2024-07-24_Get_as_Much_of_the_Highest_Quality_Education_As_You_Can
00:00:00.000 | You've always known just how smart she is.
00:00:04.840 | From her early aptitude for science to her first big discovery.
00:00:09.600 | And now that graduation is right around the corner, she can continue to excel.
00:00:14.120 | America's Navy offers her the chance to get hands-on training and experience for the career
00:00:17.920 | she was born for.
00:00:19.560 | From fluid design to cyber intelligence and comms networks or civil engineering, it's
00:00:23.320 | the smart way to get ahead.
00:00:25.520 | Learn more at Navy.com, America's Navy, forged by the sea.
00:00:30.220 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:33.160 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:37.000 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:39.480 | My name is Josh Rasheeds.
00:00:40.480 | I'm your host.
00:00:41.480 | Today we continue our financial goals that everybody should set series with goal five,
00:00:47.520 | which is simply this, set a goal to get as much of the highest quality education that
00:00:54.920 | you possibly can as soon as you can.
00:01:00.360 | Set a goal to get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as
00:01:05.860 | you can.
00:01:06.860 | I'm going to expand this concept very carefully in today's podcast, explain to you why it
00:01:11.160 | is so foundational.
00:01:12.700 | But a quick review of this series so far, goal one, I encourage you to get a job because
00:01:18.240 | once you have a job, you have income.
00:01:21.120 | And as soon as you have income, you start to be able to make important decisions.
00:01:25.140 | Number two, I encourage you to spend half your income and save half your income.
00:01:29.960 | The goal being to accumulate investment capital, extra money that you can use for even things
00:01:35.520 | like we're going to talk about today.
00:01:37.400 | Goal three, I encourage you to give away 10% of your income, to do it systematically in
00:01:42.060 | order to strengthen your giving muscles, to increase your own happiness and self-confidence
00:01:46.560 | in life by recognizing that indeed you are quite well off, and to prepare you to make
00:01:51.800 | a difference in the world by helping you to hone in on the things that are most important
00:01:56.000 | to you where you want to make the biggest difference.
00:01:58.960 | Then goal four was I encourage you to begin a job or a career that has the long-term potential
00:02:04.560 | to get you to be a top 20% income earner.
00:02:09.280 | Encourage you not just to take some random job, at the beginning, first one was, okay,
00:02:14.400 | take a random job, that's fine.
00:02:16.000 | But then I want you to think about where your job might lead.
00:02:19.800 | If you don't see the potential for your current job or your current career track to take you
00:02:24.960 | to be a top 20% income earner, then I want you to reconsider that career track and try
00:02:29.940 | to find a job or a career track where that is a reasonable possibility in the fullness
00:02:35.280 | of time.
00:02:36.280 | Now today, goal five, get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as
00:02:40.440 | soon as you can is probably going to be your pathway to accomplishing goal four.
00:02:46.780 | Even if it's not directly related, this goal still needs to stand strong.
00:02:52.720 | There are a couple of reasons that education is the foundational thing that we look at
00:02:59.000 | in order to think about long-term financial impact.
00:03:02.520 | The first reason is that education allows you to move into fields that have a much bigger
00:03:09.480 | long-term opportunity than those without.
00:03:13.360 | Think back to earlier in the series where I talked about the basic value of human labor
00:03:19.280 | and I talked about how when you're beginning, if you're not highly educated, you don't have
00:03:23.000 | any particular skills, basically what you're selling is your physical ability.
00:03:28.840 | I use the example of digging a ditch.
00:03:31.560 | All around the world, we don't see this much in the United States anymore, but all around
00:03:34.960 | the world, I run into people who are quite literally just selling their physical daily
00:03:40.080 | labor.
00:03:41.080 | You'll run across an old man or an old woman that's passing down the street with a broom
00:03:45.240 | in his hand, picking up garbage, sweeping the streets, things like that.
00:03:49.640 | These are the most poorly paid jobs in the world and without education, there's not really
00:03:54.240 | much of an ability to advance from them.
00:03:57.040 | These jobs are useful.
00:03:58.740 | They should be treated with honor.
00:04:00.360 | We should honor those who do them because they're doing something that we need done
00:04:05.000 | and that may be the limit of this person's capability or the limit of this person's ambition.
00:04:09.880 | We want to honor the work itself.
00:04:12.860 | There's nothing dishonorable about it because it's honest labor that contributes to the
00:04:16.320 | good of society, but it's very hard to build a long-term financial plan on that.
00:04:22.000 | Again, there's no shame in these.
00:04:24.300 | Most of us start with this.
00:04:25.400 | I remember one of the earliest jobs that I had that was similar to this was when I was
00:04:29.480 | in middle school.
00:04:30.480 | I worked for a friend of mine who was a tile contractor and I worked as a helper on a tile
00:04:36.240 | job.
00:04:37.240 | And this job is working as a helper laying tile is basically the same thing as is just
00:04:44.440 | simply selling your basic labor.
00:04:46.480 | You don't start with anything skilled.
00:04:47.900 | You're not actually laying tile.
00:04:49.720 | All you're doing is using your physical strength.
00:04:52.780 | And so I remember day one of that job, I was put to work with a chipping hammer, chipping
00:04:56.320 | up a floor, lobby of a big condo building that we were retiling.
00:05:00.560 | And so basically all you need to do is hold the chipping hammer and use it to chip up
00:05:04.640 | the floor, swing the sledgehammer to chip up the floor and it's basic labor.
00:05:08.820 | Then from there, you move on to something where you get a little – well, the next
00:05:12.960 | one is usually you do carrying jobs.
00:05:15.100 | So I carried many boxes of tile from by the street where the truck dropped them off to
00:05:19.440 | the job site and positioned them in the bathroom.
00:05:22.100 | Carried many buckets of thinset and mud depending on whether we're laying tile or marble.
00:05:28.280 | Carried many buckets of those kinds of things, just basic raw labor.
00:05:32.720 | And it's again work, it's useful.
00:05:35.800 | I'm glad I had the job.
00:05:36.800 | I learned a lot from it.
00:05:37.800 | But there's no opportunity for it until you start being educated.
00:05:42.160 | So education begins with something like here's how you mix up a bucket of thinset.
00:05:47.100 | And if you're a helper, then somebody gives you a lesson.
00:05:49.440 | Here's the basic dry ingredients.
00:05:50.980 | Here's how much water you have.
00:05:52.520 | Here's the mixer.
00:05:53.520 | Mix it up and carry buckets of thinset or buckets of mud to the tile setter who's actually
00:05:57.080 | laying the tile.
00:05:58.320 | So now you start to have a little bit of skill.
00:06:00.440 | And skill grows over time and by the end of the summer, I was grouting floors.
00:06:05.520 | I was doing some polishing work and refinishing work, various things where you start to build
00:06:10.000 | a little bit of skill.
00:06:11.680 | But in order to build skill, you have to get educated.
00:06:15.760 | You have to be taught how to do that.
00:06:18.040 | Now my advancement over the course of that summer job was very slow and all of the education
00:06:23.160 | was informal.
00:06:24.160 | It was all based upon the instructions, just the daily instructions from the tile mechanic
00:06:31.720 | whose helper I was.
