June 24, 2026 • 25 mins
Brian Herriot, author of Time Freedom, shares how to take control of your time before retirement
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
So today I.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Am delighted to welcome Brian Harriet to Before Breakfast. Brian
is the author of the new book Time Freedom, which
will be out soon.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Brian, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Thank you, Laura. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'm excited to have you. Why don't you tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, so I am an author and a speaker. My
book is coming out in September, but I'm going to
tell you how you can get it early. However, I
believe in living the lifestyle that you're meant to live,
creating a life that you love, creating work that you love,
and that's where my passion is and that's what I
(01:05):
want to I love talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Well, maybe you can tell a little bit about your background.
Are you in the personal finance world?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I am. I am a financial advisor. That is my
job by day, and I have structured it though in
a way where I'm able to essentially work at it
kind of intensely in full time for about nine months
of the year, and then I head off to northern
Wisconsin to a cabin that my wife and I own there,
(01:34):
and with our son we take the summer and we
ski and we fish and we do all those fun things.
Not that you can, ever, as an entrepreneur, really completely
forget about your business, but it does offer a time
to think about bigger and different things and make creative
connections when you're not in the day today. And then
(01:54):
at the end of the summer, our son we head
back to California, where we live most of the year.
Our son goes back to school and back to work exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, is that time freedom? I mean, let's talk about
what the definition is for time freedom.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yes, I do definitely believe that's time freedom. Usually when
I describe time freedom to people, I start with what
it's not. And there are two things I believe that
it's not. One thing is it's not work life balance.
I've always struggled with work life balance. I feel like
it's just taking a day off in the middle of
(02:29):
the day to work two hours late at night. And
so whereas work life balance to me is hours and
days and how you structure that, time freedom to me
is weeks, but even more so months and years, like
how you structure a full year of your life to
be more seasonal, and how you approach work and play
(02:50):
in that regard. The other thing that time freedom is
not is financial freedom. And I had always approached financial
freedom believing that that was the key to unlocking time freedom.
And that's really what this book is about, which is
that they're different. Financial freedom to me is of course
(03:10):
having absolute freedom where you never have to work again,
a wonderful thing, you know, to be able to choose
exactly what you want. However, I still think that you
can achieve meaningful freedom while still having to work, if
you can just work in a way that meets your needs,
and so time freedom allows for that. So you know,
(03:31):
so in essence, time freedom is just a different path.
It's a different way of living. It's one that's maybe
less focused on, you know, optimal wealth building and optimal
career building, where you can still do elements of those things,
but your main focus is how you structure your time
(03:51):
and how you live your life day to day so
that you're not putting off the things that you really
want to do now.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, and one of those things I imagined was for you.
Now the cabin in Wisconsin. Was that what led you
to pursue this?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It is so ever since I was a kid, my grandparents.
This is a thing I guess if you grow up
in the Midwest, at least in Wisconsin, is that you're
lucky as a grandchild if your grandparents have a cabin
in northern Wisconsin. And so I had been doing that
for years and then they had to sell the place
when I was in college. And if of course I
had no money in college, if I had it, I
(04:25):
would have bought it, but second best option. I met
my wife around that time and she lived up there,
so I was able to continue this north Woods part
of my life, you know, you know, since since the beginning,
and that it's just one of those things that to
me is in I mean, it's ingrained in how I live.
And so I've always wanted to do that. I've always
(04:45):
wanted to pursue this life where I had summers off,
I could never make it work. And then finally I
figured out, you know how to do it, and so yes,
to me, summers at the lake is time freedom. For
other people, it's you know, bumming around Europe for three months,
or you know, it could look different to different people.
