Have you ever thought about altering the entire course of your life or packing up and leaving behind everything you know? How about filming a documentary about the entire experience? That’s exactly what Scott Rick’s did. Scott, along with his wife Taylor, are the subjects of a recently released documentary titled, Playing With FIRE. The film takes viewers along the journey that led Scott and his wife to give up their comfortable San Diego lifestyle in pursuit of financial independence. Scott joins me this week to share some of his story and discuss what it was like to shoot the documentary.

Welcome to the Maple Money Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. It’s February, which means time is running out to make an RSP contribution for the 2019 tax year. Opening an RSP through our sponsor, Wealthsimple, can get you a bigger refund while helping you save on investment fees, Maple money readers get $10,000 managed for free by opening a new account or transferring their RSP to Wealthsimple. To open your RSP, head to maplemoney.com/wealthsimple, today. Now, let’s chat with Scott…

Tom: Hi Scott, welcome to Maple Money Show.

Scott: Thanks for having me.

Tom: When did the documentary come out, first of all? How long has it been now?

Scott: It came out in November so it’s been a couple of months.

Tom: It seems so much longer than that to me just because in our whole personal finance circle, we’ve had this huge build up. You’ve been interviewing different people in our community and promoting it at FINCON and everything. You could have told me a year ago and I wouldn’t believe it. It seems like we’ve been doing this for a while. And you were touring it around and everything, right?

Scott: Yeah. It’s actually been a three year project. The digital release was in November, but we actually released the film theatrically in late May in San Diego. That was the premiere. Then we toured it around the country (and the world) for three and a half months or something like that. We ended up in about a little over 200 theaters and sold over 10,000 tickets over those three months. Looking back in hindsight, I don’t know if I would have—it was wonderful to have the community at large rally around this and have a reason to come together. We worked closely with the ChooseFI guys in their local community, meet-up groups and things like that so from that standpoint, the galvanization was really fun, awesome and rewarding. But when I look back now I’m not sure I’d do it again because it because it was three months on the road. We left in May and got home and basically in November. I felt like I didn’t even know what my home looked like anymore. It was a wild ride.

Tom: I’ve seen the documentary twice. I’m about to go see it for a third time. How many times have you seen it?

Scott: Well, I’m so sorry you had to see it three times. It’s hard to know because I’ve seen so many iterations of it. The bulk majority of the times I’ve seen it was during the editing process, of course, and it changed a bunch of times. In my expertise, if someone really wants to know what you do, I would tell them I’m a story producer first. That’s where I really feel the flow happens. I love that piece of video production and storytelling in general. I’ve seen it a million times on that front. It’s probably, literally 800 times. But in its final format, I’ve probably only seen it maybe five times, and I haven’t seen it since June, I believe. All of those screening tours and all those nights we would actually leave when the film was happening. I’ve seen the last five minutes of the movie a million times. We always come in at the last five minutes so we could do to a panel or say thank you or whatever. But yeah, it’s something where I don’t want to lose the love of the project so I try to avoid it.

Tom: I get it. That would be a lot. For people who are wondering what we’re talking about here, can we kind of go back to the beginning? What did your life look like? I think you’re living in San Diego or the area at least? What were things like for you before all this started?

