2023-04-28_Friday_QA
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00:01:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.
00:01:10.000 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host.
00:01:12.000 | Today is Friday, and today, as we do every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate technology, we record a Friday Q&A show.
00:01:19.000 | You can call in, ask about anything that you want, opine on anything of your choice.
00:01:24.000 | It's up to you. You guide the topics. You guide the show.
00:01:27.000 | We have a lot of callers. We do a lot of questions. If we have a few callers, we do a few.
00:01:32.000 | You're welcome to call in and talk about anything that you would like.
00:01:35.000 | If you would like to join me on one of these Friday Q&A shows, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.
00:01:42.000 | Become a patron of the show there, and that will gain you access to one of these Friday Q&A shows.
00:01:47.000 | We begin with Jose Luis in North Carolina. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?
00:01:53.000 | Hello, Joshua. The reason why I'm calling is we've been lately listening to your podcast of different shows on how you taught languages to your children.
00:02:05.000 | And the question we have, or I have, is how would you teach, how would you modify your method to teach a new language if you were not able to speak it in the first place yourself?
00:02:21.000 | That's a good question. What language are you considering teaching?
00:02:25.000 | We're considering French. We already speak Spanish and English at the house, and neither one of us knows French.
00:02:34.000 | But we would like to get them started in French, like you have.
00:02:37.000 | Right, right.
00:02:38.000 | And we think that if we had to wait until both of us or one of us is fluent before we can teach it, we may waste time in that learning period for ourselves.
00:02:50.000 | We don't really have a lot of time, so we thought, might there be a modification that you would try to your method?
00:02:56.000 | Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts that I think will be helpful.
00:02:59.000 | First of all, the difficulty of learning a language, a significant factor in the difficulty of learning a language,
00:03:06.000 | is whether you are choosing a language for which language instruction materials are available or a language for which they are not available.
00:03:16.000 | So the French language is a language for which many instructional materials are available, especially to speakers of Spanish and of English.
00:03:25.000 | If you were to study, I don't know, Twi or some other more minor local language, you would have a much harder time with that.
00:03:34.000 | So you're making a good choice by choosing a language such as French.
00:03:38.000 | Now, if you don't speak the language, there are a couple of different options that you can choose.
00:03:46.000 | First, in order for somebody to learn a language, the most important thing is that that person is exposed to comprehensible input in that language.
00:03:58.000 | Comprehensible input simply means portions of language, portions of speech, that the learner is able to comprehend in some way.
00:04:08.000 | That comprehension can occur in various forms.
00:04:12.000 | That comprehension could occur because there's a physical person, a teacher, they're handing someone a cookie and saying, "Would you like a cookie?"
00:04:21.000 | The comprehension could occur because there is a classroom environment, because there's a list of vocabulary.
00:04:27.000 | The comprehension could occur because there's video on the screen explaining what is happening.
00:04:33.000 | The comprehension could occur because there's simultaneous translation.
00:04:36.000 | There's somebody translating between French and English or French and Spanish, etc.
00:04:41.000 | The only thing that is necessary is that there is some amount of comprehensible input and that the language exists.
00:04:49.000 | If the human brain can understand a language in some way, it will learn the language.
00:04:57.000 | It's not optional.
00:04:58.000 | The human brain is designed to learn language.
00:05:01.000 | So, if it can be made understandable in some way, it will learn the language.
00:05:05.000 | The reason I talk about the methods that I have used is not because they're somehow different, meaning all they do is create some form of comprehensible input.
00:05:17.000 | The reason I talk about them is because I have discovered that they lower the pain threshold of teaching children languages because of the use of stories and bilingual translation.
00:05:29.000 | So, for example, you could go out and you could get a Pimsleur course on French.
00:05:34.000 | You can listen to the Pimsleur course on French and you'll learn, I don't know, a couple thousand words depending on how many of the courses you go through.
00:05:41.000 | That's a good way to start if you've got nothing else.
00:05:45.000 | But your children, especially your young children, are not usually motivated in the direction of learning languages.
00:05:51.000 | And because they're not motivated in the direction of learning languages, then they're not really going to want to sit and listen through the boring 30-minute Pimsleur lesson.
00:05:59.000 | So, if you as a parent recognize that you're trying to do two things.
00:06:03.000 | You're trying to, number one, find -- you're trying to create comprehensible input for your child and you're trying to find a method that the child does not resist, that is not painful to the child.
