594-Friday_QA
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00:00:30.360 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's Friday Q&A.
00:00:34.360 | ♪
00:00:50.360 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,
00:00:54.860 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:57.860 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:01:00.860 | Today is Friday, and as with any Friday that I can arrange an internet connection to do a Q&A,
00:01:06.360 | I have a live Q&A call. That's where you can call in, you can talk to me about anything you want,
00:01:10.860 | you can ask questions about living a rich life, building financial freedom,
00:01:14.860 | you can make commentary, anything you want on a Friday show.
00:01:17.860 | ♪
00:01:22.860 | I guess we could more commonly call it Open Line Friday.
00:01:25.860 | Again, anything you want, this is a great place to talk about any question you want.
00:01:28.860 | If there's a subject that you have wanted to ask me about, a show topic that you've wanted to get my opinion on,
00:01:33.860 | a lot of times I find these Friday Q&A shows far less intimidating to do.
00:01:38.860 | So people all the time send me show topics and they say, "Joshua, what do I do about such and such a thing?"
00:01:43.860 | But if I create a standalone show, that requires me to spend a bunch of time,
00:01:47.860 | maybe a couple hours putting together an outline.
00:01:49.860 | And so I like to just answer them extemporaneously sometimes,
00:01:53.860 | because it allows me to possibly give you something useful or give you a couple of ideas,
00:01:57.860 | and it takes the burden off of me to do hours and hours of preparation to make something really good.
00:02:01.860 | I can always say, "Hey, it was an impromptu speech." Of course it wasn't really very good.
00:02:06.860 | So if you would like to join me on a Friday Q&A show, I would love to have you call in in the future.
00:02:10.860 | Here is the most reliable way of reaching me on those shows.
00:02:13.860 | Join the show at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.
00:02:16.860 | I plan on becoming a patron there at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.
00:02:20.860 | That is always the first place that I go to, and I have tried hard.
00:02:23.860 | Although my Patreon program has suffered over the years, and as with many things, it's had its fits and fizzles in time.
00:02:30.860 | But I've always tried to give good discount codes to the patrons,
00:02:34.860 | and I've always tried to give as much access as possible to these Q&A calls and talking with patrons.
00:02:43.860 | If you're a patron of the show, I want to say thank you.
00:02:46.860 | I probably don't say it as frequently as I should, but thank you.
00:02:50.860 | I appreciate your support. It means and it has meant the world to me, just to know that you're willing to put your money where your mouth is.
00:02:57.860 | It's a very small percentage of people who are actually willing to put their money where their mouth is in a real way.
00:03:05.860 | Thank you. You are a unique breed.
00:03:07.860 | Which takes me to Jan in Iowa. Thank you. Welcome to the call.
00:03:10.860 | How can I serve you today, sir?
00:03:13.860 | Hey, Joshua. First long-time listener and first-time caller, so I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you,
00:03:19.860 | and I do enjoy your podcast and the work you're doing.
00:03:23.860 | I've got a kind of a question that I've not heard you talk about before, but I may have missed it if you did.
00:03:29.860 | Twenty-five, thirty years ago, we were influenced by people like Larry Burkett and on Christian financial principles,
00:03:36.860 | and we worked hard to become debt-free, and we paid off our house, and probably for the last 25 years, we've lived that way.
00:03:46.860 | We don't have a lot, but what we have is ours. I guess that's our situation.
00:03:50.860 | But recently, I've been a little concerned about credit scores and things like that, not because we need to borrow money,
00:03:58.860 | but when we do the credit checks with TransUnion and those, they don't know we exist.
00:04:06.860 | And is that hurting us? And as am I -- do I have a mouse on my hands? I guess that's kind of what I'm wondering about.
00:04:14.860 | We've really not tried to borrow money. A couple times, we've applied for stored credit cards and been turned down.
00:04:22.860 | And then a couple years ago, we tried to get a phone plan with Verizon, and they turned us down, too.
00:04:27.860 | And I was thinking it was more because of income, because we don't make a lot.
00:04:33.860 | And so I don't know if that gives you enough background, but that's kind of where we're at.
00:04:39.860 | It does, absolutely. So let me start with asking you about your convictions around debt.
00:04:45.860 | Do you see debt as something that is a matter of what is wise or unwise, as a matter of kind of pragmatic application?
00:04:55.860 | Or do you see debt as more of a moral issue, a right and wrong, a sin and righteousness type of discussion?
00:05:04.860 | We're probably somewhere in the middle. We have personal convictions on debt based on scriptures,
00:05:14.860 | and that's how we've tried to live our life. But I'm wondering if that's not -- if it's causing us some trouble
00:05:22.860 | that we may or may not have to deal with.
00:05:26.860 | So I think it's important to start from the perspective of conviction, of religious ideology, of doctrinal understanding.
00:05:33.860 | Because at the end of the day, if you prioritize religious conviction and doctrinal understanding as being influential in your life,
00:05:43.860 | you're seeking to live in obedience to God's word as you understand it, you're seeking to be faithful and to live a life as a faithful Christian,
00:05:51.860 | then you need to make that decision independent of practical considerations.
00:05:57.860 | I don't think it's a very healthy hermeneutic to start with the idea, "Well, what's practical and what's not practical?
00:06:03.860 | Let me figure out kind of what to do, where to be." I think it's important to start with understanding.
00:06:08.860 | If you have religious ideology, if you have religious principles, if you have a doctrinal understanding,
00:06:15.860 | I think you should start with that and then adjust the situations of your life to that rather than the other way around.
