Extreme Personal Finance Show

Building A Life Worth Retiring To with Amberly Grant | 118
What happens when you build a money community and then take it around the world?
What we cover:
Why Amberly started FinTalks in the worst month in modern history to start anything
Turning a weekly Zoom call into cruises, castles, and Antarctica
How travel advisors actually get paid, and why booking through one costs you nothing extra
Group rates, onboard credit, and automatic repricing most people never ask about
The Scotland castle co-working and no-working trip, and the Italy version coming in 2027
Real numbers on the short-term to long-term rental pivot
What killed short-term rentals in Denver, and whether it's coming for your market
Midterm rentals explained, including the insurance placement angle
Renting out your primary residence so you can travel
Financing, house hacking, and the first call every new investor should make
Tenant screening that actually works, including Chris's car trick
Travel as a muscle, and how to build it if you're a homebody
World schooling, green cards, and raising kids who've seen more than one country
This week I'm joined by Amberly Grant, real estate investor, financial educator, and the creator of FinTalks, a weekly money and life community she started in March of 2020. And not just because it seemed like a good idea. Amberly started it while her life was falling apart. She had just left her fiancé, handed over $80,000 to buy him out of their house days before the market dropped, and decided the best thing to do while hurting was to go help other people. Six and a half years later, FinTalks is still meeting every Tuesday.
That community has grown into something wild. It started with in-person meetups in Colorado, turned into a 65-person cruise, then a 120-person cruise, then a two-week co-working and no-working adventure in a Scottish castle with scotch tastings, sheep herding, and race car driving. Now she's got two Caribbean cruises on the books for January 2027, an Italian farmhouse in August 2027, and an Antarctica expedition in 2028 where 57 people have already signed up at $16,500 a head. Amberly thought frugal people would never go for it. She was wrong.
But this episode is not just travel talk. Amberly opens the books on why she's moving her rental portfolio from short-term to long-term, and she does not sugarcoat the cost. At her peak she was clearing about $6,500 a month. By 2025 that was down closer to $4,000. Going long-term costs her another $1,000 to $1,500 a month. She did it anyway, and she explains exactly why: a saturated Denver market, Airbnb support that let her down, guests who started treating her place like a hotel room, three bad stays in a row, a second baby, a full-time job, and a travel business she was building on the side. Something had to go.
We also get into the stuff you can actually use. What a midterm rental is and why insurance placements are one of the best-kept secrets in the game. How Amberly rented her primary residence for $6,000 a month while living in Mexico City with a three-month-old. Why she makes every prospective tenant get on a 15-minute phone call before she'll even schedule a showing, and how that process has kept her properties at basically zero vacancy for six years. Why vetting is the single most important stage of your entire real estate journey. And why you should never, ever do favors for people who give you a sob story, with one exception she'll explain.
Plus the part that hit home for me personally: Amberly's take that travel is a muscle. If you haven't flexed it, of course it feels scary. Start small, start known, and work your way up. As a guy who likes his own bed and gets a knot in his stomach at the airport, I needed to hear that.
Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.facebook.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://x.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://www.instagram.com/chrisluger
https://www.tiktok.com/@heavymetalmoney
email: chris at heavymetal.money

Resources and Links:

https://www.amberlygrant.com

https://www.amberlygrant.com/travel-events

https://www.amberlygrant.com/fintalks

Amberly on instagram
 https://www.instagram.com/amberlygrant/

Mile High FI Podcast
https://milehighfi.com

CampFI
https://campfi.org

https://www.silversea.com

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.instagram.com/heavy_metal_money/
https://www.youtube.com/@heavymetalmoney
https://www.facebook.com/chrisluger

