2024-07-30_Own_a_Dwelling_Place_Free_and_Clear
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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:33.040 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:37.280 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:40.240 | My name is Joshua. I'm your host. And on today's podcast, I want to continue our
00:00:44.560 | Financial Goals That Everyone Should Set series with goal number seven, which is to own
00:00:51.440 | a dwelling place free and clear. Own a dwelling place free and clear.
00:00:59.360 | In this podcast series, I'm giving you goals that I think should be universal,
00:01:04.800 | that if everyone had this goal and was working towards achieving it and/or achieved it,
00:01:12.000 | our world would be better off. There's nothing here that wouldn't make your life better.
00:01:16.160 | And this one here really, really matters. Own a dwelling place free and clear.
00:01:21.920 | Now, the first question that will be obvious is, why is Joshua using that funny phrase,
00:01:27.600 | dwelling place, instead of the more obvious home, right? Own a home free and clear,
00:01:33.680 | or the also obvious house, own a house free and clear.
00:01:37.360 | And the reason is I want to expand your mind beyond it. I don't want you just to stay in the
00:01:44.240 | same tired groove to say, "Well, I'm going to need to own a house free and clear," and automatically
00:01:49.760 | picture a nice three-bedroom, two-bath house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, and that
00:01:54.400 | instantly be your goal. That's a worthy goal, and I think a great place for you to live. And if
00:01:58.800 | that's your dwelling place, wonderful, go for it. You're going to be great. However, I want to
00:02:03.600 | expand the concept beyond this in order to make it more accessible to more people at more stages
00:02:11.200 | of life. As I proceed through this podcast, I will discuss how and why I think everyone probably,
00:02:19.280 | in the fullness of time, can own a house free and clear, and that would be great. But it's not the
00:02:25.040 | house itself that is the basic need, but rather the housing. It's not owning a freestanding,
00:02:33.600 | single-family home that is the key factor. It's having a roof over your head so you can be secure,
00:02:40.240 | not be worried about having your stuff stolen while you're staying in some shelter somewhere,
00:02:44.560 | not be worried about violence because some roommate is trying to break into your room and
00:02:50.480 | commit violence against you, not be worried about getting kicked out and living on the streets
00:02:55.280 | because something happened and you lost your job. Everyone should own a dwelling place free and
00:03:03.440 | clear, and that word "dwelling place" can be expanded in many ways. I want you to think about
00:03:09.360 | having a place that you can go where you can be safe, where you can be warm, where you can be
00:03:15.760 | comfortable, where you can recuperate, where your family can be sheltered. In the modern world,
00:03:22.000 | we're so embarrassingly rich that we automatically assume that it's our basic birthright to own a
00:03:29.760 | home, to own a house, to own this big structure that's going to cost hundreds of thousands of
00:03:35.920 | dollars, and that somehow our economy is failing us if we can't get it or if we can't get it quite
00:03:42.000 | yet. We forget about how rich we are in the grand scheme of history as well as the grand scheme of
00:03:50.160 | the globe today as it stands. There's a podcast title that I've had on this subject for a while
00:03:58.000 | and I've never done it, but I'm always amazed at historical references to wealth and poverty.
00:04:05.280 | One of my favorite examples of this, one of the oldest that I know of,
00:04:08.720 | comes from the Bible and the book of Deuteronomy, where it's talking about,
00:04:12.960 | specifically the one I'm thinking of, is where you take someone's coat as pledge for a loan,
00:04:18.000 | collateral for a loan. Let me read you the whole passage because it's all fascinating.
00:04:23.280 | It comes from Deuteronomy chapter 24. "When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor,
00:04:27.920 | do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge. Stay outside and let the
00:04:33.760 | neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. If the neighbor is poor,
00:04:39.280 | do not go to sleep with their pledge in your possession. Return their cloak by sunset so that
00:04:45.040 | your neighbor may sleep in it. Then they will thank you and it will be regarded as a righteous
00:04:50.240 | act in the sight of the Lord your God. Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy,
00:04:56.560 | whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns.
00:05:00.880 | Pay them their wages each day before sunset because they are poor and counting on it.
