054: Taking a Coast FI Sabbatical | Modest Millionaires

Disclaimer: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. That means we may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking through our links.

Money Mechanic
Hello, listeners. Welcome to Explore FI Canada, where we sit at the roundtable with Canadians, and share their thoughts, ideas and personal journeys to financial independence.

Thanks to Matt McKeever for sponsoring Explore FI Canada. Matt is a Canadian investor, CPA, entrepreneur, and real estate expert who achieved FIRE at age 31. Do us a favour and check out his YouTube channel by searching Matt McKeever or using the link in our show notes.

Money Mechanic
Hello listeners Welcome to Explore FI Canada, where we sit at the roundtable with Canadians and share their thoughts, ideas and personal journeys to financial independence. Thanks to Matt McKeever for sponsoring Explore FI Canada. Matt is a Canadian investor, CPA, entrepreneur, and real estate expert who achieved FIRE at age 31. Do us a favor and check out his YouTube channel by searching Matt McKeever or using the link in our show notes

Welcome back to Explore FI Canada Chrissy How often do your dog… does your dog… I have dogs… does Mika give you the evil eye? Because I am getting the evil eye from my dogs because we were unable to walk them yesterday and they know today is like sliding by, and it’s time to walk and you they have this look in their eyes. It’s like the guilt trip. I feel so guilty.

Chrissy
We get that all day cuz Mika’s a Shiba Inu and they’re famous for their evil eyes. They’re always judging, always judging.

Money Mechanic
How are you my friend?

Chrissy
I’m okay. I could be better. I hurt my shoulder.

Money Mechanic
You got some early 40s pain? I can relate to that.

Chrissy
A lot. Worse, worse than it’s ever been, but I’ll make it.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, well, at least you’re here recording a podcast, we always have fun. And we’re always happy. And we’ve been having a great string of interviews this year. And it’s no different. Chrissy, you and I should probably just do a show alone one of these days and like actually pretend we know a lot about financial independence. But why when we have a constant, these people that come on the show? So who do we have this week?

Chrissy
Well, we have someone who was formerly known as a different name, Ms. Mod. And now she has come out of the closet, shall we say, as a blogger and she is fully out in the open now. So why don’t you introduce yourself as your real identity?

Mel
Well, thanks for having me on. I’m so excited to be on here with you guys as I’m, like frequent listener to the podcast. So my name is Mel Dorion, as you can hear, I’m from Quebec. And I’m trying not to roll my Rs too much. But I’m from Quebec. So my blog is available both in French and English, I produce my content and both languages do have the widest reach. And my blog is modestmillionaires.com. And that’s why I was known as Ms. Mod as I started blogging anonymously initially, but now I’m officially out as my own name.

Chrissy
I think it’s amazing. I’ve always told you how amazed I am that you can blog bilingually because that is not easy. And your English is spot on. Like, I don’t know about your French. I can’t read the French and know if it’s grammatically correct. Obviously, it must be because that’s your native tongue. But wow, that’s quite a feat to be able to blog in both languages.

Mel
Yeah, I feel pretty fortunate because where I grew up, I live like on the border to Ontario’s it’s a very bilingual community. And my family itself is very bilingual.

Chrissy
Yeah, yeah. And something I learned about you recently you, I asked you about but I was curious. And you told me that you have some indigenous heritage in your family. And I think it’s just really cool to call that out. Because Canada is very diverse. But the finance community isn’t always a it’s not always apparent how diverse we are. So I think it’s important to highlight that that you know, there, there’s some interesting heritage in your family.

Mel
Definitely. It’s been kind of a word of mouth story in our family, like I’m not sure exactly which First Nation community, but it’s definitely something I’ve been fascinated about. I know at least two great grandparents who are First Nation. And I think that’s one privilege of FIRE is that I’ll have time to actually do the research. And as my kids get older, I do want to share that with them and just that culture and knowing about the background of this heritage.

Chrissy
And you mentioned you have two kids. How old are they now?

Mel
They are six and five. They’re What do you call them? Irish twins sometimes?

Chrissy
Very close together.

Mel
16 months apart!

Chrissy
Wow.

Mel
The first year was rock’n’roll, but now it’s pretty smooth.

Chrissy
Yeah. And I know you’ve mentioned that they’re a big part of why you have decided to transition into a different lifestyle. So maybe we can go back into your story. And you can tell us more about where you were maybe a couple of years ago and where you are now.

Mel
Yeah. So discovering FI happened, I’d say like in 2012. I had almost finished paying off $25,000 of student loans. And I was thinking about the next step. And like a lot of people I stumbled on a famous blog, Mr. Money Mustache.

Chrissy
Our favourite.

Mel
Yes! I got extremely excited about this. And I came up to my partner and said, hey, there’s this thing. And we can like, cut our expenses and quit our jobs in our 30s. And he was like, Huh, why? And no, thank you, I think we’re good. We were living pretty frugally already, I was really like determined to pay off the debt. And to him, that didn’t make much sense. But as like, I got more into the idea and started making my own plan. We got more into the why we want to be financially independent. And then that’s when he really got on board is when we were expecting our first kid in 2014. And he saw the value in having more time and spending more time with the family. And not necessarily coming at it from a let’s cut our spending, it’s more understanding what our spending is really to, like, support that life that we want, which too has to end like you mentioned, Chrissy, is like spending more time with my family. But it’s also spending time on passion work. Like I started coaching individuals, after I started blogging about it, it was first friends and family members that would ask for help and just guiding them with their own budget. And I really fell in love with that type of work, and just helping getting people on stuff with their finances. And it became a side hustle. And eventually I realized that I would still want to do this after I reached financial independence. So it wasn’t necessarily about reaching a point where I’m not making any income anymore. It was about spending that time and doing passion work and helping people. And eventually that led me to make the decision of taking a sabbatical to test out entrepreneurship and just see if coaching people might generate enough income to provide for my cost of living at least my share of our expenses. And then my investments could continue to compound to reach my full financial independence number in the coast by fashion. I know you guys had The Fioneers on. Jess is my good friend. So it’s kind of that Coast FI approach.

