285 | Beginning of a New Era

<h3 id="h-what-you-ll-get-out-of-today-s-show"><strong>What You'll Get Out Of Today's Show</strong></h3> <ul> <li>2021 kicks off the fifth year of the ChooseFI podcast. Despite being at different points in their own financial journeys, <strong>Brad</strong> and <strong>Jonathan</strong> have experienced the benefit of incremental growth with both their finances and self-improvement. While it may seem simple and even mediocre, they are living amazing lives.</li> <li>You need to control what you can control, starting from wherever you are. If you can optimize at the margins, you can reclaim decades of your life.</li> <li>It's not just the ChooseFI podcast trying to share this message and concepts. The entire community is working to share this message.</li> <li>In a Facebook post from Jessica, she shares that her goal at the age of 19 was to save $5,000 so that she could feel stable. She began finally saving at the age of 26. By spending less and earning more, five years later, she hit the net worth milestone of $100,000.</li> <li>The concepts ChooseFI presents are not new. The show brings information together to tell a story to motivate and encourage people to take action with it.</li> <li>Don't just do what people tell you to do. Look at what they are doing. JL Collins' blog series, The Stock Series, started out as a way to document what he wanted to teach his daughter about investing. Warren Buffett plans ate leave 90% of his investments in a low-cost index fund.</li> <li>What is impressive about index fund investing is that there is ample evidence that over the long-term, this simple plan outperforms other strategies.</li> <li>Index funds, like total stock market index funds, are self-cleansing. Rather than trying to pick the winners or attempting to build your own index where you need to stay abreast of what's happening in the market, your ownership in companies performing poorly automatically decreases as a percentage with an index fund.</li> <li>To illustrate this point, of the original companies making up th