00:06:16.000 | And if you can find that method that the child will not resist, then you can expose the child to the language for a sufficient number of hours in order for the language to be acquired.
00:06:26.000 | So, think in terms of, you know, it's probably -- if you had good disciplined language education for someone who speaks English and Spanish, you could probably learn French in, I would guess, 500 hours or less.
00:06:39.000 | But let's say you double that and say we're targeting 1,000 hours.
00:06:42.000 | So, the question is, how can I expose my child to a language in a way that we can get to our 1,000-hour target with it being minimally painful?
00:06:51.000 | That's the basic function.
00:06:53.000 | And then your question of how to do that is based upon what is available to you.
00:06:58.000 | So, the first thing is a person.
00:07:00.000 | Could you hire a person?
00:07:02.000 | A proven technique to help your children learn a language would be to hire some form of companion or teacher in order to teach that language.
00:07:12.000 | So, here are two examples.
00:07:14.000 | There's this somewhat famous little girl -- she's probably not a little girl now -- named Bella, who is a Russian girl.
00:07:21.000 | And she first came to prominence with her appearance on a Russian version of "You've Got Talent," wherein she spoke and read in seven languages, I think, something like that.
00:07:35.000 | Russian, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and perhaps one more.
00:07:42.000 | I don't remember the specifics at this point in time.
00:07:44.000 | The technique that her mother employed in order to help this little girl do this at the age of four or five was the technique of simply bringing tutors into the home.
00:07:56.000 | And so she had an Arabic tutor, somebody who came into the home several hours per week, spent time with her, played with her.
00:08:03.000 | But all of their play together was in Arabic.
00:08:06.000 | And that was how she learned Arabic, in just a natural way, in the way that children learn languages.
00:08:11.000 | So that's a proven technique that can work, is can you bring a tutor into the home?
00:08:16.000 | And if you can, then that is your way of -- if you can afford it and if you can arrange it, that's a great way of doing that.
00:08:24.000 | Because the child can largely just simply play and focus on enjoying his or her play with the tutor, and yet it's a natural part of language learning.
00:08:37.000 | One great way you can do this is you can take this online.
00:08:41.000 | So a good example here, I would point to Asim -- I forgot his last name -- Qureshi.
00:08:47.000 | Asim Qureshi, who writes -- who for some time wrote a blog called wonderyearsschool.com.
00:08:55.000 | Wonderyearschool.com.
00:08:57.000 | And Asim was a father of three, is a father of three, and he wanted his children to be fluent in six languages.
00:09:05.000 | And so he had English as their family language.
00:09:10.000 | His wife was French, and so she spoke to the children in French.
00:09:13.000 | But he additionally wanted his children to acquire Chinese, Arabic, Malay, and -- I forget the fourth one.
00:09:21.000 | So what he did was he basically hired online tutors to hang out and chat with his children online.
00:09:30.000 | And he would schedule two or three tutoring sessions per week with these tutors, and his children were able to develop conversational fluency in these languages over the course of years by simply chatting with their tutors online over Skype on a regular basis.
00:09:44.000 | And so you could bring in something like that if you didn't speak the language.
00:09:48.000 | That's a good way to start.
00:09:50.000 | So if you can find a tutor or you can afford to bring a tutor into your home, that's a great way of introducing a language.
00:09:57.000 | And, of course, there are other versions, a multilingual school, a school with French classes, et cetera.
00:10:02.000 | Next is can you find materials that are specifically oriented towards helping someone learn the language?
00:10:10.000 | Now, for an adult learner of French, you would use something like French in Action.
00:10:14.000 | French in Action is this well-known TV show that was developed back in the '80s or '90s.
00:10:19.000 | And the basic concept was could we show people videos that purely with the context of what was seen on the screen and what was happening in the dialogue that someone could learn the language with that kind of exposure.
00:10:33.000 | And French in Action was very well done.
00:10:35.000 | The biggest problem is it's just not particularly interesting to children, I would think, depending on the age of the children.
00:10:40.000 | So for a 15-year-old who wants to learn French, OK, that's a good place to start.
00:10:43.000 | But then again, the 15-year-old can also study vocabulary lists and flashcards, et cetera, to get his foothold on the language.
00:10:49.000 | But if you could find something like that, that would be wonderful.
00:10:52.000 | I don't know of anything like that that exists for French that's devoted to children, which brings us to the next thing.
