Econome

I spent a bunch of money to hang out with people who save lots of money. Here’s how that went.

A few weeks ago my wife and I went to Econome. I’m assuming if you’ve meandered to this blog, you’re somewhat aware of the FIRE space, and therefore the knowledge of Econome has permeated your consciousness due to all of the podcasts and articles running ads for it. But hell, let’s throw in the official blurb about the event just in case:

“The EconoMe Conference is a three-day party about money held in Cincinnati, OH. The event is designed specifically for the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) which is a lifestyle movement with the goal of financial freedom.”

The conference itself is designed to provide a solution to these challenges associated with living the FIRE life:

1. Pursuing FIRE can be lonely, as the rest of the world is spending shit tons of money while you’re trying to save it. You get to meet other FIRE peeps at the conference, and hopefully build a community that will help you feel less isolated
2. It takes years to achieve financial independence after finding out about the concept. Usually the initial excitement wears off within a few years, and you can lose motivation afterwards. The path to FIRE can feel like a slog after a while; I know it did for me. Econome is designed to re-up peoples enthusiasm by providing a bunch of motivational talks and educational opportunities through break out classes.

Now let’s hit the TL;DR about this thing:

• Was it worth it? Mostly, I guess.
• Would I go again? Somewhere between maybe and probably.
• Did I learn a lot? Yeah.
• What actually happens there? You hang out with people, watch talks, go to classes.

How much does it cost?

Let’s look at the numbers, as a part of this “worth it” thing:

Tickets for 2: $574.22

Hotel for two nights: $325.22

Food for the weekend: $150

Transportation: $50, due to some hacks

Childcare for our two kids: Free thanks to my amazing mother in law, but we’ve essentially used up one of the finite times a year we feel comfortable asking for such a huge favor.

Total: $1,099.44

Holy shit! That’s a lot of money! Before I start trying to justify such an outlay with a bunch of subjective narratives concerning feels and whatnot, I’ll describe what the hell we actually did. Also, please understand an important factor of this description of the conference-my entire family had a nasty cold for the week preceding Econome. Like totally laid us out and it sucked. Never fun to be trying to take care of sick kids while also being sick. While we were recovered health wise by the time the conference started, we were both still really tired from the lack of sleep, so we weren’t super motivated to be all excited about stuff. My view of the weekend is therefore colored by our lack of energy.

Friday:

Arrival

There was a cool urban hike scheduled for the morning, followed by some bowling thing. We didn’t get in until the afternoon though, so both of those were out. I would have liked to have gotten there earlier, but that would have required an additional hotel night, and more importantly, an extra night of childcare. It was a stretch to get our mother in law to watch our young kids for two nights, and we didn’t feel comfortable asking for any more. Thankfully we didn’t, because it would have sucked even more since our kids were also just getting over being sick. But we were bummed to have missed a bunch. This was a continuing theme for the weekend.

Instead of making it to that stuff, we checked in early to our Hotel, and grabbed some crepes from a local eatery. They were good! Cincinnati is a cool town; love the hills.

Screening

Late afternoon there was a screening for the movie Seeking FIRE. We went to that, and holy shit! It was good. Best FIRE doc yet, for sure. The documentary started out sort of jumbled up, but slowly built into this coherent story that I think best highlights the culture and life associated with this FIRE thing. It was also hilarious at times, and very identifiable. Can’t say enough good things about this documentary.

We then grabbed some dinner from one of the many restaurants within walking distance. We did that for all meals that weekend, hence the hefty food price tag. We knew this going in, as we wanted to prioritize socializing with other people instead of eating PB&Js in our hotel room. It was cool to be able to walk to so many food options, something we don’t have in our suburban area where every restaurant is at least a 10 minute drive away.

Friendshipping

Friday night we went to Friendshiping, run by Brad Barrett of Choose FI. Later in the weekend Brad randomly asked me about a jersey I was wearing, and we had a brief conversation. I’m put off by a bunch of the shamwow FIRE influencers who are big on hype and platitudes. I ran into a few at this conference, as well as many who were trying to reach FI sooner by becoming a successful FI influencer, and my revulsion of those people doubled. Brad is not one of those people. In real life he is as he appears on the socials; a genuine nice guy who actually cares about people. I told my wife this, now she thinks I have a crush on him. 🤣

Anyways, friendshipping was good. Met a bunch of cool people, and learned some stuff. Throughout the weekend I kept meeting people in the same boat as me-they’d recently retired, and now they didn’t know what the hell to do. I’m right there now; a year after leaving work, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. It feels weird, and it was nice to know I’m not alone. As hard as I looked, I didn’t find any concrete answers as to how to solve this. One lady I met at Friendshipping did have a good suggestion; find what pisses you off and then work on that.