Scott: I was living in San Diego. My wife and I had been there for about five years at the time. We were growing our careers down there. We’re not from there, neither of us. I was born in San Diego but I moved around a bunch as a Navy brat. My wife grew up in the Pacific Northwest and she had gone to college in Reno, Nevada. That’s where we had met. I moved out there and we hung out in the high Sierra Desert for four years together and just loved it. But that place got hit really hard by the recession so we were kind of looking around and were excited about beaches, of course, and San Diego at during recession was actually somewhat affordable to move to and live in. We thought that’s where our careers could really progress. The economy down there hadn’t been hit very hard. It was doing really well. It was growing. So we went down there and I found myself in video production. I started out in drone work which was before they were all over the place. That led me into producing. Then I got into the whole agency creative space, in general. It was a lot of work. There was a lot of travel. Video production is actually a lot more of a physical grind than people give it credit for. You have anywhere between five and 10 large, 90 pound, pelican cases to carry. It’s a lot of gear and it’s a lot of travel and a lot of long days. A typical day is 14 to 16 hours so it’s a young man’s sport, as I like to say. Fast forward five years and I’ve been doing the whole career thing for 10 plus years. And physically, I’m starting to feel it a little bit more. Now we have a baby and I don’t want to be gone. I don’t want to travel as much as I enjoyed traveling prior. I want to be there for my wife and baby. I’m starting to get a little older so all these things are starting to kind of stack up. In the meantime, I’m looking at the bank account and the recession is over. San Diego is absolutely exploded. The cost of living has gone through the roof. We’re doing fairly well with our salaries in relation to living in the San Diego area. It’s nothing extravagant in terms of San Diego. We’re making reasonable money but there is just nothing left over at the end of the month. For the prior year leading up to finding FIRE, something was off. Something was wrong but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it other than knowing I’m working really hard but don’t have a lot of money. What’s going on here? But I didn’t really know how to solve that problem. I’ve never had financial mentorship of any kind. I didn’t really know where to turn or what question to ask. That manifested into wondering whether we should move, find a different career and all those types of things first? That led me down the path of solving it by making more money. So here I am entrepreneur mined wondering what I could do? What could I make? What’s the million dollar idea? What’s something different I can get into that’s more passive? Something where I can stop traveling and working so hard but make more? I was looking at FBA businesses, blogs and all that kind of stuff. Then I started thinking about my skill set and the production concentration and started kind of dabbled in the blog world thinking about that type of thing. It was around that time I was listening to a Tim Ferris podcast and heard Mr. Money Mustache on there. That was when everything collided because I was listening to Tim Ferris trying to get the strategies, tips on the entrepreneur side and Pete was talking about the polar opposite lifestyle (or mindset) and it felt like a weight had just been lifted off because here I was absolutely spinning myself out of control with the stress of trying to increase my income and figure out a new path. Now I’m throwing away a whole career? There are so many elements to it. Moving and all that stuff is very stressful, so for him to say, “Hey, if you’ve got this money now, just take as best care as you possibly can with the money you have right now and start rewiring the way you live,” I needed that guiding light, that mentorship. But how do you do that? As simple as it sounds now to me, back then I’ve tried to budget but it didn’t work. You just come up with a million excuses for not budgeting. But I had enough incentive at that time in my life and I heard the message at the right time. I thought this was it, we can we can do this. My family’s from Iowa and we come from a very frugal natured background. My sentiment was still there. Hanging out with people, if we were going to a concert over the weekend, we’d discuss how we got the tickets on sale. It was like a sense of pride. So that mindset was there, but we just weren’t practicing that.

Tom: How was your wife at this time? I believe she took a little more convincing to go along with this than you did, right?

Scott: Yes. First and foremost, she loved San Diego. She loves that beach lifestyle. For her every day’s a sunny day and everything’s great. That was the first problem. She had no incentive. And second of all, she likes her work. Not that I don’t like my work but she didn’t have the physical nature of it. She’s perfectly fine with work. And she likes her friends, of course, as do I. So just there was no impending doom. There’s was no problem for her to live life a little bit blissfully ignorant. The systems are set for her—she puts a little bit away of retirement, things work out. That was her mindset. I think that was a big part of why it didn’t immediately resonate with her. The other side of it was she and I both we didn’t really fully comprehend or understand what retirement meant—how to even calculate a retirement date or a number or what you need. I had no idea. To her credit, it wasn’t this long, drawn out process of understanding what we were doing. It took awhile for her mental shift to turn to understanding we could retire much earlier. But even more importantly, we’d be more secure, much faster. But then she thought of all the stuff she’d have to give up. That’s the part that was a lot more difficult because she felt like she had been working up to this point to be able to afford all those things—to enjoy the luxuries life was giving her. It meant trying to shift that mental state into realizing that if we could be happier on less, we’d be better off for the rest of our lives. That takes some time.

Tom: You mentioned giving things up. One of the toughest parts (I would think) is the day you quit your job. What led to that? What made you decide that you could actually quit your job and move and do all this? Because that’s quite a lifestyle change.

