RPF0169-Opportunity_Cost
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00:00:51.000 | Today I want to share with you a concept
00:00:53.000 | that I believe has the potential to transform your life
00:00:58.000 | in and of itself.
00:01:00.000 | And I don't say those words lightly.
00:01:02.000 | We're going to talk about the concept of opportunity cost.
00:01:06.000 | And give me a shot, give me a chance
00:01:08.000 | to flesh out this concept for you,
00:01:11.000 | and then let me know if you agree.
00:01:13.000 | I really believe this is one of the most powerful ideas
00:01:16.000 | that you can understand
00:01:18.000 | when it comes to personal financial planning.
00:01:20.000 | [Music]
00:01:36.000 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast.
00:01:38.000 | My name is Joshua Sheets.
00:01:40.000 | Today we dig into a little bit of economics,
00:01:43.000 | but we're going to apply it very directly
00:01:46.000 | to personal financial planning.
00:01:48.000 | I mentioned this briefly on Monday's show,
00:01:50.000 | the Used Car vs. New Car show,
00:01:52.000 | that I was going to do this.
00:01:54.000 | I didn't plan to do it, but I just considered it
00:01:56.000 | and I thought this is too important for me
00:01:58.000 | to let it go any longer.
00:02:00.000 | So today we go into opportunity cost.
00:02:02.000 | [Music]
00:02:08.000 | Monday's show was a detailed discussion
00:02:10.000 | of used cars vs. new cars.
00:02:12.000 | And I had been excited to do the show,
00:02:15.000 | but frankly I just felt like it fell a little bit flat.
00:02:17.000 | And I did my best.
00:02:19.000 | I wasn't feeling great at the time
00:02:21.000 | and I just think my brain was a little bit foggy.
00:02:23.000 | I did my best with it, but at the end of it
00:02:25.000 | I just thought, "Man, it wasn't awesome."
00:02:27.000 | And I had actually tried,
00:02:29.000 | I'd actually re-recorded it three times total,
00:02:31.000 | at least the first 20 minutes or so,
00:02:33.000 | just because it wasn't working.
00:02:35.000 | And at the end I realized it's because
00:02:37.000 | the entire discussion of used cars vs. new cars
00:02:40.000 | is based around opportunity cost.
00:02:42.000 | That's it.
00:02:44.000 | It doesn't need to get any more complicated than that.
00:02:46.000 | People that buy new cars,
00:02:48.000 | and I'll define opportunity cost in just a moment,
00:02:51.000 | but put simply in the context of used cars vs. new cars,
00:02:54.000 | people that buy new cars are doing so
00:02:57.000 | because they value having the new car
00:03:00.000 | more than they value other things that they can do with the money.
00:03:03.000 | And people who buy used cars are doing so
00:03:05.000 | because they value the other things that they can do with the money
00:03:09.000 | more than they value having a new car.
00:03:12.000 | That's it. It's as simple as that.
00:03:15.000 | Now, you can get into more of the calculations
00:03:17.000 | and figure out the total cost,
00:03:19.000 | and figure out what it's worth to you, but that's really it.
00:03:22.000 | Then why do people get so hot under the collar about this issue?
00:03:25.000 | Well, I think one of the reasons why I get pretty passionate about it
00:03:28.000 | is simply that it doesn't feel to me
00:03:32.000 | like most people think
00:03:35.000 | in terms of all of the options that are available to them.
00:03:40.000 | It seems like many people just simply make a decision
00:03:43.000 | without considering the alternative decisions they could make.
00:03:47.000 | They spend money without considering the alternative use of their dollars.
00:03:52.000 | And that's a real challenge.
00:03:55.000 | And so I thought, "Well, I need to do this opportunity cost show
00:03:58.000 | because everything that I talk about every day
00:04:01.000 | is all about just demonstrating other things that you can do,
00:04:06.000 | other decisions that you can make,
00:04:08.000 | and then I just leave the decision up to you to decide what you can do."
00:04:11.000 | So let me start with actually defining opportunity cost for you,
00:04:14.000 | and I'm going to do it by reading an article
00:04:16.000 | by an economist named Russell Roberts.
00:04:19.000 | And Mr. Roberts is a well-known economist.
00:04:23.000 | He is a representative of the Hoover Institute.
00:04:26.000 | He hosts an excellent economic podcast called EconTalk.
00:04:29.000 | He's been hosting it for many, many years, and he's a good guy,
00:04:32.000 | and I have enjoyed a lot of his teaching.
00:04:34.000 | Well, he wrote an article in 2007, February 5, 2007.
00:04:38.000 | It's a short little article about opportunity cost.
00:04:40.000 | I'm going to read it to you because I think it's the best introduction to this.
00:04:45.000 | Now, if you are well familiar with economic concepts,
00:04:49.000 | feel free to skip forward and skip this article,
00:04:52.000 | but make sure you listen to some of my examples.
00:04:55.000 | But I think this will be a good refresher for you,
00:04:57.000 | and I want you to really grasp this because this is a major theme on this show
00:05:01.000 | even though I don't often identify it as such.
00:05:04.000 | And if you're new to the study of economics, just hang in there.
00:05:08.000 | This is a very simple concept that will be intuitive to you,
00:05:13.000 | but the application might not.
00:05:15.000 | So let's kick it off with this interview –
00:05:17.000 | with this article here by Russell Roberts posted at econlib.org.
00:05:22.000 | One of the challenges of being an economist is explaining what you do for a living.
00:05:27.000 | People understand that one of the things a professor of economics does is teach economics.
00:05:32.000 | But what is that exactly?
00:05:35.000 | Most presume it has something to do with investing and financial management.
00:05:41.000 | When I once told my seatmate on an airline flight that I was an economist,
00:05:44.000 | she said, "Oh, what a shame. My husband loves the stock market."
00:05:49.000 | I didn't tell her that other than the advantages of investing in indexed mutual funds,
00:05:53.000 | I know next to nothing about the stock market.
00:05:56.000 | My seatmate might have profited from reading Alfred Marshall,
00:05:59.000 | who called economics "the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life."
00:06:06.000 | This was the enterprise of Marshall and Adam Smith and Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman.
00:06:12.000 | They tried to understand what people do and the implications of their behavior for the society at large.
00:06:18.000 | But my favorite definition of economics is a variant of Marshall's.
00:06:22.000 | It comes from a student who heard it from another teacher of hers.
00:06:26.000 | Economics is the study of how to get the most out of life.
00:06:31.000 | I like this because it strikes at the true heart of economics,
00:06:35.000 | the choices we make given that we can't have everything we want.
