2023-11-01_Why_I_Left_the_USA_part_2
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00:00:27.300 | 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,
00:00:37.300 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:40.300 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host.
00:00:42.300 | And on today's podcast, I continue the series on why I left the USA.
00:00:47.300 | And I'm doing this series in order of least important reasons to most important reasons.
00:00:54.300 | But I think today's reason is going to be probably the most universal.
00:00:59.300 | And although in my own mind, it's kind of the least important of my three big reasons, that doesn't make it unimportant.
00:01:05.300 | And I'm not actually sure that that ranking is true.
00:01:08.300 | Because after all, we can lay out the idea that we're logical creatures and making careful decisions.
00:01:14.300 | But at the end of the day, there's a little bit of whimsy and just moving on a lark in all of us.
00:01:20.300 | And in terms of how and why I left the United States, there was no long-term plan.
00:01:26.300 | The reasons number two and one that I am going to mention were definitely part of my longer-term plan.
00:01:34.300 | But at the end of the day, they had been in my thinking for some years.
00:01:38.300 | And the reason I actually left was just that it was a convenient time to leave.
00:01:42.300 | So let me not bury the lead anymore.
00:01:45.300 | The reason I have left the United States and still have lived abroad is just a desire for adventure and interest.
00:01:55.300 | And a desire to be prepared for opportunity in the world.
00:01:59.300 | I see those two things as being very related, which is why I have joined them.
00:02:04.300 | Life should be interesting. Life should be as much of an adventure as you desire.
00:02:11.300 | I'm not into the idea that "normal life" is boring and to be escaped from, etc.
00:02:18.300 | But at the end of the day, at the end of every year, at the end of every month, at the end of every decade,
00:02:23.300 | I think we should be able to look back on the last month or year or decade and have some interesting stories.
00:02:29.300 | I don't think that every day is going to be an adventure in and of itself.
00:02:33.300 | There are some days in which you sit down and rest.
00:02:36.300 | Sometimes the humdrum routine gives you a tremendous sense of satisfaction and relaxation.
00:02:45.300 | And so there's nothing wrong with routine.
00:02:48.300 | I think there are different personality types.
00:02:50.300 | Some people really derive great pleasure in routine, and I understand that very much.
00:02:55.300 | I myself am not one of those people.
00:02:57.300 | I myself am one of those people who enjoys variety in life, and I want to live an adventure.
00:03:04.300 | At the end of the day, when I do an assessment of basically my life's purpose,
00:03:12.300 | there are a few different components of that.
00:03:15.300 | And one, for example, one of my most important senses of purpose,
00:03:21.300 | something that gives me a sense of purpose, is to say,
00:03:24.300 | "Is there an opportunity to make an impact on the world, an impact for good?
00:03:28.300 | Can I sow a little bit of justice and righteousness into a corner of the world?
00:03:32.300 | I want an opportunity to love my neighbor of varying degrees.
00:03:36.300 | I want an opportunity to impact my community."
00:03:38.300 | And I think that a good life is a life well-lived,
00:03:43.300 | is one where you have a handful of friends, a handful of family members.
00:03:47.300 | You love them. You encourage them.
00:03:49.300 | You have a community, and you enjoy interacting with that community.
00:03:52.300 | That's a good life.
00:03:53.300 | But there's a whole other element where at least I myself crave a sense of adventure,
00:04:00.300 | a sense of difference, and a sense also of impact in the world.
00:04:04.300 | I think a desire to make a difference on a bigger scale
00:04:07.300 | or a desire to see something on a bigger scale is something that is connected to us.
00:04:12.300 | And maybe it's not there universally, but it is something that has always been there for me.
00:04:18.300 | There is a stereotype among my generation, I being a millennial,
00:04:24.300 | that we understand that we want to collect experiences and not things.
00:04:29.300 | And we can make fun of that.
00:04:30.300 | After all, collecting a bunch of experiences can just become a bunch more things.
00:04:36.300 | I love passport stamps, for example.
00:04:38.300 | And I always have to ask myself, "Am I just collecting passport stamps as another thing,
00:04:42.300 | or am I really genuinely investing into the experiences
00:04:45.300 | that those passport stamps represent in terms of reality?"
00:04:50.300 | But we want to enjoy experiences. We want to live a variety of experiences.
00:04:56.300 | And it seems to me that one of the reasons people get old before their time is they stop living,
00:05:02.300 | meaning they stop going after adventure.
00:05:05.300 | They stop pursuing goals that are important to them.
00:05:08.300 | They take the easy road.
00:05:11.300 | And that seems foolish to me.
00:05:14.300 | And so one of the ways that I believe that we age successfully
00:05:18.300 | is to always make our future bigger than our past.
00:05:21.300 | And that's something that we have to define for ourselves.
