RPF0463-Seasons_of_Life
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00:00:30.000 | All the world's a stage, and all the men and women, merely players.
00:00:36.000 | They have their exits and entrances,
00:00:39.000 | and one man in his time plays many parts,
00:00:42.000 | his acts being seven ages.
00:00:46.000 | At first, the infant mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
00:00:51.000 | Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
00:00:54.000 | and shining morning face creeping like snail
00:00:57.000 | unwillingly to school.
00:00:59.000 | And then, the lover, sighing like furnace
00:01:02.000 | with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow.
00:01:06.000 | Then, a soldier, full of strange oaths
00:01:09.000 | and bearded like the pard,
00:01:11.000 | jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
00:01:14.000 | seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth.
00:01:17.000 | And then, the justice in fair round belly
00:01:21.000 | with good cape unlined,
00:01:23.000 | with eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
00:01:28.000 | full of wise saws and modern instances.
00:01:31.000 | And so, he plays his part.
00:01:34.000 | The sixth age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon
00:01:39.000 | with spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
00:01:42.000 | his youthful hose well saved, a world too wide
00:01:46.000 | for his shrunk shank and his big manly voice
00:01:50.000 | turning again towards childish treble,
00:01:54.000 | pipes and whistles in his sound.
00:01:58.000 | Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history
00:02:02.000 | is second childishness and mere oblivion.
00:02:07.000 | Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
00:02:15.000 | [Music]
00:02:31.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,
00:02:33.000 | the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,
00:02:36.000 | today's focus, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now
00:02:41.000 | while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.
00:02:43.000 | My name is Joshua and I am your host.
00:02:45.000 | Welcome to the show.
00:02:47.000 | Today, we talk about the seasons of life.
00:02:50.000 | The seasons of life and how you can think about that with regard to your money.
00:02:56.000 | [Music]
00:03:03.000 | On today's show, I want to discuss a little bit of philosophy with you
00:03:07.000 | and I need to begin with a caveat.
00:03:09.000 | Today's show is not intended to give specific advice.
00:03:14.000 | Rather, it's intended to be more philosophical,
00:03:16.000 | to give you just something to think about as you consider your own situation.
00:03:20.000 | Many times, it's valuable to hear specific advice.
00:03:24.000 | It's valuable to think about and listen to people saying,
00:03:27.000 | "Here's what you should do in your situation."
00:03:30.000 | That does have a place and that is useful,
00:03:32.000 | but today's show is not dedicated to that.
00:03:35.000 | Today's show is just designed to get you to think
00:03:38.000 | about some of the things that you may have grasped and accepted
00:03:43.000 | without adequate consideration.
00:03:47.000 | I'm convinced more and more that we need to embrace a sense of seasonality
00:03:53.000 | in our modern world,
00:03:55.000 | and yet, it's never been so hard to embrace seasonality as it is now.
00:04:01.000 | I see this lack of seasonality reflected in almost every aspect of my life.
00:04:07.000 | First, I live in Florida,
00:04:08.000 | and in Florida, we don't really have four seasons the way that many of you do.
00:04:11.000 | We have a hot season and a not hot season.
00:04:15.000 | It's basically sunny most of the time,
00:04:17.000 | and I don't really know when the first day of spring is
00:04:20.000 | and when the first day of fall is.
00:04:21.000 | If my wife didn't remind me about those dates, I wouldn't have a clue.
00:04:24.000 | I don't pay much attention to even the weather.
00:04:27.000 | Last week here in South Florida, it was rainy, rainy,
00:04:29.000 | and it had been raining for about three days.
00:04:31.000 | Finally, I thought to myself, "Man, it's been raining a long time,
00:04:34.000 | and I wonder how long it's going to rain."
00:04:36.000 | I pulled out my phone and flipped to the little weather app
00:04:38.000 | and was shocked to see that it was supposed to be raining for the next week,
00:04:43.000 | but it had been three days into it before I finally paid attention.
00:04:48.000 | I'm blessed in that I don't need to leave my house to do my work,
00:04:52.000 | and so as such, the outside weather doesn't really impact me all that much.
00:04:56.000 | Some days, I keep the shades drawn
00:04:58.000 | and hardly even notice the difference between night and day.
00:05:00.000 | My wife swears that I live in a cave.
00:05:03.000 | It's not true, but at times I confess that it has been true.
00:05:07.000 | I don't pay much attention to the seasons,
00:05:10.000 | and many of you are the same.
00:05:12.000 | I've noticed that with our modern technology,
00:05:17.000 | we're not forced to pay attention to the seasons.
00:05:21.000 | Very few of us make our living in a way that allows us to be out in the elements.
00:05:25.000 | Most of us are protected.
00:05:27.000 | Many of you do the same thing that I do.
00:05:29.000 | You go on with your plans regardless of the weather or regardless of the season.
00:05:35.000 | If it's dark and it's a winter season, you can flip on an electric light
00:05:38.000 | and you work early in the morning or late at night.
00:05:42.000 | In days gone by, though, that wasn't the case.
00:05:44.000 | There was more of an understanding of the seasons,
00:05:49.000 | and the work was adjusted to meet those seasons.
00:05:53.000 | There are more parallels to this seasonality, though,
00:05:56.000 | and the loss of seasonality than just the weather or the time of day.
00:06:01.000 | This affects us with regard to our work.
00:06:06.000 | My dad years ago did a lot of travel for business,
00:06:09.000 | and he often enjoyed his business travel because when getting on an airplane,
00:06:13.000 | he was disconnected.
00:06:15.000 | In those days with international travel, when you were out of the office,
00:06:20.000 | you were out of the office.
00:06:21.000 | The people back at the home base needed to handle the work.