00:06:33.400 | And you could advance in that regularly little by little.
00:06:36.800 | But now I want you to imagine that I actually engaged in some process of education.
00:06:42.480 | I myself was not smart enough to do this at the time.
00:06:45.260 | But imagine that I had gone to the library and checked out a couple of books on laying
00:06:50.200 | tile.
00:06:51.280 | Imagine that in today's world, I had gone to YouTube and I had found some various tutorials
00:06:55.960 | on YouTube and I had started to take some lessons and some classes on different aspects
00:07:01.100 | of tile setting.
00:07:02.760 | And then imagine at some point my boss gave me a chance to do something that was a little
00:07:06.080 | bit complicated and I did it well because of the education that I had taken, the knowledge
00:07:11.200 | that I had learned.
00:07:12.200 | And as soon as I had an opportunity to practice those skills, I practiced those skills, then
00:07:16.140 | now I could make much faster progress in my career.
00:07:20.240 | So this is a very simple example of the importance of education.
00:07:24.240 | If you will go and become educated in the thing that you're doing and you'll get as
00:07:28.240 | much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can, you will
00:07:33.640 | get much faster financial results.
00:07:37.060 | Imagine if I weren't simply a middle schooler with a random summer job, but instead I were
00:07:43.260 | say a young guy who had just graduated from high school.
00:07:46.320 | And I had actually gone and instead of just signing up as a helper, I had gone and taken
00:07:50.760 | some classes from some kind of tile setting institute or coursework.
00:07:54.980 | And I had practiced and I was trained in some way in order to be an effective tile setter.
00:08:00.540 | Well now I would have gone into the career world and I would have been able to be hired
00:08:04.280 | as some form of actual tile mechanic rather than just a random helper who had to work
00:08:08.660 | his way up slowly.
00:08:10.260 | And that jump in pay from being educated as a craftsman would have made a big difference
00:08:15.960 | to my financial results as say a 20-year-old, assuming I started at 18, instead of just
00:08:20.820 | simply starting as a helper and working my way up.
00:08:23.220 | I would be years ahead of the 18-year-old who just started off as a basic helper if
00:08:28.940 | I had actually gone through some courses.
00:08:30.940 | Incidentally, I think in the United States, this is something that we don't generally
00:08:33.920 | do well in training people systematically with coursework for the skilled trades.
00:08:39.180 | I'm a great admirer of the European system in Switzerland and Germany and other nations
00:08:44.340 | where being a craftsman or a builder is actually a skilled trade.
00:08:48.880 | And there are many high quality schools that go through and systematically teach the skills
00:08:54.100 | to young apprentices so that they can enter into their field at an earlier age with actual
00:09:00.620 | skills that have been proven in a classroom environment.
00:09:03.340 | We'd like to see more of that happen in the United States because the informal method
00:09:06.780 | of instruction where you're just relying on your boss to teach you something and show
00:09:11.140 | you something suffers from a whole host of problems in terms of an actual method.
00:09:16.360 | It can work.
00:09:17.360 | It certainly has worked throughout history, but in order for it to work well, you need
00:09:20.820 | a very educationally focused master, meaning a leader, the mechanic, the person that you're
00:09:27.540 | working under, and that person needs to have the skills and the ability to actually train
00:09:32.180 | you.
00:09:33.180 | And there aren't many, I didn't ever experience that there were all that many people who are
00:09:37.100 | very good at training.
00:09:38.840 | There were some and when you find those people as a young guy and somebody who's actually
00:09:42.900 | willing to take the time and explain to you what's happening, it's incredibly rewarding.
00:09:46.940 | But having to pick everything up the hard way doesn't really, really work.
00:09:50.880 | So I use this as a practical example just to say that if you get as much of the highest
00:09:55.460 | quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can, you will be able to make
00:09:59.840 | faster progress in a career.
00:10:01.920 | You can get hired at a higher initial rate.
00:10:05.140 | Because of your higher levels of education, you'll probably make faster progress and be
00:10:09.700 | more productive than many other people, which allows your financial income to grow faster.
00:10:15.340 | And all of this, especially if you're saving half your income, all of this will compound
00:10:20.180 | more and more with the fullness of time.
00:10:23.160 | Getting more education also puts you into a different direction in terms of potential
00:10:28.700 | careers.
00:10:29.920 | The person who has the most education is usually going to be being steered relatively automatically
00:10:39.120 | towards the highest income careers because of the cost of getting that education.
00:10:44.580 | As we think about various professions and you go down just industry level professions
00:10:49.860 | and you rank them based upon their current earnings, the standard earnings for that profession,
00:10:56.620 | they rank pretty neatly in terms of the actual amount of education needed as compared to
00:11:04.340 | the average income of the participants in that career field.
00:11:09.620 | The more education required or the more schooling required in order to function in this career,
00:11:16.540 | the higher the long-term earning potential.
00:11:20.500 | And if you look at the total lifetime earnings of various careers, you can see that the payoff
00:11:26.260 | of investing in education is extremely high.
00:11:31.180 | Education puts you on the fast track in everything.
00:11:35.260 | And the most highly educated person in a job or in a career or in a career area is going
00:11:43.900 | to have the basic tools and equipment to go the fastest towards the long-term goal, towards
00:11:50.360 | long-term success.
00:11:51.980 | Now you notice about 40 seconds ago I stuck in a word that I hadn't used until the about
00:11:56.900 | 11 minute mark of this podcast.
00:11:59.020 | I inserted the word schooling alongside the word education.
00:12:04.900 | I want you to note that the word education has a different connotation for you than the
00:12:10.460 | word schooling.
00:12:12.540 | You should not necessarily conflate education with schooling.
00:12:19.260 | School is normally an extremely valuable source of education, but it is certainly not the
00:12:26.380 | only source of education, and it is not the only source of education that matters.
00:12:32.220 | So these words are not synonymous.
00:12:35.300 | When I refer to education, I am referring to learning, to your gaining knowledge, to
00:12:41.940 | your building skills, to your enhancing your abilities through active, focused learning.
00:12:49.740 | Generally speaking, I like the idea that education is something that you must get for yourself.
00:12:55.940 | It's something that you must do for yourself, that education basically should be thought
00:13:01.740 | of always as self-education.
00:13:04.460 | The only real education is self-education.
00:13:07.860 | That's not necessarily the same thing for school.
00:13:10.700 | You can go through school and you can be poorly educated because you chose not to learn anything.
00:13:17.540 | Alternatively, you can go through school and you can become highly educated because you
00:13:22.940 | were determined to educate yourself through school.
00:13:27.020 | Schooling can be forced, education can't be forced.
00:13:30.620 | So in the context of this podcast, I'm referring to education from any source, but that doesn't
00:13:37.900 | indicate that you should be opposed to schooling.
00:13:42.140 | On the contrary, the standard option that you should choose is as much schooling as
00:13:48.820 | quickly as you can of the highest qualities.
00:13:51.500 | Let me restate the basic thesis of this show and let's see if this holds true.
00:13:56.900 | Your goal should be to get as much of the highest quality schooling as you possibly
00:14:02.220 | can as soon as you can.