00:05:06.480 | Otherwise, they may cry to the Lord against you and you will be guilty of sin."
00:05:10.480 | I've always thought about the idea, let's say that you need to lend somebody money and that person
00:05:15.760 | brings you his cloak, his coat as collateral for the loan that you're making to him.
00:05:20.960 | The ancient culture of the Israelites was so poor that a poor man might literally have nothing else
00:05:30.160 | to keep him warm other than his cloak. That was what kept him warm. He may have had no house,
00:05:37.440 | he may have had just a cloak to shelter him with. And yet, that's not particularly historically
00:05:46.640 | abnormal. That's the definition of poverty throughout much of human history and that's
00:05:52.000 | the definition of poverty still today all around the world. All around the world,
00:05:56.320 | there are entire families that are living under a piece of tin in some slum somewhere.
00:06:03.280 | All around the world, there are entire families who literally don't have a roof over their head.
00:06:08.800 | So, we're so embarrassingly rich that we automatically take our minds
00:06:13.360 | directly to our nice, comfortable suburban house with central air conditioning and central heating
00:06:18.240 | and that's what we think should be the goal. And yet, if you just drive down the streets of your
00:06:24.000 | town, you'll find homeless people who all of a sudden find themselves, "Hey, I can't make it
00:06:29.920 | anymore. I need a roof over my head." And if you start working with people who've had life smack
00:06:34.480 | them in the face, then you quickly find out that having a roof over your head is actually really
00:06:39.360 | important. So, I think all people should set a goal to own a dwelling place from the earliest
00:06:47.440 | age of life all the way to the end of life. And that dwelling place should be something that you
00:06:52.320 | own, that you own free and clear so that you will never be in such a vulnerable position
00:06:59.360 | as to be curled up on the side of the road with nothing but a cloak over your head.
00:07:03.760 | The dwelling place, what would be some examples? Well, it can be anything and the specific example
00:07:10.000 | would change based upon who you are, where you're from, what's available to you, the city that
00:07:16.320 | you're in, things like that. I'm open to anything from a simple tent that you could set up in a
00:07:21.920 | park or in the local woods and live in that would keep you the rain off of your head.
00:07:25.760 | I'm open to all kinds of vehicles. We can do van life, we can have an RV, we can have a sailboat,
00:07:30.640 | we can have a little cabin in the woods that's kind of a backup plan. I'm open to simple homes,
00:07:35.840 | small apartments, small condos in different places. I'm open to even, again, big homes and
00:07:42.640 | just normal sized financial life. Anything is valuable. But the goal is that you have a place
00:07:48.960 | that you could retreat to and/or just live in that is a dwelling place that is free and clear.
00:07:55.280 | When you think about the basic building blocks of life, this is fundamental. Your health,
00:08:00.880 | your ability to do work because of good health, that's what allows you to do work. That's what
00:08:05.920 | allows you to generate income. And as we talked about in goal number one, get a job, once you
00:08:10.880 | have a job, you can fix most of your financial problems. Now, the next thing is having a roof
00:08:17.360 | over your head. Having a roof over your head keeps you alive, keeps you from being frozen in
00:08:21.360 | the cold or destroyed in the heat, keeps you out of the rain. And these things basically allow you
00:08:28.160 | to live. And we can be thankful that most of us live in societies where there's resources for
00:08:33.920 | people who are homeless and people want to help us. But having your own place that you own free
00:08:40.320 | and clear that provides you with a place that you can dwell is really, really important.
00:08:46.320 | If you will exercise this also as a strategy to control your expenses,
00:08:52.720 | it can add up enormously. I know when I was younger, I didn't think about living any kind
00:08:59.200 | of weird alternative lifestyle. I just thought about renting an apartment and buying a house.
00:09:05.280 | That was the extent of my ideas. I didn't consider other alternative ideas. I had a
00:09:10.720 | friend of mine who would talk about, "I'm going to buy a sailboat and I'm going to
00:09:14.400 | anchor it for free out in the harbor, and I'm going to live on that." I never considered doing
00:09:19.200 | that, even though all around the world and all across the United States, people do that.
