How to Catch FIRE Retire Early with Financial Independence

Did you know that you can retire early? Well, there is a term you need to know. It is F.I.R.E. This stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. Today, I brought on an awesome coach who shows us the fire retire early movement and how to become financially alert.

Do you know what J.O.B stands for? Just Over Broke. You live Just Over Broke if you work for someone else. I got laid off from my job and that woke me up and I knew there had to be a better way, besides working for someone else. Personally, I found real estate investing.

This show is all about you finding every single way possible to not have to work a J.O.B. and still have money coming in to provide for your family. I want you to learn how to do that.

I want you to learn about something I wish I had known a long time ago: passive income. Passive income is what you earn when you work one time and you get paid over and over and over again. For example, when I buy one rental property, it makes me $250 or more in passive income every single month.

That’s how I don’t work and still make money.

Imagine having 10, 20, or 30 rental properties!

As you scale, you earn more and more. It is similar to writing a book or writing a song and getting paid over and over again.

Would you like a copy of my bestselling book, How to Quit your Job with Passive Income, for free? I want to help you get started and this book will help you do that.

Go to successfullyunemployed.co/freebook, and I will give you the PDF version for free. Get the book, get started right away, and change your life.

Today, we are going to be talking to an expert, Michael Quan, about FIRE. This is an acronym for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Michael is going to show you how to reach FIRE like him and like me, normal, ordinary people.

He has the website financiallyalert.com and he hosts Breakthrough Millionaire podcast. Like Michael, you can be successfully unemployed.

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How Michael Makes Money Without Having a Job

When Michael was just out of college, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his economics degree and chemistry minor. He wondered if he should get a corporate J.O.B. and join the rat race or if he should do something else.

He decided to get a job and start learning about how business works and what it meant to work in a corporate environment. It was great because it taught him what he liked and what he didn’t like.

Michael graduated during the dot com boom and he got a job in IT. Jobs were generous back then, but after 9/11, his company imploded. When they were on the sixth round of layoffs he started wondering what he was going to do to take care of himself.

Michael’s arm of the company was IT consulting, and they were doing support and integration. They were the only profitable part of the company. He talked to some of his coworkers to see if they wanted to leave and start their own company, before they were laid off during the seventh round of layoffs.

Michael and his coworkers took the leap and spent the next 10 years growing their new company from the ground up and exploring entrepreneurship. They didn’t take any funding, instead they each put in a couple thousand dollars. It ended up being a 12-person company with $2 million in revenue.

They decided it was a great time to sell the company and Michael was ready to do something different. After exiting the company, he took some of the money from the sale and put it into cash flowing real estate.

Michael doesn’t have to answer to anyone and is successfully unemployed, because of his cash flowing real estate and side hustles he gets to explore because he has the freedom.

After exiting the company, and having more time, he decided to be more present with his family, and he spent the better part of six years at home with his kids. His son went to kindergarten last year.

Michael has done financial coaching, because he started the blog and people started asking him how he does what he does. For three years, he explored an Amazon FBA business, where he sourced a product from China and sold it. Real estate investing was also something he was interested in.

When he was home with his kids, going out to look at properties wasn’t feasible, so he got involved in other investments like crowd funding real estate and syndication.

Today, he wants to get a message across to his listeners that finding that place where you can play and earn income is a ton of fun and you can create impact along the way.

When Michael’s IT company was going through layoffs, he wasn’t married, but he was dating his wife. It was easier for him to start a company, because he wasn’t supporting a family.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now” — Chinese Proverb.

The End Game is to Have Multiple Streams of Income

When you first get started you probably want to focus on one thing specifically that will generate the bulk of your income. Once you have enough revenue to spread seeds across the board, then do that.

It gives you the opportunity to diversify and grow your net worth and wealth across multiple streams.

Some of the wealthiest people have a lot of real estate, businesses, and investments. It is a very common thread.

The Concept of FIRE Has Been Branded and has Been Trending in Recent Years

The FIRE acronym stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. There are a ton of people who have a dream to have enough financial independence so they can do whatever they want and be successfully unemployed.

On the other side of it, you realize it is great and a lot of fun, but there is more work to be done.

The main concept of FIRE is focusing on FI, because that is the main ingredient to the recipe. This is what will ultimately give you the freedom. FI just means that you will have enough passive income to cover your living expenses.

If you have $5,000 in living expenses every month, you know you will need at least $5,001 in passive income to be financially independent.

This will allow you to operate how you are currently operating and pursue whatever it is you want to pursue.

The First Step to Financial Independence is Getting Clear with Where You Want to Go

What is your purpose? You need to find your why. When you are exploring it, you want to get clarity on your numbers. If you don’t know what your numbers are, how are you going to measure your results?

If you don’t know your outgoing cash, how are you going to know how much passive income you will need?

Many of us bury our heads in the sand, because we live in a society that doesn’t teach financial literacy. Now that you have this knowledge, what are you going to do?