00:05:25.300 | For me, one of the ways that I myself want to make my future always bigger than my past
00:05:31.300 | is to make my future in some sense different than my past.
00:05:36.300 | I have found that the joy of the pursuit of goals in new and different and meaningful contexts
00:05:44.300 | is more enjoyable and more meaningful than the achievement of specific goals in specific contexts.
00:05:52.300 | And so it's much more important for me to be focused on pursuing things that are new and different
00:05:59.300 | that I have chosen because it's the joy of the journey,
00:06:03.300 | it's the actual pursuit of those things that is enjoyable.
00:06:09.300 | It's not the achievement. It's the pursuit.
00:06:11.300 | And so in order to have the ongoing joy of the pursuit,
00:06:16.300 | there should be variety and there should be changing
00:06:18.300 | and we should be setting new things that challenge ourselves in new ways.
00:06:21.300 | New goals that require us to grow in order to accomplish and achieve them.
00:06:26.300 | If we will set those goals, those goals that are different and require us to grow in order to achieve them,
00:06:32.300 | then each and every phase of life can be something that we take great value in.
00:06:37.300 | And when we reflect back on different phases, we'll be able to differentiate phases one from another.
00:06:44.300 | Let me talk for a moment about memory, differentiation, and the phases of life.
00:06:50.300 | In financial planning, I have learned that a lot of people think about financial planning in a few basic phases.
00:06:59.300 | So if you were to go and gather together a room full of CFP test takers,
00:07:05.300 | they would frequently say, "Well, there's childhood or we could combine childhood and adolescence
00:07:14.300 | and everything into basically an academic phase.
00:07:16.300 | There's a phase in life in which you're going to school.
00:07:19.300 | Then you get out and you have your career phase.
00:07:21.300 | Then you have your retirement phase."
00:07:24.300 | And in the world of financial planning traditionally, as well as modern variations,
00:07:30.300 | such as the early retirement movement, there's this intense focus on getting as quickly as possible
00:07:36.300 | from the work phase to the retirement phase because that's where the juice is.
00:07:42.300 | That's where the joy is.
00:07:44.300 | And over the years, as I've thought a lot about this and worked with a lot of people,
00:07:47.300 | I just think that's a woefully inadequate way to approach life, a woefully inadequate way to think about life.
00:07:56.300 | We should have a lot more phases than just those.
00:08:00.300 | So I appreciate how having children introduces different phases into my life.
00:08:05.300 | We've got the married but no children yet phase. That's a great phase.
00:08:10.300 | Then you've got the baby phase. That's a great phase, but has certain restrictions that don't exist later.
00:08:16.300 | Then you've got the young children phase.
00:08:19.300 | Then you've got the adolescence. Then you've got your young adult phase.
00:08:22.300 | Then you've got the grandchild phase, etc.
00:08:24.300 | And so that all adds texture to life.
00:08:26.300 | It makes life more interesting because you can embrace certain activities at one phase
00:08:30.300 | that you wouldn't generally embrace at a different one and enjoy a whole different life and lifestyle
00:08:35.300 | that is not always available to you.
00:08:38.300 | But you can go beyond this.
00:08:40.300 | Why should your work phase just be one monolith of 40 years?
00:08:45.300 | I've got this 40-year chunk and I'm going to do the same job continually throughout that.
00:08:50.300 | That's how it used to be. Nobody does that anymore.
00:08:53.300 | But why not insert something different?
00:08:55.300 | Why not insert four different careers, one for each decade of those 40 years
00:09:00.300 | and enjoy the growth, the achievement, the success that can come with each of those things?
00:09:06.300 | Why not move from one specialty to another so that you're always learning and growing and moving along?
00:09:12.300 | Why not within each of those decades insert a couple different opportunities?
00:09:18.300 | Why not have two different jobs each for five years during each decade?
00:09:22.300 | Now you'll remember things much more clearly.
00:09:26.300 | You'll have different unique circumstances. You'll grow more in each opportunity.
00:09:30.300 | Instead of just doing the same old thing, same old way, same people all the time,
00:09:34.300 | you'll have an opportunity to change and to adapt.
00:09:37.300 | There may be good professional reasons not to bounce around all the time,
00:09:40.300 | just like there can be good professional reasons to bounce around more frequently than some people do.
00:09:45.300 | But on a big picture, the phases of life matter and they help us to engage with it.
00:09:51.300 | What about where you live? What about how you work?
00:09:55.300 | What about things on a broader level?
00:09:58.300 | When I think back to something like my college experience,
00:10:03.300 | to me, one of the things that was the most impactful in my college experience
00:10:08.300 | was the one semester that I studied abroad.
00:10:12.300 | That phase of life, one semester out of eight semesters total of school,
00:10:18.300 | one semester, that one out of eight semesters accounts for probably 50% of my college memories.