00:06:23.860 | I see that as the only defensible -- well, hermeneutic, basically -- especially with the Christian religion,
00:06:30.860 | with which I'm, of course, familiar, but even with other religious understandings.
00:06:34.860 | And so the reason I ask what your own personal conviction is, is because you have to start there.
00:06:39.860 | If you are convicted that to have a series of time payments, for example, to buy a phone from Verizon
00:06:47.860 | and to purchase that phone using their two-year payoff plan at $30 a month, that is, in some understandings, that is debt.
00:06:56.860 | That is a form of payments. And so some people would say, "No, you should not have that because that is debt."
00:07:02.860 | If you're convicted that that's debt, then you should avoid it no matter whether it's practical or not.
00:07:07.860 | You should avoid pledging yourself in debt. And so that's what you should start from.
00:07:14.860 | Now, in my own convictions, I've wrestled with this subject a lot over the years. I've really wrestled with it.
00:07:21.860 | And it's one of those issues where I think there are well-meaning perspectives on many sides,
00:07:27.860 | and it's not -- I don't think it's as crystal clear as perhaps we would like.
00:07:32.860 | And a lot of it has to do with your hermeneutical principles.
00:07:34.860 | For example, when Paul writes in Romans and he says, "O no man anything except love," does he mean by that -- what does he mean by that?
00:07:43.860 | Does he mean, "O no man anything"? Well, the reality is there's always going to be some way of application to that.
00:07:52.860 | Or when -- I'll stop going into all the verses. So you have to figure out how to apply it because it is almost impossible.
00:08:01.860 | I would say it is impossible. It's impossible to live a life free of debt of any kind.
00:08:07.860 | Even as simple as this. Let's say that you bring on a laborer and somebody is working for you,
00:08:12.860 | and your agreement is that you're going to pay them for their work on Friday.
00:08:15.860 | Well, that means that at the end of the day on Monday, you're in debt to your worker for what they've done on Monday.
00:08:19.860 | You're in debt to your worker on Tuesday. You're in debt to your worker on Wednesday.
00:08:22.860 | So we all have to -- until you pay them on Friday.
00:08:25.860 | So, of course, you could pay your worker their wages on a daily basis or on an hourly basis.
00:08:29.860 | And I actually support that. For example, there is a clear instruction in the Old Testament law where you were clearly instructed to make sure that if somebody is impoverished,
00:08:40.860 | that you pay them their wages quickly. You don't make them wait.
00:08:43.860 | And I think that's a very valid thing to do. That if somebody is earning plenty of money and they can make it for a weekly or a biweekly or a monthly paycheck, then totally fine.
00:08:55.860 | But if somebody is living day by day, you need to pay them quickly because your responsibility is to look out for those who are poor and those who are disadvantaged.
00:09:02.860 | So back to debt. My own personal conviction on it is I believe there is a moral element to debt.
00:09:09.860 | But it's my current understanding and my current conviction that it is immoral to not do what you have said you would do.
00:09:18.860 | But it is not immoral to have a series of time payments.
00:09:22.860 | I do think it's unwise in many circumstances, but it's not immoral.
00:09:26.860 | Let me give an example. One of the most commonly quoted scriptures about debt would be from Proverbs, where the writer of the Proverbs says, "The rich rules over the poor and the borrower is servant to the lender."
00:09:37.860 | Well, I think it's absolutely a true principle that when you borrow money, you are a servant to a lender.
00:09:44.860 | But is it morally wrong to be a servant?
00:09:47.860 | I would say no, it's not morally wrong to be a servant. It's not even morally wrong to be a slave.
00:09:53.860 | And so we can commit ourselves to being a servant of another person.
00:09:57.860 | We can do that intentionally knowing the cost.
00:10:00.860 | And it's not morally wrong to be a servant.
00:10:03.860 | Now, of course, we have to deal with the New Testament encouragement that if you were a free man, when you were called, remain as a free man.
00:10:08.860 | If you were a slave when you were called, remain as a slave.
00:10:10.860 | But it's not morally wrong to be a servant is the point.
00:10:13.860 | So there are scriptures that if you apply them wouldn't lean literally and depending on how you mean debt, they certainly lead you in one direction and others lead you in another.
00:10:23.860 | So here's to wrap that up and say simply, here is my own conviction.
00:10:27.860 | For Christians, what I currently understand and what I currently encourage and advocate, Christians are well advised to steer clear of debts.
00:10:37.860 | Because what a debt basically does when you pledge your hand and you say, I'm going to make you a series of payments, it commits your future when you don't actually know what the future has.
00:10:49.860 | And you might commit yourself today to something that could take many years to work out.
00:10:55.860 | And so you should be very, very slow to do that.
00:10:58.860 | Because Christians are encouraged not to be concerned about tomorrow, to focus on today and to not say, you know, tomorrow we'll go here and buy and sell, but rather, you know, say if the Lord wills, I need to be available.
00:11:10.860 | I need to be flexible.
00:11:11.860 | The second big thing is what I believe is immoral is not to make payments as agreed.
00:11:16.860 | So for example, somebody comes to me and says, I have a mortgage and I'm making my mortgage payments.
00:11:23.860 | I personally do not believe that to be an immoral situation.
00:11:26.860 | You have made an agreement with a bank to make your payments.
00:11:30.860 | What is immoral is if you don't pay as agreed.
