210. End of the Build A Wealthy Spirit Era

Reflecting on Four Years of Podcasting

Jan 28, 2025

I’ve been counting the tiny insignificant moments leading up to our podcast ending.

The last time Audacity crashed on me.

The last time I labored over each sound wave, quieting our heavy breaths as I aimed for the cleanest beats of silence.

Fine. The last time editing the podcast was not bittersweet, I was only grateful to have finally finished. I don’t think Sammie or I will miss those long hours listening and relistening to our podcast.

That being said, Sammie and I savored the good memories of podcasting during our last episode.

Yes, it’s the end of the Build A Wealthy Spirit podcasting era.

After four years, Sammie and I felt a completeness with our podcast. We’ve done deep dives in our favorite personal finance and personal development topics. We’ve even revisited the ones we felt were the most important. At a certain point, we went full woo woo and we’re happy those episodes exist too.

Nothing happens to any of those episodes, the last four years of our lives are immortalized on your favorite podcasting platform (or even YouTube)!

In this episode, Sammie and I both share our favorite memories and more importantly, how motivating it’s been to hear from people who said they’ve made changes to their lives because of Build A Wealthy Spirit.

We started this podcast because we both had gotten to a point in our lives where we had checked box our way to “success” and then realized we weren’t necessarily thrilled with the results.

I remember living in San Francisco, a couple years into my tech job, feeling as if I made it. I was making more money than I expected. I didn’t know what to do after saving some of it, so I spent it on fancy Michelin adjacent restaurants, nights out with friends at bars that barely became dance floors and Ubers everywhere a hill blocked my view.

Fast forward to when Sammie and I started Build A Wealthy Spirit, or at the time, Status Post Adulting. It was January 2021, still Covid times, and I had moved in with my parents after losing my job. I decided to take a work break, but was so shy about it, I didn’t mention it on our podcast for a year. Funny to think about that now, when people often reach out to me because I talk so much about sabbaticals.

The one thing Sammie and I knew at that time was that we had made changes to our “fancy” San Francisco lives thanks to gaining a little bit of personal finance knowledge through the FI/RE movement. Our friend Marina happened to mention the idea to us when we were visiting her in Vienna, and luckily Sammie took her one throwaway comment and went down the financial independence rabbit hole.

One thing that was true for Sammie and I was that closing the gap in our personal finance knowledge allowed us to start saving, investing and eventually building a life that was aligned with our own values.

We started this podcast with the belief that arming people in our community with this information could help them as well. Having a resource to point people to, where we could keep things educational and fun was our experiment to test this theory. We didn’t realize we were building a lighthouse for people searching for this information.

Over the past few years, people have told us they’ve gotten out of debt, taken sabbaticals, saved money, invested money, took a vacation, spent more time with their kids, got a better job, start a newsletter and many reached out to Sammie to figure out how to work with their student loan programs.

I bring this up because the one thing that kept us going the past four years was knowing there was an impact in our community. Four years is a sufficient amount of time to see how people can take one piece of knowledge, and use that to take action to change their lives.

Now, most of those people could have their own podcast (and some do!). New people do find Build A Wealthy Spirit, and our catalogue is still available for anyone looking to make changes in their lives. Heck, if you want to time travel, start at episode one and follow our journey from living with our parents, to living in a small town, to (spoiler alert) finally moving back to a normal city. If four years seems like a lot, we also focused our last ten episodes on what we felt were the most important topics we’ve ever covered.

It’s funny to look back and see our own growth too.

Sammie went from convinced she’d work until she was financially independent to taking her own sabbatical. I went from being totally unemployed to discovering online communities and freelancing with them. Today, I even run my own business. Sammie may be launching one too (shh).

For me, working on this podcast taught me a lesson I hear quoted in my corners of the internet often, “you can just do things.”

You can just start a podcast.

You can just keep publishing every week.

You can just ask people you admire to be on your podcast and they will either ignore you or say yes.

You can drive 3.5 hours in the hottest US desert to attend a book tour and that can turn into a mentorship with people you respect.

You can speak at CampFI and share with people how you make friends.

You can choose to end your podcast on your four year anniversary.

Thank you for supporting Sammie and I on this journey.

Whether you’ve listened to one episode, every episode, or simply have been reading the newsletter, not realizing it’s not the same thing as the podcast, we are so grateful for you. Committing a little time to listen to us is not a small sacrifice, and we appreciate it more than we can express.

PS Thank you mom for listening to every episode and "gently” telling everyone you know to listen. She says she’s not biased and we have the best podcast ever.

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