RPF0537-Friday

00:00:00.000 | It's Friday and today, live Q&A.

00:00:20.480 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:24.000 | insight, education, and encouragement that you need to live a rich and meaningful life

00:00:28.240 | now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:31.480 | My name is Joshua.

00:00:32.480 | I am your host.

00:00:33.480 | I am your fellow journeyman.

00:00:35.400 | I am with you on this path towards financial freedom.

00:00:38.280 | And these Friday shows are where we get together and discuss the details of how to actually

00:00:43.360 | do it practically today.

00:00:47.760 | Each Friday that I can arrange the technology in order for me to host this call, we get

00:00:57.840 | together for a live Q&A call.

00:01:00.000 | I really enjoy doing these.

00:01:01.120 | They are my favorite show of the week because I get to interact with you on real circumstances,

00:01:05.400 | on real questions, on real things that you're facing.

00:01:08.280 | This is your opportunity to drive the content of the show.

00:01:11.680 | So if that means that you'd like to ask me advice on something in your own personal life,

00:01:15.480 | something in your own finances, you can pump me for a little bit of low-cost financial

00:01:19.500 | planning I guess.

00:01:20.500 | If you want to ask me some tactical, technical question on anything related to financial

00:01:25.240 | planning or if you want to talk about some bigger picture thing or some philosophical

00:01:30.040 | question, if you want to agree with me, disagree with me, that is up to you.

00:01:33.560 | I just go to a phone line and open them up to you.

00:01:36.700 | So I'd love for you to join me for a Friday Q&A show if you would like.

00:01:40.440 | I don't publish the phone number publicly to every listener.

00:01:43.960 | Rather, what I do is I restrict these calls to patrons of the show, people who go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron

00:01:50.560 | and sign up to support Radical Personal Finance there.

00:01:53.040 | And I would love for you to do that if you would like to do that.

00:01:55.560 | It's your best way to get some interaction with me, the best way to have your questions

00:01:59.000 | answered.

00:02:00.000 | And over the years, I guess I've been doing these now, over the years people have asked

00:02:03.160 | all kinds of interesting things.

00:02:04.640 | So there are currently 274 individuals just like you who support Radical Personal Finance

00:02:09.720 | at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

00:02:12.000 | I would love for you to join that program and in doing so to be on the next call.

00:02:18.320 | Let's go first to Matthew.

00:02:19.520 | Matthew, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

00:02:21.240 | How can I serve you today?

00:02:22.960 | Absolutely, Joshua.

00:02:24.240 | Thank you for taking my call today.

00:02:26.600 | So on the Facebook group, I think a few months back you mentioned that you had finally made

00:02:32.600 | the change from the PC world to the Mac world with the acquisition of a new Mac computer.

00:02:40.280 | And I have been interested in making that change as well, but I've lived in the PC world

00:02:45.000 | my whole life and I feel very rooted in it.

00:02:49.040 | But I would like to think about making that change.

00:02:53.040 | But from a productivity standpoint, what have you noticed from that change, pros and cons

00:03:00.720 | for making it?

00:03:02.640 | Good question and a fun one.

00:03:04.340 | So I'll share just a short bit of my background and why I made the change and then answer

00:03:09.200 | the question straightforwardly.

00:03:11.680 | For my entire computing lifetime, I have been a PC user and a Mac admirer.

00:03:19.460 | But because the cost of entry for the Apple platform is so high, I never could find the

00:03:26.440 | ability to really justify it.

00:03:28.940 | So I admired some of the usefulness of the Apple ecosystem for many years, but I just

00:03:35.800 | couldn't justify the money.

00:03:38.640 | And I always struggled with that because I want to make a good purchase decision.

00:03:41.760 | I really want to be frugal with my money and I want to do a good job and it just seemed

00:03:45.760 | so hard to justify, especially because I was not in media production for most of my career.

00:03:51.360 | I wasn't producing video or doing artwork where I really needed some kind of tool in

00:04:00.400 | the multimedia environment where the Apple approach really shined.

00:04:05.440 | So when we're talking a decade of being an admirer and never pulling the trigger on it,

00:04:11.560 | what finally forced me to move was there were three things involved.

00:04:17.440 | The first thing was that my laptop was just simply really slowing down and it came to

00:04:24.440 | the point where I finally concluded that it was hampering my ability to actually produce

00:04:29.980 | more work.

00:04:30.980 | I find it very easy to tell other people that they should invest money in quality tools

00:04:36.040 | in order to produce more work.

00:04:37.440 | It's easy for me to tell other people to spend their money.

00:04:39.560 | I find it easy to make that intellectual argument very strongly towards others, but I find it

00:04:45.400 | a little bit harder when I have to actually open my wallet and put down some hundred dollar

00:04:50.180 | bills on the counter.

00:04:51.360 | I find it a little bit harder to follow through and spend hundreds and thousands of dollars

00:04:55.480 | on good tools for my business.

00:04:58.060 | But I finally reached the point where I could see that it was slowing me down and I needed

00:05:01.040 | to upgrade the computer.

00:05:03.260 | The second factor that had been influential for me was Windows 10 and the complete loss

00:05:11.020 | of privacy that Windows 10 afforded.

00:05:14.320 | I previously had not had a lot of problems with Windows because it was relatively easy

00:05:18.640 | to lock down some of the privacy arrangements, but after they came out with Windows 10, after

00:05:23.480 | Cortana was fully integrated, after all of the data started being sent to Microsoft and

00:05:28.920 | basically every other publisher, I came to the point where I just said, "This is absurd.

00:05:33.760 | This is obscene and I don't want to do it any longer."

00:05:38.140 | So I stayed with Windows 7 for quite a while, but I eventually came to the point where I

00:05:43.280 | said, "I can't, in good conscience, I can't participate in this insecure environment.

00:05:49.600 | It's wrong for all of my data to be sent back to Microsoft."

00:05:55.640 | I just didn't want to participate.

00:05:57.320 | And then the third thing was in the media business, I made a decision that I was going

00:06:01.060 | to produce more types of media, especially more video work.

00:06:06.260 | And I finally said, "Okay, well if I'm going to do that," because basically everybody in

00:06:13.480 | the common advice-giving landscape in the world of media, audio creation, video creation,

00:06:20.040 | et cetera, because basically everybody uses Apple, it's very easy for me to get good advice

00:06:25.440 | in using Apple.

00:06:26.880 | And I would frequently find a Windows program that would work so-so, but because all of

00:06:32.560 | the other podcast producers, all the video creators, because everyone else uses Apple,

00:06:36.120 | they just automatically go and say, "Look, here's the Apple solution."

00:06:38.920 | A simple example would be a program like ScreenFlow.

00:06:41.760 | ScreenFlow is, to my knowledge, a Mac-only application, but it's the program that everybody

00:06:46.680 | uses to create great and easy screen recordings on their systems.

00:06:51.080 | And so I would have to go and find some Windows version of that to make things work.

00:06:56.000 | And so I came to the point and said, "Well, if I'm going to do more video, do video editing

00:07:00.260 | on my computer, it's worth it for me to go ahead and just go ahead and move to Apple."

00:07:05.600 | And then the same thing applies in the world of privacy.

00:07:08.000 | If you care about your data security, then it is a lot easier to be more secure in an

00:07:15.480 | Apple environment than in a Windows environment.

00:07:18.080 | And there are kind of multiple levels to that.

00:07:20.040 | Let's talk about data security for a moment.

00:07:23.280 | Windows being the big player, there are many more threats that are targeted towards Windows

00:07:30.100 | users than towards Apple users.

00:07:33.800 | That ratio used to be much stronger because Apple was such a small market share.

00:07:37.760 | So it used to be that most Apple users came to the point where they just said, "Well,

00:07:42.120 | I don't have to really worry about viruses.

00:07:43.920 | I don't have to worry about attacks to my computer because it's not a PC."

00:07:48.840 | And PC users were the ones who had to protect against all those.

00:07:52.880 | That seems to have changed, but it still seems that there are fewer threats for the Apple

00:07:57.760 | platform than there are for the Windows platform.

00:08:01.000 | But especially if you want to move into the world of being a little bit more secure than

00:08:05.400 | the standard user.

00:08:06.820 | For example, for a long time, the Mac operating system has allowed you to encrypt your computer

00:08:16.440 | with a built-in encryption software.

00:08:18.960 | Now you can do that today.