00:11:33.860 | And that's my personal conviction at the moment about what, you know, where the morality of debt comes in.
00:11:39.860 | If you don't follow through on your word, you're breaking your word, you're breaking a promise.
00:11:43.860 | And that's a very serious thing.
00:11:44.860 | And you must go and beg for mercy from your creditor.
00:11:47.860 | You need to go and work more.
00:11:49.860 | You need to figure out how to sell that asset and secure it.
00:11:52.860 | You need to do whatever you can to make that right.
00:11:54.860 | And you need to make sure that if you've borrowed money, if you owe people money, that you make restitution for that.
00:12:00.860 | So Christians, for example, they can't go and just leave a wake of unpaid people in their past.
00:12:06.860 | They need to go in to make restitution and pay back the people that they've stolen from.
00:12:10.860 | In effect, if you commit yourself to a series of payments and you don't pay, you are stealing from a creditor.
00:12:20.860 | It is theft.
00:12:21.860 | And so that's why it's so serious.
00:12:23.860 | You cannot steal.
00:12:25.860 | You cannot, you can't steal.
00:12:27.860 | And so if you've stolen something from somebody, then you need to go back and make restitution for your theft.
00:12:32.860 | So that's the, that's my understanding of my current approach to the moral question.
00:12:38.860 | So, so from a moral question, from a moral perspective, I would say you should always be very, very careful because you don't ever want to run the risk of turning yourself into a thief.
00:12:47.860 | You don't ever want to run the risk of where you might commit something that is immoral.
00:12:52.860 | You might sin because you put yourself in that situation.
00:12:55.860 | And so you should flee from those circumstances that might cause you to be there.
00:12:59.860 | Now, then you get to kind of the practical consideration.
00:13:02.860 | This is where we all wrestle because some people practically wrestle with the reality of buying a house.
00:13:10.860 | Is it ever possible for me to buy a house if I don't have, if I don't have, if I don't take out a mortgage?
00:13:16.860 | I deeply respect the people who are very committed to saying, I will not borrow for a house.
00:13:23.860 | I am personally my own conviction.
00:13:25.860 | I'm 99.9% of the way there.
00:13:27.860 | What happens is a lot of times my understanding of the law around finances and the financial tools available, because I understand so much the practical arguments, it makes it hard for me to go 100% of the way there.
00:13:40.860 | But I'm personally there, especially as a young person to say, I really respect and admire the people who say I'm not going to borrow money.
00:13:48.860 | And I see that as being well worth pursuing, because even though you might not be as financially rich by choosing not to borrow money, I believe the lower stress can be so helpful.
00:14:00.860 | And when I look at those things that are moral and immoral and figure out how do we position ourselves so that we're not subject to moral temptation or to pressures that would cause us to sin, I think being very conservative and very careful is important.
00:14:14.860 | So, I want my children, for example, I've always admired the testimony of Steve Maxwell with his children, where by the time before his children married, they were able to pay cash for their house and be in a situation where they could pay cash for a house.
00:14:31.860 | Now, there's nothing morally right or wrong about owning a house versus renting a house.
00:14:36.860 | But if you look practically at it and you start to say, well, what could that do?
00:14:40.860 | I personally really love the scripture from the biblical law in the Old Testament where in Deuteronomy, I think, where it says if a soldier marries that he shouldn't be allowed to go out.
00:14:53.860 | He's not allowed to go to war during the first year of his marriage, but rather he needs to be able to stay at home and please his wife.
00:14:59.860 | I think that's a really valid, learn how to please his wife.
00:15:01.860 | I think that's such a valuable principle, and I wish we embrace that more in modern Christian culture to say for a newlywed, what can you do, especially in the first year of your marriage, to just simply be together with your new wife or your new husband?
00:15:16.860 | What can you do to just simply be together so that you as man and wife have time to learn how to please each other in every sense of the word?
00:15:24.860 | Well, that's a lot easier to do if you're not experiencing financial strain.
00:15:29.860 | It's a lot easier to do if you don't have a big hairy mortgage payment.
00:15:31.860 | If you don't have a mortgage payment, then in your first year of marriage, you can cancel your business or pull it back to 20% time.
00:15:37.860 | So you have plenty of time and you can enjoy some of the richness of life.
00:15:41.860 | And I often wonder, well, we look at divorce statistics.
00:15:44.860 | So of course, divorce is a great moral wrong, a great sin.
00:15:47.860 | So if we look at divorce statistics, I've often wondered, well, what if we avoided the financial pressure?
00:15:51.860 | Because a lot of people report that financial pressures are significant factors on their way to divorce.
00:15:56.860 | What if we avoided that?
00:15:57.860 | Would that not lead to greater health of marriages, greater permanence of marriages, et cetera?
00:16:03.860 | So practically speaking, I think we're well served to follow the path that you have followed.
00:16:09.860 | And excuse me, I admire you for that, and I think it is good.
00:16:13.860 | Now, let me pause for a moment and ask you this.
00:16:18.860 | Can you imagine a circumstance in the future, given your convictions, given the way that you've lived the last 25 years, can you imagine a circumstance in the future in which you would choose to borrow money?
00:16:29.860 | And if so, explain to me what that circumstance would be.
00:16:33.860 | You know, Joshua, at this point, I really can't.
00:16:37.860 | I think we would go without before we would borrow money, just personal conviction.
00:16:42.860 | So no, I really can't, unless it was health emergency or something where we had to.
00:16:47.860 | But no, I just really can't.
00:16:50.860 | Right.