00:06:25.000 | If there were any emergencies, they would be handled locally,
00:06:27.000 | and the person who was out traveling just simply had to worry about their trip.
00:06:32.000 | I distinctly remember back in the early '90s when my dad started to get his first--
00:06:39.000 | he got his first laptop and started to carry it with him on business trips,
00:06:42.000 | and for the first time in his life, he would be dialing into the Internet
00:06:45.000 | and downloading his email on a trip.
00:06:48.000 | It was still hard in those days, so you had a little bit of mercy
00:06:51.000 | from the people who wanted to get ahold of you.
00:06:54.000 | But today, even that is gone.
00:06:56.000 | Most of us have a smartphone on our hip that no matter where we go in the world,
00:07:00.000 | it'll be connected, and it'll be connected easily and completely,
00:07:04.000 | and we can be gotten ahold of.
00:07:07.000 | Most of us have access to email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
00:07:13.000 | and without good safeguards constructed to put a barrier between us and our work,
00:07:19.000 | our work flows into every part of our life.
00:07:23.000 | We're constantly connected.
00:07:25.000 | We never have a sense of disconnectedness.
00:07:28.000 | You say, "Oh, yeah, Joshua, I know all that. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:07:31.000 | I've heard all that stuff before. What does this have to do with my money?"
00:07:35.000 | It has a lot to do with your money because with our money,
00:07:39.000 | we don't stop and think about the different times that it's useful
00:07:43.000 | and the different times that it's more useful to earn
00:07:47.000 | and the different times that it's more useful to spend.
00:07:51.000 | Most of us have only one financial goal, and that goal is more,
00:07:57.000 | just a little bit more.
00:08:01.000 | The phrase "just a little bit more" is usually attributed to John D. Rockefeller,
00:08:05.000 | the man behind Standard Oil.
00:08:07.000 | At one point, he was the richest man in the world,
00:08:09.000 | and he was the first ever American billionaire,
00:08:12.000 | back when a billion dollars was actually quite a bit of money.
00:08:17.000 | When asked one day by a reporter how much money is enough,
00:08:21.000 | allegedly his response was, "Just a little bit more."
00:08:26.000 | Now, I don't know if that account is apocryphal or not, but it's instructive.
00:08:31.000 | Just a little bit more.
00:08:34.000 | Most of us bring that attitude to our own lives, to our own money,
00:08:39.000 | and we think, "Just a little bit more."
00:08:45.000 | But just a little bit more is not a useful financial goal.
00:08:51.000 | The reason I began with that caveat of saying I'm speaking philosophically
00:08:55.000 | is because it's very possible that if you do everything well in your life,
00:09:02.000 | you'll enjoy financial abundance at every stage of your life,
00:09:06.000 | and your wealth will continually grow,
00:09:09.000 | and thus you'll experience the effect of just a little bit more.
00:09:15.000 | That's possible.
00:09:16.000 | And you can have just a little bit more at every stage of your life
00:09:20.000 | without it negatively cutting into some of your other important considerations.
00:09:26.000 | But if your goal is just a little bit more,
00:09:29.000 | if that's not simply a useful effect,
00:09:32.000 | if it's an actual goal, that goal is extremely short-sighted.
00:09:39.000 | And in our modern world, most of us have that short-sighted goal.
00:09:46.000 | One of the biggest reasons we have this goal of more, more, more, more, more
00:09:50.000 | is because we're talking about digits on a computer screen, a simple number.
00:09:58.000 | And numbers go from zero to infinity.
00:10:01.000 | Thus, there is no end to how high those numbers can grow.
00:10:06.000 | So, because of our normal desire to grow
00:10:12.000 | and to take dominion over the things that are around us,
00:10:15.000 | we desire to add more, more, more.
00:10:19.000 | And we never see how much we have.
00:10:21.000 | And because our consumption and our risks usually rise,
00:10:25.000 | it's very hard for us to get a sense of just how much we have.
00:10:29.000 | I frequently receive emails from listeners and receive calls on our call-in shows,
00:10:34.000 | people saying, "Joshua, I have a half a million dollars.
00:10:37.000 | I have a million dollars. I have two million dollars.
00:10:39.000 | I don't know if I can afford to retire."
00:10:43.000 | If you talk to many financial advisors,
00:10:45.000 | they'll tell you that one of the biggest questions that they receive is,
00:10:48.000 | "How much do I need to retire?"
00:10:52.000 | And the numbers and sums that are discussed are absolutely staggering.
00:10:58.000 | A million dollars is a huge amount of money.
00:11:03.000 | You've heard me, if you're a long-time listener of the show,
00:11:06.000 | you've heard me take that number and break it down without investment returns
00:11:11.000 | just to give somebody a sense of how many years they can just simply live on that money.
00:11:17.000 | And yet, many times after I've done that, people still don't think they have enough.
00:11:24.000 | I was on the phone with a consulting client just last week,
00:11:26.000 | and this exact conversation came up.
00:11:28.000 | This particular client said, "I have all this money."
00:11:32.000 | In my words, lots of money. They didn't think it was a lot of money.
00:11:35.000 | "Can I afford to go and make this change I want to make in my life?"
00:11:40.000 | I looked at it, and I instantly said, "Of course you can do that. You have tons of money."
00:11:44.000 | But this client is worrying about torpedoing their career.
00:11:47.000 | They're worrying about, "What if I don't have enough, and what if I can never make it back?"
00:11:52.000 | Coming from a place of fear.
00:11:55.000 | There are many causes for this, but one cause is that you can't see the money.
00:12:00.000 | You don't ever see the money.
00:12:02.000 | None of you have a million dollars stacked up in $20 bills,
00:12:07.000 | piling up in your local bank vault.
00:12:10.000 | It's all just digits on a screen, and thus, that lacks any connection to our actual life.
