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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
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.
So today I am delighted to welcome Brian Harriot to Before Breakfast.
Brian is the author of the new book, Time Freedom, which will be out soon.
Brian, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Laura.
I'm really glad to be here.
I'm excited to have you.
Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
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 love talking about.
Well, maybe you can tell a little bit about your background.
Are you in the personal finance world?
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.
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-to-day.
And then, 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 I head back to work.
Exactly.
Well, is that time freedom?
I mean, let's talk about what the definition is for time freedom.
Yes, I do definitely believe that's time freedom.
Usually when I describe time freedom to people, I start with what it's not.
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 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 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, having freedom.
Absolute freedom where you never have to work again.
A wonderful thing 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 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 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.
Well, and one of those things I imagine was for you now, the cabin in Wisconsin.
Was that what led you to pursue this?
It is.
So ever since I was a kid, my grandparents This is a thing, I guess if you grew 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 of course, I had no money in college.
If I had it, I 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 Northwoods, part of my life since the beginning.
And it's just one of those things that to me is, I mean, it's ingrained in how I live.
And so I've always wanted to do that.
I've always wanted to pursue this life where I had summers off.
I could never make it work.
And then finally I figured out how to do it.
And so, yes, to me, summers at the lake is time freedom.
For other people, it's bumming around Europe for three months or it could look different to different people.
I'm continually expanding what it means to me.
And I think it ebbs and flows and changes over time as well.
Well, it's interesting to get at that angle with the finances, because I'm sure one of the reasons people
You know there are 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 sort of the assumption with this is that that's going to involve year-round, full-time work.
Perhaps your wife could go to a cottage somewhere and a vacation destination for the summer with the kids, but not you, right.
Like, have you encountered that narrative, I assume?
I certainly have.
And it's not – 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 even though I had wanted this all along, I still got wrapped up in the normal way of doing things until I was finally able to break free.
Now, 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 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.
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 anyone find the sort of work that could be done in a time freedom way?
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 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 And shrink it down and compress it basically and offer that service in a shorter period of time and then take those services and then 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...
Even if you're a solo entrepreneur, I think you should have an assistant, because that assistant can do things for you that then free you up, even if it's just managing your calendar or your inbox 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 employment that honor these types of ideas.
For example.
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.
What are some ideas?
One is, for example, if you can take off the first Friday of every month 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 onto the front end and a week onto 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 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'd seem like they always had these cool three week trips planned.
Like those are ways to definitely recognize more time freedom in your life.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Brian Harriot.
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Well, I am back talking with Brian Harriot, 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 OK, I'm aiming for retirement.
Now, maybe that's at age 65, 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 the problems you see with that idea?
I see several problems with it.
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 personally, you may never plan to send your child to private school, but because of the way they learn, you really need to.
And that all of a sudden costs money.
And so to build up that giant nest egg process.
Listeners may be familiar with the 4 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 4 of the money that you have out each year and safely live 30, 40 years on that money.
Well, if you're a millionaire and you've saved up a million dollars, that means you can pull 40000 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 $40,000.
And so then you start to bump it up to two and 3 million.
And at, $4 million, you're up to $160,000.
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 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 100 beholden to what happens in the markets.
And Heaven forbid, it's the year 2000 or something like that, where you've retired at the top of the market and you're pulling your money out and the market is going down at the same time.
I know personally, I would have a lot of anxiety around that.
And that ultimately is kind of what happened with me.
Again, like I had mentioned, I always thought you need to achieve financial independence first to control your time.
And then we were getting kind of close to that in 2020.
And then the COVID crash hit.
Now it recovered right away.
But in the moment, that was a 35% drop.
And I just saw all those years of saving and investing just like disappeared right in front of my eyes and thought well, I guess 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 nest egg that you have to build up your, You're a little myopic in terms of again thinking how can I make this work for me?
And you don't have as many levers to pull.
Let me put it that way.
Yeah.
Well, and with that, I think...
I think you and I agree that work is not this terrible thing.
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 need to live crazy frugal.
You need to save all this money so you can live off the passive income.