00:08:20.120 | It's called FileVault on the Mac system.

00:08:22.800 | You can do that today on Windows.

00:08:23.880 | I think the application is BitLocker that works on Windows.

00:08:27.720 | But it was a little bit easier to do in the Mac environment.

00:08:31.720 | And there are all kinds of little interesting applications that you can use in the Mac environment

00:08:35.440 | that could work in the Windows environment.

00:08:37.240 | But most of the people who are interested in greater privacy and security for their

00:08:41.180 | computer seem to gravitate towards the Mac.

00:08:44.360 | And with that being an increasing concern of mine, I decided to go ahead and pull the

00:08:49.960 | trigger.

00:08:50.960 | So what I did to try to minimize the problems as far as the transition was to try to get

00:09:00.260 | something that was good enough, that was good at what I needed to do, but to get a deal

00:09:04.840 | on it.

00:09:05.840 | So what I wound up doing is I was able to buy a scratch and dent laptop that had been

00:09:09.320 | returned to a retail store.

00:09:11.020 | So it was the latest.

00:09:12.020 | It was a good MacBook Pro.

00:09:15.680 | But I was able to get a scratched model.

00:09:17.440 | Somebody had bought it, had returned it, had some scratches on the bottom of it.

00:09:20.840 | And I saved a significant discount from getting that.

00:09:24.760 | As far as the transition, the transition I have found to be very easy.

00:09:29.520 | It required the purchase of a few new applications, which was fine.

00:09:32.720 | I was intending to buy those applications anyway.

00:09:35.360 | And it's required learning a few of the peculiarities with the Apple system.

00:09:45.200 | But it's been relatively simple.

00:09:46.960 | There's not a big learning curve.

00:09:48.320 | For somebody who is a native or almost native computer user, it's not like you can't figure

00:09:52.960 | it out.

00:09:53.960 | It's relatively straightforward to set up.

00:09:55.960 | So I've had no problem with the productivity in terms of learning how to do it.

00:10:00.000 | It has measurably and massively increased my own personal productivity by just having

00:10:05.640 | a faster machine.

00:10:07.920 | It takes so much less time for me to process audio files and do some of the work that I

00:10:12.560 | do on a daily basis than it did in the Windows environment.

00:10:16.400 | However, that's not due to moving over into the Mac OS.

00:10:20.280 | That's due to upgrading the computer.

00:10:22.000 | So I could have gotten those exact same things from just simply upgrading into a Windows

00:10:28.040 | machine.

00:10:29.160 | There wasn't that much of a difference in terms of it's not the Mac OS that made me

00:10:35.640 | more productive.

00:10:36.640 | It was the upgrade in processor speed, etc.

00:10:40.800 | So I'm very happy with it.

00:10:43.040 | Those privacy and kind of just OS security features are valuable enough to me that I'm

00:10:51.560 | happy with it.

00:10:52.560 | However, I do think that I'm going to move on to at some point in the coming years, I

00:10:57.680 | think I'm going to move on from the Apple ecosystem and go ahead and upgrade my own

00:11:04.760 | skills and move into the Linux system in the future.

00:11:07.800 | What I find deeply frustrating is how everybody wants my data.

00:11:16.280 | It used to be, in my understanding, it used to be that the Windows platform was a little

00:11:20.780 | bit stronger.

00:11:21.780 | Sorry, was the worst and Apple was much superior.

00:11:25.200 | But now I can't open up my computer without again and again Apple wanting more of my stuff,

00:11:31.720 | wanting me to integrate my phone in my computer, wanting me to connect and send back all this

00:11:37.440 | stuff to the home office.

00:11:39.120 | I can't download an application from the App Store.

00:11:43.520 | I can't install something from the App Store without being totally verified through the

00:11:47.560 | whole system.

00:11:48.560 | I think that's just unacceptable with the increasing risk of hacking, with the increasing

00:11:55.200 | risk to data security, with the constant and never-ending breaches that we're all engaged

00:12:01.040 | in just again and again.

00:12:03.000 | I'm coming to the point where I'm fed up with it.

00:12:05.400 | What I've realized is I'm not going to complain about it.

00:12:07.400 | I just need to upgrade my own technical skills and move into the future.

00:12:14.840 | I guess I left the 80% and moved into the 20% with the move to Mac.

00:12:21.080 | Now I guess I'm going to move into the 1.1% of the computing population at some point

00:12:25.520 | moving on to Linux.

00:12:27.160 | That's the direction that I'm going.

00:12:29.120 | I've been happy with it.

00:12:30.640 | It's been really good, but I'm probably not going to stick around too long with some of

00:12:35.040 | the changes even that Apple is making from the perspective of privacy and security.

00:12:40.600 | Awesome.

00:12:41.600 | Thank you, Joshua, for taking that.

00:12:43.960 | You made a point earlier in your talk that talking about investing in productivity tools,

00:12:50.400 | I wish that I just recently made the change from being a standard W2 employee to being

00:12:56.560 | a business owner.

00:12:57.560 | That's one thing that I wish I would have known as an employee because I think most

00:13:02.160 | of the times whatever company we work for, we just get whatever productivity tools they

00:13:07.800 | have.

00:13:08.800 | There are so many tools out there that come in at very low cost that help increase your

00:13:13.720 | productivity so much that I even think as looking, even if you look into it from a personal

00:13:20.160 | employee standpoint and you can't "ride it off" or whatever, I still think it's worth

00:13:25.000 | your time to even look into that.

00:13:26.400 | That's something I wish that I would have paid more attention to, but thank you so much,

00:13:30.160 | Joshua, for answering that.

00:13:32.680 | I've been quite curious in making that transition because you hit a great point too halfway

00:13:36.720 | through the talk or another great point that it is difficult when you actually go to look

00:13:42.240 | for tutorials and the moment that you say that it's in a Mac environment, you have to

00:13:47.040 | "Okay, I can't pay attention to this.

00:13:48.400 | I've got to go find something else."

00:13:50.360 | From a creative standpoint, it does seem like most of the tutorials are in the Mac world,

00:13:55.400 | but thank you so much for answering my question.

00:13:59.920 | It seems as though the thing that finally got me is anytime you switch platforms, you

00:14:05.080 | say, "Well, what am I going to lose?

00:14:06.080 | Am I going to lose the ability to run an application that matters?"

00:14:11.760 | Some people will lose that.

00:14:12.760 | For example, there are Windows applications that are required in order for you to function.

00:14:23.800 | If that's the case, if you are in a situation where you have to use that platform, then

00:14:32.760 | you better stick with the Windows.

00:14:35.160 | But basically, I came to—and the same thing with Apple.

00:14:38.920 | There are programs that only work in the Apple ecosystem.

00:14:42.400 | But the advantage that's been around for at least the last decade—I'm no Mac expert—is

00:14:46.760 | that if you run a Mac, you can run Windows within that and you can run Windows applications.

00:14:57.560 | To my knowledge, that's not possible in the other direction or at least it wasn't in years

00:15:01.640 | past.

00:15:03.280 | You can usually do that and you can move over into Mac and still retain some of your Windows

00:15:11.320 | options.

00:15:12.320 | I haven't needed to actually do that.

00:15:13.720 | I thought I was going to go ahead and set up Windows, but there hasn't been a single

00:15:16.320 | application that I haven't found a superior option for in the Mac environment.

00:15:20.960 | Back to tools, I know that it does make a big difference and it's hard to swallow it,

00:15:27.460 | but if you actually look at it, in the early years of a career especially, investing in

00:15:32.460 | tools is perhaps the best investment that an individual can make.

00:15:36.960 | Because if you buy a $500 tool that allows you to produce an extra $100 per week of output,

00:15:45.800 | your return on investment of that over the course of a year is huge.

00:15:51.080 | It's absolutely massive.

00:15:52.840 | So if you think about it in terms of—I like to use the example of somebody who is a tradesperson

00:15:59.720 | where their acquisition of tools is fundamental to their work.

00:16:05.440 | Somebody is a mechanic on vehicles or they're a carpenter or they're a specialized type

00:16:13.240 | of construction person.

00:16:15.320 | In this situation, the tools are required in order for you to do your job and they're

00:16:20.480 | one of the best investments in the early years because they speed things up.

00:16:23.680 | Now it's harder for me to look at my computer and see in it the value that a specialized

00:16:29.480 | set of wrenches can make for an automobile mechanic or a really great set of saws and

00:16:36.880 | specialized tools would be for a construction worker, but it is exactly the same thing.

