Make Fitness Fun, 50% Savings Rate = Early Freedom, The Science Of Wellbeing | FRLN 148

What do you look forward to in your everyday life?

Moving your body? Seeing your people? Creating something? Getting a little better at something you care about?

I've been thinking about that question after my conversation with Rachel Jimenez, the founder of Money Hacking Mama and my guest on Fit Rich Life Podcast Episode 118.

Rachel and I met at FinCon in Palm Springs. She's made nearly half a million dollars on Etsy. Mind-blowing. Together with her husband, she's built wealth and created more freedom to choose how she spends her time.

But what I especially loved about our conversation was getting into how she actually uses that freedom. What makes movement enjoyable? How do you create more room to invest? And how do you make sure your life includes the things that bring you happiness, connection, and purpose?

At the end of the episode, Rachel shared her favorite strategies for fitness, money, and life. Each one connected to something I've experienced on my own journey.

The goal is to build a life you enjoy participating in — and the financial freedom to keep choosing it.

Let's dive in.

FIT — Make Fitness Fun

Rachel's fitness advice started with something simple: get your steps in and find ways to enjoy doing it.

For her, that might mean walking while listening to an audiobook or podcast. She's also recently gotten back into soccer. Her bigger point was to find movement you actually want to do.

I completely agree.

Throughout my fitness journey, I've fallen in love with different sports and styles of strength training. During the pandemic, I hung gymnastics rings in my garage so I could train at home. What started as a practical solution turned into a full-blown love of gymnastics training.

It also reconnected me to something I loved as a kid. There was something really special about rediscovering that part of myself while learning new ways to move and get stronger.

At other points in my life, I've been super into obstacle course racing, rollerblading, and road cycling. And these days, as longtime readers know, a ridiculous amount of my excitement revolves around pickleball.

Your fitness interests are allowed to evolve. Following your curiosity can help keep movement a lifelong part of your life.

That applies to something as simple as walking, too. Like Rachel, I'll often listen to a podcast or audiobook, or get on a phone call with a friend or loved one. Oftentimes I'll make the walk itself a chance to spend time with someone in person.

The other week, one of my best friends and I walked all over Midtown Santa Cruz, doing a little urban hiking. We explored neighborhoods and pockets of neighborhoods I'd never been through before.

I got to move my body, have a great conversation, and discover more of the place I call home. I finished that walk loving where I live even more.

We all get bored with our routines sometimes. If your current approach to fitness feels stale, maybe it's time to try a new sport, take a different class, or explore a style of training you've been curious about.

You can keep building strength and consistency while making room for discovery. There are so many ways to move your body and grow your fitness.

Give yourself permission to find the ones that make you excited to show up.

RICH — 50% Savings Rate = Early Freedom

Rachel's money advice was straightforward: work toward saving and investing 50% of your income.

She acknowledged that this is simple to understand and often difficult to do. If you're starting at 5% or 10%, start there. Then work on increasing that percentage as you earn more and find opportunities to reduce your expenses.

I'm a huge believer in this because your savings rate is one of the biggest drivers of how quickly you can reach financial independence.

A person making $500,000 a year can still spend nearly everything they earn. A big paycheck creates opportunity, but you have to keep and invest a meaningful portion of it to build wealth.

Growing the gap between your income and your cost of living is what gives you more money to put to work for your future.

To illustrate the impact, saving and investing 10% of your take-home income could mean roughly 51 years to financial independence. Increase that to 50%, and the timeline drops to around 17 years. At 65%, it becomes about 10 years. Get it to 80–90%, and you're looking at roughly 3–6 years.

Those are illustrations, not promises. They assume you're starting from zero and your investments grow an average of 5% per year after accounting for inflation. They also assume you build a portfolio worth 25 times your annual spending — enough for an initial 4% annual withdrawal — and maintain the same lifestyle spending after adjusting for inflation.

The lesson is powerful: your savings rate can dramatically change your timeline.

Of course, earning more helps. Covering basic needs leaves much less room to save at lower incomes. In my own journey, growing my income while keeping my biggest expenses under control made an enormous difference.

I focused on the big three: housing, transportation, and food.

Housing was the biggest lever I pulled.

As I like to say, I lived in the shittiest place my wife could stand. We stayed there for nine years while building toward financial independence.

As our income grew, we kept that major expense low and invested the difference. Today, we live in a beautiful, modern home about a five-minute drive from the beach here in Santa Cruz.

That earlier housing choice was a strategy for a season of our lives. It helped create the financial foundation that supports how we live now.

Transportation was another huge opportunity.