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The people that are hungry will realize that life doesn’t have to be in a J.O.B. and they don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck.

They will realize that if they grow their assets large enough, the assets will work for them and pay them indefinitely. That freedom is magical.

You Don’t Necessarily Need to Sacrifice, You Need to Make Intentional Choices

When you pursue FIRE, not only are you building wealth for yourself and your family, in the process, you are building yourself. Michael is a huge proponent of self development and FIRE forces you to go beyond yourself.

It forces you to take action in the face of fear, it forces you to believe in yourself, and when you don’t believe in yourself, it forces you to lean into faith.

When you are able to do this, it is a beautiful thing, because you are able to operate in a space where it is completely true to who you are, and the integrity is grounded within you.

FIRE is an incredible vehicle, not only for the wealth, but the way it builds your character over time.

The Characteristics We Need to Develop to Reach FIRE

When Michael does financial coaching, the first questions he asks is, “Who are you? What excites you? What is your core purpose?”. Is it making connections? Is it making an impact? Is it having fun?

After that, he digs in to the actual numbers. If you are motivated enough an find that “why”, those characteristics will appear. You will find perseverance and a hunger that you can’t create otherwise.

If you are not operating within what is authentic to yourself, you will get started, but you will burn out. If you have something that speaks to you deep down inside, you are going to push through and persevere.

Perseverance, by far, is the number one thing it takes to reach financial independence. You are going to come across so many different roadblocks. Concentrate on the end goal, not necessarily how you are going to get there, and then experiment. Have fun, explore, try different things, and take action.

What it really comes down to is taking massive action, having perseverance to see what the result is, shift it until you get the result you want, and keep moving forward.

When You Get to “Retired Early”, Enjoy it, Celebrate, and Keep Moving Forward

When Michael was working his J.O.B., he had the dream of hitting the number, exiting the job, and sitting on the beach, or fishing, or golfing, or playing tennis, or just relaxing.

When he finally exited the company, he did some of those things for about a year, and he even took a special effects class.

You want the goal to speak to you, and when you reach that milestone, take time to celebrate.

Now that Michael has reached that goal, he needs to change his story: he retired from a traditional nine to five career path. If you traditionally retire, you aren’t able to grow any further. If you aren’t able to grow, you will be miserable, because happiness and growth go hand in hand.

After he sold his company and took some time off, Michael had a gnawing feeling of “what else is there?”. Even beyond raising his kids, he felt like there was something more he needed to give.

This is why he created his website, financiallyalert.com. He wanted to share some ideas about non-traditional career paths and how to find the path to financial independence.

It has spawned everything else, including trying different businesses to working with other people to real estate investments that wouldn’t have come about any other way.

How Networking Can Help You Reach FIRE

Networking is all about making connections. As a person who considers himself as passive and introverted, Michael forced himself to network, go to conferences, and meet other people. The reason he leans into that fear is because he knows there is great wealth in other people’s minds. Having a mastermind or people that will raise your game is a game changer.

Michael wishes he would have networked when he owned his business and joined a mastermind with people who were at his same level of thinking and higher. Everyone raises everyone up. It is so powerful, because you can tap into the knowledge of other people instead of figuring it out on your own.

Your net worth is usually a function of those people around you and who you have access to. People who get high paying jobs in executive positions, don’t apply for those jobs online, they know people.

For the people who are quiet and reserved and don’t want to put themselves out there, do it anyway. Get outside of yourself. If you don’t do it, nobody is going to know.

No one is going to be your biggest proponent except for you, unless you speak up. When you decide to speak up, the world opens up to you.

Don’t just go through the motions. Be engaged, be interested in what other people are doing, and get out of your head. This will serve you in ways you cannot even imagine.

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How Michael is Making the World a Better Place

Michael has tried to give on a financial basis from the beginning, where he is able to. Beyond that, he gets the most joy by giving of his time and abilities.

Every summer he goes to a camp called The Global Youth Leadership Summit, and it is put on by the Tony Robbins Foundation.

Children, ages 14 to 17, from all over the world are brought to this camp to help them build leadership skills. Michael serves as a coach and chaperone for a week every year.

The Advice Michael Would Give to Anyone Who Wanted to Become Successfully Unemployed

You Need to educate yourself. There are so many people working a J.O.B. and, when they come home, they just want to unplug and turn on the TV.

In order to break that cycle, watch half of what you normally watch and take the other half of that time to educate yourself.

Once you have that knowledge, you start getting inspired, and you build new beliefs. Ultimately, those beliefs are what lead to our actions and our actions lead to our results.

The Advice Michael Would Give to His Younger Self

Don’t doubt yourself. Have faith that everything is going to work out. As you go along in life, it is a rollercoaster, but you get to decide how you interpret the events that occur. You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you perceive them.

If you are operating on faith that things are going to work out, the actions you take from that point forward are going to be different than operating on the belief that things are going to be horrible and woe is me. Take the time to tell yourself that things are going to work out.