00:16:42.840 | And it's one of those things that should be done early because it leads to big impacts

00:16:51.800 | in the short term that will create more productivity down the road.

00:16:56.240 | And the earlier you invest in those, the more you can enjoy them and the longer that it'll

00:17:00.800 | work.

00:17:01.800 | So I recommend it and keep in touch.

00:17:03.760 | Ask me that in a couple of years and we'll see if I actually make the transition to Linux.

00:17:10.480 | Matthew, you got another question?

00:17:12.640 | We'll come back to that at the end of the show.

00:17:14.640 | Zach, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

00:17:16.120 | How can I serve you today, sir?

00:17:17.120 | ZACHARY LITMAN: Thanks.

00:17:19.120 | So I have a blog about CLEP and studying for CLEP exams and I haven't done much to work

00:17:25.160 | on it, but I'm getting a lot of emails from people, new subscribers, comments, and all

00:17:30.600 | sorts of questions.

00:17:31.600 | So I'm not doing that much, so I'm kind of wondering, like, people seem hungry for this,

00:17:36.000 | so what should I be doing to take advantage of this?

00:17:38.960 | DAVE SMITH: Zach, I mentioned you on last week's show.

00:17:40.920 | Did you hear that?

00:17:41.920 | ZACHARY LITMAN: Yeah, I heard that.

00:17:42.920 | I did.

00:17:43.920 | That was so cool.

00:17:44.920 | DAVE SMITH: Yeah.

00:17:45.920 | So just for a little bit of background for new listeners, Zach has been a longtime listener

00:17:47.560 | to Radical Personal Finance.

00:17:49.920 | I think I've recorded two episodes based upon your email questions and you wrote in to me

00:17:57.440 | about the question of saying, "I'm a 13-year-old young man.

00:18:01.040 | What tips for success would you have?"

00:18:02.480 | And I talked about how I would use that foundation and encourage you to build towards financial

00:18:11.400 | independence by about the age of 30.

00:18:13.920 | And a primary component of that that I recommended to you was to focus on your education, on

00:18:20.440 | building education, and on doing it in an intelligent way.

00:18:26.520 | And so as a component of that, you decided to work and to build towards trying to achieve

00:18:35.240 | your bachelor's degree by the age of 18, primarily through distance learning.

00:18:39.100 | And this is doable for you because you are educated at home.

00:18:43.640 | And so you've been writing about that.

00:18:45.120 | And what's your website about that, Zach?

00:18:47.440 | What's the URL, please?

00:18:48.440 | ZACHARY LITOWSKI: bachelorsby18.wordpress.com.

00:18:49.440 | DAVE SMITH: Great.

00:18:50.440 | So bachelorsby18.wordpress.com.

00:18:51.440 | And there, you're talking about you're chronicling your journey and you're laying out the approach

00:19:01.840 | that you're taking towards that goal.

00:19:04.320 | So the goal is to finish an accredited bachelor's degree by the age of 18 with a total amount

00:19:09.680 | of money spent on it of about $10,000.

00:19:13.720 | So that's the background for new readers.

00:19:16.240 | So you're starting to get a little bit of traction.

00:19:18.480 | You're writing about this publicly.

00:19:20.320 | And the question is, how do you grow it?

00:19:21.520 | Is that right?

00:19:22.520 | ZACHARY LITOWSKI: Yeah, exactly.

00:19:23.520 | DAVE SMITH: Right.

00:19:24.520 | So the king in the world of the internet, the key thing to always focus on is service

00:19:32.440 | and just simply providing something that is useful and helpful for people.

00:19:37.480 | There are all kinds of-- I don't like the word tricks.

00:19:41.360 | Let me use the word tactics and techniques that can be applied to decent content to make

00:19:47.160 | it better.

00:19:48.160 | You will become familiar with terms like search engine optimization and different approaches

00:19:53.000 | to that.

00:19:54.240 | Here's my analysis of those circumstances.

00:19:58.840 | It is possible to use techniques such as modern search engine optimization techniques to market

00:20:06.960 | a mediocre site and to draw a lot of people to it.

00:20:11.160 | And there are some approaches where that really makes a difference.

00:20:16.120 | But at the end of the day, it's more satisfying and easier just to produce something that's

00:20:21.600 | good.

00:20:23.000 | And if you'll produce something that is good and that is useful and that serves people,

00:20:28.000 | in time, the internet works.

00:20:30.360 | People will find it, and they'll refer people to it.

00:20:33.040 | And that's basically-- that gives you a good strength where you know that if it's good,

00:20:39.280 | it'll stand through as search engines change, as the way people use the internet changes.

00:20:43.840 | It will go on over time.

00:20:47.200 | It'll actually work.

00:20:48.560 | So I've come to the conviction that if I could only focus on one thing or the other, I'm

00:20:54.400 | going to focus on trying to produce something that's fundamentally valuable.

00:20:58.700 | And if I produce something that's fundamentally valuable, each person that finds it valuable

00:21:02.680 | will share that.

00:21:03.840 | That's the approach I've taken with radical personal finance.

00:21:05.960 | I've just said, I'm going to focus on doing the very best that I can and let my audience

00:21:11.720 | help me by publicizing it.

00:21:14.200 | And that has worked.

00:21:15.200 | Now, I don't think it should be done all of one or the other.

00:21:19.640 | And that's one mistake, because I've erred too much in my own work.

00:21:23.160 | I've erred too much on just trying to produce something that's good and not enough on publicizing

00:21:27.640 | it.

00:21:28.840 | But the best course is just to focus on providing something that's good.

00:21:33.480 | And so when you want to do that, you've got to focus on who am I trying to serve and what

00:21:38.440 | is my purpose.

00:21:40.560 | And the best way that I know to do that is to teach, is to focus on teaching.

00:21:45.620 | And so if you are, you're currently 14 years old and you're working on this goal of bachelor's

00:21:51.000 | degree by 18, what I would recommend is the easiest and the best thing to do is focus

00:21:55.800 | on teaching somebody who's just a little bit behind you.

00:21:59.360 | So pretend that you're speaking to your 10-year-old brother and you're trying to say, "Okay, with

00:22:04.640 | my 10-year-old brother, what would I encourage them to be doing?"

00:22:08.300 | And that way, you don't have to worry about trying to reach somebody who's old.

00:22:13.580 | So for example, you at 14 years old, if you set out and say, "My goal is to write to a

00:22:18.560 | 65-year-old grandfather and to try to teach that 65-year-old grandfather what they should

00:22:23.860 | do with their grandson," that's going to be hard for you to do.

00:22:26.580 | But if you'll just focus on teaching somebody who's just a little bit behind you, a 10-year-old,

00:22:30.680 | a 12-year-old, and share with them what you're learning and give your advice to them, what

00:22:35.320 | happens is the 10 and 12-year-old will find you, the 35-year-old parent of the 10 and

00:22:40.420 | 12-year-old will find you, and the 65-year-old grandparent will find you.

00:22:45.280 | So all three of those will find you and they'll appreciate the simplicity.

00:22:48.940 | So the first thing that I would focus on is, one, serving somebody.

00:22:53.340 | And the easiest way to do that is just to imagine somebody, a sibling, a friend who's

00:22:57.660 | two years behind you, three years behind you, something like that, and to teach them what

00:23:02.100 | you're learning.

00:23:03.220 | And not to put on airs about it, but just to teach them what you're learning.

00:23:06.660 | And so when you write an article, let's say that you are working on CLEP exams.

00:23:10.820 | A CLEP exam is an exam that you can sign up to take, which will allow you to basically

00:23:15.300 | quiz out of a semester of school.

00:23:17.620 | Well, there are, how many CLEP exams are there available, Zach?

00:23:20.700 | 33, I think.

00:23:21.700 | Okay, so there are 33 CLEP exams.

00:23:24.660 | So if you think about a concept like, okay, there are 33 CLEP exams, and if you're trying

00:23:28.420 | to give advice to somebody who is two years behind you, then you would write an article

00:23:33.620 | and you would say, "Here are the 33 CLEP exams," and you would explain what they are.

00:23:38.140 | And then you would analyze those 33 exams and you would say, "How many of these 33 exams

00:23:42.660 | should be taken or could be taken?"

00:23:44.740 | And you would perhaps rank them in order of easiest to hardest, and you would explain

00:23:48.840 | how to intelligently proceed through them.