I'm continually expanding what it means to me, and I
(05:06):
think it ebbs and flows and you know, changes over
time as well. Well.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
It's interesting to get at that angle with the finances
because I'm sure one of the reasons people you know,
there men and women who listen to this show, but
I know men in particular often have a story in
their lives that they need to be able to support
their family. And the sort of the assumption with this
is that that's going to involve year round, full time work.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Perhaps your wife could go.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
To a cottage somewhere and a vacation destination for the
summer with the kids, but not you, right like, there's
have you encountered that narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
I assume I certainly have, and and and it's not
I would I would just call it beyond just men,
it would be conventional lifestyle in the United States. I mean,
that's just really what you do. And you know, even
even though I had wanted this for all along, I
still got wrapped up in the normal way of doing
things until I was finally able to break free out.
(06:04):
Like obviously, a big element to be able to live
this way is if you have the luxury of being
an entrepreneur or you can form and that doesn't mean
having to have this high growth business that is a
radical new idea. But if you have some sort of
way in which you can work on your own and
design your lifestyle around your work, you have much more
freedom to be able to take these extended periods of
(06:26):
time off. Although I would also argue that more and
more companies these days, I guess, especially forward looking or
progressive companies, are trying to do different work models where
perhaps you work four days a week or you're able
to take more extended time off. So there are other
opportunities out there.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Well, let's talk about that, because yeah, when people hear
the idea of working flexibly and being able to take
time off, I mean, what would that look like for
a lot of people? Can can anyone find the sort
of work that could be done in a time freedom way?
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, if I can start with the obvious one, which
is entrepreneurship, So if you are a solopreneur you have
a small team. I actually do believe that you can
structure your business in a way that you can get
extended periods of time off regardless of the industry that
you're in. You just have to think creatively and you
have to have that be your number one goal. And
(07:24):
it's not just about developing passive income, although if you
could do that, that's great. I think a lot of
it comes really down to what are you offering as
your service, and how can you shrink it down and
compress it basically and offer that service in a shorter
period of time, and then take those services and then
(07:44):
move them into the months where you want to work.
You know, for me, it's never in the summer months. Now.
You can do that also through leveraging your team. So
if you have you know, even if you're a solo entrepreneur,
I think you should have an assistant because that assistant
can do things for you that then fore you up,
even if it's just managing your calendar or your inbox
(08:05):
or doing operations pieces of the work that you don't love. Again,
you can use how you structure your work and how
you structure your team to find the time off. For
those that are not entrepreneurs, I think it comes down to,
of course, developing a skill and being very good at
your job so that you can then find places of
(08:28):
employment that honor these types of ideas. And for example,
and so for example, I think there's these are things
that a lot of people have a hard time going.
I'm going to work seasonally. I need to step into that.
So what are some ideas. One is, for example, if
you can take off the first Friday of every month
(08:49):
or the or find a job that doesn't work on Fridays,
that's a wonderful idea. Or if you take two weeks
off over the winter holidays, can you add a week
on the the front end and a week on to
the back end and take a full four weeks off.
There's a I think a difference in having four weeks
away versus two weeks away. I actually I've really heard
(09:10):
it described to me that when you hit the six
week mark, that's when it really really feels different. But there,
you know, if you can save up vacation and do
some strategic things. Again, if you're focused on this, I'm
sure we've all met people at work they're like, Wow,
they are always good about taking their vacation. They seem
like they always had these cool three week trips planned
like those are ways to definitely recognize more time freedom
(09:31):
in your life.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and
then I will be back with more from Brian Harriet. Well,
I am back talking with Brian Harriet, who is the
author of the book Time Freedom. So you are in
the financial world, and I know that a lot of
people view this as sort of like, Okay, I'm aiming
(09:57):
for retirement. Now, maybe that's at age sixty five, but
maybe in the you know, the fire world, it's earlier.