She was pissed that there were a bunch of mistreated and neglected animals without owners, so now she spends much of her time volunteering to fix that. I’m now deeply thinking about what pisses me off in the world, and how I can try to work the problem.

Saturday

Mainstage Morning

The morning was a bunch of mainstage speakers, as was the following morning. I really enjoyed Gwen from Fiery Millennials and Kevin from Financial Panther. James from rethink the rat race was informative and incredibly entertaining. Before we discuss their talks, I need to describe the others first.

Look, the other main stage presenters were great. But I didn’t really like their talks. Judging by the applause and reactions in the room, I was in the minority. I’ve been having a hard time pinning down why I didn’t like them, and I settled on this: They were big on inspiration and emotional appeal. No doubt, they had overcome stuff. And their talks were super well put together. They were on par with the best TED talks. But that was why I didn’t like their presentation-they were big on inspiration and motivation, and they were so put together they didn’t seem like normal people. Their amazingly effective presentations made them seem larger than life. But I didn’t identify with them, and I didn’t get anything applicable from their talks.

Gwen’s presentation was the opposite. She gave a talk about how she had screwed up a bunch of crap while on her path to FI, and how she adapted to the issues. She seemed like a normal person-like me. And she had one specific message that resonated: it’s ok to go back to work. Many in the FIRE space are dead set against work, and then only accept it if you work part time on some passion. I liked Gwen’s message. It is ok to work, and not everyone can be big time influencers preaching the FIRE life or be on the advisory board of a super effective charity that saves the world or whatever. Normal work is fine too.

Kevin talked about E-bikes. He also talked about delivering food on his bike. This sounded like so much fun, I signed up for door dash and uber eats. His presentation was good, but it was clear he had built it to put out applicable information, not elicit an emotional response. And he came across as a real guy who was excited about bikes. So I liked that.

James’ talk was on Sunday, but fuck it, we’ll put it in this section. He talked about building systems to self manage rentals. Again, big on applicable stuff. And it was funny. He came across as a millennial douche, and played it up for mostly self-deprecating humor. It worked. Having spaced the main stage schedule, I had no idea he was giving a talk when I randomly ran into him in the bathroom like 20 minutes before he presented. He’d mentioned in a previous class we both attended that he had flipped mountain bikes, so I picked his brain about that. Having given large scale presentations before, I know how nerve wracking the time immediately before your presentation can be. Had I known he was about to give a talk, I wouldn’t have bugged him due to this. Despite probably being stressed out, he took the time to give me some specific tips on how to flip mountain bikes. I really appreciate that, and may pursue bike flipping.

After the Saturday mainstage, I ran into Carl and Doug from Mile High FI. Thanked Carl for his reframe of Warren Buffet’s idea which gave me the final push to retire. Cool dudes IRL.

Lunch

The highlight of our trip. I ran into some dude that I’d met at friendshipping the night before, and we ran into some other people we’d met along with others. My wife brought some people she met, and we all formed a larger group that walked to grab takeout and eat it back at the conference center. It was fucking great! We had some great conversations, and met some really cool people. I wish I could do something like that a few times a month, it was so good to talk to people that actually understood this FIRE thing.

The main commonality we shared was we all had kids, and were either close to FI or there. In the FIRE space, it seems like much of the media attention is given to young childless people who are traveling the world on a seemingly never ending adventure. Obviously this is a distortion of those people’s lives, and I know it’s actually not all unicorns and fucking rainbows living such a life. Despite this, it can get kind of old seeing that when you’re rushing to clean up poop so you can get the kids to school on time. Sure, there’s some super adventurous parents who are living the perpetual travel life, posting selfies on a beach or in the mountains. I guess I’m not that brave. But it’s hard not to feel jealous,. I start to feel like most FIRE peeps are out having glorius fun surfing in Belize while I’m trying to concentrate on making dinner as I keep my kids from braining each other with a plastic rocking horse.

Meeting other people in the same boat as me was huge. We met this one couple that had just got back from Mexico with their kids. My wife put it best-when she heard them say this, she thought “oh crap, here we go, they’re about to describe some amazing international trip and we’ll feel like shit for barely being able to drive 3 hours away with our kids”. Instead this couple was like “it fucking sucked!! The kids complained the entire time that the chicken nuggets at our resort weren’t shaped like dinosaurs. No way we’re doing that again!”. This was such a nice breath of fresh air. My writing skill are limited-I can not describe how huge it was to be around normal people who were FI with kids and not living in a van while traversing Patagonia or some shit.

