2024-03-08_Friday

00:00:00.000 | Azure Standard presents David's Corner with founder and organic pioneer David Stelzer.

00:00:05.500 | Sometimes it is easy to see the scarcity in our lives, but I tell you that God created enough abundance for all.

00:00:12.500 | Sometimes we just have to work for it a little bit.

00:00:15.000 | So create abundance in the areas of your life that matter most.

00:00:19.000 | In your health, in your homes, in your relationships and families.

00:00:23.000 | Those are the important things.

00:00:25.500 | Here at Azure, our job is to create abundance directly from the farm to your home of healthy food products.

00:00:34.500 | And we are here to do that job.

00:00:37.500 | And as you create abundance in all the areas that matter in your life, remember that God made an abundant world.

00:00:49.000 | That was David's Corner presented by David Stelzer, founder and CEO of Azure Standard.

00:00:54.500 | America's premier supplier of organic foods and over 12,000 healthful products.

00:00:59.500 | Join our community for free at azurestandard.com.

00:01:03.500 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, live Q&A.

00:01:22.500 | 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 10 years or less.

00:01:31.500 | My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host.

00:01:33.500 | Today is Friday, March 8, 2024.

00:01:36.500 | This is the live Friday Q&A show for today.

00:01:39.500 | You can call in, talk about anything that you want.

00:01:41.500 | Works just like talk radio.

00:01:42.500 | Call in, you set the agenda, you ask the questions, you make the commentary.

00:01:46.500 | This is your show, my friends.

00:01:48.500 | Each and every Friday here at Radical Personal Finance, in which I can arrange a camera and an internet connection and all of the appropriate recording technology, I record a live Friday Q&A show.

00:02:03.500 | If you'd like to gain access to one of these shows, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

00:02:10.500 | Sign up to support the show on Patreon and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

00:02:15.500 | You can call in, I won't censor you, you can ask me any question you want.

00:02:18.500 | Sometimes we've got a lot of callers, sometimes we've got a few callers.

00:02:20.500 | Today we don't have many callers, so we'll see.

00:02:23.500 | But Kyle, I've got plenty of time for you.

00:02:25.500 | Kyle in Washington, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today, sir?

00:02:27.500 | Well, let me start my first softball here.

00:02:31.500 | I have a frugality question about some books.

00:02:34.500 | I was listening to Show 1000 and you recommended, didn't recommend, you talked about a book that you read and I'm interested in reading it and I went for looking for a copy of it.

00:02:43.500 | And the cheapest one I could find was somewhere in the order of like $130 and it's more of a pleasure read for me and not necessarily like a textbook that I think I need to have.

00:02:56.500 | Do you have any hot tips for finding stuff like that? Yeah.

00:03:00.500 | Which book was it?

00:03:01.500 | Oh, the name of the book, sorry, it was After the Ball by Metzger.

00:03:06.500 | That one was very difficult to lay my hands on.

00:03:11.500 | And so it's very hard to find in today's world.

00:03:15.500 | So if you want a physical copy, you'll probably wind up paying $130.

00:03:20.500 | However, I believe there is a copy now on archive.org.

00:03:26.500 | For a while there were just some pretty bad copies, but now if you go to archive.org, I was looking at that the other day and I see now that there is a well scanned full and complete copy on archive.org.

00:03:38.500 | So that's where I would look for that one.

00:03:40.500 | And in terms of the technique, I think in general you want to look and so here's kind of how I go after it.

00:03:48.500 | Number one is in terms of looking for books, obviously Amazon is probably a good start for most things.

00:03:54.500 | There are a variety of used book sites that also need to be checked.

00:03:57.500 | Abe books, A-B-E books is a very popular one that works well sometimes.

00:04:02.500 | Usually if Amazon doesn't have it listed, then you'll want to check a couple of other Amazon sites for other countries.

00:04:09.500 | And so you'll want to look around and see, all right, they don't have it on the U.S. site, but they have it on the German site or they have it on the American site.

00:04:16.500 | And those are good sources.

00:04:19.500 | Then you want to check eBay and eBay often has copies of books available, especially the more sought after books.

00:04:27.500 | But the digital versions are really where things shine.

00:04:31.500 | So just go to a web search. I usually use DuckDuckGo, but they're not as good as they once were.

00:04:39.500 | Any web search will work.

00:04:41.500 | And at the end of the day, if nothing else, then use Google.

00:04:44.500 | And they took away, the secret with Google has generally been to search by file type PDF.

00:04:52.500 | They took that functionality away for a while, but then recently there are some ways to bring it back.

00:04:58.500 | So at the very least, if you just search the title that you're looking for and then PDF, that will often bring up some of the sites that are available.

00:05:07.500 | And it'll usually search archive.org, it'll search Gutenberg, and you can trace some things down that way.

00:05:13.500 | Now, if you can't find it there, there are some other file sharing sites and things like that, but I can't go through those names right at the moment.

00:05:21.500 | But there are options out there.

00:05:22.500 | But I know for that particular book, if you want to read After the Ball by Hunter Madsen and Kirk someone or other, then you can find that one on archive.org right now.

00:05:33.500 | Appreciate it. Yeah. eBay is usually my favorite.

00:05:36.500 | And then I go to a couple others, like you say, world books, thrift books, aid books.

00:05:42.500 | But yeah, you can come up with some interesting titles, you personally, and so I look for them and then I go, man, Joshua, I can't stomach that one.

00:05:52.500 | I'm going to skip it.

00:05:54.500 | Absolutely. What next?

00:05:59.500 | Yeah, so I was only calling with that one today, but I do have another one.

00:06:02.500 | Sure. I called a few weeks ago about being frustrated with my ability to find like minded men in the church.

00:06:13.500 | And you did a good job about answering that question.

00:06:17.500 | You really get put on the spot and I really appreciate that you go into detail on that stuff.

00:06:22.500 | And I just wanted to make a comment more than anything is that I I don't know if it was just my finally saying it, putting it out in the ethos sphere.

00:06:33.500 | And I was able to find a group like that.

00:06:36.500 | But I've I found a group that's meeting at a local church and we're going through a curriculum once a week in the evening by a man by the name of Pastor Robert Lewis.

00:06:47.500 | And he has immense fraternity curriculum and he's he's created a handful of different ones.

00:06:53.500 | But it is very good for any other listeners who are looking to explore how to become a better man.

00:07:04.500 | Right. And it's not it's not terribly churchy if that turns people off.

00:07:09.500 | But he is it is beyond my expectations. It's blown me over how good of a program this guy put together.

00:07:17.500 | And I should call him for a kickback before.

00:07:24.500 | But yeah, it is very good. And so I just wanted to make mention of that because there was another man that called in that made mention of my comment on another Q&A and I found it very helpful.

00:07:35.500 | So it's Pastor Robert Lewis and it was men's what was the what was it called? Men's fraternity. Men's fraternity.

00:07:43.500 | And yeah. And he's got three different curriculums. It's like a three year program and he's got three different curriculums that he does.

00:07:53.500 | And so we're working on the first one right now. And he's got one that he does for fathers and sons.

00:07:58.500 | And he's got a new one called it's got nights in the title, something about raising a modern day night or something to that effect.

00:08:06.500 | And I haven't he's he's got a handful of different ways that he sells these things.

00:08:10.500 | But I would look at buying them in there. It's like the kind of thing.

00:08:15.500 | It's not terribly expensive, but it's the type of thing you would buy for a group and get together as a group of men and go through.

00:08:21.500 | And I've I've found it very helpful, very encouraging, very interesting.

00:08:28.500 | It'd be, I think, worth looking at. If you're so inclined. Excellent.

00:08:34.500 | I appreciate the recommendation. After all, anything anything that brings men together in a manly context, I think can be a useful tool.

00:08:43.500 | Most of our third spaces as men have disappeared out of our lives.

00:08:48.500 | And so to be able to get together with just just other men and other men and other men exclusively is, I think, enormously valuable.

00:08:56.500 | So I appreciate the recommendations. All right. Move on to thank you for calling.

00:09:00.500 | Move on to the state of Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

00:09:06.500 | Pennsylvania. Yes. Hi. Oh, can you hear me? I can go ahead. Tell me your name, please.

00:09:13.500 | Sorry about that. This is Maggie. And I've called a bunch of times before.

00:09:18.500 | So today I had something really exciting happen this week.

00:09:22.500 | I had a phone call with my 15 year old nephew and we were talking.

00:09:27.500 | We're just chatting. And it turned into a two hour phone conversation about finances.

00:09:34.500 | And he just asked me a lot of questions. He's had a job himself with doing lifeguarding in the summer.

00:09:43.500 | And he's going to do that again this summer. And he told me, like, he's earned money.

00:09:47.500 | And we talked about, you know, earning, saving, investing. And he said, well, maybe he'll invest.

00:09:52.500 | And he asked me about that. Should he invest? It was like absolutely should invest.

00:09:56.500 | He knows about Iris. We talked about the difference between Roth and all these things.

00:10:02.500 | So he wants an investment account, but he doesn't have he doesn't have like fifty dollars a month or one hundred dollars a month to to put in every month because he'll be working in the summer.

00:10:14.500 | So I'm looking around for options. I'm not his parents.

00:10:19.500 | So he's going to talk with his parents and make sure they're OK with it. Hopefully they will be. Maybe he could invest where they invest.

00:10:26.500 | But it's wondering if you knew of anything we saw, like fidelity has a youth account that looks really neat.

00:10:35.500 | But what happens when it's for teens from 14 to 17? And I'm wondering, like, when he turns 18, what are the fees?

00:10:43.500 | So I have to look into that a little bit deeper. But I guess I've been out of this for a little while.

00:10:49.500 | And I'm wondering, do you know what the best way is to help somebody, a young person start investing?

00:10:58.500 | There are two answers that I would love to give to that question. The first answer specifically is exactly the path that you're going down.

00:11:08.500 | Let me help you open a retirement account. Let me help you buy a mutual fund. Let me help you to facilitate that process.

00:11:17.500 | The second answer is to help young people to not get trapped by that system, because while it can be a useful stepping stone to help them to set aside $50 a month,

00:11:30.500 | it's ultimately not going to lead a young person to significant amounts of wealth. I think ideally they can both be done, but I want to cover them both.

00:11:41.500 | So in terms of the specifics of actually opening that particular account, if you have found something with a large, well-known custodian such as Fidelity that will work, then that will be fine.

00:11:55.500 | And if it's earmarked towards people aged 14 to 17, that's fine. All of this that you're referring to is basically a commodity.

00:12:03.500 | Since he has earned income, the first starting point would be to open a Roth IRA, and he can open a Roth IRA at any large custodian, Fidelity, large, well-known, etc.