And the idea is that you hit a number and
that this number will then support you for the rest
of your life. What are what are the problems you
see with that idea?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I see several problems with it. One one problem. The
main problem is that it usually has to be a
really big number, and life happens, and we have expenses,
and you may not you know, for you know, personally,
you may never plan to send your child to private school,
but because of the way they learn, you really need to,
(10:39):
and that all of a sudden costs money. And so
to build up that giant nest egg listeners may be
familiar with the four percent rule, but this is the
general rule or rule of thumb that says, if you're
invested in a certain way, a pretty standard way, that
you can pull four percent of the money that you
have out each year and safely live of thirty forty
(11:01):
years on that money. Well, you know, if you're a
millionaire and you've saved up a million dollars, that means
you can pull forty thousand dollars out. My goodness, I
mean it's I mean, I'm sure in some parts of
the country and with you know, if you're extremely frugal,
you can figure that out. But I think a lot
of people would have a hard time living off of
(11:21):
forty thousand dollars. And so then you start to bump
it up to two and three million, and at you know,
four million, you're up to one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
All that to say, the number is really big. And
so what then happens is that you are scrimping and
saving on your way to this number. When you try
to get to that number, you think, well, maybe I
should just work another year, or another two years, or
(11:44):
another five years, just to make sure that that number
is high enough. And then once you ultimately do decide
to retire, now you're one hundred percent hold into what
happens in the markets, and heaven forbid, it's the year
two thousand or something like that where you've retired at
the top of the market and you're pulling your money
(12:04):
out and the market is going down at the same time.
I know, personally, I would just I would have a
lot of anxiety around that, and right, and so that's
and that ultimately is kind of what happened with me.
I Again, like I had mentioned, I always thought you
need to achieve financial independence first to control your time,
(12:26):
and then we were getting kind of close to that
in twenty twenty, and then the COVID crash hit. Now
it recovered right away, but in the moment, that was
a thirty five percent 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
(12:47):
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
nesting that you have to build up your your little
myopic in terms of again thinking how how can I
make this work for me? And you don't have as
many levers to pull, let me put it that way.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah. Well, and with that, I think.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I think you and I agree that work is not
this terrible thing, right. 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, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
It's like, well, if we take that out and say.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Well, there's ways to work that aren't terrible, there's you know,
you don't only have to work in like forty 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.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Yeah. The in that community they even want you to
build up an FU fund so you can tell your
employer to f you. I'm like, okay, that's yeah. 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,
(14:13):
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 twenty
twenty 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
(14:34):
have a good answer, and then I finally realized that
I did like doing what I was doing. I just
wanted to do 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
(14:57):
in Wisconsin over the summer, and and we've really been
doing that since twenty twenty one. It was one of
the silver linings, I guess, of COVID, and then we've
just kept it going. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I love that now. What This is always a beef
I have with them.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I get pitches sometimes from you know, 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 you know, 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, right, and there
are ways to do work we like and earn money.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
I was my biggest fear looking back now is that
I would have scrimpt and safe 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 That's ultimately what you wanted is
(15:54):
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 that's where it's all at.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
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
(16:30):
investing this to pull out twenty years in the future.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
That's right, and certainly for someone I do believe a
lot of people kind of start off after school, you know, professionally,
and you don't know any other thing other than you know,
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,
(16:55):
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, you know, and I'm going to have perhaps
(17:16):
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 twenty twenty, 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
(17:41):
that's why I 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,
and the easiest way to do that is just to
hold more in a cash or cash a quid you know, accounts.
(18:03):
And the common financial advice would say that that you
know you're losing out by having that cash because that
cash should be invested in the markets and be earning more.
But I would argue, you know, so maybe it's not earning,
maybe it's earning five percent less per year, but it's
giving you this freedom if the job that you had
(18:26):
is awful and you need to leave, or you want
to invest some of that cash into a business that
you can then turn around and start generating revenue on.
You can earn a lot higher returns using that money
that had been in cash to support you in your
freedom goals.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Like anything, it's a balance.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
We're going to take one more ad break and then
i'll be back with more from Brian Harriet. Well, I
am back talking with Brian Harriet, who's the author of
the forthcoming book Time Freedom. So I want to pivot
a little bit Brian and talk about your own schedule.
Do you have a morning routine?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
This is a show called Before Breakfast, so we always
love to hear about those.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
I do have a morning routine, and I am a
morning person. Of course, it varies. When I was writing
the book, it involved getting up and spending a couple
hours writing the book. But the writing of the book
has passed me. What my typical morning routine is. I
wake up at five o'clock in the morning and I
immediately work out. That's the first thing that I do.