00:10:57.000 | Is there content that you can simply get to that's interesting to the child for the sake of the content?
00:11:04.000 | So if your child is interested in Peppa Pig or some other cartoon program, just switch the audio to French and play it.
00:11:14.000 | And over time, eventually, with enough exposure, the child is going to understand it due to the context of the cartoon or the context of what's happening.
00:11:24.000 | There's not a lot of good research that I've found on whether this is an efficient process.
00:11:30.000 | And as adults, we usually want the most efficient process.
00:11:34.000 | We want the fastest results.
00:11:36.000 | So if it were me as an adult, I would be happy to watch and listen in the foreign language while reading subtitles to improve comprehension.
00:11:43.000 | And I think that probably makes for a faster process for adults.
00:11:47.000 | But if you're trying to teach a language that you don't speak, then something is better than nothing.
00:11:53.000 | And even just hearing the sounds is appropriate.
00:11:55.000 | So look at the media consumption habits of your children and think, "I'm going to switch this to French."
00:11:59.000 | And while it may not be the most efficient process, it will work in the fullness of time if there are enough hours of exposure.
00:12:06.000 | Finally, the third thing I would point out is you can use tools that make reading doable.
00:12:12.000 | So if you wanted to do reading, you can use tools that make reading doable.
00:12:17.000 | So this is what I experimented with heavily in teaching my children German.
00:12:23.000 | When I started teaching my children German, I did not speak or understand German.
00:12:27.000 | I had never studied German.
00:12:29.000 | And the languages I had done previously were languages that I did have exposure to.
00:12:34.000 | But what I started to do was I spent enough time reading some manuals of... reading some materials.
00:12:44.000 | I didn't even do it by myself.
00:12:46.000 | I did it with my eldest, going through some materials that were specifically designed for learners of German.
00:12:53.000 | I used the materials that Ion Academy publishes on YouTube and on their Patreon page, A-Y-A-N, Ion Academy.
00:13:00.000 | They have several German materials, manuals.
00:13:04.000 | I forget the names of them now, but they have several things that are available.
00:13:07.000 | So I could read the manuals and then listen to the German pronunciation.
00:13:12.000 | And so I, being an English speaker, over time I developed enough of a basic understanding of how German is pronounced,
00:13:18.000 | just from 30 to 50 hours of reading and listening.
00:13:21.000 | And then what I started to do and what I do now is I use a translation tool.
00:13:26.000 | So what I do is I get a book that I want to read to the children.
00:13:29.000 | I import the book into the app called LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q.
00:13:34.000 | I read the book in LingQ in what is called sentence mode.
00:13:38.000 | And so there's a function within that software application that I can break the text apart into one sentence at a time.
00:13:44.000 | And then the software application uses a Google Translate script to translate each sentence of the text using simply Google Translate.
00:13:56.000 | So I read the translation, or I read the text in German.
00:14:01.000 | Then I simultaneously hit translate sentence and I read the Google Translate sentence translation in English.
00:14:08.000 | And that allows me to read in German to my children, even though I don't speak German myself and I have a hard time reading it.
00:14:16.000 | I make plenty of mistakes with my pronunciation.
00:14:18.000 | My pronunciation is poor, but it's enough to get that foothold.
00:14:22.000 | And my goal in those first few hundred hours of exposure is just to get a foothold.
00:14:27.000 | I don't think my children are going to absorb my very poor German accent.
00:14:31.000 | In the fullness of time, once they get that foothold on the language, they're going to go straight into native language materials,
00:14:37.000 | native language audio books, native language video, etc.
00:14:40.000 | And they're going to hear plenty of native speakers so that they can perfect their accent.
00:14:43.000 | They're going to do lots of reading, etc.
00:14:45.000 | But my job is just to help get that foothold.
00:14:47.000 | And so what I would tell you is, as a speaker of English and Spanish, French is thoroughly understandable to you.
00:14:55.000 | All you would need is about 10 to 15 hours of exposure to French audio with text so that you can absorb the French pronunciation scheme.
00:15:03.000 | And you would be able to do exactly that.
00:15:06.000 | You would be able to use that tool to read whatever books you can find in French to your children, even though you yourself don't speak French.
00:15:13.000 | So those would be the three basic approaches that I would use.
00:15:16.000 | Excellent. This is really helpful.
00:15:23.000 | Good. Anything else?
