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Hey everyone, Kirk here again from optionalpha.com and welcome come back to the daily call. Today, we are going to talk about quitting your job to trade options. Really, I think there's four things that you need to do first if you want to quit your job and trade options. I think this is an interesting topic because people are really interested in quitting their job for some reason and wanting to quit their job and just trade full-time. Just for the record, I don't think you need to quit your job to trade and make a living trading. I think that it takes very little time actually to trade and trade successfully. In fact, you do not have to be glued to the computer screen all day. I would be a totally different person if I had to be glued to this computer screen all day. I tell people often that the reason I can run Option Alpha and watch my girls at home and stay at home with my wife and trade is because trading frankly does not take all of my time during the day. It’s maybe 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the afternoon. If I just did that, I would literally spend probably about an hour every day doing trading type activities and nothing else. I think that you can obviously filter or weave in options trading to your regular job, your regular schedule that you already have. And as we get closer to launching our auto-trading software, that will become even less of a burden on you, is this time commitment for trading options because our auto-trading software and platform gives you the ability to use bots which will automatically look for exit, manage the whole deal, an entire options trading strategy for you. Again, we’re going to be the only people that has ever released this type of software and again, the reason that we’re doing it is because we realize you can trade and maybe you have more time commitments than maybe I do and you need something to help out to manage those expectations. Now, if you want to get to the point where I think you want to quit your job for whatever reason, I think there’s a couple of things you have to do and these are in order. I did think about these and say, “Okay. What would I do differently or the same as what I’ve done before, starting to trade full-time?” The first one is you've got to have reasonable expectations. I think this one goes without saying, but it actually has to be said again and again because I consistently get emails from people saying, “Hey. Do you think it's reasonable for me to generate 10% per month?” And I’m like, “That’s 120% a year. No, that's not reasonable, not even close. That is not a reasonable expectation.” I think you’ve got to have really reasonable expectations of how much money you can draw from your account and really not dilute the value of that account, so that it can still maintain its buying power, its option-selling power to continue to generate income in the future. A common rule or guideline (not to say that I totally agree with it or totally disagree with it, I think there’s positives and negatives to this) is a 3% or 4% rule. You can basically draw 3% or 4% from your trading account every single year and then really never deplete it. Now, of course, if you're generating returns that are higher than that, then yeah, of course, you can always draw say 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%. You can draw that from your trading account. But if you draw more money from your account, you run into the risk of at some point, having maybe a drawdown that lasts a year or two and depleting a significant value of your account. I say you air on the side of caution and go with the lower end of the range, say sub 5% as a reasonable expectation of where you should be able to draw money for income. Now, after you do that… That’s number one. After you do that, the second thing that you should do is you should start to withdraw an income now. I say this often on the webinars with pro and elite members as we’re getting onboarding every other week, is if you wanted to take money from your trading account, start right now with some small account or some small amount. If you have a trading account say of $10,000 or $15,000, take $100 out of that account every month and literally pay one bill with that money. Whatever, say your cable bill or your electric or heat bill. Take something out of your account right now and pay one bill and then as you get closer to your target exit date of your job, so say you say, “Hey. I want to quit my job in one year and I want to setup everything to do in a year.” Okay, great. The first couple of months, pay a bill, then the next couple of months, pay two bills, then the next couple of months, pay three bills and you start slowly weaning yourself off of using your regular job income to pay your regular bills and start using your trading account to pay your regular bills. This is good because it also teaches you to draw salary from your account, not just to draw always profits. But I think it makes the transition slowly and helps you recognize how important it is to have a large amount of money, unfortunately, already saved up and already used before you start drawing that income because you will start whittling down that account very quickly if you don't have enough money saved up or if you're not trading enough of an income strategy that's generating money in that account. The third thing that you have to do though is you have to pay off some of the debt. I don't ever really talk about this aspect of trading, but when me and my wife started doing this and I came to her and I said, “Look. I want to do this full time.” She was working as a teacher at that time, so that absolutely helped out, like we had an advantage there. She was still working as a teacher for many years as we started to trade at home and do this full-time. But what we did is we paid off all of our debt. We didn’t have that much debt to begin with, but any student loans that we had, car payments, like we've never had any of that stuff because we paid it all off and we've remained pretty much debt-free except for real estate leverage I guess for investment properties. But we've remained debt-free through this entire experience. Now look. That meant that we had to sacrifice on a lot of stuff early on in our relationship. When we were living outside of DC, we didn't have fancy cars, we didn't go out to dinner all the time, we didn't have this huge apartment complex or townhouse or house like all of our friends had. We decided to live in a very small condo, just the two of us and then we had our daughter, Molly eventually in that condo, but we lived in a very small area, like very cheap because we wanted to pay off all of our debt and basically set ourselves up for success. I think you have to do that. If you've got this mountain of debt, use your job right now to help snowball that debt payoff, so that you’re better set up and you don't make irrational decisions later on. The fourth thing I think you have to do is reduce expenses. Now look. This one gets hard for sure. It’s easy to say, “Oh yeah. You can cut expenses.” But I'm talking about a drastic reduction in expenses. If you really want to do this… I’ve told people this before and I get some people who just like after they hear me say this, they say, “You know what, Kirk? I actually don't really want to do this. I like where I live and all that stuff.” But if you really want to cut your expenses and you really want to trade for a living, you have to understand that it doesn't matter where you live. If you live in a high cost area or an area that's very, very expensive, you should probably move. Again, now, look. Some people are going to say, “Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Stop right there. I don't want to move. I love where I live. My family is here. My kid’s here.” I know. Okay, look. I know that there's extenuating circumstances, but you could probably downsize where you live. You could probably move further out of town. Maybe it’s a little bit cheaper. You don't have to be right in the city. But you could do a lot of things that really reduce your expenses. Get rid of your nice new car that maybe has a car payment and buy something a couple of years older that has no car payment. There's a lot of things that you can do if you truly, truly want to be successful doing this. What me and my wife did after we had our first child, Molly is we moved from DC to Pennsylvania. Now, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that. It wasn't just that we wanted to reduce our expenses. But that was a major draw for us, is that we could as we're building a family, basically live in Pennsylvania, closer to my wife's family for about a fifth of the cost of living in DC and raising a family in DC. For us, it made really a lot of sense to do that move at the time because we could reduce our expenses, we get closer to the family, at that time, we were able to buy a bigger house that was basically half the cost of the condo that we were living in at the time in DC or outside of DC. I think it's something that you have to think about. Again, I’m not going to say you have to do it, but you’ve got to figure out a way to reduce expenses, so that you don't feel like you have this huge hill to climb every single month to pay your bills. And that means that maybe you sacrifice short-term and then have the ability to basically generate profits much, much longer in perpetuity going out in the future because you’re able to sacrifice early on. Hopefully that helps out. Like I said, just want to talk through these things or rethink about aspects that I would've maybe thought about a little bit more heading into this. But if this helps out, let me know or if you guys have any questions, hit us up on Facebook or on Twitter, social media. Let me know what you think about today’s show. Until next time, happy trading!