email: chris at heavymetal.money

How to Retire on Purpose: The Last 6 Months Before Walking Away
What happens when your financial advisor looks you in the eye and says "you could retire today," and you decide to keep working anyway?
My friend Scott Folland is back on the show, and this time he's got a date circled. He's an orthopedic PA here in the Twin Cities, he's been at the same practice for 15 years, and he's clocking out for good in early January. Not because he hates the job. He actually likes it. That's what makes this conversation so different from most early retirement stories you hear.
Scott walks us through the slow downshift, going to 80% time with Fridays off a couple of years back, then spending six months training the person who's taking over his role. We get into the part almost nobody talks about: what happens to your identity when the title goes away. Scott's had three sabbaticals in his career, including two years living overseas in East Africa, so he's had some practice being a person who isn't his job.
Then there's the whiteboard. Scott went through a retirement planning module, decided the "vision board" exercise was corporate nonsense, bought a whiteboard at Target out of spite, and ended up with something that now sits next to his bed where he looks at it twice a day. Three columns: things to add, things to try, and things to cut out of his life entirely. That middle column is the one most people skip.
We also get into the nuts and bolts. Where the money comes from first, why he's letting the 401(k) keep growing even though the rule of 55 is right there, how he's covering health insurance before Medicare, why he shut off his retirement contributions in the final year, and what he's doing with 2,700 miles of gravel road between Mexico and Banff.
Oh, and he's planning to get a job. Two of them. You'll want to hear why.
If you're a few years out and terrified to pull the trigger, Scott's closing advice is worth the whole episode.

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.facebook.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://x.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://www.instagram.com/chrisluger
https://www.tiktok.com/@heavymetalmoney
email: chris at heavymetal.money

Resources and Links:
Stacking Benjamins Podcast

Marks Money Mind Podcast

Earn & Inest Podcast

Faribault Wool Mill Tour

Hostel Movie

Rock Retirement Club
https://www.rockretirementclub.com

Jean Chatsky’s The Forever Paycheck

Life Transitions - Live from CampFI RM Week 3 | Episode 051
https://youtu.be/7i_tGglOv28?si=3HQ2tKU2e2p4Qhz0

Williams Sonoma Coffee Class

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.instagram.com/heavy_metal_money/
https://www.youtube.com/@heavymetalmoney
https://www.facebook.com/chrisluger

email: chris at heavymetal.money

Stop Competing, Start Collaborating with Joe Saul-Sehy and Jordan Grumet | 116
Joe Saul-Sehy from Stacking Benjamins and Dr. Jordan Grumet (Doc G) from Earn & Invest trashed my place…err I mean crashed at my place during Camp FI Midwest. Naturally, I put freakin’ microphones in front of them!
This one started as a conversation about our joint Benjamins After Dark meetup in the Twin Cities and turned into a full-on masterclass on why collaboration is a money skill. Not a soft skill. A money skill.
Competitor or collaborator? Pick one. Joe tells the story of meeting a brand new finance podcaster at Podcast Movement who wouldn't even say what his show was about. Joe never heard from him again. Being guarded gets you nowhere.
You grow no matter where you sit. Doc G breaks down the mentor, mentee, and peer roles. If someone knows more, they're your mentor. If they know less, you're theirs. Either way, both sides walk away with more than they started with. As they say in medicine: see one, do one, teach one!
Set the goalposts before you start. Collaborations can go sideways because nobody defined what success looked like up front. Different intentions, different audiences, two years of silence. Doc G's take: if one person wants to educate for free and the other wants to charge per download, you need to know that on day one.
Be useful. Joe pulls from Alex Hormozi and Zig Ziglar: become the person people call. In his financial planning days, clients called him for mortgage guys, estate attorneys, even mechanics. That's the whole game.
Open your network or go home. Doc G says a collaborator who won't share their contacts isn't worth their salt. I've seen the opposite in my tech career, people hoarding contacts like dragons on gold. It never works.
Your advisor should be a collaborator. If someone leads with a product instead of asking about your life, that's a sales pitch, not advice. Roger Whitney's line: anyone who leads with product and not process is not an advisor.
Networking is dead. Doc G declares it, and Joe agrees it should be. Replace it with three steps:
Show up somewhere with like-minded people
Listen more than you talk
Be generous with what you know when the time is right.
Friendships over FI numbers. Joe says becoming financially independent was fine. Realizing he had enough people in his corner that they'd never let him fail? That hit way harder.
Collaboration leads to impact. Doc G's closer. We all say we want money and career success. Roll it up and what we really want is impact. Collaboration is how you get there.
Bonus content: a Camp FI travel hacker who turned out to have a PhD in agriculture, Joe getting pizza oven lessons at his sister's birthday party, my uncle refusing to meet my banker at the horse track, and a man in Mankato who volunteers so much people call him Mr. Mankato.