00:15:25.000 | No, I can't think of anything right now.
00:15:29.000 | Wonderful. Go for it. And then I'll report back in and let me know how it goes.
00:15:32.000 | I would emphasize what I just said, that if you speak Spanish and English, then French is exceedingly easy.
00:15:40.000 | Because the entire structure of the language, being a Romance language, you'll find very compatible with Spanish in terms of conjugation, verb tense, etc.
00:15:49.000 | All of the tenses, etc.
00:15:51.000 | And the vocabulary, a huge portion of English vocabulary, comes directly from French.
00:15:57.000 | So you have large numbers of cognates.
00:15:59.000 | And so it's a really, really simple and straightforward language for you to learn and also for your children to learn.
00:16:08.000 | And let me give you one last piece of inspiration.
00:16:10.000 | When I started studying French, I did a test. I did a project.
00:16:15.000 | I had read about the activation hypothesis with language learning and also the input hypothesis.
00:16:21.000 | And I was curious if they worked.
00:16:23.000 | So the way that I did my French studies was this.
00:16:25.000 | I decided that I was not going to try to speak the language at all.
00:16:29.000 | I was just going to read and listen.
00:16:31.000 | And so I found a series of books that I could read in French.
00:16:36.000 | And because I used the app that I have mentioned, LingQ, it made books very accessible to me.
00:16:44.000 | So I started with Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days, because I could get a free copy of that, reading it.
00:16:50.000 | And I started with Steve Kaufman's book called The Linguist that was available in LingQ in French.
00:17:02.000 | And I just labored my way through it sentence by sentence, working it through to get kind of just some basic vocabulary.
00:17:08.000 | And then I listened to it while reading it because the audio was available.
00:17:12.000 | Then I went and I read Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days.
00:17:16.000 | And what I would do is I played the audio, because old book, plenty of free audio available, including in there in the app.
00:17:23.000 | So I would play the audio and I would read.
00:17:26.000 | And any time I got behind, I need to look up words, I would just pause the audio, look up the words and continue on.
00:17:32.000 | So all the time I read and listened together and I focused on the story.
00:17:36.000 | After that, I went and I read the Jason Bourne series.
00:17:40.000 | I was able to find matching text of Robert Ludlum's books, the original trilogy published in the 1970s.
00:17:48.000 | I found the text with French translation and I found matching audio books on Audible.
00:17:53.000 | And I wanted to go with a novel because a novel would pull me through.
00:17:58.000 | Novels are hard because the vocabulary is very unique.
00:18:03.000 | It's very flowery.
00:18:05.000 | Novels are the hardest reading to do.
00:18:07.000 | But I wanted to find something where the story would pull me through.
00:18:10.000 | And I needed to find something where I could get the written text in digital form as well as an audio book with a matching reading.
00:18:20.000 | And so I read the Jason Bourne trilogy as well as some other, not, I also incorporated over time some other books that were non-fiction.
00:18:35.000 | So I read The Four Hour Workweek in French.
00:18:38.000 | I read The Personal MBA in French.
00:18:40.000 | I read Olivier Roland's book.
00:18:44.000 | It doesn't have an English translation but it's a self-help non-fiction book, etc.
00:18:48.000 | And I set a target to read one million words.
00:18:52.000 | So I read one million words in French.
00:18:54.000 | It took me about three and a half months.
00:18:56.000 | So two and a half, about 10 to 12,000 words a day which is about an hour a day.
00:18:59.000 | And then after that I hired a French tutor to spend a weekend with me.
00:19:06.000 | And that was my first French conversation.
00:19:09.000 | And at first it was very difficult because French didn't want to come out of my brain.
00:19:14.000 | My brain produced Spanish.
00:19:15.000 | It didn't produce French.
00:19:16.000 | But after a couple of hours it started to produce French.
00:19:19.000 | And at the end of the weekend, while I of course committed a bazillion errors, I was able to spend time with my French tutor interacting verbally in a smooth and flowing way.
00:19:33.000 | We weren't doing language exercises.
00:19:35.000 | We were just chatting.
00:19:36.000 | Chatting about, he was a young man, we were chatting about business, chatting about life, chatting about travel, all the different subjects that I would normally speak about.
00:19:43.000 | And I was able to engage in those conversations.
00:19:46.000 | And then after that weekend, which was my basic activation weekend based upon the activation hypothesis, I went and I took an official French exam that scored my level in each of the four categories.