00:06:39.000 | Economics is the study of infinite wants and finite means, the study of constrained choices.
00:06:46.000 | This is true for individuals and governments, families and nations.
00:06:51.000 | Thomas Sowell said it best, "No solutions, only tradeoffs."
00:06:56.000 | To get the most out of life, to think like an economist,
00:06:59.000 | you have to be aware of what you're giving up in order to get something else.
00:07:05.000 | That's all opportunity cost is.
00:07:08.000 | Opportunity cost is what you have to give up to get something.
00:07:13.000 | What could be more straightforward?
00:07:15.000 | If you want something, you have to give up something.
00:07:18.000 | The idea turns out to be a little subtler than it appears at first glance.
00:07:23.000 | Let's look a little more closely.
00:07:25.000 | Milton Friedman used to say that economics is simple.
00:07:29.000 | All you have to remember is that demand slopes downward and that nothing's free.
00:07:34.000 | The hard part is applying those two simple ideas.
00:07:38.000 | When Friedman said that nothing was free, he meant that everything has a cost.
00:07:43.000 | Take the proverbial free lunch that Friedman delighted in pointing out didn't exist.
00:07:48.000 | Suppose I invite you to lunch and it's on me.
00:07:51.000 | I promise to pay and I keep that promise.
00:07:53.000 | Free, right?
00:07:55.000 | No, says the economist.
00:07:58.000 | Economist, there's no monetary cost today,
00:08:01.000 | but there's an expectation that you'll return the favor and treat me to a future lunch.
00:08:06.000 | You, the believer in the free lunch.
00:08:08.000 | But you don't realize I'm not a nice person.
00:08:11.000 | I don't plan on reciprocating and I'm going to keep that promise to myself.
00:08:15.000 | Today's lunch is free.
00:08:17.000 | Economist, no, even if you don't plan to reciprocate, the guilt at being a moocher is a cost.
00:08:25.000 | You, you don't realize just how not nice I am.
00:08:29.000 | I have no conscience, so I do get a free lunch.
00:08:34.000 | Economist, alas, no, you have to listen to me talk while we're eating.
00:08:39.000 | You, I won't be listening.
00:08:41.000 | I'm going to daydream about an upcoming vacation.
00:08:44.000 | I'm going to pretend to pay attention.
00:08:47.000 | Economist, it's still not free.
00:08:50.000 | The cost of having lunch with me, even when I pay,
00:08:53.000 | even when you don't plan on reciprocating,
00:08:55.000 | and even when I do all the talking that you ignore,
00:08:58.000 | is the pleasure you would have received doing something else instead.
00:09:02.000 | Whatever you gave up to have lunch with me,
00:09:05.000 | not just the money, not just the time,
00:09:07.000 | but the value or pleasure you would have received from doing something else.
00:09:13.000 | So, one of the keys to thinking like an economist is always remembering that everything has a cost.
00:09:19.000 | This may be one reason economists have fewer friends than they otherwise would.
00:09:24.000 | Sometimes people are very happy holding onto the naive view that something is free.
00:09:29.000 | We like the idea of a bargain.
00:09:32.000 | We don't want to hear about the hidden or non-obvious costs.
00:09:36.000 | Thinking about foregone opportunities, the choices we didn't make, can lead to regret.
00:09:42.000 | Choosing this college means you can't go to that one.
00:09:46.000 | Marrying this person means not marrying that one.
00:09:50.000 | Choosing this dessert, usually, means missing out on that one.
00:09:55.000 | Sometimes people just want to eat their cake and have it too,
00:09:58.000 | without being reminded that they missed out on a spectacular piece of pie.
00:10:03.000 | All true.
00:10:04.000 | But, if you want to get the most out of life, you have to take account of the opportunity cost.
00:10:09.000 | The foregone alternatives.
00:10:11.000 | Better to make good choices and learn how to live with them,
00:10:15.000 | than make bad choices in blissful ignorance that lead to ruin.
00:10:20.000 | Here are some applications of how understanding opportunity costs helps you get the most out of life.
00:10:26.000 | The real cost of college.
00:10:28.000 | What's the cost of college?
00:10:30.000 | The obvious part of the cost of college is tuition.
00:10:33.000 | It's not room and board because those would be incurred anyway,
00:10:36.000 | but the opportunity cost includes the foregone wages from the jobs you could have had if you hadn't gone to college.
00:10:42.000 | This is one of the reasons we go to college when we're young without any experience in the workplace.
00:10:47.000 | Our wages are relatively low, so the foregone earnings from going to college are lower.
00:10:53.000 | The return on your investments.
00:10:55.000 | Economists do know something about the stock market.
00:10:58.000 | If you tell me you have a great investment track record, I want to know, compared to what?
00:11:04.000 | A mutual fund manager who earned 12% last year for his investors seems to have had a banner year,
00:11:10.000 | but mutual funds indexed to the S&P 500 earned over 15%.
00:11:15.000 | If both funds had a similar level of risk, that mutual fund manager had a negative return of 3%.
00:11:22.000 | Similarly, holding your assets in the form of cash means foregoing the opportunity to invest them.
00:11:29.000 | The opportunity cost of cash is the return you could earn by investing it.
00:11:34.000 | Home ownership and home improvements.
00:11:37.000 | Real estate agents like to tell you that a house is a great investment.
00:11:41.000 | Your house is appreciating and you get to live in it.
00:11:45.000 | Sometimes both are true statements.
00:11:48.000 | But appreciation of the house isn't enough to make it a good investment,
00:11:52.000 | or a reason to buy a particularly large house on the argument that
00:11:56.000 | if the investment is going to appreciate, it's better to have a bigger stake.
00:12:00.000 | Homeowners like to savor how much they sold their house for above what they paid for it.
00:12:05.000 | When measuring the return, they rarely subtract the direct monetary costs,
00:12:10.000 | the repairs, the taxes and the fees and commissions of lawyers, real estate agents and government agencies.
00:12:16.000 | But I've never known the proud Boston or Washington or LA house seller
00:12:20.000 | who calculates the foregone investment opportunities from tying up the down payment
00:12:24.000 | and the mortgage payments over the life of the time in the house.
00:12:28.000 | Similarly, real estate agents and contractors like to tell you that redoing your kitchen is a good idea
00:12:34.000 | because you'll get the money back in the form of a higher price when you sell your house.
00:12:39.000 | So the kitchen is free.
00:12:41.000 | And in the meanwhile, you get to enjoy the pleasures of the kitchen.
00:12:45.000 | That logic is fine as long as you get enough pleasure from the kitchen
00:12:48.000 | to offset the opportunity cost of tying your money up in cabinetry and granite
00:12:53.000 | and giving up the return you could have earned doing something else with the money.