Scott: Yeah, it is. And it’s quite confusing to the layman who isn’t totally involved in FIRE, understanding what that actually meant and why did that. We get a little heat for that on media with comments and stuff. It was a bittersweet moment. I really enjoyed that particular job at that time. I was working at this creative agency with a real group of guys. They’re going places. They’re still growing right now. It’s a little creative agency shop in San Diego called, Grizzly. The guys that run it are wonderful human beings. People that work there are too. I really enjoyed the culture but it wasn’t about the job. It was our lifestyle and where we were living. So quitting the job was actually like ripping off the Band-Aid to initiate the move. And the move was critical because where we were living had such a high cost of living. Taylor and I knew that since she worked remote already there was no reason for her to live in this high cost living area. This is how I kind of got Taylor to agree to all of this; I pitched it as an adventure. We had never really chosen where we were moving predicated on a really solid set of parameters. It was more like, “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” “The beach sounds fun. San Diego is pretty. Let’s go there. I’ve got family there…” It was that kind of thing opposed to talking about what we actually did want—the pieces that were important to us; does traffic play a factor? What’s the population look, ideally? Are there a lot of outdoor opportunities? What’s the cost of living life? What’s the tax rate? We were able to really pinpoint a list of places and that’s kind of how we got that going. But quitting the job was, a Band-Aid to get that whole thing started. There’s a scene in the film where I quit which is interesting to watch because I can see it my face. I was pretty emotional getting out of there that day. I remember that was actually the very first time I ever hit the record button on this project. As I was walking out saying my goodbyes (after announcing to the team that I was leaving) one of the owners who knew what we were pursuing said, “Hey, I know you were talking about making a documentary about the FIRE movement. You should record this moment.” I thought that was a good idea. So there I was walking through the alley trying to record myself—just to get my thoughts out. It was very weird because I’ve always been on the other side of the camera. This was the first time I turned it towards myself. The original impetus for that idea was that this whole FIRE thing is so amazing and I just accidentally stumbled upon it. Yet, this is something everyone should know. And I was already thinking, “What’s the next thing?” As a content creator with one documentary already under my belt and as a director for a documentary that was from the roots of my ideas, it all kind of came together. I would love to showcase this movement to the world. I had no real intention of putting myself in it the way we ended up putting ourselves in it— an introduction through our initial journey. The original impetus was I would be more like an investigative journalist. It would give me a reason to go meet people and become friends with my new heroes, which turned out to be an ultimately sneaky plan that worked, thank goodness. It all made sense as I ended up connecting with Travis Shakespeare, our director, who said, “Oh, we should probably follow you guys around a bit, too, because seeing someone going through it from the beginning is really compelling.” That’s when you really are ripping the Band Aids off and making difficult choices. Once you get all those systems set and you get through it, I would argue it almost gets a little bit boring to some extent. With the systems in place, you kind of go on with your life. That’s my story around the quitting.

Tom: No, I think it worked much better, too, weaving your story in there. Otherwise, if it was just a documentary where you’re interviewing experts, it’s been done. But having your story in there is great. How new were you to this whole FIRE thing at the time you quit your job? Was it a year? It seems like it was still quite new to you at the time.