Money Mechanic
Here we are. Another Coast FI (inaudible). I love it.

Mel
It’s getting so popular.

Money Mechanic
Well, you know, I was just thinking about that it is such a familiar story that we so many of us found Mr. Money Mustache. And you know, Ryan’s shouting at his headphones right now that we’re not talking enough about FIRE and Mr. Money Mustache. Mr. Money Mustache is listening. He’s like, no, it’s all about the early retirement. And so much of the story now we hear is, it’s the, you know, a passion project, an entrepreneur side hustle turning into something I really enjoyed doing. And I’ve always believed it’s you, you need to kind of retire to something. And the freedom to do it, aside from the money is really what we want to talk about, isn’t it? It’s that time freedom. Take us back a little bit further to sort of what your background is, and what gives you some credentials to do that kind of sort of coaching and finances and take us back to the beginning of your blog sort of days.

Mel
Absolutely. Well, in fact, my my interest in finances comes from a long way back, I actually decided to choose a college major that combined two of my interests, which is international travel and international development and business. So I studied a really cool program at HEC Montreal in Montreal, which allows you to do a trilingual bachelor’s degree in business admin. So I studied a third of my courses in French, a third in Spanish and a third in English and then spent a semester abroad that was in Peru, which was an amazing experience. So I kind of use that knowledge, like the business side of things in my own personal finances. And meanwhile, it led me into a career as a senior business analyst in the federal government. So I was a public servant for the last 10 years now. And I’m on a sabbatical from that. But all that knowledge that was like kind of helping businesses because it was more in link with the industry positions. My most recent position was like with telecommunications industry, and like dealing with conflicts of smaller players with larger players like Bell, TELUS, and, kind of thinking, How can I apply that knowledge to finances and making our goals sustainable in the long run? And, like, I don’t want to use the term profitable, but making sure that we remain profitable and like, you know, financially independent.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, this is this is where one of the things that I read in your blog struck me, and I’ve heard this mentioned before as well. If you become running your family’s finances, as a small business and having that business background, it was probably a natural progression to just start doing that, but it is a great way to think of it. And it kind of removes a little bit of the emotion of sort of the day to day spending and run it more like your businesses if you got your, you know, your profits and your liabilities and your expenses and run it like that. Right?

Mel
Absolutely. But it did at times drove my spouse nuts, especially in the beginning, because if I’m approaching every little decision as a business, and take all the emotions out of it, it can drive someone crazy. That was kind of a learning too, and like in our communications and being like, no, remember what we value and those things. So that’s something he he helped me kind of move away from the too, like black and white and see the nuance of writing our own personal finances.

Chrissy
Yeah, it’s important to have that input from your partner, because I’m the same, I can drive my husband crazy. I’m all about the math and optimizing. And he’s more on the emotional side, you know, enjoying life while we get there. And then not just, you know, putting the pedal down all the way the whole way. So yeah, I totally get that.

Money Mechanic
I’ve got a quick question here. I noticed that you’ve got you said in 2014, you had a 10-year plan. So I think in your blog, I read 2025 was your original plan. And you actually have a post in there where you’ve shown your annual progress as a percentage towards FI going through, that’s kind of an interesting trajectory to see. And I’d like you to tell our listeners, what the difference is. Because you’re I think you’ve you’re probably closer than you thought you’d be in 2021, right? So for people that are just starting out, and they see that they’ve got a 10-year plan, you know, it’s probably realistic to set that timeframe. But how do you feel about how that sort of shortened for you? And what happened that was unexpected? Or is it just things that we don’t anticipate and compounding and saving that happened? What did you find?

Mel
That’s a great question. When we started out, it was that that 10 year timeline. And since we wanted to make space for, like, time with our family, and we were expecting at the time, our plan did kind of have caveats of saying we’d like to spend some parts of the summers on leaves without pay once the kids are in school so that they don’t, they don’t go to like, well, they could go to day camps. But at least we’d spent a lot of time with them. So we did have that built into the plan. But for sure, there was some compounding, like we had, I had a promotion that fell into that. And we had not planned any promotions, really, other than like economic growth that we do have in our salaries as public servants. So that was definitely an increase. But I made other choices like working from home in 2018, I negotiated work from home that cut our spending. Again, and it just like compounds by being surrounded also in the community of like seeing what others are doing. And then you become more efficient at making the little changes and everything ends up being optimized. And you get clearer too, on what’s important, like spending your time, like we don’t spend that much money on entertainment and stuff. Because we know that it’s spending time with family and spending time outdoors. And that that really helped compound but also let’s not lie, like it’s been the biggest longest. What is it? longest bull market?

Money Mechanic
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah, external factors definitely matter. Yep.

Mel
The first year. So that definitely helped. But it did mean that we were at the right point. And having everything optimized that we could always make the best decision with the opportunity that did show up.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, I think I’ve said this before on both podcasts is that many of us are probably too conservative with our estimates, which is is a good way to be, to err on the conservative side. But you’re not the first person that has said, we’ve kind of got to where we thought we’d be a lot sooner than what we expected. And and then you’ve got the freedom to what you’ve done is what we’re kind of, of course, my favorite, Coast FI, topic is, instead of keep pushing hard for the end, you’ve decided to take a sabbatical.

