#209 - How I Retired Early in Tech: My Journey to Financial Independence - Kristine Howard

[00:01:11] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, guys. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I’m very excited to have Kristine Howard with me. So Kris used to work in AWS as the Head of the Developer Relations. But interestingly, she actually has started her early retirement. So she’s into, uh, I don’t know, six, seven months now. And she just shared her story, and I found it really interesting for her to share it with us here. So that maybe for some of us who aspire to retire early, we can learn something from her. So Kris, welcome to the show.

Kristine Howard: Thank you so much, Henry. It was really exciting to get the invitation from you and looking at the caliber of your guests that you’ve had. I mean, Rebecca Parsons, I was lucky enough to meet her once and she’s just a hero of mine. So to be in the same company as her is such an honor. Thank you.

[00:02:07] Career Turning Points

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for the compliment. So Kris, maybe let’s start by, you know, sharing a little bit more about yourself. I normally ask my guests to share the career turning points. So something that you think we all can learn from that.

Kristine Howard: Sure. I mean, I’ve been working in tech for more than 20 years, pretty much my whole career. You can tell from the accent, I grew up in America. But after university, I knew I wanted to move overseas. So I got a job as a web developer and moved to England. And that’s where I sort of really started my career in the tech industry as a developer. Eventually met an Australian and moved to Sydney. So I’ve lived in Sydney since 2001. And I was a developer for the first few years.

And so I think the big sort of first career turning point was moving from developer into other roles, into being a business analyst. And the way that came about, as a developer, I found that on my team I was working on, I was always the one that was doing the demos when we did showcases or when we showed our progress to our leaders. I was actually the one writing a lot of documentation for our users. I actually ran training sessions for what we built for some of our users. And I found that that was really resonating with me more than writing code was. Like I like writing code because I like solving problems and I like making things. You can probably tell from my craft room behind me. But I found that there were other aspects of this job that I was good at and that I liked.

And so, the company I was in actually had a round of redundancies and I realized this might be my chance to make a jump. So when I got the redundancy, I reached out to a former colleague who had seen me doing those things and said, I’m looking for work. And he said, well, we have a BA role. I can give you a try, and I know I can always have you be a developer if it doesn’t work out. And that was huge for me. Like I know it’s hard to make those big career ladder jumps, and that was really great for me to be able to rely on my network and to have demonstrated that I could do some of those skills. And I think that’s something anybody can do in their role, is try and get skills outside your day to day job.

So that put me into the business analyst and I sort of moved into being a Scrum lead and did sort of, you know, more project manager type of roles for many, many years, and ended up on a team at Channel 9, which is one of the TV networks here in Sydney. And was sort of, I was kind of the glue person across the whole team. And we had a major reorg, and that was when I got asked if I wanted to move into a leadership role. And again, I think it was because as part of leading the team, of speaking to management, of just being across what everyone was doing, of being somewhat everyone on the team trusted. They sort of like, you know what, I think you’re ready to move into being a manager, into being a people leader. And it was really scary. I felt super unprepared, but I did it. And so that was where I sort of then had to learn a whole new skill set again of what does it mean to actually be a people leader, to be a tech leader. And that sort of got me into the third phase of my career, really. So that was a really big turning point for me. And I pretty much stayed on the people manager track after that ever since.

And there was only one other turning point I did want to mention for people, cause I think it’s so important, is early in my developer career, I got burnt out. And that happens to so many of us. And I actually did leave the tech industry for a couple of years. I actually went and I worked in a local craft store here in Sydney. You know, I was like, I just need to be away from tech. I need to help real people with real problems. And then what I found out is actually it wasn’t tech that was the problem. It was the, you know, the particular org or the role that I was in. Like I liked helping people. I liked talking to our users. You know, as a developer, I was just so divorced from the users of our product.

And so I ended up actually taking over the store’s website. I became their webmaster. I built out their entire e-commerce platform. I was doing their social media. So I was still in tech and I’ve sort of refound my love for it. By actually getting out of the sort of nine to five tech industry job and going back and really engaging with users. And look, I know that’s a privilege. Not everybody can do that. Like I took a huge pay cut for that for which I was lucky enough to have a partner who still was able to make rent. I know not everybody can do that. But if you are feeling burnt out, I think changing things up for a little while can just give you a whole new perspective on what you like about your job in tech and maybe help you come back to it with renewed energy, which is what happened to me.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, thank you so much for sharing such a interesting learning points, which I’m sure many people can relate. So the first is about like jumping your role, right? From developer to BA. I think some of us might have had that opportunity in the past, right? Also very difficult to kind of like navigate the new role.

But I guess, as long as you have the passion to do it, I think you may be doing it all right. And then the second one is about, you know, leadership. I think many, many individual contributors might relate to this, right? So leadership is always scary in the first…

Kristine Howard: I was terrified.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, in the first place. But I think it can be rewarding, right?

And so the last one is about burnout. So I think, I’m sure many people might experience this. So I think changing things up, taking a break, it’s probably a good idea as well.

[00:07:01] Getting into Early Retirement

Henry Suryawirawan: So Kristine, one thing that we’d like to discuss here is about your early retirement, right? So tell us a little bit more, the story, how you got into this mode, you know. So maybe something from there.

Kristine Howard: Yeah, this is something, look, it was never, it was not something that I was aware of or that I planned for from the beginning. My husband and I, we come from working class families, you know, we just expected that we would work our whole lives. But being in the tech industry, you know, you’re pretty lucky you have good earning potential. And so for, you know, the first 10 years of our career, we bought a house pretty early and we just basically put all of our salary into that. And especially once I went back to tech, we were able to really sort of chip away at paying off our house. And that gave us a bit of security, of feeling like, okay, we at least have somewhere to live.

And then once the mortgage got paid off, we suddenly went we’re still earning a decent amount of money and what do we do with it now? And so we started reading finance blogs and things like that. And that’s what sort of put us on this journey. My husband worked at Google for 10 years and they do a lot of internal education around personal finance, which was really cool. Like I think if you’re in a company that has anything like that, you should take advantage of it. And he saw a talk about financial independence that really kind of put him on that journey.

And we started sort of thinking this might be a possibility. I didn’t think I would do it. I thought he would do it. He’s the kind of person who can be very happy like just doing his own thing. And I always thought I will not be comfortable without a job. Like I like being around people and like doing stuff and like keeping busy. And I was like, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it, but for you, sure. And so, yeah, that was the goal initially was to get him to that point. And then, yeah, we’ll get there eventually. But I said, I came around on it as well, but that’s how it started, really.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So I think many people aspire to kind of like retire early, got into financial independence and not having to work, you know, all day, especially the jobs that they don’t like. So I think it’s definitely a privilege for, you know, some people who can reach that stage. Nevertheless, right, I’m sure there are some learnings that everyone, even though, maybe, you know, different people have different situations, right? Maybe something that we can learn from that situation, right? So you’re about to say something?