00:09:24.400 | But I never considered doing it. I was pretty conventional in my thinking.
00:09:28.240 | And so because of that conventionality, I spent all kinds of money that, in hindsight,
00:09:33.680 | I didn't have to spend. I just didn't think of doing anything else. If you have a place that
00:09:39.920 | you can live rent-free, you can pile up money really quickly. The median cost of renting in
00:09:47.600 | the United States right now, across all markets, seems to be about $2,000. Now, that's going to
00:09:52.720 | include, of course, bigger places, littler places, but the median cost of rent in the
00:09:56.560 | United States seems to be about $2,000, maybe different in your area. But just use that.
00:10:02.160 | That adds up quickly. $2,000, $24,000 a year, that's a significant amount of money.
00:10:08.320 | Even at $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year, each and every year, every year that you're renting,
00:10:14.560 | that's quite a lot of money going out the door into someone else's pocket.
00:10:19.120 | What would it be like financially if you actually owned your dwelling place?
00:10:23.840 | And what would it be like financially if you did that from the very beginning of your financial
00:10:30.320 | life? I believe that this approach is possible and should be a priority for all people, that you
00:10:38.720 | should focus on always owning a dwelling place free and clear. I'm not advising that all people
00:10:46.400 | should go out and build a tiny house or live in a van. I'm not recommending that. But many people
00:10:52.800 | should do that. And at the very least, you should have a tiny house or have a tent or have a van
00:10:59.840 | that you could move into if you had to, if life went sideways, so that you could at least have
00:11:06.080 | a roof over your head and not genuinely be homeless. So I'm going to talk... I've hopefully
00:11:12.240 | have underscored it. Understand, I'm going to give texture and I'm going to tell you why I think that
00:11:18.800 | there are many situations where you won't actually do these strategies. But being able to do the
00:11:23.760 | strategy will open your mind much more readily to when it's the right move and when it's not the
00:11:29.120 | right move with regard to your specific applications in life. And it's my ambition, as it
00:11:36.240 | has been for a long time, to see even teenagers set up with their own dwelling place so that
00:11:42.560 | they're not entirely dependent on a system that makes it hard for them to get ahead.
00:11:47.600 | What are some of the options for a home, for a dwelling place? Well, the obvious things are
00:11:52.880 | things like buying a house or buying an apartment to live in, buying a condo, something like that.
00:11:58.560 | These are all perfectly reasonable ways and are probably the ways that most people will
00:12:02.960 | ultimately wind up living. Most people who have money are not going to choose to live in a vehicle
00:12:09.120 | just for fun. Houses are nice, they're comfortable, they're built for our comfort, so they're obviously
00:12:15.680 | good solutions for meeting our housing needs. But that's not the only option. There are all kinds
00:12:21.440 | of alternative dwellings that would provide the same basic function at a fraction of the cost,
00:12:28.000 | and yet allow you to quickly save money and get ahead. Here on Radical Personal Finance in the
00:12:33.600 | archives, I've interviewed people who lived in pickup trucks. And today, it's just so much easier
00:12:38.320 | than when I started the podcast. Today, you can go on YouTube and you can find all kinds of people.
00:12:43.360 | And there's tons of people that live in the back of a pickup truck, live in a van, live in a car,
00:12:47.360 | live in a tent, live on a boat, live in pretty much anything, live in a bicycle camper,
00:12:53.520 | live nowhere, live in hotels. You can find all kinds of people who have figured out various
00:12:58.000 | ways of making things work. And in many cases, they can stockpile money like crazy.
00:13:02.880 | Number of years ago, there was a YouTube guy who was a firefighter, and he lived in the back of his
00:13:08.080 | pickup truck. So he was earning all of his firefighter salary, was saving basically every
00:13:12.800 | dollar of it. When he was on duty, of course, he was staying at the firehouse. When he wasn't on
00:13:17.280 | duty, he was staying in his pickup truck. And he was saving all of his money, and he was very
00:13:22.480 | quickly able to build a nest egg. I'm not sure what he has gone on to do with it, or if he's
00:13:26.800 | even talked about it. But just imagine you're earning a healthy six-figure salary as a fireman,
00:13:32.160 | and you're saving all of it. Well, in two or three, four years, you're free of the system.