00:12:15.500 | No problem with Fidelity or any other large custodian that would service him.

00:12:21.500 | If he has a bank account at a local bank, if there's any other financial provider that he interacts with, I'm fine with any financial provider for that.

00:12:32.500 | And he can just open a Roth IRA and start putting money into the Roth IRA.

00:12:36.500 | I would encourage a young person to use a Roth IRA, even if there's some chance that the young man will take the money out before retirement, because it'll start setting in place a really useful goal.

00:12:50.500 | The money can be accessed, only the contribution, but not the interest, not the gain, but the money can be accessed if he needs it for something else, and he'll get the benefits of tax deferral and creditor protection with his Roth IRA.

00:13:04.500 | So even if we're starting with a modest amount of money, a few hundred dollars, I still would put that into a Roth IRA, unless it were earmarked for some specific short-term expense, in which case obviously we wouldn't be opening the investment account at all.

00:13:17.500 | And then in terms of what to fund it with, I would just look for an index fund. One simple, broad index fund will work well.

00:13:26.500 | It could be a total stock market fund. It can be a Vanguard 500 fund. Any just large index fund that the custodian offers would be fine.

00:13:34.500 | And then the idea is to help him find some amount that he could contribute to.

00:13:40.500 | And so if they have a youth account or they allow contributions of $25 a month, then that's ideal.

00:13:46.500 | I signed up for something like that when I was young, and the mutual fund specifically had a very low buy-in amount, and I started funding it with a very modest amount, but it felt good to know that I was making progress towards that.

00:13:59.500 | So any custodian that you have a connection to, that he has a connection to, or that his parents have a connection to, should offer some version of those specific pieces.

00:14:08.500 | That's basically a commodity in today's world.

00:14:11.500 | As you continue in the conversation, I would encourage the young man to recognize that he should not only invest in stocks or mutual funds.

00:14:24.500 | I don't want to discourage that because often that's the pathway that gets people started towards accumulating money, but I get frustrated if that's where the conversation stops because somebody who is 15, I think, also needs to be taught not only about the time value of money, not only how wealthy you can be if you put $5,000 in your Roth IRA from 15 to 20 and then stop investing.

00:14:47.500 | I know that is true, but the primary thing that is going to drive his long-term wealth is ultimately going to be his earning ability.

00:14:54.500 | Maybe his lifeguard job is his first job. Wonderful. Celebrate it. But now let's figure out what is it that takes you from $8 or $10 or $12 or $15 an hour to $20 or $30 or $50 an hour.

00:15:07.500 | What are those types of changes that you could make and get him started down the pathway to thinking about maximizing his income?

00:15:14.500 | Because this is a conversation that is very rare in my experience. It should be intuitive, the idea being that if I make more money, then I'll be wealthier.

00:15:25.500 | It's obvious when you say it out loud, and yet the actual conversation is rather uncommon. And so I would love to coach him on that alongside of the mutual fund advice.

00:15:37.500 | I love this a lot because we talked a little bit about gaining skills. He might want to have a car at some point, and he said when he has his car, he's going to take it to my brother's shop to have it detailed.

00:15:49.500 | And I said, "Well, what about you learning how to detail it?" And he said, "Absolutely, that's a skill I want to have because I want to have a business."

00:15:56.500 | So he's thinking about skills, and he's also thinking about opening businesses. And I said to him, "Absolutely, open a business now. Think about what kind of business you want, and don't worry if you're going to succeed or fail.

00:16:09.500 | We're going to learn about business, and we're going to open up many businesses." And I have some dreams, as you know, probably, for the family in general that I talked to him about, but he needs to follow his dream as well.

00:16:22.500 | So I love hearing this from you. We talked about investing in oneself with education as well, but I love hearing this from you because I think you're putting it together so eloquently.

00:16:36.500 | And then it's also not just from one source, even though he talked to me for two hours, and he's 15, so I think that was a big win for me.

00:16:47.500 | What other advice? I did interrupt you, but I just wanted to interject that, like, "Oh my gosh, we're on this path," and I didn't expect this answer, but I love it, and I'd love to hear more.

00:17:02.500 | Do you think he is a good candidate for college after high school?

00:17:07.500 | I do. He is a straight-A student. He's very academically inclined. He told me he had just selected his classes for the next semester, and I asked him about language because you need language to get into college, and he's taken two years.

00:17:23.500 | He's thinking about not continuing with a language, and I let him know if you want to go to certain schools will take two years, certain schools will require four years, but you helped me with this.

00:17:37.500 | I said to him, "If you don't want to take language in school because maybe there's other things that you're pursuing, that's totally fine, but we need to get you language proficient, and we can do that if you want."

00:17:52.500 | So I offered that to him, and we could do some of the things that you've talked about, like buying a curriculum and finding a natural language speaker. He's doing Spanish. They're doing Mexican Spanish.

00:18:03.500 | I have an interest in learning Spain Spanish, so he said, "Yeah, he's joined that with me, so we might find a tutor, and if his parents allow him to do all this, just learn from a natural speaker, a native speaker, using a curriculum, and then reading books and watching movies and different things like that that you've recommended already."

00:18:27.500 | Even though you were talking about doing that with your children at the breakfast table, I'm happy to read a children's book, and I think he is, too, to get started and really learn.

00:18:37.500 | I just came back from Spain in February, and I loved it. I want to be there more. So it was top of mind for me that when he said that, I was trying to get him interested in thinking of things in different ways.

00:19:00.500 | He's at the government school, same school I went to, great school, but we don't have to do things the way that people have laid out for us, and often the path not taken is really much more successful because you're bringing value that others have not even thought of.

00:19:20.500 | At least that's been true for me, and it also brings me a satisfaction and a joy, and it aligns with our spiritual path.

00:19:30.500 | I shared with him the spiritual path that I believe my family is on as a whole, and maybe it's different for his generation, but I have big thoughts and ideas like this.

00:19:44.500 | He's eating it up. He's not telling me I'm a crazy old kook, which I probably am as well, but he's really enjoying it, it sounds like.

00:19:55.500 | You're a man, and you're so wise, and you're so articulate, and I've learned so much from you. I'm talking too much. Anything I can hear from you really enhances me because I have access to so many brilliant people.

00:20:14.500 | Academics, business people, entrepreneurs, and very few will come at life from their own standpoint based on maybe value sets, whether it's a standard religion or, okay, pick another value set, but come from a standard set of values.

00:20:33.500 | People seem to want to provide value with a set of values at work or a set of rules or things that they live by at work, but they don't seem to want to do that in their life.

00:20:46.500 | It just seems like you get so much further ahead if you do, but it's satisfying spiritually for many reasons that you often point out and articulate.

00:20:57.500 | I want to get some of these ideas across to him. You don't have to do things the same way everybody tells you to. If that was the case, as a woman in engineering, when I graduated, I wouldn't have graduated like many other of my women colleagues.

00:21:11.500 | I would have gone into marketing or something, which is valuable and good. I have to know that now, but my path would have been impossible. I love bringing new. Now, many people call me thought leader in different areas, and that's lovely to hear, but we could all be thought leaders.

00:21:31.500 | If we follow our paths and bring, at any point in our career, even 15-year-olds, he teaches me things. I love what you're saying here. I didn't even realize it was a commodity to be able to invest like that.

00:21:52.500 | He wants to do stocks. He wants to buy individual stocks. I'm thinking, "Well, you can lose a lot with stocks, so maybe we're going to talk about what percentage. Maybe he can just choose his own percentage, but I'd like to set up mindset."

00:22:07.500 | I also tell him, "We don't fail. We learn." This is a good time to do some learning. He's aware of that risk assessment thing.

00:22:19.500 | All right. Let me lay out for you a few ideas to continue to stimulate your thinking on this. What I would say, though, is the ideal goal is to cultivate, to take this initial spark of a serious goals-oriented conversation that you and he have, and then build from here and start to develop a relationship in which you can coach him systematically on the additional things that he wants.

00:22:48.500 | The additional things that he will need, because there's no one thing that is some magic cure. One conversation doesn't dramatically change anything, but one conversation can be the spark that facilitates an ongoing relationship, ongoing counsel, and as an older person, you have the benefit of experience.

00:23:08.500 | You understand how long life is, how you can grow, how you can learn anything that you wish to learn, and that it just simply takes time. When you're young, you're often just looking for the answer, and there's often not an answer. There's a process that leads to answers.

00:23:24.500 | Let me begin with just one short story to illustrate my first point. Let me say the point first. I would say the most valuable thing that you can help somebody who is 15 to do is to start thinking about where he wants to go and how he might be able to get there if it were possible to get there at all.

00:23:44.500 | Because if somebody can learn to think and recognize that life is really a logical process of steps, then he can coach himself towards the accomplishment of almost any goal, and I'll tell one story.

00:23:58.500 | This is probably my most successful story, especially before Radical Personal Finance. Years ago, I was a financial advisor at the time. This was before Radical Personal Finance. I used to teach junior achievement, and I taught a little bit of junior achievement in the elementary school classroom.

00:24:14.500 | That wasn't for me, but I loved it when I started teaching the high school junior program in the high schools. I really enjoy interacting with high school students, and so I was teaching the class in a local school, just a standard local government school in my area.

00:24:30.500 | I was doing the curriculum, but I was also doing my own version of the curriculum. In one of the classes, it was appropriate to talk about goal setting, so I started talking about goal setting. There was a young man, a high school junior, who was clearly disengaged, clearly just the stereotypical laying back in his seat in the back of the class and not really interested.

00:24:53.500 | I started picking on him because that's what we do when we get to stand in front of the room. We pick on people who don't look like they're engaged. I used the example. I tried to get out of him what are some goals that he was interested in.

00:25:06.500 | He spouted off, and he said, "I'd like to have a 1967 blue Shelby Cobra Mustang." I said, "Great." I didn't tell him it was a stupid goal. I just said, "Great. All right. Well, how are you going to get there? Let's talk about it."

00:25:19.500 | I started on the board laying out a very simple process. How much does a Shelby Cobra Mustang cost? I don't know. It was $80,000 or whatever. I said, "All right. Well, how are you going to do that? Do you have any money saved?"

00:25:30.500 | "No, I don't have any money." "Do you have a job?" "Yes, I have a job." He had some retail job making entry-level wages. I calculated how long it would take for him to accumulate the $80,000 for a Shelby Cobra Mustang on that pathway.

00:25:45.500 | Then I said, "How could you earn more money?" His answer was something like, "Go to college." I said, "Okay. Well, are you going to college?" He said, "No, I'm not going to go to college." I said, "Why not?"