Mel
Absolutely. And it was it was kind of an idea that that came even in the early on, when when I talked about like my Why is my passion work and all of this, it was something I was exploring. And it’s also why I started blogging, I wanted to talk about it more and like help others along the way potentially. And then actually helping one on one became such a energizing type of work. And that idea built up this this wanted desire to try this out this entrepreneurship. But then what I did was in 2019, I started to think like maybe I will move out of my nine to five sooner before that 2025 date, because we’re doing that, like we’re progressing so quickly. And this seems to make sense, it’s not that big of a risk. But I was still scared obviously, because it is a big change, like moving from investing 50% or more of your of your revenue to only even my goal was like only cover my cost of living was scary. So I reached out to (;ink) Gillian Johnsrud. You both, I think, are familiar with her, but she’s in the FI space. And she reached financial independence at 32. And then what she started doing, after she started blogging, was helping people who are in transition mode, like going into FI or going into entrepreneurship. And I reached out to her and I told her, I, I’d love to get mentoring, my plan is within the next three years. So that’s 2019 at the end of the year. And then 2020, as we all know, the pandemic showed up. And this was kind of a drastic change in our lifestyle with two young kids having to have them home all the time, and dealing with the flexibility, because in Quebec schools opened up but then if my son has sniffles, then we have to plan out a test and you know, needing all that flexibility, made it quite appetizing to say maybe I should do this sooner, right? Like the three-year idea is not, that time line isn’t working for me anymore. So working with Jillian was huge in that mindset shift, and the accountability of having her alongside to check-in and help me through it, but also having the accountability of, I mentioned, Jessica, from The Fioneers, she’s a good friend of mine. And we’ve been hitting up virtually pretty much every week to check in. And she’s also launched a business. So it’s nice to have somebody in the same position. And I think like anyone that has even financial independence goals, it’s good to be part of the community to see, like, people who have been there, what they’re doing, what has helped them through struggles. And then the other part of that was having kind of failproof plans or like plans that can adapt to different circumstances. So Jillian had me craft out, like brainstorm how many ways I could generate the income, I would need to cover my cost of living. And that really helped kind of empower me. And I still had to work through some limiting beliefs, like anyone, starting a business.

Yeah, for sure. Imposter syndrome.

Yeah, and anyone like moving into financial independence, I think there’s a ton of limiting beliefs that shows up like when you have a big decision of like slowing down. So definitely was still scary. But the excitement and like the clear vision and all those backup plans, kind of it overcame that that fear to make the leap.

Chrissy
But I would like to dig in to the more actionable info because I’m all about that. So how did you approach this discussion with your employer? And you’re saying it’s a sabbatical? So does that mean that they are holding the position for you? And like, what was the agreement that you worked out with them?

Mel
So in the federal government, we do have different options for leave without pay. There’s like for childhood care if there you have children under five, and there’s different options, but personal leave is one of them. And I had been very honest with my employer along the pandemic of saying that it was difficult to manage with the kids. And both me and my spouse were essential positions. He works for the federal government as well. But, like, making sure that like the pension payouts and everything run well. So we understand that this is very essential, even in a pandemic, and I worked in relation with the telecom industry, which has been like, very important, helping people school online, and people work from home. So it was very demanding, and I was very open with them along the last year. And at a certain point, I think it was five months prior to my leave date, it became even harder when school started up. And we needed all that flexibility. And then I approached my employer and I told them, I was thinking of making a change. So they had advanced notice. And I even gave my notice four months in advance saying that I’m going to take a sabbatical, so a year off, so they had time to staff the position for replacement. And then how it works is that if I come back within the year, I come back into the same position. But otherwise, it might be just on a priority list in the federal government. Or you can reach out to your contacts and see what’s available. But I’m I’m kind of testing so I want to see how it goes, how I’m generating income how it feels because as I mentioned, this is a different feeling of only covering your expenses. And then I would give advance notice if I’m not returning to my employment, so

Chrissy
It’s almost like a mat leave.

Mel
Yeah, kind of.

Money Mechanic
I was gonna call it Spouse FI.

Chrissy
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that too, like, which I was also going to ask about your partner’s role in all of this, because you’re saying that this means that you’re going to cut out your savings, you’re planning to only cover your living expenses. So does that mean he is going to cover the savings portion as well as his portion of the living costs?

Mel
That’s a great question. And the funny thing is, I mentioned how I approached him with the financial independence idea, like kind of did the same thing when I started to think about entrepreneurship. And like, I was starting to see people do Coast FI, I was like, you know, what, I’m, I’m getting out of this plan. And I want to do entrepreneurship. So this is happening. He was like, wait! You got me on this. So we had to talk a lot through it. And that was like, back when I was thinking about the three-year timeline that was kind of a compromise between each other and saying, Well, you know, what, we know this won’t compromise our full FI at the rhythm we’re going. And it’s important to both of us that we each reach our own financial independence number, we kind of have a separate and combined approach where we have, like, a combined account for all the costs for the kids. Combined credit cards for those costs, but we each, like, receive our paychecks in our individual accounts. Well, my freelancing income now in our individual accounts, and then we just split the rest. And we’ve always been this way, we are very different people. He’s cautious per se, and very calculative, as well, he’s very good with financial knowledge, too. But he does not want to have to generate an income when he leaves his nine to five. And he likes what he does, too. So that’s another point I was at the latest, the last year, I found it more difficult with the circumstances at all. And I wasn’t quite as happy with my work, too. But also, I know, I want to do passion work and for a long time. And I’m very all over the place too. I can be very quick to make a decision. So it’s good that it grounds me sometimes to like, let’s think about this, put the right steps in place. And it really works for us because we’re both different, risk averse, and all of that. And the way we’re approaching it is that I my objective is to cover my share of our spending. He’s just continuing to invest on his side. So my FI number is going to slow down, like, the progression. I know Money Mechanic, you mentioned that I have that progression chart and I I haven’t been updating it these last few months because I want to change it to have my FI progression. And my spouse’s FI progression, which will be interesting to see because he’s probably gonna go really faster. And then our combined number.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, it will be aninteresting comparison, so yeah, now it’ll be what do you want for your birthday or Christmas? You’re like, Oh, you know, maybe a TFSA contribution?