[00:09:16] Financial Independence vs Early Retirement

Kristine Howard: Well, I was just gonna say it’s not necessarily, and I think you talked about it in our notes we were talking about, is it’s about really financial independence as opposed to early retirement. Financial independence means you are not dependent on the job you’re in today. You have the freedom to leave and not worry, like I did, of I’m burnt out, I want to go do something else for a while. That’s financial independence. Of being able to, if you’re not happy in what you’re doing, do something else. And unfortunately, I know for a lot of people, that’s not possible. You know, you’ve got family obligations, you’re getting out of debt. You know, there are a lot of reasons people don’t have that, but I think FI, financial, FI as they call it in the community, means different things to different people. Like some people it means, I want to start my own business and not have to worry about it failing. For other people, it means I just want to take more vacations every year and fly business class, you know? And so I think it can mean whatever you want it to mean for you.

[00:10:13] Can We Reach Financial Independence?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think that’s pretty good definition, right? Financial independence. So if you don’t actually… you reach a stage where you don’t actually need to depend so much on the day to day job, right? The nine to five, like typical corporate job that many of us have. So I think, one thing that I would like to ask, right, do you think all of us here can really reach financial independence?

Kristine Howard: I think everyone can reach, in tech, I mean, I think you should be able to reach a level of feeling a little bit of security. I would hope you can. There is such a huge amount of privilege involved here. And I think that’s important to call out is I know that there are lots of people in tech whose situation is more precarious than mine.

To state it boldly, I am a white cis American passport holding, you know, university educated, I don’t have any disabilities that keep me from being able to work, and, well, it seems a bit silly to call it privilege, I don’t have children, which in terms of monetary puts you in a different situation than someone who’s caring for small kids. I don’t have parents that either of us are supporting right now in our lives. So, there’s a massive, massive amount of privilege of being in a, I mean, I live in a city with, that’s not on fire at the moment, you know. I have family members living in LA, I live in a country with national healthcare, so I’m not spending a huge percentage of my income every month on health insurance. I don’t want to discount that, that there’s so much luck and privilege involved. There are many people who might not be able to have what I have. And I do know how lucky I am. But I would hope that being in tech, compared to other roles, you absolutely have more financial independence than people in many other roles who aren’t as lucky as we are.

[00:11:56] The Shares/Equity Lever

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think it’s really important to acknowledge, right? So everyone’s path is different. We are not trying to kind of like make this, you know, for everybody, but I think I’m sure there’s some learnings that everyone can learn from your journey, right? So let’s start from your, I’m sure like one of the big levers of your financial independence is working in tech, right? So I know from your career, you worked in multiple, you know, big tech companies, right? Where probably there’s a portion of equity. So is this one lever that anyone who works in tech can actually use?

Kristine Howard: I mean, I don’t know. I’ve worked with some younger folks who I think put a little too much emphasis on share equity. You know, I worked in startups early in my career in the dot com boom and got offered lots of stock options. And guess what? You know this. They all blew, they all blew up. They all went away. They amounted to nothing. And I think that taught me a very important lesson that money in hand is worth more than pieces of paper, because you have to pay the mortgage. And so I very consciously throughout my career, I worked on getting my salary up. And especially for women, you know, we’re not, and a lot of men I know as well, are not trained to negotiate hard.

And I remember like my first job as a developer, my husband and I worked in the same company. And after we started going out, found out he was making like 20% more than I was in the same role. And it was because he negotiated harder than I did. I just took, accepted what they gave me. And that was a really big lesson to sort of advocate for myself. And yes, tech, I mean, I’ve moved jobs more often than he has, because it’s one of the main ways you have of actually jumping that salary band of getting a bigger increase. You know, it’s hard sometimes in a company, you know, you might get a small bump every year. You might need to jump in order to actually get those bigger leaps. But that’s really how I got up the salary ladder.

I was fortunate enough to work at Canva, who are a startup here in Australia. They’re a unicorn. They’re working towards an IPO. And they’re one where I took a big pay cut to work there. This was going back to financial independence. I could afford to do that at that point in my career. And yes, they offered me a lot of stock options. I actually tried to negotiate more salary and less stock options from them, because I was like I’ve worked in startups. This could go away tomorrow. And right now I think in terms of our retirement, like Canva, of course, was a lucky bet. It paid off, but that’s a lottery ticket, man. Like I didn’t expect that. And so I think Canva is probably about half our retirement savings. And the other half was from plugging away in corporate jobs of getting as much salary as I could.

And shares. I mean, every share we got, we sold as soon as it vested. And I think a lot of people in tech, they get shares and they sit on them, because they don’t know what to do with them or they think, well, they keep going up. Number goes up. I hang on to these. We very much took the approach of let’s sell these and invest in, in other things. Because if you’re working for a company and all your retirement savings are in that company, if that company tanks, you are, pardon me, screwed on both fronts. You might lose your job and the value of your shares are going to go down. So by sort of diversifying, you at least reduce that risk of having your entire financial stake in one company, which is really important. So yeah, for me, a mix of corporates and one lucky startup. But I wouldn’t, you know, I don’t think people should necessarily chase those unicorns, because it’s a lottery ticket. You never know.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So first of all, both of us are not financial experts. So for those of

Kristine Howard: Yes, very important to say, very, very important to say!

Henry Suryawirawan: When you listen to this, just take it as a learning, right? Nothing that we advocate or advise.

Kristine Howard: Not a financial advisor.

Henry Suryawirawan: So have to get that out of the door.

[00:15:43] Working in Startups vs Corporates vs Big Tech

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think you mentioned a couple of interesting things, right? So many people, these, I mean, not maybe these days, right, but maybe in the past few years, right, aspire to work in startups and, you know, chase that options like what you mentioned, and dream of, you know, they go to unicorn, they go IPO, somebody acquired them and that stock options would worth a lot.

So you’re saying just now that something that is probably a risk, right? Because many startups actually fail and didn’t even reach that stage. So for those of us who still kind of like thinking, should I focus more in corporate? Should I focus in startups? Should I go big tech? Any advice that you can give for people in that situation?