00:25:56.500 | We went through this whole back and forth. "Why are you not going to college?" "Well, I don't get good enough grades and I haven't taken the SAT." Basically, I laid out for him and I said, "Listen. If you did start to take life seriously, you don't seem stupid to me. You seem like a perfectly ordinary student, so let's assume that you did decide you wanted to go to college."

00:26:17.500 | I laid out, "If you went to college and you got a higher paying wage, let's say that you earned $40,000 coming out of college or whatever the numbers would be, look, you could have this Shelby Cobra by the time within this amount of years."

00:26:31.500 | I showed him that. What would be necessary? Well, we need an SAT score. I showed him that right now you could take the SAT and what's more is you could sign up for an SAT tutoring class, you could systematically practice the skills that are related to success on your SAT, and you could probably raise your grade by 100 or 200 or 300 points just by focusing on it a little bit.

00:26:53.500 | That would get you into a perfectly reasonable school. We went through the whole thing and I used his numbers, his goals for the process. I got an email from him a year later, a year after I was done teaching the class.

00:27:08.500 | He took me out to lunch and he said, "Mr. Sheets, I wanted to share with you what happened." He said, "You really touched me that day and I realized that I could do these things, that none of these were out of my reach.

00:27:22.500 | I was just choosing not to do that." Basically, he said, "I took your advice. I started studying. I decided that I was going to go to college. I started studying for the SAT. I got a great score on the SAT."

00:27:37.500 | At the end of the day, he was finishing as a high school senior. I think he had just graduated and he was going off for his freshman year of college. He had been offered a full ride scholarship at a school. I forget at this point what he was going to study.

00:27:52.500 | I went to college for free, full ride because he had taken action off of this goal setting exercise of how he could achieve his Shelby Cobra Mustang. I don't really think it matters. I have no idea whether he owns today a Shelby Cobra Mustang or whether he just decided he didn't care.

00:28:10.500 | I don't think it matters what the goal is or where we start. You can have almost any starting point for building these principles, but what you need to show to young people is how your actions that you take today matter.

00:28:25.500 | Things that you do systematically matter because it often feels irrelevant, a lot of the stuff you're doing on a day-to-day basis. If you wake up and you're 15 years old, you've been in school for almost 10 years. What's the point? You're doing a lifeguarding job especially. What's the point? There's no connection here.

00:28:41.500 | But if you can show somebody how over the next 3, 4, 5, 10 years you can be on this trajectory and that these are available to anybody who wants them, that things like academic success, getting strong grades, doing well on important exams, whether it's A-levels or SATs, going to college, graduating successfully from college, running a business alongside.

00:29:07.500 | That these are ordinary things that ordinary people can do when they have a plan and they're accountable to the daily disciplines that lead them there. That's the foundation of everything.

00:29:18.500 | When it turns to money then, we can bring in other aspects to that, but the ordinary path I think is still an excellent path. When I say ordinary, I mean that ordinarily a 15-year-old should be primarily focused on academics because those academics will serve him very well.

00:29:39.500 | If he's academically competent, then those academics will usually provide the strongest launching pad for him into the world of work, into the world of industry, whatever direction he goes, and the normal pathway should be from high school through college.

00:29:55.500 | What I would emphasize is alongside academics, he should be systematically collecting and building experience. If this summer he's working as a lifeguard, great. That's a phenomenal experience for this summer.

00:30:10.500 | But next summer, ideally he would be doing something that's very different than lifeguarding because if he just goes back to lifeguarding because it's easy, then he's stuck in a rut. Find something that's not easy. For young men especially, what I would emphasize is simply that if you want to earn a lot of money, you need to do a job that is hard.

00:30:33.500 | Nobody pays people a lot of money to do a job that is easy. Lifeguarding is easy. It's fun. You sit around in the sunshine. You stare at a pool. You took a simple class. You're a good enough swimmer. It's perfectly reasonable work for a young man, but it's not work that's going to pay you very much.

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00:31:22.500 | It's just what my dad always told me is that Joshua, your boss will be willing to pay you a lot of money if you do work that is hard and you work really hard at it.

00:31:32.500 | And so those are the things for young men. We want to find something that's really hard. And ideally, we want to find something that's quite different than lifeguarding so he can start to accumulate experience.

00:31:40.500 | Now experience can be acquired on a first-person basis. I gain from the experience that I have doing this job for me. However, experience can also be acquired vicariously.

00:31:53.500 | And so that's the other thing that we want to encourage. We want to cultivate a habit of acquiring vicarious experience.

00:32:02.500 | And that comes from being exposed to the stories and the lives of others. And the three-pronged way to do that is, number one, movies, TV shows, things like that.

00:32:15.500 | You want to pay attention to any kind of media that you consume. What are the types of things that you observe with the YouTube channels that you watch?

00:32:23.500 | What are the types of things that you observe with the movies that you're attracted to? The shows that you like? Recognizing that all of these media presentations give us some insight into the lives of other people, real people to a certain extent, of the way that other people live.

00:32:42.500 | And so we should pay attention to those things and talk about them. Why are we attracted to the kinds of movies that we're attracted to? What are the people, the characters that we aspire to be like and how could we move our life in that direction?

00:32:54.500 | The second thing is reading. Reading gives us a really unique insight that other forms of on-screen media don't. In that, by reading, we can either hear the actual thoughts of somebody as recorded in a biography or an autobiography, or we can hear the thoughts of a character as recorded by a novelist.

00:33:17.500 | And so that's the great power of reading is that we're able to enter into the internal struggle of a protagonist or even supporting character in a book in a way that's not possible with on-screen media.

00:33:31.500 | And so we want to cultivate a habit of diverse reading. And when reading, we want to read, if possible, we want to read novels, we want to read biographies, we want to read all kinds of interesting things. And again, pay attention to the themes. What are the kinds of things that we're attracted to? The kinds of lifestyles that we're attracted to?

00:33:48.500 | Because you can learn a lot about somebody by reading about them. And I think that this is an area where you as an adult can provide good coaching. Let's say that you're coaching a young man who's interested in a certain field. He's interested in engineering like you, or interested in law, or interested in medicine, or interested in marketing.

00:34:07.500 | Find something related to that and say, "Let's read a novel or two about it." And you can start to gain vicarious experience that way. And then also you gain vicarious experience through relationships. And so at 15 years old, certainly a young man needs relationships with his peers.

00:34:23.500 | That's fine. But those relationships with peers should not be the primary, should not be the sole social contact. But on the other hand, he should start to be very focused on cultivating relationships with adults. And so with a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of playing out, he may be willing to do this.

00:34:43.500 | But if he's going over to his friend's house, he should be interacting with his friend's adults. All of the jobs that I got in high school were all based upon my friend's parents who I would talk to at birthday parties and things like that. And they wound up just offering me work. Those were where all of them came from.

00:35:00.500 | And so he should be encouraged to interact with those parents. He should be encouraged to take networking seriously, to study it as a specific goal and then start to apply it.

00:35:15.500 | I'm making the number up, but 98% of people in the world who are wealthy, successful, effective, experienced in any field will instantly say yes to a lunch request from a 15-year-old.

00:35:32.500 | And so when we're young, it's so easy for us to build a strong network because everybody wants to help us. Everybody wants to share experience with us when we're young.

00:35:44.500 | As we get older, it becomes more challenging. But if you coach him into collecting advice, collecting, really engaging with people and teach him how to network intentionally with people that he admires, people that he aspires to be like, people who might be able to teach him about something that he's interested in,

00:36:04.500 | then he can start to build a portfolio, a stable of advisors and mentors who are really working with him. And you should teach him, I have to stop with this, but you should teach him the simple formula.

00:36:17.500 | The simple formula for engaging effectively with mentors is find somebody that you admire, ask them for advice, and then do what they say and then go back and after you finish doing what they say to do, tell them, "Hey, I finished doing what you said to do and now what else would you say?"

00:36:36.500 | Because basically no one does that. No one follows through. And so as someone who gives advice, I have, I think, the common experience that when I give advice, I just assume that the vast majority of people aren't going to take advice. They don't do it.

00:36:51.500 | And they don't ever come back and say, "Oh, I took your advice and here's what happens." And so the small percentage of people who do that really instantly set themselves apart.

00:37:01.500 | And so I would encourage him to collect this experience vicariously through that three-pronged attack. And also he wants to collect as much diverse experience himself and basically pay attention to the world and coach himself through it by paying attention to what he's drawn towards, what he's repulsed by.

00:37:19.500 | If he'll do that systematically over the next three years of his normal high school work, different summer job every summer, different job when he's in school, different projects, engaging with people, taking advice, looking for opportunities, trying things just because, "Hey, that sounds interesting. Let me try it."

00:37:37.500 | We shouldn't encourage young people to have an expectation of permanence in anything that they do. I'm pretty deeply opposed to the, I'll call it the European style of education that is primarily related to a long-term career.

00:37:53.500 | And so in some places in Europe and in other places as well, young men and women are funneled onto a career track at a very early age. Now there are benefits to that because you could build these career skills, but I think in the long run it leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction because they don't have enough experience yet.

00:38:11.500 | They don't know themselves well enough to actually effectively choose a career. And so what we should do is encourage young people to try different things and give them the permission that none of this has to be permanent.

00:38:23.500 | Do it for a summer. Do it for two months. Take this job for two months. Do it well. Try to always leave a good reputation, which means you need to do it long enough to where you're actually useful, not just float in, take a week of training and disappear, but recognize you don't have to do this for the long period of time.

00:38:36.500 | And then the common track through high school, through college, that common track works very effectively. And if that's followed by encouragement to start a business here, try these things there, he'll accumulate enough experience and he'll change his major a bunch of times and he'll change here and there.

00:38:53.500 | But when he arrives on the other side of college, he'll be very well prepared for long-term success because he'll have a great font of experience from which to draw. And all of that can be done alongside systematically saving money, but on the whole, even if the saving money doesn't happen,

00:39:13.500 | it's much more important that the experience happens and that he stays, as long as he stays out of debt, that he stays exploring the world and looking for and cultivating mentorship from others who have the kinds of things that he wants more of in his life.

00:39:30.500 | That's much, much more important than any particular mutual fund or savings account. And then one final comment as I close and move on to the next caller is simply that if he wants to invest in single stocks, I would not discourage that.

00:39:45.500 | I think it's important, I'm the kind of man who likes to test things for myself. You can tell me and give me great advice, but I ultimately want to test things for myself. And so if he wants to invest in single stocks rather than mutual funds, great.

00:40:04.500 | At the end of the day, none of it is going to make a difference in the long run. What I mean is if he saves a couple thousand dollars a year, which would be great. Let's say he saves a couple thousand dollars a year and then he gets to, and he graduates from college and he's got an account with $10,000 in it.

00:40:21.500 | That account with $10,000 in it is not a meaningful thing in terms of where he's going to be over the long term. And it's great and it's better than nothing, but that's not the key to his getting rich.