(19:29):
This year, I decided to invest in a personal trainer,
which is the best decision I could have ever made.
I was late to just having coaches in general in life.
Maybe that's like a Midwestern you know, I can just
figure this out myself kind of mentality. But boy, when
you have someone that's been through it before, you can
(19:50):
learn that thing ten times faster. And so I'm making
great progress there. So I do my workout usually from
five till about six six thirty, and then I take
care of some other things. And then I still even
though my son is in high school, he still needs
me to get him up. I don't know if I
(20:11):
understand you.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I totally understand the weak thing.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, But then usually I, you know, I'm able to
get into work by seven thirty or so and do
some of my deep work before all the meetings start.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Excellent. I love it. And what does what does your
work schedule then look like?
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Do you do?
Speaker 1 (20:29):
You organize it in a certain way.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
I do try to take half of the day. It's
not always perfect, but I do really try to take
half of the day working on the things that move
the needle and whatever it has to be in you know,
in that moment in my business right now, it's going
to be getting pre sales on the book, right, and
so I will dedicate time to that specifically. I fortunately
(20:55):
do have an assistant who's now really turned into more
of an operations manager for me who takes care of
a lot of the small tasks, which is really great
because then I can work on the important things. And
then you know, usually half the day is interviews and
meetings and things like that as well.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
What's something you've done recently to take a day from
great to awesome?
Speaker 3 (21:17):
How would I say this? It is my wife a
year ago did a women's sailing seminar on the weekend
and said it was one of the most incredible empowering
things that she's ever done, and she's really got into
sailing over the last year. Finally I've started to join
her on her journey and it's been really wonderful to
(21:41):
see her in action empowered in this way. And so,
for example, last night I went and joined her for
a pot luck after their race and got to meet
all of the people that she's been meeting and it
just made me feel really good, so happy for her,
and I'm now excited to start joining her. She really
(22:03):
wants me to get on the boat and start learning
how to sail so that we can take these new
and different and interesting types of trips together. So that's
the example I get. That's what i'd share with you.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Okay, so you're gonna learn how to sail as well,
you're gonna be I mean not with the probably not
the Women's Empowerment Weekend, but you'll you'll learn to sail
in a different different versions.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Oftly they don't want me around there. And yeah, I
mean I've I've sailed those little sunfishes that you can
flip and pull back over. But these are like six person,
ten person, twelve person boats which aren't supposed to tip over.
That's I'm excited about that.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Well, here's the question, Brian, going into the summer.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
I mean, because we're this is running in the summer,
and I know you have a book coming out early
in the fall, are you going to be able to
still take much of the summer off?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Are you kind of compartmentalizing that this summer is a
little bit different on two reasons. Well, one is that
our son now is in high school, and so he
really wants to stick around here. We're you know, in
California as friends are, and so we are sure we're
definitely going back to Wisconsin. We're only going to do
it for four weeks though this summer, which is a
little sad it may look like this for the next
(23:09):
few years, but then once he's off to college, we'll
head back for hopefully even longer and then yes, but
with the book coming out, I'm still taking some dedicated
time off. But as you know, with big Time in
your book that is just launched, I mean there's a
lot to do leading up to that. And of course
my launch date is September fifteenth, which is right at
the end of summer, so I will be doing some
(23:31):
things over the summer this year.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Gotcha, gotcha? Well, where can listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
So the best way that listeners can find me is
I would urge them to go to timefreedombook dot com.
So this is the URL where you can pre order
my book, and of course you won't get the actual
hard copy of the book until September. However, if you
put the order number of your pre order and the
(23:58):
passcode or the secret word Laura in on that form,
I will send you the audiobook immediately, so it's as
if you can still get the book right now, and
then in some tepper you'll have a surprise where you'll
actually have the written copy as well. So yeah, Time
you can do all that at Timefreedombook dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
All right and using the code Laura. I love it.