00:12:17.000 | But other forms of wealth, if we stored our wealth in other forms,
00:12:22.000 | would actually demonstrate to you how much you have.
00:12:26.000 | You might actually be more willing to see the amount that's enough
00:12:34.000 | if you could view your money in other terms.
00:12:38.000 | Think about this.
00:12:39.000 | Pretend that you lived a long time ago, and you have a modest farmhouse
00:12:46.000 | in which you and your family live.
00:12:49.000 | Well, as a part of that modest farmhouse, you need to provide for your family's needs.
00:12:56.000 | Of course, you need to keep from freezing to death.
00:12:58.000 | And so, one of the standard chores on your farmhouse is to go and to chop wood,
00:13:04.000 | harvest trees from the woodlot behind your house,
00:13:07.000 | cut them into rounds, and then split them up and lay them out to dry.
00:13:11.000 | And this is extremely important.
00:13:14.000 | Those of you who heat your houses with wood heat know how important this is.
00:13:19.000 | You have to do this in advance.
00:13:21.000 | If the blizzard is coming or the blizzard is upon you,
00:13:25.000 | you can't go out in the middle of the blizzard and get wood if your woodpile is empty.
00:13:31.000 | It doesn't work that way.
00:13:34.000 | It's actually even really hard if you're depending on wood for heat
00:13:38.000 | to go out in the fall right before the winter and cut your wood for that winter.
00:13:43.000 | That might keep you alive, but that's not the best wood.
00:13:48.000 | In order to keep yourself alive, the best time to go out and get the wood is during the summer
00:13:53.000 | when it's warm and you can work easily.
00:13:56.000 | And you go out and you fell your trees and you limb them and then you cut them up
00:14:00.000 | and you haul the wood back and you split it.
00:14:02.000 | And then the best burning wood is wood that's been seasoned, sat outside, dry, protected for a year.
00:14:10.000 | Burns the hottest and the cleanest in your stove or in your fireplace.
00:14:13.000 | That's the best wood for you to use for your fire.
00:14:16.000 | So you need to have the forethought and the work ethic to go out and get that wood.
00:14:23.000 | But think about the size of the woodpile that is useful to you.
00:14:34.000 | If your house during the course of a winter, if you usually burn through--
00:14:38.000 | I am unfamiliar with how many cords of wood they used to burn in my old examples.
00:14:43.000 | Let's just make up a number that makes for easy math, 10.
00:14:46.000 | Let's say that you burn through 10 cords of wood in a summer.
00:14:49.000 | That's far too much. Let's go with five.
00:14:51.000 | Five cords of wood in a summer.
00:14:52.000 | And you go-- sorry, winter.
00:14:54.000 | And you go out and you're working and working and working, stacking up cords of wood.
00:14:57.000 | You got five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40.
00:15:02.000 | Imagine 40 cords of wood out in your various woodsheds.
00:15:07.000 | And you keep looking out there and saying, "We just need a little bit more wood.
00:15:09.000 | We need a little bit more wood, a little bit more wood, a little bit more wood."
00:15:12.000 | You're putting up woodsheds and putting piles and piles of wood into those woodsheds.
00:15:19.000 | Isn't there a point at which you look out and say, "We've got enough firewood"?
00:15:26.000 | Obviously, there is.
00:15:30.000 | But when it comes to firewood, you can picture that in your mind.
00:15:35.000 | You can recognize that there's a good amount of planning to have two or three or maybe four or five seasons of wood stacked up.
00:15:44.000 | After all, you might fall and hurt your back this summer and not be able to pull in wood for this season.
00:15:50.000 | In that case, you better have a few cords of wood stashed out there to get you through a few winters.
00:15:55.000 | That's good, proper, prudent planning.
00:15:59.000 | But there's a point in time at which you got enough wood stacked up.
00:16:05.000 | We could give the same example with food.
00:16:08.000 | Picture your basement filled with food, rows and rows of carefully canned foods that you've prepared, put by for winter.
00:16:17.000 | Rows and rows and rows of smoked meats in your smokehouse, and your basement is filled with preserved food.
00:16:26.000 | Do you need to put up two, three, four, five barns?
00:16:30.000 | Or is there a point in time at which you look and say, "I've got enough food and I've got enough wood"?
00:16:39.000 | Pretend it's a beautiful summer day, and you come by my farmstead on this gorgeous summer day, and you say,
00:16:45.000 | "Joshua, let's go up to the lake, up in the mountains and go fishing. Let's take our families and enjoy a few days up at the lake."
00:16:52.000 | Or, "Let's go down to the swimming hole and go swimming and enjoy this beautiful afternoon."
00:16:57.000 | I'm out in my backyard, sweating, covered in wood chips, splitting wood feverishly, and you look across my backyard,
00:17:07.000 | and you see dozens of little woodsheds and hundreds of cords of wood.
00:17:15.000 | I have a feeling you might think and be correct in your assessment that I'm a bit crazy.
00:17:25.000 | And yet, if you come by my house and I pull out my account books and show you that I've got a million dollars,
00:17:33.000 | two million dollars, three million dollars, four million dollars, and I'm feverishly laboring at my work,
00:17:44.000 | ignoring the fact that my children want me to come out in the backyard and play catch with them,
00:17:48.000 | or ignoring the fact that it's a beautiful day and the fish are biting up in the mountain lake,
00:17:52.000 | and I'm just saying, "I've got to get a little bit more. I've got to get a little bit more just so I can retire,"
00:18:01.000 | you'd probably think I was normal.
00:18:05.000 | Because that's what we're supposed to do, at least if you listen to much of the finance industry.
00:18:16.000 | How silly is this concept?