00:13:36.080 | You've got it stacked up. A number of years ago, I had a client of mine, listener of Radical
00:13:39.920 | Personal Finance, that did a similar thing. He was working as a lineman, and he was living in his car.
00:13:45.120 | It's not the car I would live in, kind of joked about it, but he was living in a Honda Accord,
00:13:51.040 | big tall guy. He was working as a lineman, and he was basically putting every single dollar
00:13:56.160 | of his paycheck directly into Bitcoin. Today, he's a Bitcoin bazillionaire with all of his money. His
00:14:01.920 | Bitcoin play worked out, and his entire pathway was the fact that he was living in his car.
00:14:07.200 | Now, why don't more of us do that? Why don't more of us go and live in our cars? Why don't
00:14:13.520 | more of us go and do something? Well, a couple of reasons. My reason for not doing it,
00:14:20.960 | was that I never had the idea. I just didn't conceive of it. It didn't seem like something
00:14:25.760 | I would do. It wasn't kind of my social class. That wasn't the kinds of things that people like
00:14:30.560 | me really did. Today, after years of hearing other people, I would think more carefully about that,
00:14:37.440 | and consider going and doing some of those things. For many people, I think we're just
00:14:42.480 | held captive to our luxury lifestyle and to our wealth. Because again, most people would
00:14:48.160 | acknowledge that it's more comfortable to live in a traditional house than it is to live in a
00:14:52.000 | vehicle. It's usually not until people get desperate enough or life kind of knocks them
00:14:58.080 | in the face where they go and do something different. I've read a lot of, a guy will get
00:15:04.320 | divorced, and he loses his house, he loses his money, he doesn't know what to do, and he goes
00:15:10.080 | and gets a box truck, and buys this old couple thousand dollar box truck, and basically moves
00:15:14.880 | into it with an air mattress, and he's got a dwelling place. And all of a sudden then he
00:15:19.280 | discovers, "Hey, this is actually pretty cool. I kind of like this." And now he can live in this
00:15:24.240 | truck and create a comfortable scenario around him. And if you actually think about the amount
00:15:29.440 | of space that we actually exist in, it's pretty modest. You could take a 16-foot box truck,
00:15:35.600 | and as many people will show you with their renovation work, you can make a luxury apartment
00:15:40.560 | in a 16-foot box truck. But you can basically park it in any parking space and have your own space.
00:15:46.160 | If you go back historically and you look at the size of a cabin that a guy would live in with his
00:15:50.400 | entire family, it's not much bigger than a box truck is. And yet you have this thing that you
00:15:56.240 | can buy for a few thousand dollars that you can live in, that can be yours, that you can own,
00:16:00.160 | and you can live in rent-free. And again, many variations on this, a truck, a trailer, a boat,
00:16:06.320 | an RV, a van, those are all kind of road-mobile versions of it, sea-going versions of it,
00:16:12.800 | a shanty boat on a river, a houseboat, a sailboat for deep-water cruising. There's all kinds of
00:16:18.400 | water-based options for this. If you're going back to the land, you can build a cabin,
00:16:24.800 | buy yourself a little scrap of land somewhere, build a cabin, have a tent, something that gives
00:16:30.320 | you the ability to live, but yet does it cheaply, is available to anybody. And these lifestyles,
00:16:38.800 | while they're not as comfortable for many people as living in an apartment, they're not
00:16:44.080 | necessarily uncomfortable. With the miracles of modern technology, it's more comfortable to
00:16:50.160 | live in a tent or live in a boat than it ever was. If you were to go back, and let's say you were
00:16:56.480 | going to go to someplace where there's a strong history of this, narrowboating in the United
00:17:00.320 | Kingdom, for example, and you were to go and live in a narrowboat 50 years ago, you wouldn't have
00:17:05.760 | very many modern conveniences. You would have a coal stove to keep you warm. You would have a
00:17:11.760 | kerosene stove to cook on. It just wasn't nearly as comfortable as it is today. Today, you would,
00:17:20.080 | of course, get yourself a nice battery bank system that you could charge from various places. This
00:17:26.960 | allows you to run all your electronics, run lights, things like that super easily. You have