I mean, for us, it was pay off the mortgage. It was achieve some financial security, which if you’re working in a startup that’s paying you in options, that’s not necessarily gonna amount to much. So I only went to Canva after we kind of had built up some savings. Because once you’re not 20 living in a house with four other people and crashing on used IKEA furniture, like, you know, that’s fine if you can do that for a few years in your career, it’s great. I think it’s a rite of passage. I did that when I was in London. I had a share house with the other developers and it was so fun. But once you sort of get a little bit further in your career, you realize, I want to have a house. I want to have a car. I want to go on vacation, which means I need to actually earn money and not just, you know, work for a startup that pays you on a hope of a future dream.

Yeah. So I think in the end, right, your basic salary, whatever that is, right, needs to meet your needs, I guess. I think it’s always a very wise not to just accept the pay cut, put you in a dire situation, just for the chase of the options.

Kristine Howard: Yeah. I mean, if you are strongly convicted about a company, and I mean, look, Canva also, I didn’t go there thinking this is my lottery ticket. It was, this is a product that people like, that they’re willing to pay for, that aligns to my values, that isn’t crammed with ads, and that seems to be run by people that I want to work with. So I didn’t actually go there for the startup-ness of it. I went there because of the product and because I believed in it. And I think that’s an important one too. I think if you pick something just because you think it’s going to be a get rich quick, in my experience, that’s not a way to have a very happy, fulfilling career.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And you mentioned, uh, it’s like getting a lottery, right? So I think we should always think of, you know, the options or the shares that you got is some kind of a lottery. So don’t expect that it will turn out for sure, right. Like…

Kristine Howard: Well, especially a company that’s pre IPO, that’s, that’s not public, if you’re getting shares in a public company, that’s great. I mean, but that’s part of your salary. That’s, you know, that’s part of your salary and you should consider it part of your salary. That’s what I think.

[00:18:34] The Importance of Financial Tracking

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So equity definitely is one portion. So tell us other, you know, big levers that you went through to reach this stage.

Kristine Howard: I think when we started out, the biggest thing we did, and I think we kind of did it inadvertently and it turned out to be so useful, was tracking. And it’s something I know most people don’t do very well. So if I ask you, you know, how much do you spend in a month? You might have a rough idea, you know how much you spend on groceries, how much you spend on when. But do you know exactly, do you have a data lake that actually you can ask these questions? And so we sort of, you know, 15 years ago, when we were sort of, when we got the house, when we got the mortgage and we started paying it off, it was like, what are we spending all our money on? Cause people always say, are you buying too much avocado toast, young person? It’s like, are we? I don’t know. So we experimented, we got, we tried out a few different apps. And I’m an iOS person, my husband’s an Android person, so we tried to find things that were cross platform. And it was just like, keep track of what you spend. Now it’s a little easier these days, because a lot of the banks will actually categorize stuff for you as you spend money. And you know, we all mostly spend digital money these days, not real cash, anyway. But just tracking that stuff.

And for us, we were really granular. Like every week, or every, at most every two weeks, we’d go through all our bank accounts, make sure everything’s in there, make sure it’s up to date. And it’s good for other reasons, you know. You check and make sure you’re not getting scammed. You don’t have any charges on there that you don’t recall. But that meant that as we got further along this sort of financial independence and retirement journey, it was like, okay, we know exactly what we’re spending. We can actually now start to do stuff based on that data. You know, we can actually, grocery bill is really low. We could start buying the organic stuff, you know. And then maybe, or actually, no, we’re spending too much on vacations. So maybe, you know, the next vacation we go somewhere locally instead of overseas.

You get that way, you get that sort of muscle memory of capturing the data of building in automations wherever you can. That’s really handy as well if your bank or other places offer it. I mean, the software that we use at present actually can import from your bank. But it doesn’t automatically do it in Australia, it doesn’t have the connections to the banks. I know in other countries they can. They can just automatically suck down all your transactions and categorize them for you. But we built charts and dashboards off that, which really sort of gave me motivation as we started building up our savings.

So I think if nothing else people take from this chat, Henry, do tracking, whatever that means. If that is just an Excel spreadsheet, do some tracking. If that is just looking at whatever dashboards your bank account gives you or if you really want to get serious about it, start tracking, right now, using some app, all of your expenses.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think this is really important, right? You can’t really improve something that you can’t measure. That’s a classic advice.

Kristine Howard: Exactly. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: And you put the analogy of like monitoring, you know, like monitoring system in our tech industry, right? So, and also building like a data lake or data warehouse where you’ve got all the transactions, all the assets that you have, and kind of like track them. And maybe you build fancy dashboards, charts, and things like that. But also the importance of discipline. I think what you said, you do it every one week or two weeks. I think this is kind of like a long journey, right? You can’t just do it for a month. And maybe also because you forgot, you would have forgotten.

Kristine Howard: Even we’re not perfect. I mean, you try and do discipline. But like I was doing it yesterday. I was catching it up and I realized, oh, we were out like 30 bucks on cash. We spent $30 in cash that we didn’t write down. It was like, all right, it was probably at a cafe or something. You know, like we’re not perfect, but you can get pretty good at it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And I think from my experience as well, like once you started this habit and you kind of like benefit from it, I’m sure you get more passion, you know, to actually do it more diligently. So I think tracking is definitely something that I would also advocate people to do, right? Especially if you don’t have anything apart from your bank statements and credit card statements. But the challenge these days is like we have multiple bank statements and credit card statements and kind of like forgot like where things go.

Kristine Howard: I think once you get in the habit, I mean, it took me like 20 minutes yesterday maximum. Like it doesn’t take a long time. Depends of course how many different bank accounts you’re checking and how often you’re doing it. But, you know, hopefully you can get a system that’s automated enough. But I just think the review is so good. It’s almost like a daily standup or something, you know. It’s a check in of actually looking at this stuff. Because I think it’s very easy to just, especially when, you know, instead of handing over money, you just tap your phone or your watch on something. You don’t really realize you’re spending money. And when you’re forced to go through and go, did I really spend $9 on a coffee the other day? You go, oh! Like that’s important. That, that’s, that’s important.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So you might think that it’s a little money that you spend on that particular time, right? But over, you know, maybe at the end of the month, you’ll realize, oh, actually that’s kind of like pretty big, right? Especially if you do it often.

[00:23:36] Building Automation & Doing Periodic Reviews

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think another thing about tracking these days, right? So you mentioned about automation, right? I think in some financial system you could actually do that. How do you actually automate or what kind of automation that you built? Maybe for some of us here to get some spark of ideas.