00:18:19.000 | Consider the whole concept of retirement, but for the sake of my metaphor, keep my assets very simple.
00:18:26.000 | Piles of wood and storehouses of food.
00:18:31.000 | My farmstead's paid for. I just need wood and food.
00:18:35.000 | Water's free. Just need wood and food.
00:18:38.000 | And I'm 30 years old, and I'm feverishly, feverishly cutting wood, feverishly, feverishly setting aside stores of food.
00:18:47.000 | You say, "Joshua, why are you putting aside all of this wood and all of this food?"
00:18:51.000 | My goal, I tell you, is that by the time I'm 34 years old, to be in a position where I never have to cut wood again in my life.
00:19:02.000 | I can't stand this axe. I can't stand cutting wood, and I don't ever want to cut wood again in my life.
00:19:09.000 | I'm going to dedicate the next four years of my life to feverishly stacking up wood so that I can throw this axe in the lake and go fishing every day.
00:19:21.000 | You come by my house and you see rows and rows of food lined up.
00:19:24.000 | And you say, "Joshua, you've got enough food here for the last year for 10 or 20 years, and you're only 30 years old, or you're only 32 years old, or you're only 40 years old, or you're only 50 years old."
00:19:32.000 | And I tell you, "No, in the next five years, all I'm going to do is can, can, can.
00:19:37.000 | I'm going to hunt, hunt, hunt, smoke, smoke, smoke, can, can, can, do everything I can to get enough food set by so that four years from now, I'll never have to save for the winter again.
00:19:48.000 | I will have enough food in my basement to get me going for the rest of my life."
00:19:58.000 | Now, you're a thoughtful person.
00:20:02.000 | You might look at me and say, "But Joshua, the sun is shining.
00:20:08.000 | Your children would love going up to the lake.
00:20:12.000 | It's a beautiful time to do it.
00:20:15.000 | Why don't you work for a few more hours and then let's go up to the lake?"
00:20:21.000 | I think I've used this metaphor enough, but I hope it sinks in for you.
00:20:27.000 | The point is not to say that it's not good to set aside food and wood and money.
00:20:33.000 | It's prudent.
00:20:35.000 | And if you come by my house and you say, "Joshua, let's go up to the lake," but then you look around back and you recognize that there's no wood on my wood pile, and you open up my cupboard in my basement and you recognize that there's no wood in my basement,
00:20:49.000 | I hope that you'd say, "Joshua, you ain't going to make it through winter.
00:20:54.000 | It's not time to go fishing.
00:20:56.000 | It's time to go out and start chopping wood and plant the garden."
00:20:59.000 | There's a time to work.
00:21:01.000 | There's a time to save.
00:21:03.000 | But there are also times to embrace the seasonality of life.
00:21:09.000 | And I am more convinced than I've ever been in my life that it is pointless and foolish to spend all of your time laboring for more, more, more, more, more, just so that someday in the long future you won't have to do it anymore.
00:21:29.000 | There's a more reasonable pace to life.
00:21:34.000 | Now be careful that you don't hear me saying something I'm not saying here.
00:21:38.000 | I don't want to draw a direct distinction between work and play in the sense that work is something to be avoided and play is something to be praised.
00:21:47.000 | Both have their place.
00:21:52.000 | And I don't want you to go away from this show thinking that somehow we should run from work or that working hard for seasons is not valuable.
00:22:03.000 | It is.
00:22:05.000 | But just like the poem I opened up with, the famous "Seven Ages of Man" poem from Shakespeare, it's valuable to recognize that life goes through seasons.
00:22:20.000 | And there are times in life at which it will be more valuable for you to stack up money.
00:22:25.000 | And I'm convinced there are times at which it will be more valuable for you to use your stacks of money.
00:22:32.000 | For the third time, it's possible to go through life and always stack up money, but this is an effect.
00:22:38.000 | This is an effect of modest frugal living.
00:22:41.000 | This is an effect of wise and diligent investment.
00:22:44.000 | This is an effect of industrious hard work.
00:22:47.000 | And you can set the stage so that you go through your entire lifetime with your stacks of money always growing no matter how hard you work to give them away, no matter how hard you work to reinvest them.
00:23:00.000 | But if you're not in that situation, perhaps because you went to the lake early in your life and you didn't cut wood, perhaps because you didn't build the wood lot that would allow you to sell part of the wood, that would allow you to hire people to come and cut their own wood and they'd cut yours for you.
00:23:23.000 | If you're in that place where you feel like I've just got to make more, make more, make more, I want you to think seriously about the seasons of life.
00:23:33.000 | And with your children, I want you to think seriously about the seasons of life that your children go through.
00:23:39.000 | Shakespeare, of course, laid out seven ages of man, the helpless infant, the whining schoolboy, the emotional lover, the devoted soldier, the wise judge, the clueless old man, and the corpse.
00:23:51.000 | I'm going to keep it simpler.
00:23:54.000 | I'm going to talk about childhood, young adulthood, young married life, young families, older children, and empty nasters.
00:24:01.000 | And I want you to recognize that money is more and less valuable at different times.
00:24:07.000 | I have young children, and as I consider what's important for them at this stage of their life in childhood, I have a hard time with the idea that money is particularly useful.
00:24:22.000 | Childhood is well used as a time of exploration.
00:24:27.000 | When possible, there should be play in childhood, time to learn and to explore without the pressure of money.
00:24:37.000 | None of us would seek to send our children out, and here I mean children.
00:24:42.000 | None of us would seek to send our children out into a factory to have them earn a little bit more money so that they can lay by what they need.
00:24:51.000 | We wouldn't tell our four-year-old, "Son, daughter, this is the time for you to be working.
00:24:58.000 | Just think, if you work from the time that you're four here as hard as you can, and you get your job and you save your money and you invest diligently, by the age of 15, you can be financially independent."