00:23:51.460 | You would investigate any scheduling and say, "If you're going to take these at 14 years

00:23:55.300 | old, if you're going to start at 14, you would need to take these exams in your 14th year,

00:24:01.180 | in your 15th year, in your 16th year, you take these," and you lay those things out.

00:24:04.980 | And so basically what you do is you answer your questions, but you phrase them in terms

00:24:08.940 | of advice to somebody else.

00:24:10.780 | And I've found that to be one of the most effective ways for you to learn is by teaching.

00:24:16.320 | If you study educational philosophy, one of the things that I feel like we've really lost

00:24:21.340 | is the value of the so-called one-room schoolhouse.

00:24:24.840 | If you were to go back 200 years and look at how students studied, they studied in the

00:24:30.780 | one-room schoolhouse, and again, that's kind of proverbial one-room schoolhouse.

00:24:34.420 | It was literal in some contexts, but it wasn't literal in others.

00:24:38.260 | And the idea was that you had, instead of having age-segregated learning where the 10-year-olds

00:24:43.880 | are put with the 10-year-olds and the 12-year-olds are put with the 12-year-olds, you had age-integrated

00:24:47.980 | learning where you had older children and younger children working together.

00:24:53.160 | This is the way it was in my family's schoolhouse when I was growing up.

00:24:56.480 | I was the youngest of seven children, and we were educated at home, which meant, and

00:25:02.220 | my mom was a trained teacher in the normal teacher education systems, and so she ran

00:25:09.620 | her homeschool in a very structured way.

00:25:12.880 | She would have her desk.

00:25:13.880 | We all had our own desks, but it meant that I could hear what was happening with the older

00:25:18.840 | students and they could hear what was happening with me.

00:25:21.360 | If I'm studying phonics to learn how to read, one of my older siblings would have also been

00:25:26.340 | studying biology at a high school level.

00:25:29.480 | And the best way to do this in the way that it was done previously is once somebody passed

00:25:34.640 | through, let's say, the third grade, they would also, as part of their work, they would

00:25:38.520 | help somebody who was in second grade or first grade do their reading.

00:25:43.080 | And I think this is really valuable as an educational philosophy because it helps to

00:25:46.920 | cement the knowledge and the learning.

00:25:50.000 | I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but there are statistics that educational

00:25:54.120 | researchers and philosophers have used that identify the amount of learning, amount of

00:25:59.240 | things you retain if you read, the amount that you retain if you speak, or sorry, if

00:26:04.480 | you listen, and the amount that you retain if you teach.

00:26:07.800 | And the highest way to retain is by teaching.

00:26:11.880 | And so in any context, anything that you want to learn, one of the best ways to do this

00:26:16.800 | is to teach it.

00:26:19.240 | I've used the advice of in studying for something that if you want to study for something, go

00:26:25.620 | and teach it to others, or if you don't have that opportunity, teach it to the wall.

00:26:30.280 | So if you're going to take an exam for, let's say, you're going to sit for the CLEP exam

00:26:34.280 | in chemistry.

00:26:35.280 | Well, let's say that chemistry is a difficult subject for you.

00:26:38.960 | One of the best ways that you can handle that and learn it is to say, "I'm going to study

00:26:43.880 | this chapter of my CLEP preparation textbook.

00:26:47.040 | I'm going to learn this about chemistry, and then I'm just going to, in the privacy of

00:26:51.000 | my bedroom, I'm going to stand up and I'm going to deliver a short lecture on what this

00:26:55.280 | chapter speaks about."

00:26:57.520 | And if you can close the book and just with a few written notes, lecture that chapter

00:27:02.200 | to the wall, you will cement that learning in your brain in a much deeper way, and you

00:27:08.640 | can be confident that you've mastered the material.

00:27:10.640 | So when you go and sit for the actual exam, you'll find it very easy to do.

00:27:14.580 | So philosophically, this is one of the most important things of ways to learn is by teaching.

00:27:19.860 | You can do it individually like that, lecturing to the wall in your bedroom.

00:27:23.260 | You can do it in writing.

00:27:25.240 | You can do this in really any subject.

00:27:27.780 | But what's happened in...

00:27:30.020 | The reason I'm going on about this is because we've lost this in much of modern US-American

00:27:34.860 | systems.

00:27:35.860 | What we do is instead of expecting others to teach, we expect each person just to sit

00:27:41.900 | and learn from an expert.

00:27:43.380 | So instead of everybody interacting with their fellow learners, we constantly look to experts.

00:27:49.300 | And this is a problem in education.

00:27:51.600 | It results in one teacher lecturing to 20 to 100 students, but those 20 to 100 students

00:27:58.100 | don't really grasp the material, most of them, because they're not involved really in teaching

00:28:01.940 | it to others.

00:28:03.060 | It results in challenges in business where everyone's always looking to the expert.

00:28:07.460 | It results in a collapse in churches.

00:28:09.480 | If you look at the way that many modern US-American churches function, it's one person standing

00:28:15.040 | and lecturing to hundreds of people, and those hundreds of people are passive participants...

00:28:19.700 | Or sorry, passive onlookers instead of being active participants because they're not involved

00:28:24.020 | in teaching others.

00:28:25.260 | And this leads to a very weak, structured society.

00:28:28.140 | So let me bring it back to your specific question.

00:28:31.940 | Focus on teaching the things that you're trying to learn.

00:28:35.940 | And that's essentially what a good writing assignment is.

00:28:39.060 | And what I would recommend to you is that you view your blog as an outlet for your writing,

00:28:44.740 | as an outlet for you to say, "What question do I have?"

00:28:47.980 | One of the most valuable ways that you can train yourself throughout your lifetime is

00:28:52.540 | to make a habit of journaling.

00:28:55.060 | And many people look at journaling in a flawed way.

00:28:58.460 | I used to try to sit down and say, "Dear diary, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:04.380 | Here's what happened today."

00:29:05.380 | And I've never in my life been able to keep that kind of journal.

00:29:08.540 | It has never been interesting to me.

00:29:10.900 | And I've had a dozen times where I would say, "I'm going to journal every day," and I just

00:29:14.500 | didn't have anything interesting to say.

00:29:16.220 | Same.

00:29:17.220 | Right.

00:29:18.220 | And it's not to say that that's not important.

00:29:21.740 | In my own family, one of my sisters died when she was 14 years old.

00:29:25.820 | And one of the things that we always appreciated is that she was a faithful and committed personal

00:29:30.340 | journaler.

00:29:31.580 | So when she died, we had a stack of her notebooks for, I don't know how many years, but many

00:29:37.100 | years, up to the time when she was 14.

00:29:39.100 | And it was a great joy to be able to read those journals and get to know who she was

00:29:44.940 | based upon her dear diary entries.

00:29:47.740 | And so when I was growing up, knowing the value of those journals to my family, I tried

00:29:51.540 | to do that.

00:29:52.540 | I just never did it.

00:29:53.540 | Here's what I've learned, is that I can journal well if I tackle a problem.

00:29:57.580 | And so I learned to just say, "Write at the top of a page what the problem is that I'm

00:30:03.820 | working on.

00:30:04.900 | And then write below that what my solutions are."

00:30:08.960 | And that's basically one of the functions that a blog can be.

00:30:12.260 | And that's what my podcast is.

00:30:13.740 | Frequently I'll choose a topic and I'll say, "Here's my topic.

00:30:17.380 | Here's my premise."

00:30:18.380 | And then I'll prepare the show notes in advance that are essentially me talking through the

00:30:24.380 | problem and trying to prove or disprove my premise or my thesis.

00:30:29.440 | And so if you approach your blog in that way, you'll produce valuable, helpful content.

00:30:33.780 | It'll be most helpful to you if nobody reads, but it will have the side benefit of helping

00:30:39.540 | others.

00:30:40.740 | And I think if you do that consistently and effectively, that'll cement the foundation

00:30:46.580 | for your platform to grow.

00:30:49.300 | And then after you have that habit, then you can come back and say, "Well, what else can

00:30:54.500 | I do to share that with others?"

00:30:58.060 | The short answer is you just interact and make friends with others online and you say,

00:31:02.740 | "Here's what I'm doing."

00:31:03.900 | And then if you read a question that somebody has, instead of responding to it there on

00:31:09.260 | their website or writing them an email, you write it with your own public answer to that

00:31:15.420 | question.

