The Secret To 6-Pack Abs, F*ck-It Money, Interdependent Marriage | FRLN 136

No is the most underrated word in a Fit Rich Life.

Not the grim no.

Not the white-knuckle, joyless, I-can't-have-anything no.

The no that buys something.

The no (to a few hundred calories a day) that buys you a body you're proud of.

The no (to a thousand small purchases) that buys you the right to shrug at a big one.

The no to two days of a music festival that buys you a marriage where both people get to stay themselves.

Every yes you're impressed by was funded by a no that somebody didn't want to make.

That's the whole issue this week.

Let's dive in.

FIT — The Not-So-Secret Secret To Abs

Over the last two months, I've dropped 18 pounds of body fat.

I'm sitting around 7% right now. My abs are very visible at this level.

I play pickleball shirtless, so almost every day someone asks me what I did to get so fit.

My answer is always the same.

I ate less calories.

That's it. That's the answer nobody wants.

People want the ab circuit. They want the six-move core finisher. They want the thing they saw on Instagram where a guy with a visible six-pack does a movement and implies the movement is why he has the six-pack.

It isn't.

Abs are not an ab problem.

Abs are a body fat problem.

You have a six-pack right now. Everybody does. It's a muscle group, and it's already there. The only question is whether there's a layer of stored energy sitting on top of it.

For most men, the abs show up somewhere around 10 to 12% body fat. Not because of what you did at the end of your workout. Because you spent enough weeks in a calorie deficit — eating less than you burn — that your body went and got the energy from the place it stored it.

Now let me be clear about what I am not saying.

I am not saying core training is a waste.

Core strength is genuinely valuable. It stabilizes your trunk under load. It protects your spine on squats and deadlifts and every heavy compound movement you'll ever do. It makes you better at every athletic thing you care about — and for me, that's pickleball, which is nothing but rotation and bracing and stopping and starting.

Train your core. It's worth it.

Just don't confuse strength with visibility. They are two different projects.

And if you're spending 30-plus minutes on abs while avoiding the big, hard, uncomfortable compound movements, you're spending your best energy on your smallest lever.

Here's my honest test.

If I only had 20 minutes to train, I wouldn't do abs at all.

I'd do pull-ups and dips — weighted if I could. I'd squat. I'd deadlift. Big movements, huge muscle groups, maximum return on 20 minutes of effort.

What I actually do for abs is one or two core exercises, two or three times a week, at the end of a real strength session.

Hanging leg raises to the bar. Hanging weighted knee raises. Ring or TRX rollouts. Ab wheel rollouts from my knees — I'll do them standing when I'm feeling ambitious, but standing rollouts are brutally hard and not something to jump into. And I love a weighted crunch machine where I can load it up heavy and get 2 to 3 sets of 10 to 20.

That's it. That's the whole ab program of a guy at 7% BF with rock hard abs.

I learned this the hard way.

For most of my life, I was "kinda fit, kinda fat." I trained. I looked okay. I never had visible abs, and I quietly assumed abs were for other people.

Then at 31 I hired my first fitness coach, and he had me do the one thing I'd been avoiding: track my calories and macros.

Within six months I lost 30 pounds. I went from 18% body fat to 8%. I had a real 6-pack for the first time in my life.

Not because I found a better exercise.

Because I finally found out what I was actually eating.

One more thing, because I coach people through this and I don't want anyone hurting themselves with it: the deficit is a season, not a personality. You go in on purpose, you get where you're going, and you come back out and eat to maintain and build. Living in a permanent deficit is how people end up weak, miserable, and eventually rebound to heavier than they started.

But if you want the abs?

There is no version of this where you skip the deficit.

That's the not-so-secret secret to a 6-pack.

RICH — F*ck It Money & Financial Independence

Long-time readers know that JL Collins, author of NY Times Bestseller The Simple Path to Wealth, has become a good friend and a mentor of mine.

This past week I got to interview his daughter, Jessica.

Jessica walked the simple path from beginning to end and early retired two years ago at 32 — thanks to her father's teachings, which she'll happily tell you she only begrudgingly listened to for much of her childhood. Which is what most kids do. They resist their parents.

Here's what makes her book so interesting to me.

JL created the simple path, but he spent most of his life wandering around trying to figure it out. Jessica is the one who actually walked it, start to finish, with the map in hand.

So she wrote the workbook.

​The Simple Path to Wealth Workbook is the hands-on companion to the book, and it's great. You can pre-order it now, and I suggest you do. Our interview about it will drop closer to the release.

In that conversation, Jessica gave me a concept I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

She calls it F-It money.

You may already know her dad's version (F-You Money).

F-You money is enough money to leave a toxic job. It's not enough to never work again — it's enough to get yourself out of a bad situation without asking anybody's permission.

F-It money is smaller and comes way earlier.

F-It money is enough money to absorb a surprise expense or an inconvenience without stressing.

That's it. That's the whole definition. And it might be the most underrated milestone in personal finance, because it's the first time in your life that money stops being a source of low-grade dread.

Here's my F-It money from this past week.

Outside Lands, the iconic music festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. My wife bought her 3-day pass early and paid $888. I only wanted to go for one day, and I was lazy about buying my ticket.

So the price went up. And up.

The single-day ticket cost me over $600.