Mel
Could you fill up my RSP?

Money Mechanic
No, you’re using TFSA now if you’re self-employed.

Chrissy
So does that mean that you don’t have joint investment accounts? You keep everything separate? So that you can have your own goals and not have to mix up the money that way?

Mel
Exactly. Except for the RESP. I was gonna say the French acronym… the RESP.

Chrissy
Okay. Okay, that’s that makes it very clear. And it completely makes sense. Now. We’re going to talk about Spouse FI like, how is this working? It is it is a version of it, I would say.

Mel
Yeah. And he likes to say that he’s that I’m satisfied. I’m like, super stubborn. I’m like, No, I’m covering my costs of spending. But we’ll see down the road how things go. Like, I want to slow down even more in the summer, because the kids will be home. So that’s a thing to take into consideration. But he’s very understanding of the plan and everything. So he’s really on board. But I’m also trying to influence him. He’s thinking about taking a leave without pay this summer, which I’m excited about. And it’s it’s kind of seeing his timeline as closer now by seeing me take all those steps and being like, oh, wow, we’re closer than we thought. Okay, we’re doing this.

Money Mechanic
And we should say that, you know, when we when I say Spouse FIRE, it’s kind of tongue in cheek, right? Because it all it only works if it’s a good discussion with both partners and that it makes sense to both people, right? It’s not like, Hey, I’m quitting my job, but you have to keep working to support the family. Right. I think it has to be made as a group a team decision, right?

Mel
For sure. But it also kind of had security to the plan too so it’s important to develop it and kind of be honest about it because I do still I am on his insurance plan the family’s on his insurance plan. It’s benefits that help with that mindset shift and that kind of comfort with making the leap. Like that played a huge part for sure.

Money Mechanic
Well, and you know, what makes a difference too, is that you, you mentioned that your husband may, right now not want to do any work after his nine to five, totally fine if he stays that way. But there may be an advantage to one person making the transition early and getting something established that they love doing that generates a little bit of income from the family. And later down the road. At that point, when your husband’s happy to transition away from the nine to five, he can then choose whether he wants to or not. But he may have seen the business and the enjoyment and the fulfillment, the purpose, right, cuz that’s one of the things we need is purpose. So he may find that purpose for himself. Right? So having split up instead of both people going, boom, we hit FI Let’s both quit. It kind of makes sense to stagger it a little bit, I think.

Mel
Yeah. And there’s kind of other advantages of like having that time, I’ll have more time to kind of investigate some things that we’re we need to have in place. Once we are done with working. Like the insurance, as I mentioned, that’s something I want to spend time researching. Do I want private insurance? Once we’re done, and we’re off the government plan, but I’ll have more time to do that while he’s still working. And we still have that option.

Money Mechanic
Okay, Chrissy, I think we need to talk about time.

Chrissy
Yeah. How so?

Money Mechanic
Well, because I did read one of Mel’s recent posts, the beginning of 2021, because she just started the sabbatical this year. And from what I gathered, time, was the biggest thing that wasn’t quite what you anticipated in the first sort of month and a half, two months of this, of this practice FI, practice FIRE. So tell us a little bit about what things went, or how things not quite went as planned.

Mel
That’s definitely interesting. Like, two months in now, I’m over two months in now. And in that one month update, I talk about how it’s such a learning experience to finally be in that in that, yes, sabbatical or like FIRE practice. as I like to call it. I thought I would go in and I had this list of things I wanted to do like both personally and for the business itself. I came gun guns blazing into my first week. And I’m like, I’m decluttering the whole house in two weeks. And I think I first said like in one week. And then like the first week I burnt myself out. And then the second week, was like I think I entitled it entitled it The Exhaustion. I like just lounged on the couch and was like this doesn’t make sense. What am I doing? Why did I did I think I would like Konmari my house in two weeks? And then even the business goals. I looked at my list, I was like, this is crazy, like I can’t build out a course, take on that many clients, do this and that. And I was like, okay, the idea is to work 20 hours per week, not go into 60 hours a week on my business, that was not the plan. And it was also a lot around like the pandemic having that flexibility. So I need to build up a schedule that makes room for the different moving parts. So that’s like having space for my clients, but also working on preparing tools for those clients too. There’s not just the calls, there’s the background work. And then there’s working on the business, the writing on the blog, and all the other stuff, and then making space for family, having that extra day in the week that’s just like errands or like potentially a kid at home sick day or something. And then for my health too. And that’s what I’ve been experimenting with these last, I think I’m in my ninth week now. And I think I’m going to continue to change and adapt and remove stuff on the list now and then and make it more manageable.