00:17:31.920 | all kinds of ways to cook, all kinds of fuels, all kinds of things that make cooking pretty simple,
00:17:37.600 | all kinds of ways to have entertainment, communications. Everything is pretty easy
00:17:42.880 | today with all of these modern technologies. So why don't we do more of them? Again, ideas,
00:17:49.040 | or we're just captive to our wealth and luxury, or to other people's opinions of us. This would be,
00:17:55.920 | as someone who's influenced by other people's opinions of me, probably unduly so, this would
00:18:02.800 | also be something that would affect me. I would say, "Well, I don't want to be like that because
00:18:08.640 | I don't want to be unconventional," which is really silly. But in today's world, one of the benefits
00:18:14.640 | is I see a lot of people who've come up with various unconventional ways to do it, but yet
00:18:20.480 | make it really cool and classy, and make it really attractive. If you put the right filter on your
00:18:25.200 | tent or your van life, you can have a monster following because you show the good side of it,
00:18:33.920 | and then just ignore the not-so-good side of it in your public postings. I'm glad that people are
00:18:40.000 | finding this and people are discovering this, and I want to encourage this. So the idea for you,
00:18:46.160 | or for me, or for our 15-year-old nephew, would be to say, "What would it look like in your context
00:18:54.720 | for you to own a dwelling place free and clear?" I would love it for us to do more of that in the
00:19:04.720 | conventional space. In the archives of Radical Personal Finance, I've interviewed home builders,
00:19:09.840 | people who teach people how to build homes using simple technologies. Once again,
00:19:13.920 | we live in a time of embarrassment of riches. If you live in a place where you're not restricted
00:19:17.600 | by building codes, pretty simple for you to go and build a structure for yourself.
00:19:22.800 | All kinds of neat technologies using very sustainable building practices to just build
00:19:29.600 | a structure, and you can do this for a few thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
00:19:34.560 | In some places, you can do things like shed conversions. A lot of people have done this
00:19:40.080 | really successfully. They'll go and buy a pre-manufactured shed that you can save some
00:19:44.480 | thousands of dollars for, maybe tens of thousands, bring that in, that can work within your local
00:19:50.800 | coding regulations, and then you just go ahead and finish it off, insulate it nicely, make it
00:19:55.600 | comfortable, bring in that mixture of technologies that I described that make life really doable.
00:20:00.960 | And if you can deal again with occupancy permits and find a little place to put it,
00:20:06.160 | you can have your own dwelling that will keep the roof off of your head and allow you to build from
00:20:13.200 | using something like a shed conversion. You can also then look at the vehicle place. I've seen
00:20:18.560 | teenagers who have worked with their parents and done something like build their own tiny house
00:20:24.960 | on a trailer. And the idea is on a trailer, Junior can tow this thing to college and he has his house
00:20:29.920 | to live in. Some people will do this with a vehicle. If it were me, if I were a single guy,
00:20:35.280 | I would myself live full-time in a truck camper. It's the best kind of lifestyle that I know of
00:20:42.320 | that I like. I would have a truck camper. Whenever you want it off the truck, you just take it off,
00:20:46.720 | you set it in a friend's yard or rent a little space behind someone's house and give you a
00:20:51.040 | livable, basically a hard-sided tent that you can live in on the ground. Or whenever you want to
00:20:55.360 | move it, you pop it on the truck and you have that. You want to do stealth camping, you can
00:20:58.320 | do stealth camping. You have all the modern amenities, everything is ready for you. And you
00:21:03.600 | can get into that lifestyle for some, again, under five figures for an older used model that's
00:21:10.640 | sufficient, or of course, some tens of thousands of dollars for newer, more modern gear. All of
00:21:16.000 | that's available. I like that setup more than I like van camping, although I acknowledge that
00:21:21.600 | they all have an option. And so if you work with your teens and you help them develop some kind of
00:21:27.840 | housing solution, it could be a boat. I don't need to keep repeating all these options. They could
00:21:33.680 | have something for them and they would have some kind of backup. I even think this matters just in