00:16:51.860 | And I think that is, well, I think that's really good.
00:16:55.860 | You know, one of the things I really admired, I interviewed a long time ago, I interviewed a businessman I met named Tim Yarborough.
00:17:01.860 | And one of the things that Tim Yarborough, he's in his late 60s.
00:17:05.860 | One of the things he said in that interview here on Radical Personal Finance was he said, you know, he said, my wife and I, if we didn't have the money to pay for it, we wouldn't buy it.
00:17:14.860 | And he said, you know, if we didn't have any money and we had to live in a tent, well, she would say, what color of tent do we want to live in?
00:17:19.860 | Because that's what we've got.
00:17:20.860 | And I really admired him for that statement.
00:17:24.860 | And it's always stuck with me since hearing him say that here in the show.
00:17:28.860 | And I, you know, I really I really think that's a valuable conviction.
00:17:33.860 | And I am, you know, I try to, like I said, I'm 99% of the way there.
00:17:38.860 | And of course, I don't I don't want to impose that on other people because not every wife would go along with a husband.
00:17:44.860 | He was an experienced, mature husband.
00:17:46.860 | They had a mature relationship.
00:17:47.860 | Not every wife wants to hear what color of tent do you want, honey.
00:17:50.860 | But I respect that.
00:17:51.860 | So I would say, first of all, for you, if that's your answer, then I don't think you should even worry about your credit score.
00:17:57.860 | I don't think you should worry about any of this stuff.
00:17:59.860 | Because because because let me make two points for you.
00:18:02.860 | First of all, there is a difference between your credit worthiness and your credit score.
00:18:11.860 | So, Jan, you today have credit.
00:18:14.860 | You could go to friends of yours, family members of yours, business owners that you know, wealthy people who you know.
00:18:22.860 | You could go to the preachers in your church.
00:18:24.860 | You could go to the elders in your church.
00:18:26.860 | And you could say, I need money.
00:18:29.860 | Will you lend me money?
00:18:31.860 | And you today have credit with those people.
00:18:35.860 | There are probably dozens of people that would say, how much do you need, Jan?
00:18:39.860 | Here's the money.
00:18:40.860 | They're not going to check your credit score.
00:18:42.860 | They're going based upon your word, based upon your affirmation that you say, I need money.
00:18:48.860 | I will repay you.
00:18:49.860 | And they know you to be a morally righteous person who will follow through.
00:18:53.860 | And so you today have credit.
00:18:55.860 | What you don't have is a credit score.
00:18:58.860 | Now, what is a credit score primarily?
00:19:00.860 | A credit score is a way of facilitating financial relationships and transactions of trust between persons who don't have any relationship of trust.
00:19:12.860 | If you go and apply for a credit card with Bank of America, Bank of America doesn't know you.
00:19:18.860 | They don't know that you're a morally upstanding person or a not morally upstanding person.
00:19:24.860 | They don't know if you will pay them back or not pay them back.
00:19:27.860 | And so the credit score is a basic means of trying to facilitate economic transactions of trust between disconnected people who don't previously have a relationship.
00:19:37.860 | And you can make a strong argument that that is an economic miracle.
00:19:41.860 | And one of the most powerful things about the U.S. American financial system and about the U.S. American economy is you can have financial transactions in a society that doesn't have a high level of mutual trust and doesn't have a high level of mutual connectedness.
00:19:58.860 | That leads to a powerful situation.
00:20:00.860 | So I first emphasize to you that you do today have credit.
00:20:03.860 | What you don't have is a credit score.
00:20:05.860 | Now, secondly, I can think of many good benefits of not having a credit score, of not having that information.
00:20:11.860 | And and as long as you don't see the circumstance in which you would actually need the credit score, where you would actually borrow the money from an institution that doesn't know you, as long as you don't have that circumstance, I don't think you need to worry about it.
00:20:25.860 | For example, the privacy that you enjoy by not having a credit score, the fact that TransUnion and Equifax and Experian and Novus, the fact that these companies think that you're intelligent.
00:20:36.860 | Anyway, the other the other two that that are increasingly prominent, the fact that they don't know who you are is great from a privacy perspective.
00:20:43.860 | I think that's awesome.
00:20:44.860 | And your life is very low stress from it.
00:20:46.860 | So where does it hurt you?
00:20:47.860 | About the only place is going to hurt you personally is if you go to do something like take advantage of a Verizon gimmick of two year phone and things like that.
00:20:55.860 | Or if you the big one is things like insurance, car insurance.
00:20:59.860 | Some car insurance companies will bring in your credit score as a component of your underwriting for the rates that they give you.
00:21:06.860 | Have you experienced that problem personally?
00:21:08.860 | That's I think one of the things we're fighting right now is our auto insurance is crazy and the only reason they can give us is is basically the credit score.
00:21:18.860 | Right. Right. And that's what's unfortunate about it.
00:21:21.860 | So I don't have any personal experience not having a credit score and trying to fight about this.
00:21:28.860 | So I would give you three suggestions.
00:21:30.860 | Number one, if any listeners have done this, listeners like you who don't have a credit score, who it's been so long since they borrowed money.
00:21:36.860 | If they have tips, please come to the blog post for today's show or email them to me and I'll come to the blog post and comment about it so that we can try to get those tips to you, Jan.
00:21:47.860 | Number two, I would shop far and wide and I would make sure that as a component of it that you tried to find an insurance company, an insurance broker who would actually work with you.