00:40:35.500 | So if he wants to explore single stocks and he loses $1,000, that lesson, if he only learns that with $1,000, that will be one of the best priced lessons he could possibly have. And so we want to talk about it, but let's say that someone comes to me and says, "I want to trade options."

00:40:57.500 | That was the thing when I was in college. Everyone was learning to trade options and we all lost all of our money. So fine. Okay, you want to trade options and futures? Let's talk about it and you be the sounding board, the person who says, "Hey, here's a couple of books that I got on the subject. Here's how we learn about that. Let's look for the best advisor. How would we know if this is good advice? What worked this week? What didn't work?"

00:41:19.500 | And as I see it, one of the most effective things we can do in a mentoring relationship is not to try to give people answers, but rather to invite them into a conversation where a young person can systematically work towards the answers that are right for him in the long run. Those are some things to keep in mind alongside the financial conversation.

00:41:43.500 | Fantastic. Thank you so much.

00:41:45.500 | My pleasure. Keep up the interacting with him and keep me in the loop too. Maybe this can be our case study project over the next few years. We move to Travis in Vermont. Travis, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

00:41:59.500 | Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. Well, I just wanted to say, first off, I was listening to the thousandth episode just yesterday, and you had mentioned that you don't consider yourself radical anymore, and I had a perspective on that, something that I appreciate about the advice that you give, which is that you think outside the box without losing the context of the box.

00:42:24.500 | And so, in one sense, I think it's still radical, and that's really why I'm bringing the questions that I have to you today.

00:42:32.500 | Thank you. So, if I ramble, please redirect me, because there's a lot of elements that I might risk trying to describe.

00:42:41.500 | And there's a couple of different questions embedded, but I'll try and focus on the first one.

00:42:48.500 | So, I'm 42 right now, and I have a young family. My daughter, my one child is about to turn seven, and her mother and I have been together for a little over eight years.

00:43:01.500 | We didn't know each other for very long before suddenly we had a baby on the way, and we, long story short, are not the best match for each other.

00:43:10.500 | And so, I've known that for quite a while. We're in the process right now of sort of navigating our lives apart.

00:43:18.500 | And some of the things that haven't worked out well are the strategies that we each have around finances and other things.

00:43:28.500 | And some of those for her are essentially impulsive decision-making, kind of a short-sighted sense of return on time, return on money, and so some of the decisions I find quite rash.

00:43:43.500 | And I'm trying to figure out, some are just very irresponsible, and we're splitting up in part because of some of the typical lying, cheating, stealing stuff.

00:43:55.500 | So, it goes beyond finances, but it's going to be better for everybody involved.

00:44:02.500 | That said, she is not someone who stands on her own two feet financially. She's not, I think, very capable of it, certainly not inclined to.

00:44:11.500 | So, I see my role and responsibility as sort of continuing to be the father of the family and continuing to not just take care of my daughter,

00:44:22.500 | but also to support my daughter's mother. And so, I'm trying to figure out, as we split up our finances, we have some shared bank accounts.

00:44:34.500 | We have a house that we both own. We have the two vehicles, each of our vehicles is co-owned with a loan through the bank, so some of those things.

00:44:44.500 | And we also have a house that we own together, and we're basically everything except married. We don't have to go through a formal divorce.

00:44:53.500 | And trying to figure out any strategies or advice you might have about how to provide financially for her while we move away and live in separate places and figure out what custody looks like and that sort of thing.

00:45:10.500 | But in a way that's protected, to whatever degree it can be, from what I see as that rash decision-making.

00:45:18.500 | And a couple of examples, specific things that I've been considering are like a life insurance policy.

00:45:25.500 | I'm not sure if she should be, if the mother should be the named beneficiary or if I might instead choose a grandparent who I trust to manage that money more wisely in my absence.

00:45:37.500 | The sale of the house is a bit of a bigger question, and I could follow up with that one, whether to keep the house, sell it, some of those considerations.

00:45:47.500 | But there are some other things outside of our relationship that come into play, so I kind of set that aside a little bit for now.

00:45:54.500 | And I'm considering, sorry, not for a hike, so I'm huffing and puffing a little bit. I think better when I'm outside.

00:46:02.500 | So considering beeping one shared bank account, which would be the one that I put money into for her use, but then I can also see that money, see what's there, see what it's been used for, make sure that there's enough there, that kind of thing.

00:46:20.500 | Whereas essentially everything else that has both of our names on it, I'd like to get our names off of it.

00:46:28.500 | So let's start with that as a question.

00:46:33.500 | Understood. So clearly there's a lot here, and clearly this is an extremely personal situation.

00:46:39.500 | I'm going to ask you, I'm going to deal with it direct and in a straightforward way, because you're calling me to ask for advice. I don't know any other way to do it.

00:46:48.500 | But if anything that I say or you'd say is too personal, feel free to wind it up and just say, I'm just not comfortable to answer that. It's totally fine.

00:46:57.500 | But a couple of quick questions. Does she have a job? Is she earning income?

00:47:03.500 | She has just reduced her hours. She was working two days a week at the school where our daughter attends, which brought in some money. And then also she's working as a bartender and she went from three nights to two nights.

00:47:16.500 | So she's reduced her work. And actually, just to give a little bit of context around her decision making, as we move into separate places, rather than accept money from me for a portion of the rent,

00:47:30.500 | she would like to tell a local church that she's been abandoned as a single mother and ask them to pay her rent.

00:47:39.500 | So there's some murky stuff that I'm trying to guard against, some ethical and some practical.

00:47:47.500 | All right. Let me give you just kind of a big picture overview of some ideas for you to consider and for you to respond to.

00:47:55.500 | So first we have to deal with the question of marriage. I deny the authority of government over marriage.

00:48:03.500 | It doesn't matter to me whether you have a government marriage license or not. I myself do not recognize any authority of government over marriage.

00:48:13.500 | Now, if you have a government marriage license, then obviously if you go through a divorce, you're handling it differently than if you don't have a license from the government.

00:48:24.500 | But from my perspective, I don't acknowledge that they have authority over marriage to either call people married or to call people unmarried.

00:48:33.500 | And so I am considering this woman to be your wife based upon how you have lived.

00:48:39.500 | She is the mother of your child and you have been with her, lived with her as man and wife for the last eight years.

00:48:45.500 | And so I'm going to call her your wife even though I acknowledge that you don't have a government marriage license.

00:48:54.500 | In addition to that, if you have a child with a woman, it doesn't matter almost in any way financially, legally, etc. that you don't have a marriage license.

00:49:13.500 | Functionally speaking, there's a huge backlash in US American culture right now on all sides against marriage.

00:49:21.500 | And from the male perspective, there are a lot of men who are saying, well, I'm not going to get married because to get married would open me up to enormous risks.

00:49:31.500 | And this woman could divorce me and she could take half my money, all that stuff.

00:49:35.500 | As best I can understand, I'm not a lawyer, I don't play one, but as best I can understand, once you procreate with someone, you have functionally the same basic legal relationship with her as if you are married to her legally in a court in the United States.

00:49:54.500 | There's really no functional difference.

00:49:56.500 | So you have legal obligations, financial obligations, etc. that arise due to your paternity of a child with her.

00:50:04.500 | So you should also be aware of that.

00:50:07.500 | I hate divorce. I hate divorce with a passion.

00:50:11.500 | It is one of the most evil scourges on our land.

00:50:17.500 | It is destructive to the basic fabric of society.

00:50:22.500 | And it is destructive to your daughter or your child.

00:50:26.500 | I can't remember if you said poor girl, but to your child.

00:50:30.500 | To your daughter, if you are divorced or separated from her mother compared to her long term outcomes of a married couple, then her statistical probabilities of success are very, very limited.

00:50:46.500 | You are creating trauma in yourself, in your wife and in your daughter that in many cases is not necessary.

00:50:54.500 | I do not deny that some people's actions are so heinous and so evil that divorce, there may be no other solution.

00:51:06.500 | But I think that we should hate divorce with a passion and we should approach the relationship from that perspective first rather than seeing it as an easy option.

00:51:18.500 | In the United States today, a huge percentage of married persons see divorce as no big deal.

00:51:26.500 | After all, the legal limitations to divorce are now very small.

00:51:31.500 | Since no-fault divorce became the law of the land, anybody can divorce anybody else for any reason.

00:51:36.500 | Formerly, there was a social stigma associated with being divorced.

00:51:40.500 | That social stigma has now entirely disappeared or almost entirely disappeared.

00:51:46.500 | And so there's not much of an impediment to somebody being divorced, but we see the damage all across society.

00:51:58.500 | For every man or woman who says, "Hey, this is wonderful. I'm going to be free of this person who's a toxic person in my life and I'm going to go and live my life and I'm going to find the man of my dreams or find the woman of my dreams and I'm going to rebuild my life."

00:52:12.500 | Does it happen? Sure, I'm happy to grant it, but in general, it doesn't.

00:52:16.500 | And in almost every circumstance, you're probably much better off to stay married to the person that you know and the person that you love and the person that you've been with for a significant period of time.

00:52:28.500 | So I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't do. I'm trying to establish a tone of thinking and approach that I think should be taken seriously and it should be our default perspective.

00:52:43.500 | And then we go and deal with facts. And I'm not going to deal with too many of those facts here. This is not the place for it.

00:52:49.500 | But the general tone of what I described I think is the healthiest tone. We should fight for marriage. We should fight to identify what is wrong, what is going wrong, and how can it be fixed, not just say, "Well, okay, we're kind of drifting apart."

00:53:02.500 | I appreciate your desire to care for this woman who you care for in some—meaning I appreciate your desire to be responsible towards her for her own long-term good and to express that care that you feel for her and caring for the mother of your child, etc.

00:53:23.500 | But it's going to be difficult for you to do that effectively if you're not—it's going to be much harder for you to do that if you are separated from her than if you are married to her or together with her if you prefer to say it that way.

00:53:37.500 | So in terms of a starting point, do you see—is there any way that you and she could be reconciled if you wanted to be reconciled with her?

00:53:49.500 | That's essentially the point that I've come to over the last year is that I don't believe so.

00:53:57.500 | And is that based upon a fundamental inherent quality or characteristic that either she or you expresses, or is it based upon just a broad observation of this really isn't working?

00:54:17.500 | It's a broad observation. Certain things come up every two or three years, cheating being an easy example or hiding large sums of money.

00:54:28.500 | And actually since she took the job at the bar a little over a year ago, it's all increased a great deal.

00:54:37.500 | Obviously. She's a bartender. What do you expect?

00:54:40.500 | Yeah. I'm not surprised, and I saw that as a risk. But therapy is not something that she's open to.