00:19:59.000 | And I was able to score with that exercise, again about three months of study, a million words read, and then a weekend of conversation, I scored a C1 on my reading comprehension.
00:20:15.000 | I scored a B2 on my verbal comprehension.
00:20:17.000 | I scored a B2 on verbal expression.
00:20:20.000 | And I scored a B1 on written expression just based upon that exercise.
00:20:25.000 | So I say that to say that I did that because I wanted to teach my children French.
00:20:30.000 | And I gave it as a three-month project and I figured, hey, this was kind of cool.
00:20:34.000 | I wonder if I could learn French so I could teach my children French.
00:20:36.000 | And it worked.
00:20:38.000 | And then I went on and I have continued to read to them, et cetera, in French.
00:20:42.000 | So you would have similar results.
00:20:44.000 | So the idea of your learning French as a Spanish and English speaker is not an insurmountable project.
00:20:49.000 | It's more of a three-month project or a three- to six-month project to get to that kind of B2 level, upper intermediate, where you could do it.
00:20:58.000 | And then especially if you bring in those other tools, it's very accessible for you.
00:21:02.000 | Hope that helps.
00:21:03.000 | All right.
00:21:04.000 | Move to Zachary in California.
00:21:05.000 | Zachary, welcome to the show.
00:21:06.000 | How can I serve you today?
00:21:07.000 | Hey, Joshua.
00:21:09.000 | Thank you for taking my call.
00:21:10.000 | My pleasure.
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00:21:42.000 | So my question, just as you often do a great job of articulating how to think through methodology type of items,
00:21:51.000 | I wanted to think through a question of how do I evaluate moving to a new state?
00:21:57.000 | So as additional background, excuse me, I'm 38.
00:22:02.000 | I was born and raised in Texas in a very small, close-knit family.
00:22:07.000 | After college, I moved to California, developed a good career, was there for 10 years.
00:22:12.000 | I've now been in Denver, Colorado for 7 years, and I'm evaluating moving back to Texas to be closer to friends and family.
00:22:19.000 | So just one of your thoughts on maybe how do I go about putting pros and cons together on that?
00:22:24.000 | Is there any financial incentive to you one way or the other?
00:22:26.000 | Is there a great job waiting or anything like that?
00:22:29.000 | No, it's more personal.
00:22:32.000 | I'll keep my same job. I'm fully remote.
00:22:35.000 | As remote as it is.
00:22:37.000 | Well, it's a hard question to answer, but there are definitely some things to think through.
00:22:44.000 | So first, for years I had the goal of being fully remote.
00:22:52.000 | When I was 15 years old, it first sparked in my mind the dream of being able to live wherever I wanted to live and work from a laptop or my living from a laptop.
00:23:00.000 | It took me 15 years to make it a reality, but better late than never.
00:23:04.000 | Once I achieved it, I achieved the goal.
00:23:07.000 | I was like, "I can move anywhere. I can live anywhere."
00:23:10.000 | I thought, "This is fantastic. I am so glad to have this because now I can engage in perfect optimization."
00:23:17.000 | I can optimize every single thing in my life.
00:23:20.000 | I can engage in geo-arbitrage. I can have tax savings. I can have all of these things.
00:23:25.000 | So I started looking around and thinking about life and thinking about how to optimize things.
00:23:30.000 | I very quickly became completely and utterly overwhelmed.
00:23:34.000 | I continue to be overwhelmed by that prospect.
00:23:39.000 | I don't know if a human being is capable of experiencing that much freedom.
00:23:44.000 | Because it is such a heavy load if you're trying to optimize everything.
00:23:49.000 | It's just, "Where are you going to go? How are you going to do it?"
00:23:52.000 | I find it too difficult to know how to think about it.
00:23:56.000 | How do you think about it from the perspective of even an international perspective?
00:24:00.000 | The United States is big enough that these three areas that you've lived are very different.
00:24:04.000 | But when you look at it even from an international perspective,
00:24:07.000 | why would you live in Texas when you could live in Mexico City?
00:24:10.000 | There are reasons either way.
00:24:12.000 | It's a pretty daunting and overwhelming position to be in.
00:24:16.000 | Most people live where they live for one of three reasons.
00:24:19.000 | Either number one, that's where they're from.
00:24:22.000 | Number two, it's where their family is.
00:24:24.000 | This can be parents, this can be children, it can be anyone.