00:14:05.180 | Is that true?
00:14:06.860 | I don't think it's as true as it is when I stated it in the term of education, but I
00:14:11.900 | think it is generally true because schooling is mostly the most direct pathway to education.
00:14:20.620 | It allows you to learn very efficiently because for most fields, most jobs, the person who
00:14:30.820 | teaches you your school classes is a person who has been carefully focused on how to teach
00:14:38.500 | those the most effectively.
00:14:41.500 | The difficulty here comes from the fact that the one type of schooling that we all have
00:14:47.260 | some experience in to some degree or some knowledge of is usually government K-12 compulsory
00:14:54.540 | schooling.
00:14:55.900 | That statement that I said probably doesn't hold true for all of our schooling experiences.
00:15:01.340 | Most of us have had some really great teachers who put enormous amounts of thought into helping
00:15:06.500 | their students to learn as much as possible, inspired learning.
00:15:10.020 | Most of us have also had some pretty subpar teachers who really didn't accomplish those
00:15:13.940 | goals and that's probably inevitable in that kind of schooling.
00:15:17.500 | Once you get out of K-12 though, depending on the school that you go to, things can change
00:15:22.660 | very differently.
00:15:23.660 | I remember one school experience that I had was when I went through my insurance school,
00:15:29.700 | when I first got a life health and annuity insurance license in the state of Florida.
00:15:35.100 | It's a 40-hour school requirement in order to get your basic license and the teacher
00:15:41.980 | who taught that class was a wizard at teaching.
00:15:45.780 | He was so good.
00:15:47.500 | He had taught the class for years.
00:15:48.980 | He had had a long career as a life insurance agent.
00:15:51.300 | He'd retired from that and he'd taught this class for years.
00:15:54.700 | His entire 40-hour class was perfectly scripted to hit every time mark.
00:16:02.260 | He had carefully crafted his message to teach important lessons from the industry, to teach
00:16:10.020 | important tools and sets of knowledge as well as to pass the exam.
00:16:15.260 | And when I finished his school, his 40 hours worth of class, his 40-hour school, I felt
00:16:20.060 | like it was one of the most productive experiences of my life.
00:16:23.340 | I came away from that school basically saying, "Every adult should take a 40-hour life health
00:16:27.940 | and annuity class.
00:16:28.940 | This is amazing levels of education.
00:16:30.680 | This is wonderful."
00:16:32.180 | And it was vastly more efficient for me to go through his class than for me to go out
00:16:36.860 | and try to put together a big stack of books.
00:16:39.340 | I've routinely found this to be a differentiator.
00:16:41.820 | If you talk to just simply an average life insurance agent versus an average personal
00:16:47.220 | finance enthusiast, I think that the average life insurance agent, by virtue of having
00:16:53.220 | gone through the basics of an insurance school, has a better broad-based understanding of
00:17:01.620 | the world of financial products and rules and laws and things like that than does the
00:17:07.020 | average personal finance enthusiast.
00:17:09.580 | That's not to say that the finance enthusiast may not also have areas of strong specialization.
00:17:15.740 | But usually what happens when you're purely self-educated is that you tend to gravitate,
00:17:21.380 | you tend to orient your education towards the things that interest you the most, and
00:17:25.860 | you tend to neglect the things that don't interest you, which means that you often have
00:17:30.580 | holes in your knowledge base that you wouldn't have if you went through some form of mandatory
00:17:37.140 | course of instruction.
00:17:39.140 | And having exposure to that allows you to ask better questions.
00:17:44.140 | And so the ideal thing is to bring these two things together, is to have the exposure to
00:17:52.700 | what is taught in a school of some kind, where you're basically forced to learn everything,
00:17:58.380 | and then supplement that with your own real focus on the things that interest you the
00:18:02.700 | most.
00:18:03.700 | Similarly, and just you staying in the life insurance space, I went through various schools
00:18:07.860 | for preparing for a certified financial planner exam.
00:18:10.980 | I went through schools for preparing to take all the various securities exams for securities
00:18:15.940 | licenses.
00:18:17.140 | And time and again, I found those schools to be enormously productive experiences, to
00:18:22.420 | be extremely valuable.
00:18:23.940 | And every time I went through one, I came away really impressed with the experience.
00:18:28.900 | Every industry and every career has some version of these schools.
00:18:33.140 | And because when you sit down to teach a class, you generally automatically make a comprehensive
00:18:38.940 | – the person who does it usually knows the field very well and sits down to try to say,
00:18:44.100 | "I need to make this class serve everybody with all of the mandatory minimum levels of
00:18:49.460 | knowledge that this person needs."
00:18:50.940 | And the experience you have going through schools is very productive.
00:18:56.060 | Even though in today's world, we love to dump on the value of a college education,
00:19:00.220 | I think this basic principle still holds.
00:19:02.420 | I think it still holds even for a standard high school model.
00:19:06.100 | As my children are headed towards high school, I've been spending a lot of time looking
00:19:09.620 | at my state's various requirements of what they need to know, what they need to study.
00:19:15.100 | And at its core, when you look at it, you say, "This is a pretty good base level of
00:19:19.820 | knowledge that most people would be well-served if they knew this."
00:19:24.040 | Same thing with college.
00:19:25.040 | If you have a college degree in a certain subject, the degree-granting institution is
00:19:29.180 | going to make sure that you have gone through and learned all the different fields that
00:19:34.060 | are necessary.
00:19:35.420 | And that is one of the reasons why this traditional school model that we all live in still has
00:19:40.340 | significant levels of value.
00:19:43.060 | And so I think it is fair to say that you should get as much of the highest quality
00:19:47.500 | schooling as you possibly can as soon as you can.
00:19:50.900 | I don't bristle against that statement.
00:19:53.820 | Very specifically, let's note this back to the normal trend of decisions that especially
00:20:01.080 | young people make.
00:20:02.700 | Should you finish high school?
00:20:05.100 | My answer is yes.
00:20:07.260 | You need a credential of some kind to indicate finishing.
00:20:10.700 | High school is one of those funny things where we know that it's significantly important,
00:20:15.060 | but it's hard to defend all of the applications of its importance.
00:20:20.940 | When you go on from high school, the high school credential basically becomes irrelevant.
00:20:26.160 | I don't think I have ever shown anybody my high school diploma.
00:20:30.820 | I obviously must have submitted it to the college that I attended initially, but since
00:20:36.400 | then I've never seen or gotten a high school transcript or showed my high school diploma
00:20:42.460 | to anybody.
00:20:44.460 | And I think that there are many people who don't have any form of high school diploma
00:20:47.780 | that can generally go through life pretty well.
00:20:50.980 | But what happens is if you don't have some form of completion certificate for high school,
00:20:57.860 | you reach a certain point where you want to take a certain job and they say, "High school
00:21:01.100 | diploma required," and all of a sudden you can't do it.
00:21:03.980 | And yet, if you just focus on it, it's not that hard to finish it when you are younger.
00:21:09.780 | You've always known just how smart she is, from her early aptitude for science to her
00:21:16.620 | first big discovery.
00:21:18.700 | And now that graduation is right around the corner, she can continue to excel.
