Diania Merriam is the Chief Economeist behind the EconoMe conference, a two-day event at the University of Cincinnati whose roots are in the FIRE movement. In 2019, Diania was preparing for the launch of EconoMe in the spring of 2020. She could not have anticipated the risk of a global pandemic impacting her conference, but it was successfully held on March 7, 2020, just before the event location’s shut down. The 2020 event hosted 250 attendees and nine expert speakers. After putting 20 months of work into the conference, Diania was gratified to hear that 90% of participants loved the event and would recommend it to a friend. Getting together as a community is something that has been missed in the financial independence community over the last year. While some may label the movement as a cult, that is s misconception. Like many others in the financial independence community, Diania felt the need to share content to make it accessible and help those receptive to the message get their financial houses in order, much like Mr. Money Mustache did for her. She finds that many people have preconceived notions and assumptions, thinking that it won’t work for their personal situations, but Diania believes putting more content out there will help others it’s a mindset and there are no hard and fast rules. Although some may believe you have to be a white 3o-something male with a tech career to be in the FIRE movement, Brad points out that is far from the reality ChooseFI sees in its Facebook and local groups. Brad says that 90% of the responses to his weekly email are from women. Financial literacy is for everyone and FIRE is merely an aggressive and enthusiastic brand of it. Though there seems to be an assumption that those in the FIRE movement earn high incomes while eating rice and beans, Diania says in truth, it is rather agnostic when it comes to income. It might be easier for those with high incomes, but those with lower incomes can also improve their finances. The way to improve your finances is to increase income, decrease spending, and invest the gap. What is most important is the gap. The loudest voices in the space tend to talk about frugality because it’s the easiest thing you can do when first starting out, however, ideally, you should be doing both. Jonathan gets angry at the assumption that there’s little to nothing you can do to increase your income. You aren’t stuck at your current salary level. A lot of personal finance content revolves around sacrifice and struggle, but there is a sense of optimism in the FIRE community. You have control over reducing your expenses and increasing your income. Coming across FIRE content helped Diania realize how much privilege she had and enabled her to be honest about how wasteful her spending really was. For Brad, the heart of financial independence is optimism and an internal locus of control. You can affect change on your life with tiny actions that compound, resulting in success. For awhile, Diania wanted to be the female Mr. Money Mustache. It took her a while to realize she needed to be herself and figure out her own flavor of FI that was based on her own goals. Diania’s original plan looked a lot like other bloggers, where she would reach a net worth of 25 times her annual expenses and then retire at 40-years-old. However, life presented other options and she began to ask what she wanted out of life and what she wanted to create. Now she feels like slowing down instead of just racing to meet her FI number. Jonathan likes to think about life in terms of five and ten-year timelines. Ten years ago, did you have any idea you’d be where you are today? Brad notes that just being on the path to FI gives you the space to explore what you want your life to look like and what you want to focus on. The nuts and bolts of money is pretty easy to figure out. Figuring out how you want to spend the next 60 years of life is harder. Like Diania, because Jonathan was on the path to FI, he was to e