RPF0160-Friday

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00:00:16.280 | Radical Personal Finance is 100% listener supported. This allows me to bring you the

00:00:22.160 | show commercial free and also conflict of interest free. For more information on how

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00:00:34.300 | of doing so, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

00:00:40.800 | Today on the show we dig into some Friday Q&A. I've got two questions lined up. Number

00:00:46.040 | one, Joshua, I've had an ideological change of heart and I no longer can do my job with

00:00:50.860 | a clear conscience. How on earth do I transition to another career? Number two, Joshua, my

00:00:57.840 | income is fluctuating greatly. How do I plan for a fluctuating income?

00:01:19.920 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and this is the show

00:01:24.200 | for Friday, February 27, 2015. It will not be released on Friday, but it is the show

00:01:31.300 | for Friday as promised. Life gets in the way sometimes and sometimes you have to make adjustments

00:01:36.880 | and that's what we're doing, but I've got a good one for you. It's useful to learn from

00:01:40.540 | other people's experiences and that's what we're going to do today.

00:01:51.440 | I really love doing these Friday Q&A shows because over my lifetime I have learned so

00:01:55.960 | much from listening to other people's scenarios and other people's stories. There's something

00:02:00.280 | to be said for simply learning from someone else. In so many times it's easier to see

00:02:04.980 | what other people should do than it is to see what you should do. I know for me it's

00:02:09.560 | very much easier to see what other people should do, but not so easy to see what I should

00:02:13.640 | do in my own situation. I'm sure it's the same for you. That's why these Friday shows

00:02:17.600 | I think are super, super valuable. Real quick, as we get started, last night

00:02:22.840 | we had the first ever Google Hangout for the patrons of the show. I want to thank all of

00:02:28.520 | you who came. It was an awesome experience for me. I really enjoyed it. I know many of

00:02:33.620 | you were actually unintentionally frozen out of the Hangout. I apologize. There are two

00:02:39.440 | kinds of Google Hangouts that the Google Hangout system has. One of them has a system wherein

00:02:45.620 | you can allow everyone in and everyone can video chat and video conference. That has

00:02:49.840 | a total of 10 people that can be admitted to that call. The other one is Google Live

00:02:54.600 | where essentially it transmits a video feed of me to the internet. You can chat in a chat

00:02:59.400 | room, but it doesn't allow everyone to be seen.

00:03:02.920 | I was trying to launch Google Live. I practiced in advance and I had everything ready to go,

00:03:07.600 | but I wound up somehow. I still can't figure out how I did it. I accidentally launched a

00:03:12.040 | Google Hangout. That allowed only 10 people into the Google Hangout and several of you

00:03:15.760 | were frozen out. I apologize to those of you who were frozen out. It was a really fun experience

00:03:20.940 | for me to be able to interact with 10 of you face to face and answer your questions and

00:03:25.560 | see your face and for us all to see each other. That was super fun. In the future, it'll be

00:03:29.040 | more of a scenario where I think you'll be able to see me and I'll be answering questions

00:03:33.880 | that you give in a chat room type of environment. We'll have that worked out for next month.

00:03:40.240 | Thank you to all of those of you who came. I really enjoyed doing it with you. I really

00:03:44.280 | did.

00:03:45.280 | I guess I'll plug in the Patreon account here a couple of ways. Those Google Hangouts are

00:03:51.080 | available to you for everyone who supports the show at $10 per month or more. Every single

00:03:58.200 | month I'll do a Google Hangout for all the supporters of the show who support the show

00:04:01.440 | at $10 a month or more. There are also a bunch of other benefits, but that's one of the primary

00:04:05.280 | benefits that you get at that level. I'll try to answer all your questions. I'll try

00:04:09.040 | to give you all the details that I can.

00:04:11.400 | Today also, in a Friday Q&A show, if you're supporting the show for $5 per month or more,

00:04:17.320 | your questions will go to the head of the line. I'll get your questions ahead of other

00:04:22.160 | people's questions on the Friday Q&A show. At this point, I have too many questions for

00:04:26.080 | me to ever answer them all on the show and more coming in all the time, which is great.

00:04:29.560 | So I think this will help to prioritize it. I think it's in a fairly ethical way where

00:04:36.280 | I'm not saying I'm not going to answer everyone's questions. I'm not saying I'm not going to

00:04:39.800 | answer anyone who's not a supporting patron of the show, but it does help me to have a

00:04:43.720 | way of changing the flow of questions a little bit.

00:04:46.560 | So I invite you to go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. You can see all those benefits. So enough advertising.

00:04:52.320 | Let's get to the questions. First question comes from Bill. Bill has a question about

00:04:58.000 | career planning. He writes me this question. "Joshua, the reason why I'm writing has nothing

00:05:02.200 | to do with finances but career advice. Did you or do you provide career counseling? If

00:05:08.560 | not, can you at least recommend someone you trust? I thought I heard you mention on a

00:05:12.280 | previous show that you were involved in that line of work, but unless I'm mistaken, it

00:05:15.960 | may have been a guest. Brief introduction. I'm 32 years old, a recent MBA graduate, and

00:05:21.320 | have a really unique professional background that makes career transitions exceptionally

00:05:25.840 | difficult. Suppose I were a client of yours who was considering a career change at a radical

00:05:30.480 | 50% pay cut. There are huge financial and emotional considerations at stake. Would such

00:05:37.200 | a career change be consistent with my financial goals? I've been working in a specific industry

00:05:42.180 | since I started fresh out of college. I have recently undergone an ideological conversion

00:05:47.160 | to a different system of thinking, and I now face some cognitive dissonance over what I

00:05:51.640 | do for a living and who I do it for. I want out. In fact, this is the reason I went back

00:05:57.240 | to school for my MBA a couple years ago. I thought the MBA might help me push the reset

00:06:01.540 | button on my career, but the job market hasn't been kind to me. I've applied to all kinds

00:06:06.520 | of jobs that I've thought were similar enough to the work I currently do. Unfortunately,

00:06:10.880 | I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place. I'm too old to be considered for

00:06:15.100 | lower-tiered, entry-level positions. I'm also too inexperienced to be considered for

00:06:19.440 | more senior or mid-level positions. I am seen as a liability. Recruiters think I won't

00:06:25.440 | last very long if they bring me in at a lower level. Recruiters think I won't last very

00:06:30.240 | long if I'm brought into a new environment or industry. I'm stuck. I'm hoping to speak

00:06:34.720 | to someone who can help me do two things. One, better understand what marketable skills

00:06:38.240 | I have, and two, better understand what jobs exist that are the best match for my skills.

00:06:44.040 | It gets a little crazier. Due to nondisclosure agreements I've signed, I cannot fully disclose

00:06:48.140 | the exact nature of my skills. This is perhaps the real pickle, which makes this ordeal much

00:06:52.740 | harder than it would normally be for other career changers. What are your thoughts, Bill?

00:06:57.460 | Bill, this is an interesting question, and I'm going to give you some referrals and some

00:07:02.980 | resources at the end, but first I want to give you just some ideas, some things for

00:07:06.940 | you to consider. I have a theme that I refer to continually in my own mind. I've been planning

00:07:13.180 | to do a whole show on this. I can't remember where it came from. It may have come from

00:07:17.120 | Charles Hugh Smith's books. I'm not sure where it came from, but the theme is how can I focus

00:07:23.680 | on working comfortably instead of retiring comfortably?

00:07:29.480 | This is probably, if you think this show is all about retirement or early retirement or

00:07:33.920 | something like that, that might sound like a bit of a disconnect for you, but I think

00:07:37.240 | both of these things are important. I think any time we have a career crisis, we should

00:07:42.200 | first in essence focus on fixing that. The reality is most of us will spend more time

00:07:48.920 | in our lives working, earning an income, than just about any other occupation or any other

00:07:55.920 | activity. Work, actually doing it and thinking about it, consumes a massive percentage of

00:08:03.120 | our time, and as such it's going to have a bigger impact on our life than just about

00:08:07.760 | anything else. For me, in essence, I've got kind of an almost

00:08:11.960 | small informal rule. If there's a problem with our career or our work or our income,

00:08:18.040 | our job, our business, whatever you want to call it, that's almost always going to be

00:08:21.560 | the first priority. It's important to change our mindset and not be so focused on this

00:08:28.160 | idea of how can I do something that I don't really like just so I can pile up a bunch

00:08:32.900 | of money and retire comfortably down the road, and rather just simply focus on working comfortably.

00:08:38.440 | Again, I wish I could remember who I'm supposed to attribute for giving me that phrase. I'll

00:08:42.680 | just pawn it off as my own, I guess, because I can't remember it. If any of you know,

00:08:46.880 | I don't know. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's not really original with anybody,

00:08:49.960 | but just remember this. Focus always on working comfortably, not retiring comfortably. Then

00:08:54.800 | in essence, you've achieved what most people are trying to achieve through retirement.

00:08:59.200 | Now I personally was not always this way. I used to be very focused on the income and

00:09:04.220 | how to do well and have the highest income, but I've changed after years of doing financial

00:09:10.240 | planning and meeting with actual people and talking about their money. As far as I'm concerned,

00:09:14.220 | I've cracked the code on money. I've cracked the code. I don't care all that much about

00:09:20.400 | top line revenue. I don't care all that much about what the number is of the salary. It's

00:09:25.820 | not the most important thing. It does matter, but it's not the most important thing. Remember,

00:09:32.340 | you can build in today's modern world a life that is comfortable in every way, that has

00:09:39.400 | all of the conveniences of every kind, a life that is abundant and just wonderful for simply

00:09:47.760 | not much money. And you can also spend a lot of money on a life that's not really so abundant,

00:09:53.860 | not really so comfortable. So the primary focus being on top line revenue, on salary,

00:10:00.300 | is not a valid focus. It's a valid focus, but it's not the only thing. I think a better

00:10:07.260 | approach is to say, "How can I optimize my way of earning the income and then work out

00:10:11.980 | the planning on the back end?" The challenge is this. If a career doesn't fit your personal

00:10:17.580 | ideology, you can't possibly be world class at it. So that leads you to either you need

00:10:25.340 | to change your ideology or you need to change your career. There are a few ways to do this.

00:10:33.260 | I would say first, one change I think is a good one to make is change your mindset about

00:10:39.460 | the nature of your career. I'm not defined by what I do for a living. Regardless of how

00:10:45.820 | people want to define me by that, I refuse to fit that definition. There are many things

00:10:51.380 | that I can do for a living, and these things do not define me. Whether I'm Mr. Successful

00:10:57.600 | Financial Planning Guru or whether I'm world class podcast host or whether I'm a guy who—what's

00:11:05.300 | the most menial task? I'm a guy who cleans toilets for a living or I'm a guy who swings

00:11:09.660 | a hammer for a living or I'm a guy who digs a ditch or who delivers pizzas. I'm still

00:11:14.700 | the same guy. I'll tell you one of my favorite scenes from a movie. I always loved the movie

00:11:21.340 | with Harrison Ford. It's called Sabrina. There's a character in that movie. I've watched it

00:11:26.260 | a couple times with my wife, and I really enjoy the movie. The character in that movie

00:11:29.980 | that I would most aspire to be when I was younger, it would have been to be whatever—I

00:11:35.820 | think his name was Linus. That was the main protagonist, the hero of the movie, the big

00:11:40.420 | business guy. That was who I wanted to be when I was younger. These days, I want to

00:11:44.660 | be the chauffeur. If you're not familiar with the movie, there's a driver. The chauffeur

00:11:50.180 | in the movie, he takes a job. It's clear at the end of the movie. It makes it clear. He

00:11:54.820 | takes the job of a chauffeur, so it gives him time to read and to learn. Whenever you

00:11:59.180 | see him in the movie, he's either driving or he's sitting in his home surrounded by

00:12:02.700 | his books. The natural outcome is when he's driving the car, when he's waiting for his

00:12:07.380 | passengers, he has time to read. That was why he chose that career.