00:10:26.300 | 50% of the college memories come from the seven semesters and then 50% come from the one semester.
00:10:33.300 | But why should it be that way? Why don't we do a more intentional job of creating change in our life
00:10:40.300 | so that we remember our life and so that we achieve different things at different phases of our life?
00:10:47.300 | And so in my own life, when I reflect back on the time prior to leaving the United States
00:10:53.300 | and the time after leaving the United States, I experience a great joy in the challenges of life.
00:11:00.300 | Part of that may simply have to do with the phase of life that I was in prior to leaving.
00:11:06.300 | I was in, my wife and I, we got married, we had babies, we bought a house, we did all the stuff.
00:11:12.300 | I had a stable job for a long time, then I started a business, etc.
00:11:16.300 | And you reach that point, and it's not a midlife crisis, but it's one of those things
00:11:20.300 | where you've mastered a whole lot of aspects of your life and you're looking for something new,
00:11:24.300 | something different, but you can't change everything all at the same time.
00:11:28.300 | I'm not going to get rid of my children just because I want something new and different.
00:11:32.300 | Not going to get rid of my wife just because I want something new and different.
00:11:34.300 | Not going to get rid of a business just because I want something new and different.
00:11:37.300 | Not going to get rid of my friends, my family, etc.
00:11:40.300 | But is there something I can change? And so yeah, you can add a hobby, you can change houses,
00:11:44.300 | you can drive a different car. What if you just change countries?
00:11:48.300 | What if you change the language that you live in? What if you change something like that?
00:11:52.300 | Those kinds of changes bring a zest to life and it's just simply flat out enjoyable.
00:11:58.300 | And so when I left the United States, it was convenient to do so.
00:12:02.300 | We had been traveling around the United States, living in an RV full time.
00:12:05.300 | We'd gotten rid of a lot of stuff. We'd already just made life very streamlined.
00:12:10.300 | And so once you do that for a while and you realize, "Hey, living out of some suitcases is not so bad.
00:12:15.300 | We can do it anyway." Then, "Got a couple of passports. Let's buy some plane tickets and hit the road."
00:12:21.300 | It's a lot harder to make those enormous changes when you've got a lot of stuff.
00:12:26.300 | You've got a big house, lots of things, etc. It's just much more challenging to make that change.
00:12:31.300 | Now, I would hasten to add that you probably don't want to, for example, nomadism or traveling constantly.
00:12:42.300 | I don't think it's a great lifestyle. I don't think it's a great long-term way to live.
00:12:47.300 | It seems to work for some people, but it's not something that I'm interested in doing.
00:12:52.300 | I don't want to live out of a suitcase for 10 years. I don't think it's a great way to raise children, etc.
00:12:56.300 | There is a great value to the standard approach.
00:12:59.300 | The standard approach, the conventional approach to life, contains a whole lot of wisdom
00:13:05.300 | that has been developed by our forebears and received from them in the form of a culture, in the form of a society.
00:13:14.300 | This brings me conveniently to the next point, that you don't appreciate what you have until you don't have it.
00:13:20.300 | You don't appreciate your home and how comfortable it is until you're taken out of your home.
00:13:26.300 | You often don't appreciate the people in your life until those people are absent.
00:13:31.300 | We have the proverb that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It does.
00:13:35.300 | Because when you're taken away from the people that you love, you appreciate them more when you come back into context with them.
00:13:43.300 | And for this reason, I think it's helpful to intentionally insert times of deprivation into our life or times of change.
00:13:52.300 | We can do this in different ways. We can fast in some way, shape or form from food or certain forms of food.
00:14:00.300 | Then when we reintroduce those forms of food to ourselves, we appreciate them more deeply.
00:14:06.300 | I see this myself very distinctly in four season weather cultures, climates.
00:14:12.300 | Having grown up in Florida, where we don't have four seasons, we have two seasons.
00:14:17.300 | One of the things that is so obvious to me is when I travel to a four season climate, there is a much more intense experience of life based upon the seasonality.
00:14:29.300 | When you go to a cold weather climate at higher latitudes and it's summertime, there's this intense joie de vivre, this intense pursuit of the good life that everybody seems to feel in the summer.
00:14:44.300 | You know that winter is coming. You know the cold, long, gray, rainy days are coming.
00:14:49.300 | And so you get out there and you really enjoy it. And people say yes to all kinds of things.
00:14:53.300 | And there's summer festivals and they go out at 10 o'clock at night and they hang out and they do all the sports activities.
00:14:59.300 | And someone says, "Do you want to go camping?" And you say, "Absolutely." Because you know the winter is coming.
00:15:04.300 | On the other hand, when you're in a tropical climate, that doesn't exist.