00:12:57.000 | One aspect of homeownership and opportunity cost is particularly tricky.
00:13:02.000 | Suppose your house appreciates.
00:13:04.000 | You could sell it and move to a smaller house or a house in a different neighborhood,
00:13:09.000 | but you decide to stay.
00:13:11.000 | The appreciation of your house means it has gotten more costly to live in.
00:13:16.000 | But that increase in cost, being an opportunity cost rather than an out-of-pocket cost,
00:13:22.000 | does not mean you are worse off.
00:13:24.000 | In fact, it is a sign that you are better off.
00:13:27.000 | An asset you own has appreciated and your wealth is higher,
00:13:31.000 | at least as long as the appreciation stays in place.
00:13:34.000 | Opportunity cost is different from what we think of colloquially as cost,
00:13:39.000 | which usually means a monetary payment.
00:13:42.000 | Opportunity cost guides rational decision-making,
00:13:45.000 | but an increase in costs doesn't necessarily mean that you are worse off than you were before.
00:13:51.000 | Sunk costs are sunk.
00:13:53.000 | Historical costs are history.
00:13:56.000 | Opportunity cost is a forward-looking concept.
00:13:59.000 | If my car breaks down and I fix it and it breaks down again,
00:14:03.000 | the decision to fix it a second time is independent of the first repair's costs.
00:14:08.000 | It is irrational to think that I have to fix it because I've put so much money into the car already.
00:14:14.000 | If I don't fix it, I'll lose all the money I've already invested.
00:14:17.000 | I've already lost the money on the first repair.
00:14:21.000 | Now I should only ask whether the second set of repairs are worth it.
00:14:25.000 | A variation on the "sunk cost" argument is the irrelevancy of historical costs.
00:14:31.000 | What the seller paid for a house 20 years ago has little effect on the market price today.
00:14:37.000 | Complaining that the seller is charging an exorbitant price compared to what the seller paid originally
00:14:42.000 | only ensures you will have trouble finding someone to sell you a house that meets your standards of a fair price.
00:14:49.000 | On the flip side, complaining to a prospective buyer in a housing market that has collapsed
00:14:54.000 | that your price is high because, after all, you paid a lot for it once
00:14:59.000 | and it's only fairer that you get your money back plus a fair return
00:15:02.000 | is unlikely to be a successful strategy for selling your house.
00:15:07.000 | Market prices ignore history.
00:15:10.000 | Replacement costs are more relevant than historical costs.
00:15:15.000 | If a friend gives you a Van Gogh as a wedding present
00:15:17.000 | and a few years later a drunken dinner guest plunges a carving knife through it after losing his balance,
00:15:23.000 | your guest wouldn't tell you to shrug it off because, after all, it was a gift.
00:15:27.000 | You didn't pay anything for it.
00:15:30.000 | Self-sufficiency versus relying on others.
00:15:33.000 | Perhaps the most important application of opportunity cost is the decision to do things for yourself versus hiring someone.
00:15:41.000 | Doing it yourself is often cheaper and can be fun,
00:15:44.000 | but the cost of doing it yourself is the value of the other things you could have done with your time.
00:15:49.000 | Those other things might include working a part-time job or doing consulting, which means you forego money.
00:15:56.000 | So doing it yourself can be costly in the monetary sense,
00:15:59.000 | but the non-monetary costs can dwarf the monetary costs.
00:16:03.000 | Time spent painting your house yourself is time you can't spend reading to your children
00:16:08.000 | or being with your spouse or volunteering at the local soup kitchen.
00:16:12.000 | Ultimately, anything close to genuine self-sufficiency is the road to poverty.
00:16:17.000 | An avid do-it-yourselfer might change her own oil, bake her own bread, and build a bookcase in her basement workshop,
00:16:23.000 | but she won't forge her own steel and fashion her own car.
00:16:27.000 | She won't grow her own wheat or mill her own flour.
00:16:30.000 | She won't cut down a tree and plane the wood for that bookcase.
00:16:33.000 | And even if she did, she'll buy the saw.
00:16:36.000 | She won't make it for herself.
00:16:38.000 | By specializing in a very small set of skills, selling those skills in the marketplace,
00:16:44.000 | and relying on the skills of other specializing individuals, we create much of what we call specialization.
00:16:50.000 | We specialize because the costs of self-sufficiency are so high.
00:16:56.000 | Of all the constraints we face, the constraint of 24 hours in a day and a finite lifetime are ones we cannot escape.
00:17:05.000 | Getting the most out of life means using that precious time wisely.
00:17:10.000 | Using that time wisely means using and understanding opportunity cost.
00:17:16.000 | I've read many articles over the years on opportunity cost,
00:17:21.000 | but I've never read one that was more straightforward and brought together so many useful ideas in such a concise package.
00:17:29.000 | I hope you enjoyed that and appreciated it.
00:17:32.000 | If you grasp the concept of opportunity cost deeply and then you start looking at the world around,
00:17:39.000 | you will quickly see that it explains much of the things that bring – many of the things that bring controversy between people.
00:17:47.000 | People have different sets of values, and they value different costs and benefits differently.
00:17:55.000 | Now, there is a high degree of economic illiteracy in our country.
00:18:02.000 | Very few people that you ask on the street, if you ask them, "What is opportunity cost?" and you ask them to explain it to you,
00:18:08.000 | very few people I think could answer that in a straightforward way.
00:18:11.000 | And if you ask somebody who's making a decision what the costs of the decision are,
00:18:17.000 | very few people will calculate and lay out all of the different opportunity costs that are associated with that decision.
00:18:23.000 | But we desperately need to think that way.
00:18:27.000 | And if you think that way, you can do a couple of things.
00:18:30.000 | Number one, you'll make excellent decisions for yourself because you'll feel confident about the course that you've set and the course that you're pursuing.
00:18:37.000 | And then if you don't feel confident, you'll change the course.
00:18:42.000 | You'll also be able to help other people understand the results of their actions.
00:18:48.000 | And that's incredibly powerful to be able to actually help people understand the results of their actions.
00:18:57.000 | To me, I think this is one of the most common things that is not understood in our society.
00:19:04.000 | We just simply don't understand all the different things that we could choose.
00:19:08.000 | Let me give you one that I've harped on on this show ad nauseum.
00:19:11.000 | I talked about college.
00:19:13.000 | Now, I will continue talking about college.
00:19:16.000 | At the end of the day, every single one of you has to make a decision for yourself and for your children, help your children make their decisions about the theme.