00:12:14.060 | It's funny to me because that to me is what I would rather make that choice and just have

00:12:18.100 | the time to pursue the things that are of interest to me and have enough money to support

00:12:22.740 | myself. Now, I say that simply because I'm not defined by what I do for a living, and

00:12:27.900 | neither are you. Our culture would love to define you that way. Our culture would love

00:12:33.380 | to define you as a cog in an economic machine. It's not true. You're not. I'm not. We're

00:12:40.380 | not humans doing. We're humans being. It's a big difference.

00:12:46.540 | Now, historically, throughout the history of civilization, we all did pretty much the

00:12:50.500 | same thing. A hundred years ago, the vast majority of us worked in the soil and provided

00:12:56.800 | for our means of living through the soil. Does that mean we were no different because

00:13:02.580 | we all did the same thing? No, we were incredibly different. We just happened to do the same

00:13:07.460 | thing. As far as I'm concerned, my career is simply a funding mechanism for my life.

00:13:12.700 | It's nice if I can do that and earn my living in an agreeable way. That's really ideal.

00:13:18.740 | But it's not a guarantee, and it does not define me. It's just simply a funding mechanism.

00:13:24.060 | Now, it's taken me a little bit. I didn't have the confidence years ago to declare that

00:13:27.940 | quite as freely as I can declare it now. I remember when I got out of college and I had

00:13:34.900 | the fancy-sounding job with a fancy-sounding title that could sound really cool. I got

00:13:38.580 | to the point where I didn't like doing the fancy-sounding job. I didn't like doing it

00:13:42.100 | no matter how fancy the title was. I realized I don't really care. I don't need to be judged

00:13:48.740 | by somebody else's system of social ranking. One of my favorite sayings, "I reject your

00:13:54.700 | reality and substitute my own." So I just simply view a career as a funding mechanism

00:13:59.660 | for my life. That's it. So if you change your mindset about it, I think it can remove some

00:14:04.420 | of the fear and some of the associated baggage of emotions that's built into our careers.

00:14:11.820 | Remember this. We are trained and conditioned as young, aggressive, career-minded people

00:14:20.200 | to spend all of our time thinking about our career. After all, a common meme in society

00:14:26.680 | is the purpose of schooling is to prepare you for your career. If you don't graduate

00:14:30.220 | from high school, you can't get a good job. You heard that. We have job counselors and

00:14:34.380 | career counselors that start talking to us from the beginning age. Then that became from

00:14:38.460 | getting a good job because you have a high school degree, that became getting into a

00:14:41.220 | good college so you can get a good job. So we spend 12 years preparing for college and

00:14:45.500 | we spend four years or more preparing in college to get a good job. Then once we get a good

00:14:50.180 | job, we're supposed to build out our resumes and you spend all your time focusing on getting

00:14:54.340 | a good job and managing career and you forget about your life. What a waste of time. It's

00:15:03.260 | a total waste of time. Now, do you need to support yourself? Yes.

00:15:09.340 | Does the intelligent management of a career make a play a part? Yes. I probably couldn't

00:15:14.540 | be doing what I'm doing now if I hadn't done a little bit of an intelligent job managing

00:15:18.580 | my previous career. So I'm not saying throw that out the window. I'm saying adjust the

00:15:21.740 | priority and realize that it may be tough. You may have to undo decades of training and

00:15:29.860 | thought about everything is about the career, everything is about the career. That's tough.

00:15:33.740 | But if you get there, man, having been stuck in that career mindset and then also having

00:15:38.300 | been I guess freed of it, it's pretty liberating to realize that there are thousands of things

00:15:45.260 | that I could do quite happily because I'm not identified by my career. I don't care

00:15:49.500 | whether that's managing a surfer bar in Nicaragua or whether that is running a hostel in Turkey

00:15:57.460 | or whether that's setting up a business and working as an insurance agent in Hong Kong

00:16:02.380 | or whether it's working as an urban farmer in Atlanta, Georgia. It doesn't matter. I

00:16:07.180 | can build something great in any of those areas.

00:16:12.300 | So I know I'm probably laboring at that a little too long, but it's a big factor is

00:16:16.580 | that we're scared to mess up our careers. We're scared to mar our perfect little resumes.

00:16:21.180 | People say, "I want to take a year off and travel," or, "I want to take two years off

00:16:23.820 | and travel, but I'm concerned about what it's going to do to my resume." What's it going

00:16:27.340 | to do to your resume? Everybody you ever interview with, that's going to be what they're interested

00:16:30.700 | in because you have the guts to say, "Forget this. I'm going to go follow my own path and

00:16:35.620 | chart my own course and I'm going to go travel."

00:16:39.220 | Now does that make you a highly qualified candidate? Probably not because it shows more

00:16:43.260 | of an independent streak and you might not fit quite so well as somebody with pressure.

00:16:48.980 | But to the right employer, that ability to think for yourself is going to be the selling

00:16:54.900 | point. Remember, I think most employers are at least in a small enough business where

00:17:00.740 | the business owner can actually have contact with many of the employees. Job skills are

00:17:07.100 | relatively easy to train. Character skills are not easy to train. Of all the business

00:17:13.820 | owners with whom I've interacted, I think the majority of them would rather have somebody

00:17:17.720 | that was poorly experienced in a specific area but were very dependable in their personal

00:17:23.580 | character because you can train most of the things that you need to do. It's hard to train

00:17:27.540 | somebody's character flaws.

00:17:30.740 | So change and adjust and just recognize at least your mindset about the nature of your

00:17:35.820 | career. Now many people do change their ideologies in order to fit their career. A lot of people

00:17:41.700 | do that. I've had to think about this. For example, when I got into the financial planning

00:17:49.900 | world, one of the biggest things that I really struggled with was my ideology prior to becoming

00:17:58.180 | a financial planning about certain types of insurance, specifically whole life insurance

00:18:02.580 | because I had an ideology that whole life insurance was never an acceptable financial

00:18:06.740 | product and that was what I spent several interviews trying to figure out.

00:18:11.060 | Well, then I had to go and I recognized that it wasn't necessarily the career that was

00:18:15.300 | wrong. It was rather my ideology was poorly informed. There was a lot that I didn't know

00:18:21.380 | and once I understood that, I was able to change my ideology and then enter into a new

00:18:24.460 | career on an ethical basis. So for some people, that might just need to learn something about

00:18:30.060 | a career. So just check your ideology and ask yourself, "Am I really violating something

00:18:34.260 | that's important?" If so, change the career. If not, you might change the ideology.

00:18:42.220 | If you don't want to change the ideology or you can't, change the career. There are thousands

00:18:47.020 | of careers that I simply couldn't do and excel at for various reasons from the mundane to

00:18:52.420 | the pretty big. I've always been fascinated with trucking. From the time I was a kid,

00:18:58.140 | I wanted to be an over the road trucker. I thought that would be the coolest job in the

00:19:01.460 | world. Probably most boys, little boys do. But I couldn't do that today with a clear

00:19:07.420 | conscience. I couldn't do it. It would destroy my family and I'm not willing to do that.

00:19:13.260 | So I simply am not willing to even consider that as an option even though I always thought

00:19:19.180 | it would be fun. By the way, for some of you, it's not a bad

00:19:24.380 | retirement plan. I've talked to some people who are husband and wife teams of truckers

00:19:29.100 | and they specialize in expedited freight or something where when it's got to get there,

00:19:32.420 | it's got to get there. But then there are other times where they can hang out and they

00:19:34.660 | live in their truck and they earn quite a bit of money for the two of them with low

00:19:38.420 | living expenses. In a few years, they've been able to salvage their retirement. I wish I

00:19:42.620 | could get some of them on the show. If any of you know anybody who has a story like that,

00:19:46.660 | then let me know. I've talked to some in person, but I've never been able to find someone that

00:19:50.180 | I could bring on the show. But it's kind of a potential retirement plan.

00:19:53.220 | If you wind up broke and bankrupt at 55 years old, well, maybe you get on the road as team

00:19:59.380 | trucking. Do that for six or seven years, save all your money and you can change your

00:20:04.140 | future. But I couldn't be an over-the-road trucker.

00:20:07.940 | I couldn't – I don't know. I couldn't work and I couldn't serve in the military.

00:20:10.780 | I couldn't work for the federal government even though I thought it would be super cool

00:20:13.780 | as a kid. When I was a kid, I always loved reading spy novels and novels about that.

00:20:17.980 | I always thought – but a kid doesn't probably. I thought it would be fun to be a CIA agent

00:20:21.060 | or Jason Bourne or Jack Ryan. For me, I always loved Tom Clancy.

00:20:26.020 | So I thought that would be fun. Then later on, as an adult, I just evaluated as an adult

00:20:30.380 | away from the romance of it and realized I could never serve in that capacity with my

00:20:36.540 | ethics and my belief system. I couldn't do it. Not saying other people can't do

00:20:40.540 | it. I couldn't do it. So I could never excel in that. So I would never be able to do that.

00:20:44.700 | If I were in that, I would have to change my career.

00:20:47.980 | So some of those types of things you may need to change. It's not that bad to change a

00:20:54.020 | career. A couple of pieces of good career advice that have really helped me and one

00:21:00.860 | of them – I just mentioned this on last night's Google Hangout actually with the

00:21:05.220 | listeners of the show. The source of this was actually John T. Reid's book entitled

00:21:10.700 | "Succeeding." In that book, he makes this statement and he says, "Go where you're

00:21:16.580 | valued and appreciated, not where you're merely tolerated." For some reason, when

00:21:23.100 | I read that book years ago – and it's a great book by the way. I highly recommend

00:21:26.020 | it. It will be on my list of recommended reading. I'll give you in a minute and I'll put

00:21:29.020 | links in the show notes. But when I read his book, I said, "Go where you're valued

00:21:34.380 | and appreciated, not merely tolerated." It just struck a chord.

00:21:37.860 | Now, his example was that he started his career as an army officer. He went to West Point,

00:21:44.980 | graduated from West Point, was in the army. I think he was in the Rangers, something like

00:21:47.460 | that, was an army officer. But he didn't get along well in the army because he wasn't

00:21:52.180 | willing to play the political game. His army career, although he certainly had an honorable

00:21:58.940 | discharge and no external markings of that, but his army career was substantially short-lived

00:22:04.780 | and quite miserable as he relates it simply because he was not willing to bend to fit

00:22:10.220 | the environment around him. So he was destined to not be successful within that context.

00:22:17.860 | But over time, he was able to transition to a different career and he actually transitioned

00:22:21.700 | first to the career of a real estate investor and later to the career of a self-help author

00:22:26.060 | writing self-help books and instructional how-to books.