00:31:16.420 | And what I encourage you, Zach, is don't be scared of the question.

00:31:20.180 | So for example, if you are trying to...

00:31:23.180 | If you're focused on earning a bachelor's degree by the age of 18, you should think

00:31:28.580 | about the problems with that plan and you should write about them.

00:31:32.500 | So you should say, "Well, what's the downside if I am able to successfully accomplish my

00:31:37.680 | goal of earning a bachelor's degree by the age of 18 through distance learning for a

00:31:42.540 | total of $10,000?"

00:31:44.580 | Then you should then say, "What am I giving up by doing this?"

00:31:51.060 | And you should write about that.

00:31:53.220 | And that's a good, valuable public blog post that you can share with others.

00:31:57.140 | And what you'll learn is that as you share these ideas in public, and what I would encourage

00:32:01.780 | you, Zach, at 14, is I would encourage you to be very cautious, to keep your public sharing

00:32:07.580 | of ideas focused on a specific topic, such as bachelor's by 18, rather than things that

00:32:14.020 | are very personal.

00:32:16.180 | Because the internet can be a wonderful place, but it can also be a very dangerous place.

00:32:20.620 | But if you write about the problems of gaining a degree by distance study at 18 and what

00:32:25.580 | you're giving up by not going to the local government college from 18 to 22, then you'll

00:32:32.900 | start to get comments and feedback from your listeners and they'll ask good questions.

00:32:36.420 | And then you can take that, develop it into the next question, develop it into the next

00:32:39.700 | point of contact.

00:32:42.220 | And the person who will win from that approach is you.

00:32:45.220 | Your listeners will benefit, but the one who wins the most will be you.

00:32:48.900 | Wow, thanks.

00:32:50.700 | Any follow-up questions or is that enough for today?

00:32:54.900 | I think that's it, but it's really cool because as I've been writing on there, I get emails

00:33:01.460 | from people who are like, "Thanks, this is so helpful.

00:33:03.620 | I see your blog everywhere."

00:33:05.100 | Or someone on the forum was like, "I'd like to thank Zach for helping me pass this exam."

00:33:09.540 | So it's just cool to be already seeing people passing exams from the blog.

00:33:14.860 | My operating mindset is very simple.

00:33:17.100 | I believe that these words are absolutely true.

00:33:22.140 | Jesus said this, "The greatest among you will be the servant of all."

00:33:27.900 | And if you just simply focus on serving, as Jesus taught, being a servant to all, if you

00:33:34.220 | focus on serving, everything works out.

00:33:38.540 | And a good writer, I think, focuses on serving their audience.

00:33:42.700 | It's hard to hit that 100% because you don't know whether what you're saying does serve

00:33:47.300 | the audience or not.

00:33:49.140 | And I have found that to be very challenging in my work.

00:33:51.860 | You don't know in advance if what you're doing is serving.

00:33:55.180 | But if you just have that servant's heart and you maintain that attitude of saying,

00:33:58.820 | "How can I be of service?"

00:34:00.780 | If you do that, that will be helpful to other people.

00:34:03.940 | And as one of my favorite quotes by Zig Ziglar, as he rephrased what Jesus said in this way,

00:34:10.300 | he said, "You can have everything in life you want if you just help enough other people

00:34:14.220 | get what they want."

00:34:15.740 | That's just a rephrasing of what Jesus taught, that the greatest among you must be the servant

00:34:19.540 | of all.

00:34:21.180 | If you keep that philosophy, what you'll see is it's really true.

00:34:26.700 | At every stage, the person who serves the most people is the one who gains the most

00:34:32.220 | benefits.

00:34:33.220 | And you can see this work out on the macro scale.

00:34:37.660 | Even in capitalism, you can see it work out in basically every area of our society.

00:34:44.140 | A company that serves the most customers effectively is a company that, in a free market system,

00:34:49.740 | absent government coercion, that's a company that will, over the long term, be built on

00:34:56.060 | a strong foundation.

00:34:57.060 | So just focus on serving, and what you'll find, I think, is that everything becomes

00:35:01.740 | simpler and you always have a foundation to go back to.

00:35:06.260 | Andy in Indiana, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

00:35:08.780 | How can I serve you today, sir?

00:35:10.660 | Hi, Joshua.

00:35:11.660 | Thank you for taking my call.

00:35:13.540 | I really appreciate this opportunity to call in and get some advice.

00:35:18.460 | I have a young friend of mine who is in an excellent financial position, and I've kind

00:35:23.540 | of wanted to get your input on if there was anything special you'd recommend that he be

00:35:27.940 | doing at this stage.

00:35:29.500 | So he's 18, graduated from high school, has a job with a local company where they will

00:35:36.100 | pay for his college education, basically whatever he wants to do that's related to the work

00:35:42.700 | that they do, which he wants to get an engineering degree, which is related, up to $7,000 a year

00:35:48.300 | as long as he's an employee.

00:35:50.700 | And then he also is working full-time with them, making about $40,000 a year, and is

00:35:55.820 | able to live with his parents.

00:35:57.900 | So I guess kind of the Mr. Money Mustache thing would be just throw it all in a 401(k)

00:36:03.180 | and a Vanguard account, and I wondered if you had any more suggestions for somebody

00:36:06.860 | that has that kind of income and low expenses.

00:36:11.260 | What a phenomenal situation to be in.

00:36:14.500 | How did he find...

00:36:15.500 | Do you know anything about the background?

00:36:16.680 | How he found this job?

00:36:17.940 | What he did to come to his boss's approval?

00:36:20.660 | Were they willing to approve this tremendous situation he's in?

00:36:25.900 | I actually work for the same company.

00:36:28.980 | I'm actually finishing the same apprenticeship program he's in.

00:36:32.740 | I'm just quite a bit older.

00:36:35.980 | The company across the board will pay for any of their employees to get education.

00:36:39.940 | That's just a standard employee benefit.

00:36:43.220 | And then the program he's in is an apprenticeship where he's apprenticing as a drafter.

00:36:49.540 | So he does CAD drawing for this engineering company.

00:36:55.920 | And then four years of on-the-job training, certain educational requirements that they

00:37:00.180 | have, which are part of a Bachelor's of Engineering degree, and then you work full-time in that

00:37:07.060 | apprenticeship.

00:37:08.060 | That is wonderful.

00:37:10.060 | If I could just wave my hands and rearrange the US-American culture without forcing people

00:37:22.300 | into a certain path, but rather encourage just a complete transformation of the normal

00:37:27.660 | process, what you're describing is, in my mind, ideal.

00:37:32.100 | It's what I hope that my children would be able to find and develop in the future.

00:37:37.220 | I see so many benefits in what you're describing.

00:37:39.980 | Let me just quickly enumerate those before answering your advice, just from the philosophical

00:37:47.340 | perspective.

00:37:48.340 | Well, there are a few major problems that I see that face young men and women in this

00:37:54.180 | delicate transitional age, 18, 16, 19, 20.

00:38:00.100 | It's an age at which there are a lot of questions, and it's an age at which either major mistakes

00:38:06.940 | can be made or major benefits can be had.

00:38:12.300 | If you look at them and analyze them, they fall into a few key areas.

00:38:21.700 | And so let's talk them through.

00:38:24.660 | One would be educational, in terms of what's the education that people are getting.

00:38:30.660 | Our current society has big questions about it.

00:38:34.100 | It's really messed up in the way that we approach education, because education usually lacks

00:38:38.820 | context and meaning.

00:38:41.260 | If a young man or woman is not trained in, is not active in a specific area, they usually

00:38:50.800 | just go based upon, "Well, what sounds fun to me?

00:38:53.140 | What job would sound interesting?

00:38:56.100 | What career sounds fun?"

00:38:57.980 | And you see kind of an increasing aimlessness amongst young men and young women, especially

00:39:04.040 | as it relates to college.

00:39:05.900 | Frequently, people will be undeclared in their major, "I'm just kind of exploring things."

00:39:11.300 | But exploring things in a college class can be either helpful or non-helpful.

00:39:17.060 | For your college career to be based upon exploration can be unhelpful.

00:39:20.860 | But if you have a career that's established and defined in purpose, then taking a little

00:39:25.740 | bit of exploration with things that interest you and enjoying the benefit of learning at

00:39:29.960 | that age can be really helpful.

00:39:31.980 | But educationally, there's a lot more value in study if it's connected to a career, if

00:39:37.300 | it's connected to a purpose.

