On today's episode, Cody and Justin are joined by Ryan Jacob who has one of the more gutsy stories you'll hear. Ryan has decided to step into a mini-retirement or super lean FIRE plan in order to get away from his soul-crushing job.

He was in an extremely corporate setting with big money in his future but decided instead to take his nest egg of just over $300k and call it a day. Instead of a cubicle he now spends most of his time on the water catching some awesome fish.

It's obvious to see that Ryan is looking for more than fishing in his retirement and is itching to start his own business. Want to know what kind of business he has had and will have? Curious what life looks like when retiring on $300k?

Well, go take a listen to today's episode and let us hear what you think.
Episode Summary

Grew up middle class with a stay at home mom and his dad was a self-employed contractor
His mom was a saver while his dad was a saver and his mom's habits rubbed off on him
He would always save everything even as a kid
Ryan even started investing money at age 14 after he'd saved up $2k through a custodial account with his mom
It's the late 90's during the dot com boom
His mom sets him up with an adviser and he lost everything in that dot com bubble
That experience actually pushed him to learn more about the market instead of discouraging him
In college, he studied finance and he realized the adviser who was overseeing money for the whole family was actually doing some shady investing practices
Ryan really wanted to start up his own business even at 18 but his mom pushed him to go to a traditional four-year college
We talk about the huge gap in financial education in high schools and college
He worked for 4 years after college as a consultant and an analyst at a management consulting firm making around $60-70K saving around 40%
Part of that career path required an MBA so he went off and did that and came back to a salary of $110k-$120k
Ryan talks about his path  wasn't a flip of the switch that it was a very thorough and long term plan
Even though he was marching towards retiring early he didn't discover the financial independent movement until just under 2 years ago
Ryan stepped away from work after fulfilling his last commitment with his company after saving up just over $300k
He's aware that he'll probably need to work again but he's in no rush
A really interesting take was his discussion about how if he'd kept working longer and saved up so much to have a safe retirement, he wouldn't have the push to start up his own business which is a big goal of his
In college, Ryan had started up a business which was a painting service including a van that he paid $75 for
The group made $70k over that summer
From that point, we swapped into digging into Ryan's investing strategy
His first recommendation is to avoid the percentage based advisers and swap to one time fee-based advisers
He also recommends robo advisers such as M1 finance, Betterment, or Wealth-front
The number one recommendation though is Vanguard for their index funds
Vanguard even has their own advisers
We then transition into what Ryan was looking into doing in retirement
His goals are related to ocean fishing, hunting, reading, spending time with family, brewing beer, and start a financial advisor business
You can really tell how refreshing it is for Ryan to get to reconnect with his family after his profession took him away from them for so long
He rounds out the episode by pleading with people to understand that the path to financial independence isn't common and you'll have a lot of people try to stop you or second guess but to stay the course and be confident

Key Takeaways

There is a middle-ground: Notice how Ryan accepts that he may need to go back to work? That's totally ok with him. He chose to put himself first and get out of a toxic situation.