Scott: Now, that’s great question. I will say the entire documentary is a legitimate documentary in that there’s nothing derived. There’s nothing really fake in there. We did have to set up one scene. Everything else was completely real and legit. No acting. Oftentimes we would ask Travis what he was trying to accomplish and he’d just tell us we didn’t need to know what was going on. Anyway, I was probably about two or three months into finding FIRE when I quit my job. It was fairly quick. I spent the first three weeks or four weeks literally consuming Pete’s blog. I read through that entire thing as fast as I could. It was such an eye-opening, life changing perspective. And he is such an incredible writer that with both those things together, it was fun. It was interesting and life changing. So I went to town on that. We had a very young daughter at the time and the only way she would fall asleep is if I was carrying her in the Bjorn baby carrier. I was walking for literally hours. If we stopped walking, she would wake up. I was listening to tons of podcasts because walking alone in the quiet would have been the demise of me. I should probably meditate more but I can’t turn off that monkey brain. Obviously, I was looking for FIRE podcasts and there weren’t many out there at the time. There was the Mad Fientist and Paula’s, Afford Anything. I’m trying to think if there were any others at that moment. There weren’t many. I got through those fairly quickly as well but that was really the eye-opening, realization that there was a big world here. This isn’t just Mr. Money Mustache. And his blog showed a little bit of that as well. I think I first learned about J.D. Roth on his blog. But I feel like it was the Mad Fientist podcast that really kind of laid the groundwork for what the FIRE movement was at that time. The first 30 episodes or something are all the greats, in my opinion—at least from my perspective because that was how I learned about it. And it was taking those deep dives, discovering a whole world of characters that are fascinating and coming from all different walks of life. There’s actually a fairly decent amount of diversity considering this is a topic about money and wealth. That’s fascinating and important. And that’s where the story started to evolve into knowing this could be a legitimate documentary. Regardless, it’s definitely a story that I want to try to contribute to tell because I have to pay this forward. This is going to fundamentally change my life. I knew it before it did it. And so I needed to get it out there as well. Things were working in tandem. I was working on my FIRE journey from a personal standpoint while also trying to tell as many people as I could about the FIRE journey and the FIRE movement at the same time.

Tom: I felt the same when I just got into personal finance in general around 2007. But certainly by 2008, 2009 when I launched my blog, I felt the same like you. I read magazines and some library books… I did the same thing. You just can’t get enough information. Then you kind of want to return your own version of that back out. I get that it wasn’t a FIRE movement but just the more of the boring bubble of personal finance. Not quite as sexy in the marketing but it was definitely life changing.

Scott: It’s something you need to feel. You need to have that impetus. You need to have that reason to care about it. And when you do, I feel like it’s this ultra compelling, life changing thing if you didn’t know about it prior. When you turn around and try to tell someone about it, that’s a real problem.

Tom: Yeah, it doesn’t always pay it within the same way you took it in. You mentioned something there briefly that I’ve got to ask you about. What was the scene that was set up after the fact?

Scott: Oh, okay, yeah. Fair enough. I’ll spill the beans on that one. There’s a scene where we are going through our happiness list that actually happened in our lives. It’s such an important piece (in our opinion) to people’s money journey. To really align your values with your spending you need to know where your values lie. Putting together this happiness list was actually the first thing I asked Taylor to do… Well, that’s not really true. I had sent her a couple of blog posts from Mr. Money Mustache and they were falling on deaf ears or dead eyes in this case. She just didn’t care. She said she saw the things I sent but didn’t know what I wanted her to do with it. I couldn’t understand why things weren’t resonating with her. Honestly, I believe Brandon was talking about how he and his wife had had some “at odds” mindsets about FIRE and saving money and things like that. It was from a more extreme level. I think Brandon was freaking out about whether he should order anything, take the free water or something like that on their first date. We weren’t quite in that space. But since then, he and his wife had come together and understood. She basically wrote him a letter saying, “Now I get it and I’m here with you on this journey.” And it was really touching and wonderful but it also gave me a lot of perspective on how to talk today; how to introduce this to her and how to speak to it. Part of that was to be more focused on exactly what makes us happy because we assume what makes each other happy. We’ve been together, we’re married but do we know? Have we have we explored that for ourselves, let alone for our partner? That was one of the turning points for her. Sitting down and writing that list she didn’t realize she hadn’t added the beach on the list. That was sort of the beginning because I couldn’t pry her away from San Diego at this time. I was worried. I felt trapped. I felt like there was no way we’re ever getting out of there. I like San Diego, by the way. I don’t mean to hate on it. It’s a wonderful city.

Tom: I think it’s my favorite city from anywhere I’ve been.