We didn’t just sit around a bitch, the actual amount of complaining was minimal. We instead all agreed that FI was great, but not some fairy tale. And we all talked about how it was a struggle to figure out what the hell we were supposed to be doing now. We also learned some applicable stuff.

One dude we ate with is almost done with his CFP certification. Like many in the FI world, once I started learning about investing, I got really fucking interested in how all this money shit works. I’ve spent thousands of hours reading not just FI blogs, but IRS tax code and financial industry journal articles. One idea that always floats to the top is to use this knowledge to become a fee only financial advisor. It’d be sweet to help the people out there who have no desire to read all the esoteric financial shit I have, and charge them a fair fee instead of doing some backdoor kickback based AUM model that is the is the industry norm. I looked up certifications and became attracted to the CFP. But man, it costs a bunch, and more importantly, requires thousands of hours working under a CFP before you’re granted the cert. Chris over at Can I Retire Yet did a great write up of the process. I applaud him for going through it, and have added that to my list of “maybes” for the future.

Then I met this dude at lunch on the CFP track. He echoed a lot of what Chris said, but then pointed out something: He said he should of just got his Series 65 instead. We talked about this awhile. I’m now considering this.

That same dude is also a genius, but not because of the financial advisor stuff. Right when he and his wife were about to have a kid, they were confronted with the extremely high cost of childcare. They live in the DC area where it costs $40k a year! Holy shit, I thought our $17k a year was spicy. So what did they do? They fucking bought a Goddard-a franchise daycare center. They got free childcare and they made money! And he considered himself the CFO of the business, which he was able to use to satisfy the CFP hours requirement. Again-fucking genius. Plus he was a cool guy.

That was lunch. Highlight of the conference, for sure.

Breakout classes

In the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday there were several breakout conferences you could choose to do. First I went to the withdrawal class by Frank Vasquez, then I went to the starting a business/entrepreneurship class.

Frank’s class was great. I generally follow ERN’s beliefs about Gold and Small Cap Value, of which Frank had differing views. Besides those differing beliefs, which I think are almost akin to splitting hairs and nearly a philosophical debate, the class was a lot of fun. He went into a lot of detail, and though I’ve gone through every part of ERN’s SWR series, Frank put the high points together in a beautifully coherent manner while being entertaining.

One big takeaway I got was the effect of CPI on your SWR. I’ve heard plenty of bitching about how CPI isn’t real or whatever, but Frank dialed that back in and described how the original 4% rule was based on taking CPI increased withdrawals every year. And if you look at CPI, housing makes up over 40%:

That’s a pretty big chunk.

But here’s the thing, if your housing is mostly fixed-like you own a house either outright or with a fixed rate mortgage, nearly half of that CPI increase isn’t going to effect you much. Sure, your property taxes may go up, but not nearly as much of a percentage change as someone who gets an inflation based increase in rent. Therefore if you have fixed housing costs, you won’t be taking as much of a inflation based withdrawal increase as CPI dictates. And since the 4% rule’s failure is based on taking those full CPI increases, your safety margin increases when your actual withdrawal increases are less. Long story short, own a house and the 4% rule works even better.

The next class was the business/entrepreneurship breakout. Given, the presenter flat out said that the year prior only about 10 people came to the class. He planned this year to do a small group oriented roundtable which he had developed some topics to lead the discussion. Unfortunately this year over 50 people showed up. The presenter did a good job of trying to facilitate the discussion, but it mostly turned into people telling stories about how they were crushing it. When someone who was just starting their business asked a technical question (ex: how do you keep books for inventory based small business), others answered with fluff type answers (ex: ask yourself how your limiting beliefs are keeping you from realizing your dreams) couched in a story about how they were killing it.

I realized I was in the wrong class. I’m interested in the idea of starting a small business as something to do post conventional work. Like flipping mountain bikes, or becoming a small time financial advisor. Something I can do 20-30 hours a week that I mostly enjoy. In this class, it seemed like the vocal people were all trying to become big time FI influencers. How they were building their brand, and building their funnel. How they were doing coaching. And here’s the thing-I don’t really like a lot of the influencers. Now this is a bit hypocritical, as

1. This is a blog, so one could say I’m trying to influence someone. I guess, maybe.
2. Had it not been for someone influencing me, I never would have found out about FIRE, nor would have read the plethora of good info out there. My life is much better because of this stuff, and it would suck had I never found it.

