J.L. Collins

And he turned to me and said, it's free.

And I said, Pete, come on, man.

You know, I know things are inexpensive in Ecuador, but the merchant's going to want us to leave some money behind before we walk out with his wine, you know.

He said, no, no, JL, you misunderstand me.

He said, for you and me, everything's free.

And now I'm really confused.

What on earth are you talking about?

And he said, you know, when you achieve a certain level of wealth and that wealth is throwing off a certain amount of more money and that money exceeds what you need to live on and then some, everything essentially becomes free.

And that's a wonderful place to be.

It was an epiphany for me.

I'd never thought about that.

And it's also a lesson in that the frugality, if you will, that gets you there is not necessarily what you need to continue forever.

So my wife and I don't really have interest in very many material things.

So we don't inherently buy stuff just because even though we can afford it, we're not interested.

but we do still have this habit of thinking well you know this thing costs 300 should we buy it or not and and inevitably one of us will say to the other well it's free and then we kind of laugh about it and oh yeah it is free and then you know it's that money no longer becomes the uh

The options.

So there's not a lot we want to buy, but we don't deny ourselves anything that we do want.

For instance, we fly first class just because it makes flying slightly less miserable than it would be otherwise.

And it's free for us at this point.

Yeah, I think that last thing is an important part of it.