00:22:31.420 | The exact same character quality which made him persona non grata in the army made him

00:22:37.660 | loved and valued and appreciated in his career as a how-to book author. Same person, different

00:22:44.100 | scenario. That was a huge thought for me because I've realized that, for example, in the mainstream

00:22:53.380 | financial planning world, I am, as a person, I'm more tolerated and people appreciate certain

00:23:00.140 | things but I'm more tolerated than I am appreciated and valued. I'm a bit of a maverick. I've

00:23:05.060 | got a bit of an independent streak. I've got strong ideas and strong ideology behind certain

00:23:10.020 | things and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

00:23:13.300 | But in a world like this, in the world of radical personal finance, that exact same

00:23:18.100 | character trait instead of simply being – Joshua being someone to put up with, that same character

00:23:22.960 | trait can make me somebody that people appreciate. You may not agree with me. Usually, I can

00:23:28.780 | just give enough time. I'll give you something to disagree with me about. But at least you

00:23:32.220 | can understand and appreciate that and I can buff at your thinking a little bit. I get

00:23:34.920 | emails all the time from listeners saying, "I just like listening to your show because

00:23:37.620 | I'm challenged with my ideas." And so it's a strength of – it's just a character

00:23:43.180 | trait of mine that gets reflected in the world around. So check that book out. I'll give

00:23:47.900 | some recommended in a minute. But if you are in a place where your ideology doesn't fit

00:23:52.900 | what you're doing, you got to get out. You got to get out and go where you're valued

00:23:59.940 | and loved and appreciated, not simply tolerated. Where would you be that? Where would you be

00:24:06.060 | loved and appreciated and tolerated? Well, that would be where it sounds like you need

00:24:09.140 | some time to figure out and know yourself. I don't know a better way to do this than

00:24:14.220 | to spend a lot of time with a journal. What careers sound fun? Daily list making. Write

00:24:19.700 | down 30 jobs that to you seem super fun and super interesting. If I were making that list,

00:24:24.900 | it would be all kinds of wacky things. I was recently in a kind of a mentoring appointment

00:24:28.700 | with a young man that I've been mentoring a little bit and we were talking about this.

00:24:32.300 | For me, I actually have these lists. But there would be things on there, everything from

00:24:36.140 | being a commercial sea fishing captain to working in a Starbucks restaurant to running

00:24:42.260 | a beef ranch to building a financial planning empire. Those things might seem disparate

00:24:49.460 | to somebody on the exterior. But I actually know specifically why each of those four different

00:24:54.460 | occupations appeals to me intensely. Now, some people, they say, "Why on earth would

00:24:59.740 | you ever want to…" I know the reasons why. So for you, you've got to know those

00:25:02.340 | reasons. So start with making lists. Write down what are the jobs that sound fun, what

00:25:05.620 | are the careers that are interesting, and then look at them and look for the common

00:25:08.860 | threads. What happens is we're often looking for an external solution to our problems instead

00:25:13.000 | of understanding who we are and what we want. We spend so much time, and I've been guilty

00:25:16.860 | of this, we spend so much time looking outside for someone else to tell us what we should

00:25:20.660 | do. We don't simply sit down and say, "What sounds good to us? What do I actually think?"

00:25:27.900 | Spend a lot of time with a journal writing down what are you skilled at? What are the

00:25:32.140 | skills that you have? What things do you like? Sounds a little airy-fairy, but it's really

00:25:38.580 | important. Many people have no idea, especially you sound like a motivated go-getter, MBA,

00:25:45.340 | getting jobs right out of college. Have you ever stopped to actually ask yourself what

00:25:48.980 | kind of person you are? The cool thing is you're only 32 years old. The bad thing is

00:25:55.060 | when you're 70 years old and you realize you've spent 40 years practicing medicine because

00:25:59.300 | your mom said it would be a good career for you, and then the reality was you wanted to

00:26:03.580 | go and, I don't know, travel the world as a vagabond artist. Figure out who you are.

00:26:12.740 | Yeah, I think some people can help. Things can help. There's all kinds of interesting

00:26:16.900 | personality tests you can do. Some of them may be helpful. Some of them may not be.

00:26:20.300 | Now, here's the key, though. You do need to do a market assessment and figure out what

00:26:24.660 | does the market want. Oftentimes, I get very nervous about some of the career advice I

00:26:29.540 | hear because we're always focusing. Sometimes, it just feels like we're too much focusing

00:26:34.140 | on ourselves and what we like and what we want to do and not enough on what the market

00:26:38.060 | wants and needs. Supply has to meet demand. That's the reality. That's how the marketplace

00:26:46.060 | works. You need to look at the marketplace and say, "Okay, how could I use these skills

00:26:49.940 | and use this knowledge and use this ability and use these interests and use these natural

00:26:54.300 | inclinations and proclivities and apply it to a demand that exists in the marketplace?"

00:27:02.700 | Look at the trends. I love to teach would be an example. I like to teach, obviously,

00:27:07.460 | but I don't have any interest in going into formal academia. Academia is dying. It's going

00:27:11.980 | to be very slow and very long-lived, but A, I wouldn't fit well in academia and B, the

00:27:20.100 | trend is down. The trend is down. So I want to be here on the cutting edge of the so-called

00:27:25.820 | new media where the trend is up. So look at the trends and figure out where does my supply

00:27:30.720 | of labor and ideas and skills and knowledge, where does that meet the demand that's in

00:27:34.860 | the marketplace?

00:27:37.260 | If you spend a lot of time looking and thinking, you should be able to find a bunch of common

00:27:41.620 | threads in who you are, what you've learned, and what you've already applied and you should

00:27:47.460 | be able to smoke out those skills that are transferable. You have a wealth of skills

00:27:53.540 | that are transferable to any industry. I'm just using myself as an example because you

00:28:00.720 | probably at this point in listening to the show, you know me a little bit and sometimes

00:28:03.540 | it's easier to see an example in someone else, but my sales skills are transferable to any

00:28:07.980 | industry. The things I've learned in the sales of financial products, that's transferable.

00:28:14.140 | I don't care whether I'm selling cars or airplanes or boats or dog food or cutco knives.

00:28:18.980 | Sales is a very simple process once you master it. All you need to do is simply find out

00:28:23.480 | what the product is that you're going to sell, find out who wants that product, and figure

00:28:27.700 | out a way to reach those people and convey to them the value of your product. Done. That's

00:28:33.900 | all you need to know about sales. Now, of course, the permutations of that are infinitely

00:28:38.340 | complex, but it's a very simple process. You measure the inputs, you measure the outputs,

00:28:43.420 | you adjust the inputs, you see how that affects the outputs. Done. Create a system of tracking

00:28:48.180 | it, create a system of actually producing that result and connecting the product with

00:28:53.300 | the people that need and value that product. It's very transferable.

00:28:59.060 | That was why I wanted to learn sales originally when I was building my career. As I said,

00:29:03.180 | sales, highly compensated, highly difficult skill set to learn, and infinitely transferable

00:29:09.260 | to every business no matter if it's working for someone else or working for myself. That's

00:29:12.500 | why I set out to learn sales. My investing skills are transferable to any industry.

00:29:18.020 | For example, I always thought it'd be fun to work for some kind of international mutual

00:29:22.220 | fund or hedge fund as an on-the-ground analyst. I enjoy traveling and I like business and

00:29:29.300 | I like finding things out about industries and looking at trends and things like that.

00:29:33.380 | You hear that reflected in this show. I always thought it'd be really fun to be the on-the-ground

00:29:38.740 | guy traveling around Thailand on a motorbike trying to find where are the up-and-coming

00:29:43.460 | companies in the Thai economy. To me, that sounds like a tremendously perfect job description

00:29:51.060 | for me.

00:29:52.060 | Now, the problem is it's attached to working for a company where, in general, the poor

00:29:57.220 | analysts are incredibly overworked and, in my opinion, underpaid and it's not a good

00:30:03.860 | lifestyle fit. Underpaid in the sense of too much work, yeah, they get paid well, but it

00:30:08.860 | would just destroy the rest of my life, so I've never pursued that. To me, that sounds

00:30:12.380 | super fun. That's the skill of business and investing. It's transferable.

00:30:17.100 | It's no different whether I'm out analyzing commercial real estate or out analyzing trying

00:30:22.500 | to find good farmland for someone who's invested in wanting to buy farms. I have a skill and

00:30:27.980 | background and an interest in agriculture. I have an understanding and a basic understanding

00:30:33.220 | and experience with business and I have a real interest in investing and in trends,

00:30:37.860 | economic trends. So that's what I can take and I can take it out and use that to find

00:30:42.540 | farmland or I could build a career bird-dogging investment deals for local real estate investors.

00:30:48.100 | If I had no money, all I got to do is go out, put the hard work in to find local real estate

00:30:55.100 | deals. I know a bunch of investors right here in West Palm Beach where I live who, if I

00:30:58.780 | brought them deals all day long, the hardest thing is just finding the deals. I brought

00:31:02.740 | them deals, they put it through their filter, boom. There's thousands of dollars of finder's

00:31:07.220 | fees for finding the deals. That's a learnable skill and it combines the sales skills, building

00:31:13.320 | up the infrastructure. It all works together.

00:31:15.900 | So once you understand what your skills are and what your interests are, then you can

00:31:19.280 | create dozens and dozens and dozens of potential careers. Many businesses are very similar.

00:31:25.140 | One thought I had for you when listening to your scenarios, I would say look at the anti-industry

00:31:29.940 | for your industry. If you've had an ideological change of heart, perhaps you should go on

00:31:34.820 | the attack against the industry in which you're now engaged.

00:31:38.500 | Example, you hear this if you pay attention to the things that get advertised in financial

00:31:44.440 | media. Oftentimes you hear tax defense companies advertise people who are going to go with

00:31:50.960 | you against the IRS. Where do those people often get their start? They often get a start

00:31:56.880 | with a career with the IRS. Now, I personally, I could not – it would be a violation of

00:32:03.980 | my conscience at the moment for me to want to go and work for the IRS. But I could go

00:32:08.380 | and work and be a tax defender and have an excellent fit between my ideology, what I

00:32:12.980 | enjoy and my skills. A bunch of people do that. They work for the IRS and then they

00:32:21.220 | transfer over later to a tax defense firm of some kind and they represent people who

00:32:28.020 | are in combat with the IRS.

00:32:30.960 | So is there an anti-industry? Another example comes to me. I don't know if you're familiar.

00:32:34.060 | There's a guy online. You can check him out sometime. His name is Barry Cooper and

00:32:38.580 | he started off as a narcotics officer and he was working in the narcotics group for

00:32:46.540 | some law enforcement organization, some local police department I think. If you believe

00:32:50.820 | his legend in his PR, he was highly decorated and highly successful as a narcotics officer.

00:32:56.100 | He had a change of heart and he sat down one day and he's like, "Why on earth am I

00:32:59.400 | putting all my time into busting people who are just doing drugs? What is the ethical

00:33:03.980 | foundation of busting people who are doing drugs?"

00:33:08.500 | And he switched and now he is the anti-narc guy. He has a whole website and he provides

00:33:14.080 | expert witness testimony. He has a whole site called Never Get Busted where he teaches people

00:33:18.620 | how to avoid the drug laws, how to avoid getting arrested for drug violations, how to avoid

00:33:24.380 | prosecution, how to get out, how to pull apart legal cases. He's built a business on it.

00:33:31.940 | Now I don't know how successful it is. My point is look for the anti-industry, for the

00:33:37.460 | industry that you have the ideological heart from. It doesn't get much more obvious than

00:33:41.260 | to go from being a narcotics police officer to representing everybody against narcotics

00:33:48.060 | violations and having a website where you teach people and YouTube videos where you

00:33:51.620 | teach people how to not get busted for drug violations.

00:33:55.660 | Years ago I remember reading a book by John Perkins called Confessions of an Economic

00:34:00.060 | Hitman. In essence, Perkins describes in his book that his job for years and years was

00:34:06.860 | to travel the world as an agent of various organizations, the World Bank, just travel

00:34:15.940 | the world as an agent of various financial institutions and construct deals with various

00:34:22.100 | countries around the world, financing deals through the World Bank and through the USAID

00:34:26.580 | program and set up financing deals with them.

00:34:29.080 | But the goal of his work, the ultimate effect and the goal of his work was to create a system

00:34:36.440 | of pressure that the United States could bring to bear on those countries to further the

00:34:43.100 | political goals of the United States. Well, he does this for years and then according

00:34:47.700 | to his book and according to his story, finally decides, "You know what? This is not right.