I don't know if I've gotten to be a code before,
but how fun is that?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah? So well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback
on this or any other episode, you can always reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
(24:55):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura Ura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before
Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:17):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
So today I.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Am delighted to welcome Brian Harriet to Before Breakfast. Brian
is the author of the new book Time Freedom, which
will be out soon.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Brian, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Thank you, Laura. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'm excited to have you. Why don't you tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, so I am an author and a speaker. My
book is coming out in September, but I'm going to
tell you how you can get it early. However, I
believe in living the lifestyle that you're meant to live,
creating a life that you love, creating work that you love,
and that's where my passion is and that's what I
(01:05):
want to I love talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Well, maybe you can tell a little bit about your background.
Are you in the personal finance world?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I am. I am a financial advisor. That is my
job by day, and I have structured it though in
a way where I'm able to essentially work at it
kind of intensely in full time for about nine months
of the year, and then I head off to northern
Wisconsin to a cabin that my wife and I own there,
(01:34):
and with our son we take the summer and we
ski and we fish and we do all those fun things.
Not that you can, ever, as an entrepreneur, really completely
forget about your business, but it does offer a time
to think about bigger and different things and make creative
connections when you're not in the day today. And then
(01:54):
at the end of the summer, our son we head
back to California, where we live most of the year.
Our son goes back to school and back to work exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, is that time freedom? I mean, let's talk about
what the definition is for time freedom.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yes, I do definitely believe that's time freedom. Usually when
I describe time freedom to people, I start with what
it's not. And there are two things I believe that
it's not. One thing is it's not work life balance.
I've always struggled with work life balance. I feel like
it's just taking a day off in the middle of
(02:29):
the day to work two hours late at night. And
so whereas work life balance to me is hours and
days and how you structure that, time freedom to me
is weeks, but even more so months and years, like
how you structure a full year of your life to
be more seasonal, and how you approach work and play
(02:50):
in that regard. The other thing that time freedom is
not is financial freedom. And I had always approached financial
freedom believing that that was the key to unlocking time freedom.
And that's really what this book is about, which is
that they're different. Financial freedom to me is of course
(03:10):
having absolute freedom where you never have to work again,
a wonderful thing, you know, to be able to choose
exactly what you want. However, I still think that you
can achieve meaningful freedom while still having to work, if
you can just work in a way that meets your needs,
and so time freedom allows for that. So you know,
(03:31):
so in essence, time freedom is just a different path.
It's a different way of living. It's one that's maybe
less focused on, you know, optimal wealth building and optimal
career building, where you can still do elements of those things,
but your main focus is how you structure your time
(03:51):
and how you live your life day to day so
that you're not putting off the things that you really
want to do now.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, and one of those things I imagined was for you.
Now the cabin in Wisconsin. Was that what led you
to pursue this?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It is so ever since I was a kid, my grandparents.
This is a thing I guess if you grow up
in the Midwest, at least in Wisconsin, is that you're
lucky as a grandchild if your grandparents have a cabin
in northern Wisconsin. And so I had been doing that
for years and then they had to sell the place
when I was in college. And if of course I
had no money in college, if I had it, I
(04:25):
would have bought it, but second best option. I met
my wife around that time and she lived up there,
so I was able to continue this north Woods part
of my life, you know, you know, since since the beginning,
and that it's just one of those things that to
me is in I mean, it's ingrained in how I live.
And so I've always wanted to do that. I've always
(04:45):
wanted to pursue this life where I had summers off,
I could never make it work. And then finally I
figured out, you know how to do it, and so yes,
to me, summers at the lake is time freedom. For
other people, it's you know, bumming around Europe for three months,
or you know, it could look different to different people.
I'm continually expanding what it means to me, and I
(05:06):
think it ebbs and flows and you know, changes over
time as well. Well.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
It's interesting to get at that angle with the finances
because I'm sure one of the reasons people you know,
there men and women who listen to this show, but
I know men in particular often have a story in
their lives that they need to be able to support
their family. And the sort of the assumption with this
is that that's going to involve year round, full time work.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Perhaps your wife could go.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
To a cottage somewhere and a vacation destination for the
summer with the kids, but not you, right like, there's
have you encountered that narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
I assume I certainly have, and and and it's not
I would I would just call it beyond just men,
it would be conventional lifestyle in the United States. I mean,
that's just really what you do. And you know, even
even though I had wanted this for all along, I
still got wrapped up in the normal way of doing
things until I was finally able to break free out.