00:39:39.100 | And so for somebody who is currently working and is apprenticed in an engineering firm,

00:39:44.980 | they're a junior drafter and they're learning on the job, that gives them the ability in

00:39:50.600 | their formal studies to apply what they're studying and actually have context and reason

00:39:56.700 | for it.

00:39:57.900 | And in the way that our culture is structured, where many firms don't want to work with people

00:40:03.260 | who are students while they're in school, really the traditional area of this was agriculture,

00:40:10.140 | where a farmer would send his son off to agriculture school.

00:40:13.540 | Well, at least he could come home and say, "Dad, here's what I'm learning," and they

00:40:16.060 | could start to apply the different techniques.

00:40:19.460 | But that should be in most businesses.

00:40:20.780 | So I love the apprentice model from an educational perspective because it allows there to be

00:40:25.460 | meaning and context with learning as related to the job.

00:40:30.700 | So the job gains because the firm is getting the benefit of the current academic knowledge

00:40:36.060 | and the student gains because they see meaning and application in what they're learning.

00:40:40.580 | One of my biggest regrets about my personal degree, my final, my cumulative bachelor's

00:40:45.740 | degree was in international business.

00:40:48.300 | I never found any relevance in studying business.

00:40:51.980 | It was always intellectual knowledge that didn't have any context.

00:40:57.020 | But when I got my master's degree in financial planning, I used that information every day.

00:41:01.780 | And for me, the educational balance of my bachelor's degree and my master's degree were

00:41:07.260 | night and day in terms of their impact on me.

00:41:10.500 | The second, of course, is financial.

00:41:12.100 | And what you described, I really love because instead of being an unproductive leech where

00:41:18.660 | the only benefit that a young man has here in this context is to spend money, spend money,

00:41:24.780 | spend money, then there's actually an earning component as well.

00:41:29.380 | So they can retain that self-worth of actually earning and being productive while also learning.

00:41:35.460 | And because they're earning, it gives a balance to their ability to interact normally financially

00:41:41.240 | with the world.

00:41:42.400 | If you take somebody totally out of the workforce and they have no income, it leads to challenges

00:41:46.880 | of how do you actually structure your life?

00:41:49.500 | How much money can you afford?

00:41:50.780 | How much money can you not afford?

00:41:52.620 | When I was in college, one of the great mistakes I made, my first year I worked my way through,

00:41:57.260 | but most of my work was spent paying for tuition.

00:42:00.220 | My second year, I stopped working and I started borrowing.

00:42:03.560 | But what happened was because I was borrowing, I kind of felt like, "Well, it's no big deal.

00:42:08.380 | When I graduate from college, I'm going to have this great high-paying job, so I might

00:42:11.980 | as well just spend as much money now as it takes for me to enjoy my life."

00:42:16.020 | And so I spent, I dramatically overspent because I was spending free money, money that I got

00:42:21.220 | on student loans.

00:42:22.780 | And so if you can avoid that and you have somebody that's earning, then they're able

00:42:25.980 | to still put constraints on their budget and have the benefit, of course, of all of the

00:42:31.300 | financial benefits, which we'll get to, of their situation.

00:42:34.740 | And then the third thing is just the moral aspect of a young man's life.

00:42:39.260 | It's very, very bad and destructive for young men and women to have 168 hours a week available

00:42:44.940 | to them, of which only perhaps 12 to 18 hours are committed in class.

00:42:50.660 | That leads to so much free time and it's fundamentally destructive to most or many students' lives,

00:42:59.140 | where it leads to idleness, it leads to bad choices, it leads to just a very, very bad

00:43:04.860 | indulgence of hedonism frequently, which leads to moral rot.

00:43:10.100 | And so one of the most important things, I think, for young men and women is to maintain

00:43:14.860 | themselves very busy.

00:43:16.180 | And I find for myself that if I put in structure for myself, a busy structure, it helps me

00:43:22.420 | to stay out of the ditch, it helps me to keep on the straight and narrow.

00:43:26.900 | If I remove those time constraints, if I remove that busy structure to my life, then it's

00:43:31.740 | very easy for me to wind up in a ditch.

00:43:33.740 | So I love everything that you've said without my actually answering your question yet.

00:43:39.420 | I love what you're describing, Andy.

00:43:42.100 | I did think, Joshua, while you were speaking, one comment that you asked about how he was

00:43:46.020 | able to get into that position.

00:43:47.020 | And I think it may be helpful to put this to mention, like the job that he has is not

00:43:54.100 | a blue-collar job, or I mean, sorry, it's not a white-collar job.

00:43:56.820 | It's not a guy who's doing an engineering job.

00:43:59.780 | He's in a union apprenticeship that if he does everything right and works really hard

00:44:04.780 | in 15 years, he'll top out making $70,000, $75,000 a year.

00:44:09.820 | And almost everybody in that program, because I'm actually in the same union program at

00:44:15.540 | the moment myself, is from a blue-collar background, has no aspirations to get a college degree,

00:44:22.380 | has no aspirations to move up within the company.

00:44:25.700 | They just are intending to top out in that union job, which is a very good job, don't

00:44:31.820 | get me wrong, but where he's looking to maybe get an engineering degree and move on, he

00:44:37.140 | will have to leave the union.

00:44:38.140 | So to get somebody from a white-collar background looking for a good job in this company, I

00:44:44.940 | very much doubt any of them would actually look at the program that he's in.

00:44:50.900 | Usually you need somebody younger to take advantage of that, but there are so many opportunities

00:44:56.680 | right now for people to get great jobs, earning good amounts of money if they're willing to

00:45:01.500 | work and if they're willing to get their hands dirty in the nature of their business.

00:45:05.980 | And so as far as career advice, what I would say is basically the perfect approach for

00:45:12.460 | somebody like him is one, do good work and keep your job and learn on the job and study

00:45:19.080 | whatever's necessary on the job so that you actually can just excel at the requirements

00:45:27.060 | of your work.

00:45:28.060 | Two, get the engineering degree, because an engineering degree is a hard science degree,

00:45:33.540 | which is very valuable in the marketplace.

00:45:35.380 | It's valuable because it imparts practical tools and it separates and sets apart the

00:45:40.860 | student from somebody who's pursuing some random degree in sociology or communications

00:45:48.300 | theory or something that doesn't have very much practical application.

00:45:52.780 | Engineering has a basic corpus of academic knowledge that can be applied in various specialties,

00:46:02.980 | and so that sets him apart in terms of his basic, the value of that education.

00:46:10.560 | Number three is I would do self-study in business, and the best recommendation I would have for

00:46:17.100 | him would be pick up Josh Kaufman's book, The Personal MBA, and read that book as just

00:46:24.580 | a pithy, hardcore summary of basic business concepts, and then in personal reading, work

00:46:36.740 | through his suggested book list of the Personal MBA book list.

00:46:41.460 | And if I were him, I would probably, after finishing the MBA degree, I would go ahead

00:46:46.180 | and take advantage of my educational velocity and just finish some distance learning MBA.

00:46:53.580 | There are a number of MBA programs that can be done entirely through distance learning

00:46:57.220 | without interfering with the day-to-day career, and they're inexpensive to get, but an engineer

00:47:06.420 | with an MBA is a very marketable individual in the job marketplace.

00:47:12.760 | That would be kind of my suggestion for him.

00:47:15.740 | Any comment on that before I go on to financial planning?

00:47:17.980 | No, that sounds like a great plan.

00:47:21.300 | So here would be my comments on financial planning.

00:47:26.980 | We're in the world of, is there anything wrong with this plan, for example?

00:47:30.700 | Is there anything wrong with this young man putting the majority of his investments into

00:47:36.820 | the Vanguard Total Money Index Fund, as my friend Jim Collins would recommend?

00:47:41.180 | No, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:47:43.560 | Is there anything wrong with this young man buying a house and living in it or renting

00:47:48.920 | it out?

00:47:49.920 | No, there's nothing wrong with it.

00:47:50.920 | So the first thing we would need to do is identify what are his interests and what's

00:47:58.540 | his natural bent?

00:47:59.860 | What is he naturally drawn to?

00:48:02.400 | That would be important, because in terms of identifying what's the right move for his

00:48:07.460 | money, he can't do that without knowledge of who he is.