00:21:55.860 | You can easily pull your driving record and you can submit that and you can simply show them and say, listen, I don't borrow money.
00:22:03.860 | I'm a very safe and conservative person.
00:22:05.860 | Here's my driving record.
00:22:06.860 | And you can fight for a company to underwrite you based upon them actually looking at you.
00:22:11.860 | And I think that's that's worth it.
00:22:12.860 | And third, if you have to pay higher rates because you don't have a good credit score, then, well, you're saving money by not borrowing money.
00:22:20.860 | It angers me that there are so few companies that are willing to work with an individual.
00:22:25.860 | You know, they talk about the rise of the machine and how computers control us.
00:22:28.860 | I have experienced so many times where people have become just stupid computer controllers where the computer spits out the answer and they don't have the ability to think.
00:22:36.860 | And the computers control everything.
00:22:39.860 | I can give example after example.
00:22:41.860 | It's frustrating.
00:22:42.860 | So I don't have any good solution to you.
00:22:44.860 | I would just say this.
00:22:45.860 | The Verizon stuff, gimmicks.
00:22:46.860 | The store credit cards, all gimmicks.
00:22:48.860 | You don't need any of that stuff.
00:22:49.860 | That stuff doesn't matter.
00:22:51.860 | You get a better deal just paying cash for it and stay consistent, not just pay cash for all that stuff.
00:22:56.860 | The only one where it hurts you is car insurance.
00:22:58.860 | And if it costs you an extra $600 a year or whatever, you know, fine.
00:23:01.860 | So be it.
00:23:02.860 | I don't have any good solutions for you there.
00:23:05.860 | That does help, Joshua.
00:23:07.860 | I appreciate that.
00:23:09.860 | Kind of reinforces where we're at and makes me not quite as concerned.
00:23:12.860 | And I just want to, as you go, I just want to say thank you for following through over the years.
00:23:19.860 | You know, Larry Burkett was a treasure.
00:23:21.860 | I so appreciate, I remember when I was a kid, used to hear his stuff when we would sit at the bus stop waiting to pick up my older siblings.
00:23:30.860 | It was always about 3:30 in the afternoon, and my mom would play Larry Burkett when I was a kid.
00:23:34.860 | So I've always admired him.
00:23:36.860 | I like Ron Blue, who took over, met Ron a couple of times, and I appreciate a lot of the work they've done.
00:23:40.860 | I've read several of Larry Burkett's old books, and they were good, a lot of good stuff in there, and help people to do good things.
00:23:48.860 | I'm glad you've benefited from his teaching.
00:23:51.860 | Okay, great. I appreciate that.
00:23:53.860 | Thanks for the info, and you did help.
00:23:56.860 | Good. My pleasure.
00:23:57.860 | Well, and keep up the good work.
00:23:59.860 | I say at this point, if you don't need a credit score, don't bother.
00:24:01.860 | It's a silly system.
00:24:03.860 | There are good things about it, but in many ways it's a silly system.
00:24:05.860 | We go now to Matt in North Carolina.
00:24:07.860 | Matt, welcome to the show.
00:24:08.860 | How can I serve you today, sir?
00:24:10.860 | Well, hey, Joshua.
00:24:11.860 | It's a pleasure to speak to you again.
00:24:13.860 | I guess I want to just lead off by asking, how are you and your family enjoying life on the road?
00:24:17.860 | Is it treating you well?
00:24:19.860 | Yeah, I don't talk much about it, do I?
00:24:22.860 | I always get a little embarrassed with too much self-promotion, and I just feel like, well, people would rather hear other things other than what the road is like, versus -- but then I realize people are interested.
00:24:39.860 | So thank you for teeing me up with a softball question to talk about myself.
00:24:44.860 | Yes, we are enjoying the road.
00:24:46.860 | It has confirmed many of the things that I previously thought.
00:24:52.860 | So, for example, in past times when I've interviewed people who are longtime travelers, I've always said to them, "What are you doing?
00:24:59.860 | What's the point of your travels?"
00:25:02.860 | And we have various goals that we have been systematically fulfilling in our travels, but sometimes I just kind of feel like I'm wandering about.
00:25:09.860 | And it's very different than being in one place, part of a standard community where you can actually be still and able to produce -- to be able to make an impact in the community.
00:25:21.860 | I think that's so important because those community-focused things are -- well, they're very meaningful.
00:25:29.860 | One of the big disappointments that I have had of being on the road, it's been very hard to find families to spend time with, especially time for our children to be with.
00:25:37.860 | Many RVers talk about the RVing community, the fact that they find it so easy to go out and there's families all over the place, etc.
00:25:44.860 | I've read a lot of and talked to some full-time RVers who say, "Oh, it's no big deal. There's community everywhere."
00:25:49.860 | I have not found that to be the case.
00:25:51.860 | I have found that most of the parks that we're in, there are very few children, very few families.
00:25:56.860 | There are quite a number of retirees, quite a number of 50s, 60s, 70-year-old travelers.
00:26:01.860 | There are some young couples every now and then, but there are very few families, and especially if you're not traveling during the vacation times when children are more commonly out of school, there are very few families.
00:26:11.860 | That's been very challenging.
00:26:13.860 | I've tried to latch on to any opportunity possible to really stay still whenever we've found families to spend time with.
00:26:20.860 | I have found that I really enjoy some aspects of working from the road, but it is very difficult to be both a father and a mobile worker.
00:26:30.860 | I've solved a lot of those problems.