00:15:07.300 | Someone says, "Hey, you want to go hang out and go camping this weekend?" "Well, maybe sometime."
00:15:11.300 | There's a laziness. There's just a lack of daisical attitude that exists much more intensely in tropical climates than in four season climates.
00:15:21.300 | And related to the climate, you have different activities.
00:15:24.300 | And you can look forward with anticipation to those activities because they're not there all the time.
00:15:30.300 | You have your summer activities, maybe you're outdoors, in the water, enjoying the long summer days.
00:15:36.300 | You have your fall activities that you look forward to, the changes, the smells, the ways that you celebrate and live in fall.
00:15:45.300 | Then you have your winter activities, your springtime and your summer activities.
00:15:48.300 | And being someone from a subtropical climate, to me it's so obvious that that is a superior way to experience life.
00:15:59.300 | That mixture of the familiar with the new and different.
00:16:06.300 | Knowing that this season has its whole set of activities, its sports, its endeavors, its experiences.
00:16:13.300 | And I'm going to savor them for the three months that I have to savor them.
00:16:18.300 | And then they're going to be gone. And I have to wait a whole year for them to get around.
00:16:22.300 | But then there's a whole other season's activities to look forward to.
00:16:27.300 | So why shouldn't we incorporate more of this into our life? And we can. We do.
00:16:33.300 | As people's wealth increases, sometimes they become snowbirds. That was common where I'm from.
00:16:40.300 | We have lots and lots of snowbirds live in the north during the summer, usually springtime, summer, fall.
00:16:46.300 | And then during the winter, they come to Florida.
00:16:48.300 | What a great way to enjoy certain aspects of your life differently at different times.
00:16:53.300 | Maybe you have your global relocation. You spend time in two or three homes around the world.
00:16:58.300 | Why not incorporate more of that into our own lives?
00:17:02.300 | The careers that I've always admired have had this as well.
00:17:05.300 | You have the concept of a sabbatical in the academic careers or for missionaries, people like that.
00:17:13.300 | They have a time where after five, six, seven, eight years of work, then they take a year off or six months off.
00:17:20.300 | And they go on leave and do something that's very different.
00:17:23.300 | The experiences of that help to incorporate more of the seasonality of life.
00:17:28.300 | And if you use that concept of sabbatical and incorporate it into your life, you go back to your other life, a changed man.
00:17:36.300 | And so basically this was just this element of wanting a little bit of adventure, wanting a little bit of a change.
00:17:43.300 | That was one of the basic reasons why I left the United States, was just to pursue that.
00:17:49.300 | And this is why whenever I talk about this, I say I'm not upset at the United States.
00:17:53.300 | I don't have, you know, I may go back, but when I go back, I go back with a much bigger appreciation for the many good things of the country because absence makes the heart grow fond.
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00:18:38.300 | And to me, that's been really, really helpful.
00:18:41.300 | So there's no denying that just a simple desire for adventure, simple desire for change, simple desire for variety, wanting to make interesting memories with my children in my own life with my wife, etc.
00:18:54.300 | Is a big component of that.
00:18:56.300 | And in a world that seems broadly conquered where we don't struggle on a day to day basis, we flip on the tap and high quality drinking water comes out.
00:19:07.300 | Everything is provided for us.
00:19:09.300 | We have money, we have warmth, we have cool, we have food, we have relationships, etc.
00:19:15.300 | Sometimes you want to give up that for a new sense of adventure and international travel or international relocation is one way that that can be accomplished.
00:19:27.300 | I should say it's not only international, even just some kind of national level or local or regional level travel can be one way of incorporating that.
00:19:38.300 | Now, I'll get to the opportunity comment in just a moment, but let me emphasize that there's one other aspect of seasonality that is really important.
00:19:49.300 | And I've mentioned it already in terms of the stages of children.
00:19:53.300 | When I left the United States, I had a five year old, a three year old and a one year old.
00:19:58.300 | And one thing that is very clear to me is that as a parent, you have different levels of freedom and flexibility at different points in your life and your lifestyle.
00:20:11.300 | When you have babies, they add hassle to your life.
00:20:15.300 | Babies are a hassle. No question about it.
00:20:17.300 | They add difficulty. They're annoying. They're loud. They're a hassle.
00:20:21.300 | They're not easy to bounce around all over the place with.
00:20:25.300 | But babies very quickly become little children and little children are far less of a hassle than babies are.
00:20:31.300 | Little children grow up to become adolescents.
00:20:35.300 | And the process of adolescence is a process that results in children having more and more of their own agendas in life.
00:20:45.300 | And as a parent, we are, we must respect the uniqueness of our children and treat them as persons.
00:20:56.300 | Children are born as persons.
00:20:59.300 | And that personhood comes into greater and greater importance as they age.
