2044: A Million Dollar Retirement By 21 (Also, Life After the CPA Steals Your Money)

If you've ever felt like the math just doesn't work anymore, you're doing everything right, still coming up short on your housing payment, groceries, student loans, this episode's for you.

My guest, Freddy Smith, spent nearly 20 years acting, including nine of those years on Days of Our Lives, before a business manager, who was supposed to be handling his money, stole it and stopped filing his taxes. Then came the pandemic. He lost the show. He moved to Florida and had to rebuild his finances from zero in a brand-new career. That personal collapse turned into a mission.

Freddy started sharing what he was learning about taxes, investing, inflation, and the Fed on TikTok and Instagram, not as an expert, but as someone figuring it out in real time alongside his audience, and that honesty struck a nerve. He's now built a community of two million people in three years, and it's now the subject of his new book, Generation F'd: How Millennials and Gen Z Were Robbed of the American Dream and How We Can Fix Our Futures.

In this conversation, Freddy and I get into why he thinks the real crisis for millennials and Gen Z is not financial illiteracy, it's wages that haven't kept pace with the actual cost of living.

We talk about his big four: housing, student loans, childcare, and healthcare, why he thinks college needs a hard math test before anyone signs on the dotted line, his wild but genuinely compelling case for how a young person could retire with millions just by investing early, and why he's cautiously optimistic that his generation is about to be the one that finally changes the system.

This episode first aired on July 27. How's midlife going? Fill out Farnoosh's survey and help shape the podcast in 2027.

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