00:48:11.780 | If he's a handy guy, he's working in a blue collar trade, and he's a handy guy and he

00:48:18.140 | has a good amount of money, he could be a great fit for buying a semi-dilapidated duplex,

00:48:26.620 | triplex, quadruplex, moving into one bedroom of a quadplex, renting out the other three

00:48:32.860 | units and one or two of the bedrooms in his own personal unit.

00:48:37.060 | That could be a tremendous use of his money.

00:48:40.040 | He could put himself in a situation where a couple years from now he strokes a check

00:48:44.340 | for $150,000 of cash and buys that, and it would be a tremendous use of his money.

00:48:50.380 | But if he has no interest in real estate, has no desire to learn about how to do it,

00:48:54.580 | then that's probably not a good move.

00:48:56.660 | If he's entirely interested in his corporate career, it's not bad for him to put all his

00:49:01.140 | money in a total stock market index fund and just to focus on his corporate career.

00:49:06.340 | That's a really simple, easy process.

00:49:08.900 | On the other hand, if he has interest in entrepreneurship, he may be able to use his engineering degree

00:49:13.620 | to get in with maybe somebody else that he meets and they want to start a new company.

00:49:18.260 | In that case, he finds some outlet for the money in his personal life.

00:49:24.740 | You can't really give good financial advice without the context of the individual nature

00:49:29.700 | of the investor or the individual nature of the person.

00:49:33.560 | Some people are well-suited to stock market investing.

00:49:37.380 | They have nerves of steel.

00:49:39.060 | They're knowledgeable about it.

00:49:40.740 | They're not going to sell when the market dips.

00:49:42.660 | They're not going to get greedy when Bitcoin is shooting off and the S&P 500 is stagnant.

00:49:48.100 | They're good fits for the stock market.

00:49:51.660 | Some people are good fits for some unique trading strategies within the market.

00:49:57.120 | They enjoy it.

00:49:58.120 | They study it.

00:49:59.120 | They want to spend their time doing it.

00:50:00.120 | Some people are not good temperamental fits for that, and they're really best at buying

00:50:03.940 | local houses and fixing them up.

00:50:06.260 | You have to know about the investor individually.

00:50:08.940 | Let me give you the things I do think are important.

00:50:12.880 | Number one, I think the first thing for a young man to focus on is, to the best degree

00:50:17.380 | that he knows, to choose location.

00:50:21.340 | In the current situation, he's able to live with his parents and he has a great job and

00:50:25.540 | a great college.

00:50:26.620 | He probably shouldn't make any changes.

00:50:28.900 | That's the perfect scenario in my opinion.

00:50:31.980 | But if he does want to live in a different location for some reason, it's best to make

00:50:36.100 | those transitions as early in life as possible because locational stability is very valuable,

00:50:42.100 | but it has to be started at an early age.

00:50:44.460 | But the earlier it starts, the better.

00:50:46.180 | A 50-year-old who's been in a local community for 30 years and who runs a local business

00:50:51.740 | and who's been active in the local community will have a much stronger base to their life

00:50:57.580 | than a 50-year-old who just moved into the town two years prior.

00:51:01.380 | If there's any uncertainty about location, then the person should choose that as clearly

00:51:07.740 | as they know.

00:51:09.780 | With regard to money, the first focus with money should be to save and to establish for

00:51:15.780 | that location, to save and to figure out what needs to be done to be in that location.

00:51:21.500 | The second thing is career choice.

00:51:23.900 | What career choice is available to them?

00:51:26.660 | If somebody is not well-established in a particular career, then they should focus on exploring

00:51:33.540 | that career.

00:51:34.540 | Now, it sounds like he's got a good start, but there may be more things to do with money

00:51:38.380 | related to that career in the days to come.

00:51:41.420 | And so if he needs to pay for his own MBA or if he needs to pay for something outside

00:51:47.020 | of what's provided for this job, he should be available and aware of it and have money

00:51:53.300 | saved for that goal and for that benefit.

00:51:55.860 | The third thing is personal relationships.

00:51:58.220 | So one of the best focuses of his time should be into establishing his personal relationships

00:52:05.620 | and making sure that he makes few decisions without having those big things squared away.

00:52:13.140 | I've come to the conviction through personal experience and through study that to encourage

00:52:19.300 | somebody to invest in any kind of outside investment until they have the basic structure

00:52:27.060 | of their life established is probably unwise.

00:52:32.860 | And I don't know any way to prove any hard numbers, but I'll tell you the two that I've

00:52:36.460 | shared on the show that I think are really important.

00:52:39.260 | The numbers are $10,000 and $100,000.

00:52:42.700 | The first goal, I don't think any investment should be made until a young man or woman

00:52:46.580 | has $10,000 cash in the bank and is debt free.

00:52:50.500 | If you have $10,000 cash in the bank and you're debt free, there is almost no life decision

00:52:56.500 | that you couldn't make.

00:52:57.860 | You can move across the country, you can change jobs, you can change careers.

00:53:02.660 | You'll be scrambling a little bit.

00:53:04.140 | $10,000 might only cover your income for a few months, but you can do that if you're

00:53:08.980 | $10,000 and debt free.

00:53:10.220 | So that should be his first goal.

00:53:11.860 | The better goal, I think, is $100,000 and debt free.

00:53:15.440 | If you have $100,000 of cash in the bank and you're debt free, there's no limit on your

00:53:20.500 | ability to marry.

00:53:22.200 | There's no limit on your ability to buy property, to start businesses, to change location, anything.

00:53:28.780 | And in terms of the strength, the emotional strength that somebody has by having $100,000

00:53:35.780 | in the bank being debt free, I don't think you can match that with the fact of somebody

00:53:41.740 | being having the money in a mutual fund or having the money in real estate or really

00:53:47.540 | anything.

00:53:48.540 | So those would be my first pieces of advice to him.

00:53:51.100 | Clarify where he wants to live, the career that he wants to be involved in, and what

00:53:55.860 | the prospects are for his marriage relationships.

00:53:58.820 | Set a clear goal of building the first $10,000 in the bank and then $100,000 in the bank

00:54:03.580 | and debt free.

00:54:04.700 | And then once those goals are met, to apply that diligence to figuring out what the path

00:54:10.740 | to financial independence is going to be.

00:54:13.020 | And here I'd recommend episode 460 of the show, which I did, which was called How to

00:54:17.220 | Decide What to Invest In, which walks somebody through that thinking process to say, "Okay,

00:54:22.780 | I've got this base, this foundation.

00:54:26.680 | Now where do I go?"

00:54:28.840 | In the early years, I made the mistake of following basic financial planning books,

00:54:36.260 | which said, "Put all your money in a Roth IRA, put all your money into mutual funds."

00:54:41.940 | And I didn't enjoy the stability of life that I would have if somebody had just told me,

00:54:47.900 | "First $10,000, then $100,000 in the bank."

00:54:51.020 | And now in my early 30s with a young family, I wish I had followed a different path.

00:54:57.560 | Because although I made a little bit of money on stocks and although I made a little bit

00:55:00.900 | of money on various other investments, the emotional and life security gained by having

00:55:10.880 | money in the bank and being debt free, those are things that I would not trade for a slightly

00:55:17.740 | higher rate of return in stocks at this stage of life.

00:55:22.900 | I'm against basically all of financial advice in that, but it has been a source of great

00:55:29.300 | satisfaction and peace to me to go against it.

00:55:33.060 | And all I can do is speak from experience and from a little bit of analysis.

00:55:36.900 | Those would be my thoughts, Andy.

00:55:37.900 | So this is a rough map in my head with what he's able to save of $1,500 or $2,000 a month.

00:55:46.420 | Would you recommend he basically puts that all in a savings account in the bank for the

00:55:54.380 | next four or five years until he's got $100,000?

00:55:57.380 | Am I understanding that correctly?

00:56:00.740 | Basically yes.

00:56:01.740 | And here's where I think it is valuable to say, is this a hard and fast rule?

00:56:06.780 | No, I don't think so.

00:56:08.300 | So what could I imagine in terms of, let's say, fast forward a year.

00:56:14.060 | Because if he doesn't have, absolutely it should be $10,000 in the bank.

00:56:19.220 | Every young man or woman should maintain $10,000 in cash in an emergency fund as quickly as

00:56:24.620 | they can.

00:56:25.900 | But there could come a point where, let's say, two years from now he realizes that this

00:56:30.100 | company, although it's a great deal and he's enjoying it now, two years from now he realizes

00:56:36.660 | this company and this industry is not for him.