00:21:06.300 | When a child gets into the adolescent years, in many cultures, the adolescent years are the years of adulthood.
00:21:14.300 | Then we have to incorporate our children and their unique interests, their unique desires, their unique goals, and their unique best life into our family agenda.
00:21:28.300 | But you don't really have to do that prior to adolescence.
00:21:32.300 | I'm not saying that we will ever do anything that we don't genuinely think is good for our children.
00:21:37.300 | But let's say that I decide that it's best for my family that we go on a road trip.
00:21:43.300 | And one of my children starts complaining and says, "I don't like road trips. I don't want to go on a road trip. I don't want to go in the car."
00:21:50.300 | Well, if that child is five years old, I'm pretty much going to ignore that.
00:21:56.300 | You're five years old. You don't know what you should or should not like.
00:22:00.300 | And I'm not that interested in your opinion.
00:22:02.300 | So sit down, be happy, and change your perspective.
00:22:05.300 | That's a good lesson for a five-year-old.
00:22:07.300 | On the other hand, if you're dealing with a 15-year-old and you say, "What we're really going to do is we're going to take a road trip and we're going to tour all of the Civil War battlefields."
00:22:19.300 | And your 15-year-old says, "I'm just not interested in any way, shape, or form in the Civil War battlefield. Isn't there something different that we could do?"
00:22:27.300 | Then you want to incorporate, with a great degree of care and love, what your 15-year-old wants and desires and what's best for the 15-year-old.
00:22:38.300 | You may still, obviously, overrule his vote.
00:22:41.300 | But you need to be very thoughtful about the personhood of that 15-year-old.
00:22:46.300 | In addition, at five years old, it doesn't really matter what country your child is living in.
00:22:53.300 | You can make some good reasons up why your child should learn another language or live in another place.
00:22:58.300 | But at five years old, your child could be totally fluent in a foreign language.
00:23:02.300 | And then you move to where that foreign language is not spoken at seven and the language will disappear.
00:23:09.300 | So it really doesn't matter.
00:23:11.300 | You can come and go as you like.
00:23:14.300 | With a 15-year-old, though, if you just pluck your 15-year-old up out of a great school and he's on track for this certain thing that's really going to feed his career and he's got a great summer internship lined up, etc.
00:23:26.300 | And you pluck him up and say, "No, we're going to go and live in the rainforest and study poison dart frogs."
00:23:31.300 | Then you have a different -- that's going to be costly.
00:23:37.300 | Not to say it's not good. Studying the poison dart frogs, living in the rainforest might be great.
00:23:41.300 | But if he's not on board with that or that doesn't make sense given his life ambitions, you got to be super careful about that.
00:23:48.300 | And I see this so frequently among parents.
00:23:50.300 | I see that parents ignore -- they're so overwhelmed.
00:23:55.300 | We are so overwhelmed sometimes with the challenges and the logistics of babies.
00:24:02.300 | In a culture that makes baby raising very difficult, it feels like a day-to-day battle.
00:24:09.300 | And so what many parents do is they defer their dreams.
00:24:13.300 | They defer their goals for their children until they're hoping that, "Well, someday my child will be mature enough to sit in a car for five hours."
00:24:21.300 | And they're dreaming and they're dreaming of that day.
00:24:24.300 | And so they don't do it. They don't travel. They don't go abroad. They don't buy the camper.
00:24:28.300 | They don't do the hard hikes, etc.
00:24:30.300 | And they're hoping that someday my 13-year-old will finally be able to comb his own hair and brush his own teeth and finally be able to pick his room up, etc.
00:24:38.300 | Then we'll start doing all the stuff.
00:24:40.300 | Well, then the 13-year-old doesn't want to do the stuff.
00:24:44.300 | And now the chance is gone or it's a big challenge.
00:24:48.300 | Now, this is not insuperable. It can be overcome at any stage of life.
00:24:52.300 | But my experience or my observation is that if you want children who are flexible, you kind of got to go do it.
00:24:59.300 | And I'm not willing to defer the way that I want to live just for children.
00:25:07.300 | So it certainly adds a whole lot of challenge. It certainly adds a whole lot of stress.
00:25:11.300 | It certainly adds a whole lot of expense.
00:25:13.300 | But I'm not going to sit around and wait to live my life mission just because I happen to have a house full of children.
00:25:20.300 | Rather, I'm going to incorporate my children in that mission.
00:25:23.300 | I want to be sensitive to their needs. I want to do the best thing possible.
00:25:26.300 | But I want to do it at an early age.
00:25:29.300 | And I want to do it when it's relatively easy.
00:25:32.300 | There is a golden period when a child is, say, from, I don't know, 5 to maybe 13, 15, something like that.