00:21:23.220 | America's Navy offers her the chance to get hands-on training and experience for the career
00:21:26.980 | she was born for.
00:21:28.660 | From chemistry to computer science, aviation mechanics, or ship propulsion, it's the smart
00:21:32.740 | way to get ahead.
00:21:34.580 | Learn more at Navy.com.
00:21:36.500 | America's Navy, forged by the sea.
00:21:39.540 | I can't think, other than significant disability of some kind, in which case you could still
00:21:45.060 | get a diploma of some kind, I can't think of a scenario in which I don't think a teenager
00:21:51.020 | should finish a course of study for high school.
00:21:54.020 | The course of study doesn't have to be huge and comprehensive, it doesn't have to be nothing
00:21:58.460 | but AP classes.
00:21:59.860 | It may be as simple as completing a GED.
00:22:03.140 | For the non-Americans, that's basically a, I think it's grade equivalent diploma, I don't
00:22:07.660 | remember what it stands for, but it's basically a quiz or a test for certifying that you have
00:22:13.620 | learned what is expected for an average high school student.
00:22:18.460 | So completing some kind of test can be fine.
00:22:21.420 | And so if I'm working with a student, and let's say that I'm coaching a 14-year-old
00:22:25.120 | who says, "I think high school is going to be an enormous waste of time," well, my answer
00:22:28.540 | is, "Okay, let's do your GED, pass your GED, and be done with it."
00:22:32.720 | But you need to have something that indicates your academic ability, unless you have some
00:22:37.020 | significant level of disability that needs to be dealt with.
00:22:42.220 | So you should finish high school, and we know that, in general, the average person is going
00:22:50.600 | to earn significantly more with a high school degree than without a high school degree.
00:22:55.560 | We're always tempted, and I especially have this temptation, we're always tempted to go
00:22:59.660 | to the extreme example, the brilliantly smart person who became a multi-gazillionaire without
00:23:05.020 | ever finishing high school, and say, "Well, this proves the rule."
00:23:08.320 | But in fact, it doesn't.
00:23:09.320 | I'm sorry, "This proves that the advice of finishing high school is not good."
00:23:13.120 | But in fact, it doesn't prove it in any way.
00:23:16.280 | It's the exact opposite.
00:23:17.600 | In order to succeed without a high school degree, you've got to be super, super brilliant
00:23:21.640 | and super, super competitive and have all kinds of other benefits, whereas if you just
00:23:25.540 | finish high school, you can be perfectly normal and average and do well in life.
00:23:32.040 | So you should finish a high school degree.
00:23:34.200 | Should you go to college?
00:23:35.520 | My answer is, for most people, most probably.
00:23:38.180 | If you're asking the question, then you probably should go.
00:23:41.200 | And I think that you're generally not going to regret having a college degree in the fullness
00:23:47.440 | of time.
00:23:49.000 | Even though I have regrets about how I went about it, I do not regret not—excuse me,
00:23:55.640 | I'm all twisted up—I don't regret going to college.
00:24:00.440 | There are other pathways other than college.
00:24:03.260 | But if you're the kind of person who's asking the question of, "Should I go to college?"
00:24:06.920 | the answer is probably yes, you should.
00:24:11.160 | Now that we've arrived at basically undergraduate degree, let's talk for a minute about why
00:24:15.560 | I think this is pretty obviously sound advice.
00:24:20.760 | There are options available that will fit almost any kind of person, with almost any
00:24:25.560 | kind of interest, of almost any kind of budget.
00:24:29.020 | If the only option was, "Should I go to college at this very difficult school to get into
00:24:34.360 | that's going to charge me $50,000 a year?"
00:24:36.880 | I couldn't be so casual in saying that everybody should go to college.
00:24:42.280 | But since there are many options, including very low-cost options, including much less
00:24:48.720 | difficult options, including degrees that emphasize all kinds of different skills, some
00:24:53.840 | of them emphasizing liberal arts skills, some of them emphasizing practical skills, with
00:24:58.660 | all kinds of degrees, there is something that you can find that will fit your basic skill
00:25:04.160 | and basic inclination.
00:25:06.080 | And once again, if you have a college degree, you will find that life is a lot easier for
00:25:13.720 | you.
00:25:14.720 | You'll find access to more jobs, more careers than you otherwise would find, and there are
00:25:18.640 | plenty of more options available to you, which in the fullness of time will lead to your
00:25:23.360 | earning more money and make it more straightforward for you to get that top 20% income, job or
00:25:31.320 | business or career that you want to look for.
00:25:34.720 | If I'm coaching somebody who has a college degree, I can with confidence put them on
00:25:39.680 | track to that top 20% job, top 20% of income level job.
00:25:47.140 | If I'm coaching somebody who doesn't have a college degree, I don't have the same level
00:25:51.920 | of confidence.
00:25:52.920 | I believe it's still possible, but I don't have the same level of confidence.
00:25:57.240 | So this holds true.
00:25:59.280 | You should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can.
00:26:04.200 | Now let's take that apart here for a moment and talk about highest quality.
00:26:10.920 | Highest quality is a subjective term, but a meaningful one.
00:26:15.520 | There are many careers that don't need any kind of four-year bachelor's degree.
00:26:23.160 | For example, let's say that you wanted to go and work as a paramedic.
00:26:26.480 | Well, you don't necessarily need a four-year bachelor's degree to do that, but you do need
00:26:30.680 | EMT school and you do need paramedic school.
00:26:33.720 | And so you should go and get as much of the highest quality paramedic schooling and training
00:26:39.760 | as you possibly can.
00:26:42.220 | Highest quality matters in almost any field.
00:26:45.840 | The highest quality education is usually going to be some of the more expensive options.
00:26:52.160 | The free market tends to shake out demand based upon pricing.
00:27:00.580 | So if you go out and you're looking at different schools, let's say you want to become a
00:27:03.640 | pilot and you've never flown anything, if you go out and you're looking at the cost
00:27:07.320 | for different flight schools, the highest quality flight schools are probably going
00:27:13.000 | to be those that are in the top quartile of cost.
00:27:17.920 | Maybe not the most expensive, and maybe there's one out of let's say the top 10 best flight
00:27:23.320 | schools that really is not all that great and they're just trying to puff up their cost
00:27:29.220 | as compared to the value.
00:27:30.400 | But in general, what things cost pretty much relates to the basic value of them.
00:27:35.680 | Those of us who sell services or products, we try to make a reasonable and informed decision
00:27:42.400 | of the costs to charge for things based upon their value.
00:27:46.500 | Not always, but most of the time.
00:27:49.080 | And there are usually a whole host of benefits associated with the higher cost options that
00:27:56.840 | might not be visible to you till the backside.
00:28:00.180 | So for example, people who go to a prestigious school in a particular field probably have
00:28:07.680 | an easier time getting hired and getting a job afterwards.
00:28:11.100 | It's not that the other guy can't get hired, that he can't get a job, it's just that he
00:28:15.400 | probably has a harder time if he doesn't go to a prestigious school.
00:28:20.760 | All of the other benefits, the kinds of people that you're involved with, these basically
00:28:25.520 | align with overall cost.
00:28:28.880 | So in general, you should get the highest quality schooling and education that you can
00:28:33.080 | afford based upon the amount of money that you have saved.
