Grant Sabatier, author of Financial Freedom, is today's guest. We talk about his book, the FIRE movement, and his work with Vicki Robin. Show transcript: Hey there. I'm Dawn Starks, author of Simplify Your Financial Life, and your host for the SimpleMoney Podcast, where we make personal finance simple. Welcome. This is Episode 139. Today's interview is with Grant Sabatier, creator of Millennial Money and author of Financial Freedom. I met Grant last fall at the FinCon conference, and I've been a fan ever since. His book is fantastic, I did a review of it on the blog if you're interested. Grant and I have several things in common, but one is our mutual respect and admiration for the work of Vicki Robin, author of the personal finance book Your Money or Your Life. It's my number one book recommendation for anyone wanting to become more financially literate. I hope you enjoy my interview with Grant Sabatier. DS: Grant Sabatier, welcome to the SimpleMoney Podcast. GS: Glad to be here. DS: Why don't you start by giving a little bit of your background? GS: Sure. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, and my parents originally are from Southern Indiana and they were the first people in their family to leave Southern Indiana and moved to DC, to give me a different type of life and a different opportunity than they thought that I could get there. And so growing up, money was something that was always very present in our household. My parents were always stressed about money. And so I grew up with it being very front and center in my life, and talked about often. Growing up, I was one of those people who did everything that they were kind of supposed to do. I worked hard, I got good grades. I studied very hard. I graduated second in my class in high school and went off to the University of Chicago where I studied philosophy and I've always been interested in philosophy. And this is in the great recession, so I graduated in 2007 and bounced around a number of jobs and didn't quite find the right fit and had to move back home with my parents at the age of 24. Which is really where my money story starts, because that's where I started questioning not only my relationship with money, but our culture's relationship with money. It was an August 2010 that I read Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life and realized that whenever I was working, I was going to be trading my life energy for money, and that I needed to figure out a way to make as much money as I could in order to have more time and space, and ultimately, options in my life. And so it was at that time that I started diversifying my skill set and taught myself how to run Google ad campaigns, and ended up finally getting a job running Google campaigns at a digital agency. I learned a lot about digital marketing very quickly, ended up leaving after a year and starting my own company. And it took me five years, three months and six days from the day that I left my parents' home in 2010 to reach financial independence and have over $1.25 million in liquid assets saved and invested. So it was a very aggressive five years and I learned a lot about money, and myself, and our culture, and our world, and was pretty tired at the end of that period! But was very inspired to share what I'd learned, because I felt like a lot of what was talked about money in our culture was not only outdated, but it was actually holding people back. And so then I launched Millennial Money in 2015, started writing about what I'd learned, and have spent the past five years fully dedicated to sharing everything that I've learned about money and helping others who are stressed about money, or suffering or worried about whether or not they're making the most of their life. And I feel grateful every day that I get to do this and share my story. And for a natural introvert, that I get to connect with others all around the world, and you