00:26:32.860 | I had major problems in the beginning figuring out where to work, when to work, and I've solved a lot of those problems.
00:26:39.860 | I figured out how to create an office on the road.
00:26:44.860 | What I did was I bought a pop-up truck camper for my pickup truck.
00:26:49.860 | We now have two RVs.
00:26:51.860 | I have a truck camper on the truck, and I have a trailer.
00:26:54.860 | That gives me a place to go and to be in a stationary place where I can be protected from the wind and from the sun, but yet I don't have to constantly be going and looking for a co-working space.
00:27:04.860 | I don't have to constantly be going and looking for a Starbucks or a coffee shop.
00:27:08.860 | I have found that to be—that's helped a lot, but it took me a little while to figure out how to do that.
00:27:15.860 | I really struggled with that a lot.
00:27:16.860 | I find it's hard to figure out a work schedule that also works with traveling.
00:27:20.860 | Traveling is very tiring, and especially traveling with young children is very tiring because your days on the road are different.
00:27:29.860 | It's funny.
00:27:30.860 | So much of my life being a father, I've realized how well-meaning but utterly impractical so much of the advice that I used to think was just brilliant was.
00:27:43.860 | I remember my wife and I laughed to each other.
00:27:46.860 | I remember reading when I was younger, I would read people talk about their morning routines.
00:27:52.860 | This is a big thing in the personal development self-help world about, "What's your morning routine?"
00:27:58.860 | You find people who talk about their writers or their prominent people, and they say, "Well, I get up in the morning at this time, and I follow my Hal Elrod miracle morning.
00:28:11.860 | I do 10 minutes of this.
00:28:13.860 | I do 10 minutes of that.
00:28:14.860 | I make my coffee just this way.
00:28:16.860 | I have this certain breakfast, and this is this perfect thing."
00:28:19.860 | I look, and I think to myself, "Are these people not parents?"
00:28:25.860 | It's just all the advice is so utterly unsuited for parents of young children where your morning routine, sometimes you get up really early in work, and the kids all sleep.
00:28:39.860 | Sometimes you've got multiple sick children, and you get two hours of sleep, and the most important thing you need to do is just to sleep in.
00:28:45.860 | So much of the traveling world and all of that is a lot of the advice is not suited to parents.
00:28:54.860 | I find it just challenging to figure out how to stretch our children out but also how to make sure that we're doing things that they're enjoying.
00:29:01.860 | And then finally, I guess my final comment, I never thought that traveling with young children was all that important to the children in the sense that it never made sense to me.
00:29:11.860 | What does a five-year-old get out of seeing Custer's Last Stand?
00:29:14.860 | They don't know who Custer is.
00:29:15.860 | They don't know what a last stand is.
00:29:17.860 | They don't understand the intricacies of what was happening with the Indians and the white people and battles and all of this stuff.
00:29:24.860 | And they're like, "Oh, Custer's Last Stand.
00:29:25.860 | It's a grassy field, and there's a bunch of crosses.
00:29:27.860 | Great."
00:29:28.860 | Or they don't conceive of what the Civil War was.
00:29:32.860 | And so I've always wanted to travel with children who were in their early teens where we could talk about those things and we could read the biographies.
00:29:41.860 | And I've always wanted to sit out on a battlefield in the south somewhere and talk about the war of northern aggression and discuss what happened, what were people doing.
00:29:50.860 | And I've always wanted to do that and have those experiences of traveling.
00:29:53.860 | Well, my little children, they're troopers, but although I try really hard, they don't understand the war of northern aggression.
00:30:01.860 | They can't really talk to me about what happened.
00:30:05.860 | So I would say that I stand by my previous thought that although traveling can be – there are certain things that are good about it.
00:30:13.860 | My children are certainly enjoying it.
00:30:14.860 | And a lot of times I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
00:30:17.860 | If the parents don't have their own reasons for doing it, I don't think it's worth the hassle to do with young children.
00:30:23.860 | I think wait till your children are 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
00:30:28.860 | I think those are the ideal times to go and spend extensive time on the road.
00:30:32.860 | So I would say in short, we've been enjoying ourselves.
00:30:35.860 | That was a lot of negative things, I guess, but we have been enjoying ourselves.
00:30:38.860 | I haven't found much that has surprised me.
00:30:41.860 | We are achieving the goals of our trip, some of which are public, some of which are not public.
00:30:46.860 | So we are enjoying it, but it is not – but I stand by most of my previous thoughts and my skepticism that's probably come through as I've interviewed other travelers.
00:30:57.860 | Yeah, cool.
00:30:59.860 | I appreciate that.
00:31:00.860 | I just wanted to hear.
00:31:02.860 | And I think people enjoy the story part, right?
00:31:05.860 | That's what folks connect with.
00:31:07.860 | I wanted to ask a little more, I guess, kind of prosaically, as someone who's listened to your show and has enjoyed knowing you a little bit over some years, I kind of wondered how you have seen your audience shift, at least in my perception, as your show has transitioned from one with a ton of specific personal finance content to what I would say is more of like a lifestyle and ideas show with connections to personal finance.
00:31:35.860 | What has that meant for you as a creator?
00:31:39.860 | Well, I've certainly enjoyed the artistic outlet of clarifying ideas.
00:31:48.860 | Over the last few years, I've honed in on what I believe is my core skill, which is to absorb a diverse array of information and then synthesize it and organize it into useful approaches.
00:32:02.860 | I really think that's basically what I'm good at.