00:34:51.700 | I'm going to change this." At that point in time, comes out and writes the Confessions

00:34:56.820 | of an Economic Hitman and becomes the anti-political manipulation guy, exposing what he was previously

00:35:03.500 | doing and leading the charge against it.

00:35:07.020 | So whether it's Barry Cooper or John Perkins or more recently Edward Snowden, work for

00:35:11.740 | the enemy and then go out and expose the enemy or whether it's Julian Assange, not a great

00:35:17.980 | example but remember – by the way, remember though when you become the anti-industry,

00:35:23.700 | Bradley Manning, the guy who provided all of the documents for Julian Assange and the

00:35:27.020 | WikiLeaks stuff, that guy is in jail. So be careful what you do. You'd be winding up

00:35:33.300 | in jail.

00:35:34.300 | My point is, is there a way that you can leverage your experience in the anti-industry for the

00:35:39.300 | industry in which you're ideologically opposed now? I would also say look for work in the

00:35:46.220 | non-published, non-public job market.

00:35:49.980 | So first, you've spoken with recruiters. Awesome. That's a whole topic in and of

00:35:53.540 | itself of how to effectively work with a recruiter. I like the idea of using recruiters to find

00:35:58.780 | work. But if you've not found a good fit with a recruiter or you're not finding success,

00:36:04.180 | then you need to create an opportunity for yourself.

00:36:07.740 | Easy one is this. Man, if you are unqualified for jobs, then stop looking for a job and

00:36:13.180 | go create a business. Sounds silly, but it's not. Here's an interesting thought process

00:36:21.020 | for you. What would you do if you were an illegal immigrant to the United States of

00:36:24.780 | America and you had no ability to legally get a job? How would you do that?

00:36:31.260 | I've worked with a bunch of them in the agriculture industry when I was younger and I was fascinated

00:36:35.100 | by this. But one of the things you find is oftentimes you simply start a business. What

00:36:41.420 | would you do if you were an ex-convict and you had a criminal history in the past that

00:36:49.620 | made it difficult for you to find a job? I'd say one of the things you could do is just

00:36:53.700 | simply go look for something where that's not a factor. There are tons of industries

00:36:59.180 | in which you can do this. There's very consistent well-known industries.

00:37:03.280 | Half the real estate agents that have a business selling real estate got started because they

00:37:07.820 | didn't know what to do and they could go out and spend some time studying and get a real

00:37:11.660 | estate license and start making stuff happen. I don't know if that's of interest, but it's

00:37:15.620 | like half the people that are involved in multi-level marketing companies have done

00:37:18.220 | exactly the same thing. They needed an ability and somebody came along and said, "Here's

00:37:21.900 | a product. Go sell it." I've worked with people. Fascinating to me, there are product

00:37:27.940 | representatives that just simply go out and find products and then go sell stuff. No one

00:37:31.700 | ever told them they could. They just set it up and they made the deal happen. Or start

00:37:37.020 | a business. There's all kinds of businesses. Don't restrict yourself to one specific thing.

00:37:41.460 | What happens if you're a corporate employee, you may only be looking in that perspective

00:37:45.860 | and you're completely forgetting about just going out and creating an opportunity for

00:37:49.380 | yourself. If you just go back and listen to all the

00:37:52.300 | shows that I've done, you'll find tons of examples of stuff like this. Remember, I interviewed

00:37:55.540 | a guy, was it Ryan Finley, who makes his entire living buying and selling stuff on Craigslist.

00:38:02.940 | And he makes a good living, by the way. It took him a while, but he makes an excellent

00:38:07.580 | living, buying and selling appliances on Craigslist and now he runs an info marketing business

00:38:12.220 | where he teaches other people how to do that. If you can do it with that, you can do it

00:38:18.380 | with anything. Another flip side is, so create an opportunity

00:38:22.700 | for yourself. Another way to do that is just go into just about any other industry, any

00:38:26.660 | industry in which you're interested, just about any level and just show up and do hard

00:38:30.240 | work and you'll quickly get promoted and advanced to the place that you need to be

00:38:33.460 | and that you deserve to be based upon your skills and qualifications and work. As long

00:38:37.560 | as you're not working in the government, the government is the one place where actually

00:38:40.540 | performance isn't the basis of promotion. There is just show up, show up and go along

00:38:48.100 | to get along basically. But as long as you're not in a government

00:38:51.260 | entity, you can start at just about any level and if you demonstrate skill and hard work

00:38:57.300 | and work ethic and integrity and character and all of those good things that certainly

00:39:00.980 | I'm sure you have, you'll quickly be advanced. In reality, I would say you kind of focus

00:39:08.980 | on what industry do you want to be in and then just get in, get a foothold in and once

00:39:12.580 | you're inside the industry, then everything is going to be a lot simpler to you.

00:39:19.260 | Another thing that is you're looking for a job and this is why you have to start with

00:39:22.440 | skills and talents and what interests you have is just simply sell your way in. It's

00:39:28.700 | a real pity in my opinion that we don't teach sales skills to young people. As far as I'm

00:39:34.980 | concerned, we ought to scrap half of trigonometry or the whole year of trigonometry and teach

00:39:38.740 | sales skills. I think we'd have far more effective and happy and successful and richer

00:39:44.660 | and better adapted adults if we did that. But we don't teach sales skills. We teach

00:39:50.720 | resumes and we have classes in college on writing a resume. Writing a resume and trying

00:39:55.980 | to get a job with a resume is like trying to go out and sell a Ferrari with a written

00:40:01.060 | brochure. You don't sell a Ferrari with a brochure. You sell a Ferrari by tossing a

00:40:06.980 | rich guy the keys and saying, "Get in and see how it sounds." A resume might be a

00:40:16.260 | necessary box to check but it's not the way to sell a job. Go out and create an opportunity

00:40:22.220 | for yourself. So if you're going to do this, you need to know your target industry. You

00:40:25.460 | need to network your way in. You need to sit down and make a list of is there a company

00:40:29.480 | or there are a number of companies. Let me use this as an example. Let's use my IRS

00:40:34.180 | versus anti-IRS industry example. Let's say you're working for the IRS and you say,

00:40:37.900 | "I don't want to be a revenue agent anymore but I really would like to kind of change

00:40:42.420 | because I've had an ideological change of heart. By the way, I have some friends and

00:40:49.700 | actually clients, former clients who are revenue agents. No problem. I'm just saying for

00:40:53.340 | me that wouldn't be a good fit." But let's say for you, you want to transition from being

00:40:56.500 | a revenue agent for the IRS to something else. What you do is you make a list of all the

00:41:02.100 | skills and abilities and resources you have and you make a list of all of the firms that

00:41:06.180 | are the leaders in that space. You research and identify which are the firms that you

00:41:10.020 | actually want to work for, which are the ones that have a good reputation, which are the

00:41:13.220 | ones that are doing a good job, that are behaving ethically. You take that short list. You figure

00:41:17.780 | out who at these firms do I need to meet and do I need to know and you sit down and you

00:41:21.420 | call if they're small or medium-sized firms. You call the CEOs of every single one of those

00:41:25.860 | firms and you tell them, "Listen, I'm currently working in this capacity with the IRS. Now

00:41:30.120 | I want to transition and I want to work with you. I don't know if you're hiring. I would

00:41:34.460 | like to come by and give you an opportunity just to share with you a little bit of my

00:41:37.660 | story and see if I could be a fit for you in the future when you have opportunities."

00:41:41.340 | Don't wait for a job posting and apply. It's too late. Make it. Find out in advance or

00:41:47.180 | at least get on the list. Network your way in. Learn your way in. Promote your way in.

00:41:51.620 | Start a whole business and start a whole website about it. Do something flashy and unusual.

00:41:57.180 | There are dozens and dozens of ways to do this depending on the amount of time you have,

00:42:00.220 | but it all comes back to the stuff I've talked about tons of times. Become a leader in your

00:42:03.340 | field. Establish your reputation. Market yourself. Create for yourself a way to be highly in

00:42:09.900 | demand.

00:42:10.900 | If you spend more time thinking about that and less time thinking on how do I effectively

00:42:14.780 | write a cover letter, I think you'll – yeah, the cover letter might be important because

00:42:18.300 | remember, the business owner has to check the box so that the Equal Employment Opportunity

00:42:24.420 | Commission doesn't get on their back. That's why they advertise jobs. I'm convinced half

00:42:28.500 | the jobs that get advertised purely get advertised just simply so that the head of HR cannot

00:42:33.140 | get fired or can have some legal standing.

00:42:37.220 | But man, I've never gotten a job off of a – job offer myself and I've never really

00:42:40.900 | seen anybody get a job off of a job offer. You're working in a – the problem is this.

00:42:45.580 | Even if the company is legitimately advertising for a job, and I'm not saying they're not,

00:42:51.060 | you're competing at the point of massive competition instead of creating the demand

00:42:55.820 | up front.

00:42:56.820 | Give an example. I have this – I've had this discussion with people in the financial

00:43:02.820 | planning industry and very few people of them understand. The big focus – and I think

00:43:06.980 | it's right, but a big focus is how do I get leads in financial planning industry?

00:43:12.060 | And so everyone is always focused whether it's – whatever aspect you're in, whether

00:43:15.100 | you're selling insurance or whether you're doing comprehensive, some kind of in-depth

00:43:20.340 | planning. A lead in my experience, I would generally not want just what most people market

00:43:26.940 | as leads. If you're in the financial planning business, if you sign up for information on

00:43:30.100 | a website, you're going to immediately get on a list of leads and you're going to be

00:43:32.940 | sold.

00:43:33.940 | And so agents and reps sometimes have to go out and buy lists of leads. And can it work?

00:43:38.100 | Yes, it can work. And I want to clarify a piece of information here. When I say lead,

00:43:43.220 | I'm talking about a non-qualified or only moderately qualified lead, someone who doesn't

00:43:47.700 | really know much about me but they're interested in – let's stick with insurance.

00:43:50.900 | Somebody wants to buy life insurance. They put information into an online website for

00:43:54.220 | a quote – they're interested in a quote and that's it. I'm not talking about somebody

00:43:59.040 | who listens to Radical Personal Finance for an hour and a half a day and who knows me

00:44:02.660 | and who knows everything about me and then comes to me for information. That's not a

00:44:05.540 | lead. That is a highly qualified prospective client if I were doing that type of planning

00:44:11.180 | business.

00:44:12.180 | Let's just stick with a lead. I hate working with leads. I hate it. I hate it, hate it,

00:44:16.620 | hate it. You know why? Because now I'm in competition. I'm in competition with two

00:44:21.060 | or three or 15 other insurance agents and I've got to somehow beat them out. I've

00:44:26.980 | got to do some kind of dog and pony show. 100% of the time, if I've got to build my

00:44:31.620 | business on that, I would 100% of the time say no and I would go work with people who

00:44:36.180 | have no idea that they even want to buy life insurance. I would approach them out of the

00:44:41.020 | blue. I'd go cold call and approach them out of the blue and talk to them about life

00:44:45.260 | insurance and then through some skillful discussions and some good questions and some good discussion,

00:44:51.580 | ask them if they have any interest in buying life insurance because now it's just me

00:44:55.180 | and I'm not in competition.

00:44:56.180 | Well, it's the same thing in finding a job. If I go out and I apply for a job and there

00:45:01.460 | are dozens of other highly qualified applicants, now I'm going to be sorted across stupid

00:45:07.780 | criteria. Like did I go to a more prestigious college or university than the other guy?

00:45:14.780 | Do I have an MBA after my name or not? I would much rather go out and create an opportunity

00:45:20.340 | where there is no competition, find what I want to do, go out and find who needs what

00:45:24.660 | I want to do and demonstrate to them that I can do it even if I've got to go work

00:45:27.460 | for free for two months and demonstrate it to them rather than following the clogged

00:45:33.620 | up mechanism of replying to job ads on monster.com. Not that it can't work, just I don't have

00:45:41.620 | any interest in dealing in that world. So I would suggest to you that my plan is a little

00:45:45.460 | bit – I don't know. For me, it's better but your mileage may vary. Check it out.