Chrissy
Yeah, and it evolves as you go. And also as your kids grow up. I had a very similar experience when because I’m a stay-at-home mom. And when both of my kids were finally in school, they, some people tease stay-at-home moms, they say that’s your Princess Year, where you’re finally free of all the kids and you get to be a princess and I’m not into being a princess. But I was like you, I had this these lists of things I was gonna get to and you’re so motivated, you’re so excited and you’re just crushed within, you know, the first couple of weeks. You’re like, I can’t do all this. It’s not realistic. And it is kind of a crash course in reality, just because you suddenly have more time. There’s still a lot of just day-to-day stuff that you have to deal with. And, you know, you have to be smarter with your time organization. You’ll get it done, but it’s not going to be quite as fast as you think it’ll be

Mel
Right. And like even individuals Without kids, like running a household takes a lot of energy and time. And we often underestimate that. And I think this last year in the pandemic, like, a lot of people figure it out, we’re going to be home all the time. But then there’s that added weight of we’re in a global pandemic. Like there’s so much stress. But just running a household. It’s busy.

Chrissy
Yeah, yeah. Well, at my household, everyone’s at home, like my kids are schooling from home, my husband’s working from home. And I find there’s so many dishes like all day long. And cooking. That’s all I’m doing right now. And it’s, it’s kind of crazy when people are around all day, how much difference it makes in the house, how much more work there is.

Money Mechanic
I think there’s a big transition time from, especially when you come from a nine to five, or from a full-time atmosphere, where the expectation is that you are productive for that period of the day. And then you know, your free time, well, let’s not even call it free time. Let’s call it what it is. The rest of the time, you have to do stuff when it’s with your children, like I said, with your household. It’s like you get you might get a little breather on the weekend, if you’re lucky. And that’s what wears so many people down, right. But just because all of a sudden your days are empty from that work schedule. We can fill it up really fast because we’re our own worst enemy at expectations. It’s like I’ve got all this time out I’m gonna do all of this stuff on this giant list. I we’re all victims it and especially I think people in the FI community because we’re optimizers. We’re generally hard workers, right? So we create these unrealistic expectations and burn ourselves out really fast, right? And I like what you posted in there about Purple. She retired last year. And I saw that I didn’t click it, I was going to, it’s called Slug Life. Just briefly tell me what Slug Life is.

Mel
Purple is the ultimate Slug Lifer is what I think it’s her mom and her that coined that term, where it’s she masters the art of being unproductive to fuel the times where she really needs to be productive. And she has such a good way of finding that balance. And it’s always so funny when I hang out with her. Because I’m like, I have a pretty easy day. And I’ll have like five things on my schedule. And she’s like, Oh my gosh, just having this call was a lot. So she’s good at like grounding me back in that like fighting against my productive voice in the background.

Chrissy
And if anyone doesn’t know who purple is, she’s the blogger behind A Purple Life. And she was based in Seattle for a really long time when she started her blog, but now she’s kind of nomadic. The pandemic kind of clipped her wings a bit, but it sounds like she’s just about ready to take off and go gallivanting around the world with her mom as she had planned.

Mel
Yeah, she’s awesome. I love her blog and, and she’s an awesome person on the she she says that she’s like, I don’t know how she puts it, but it kind of like she has granny activities. So rich, early retirement life is perfect for her. She’s like bird watching right now. And reading and just lounging and she loves it. Yeah, it’s wonderful for her.

Money Mechanic
I think it’s important for us all to kind of master the art of doing nothing. Like, just take some time out of the day, you know, once in a while, when I get a chance. It’s like, I’ll just lay on the couch and read a book for half an hour. And it’s wonderful. You know, it’s just it’s the middle of the day everybody else’s at work. I’m reading a book. This is amazing.

Mel
And like a novel not fiction.

Money Mechanic
Well, okay. No, I read ,y novels before I go to bed. But I read the nonfiction during the day. So then it’s kind of like, I’ve been productive, but I’ve been lazy.

Mel
I do that too.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, no, my novels put me to sleep.

Chrissy
Now we are going to, not quite pivot, but go back into Mel’s story a little bit because you have found I would like to say incremental levels of freedom along your FI journey. And even though you’re still three years out from actually hitting your goal, you have found different ways to give yourself a bit more time to spend with your family and doing the things that you enjoy. So maybe you can go over some of the ways that you have just slowly found this freedom in your life.

Mel
One way was in even early on like in 2014 to 2018 my spouse and I would do a little more like work from home days. It started with one day a week and he was doing the same and then it was two days a week so we didn’t have the commute. And I found that that was so helpful with our family life especially when the two kids were they were two under two. And we were both working out of the house. It was a bit hectic. And I I took the opportunity at work when they were running out of office spaces. I asked to work from home full time. And now it’s so common, especially in the federal government. Like, everybody’s working from home. But back in 2018, that was not a usual request. And it took me several months to negotiate it. Just as you would negotiate a salary, I have negotiated a full-time work from home, and it was saying, like, I’m giving up my office, please, I don’t want it. I just want to work from home. But that was one change that really increased our time as a family. And like I could start doing errands during the day and stuff like that. So that was an awesome first way. And I used to say back then that it was a good way to kind of like test out what it would be like being at home all the time. But now people have been like, at home for a year. But it’s a bit different, like not in a pandemic, not with all the family members at home. So that was one way. Then in 2019, we started planning a trip. So another one of our passion is travel, which we’re missing a lot right now. But we wanted to travel for, to go to Mexico, that was the initial plan. And we were looking at all-inclusives and stuff like that, which is not my preference. And I managed to convince my spouse to go a full month to Mexico with the kids and bringing along extended family members. So we were extremely lucky. We went in January 2020, we spent a month in Mexico, really lucky on our timing, and doing those little changes along the way. And kind of increased my comfort at asking for stuff like I want to take a full month off from work is a big ask, depending on the positions, and increased also my learning of what I was enjoying. Like, we like the idea of traveling long term with the kids, but one month felt just right. Like we were happy to come back, the kids were happy to find back their home. So it informed us on how to plan ahead and adjust our plans accordingly. And I do that kind of with my clients too. I have them like if they need to reduce their spending and increase their gap. But I won’t have them like reduce all their spending will pay attention first to one or two categories. Let’s say they want to try reducing takeout expenses. And then they get to learn how that felt what struggles showed up, did they end up eating cereal like three nights a week, because they weren’t planning as well. And then you kind of clarify the support that can help you. Like in my case, talking with people was so helpful with negotiating that work from home. And that’s why that that reaching out to a coach for my transition to this entrepreneurship felt like the right choice to me, because I knew that kind of support was really helpful, or that person that tried to cut takeout, they might want to look at meal planning and find more recipes that are easier and plan ahead.