00:25:42.300 | There is a golden period of freedom from 5 to 13, from 6 to 14, where you don't have the difficulties of toddlers and really young children who are slaves to their emotions, etc.
00:25:55.300 | But you don't yet have the difficulties of adolescents who are craving independence and craving to build their own lives.
00:26:02.300 | And that's your golden period.
00:26:04.300 | That golden period window closes very quickly.
00:26:07.300 | And so for me, part of the reason to go and do the adventure and live abroad and move here, move there, etc., just has to do with making sure that I do it while it's easy.
00:26:18.300 | Because I now have a 10-year-old.
00:26:21.300 | My window is closing very quickly.
00:26:23.300 | That's not to say that I can't live my life the way that I want it to live.
00:26:27.300 | But I have to for the next, starting in a few years, for about 15 years, some of my own decisions have to be measured against the individual ambitions of my children.
00:26:42.300 | And as a good father, I have to take their ambitions very carefully into account and help them to achieve them.
00:26:52.300 | And that may mean that I have to suppress and defer my own ambitions.
00:26:57.300 | That can be a painful period of life.
00:26:59.300 | That's the kind of thing that causes a lot of men to flip out.
00:27:02.300 | But I think you can minimize that by not being one who sits around and worries about the difficulties of young children, but rather go and embrace the travel, go and embrace the stuff with young children while also acknowledging their limitations associated with it.
00:27:17.300 | Let me pivot now to the concept of opportunity.
00:27:21.300 | Remember I said that I've always craved adventure and also opportunity.
00:27:27.300 | I've been haunted by this question of opportunity.
00:27:32.300 | And for many people it'll sound funny, meaning that I come from the land of opportunity.
00:27:38.300 | I come from the United States of America, known broadly as the land of opportunity.
00:27:43.300 | In the past, I was unsure if it still is the land of opportunity, if it was still deserving of that characterization.
00:27:50.300 | And thus, I've wanted to travel and check it out, test and see.
00:27:55.300 | I have a hard time believing stuff that's told to me. I'm so conscious of the potential for bias based upon what we are shown or what information is selected to be presented to us that I just have a hard time trusting what many people say unless I can interact with them enough to satisfy my own concept of -- just to satisfy my own confidence.
00:28:24.300 | In their bias or their lack of bias or how they overcome their biases.
00:28:30.300 | So, it's one thing if you just live in the United States and you accept because it was taught to you that America is the land of opportunity.
00:28:40.300 | It's another thing if you've gone out looking for opportunity and you've either found it more in other places or you've then come back to the United States and discovered that it genuinely is the land of opportunity.
00:28:56.300 | And so, because of my interest in the world of internationalization and all the great newsletters and books and things that I have read over the years extolling the praises of this region or that region or this city or that city.
00:29:09.300 | And because as Americans we're very good at seeing the worst in our country and thinking about how much better it used to be, etc. I feel like I owe it to myself. I feel like I owe it to my children to go out and check it out. Let me go check it out.
00:29:26.300 | See what the opportunity is in different places. Go and see it for myself.
00:29:30.300 | There's nothing in the world that can replace the power of a personal visit. I don't care how learned you are. I don't care how much you've learned about or how much you've seen. There's just nothing that replaces the power of a personal visit.
00:29:47.300 | Personal visit is more powerful when it's buttressed by good study, good examination, good data, etc. But there's nothing that replaces the power of a personal visit.
00:29:56.300 | And so as someone who cares a lot about optimizing, as someone who has strong feelings about the value of being in a good company and a good career with a growth trajectory as being a fundamental factor that'll make the difference in your long-term financial outlook, I believe in going and looking for opportunity.
00:30:13.300 | And this is a long-held thing. I remember a book that impacted me very much when I was in high school was Jim Rogers' book. I don't remember the name of it. It was the one where he had his Mercedes convertible.
00:30:29.300 | What Jim Rogers did, Jim Rogers was a wealthy investor. He had made a lot of money in New York. At one point in his life, he had gone around the world on a motorcycle. And then he got married and he wanted to go around the world again. And so he bought a Mercedes G-Wagon, which is a capable 4x4 vehicle.
00:30:49.300 | He took off the body of the G-Wagon and replaced it with the body of a two-door convertible that Mercedes sold at that time. And then he made a little trailer to go with it. And he and his wife drove that thing around the world.
00:31:01.300 | I was wandering through the library one day. I found this book with this really intriguing picture on the front of this 4x4 convertible. And I got the book from the library, took it home and read it in high school. And I really just loved the idea of going around the world and looking for opportunity.
00:31:19.300 | That was where kind of where the seed was planted. But I didn't do much with that when I was younger. One of the big opportunities that I frequently kicked myself for that I didn't pursue was during my senior year of college.