00:45:50.820 | Couple of very important technical ideas for you. Number one, you got to have a sound financial

00:45:54.700 | plan and so here would be what I mean. All of your ability to do these things is built

00:46:01.660 | and is contingent on your flexibility. So do you have money? Do you have savings? If

00:46:07.740 | you don't have savings and you recognize you're at a career transition point, stop

00:46:12.020 | any kind of external investments and save money and pile up money. If you have debt,

00:46:20.180 | clear your debt because when you're talking about taking a 50% pay cut, if you're spending

00:46:24.100 | 90% of your income, taking a 50% pay cut, there's no possible way to do it unless

00:46:28.560 | you get rid of a bunch of debt and you cut your expenses. But if you're spending 20%

00:46:32.540 | of your income or you could live on 20% of your current income in another scenario, then

00:46:37.580 | yeah, take a 50% pay cut any day, especially if you're going into a career that you actually

00:46:42.460 | want, that you actually want to be a leader in and you can go from that 50% pay cut over

00:46:46.060 | the next three or four years to making double or triple or quadruple what you're making

00:46:50.100 | at your current job. But if you remove all of the fixed obligations, so you clear your

00:46:57.580 | debt, you have savings and you're flexible on your lifestyle, maybe you can – then

00:47:05.460 | you can look at it as a comprehensive transition. If you move from New York City to rural Mississippi

00:47:12.060 | and you earn your income online, you might be able to build a way better lifestyle and

00:47:15.500 | way less money. So there are some very practical financial planning steps that you need to

00:47:21.540 | consider on this journey.

00:47:24.540 | A couple of book recommendations and I hope this has been helpful for you. I hope it's

00:47:29.140 | just some ideas to spark your thinking. Realistically, I can't solve your problem but you can.

00:47:34.660 | Just apply a system of discipline, focus, systematic thinking. Ask yourself, "If

00:47:41.300 | I were the president of this company and I'm putting all my fancy MBA knowledge to work,

00:47:48.180 | how would I do this?" and coach yourself through the process. Here are some books that

00:47:52.260 | might help you.

00:47:53.620 | The obvious one and kind of a good entry level one, a great one is Dan Miller's book,

00:47:57.620 | 48 Days of the Work You Love. Some resonates with some – there are a bunch of mainstream

00:48:03.400 | job books. This is one. There's like What Color is Your Parachute is another famous

00:48:06.780 | one. Read them. Just look for inspiration but he does a good job. He has a good podcast

00:48:12.300 | if you're interested in career stuff. I've listened to it a little bit here and there.

00:48:16.620 | Check out Dan Miller's work. He's got a bunch of career coaches that he does some

00:48:20.820 | career coaching. He certifies career coaches and I think there's probably a big value

00:48:24.740 | for career coaches and there may be a huge value for you in that context.

00:48:28.860 | Next check out John T. Reid's book, Succeeding. It's just a good, really good general book.

00:48:33.140 | He doesn't really specifically talk about the job market but he does a little bit and

00:48:37.660 | I've just really enjoyed it since I mentioned it. Let me add that to the list. It's a

00:48:41.900 | good book. James Altucher wrote a book last year or the year before called Choose Yourself.

00:48:47.100 | It's really an interesting, unusual book but he makes a big point of just simply like

00:48:52.060 | pick what you want to do. Choose yourself. Well worth reading. I enjoyed it when I read

00:48:56.220 | it.

00:48:57.220 | Then a good one which is pretty deep and pretty meaty but a well-written book. I don't

00:49:02.260 | enjoy a lot of the fluffy books because oftentimes they're just so fluffy and they hit at

00:49:07.220 | a point but the best book I've found that's kind of a comprehensive textbook on finding

00:49:11.180 | a job is by a guy named Charles Hugh Smith. His book on this subject is called Get a Job,

00:49:17.460 | Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It's kind of a comprehensive look

00:49:22.700 | at the whole idea of how to get a job, build a real career and how to defy a bewildering

00:49:28.980 | economy. So check that book out. I'll make sure there's links in the show notes.

00:49:33.500 | But man, listen, there are a world of incredible opportunities out there right now. So I say

00:49:38.900 | just get started and choose something you're passionate about and go focus on it. Go change

00:49:44.140 | the world. Choose something that interests you.

00:49:46.420 | I close this question with this scenario. Years ago, I don't remember where I heard

00:49:51.460 | it, somebody described to me the concept of the hallway. It's been a helpful concept.

00:49:57.180 | And the idea is sometimes we open up a door and we look down a long hallway. We don't

00:50:02.380 | see anything except this long hallway. And we're a little scared to start walking down

00:50:06.420 | that hallway. And so we sometimes don't do anything. We just sit and we sit and we sit

00:50:12.700 | and we sit and we sit and we sit and we sit. But if you would stop sitting and actually

00:50:17.740 | take a step forward and start walking, all of a sudden, there's a door. And you didn't

00:50:22.220 | see it from the end of the hallway. But now you see the door and you can open up the door

00:50:26.460 | and you can look through it and see what's interesting on the other side. Maybe there's

00:50:28.940 | nothing there, in which case you close it and you keep going to the next one. Or maybe

00:50:32.120 | you go down that hallway or go into that room or whatever it happens to be.

00:50:36.340 | The point is if you start moving, whatever that looks like, things happen. Exposure creates

00:50:44.180 | opportunity. As a former boss of mine, beat into my head every day, exposure creates opportunity.

00:50:49.220 | It's kind of funny. When I started Radical Personal Finance, I had no idea. I still practically

00:50:53.620 | have, I'm figuring things out, but I didn't really know what I'm doing. I just kind of

00:50:57.260 | had an idea. But man, I've had so many opportunities that have come to me since doing it. But they

00:51:02.620 | wouldn't have come if I hadn't taken action. So just get started and start exploring, start

00:51:08.940 | reaching out to people, start networking. If you have a target industry, start writing

00:51:12.140 | down lists of target industries or start talking to people. Make a podcast about your job search.

00:51:17.660 | Call people and say, "Hey, listen, I'm trying to find out what do you love about your job

00:51:21.300 | or I'm trying to figure out what's right for me." Write a blog series about it. Do something.

00:51:25.340 | All of a sudden, some opportunities will emerge that you'll be really excited about. But if

00:51:29.580 | you're in a situation where you are hurting your conscience every day in what you're doing,

00:51:34.020 | you got to get out. Otherwise, you're going to wind up in an unhealthy place. Hope that

00:51:38.500 | helps, man.

00:51:39.500 | All right. Next question. It's a good thing I only grabbed two questions for today. I

00:51:43.620 | knew that one would go for a while. Next question comes from Brandon. He says, "Hey, Joshua.

00:51:47.740 | Thanks so much for the show. It's really helped me and my fiancé get our finances in order

00:51:51.780 | and to start us thinking about how we could become financially independent. Even as a

00:51:56.060 | Canadian, I've gotten a ton out of the show and I've tried to hook as many people as possible

00:51:59.180 | as I can." Thank you, Brandon. That is a huge deal. If you want to help the show, the biggest

00:52:03.520 | thing you can do, just tell people about it. Tell them about the show and then tell them

00:52:07.440 | just go to the App Store and search "radical personal finance" and you can listen. I made

00:52:10.980 | it super easy. Just go to the App Store, search "radical personal finance." Keep going.

00:52:14.220 | "I was wondering if you might be able to touch on tips and tricks for someone who doesn't

00:52:17.720 | earn a consistent or regular income. I do video work and while it's consistent right

00:52:23.100 | now, I've spent most of my career either working every day in a month or not working at all

00:52:27.740 | for weeks at a time. I was just curious if there might be any wisdom you can impart on

00:52:31.940 | those kinds of situations. Luckily, my fiancé has a very stable job and makes good money

00:52:37.260 | so it gives us the ability to plan at least a bit. Thanks again for the show. I look forward

00:52:40.820 | to it whenever I walk the dog and on the way to work. Brandon." Brandon, thank you for

00:52:46.100 | the question. This is fun. So I would give you two simple answers. You said, "I was

00:52:53.100 | wondering if you might be able to touch on tips and tricks for someone who doesn't earn

00:52:55.760 | a consistent or regular income." The first answer, the big one, is start earning a consistent

00:53:00.520 | or regular income. I know that sounds kind of smart, Alki. It was meant to a little bit.

00:53:06.000 | I'm serious. Change your income from an irregular income to a regular income and I'll give you

00:53:09.720 | a bunch of ideas on that. That would be the first way that I can go with answering this

00:53:13.120 | question and I'm very serious about that even though there is a bit of tongue in cheek.

00:53:17.560 | Just simply stop earning an inconsistent income. It is hard to budget for an inconsistent and

00:53:23.360 | irregular income. It's hard to make that work. So make your irregular income a regular income.

00:53:29.720 | We'll talk about that. Number two would be, yes, you can adjust the budgeting system but

00:53:34.240 | this is tough. So let's focus most of our time and attention on how to change from an

00:53:39.880 | irregular income to a regular income. The big thing I would focus on is simply increasing

00:53:46.680 | the demand for your services, whatever those are, so that you can pick and choose and schedule

00:53:55.880 | the work when you want to have it. If you simply focus on that, you can solve your inconsistent

00:54:04.480 | and irregular income problem. How do you do that? Well, it probably comes down to how

00:54:11.320 | good is your product. Do you have a really excellent product? Also, how effective is

00:54:14.860 | your marketing? Probably the disconnect, which is for most of us, is how effective is your

00:54:20.480 | marketing? But the key is create the demand for your products or services so that you

00:54:26.520 | have the choice over when and where you fill it. There is somebody in your industry, no

00:54:33.600 | matter the industry, and especially in the video industry, there's somebody in your industry

00:54:36.840 | who picks and chooses when they want to work. Become that person.

00:54:44.880 | You can do this in just about any business. One of my favorites, let's see, probably one

00:54:49.520 | of my favorite examples here would be a guy named Joe Girard. I came across Joe Girard

00:54:55.400 | years ago. I don't even know how. I've researched all these weird arcane things. Joe Girard

00:55:00.320 | is most famous for being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's

00:55:04.320 | greatest salesman. He trumpets that high and loud, which is awesome. Good for him. Guinness,

00:55:10.160 | the year that he was done was the last year they ever awarded that. He was amazing. He

00:55:13.520 | sold over 13,000 cars. He sold 13,001 cars at a Chevrolet dealership between 1963 and

00:55:22.440 | 1978. In case you're interested, that's 15 years, which means he sold an average of 866

00:55:29.600 | cars per year over his entire career.

00:55:32.200 | Now, interestingly, I actually have reached out to him for an interview. He's declined,

00:55:36.800 | so I'd love to get him. If any of you know him, tell him. I'd like to interview him on

00:55:39.520 | the show. For now, I'll just recount his story. When Joe Girard started working, he was broke

00:55:45.720 | and he couldn't feed his family. He tells this. He was completely broke. He'd been a

00:55:49.640 | total failure. He went down to an auto dealership. It was in Michigan. He went to a car dealership.

00:55:57.040 | He said, "Listen, I need a job." This ties in perfectly to the first question. I'll give

00:56:02.760 | you a few details on the story. If I get anything wrong, it's just because I last read his books

00:56:06.480 | five, six, seven, eight years ago, something like that.