00:19:25.000 | But the reason I harp on college or schooling in general, education, or any of the things that I discuss is simply to try to expose various alternatives.
00:19:35.000 | I like to use college as an example because it's so commonly understood.
00:19:39.000 | It's part of our cultural heritage that we all think, "I need to go to college."
00:19:44.000 | But let me explain some of the costs and the opportunity costs of college.
00:19:48.000 | Robert mentioned it in his essay, but he didn't go into all of the costs that I would say.
00:19:57.000 | So in general, when people are considering college, they're usually thinking something along the lines of this.
00:20:03.000 | "My choices are to either go to college so that I can become a skilled professional and command a high wage or to be a high school graduate only and be stuck in the minimum wage job environment because I don't have a college degree."
00:20:19.000 | That's what most people think of.
00:20:22.000 | And so in that frame of reference, it's a fairly simple decision for many people.
00:20:29.000 | After all, who wouldn't want to be a highly paid, highly respected professional with excellent job prospects as compared to a dead-end deadbeat with only a high school degree?
00:20:41.000 | But are those really the only options?
00:20:45.000 | They're not.
00:20:47.000 | So college includes a major cost of lost wages, but it also includes a cost of time.
00:20:54.000 | What if my option was laid out in this way?
00:21:00.000 | I could either choose to go to college and follow a predetermined course of study laid out to appeal to a generalized population or I could invest the same amount of money and the same amount of time into self-education.
00:21:18.000 | What if I were the type of person that followed through on the self-education?
00:21:25.000 | Now, if the purpose of college is education and if somebody were very motivated, I believe that somebody with that decision criteria could achieve a world-class education as compared to the college degree.
00:21:44.000 | Now, they wouldn't achieve the certification. They wouldn't achieve the social proof, but they would achieve the actual education.
00:21:51.000 | Think of the path of education that I could pursue if I decided to allocate four years of my life toward pursuing mastery in a specific subject.
00:22:02.000 | I set out the list of books, the list of people, and I spent those dollars – let's say instead of spending the dollars on tuition, I spend those dollars on buying a video camera, becoming basically knowledgeable about film production.
00:22:17.000 | I spend the time researching the leaders of the world in this specific area of interest.
00:22:23.000 | I read all of their books, take detailed careful notes, and I spend four years going – flying to them on my own dime, interviewing them in-depth for my film.
00:22:35.000 | And I spend four years creating an in-depth documentary film and producing a couple of books or let's just say one in-depth detailed book on the topic of study.
00:22:45.000 | Which of those things would lead – so which of these, that idea or simply a general studies degree in that course of study at a local university, which of those would be a better educational outcome?
00:23:00.000 | I think my self-directed education would win.
00:23:04.000 | Now, that's not the only choice. That's kind of just a choice focused on education. But what if instead of educating, I apprenticed?
00:23:14.000 | What if instead of paying the local state university $50,000, I found the world leader in the subject of interest that I'm interested in studying and said, "I would like to pay you $50,000 to work with you for four years.
00:23:27.000 | And I will work for you full-time for 40 years, and I'll pay you $50,000."
00:23:32.000 | Imagine if you made that offer as a young student to an industry leader in any industry.
00:23:40.000 | Do you think they might consider it?
00:23:45.000 | What would your career in education be like if you could apprentice underneath the world leader for four years?
00:23:55.000 | Couldn't it be pretty incredible?
00:24:00.000 | And I'm saying you're working and you're paying to work.
00:24:04.000 | That would be an investment worth making for some.
00:24:08.000 | Could everybody do that? Of course not. Certainly not.
00:24:11.000 | But it would be an investment worth making for some.
00:24:15.000 | What if you took the amount of money that you were going to spend on a college degree and used that to instead focus on building your wealth in something as simple as buying rental houses?
00:24:27.000 | And you used the $50,000 you were going to spend and used that money as down payments on, say, a portfolio of four or five houses.
00:24:36.000 | You spend those years learning the skills of real estate investment.
00:24:41.000 | Well, now instead of your simply having the ability to go get a job, you might have an empire, a real estate empire.
00:24:49.000 | Or you might at least have the basics of it, the foundation of it.
00:24:52.000 | What if you took the $150,000 you were going to spend on a prestigious MBA and used it on starting a series of businesses, none of which you were concerned about failing because if they did, that was just the cost of tuition?
00:25:06.000 | And you made sure to buy the excellent advice of other people to help you in your businesses.
00:25:13.000 | Could that potentially be more valuable than the letters MBA?
00:25:17.000 | What if instead of going to college and being in one place for four years, you spent four years traveling around the world and you spent your entire $100,000 college tuition fees, you spent $25,000 a year traveling around the world?
00:25:32.000 | Oh, and what if, by the way, you also did self-education at the same time, reading constantly?
00:25:38.000 | And what if, by the way, you also did something like filming, videotaping, writing about your experiences?
00:25:45.000 | And you retained your ability to use YouTube University and iTunes U and read while you travel?
00:25:53.000 | And then you integrated all of the cultural experience and exposure?
00:25:56.000 | And what if you had a theme to your travel?
00:25:58.000 | You were interested in archaeology, so you, instead of just getting a degree in archaeology, you spent four years traveling to the world's greatest archaeologists.
00:26:06.000 | And that was how you created your education.
00:26:09.000 | Or one final idea on this, I'm just giving you things that are coming to the top of my head, but one final idea is what if you took that minimum wage entry-level job with a high school degree?
00:26:22.000 | And what if you didn't have the money saved up for college?
00:26:25.000 | But what if you took the minimum wage entry-level construction job with a vision to learn various trades that you would need to learn?
00:26:36.000 | And you spent the next four years apprenticing at entry-level, minimum wage entry, whatever – and by the way, in the construction industry, there's almost nothing at minimum wage.
00:26:45.000 | It's one of the things about the minimum wage controversy that happens in our country.
00:26:50.000 | I've worked in construction and I would – I've never found hired guys that worked for me on a crew one time and I never found anybody that would work for anything near minimum wage.
00:27:01.000 | So, anyway, so it's not actually minimum wage. But the point is what if you started at entry-level wages for the construction industry and you just simply worked as a helper and an apprentice, but you worked in eight different trades, six months in each trade.
00:27:14.000 | And then at the end of four years, you had a broad-ranging experience and exposure with various methods of house building, everything from rough carpentry to roofing to plumbing to electrical.
00:27:25.000 | And then you took a year or two and you spent a year or two building your own house. You'd have to save the money along the way for the materials cost.
00:27:33.000 | But what if you did that and then you started your career at 24 with a paid-off house that you could live in or that you could rent out?