Scott: Yeah, I totally agree with you. It just didn’t fit what I wanted our new lifestyle to be. Or it would be longer and more difficult road if we were to stay there. It’s not to say that you can’t FIRE out in San Diego. You absolutely can. I was also ready for a change and I’m a Navy brat who likes to move. That may be a little bit selfish. But anyway, all those caveats aside, I love San Diego. I love you guys. I kind of get to talk about it like that because I was born there. Anyways, at the end of the day, that happiness list was really important to add into the film because if we had reached our goal of trying to get this film in front of as many people as we could who don’t know about FIRE, then that would be a scene that I felt was critical to starting to plant that seed in the audience’s head of what makes you happy? Is your spending aligned with those values? Because otherwise you can come up with just a million excuses on why budgeting doesn’t work for you. I’ve been there. I did it myself. Budgeting failed for us for years. So we recreated that scene to some extent. Hilariously enough (as usual) that scene isn’t necessarily acted because we actually changed our list a little bit from the original time we had written it down. Even then, it was only maybe three or four months after we’d actually done the happiness list that things already started to change and shift mindset wise.

Tom: So in a way, you’re really just redoing the project of doing that list? Because it certainly didn’t come across as acting. I wasn’t able to say, “Oh, I know this scene.”

Scott: I appreciate that.

Tom: I had to ask.

Scott: And that’s a first. You’re the first to hear it. Feel free to delete that in the edit.

Tom: Oh no, we’re keeping that.

Scott: It’s fine because I can stand up for that scene. I can say that it’s a critical scene for the audience to see. And I know for a fact from my heart that the way that scene plays out was a pretty genuine conversation. In fact, when we shot that we were in San Diego. The thing really hadn’t happened yet. But there was still a level of angst that was very real.

Tom: Another thing that happened in the documentary I wanted to bring up—and I don’t want to be a spoiler but when I watched the first time, it seemed to go on for awhile where I thought this was just going to be a millennial story about saving money by living with your parents. Was it your parents or her parents? I don’t remember.

Scott: We actually lived with both of them for a short period time.

Tom: Just the way it went in the movie at first I thought this better not be a story about saving money by living with your parents. But it did go beyond that. How’d that work out? What was it like living with both sets of parents and then kind of moving on to the next stage?

Scott: Thank you for asking that, too, because that’s the other piece we get a lot of heat for from people that don’t know the project. They just saw in the article that we’ve moved in with our parents. And that is such a trigger for people. We didn’t actually realize it would be starting off this whole project. We might have treated that whole situation differently had we known that it was such an emotional trigger for people who don’t know about the project. The people that do know about it don’t seem to have a big issue with it. The real impetus behind that was we wanted to spend more time with our family. We looked at it as an opportunity—traveling around to try out these different cities we are considering moving to. And that was the original plan, by the way. We had about five cities around the western United States. We were going to go live in each one of them for about a month and try them out and then ultimately choose. What ended up throwing a wrench in that plan is getting to Bend, Oregon, and falling madly in love with it. Like I told you, I was so nervous about even getting Taylor to move at all that I said, “Well, if you like it as much as I do, let’s just wrap up this whole search thing and put some roots down here. Let’s give this a shot.” In the meantime, I suggested we include a trip to her parents and a trip to my parent’s places so they can spend more time with their brand new granddaughter which would be such a wonderful little moment. It’ll give us a chance to reflect on this whole journey and just slow down a little bit. And, if we’re going to stay there for a month or two, we’ll be able to save a significant amount of money which will help us when whenever we do land to possibly put a down payment on a home a little bit sooner than we would have. I hope it doesn’t come across as like a big strategic move where we’re saying, “You’ve got to move in with your parents to start doing the FIRE,” no. It just happened to work out well for us. We’re very blessed to have tight families who love each other and don’t mind having us for a bit. It seemed like a good plan. By the way, all that said, it wasn’t a very good plan. I don’t recommend moving with your parents if you don’t have to. I love them to death but it ended up being kind of taxing on all sides. They would say it too. At the end of the day we’re all happy we did it. It was a lot of fun. There were a lot of good moments but maybe we stayed a couple weeks too long or something. And that comes across in the film a bit.

Tom: That sounds great, it’s a good point. Bringing up the kid and using that newfound freedom to actually get to spend time with the rest of your family and not just move off somewhere that’s cheaper and make them visit you.