00:56:09.440 | He walks into this car dealership and he says, "I need a job." The sales manager said, "I'm

00:56:13.440 | not going to hire you." He says, "I don't need any more people." If you're not aware,

00:56:17.560 | in the car sales industry, there needs to be a certain number of salespeople. You know,

00:56:27.000 | it's a ratio of people that come in because most of the salespeople get most of their

00:56:30.480 | business based upon walk-ins, walk-ins to the dealership. People walk in. The next salesperson

00:56:35.320 | who's up walks out and takes them. If they sell them a car, they get the commission on

00:56:39.880 | that car. Joe was desperate. He strikes a deal with the guy. He says, "Listen, I won't take

00:56:45.260 | any walk-ins. I don't need any walk-ins. Just give me the ability to sell some cars. I won't

00:56:50.120 | take anybody from the floor." The sales manager says, "Well, I guess if that's the deal, you

00:56:55.960 | can do it." He gives him a desk upstairs. Joe Gerard goes up and he starts cold calling

00:57:00.960 | out of the white pages or yellow pages to sell cars. As memory serves, he spent all

00:57:05.800 | day cold calling. He didn't get many leads. He called and called and called and he was

00:57:10.240 | desperate. Late at night, it's 7.30 at night or something, he walks downstairs. The guy

00:57:15.800 | had no training. He walks downstairs and sees a customer there in the showroom. He looks

00:57:19.880 | around and there's nobody there. There's no other salespeople there. He goes over and

00:57:23.040 | he starts helping the customer. He sells the guy a car. He didn't know what he was doing,

00:57:27.920 | but he went ahead and he sold the car. That started his career. He sold a car on his very

00:57:33.360 | first day, but it was pure happenstance. It was actually a technical violation of how

00:57:37.920 | he had started. It gave him the courage to keep going. He just kept on calling and calling

00:57:42.320 | and calling. As memory serves, a few months later, he had sold so many cars that all the

00:57:47.400 | other salespeople were jealous. The dealership ended up firing him. Now, he went to another

00:57:51.640 | dealership and that was where he worked his career at a Chevrolet dealership. The key

00:57:57.040 | that I remember, if you know anything about car sales or if you ever talk to car salespeople,

00:58:01.280 | the average car salesperson sells very few cars. Joe Girard, in one year, he sold over

00:58:09.240 | 1,200 or 1,300 cars one year. In his career, he sold 13,000 cars. That's 866 cars per year,

00:58:16.800 | but he was slower at the beginning than at the end. In one year, I think he sold over

00:58:19.520 | 1,300 cars or about that number. These were all, as he puts it in his books, person to

00:58:24.680 | person, belly to belly, cars at fair prices with people, fair prices without—it wasn't

00:58:30.320 | fleet sales where he's selling 200 cars at a time, although that's not a bad strategy,

00:58:34.360 | by the way, if you're in sales. There's an interesting story I heard one time about

00:58:37.960 | the Cutco, one of the Cutco leaders who took that strategy. We'll save that for another

00:58:42.360 | time. He told the story. He had customers lined up outside of his office to buy a car

00:58:49.920 | from Joe Girard. Over time, he got to the point where he had so many people coming to

00:58:58.320 | buy a car from him that he had them lined up, he hired staff, and ultimately, in the

00:59:03.360 | end, he only sold cars by appointment. I'm serious. He only sold cars by appointment.

00:59:11.280 | He had people lined up. He had a team of people. He had a couple of assistants that handled

00:59:15.560 | all the paperwork for him. He had somebody that came in, and when somebody was going

00:59:18.720 | to come in and trade their car in, that person would do the appraisal and get all of that

00:59:22.280 | prearranged. They get their financing prearranged, and Joe would just simply do the final sale

00:59:26.360 | right there in his office. You say, "How on earth did he do that?" Well, that's—you

00:59:31.320 | go read his books, and you'll see how he did that. Listen to his audio. He did it with

00:59:36.320 | a comprehensive system. For example, he sold good quality cars at a fair price. He took

00:59:41.280 | care of his customers. He was aggressive with his marketing and his advertising. He would

00:59:45.520 | go to football games, and he would take a briefcase full of business cards, and he would

00:59:49.440 | throw them around. He would just throw them in the air and say, "Buy a car from Joe

00:59:53.900 | Girard." He would send all of his customers away with a massive stack of business cards

00:59:59.600 | in their glove box, and he would tell them all. He would call them all a couple of days

01:00:03.320 | later and say, "Has people been admiring your car? Who are those people?" He would

01:00:06.600 | call those people and come and buy a car from Joe Girard, and he would give them a great

01:00:10.480 | deal. He had the whole service department. He took care of, in essence, a lot of his

01:00:14.360 | own service to make sure that his customers were happy and they came back every single

01:00:18.080 | time. He had a whole comprehensive mailing system set up where every single month, every

01:00:23.080 | person that ever bought a car from him, every single month received a card from him. It

01:00:27.840 | would be, "Happy New Year," and "Happy Valentine's Day," and "Happy March,"

01:00:31.080 | whatever you do in March, and "April," and "May," and "June," and "July,"

01:00:33.880 | "Happy Birthday." He was constantly top of mind. He would constantly stay in contact

01:00:38.800 | with his customers, and from everything, from all appearances, his customers loved him.

01:00:42.840 | By the way, from financial planning, interesting financial planning tip, he got rich in 15

01:00:48.640 | years and retired. He didn't want to do it forever. He got rich in 15 years and retired.

01:00:55.480 | Saved a bunch of money, retired, did a little bit of corporate speaking and things like

01:00:59.960 | that after retiring, but he didn't want to do that for the rest of his life. He was

01:01:02.840 | working hard. It was hard work.

01:01:04.240 | What was my point? My point is that you can probably do that in just about any industry

01:01:09.560 | if you figure out how to do it. The key is to go from ho-hum, same as every other video

01:01:16.160 | person, to being in the upper echelon of your field, getting to the top 20%. How do you

01:01:22.520 | do that? I don't know. I don't know how you do it in your industry, but all you need

01:01:26.240 | to do is get started studying and learning and applying what others have done and see

01:01:31.040 | what works. Just apply. Go down the road map that others have already gone down and apply

01:01:36.640 | what they've done and see if it works for you. I'll use myself as an example.

01:01:41.960 | In the past, I wanted to increase the demand for my financial planning services. I wanted

01:01:46.080 | to spend less time working with people who weren't a perfect fit for me. I wanted to

01:01:50.680 | spend more time working with multimillionaire entrepreneurs and people who were close to

01:01:54.920 | retirement. That was what I wanted to do. One of the motivations I was starting a show

01:02:01.920 | was I sat down and I said, "You know what? If Dave Ramsey did individual financial planning

01:02:06.120 | and financial coaching, he would be booked solid morning to night at any rate he wanted

01:02:11.480 | to charge. He could charge $10,000 an hour and he would be booked solid from day to night."

01:02:18.320 | I said, "What did he do? He's got nothing on me other than a 20-year head start."

01:02:23.960 | So I said, "Well, I've got this desire to do this show and worst case scenario, the

01:02:29.280 | show becomes an excellent marketing vehicle for my personal financial planning services.

01:02:34.080 | Best case scenario, it becomes its own profitable business." So I focused on marketing. I started

01:02:41.520 | doing this. As I do it, I'm simply copying and modeling and learning from the people

01:02:48.800 | who are the best in the business. Why is my show here Monday through Friday? It's because

01:02:53.400 | I just with Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard and Jim Cramer on TV and Suzy Orman. That's what

01:02:58.200 | they do. They do a show five days a week, so I'll do a show five days a week. I'm studying

01:03:02.920 | them and applying all the fundamentals. I'm copying them, but I'm making it better.

01:03:06.520 | I studied Dave Ramsey's business model. I say, "Where does his income come from?" I

01:03:10.480 | look through his products and I figure out, "Okay, he's got this. He's got this. How

01:03:13.520 | does his business work?" Well, at this stage, originally, he just started with an idea,

01:03:17.240 | but the radio program simply serves as an outlet for people to find out about him. That

01:03:26.360 | leads them into his sales funnel. The radio program is presented to them free, but he

01:03:31.800 | makes money on the radio program with advertising. This is his business model. He produces a

01:03:37.640 | radio program. It's broadcast across the nation. People like listening to it. It's interesting,

01:03:42.520 | so it's picked up by more stations that pick up and pay him for it. Then it's also paid

01:03:46.480 | for with advertising. His listeners are listening to his show and they're listening to his advertising,

01:03:55.120 | so they're actually paying him for his show. Then as they consume the content, then at

01:04:01.240 | some point they say, "You know what? I need something that's a little bit more specific,"

01:04:04.080 | so he's advertising his specific books and his courses.

01:04:06.640 | I say, "I'm going to go ahead and buy Total Money Makeover. I'm going to go ahead and

01:04:09.560 | buy this new book on kids' finances." They go ahead and buy it. Well, this starts the

01:04:13.480 | deeper relationship. They're working through the sales funnel. Then he's constantly on

01:04:17.600 | the show. He's constantly referring to his book. He's sending them out to his listeners.

01:04:20.840 | He's referring to his courses, so he's setting up Financial Peace University classes and

01:04:25.600 | sending people to those classes. Then he's creating and marketing those classes to other

01:04:30.240 | demographics. He sells it to churches and he sells it to businesses. Then he creates

01:04:35.760 | a kids' curriculum, so he's building out more markets to reach more people. It's all built

01:04:39.800 | upon the core and the foundation of the verbal radio show.

01:04:46.120 | But he's got dozens and dozens and dozens of lines—well, probably not dozens and dozens,

01:04:50.080 | but he's got over a dozen individual distinct lines of income. He's got seminars. He's going

01:04:56.160 | and speaking at seminars. Then he creates other seminars. Some people listen to how

01:05:00.000 | an A-list client of the Dave Ramsey empire goes through their program. They start with

01:05:06.440 | listening on the radio. Their listenership creates income for him from the radio station

01:05:11.680 | paying for his program and also for them listening to their commercials. So that starts. Then

01:05:16.360 | they go ahead and they probably buy a book. They may or may not read it, but they probably

01:05:19.440 | buy a book. Then they'll probably give that book away to their friends and they'll buy

01:05:22.280 | more books. At some point, they'll probably go to a Financial Peace University class if

01:05:25.800 | they have a good experience there, which by the way is a brilliant business model because

01:05:29.680 | Dave Ramsey sells the curriculum and other people do all the work and he has no responsibility

01:05:36.080 | for paying them to do the work. So he's got a bunch of people who are proctoring the class

01:05:41.640 | because of their desire to help. He's getting rich from selling the product. They're helping

01:05:45.540 | and they're creating and building more customers for the business. It's brilliant. It's absolutely

01:05:50.480 | brilliant. It's amazing. He's an amazing business guy.

01:05:54.760 | So then they become interested. They come to a live event, a live seminar to bring their

01:05:58.840 | reluctant spouse along is usually what it is. Then they go to one seminar. They go teach

01:06:02.760 | another class. They buy more books. He serves them with four or five new books depending

01:06:06.520 | on the situation. They buy the envelopes for their – the envelope system and the fancy

01:06:11.000 | little vinyl thing that you stick in your pocket for your managing your cash and he

01:06:18.480 | sells them. He's got a whole other source. So the business owner doesn't necessarily

01:06:23.240 | need my information on how to get a credit card debt, but how can I teach people what

01:06:26.480 | I'm doing with his Entree Leadership Program and high-end exclusive events and just look

01:06:31.080 | at it and you sit back and you say, "What a brilliant business model and what a brilliant

01:06:36.600 | business mind." It's absolutely amazing.

01:06:42.840 | He's doing a job that is desperately needed. The market is desperate for his work and for

01:06:47.200 | his information. I just judge that by the numbers and by the sheer volume of his success.

01:06:54.720 | He's helping a ton of people who are committed, passionate, not only customers but advocates.

