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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we got to be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude.
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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a slightly longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Brian Harriot to Before Breakfast. Brian is the author of the new book, Time Freedom, which will be out soon. Brian, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Laura. I'm really glad to be here.
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Chapter 2: What is time freedom and how is it defined?
And then we were getting kind of close to that in 2020. And then the COVID crash hit. Now it recovered right away. But in the moment... that was a 35% drop. And I just saw all those years of saving and investing just like disappear right in front of my eyes and thought, well, I guess I'm going to be working forever again.
And so I just, I feel like when you only look at it through the money lens of the retirement and the big nest egg that you have to build up your You're a little myopic in terms of, again, thinking, how can I make this work for me? And you don't have as many levers to pull. Let me put it that way.
Yeah. Well, and with that, I think... I think you and I agree that work is not this terrible thing. I mean, like there's a lot of people in the sort of fire community where the idea is like work is terrible. And so you want to not work.
Chapter 3: How does time freedom differ from work-life balance?
Like the goal is to not work. And as part of that, you know, you need to live crazy frugal. You need to save all this money so you can live off the passive income. It's like, well, if we take that out and say, well, there's ways to work that aren't terrible. You don't only have to work in like 40 hours in a job you hate with two weeks of vacation a year as a way to earn money.
Then it becomes much more tenable to keep working for a long time.
In that community, they even want you to build up an FU fund so you can tell your employer to FU. I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I don't love that perspective at all.
Yes, if you can create work you love, I would actually advocate you work it as long as you can because you get so many benefits from work beyond the monetary benefits, the social connections, the sense of achievement, the problem solving, all of these wonderful things. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that work can be wonderful.
And that's actually what happened in 2020 when I told my wife, we're not going to be hitting financial freedom soon. And when she asked me, well, what does that look like to you? First, I didn't have a good answer. And then I finally realized that I did like doing what I was doing. I just wanted to have an opportunity to take longer periods of time off to recover when I needed it.
And she then said, well, why don't we do that right away? And we couldn't do it right away, but we figured out a way within three years to make that happen. And that is when we started going back and living in Wisconsin over the summer. And we've really been doing that since 2021. It was one of the silver linings, I guess, of COVID. And then we've just kept it going.
Yeah, I love that. Now, this is always a beef I have with them. I get pitches sometimes from people who are in that world and they're like, well, I'm not working. I don't have to work anymore. And then they're running a podcast. They're writing a newsletter. They're giving talks and they're writing books. I'm like, but that's what I do. Like, you're still working. I'm working. We're both working.
We're just doing work we like now.
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Chapter 4: What misconceptions exist about financial freedom and time freedom?
Right. And there are ways to do work we like and earn money.
My biggest fear, looking back now, is that I would have scrimped and saved to get to the point where I didn't need to work, only to then realize that you wanted to work again. So again, why do all that working in a difficult job for so long to then realize that you just wanted to create work you loved? That's ultimately what you wanted, is you wanted...
to create work you love, work on your terms, work in a way that you wanted to work from where you wanted to work with the people that you wanted to work with. And that's where it's all at.
But part of this time freedom, I mean, you do still advocate saving and investing money. And one of the ways people can sort of work less is to have both your current income and some investment income.
But I suppose you would need to invest differently in that case if you are pulling money out more continuously or wanting assets that kick off a lot of income versus I'm investing this to pull out 20 years in the future.
Right. That's right. And certainly for someone, I do believe a lot of people kind of start off after school professionally, and you don't know any other thing other than I'm going to put my head down and I'm going to work hard. And so that's good. And if you can save while you're doing that, that's even better.
Then you wake up mid-career, like, again, a personal story, and you think, hmm, why am I doing this job that I'm doing? Is it the right work that I want to be doing? The fact that you have had some money saved up is very freeing. It's not enough to retire on, but it's enough to be able to say, I want to now create work that I choose on my own.
And I'm going to have perhaps some inconsistent income for a couple of years while I figure that out. But I can because I've saved up. So you're absolutely right. It's quite freeing. Where it comes to like, how do you invest differently? This is what I observed in 2020, where when you're getting closer to using your money, you don't want it to drop so significantly.
And I was not prepared for that. And that's why it caught me off guard. So if you want to live with time freedom, that does mean that, yes, you're going to need to perhaps, not always, but perhaps pull some money out of your savings earlier than you otherwise would. So you need to protect against that downside.
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