00:25:08.000 | None of us would say that.
00:25:11.000 | All of us would recognize that childhood is a time of learning and exploration, and there should be liberty and freedom, freedom to explore.
00:25:21.000 | That does not mean that the money is not useful or that it shouldn't be acquired, earned, invested, and the skills learned.
00:25:35.000 | I'm diligently seeking to teach my children the principles of money.
00:25:39.000 | But when children are young, the time is the most valuable asset they have, and the money is not such a big difference maker in their lives.
00:25:51.000 | On the contrast, young adulthood is a very valuable time when it comes to money.
00:25:59.000 | You'll notice I skipped adolescence. I do that intentionally. I'm opposed to the concept of adolescence.
00:26:04.000 | I think it's a scam. We can talk about that later. You can listen to my parenting podcast if you're interested in more on that.
00:26:10.000 | But for young adults, there is a time at which work is valuable.
00:26:18.000 | If there's a time at which I would like to see people working harder than ever else in their life, it's during young adulthood.
00:26:27.000 | Especially if the young adult is single.
00:26:31.000 | My next phase is young married life, so let's stick with young single adulthood.
00:26:35.000 | The sweet spot for pouring on the work and cutting that wood and canning that food to belabor my metaphor is young adulthood.
00:26:48.000 | Young adulthood is a time of preparation, and I want to extend my farmstead metaphor.
00:26:54.000 | Picture a young adult going out, and there's a tract of virgin forest.
00:27:01.000 | The best time for that person to go out and take their axe and clear the trees and build their house is as a young adult.
00:27:09.000 | That's the time at which you gather, gather, gather, gather the wood, plant those gardens, harvest the food.
00:27:17.000 | That's the time at which you establish yourself.
00:27:20.000 | Now in the modern world generally, most of us, it's a matter of time when you establish yourself in a career, when you establish your businesses, when you take the risks, and you pour on the work, and you pour on the hours.
00:27:30.000 | And if you do that early in life, you can build such incredible reserves, especially financial reserves, that it can set you up to do very well for the rest of your life.
00:27:41.000 | In days gone past, we held the vision before young men and women that they prepare, prepare, especially financially, that they prepare for marriage.
00:27:52.000 | And due to driving hormones and deep abiding love, most men and women had a desire to prepare for marriage.
00:28:03.000 | Part of that is financial preparation.
00:28:05.000 | In days gone past, and I hope and pray in days in the future, days gone past it was expected that before you kindled the love in another person's heart, you'd be in a position to where you could provide for them.
00:28:20.000 | And thus, young men and women were diligent to prepare for a new phase of life.
00:28:27.000 | Fathers held young men who were coming as suitors for their daughters, held them responsible and said, "How are you going to provide for my daughter?"
00:28:38.000 | And the young man had an incentive to clear his forest, build his cabin, and set by his initial stores of wood to get them through the first winter.
00:28:48.000 | This early season of life is a time at which work is valuable.
00:28:53.000 | And yet, what do we do in our modern culture?
00:28:56.000 | Well, we take the value of play that is valuable in childhood and we extend it through 30.
00:29:03.000 | We expect little and thus we get little.
00:29:07.000 | Culturally, we teach young capable men and women that the most valuable thing to do is to go off and have a college experience.
00:29:14.000 | And you should make sure that you can do it on daddy and mommy's dime or at least borrow the money so that you can live high and have fun before facing the drudgery of modern life.
00:29:25.000 | Well, guess what? Maybe if this time of life were actually invested in something useful and productive and if actually work were accomplished, then modern life after college wouldn't be such drudgery.
00:29:36.000 | But unfortunately, we find it culturally easier to try to extend childhood to the ugly age of mid-20s or 30.
00:29:48.000 | Worse, we remove the incentive to marry in the first place.
00:29:52.000 | No reason to labor and buy the cow when you can steal the milk at night for free.
00:29:57.000 | No reason to work to provide and to plan and to prepare when marriage becomes less about a family and more of a matter of sexual attraction and a business plan.
00:30:10.000 | You'll make this much. I'll make that much. You'll pay these bills. I'll pay these bills.
00:30:16.000 | And we'll be together until death do us part or until it's inconvenient.
00:30:21.000 | Or we fall out of love or we're unhappy or we meet someone else or insert reason here.
00:30:28.000 | The major point here is that the motivation for young adulthood for that time of building the barns and building the house disappears.
00:30:37.000 | Don't do that to your children.
00:30:40.000 | Encourage them in their time of young adulthood.
00:30:43.000 | Encourage them to lay the foundation.
00:30:47.000 | Encourage your sons and daughters to provide for themselves skills, to build for themselves careers, to develop a diversity of ability.
00:30:58.000 | Things that are valuable because they're inherently valuable, their cultural value, their personal value, and also things that are valuable in the marketplace.
00:31:08.000 | Help them to develop a deep bench of interests and skills that can be applied broadly so that they have many backup plans.
00:31:17.000 | Help them to build businesses so that that woodlot is paid for, so that they can sell some of the wood and as such have their wood taken care of by other people.
00:31:29.000 | That's what business does.
00:31:31.000 | Help your sons and daughters to buy houses, build houses.
00:31:38.000 | Help them to do it free of debt.
00:31:41.000 | Help them to do it at an early age.
00:31:44.000 | If you're blessed to have a young child, there's no reason why your child cannot go into the age of marriage with a paid for house, a productive, profitable business, and plenty of money in the bank.
00:31:59.000 | Not enough to protect them for the rest of their life, although that's possible, or to provide for them for the rest of their life, although that's possible.
00:32:06.000 | But they can go into marriage with enough cords of wood stacked in the backyard to get them through a few winters so that as they begin their married life, they can begin on a different foundation.