Chrissy
Yeah, I think it’s really important to be able to highlight that more and more of us in this community are talking about these incremental steps towards freedom instead of this one goal that you get to as fast as you can at the very end. And I know there are some people who are very hardcore about FIRE and that’s the way that they think it should be done. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re able to do that, go for it good for you. But for many people, a slightly slower path, a more measured approach is more sustainable. It’s healthier, emotionally, it’s something that you can control better, because you can change things along the way so that they suit your life better. And, a lot of times that does mean slowing down on your saving, but it’s worth it because it’s a happier path. It’s a more sustainable path.

Money Mechanic
Well, I’m gonna agree and disagree with you, Chrissy.

Chrissy
Okay.

Money Mechanic
I think I think at the beginning, though, when you kind of see when you have the FIRE epiphany, when it grabs you, we all know what it was like at the beginning. And I think you need to jump into the pool in the deep end, and learn to swim, right? You need to make some big changes to your finances, to your lifestyle, to your savings. And you need to get yourself seriously on this path, set a target goal and work at it, right? Because it takes about a year to kind of get it all dialed in.

Chrissy
That’s true.

Money Mechanic
But once you’ve put that hard work into it, and you know, you’ve created a 10 year plan, you’ll probably find that three or four years into it, you can go, you know what, it doesn’t have to be full throttle all the time, right? I can take a month to go to Mexico and enjoy slow travel with my kids, my family. It’s like okay, let’s you know, pump the gas this year. For that, we know it’s going to extend the ultimate deadline. But, you know, for example with Mel, you’re, what do you say, you’re six years in to the journey?

Mel
Yeah, six years.

Money Mechanic
Yeah. And you’re like, hey, I want to try this Coast FI thing. So I agree with you that slowing down is appropriate. But I also think that you need to hit it hard at the beginning and get the right attitude, mentality, systems in place. And once you’re confident with everything and it’s working, then you get more options.

Mel
Yeah, asking those questions about like, how and when can I slow down? It stems from having a good grasp on where you’re at? And having like, track your spending, have an understanding of your goals, too. And like, what’s the gap between your goals and where you’re at? You need to really be clear on that, before even defining how you’re going to bridge that gap. And that’s where the levers lie of how quickly can I bridge that gap? Or can I pull on those levers and reduce the speed a bit, but I’m still working towards that end goal and not compromising? In my case, financial independence in the long run? I know it will happen at a point.

Chrissy
Yeah, you’re both right. Absolutely. You have to, you have to develop that foundation. You’re right. I didn’t mean to skip over that initial part. You’re right. That is important. Until you get to that stage. I guess the different bloggers that we’ve mentioned they, I think you said that JD Roth has this continuum of I don’t remember exactly what he calls it, and then so does Jessica, The Fioneers, but they all have these continuums, where there’s these different phases that you pass through. But yes, you do have to reach those initial phases, where whether it’s FU money or solvency, whatever it may be, but you have to get there before you can slow down.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, well, okay. I mean, we can sit here and say that you can go as slow as you want. And maybe you’ll be at FI at 65. And if that’s your goal, that’s totally fine, too. Like, we’re not here to judge anybody’s goal. We know it’s personal. But if you read and you get into FIRE, right, because that’s, that’s the pitch we all want is we all want to quit early. And it’s up to you how hardcore you take the beginning. If you go ERE, Early Retirement Extreme, that’s totally fine too, right? It’s but you know, as I guess what I’m just trying to defend is I think you need a little bit of that like intensity at the beginning. And then you can kind of go that’s just not quite working. My spouse is not quite on board with that. Let’s see if we can tweak things a little but yeah, it’s it’s interesting because there are so many different things and it has been brought up by Jessica and JD Roth and Joshua Sheats about a continuum phases of FI I talked about it recently on an FI Garage podcast. And and you one of the hardest things is what we struggled with on the other podcast is how do you know when to make that transition? Mel? Was there something like an impetus was like now’s the time for transition, because you had a good job. You said you didn’t like it, but you were kind of okay with it. But you’re like, no, now’s the time,

Mel
The pandemic definitely played a big part, for sure. It was unsustainable, but it had been like a work in progress in the last years where I was seeing that, that like possibility, seeing other people doing this, when I went to Fincon, the financial conference with other bloggers in the FI space, or just other people that don’t even create content, but have achieved this goal, I saw was actually Oh, it’s true. And people are actually living off of their investment growth and 4% rule. And it makes things more real. And then you can kind of sustain that, that possibility. And another cool thing I would do is on the Mr. Money Mustache forums, is look in the cohorts of people that are about to FIRE. And you see the one more year syndrome pop up. And oftentimes the reason why pops up is because people get offered great balance opportunities, like full-time work from home, or take three months off, and then come back or work that many hours a week. And that builds up my confidence to, of making asks, to get that balance that kind of feels right for my family.

Chrissy
Yeah, why not get that earlier rather than till you wait till you get your goal. And then you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll stay one more year, two more years, you know, get that balance early, and then maybe stretch out your goal a little bit, just so you can have the best of both worlds?