Kristine Howard: Yeah. So I’ll mention the tracking software we’re using at the moment. I don’t want to, you know, I’m not a financial advisor and I’m not telling you, you have to use this one. But we’ve been using for many years now, You Need a Budget or YNAB which is great. It’s good for tracking. It also has a whole sort of budgeting side. It’s really useful for people who are trying to pay down credit card debt or something like that. We don’t really use that side so much. But that’s one. And it has a lot of built in dashboards. So once you start tracking all this, it will tell you your net worth. You know, your total net worth. It can track your income versus expenses over time. You can start grouping things together in categories and then track those over time.

So very early, I read a blog post about the balanced money formula. And this is, so it comes from a famous economy book. I think it was called Your Money or Your Life or something like that. Or maybe it was called Balanced Money Formula. But the idea is that you should spend no more than 50% on your needs. So that being like your home, grocery, like the food, insurance, like stuff you have to pay, transportation. 30% on wants. So all the stuff that, you know, make life fun and worth living and going out and buying stuff. And 20% minimum on savings.

And so what we did is once we started tracking, we kind of were able to, in our software, group into those categories. And then I was able to actually see on a pie chart, you know, how much percentage are we doing? And okay, that was just a really early way for us to go because we had no idea what our numbers should be. You know, you don’t know what you should be spending on groceries or what. But that gave us, okay, if our income is this, that means we should be doing that. And we realized pretty quickly that, okay, we can actually up that spending percentage. Because once we were spending under needs, I think we started our needs at about 50, but as we paid down the mortgage and stuff, we were able to get that down lower.

So that was some automation that’s built into there, you know. Different graphs and charts and things like that. And then we actually built some ourselves. So I think, you know, with an Excel spreadsheet or with a Google spreadsheet, we’d use Google because it works for both of us. We built some spreadsheets that tracked that over time, tracked our income over time. And eventually I got to the state where I had a little graph that I would update once a month, which had our net worth and it had our retirement goal as a line. So I could see that little line moving up there. And look, I wasn’t sure if I was, like I said, I wasn’t sure I wanted to actually retire at that point. But knowing that that’s the point where I could, like that was hugely motivating. So building these little graphs and stuff.

The other part of automation I think is important is, it’s not so much automation, is every month or so we would, like I said, do a review, update our spreadsheets. And it sort of forced us to have a little chat about the state of how we were tracking towards our goals. And I think I know a lot of people, I’m very fortunate in that my partner and I have very similar approaches to money and very similar approaches to this. Some people, they and their partner are maybe not on the same wavelength with money and maybe find it easier to avoid those conversations. And I think that’s very dangerous. So having these systems meant that we reviewed it and we talk about it. And that’s, I think an important part of automation as well. But yeah, also there’s cool stuff. Like I said, we can’t use in Australia, but being able to import all that stuff from your bank automatically into a tool would be amazing. That would be so good too.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, you touched on a very good point, right? For some people, they kind of like, I don’t know, avoid the money discussion, talking about money or even reviewing about money, right? So I think this is also one mindset that we should try to, you know, be more proactive in getting your money in order, right? So, planning it, tracking it, so I think that’s really important. And I think I like the balanced money formula that you mentioned, right? So if people are kind of like not sure what should I aim for, I think this is kind of like a good formula, right? So 50% of your income should be spent on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings.

And I think many people have different philosophies, right? Some say that you should always try to increase your income. But at a certain point, probably that’s not achievable, right? And that’s when you actually need to kind of like adjust your spending. And having a good tracking system like this could actually tell you how much you’re actually spending each month, each day, and each year, right? So I think…

Kristine Howard: I looked up the book. The book was called All Your Worth, The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, was where it came from. But I learned about it on a blog called Get Rich Slowly, which I really recommend is a good blog. That’s where I learned about it. But yeah, that’s, it’s a really easy starting point if you have no idea what your budget should be. Once you’ve got some data, then you can look at this pattern and start trying to fit to it, which was helpful for us to get started.

The other automation thing I was going to mention real quick, Henry, is automating paying your bills. I think that was, you know, luckily now you can do so much of that with banks. But I, I think like earlier when I was like in my 20s and I was an idiot, you know, oh, I forgot to pay the electricity this month. You know, it’s like, you can automate that stuff. Especially once you know you’ve got enough of a buffer in your bank account, you don’t have to worry about, you know, going over. Automate all that you can, like, don’t rely on your, this is SRE basics here, you know. Don’t rely on human to do stuff that you can automate with a computer.'

Henry Suryawirawan: And especially, if we don’t have alert, right? So if the bills doesn’t send you notifications, I think that’s a pretty dangerous.

[00:29:17] Focus on the Spending Rather Than Income

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned about this balanced money formula, right? I see that there’s a ratio that kind of put in place. Is this some kind of budgeting? So you mentioned about budgeting just now earlier, right? So is this something that everyone needs to kind of like get good at?

Kristine Howard: I think it helps. If you have goals of financial independence, the biggest thing you need to know is, you talked about salary. And people think, oh, I’m on this hundred, you know, $200,000, that means I need to have 10 times that to return, no, no, no. The money you need to be financially independent, it’s not based on your salary at all. It’s based on what you spend. That’s the important number is what you spend per month. And so, yes, earning more salary makes your savings ramp up, which is good. And that’s an important part of this, you know. You’re not going to get to early retirement just by not eating avocado toast. That’s, we all know that that’s not going to happen. But if you’re in the tech industry, you’re probably earning good money.

I think having some sort of idea of what you’re spending, because that will tell you. Like as a very first goal, you might have, and we did have this as our first goal. Let’s have an emergency fund of three months of expenses, not salary, because salary is irrelevant. Three months of your expenses. That means if you get laid off tomorrow, if you decide you have to quit this job, you’ve got three months of a safety net. You know, that is a good goal, and it’s not based on salary. It’s based on expenses. That’s what you need to get to, is knowledge on what you’re spending.

[00:30:43] Budgeting

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think emergency fund, especially these days, very uncertain, right? So people got laid off in multiple countries, right? So always have this so called rainy day budget so that you can at least have a kind of like a buffer in whatever dire situation, right? It could be medical, it could be job situation. It could be, I don’t know, family emergency. So this thing is actually very important. And I think, again, like you, you mentioned, you know, thinking about the how much you spend, it’s actually very important towards your financial independence. Because you could earn, you know, as much as you can, but if you also spend it, you know, without like no tomorrow, right. So I think that’s also not going to help you.