00:32:20.000 | During young adulthood, single adulthood, time is valuable and money is so valuable.
00:32:28.000 | Help your children to have a vision for the time of sowing in young adulthood.
00:32:35.000 | If there's a time to start a business, to make career changes, this is it.
00:32:39.000 | What about young married life and young families?
00:32:41.000 | Let's move on to the next phase.
00:32:43.000 | Well, first, I think young married life is a valuable time to not worry so much about stacking up money.
00:32:57.000 | When I counsel young couples who are planning for marriage or who are newly married, I encourage them not to place a high priority on the stacking of wood and the canning of vegetables unless they're able to do it in a way that keeps them together and keeps the pace of their life slow.
00:33:16.000 | One of my favorite and most useful verses from Deuteronomy, the Mosaic Law in the Bible, God commanded that a newly married man, Deuteronomy 24, 5, "A newly married man must not be drafted into the army or be given any other official responsibilities.
00:33:33.000 | He must be free to spend one year at home, bringing happiness to the wife he has married."
00:33:39.000 | Again, a newly married man must not be drafted into the army or be given any other official responsibilities.
00:33:46.000 | He must be free to spend one year at home, bringing happiness to the wife he has married.
00:33:52.000 | In my own five plus years of marriage, I have never once found that an extra zero in the bank account brought greater happiness to my wife.
00:34:02.000 | For me to bring happiness to the wife that I married, that is not best done with money.
00:34:09.000 | And unfortunately, again, in order to come against this, you have to fight and stand up against modern culture.
00:34:15.000 | In modern culture, if a couple pursues marriage at all, they often pursue it largely on their own.
00:34:23.000 | The community around offers little support.
00:34:26.000 | The wedding day is often heavily borne, the cost, by the young couple.
00:34:33.000 | Many young couples that I've counseled put themselves deeply into debt to provide a great party for their family and friends.
00:34:39.000 | And so they begin their life in the negative right there.
00:34:44.000 | Also, because of the decisions made by the husband and wife, many young couples are deeply in debt from their college years.
00:34:51.000 | Behind the eight ball already.
00:34:54.000 | Tack on a little bit more debt from various payments and very few young couples can do much more than survive.
00:35:04.000 | How much better to have spent a few years in young single adulthood, stacking wood and loading the shelves in the basement,
00:35:11.000 | so that the first year of marriage can be a more restful time.
00:35:19.000 | I always chuckle at the visual image that comes from this verse in various translations.
00:35:25.000 | A different translation that I read every day is we says this,
00:35:28.000 | "When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be liable for any other public duty.
00:35:32.000 | He shall be free at home one year to be happy with his wife, whom he has taken."
00:35:40.000 | I'll let you define how and what it means for a man to be free, to be at home, to be happy with his wife.
00:35:47.000 | But it's hard for me to associate money with that.
00:35:52.000 | I don't think that a newly married couple is best served by starting new stressful jobs.
00:36:01.000 | I don't think a newly married couple is best served by starting new businesses,
00:36:07.000 | stretching and striving to work more, spend less just so that they can move to early retirement.
00:36:16.000 | Emphasis on the caveat I gave at the beginning of the show.
00:36:18.000 | Not that there aren't ways that this may work out.
00:36:21.000 | Not that if you did start a business that you immediately need to shutter it.
00:36:24.000 | Just that I don't think that's a good time for a career transition.
00:36:29.000 | Better to focus on building the stability of your family.
00:36:33.000 | One of the most sobering trends that I have observed in my peers, my cohort,
00:36:39.000 | has been the incredible number of very short-lived marriages.
00:36:45.000 | And by short-lived, I mean less than a year.
00:36:47.000 | My wife and I have kind of a casual tally of – I could list to you almost – a dozen would be too much.
00:36:56.000 | But in excess of half a dozen, somewhere between eight to ten of our friends from college
00:37:01.000 | who were married and their marriages last less than a year.
00:37:06.000 | My friends were doing something wrong.
00:37:09.000 | I've asked other friends of mine in my similar cohort.
00:37:13.000 | And they've all reported the same thing.
00:37:16.000 | Too many marriages are lasting less than a year.
00:37:21.000 | This is not the time to bring on the pressure of additional stress.
00:37:28.000 | Stretching and striving just to make a little bit more.
00:37:34.000 | What about young families, young children?
00:37:37.000 | This can also be a tender time, but I think there's a difference.
00:37:42.000 | When I transitioned from the company I was with to start Radical Personal Finance,
00:37:47.000 | I transitioned when I had been married for two years and we had a young baby.
00:37:53.000 | I've worked a tremendous amount.
00:37:56.000 | I think this is actually – if you need to make a transition, if you need to work hard, if you need to work like crazy to get out of debt super fast or save a bunch of money,
00:38:03.000 | I think young childhood is a good time to do that.
00:38:07.000 | If you can arrange that your children are not being raised by a hired hand.
00:38:19.000 | If you study young child psychology and young child development, what you find is that the first few years are absolutely crucial.
00:38:25.000 | In my opinion, the very worst time, in my opinion, born out by research, do your own research.
00:38:32.000 | This is not an unresearched opinion.
00:38:35.000 | In my opinion, the very worst time for you to hire somebody to care for your children is in the first five years.
00:38:44.000 | The very best plan is for mom and the kids to have every bit of time together for the first five years.
00:38:56.000 | If necessary, better to have dad and the kids together, but that's inferior to mom in the beginning.
00:39:03.000 | The first five years of your children's life will be shaped by the person that they're with, and you cannot make it up.
00:39:13.000 | So if you care about the legacy of your family, the time to focus on getting rich, rich, rich so that you can quit, quit, quit is not when you have young children.