(06:04):
Like obviously, a big element to be able to live
this way is if you have the luxury of being
an entrepreneur or you can form and that doesn't mean
having to have this high growth business that is a
radical new idea. But if you have some sort of
way in which you can work on your own and
design your lifestyle around your work, you have much more
freedom to be able to take these extended periods of
(06:26):
time off. Although I would also argue that more and
more companies these days, I guess, especially forward looking or
progressive companies, are trying to do different work models where
perhaps you work four days a week or you're able
to take more extended time off. So there are other
opportunities out there.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Well, let's talk about that, because yeah, when people hear
the idea of working flexibly and being able to take
time off, I mean, what would that look like for
a lot of people? Can can anyone find the sort
of work that could be done in a time freedom way?
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, if I can start with the obvious one, which
is entrepreneurship, So if you are a solopreneur you have
a small team. I actually do believe that you can
structure your business in a way that you can get
extended periods of time off regardless of the industry that
you're in. You just have to think creatively and you
have to have that be your number one goal. And
(07:24):
it's not just about developing passive income, although if you
could do that, that's great. I think a lot of
it comes really down to what are you offering as
your service, and how can you shrink it down and
compress it basically and offer that service in a shorter
period of time, and then take those services and then
(07:44):
move them into the months where you want to work.
You know, for me, it's never in the summer months. Now.
You can do that also through leveraging your team. So
if you have you know, even if you're a solo entrepreneur,
I think you should have an assistant because that assistant
can do things for you that then fore you up,
even if it's just managing your calendar or your inbox
(08:05):
or doing operations pieces of the work that you don't love. Again,
you can use how you structure your work and how
you structure your team to find the time off. For
those that are not entrepreneurs, I think it comes down to,
of course, developing a skill and being very good at
your job so that you can then find places of
(08:28):
employment that honor these types of ideas. And for example,
and so for example, I think there's these are things
that a lot of people have a hard time going.
I'm going to work seasonally. I need to step into that.
So what are some ideas. One is, for example, if
you can take off the first Friday of every month
(08:49):
or the or find a job that doesn't work on Fridays,
that's a wonderful idea. Or if you take two weeks
off over the winter holidays, can you add a week
on the the front end and a week on to
the back end and take a full four weeks off.
There's a I think a difference in having four weeks
away versus two weeks away. I actually I've really heard
(09:10):
it described to me that when you hit the six
week mark, that's when it really really feels different. But there,
you know, if you can save up vacation and do
some strategic things. Again, if you're focused on this, I'm
sure we've all met people at work they're like, Wow,
they are always good about taking their vacation. They seem
like they always had these cool three week trips planned
like those are ways to definitely recognize more time freedom
(09:31):
in your life.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and
then I will be back with more from Brian Harriet. Well,
I am back talking with Brian Harriet, who is the
author of the book Time Freedom. So you are in
the financial world, and I know that a lot of
people view this as sort of like, Okay, I'm aiming
(09:57):
for retirement. Now, maybe that's at age sixty five, but
maybe in the you know, the fire world, it's earlier.