00:27:42.000 | My point is the decision is not only so simple as go to college and be a highly paid professional or be a deadbeat. It's really not.
00:27:52.000 | Now, I personally am firmly of the persuasion at the moment that a college degree, the accreditation, the certification has value in our culture.
00:28:04.000 | But I like to point out the alternative things that could be done because I wish that when I were 16 years old, somebody had sat down with me and laid out a few of those ideas.
00:28:16.000 | If I had been inspired and given a vision, I probably could have done just about any of those and I might have made different choices.
00:28:25.000 | Now, again, at some cost, I can't go back and try to think, "Well, if only. All I can do is go from where I am today."
00:28:31.000 | My point is, though, because it's such a useful scenario that we think about a lot in our culture, perhaps we could apply some of the lessons from that decision to our own current situations.
00:28:45.000 | Even something as simple as the time that you spend sitting in a college lecture is time that you can't spend reading.
00:28:53.000 | So the lecture had better deliver value.
00:28:55.000 | It's everywhere.
00:28:59.000 | Now, go back to the discussion of buying the used car.
00:29:02.000 | I believe one of the ways that we can apply this concept of opportunity cost is simply by demonstrating to people different choices they could make and the impact that those choices could be.
00:29:11.000 | Because if you see the used car versus new car decision as I can either drive a piece of junk and have a junky life or I can drive a really great new car and have a junky life and have my life be the same except it's better for the new car, you would choose the new car every time.
00:29:28.000 | But if you recognize the other things that you could do with the money and how those might also be beneficial to you, then you might -- emphasis on "might" -- you might make a different decision.
00:29:42.000 | Now, many people that buy used cars instead of new cars, they're just going to spend the money anyway.
00:29:49.000 | But what if you emphasize the things that you could spend the money on?
00:29:54.000 | Here's a simple one that I've done.
00:29:55.000 | What if you said, "I'm going to drive a -- I have $30,000 and I could buy a car with it, but I'm going to choose to buy and drive a $2,000 car instead of a $30,000 car.
00:30:06.000 | And then I'm going to go and I'm going to buy a mobile home and I'm going to rent it out.
00:30:10.000 | I'm going to pay cash for it, $28,000 cash, and I'm going to rent it out for $600 per month.
00:30:15.000 | I'm going to net on that $400.
00:30:17.000 | And now that I've got the mobile home, I'm going to take that $400 and then in about a year, once I've built up a little bit of margin, then I'll trot down to the car dealership and I will get a car payment for $400 a month.
00:30:29.000 | But now my mobile home is paying for my new car."
00:30:32.000 | You could do that.
00:30:34.000 | Incidentally, the reason people don't do that is because they never accumulate the $30,000.
00:30:39.000 | And the reason they never accumulate the $30,000 is because they go and get the $400 car payment.
00:30:43.000 | But if you had the $30,000 and you were paying cash, you could do that.
00:30:48.000 | People often just don't recognize what they're giving up.
00:30:51.000 | But if you can demonstrate to somebody, yourself or to somebody else, what you're giving up in exchange for choice, you might have a chance at changing their mind.
00:31:02.000 | I've mentioned this essay at least a half a dozen times on the show before, but I don't think I've ever read it.
00:31:08.000 | I'm going to read this essay to you, and this is from – this was an essay that impacted my life and that's why I've said it again and again on the show.
00:31:15.000 | But this was the article entitled "100 Countries or an SUV."
00:31:19.000 | This essay rocked my world when I read it because I immediately recognized it as being a powerful demonstration of the choices that we all have.
00:31:30.000 | This is written by Chris Gillibeau, and he published this on his blog on March 14, 2008, and it's entitled again "100 Countries or an SUV."
00:31:42.000 | "Traveling between Budapest and Prague in the summer of 2004, I suddenly realized how comfortable I felt with the process of moving from place to place.
00:31:52.000 | I was 26 years old and beginning to travel independently.
00:31:56.000 | It no longer felt strange to fly between continents or change currencies three times in a week.
00:32:02.000 | Adding up my adventures up to that point, I found that I had been to about 35 countries.
00:32:07.000 | Nearly a third of them were in Africa, and I knew I'd be going to at least five more over the next year.
00:32:13.000 | That same summer, I began writing out my life goals for the first time.
00:32:17.000 | As part of the list, I decided to set a goal of visiting 100 countries sometime before I died.
00:32:24.000 | At the time, I thought that was a fairly ambitious goal, which is funny considering what I decided to do later.
00:32:30.000 | When I set goals, I like to map out what they will cost in terms of time, money, and other resources.
00:32:36.000 | I did the math for my 100 countries goal while riding through Slovakia.
00:32:41.000 | Considering I had already visited about 35 countries and factoring in flights, lodging, visas, and incidentals, I tried to set a budget for what the rest of the adventure would cost.
00:32:51.000 | This kind of travel goal can be hard to budget, because some countries are relatively cheap and others are expensive.
00:32:58.000 | For example, it cost me only $25 to get to Luxembourg when I was already in Belgium. Done.
00:33:04.000 | The same is true of lots of small border countries. Once you're in Denmark, Sweden is easy.
00:33:09.000 | From Singapore, you can visit Malaysia in a day.
00:33:12.000 | But other countries, of course, are a lot more difficult to get to, and therefore expensive.
00:33:17.000 | If I hadn't been working in Liberia, it would cost me nearly $2,000 to fly there.
00:33:22.000 | To go back and forth across oceans usually costs at least $700 just for a ticket to one city.
00:33:29.000 | Considering the various factors, I finally worked out a rough estimate of about $500 per country.
00:33:36.000 | At 65 countries to go, I realized that my financial cost to visit 100 countries would be approximately $32,500.
00:33:46.000 | After thinking it over, I decided that $32,500 was a small price to pay compared to the experiences I would gain from visiting 100 countries.
00:33:57.000 | I'm not naive about the cost. I lived in the poorest countries in the world for four years, where people often make less than $1 a day.
00:34:05.000 | I also understand that there are poor people in America, although not in any way comparable to Liberia or Pakistan.
00:34:12.000 | But by Western standards, $32,500 is less than the average individual income of about $39,000 in the United States.
00:34:20.000 | Less than one year's income to visit 100 countries?
00:34:25.000 | To a person who values international travel, that seems almost too good to be true.
00:34:31.000 | I then started thinking about what else $32,500 can buy.
00:34:36.000 | In America, a high number of people think nothing of spending that much on a car.