00:39:26.000 | If that requires both mom and dad to be out of the house and to hire somebody to raise your children, you'll regret that situation and that decision down the road.
00:39:38.000 | Because if you talk to older people, you talk to people who are retired, and you ask them about the happiness that they get from a little extra money in the bank
00:39:54.000 | as compared to the happiness they get from rich relationships with their children and grandchildren,
00:40:01.000 | you'll find that the relationships make a bigger difference than the money in the bank.
00:40:08.000 | If I had to choose, and I had to choose between quality, deep, rich, loving relationships with my children and grandchildren in my old age
00:40:22.000 | or plenty of money to be financially independent, you can take the money, I'll take the rich relationships.
00:40:33.000 | My wife and I will happily live in a spare bedroom at our kid's house and help them and be integrated with them and experience the richness and the joy of close intergenerational family life.
00:40:46.000 | You can take your lonely 4,000 square foot lake house and the broken lives that come with it.
00:40:54.000 | Caveat again, notice I said if. I don't believe you have to make the choice. I don't want to engage in a false dichotomy here.
00:41:03.000 | You can do both. But in terms of priority, if you have to choose, choose wisely.
00:41:12.000 | I do think that if you're comparing the costs of changes in young childhood versus older children,
00:41:22.000 | there's a good argument to be made that if you need to make a transition, you need to start a business, you need to switch careers,
00:41:27.000 | and it's going to require a few years of hard work, as long as mom or if necessary at the worst case, dad, as long as mom can be home with the children,
00:41:38.000 | the best time to do that would be when they're younger.
00:41:40.000 | Now as children start to become more aware, four, five, six years old, start to be more engaged, I think you reach that point where you have older children at which you want to be very careful about your decisions.
00:41:53.000 | From say five to 15 years old, you have a very tender, tender time with your children. If I had a five-year-old child and you offered me a chance to be the CEO of a publicly traded Fortune 500 company,
00:42:13.000 | there's not a chance in the world I'd accept that gig. The cost is too high. There are certain careers that are high stress, high intensity that I don't think should be staffed by parents of eight-year-old children, 10-year-old children, 12-year-old children.
00:42:31.000 | It's not an all or nothing thing. The idea is not that life is just going to be better if you can just sit at home and do nothing but hang out with your children.
00:42:40.000 | Well, life does not revolve around my children. Children fit into my life. But in terms of the cost, the cost is just too high.
00:42:47.000 | With older children, and by older again I mean five to 15, there's a valuable, really valuable time. And that's not the time, I don't think, to be focused exclusively on chopping wood and piling up money if it cuts too deeply into the opportunities that you have with your children.
00:43:10.000 | If you have a 10-year-old or an 8-year-old and you feel like, "Joshua is pressuring me to become financially independent because he says we want to build a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less," look for an opportunity to integrate with your children.
00:43:27.000 | And if you can build a business that allows you to transition from what you're doing to something else that gives you more freedom, and you can do it with your children, go for it.
00:43:37.000 | But if you think that by taking a job as a black ops contractor and spending the next two years in Iraq and piling up a few hundred thousand dollars, you're going to be happier, friend, you'll never get these years back.
00:43:53.000 | Don't pay that price.
00:43:57.000 | There'll be plenty of time when your children are grown and out of the nest that you'll be able to take those jobs.
00:44:10.000 | Which brings me to the final phase.
00:44:13.000 | Adult children, ages 15 plus, and empty nesters.
00:44:18.000 | At this point in time, if you want to pour it on, you've got all your flexibility back.
00:44:24.000 | You can change jobs, you can take careers.
00:44:29.000 | My opinion, this is the time to tackle the big projects, the huge projects.
00:44:33.000 | In the US Constitution, there's a requirement that the President of the United States has to be at least 35 years old in order to run for president.
00:44:45.000 | Now, I appreciate that the framers of the US Constitution had a desire that the president be somewhat mature, but I tell you, I hate to see parents of young children taking on the office of the presidency.
00:45:01.000 | The Obama family came in with young children.
00:45:06.000 | Bush family came in with young children.
00:45:08.000 | Clinton family, young children.
00:45:10.000 | Now, from seemingly outward appearances, they seem to have survived, but of course I have no inside knowledge.
00:45:18.000 | But to take on the job of president of the United States with two young daughters, to me is inconceivable.
00:45:26.000 | The people who should be doing that job is people who have grown children.
00:45:31.000 | They're the ones who can spend day and night on an airplane traveling the world.
00:45:37.000 | Not you.
00:45:40.000 | There's no shame in making different choices.
00:45:44.000 | So if you want to be a Fortune 500 CEO or if you want to switch new businesses or you want to work like crazy or you want to do crazy things, just pay attention and recognize that there are seasons of life in which that will be more valuable.
00:45:57.000 | That's the thesis of what I've been trying to share with you today.
00:46:02.000 | At some seasons of your life, money is more valuable, and at some seasons of your life, time is more valuable.
00:46:11.000 | Money and time are not always inversely related, but they often are.
00:46:18.000 | And if you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose money or time, consider carefully.
00:46:26.000 | There is no shame in making the decisions that are best for you at a certain point in time because of your own personal goals.
00:46:38.000 | And there is no shame in prioritizing some of your goals versus others.
00:46:44.000 | I often look at people who can crank out a couple books a year.
00:46:49.000 | I have some intellectual heroes that just seem to be incredibly productive.
00:46:54.000 | And I often think, "Well, I'm as good as they are. I can do everything they can do. If they can do it, I can do it too.
00:46:59.000 | Whatever you can do, I can do better," as Annie Oakley used to sing.
00:47:06.000 | "Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you." That's often been my thought.