Kristine Howard: And there are different models for budgeting. I mean, the one that You Need a Budget is based on is called the envelope method. And there’s different ones. So, you know, but the envelope method goes back to when people were paid in cash. You know, imagine you get given $100 in cash. And you have all these different envelopes. One is for rent, and you put a certain amount in there. One is for, you know, Christmas presents, and you put a certain amount in there. One is for groceries, and then you put them in, and then you only spend from the envelopes.

So some of the software is actually designed to emulate that and this particular one we use is. So every month we sort of know, okay, we’re putting this amount towards groceries, we’re putting this amount towards eating out at restaurants, this amount goes towards the electricity bill. And once you have the buffer, it’s less important if you know you can go over. But the idea is that you can move around between the envelopes. Like, okay, I’ve spent a little too much this month on one category. I can move it out of something else. And so, there’s a lot of financial literacy stuff on YouTube, on blogs, that was really helpful to us and that can help you with this stuff. So I’m sure there are other models for budgeting. That’s just the one that I know the most.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think the envelope, what I learned as well, the envelope method can actually help you. If let’s say you don’t have a discipline about spending, right? You basically just put it in first, right? And then whatever left over is something that you can kind of like use for that particular month.

Kristine Howard: And You Need a Budget does it. Like I have on my phone, I have actually a widget that shows me what is in my allowance for the month. So, you know, we’ve paid ourselves an allowance each of us a month, so it’s like a certain amount of money that we can spend if you, you know, I want to go and buy something, what did I buy recently? I don’t know, I bought some concert tickets or something. I can just, I can look at this and if it’s green, that’s how much money I’ve got in there. If it’s red, I’ve overspent for the month. So it’s almost like a sort of digital version of that envelope.

[00:33:12] Trade CapEx for OpEx

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So one tips that I saw in, you know, your presentation as well, you mentioned that people should opt for OpEx rather than CapEx. This is like the corporate world, right? Going to the cloud, you know, you don’t buy servers anymore. But then tell us a little bit more about this philosophy, right? So why we should trade off, you know, like CapEx for OpEx?

Kristine Howard: Well, the example I’ll give for that is owning a car. I mean, look, you’re in Singapore, right, Henry? Do you own a car?

Henry Suryawirawan: No, I don’t.

Kristine Howard: No, exactly, if you live in a city where you don’t have to. How many times a year do I need a car? Maybe five times. When I go to IKEA or when I need to drive somewhere that there’s no public transport to. And so we’re very fortunate here. We have a car share in Sydney, where I can, I’m a member of it. I pay a membership fee and I can then rent a car by the hour on those occasions. So that’s my analogy of instead of the CapEx of buying a car, of storing it in a garage, of paying insurance, I actually can just get one when I need it. It’s like using the cloud. It’s, you know, pay as you go, as opposed to owning a thing that you need to keep.

And so that’s something that we’ve been trying to do is if you don’t need a thing like all the time, rent it, you know? Rent it if you possibly can. Because even if the rental cost seems high, you are still going to be far ahead from what you would have paid to own the thing. And so that’s just one tip, I think, on budgeting. Look, it doesn’t work everywhere. Like, I grew up in a rural area. You have to have a car or you can’t get around. But I think if there are places where you don’t have to buy a thing, that’s what you should do.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. And this is also probably going back to the needs/wants thing, right? So if cars is something that you need, maybe for your job or whatever…

Kristine Howard: Or if you like them. If you’re a car person, you’re a car guy, you like it, that’s your hobby, sure, that’s a different thing. But for me it’s just a way of getting around. And yeah, I don’t need to have an expensive asset sitting there most of the time.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. And I think these days there are so many renting options, right? You mentioned, you know, we can rent a car. We can rent even dresses that, you know…

Kristine Howard: Yeah, that’s a good-one. Like, a fancy event, I think you can rent things now as opposed to buying something new. That’s a good one. Or using, um, you know, an e-bike to get around. Like, there’s all these like options now you can do that in big cities. Again, this is really important. I’m living in major metropolitan areas, but yeah.

[00:35:36] Saving & Investing

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. The other portion that I’m sure that you do very diligently is about the savings aspect, right, or investing. So tell us some things that you think we all can learn from you as well.

Kristine Howard: Okay, and this is, again, not a financial advisor. Because my understanding is you can get in trouble if you give people a financial advice and you’re not a financial advisor. So I am not. My husband is not. But our strategy, so as I said, once we paid off the mortgage, it was like, okay, well we’re starting to build up our savings account. And, you know, interest rates have not been great for, they’re getting better now, but for a while there they were low. Like you were getting nothing on having money in a bank account. And so what do we do with this? And so there are a few people that we learned from.

So there’s a blog called Mr. Money Mustache. That was one I read. There was also this guy, his name is, I think, J.L. Collins. He wrote a book called The Simple Path to Wealth, and he gave a talk at Google that’s actually on YouTube, so people can watch that. But he’s the sort of godfather of this financial independence movement. And one of the things he talks about is spend less than you earn. So, of course, by tracking, that helps you make sure you’re doing that. Invest the surplus. So whatever’s left over, you’re going to invest that. And avoid taking on debt. Do simply this and you’ll wind up rich. That’s what he says in this talk.

And so, okay, invest. We didn’t know how to do that. We don’t come from families that have stockbrokers, you know, on speed dial. But so reading some of these blogs and stuff, it seems that a lot of people talk about investing in index funds, which, and again, this is me as a lay person, is basically like it’s a bucket of all the spread across the entire stock market. So instead of investing in a single company, you’re investing basically in the economy as a whole. And over time that pays pretty decent returns, you know, pretty good, historically. Like not as good as being in a unicorn startup, of course, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to actually just build wealth securely with minimal risk. And so that’s what we did. As I said, we sold the stocks we got given by our employers and we basically just started putting them into index funds. So that was our strategy.

I know that other people think, you know, paying off the mortgage first actually may not have been the right thing to do, because you have to look at the interest rates. Like what interest were we paying on our mortgage, versus what we would get for putting that, like paying the minimum on the mortgage, and maybe putting it into the stock market. We felt we wanted the security first of knowing that the house was paid off. But other people, you know, you have to, I would advise anyone to talk to a financial advisor and get some advice on this. We have done that more recently just to make sure that our strategy is sound. But for us, it was about sort of not putting it all in any one thing and of spreading it across as many businesses as possible, basically.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. People have different preference in terms of investment, but I guess the gist that you just mentioned, right? So if, let’s say you are a low risk taker, right…

Kristine Howard: Yeah, that’s me.

