Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Start free trial →ChooseFI | Financial Independence Podcast · Money & Markets · November 2026
Alan Donegan had just explained zero-based thinking as asking whether you would choose something again. Katie Donegan adds a caveat so the exercise isn't taken as blaming yourself for old financial decisions.
…decades, and we took advice from different people, who the heck knows, and it all just kind of came into this hodgepodge. So, zero-based thinking is something that you guys have mentioned previously. Let's just give like a quick definition for that. So, what zero-based America is playing off of?
…someone shouts, Well, we've been doing it since 1982. It worked then, it works now. Stop changing things. And we just have this energy of, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. However, that's a very strange energy at times because just because it isn't broken doesn't mean we can't make it much better.
And this is not a persecution or prosecution of past you. Like they were making the best decision they could at the time, and actually might have been the right decision for that version of you. But perhaps there's a different choice that current you and future you could benefit from.
Yeah, like you said, inertia, stickiness, which Aubrey introduced, some cost is another one, right? So many people think, oh, but I've put so much X, Y, and Z into something. Well, under zero-based thinking, that doesn't exactly hold water. So, okay. So, Aubrey, if someone came to you having…
Well, the first thing is this isn't as strange as you might think. A lot of people, including people in the Phi community, are going through major transitions. Phi, the whole goal of Phi is to be able to make that transition. And often there is a huge opportunity to maybe simplify, consolidate, to…
As you just said, even with that 401k to an IRA, I suspect a significant percentage of our listeners who are savvy when it comes to personal finance don't know what to do there. We wouldn't just be doing this episode if we thought it was only applicable to people moving from the UK to the US. Let's…