00:34:40.000 | Not me, personally. The most I've ever spent on a car was $6,000, but a lot of people think nothing of going into debt for their expeditions and navigators and all the other large vehicles that inspire off-road adventures to Target.
00:34:52.000 | I live in Seattle now and don't own a car.
00:34:55.000 | Sometimes, the public transportation here isn't the greatest, but I don't think about it much when I'm in Bangkok, Johannesburg, Vienna, and all the other fun places I regularly visit.
00:35:04.000 | It comes down to a choice of values.
00:35:07.000 | In other words, what do I value?
00:35:10.000 | What about you?
00:35:12.000 | Lots of people obviously value their SUV.
00:35:15.000 | Hey, I don't blame them. It's a choice they've made.
00:35:18.000 | But for me, I feel much more comfortable valuing life experiences.
00:35:24.000 | I value meeting people all over the world.
00:35:27.000 | I value stamps in my passport and real-life adventures I would have missed if I would have stayed home.
00:35:33.000 | I have no car, no subprime mortgage, no debt, and nothing preventing me from seeing the world.
00:35:40.000 | I do have a plane ticket to India for March 13 where I'll spend about 10 days taking local transport through the country and over to Bangladesh.
00:35:47.000 | I have a return ticket to Bucharest, Romania, sometime later in the summer.
00:35:51.000 | I have half a million frequent flyer miles that I can use to help me get around the world and back.
00:35:56.000 | In short, I realized back on that train to the Czech Republic that I can have an SUV or I can have the world.
00:36:06.000 | For me, it was an easy choice.
00:36:10.000 | When you set big goals, they tend to get bigger.
00:36:14.000 | In September 2007, I had been living in Seattle for two months after returning from four years in Africa.
00:36:20.000 | It was the longest time I had spent in the U.S. since 2001, and I needed an adventure before I began a new graduate school program at the University of Washington.
00:36:29.000 | I bought a Circle Pacific ticket to Asia that allowed me to visit four places for the price of one.
00:36:34.000 | I chose Hong Kong, Vietnam, Burma, and Singapore.
00:36:38.000 | My first stop was Hong Kong, a beautiful city that I had been dreaming about visiting since I was a teenager.
00:36:44.000 | I walked around the city for six hours every day for three days in a row.
00:36:48.000 | I took the metro line as far as it would go in each direction, got off, and walked back to the city center.
00:36:54.000 | I absolutely loved it.
00:36:56.000 | Before I went back to the airport on my last day to head for Vietnam, I took the ferry over to Macau, another Chinese colony that is still nominally independent from Beijing.
00:37:05.000 | On the ferry, I sat thinking about my goal of visiting 100 countries.
00:37:10.000 | It's really going to happen, I thought.
00:37:13.000 | And then I realized the next part of the goal, which was seemingly logical but I had never considered before.
00:37:20.000 | Why not go to every country in the world?
00:37:23.000 | An hour later, 12 songs on my iPod had gone by, and I had filled two pages of journaling in my moleskin notebook with thoughts about this challenge.
00:37:31.000 | I'll be writing about the adventure on this site throughout the rest of 2008.
00:37:35.000 | You are invited to follow along the journey as I travel to 20-plus countries in pursuit of the goal this year.
00:37:40.000 | I'm using this incidentally. Of course, that was written in 2008. It's 2015. He completed that at least two years ago, something like that.
00:37:47.000 | He traveled to every country in the world by the time I think he was 35.
00:37:50.000 | Interesting, huh?
00:37:53.000 | Does every person who's buying a new SUV or about to spend $32,500 on any car think to themselves that I could either own this car or I could visit 100 countries?
00:38:07.000 | Many don't.
00:38:11.000 | Now, I would say also that many who would consider that would still choose to have the SUV.
00:38:18.000 | And that's fine. That's fine.
00:38:21.000 | Just because I would probably choose the 100 countries doesn't mean that you should. It's up to you.
00:38:27.000 | But like I said before, would you choose the SUV or would you choose the RV?
00:38:33.000 | Do you recognize the choices that are open to you?
00:38:38.000 | When people make different decisions about life, they do it because they value different things.
00:38:45.000 | Different people make different housing decisions.
00:38:49.000 | Those who take somewhat unique approaches to housing simply desire a different lifestyle than those who take mainstream approaches.
00:38:56.000 | The size of your house matters because there's a cost for every square foot.
00:39:00.000 | There's also a cost for every square foot you don't have.
00:39:04.000 | You've got to decide where in that scale you're most comfortable.
00:39:09.000 | The amount of stuff in our house matters.
00:39:12.000 | The more stuff we have, the more stuff we pay to keep.
00:39:15.000 | Some people would rather have more stuff and to keep it and some people would rather have less.
00:39:20.000 | The state that we live in matters.
00:39:22.000 | Some of us pay more to live in certain places.
00:39:25.000 | Some of us pay less.
00:39:27.000 | If you're comfortable with the exchange rate of what you're actually paying versus what you're getting for the place that you live, that's fine.
00:39:38.000 | The country we live in matters.
00:39:40.000 | Some of us choose to live in countries that have certain attributes and certain costs and some of us choose to live in other places.
00:39:48.000 | Even all of the very personal things that are associated with our lives, the way that we eat, the way that we move, some of us eat ice cream and not beef jerky.
00:40:01.000 | Some of us move more than others because we value the benefits of more movement versus the benefits of a sedentary lifestyle.
00:40:14.000 | It's as simple as that.
00:40:16.000 | Again, even those personal decisions.
00:40:19.000 | Some people choose to marry.
00:40:21.000 | Some people choose not to marry.
00:40:23.000 | Even the decisions that we make on children, many people, including many listening to the show, choose not to have children.
00:40:29.000 | I value personally, I'm just saying me, I value far more the benefits of having kids versus the benefits of being child free.
00:40:41.000 | But you've got to decide for yourself.
00:40:44.000 | Even the way that we work and the type of work that we do.
00:40:47.000 | Entrepreneurship is tough.
00:40:49.000 | It is tough.
00:40:51.000 | It's tough for me.
00:40:56.000 | At least so far I value the benefits of the tough road of entrepreneurship versus the benefits of the easier road of employment.
00:41:05.000 | That may not be right for you.
00:41:08.000 | Even the themes that we talk about constantly, we talk about retirement.
00:41:12.000 | I don't value the idea of retirement.
00:41:15.000 | Some people do.
00:41:18.000 | Retirement has costs.
00:41:20.000 | It's not all fun and roses.
00:41:23.000 | Even just the costs of terminating a career, if you're working in a career that you're passionate about or if you're working in a career that you think matters, if you're doing something that is important to you and you retire from that, you're no longer going to be able to leave the mark on the world that you wish to make, that you wish to leave.