00:21:40.160 | terms of choosing a car. I recently was advising a young person on buying a vehicle and this
00:21:46.080 | person was wanting to upgrade. She wanted to upgrade from a car that she had that she felt
00:21:50.720 | was too small and she wanted to get a midsize SUV. And I pleaded with her. I said, "Listen,
00:21:55.280 | what's the point of the midsize SUV? Why don't you want a minivan?" And I said, "The minivan
00:22:00.240 | would give you, of course, all these other benefits. And one of them is that you now have
00:22:05.280 | something that you can sleep in, that you could travel in. It's super comfortable." I've spent at
00:22:09.600 | least two weeks, not months, but at least a couple of weeks living in a minivan. Kind of just the
00:22:16.640 | standard issue minivan is super comfortable way to camp in. You can fit, without any modifications,
00:22:26.400 | without building anything, you can fit a twin-size mattress in a minivan. And the great thing about
00:22:35.040 | it, it's heated, it's cooled. If you need to run the engine overnight, it costs probably $15 or $20
00:22:43.120 | of gas to run the engine overnight for cooling or for heating. It's simple, it's easy, it's
00:22:48.720 | straightforward. It just is a wonderful way to travel having a mattress in the back of your
00:22:52.560 | minivan. It's not quite as sexy in your pictures as our friends who have a beautiful 1957 Vanagon
00:23:00.160 | Volkswagen camper, but it's the same basic idea. Just toss a bed in the back of a van and boom,
00:23:06.240 | you're on the road. You've got it. If I had a college-bound daughter and she wanted a bigger
00:23:13.840 | vehicle, I would try to get her a minivan because at the end of the day, if you need a roof over
00:23:18.800 | your head and you need a place to sleep comfortably, you can sleep comfortably in the minivan. It
00:23:22.400 | provides you with all of these benefits. One time I did this for a trip. I had a super fast trip
00:23:27.520 | that I needed and there weren't a lot of great hotel options and I was going to be driving a ton.
00:23:35.120 | I flew into a city. I rented a minivan. Specifically in that case, because I didn't
00:23:40.080 | have storage space, I rented a Dodge Grand Caravan. The important thing there is that
00:23:46.800 | it's called Chrysler now. Anyway, it was whatever the version of. The important thing about that
00:23:51.680 | vehicle is simply that they have their stow-and-go seats. All the seats go flat so you can get a
00:23:57.600 | rental car and then you just fold all the seats down and you've got a completely flat floor.
00:24:01.680 | Drove to Walmart, bought an air mattress, bought a carbon monoxide detector. I think I bought a
00:24:07.280 | sleeping bag and I stayed in the van for three days, did my enormous amount of driving and it
00:24:13.520 | was so much better than a hotel because I didn't have to plan ahead of where I was going to stay.
00:24:18.640 | So I could just pull over, stay at the rest area, shower up at a truck stop and then move on and I
00:24:25.520 | didn't have to plan my schedule out all around where I could find a Holiday Inn Express in the
00:24:29.840 | middle of nowhere. And so it's totally doable. And you could do it in smaller cars, obviously.
00:24:38.480 | I've done it in a Prius. I really like a Prius, but it's totally fine to do it. It's nice to do
00:24:43.680 | it in something like a minivan. I think though we probably should aim higher than just a vehicle. I
00:24:49.280 | think it's perfectly fine for people to have a vehicle and it's worth considering, but it's
00:24:55.040 | probably going to make more sense to have a bigger vehicle with more capacity, more comfort.
00:25:00.080 | And here again, if we can find the right solution, it can really work out well. Years ago,
00:25:05.440 | I used to read a blog by a guy named Tynan, T-Y-N-A-N. He still blogs, but for years he lived
00:25:12.240 | in an RV. And he was one of the early guys of living in this relatively small RV that he had
00:25:18.320 | completely remodeled inside, made it super attractive. And he lived right in the middle
00:25:22.320 | of a city, a very expensive city. And he just rented a parking space for his RV,
00:25:27.680 | lived right in the middle of everything, but was able to do it exceedingly inexpensively
00:25:32.080 | and yet do it in extreme comfort. And so having some form of an RV or a sailboat on the dock or
00:25:39.280 | something like that, I think is probably a better thing to aim for, for many people.