00:28:36.160 | And this is why I encourage you to restrict your spending to, say, 50% of your income,
00:28:41.440 | to free up money for yourself so that you can get onto the fast track.
00:28:45.160 | You should focus on getting the schooling and it's better to go to a bad school that
00:28:50.220 | you can afford than an expensive school that you don't have the money for, sure.
00:28:54.480 | But by being conservative with your spending, that should free up the money for you to go
00:28:58.800 | to the highest quality institution that you can find that's going to serve the particular
00:29:02.740 | career that you are targeting or that you are interested in.
00:29:07.560 | So the general default answer for questions like, "Should I go to college?" or "Should
00:29:13.520 | I go to the school or just start in the business?"
00:29:15.800 | Generally speaking, the answer from a financial perspective is, yes, you should go.
00:29:20.460 | If you're capable of going, if you're capable of getting in, and if you're capable of finishing,
00:29:24.200 | you probably should go.
00:29:26.280 | I acknowledge that many people are not capable of going.
00:29:28.920 | They're not capable of getting in and not capable of finishing.
00:29:31.560 | And so I'm intentionally trying to be very subjective here.
00:29:35.760 | Notice I said you should get as much education, get as much of the highest quality education
00:29:41.680 | that you possibly can.
00:29:44.460 | The you is important.
00:29:45.840 | Your skills and your abilities will be different than mine and different from every other person.
00:29:49.840 | But you should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as
00:29:55.500 | soon as you can.
00:29:56.500 | So you should go to college.
00:29:57.900 | You should go to the best college that you have access to and that fits your overall
00:30:02.160 | ambitions and long-term plans.
00:30:05.000 | You're not going to be a failure if you don't go to an Ivy League university.
00:30:09.580 | But if you do go to an Ivy League university, you probably aren't going to regret the credentials
00:30:15.280 | that you are granted at the end of your time there.
00:30:19.840 | And so if you want something other than what an Ivy League university can offer you, pursue
00:30:25.120 | that.
00:30:26.120 | But the Ivy League university pathway still offers enormous benefits.
00:30:31.120 | So if you can work it out, you should go to the best quality school that you can.
00:30:36.320 | Now long-time listeners of Radical Personal Finance would probably be expecting me to
00:30:41.120 | start inserting more caveats and more disclaimers and more justification and things like that
00:30:47.800 | here because that's my general inclination.
00:30:50.720 | My general inclination is to go into things like, well, you should calculate the value
00:30:56.200 | of the cost of the degree and how much money you have and all of that stuff.
00:31:00.800 | But I've decided not to put that in here and it's for one basic reason.
00:31:06.320 | I've realized that it's enormously valuable to simply set the goal and then let people
00:31:15.640 | figure out how to do it.
00:31:18.720 | And I didn't say that everybody should go to an Ivy League university as my goal.
00:31:24.200 | I did say get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as
00:31:28.920 | you can.
00:31:30.200 | And my reason for doing that is simply that you will establish the actual meaning of that
00:31:37.200 | based upon what is accessible to you.
00:31:40.680 | And whatever you consider to be the highest level of education, I'm using Ivy League
00:31:45.000 | university as a kind of a stand-in for something that has a lot of cultural panache and cachet.
00:31:52.040 | But if you set the goal of going to an Ivy League university, you're probably capable
00:32:00.240 | of going there and you're probably also perfectly capable of going there and paying for it,
00:32:05.520 | having it paid for without ever borrowing money, without ever doing anything.
00:32:09.040 | And you're probably also perfectly capable of going there and choosing a degree that
00:32:13.160 | that Ivy League university is really valuable in rather than a degree that it's not valuable
00:32:18.760 | in.
00:32:19.760 | And you're probably perfectly capable of going there and maintaining your soul in the process
00:32:23.640 | and really being a valuable part of your life.
00:32:28.480 | So sometimes I've realized that I spend so much time caveating everything that it can
00:32:34.980 | discourage somebody who's capable of going there.
00:32:38.120 | This leads me conveniently enough to the next thing that I want to move to, which is partly
00:32:44.000 | by considering higher levels of degrees.
00:32:46.800 | So I talked about should you finish high school, go to college, go to a fancy college.
00:32:51.480 | Question now is should you go to things like graduate school?
00:32:55.800 | My answer is yes.
00:32:58.120 | You should get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as soon as
00:33:03.640 | you can.
00:33:04.640 | And that includes, if you're in the standard academic world, graduate school, master's
00:33:10.240 | degrees, PhDs, postdoctoral work.
00:33:12.720 | If that includes some other field that you're in, it means advanced specialty schools, advanced
00:33:16.680 | training institutes, whatever is appropriate to your career and interest.
00:33:21.360 | You should go as far as you can as fast as you can.
00:33:25.200 | Why?
00:33:26.280 | Why do I say this with confidence now?
00:33:29.360 | The reason is you don't have to do one or the other.
00:33:34.080 | When I think back on all of the arguments that people made to me, I was discouraged
00:33:38.520 | by some people.
00:33:39.520 | I can't remember who, but generally I was discouraged from going and getting a master's
00:33:42.960 | degree, from going and doing PhD work.
00:33:45.720 | I heard things from people who said things like, for example, that, "You know what?
00:33:50.880 | If you're going to go to get a master's degree, you should probably have a few years of work
00:33:56.640 | experience."
00:33:57.640 | Okay, that could be perfectly true.
00:34:00.480 | I'm not denying that work experience can be useful, but the goal still should be get as
00:34:05.520 | much work experience as is useful and then go and get the graduate degree.
00:34:09.960 | Similarly, I am a proponent of things like gap years for graduating high school students.
00:34:16.140 | All of the research that I have seen on the concept of a gap year indicates that a gap
00:34:21.000 | year is a really good and healthy thing for young people to have, that for the college-bound,
00:34:26.480 | for those who go to college after the gap year, they outperform the non-gap year students
00:34:34.100 | on basically every metric.
00:34:37.240 | I don't know how many students go on gap year who choose not to go to college, nor do I
00:34:43.320 | particularly worry about it, because if that's what they learned by going to gap year, they
00:34:47.040 | probably found that that was a better choice for them.
00:34:49.840 | Inserting a little bit of time, a year or so, to think about something else, pursue
00:34:53.380 | something else, is probably a healthy thing.
00:34:56.480 | What happens is that when you go as far as you can, as fast as you can, you are probably
00:35:02.240 | trading out consumption for achievement.
00:35:06.120 | What I've discovered whenever I have made my life easier is that usually I just started
00:35:12.160 | to consume rather than to produce more.
00:35:15.000 | One of the biggest financial mistakes I made when I was younger, as an example, I was a
00:35:18.680 | young financial advisor and everyone says, "You need to hire staff.
00:35:22.640 | You need to hire someone to work with you, work for you so that you do less administrative
00:35:26.280 | work so that you can earn a higher hourly rate."
00:35:28.680 | I think that is true.
00:35:30.200 | And so I did that.
00:35:31.200 | I hired staff.
00:35:32.480 | Problem is, I didn't go and do more of the high return work.
