Hello, hello, hello, my dear listeners, as you may or may not know, my husband, Carl, and I have a new

series on YouTube on the Bigger Pockets Money channel called Life After Fire.

And as a very special bonus, we're going to be airing episodes here on the podcast on Wednesdays.

Today, we're talking with my friend Amy about the taboo topic of hiring a financial advisor to help her with her finances and why she chose to go this route.

We'll also talk about her fire life as a single woman and how she reached financial independence in the first place.

Hi there. I'm Mindy Jensen and there's no Carl Jensen today.

This is The Life After Fire Show and we call it that because we're talking about and talking to people who are living their best life after reaching financial independence.

Amy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

Let's first chat about how you reached financial

independence. Sure. So back in 2015, I found Pete's blog, Mr. Money Mustache. I don't remember

exactly how I got there, but I have a hunch. It was probably through Get Rich Slowly,

because Get Rich Slowly and J.D. Roth were the very first finance

blog I ever started reading. And I'd been checking in on him for years. And sometimes I think he

would talk about Pete or he would link to Pete. And so eventually I ended up on Pete's site. And I read

that very pivotal article, the shockingly simple math behind early retirement, the one that

explains, okay, if you can save 25 times your expenses, then guess what? You can retire.

And I remember just being like kind of skeptical, but very, very intrigued by this. And like,

wow, this is really interesting. Okay. So I had a full-time work-from-home job at the time,

which meant, like, yes, I was spending some of that time, like, browsing blogs and reading

the internet and not, like, being 100% productive. And I made my way down the list of every single

post that had ever been made on Pete's blog. And, you know, especially in those early

...