Pathfinders: An Interview with JL Collins

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I first met JL Collins at the 2015 Ecuado­ri­an Chau­tauqua. I’d been read­ing his blog jlcollinsnh.com basi­cal­ly since I’d dis­cov­ered FIRE. The blog was orig­i­nal­ly start­ed to doc­u­ment his advice to his daugh­ter, Jes­si­ca, who is just a few years younger than I am. Thus, the con­tent of the blog was par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant to me.

Get­ting to dis­cuss all things FIRE with him towards the begin­ning of my jour­ney was so incred­i­bly help­ful and val­i­dat­ing that I was on the right path. He did­n’t cre­ate the path, but he did help find the best path for me. Now, JL is only one per­son and can’t have 1‑on-1’s with every­one in the world, so he turned all those words of wis­dom into his first book, The Sim­ple Path to Wealth. By fol­low­ing JL’s advice, I am well on my path to wealth. 

I’m not only one, either. Since the book came out in 2016, peo­ple have let him know through con­ver­sa­tions and emails how much impact his advice has had. He thought those sto­ries might be use­ful to oth­er peo­ple on the finan­cial inde­pen­dence jour­ney, so he put out an offi­cial call for sto­ries, picked the best exam­ples, and turned those into his lat­est book, Pathfind­ers: Extra­or­di­nary Sto­ries of Peo­ple Like You on the Quest For Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence. 

I was lucky enough to sit down with JL the day it launched and talk about the book with him. I’ve high­light­ed some of that inter­view and includ­ed my thoughts on the book below.

I hope you enjoy! 

Gwen: With all the sto­ries in the news on how most peo­ple can’t come up with $400 for an emer­gency, con­sumer debt is reach­ing new highs, car loans are at their high­est-ever lev­els, and so on, are you still bull­ish on the idea of Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence and Retir­ing early?

JL: Absolute­ly. First of all, in this cur­rent day and age, unfor­tu­nate­ly, the media is a con­stant drum­beat of neg­a­tiv­i­ty around these eco­nom­ic kinds of things. It’s just not true. There’s grains of truth to it, which is what they build it around but the world is a much, much bet­ter place and filled with far more oppor­tu­ni­ty than you would ever gath­er if you just lis­ten to the input from social media and media in general.

In Pathfind­ers, there are sto­ries from all over the world. There’s a sto­ry in here from Ukraine. A guy in Ukraine who is on The Sim­ple Path to Wealth, was on it before the inva­sion, before his coun­try was attacked, and is still on it, and you know — he’s liv­ing in a war. There’s a sto­ry in there from a guy who’s in Rus­sia, who is also fol­low­ing the sim­ple path and he’s in a coun­try that’s become an inter­na­tion­al pari­ah and has all kinds of sanc­tions that are crush­ing it.

So when I read news reports about how ter­ri­ble things are for Amer­i­cans, it’s like, get a grip! One of my my fears is that peo­ple lis­ten to that non­sense and then they throw up their hands and despair and say well, I’m not gonna try. I’ve said in oth­er inter­views and I’ll say to you, that if you read Pathfind­ers you will nev­er again be hon­est­ly able to say this can’t be done because you’re going to read a hun­dred sto­ries of peo­ple who are doing it.

Gwen: Do you think peo­ple will choose to do it after read­ing Pathfind­ers and oth­er peo­ple’s stories?

JL: Not every­body. In fact, I think, actu­al­ly, very few peo­ple are ever going to choose to spend a sig­nif­i­cant amount of their mon­ey buy­ing their free­dom. Most peo­ple are going to say they want to buy a fan­cy car or a big­ger house, or they don’t have enough mon­ey to be able to choose free­dom and live the lifestyle that they want.

Gwen: So what would it take, then? 

JL: So, if you’re going to become finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent, you have to struc­ture your life in a way that you are not spend­ing every­thing you earn. It does­n’t mat­ter how much you’re earn­ing, it’s a mat­ter of choos­ing what you want to spend your mon­ey on. We all have a finite amount of mon­ey that’s com­ing in and we all get to choose what we do with it. The peo­ple that you’re going to read about in Pathfind­ers, and a lot of peo­ple in the FIRE com­mu­ni­ty, chose to say you know what, the most impor­tant thing I can spend my mon­ey on is invest­ments because that’s how I buy my free­dom, and that means by def­i­n­i­tion I’m not gonna be able to spend that mon­ey on oth­er stuff.

Gwen: How did you decide to pur­sue what would even­tu­al­ly become this path to finan­cial independence? 

JL: I start­ed in the wild­ness, so to speak, in the 1970’s and had to fig­ure it out on my own. It was­n’t a great envi­ron­ment to be start­ing out in with what would be called Stagfla­tion. It took me two years to find a job that paid $10,000 the first year. I arbi­trar­i­ly decid­ed to save half as I knew peo­ple liv­ing off of $5,000 a year. 

(Note from Gwen: $10,000 in 1974 is the equiv­a­lent of $62,000 in 2023)

As my income grew, I still saved half and that gave me the free­dom and peace of mind I need­ed. It’s a per­son­al choice to make your sav­ings rate what­ev­er you want it to be. Just under­stand that the high­er it is, the soon­er you’ll reach finan­cial inde­pen­dence. The low­er it is, the longer it will take, and good luck if you ever lose your abil­i­ty to trade your labor and time for mon­ey, which of course hap­pened to my father. That cre­ates a des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion, and see­ing what hap­pened to my father left me cer­tain that I nev­er want­ed to be vulnerable. 

