This book is well written, easy to read, entertaining, and full of practical advice. I will recommend this book to other military pilots I know and will give a few copies to young UPT students when I think they will benefit from it. This was my first introduction to the FIRE movement. Depew recommends the ChooseFI podcast, which I am going to go through. In episode one (at least I think it was the first episode) they are extremely dismissive of Dave Ramsey. I think it is due to a lack of understanding of what Dave teaches. Many people present strawmen for Dave's points and it annoys me. I have listened to thousands of hours of Dave Ramsey and have followed his advice for more than 10 years. I refuse to hold any debt at any time and completely disagree with those parts of the book. My credit reports are frozen and will stay that way for the rest of my life. Will I lose out on some money due to ignoring travel hacking? Yes. Do I care? No. Will it slow me down? No. Will I still be a multi-millionaire with a full treasure bath and be able to retire 20+ years early? Yes. They, and maybe by proxy Depew, recommend not paying off your house early if you can get a greater return in the market. This sounds like investing on margin to me and I would never suggest anyone do that. Why would anyone ever pay off their home then? Why not take out as many mortgages as you can on your house at all times? Why not get an interest-only loan since you are a better investor than a bank and guarantee a return greater than a mortgage interest rate? The biggest benefit from this book for me was the timeline for reaching a level of passive income to be considered "retired." My wife and I had not discovered our number before reading this book. We will not be starting at zero on day one of an airline gig, but rather we'll be halfway or more of the way there. Now the question is "are we going to be done at 45 or 40?" In the end, pilots earn an insane amount of money and we will all be stupidly rich as long as we keep our lifestyles in check. Save half your paycheck and put the money anywhere from a mattress, 2% money market, or the stock market and you will be a multi-millionaire. If you are a pilot, know someone that is a pilot, or know anyone with a decent income that could benefit from some sound financial advice, buy this book. I look forward to Depew writing more books in the future. I would love to see one on flight instruction. (Disclosure: I have met the author and he almost made me throw up in a T-6. He is a great American.)

This is a good discussion of a method of acquiring wealth that is very simple, yet unknown to most people. The book is authored by a pilot and is directed to pilots, but applicable to various others, such as attorneys and doctors, though various others would benefit by following its principles if on a different scale. The number crunching doesn't get too "nuts and bolts" to illustrate the ideas. There is humor throughout, and the text reads well. The author does a good job of presenting ideas, discussing them, and then spelling out direct action to get the reader started accumulating wealth. There are many references to other authors' works. This book and a half-dozen referenced and recommended others, plus some websites, can educate an investor to the point of enabling the reader to take control of his or her future.

This book would be very useful for the military pilot/airline first officer early in their career who needs to understand the fundamentals of building an investment plan around low cost index funds, living below ones income, minimizing one’s expenses, expenses, one house/one wife/one husband, 401 plans/Roth IRA , etc. The book includes very useful chapters for the military reserve pilots who work as airline pilots as the first job and who need to understand how the military retirement and airline retirement systems work along with how their military careers work with their airline career. Read this book over a couple of layovers, and you’ll gain a wealth of basic financial knowledge.

I’ll start off by saying that overall, I enjoyed this book, it was easy to read and I was able to finish it during one 4 day trip (whilst commuting, don’t tell Jason ;) I’m also an airline pilot and have been working with a well-known financial advisor for over two decades. I can boil down the message of the book to one sentence: Earn more than the national average salary, spend only as much as the average national household expenses, save the difference in tax deferred accounts to the maximum amount allowed by law, and you’ll quickly bank enough to live off passive income the rest of your life -from that point only working on those things you want to do. He admits that he re-packaged this from the FIRE movement, and one can’t argue with the logic, for the most part. On page 10, you’ll quickly see that he will accept no excuses and thinks that sarcasm and ridicule are the best motivators, perhaps some of his fellow pilots will agree with him. One only need to brush up on objectivism and Ayn Rand (obliquely referenced on page 62) to see where that is coming from. It’s just something you’ll have to accept, like his premise that basically you shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I wouldn’t avoid this book because of that, nor is it overly heavy with “pilot-speak”, to the contrary, it is very easy to follow and the pilot jargon is rare. There is a lot I agree with, like the quarterly earnings postings of major corporations driving a constant panic if consumerism doesn’t continuously grow. He asks good questions like “how much (money) is enough?” and attempts to answer it using the Bureau of Labor and Statistics average consumer spending numbers, while giving some advice on how to reduce one’s spending. My major beef (and it is fairly minor) with the pilot math portion of the book is that, while he acknowledges the role of inflation on page 104, he appears to totally leave it out of his calculations on page 69. While the average household spending as of 2016 was $55k+, accounting for inflation means that the pilot would need to spend $68k+ to afford the same expenses 7 years later just before their Captain upgrade. Then, the author suggests doubling the spending at Captain upgrade, but due to inflation, this will end up being actually closer to $140k in expenses than $115k. When the pilot retires in their 30th year, the expenses would increase to $235k annually - the equivalent of $115k in 2016 dollars. This is over double the expected expenses when the Captain first upgrades. Then, those expenses will again increase over time during retirement, either more quickly depleting the treasure bath, or requiring the pilot to work longer to get a self sustaining bath. The higher expenses in earlier years will no doubt reduce the power of compounding interest in the later years, since the pilot won't be able to have as high of a savings 'rate'. I will concede that he used today's pay rates over thirty years, while pay rates would likely increase over time (though they have yet to keep up with inflation in my experience), so that might offset many of the increased expenses. He argues that he uses a conservative interest rate of 5% to account for some of this, though that means one would need an actual 8% interest rate over thirty years to account for inflation in order to make his numbers work. A minor point, but one that throws the calculations off a bit. The next thing I wasn’t a fan of (but I prefer lower risk) was his idea of minimizing one’s emergency fund, instead relying on either sales of shares from your brokerage account or Home Equity Line of Credit (depending on one’s ability to time the market) to cover anything beyond one to two month’s expenses. Next he takes you through quite a few topics you might be familiar with or might not be, such as REITs, real estate, qualified investments, tax loss harvesting, and mega-back door Roth. He rightly refers you to professional financial advisors for more info if any of these sound right to you. Next he breaks down the math for military pilots and regional pilots, then shares some great ideas for those on the cusp of a flying career about how to get experience under their belts. Next, he delves into an ‘emergency checklist’ of how to minimize expenses in a (likely) transportation market recession. Here, he claims that real estate would be a recession-proof income stream. However, the last recession was all about people no longer being able to afford their payments due to their incomes changing, so I’m not sure I agree here. His bottom line of making sure that the entire family is brought up to speed on the new financial situation and having a side-hustle to fall back on is excellent advice here. One of the last chapters is a high-level look at side-hustles (it looks like this will likely be his next book - and this book is one of his side hustles- how meta!) and then he wraps up with an eight page summary of the whole book. As with much of the FIRE materials, the prose keeps coming back to motivation - how to make this change to your life something you need to drive you everyday in order to make the whole thing work. While there is some great stuff here, and he is a motivational speaker, I worry about human nature to “fall off the wagon” from time to time and how well you will be able to bounce back to the program if you ever can admit you were on it in the first place. Overall, I’d say the book was worth the money, but you should realize that it is only a gateway to a world of learning about the FIRE lifestyle and personal finance. Enjoy your bath!

I thought this would be a get-rich investment book for pilots, but I was pleasantly surprised. Regardless of your experience level with saving and investing, I think you’ll enjoy Emet’s unique perspective on achieving happiness through work-life balance and financial freedom.