There’s that. And I don’t not like all influencers. I mostly dislike uber fake motivational types that are trying to sell people stuff. The whole “anyone can be FI in 6 months, all they have to do is buy my course and get my one on one coaching” BS. That’s certainly not most people that are vocal in the FIRE community, but as this movement has gone mainstream it appears to be growing. And it seemed like there were a few of such types in that breakout. Maybe I’m being overly judgy. Maybe I was just especially tired after barely recovering from being sick. I don’t know-either way, that was not the class for me.

Done

After the last breakout, we were absolutely wiped. My wife and I really liked lunch, but we’re both introverts, and the high amount of social interaction had drained us. The lack of sleep was catching up on us too. We had both gotten only 5 hours of sleep the night before, and less during the previous week dealing with sick kids. Obviously a function of circumstances outside the control of the people running the conference. We would have liked to have hung out with the peeps from lunch again, but by then we could barely string words together into something intelligible. We grabbed dinner, went back to the hotel, and enjoyed a bit of kid free quiet before crashing super hard. I bet the saturday night social activities would have been fun, but no way we were making it to that.

Sunday

Got some rest, and checked out of our hotel. It was fun being able to walk to everything, and since all the conference attendees were heading in the same direction, this was a cool opportunity to talk to like minded people too.

Mainstage

As I discussed above, I wasn’t into half of these. Good people with cool talks, heavy on motivation and inspiration, not so much on practical stuff that appeals to a logical curmudgeon like me.

Bye!

After the mainstage talk, we bounced. My mother in law had to get back to work early monday morning, and she was already doing us a huge favor watching our kids for the weekend. Asking her to watch them so we could attend the Sunday afternoon breakouts would have made her late to her job, as she had a significant drive to get back home from our place. This was too bad because I really wanted to go to the Sunday breakouts. There was stuff like “what to do after FI” , as well as a presentation by Jess from the FIoneers. Of all the breakouts and presentations, those are the ones I wanted to see the most. Plus it would have been cool to go to the brewery meetup afterwards. Oh well, so it goes.

Worth it?

The weekend was fun, I learned a lot, and the Saturday lunch was great. But was that worth the cost? I have a hard time using intangibles to justify paying over $1000 for a weekend. My math oriented brain says that it’ll only be worth it if I make that money back by pursuing one of the paths I learned about such as:

• Bike courier
• Series 65 certified Finanical Advisor
• Bike flipper
• Finding something that pisses me off and building a business to solve it

If one of those paths generates more than $1k, then the weekend will have been worth it. Other people may say things like “you can’t put a price tag on the relationships you built” or “building a community is priceless”. I guess. My brain doesn’t work that way. I have a hard time paying for feels.

Overall the weekend was great, but in reviewing our spending last month I have a hard time not getting sticker shock. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Diania is charging too much for the conference. It was really well put together, and I don’t expect anyone to lose money on something they’ve spent so much time and energy building. And I think she delivered on her stated goals of:

1. Providing a chance to meet other FI people: I sure did. Had I not been sick the week prior, I would have gone to more social stuff, and had more energy at the ones I did attend. Maybe I would have followed through and stayed in contact with those I met.
2. Give motivation to those on the FIRE path: Like I said before, this was my main gripe with the main stage programming-much of it was big on motivation and short on actionable items. But if I take a step back from my little world, they probably served the majority of attendees well. For those still working towards FIRE, I bet they would appreciate the motivation heavy talks. I guess due to my post FIRE status I’m being a whiny bitch. I no longer need the motivation stuff. I’d rather have practical stuff.

In my perfect world, there would have been less than an hour of moto style talks in the morning, followed immediately by break out classes. I was bummed we missed half the breakouts due to our childcare arrangements. Maybe others with kids were in the same boat, so I’ll be sure to point this out in the survey Diania sent.

Was it worth it then? For me, meh. The big factors that made it less so for me were outside of the control of the conference; us recovering from being sick, and childcare unavailability on Sunday afternoon. And I get that the majority of people going to the conference are still working towards FIRE, so it makes sense the programming would be skewed towards them.

Will I go again? Maybe in the future. Probably not next year, I’m still recovering from sticker shock. And I’d like to check out a Camp FI, I think the smaller group may be better calibrated towards my introverted tendencies.

Should you go? Yeah, what the hell. If you got an extra thousand bucks that you don’t need, go for it. I think it would be a good event for those that are a few years deep into plowing towards FIRE and starting to feel the isolating doldrums such a lifestyle can produce. Just try not to get sick beforehand.

Did you go to Econome? What did you think of it? Any recommendations on Camp FI?