00:31:35.300 | When I studied abroad, I met a guy who was a Chinese-Canadian and we met each other in Costa Rica. And after Costa Rica, he was a pilot. He became a pilot and he went to Africa and got a job flying for one of the twin engine regional airplane services in some corner of Africa. I don't know which.
00:32:01.300 | And while he was there, he came across an opportunity to get involved with a company that was establishing cell phone infrastructure in that corner of Africa, working with a Chinese company to import cell phone infrastructure and to sell Chinese cell phones into Africa.
00:32:19.300 | And he got in touch with me and he said, Joshua, you should come and get involved with this. Now, this was not completely out of my area of interest. I was my degree, my undergraduate degree is in international business. And there's a reason for that. I was always interested in international business. But I didn't do it. I was pursuing the safe path. I had a job, had the stuff lined up and I viewed it as risky. And after all, how could I go to Africa and do it? What if it fails?
00:32:46.300 | Nobody had yet put within me the concept of what if it works and nobody had told me about the need for asymmetrical opportunity and the need to go where there's less competition and get involved on the early ground floor. And so I was working in a very traditional job and a very traditional business where there wasn't any big win opportunities. But I thought that was the key. I thought that the key was I need to make steady increases in my income. I need to put aside 10 percent of my money for retirement.
00:33:12.300 | I was locked in that mode of thinking instead of instead of the mode of thinking that I now would teach to say that when you are young, the downside risk of any opportunity is very low as long as you can keep yourself alive. Even bankruptcy risk is no big deal. Go for it. Go and look for an asymmetrical return. Go and look for something, something somewhere where you can get in on the ground floor, somewhere where you can take a risk, somewhere where you may do something big.
00:33:38.300 | And so I should have gone to Africa. I would have figured out when there I would have had a lot less competition. That's what I should have done. And I didn't. So that's OK. We all make our decisions. But that haunted me for a lot of years. And then the lock in went from one job to another rather kind of safe, stable, boring job selling life insurance, doing financial planning, managing money. And then once you get into that world, it's like I just got to do this. I got to keep on going. Got to keep on going.
00:34:06.300 | But nothing's changed about that business in forever. And so I always sense that frustration of where's the opportunity? Where's the thing that's going to be new and different? So when I started Radical Personal Finance, that was one of the first times in my life where I said yes to opportunity because I believed in opportunity and nobody else believed in it.
00:34:28.300 | Nobody except my dad and my dad, basically. And he didn't believe in the opportunity. He didn't know anything about it. He just believed in me and my wife believed in me. And that was it. Every other person that I asked for advice told me I shouldn't do it. Every other person said I was a fool for doing what I wanted to do. Well, I did it. And I'm very glad I did it because I saw opportunity based on timing and it worked. And it gave me a dream life. And I'm very grateful for that.
00:34:56.300 | And so over the years I've tried to train myself to walk away from conservative thinking, to walk away from the safe route and go for opportunity. And every time I've said no to conservatism and said yes to opportunity, I have enjoyed the journey immensely.
00:35:18.300 | And it hasn't always been winners, but it's just been more enjoyable, a better life, more interesting. And even in failure, it's more interesting and I wouldn't trade the failure for success in the other. So how much is this personality? You be the judge. But I want the same opportunity for myself in the future and for my children. I want the same thing. And sometimes a relocation would be a great way of achieving that.
00:35:44.300 | And even if it's a temporary relocation, it's still incredibly valuable because it speeds up the process of learning. And in an international context, it speeds up the process of learning in a way that probably nothing else can.
00:35:58.300 | A year or so ago, I was in Springs in Florida with my family. And there I met a young man who had just graduated from business school at a local university there in Florida. And he was thinking about his decisions after college. He had a couple of job offers and whatnot.
00:36:20.300 | But in talking to him, it was very clear that he had his degree, everything was good, he had options, etc. But he didn't have anything that was really exciting. And I was speaking to him, explaining where I live, what I do, all that stuff. And he said, "What advice do you have for me?" And my answer to him was, "Why don't you commit a couple of years to going to where you are rare?"
00:36:46.300 | My point to him was that in the United States, he is a commodity, an attractive, intelligent, hardworking guy, just graduated from a business school, looking for a job, etc. He can go out and he can get a job and he can get started on the career ladder.
00:37:06.300 | But unless he finds a company with potential or an industry with potential, it's very difficult for him to make rapid progress in that kind of industry. And in his case, he was interested in international stuff. My comment to him was, "Pick a country that you're interested in, go to that country, and start looking for opportunity."
00:37:29.300 | Because when you go to a place where you're not a commodity, you can make connections much more quickly. You go to any nice hotel in Asia, you go to any nice hotel in Africa, you go to any nice hotel in South America, and you just go to the hotel bar, order a drink, start meeting people.