00:54:49.500 | She's very aggressively against that, and she's not able to provide any sort of alternative other than really what she's been saying the whole time we've been together,

00:55:01.500 | that we've been essentially married, because I do see it similarly to you, is that I just need to stop being bothered by the things that she's doing.

00:55:09.500 | And I don't agree that that's a solution. And it's been very detrimental to me in trying to do that.

00:55:19.500 | I've had the advice of the therapists that we've seen together and those that I've seen on my own that this isn't a problem I can solve.

00:55:26.500 | It's something that she and I have to solve together. And I don't believe that she has been or is going to be willing to acknowledge that.

00:55:36.500 | I don't rule out the possibility that with some space and a little bit of time out of the heat of being so intensely living together and the interactions day-to-day, the patterns that we've gotten into,

00:55:50.500 | I don't rule out that we might come back together. But I'm not really casting a vote, a forecast on that from today.

00:55:58.500 | I understand. Let me define some terms to make sure we're dealing with things.

00:56:02.500 | Is she willing to be in a sexually monogamous committed relationship with you? Or is she unwilling to be in that kind of relationship?

00:56:11.500 | She's not.

00:56:12.500 | Okay. So that's a nonstarter. That's a definitional thing. If she's not willing to be in a monogamous relationship with you, then obviously everything else is a nonstarter.

00:56:24.500 | We can deal with lying. We can deal with putting safeguards. You can deal with financial conflict, et cetera. But if she's unwilling to be committed to you in a sexually monogamous relationship, then everything else is a total nonstarter.

00:56:39.500 | Is that how you see it?

00:56:42.500 | It is. Yeah. Any agreements that we've made around our relationship, she has made a point of violating and doesn't feel any remorse for them.

00:56:54.500 | Okay.

00:56:55.500 | That sends it around on me.

00:56:56.500 | So there's really no reason to go any further then. What I would usually ask or what I would probe, and let me just say it just in case as you're considering or maybe re-listening to this conversation later.

00:57:08.500 | What I want to question is, is there something that you could do that would cause her to be willing or more likely to take some of those basic relational commitments?

00:57:24.500 | So for example, it's hard for me to imagine any husband in the world who's going to take his wife off and drop her off at her job as a bartender. It's the most absurd concept at all to consider that somehow she's going to remain faithful to you in an environment like that.

00:57:47.500 | Bad enough if you've got to take her and drop her off at an office where she's facing just kind of ordinary things.

00:57:56.500 | And so I would question, is there a way that I could create a lifestyle both financially and otherwise where my wife weren't in this environment?

00:58:04.500 | Would that then cause things? But I don't think that would based upon how quickly and clearly you answered it.

00:58:10.500 | It doesn't seem that she has any desire to live this normal committed type of relationship lifestyle with you, in which case you ending it is that's it.

00:58:23.500 | There's really nothing else that can be done. And you are then going to just simply do everything you can to protect your daughter through it.

00:58:32.500 | It's not healthy for your daughter to be in an environment where her mom is going off to work every night as a bartender.

00:58:38.500 | That's clearly not going to be a great fit. So you're going to be exploring, you know, I can't imagine that you would, I don't want to get into details.

00:58:49.500 | But basically, then I would say that you have to, you're doing what you're doing, which is just to care for your daughter and do everything you can to provide for her.

00:58:58.500 | I don't know, that's tough. So in terms of specifics, have you, do you expect, have you and she talked about what your parenting relationship is likely to look like in the coming years with regard to care for your daughter?

00:59:14.500 | No, she's not really open to conversations that are difficult or stress her out. So we haven't.

00:59:23.500 | Have you, have you sought legal counsel as to what your paternal rights are with regard to your daughter?

00:59:30.500 | No.

00:59:34.500 | If you, if you so desired, do you think that you could obtain primary custody of your daughter?

00:59:45.500 | I want to say yes, although it's a fairly uneducated, or I think it's a fairly uneducated guess. I am the primary income producer and, you know, and if it got nasty, you know, the things that are leading to this separation are, you know, are not.

01:00:05.500 | They're on her, they're not on me. So I would guess that I'm in good standing.

01:00:11.500 | Do you think this woman is a good mother for your daughter?

01:00:16.500 | I do believe that, yeah. Yeah, she puts a lot of effort into creating an amazing experience for her.

01:00:26.500 | Yeah.

01:00:27.500 | Okay.

01:00:29.500 | Has she done anything, has she done anything that would endanger your daughter in any way?

01:00:35.500 | No.

01:00:36.500 | Okay. Well, you should just consider, because at its core, if you're dealing with somebody who, I'm trying to answer your question as directly as possible, but as I said, it's a kind of a difficult way.

01:00:48.500 | But you said, basically, as I would frame your question, you said something like, "How can I, through the back door, exercise stewardship and care over this woman who we're splitting up and over my daughter? Is there some way that I can do that?"

01:01:05.500 | And I'm trying to look out for her destructive behavior.

01:01:09.500 | Generally speaking, on the whole, when people are destructive, you want to separate yourself from them entirely.

01:01:16.500 | You don't want destructive people in your life or around those people that you care about.

01:01:21.500 | And so your instincts that you feel, we all care. So let's separate this, what I'm trying to do.

01:01:29.500 | Let me be explicit about why I'm approaching it in this way.

01:01:33.500 | Let's assume that I'm in a relationship with an adult, an adult woman, and I don't have a daughter. I don't have children or entanglements.

01:01:41.500 | And I observe that this woman is engaging in entirely destructive behavior that is likely to lead to her long-term downfall.

01:01:50.500 | And she's not interested in my care. She's not interested in my help. She's interested in my free money, if she could get it, but she's not interested in any real help.

01:02:01.500 | Well, if somebody is not repentant and she's not interested in changing, then you have no duty or obligation to support her.

01:02:11.500 | She's an adult. She's making her decisions. And if somebody's engaging in destructive behavior, as I see it, there's really, you can speak out of love.

01:02:21.500 | You can express your love by demonstrating and saying what needs to be said directly.

01:02:27.500 | But at the end of the day, you have to allow someone to continue in the course of sin until she receives the full weight of it and desires to change.

01:02:38.500 | If somebody doesn't desire to change in anything, there's no point in any further discussion.

01:02:44.500 | And so if somebody desires to change, then obviously instantly you jump and say, "Hey, you desire to change. Well, let's work on it." And you take any indication that someone gives you of a desire to change and you do everything possible to then help, support, lift up, anything that's possible.

01:03:01.500 | But if somebody doesn't desire to change, and I'm talking an independent adult, then what do you do? There's nothing that can be done. You just let them go on their way and eventually when the pain gets heavy enough, they desire to change.

01:03:16.500 | Now, let's say that you're dealing with a divorce situation where you have a child. Well, now everything that I've described is still true, but now you're trying to care for the child and you're trying to do what is best for the child.

01:03:33.500 | Ordinarily, if somebody is an untrustworthy or toxic person, then you would document that and you would seek to gain custody of the child so that you can protect the child from this negative influence.

01:03:46.500 | But what you're describing is not really that. You're describing a milder kind of version of that. And ordinarily, most courts are not going to separate a mother from her child unless there's some documented danger, some destructive or potentially destructive behavior that you've documented and that you can present in court.

01:04:07.500 | And if that were the case, then you would go down that path. Otherwise, then clearly your daughter needs a relationship with her mother and you're not trying to limit that.

01:04:19.500 | And I'll say that I don't see it as being destructive. I see it as being best for my daughter, not being solely in my custody. I do see it as being gained by having both her parents in her life.

01:04:39.500 | If possible, then I think you try to arrange living circumstances where you can be close and involved in each other's lives. In terms of protecting her, I don't know what you can do with the woman. You can provide for your daughter. You certainly should have a life insurance policy for your daughter's benefit.

01:05:00.500 | I would not assign… Practically and specifically, step one is definitely you need to make sure that you have a life insurance policy, a large term life insurance policy.

01:05:11.500 | The beneficiary of that policy should not be your ex-wife. It should not be your daughter, but rather should be a trustee for the benefit of your daughter.

01:05:22.500 | You would create a simple trust. Most life insurance companies have some standard boilerplate trust, the document that is sufficient, but you would assign a trusted friend or a trusted person in your own life to be the trustee to manage the proceeds for the benefit of your daughter.

01:05:41.500 | In terms of her mother, if you're not going to pay her bills and provide her lifestyle, which you shouldn't obviously, I think your primary focus needs to be on the safety of your daughter.

01:06:00.500 | I would just observe very carefully that's clearly got to be the primary thing. If this woman is going to continue, if she's going to live, for example, a promiscuous lifestyle and your daughter is there, there is an enormous danger of your daughter facing sexual abuse.

01:06:22.500 | When a single mother has a daughter in the home and is bringing men into the home, there is an enormously high documented risk of sexual abuse for the child, so you need to be very cautious of that.

01:06:36.500 | It may mean that you need to live close enough that any time your wife or the woman is going to bring somebody home, then you can go over and get your daughter. I don't know. I'm kind of out of ideas.

01:06:52.500 | That is my intention is to stay close enough to be in my daughter's life daily. In a perfect world, I wouldn't be in that situation, but I guess for context, I would say that probably the best career that I think the mother could have would be taking care of my daughter each day.

01:07:21.500 | I guess that's a piece of where I'm coming from. I'm concerned that if she's under the stress of trying to manage, if she has difficulty working a part-time job with my support, with me taking care of things around the house, paying the majority of the bills when she is making an income, that sort of thing,

01:07:39.500 | I guess part of my concern is that if the added stress is put on her to then work full-time, to take care of her house without assistance, then it could increase, I guess on the one hand, impulsively bringing another man in more consistently, more permanently to take my place,

01:08:06.500 | but also put the stress on me and then I think that it could become just a more toxic environment for my daughter.

01:08:16.500 | Could you live in the same house as this woman where each of you has separate bedrooms and you're in the same house as her, thus allowing her to live rent-free, have room and board in exchange for caring for your daughter in the home,

01:08:38.500 | and simply establish an understanding that you can live here in the house, will basically be some version of roommates, but you're not to bring another man home to this property? Could some kind of agreement like that work out?

01:08:57.500 | In some sense, that's what we've been doing, or at least that's what I have been treating most of the last year as. We've been living together, but in separate spaces of the house, and it does need to go a little bit further than that.

01:09:12.500 | I would introduce actually the house that I mentioned that we both own is back east. It's on the east coast, and that's a duplex, and so one of the ideas that I've had and that my mom is actually a proponent of would be the two of us living in that house, but on separate sides,

01:09:30.500 | which are, you know, they're just separated. Each one is two bedroom, one bath, has some kitchen and all those things. I'm not sure if that specific option is something that is on the table that she would choose to do. I'm not sure that she wants to move back home to Vermont.