00:24:28.000 | But where they're from, where their family is, or that's where they have a job.
00:24:32.000 | When you take these away, if you can live anywhere you want because you work online,
00:24:39.000 | then you're left with, "Am I going to live where I'm from or am I going to live where my family is?"
00:24:43.000 | If I'm not going to do that, there needs to be a clear reason why.
00:24:47.000 | Why am I not going to do that?
00:24:50.000 | My point is I think it's perfectly valid for you to say,
00:24:54.000 | "I just want to live where my family is and that's a good enough reason to go there."
00:24:58.000 | This hyper-optimization that I have probably championed,
00:25:03.000 | I've certainly championed in idea anyway,
00:25:07.000 | is very overwhelming to apply in practice.
00:25:10.000 | And it's not super practical.
00:25:12.000 | As human beings, we can be happy in any large number of places.
00:25:16.000 | And so constantly looking for the best thing, to me, seems a fool's errand.
00:25:23.000 | I have made fun of people like hyper-involved Yelp foodies
00:25:28.000 | who go through their life constantly trying to find the world's greatest food.
00:25:33.000 | And they go from restaurant to restaurant.
00:25:35.000 | You talk to some of these people or listen to them,
00:25:37.000 | and it's almost like they're never satisfied.
00:25:39.000 | They can't just eat a meal because they're always thinking,
00:25:42.000 | "Well, I wasted this opportunity to have a meal."
00:25:44.000 | And there would be somebody else that--
00:25:46.000 | There was a better restaurant across town that had even better dumplings
00:25:49.000 | than at this restaurant.
00:25:51.000 | And I woke up one day and I realized,
00:25:53.000 | "Joshua, you're kind of promoting the same thing in terms of where to live.
00:25:57.000 | Maybe you should preach to yourself before you judge others so much
00:26:00.000 | about this millennial concept of perfect optimization."
00:26:05.000 | So I say that to say that if you just want to move to Texas
00:26:09.000 | because that's where your family is and you miss them,
00:26:11.000 | that's a perfectly reasonable and legitimate reason to move
00:26:14.000 | and you don't need anything more than that.
00:26:16.000 | If you're going to choose something other than one of those three things,
00:26:20.000 | then I think the benefits should be significant.
00:26:24.000 | So what are the benefits that are significant enough to take you away from
00:26:29.000 | where you're from or where your family is or where you make an income?
00:26:33.000 | I think it would need to be some form of purpose,
00:26:36.000 | some form of overriding sense of purpose.
00:26:40.000 | So the way I think about this is almost a component of missionary service.
00:26:45.000 | Can you be sent out from where you are to go to some place where your talents
00:26:48.000 | are needed or where you can make an impact or where you can make a change
00:26:51.000 | in the area, and that's why you go there and start in that new area.
00:26:58.000 | Most of the pleasure-oriented things of a location, such as,
00:27:03.000 | "I'm going to go and get better weather,"
00:27:05.000 | or "I'm going to go and have more outdoor recreation activities,"
00:27:09.000 | a lot of those things are only pleasurable for a short time,
00:27:13.000 | and then you acclimate to their presence or their lack,
00:27:16.000 | and it's not such a big deal.
00:27:18.000 | So purpose, I think, is usually the best reason to go somewhere.
00:27:22.000 | With regard to moving from California or from Colorado to Texas,
00:27:26.000 | as long as you're comfortable in Texas, Texas has a great overall setup.
00:27:30.000 | There are a lot of people who are stuck in a place where they don't like
00:27:33.000 | their neighbors.
00:27:35.000 | They're right-wing people living in a left-wing place.
00:27:38.000 | They're left-wing people living in a right-wing place.
00:27:40.000 | They don't like their neighbors, and I think that's a legitimate reason
00:27:42.000 | to move is you don't like your neighbors and you want to move elsewhere.
00:27:46.000 | The caution I would give to you or to anyone is simply you do want
00:27:50.000 | to minimize moving as much as possible because every time you move,
00:27:53.000 | you have costs of moving, but a big cost is simply relationships.
00:27:57.000 | And the more you sever relationships and the more you have to start
00:28:00.000 | in a new place and make new friends and build new connections,
00:28:05.000 | it takes time for those relationships to go deep,
00:28:07.000 | the more difficult things are.
00:28:10.000 | So I didn't give you all of the frameworks.