I used to drive a fancy Range Rover. Before selling it, I added up what I'd spent on repairs and maintenance over two years: more than $7,000. That's over $3,500 a year before gas and insurance.

I sold it and switched to a 2012 Toyota Prius, which I still drive today. In my experience, with the Prius, it's been rare to spend more than $200 in a year on repairs and maintenance, and gas and insurance have been much less expensive, too.

That one decision freed up more money to invest, year after year.

Then there was food.

For about three years, I stopped going to restaurants, ordering takeout, or getting food delivered. I was more excited about investing that money and accelerating my path to financial independence.

Today, I probably eat out three or four times a week, sometimes more. We built enough financial room to enjoy that spending while maintaining our freedom.

That's the important part: you can make temporary tradeoffs, build a stronger financial position, and later upgrade the things you value when your finances can support them.

If you want a more expensive lifestyle after reaching FI, that higher spending needs to be part of your plan. Reaching enough for one lifestyle doesn't automatically fund every future upgrade.

And you may discover that some upgrades don't matter much to you anyway.

I could buy a Tesla tomorrow. But buying a car and selling my current one sounds like a hassle, and I don't care enough about cars to bother right now. So I'm still happily driving the Prius.

Start by looking at your biggest expenses. Meaningful changes there can make a higher savings rate much more achievable. Combine that with income growth, and you can give yourself more choices about how you live and work.

LIFE — The Science Of Wellbeing

One of my favorite parts of my conversation with Rachel was exploring the science of wellbeing — and how we can actually apply it to our everyday lives. She introduced the PERMA model, a framework developed by psychologist Martin Seligman that identifies five elements of wellbeing.

It identifies five elements of wellbeing:

• Positive emotion: Experiencing joy, gratitude, and other positive feelings.

• Engagement: Becoming absorbed in something, sometimes to the point of losing track of time.

• Relationships: Building meaningful connections with other people.

• Meaning: Feeling that what you do has purpose and contributes to something beyond yourself.

• Accomplishment: Making progress and achieving things that matter to you.

Rachel's suggestion was to look at your calendar and see how your actual activities line up with those five areas. She described realizing she had plenty of work meetings scheduled, but wasn't making enough room for the people and experiences that brought her joy.

One practical change: she and her husband scheduled monthly date nights and took turns planning them.

I love how useful this framework is. You can identify an area that needs more attention and deliberately make time for it.

And one activity can deliver on several — or even all five.

Pickleball does that for me. I have fun, get completely absorbed in playing, connect with friends, pursue something meaningful to me, and experience the satisfaction of improving.

But as I reflected on our conversation, I realized something else: this newsletter and my podcast help me experience all five, too.

Every newsletter brings me joy because I'm adding to a body of creative work that benefits other humans. Writing engages me. I get to take an idea or experience, explore it, and figure out how to communicate something useful.

It creates connection, too. Sometimes that means diving deeper into a conversation with a podcast guest, like I'm doing here with Rachel. Sometimes it means hearing from a reader who found something helpful. And the process also deepens my relationship with myself as I excavate the growth and healing I'm going through.

There is meaning in knowing this work can be of service to someone else. And there is accomplishment in finishing another newsletter or recording another podcast — in continuing to show up and create.

This is issue 148. That body of work keeps growing, one piece at a time.

I'm fortunate to have work I choose to do that brings so much fulfillment into my life.

Your version might look completely different. It could involve parenting, volunteering, gardening, making music, learning a skill, or building something with people you care about.

You don't need one activity to do everything. You can build a collection of activities and relationships that, together, give all five elements a place in your life.

Look at how you're spending your time. Where are you experiencing joy? What absorbs you? Who are you connecting with? What feels meaningful? Where do you feel yourself making progress?

If something is missing, that's useful information. You can start making room for it this week.

ACTION — Make Room For A Richer Life

Choose one action to take this week:

• FIT: Try a type of movement you're curious about, revisit something you used to love, or invite a friend on a walk somewhere you haven't explored.

• RICH: Review your housing, transportation, and food spending. Identify one change that could create more room to invest, and decide how you'll put those savings to work.

• LIFE: Run your past week through the five PERMA elements. Pick the one that needs more attention and schedule an activity that supports it.

Movement you enjoy. Money that creates choices. Activities and relationships that give your days meaning.

That's a Fit Rich Life worth building.

To your health, wealth, and happiness,

— Justin David Carl

P.S. Listen to Rachel Jimenez: Money Hacking Mama, $497K on Etsy, Financial Independence, Achievement & Happiness | FRLP 118 (Spotify,, Apple, YouTube, Web). We go deeper into her Etsy journey, financial independence, the pursuit of achievement, and building a life you enjoy along the way.