And the idea is that you hit a number and
that this number will then support you for the rest
of your life. What are what are the problems you
see with that idea?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I see several problems with it. One one problem. The
main problem is that it usually has to be a
really big number, and life happens, and we have expenses,
and you may not you know, for you know, personally,
you may never plan to send your child to private school,
but because of the way they learn, you really need to,
(10:39):
and that all of a sudden costs money. And so
to build up that giant nest egg listeners may be
familiar with the four percent rule, but this is the
general rule or rule of thumb that says, if you're
invested in a certain way, a pretty standard way, that
you can pull four percent of the money that you
have out each year and safely live of thirty forty
(11:01):
years on that money. Well, you know, if you're a
millionaire and you've saved up a million dollars, that means
you can pull forty thousand dollars out. My goodness, I
mean it's I mean, I'm sure in some parts of
the country and with you know, if you're extremely frugal,
you can figure that out. But I think a lot
of people would have a hard time living off of
(11:21):
forty thousand dollars. And so then you start to bump
it up to two and three million, and at you know,
four million, you're up to one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
All that to say, the number is really big. And
so what then happens is that you are scrimping and
saving on your way to this number. When you try
to get to that number, you think, well, maybe I
should just work another year, or another two years, or
(11:44):
another five years, just to make sure that that number
is high enough. And then once you ultimately do decide
to retire, now you're one hundred percent hold into what
happens in the markets, and heaven forbid, it's the year
two thousand or something like that where you've retired at
the top of the market and you're pulling your money
(12:04):
out and the market is going down at the same time.
I know, personally, I would just I would have a
lot of anxiety around that, and right, and so that's
and that ultimately is kind of what happened with me.
I Again, like I had mentioned, I always thought you
need to achieve financial independence first to control your time,
(12:26):
and then we were getting kind of close to that
in twenty twenty, and then the COVID crash hit. Now
it recovered right away, but in the moment, that was
a thirty five percent 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
(12:47):
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
nesting that you have to build up your your little
myopic in terms of again thinking how how can I
make this work for me? And you don't have as
many levers to pull, let me put it that way.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah. Well, and with that, I think.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I think you and I agree that work is not
this terrible thing, right. 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, 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.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
It's like, well, if we take that out and say.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Well, there's ways to work that aren't terrible, there's you know,
you don't only have to work in like forty 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.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Yeah. The in that community they even want you to
build up an FU fund so you can tell your
employer to f you. I'm like, okay, that's yeah. 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,
(14:13):
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 twenty
twenty 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
(14:34):
have a good answer, and then I finally realized that
I did like doing what I was doing. I just
wanted to do 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
(14:57):
in Wisconsin over the summer, and and we've really been
doing that since twenty twenty one. It was one of
the silver linings, I guess, of COVID, and then we've
just kept it going. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I love that now. What This is always a beef
I have with them.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I get pitches sometimes from you know, 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 you know, 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, right, and there
are ways to do work we like and earn money.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
I was my biggest fear looking back now is that
I would have scrimpt and safe 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 That's ultimately what you wanted is
(15:54):
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 that's where it's all at.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
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
(16:30):
investing this to pull out twenty years in the future.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
That's right, and certainly for someone I do believe a
lot of people kind of start off after school, you know, professionally,
and you don't know any other thing other than you know,
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,
(16:55):
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, you know, and I'm going to have perhaps
(17:16):
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 twenty twenty, 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
(17:41):
that's why I 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,
and the easiest way to do that is just to
hold more in a cash or cash a quid you know, accounts.
(18:03):
And the common financial advice would say that that you
know you're losing out by having that cash because that
cash should be invested in the markets and be earning more.
But I would argue, you know, so maybe it's not earning,
maybe it's earning five percent less per year, but it's
giving you this freedom if the job that you had
(18:26):
is awful and you need to leave, or you want
to invest some of that cash into a business that
you can then turn around and start generating revenue on.
You can earn a lot higher returns using that money
that had been in cash to support you in your
freedom goals.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Like anything, it's a balance.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
We're going to take one more ad break and then
i'll be back with more from Brian Harriet. Well, I
am back talking with Brian Harriet, who's the author of
the forthcoming book Time Freedom. So I want to pivot
a little bit Brian and talk about your own schedule.
Do you have a morning routine?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
This is a show called Before Breakfast, so we always
love to hear about those.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
I do have a morning routine, and I am a
morning person. Of course, it varies. When I was writing
the book, it involved getting up and spending a couple
hours writing the book. But the writing of the book
has passed me. What my typical morning routine is. I
wake up at five o'clock in the morning and I
immediately work out. That's the first thing that I do.