00:41:41.000 | That to me is the biggest cost.
00:41:45.000 | The impact – let's say that I pursue a traditional approach of retirement and I work at something from now till 65 so that I can retire.
00:41:54.000 | One of the major costs of retiring is the fact that I'm going to miss out on 30 years of impact.
00:41:58.000 | Just think what I could accomplish in 30 years.
00:42:01.000 | Think what you could accomplish in 30 years.
00:42:04.000 | 30 years is a massive amount of time.
00:42:07.000 | You can go from zero knowledge to mastery and massive impact on any subject that you care about in 30 years.
00:42:19.000 | If I were to retire, for me, if I were to retire and spend 30 years on pleasure versus 30 years of impact, I'll take the 30 years of impact.
00:42:33.000 | In my worldview, that's what matters.
00:42:36.000 | Now, your worldview may be different.
00:42:39.000 | You've got to decide for yourself.
00:42:41.000 | But recognize that there is a cost to every decision that we make.
00:42:48.000 | I was briefly looking through the archives of my show.
00:42:55.000 | I've been working on a new website this week and I was looking through the archives and just thinking about this show topic.
00:43:00.000 | I decided I'm going to go through and I want to demonstrate to you, those of you who've listened to all of the past episodes of the show will be able to appreciate this most more than anyone else.
00:43:10.000 | But I want to demonstrate to you how so many of the interviews that I have brought on the show are simply interviews about one person choosing to make a different choice because they value something different than the mainstream population.
00:43:23.000 | My primary goal when I bring you interviews is my primary goal is I'm trying to expose you to a topic or an idea that might challenge you.
00:43:32.000 | Or I'm trying to expose you to somebody who can teach you something that I feel I'm not as capable as they are of teaching you.
00:43:42.000 | That's the reason for this very unusual – this unusual list of people that I've put together with regard in my interviews.
00:43:57.000 | So think about this.
00:43:59.000 | It started with one of the earliest interviews, episode six, was Paula Pant from affordanything.com.
00:44:05.000 | Paula chose to build an online business and invest in real estate so that she could live a travel lifestyle.
00:44:12.000 | That was important to her.
00:44:13.000 | So she chose to do independent writing to fund her life instead of the benefits of a steady mainstream job.
00:44:22.000 | Brandon, the mad scientist, chose to – chooses to live – or chose to live on a tiny percentage of his income so that he could get out of the rat race and travel with his wife.
00:44:33.000 | He chose to spend his money on his future of what he wanted to do.
00:44:40.000 | That's a choice.
00:44:41.000 | He could have certainly enjoyed a more luxurious lifestyle if he'd spent more money.
00:44:45.000 | He didn't value that.
00:44:46.000 | Jim Collins chose to rent a house instead of own a house so that he could free up his cash to have more money and free up his life and his lifestyle.
00:44:55.000 | He didn't value the thrill of ownership as much as he valued the thrill of flexibility and the lack of responsibility.
00:45:04.000 | To me, that one makes a lot of sense.
00:45:07.000 | I often think about going back and simply renting a house instead of owning one, simply to give away all of the cost of taking care of a house, fixing all the stuff.
00:45:17.000 | And I might even be willing to pay more money to do that because of the lifestyle considerations.
00:45:23.000 | David Gross chose to stop paying taxes because he valued having a clear conscience and not funding the war efforts of the United States government more than he chose the social criticism of being a tax protester and the potential legal ramifications of his decision.
00:45:44.000 | Jake Desilis chose to work like crazy building a business, which was far more work than he would have had to put in if he had simply worked for someone, so that he could sell and exit that business with a healthy lump sum and escape from the need to work for money at a much earlier age than his contemporaries.
00:46:10.000 | He basically compressed his working life.
00:46:15.000 | Jacob Lundfisker from early retirement extreme chose to stop being a consumer and chose to start being a renaissance man and doing things himself so that he didn't have to spend the time of his life, which was for him the most valuable thing that he owned, working for someone else, that he could choose to spend it in a way that he wanted to do it.
00:46:37.000 | And so for him living on his famous $7,000 per year for a single person living in California, it was not a hardship because he valued having time more than physical luxury.
00:46:53.000 | Trevor Van Heemert chose to start a business doing something he cared about, chose to work it cheaply so that he could avoid debt, chose to ride bicycles for his business so that he didn't have to go out and bring on a fleet of fossil fuel burning vehicles.
00:47:08.000 | Even today he chooses to live in an RV so that he can avoid doing work he doesn't want to do and can do work that he wants to do and save his money.
00:47:16.000 | Ken Olgunis chose to live in a van during college because he valued being debt-free more than he valued the luxury of living in a traditional four-walled apartment.
00:47:27.000 | Patrick Schulte from Bonfussil.com, he chose to sell his car early in his career, take the $5,000 and invest it so that he could create a trading portfolio, which he ultimately traded his way to wealth in the Chicago's commodities market.
00:47:43.000 | And now he chose to walk away from that very lucrative career so that he can take his time traveling full-time slowly throughout the world for the last decade plus with his family.
00:47:53.000 | Craig Mathias chose to avoid investing in retirement accounts and in publicly traded securities so that he could invest in his own business.
00:48:06.000 | John Pagliano chose to walk away from a high-paying sales career because he wanted to start his own business doing work that he cared about.
00:48:14.000 | David Stein chose to retire early when he cashed out of his business because he valued his time more than he valued potential future income.
00:48:24.000 | Ryan Finley chooses to work a very unique business because he – of making his living on Craigslist because he values that type of approach and the benefits of entrepreneurship and a family-integrated life more than going and getting a job.
00:48:40.000 | Eric Hemingway and his wife chose to take a year – it was three years off and travel the world with their kids so they could expose their kids to an exciting lifestyle at an early age and to the world at an early age rather than to save a bunch of money to send them to college rather than getting richer themselves.
00:48:58.000 | It goes on and on and on.
00:49:00.000 | I could go through every one of these.
00:49:02.000 | Rob Roy chooses to live in a house that he built himself that costs him almost nothing to live in and is more comfortable than a traditional stick-built house because he doesn't care so much about society's impressions of him living in a perfect subdivision.
00:49:16.000 | Rather, he prefers to be able to live a life doing things he wants to do on almost no money.
00:49:22.000 | James Wesley Rawls, the survivalist.
00:49:26.000 | James Wesley Rawls chooses to live on a ranch with his family in the middle of nowhere because it's a lifestyle that he wants and he values the feeling of being autonomous and more self-sufficient more than he values the benefits of living in a big city and being exposed to the nightlife.