01:07:02.880 | He's an evangelist and they're advocates and they would defend him and his philosophy,

01:07:08.800 | many of them, extremely vigorously. I know because I once did that.

01:07:18.440 | He's built an empire little at a time, consistently, and he is the number one guru in this space.

01:07:30.580 | So all I'm doing is copying what he did. He didn't get that. He got there in 20 years.

01:07:35.800 | So I can't expect to do the same thing in 20 months, but I can get there in 20 years.

01:07:41.200 | So what am I doing? I create – trying to create really great written – excuse me,

01:07:45.800 | verbal content. Trying to create it, working hard. Okay, that's the first thing I got

01:07:49.840 | to do. That has been working.

01:07:51.600 | Next, I need to get paid for that verbal content. I don't particularly want to go out and

01:07:56.560 | build out advertisers. That's why I came to you, the audience, and I established the

01:07:59.880 | Patreon program. That allows me to get paid for creating that content.

01:08:03.980 | Now what am I trying to do on the back end? Well, I'm trying to build the systems and

01:08:06.720 | the support to build me – to create for me the bandwidth so that I can create other

01:08:10.980 | additional products to scratch the itches that the audience has. So that will be additional

01:08:15.680 | books, additional information products, additional courses, additional seminars. Who knows? At

01:08:20.400 | some point, maybe I'll find the right fit and we'll start a new financial planning

01:08:24.000 | firm. I don't know. So I don't know where all these things are, but my point is by understanding

01:08:27.600 | what did the leaders in the industry do, I can start.

01:08:32.320 | So go and do that likewise. There's someone in your field who's booked solid all the

01:08:39.680 | time, completely high in demand. Go copy them. Call them up on the phone and it's better

01:08:44.680 | if you go and find a dozen people in your industry. Call them up on the phone and say,

01:08:48.760 | "I'd like to take you to lunch. You don't know me, but I've been observing your level

01:08:52.600 | of success and you certainly don't owe this to me, but would you be willing to let me

01:08:56.320 | take you out to lunch and ask you a few questions? I'd really benefit from the career advice

01:08:59.040 | if you're willing." Who's that in your industry? Is it Steven Spielberg? Will he

01:09:03.280 | go out to lunch? I don't know. Maybe he will. Is it Phil – what's the guy that

01:09:08.000 | does Lord of the Rings? You know, big famous producer. Will he go out to lunch? I don't

01:09:10.800 | know. Maybe he will. He eats lunch and he usually eats lunch with other people. So maybe

01:09:15.040 | you need to make a couple of connections. Maybe you need to reach this agent. I don't

01:09:17.880 | know. But maybe it's just the guy or gal in the next town over that has a really successful

01:09:21.880 | video business. Connect with them and learn from them.

01:09:26.120 | So thing one is focus on increasing the demand for your services so that you can schedule

01:09:30.960 | it consistently. Now, it is possible that you could have an industry that simply doesn't

01:09:36.320 | lend itself well to being booked solid. If your job is shoveling snow, you don't have

01:09:42.440 | any business the rest of the year when there's no snow on the ground. So that's not going

01:09:46.800 | to work. If you're a farmer, you probably have a big payday in the fall when you sell

01:09:50.640 | your crops or your cattle into the market. If you sell jumbo jets for Boeing, your sales

01:09:55.720 | cycle is probably extremely slow and extremely lengthy. No matter what you're doing, the

01:10:02.160 | world doesn't have the capacity or need for jumbo jets such that you can sell one every

01:10:06.240 | day or such that you can sell – Joe Gerard, if he sold 1,200 in a year divided by 365,

01:10:13.240 | he sold three and a half cars a day. You're probably not going to sell three and a half

01:10:16.520 | jumbo jets a day. But you should still look for consistency in your income. So if you

01:10:21.800 | look for it, you might be able to create it. So look at the market around you and see what

01:10:26.560 | other people do. That's why landscapers shovel snow in winter and mow lawns in summer

01:10:33.560 | so that they have consistency and continuity of income.

01:10:40.800 | A farmer who focuses and says, "I'm tired of being paid just every year," can build

01:10:45.080 | out a business model to create year-round cash flow. So compare the business model of

01:10:50.400 | a guy who is running thousands of acres of corn in Iowa and basically he has a payday

01:10:57.400 | twice a year. He has a payday when he gets his subsidies and he gets a payday when he

01:11:02.640 | sells his corn into the market. That's it.

01:11:06.880 | Now compare that to somebody like Joel Salatin who's kind of the hero of the local farmer

01:11:11.360 | movement. Joel Salatin has dozens and dozens of businesses that operate on his farm. Amazing.

01:11:17.760 | All of them create revenue and all of them are all kinds of different times of year.

01:11:20.640 | So he has consistent income all year round. And he's built the marketing empire around

01:11:25.760 | that such that he can pick and choose what he's doing and what he's selling into. That's

01:11:29.920 | business. That's what all of us need to be doing is creating all kinds of services, marketing

01:11:35.860 | them effectively to build demand for them, and then profiting off of them.

01:11:41.020 | So a farmer doesn't have to sit back and say, "I'm just going to get my cash flow in the

01:11:44.720 | fall and then spend the rest of the year." You can create year-round cash flow. Now,

01:11:50.480 | it may be some of those may be every year. Joel Salatin, I think he has a buyer's club.

01:11:53.720 | He has books that he's selling. He has all kinds of different things but some of his

01:11:57.440 | businesses will be only every couple of months. Here's the season when his chickens are ready

01:12:04.440 | and they're grown and he's ready to sell them into the market. Eggs might be for a longer

01:12:07.800 | season but maybe larger chickens are a smaller season.

01:12:11.480 | So you build that out and you look at your business and analyze it. So here are some

01:12:14.760 | ideas in the video business. I've never been in the video business so it could be that

01:12:18.560 | I don't have a clue. That's why I'm saying go find the people who do. But here are just

01:12:21.440 | a bunch of ideas I made up off the top of my head. Let's say you're a wedding videographer

01:12:25.720 | and that's your core reason. So for some reason, it's either feast or famine for you. You're

01:12:30.600 | either working every day or you're not working for a month at a time.

01:12:34.920 | What you need is you need some kind of non-correlating income streams and a non-correlating asset

01:12:41.920 | class. Here's how we're applying the principles of investing and asset allocation to a business.

01:12:46.380 | So maybe that's corporate work. So I'm making this up to illustrate the point. Don't get

01:12:50.760 | bogged down in details but maybe all of your weddings are in the summertime. So in the

01:12:54.400 | summertime, you're working every single day. But in the winter, you're empty. Well, maybe

01:12:58.400 | all the corporate meetings in your town are in the wintertime or the corporate conferences.

01:13:03.200 | So you can go and do the video work there. Or maybe what you find is that there are no

01:13:07.540 | corporate conferences or corporate meetings that you can videotape in your town but there's

01:13:11.320 | a lot of editing work. So you can set up a scenario with somebody in Florida where all

01:13:17.400 | of the conventions that happen in Florida seem to happen in Orlando for some strange

01:13:21.520 | reason and they seem to happen in the wintertime for some strange reason.

01:13:24.400 | Well, guess what? People, the business executives in Chicago want to get out of town and they

01:13:29.160 | want to take their families and go to Disney World. So now you've got a dry winter so you

01:13:33.200 | build a business doing freelancing editing work instead of videotaping. That builds out

01:13:38.880 | your winter income. Maybe it's the other way around. All your business is in the winter

01:13:43.560 | and nothing is in the summer. So you say, "Maybe I can build a business niche out of

01:13:47.760 | making beautiful sales videos for high-end real estate listings and high-end real estate

01:13:53.520 | agents." Not just the ho-hum, the $50,000 houses for sale. Maybe it's the 500,000 or

01:13:58.960 | the million-dollar houses and you can do that for a few hundred bucks.

01:14:02.480 | Man, if I'm selling a million-dollar house, I don't know what your real estate commissions

01:14:05.800 | are in Canada but in the US it's about 3%. If I'm selling a million-dollar house and

01:14:12.240 | I'm going to have about a $30,000 commission, a 3% commission before broker's fees and all

01:14:18.680 | that come out, I can spend 500 bucks on a beautiful video that will really enhance my

01:14:25.280 | property. Maybe that's the thing that works in the summer.

01:14:32.280 | So you build out a little business doing that. You get some marketing built and you get a

01:14:37.400 | client base of real estate agents that love you and refer you. Now you look at that and

01:14:41.480 | you say, "What's another area?" Everyone is taking movies with their phones constantly

01:14:45.920 | but nobody has the time to sit down and create something special off of them.

01:14:50.280 | Maybe another business niche is I'm going to edit home movies for the middle class and

01:14:55.640 | piece together all of the clips of film that are on their iPhones and create that into

01:15:00.760 | a business and market that because filming is easy and editing is not. People need Christmas

01:15:07.320 | presents for their families and it's hard to figure out what to buy a mom who has everything

01:15:11.200 | in the world that she could ever need but she would love a video.

01:15:14.800 | You market that to busy middle class or mass affluent clients who just want to do that

01:15:20.720 | and you say, "Send me, upload all your files off of your iPhone into this Dropbox account

01:15:26.280 | and I'll edit it together." You do a little bit of post-production magic and create this

01:15:29.920 | beautiful film and you charge them 500 bucks for it.

01:15:32.960 | It probably doesn't take you that long. You could charge a really nice premium off it.

01:15:36.520 | You can maybe hire some of your video work done externally, the upfront editing, and

01:15:40.880 | you just add the final tweaks and now you've created a business that is active around the

01:15:45.240 | holidays or is marketed for Valentine's Day. You know, "Okay, I need Christmas work and

01:15:50.640 | I need Valentine's Day work," and you build this out and that's an opportunity for you.

01:15:57.640 | So you're building out and saying, "Here's when it's famine so how can I build a business

01:16:01.240 | that's going to bring it in?"

01:16:02.960 | Maybe you can figure out how to build a stream of consistent income by hiring out editing

01:16:09.080 | services to some prominent YouTubers or better yet, here's an idea, find some local businesses

01:16:14.400 | and help them understand and implement new media and strike a deal with them where you

01:16:18.400 | do the upfront work but then you get a percentage of the increased sales that come from it.

01:16:22.440 | So now you want consistency and you find a stable of 20 local businesses, all of whom

01:16:27.640 | you're going to help and create a weekly or bi-weekly YouTube video for their marketing

01:16:33.480 | platform that's going to be well done but they don't have to deal with it.

01:16:37.120 | I desperately want to do video for Radical Personal Finance. I desperately want to do

01:16:42.240 | it. I think it would be really great. I haven't learned the skills yet but I would love to

01:16:46.480 | do it. I don't have the space in my day to do it. I would love to walk into a studio,

01:16:52.200 | shoot the content and somehow split that business opportunity with a partner. No one's approached

01:16:56.880 | me with that and I bet there's people in your town who if you approach them could do that.

01:17:02.800 | There's a big – the stuff that seems easy to you is incredibly daunting and overwhelming

01:17:07.320 | to other people. So maybe you're great at creating the productions but you're bad at

01:17:10.960 | the content. I'm brilliant at creating content. I have no shortage of content ideas. I just

01:17:16.760 | don't have the bandwidth yet. I haven't made it. I'm making it but I don't have

01:17:20.440 | the bandwidth to create it.

01:17:22.720 | So you pick one of those and if those aren't good ideas – I have no idea if they're

01:17:26.400 | not. I haven't tested them. I made them all up off the top of my head but if those

01:17:29.280 | aren't good ideas then figure out a good idea that is and implement it. Then maybe

01:17:34.840 | here's your real consistent income is you create a – you sell the course. You create

01:17:39.320 | a continuity product of some time where you're building a course and maybe your vision is

01:17:44.680 | you get really successful with taking those iPhone clips off of people's phones and

01:17:49.060 | charging them $299 to create a home movie for mom for Christmas.