00:32:06.860 | I have a very organized mind, and so I'm good at kind of thinking about absorbing abstract concepts, abstract subjects, and then trying to clarify them and organize them.
00:32:19.860 | And so I have enjoyed that creative outlet.
00:32:24.860 | The show has been – I've really enjoyed it.
00:32:27.860 | Probably the biggest challenge has been trying to figure out what the right model is for making a fortune with the work.
00:32:53.860 | I never would have closed my financial planning business if I could have figured out a way to create public media in that previous context.
00:33:00.860 | I'm glad that I did that, but that was a very expensive decision.
00:33:04.860 | And so one of the reasons why I did it was I thought, "Well, I'll be able to serve people who are not currently well served by the financial advice industry."
00:33:13.860 | Financial advisors do a great job of helping people who are rich.
00:33:24.860 | They don't do a good job, usually, of helping people become rich.
00:33:28.860 | And so I thought, "Well, I can do that."
00:33:30.860 | Well, then it was very sobering for me to go and turn on a microphone and then find out, "Well, am I all that good at helping people become rich?
00:33:37.860 | It's like I got a lot of rich people listening to me."
00:33:39.860 | And so it's a little bit frustrating when you sit down and you're like, "Oh, man, I used to give this advice and I would collect a five-figure paycheck or a six-figure paycheck for this advice previously rather than giving it away for free.
00:33:58.860 | Why am I spending all my time giving everything away for free?"
00:34:01.860 | And so then when you look at the different ways of building a business behind the show, I've had various – what's the term for when you're Don Quixote tilting at windmills?
00:34:13.860 | I've had various causes and Quixotic attempts of things that I wanted to see.
00:34:24.860 | I really dedicated myself to crowdfunding, for example.
00:34:29.860 | I was like, "I really love the concept of crowdfunding."
00:34:31.860 | And I'm speaking to you, of course.
00:34:32.860 | You're a patron of the show, and I thank you for that.
00:34:34.860 | But the reality is it's not possible to build a – at least in what I'm doing, it's not possible or wise to build a business on the basis of crowdfunding because you get a very, very tiny percentage of people who wish to pay for it.
00:34:48.860 | Although I love the principle and the ideology of people – of voluntarism and people being able to do all those things, it just doesn't work as a business.
00:35:00.860 | It'd be far better for me to sell insurance and, again, collect nice five- and six-figure commissions.
00:35:06.860 | So I really wrestled with a lot of those things.
00:35:09.860 | And I'm thrilled to do it, but my current focus is I've been in the work of repositioning, dropping advertising, dropping things, and just focusing on saying, "How can I create really high-quality, high-value educational content in the form of courses?"
00:35:27.860 | Because that is a leverageable ability, and that's the position that I have gone in.
00:35:32.860 | Because otherwise it doesn't make any sense for me to give it all away for free when there are lots of people – I just go back and serve rich people and make a lot more money.
00:35:45.860 | So that's been kind of the journey that I have been on personally.
00:35:50.860 | Yeah, I appreciate that. As someone who's listened over time, I was curious to get your thoughts.
00:35:57.860 | I guess you've touched on this a little bit just now in terms of maybe your vision for your business, but do you have a vision for the show as a part of that business?
00:36:08.860 | I guess it's my perception that up to this point, the podcast and the audience that you've built are really an important – it would be difficult to replicate what you've done since – I don't remember if it's 2013 or '14, but it's a much more crowded marketplace now.
00:36:26.860 | And so the equity that you've built in the show I think is meaningful.
00:36:31.860 | And so I was curious what your thoughts are on the show rolling forward.
00:36:34.860 | Yeah, it's definitely meaningful.
00:36:35.860 | It is not possible to do things the way that I did it in 2000 – whenever it was, '13, '14, I guess.
00:36:44.860 | It is not possible to do that today.
00:36:46.860 | And that was one of the reasons why I did what I did, why I launched with a minimal plan in the sense that I saw that timing was important.
00:36:58.860 | I knew the space. I knew the technology.
00:37:01.860 | I knew the adoption curve that would happen.
00:37:03.860 | And I knew that if I moved quickly, I would have an early mover advantage.
00:37:07.860 | Now, it is very possible to use media effectively today as a way – as an outlet and as a way of marketing a business.
00:37:16.860 | But it's not possible to do it in the bootstrapping way that I did it.
00:37:19.860 | And it's not possible to necessarily do the – well, to do it exactly the way that I did it.
00:37:24.860 | Now, I've not done everything well.
00:37:26.860 | I'm keenly aware of many of the things that I could do better and that I will do better.
00:37:30.860 | It's just as with anything, it's a matter of capacity and prioritization, trying to say, "What do you focus on?"
00:37:36.860 | I would say that podcasting, specifically, podcasting is very difficult as a business in the sense that it's not a business.
00:37:46.860 | Podcasting is a wonderful marketing arm for a business, but it is very difficult as a business.
00:37:53.860 | I personally had that idea when I began, but I also thought that it was possible to supersede it.
00:38:00.860 | And I've kind of – I would say with mixed results.
00:38:05.860 | Yes, I've been able to create a business on podcasting, but it's also still true that podcasting is a better marketing for a business than it is as a business itself.
00:38:13.860 | I think probably one of the most important things is the difference between vanity metrics and real metrics.
00:38:19.860 | Most of the metrics related to much of media are largely vanity metrics.
00:38:26.860 | The metric that matters, at least the measurable metric, is how much money you make.