00:25:46.240 | Obviously, we want to quickly as possible move up to bigger dwelling places. So I think that
00:25:55.120 | ideally the goal should be to purchase a house, purchase a home, a specific sticks and bricks
00:26:01.280 | house that you pay for and that you own. I intend in a separate podcast in this series to talk about
00:26:08.240 | owning a paid-for house. And I think that this goal of owning a paid-for house is accessible for
00:26:15.440 | more people than think it's accessible for. More of us can do it, we just don't have someone telling
00:26:20.160 | us we should do it. And I think it's accessible for young people to buy houses, but I also am
00:26:26.720 | aware that it's not universally popular... Sorry, not universally possible. It's not possible
00:26:32.560 | everywhere to own free and clear a dwelling, not for everyone. More possible for more people in
00:26:39.360 | more places than you might imagine, but it's certainly not the case for all people. There's
00:26:43.920 | a big difference between buying your own house free and clear in South Bend, Indiana versus Miami,
00:26:51.280 | Florida. Those are two very different places. And so it's not accessible for everyone, but it should
00:26:58.000 | still be a goal. And even if you are living a conventional lifestyle, you have a traditional
00:27:04.800 | home that you live in, you have a mortgage, and that's what's working for your family, you're not
00:27:09.040 | going to change out of that anytime soon. Even if that's you, and you're living that kind of
00:27:13.280 | conventional lifestyle, totally fine, you should still have some kind of dwelling place that you
00:27:18.880 | own free and clear, so that if your current lifestyle collapsed on you, you'd have something
00:27:25.200 | to fall back on. My kind of standard suggestions, the simplest for this is a genuine livable tent,
00:27:32.000 | something like a wall tent. Think in your mind of what they use out in the mountain west of the
00:27:37.920 | United States, a nice canvas wall tent that you would see at elk camp, something like that, that
00:27:43.440 | you paid a few thousand dollars for, that you have available to you. If your life fell apart, you keep
00:27:49.280 | it inside, keep it in storage. If your life fell apart and you had to move out, it's a lot easier
00:27:55.360 | to go to a friend and say, "Hey, listen, things are bad right now. Could I set up my tent in your
00:28:02.400 | backyard or on the back part of your farm or on some vacant land that you have? Could I set up my
00:28:08.720 | tent and be there for a couple of months while I figure out the next step?" That's an easier plan
00:28:14.240 | for your friend to say yes to versus, "Hey, can my children and I move into your living room and
00:28:21.600 | sleep on your couches?" That's harder to say yes to. But if you have your own dwelling that provides
00:28:28.080 | you with that, then you've got a place to go that you could retreat to. With the combination of all
00:28:34.160 | the stuff that we use, you can shower at the gym, you can get water from your friend's garden hose,
00:28:38.880 | you've got your Jackery power bank or whatever it is that you gav for electricity to run your
00:28:45.520 | cell phone charger and run your Starlink internet connection, you'll be able to stay out of debt,
00:28:52.160 | you'll be able to not face rental costs, you'll be able to put your family back together because
00:28:56.960 | you own a dwelling place. You can move up from there. You might have an RV, but make sure that
00:29:02.640 | you own your RV. Don't just buy it on payments. Own your RV. I've worked with families over the
00:29:08.720 | years, had significant financial problems, find out they got an RV, great. Move into the RV.