00:35:37.280 | On the contrary, I just went and spent more time hanging out and doing nothing.
00:35:41.320 | And so the staff didn't wind up increasing my productivity, it wound up decreasing it.
00:35:46.280 | Did it have to be that way?
00:35:47.720 | No, it absolutely did not have to be that way.
00:35:50.680 | It was my mistake.
00:35:52.040 | I paid for it dearly and I regret it to this day.
00:35:55.560 | But I think it is that way for many people.
00:35:59.160 | So let's say that you're young and you're thinking about, "Should I go to graduate school
00:36:03.780 | or not?"
00:36:04.780 | Well, if you don't go to graduate school, there's a good chance that you're not going
00:36:08.880 | to fill in all of that extra time with this rigorous self-education program.
00:36:15.620 | Maybe you will, right?
00:36:17.020 | And if you will, then you're satisfying what I've done.
00:36:19.560 | Maybe you'll be the guy who does the DIY master's degree in computer science and takes all the
00:36:24.400 | MIT courses and publicly blogs your way through them and posts all your projects on the internet.
00:36:29.280 | That'd be amazing if you did it and I'd be a big supporter of you.
00:36:32.840 | But there's a good chance you're probably not going to do it.
00:36:35.800 | So there's a good chance that going and signing up for the master's degree in computer science
00:36:40.480 | is probably the right move.
00:36:42.880 | Because what will happen is, instead of you just sitting around and playing video games
00:36:46.080 | all day, "Well, now I've signed up and I've got to go ahead and finish this thing."
00:36:50.320 | And then you probably might as well go ahead and sign up for the PhD program or the advanced
00:36:54.440 | certification program or whatever it is for your industry because you're just going to
00:36:58.360 | be trading out consumption time for achievement time.
00:37:02.400 | And if you've maxed out all of those things, and let's say you're 30 years old and you've
00:37:07.760 | gotten all that done, I don't think you're ever going to regret that.
00:37:13.640 | There are clearly some people, I guess, who do, but in general, going as far as you can,
00:37:18.080 | as fast as you can, as early as you can in the fullness of time makes a lot of sense.
00:37:24.800 | Just from my own personal experience, I have something like, I don't know, seven or eight
00:37:28.240 | different financial certifications and designations, certified financial planner and charter life
00:37:33.760 | underwriter and a bunch of other stuff like that.
00:37:36.060 | At the time, I thought I was working really hard to do that stuff.
00:37:40.040 | There would be times many mornings I would get up and I was newly married, I would get
00:37:44.280 | up and I'd go to leave my wife at home in bed and I'd get up and go to Denny's at four
00:37:48.960 | o'clock in the morning and study for a couple of hours in the morning.
00:37:52.240 | That was what I found out worked for me and then go home, have breakfast and then go to
00:37:55.480 | work.
00:37:56.480 | I thought, "Man, I'm working really hard.
00:37:58.160 | Maybe I'm working too hard."
00:37:59.160 | Today, I look back on the stuff and I laugh.
00:38:01.560 | I laugh at how easy it was.
00:38:03.640 | And all I did was just swap out some wasted time for doing more academics.
00:38:08.840 | And I'm glad I did it.
00:38:09.840 | I wish I'd done more.
00:38:10.840 | I wish I had pushed myself farther.
00:38:13.400 | I wish I had done more.
00:38:14.640 | Today, I wish very much that I had a PhD.
00:38:17.440 | And I could have done it, I just never set the goal, no one ever really encouraged me
00:38:21.520 | to do it.
00:38:22.520 | So don't worry, I'm not complaining or whining, I can still go and do it.
00:38:26.120 | But it is more difficult to do at certain points in time.
00:38:30.400 | And in hindsight, if I had gone ahead and just signed up for it, there would have been
00:38:34.800 | a modest cost.
00:38:36.200 | I would have had to work at it, but it would put me in a very different place today that
00:38:39.920 | I regret.
00:38:40.920 | I was offered a fellowship program.
00:38:43.120 | When I first started radical personal finance, actually, I had just finished my master's
00:38:47.520 | degree in financial planning at the American College.
00:38:51.640 | And one of the professors there, when I was there doing my capstone work, pulled me aside
00:38:54.680 | and said, "You should do our fellowship."
00:38:56.640 | And because I didn't have this automatic idea that I'm now trying to convey to you of get
00:39:02.320 | as much of the highest quality education as you possibly can as soon as you can, I just
00:39:06.200 | said, "No, no, I'm going to go work on my business.
00:39:09.280 | After all, I'm starting this new business, I'm going to go work on my business."
00:39:12.320 | But this was a false choice.
00:39:14.080 | I have the capacity where I could have done both and I don't think I would have been any
00:39:18.560 | less effective at either one of them by doing both.
00:39:22.840 | Maybe I would have, right?
00:39:24.040 | Who knows?
00:39:25.040 | We can't ever know what would have happened.
00:39:26.520 | We're not God, we don't have middle knowledge.
00:39:28.720 | But I think I could have.
00:39:32.440 | And so for basically all people, you should get as much of the highest quality education
00:39:38.920 | as you possibly can as soon as you can.
00:39:41.420 | You should go as fast as you can.
00:39:43.640 | And if at some point in time you realize, "You know what?
00:39:45.840 | I've gone farther than I should," you can stop.
00:39:49.920 | If you start a PhD program and you decide, "No, this is really hurting me," you can stop.
00:39:54.640 | You can stop for a year or two and then come back or you can just stop.
00:39:57.460 | And you'll know that that was where I should have stopped.
00:40:00.160 | Let's say you are a pilot and you get your private pilot's license and you think, "Well,
00:40:04.800 | should I really get multi-engine?"
00:40:08.280 | The answer is yes, you should.
00:40:10.440 | And if you get multi-engine and you get into it and you decide, "I don't want this," then
00:40:13.840 | stop.
00:40:14.840 | But in general, you should get multi-engine.
00:40:15.840 | And then you say, "Should I go to commercial?"
00:40:17.240 | Yes, you should.
00:40:18.240 | "Should I get my flight instructor?"
00:40:19.760 | Yes, you should.
00:40:20.760 | You should go.
00:40:21.840 | Because what will happen is as you press down that path as quickly as possible, generally
00:40:26.120 | speaking the money that you're spending on the schooling is probably money that you would
00:40:31.080 | have just wasted otherwise.
00:40:33.360 | The time that you're spending on the schooling is probably time that you would have just
00:40:36.800 | wasted otherwise.
00:40:38.760 | And you're probably not going to regret getting as much of that as you can, as much as you
00:40:43.640 | have access to.
00:40:45.360 | And when you do all that stuff when you're really young and you really go, go, go, go,
00:40:50.320 | go, it hugely transforms the rest of your life.
00:40:54.120 | It hugely transforms it.
00:40:56.960 | And education has a huge compounding effect over time.
00:41:03.640 | It's enormously valuable.
00:41:05.720 | Now I began with education.
00:41:07.200 | I kind of moved to schooling.
00:41:09.640 | Now let me move back from schooling.
00:41:12.160 | I repeat, I think these statements are true.
00:41:15.240 | Your goal should be to get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly
00:41:19.440 | can as soon as you can.