00:49:44.000 | John Schaub rented a house for his family for years while building his real estate portfolio because he valued being wealthy more than he valued the positive impression that people might have of him from being a homeowner.
00:49:59.000 | Tammy Strobel and her husband valued living in a tiny house because it allowed them to pursue businesses that they loved and they would rather have a smaller living space and more control over their time.
00:50:12.000 | Well, then later they changed and they moved out of that house because they reached a point where they no longer valued living in that house more than they valued the other costs.
00:50:23.000 | It's the same for all of us.
00:50:27.000 | I bring all these people on and there are dozens more. I just don't want this to drag.
00:50:31.000 | I bring all these people on to try to demonstrate unique ways of thinking so that you can consider what you want to do.
00:50:40.000 | It's your choice what you do.
00:50:43.000 | It's also your choice to change your mind when things go change for you.
00:50:48.000 | I live a very different lifestyle than many of the people that I bring on the show.
00:50:52.000 | I don't live in the cheapest city that I could live in.
00:50:55.000 | I can do my work from anywhere in the world.
00:50:57.000 | I could save at least $1,000 a month just by moving to a different city.
00:51:01.000 | I choose to spend $1,000 extra per month because I value the community that I'm a part of here where I live and I'm making that choice consciously.
00:51:12.000 | I don't live in the cheapest house that I could live in, but I choose to live in the house that I live in because I value it more than the money I could save and the benefits of it more than the money I could save by moving somewhere else.
00:51:25.000 | I don't drive the cheapest car that I could because I value the benefits of the car that I do drive.
00:51:31.000 | I don't save all the money that I could.
00:51:33.000 | I have two kids.
00:51:34.000 | I have two dogs.
00:51:36.000 | Those things are not cheap, but I would rather be broke and poor and have kids and dogs than be rich and kidless and dogless.
00:51:45.000 | That's the decision that I've made.
00:51:47.000 | Your decision may be different.
00:51:49.000 | I like to spend currently and my life now on adventures and experiences.
00:51:56.000 | I would rather do that sometimes than save money for the future because I'll never repeat this year of my life.
00:52:03.000 | But I also value being able to have more adventures and more experiences in the future.
00:52:08.000 | I don't even maximize all the revenue that I could maximize from radical personal finance.
00:52:12.000 | The show is significantly underperforming as far as revenue, but I have my reasons for why I'm pursuing the path that I'm pursuing.
00:52:20.000 | I'm testing and trying and working on those reasons because I value certain things more than I value the monthly revenue.
00:52:28.000 | I make my own choices for my own reasons, things that align with my values and my worldview, the reason, my calling, the reason that I'm here on this earth.
00:52:40.000 | It shouldn't matter to you what I do with my life, and it shouldn't matter to me what you do with your life beyond just a normal care and concern for the well-being and good of another person.
00:52:53.000 | My goal is just to try to expose you to ideas that I believe matter for you and give you things to consider.
00:53:00.000 | My request for you is stay open-minded as far as the costs in your life.
00:53:07.000 | Understand this concept of opportunity cost and recognize that this concept governs your choices.
00:53:15.000 | Make your choices consciously.
00:53:18.000 | Seek out alternative ideas just to see if you want to do them.
00:53:22.000 | Seek out alternative ways of living just to see if you want to live that way, and then be free to make the decision that is best for you.
00:53:31.000 | That's it. That's what I got for you today. I hope this is useful to you.
00:53:38.000 | I really believe that just with this one concept, you could probably make better decisions, and ultimately, you're the master of your life.
00:53:47.000 | You've got to sit down and figure out what's important to me.
00:53:50.000 | It's okay for that to look different than someone else.
00:53:53.000 | If you want to help somebody else, help them with this concept. Help them to understand their choices in totality, all of the different things that they could do.
00:54:04.000 | Help them understand that. I think they'll thank you for it.
00:54:08.000 | If you can help somebody else understand these things, I think you can help them make better decisions.
00:54:13.000 | When you have a clear vision of what you're trying to accomplish, the path is relatively straightforward for most people.
00:54:21.000 | Think of the example of navigation. If I were going to ask you, "How do I get from place A to place B?"
00:54:27.000 | If you know where place A is and place B, you know the steps that you need to go through, even if you don't have a map.
00:54:32.000 | The first step is go get a map.
00:54:34.000 | But if you don't know place A and you don't know place B, it's a lot harder to figure out the plan.
00:54:38.000 | Same thing with life planning and financial planning.
00:54:41.000 | A financial planner can't do anything if you don't know the goal.
00:54:45.000 | If I don't have numbers to plug into a spreadsheet or numbers to plug into a calculator or numbers to plug into a piece of financial planning software, then I can't actually create a map, a path.
00:54:56.000 | Numbers, however, are not actually the goal. The lifestyle is the goal or the achievement is the goal.
00:55:03.000 | And so we first have to get clear on what the goal is.
00:55:06.000 | Then we plug the numbers in and then we know how to get from here to there.
00:55:13.000 | We know how to make measurable progress in reasonable time.
00:55:17.000 | So think about that.
00:55:19.000 | Thank you all so much for listening.
00:55:21.000 | Thank you to each and every one of you who has in recent days been signing up for the Patreon campaign.
00:55:26.000 | I really just value each and every one of you. We're doing well.
00:55:29.000 | And I would invite you, if you have not yet subscribed to the show on Patreon, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.
00:55:36.000 | I would invite you to support the show there.
00:55:39.000 | You can do it with as little as a dollar a month and trust me, that matters.
00:55:42.000 | I would like to – in a couple of days I'm making some transitions of some of the existing irregulars over to that.
00:55:49.000 | In a few days, though, I'd like to do a real push that's based upon the number of listeners, not just the financial dollars of listeners.
00:55:54.000 | But that will be coming soon.
00:55:56.000 | So RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.
00:55:58.000 | Thanks, y'all.
00:55:59.000 | Thank you for listening to today's show.
00:56:01.000 | If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com.
00:56:08.000 | You can also connect with the show on Twitter @RadicalPF and at Facebook.com/RadicalPersonalFinance.
00:56:15.000 | This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment.
00:56:22.000 | But your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.
00:56:30.000 | Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.
00:56:51.000 | I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes.
00:56:58.000 | If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn together.
00:57:06.000 | Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.
00:57:09.000 | The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.
00:57:14.000 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.
00:57:26.000 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.
00:57:28.000 | We've locked in low prices to help you save big store-wide.
00:57:32.000 | Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store.
00:57:36.000 | Ralphs, fresh for everyone.