It's like, well, if we take that out and say, well, there's ways to work that aren't terrible.
There's, you know you don't only have to work in like 40 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.
In that community, they even want you to build up an FU fund so you can tell your employer to FU.
I'm like, okay, that's interesting.
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, 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 2020, 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 have a good answer.
And then I finally realized that I did like doing what I was doing.
I just wanted to 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 in Wisconsin over the summer.
And we've really been doing that since 2021.
It was one of the silver linings, I guess, of COVID.
And then we've just kept it going.
Yeah, I love that.
Now, this is always a beef I have with them.
I get pitches sometimes from 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 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.
I was.
My biggest fear, looking back now, is that I would have scrimped and saved 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?
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's ultimately what you wanted is.
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 where it's all at.
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 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 investing this to pull out 20 years in the future.
That's right.
And certainly for someone – I do believe a lot of people kind of start off after school professionally and you don't know any other thing other than 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.
And you think 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.
And I'm going to have perhaps 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 2020 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 that's why it 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 equivalent.
You know accounts 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 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.
Like anything, it's a balance.
We're going to take one more ad break and then I'll be back with more from Brian Harriot.
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And now Beach Bum is expanding wellness services to many locations.
With red light therapy and infrared sauna.
With more on the way.
Recharge your body.
Refresh your skin.
Reset your day.
Beach Bum isn't just tanning.
It's full spectrum wellness.
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Well, I am back talking with Brian Harriot, 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?
This is a show called Before Breakfast, so we always love to hear about those.
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 5 o'clock in the morning and I immediately work out.
That's the first thing that I do.
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 learn that thing.
It's 10 times faster.
And so I'm making great progress there.
So I do my workout usually from 5 till about 6, 6.30.
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.
I understand.
I totally understand.
Yeah.
But then usually, you know, I'm able to get into work by 730 or so and do some of my deep work before all the meetings start.
Excellent.
I love it.
And what does what does your work schedule then look like?
Do you do you organize it in a certain way?
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,
Um, 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 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.
What's something you've done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
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 see her in action, empowered in this way.
And so, for example, last night I went and joined her for a potluck after their race and got to meet all of the people that she's been meeting.
And it just made me feel really good.
I'm just so happy for her.
And I'm now excited to start joining her.
She really 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, or that's what I'd share with you.
OK, so you're going to learn how to sail as well.
You're going to be I mean not with the, probably not the Women's Empowerment Weekend, but you'll.
You'll learn to sail in a different version.
Exactly.
They don't want me around there.
And yeah, I mean, I've sailed those little sunfishes that you can flip and pull back over.
But these are like six person, 10 person, 12 person boats, which aren't supposed to tip over.
Yeah.
So I'm excited about that.
Well, here's a question, Brian.
Going into the summer.
I mean because 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, or 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 in California where his friends are.
And so we are 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 few years.
But then once he's off to college, we'll head back for hopefully even longer.
And then, yes, with the book coming out, I'm still taking some dedicated time off.
But, as you know, with Big Time and your book that has just launched, I mean there's a lot to do leading up to that.
And of course, my launch date is September 15th, which is right at the end of summer.
So I will be doing some things over the summer this year.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Well, where can listeners find you?
So the best way that listeners can find me is I would urge them to go to timefreedombook.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 passcode or the secret word Laura on that form, I will send you the audio book immediately.
So it's as if you can still get the book right now.
And then in September, you'll have a surprise where you'll actually have the written copy as well.
So yeah, you can do all that at timefreedombook.com.
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?
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 LauraVanderkamcom.
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.
If you've got questions, ideas or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at LauraVanderkam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
When it comes to looking your best, Beach Bum Tanning does it better.
Beach Bum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare and an elevated salon experience designed around you.
It's why so many guests trust Beach Bum for flawless color and real confidence.
And now Beach Bum is expanding wellness services to many locations, with red light therapy and infrared sauna.
With more on the way, recharge your body, refresh your skin, reset your day.
Beach Bum isn't just tanning.
It's full spectrum wellness.
Visit beachbum.com to find a location near you.
Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
Joy 101.
It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy 101 and listen now.
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS.
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