Scott: Yeah, exactly. You might also ask what that set in motion and the one thing I would say I didn’t see coming was, because we were talking so much about money at that time and had such a different background in money now with the perspective of FIRE, it opened up an opportunity to talk about money and our relationships with money with our parents. And it was amazing to also see where our relationship was formed individually with Taylor and myself which was a really, really important piece to understanding why our habits were the way they were. And why our decisions were made the way they are. I did not really consider prior, that I had grown up in this ultra frugal area of Bellevue, Iowa. It’s a small town where by necessity or by social norms, they are frugal. That is what it is. You value money. You do not value people flaunting money and that’s what’s going on there. Whereas in the Pacific Northwest where Taylor grew up, not so much. It definitely has some roots in that but the way she was raised is a little different. It was more like putting on airs a little bit. It was her grandma, actually, that kind of gave her that. Her grandma grew up where she saw sides; extreme poverty and extreme wealth. So she kind of chose this over every day attitude of acting like you’ve got a million bucks kind of thing. Taylor kind of took that to heart so that was her perspective. For us to see both of those perspectives and then realize that you can actually shape your own, that was a really valuable lesson… knowing we could dictate our own values, what’s important to us and not just reflect on what we learned when we were younger. If you go to therapy at all (which we started to do as well) you’ll realize that 99 percent of your issues actually are rooted in your upbringing—how you were raised. It was just a really wonderful perspective to gain.

Tom: Now, another question I had while watching this. There were a couple of times where you mentioned as you were quitting your job, you started a side-hustle or something. Is this meta thing starting with the documentary? Is that basically what’s going on there? It was never mentioned directly.

Scott: You’re a sharp guy, Tom. We went back and forth on this in the edit because it is meta. Do we break the fourth wall; look at the camera and say, “This! I’m starting this…” But at the end of the day, the thing is I’m not quitting my job and starting this new thing. I was a content creator, a video producer, a documentary filmmaker. And I was journalism major so I was actually a bit of a writer as well. It wasn’t a stretch to start writing and creating content about this, about FIRE. By doing that, I can take it remote so it doesn’t matter where I am. That was a big piece of what we wanted in our new design; that we both take the opportunity that is afforded so many now—the ability to work remote. It’s the luxury of taking the time to build or get acclimated and educated on something that can go remote. That was important to us from a myriad of reasons, all with the context of freedom.

Tom: I’m a big fan of side-hustles, work from home and stuff like that. It actually wouldn’t have mattered if you had mentioned it because that’s exactly what people should be doing to try to get to the place of quitting your job. You shouldn’t quit just with nothing. It’s good to be working towards something else.

Scott: Absolutely. I was picking up side-hustles where I have a myriad of relationships in the agency space and production space. I was picking up odd jobs in the beginning when this thing was ramping up. It was a supplement to my income. But what’s really interesting from the math perspective is by moving away from San Diego, the savings that we achieved with our cost of living completely negated the need for an additional income. I’m not saying that we didn’t want to add my income back in or anything. It’s not a chance to be a loafer, but what an unbelievable side effect. It was almost immediately realized through this FIRE framework, this reality framework. It was a level of freedom I didn’t even know we had the opportunity to achieve months prior. Suddenly it just opened up doors. And that’s the beauty of the FIRE movement. With the right little tweaks, choices and mindset shift, you can ultimately all alter your life drastically in a short period of time.

Tom: This has been great. Can you tell people where they can find the documentary online and all that?

Scott: This has been great. It’s been nice talking to you. We’ve got the document on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube and Vimeo. A simple Google search will get you there or you can go to our website, playingwithfire.co. All the information is there. I also wrote a book about the journey which goes into much more detail and allows me to explain a lot of the little ideas and situations you might see in the film. That’s also available on Amazon and on audio book. That’s where you can find the work right now. We’re getting really close to launching a podcast. It’s going to be a challenge-based podcast with Taylor and I taking on challenges together and asking people to come along for the ride and do it with us. Hopefully, we’re going to be launching that in March. That’s what we’ve got going on right now.

Tom: Awesome. Thanks for being on the show.

Scott: My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thanks Scott, for sharing insights into the creation of your documentary. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/scottrieckens. Watch all the episodes at maplemoney.com/show. If you live in the Calgary area, come and join me for free screening of Playing With FIRE on February 22nd. For event details visit maplemoney.com/playingwithfire or check the link in the show notes. Don’t forget to tune in next week as Jason Hute joins the show to discuss workplace pensions. See you next week.