Mel
Definitely.

Money Mechanic
I’ve got a quick question about the one more year syndrome that you brought up a little bit. You mentioned both you and your husband are federal workers. So you’ve got the original gilded gold pension in a DB form. Now for a lot of people that would be a consideration of when they might consider leaving their job. Just, let’s not go too far into the weeds here because we have discussed DB pensions and things like that on the past but that must have been a consideration. How do you factor it into your FI number? Do you plan on leaving it there and taking it as almost like an annuity, or are you going to compute the value? Just give us sort of broad strokes on how you factor that into your decision making,

Mel
We will commute the values. I even before discovering financial independence, I knew that federal government work would be a period in my life, I would probably go in nonprofit or something else. I knew I had that desire. But we also did a lot of research once we discovered FIRE. And we felt that with our timeline, we’ll be in our 30s. Well, I’m early 30s. And my spouse will be late 30s. But it still gives us a big timeline that it, to us, it makes sense to take that commuted value and then invest it ourselves as do it yourself investors, right (inadubile) along the way.

Money Mechanic
So in the choice to transition into Coast FIRE, I mean, I know you haven’t officially done it yet. But Chrissy, I’m willing to make a friendly bet that by December 31 of 2021, Mel will not be going back to full time.

Chrissy
Yeah.

Money Mechanic
Do a handshake bet on that?

Chrissy
I don’t know, I think I side with you on that one.

Money Mechanic
Okay, I’ll give you odds.

Mel
I’ll come back and update.

Money Mechanic
We’ll get an update plus, no, did you, did that weigh… that must have been a factor that weighed into your consideration as: I’m giving this up, am I okay with that?

Mel
Not at this latest year’s like, once the mindset shift had been done, it didn’t weigh that much. I’d say maybe like the health benefits and such, it’s still something that we want to calculate and might play into doing an extra year or not, depending on how much we need, or just generating more money from my business, or the various ways that Jillian had me think about generating money, but not as much as you would think.

Money Mechanic
Okay, that’s interesting.

Chrissy
Okay, well, I think it’s a good time to transition into you telling us about this new freebie that you’ve developed. Is it only for clients? Or is it for all blog readers?

Money Mechanic
No, I’ve got it. I’m not a client. This is not a promotional podcast. I should say we should have said at the beginning, Chrissy, this is not a sponsored episode.

Chrissy
Yeah, no, it’s not. No, we’re, we’re just happy to share Mel’s story. Yeah, so you have this new freebie that you’re releasing called Financial Clarity. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that.

Mel
So I love offering stuff free on the blog and content as, and tools really, that can help people in their own trajectory. And in this case, while I’m working with Jess on different things about overcoming a scarcity mindset, so this idea kind of stood up with is this workshop that that we’ll be doing in a couple of weeks, on overcoming that scarcity mindset and going into a place of abundance. Because what happens is when you’re stemming from scarcity, you have kind of stress, anxiety, about not having enough and there’s fear around every decision that you take. While when you move into an abundance mindset, you have a longer-term vision. And you can dream bigger, because you’re not working from defensive-type choices. And for me, the scarcity mindset, the best, the key and the first step is to understanding where you’re at. And I mentioned this, when talking about when can a person kind of think about slowing down is having a good understanding of your starting point. And this free tool is really that idea of this first step. And it’s a guide, a PDF guide, as well as the accompanying spreadsheet, and it kind of walks you through organizing your financial info. So you have an understanding of your net worth, it’ll calculate your net worth for two years. And it generates an approximate estimated budget. It’s based on kind of like allocation of the average family spends that much. But it allows you to kind of adjust this to your needs. And it guides you to kind of understand where I’m at where I’m starting from. It’s great for someone who’s never tracked their spending, because they can see a starting point. And they have this idea of a budget. But it’s also great for someone who’s been tracking because it’s based on the changes between your financial situation within a year. So you can compare your track numbers and see, am I perhaps missing some bigger costs that I did not account for? And how do I compare with this average budget going forward with my tracking?

Chrissy
I’m a big fan of tracking. I love tracking. And I’ve spoken many times about YNAB, it’s You Need a Budget, but I actually don’t use it to budget I use it to track and I think tracking your money is a huge foundation to your FI journey because if you don’t know how much you’re spending on different things, it makes it a lot harder to know where you can cut back and where you might want to spend more and where you’re spending less than you thought. So it’s it’s pretty key and critical to the journey. So I’m really glad that you focus a lot on that.

Mel
Yeah, and it helps also validate kind of the choices that you’re making along the way. Like if I’m trying to increase my gap between my income and spending, tracking allows you to see how am I doing? But also, am I compensating with like, say, if you’re cutting down takeout, am I spending way too much on grocery now because I’m not planning, being proactive in my plan. And it helps you see, well, are the changes I’m doing really translating into what I want it to translate to? And what does that mean for my long term goal? Because every time we want to bridge that gap is because we’re trying to reach a goal in the future. And tracking allows you to kind of calculate out that timeline to reach that goal and how long it will take.

Money Mechanic
I like the saying, where they say, Show me your expenses. And I’ll tell you what you value. Whereas when you look at your expenses, and if it’s not what you value, then it’s time to make a change. So that’s for me that tracking is such an eye opener, especially for people who haven’t done it. Because when they do they go, that’s perhaps not what I value.

Mel
Oftentimes, that’s exactly the reaction of a person that just started tracking. That’s not what I thought I was doing. And that doesn’t reflect who I am.