Henry Suryawirawan: … investing in the index fund definitely makes sense, right? Especially these days. I mean, people want to chase, you know, higher returns, right? But it could come with a higher risk as well. So…

[00:38:53] On Diversification

Kristine Howard: And if you’re younger, I think your tolerance for risk might be different. So I think that’s a factor as well, you know, where you are in your career. For us, lower risk was important. And so, I mean, that was the way we approached it. I think the other thing is which country you’re in. You have to be really careful with that. Like as an American overseas, there are certain things I’m not allowed to invest in or there’s a lot more reporting that’s required on that in terms of taxes. So this is where having an accountant or having a financial advisor, once you get to this stage can be really helpful because they can make sure you’re doing stuff right. You’re not going to get bitten.

And also because, you know, we live in Australia, I grew up in the US and have family in the US that I will eventually want to provide support to. So for us, we’ve spread our investments across multiple countries because currencies fluctuate. We know this as well. So depending on, look, if you’re in one country, you’re only going to ever spend money in that country, you can invest in that country. For us, it made sense to spread it beyond that.

Henry Suryawirawan: Apart from countries, do you also diversify into, you know, different types of risk portfolio or something like that?

Kristine Howard: Yeah, we haven’t done much. I have friends, I was talking to someone recently, another person on the path to early retirement who’s doing properties. You know, bought properties and in doing that, we haven’t done that. We’ve sort of talked about it, but again, part of it is tax implications and stuff like that. And part of it is just like, it seems like a lot of work and risk for not great returns necessarily. But that’s one that I know that people do is invest in investment properties. There’s things like bonds, of course, and I think we have a small amount in bonds. It’s not the biggest part of our portfolio.

And there’s other types of investments as well. For example, here in Australia, a friend of mine runs a fund that invest and provide loans to small businesses. Not a VC. It’s not trying to find rocket ships. It’s trying to find businesses that provide a return. And so we’ve invested in that business. A, because they’re giving a good return and it makes, it’s good financial sense. But also because it’s investing in small Australian businesses, which is one of our values. It’s important to us to support people here in this country. And so we’re doing that, you know, it’s not going to make us rich that one alone, but it’s something that we feel really positive about having that as part of our structure as well.

[00:41:17] The Importance of Emergency Fund

Henry Suryawirawan: I think that’s a pretty good thing, right? Especially if you invest at the same time, also promoting something that you value. So I think that’s pretty good. You mentioned that in the balanced money formula, 20% is for savings. Do you actually put all…

Kristine Howard: Minimum 20%. Go higher. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Do you put all this into the index fund? Because I know that this term called dollar cost averaging, right? You put it every month. If you do it diligently, right, because historically all the economy will rise, right, over the time, especially for a long time. Is this also something that you use as your strategy?

Kristine Howard: We don’t put everything so in there. I mean our savings, we track that savings rate over time. And I think Mr. Money Mustache talks about your rate of savings is the single biggest predictor for how long it will take you to retire early. So the more you can increase your percentage of savings. And you do that by minimizing your expenses and by increasing your salary. So get the savings. And by the end there, we were almost up to 50% savings, which was great. We don’t put it all into the investments. Like we generally keep, as I said, emergency fund. A, you want to have an emergency fund in probably a local bank that you can access of a couple months. So if anything terrible happens, you’ve got that and you can get it right away, should you need cash right away.

You know, you don’t want to have to sell stocks because you fell down and broke your leg and you need to go to, you know, whatever. Like you need to have ready liquid capital. So we keep some of it in bank accounts. And that’s where, you know, some of the banks now offer like special increased rate savings maximizer type accounts. And so if you can put it in a bank account where you get a little bit more percentage of interest on it, that’s basically what we do. And, and you can get that money out pretty quickly, but we tend to keep several months of expenses in a bank account, just because, yeah, that gives you a little bit more security.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Just to emphasize, no matter what your risk profile, always a good idea to actually have this emergency fund or a rainy day.

Kristine Howard: That’s step one. Yeah.

[00:43:12] How Did it Feel Getting Closer to Retirement?

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think one aspect that I would love to listen from you as well is the story. Just before you reach that possibility of going to retire early. I’m sure this is something that is not easy, you know, for many people, because we all want to retire early. But when we almost reach there, it’s kind of like a situation where it feels uncomfortable and probably scary. So tell us, how do you go through that particular period?

Kristine Howard: Well, my husband did it first. He did it two years before me. So he was approaching his 10 years in his role. I’m sorry. And, you know, he was getting to that stage where every Sunday night, he was dreading going to work in the morning. And he liked his team. He really liked the role he was in, but he wasn’t sort of engaged with the project they were on. And so I said to him, I was my, I was like, this is a bit cheesy, but as a mentor, what I often do with people is I go through a values exercise. And so I sat him down and we went through this. Like what are the times in your life when you felt like you were really killing it, making the right decisions? You were, you know, just really crushing life and work and everything.

And he sort of, he came up with a few, which most of them were from before he met me, which slightly insulted, but whatever. And then you go through this big list of values and you start whittling down to the ones that are, that really sort of define you at your best, that you’re proud of. And for him, they were belonging, expertise, and useful. And what we found was that the role he was in was delivering on two of those but the useful. You know, he didn’t feel that necessarily that the contribution that he was making or that the particular thing he was working on was very useful. And that was part of the reason why he was dreading it.

And I was like, well, we need to get you into things that do tick those boxes. So he quit. He quit. And for two years, I had a house husband and it was the best thing ever! Highly recommend it for anyone. Like, you know, he handled everything. When we were overseas at the time, he handled our move back to Australia. He’s handled our house renovation. He handled all of the financial stuff, buying the groceries, cooking dinner every night, which freed me up to focus fully on work. I was like, wow, this is amazing! Everyone needs a house spouse. It’s so good. I understand now why men had this for so long. And so I enjoyed my job. I could have quit at that time, but I was loving my job. I had less stress, because he was taking care of everything at home. And so I kept going.

Then, a year or so ago, I started to feel it was becoming less fun. The generative AI has taken over our industry. Many of us know this. I was less enthusiastic about that than about the other things that I was doing in my role. You know, I think people still need to know how to build secure containerized applications, or how to build well architected serverless applications. And instead it felt like, as an industry, we were just telling everyone to use coding assistants. I became less enthusiastic about that. And our company was, you know, our team was going through a bit of a reorg and it felt like, you know what? This kind of feels like the time is right. Like it just sort of started feeling like, okay, I’ll give it a go and I set myself a goal of six months. I’m not gonna take a job for six months. I’m gonna reconnect with my hobbies. I’m going to reconnect with my friends that I feel like I haven’t seen. And so my team were amazing. I love them. They sent me off with such a nice sendoff. And I really can’t say anything bad about them. I love them also. They were just fantastic.

