Clipping Chains Podcast

I’ll begin with a secret: I never cared much about the nuts and bolts of personal finance (the means), but I was rather enamored with the idea of a financially secure life (the ends). In 2018, climbing media was still full of narratives glorifying the poor dirtbag ideal, but that didn’t align with my lived experience. I wanted to climb hard, while also yearning for meaningful work and financial se...

From a market perspective, history has always favored the unfazed, the patient, the forgetful. Drastic action in times of great uncertainty is almost always the wrong move. Time and again—just like now—people convinced themselves of imminent disaster. And in nearly all cases, they were wrong. Financial writers and hardened optimists are right to remind us: “This time isn’t different.” But I’ll be...

I’ve made it my goal over the past few years to steer people toward financial independence but away from early retirement. I have many reasons, and I’ve laid those out over numerous blog posts and podcast episodes. These are the big themes:   Support this project: Buy Me a Coffee Subscribe to the newsletter: SUBSCRIBE ME! Show Notes and Links at Clippingchains.com

I’ve drifted in and out of the meritocracy trap over the years, but mostly, I’ve stayed stuck in its sticky web. I quickly learned the value of good grades and securing better jobs. Once I landed a good job and the race to secure it was over, I descended into despair at the thought of doing it for the next forty years. Fast-forward a decade, and financial independence allowed me to sidestep the me...

My wife and I stood at the edge of the world—or at least what felt like it—squinting through the murk and sea spray to snap photos of a decommissioned lighthouse. Less like some beacon of hope, its white tower loomed like a ghost, haunting the craggy cliffs of coastal Victoria and my vacation prospects. We’d arrived at the sleepy Victorian coastal town of Port Fairy expecting sunshine, a pleasant...

Australians, it seems, are utterly smitten with coffee. The beverage of choice appears to be the flat white, a silky yet buttoned-down cousin to the latte or cappuccino. We landed in Sydney at dawn, dragging two hefty bags from baggage claim. Our first order of business was to snag a flat white before leaving the terminal. Ever the minimalist, I settled for an espresso, watching the crowd in a ble...

They say that grief comes on like a tsunami, a wave of incredible power and uncontrollable force that washes over us. The metaphors are many—trains and dump trucks, roller coasters and rivers—and they all check out. Grief comes on hard and renders us powerless in its wake. But I’ve been consumed less by a powerful force and more by the emptiness of where something used to be. Because grief is, aft...

Retirement is often an ideal detached from reality. When overwhelmed by daily routines, it’s easy to imagine retirement as a stress-free life with a blank calendar and complete freedom. However, retirement often brings unexpected psychological challenges, including a lack of purpose, boredom, relationship strain, and a troubling sense of isolation. Today’s guest, David Champion, retired from his s...

Perhaps no one has quit their job like my guest today, Cory Richards. Richards, still a world-renowned photographer, abruptly ended his career as an elite mountaineer in April 2021 at the foot of the world’s seventh-highest peak. Over several days, Richards experienced what he later described as a mixed bipolar episode. With one hundred thousand dollars spent and a film in the works, Richards anno...

Recently, I’ve been increasingly conflicted by several dueling experiences and sensations: Reduced Stress: Since departing from the Standard Corporate Office Environment (SCOE), I’ve enjoyed decreased stress and anxiety levels. While stress has its upsides , reducing chronic stress is foundational to living a good life. Mounting pressure to be part of society. I’ve been working on this project for...

Imagine being faced with the daunting task of predicting the future with nothing but incomplete information and a handful of hunches. Perhaps you're considering new experiences, like travel or moving to a different town. When I imagined quitting my job, I envisioned a happier world, free from the perceived burden of corporate work. In the following months, however, my expectations were shattered u...

In 1949, a college junior named Barbara Beattie wrote a letter for a school journalism assignment. We can only speculate on Beattie’s youthful expectations: Was she so naive to expect a response, or were these different times? She’d written playwright Arthur Miller at a time when the Broadway run of his most famous work, The Death of a Salesman , was in full swing. He had every reason to ignore a...

In normal times, rent prices, like most everything else, slowly yet surely increase at about 2-3% per year. This is inflation. But in terms of the housing market, these aren’t normal times. In the pandemic era, as demand surged in supply-restricted markets, both sale and rent prices soared, with year-over-year inflation rates at 30% or more in some markets. To speak generally of the world of prici...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , chronic pain—pain lasting at or beyond three months—affected over 20% of U.S. adults, or 51.6 million people, in 2021. Symptoms were severe enough to substantially restrict daily activity for 6.9% of Americans that same year. And with chronic pain comes soaring medical costs, pharmaceutical over-reliance, and addiction.   Mounting multi...

If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I sear...

The concept of play conjures the image of my three-year-old (and blonder) self, plastic shovel in hand, amorphous stains down the front of my pants. And certainly slobber. Lots of slobber. That three-year-old was certainly not concerned with social hierarchy or status, lacking a whiff of ambition to put the best version of himself forward. He played with a shovel in the sand because something need...

For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the fart...

When we make important decisions, we are often not as rational or objective as we’d like to believe. The base rate fallacy is the tendency to misjudge the probability of a situation by not accounting for all relevant information. This cognitive bias affects everything from first impressions to voting preferences to broad market behavior.   Support this project: Buy Me a Coffee Subscribe to the new...

If you follow economic news at all, you’ve taken note of the changing conditions of the American housing economy in the last few years. First, high demand, low supply, and cheap debt fueled an extraordinary (and unhealthy) price surge. In response, the Federal Reserve ratcheted up interest rates to cool an overheated economy in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions In years prior, economic cond...

We’re back to the digital mailbag to answer your questions! For this week: An update on markets and our personal finance situation The role of dividends in growth and withdrawal assumptions Expectations vs reality on a life of financial independence Our experience with health insurance without employer-sponsored plans Real estate investing: an update on our experiences and economics as remote land...

When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing. But when I actually sit down and talk with t...

By popular demand, I’ve decided to extend a travel series centered around the topic of building community or maintaining our need for social interactions when away from home. Community building is especially complicated when abroad, where cultures and languages vary considerably from our own. My guests today, veteran travelers with considerable expat experiences, are perfectly suited to discuss th...

I’m a little unsure of the best way to frame this introduction. In some ways, this is a story of embracing climbing for all the right reasons. Pursuit of technical mastery and love for the outdoors over the gamification of grades and emphasis on physical training. On the other hand, this is also the story of early adulthood in the modern era. The narrative to pursue something like climbing full-ti...

In October I published a mini episode on my thought processes on the pros and cons of extended travel abroad . Many of you left comments or emailed me your thoughts, and I’m so thankful for your input. You’ve all given me plenty to consider. One of the most insightful emails came from Jeff of awaytofi.com, a previous guest on this podcast ( Episode 44 ).  Jeff has been living abroad for over fifte...

Uncertainty is a fact of life, yet we yearn for known outcomes. Every day we make decisions. Some decisions are small and inconsequential, while others are profound and life-altering. Sometimes events happen regardless of our decisions. And above it all and looming like a nervous wind is uncertainty. Uncertainty is forever. But those who learn to sit with and embrace uncertainty are resilient and...