Money Mechanic
Exactly. So then you have something tangible that you can make the changes that you want to make, right. It’s a good spreadsheet, I had a chance to play around with a little bit, I didn’t manage to get all my numbers in there. It’s for people, I’ve said this before. Not everybody’s a spreadsheet person. And I admittedly am not either. So don’t be too intimidated with it, keep a blank copy, and then have one that you mess around with. And it doesn’t matter if it breaks. And if it does just email Mel and…

Mel
Absolutely. And the cool thing is I did like a six-day accompanying email course, yeah, it’s an email course. That’s what I ended up calling it because it really walks you through what you can do with the tool, and how you can then identify your gaps. That is your gap between your income and spending, but also your gap with your goals, because I kind of walk you through setting goals. And then what are the next steps like getting those habits in place and make it easy?

Chrissy
Yeah, and the PDF is beautiful, too, it’s very well laid out and makes it very clear what you’re going to be teaching in, in your email course.

Mel
Awesome. And to come back to what we were talking about earlier, Chrissy, where you said, it doesn’t have to be hard to reach kind of financial independence and the trajectory, and my approach to finances and getting started into tracking your gap and everything, is kind of like positive in the sense that I think that you need to be in the right place to set up those habits. And that’s a positive approach. And I love Atomic Habits from James Clear. His book goes into like making those habits stick. And he says that if they’re easier, if they’re satisfying, you’ll stick with those kind of coming back to it. And I think that tracking needs to be approached the same way. For a lot of people they think tracking, they’re like, oh, man, this is gonna be long and unpleasant. And to me, you have to find ways to make it pleasant. So I do my tracking. Like every month, I’ll have my tea and some dark chocolate and I’ll have my favourite music and it’s like, mom’s busy. It’s my time and it’s expensive. Money Mechanic has a big bar of chocolate right beside him.

Money Mechanic
Guilty as charged.

Chrissy
So can you tell our listeners where they can get this fantastic course the email course that you’re offering with a PDF and spreadsheet?

Mel
Absolutely. It’s on my blog. So modestmillionaires.com/en for the English version slash financial-clarity-guide separated by dashes or hyphens.

Chrissy
And I’ll include it in the show notes too. So you’ll it’ll be right there.

Money Mechanic
I have a question before we sign off and Chrissy, despite like, we’ve we kind of got rid of our end of show question.

Chrissy
I know.

Money Mechanic
Sometimes it’s kind of fun. I haven’t really found the one I like yet. You know, maybe maybe this is the question we want to ask is, are you in the pay off the mortgage camp? Or are you in the let it ride camp? The reason I’m asking this, I just want to get Mel’s opinion before we sign off here, is because you did crush your mortgage. And let’s just qualify this because there’s a huge range of what housing costs all across Canada, so you didn’t crush a million dollar mortgage in a short period of time. So just putting that out there. But the fact is that you made a conscientious effort to pay off your mortgage as fast as possible. Now, the question is not how you did that. But knowing what you know now, would you still go back and do that again?

Mel
Definitely. I always one thing we did was we invested half of our gap between our income and our spending, we invested half of it and the other half we would send to the mortgage. So we’ve got that experience along the way of like investing.

Money Mechanic
It wasn’t all or nothing.

Mel
Yeah, it wasn’t all or nothing. But then at one point, we did say, you know what, let’s take action and crush it and do it. And it definitely allowed for more flexibility. Like that decision to go to Mexico, we knew it would increase our costs that year and lower income a little bit by taking leave without pay for a portion of that leave. But also taking the sabbatical. I don’t have to generate that much income, active income to cover my living because there’s no mortgage.

Money Mechanic
No, I mean, and congrats on that. And it’s not always a math decision. We know that it’s a psychological decision as much as anything, and you have some good posts on that. So encourage people to go to the blog and read about them. And I like that you reference Mr. Money Mustache in there to tie this all together that he says, pay off your mortgage or invest. It’s a win-win question. Yeah, so, there you go.

Mel
But definitely psychological and emotional.

Chrissy
There’s a lot of peace in that for sure.

Money Mechanic
Yeah. Thanks a lot for joining us.

Mel
It was my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Chrissy
Well, we’re happy to finally have you because I asked you when we started our podcast, you’re like, Oh, I don’t know if I’m ready. I’m like, Oh, come on, you gotta come on!

Money Mechanic
You know she was just like, let’s see if these guys are gonna be any good before I come on.

Mel
I was still anonymous! I was still shy (inaudible) broke free. So it was the right time.

Chrissy
Yeah. And if anyone doesn’t realize that Mel is no longer anonymous, you can go on her Instagram. That’s where she introduces herself, for real, for the first time. Is that the first time that you introduce yourself to everyone?

Mel
Yeah, the first photo, I’m building up my my comfort, then I’ll have a photo on the blog. Yeah. And also, I need to fit it in my schedule, right. I’m only doing this 20 hours a week.

Money Mechanic
Yeah, yeah, we’ve used a whole hour of your time, we better go.

Chrissy
Yes, thank you very much. It was really fun talking to you. And I think a lot of our listeners will take a lot away from your conversation because it speaks to a lot of things that most of us want along our path. You know, that incremental freedom. It’s so important.

Mel
Well, thank you both. I admire your work. And I think it’s so valuable that you showcase so many different people and in Canada, too. I love Canadian content.

Chrissy
So do we.

Mel
Yeah, it’s so enjoyable to hear people talking about the same circumstances, but also in a ton of different life circumstances within Canada and you guys are making us travel all over our country. Thank you for that.

Chrissy
Oh, you’re welcome. Well, we love it too. I mean, we’re stuck at home. So this is our way of traveling while we’re stuck at home. Right?

Money Mechanic
Yeah, that’s real sweet of you to say, till next time. Thanks for listening.

---