(19:29):
This year, I decided to invest in a personal trainer,
which is the best decision I could have ever made.
I was late to just having coaches in general in life.
Maybe that's like a Midwestern you know, I can just
figure this out myself kind of mentality. But boy, when
you have someone that's been through it before, you can
(19:50):
learn that thing ten times faster. And so I'm making
great progress there. So I do my workout usually from
five till about six six thirty, and then I take
care of some other things. And then I still even
though my son is in high school, he still needs
me to get him up. I don't know if I
(20:11):
understand you.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I totally understand the weak thing.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, But then usually I, you know, I'm able to
get into work by seven thirty or so and do
some of my deep work before all the meetings start.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Excellent. I love it. And what does what does your
work schedule then look like?
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Do you do?
Speaker 1 (20:29):
You organize it in a certain way.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
I do try to take half of the day. It's
not always perfect, but I do really try to take
half of the day working on the things that move
the needle and whatever it has to be in you know,
in that moment in my business right now, it's going
to be getting pre sales on the book, right, and
so I will dedicate time to that specifically. I fortunately
(20:55):
do have an assistant who's now really turned into more
of an operations manager for me who takes care of
a lot of the small tasks, which is really great
because then I can work on the important things. And
then you know, usually half the day is interviews and
meetings and things like that as well.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
What's something you've done recently to take a day from
great to awesome?
Speaker 3 (21:17):
How would I say this? It is my wife a
year ago did a women's sailing seminar on the weekend
and said it was one of the most incredible empowering
things that she's ever done, and she's really got into
sailing over the last year. Finally I've started to join
her on her journey and it's been really wonderful to
(21:41):
see her in action empowered in this way. And so,
for example, last night I went and joined her for
a pot luck after their race and got to meet
all of the people that she's been meeting and it
just made me feel really good, so happy for her,
and I'm now excited to start joining her. She really
(22:03):
wants me to get on the boat and start learning
how to sail so that we can take these new
and different and interesting types of trips together. So that's
the example I get. That's what i'd share with you.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Okay, so you're gonna learn how to sail as well,
you're gonna be I mean not with the probably not
the Women's Empowerment Weekend, but you'll you'll learn to sail
in a different different versions.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Oftly they don't want me around there. And yeah, I
mean I've I've sailed those little sunfishes that you can
flip and pull back over. But these are like six person,
ten person, twelve person boats which aren't supposed to tip over.
That's I'm excited about that.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Well, here's the question, Brian, going into the summer.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
I mean, because we're this is running in the summer,
and I know you have a book coming out early
in the fall, are you going to be able to
still take much of the summer off?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Are you kind of compartmentalizing that this summer is a
little bit different on two reasons. Well, one is that
our son now is in high school, and so he
really wants to stick around here. We're you know, in
California as friends are, and so we are sure we're
definitely going back to Wisconsin. We're only going to do
it for four weeks though this summer, which is a
little sad it may look like this for the next
(23:09):
few years, but then once he's off to college, we'll
head back for hopefully even longer and then yes, but
with the book coming out, I'm still taking some dedicated
time off. But as you know, with big Time in
your book that is just launched, I mean there's a
lot to do leading up to that. And of course
my launch date is September fifteenth, which is right at
the end of summer, so I will be doing some
(23:31):
things over the summer this year.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Gotcha, gotcha? Well, where can listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
So the best way that listeners can find me is
I would urge them to go to timefreedombook dot com.
So this is the URL where you can pre order
my book, and of course you won't get the actual
hard copy of the book until September. However, if you
put the order number of your pre order and the
(23:58):
passcode or the secret word Laura in on that form,
I will send you the audiobook immediately, so it's as
if you can still get the book right now, and
then in some tepper you'll have a surprise where you'll
actually have the written copy as well. So yeah, Time
you can do all that at Timefreedombook dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
All right and using the code Laura. I love it.
I don't know if I've gotten to be a code before,
but how fun is that?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah? So well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback
on this or any other episode, you can always reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
(24:55):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura Ura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before
Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:17):
listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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