00:37:50.300 | Within a few days of decent networking, you'll be connected easily with some people that are very high levels in the expat group. And it's much easier to network among expats at a higher level than it is to network among enormous numbers of your own population back in your home country.
00:38:11.300 | I'm not sure that that international pathway says necessarily that there's more opportunity for "success" or more opportunity for making money. Because the economy and the economic opportunities in the United States are so huge and the money flows so abundantly that it's hard to be confident in always saying that you're better off abroad. You're not.
00:38:37.300 | But the amount of experience and learning that you can accumulate in two years when you can network in at a higher level because you went to a place where you were very rare and there weren't a lot of people like you is so much greater than what can be accumulated in two years working in a place where you're a commodity.
00:38:59.300 | And after a couple of years of that kind of work, you'll have so much more perspective that if you want to go back to your home country, you'll be able to come in with a much more impressive list of accomplishments and experience than you otherwise would have at a much higher level, and you'll see the world much more accurately.
00:39:18.300 | And so go and look for opportunity. And I have gone and looked for opportunity for myself and for my children, and I have been steadily ticking off basically a list of the regions of the world where I think there is opportunity that I don't know well. I know the United States like the back of my hand, but I haven't spent a lot of time in some of the other regions.
00:39:43.300 | And so it's been more challenging to do it with children, no question about that, but I still am ticking those off and learning from them. And what's interesting is I've grown to appreciate them and I've grown to appreciate my home country.
00:39:57.300 | That concludes most of the comments that I want to make about this particular reason. My point is that many of us have a desire for adventure. Many of us have a desire for opportunity. And while it can be false to expect that that is always more abundant in an international context, it's been fun to go and search for it. It's been fun to go and look for it.
00:40:23.300 | And I have learned an enormous amount. In five years of being abroad, I feel like I've packed in 15 years of living. That's a pretty good ratio because we don't actually have that much time in the earth.
00:40:36.300 | Sometimes I feel like some people I know pack in about a year worth of living into five years and their ratio is really, really low and they'll get through a 50 year career and have about five meaningful years or 10 meaningful years of living packed into that. The rest of the time was sat swiping on a screen.
00:40:57.300 | My experience over the last five years, I feel like I've packed in about 15 years into five years and that has been great. I don't know if I would have accomplished that if I didn't start the process of moving a little bit, looking for some different things. It's not been perfect. There's been a lot of costs to it. Things that I now understand that I didn't before.
00:41:18.300 | But in terms of feeling a sense of confidence in myself for making decisions to go for the things that I'm interested in, for making decisions to say yes to the things that I want to pursue, that's been great.
00:41:31.300 | And then when I reflect on the experiences of, as I said, the last five years, it does feel like a really great return on investment in terms of the amount of life and life experiences for me and for my children, for my wife, etc.
00:41:59.300 | If you have an interest in adventure or you're looking for opportunity, don't be scared to pursue it. Be smart about how you go for it. But don't be scared to pursue it. Not everybody seems to be wired this way, but I myself fear the fail—I fear regret of circumstances not pursued much more than I fear failure of circumstances pursued.
00:42:28.300 | And if that resonates with you in any way, then you're probably the kind of person who should say yes to adventure, yes to opportunity in whatever way appeals to you personally, rather than saying, "Well, someday I'll get around to it."
00:42:42.300 | Because as I tried to articulate in the first part of today's episode, that someday does sometimes come, but it can often be difficult to carve it out as life starts to put you in a box.
00:42:57.300 | Thank you for listening to today's podcast. If you're interested in more commentary on this, if you're interested in more discussion of this internationalization comment, I urge you, sign up and come to the event that I'm hosting in Panama on January of 2024. Registrations need to be finalized this month as quickly as possible.
00:43:15.300 | Excuse me. Registrations need to be finalized this month as quickly as possible. Go to expatmoney.com/radical. There you'll find all the information on the conference, conference hotel, events, the tours that we're going to be doing. It's going to be awesome.
00:43:31.300 | Come hang out with me. Talk face to face. I'll share more personal details of some of the adventures of the last five years with you there face to face. Come and hang out with fellow listeners of the show. Come and hang out with my friends Gabriel Custodiate and Mikkel Thorup, who are co-hosting the conference with me. Go to expatmoney.com/radical.
00:43:50.300 | Remember also that if you're just getting started on this international journey, and if you can't come to the conference, it just doesn't work for you, make sure you take my course called International Escape Plan. I sat down. I said, "How do I take everything that I know and that I've learned about internationalization? How do I teach it in an intelligent phased approach that allows people to make smart decisions at each and every stage?"
00:44:13.300 | Go to internationalescapeplan.com. Sign up for that course today. Internationalescapeplan.com and expatmoney.com/radical. Thank you.
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