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.facebook.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://x.com/MoneyHeavyMetal
https://www.instagram.com/chrisluger
https://www.tiktok.com/@heavymetalmoney
email: chris at heavymetal.money

Resources and Links:

Dr. Jordan Grumet
https://jordangrumet.com

Earn & Invest Podcast
 https://jordangrumet.com/episodes
 
Jordan’s Substack 
https://substack.com/@jordangrumet

Joe Saul-Sehy
https://joesaulsehy.com

 Stacking Benjamins Podcast
 https://www.stackingbenjamins.com

Benjamins After Dark Meetup Groups
https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/groups/

CampFI
https://campfi.org

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.instagram.com/heavy_metal_money/
https://www.youtube.com/@heavymetalmoney
https://www.facebook.com/chrisluger

email: chris at heavymetal.money

Live From CampFI: The Power of Community with Bill Yount (Catching Up to FI) | 115

This one's different. We recorded this episode LIVE, on location, at CampFI Midwest Week 1, and I brought in Bill Yount from the Catching Up to FI podcast, to co-host it with me.
Bill and I have been talking about jamming for a while, so it only made sense to finally do it in person, in a room full of people who've actually lived this stuff. We talk about why community might be the most underrated piece of the FI journey, and then we bring a handful of campers up to the mic to share their own stories.
You'll hear from Amy, who went to five CampFIs this year and organized the very first Camp FI New York. Rhonda, who's hit 24 FI events since 2020, including 14 CampFIs. JJ, the 25-year-old who's already thinking about giving back before most people his age are thinking about a 401k. And a surprise first-time guest, Adrian, who talks about finally finding her people.
Bill and I also get into giving. I talk about the nonprofit I started after reaching FI, helping families with babies in the NICU cover the bills that pile up during an already brutal time. Bill shares his own giving story involving therapy dogs, a donor-advised fund, and a hospital oncology unit.
This episode isn't about spreadsheets or net worth numbers. It's about what happens after you get the numbers right, and why so many of us end up circling back to the same conclusion: this journey is a lot better with people around you. Whoo! Let’s go! 
Catching up to FI 
https://catchinguptofi.com

About Bill & Jackie
 https://catchinguptofi.com/about/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-yount-md-a8033036/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackiecummingskoski/
 
DOLLAR DESTRUCTION by Locus of Control 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecd_SapmcH8

Local Twin Cities Stacking Benjamins Meetup Group on Facebook
 https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1az41DVj1y/

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Tours
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/connect/tours

ChooseFI iOS App
 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/choosefi/id6751371252

The Luger Foundation
https://www.thelugerfoundation.org

Daffy - Donor Advised Funds
https://www.daffy.org/

Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital
https://www.dollychildrens.org

Discover Stillwater, MN
 https://discoverstillwater.com
 
Nelson’s Ice Cream
https://www.nelsonsicecream.biz
 

Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.instagram.com/heavy_metal_money/
https://www.youtube.com/@heavymetalmoney
https://www.facebook.com/chrisluger

email: chris at heavymetal.money

Building a Work-Optional Roadmap & How to Retire Early with Chad Taylor | 114
Do you make good money but still feel like you're falling behind? You're not alone. In this episode, we sit down with Chad Taylor, wealth advisor and founder of Seapoint Wealth Advisors, to discuss why so many high earners struggle with their finances. Chad shares his journey from the big brokerage world to independent advising and offers practical advice on how to take control of your financial future.
Key Takeaways:
The "I Make Good Money" Problem: Why tracking your spending is the first step to financial clarity.
Building a Work-Optional Roadmap: How to plan for a lifestyle that doesn't depend on a traditional retirement.
The Psychology of Retirement: Navigating the identity crisis that often comes with leaving a high-powered career.
Avoiding Common Mistakes: The two biggest errors people make in the five years leading up to retirement.
Investment Strategies: Chad's take on diversification, real estate, and why crypto isn't part of his long-term plan.
Contact Chris:
https://heavymetal.money
https://www.instagram.com/heavy_metal_money/
https://www.youtube.com/@heavymetalmoney
https://www.facebook.com/chrisluger

email: chris at heavymetal.money