00:29:14.640 | Sell the house, get a job, fix the problems, go traveling for a bit. You could live pretty
00:29:20.160 | inexpensively in an RV. And if you've got a good place to park it, it can provide a valuable backup
00:29:25.520 | situation for you. That's why I love RVs so much. You could do this with simply purchasing an
00:29:31.280 | apartment or a house in another place. There are lots of places around the world, maybe not where
00:29:36.480 | you live right now, but there's lots of places around the world where you could purchase a house
00:29:41.040 | there, or you could purchase a home there. Sorry, an apartment there, that's what I was trying to
00:29:45.040 | say. You could purchase an apartment there and have it as a backup. All across the United States,
00:29:50.800 | once you got out of the major downtown markets, you can purchase homes, cabins,
00:29:57.280 | apartments very inexpensively for five figures, low five figures in some cases.
00:30:04.640 | And so you may not want to live in that particular little town in the Midwest or that particular
00:30:11.520 | little town in upstate New York all the time, but having a place that you could go to if you had to,
00:30:17.200 | that would really be beautiful. You can go to Italy and purchase yourself one of these
00:30:22.960 | one-euro homes that's available and put eight or 10,000 or 20 or $30,000 into renovating it.
00:30:29.120 | You may not want to live there all the time, but having that home that you own
00:30:32.720 | could be really valuable to you. You might get an IKEA house in Japan, one of those free and
00:30:40.720 | super cheap, empty, vacant houses that they're giving away with Japanese depopulation out in
00:30:45.360 | the countryside of Japan. Or you might just keep the trailer that your grandmother left to you and
00:30:50.480 | have it. You figure out the individual application of it. My point is you're going to be better off
00:30:57.600 | if you have a dwelling place that you can live now and you can eliminate the cost of renting
00:31:03.680 | and you can provide a roof over your family's home. And if it doesn't work in any creative way
00:31:09.360 | for you to live in an alternative dwelling place now, and you have to live in a conventional
00:31:14.560 | lifestyle with a mortgage, with debt, it'll be valuable peace of mind for you to have some kind
00:31:21.840 | of dwelling place that you could retreat to if your life fell apart. You don't need to live an
00:31:27.760 | unconventional lifestyle forever, but if you'll live an unconventional lifestyle for a few years,
00:31:34.640 | you'll probably be decades ahead. That's one of the themes of what I'm trying to talk to you about.
00:31:39.840 | I talked about this most on live on half your income, spend half, save half. If you can do
00:31:44.640 | that for a few years, you'll be a few years behind your friends in terms of their consumption
00:31:49.920 | patterns, but you'll be decades ahead of them. And these tools that I'm describing in this show
00:31:57.920 | about own a dwelling place free and clear, this is similar. You may be a few years behind your
00:32:03.440 | friends who automatically move into big rental apartments with beautiful floor-to-ceiling
00:32:08.400 | windows that they spend thousands of dollars a month to maintain, and then they wake up at
00:32:13.360 | 10 years later and wonder, "Why am I not getting ahead?" But if you'll be the guy when it's easy
00:32:18.960 | for you to live in the truck camper parked behind someone's house for two or three years and bank
00:32:25.520 | 100% of your pay because you eat at the job site and everything else is provided for you,
00:32:31.600 | then you can waltz right into the downtown area in the town that you really want to live in and
00:32:38.000 | go ahead and stroke a check and pay cash for the really great family home that will then be your
00:32:43.600 | next instantiation of owning a dwelling place free and clear. I don't want anybody to be forced into
00:32:50.720 | homelessness. True homelessness is brutal, makes it very difficult to be productive, to keep a job,
00:32:58.080 | any of that stuff. So you've got to plan ahead and recognize, "I could be forced into that. So
00:33:04.000 | how can I not get forced into it? Well, I need to own a home or a dwelling place free and clear."
00:33:10.480 | Thanks for listening to today's podcast. I hope it's stimulating, hope it's enjoyable,
00:33:14.720 | and I hope that you've gained something from it. Don't keep yourself locked into a conventional
00:33:21.360 | financial system-only mindset. Nothing wrong with the conventional path, but sometimes it
00:33:27.120 | pays to be unconventional or, dare I say it, radical.
00:33:32.080 | You say you'll never join the Navy. Never track storms in the Atlantic or skydive as part of your
00:33:38.000 | commute. Joining the Navy sounds crazy, saying never actually is. Learn why at Navy.com.
00:33:44.880 | America's Navy. Forged by the sea.