01:09:51.500 | We're currently in Utah, and I had hoped to go home for the summer with my daughter, so that she could be with her grandparents and the friends she has there and do some work on that house.

01:10:03.500 | But the mother is inclined to at least keep our daughter here for the beginning of the summer.

01:10:10.500 | At this point, so I'm playing a little bit of, like, you know, I'm not seeing all the cards to make some decisions at this point, but the suggestion is, I think, a best case scenario. Yeah.

01:10:22.500 | Okay. I would say I think we've reached about as deep as we can go. I'm not cutting you off, but just this is where I don't know that I have anything more useful at this point to suggest to you, because here we go to quite personal, but here are some thoughts that I want you to think about as we start to wrap up.

01:10:39.500 | Number one, you need legal counsel. You need to consult with a lawyer in your state who can inform you of your legal obligations of your state, and you need to also inform yourself about anything related, anything that you could do that would create an expectation of legal support.

01:11:02.500 | Here is my concern for you. Number one, if you are living with a woman as though she is your wife, in some states, and I'm not competent to go to say anything more than that, I'm aware that in some states, you may be giving claim to her that creates a legal obligation to you.

01:11:23.500 | That if she were to take you in front of a judge, then now it's not your voluntary choice, but now the court may force you to support her, pay her some version of alimony and child support.

01:11:38.500 | And that's what, as far as I'm concerned, you wish to avoid. You want to support her, but you do not want to create legal obligations of support.

01:11:49.500 | I affirm the rightness of alimony and child support payments in divorcing situations, but they're very difficult once you get under that system, because instead of being able to respond and adapt as we do when we're not under a court-obligated payment, you just have now a court-obligated payment.

01:12:07.500 | So if at all possible, you want to avoid that. And I get nervous with the idea, for example, of you sharing a house with her, because if you're sharing a house with her, and you're paying all the bills, and you also have a child with her, then I'm concerned that three years from now,

01:12:27.500 | she may put herself in a situation in which now she takes you to court, and you have an enormous legal settlement. And what you are describing in terms of that relationship is probably the worst possible thing that could happen to you financially speaking.

01:12:43.500 | If you are working and earning a lot of money to support her, and she's not working, earning only a little bit of money, and half of it is cash that's not reported, and she hauls you in front of a judge, and if you've now created a legal obligation, well, you're sending out alimony payments for a very long time, and that could be very destructive.

01:13:05.500 | And there's an enormous amount of advice in this space where women who are planning to divorce their husbands are specifically encouraged and counseled to take some of those actions to reduce her earnings, to make sure that the earnings disparity is as much as possible,

01:13:22.500 | to make sure that she's receiving money in cash, to make sure that he's earning as much as possible, and all of that is really destructive. Men, if they're facing that, they need to do the exact opposite, right? They need to change, and so you shouldn't be working.

01:13:35.500 | If you knew you were heading for divorce, that's a really bad time for you to start making millions of dollars a year and living a high lifestyle. That's a much better time for you to be a broke student who's going back to school than if you knew you were going to be in divorce court three years from now.

01:13:50.500 | So you need to consult with legal counsel in order to understand if the actual living arrangements that you would be establishing could be creating some kind of legal expectation that could work against you in court.

01:14:03.500 | You need to assume that if she is lying and cheating and stealing, you need to also assume that she is manipulative and scheming and trying to figure out how she can get everything that she wants out of you in the future and that she's intentionally manipulating you.

01:14:21.500 | Hopefully, she's not, but you should guard yourself as though she is, and that's why you need legal counsel. Number two, from a lifestyle perspective, I don't think you want to be paying her bills.

01:14:33.500 | So the idea of setting her up in an apartment and I'm going to pay her bills so she can be a full-time mother, that's a really rough thing to do for the long term.

01:14:41.500 | Maybe you could do that for a few months. You sound fairly emotionally detached, but that's hard to do for the long term. That's a situation a lot of ex-husbands find themselves in, paying for their ex-wife's house, and it's not emotionally pleasant over the long term.

01:14:55.500 | I acknowledge the idea that if you had a duplex and she could live there and care for your daughter, in many ways that would be an ideal situation.

01:15:03.500 | It's a shame that you can't have more of a relationship, but at least it would potentially be the best thing for your daughter. But I worry about creating legal obligations in an unawares manner that you would then later have trouble with.

01:15:18.500 | So I think you need legal counsel, and based upon what you learn from that lawyer, that would guide your actions.

01:15:26.500 | The other thing I want to say is be very careful with changing states. One of the things I've learned from counseling various divorced persons is if you know that divorce or some version of divorce is coming in the future, you don't want to be stuck in a place that you don't want to be for the long term.

01:15:51.500 | Because if your wife divorces you and she has legal custody of your child, and now you're living in a place in which you have no family support, or you don't have a great infrastructure, or it's very expensive, then that can drain you.

01:16:06.500 | I had a client of mine one time, terrible situation. He and his wife had all these children, and against his better judgment, I think they were living in Texas, but he was trying to save the marriage and really trying to work with her. She wanted to move back to California, and so they moved back to California.

01:16:24.500 | Then she turned around, divorced him, and very, very difficult financial circumstances. He has enormous alimony and child support obligations, and in addition to that, he's stuck living in California trying to make it, living in California working multiple jobs.

01:16:43.500 | His situation would have been significantly improved if he had simply remained in Texas. Now, obviously, she could have divorced him, but if he had remained in Texas, then he would have been able to do much better than he is or was in California.

01:16:58.500 | So be careful and be very thoughtful and speak to your lawyer about, "Do you definitely need legal counsel at this point to figure out how to put this proper thing in?" I just want to say that I respect you for your even tone with this, and I respect you for how you're looking to care for her and for your daughter.

01:17:17.500 | May God give you wisdom as you seek to care for these two people, these two ladies.

01:17:24.500 | Awesome. Thank you, Joshua. I appreciate your candor and the time.

01:17:28.500 | It's difficult. These discussions are always difficult for me because I care a lot about them. We should care, and we're living in a catastrophe situation, but discerning through them in an appropriate way is quite challenging. So again, may God give you wisdom.

01:17:47.500 | We move to Cozart in Oklahoma. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

01:17:53.500 | Hey, Joshua. Thanks for doing this. Glad to be on. Wanted to call and discuss just some frameworks to think through for pursuing master's level higher education, and specifically in the context of getting set up for eventual entrepreneurship, maybe through acquisition of a company.

01:18:15.500 | Okay. So just curious if you have any frameworks about whether or not to pursue, you know, like a formal higher education, and then when to pursue it, and which one.

01:18:27.500 | So goal at the end of the day for me is to be equipped to lead a business organization, either my own or a corporate, you know, just in a traditional business setting.

01:18:39.500 | I have good flexibility in my job right now. I'd like to, I'm just going to be thinking 10, 15 years from now, ways to ensure that I continue to have good flexibility for a long time.

01:18:54.500 | How old are you currently?

01:18:55.500 | I'll give you just a little more context.

01:18:56.500 | Yeah, go ahead, please.

01:18:57.500 | I'm 39. Yeah, my work provides well for us. It's work that I'm well suited for and that I enjoy. It does give me a lot of autonomy right now.

01:19:08.500 | And so that's the stability that I think I need. Right now I'm 39, I've got four kids, single, like my wife stays home, so I'm the income earner.

01:19:22.500 | W2 and a couple of a couple of rental houses so I think it's good stability right now and I enjoy my work, but I am nearing kind of the limit like referencing back to some of your increasing income frameworks.

01:19:35.500 | I'm nearing the limit of do work of a higher value in my current career path.

01:19:42.500 | So the next level that I see is through kind of the business side of it. I'm currently in engineering. I've kind of pretty nearly reached the limit of that.

01:19:54.500 | And so just as I look forward, the work that carries higher value is in the business side, either at my current company or through eventual entrepreneurship.

01:20:07.500 | I was recently exposed to the idea of entrepreneurship through acquisition and it does make sense that as the newer generation kind of ages that there will be a lot of businesses which need to be transitioned.

01:20:22.500 | And I think that's probably more my personality than starting something, especially at this age and stage in life.

01:20:30.500 | And so I think I can be, you know, I can pursue a lot of that through just independent study of just, you know, equipped to lead a business, but the designation of something like an MBA or something like that does convey value and competence.

01:20:45.500 | So really just kind of weighing the opportunity cost. Like, do I do it now with a young family? Do I wait five years? Work pays for it.

01:20:53.500 | And so it feels a little bit like, you know, there's no guarantee that I'll continue with this same employer. So will I look back and regret not having used that benefit while I had it?

01:21:07.500 | So there's a bunch of context.

01:21:09.500 | Understood.

01:21:10.500 | Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

01:21:11.500 | The thing that you said was what I was looking for when you said work pays for it. And so let's go through some frameworks.

01:21:20.500 | Let's try to break it down to its component pieces.

01:21:23.500 | Number one, is more education useful? I would say yes, always. Getting more education, especially related to something that you care about, is going to pay off for you in some way, shape or form.

01:21:42.500 | The problem is that we have to, we can't just say, is more education useful? We have to say, is more education useful at this particular cost? And what is the cost?

01:21:54.500 | Well, the two costs that are the most important is the cost on your time. What is the opportunity cost of what you're not doing with the time that you're spending in an educational environment?

01:22:03.500 | And the second cost is the money. What is the actual cost of classes? In some cases, we can calculate the payoff fairly straightforwardly.

01:22:12.500 | If, for example, your company says, we'll pay for higher education, and the day you have a master's degree, we'll increase your salary by 11%, well, now we know what the payoff is going to be.

01:22:23.500 | This I see most commonly in educational circles. It's very common if someone's a high school teacher at a government school, well, if you get a master's degree, then there's now a bonus compensation for you.

01:22:34.500 | But that's not the only place. And so if someone has that kind of arrangement with an employer, then it's definitely worth doing.

01:22:43.500 | Since your company will pay for the cost of the classes, perhaps the cost of the books, things like that, your primary concern is the opportunity cost of the time. How much time would it take me to do this thing?

01:22:57.500 | In general, it's hard for me to see if you're on an ordinary course of life. And what I mean by ordinary is, hey, things are progressing, but there's nothing really exciting happening.

01:23:09.500 | It's not like I'm working as employee number 47 of a startup, and if I just put all of my extra time into this class-- sorry, into my work, and I work 100 hours a week, then we're going to really create this new product at work, and it's going to be phenomenal.

01:23:26.500 | Well, clearly, if you were in a situation like that, you wouldn't be thinking about going to college.