And the first month was super weird. It felt like I was kind of on vacation. And I feel like I almost went through a little bit of a period of depression there as well. And then it gradually over, I, I’ve kind of gotten into the routine now, to the extent that now the surprise is after six months, I don’t think I want to get a job. I kind of figured I would be crawling the walls by now, but I’m not. Like people kept saying to me, what will you do? And I was like, well, I started keeping a list on my phone, you know, sort of a year or two ago of what would you do if you’re retired just to see. I have a huge list of books to read, of video games to play. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to go do these classes. I want to volunteer. Like I had a huge list of things. I want to learn a foreign language. I want to learn to play the cello. Like everybody has stuff that they would do. And so I’ve been working away on that list and I’m actually loving it.

Like I may get a part time job. I’ve had a few things that I think would be interesting. Probably not in tech. My husband, he ended up getting a part time job. He leads craft beer tours in Sydney. You know, his hobby is brewing beer. And so he gets to, every now and then, share that with other people. You know, to get outside, to walk around, to talk about something that he’s an expert in. I would like that. Something like that. Something that allows me to sort of like engage with other people on the things I’m passionate about. Like we’re doing right now. Like this, I love this. So I think I might find something like that. I’m not sure yet what it is, but yeah, that’s been the journey to get here.

[00:48:19] The Feeling of Significant Income Drop

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Thank you for unpacking that situation, right? Because I’m sure when we reached there, we also kind of like confused, like okay, what’s next? The transition, you know, the period where you feel uncertain. And I’m sure the first month is not just the vacation that you felt, right? I think the income aspect, because normally at the end of the month ….

Kristine Howard: That-was scary!

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So tell us how did you feel about that?

Kristine Howard: I knew, like, intellectually, I knew that, you know, your investments, actually, at some point, you start getting dividends from your shares. This is a thing that I never knew growing up, but like, yeah, you own stock in an index fund or in a company, most of them will pay you some money. And it varies different countries and things like that. But it’s like, okay. And then you also have any savings accounts you’re getting interest on and stuff. And at some point, you realize that that amount of money will cover your monthly expense, and that’s really the goal. That’s where you draw that line of what’s my retirement goal is, is I know that.

And there’s different formulas for calculating this. I think the biggest one is you want to have, there’s this 4% rule people talk about, which is you want to have enough money that… Because you ideally want to have this money last for 30 years, you know. Or in my case, I’m, 47. So I plan on living longer than that. So I, you know, I need it to last. And you also want to account for like, look, 2008, the, you know, we had a global financial crisis. So in order to account for down years, you need to have the buffer in there. And so I think the general, the 4% rule says you should aim for about 25 times your expenses per year. Once you have that in your retirement, that’s when you can start to think about it. That’s what we did.

And so having the salary go away though, I was just, I remember just being like, but the bank account’s not like, it’s not going up. It’s only going down. Because you don’t see all the investment stuff. They’re not in there. And so that’s where having these like every month, we would have a little how-are-we-tracking chat, to make sure that I understood that no, we’re not just, you know, draining our funds. And that’s why I made that in my blog post. You said a little Sankey diagram that Rodd pulled for me, my husband. We actually still earned more in that six months than we spent, which is crazy without a salary. Cause yeah, I worked it out. Our income dropped to about 25 percent at what it was before I quit. You know, I was on a good wage by the end there. So that took a little bit of a mind flip to get around.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, that was a very cool Sankey diagram. So the one that you visualize how you still earn something, right? And how you spend the money. So I think, definitely if you track, you can come up with something like that. I think that’s pretty cool to me.

[00:51:01] Things Anyone Can Do Even Before Retirement

Henry Suryawirawan: So you have gone through this, you know, six, seven months. You know, I’m sure you have enjoyed so many different experience, also not having to worry about day to day job, right? So for people who are still trying to reach there, I’m sure you have done several things that you think you could have done it earlier, right? So what will be some of the things that you think are fulfilling for you now, but something that everyone or maybe you could have done it even earlier?

Kristine Howard: Well, I think one of the things I’m doing lately that I’m loving, and I did a little bit of before, is volunteering, is, giving back. And I was fortunate at Amazon, when I worked for them, they had opportunities to do that as an employee. And if your company does that, a lot of corporates do or even startups like Canva did, that’s so wonderful. Like I remember at Canva, you know, we had a day where we went and we all were at an offsite in the Philippines and we visited a shelter for women and children who’d been trafficked. And we spent time with them. I taught many women to knit. And it was like one of the most rewarding things I did in tech. And it had nothing to do with tech.

At AWS here, I did it, uh, earlier last year. We went and spent a day helping a charity in Australia that provides clothes. You know, they collect clothes that don’t sell from businesses and they provide them to people who’ve been in disasters, refugees, people who are escaping bad situations. And so I spent the day like sorting clothes in a warehouse to help them. And you, you know, I did that, my employer gave me the day off, but you can also do some of this stuff on the weekend. And that just made me feel so fantastic. Right now, Rodd and I are helping out with the Sydney Festival, which is an arts festival that happens every year here. And so with, I volunteered, there’s this big thing for kids that’s been happening where you bring your kids in and they run around and they climb and swing and everything. And I volunteered for that.

And I saw a talk a month or two ago from Mark Pesce, who’s an Australian sort of real big leader in the tech industry here. He gave a talk about how people are living longer lives. And he talked about the way that you can stay healthy as we get older is to stay active, to stay engaged, and to stay contributing. And so those were kind of the things I’ve been thinking about going into retirement, but I think those are the things people should think about regardless. Like are you being active in the sense of are you eating the right things? Are you being healthy? Are you walking? You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean doing CrossFit, but you know, are you staying an active human being?

And look, in tech, I was not necessarily doing that. And so it’s something I’m enjoying doing more of, but I think everybody could do more of engaged. Like are you seeing your friends? Are you in part of a community? Are you just working and coming home and not engaging with the outside world? And I think that’s important as well. And you can do that. You know, I’ve been an organizer for the Sydney Tech Leaders Meetup group for many, many years. And that’s one of the ways I stay engaged. I meet my peers. We share lessons learned, similar to this, like you’re doing with your podcast as a community. So I think being part of a community is something you can do, even as part of your day job.

And mentoring is part of that as well. I think absolutely mentoring juniors is a great way to stay engaged. And contributing as well. So whether that’s through volunteering, whether that is through charitable donations at a very minimum, that’s something that we could all do, is really important to do. And those are things, I think, you don’t have to be retired to do that stuff.