00:41:21.620 | Your goal should also be to get as much of the highest quality schooling as you possibly
00:41:25.680 | can as soon as you can.
00:41:29.060 | But you should also, even when finished with schooling, you should get as much of the highest
00:41:33.380 | quality education that you possibly can as soon as you can.
00:41:38.360 | So you should always look for opportunities to become more well-educated.
00:41:42.820 | And this here is where we just simply apply all of the basic fundamentals of self-education,
00:41:48.700 | being widely read, being widely lectured to, whether that's through podcasts or videos
00:41:54.920 | or online classes that you take, being widely experienced by going to conferences, meeting
00:42:01.200 | people.
00:42:02.200 | All of those things pay off.
00:42:03.920 | And you should continually do as much of that as you can.
00:42:07.720 | And you won't regret it.
00:42:09.320 | Follow your interests and go down the pathways.
00:42:12.680 | And in time, it'll pay off.
00:42:14.600 | I appreciate the many nice compliments that many people pay about the things that I know
00:42:19.660 | a little bit about.
00:42:20.920 | I know a little bit about a lot of different topics.
00:42:25.400 | And it allows me to do what I do for a living, which I find very gratifying and rewarding.
00:42:30.360 | I'm not some kind of genius.
00:42:32.880 | I'm not superhuman.
00:42:35.040 | Basically all I have done is swapped out some time-wasting consumption activities that other
00:42:42.160 | people engage in that I don't engage in.
00:42:44.560 | And I've just substituted my enjoyment for different things.
00:42:49.960 | The most mystifying question that anyone has ever, ever asks me is things like, "Joshua,
00:42:55.200 | what are your hobbies?"
00:42:56.680 | And this was mystifying to me for many years because I always felt like I should have some
00:43:02.160 | answer of what to say, like, "Well, I watch football" or something like that.
00:43:07.000 | But later on, I just realized my hobby is learning.
00:43:10.840 | That's it.
00:43:11.840 | That's my hobby.
00:43:12.840 | And I don't see why a hobby of learning is in any way inferior to any other hobby.
00:43:15.960 | It's a hobby that has served me well.
00:43:17.880 | And I don't find it any less enjoyable than anything else.
00:43:21.120 | I think I get just as much satisfaction out of learning as some other guy does from throwing
00:43:25.960 | darts.
00:43:27.200 | It's fine.
00:43:28.200 | And I'm not good at darts.
00:43:29.200 | I can sort of kind of throw a football as long as you don't go too far away, just because
00:43:32.560 | I'm a standard American boy.
00:43:35.880 | But in general, you can choose all of these things.
00:43:40.920 | And when you choose to have hobbies of things like education or schooling, they are just
00:43:45.960 | as enjoyable as anything else.
00:43:48.960 | I'm not going to go deep down this rabbit trail.
00:43:51.080 | I believe I've done other podcasts on it.
00:43:53.160 | But some guys make their hobby drinking beer and eating pizza.
00:43:58.480 | Other guys make their hobby climbing mountains.
00:44:01.660 | And both of them get together with their buddies and they do the thing that they like to do.
00:44:05.880 | They're both having a great time doing what they're doing.
00:44:09.320 | But the guy who chooses the hobby of drinking beer and eating pizza is headed for a lifetime
00:44:14.280 | of being fat.
00:44:15.320 | He's headed for early diabetes, early heart attack.
00:44:18.880 | He's headed for slothfulness in his life.
00:44:21.960 | The guy who makes the habit of climbing mountains is headed for, in general, great health, great
00:44:28.040 | stamina, and a totally different perspective of the world.
00:44:31.600 | So we need to be really careful about the kinds of things that we generally engage in,
00:44:36.360 | that we try to focus on, the kinds of hobbies that we enjoy.
00:44:39.860 | And if you go back and think about the pathway of life of someone who pursues getting as
00:44:45.240 | much of the highest quality education as he possibly can, if he spends his 20s, his teens
00:44:51.640 | and his 20s, following that path as far as possible, and he wakes up at 30 years old
00:44:57.060 | and he finishes out his advanced specialty after medical residency, did he really lose
00:45:05.200 | something that was so valuable by doing that?
00:45:08.880 | People are prone to say things like, "Well, he didn't have any fun because he was working
00:45:12.620 | all the time or studying all the time."
00:45:14.520 | I think that's a false choice.
00:45:17.480 | I've known a lot of very high-achieving academics who have a perfectly satisfying social life,
00:45:21.760 | have a perfectly normal friend basis.
00:45:24.180 | There's all kinds of ways to do it.
00:45:28.560 | There's lots of ways to do it.
00:45:30.080 | You don't have to, it's not as, "Oh, well, you're either a medical student or you have
00:45:34.040 | a life."
00:45:35.040 | What does that even mean?
00:45:37.360 | But in general, the person who really dedicates himself to his craft and who works hard and
00:45:43.200 | who becomes very highly educated is going to be a more useful and productive member
00:45:47.520 | of society.
00:45:49.160 | And that's what we need more of.
00:45:50.960 | And hard work is one of those things that when you do it, it's its own reward.
00:45:55.120 | It's satisfying in and of itself.
00:45:58.560 | When I reflect back to all the times that I didn't work hard and I thought, "Oh, I'm
00:46:03.080 | doing too much," I can't today identify any value or any benefit to my life of the times
00:46:09.800 | when I didn't work hard.
00:46:12.760 | But I can identify huge value from all the times that I did.
00:46:17.160 | Might it be true that overwork is a problem?
00:46:20.200 | Might it be true that some people are genuinely working too hard?
00:46:24.120 | Might it be true that some people's ambitions are so large that it's putting them into a
00:46:29.800 | bad place?
00:46:31.720 | Might it be true that in some cases it's important to lower ambitions?
00:46:36.240 | It's important to stretch out timelines?
00:46:38.540 | It's important to dial it back 20%?
00:46:41.200 | Of course.
00:46:42.720 | But that seems like a fairly obviously easily diagnosable problem as compared to the alternative.
00:46:50.740 | We can probably err in both directions.
00:46:53.120 | We can err on the side of being too hardworking and we can err on the side of being too lazy.
00:46:58.760 | However, one is much more easily diagnosable and recoverable than the other.
00:47:05.380 | If you, let's say that you're starting young and you find that you've worked far too hard
00:47:10.320 | through your 20s and in your 30s you have a top 20% career, you have a high income,
00:47:16.320 | you have a lot of money saved, you're very highly credentialed, you're very highly certified,
00:47:20.680 | but you're working too much and too hard, it's relatively easy to go ahead and pull
00:47:24.980 | back by 20% or 50%.
00:47:27.600 | Start coasting a little bit.
00:47:28.920 | Start smelling the roses a little bit and enjoying life a little bit more and still
00:47:33.120 | get amazing results and you'll be happy with that move.
00:47:37.680 | It's not so easy to go the other direction.
00:47:40.040 | If you spend all your teens and your 20s and your 30s lazing about because you don't want
00:47:44.520 | to just do too much and you wind up at, say, 40 years old and you're poorly educated, you
00:47:51.240 | are relatively unqualified for almost anything, that's a pain that goes pretty deep and is
00:47:57.780 | pretty hard to recover from.