01:23:31.500 | But in general, if you're going to go and do, say, two college classes at a time, and you're out of the house one or two nights a week, and you can get a degree done over the next few years, then that's probably going to turn out to be something that works well.

01:23:46.500 | Depending on, again, the home situation, if it's too rough on your wife or if she's got too heavy a load, obviously, you want to consider those things. But if you woke up and you're 45 and you have a master's degree, that'll probably pay off for you in some way, shape, or form, especially since someone else is paying the tuition.

01:24:03.500 | And in general, classes, college classes, don't take that much time. And if you can do them while working, yes, you might be giving up some of your Netflix time, you might be giving up some of your Saturday mornings when you've got to get up at 5 and write your papers in the morning before the children wake up. That's fine.

01:24:22.500 | But I've never regretted any of that kind of work that I've done. In fact, I have always wished that I did more. When I was younger, I kind of despised advanced education.

01:24:39.500 | I went to college, but I didn't have a real vision for college. I went to college just because I'm not a loser and only losers don't go to college. So obviously, I'm going to go to college. So I went to college. When I got my master's degree, I didn't really have a desire to do it, but my company paid the tuition.

01:24:54.500 | And so I was like, "Well, if they're going to pay the tuition, I'll do it. Then it's no big deal." So I just took all the classes and passed it and got my master's degree. And most of it was distance study. So I would get up very early in the morning and go to a local Denny's and study from about 4.30 to 6.30, go home, have breakfast with my wife, and then go to work. And that was how I made it work at the time.

01:25:15.500 | But what I've realized now is I've realized, "You know what? I wish I had done more." Because what I've realized is I formerly despised a lot of academics. And now I realize I'm probably actually a good fit for academia, but I don't have a PhD and I don't really have any kind of academic pedigree, nor do I have a clear, specific area of interest.

01:25:40.500 | But I think over the next couple of decades, I myself will probably move closer to academia than I am now because I enjoy most things about it. My answer to the question I ask people, if I went broke today, or I ask this question where I say to people, "You can't ever save money," my answer to what I would do if I knew I could never save money is I would go be a college professor.

01:26:00.500 | And I have a few areas. I've looked at a few PhD programs. I may pursue one, but I don't find myself wishing that I had less education. I find myself wishing that I had more formal education, especially when the cost of tuition is low.

01:26:14.500 | So the only reason I would say you shouldn't start down the pathway of a master's degree would be if you had a clear alternative of a direction that you wanted to move that you couldn't move while pursuing the master's degree.

01:26:30.500 | For example, if you knew you wanted to start a specific business, and you knew that this is the kind of business that you could acquire, and it's the kind of thing you have the money for, and you know that this is a better long-term fit for me than my current engineering job,

01:26:46.500 | then you want to move as quickly in that direction as possible because five years from now, you'd be much better off having five years of experience in the specific business that you want to own and operate.

01:27:00.500 | You'd be much better off five years from now having done that. Even if you failed at that business, you'd be much better off five years from now from having gotten that first failure under your belt so that then you can move on to whatever is necessary for the next one that might succeed this time around.

01:27:15.500 | So whenever you have a specific direction that you want to go, that you know is the right decision for you, I can't find any reason to ever wait on that more than a few months of what's necessary for you to arrange your affairs so that you can pursue it.

01:27:35.500 | Because when we do the math, you're always better off having started earlier. You're always better off if you had five more years of experience.

01:27:45.500 | If you don't have that clear goal, then I would just reconcile it by setting two goals. I would say goal number one is I'm going to go ahead and start taking classes because I can, and I'm going to try to use those classes as a way of informing myself about the direction that I want to go.

01:28:02.500 | But number two is I'm not going to only take classes. I'm going to take classes, but I'm also going to be talking to business brokers. I'm also going to be going to industry conferences related to the type of business I might want to buy.

01:28:16.500 | I'm also going to be talking to the old guys that gather down at the Smoky Cafe every morning and saying, "Hey, I want to buy a business. Do any of you know someone who wants to sell one?"

01:28:27.500 | If you're doing both of those things and you're diligent about trying to make the opportunity fall out of the tree and simultaneously taking education, to me, that's the ideal answer.

01:28:37.500 | Now, can you do it all and be there for your wife and your children? You be the judge of that. But in general, my answer is yes, we can.

01:28:44.500 | Because most of the most effective things that we do are not actually as time-consuming as we otherwise would think.

01:28:54.500 | If you put three hours a week into diligently searching for a business to acquire, then in the end of a year from now, I think you'll have a business in your hand.

01:29:05.500 | And you can do three hours a week and also do three hours of class or whatever choice you wind up making.

01:29:12.500 | Similar to earlier in the call before you jumped on, I was thinking about something like college. I was answering a question about a young man and I was advising that he go to college.

01:29:24.500 | The great misperception to somebody is that I either have to go to college or be an entrepreneur. That's silly.

01:29:32.500 | There's 168 hours available in a week and a full-time college course load is 12 to 18 credit hours. Let's say you're taking 18 credit hours.

01:29:42.500 | You still, after classes, you still have 150 hours a week available to you every single week.

01:29:51.500 | Now, obviously, let's take off 70 hours for sleep. We're down to 90 hours. Let's take off 10 hours or 20 hours of homework. We're down to 70 hours.

01:30:01.500 | Let's take off 10 hours of goofing around. We're down to 60 hours.

01:30:05.500 | A normal college student has 60 hours a week available on top of his sleep, on top of his classes, on top of his homework that he could invest into his own business.

01:30:16.500 | And so the real power comes from maintaining the academic track and maintaining the entrepreneurship track or whatever track you're on if at all possible.

01:30:25.500 | It's harder when you have family demands, but five years from now, you won't wish that you had done less now.

01:30:31.500 | You'll wish that you had done more now so that your life five years from now has more of the kinds of opportunities that you're looking for.

01:30:38.500 | Okay. Yeah, that makes good sense. I'm interested in how you would think about which one to pursue.

01:30:48.500 | You know, plenty of folks that I knew went straight from their undergrad into a master's program.

01:30:57.500 | When I was doing undergrad, I didn't have a clear enough idea of exactly what I was gifted at or what I wanted to do to have an appetite for a master's.

01:31:08.500 | I have a clearer picture now, but say when I'm evaluating an MBA versus a master's in finance degree.

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01:31:46.500 | To me, some of it is I think through self-education, you could be competent in either. Some of it is convincing myself.

01:31:55.500 | You're probably aware that engineers are a bit risk averse.

01:31:59.500 | So some of it is just convincing myself of the competency. But when I look at something like an MBA versus a master's in finance degree,

01:32:09.500 | how would you go about deciding which one is better suited for the task, you know, which I stated of being equipped to lead a business organization?

01:32:17.500 | Those are probably very equivalent and you're probably fine with either.

01:32:24.500 | That's different than studying something engineering related.

01:32:28.500 | Generally speaking, I don't have a huge degree.

01:32:31.500 | I think I generally decided I'd like to go business over, you know, over continued technical.

01:32:37.500 | All right. So I would look at the class list. I would get the syllabus for the class list for either degree and look through it and just try to rate.

01:32:46.500 | And being an engineer, I would make a spreadsheet. So take the class list and I would take the course, I would read the course description.

01:32:54.500 | And then on a scale of one to ten, I would say, how enthusiastic do I feel about this taking this course?

01:33:02.500 | And go in and give it a numerical rating for both sets of courses.

01:33:07.500 | And then at the end, calculate your average, your total points and let that inform you.

01:33:13.500 | Because if all of a sudden you discover, hey, the course list for the MBA is much more interesting or actually the finance one is much more interesting to me,

01:33:20.500 | then I then pursue whichever one is more interesting.

01:33:24.500 | I don't think there's going to be a big functional difference, distinction between them.

01:33:29.500 | The MBA is going to be more recognizable. If you put it on a business card, everyone knows what an MBA is.

01:33:35.500 | But at the end of the day, that it's more important for you to study something you're interested in.

01:33:43.500 | Either one of them can be effectively supplemented with self-study as compared to doing it in the formal academic setting.

01:33:55.500 | What I would focus on doing is you'll get the most out of your courses if you can follow some kind of, what do they call it?

01:34:05.500 | The learning scientists have a term for it. It's not interest-based learning, but it's basically the question-based learning.

01:34:11.500 | The idea being you will always learn more effectively if you go into a learning environment with a specific question that you're trying to answer.

01:34:22.500 | This phone call is an ideal example. You've called me with a specific question.

01:34:29.500 | You're in a small learning environment. I'm imparting ideas to you.

01:34:34.500 | Because you asked the question, and I'm speaking directly to your question, you're learning right now at a much higher effectiveness than you were to yesterday's podcast,

01:34:48.500 | which was just generally speaking about general topics that weren't your specific topic.

01:34:53.500 | That's what we want to try to bring to any educational learning environment. We can do that artificially.

01:35:00.500 | An effective teacher, before starting to teach the actual material, will try to engage with a class or with his students so that his students understand why they might want to learn the material.

01:35:16.500 | He'll tease them. He'll ask them a thought-provoking question, lay out a scenario. Now they're engaged, and they have a context for wanting to learn the information.

01:35:26.500 | In your case, if you know going into this master's program that there may be some applicability to my engineering job,

01:35:36.500 | but more likely I'm hoping for these business skills, then you want to go into your degree program with a set of questions that you're trying to answer.

01:35:47.500 | So how can I effectively apply these new business skills in this particular industry or this kind of job that I'd like to find or this kind of business that I would like to acquire?

01:35:57.500 | And always be approaching your learning and the course material with that in mind, and you'll learn much more effectively.

01:36:04.500 | Okay. That's a great idea. Okay. I like that. Do you think both of those convey similar value to the market as far as MBA?

01:36:19.500 | You mentioned that MBA might be more recognizable on a business card, but if you're coming to talk to somebody about the qualification to lead a business, either one conveys similar value.

01:36:31.500 | By the way, the specific term I was looking for is called inquiry-based learning. That's what the learning scientists call it, inquiry-based learning, that we want to have our most effective learning comes when we're inquiring about something.

01:36:45.500 | To answer your question as far as which of them is more effective for you, in what context? In general, the MBA is a generalized business management knowledge base that's going to make you generally familiar with many aspects of business.

01:37:00.500 | It's ordinarily going to be rather corporate in nature, and that has its broadest applicability in usually a large corporation if you were coming in at a middle manager type of position at a large corporation.

01:37:16.500 | A master's of finance is going to be more financially oriented, and that may be corporate finance. It could be financial markets, depending on the specific program that you're interested in.

01:37:30.500 | A master's of finance is going to be more focused on finance, and so whether one is more helpful than another is going to depend upon the specific job or business that you're trying to go into.