Henry Suryawirawan: I love those three aspects, right? Staying active, staying engaged, and stay contributing, right? Contributing to something, the cause or the values that you really enjoy doing. So I know that we have talked a lot, so is there something that we haven’t covered that you think people should still learn from you?

Kristine Howard: Oh, what am I going to talk about? I think I’ve covered everything. Oh, one of the things I was going to mention. You know, the transition to being retired, I was going to mention. For the ladies, like I never realized how much time and effort we have to spend. For men, it’s easier. You get up, you throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and you’re fine. But like, I used to get my hair dyed every six weeks. Because if you’re a woman in tech and you have gray hair, this is potentially could actually affect your earnings. Do you know how much money and time that, you know, we spend to look professional in our jobs? You know, makeup and things like that. And let me tell you, not doing that, like, it’s so great, like, money saver, time saver. Yeah, that was something I didn’t anticipate is now I get my haircut at the $14 place at the mall. And I don’t have to get up as early in the morning and I don’t have to make sure when I do a Zoom call that I’m very presentable and everything. I can just be me. That was really unexpected! It’s a lovely benefit.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. That’s definitely a fun thing that people can learn from.

Kristine Howard: I stopped dyeing it. You can see it’s getting, it’s getting gray. It’s doing it.

[00:56:00] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So Kris, it’s been a great conversation. I’m sure we all learned something or two from this conversation, be it tracking, budgeting, investing, whatever that is, right? So I think thanks for sharing that. Before we close the conversation, I normally ask one more question to my guests, which I call the three technical leadership wisdom. So think of it like advice for aspiring tech leaders here. So if you can share your wisdom here, so what would that be?

Kristine Howard: So I had a couple I thought of. So the first one was important to me is that career paths are rarely a straight line. And I think you saw that with my path. But, you know, I did a course at AWS once on, I think, career conversations for leaders or something like that. But we had everyone draw out their career journey on a piece of paper. And I felt really embarrassed, because mine was like all over the place, and everyone else was just going to be straight line to leadership.

And then when we went around the room and shared, everyone’s looked like that. I think there was one guy who had like come out of uni in a job and stayed at the same company and progressed. Everyone else was like, well, that year I got laid off and then I moved overseas and at this company I was doing well. But then I, you know, I had a disagreement with my boss, so I quit. And everyone had these or burnout. I’ve said burnout. I’ve had a couple redundancies in my career. I’ve moved internationally. I’ve changed industries. I’ve changed careers. I’ve had corporate, startups. So everybody’s graph does that. Don’t feel bad about that. That’s okay. So I think that’s a really important one that I wish I had known earlier in my career.

I think knowing your values is really important and I mentioned the values exercise and I can share that link with you, Henry, if you want to share it with people. But there’s an article online about it. But I think these change over time as well like what your values are when you’re 25 and starting your career are different than when you’re 35 with a young family or when you’re in your 40s thinking about, you know, what’s my retirement plan looking like? And it can help you when you’re facing those. When burnout happens, it’s because you’re not living in alignment with your values. And so that’s where my husband was trending, you know, when he made the decision to actually quit his job.

And so I think doing that every few years is a great check in, both for you, for anyone you’re mentoring. I mean for me, creativity is an important value for me. It’s something that I was feeling I was losing a little bit in the role I was in. I think that’s one of the things that helped me make the decision. I think adventurousness. My role was really good for that. Like I had a lot of travel in my role. I loved going new places. Like it ticked that box. And positivity. I like being a positive person. I like trying to affect positive change in the world. So for me, those are right now the most important things. And my retirement journey is about finding ways of things that actually align to those. And that’s what’s going to make me happy.

And the last bit of wisdom I wanted to share with people is to do the things that scare you. And there’s a book you’ve probably talked about on this podcast I’m sure, Henry, called Mindset by Carol Dweck, which talks about growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And I learned about this in a meetup in Sydney years ago. And it was like a light bulb went off. It talks about the fact that there’s two types of people. If you’re a person who, as many of us in tech were when we were young, we got praised for being smart. And for some people, that makes you very afraid to do new things where it might not show that you’re smart. Because that means you’re a failure as a person. It means that you get a certain amount of intelligence that you’re born with, and that’s it. And that, I think about the things that I didn’t do in my career because I was afraid I wouldn’t be good at them.

And then when I heard this talk, growth mindset, people think everything is an opportunity to grow. I might not be good at that now, but I can learn and I can get a little bit. Maybe I’m not going to be the best in the world at it, but I can get better at it. And so this was something that became a bit of a mantra for me.

It meant that, you know, I went to a tech conference here, Linux Conference Australia, which had a hardware workshop where we were going to be soldering, you know, circuit boards together. That’s the kind of thing where in the past I would have been like, oh no, I’m not interested in that. Secretly, I was interested. I was just afraid that I would be bad at it. And everyone would be like, oh, the girl sucks. But I did it. I went, you know, growth mindset. I might not be the best, but it’s okay. And I had such a good time. I learned so much. I wasn’t the worst. Like I learned welding. I have done a three day Haskell functional programming course.

These are things that I would not have done before I learned about this growth mindset concept. And there are, you don’t have to read the book, there’s like YouTube videos about it, but it’s such a useful model, I think, for so many of us that are worried about being imposter syndrome, about being found out to be a fraud. You know, if you have that, go into things with that growth mindset, do things that are scary. That’s what opens you up to growth as a person.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. It’s pretty beautiful, right? I think it’s very, very good wisdom towards the end, right? So when you say don’t be scared to do something new, growth mindset. And I think I also listened to like Tim Ferriss in the past, right? If you really want to grow and be really successful, chase the fears that you have, right? So don’t be kind of like crippled by the fear and wait for the opportunity. Instead, you just chase the fear. I’m sure for the extreme, maybe that can work really well as well. But for some of us who are probably a little bit more hesitant, again, the mindset is like don’t be afraid of doing something new and, you know, fail, so to speak, right.

So Kris, it’s been a pleasure. I know that you probably don’t have kind of like a professional link where people can find-you, but…

Kristine Howard: I have blog. I’ve been getting back to my blog. I’ve been doing a lot of blogging these days. So that’s probably the best place to find me these days.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Thank you so much for your time today. I’m sure people would love to connect with you and learn more about financial independence and, you know, early retirement. So thanks again for being here, Kris.

Kristine Howard: Thank you for having me. I’m so passionate. I keep whacking my microphone, because I’m so excited to talk about this. So thank you so much. It was really fun.

Henry Suryawirawan: My pleasure.

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