept of retirement and helped me reimagine a much more exciting vision of working, because you want to work and not because you have to work. There is no one path to Financial Independence, and I’m excited for you to hear more about the subject through different points of view.
Kicking off the month are Jonathan and Brad, cofounders and cohosts of the ChooseFI podcast, which is the largest independent personal finance podcast with close to 2MM downloads per month. They have built a community of people with the common goal of reaching FI, where working is optional.
What are we drinking?
Jonathan - Monster Energy Ultra Fiesta
Brad - Water
Shannon - Black Cherry Schweppes
Podcast Notes
Shannon was recently on the ChooseFI show. Click here to listen to the episode.
Jonathan and Brad have very different backgrounds with money. Brad is very frugal. After college, Brad moved back to his parent’s house and was saving all of his money. His future wife was doing the same thing. They started their working lives with an 80% savings rate.
Brad was into personal finance and started reading Get Rich Slowly, by J.D. Roth. That was the first finance blog he read. This led him to Mr. Money Mustache around 2013.
When Brad and his wife got married, they were saving 50% of their income. They felt like they were an island, because of their frugality, and it was heartening to find a community of people doing the same thing.
Not spending all of your money is counter cultural.
Jonathan had a plan carved out. He thought small businesses would eventually fail, and he wanted a steady career. He wanted to win the game and he thought that meant getting many degrees, taking out as many student loans as possible, and getting a W-2 job.
Jonathan grew up middle class and he is the oldest of five kids. There was enough to meet their needs and a few wants, but there wasn’t a lot left over. Regarding money, his parents taught him credit card debt was bad.
In high school, Jonathan was introduced to Google and his first search was on highest paying jobs. He went on to four years of undergrad and four years of pharmacy school and he had a job with an entry-level salary of $105,000 to $110,000. He had $168,000 of student loan debt at 24 years old.
Jonathan found Dave Ramsey and then the financial independence community. A 50% savings rate sounded crazy to him, but he became a spreadsheet junkie and saw his net worth change dramatically. He wanted to share his story and show people that it really works.
Jonathan proposed a podcast to Brad to talk about two different viewpoints on money. They didn’t realize it would end up being the voice of the community with focus on what other people are doing.
The community grew out of the podcast. Their original tag line was “Experiments in Financial Independence”. They thought of themselves as the crash test dummies of financial independence tests. They realized quickly that people are longing for connection and community. Stories make the world go round and embolden people to take action.
There is a limit to their story and the breadth of it. They pivoted very early on, when they realized it was about their community. They brought listeners’ voicemails and life hacks onto every podcast and it transformed the podcast from limited potential to unlimited potential.
When they started the podcast, it was a form of documentation. As the time commitment was increasing, listeners were increasing, and emails were flooding their inbox, they decided to increase from 30 minute check ins.
Their brand and message is generally around helping people spend less and optimizing the margins. This flies in the face of some business models that are all about selling something.
You can build a business around helping people spend less. Jonathan and Brad started by adding extreme levels of value to their community, building their community, and looking for the most synergistic ways to offer value. In the early days this was done through affiliate marketing.
As your audience grows, and you identify who your 1,000 fans are, they are telling you where their problems are and what they most need help with. Jonathan and Brad were able to expand outside of just affiliate marketing.
Jonathan and Brad have been in partnership for about three and a half years. There have only been about one or two disagreements that would be considered significant. It is about trust, integrity, and trying to add value to the community. This is how they approach it behind the scenes.
Jonathan and Brad didn’t know each other before starting the ChooseFI podcast. They are just looking to provide something valuable to the world and they aren’t doing it for selfish reasons.
ChooseFI now has 300 local groups in 300 cities across the world. People are getting together to talk about FI, work on businesses, and share tools. It changes everything when working toward financial independence is normalized.
When they started the podcast, Jonathan was working as a pharmacist and they recorded one episode a week. Brad wanted to do a round up, which was a casual conversation, and he finally convinced Jonathan to do a second episode a week to include voicemails and engage the community. They committed to it from that point forward and that opened the door to have a community-based show.
The next evolution of ChooseFI is to follow eight different households from all different walks of life that just found FI this calendar year.
One of their impactful podcasts was about their good friend Deanna was addicted to drugs until her late 30s or early 40s and she had a significant amount of debt, when she had an awakening and transformed her life. She will reach FI in the next five to seven years. Click here to listen to the episode.
As they put it out there that they were looking to identify these people, it became easier and easier to find them.
Everybody wants financial independence. They may not have the language yet or realize there is a tried and true process to get there, but everybody wants this end result.
When Brad and Jonathan started and they were looking for someone who had pursued FI, all they knew were the famous bloggers. There wasn’t a way for Brad and Jonathan to find them. Their network was limited to the loudest voices in the room.
For 2021, they want to follow the eight households and bring in subject matter experts to help people on the path to FI, they want to do more with less and optimize as much as possible around content production, and they want to give new community members an easy way to get started.
Brad and Jonathan have a ChooseFI foundation and they recently launched a financial independence 101 course. They have a team of educators who have worked for the past two years to put together a K-12 curriculum together and they are trying to get it adopted into schools.
Jonathan has been creating YouTube videos and Brad has been doing Facebook Live events twice a week to reach people who don’t listen to podcasts.
Takeaway: My biggest takeaway is that financial independence story lines and journeys have evolved over the last decade, and hopefully FI a goal or a path that you would like to pursue and pursue in your own way.
Random Three Questions
Are you a binge reader or binge watcher? What have you been bingeing?
If this was your last meal on earth, what would you choose?
If you had to pick one word to describe financial independence, what would it be?
Connect with Brad and Jonathan
Website: ChooseFI
Podcast: ChooseFI
Instagram: @choosefiradio
If you have any topics you would like me to cover on this podcast, or if you’d like to get in the financially naked hot seat, I encourage you to email me to Shannon@fingyms.com, or join the private Martinis and Your Money Facebook group, and let me know what you want to hear.
If you’d like to make financial independence a goal for yourself sooner than later, I hope you’ll reach out to my team at The Financial Gym. We give the goal of FI to all of our clients and work with them on the best path to get there as soon as possible. Remember, Martinis and Your Money listeners get special promotions at The Gym, So head over to, or send friends to, financialgym.com to get set up today.