00:47:59.960 | So if we have to err, it's better to err on the side of doing a little bit too much and
00:48:04.200 | then pull back when the conditions warrant than the alternative, easier to make corrections
00:48:10.340 | in that direction.
00:48:11.340 | Now, as I start to wind down this episode, I want to re-emphasize that you should be
00:48:18.120 | careful, thoughtful, and strategic about the specific delivery mechanisms of the education
00:48:27.760 | that you choose.
00:48:29.860 | If you are working in an area in which self-education through books and seminars and courses is
00:48:38.300 | the obviously best path, then focus on that.
00:48:42.540 | If you are working in an area where formal education with some kind of accredited school
00:48:48.480 | or college is obviously the best path, then focus on that.
00:48:54.140 | Make smart strategic decisions.
00:48:57.200 | Every career is different.
00:48:58.520 | Every person is at a different place in a career.
00:49:01.360 | And throughout your life and lifetime and career, there will be different time periods
00:49:08.000 | in which certain choices are pretty obviously better choices than others.
00:49:13.440 | What I want you to take home from this episode is simply this.
00:49:18.120 | Your standard choice, your default option, your basic operating mindset should be, "I
00:49:25.440 | must get as much education as possible.
00:49:30.080 | I must get the highest quality education that is available to me.
00:49:35.480 | And I must get it as soon as possible."
00:49:39.200 | If you have that basic mindset and you repeatedly exercise the specific steps that will emerge
00:49:46.460 | from that mindset, then in the beginning, your career will seem like it's only going
00:49:52.120 | a little bit faster than others.
00:49:54.680 | But when we zoom back and look at your life over the course of, say, a 40 or 50-year lifespan,
00:50:01.200 | working career, as you repeatedly dogmatically apply that throughout your life, you will
00:50:08.680 | be on a very different trajectory and you'll be very happy with your results.
00:50:13.600 | While you may strategically use periods of inactivity, such as a gap year or such as,
00:50:19.280 | "I'm going to go and work in this industry for two years and then go back and get a graduate
00:50:23.880 | degree," that can be a very valuable component of your strategy.
00:50:28.240 | So while you may employ those strategies, you should not allow that to cause you to
00:50:34.160 | become complacent, nor should you defer educational and school opportunities to the future thinking,
00:50:42.200 | "Oh, I can always go back.
00:50:43.520 | I can always do this in the future."
00:50:45.640 | You can't always go back, and even if you can do it in the future, there are times in
00:50:51.520 | life in which it's more difficult.
00:50:54.280 | Now one final point as to why this is actually very helpful.
00:51:00.360 | Think back to goal number two, where I talked about spend half and save half.
00:51:06.600 | And think back to how I said that if you'll defer your high-consumption lifestyle by a
00:51:12.280 | few years, then you will find yourself to be decades ahead of your peers.
00:51:19.440 | The time in your life in which it will probably be the easiest for you to live very modestly
00:51:25.680 | will be during your young adult years, especially your college years.
00:51:31.360 | Very rarely do we expect a young person who is in college to have a lot of money.
00:51:36.800 | And so everything about the college lifestyle is oriented towards high-return, high-fun
00:51:44.880 | activities that are cheap.
00:51:47.280 | You go to an event and you get fed.
00:51:49.680 | And if you're hanging out with college students, generally since most people are broke, it's
00:51:53.880 | pretty easy to have a lot of fun together, but to have a lot of fun together inexpensively.
00:51:59.680 | Where that starts to change is when people start to get out of college and get "real
00:52:05.800 | jobs" of adult wages.
00:52:08.240 | And now all of a sudden when they have adult wages and they have low expenses because they're
00:52:15.200 | still usually young and single, then they very quickly adapt to a higher consumption
00:52:19.680 | lifestyle.
00:52:20.680 | There's a really nice natural compliment here that if you stay in school for a little
00:52:26.040 | longer than most other people, you have kind of an easy excuse for your frugality.
00:52:32.880 | And remember that just because you're in school doesn't mean you necessarily have
00:52:35.840 | to defer earnings for many careers.
00:52:37.880 | For some it does.
00:52:40.000 | So you can exercise this strategy.
00:52:42.200 | So this is something you can exercise at any point in your life.
00:52:45.240 | But I'm certainly acknowledging that a lot of this advice in this series is going to
00:52:50.680 | be most applicable to young people who are especially thinking about this college strategy.
00:52:56.640 | So if you're spending your 20s and you're finishing out various graduate degrees and
00:53:02.320 | terminal degrees in addition to your self-education, and especially if you're working concurrently
00:53:06.700 | with that, then from a lifestyle perspective, it's fairly low pressure for you just to acknowledge,
00:53:12.320 | "Hey, I don't have much money to spend so I don't spend much money."
00:53:15.900 | And in reality, you may be earning very well and you may be saving huge amounts of money.
00:53:21.060 | So this can be a very reasonable way for you to adapt to a low cost of living lifestyle
00:53:26.580 | at a time where that really doesn't hurt you very much because your friends are accustomed
00:53:30.140 | to it and it's very easy to live inexpensively at this period of life.
00:53:35.100 | We'll cover other savings and investments in future episodes.
00:53:39.300 | But your overall long-term rate of return on investments in education tends to be the
00:53:45.220 | highest of anything else.
00:53:48.120 | If we wanted to put it even more simply than I did in the title of the show, you should
00:53:52.100 | spend as much money on your education as you possibly can until you just can't spend money
00:53:57.640 | on it anymore.
00:53:58.900 | And when you reach the point where it's just not possible for you to effectively spend
00:54:03.380 | money on education, then that's when you flip to other kinds of investments.
00:54:08.680 | Your most powerful wealth-building tool is going to be you and your income.
00:54:13.860 | And every dollar that you can spend on increasing your income is going to pay off over the long-term
00:54:19.340 | course of your career.
00:54:21.060 | This is a really smart move.
00:54:23.700 | Goal number five, get as much of the highest quality education that you possibly can as
00:54:29.580 | soon as you can.
00:54:31.380 | That's a goal that every one of us should set.
00:54:34.540 | Be we young, be we old.
00:54:36.980 | Be we at the beginning of a career, be we in the middle of a career, even be we in the
00:54:40.420 | end of our career.
00:54:42.580 | Every one of us should have a goal of getting as much of the highest quality education as
00:54:47.260 | we possibly can as soon as we can.
00:54:50.140 | Good results come from that.
00:54:52.000 | Are you having problems with your 2018 to 2024 car?
00:54:55.540 | If it's constantly in the shop, it may be a lemon.
00:54:58.540 | The pros at MyLemonLawLawyer.com are prepared to represent you.
00:55:02.580 | You pay zero, they get the manufacturer to pay.
00:55:05.340 | Dial #250 now, say the keyword Lemon Lawyer, and be connected to their staff to get out
00:55:10.780 | of that car.
00:55:12.060 | You'll have the option to receive a one-time auto-dial text message from this podcast.
00:55:16.380 | Standard messages and data rates apply.
00:55:18.300 | Dial #250, say Lemon Lawyer, or go to MyLemonLawLawyer.com.