It would have been significantly less if I'd planned ahead.

F-it. I bought it. I went. I had a great day celebrating my wife's birthday, and I did not spend one second of that day thinking about the price of the ticket.

Now here's the nuance, and this is the part I need you to actually hear.

At the beginning of your FI journey, you should avoid F-it expenses as much as possible.

When you're early, every $10 matters. Every $10 is a share of freedom you didn't buy, and a share you didn't buy in year one is the share that would have been compounding the longest. Until you're somewhere in that $500K to $1M range, the discipline is the strategy.

Which is why, for the first three years of my journey, I did not eat out at restaurants. No takeout. No delivery. Not unless somebody else was paying.

I said no to a lot of $60 dinners.

Today my net worth is $3.6M and the portfolio compounds whether I'm paying attention or not, and a $600 ticket does not move the needle. It doesn't register. So I don't stress about it.

Those two facts are the same fact.

The $600 costs me nothing today precisely because $60 cost me something then.

Nobody hands you F-It money. You build it, one boring no at a time, and then one day you notice the dread is gone.

And that's the part I love most about this concept — you don't have to wait for FI to feel it.

F-It money comes first. Then F-You money. Then financial independence.

Most people think freedom is a light switch at the end of the road. It isn't. It's a dimmer. It comes up slowly, and F-It money is the first click.

The mechanism underneath all of it is the same: a portfolio big enough and boring enough that it absorbs life's surprises for you. That's the whole shift I teach inside Investing Mastery: Your Path To Millionaire — not stock picks, but the system that turns money from a thing you worry about into a thing that works while you sleep.

Say no early so you can say f-it later.

LIFE — Interdependent Marriage

My wife just spent three days at an all-day music festival in San Francisco for her 39th birthday.

She booked an Airbnb in Berkeley so she wouldn't have to drive back to Santa Cruz every night — that's easily a two-hour drive each way with any traffic, and Berkeley put her 30 to 40 minutes from the festival.

She drove up on Wednesday.

By herself.

I didn't come up until Saturday, and I went to exactly one of the three days.

My wife lives for live music. I love it too — just not as much as she does. One day at a music festival is fun and exciting for me at this stage of my life.

Three days sounds like purgatory.

And I love that about us.

I love that we're different. I love that we support each other's highest excitement even when that excitement isn't shared.

I'd never expect my wife to play pickleball seven days a week with me. But she's genuinely happy that I love it that much.

And I'm so happy she never expected me at all three days of that festival, because that would have been torture — and she knows it, and she'd rather have a husband who shows up thrilled for one day than one who endures three.

In our relationship, we highly value being interdependent.

A lot of relationships are co-dependent instead, and it puts enormous quiet stress on both people, because both of them are constantly doing things they don't actually want to do. Then resentment shows up wearing a costume, and nobody can find where it came from.

That does not mean spending time together is bad.

That does not mean you should want separate lives.

That does not mean loving what your partner loves is a problem.

If you and your partner want to do everything together and that's what makes you both happy, that's beautiful — do that.

I just think a lot of couples could use more interdependent energy, so that each person gets to keep building their own identity while the marriage is being built too.

Here's how I think about it.

My wife has a very strong personal identity that lives and breathes outside our marriage.

I have one too.

And then there's a third identity: ours. The marriage itself. Husband and wife.

All three are real. All three matter. So we work on all three.

The trap in doing everything together is that the first two identities slowly get absorbed into the third. It doesn't happen in a fight. It happens in a hundred small accommodations, and one day you look up and can't remember what you like or who you really are.

There is something powerful and freeing about knowing you can be your 100% authentic self with your partner. About developing parts of yourself that have little or nothing to do with the other person or the marriage — and coming home to someone who's genuinely excited to hear about it.

She got three days of the thing she loves most.

I got one great day with her, and the rest of my week with pickleball and my own life.

Nobody sacrificed anything. Nobody kept score.

That's not distance.

That's two whole people choosing each other on purpose.

ACTION — Say the no that buys the yes

Pick one thing that's gonna move your life forward. Don't do all of them. Do one.

FIT — Find out what you're actually eating. Log everything you eat for seven days and change nothing. No deficit, no rules, no judgment. Just get the real number. You cannot manage what you've never measured, and almost everybody is off by way more than they'd guess.

RICH — Name your F-It number. What's the largest surprise expense you could absorb today without a knot in your stomach? Write it down. That number is your current freedom. Then write one no you're willing to make this month to grow it.

LIFE — Bless one thing that's theirs. Actively encourage your partner (or your closest person) to go do the thing they love that you don't share. Then put one thing on your own calendar that is entirely yours. Two identities, protected on purpose.

You don't get abs from doing more ab exercises.

You don't get F-It money from a windfall.

You don't get a strong marriage from never being apart.

You get all three the same way: by saying no to the easy thing long enough that the good thing becomes inevitable.

And here's what I want you to take from this week more than anything else.

You don't have to wait for the finish line to feel free.

The first click of freedom is small. It's a surprise expense that doesn't ruin your week. It's a body that does what you ask it to. It's a Wednesday where your partner drives off to do the thing she loves, and you're genuinely happy about it.

Build (and enjoy) the freedom during the journey.

To your health, wealth, and happiness,

— Justin David Carl