00:28:13.000 | From a financial perspective, probably going from Colorado to Texas
00:28:16.000 | is reasonable.
00:28:18.000 | I guess my point is that it should be pretty simple.
00:28:20.000 | If you feel a desire to be closer to your family and your other friends,
00:28:23.000 | pick up and move.
00:28:25.000 | And are you married?
00:28:26.000 | Do you have children that you need to be thinking about their lives
00:28:28.000 | and planning?
00:28:30.000 | No, I'm single.
00:28:31.000 | So as a single guy, it's pretty easy to go, and if you decide,
00:28:34.000 | "I changed my mind, I don't like Texas anymore,"
00:28:36.000 | then you pick up and you go back.
00:28:38.000 | So I wouldn't put too much thought into it.
00:28:40.000 | I would just say that if you have this desire and you want to be closer
00:28:43.000 | to family, then go and recognize that the cost of doing so is pretty low
00:28:49.000 | and that just simply wanting to be closer to your family and friends
00:28:52.000 | is a perfectly legitimate reason to make that move.
00:28:57.000 | Great.
00:28:58.000 | Thanks for that, Josh.
00:28:59.000 | Yeah.
00:29:01.000 | I'm saying one more thing because I feel like I didn't answer your question
00:29:05.000 | the way that you asked it.
00:29:07.000 | You asked me what would be the framework, and there are things I could go through.
00:29:11.000 | So what region of the country has the greatest long-term economic potential?
00:29:16.000 | Where are you going to be interacting with the people who are most likely
00:29:20.000 | to lead you in the direction you want to go?
00:29:23.000 | Where are the costs of living the lowest, the wage is the highest,
00:29:26.000 | and the tax is the lowest?
00:29:28.000 | Where do you like being?
00:29:30.000 | Where do you fit in?
00:29:31.000 | There are so many things that you could ask.
00:29:33.000 | But after years of thinking about those optimization perspectives,
00:29:38.000 | I've realized that most of that exercise,
00:29:44.000 | most of the answers to those questions don't really matter.
00:29:47.000 | At the end of the day, we're most of us going to be--
00:29:51.000 | either we're going to be in a place because that's where we're from,
00:29:55.000 | that's where our family is, that's where our work is,
00:29:58.000 | or we're going to be in a place because of some sense of purpose or mission.
00:30:02.000 | Most of the other relocations--
00:30:05.000 | and here I would especially include the concept of geo-arbitrage, right?
00:30:09.000 | I'm going to move to Puerto Rico because I'm not going to pay any taxes,
00:30:12.000 | or I'm going to move from a high-income tax state to a low-income tax state.
00:30:16.000 | There is a component in which those things make sense.
00:30:20.000 | So if I were living in--I don't know--if I were living in California,
00:30:23.000 | and California changed their homeschooling laws,
00:30:25.000 | that would be a reason for me to leave and move to Texas
00:30:27.000 | where I could enjoy more freedom.
00:30:29.000 | I would not want to be in a place where I didn't connect and click
00:30:33.000 | with my neighbors, generally speaking.
00:30:35.000 | But the overriding factors are going to be those three.
00:30:38.000 | And so you're choosing based upon one of those three.
00:30:41.000 | That's probably going to be sufficient for you to be happy to make a choice.
00:30:44.000 | As a single guy, you pick up and move.
00:30:46.000 | If you decide to make a change, you pick up and move again.
00:30:49.000 | - Thanks, I appreciate it. - My pleasure.
00:30:51.000 | And with that, we conclude today's Friday Q&A show.
00:30:53.000 | We've had very short caller lists the last couple of weeks.
00:30:57.000 | I'm not sure why.
00:30:59.000 | So I want to encourage you that if you would like to speak to me--
00:31:02.000 | I've been doing a lot of consulting lately, but I remind you that
00:31:05.000 | if you can't afford a consulting appointment with me,
00:31:07.000 | you can certainly afford to pitch a few bucks on the Patreon page
00:31:11.000 | and talk with me here.
00:31:13.000 | As we've seen today, last week I had one or two callers.
00:31:15.000 | This week we have one or two callers.
00:31:17.000 | So there's lots of room here on the phone lines.
00:31:19.000 | We have 7 to 12, but there's lots of room here on the phone lines.
00:31:22.000 | Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.
00:31:24.000 | Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.
00:31:26.000 | Sign up there, and I will speak with you next week.
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