00:38:32.860 | And I think that how much money you make is in many ways a suitable proxy in many ways for the number of people that you serve.
00:38:39.860 | Now, I always want to start with the number of people that you serve, but at the end of the day, a business has to be profitable enough for the owners to continue that work.
00:38:48.860 | And so that's what I have been seeking to do is to reorient the show in a very profit-focused direction so that it would make me enough money that I would want to continue doing it.
00:39:03.860 | So when you look at people who – when you look at podcasting metrics or with any kind of media creation, you have to look and say, "Is this a vanity metric or is this an actual productive metric?"
00:39:17.860 | And I don't have much time for vanity metrics. I prefer living a fairly private life.
00:39:23.860 | And so having lots of people that know me is not that interesting to me.
00:39:27.860 | I would much rather have metrics that matter, not just vanity metrics.
00:39:33.860 | So I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I would say that today, it's just different.
00:39:40.860 | Markets change. And so today, the strategies that I would start again with today are very different.
00:39:45.860 | Now, but you're right about equity.
00:39:47.860 | My personal belief is if you will focus as a core operating principle, if you just simply focus on serving people, you can dispense with a lot of the gimmicks.
00:40:00.860 | And people that want to be served will understand that.
00:40:03.860 | And so there is a very committed listener base of listeners to Radical Personal Finance.
00:40:08.860 | And I just wake up every day and I think, "How can I serve those people?"
00:40:11.860 | And I think it would be a real mistake.
00:40:13.860 | I don't worry about any of the analysis audiences.
00:40:15.860 | I don't try to go after any analysis audiences.
00:40:17.860 | Other people can serve other people.
00:40:19.860 | And I mean, for crying out loud, I started this Q&A show with a discussion of biblical doctrine.
00:40:24.860 | That has a very limited appeal in today's world.
00:40:28.860 | That's very different than me leading off with a shock jock discussion.
00:40:31.860 | But for the people who care about that, they can't find that in other places.
00:40:35.860 | And so my entire goal is to serve my listeners well and to take good use of their time, good use of their money, and try to give them things that they can't find in other places.
00:40:46.860 | So we'll see.
00:40:48.860 | Yeah. Cool.
00:40:50.860 | Well, that – I mean, those were the kind of things that I was hoping to just chat with you about on the Q&A call today.
00:40:57.860 | And I really appreciate you taking a minute to visit.
00:41:01.860 | Yeah, my pleasure.
00:41:02.860 | Those were some tee-up questions, and that makes my life relatively simple and easy to have people just say, "Joshua, what are you thinking about your life?"
00:41:11.860 | So we've been – I feel bad because most of what I've said in probably the last 25 minutes probably sounded negative.
00:41:20.860 | I don't intend to sound negative.
00:41:22.860 | I am more enthusiastic right now about my life, my enjoyment of today, and what I am doing than I have been in a long time.
00:41:32.860 | So everything is positive.
00:41:33.860 | I have nothing to complain about.
00:41:35.860 | I am deeply grateful to be able to live such a luxurious lifestyle.
00:41:41.860 | The fact that I can stand here in a truck camper in the middle of nowhere and talk to you is – what a blessing.
00:41:50.860 | What a privilege.
00:41:51.860 | I mean, this wasn't possible five years ago.
00:41:54.860 | And so I feel bad for most of my comments over the last 20 minutes that I – well, I should have just focused on everything that's awesome.
00:42:05.860 | I don't like to do that because I feel like life is never just awesome.
00:42:09.860 | And one of the things that happens is if you always portray everything as awesome all the time, then it leads people to feel inferior with their own life.
00:42:20.860 | It's like – this has been pretty well documented in Facebooklandia and in social media.
00:42:27.860 | If all we post on Facebook is the pictures of our peak experiences, what happens is those of us who flip through our feeds are sitting there looking, and all you see is other people's peak experiences.
00:42:38.860 | You see the beautiful picture of the family with children perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon and say, "Wow, we're so enthusiastic."
00:42:46.860 | What you don't see is that the baby just blew out their diaper and totally had to have a fresh change of clothes.
00:42:53.860 | And mom and dad just yelled at each other.
00:42:55.860 | And the older children are squabbling.
00:42:57.860 | And you just had just the briefest moment to take the picture.
00:43:00.860 | And so what happens is that leaves somebody who has just finished up a long, hard shift at their job, and they're flipping through their phone idly.
00:43:08.860 | It leaves them saying, "What's wrong with me?"
00:43:10.860 | And I think that's really unhealthy.
00:43:12.860 | We should be balanced in what we do.
00:43:15.860 | So I'll just close with this.
00:43:17.860 | I would say thank you to each and every one of you who listens to my show.
00:43:20.860 | It is an honor to serve you, and I am grateful for that privilege.
00:43:24.860 | The thing that I most appreciate about Radical Personal Finance is I feel like I get emails, I get comments.
00:43:32.860 | I feel like I'm able to help more people than I ever was when I was working face-to-face.
00:43:39.860 | And when I was working face-to-face, I loved the impact that I could have.
00:43:43.860 | But I'm so grateful to have listeners that reach out to me and say, "We saved money."
00:43:51.860 | Or I'm so grateful to reach out to listeners and say, "We got out of debt."
00:43:54.860 | Or, "We bought great insurance."
00:43:56.860 | That, to me, is so gratifying, and it makes a world of difference to me that I really love it.
00:44:03.860 | So thank you for listening, and I really appreciate it.
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