00:47:13.000 | And yet it's not true because for me to crank out two books a year and to travel the world speaking and do all of this big stuff would require a heavy price that I'm not willing to pay.
00:47:27.000 | It's not to say that I won't pay it at some point, but I'm not going to pay it today.
00:47:36.000 | I challenge you. If you're feeling inferior because you're looking and saying, "Well, so and so is doing such and such and I can do that too," be willing to recognize if they're in a different phase of life.
00:47:48.000 | One of the reasons I hate the concept of retirement is because often the concept of retirement takes people who are at a stage at which they can be the most productive they've ever been, an empty nester.
00:48:05.000 | And it encourages them to throw away their capacity and capability and squander it on play.
00:48:18.000 | The whole image is upside down often. Again, I'm painting with a very broad brush. I'm aware of that.
00:48:24.000 | You judge accordingly in your own personal situation. I'm painting very broadly.
00:48:31.000 | But the concept that's taken is that when you're young, work, work, work, build your career all through the middle years, pile up tons of money so that you can retire into a big house by the lake.
00:48:41.000 | The big house by the lake when you're two people is a waste. It's more work than it is anything else.
00:48:47.000 | The big house when you have an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old, that's the time to have the big house.
00:48:53.000 | And you can apply this to everything in your life.
00:48:56.000 | And that's why I'm encouraging you with singles, with seasons. There's no point in time that you're having the big house when you're single.
00:49:04.000 | When you're single, you can live happily in a small little apartment and put your money to work building those businesses.
00:49:10.000 | The big house isn't particularly useful when you have small children.
00:49:13.000 | When you have children of that age of 5 to 15 and until they get out of the house, 5 to 20, 25, that's the time the big house is great.
00:49:21.000 | Better to go and rent the house for 10 years and then be out of it. The kids are gone, move.
00:49:27.000 | The boat is not useful for a single person and it's not useful for empty nesters.
00:49:33.000 | The boat just sits out back and sits and leaks all the time, leaks oil and leaks water.
00:49:38.000 | The time to have the ski boat is when you got an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old and then get rid of the thing.
00:49:44.000 | The time to build the business, consider when.
00:49:47.000 | The time to make the changes.
00:49:50.000 | I belabored my points enough.
00:49:53.000 | I don't want to tell you how to live your life.
00:49:57.000 | I want to challenge you to consider how you're living your life and make sure that you're making your decisions intentionally.
00:50:11.000 | Think carefully about the cost of every decision.
00:50:17.000 | I think putting money into a retirement account is a great thing to do.
00:50:22.000 | I encourage you to consider it.
00:50:25.000 | But there's time to put your money in a retirement account and there's time to buy the ski boat.
00:50:33.000 | If you do things in the wrong order, you find yourself without a ski boat when there are people around to enjoy it with you
00:50:43.000 | because all the money is getting put in the retirement account.
00:50:48.000 | And then you find yourself with a ski boat when you're all alone tooling around the lake by yourself because there's nobody to be with you.
00:51:00.000 | If you find yourself in your farmstead and you look out behind the back wall and you recognize that there's no wood prepared for winter,
00:51:09.000 | there's no food in your basement, then for your own good and for the good of your family, don't go fishing.
00:51:20.000 | Your family is in danger of starving this winter.
00:51:26.000 | So either you go out and get your axe and start chopping down trees and canning food, or if you've got children, take them with you and put them to work.
00:51:37.000 | If you're broke and you're in debt, don't take any of the last 50 minutes and think that I've been saying that you should do nothing.
00:51:45.000 | Get busy.
00:51:48.000 | But if you look out behind the back door and see stacks and stacks of wood, you look down in your basement and you've got piles and piles of food,
00:52:00.000 | don't fall for the lie that all you need is a little bit more.
00:52:05.000 | Because guess what?
00:52:08.000 | When you go, the money's gone.
00:52:12.000 | If you measure success by a little bit more, there's not a chance in the world that you'll ever have enough.
00:52:20.000 | But the great thing is, there are other things in life that matter more than money.
00:52:27.000 | You have choices to face.
00:52:29.000 | Choose carefully.
00:52:32.000 | 525,600 minutes.
00:52:37.000 | 525,000 moments so dear.
00:52:43.000 | 525,600 minutes.
00:52:48.000 | How do you measure, measure a year?
00:52:53.000 | In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,
00:52:59.000 | in inches, in miles, in laughter and strife.
00:53:04.000 | In 525,600 minutes.
00:53:09.000 | How do you measure a year in the life?
00:53:14.000 | How about love?
00:53:20.000 | How about love?
00:53:25.000 | How about love?
00:53:30.000 | Measure in love.
00:53:34.000 | Seasons of love.
00:53:41.000 | Seasons of love.
00:53:47.000 | 525,600 minutes.
00:53:53.000 | 525,000 journeys to plan.
00:53:58.000 | 525,600 minutes.
00:54:03.000 | How do you measure the life of a orphan or a man?
00:54:08.000 | In truths that she learned or in times that he cried.
00:54:14.000 | In the bridges he burned or the way that she died.
00:54:19.000 | It's time now to sing out.
00:54:22.000 | The story never ends.
00:54:25.000 | Let's celebrate, remember a year in the life of a friend.
00:54:30.000 | How about love?
00:54:33.000 | You've got to, you've got to remember the love.
00:54:37.000 | How about love?
00:54:39.000 | You've got to remember the love.
00:54:42.000 | How about love?
00:54:46.000 | Measure in love.
00:54:48.000 | Measure, measure your life in love.
00:54:53.000 | Seasons of love.
00:54:59.000 | Seasons of love.
00:55:06.000 | This show is part of the Radical Life Media Network of podcasts and resources.
00:55:17.000 | Find out more at radicallifemedia.com.
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