01:37:42.500 | I wouldn't worry too much about the applicability. It doesn't sound to me like you have clarity yet on applicability. So, absent that clarity, just start doing the one that seems more interesting to you, and then feel free to change down the road.

01:37:58.500 | If there are 20 classes, they probably share at least three or four core classes for either of them, so start with those core classes that could go for either degree path and get those out of the way first, and then talk to your professors and use their information to make your final decision.

01:38:20.500 | Okay. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. I appreciate those thoughts. Am I the last caller? Do you have time to keep talking about entrepreneurship through acquisition?

01:38:32.500 | Go ahead. You're the last caller. Go ahead.

01:38:34.500 | Okay. Yeah, I'm just curious. I only heard that term in the past month, and so every time I hear about entrepreneurship, it's always the startup model where you're trying to do a thing and you start using a one-man show and you build from there.

01:38:55.500 | Yeah, the idea of acquiring businesses and even just the fact that there are business brokers to go talk to is new to me.

01:39:06.500 | Yeah, I don't have a well-formed question around it, but it is something that really piqued my interest, and so I have found a couple of local business brokers that at least have an in to give a call, and so it's on my list for this next quarter to talk to them.

01:39:25.500 | And then also, I think a couple of people who have gotten into business leadership in that way, so I was planning just that of going just to do some interviews to kind of figure out what is this like.

01:39:37.500 | Any more that you know about it or other ways you would advise getting educated about it?

01:39:45.500 | Very briefly, I would say I share your annoyance with the fact that this is not something that's talked about more widely. I feel that way myself.

01:39:54.500 | I think temperamentally, I don't think that I'm temperamentally well-suited to creating startups. I think temperamentally, I'm more temperamentally suited to be effective with working with a business that is already a going concern.

01:40:11.500 | Businesses function so differently across these phases of their life, and there are some people who seem genuinely drawn to one, and there are some people who seem genuinely drawn to another.

01:40:24.500 | The reason we don't talk much about entrepreneurship by acquisition is that most people don't have the money to acquire businesses.

01:40:29.500 | If you actually look across the general population at the amount of wealth that the general population holds, it's an astonishingly low number.

01:40:38.500 | In the United States, not only is it an astonishingly low number across the population, but when you get into the third quartile where people have money, all of the money is locked up in retirement accounts and home equity.

01:40:51.500 | Our entire financial situation or system has been optimized around those two basic tools, home equity and retirement accounts, and the financial industry has sold the public a bill of goods by consistent marketing of their products to basically persuade everyone that if you want to start investing,

01:41:16.500 | the way that you start investing is to buy mutual funds in your IRA, and there is a clear incentive that financial advisors have to capture the money and keep it captive in an account.

01:41:31.500 | You may have a business that you own and handle that's worth $10 million, but that you yourself, if you don't have money in investment accounts, you're basically invisible to the financial industry until you sell.

01:41:45.500 | Now, obviously, a financial advisor will want to work with you and attract you to eventually sell, but the entire system is structured around that.

01:41:54.500 | So it's only when you get into either—I don't want to call them elite circles because it's not only elite circles, but it's only when you get into certain circles where you start to realize the error of that.

01:42:06.500 | I didn't understand it until I was a financial advisor, and I was a financial advisor, and I'd be meeting with some guy, and he owns a plumbing company or an air conditioning company or a real estate company.

01:42:17.500 | I'm thinking, because I was trained by financial books, I'm thinking that, "Hey, this guy is great. What a great prospect," and he's looking at me skeptically, and he doesn't want to buy my mutual funds.

01:42:27.500 | I'm like, "Why don't you want to buy my mutual funds?" He's like, "Joshua, look at all the money I'm making over here with my business," and there's a framework for that, which I won't go into now, that I eventually developed.

01:42:39.500 | But I came to recognize that in every city, in every town, the wealthy people in the city and the town are going to be the business owners.

01:42:48.500 | They didn't get wealthy based upon buying stocks. They got wealthy based upon building or buying businesses. Once someone has a business, I think the most common form of entrepreneurship through acquisition is purchasing your competitors, and so that's very common.

01:43:10.500 | You're talking to a guy who has a lawn maintenance company, simplest business in existence, but then a competitor wants to retire. Well, the best person to buy his business is going to be his competitor, and so a guy who's focused on building will usually build by buying his competitors, expanding, or vertical integration as well.

01:43:31.500 | And so the people who are doing entrepreneurship through acquisition are usually doing that as something related to their current core business. Now, does that mean that someone can't come in and just buy a business? No, they can't.

01:43:46.500 | But ordinarily, the people who are in that space, number one, they have to be top half or probably more than that. I just don't know the quartile numbers off the top of my head, but the bottom half of the population has no money, so you're dealing with the top half of the population.

01:44:01.500 | Then you've got to get out of people who don't have all their money locked up in their home or their retirement accounts and who are actually interested in entrepreneurship, and then they're going to go and they're starting from scratch. And so where you see that usually is the franchise business.

01:44:16.500 | So franchise businesses are very popular, but that is a form of entrepreneurship through acquisition. What you're buying is the business system, not the going concern. But in your case, you're talking about buying the going concern.

01:44:27.500 | So you have a small pool of competitors because most people can't pull out the hundreds of thousands of dollars and buy the business. And then most of the people who could pull it out don't have the experience to cause them to be confident enough to do that.

01:44:48.500 | And that would be the caution that any good advisor, the same caution I'm giving to you is the same caution that any advisor is going to give. Before you write a check for $400,000 to buy some guy's business because he wants to retire and move to Florida, you need to be confident that you know something of what you're doing and have proved to yourself that this is the kind of thing that is up your alley.

01:45:12.500 | And a lot of times it's hard to write a $400,000 check if you haven't first written some $4,000 and $40,000 checks. I'm not saying it's a bad move. In many cases, it's a great move. But it's something that requires you to have enough exposure and to build the confidence to do it.

01:45:34.500 | And the kinds of people who have done that are just not a big share of the population, which is why you haven't been exposed to it before. I think it should be. I think in general, the average person would get far closer to the dream lifestyle that he's looking for by working a job enough to save some tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars,

01:45:59.500 | save those tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a way that he can use them, keeping his money liquid, and go and buy a business that works, that he knows, and then improve that business because the return on investment for that and the return on lifestyle is very, very high after the initial pain of really ironing out a business.

01:46:22.500 | I don't remember the numbers, but I consulted with a man recently who had done this. I forget the business. I think it was plumbing. He had come in. He had purchased somebody's plumbing company. The guy was retiring. And I don't remember any of the numbers of what he paid for it.

01:46:35.500 | But he had been doing it for one year, and he had invested. He had poured himself into this. They had had to upgrade, but he had modernized the entire business. He had upgraded the trucks. He had gotten the guy's computers, iPads, and things to use in the trucks.

01:46:53.500 | Everything was standardized. He had poured himself into the marketing. Everything was working. And he called me up for a consulting appointment, and basically the story that he shared was, "I don't know if I should get out of this business or not. It's been a really stressful year. Maybe I made the worst mistake of my life."

01:47:10.500 | But we actually dig into the numbers, and at the end of the day, he's making huge amounts of money, and he's way more money. There was no possibility of anything else that he could do that could ever make as much money as he's making now, and all he had done was just finish his first year of really difficult work.

01:47:25.500 | And he is on a five-year plan. I think he was trying to grow it to five million in revenue and then sell it, and it was a reasonable goal. And there's nothing else. There's no other pathway that you can start with a very small number and in five years, sell something for multiple millions of dollars other than taking a business and growing it until you acquire and make it an acquisition target.

01:47:49.500 | And this has always been—yeah, I don't need to go on and on. It's always been attractive to me. When I first met a man—he was on the podcast. I interviewed him on the podcast, but he was—I think he's passed away now, but I interviewed him years ago, and he was a turnaround specialist. That was how he built his entire career.

01:48:09.500 | And I met him on Palm Beach, and he had had a big job, but then he had become a turnaround specialist. What he would do is he would come in. He would get together. He had deep pockets himself, and he got other people that worked with him, and they would come in, and they would buy companies, and he would be CEO of this company for a time.

01:48:29.500 | And they would start chopping up the business, sell off the bad units, and then really turn around the good units. He would run the company for five or six years and turn around and sell it. And he made enormous amounts of money.

01:48:45.500 | Then he would take a couple years off, and they would wait for another target, and then they would find another company, and they would come in and do the same thing—buy the company, turn it around, make it profitable, turn around, sell it. And that always appealed to me because it's such a cool, like, seasonal approach to life.

01:49:03.500 | And yet the money for someone who knows how to do it is—it's hard to find more profitable activities because unlike doing a startup where you're trying to eke out your first hundred thousand dollars of revenue and your first million dollars of revenue, you're coming into something that is already going.

01:49:19.500 | And if you make a 5% increase in profitability, that may be an increase in value of millions of dollars when you turn around to sell the company. And it is a very powerful model. Guys, your neighbors are doing it in their blue-collar businesses. They're doing it on Wall Street. It's just not the model that the average person is taught about.

01:49:42.500 | Yeah, I'm curious if I can kind of slowly prepare for that with, you know, even allow the rental houses to build equity to where they can become liquid if you sell them to go fund something like that to kind of build up the capital for that at the right time.

01:49:59.500 | Yeah, that does sound really interesting. Do you remember offhand what size those businesses were that that turnaround guy was working in?

01:50:08.500 | I couldn't say at the moment. And I'm trying to protect those details anyway. So it was just an inspiring—even though he's passed away. I think he's passed away for years. But even so, I don't have enough of the details to be confident in them at the moment.

01:50:27.500 | No, that's neat. Okay, cool. Hey, I appreciate your time. I'll mull it over and maybe calling back to talk more about entrepreneurship, whether it's side hustles or through acquisition or whatever. So I appreciate you and have a great weekend.

01:50:45.500 | My pleasure. You as well. And with that, we close down today's podcast. Thank you guys so much for listening. As always, I love doing these Friday Q&A shows. You're welcome to call in and join me any week. We'll be able to interact.

01:50:59.500 | If you'd like to do that, go to patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. Sign up to support the show there, and I will be back with you very soon.

01:51:17.500 | Join us today during the Jeep celebration event, where right now, well-qualified LeCie's get an ultra-low mileage lease on the 2024 Jeep Wrangler Sport S4 by E for $329 a month for 36 months with $3,960 due at signing.

01:51:28.500 | Tax, title, license extra. No security deposit required. Call 188-8-925-JEAP for details. Requires dealer contribution and lease through Stellantis Financial. Extra charge for miles over $15,000. Include $7,500 EV cap cost reduction. Not all customers will qualify. Residency restrictions apply. Take retail delivery by 4/1. Jeep is a registered trademark.

01:51:46.500 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

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