Gwen: Let’s talk about this more. Hav­ing been to a lot of events like Camp FI, Fin­Con, EconoMe and Chau­tauquas, I’ve met a lot of peo­ple on the path to FIRE who have expe­ri­enced some sort of finan­cial trau­ma in their life that primes them, or makes them more recep­tive, to the sta­bil­i­ty and cer­tain­ty that hav­ing a large finan­cial cush­ion pro­vides. I grew up poor and hat­ed not hav­ing any mon­ey, so when I found out about the FIRE move­ment that told me exact­ly what I could do to have mon­ey and nev­er wor­ry about being poor again, I jumped at it (and maybe went a lit­tle over­board at first).  How do you think you were affected?

JL: My dad was a pret­ty suc­cess­ful busi­ness guy and we had a pret­ty com­fort­able life, but he was a cig­a­rette smok­er and cig­a­rettes erode your health relent­less­ly over time. He was­n’t a saver and investor and we lived a good life. But as the cig­a­rettes debil­i­tat­ed him, his abil­i­ty to work dis­ap­peared and his abil­i­ty to earn income dis­ap­peared. And if we had­n’t gone through those hard times which were very dif­fi­cult for the fam­i­ly, I prob­a­bly would­n’t have the same frame of ref­er­ence that I now.

I’ve almost come to think, if you’re born into com­fort­able cir­cum­stances, it’s almost an obsta­cle to becom­ing finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent. And there are a cou­ple of sto­ries in Pathfind­ers from peo­ple who have kind of what the crit­ics think of the stereo­typ­i­cal FIRE sto­ry. They’re high­ly edu­cat­ed, high­ly com­pen­sat­ed, they work in Sil­i­con Val­ley and then move back to the Mid­west where they’re from. And those are great sto­ries, too. But it does seem that to real­ly be effec­tive with mon­ey and to real­ly have the moti­va­tion, to take time to learn about it, there’s com­mon­ly some sort of finan­cial trou­ble or trau­ma rather, in the back­ground. And that’s cer­tain­ly my case. It sounds like it’s your case.

Gwen: Definitely.

JL: And as you say, you go to these events and you talk to peo­ple, and it’s very com­mon. I tell this sto­ry in Pathfind­ers. In cou­ples, there’s usu­al­ly one per­son who’s real­ly into this stuff, and then there’s the spouse, who just gets dragged along to these events. There was a dragged-along spouse, a woman named Kathy. I remem­ber she and I were chat­ting one day and she grew up in a wealthy fam­i­ly, and she said what we did was spend mon­ey. And not spend­ing mon­ey just feels like depri­va­tion to me. And this, again was some­body we’re not talk­ing about spend­ing mon­ey for food and basic cloth­ing, but shop­ping as a form of enter­tain­ment or recreation.

But it was an epiphany for me because it gave me a chance to reframe how I thought about it. So for the first time, as I was talk­ing to her, I said, Well, Kathy, think about it this way. If you buy invest­ments, you are spend­ing your mon­ey. You’re just buy­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent instead of buy­ing cars or hous­es or clothes or what­ev­er, you’re buy­ing your freedom.

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Gwen’s thoughts

When I was first get­ting into FIRE, I real­ly liked find­ing and read­ing all the blogs that were out there from peo­ple on the path to FIRE. They gave me glimpses into the per­son­al lives of oth­ers, and allowed me to expand my frame of ref­er­ence on what was pos­si­ble. I was influ­enced by and took ideas from many dif­fer­ent voic­es on the internet. 

Pathfind­ers is like an abbre­vi­at­ed ver­sion of all those blogs back then. The book has 100 sto­ries from 100 dif­fer­ent peo­ple in all stages of life with 100 com­pet­ing pri­or­i­ties, goals, and back­grounds. What I find inter­est­ing is that all the sto­ries are from peo­ple who found The Sim­ple Path to Wealth and imple­ment­ed it into their lives. It’s a small glimpse into what’s pos­si­ble when you find FIRE and how it can change your life. 

In my con­ver­sa­tion with JL, I found it fas­ci­nat­ing that he is still so bull­ish on FIRE being a pos­si­bil­i­ty even in today’s eco­nom­ic envi­ron­ment. I don’t entire­ly agree with him that it’s all about choos­ing to spend less than you make, as I feel there are a lot of peo­ple who can’t make bet­ter choic­es due to the ones they’ve pre­vi­ous­ly made. How­ev­er, that being said, even imple­ment­ing small changes and alter­ing some behav­iors will add up over the long run and put peo­ple into a bet­ter sit­u­a­tion, even if ear­ly retire­ment is off the table. 

Anoth­er snip­pet of the con­ver­sa­tion I found inter­est­ing was the impact of finan­cial trau­ma in the past among so many on the path to finan­cial inde­pen­dence. Being with­out, or going from have to have not, is a very pow­er­ful demon­stra­tion of how hard life can be if you don’t have suf­fi­cient cap­i­tal to meet your debt oblig­a­tions. As JL quotes in the book from Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, “If you fig­ure out mon­ey, life is incred­i­bly easy. If you don’t, life is insane­ly hard.” 

My hope is that read­ing my blog, JL’s blog, and JL’s book will help pro­pel you onto the path of an incred­i­bly easy life!

Love,

Have you read Pathfind­ers yet? Let me know what you think in the com­ments below!