01:17:53.760 | Now you take that and you teach local home educated kids how – Kennedy probably don't

01:17:59.200 | have those. You teach local high school kids how to do this themselves and now they can

01:18:05.520 | do this on a Saturday once a week and they can make $300 in a Saturday. That's a lot

01:18:09.600 | better than wasting their time working down at the local fast food franchise for minimum

01:18:13.600 | wage or maybe you master the real estate agent video marketing scenario and you can sell

01:18:21.400 | a high priced course teaching other people how to replicate that business idea or have

01:18:26.760 | a membership side of some kind.

01:18:29.960 | So those are just hopefully things that will spark you to figure out what is it actually

01:18:34.740 | in your business and again, none of those are market tested ideas. I just made them

01:18:38.560 | all up but that type of thinking I think will get you closer and the simplest way to handle

01:18:45.020 | the problems created with your inconsistent and irregular income is going to be to create

01:18:50.900 | regular and consistent income that's ample and in excess of what you need for your expenses.

01:18:56.520 | It might sound a little silly but that is the answer to your problem.

01:19:01.040 | Now as far as how to actually change and create a budgeting system to handle the irregular

01:19:06.520 | income, that's tough. It's probably simple but it's not necessarily easy and I've

01:19:12.960 | struggled with this for years myself. So when you – because I've had inconsistent and

01:19:18.320 | irregular income for – ever since I was laid off from the corporate job that I had

01:19:23.880 | before and got into the financial planning business.

01:19:27.240 | And so it's very difficult to so-called budget under this kind of scenario. Now you

01:19:32.680 | may have to prioritize and say, "Okay, sometimes I'm going to pay this and not,"

01:19:35.640 | but it's very difficult to do this idea of monthly budgeting. "All right, now I'm

01:19:38.640 | going to spend $3,000 next month and so I'm going to write it all down and end up with

01:19:42.040 | zero and have a zero-based budget." It's a great idea if you make $3,000 a month but

01:19:45.920 | what if you make $30,000 in one month and then nothing for the next four and then $15,000

01:19:50.680 | and then nothing for the next 13 months. So that's why I spend so much time on the other.

01:19:55.520 | That's the bigger problem and more challenging.

01:19:58.720 | Now the only way I've been able to solve this problem is with a buffer account and

01:20:02.640 | I think you need a buffer account if your income is inconsistent and irregular. You

01:20:05.880 | need a buffer account with lots of money in it and that's more important to your actual

01:20:10.160 | ability to execute on ideas than any of your long-term investment dollars, than any of

01:20:15.760 | your long-term IRA dollars, things like that. You need a lot of money just in savings accounts

01:20:20.240 | and it helps if you can have or develop a sense of timing with regard to your income

01:20:24.880 | to actually know when it will come in. If I earn $0 this month, $30,000 the next month,

01:20:30.720 | zero for the next three and then $11,000 and then zero for the next 18 months, that is

01:20:35.360 | very difficult to plan around.

01:20:37.760 | But if I know that, "Okay, I've got some history now and yes, there's a cycle where

01:20:42.320 | my income is down and my business is down during the winter months but it comes back

01:20:45.760 | during the summer months. Now I can plan," is what farmers do. Farmers are usually – they're

01:20:50.880 | planning based upon the depth of their bank loan. I come from a family of farmers. They're

01:20:55.040 | usually planning based upon the depth of their bank loan. My grandfather always had a sign

01:20:58.680 | on his wall. He said – this is a non-profit enterprise. He said, "Taxes and banks keep

01:21:08.480 | it such," I think, something like that, a very empowering message. I got waylaid.

01:21:17.000 | So the point is that if you know, "Okay, I'm going to make – here's my income.

01:21:20.720 | We're going to sell our crops and we're probably going to have a half a million dollars

01:21:23.360 | of income," then you sit down and you budget out the coming year.

01:21:26.040 | But every farmer I've ever met and done work with, you need a lot of money in the

01:21:30.000 | cash and cash just to fund those things. That's about the only way I know to do it. So if

01:21:34.960 | you know the cycles, then you can figure out what's the real amount of money. But I think

01:21:39.640 | you just simply need deeper savings accounts than many other people. You need accurate

01:21:43.600 | records of what you're actually spending and so that you can have a sense of what does

01:21:47.800 | $30,000 in the bank mean. Does that mean three months of expenses or does that mean 30 months

01:21:52.600 | of expenses? Big difference between your planning in those two scenarios.

01:21:56.640 | You need to have an idea of a buffer amount that you're focusing on and that would be

01:22:00.160 | different for every industry and every situation. Maybe you need three months of cash in the

01:22:05.600 | bank and maybe you need three years, very much dependent on what your expectations are.

01:22:12.640 | If you can find a way to budget off of your steady income, that would be awesome. So let's

01:22:16.800 | say that all of your expenses are from your fiancé's income and you budget based upon

01:22:23.280 | that. But all of your extra fun and all of your real investments are from your income.

01:22:29.640 | That would be really, really great. What I have worked towards is my goal and I almost

01:22:34.540 | hit it before I left the firm I was with. But my goal was to get to the point where

01:22:38.200 | I could always budget from my renewals and my residual income from my investment accounts.

01:22:43.120 | So instead of ever relying on new commissions, which can come in in big chunks and be some

01:22:48.320 | consistent and some are not, then I could focus on, "Okay, I've got this level of base

01:22:53.440 | and I'll always budget off of that and save all of the new commissions." So then over

01:22:57.840 | time that was my very simple guidelines of how I would be able to make sure that I was

01:23:02.760 | always saving a lot of money but I was still increasing my lifestyle to a certain point

01:23:08.200 | where I didn't feel like I was just starving all the time.

01:23:11.200 | Then in the early years I was focusing heavily on that, "How do I create more business

01:23:15.040 | so that I can get enough upfront commissions coming in until the renewals and the residuals

01:23:19.580 | and the size of the investment portfolios that I was managing got to the point where

01:23:22.880 | I could run my lifestyle off of that?" So now, under a different scenario, now my focus

01:23:29.280 | is to budget based upon my consulting income and the membership side income and my goal

01:23:35.080 | is to build that as the foundation of my business so that I can budget off of that regular income

01:23:40.880 | and then have different one-off business projects be the big, big money that I can save off

01:23:47.080 | of that I can invest off of.

01:23:48.760 | Again, this is all relative to scale. If I'm making $2,000 of residual income and my expenses

01:23:55.080 | are $5,000, I can't do that. I got to be making big chunks. But if I'm making $20,000 of residual

01:24:02.080 | income then maybe I'll go ahead and just keep living on five or ten and save half of it.

01:24:07.600 | So this is all relative. Hopefully you get the concept and the idea and then you've got

01:24:12.200 | to figure out what to do.

01:24:14.400 | The last piece of advice I would have for you in this situation is keep your fixed expenses

01:24:18.160 | and your fixed obligations low and your margin high. You can get away with living close to

01:24:25.040 | the edge if you have regular income. Many people do. If you have a nice regular income

01:24:30.400 | that's a very consistent paycheck, you can go ahead and you can max your life out. You

01:24:35.560 | can borrow a bunch of money. You can do well. But you can't if you have irregular income

01:24:41.520 | and expect to keep your business going.

01:24:44.000 | The number one cause of business failure is usually cash flow problems. Kind of self-evident,

01:24:50.200 | right? If businesses fail because they run out of money which means there's some extra

01:24:55.560 | problems. Is the problem a lack of sales or is the problem expenses too high or what?

01:24:59.840 | But the problem is cash flow management. So if you can keep fixed expenses down then you

01:25:05.840 | can have a bit more margin. I could not be doing what I'm doing now if I had an extremely

01:25:13.120 | high fixed cost lifestyle. I've told you all how much money I make off the show so

01:25:18.080 | far. It's not enough to support my lifestyle. But it's a long way away from the $5,000

01:25:24.200 | or $6,000 I need gross of business expenses to support my lifestyle. It's a big difference

01:25:29.180 | between creating $5,000 a month versus $15,000 a month in the short term.

01:25:34.280 | So then in the early years while I invest and build a business, in the early years that

01:25:39.000 | will compound later on down the road and I'll have more flexibility. But those are some

01:25:42.520 | thoughts that I have. I hope that's helpful to you, Brendan. That's the best guess I have

01:25:47.480 | and you'll have to figure out and take that and interpret it for your situation. As with

01:25:51.920 | all financial advice, this really is the big deal. As with all financial advice, you have

01:25:55.960 | to figure out how to apply this and interpret it to your situation. Everything, you hear

01:26:00.400 | these things, the details of your situation are fact dependent. That's a big deal. They're

01:26:06.040 | fact dependent. There's a big difference between somebody saying, give you an example. I did

01:26:11.240 | planning work for one time for an attorney and he's at variable income. I asked him,

01:26:15.000 | how much money do you make? He said, it varies. Some years, last year it was $3.5 million.

01:26:20.880 | This year it's looking like a $1.2 million. He says it kind of wanders around next year.

01:26:24.800 | I don't know. But he was winning big cases and so the income was extremely variable.

01:26:30.520 | Now, is it such a big deal to be budgeting if your income is between $1.2 million and

01:26:37.320 | $3.5 million? Well, if you're spending $2 million every year, then it's a big deal.

01:26:42.520 | But thankfully, this guy wasn't. He was spending a few hundred thousand. He was certainly living

01:26:49.160 | fine. But it's not a big deal for him if it's between $1 million this year and $5 million

01:26:53.760 | the next year. So the question is not just about irregular income. The question is, what's

01:26:59.040 | the scale? What is the actual scenario? What's the irregularity? So that's why I have to

01:27:03.000 | spend all this time talking about concepts and ideas and hopefully this has been helpful

01:27:07.520 | to you. So that's today's show. I'm sorry the show will be going out late, substantially

01:27:12.560 | late. It's still in line. It's just, well, we'll get into that another time as far as

01:27:15.760 | the reasons. I'm still learning my own business and then learning how to buffer for the details

01:27:20.280 | of life and the details of life have been challenging the last few days. But here it

01:27:23.920 | is and I hope it's been helpful to you. If you would like to get your questions answered

01:27:27.800 | on a show like this, feel free to email them to me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. And

01:27:31.840 | then I do always give priority to the patrons of the show. So if you email me, one thing

01:27:36.440 | I check actually, but the names, but it would be helpful to me if you email me a question,

01:27:40.800 | just make a note if you're a patron or not. And that way I'll just be able to more easily

01:27:44.720 | prioritize and make sure that I'm prioritizing those of you who are patrons. And if you want

01:27:50.600 | to find out and become a patron, check out all the benefits at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.

01:27:55.280 | I've got a bunch of things there set up for you and hopefully you can benefit. But we're

01:28:02.600 | doing well, but we're working hard to get to 6,000 a month of income for the show by

01:28:08.040 | June 1. And if we can do that, I can keep the show commercial free for you. So that's

01:28:12.720 | it. I'm out of here. Have a great weekend. Have a great day. Bye.

01:28:16.280 | Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email

01:28:20.840 | address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. You can also connect with the show on Twitter

01:28:27.360 | at RadicalPF and at facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. This show is intended to provide entertainment,

01:28:36.000 | education, and financial enlightenment. But your situation is unique and I cannot deliver

01:28:43.120 | any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please, develop a team of professional

01:28:50.560 | advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because

01:28:58.480 | they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide

01:29:05.440 | specific answers to your questions. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate

01:29:11.320 | in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something

01:29:16.680 | I've said, please help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn

01:29:21.960 | together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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