00:56:39.300 | Well, he should cut bait and move on to the next thing that might be for him.

00:56:44.780 | He should go explore that as quickly as possible.

00:56:47.460 | And just because they'll pay him an extra $7,000 for tuition doesn't mean he should

00:56:51.420 | stay there if he realizes that the career is not for him.

00:56:55.060 | Time's a wasting.

00:56:56.060 | He may need to go and try something else and something different.

00:56:58.940 | So I wouldn't stick with the career and stick with the college plan just so I could

00:57:04.100 | get to the financial goal.

00:57:05.260 | I would say, let me fix that because that's prior to the financial goal.

00:57:09.220 | So another example would be, let's say that he takes an interest in something like real

00:57:14.540 | estate investing.

00:57:15.540 | Well, I wouldn't encourage him to go out and buy a house if he doesn't have $10,000

00:57:19.300 | in the bank.

00:57:20.300 | But let's say, fast forward two years and he's got $35,000 in the bank.

00:57:23.980 | And he and his dad are looking around.

00:57:25.900 | They find a property and he's studied.

00:57:28.020 | He's been reading his books, et cetera.

00:57:29.860 | And he's figured out, listen, here's what I can do.

00:57:32.620 | Dad will lend me $20,000.

00:57:34.180 | I've got $20,000 here.

00:57:36.220 | We'll make a $40,000 down payment and the owner will hold the financing.

00:57:40.180 | This would be a great place.

00:57:41.180 | I'll move in there and I'll put a bunch of buddies from college in the other units.

00:57:46.180 | Then I wouldn't say that he has to wait to make that decision until he has $100,000 in

00:57:50.060 | the bank.

00:57:51.060 | But I would caution him to do it too fast.

00:57:53.340 | And that's where I don't know how to put more – I don't know how to make a hard line.

00:57:57.940 | I don't think a hard line should be drawn.

00:58:00.740 | It's a matter of what's the current goal.

00:58:03.620 | Same thing with like let's say that he meets a girl and he wants to get married.

00:58:05.980 | He should get married.

00:58:06.980 | He shouldn't wait on saving until I have $100,000 in the bank.

00:58:10.900 | If he decides, hey, this is a girl I want to marry, he should marry.

00:58:14.260 | And so maybe he takes money from his savings to buy a ring, pay for a wedding, have a nice

00:58:19.700 | honeymoon, whatever they decide is important.

00:58:22.300 | That's more important than reaching the $100,000 goal.

00:58:25.740 | But conceptually I'd want to move towards that foundation as quickly as possible over

00:58:30.460 | time.

00:58:31.460 | But not put significant assets into Roth or 401(k) or other mutual funds until you've

00:58:40.100 | got that.

00:58:41.100 | So I wouldn't focus heavily on it.

00:58:43.760 | And here's where you get into a little bit of nuance, which is hard.

00:58:48.300 | If his company has a 401(k) and if he gets a match on the money, then I think that would

00:58:55.380 | be worth participating in up to the match.

00:58:58.340 | That's fine.

00:58:59.420 | That's usually a small amount of money and that's relatively meaningless.

00:59:04.860 | Using a Roth IRA, should he put money in a Roth IRA?

00:59:07.540 | I think so.

00:59:08.540 | I don't see any reason not to.

00:59:10.120 | If he puts $5,000 into a Roth IRA, there's no problem.

00:59:14.960 | There are no penalties for him to withdraw his original contributions at any time.

00:59:19.500 | And so I would encourage him to use a Roth IRA.

00:59:23.340 | But I would be slow to invest all the money into stocks until I really had built up savings.

00:59:29.200 | And so there's nothing wrong with those things.

00:59:31.180 | I'm trying to lay out what I see as the big picture goal.

00:59:34.160 | And then those just simple tactics come in.

00:59:35.860 | Yeah, that's fine.

00:59:36.860 | Use a Roth IRA.

00:59:37.860 | Use a 401(k) if you have it.

00:59:39.140 | I don't have any problem with that.

00:59:41.140 | What I have a problem with, let me clarify.

00:59:42.580 | What I have a problem with is focusing first and foremost on the Roth IRA as a way of leading

00:59:48.360 | to wealth rather than focusing on life stability because that's what I did and I regret.

00:59:53.220 | When I was 18 years old, I had read a book.

00:59:55.340 | I read various books and they said, "Put money in a Roth IRA."

00:59:58.580 | And so on my 18th birthday, I sat down.

01:00:00.620 | I filled out the paperwork.

01:00:01.620 | Of course, I could have done before 18, but for me, that 18th birthday was just a day

01:00:06.020 | that I did.

01:00:07.020 | So I filled out a paperwork for a Roth IRA.

01:00:08.900 | I opened a local mutual fund and I started putting, I think, a couple hundred dollars

01:00:13.060 | a month into the mutual fund with a mutual fund company in the Roth IRA.

01:00:17.380 | The problem was I didn't have a purpose for that beyond retirement and retirement didn't

01:00:21.700 | matter to me.

01:00:23.180 | What I came to realize was that by viewing that as retirement, yeah, it was fine that

01:00:27.420 | I saved up some money and I have some money in a Roth IRA.

01:00:30.680 | And yes, I could go and take the money out and use it for my own personal expenses.

01:00:35.780 | But what I missed by focusing only on age 65 retirement, I missed having the money available

01:00:42.500 | for myself to make intelligent career choices, to make intelligent choices with my marriage

01:00:49.860 | and having a clear financial goals early on in my marriage.

01:00:53.260 | I missed having the foundation to pursue some personal things that I could have pursued.

01:01:01.820 | Now I look back and I realize a few different occasions where I was feeling pinched financially,

01:01:09.960 | but I wasn't going to touch the money in the Roth IRA because once I put it in, I'm going

01:01:13.340 | to leave it alone.

01:01:14.420 | There were times at which I should have used gaps in my life to further my long-term career

01:01:20.700 | ambitions instead of just having money in a Roth IRA.

01:01:24.640 | That was a very verbose way of answering the question, but that's what I want to protect

01:01:28.200 | young people from.

01:01:29.200 | I want to teach young people how to use money, but to use it not just for this ultimate goal

01:01:34.560 | of till 65.

01:01:36.680 | I want them to apply that focus and to adjust it not from 65, but to apply it to now, which

01:01:42.640 | will lead to 65 working well.

01:01:44.960 | I was very disciplined about putting money in a mutual fund for retirement because I

01:01:48.720 | knew how compound interest charts worked.

01:01:50.880 | But what I found is that just because I could look at the compound interest chart and see,

01:01:55.600 | "Well, look, I'm going to be so much richer at 65 because I started at 18," I made a lot

01:02:00.120 | of mistakes from 18 to 20, till now.

01:02:03.440 | I'm not immune to mistakes, but I made a lot of mistakes during that 18 to 25-year timeline

01:02:10.880 | that I now regret.

01:02:12.280 | I wish I had done things differently knowing what I now know.

01:02:17.140 | That's my answer.

01:02:18.140 | All right.

01:02:19.140 | Thanks, Seth.

01:02:20.140 | Thank you.

01:02:21.140 | My hope is that he's a learner.

01:02:23.320 | The only way I know how to handle those things is to encourage him to be exposed to different

01:02:27.960 | ideas and to think carefully about what he's working towards and why, and then go from

01:02:34.520 | there.

01:02:35.520 | Matthew, back to you for your final question, which I didn't expect to be so appropriate

01:02:38.720 | given that previous call.

01:02:40.760 | But go ahead with your second question for today's show, please.

01:02:45.240 | Absolutely.

01:02:46.520 | The one question that I run into all the time when I'm reading a new blog or a new book,

01:02:51.400 | and I continually find myself asking, "Who has had a significant influence on the author's

01:02:56.800 | life while I'm reading?"

01:02:58.600 | Now you can typically find out after reading a little bit of their writing, but it never

01:03:02.860 | is really explicitly stated by the author.

01:03:06.520 | Also know that most people have thousands of different influencers that have shaped

01:03:09.840 | the way that they think.

01:03:11.240 | However, with the Pareto principle, there are only a few influencers that make up the

01:03:15.280 | 80%.

01:03:16.280 | My question is, who would be the top five people that have had the most influence on

01:03:20.920 | your life?

01:03:21.920 | I don't know if five is the right number, so feel free to choose three or ten or whatever

01:03:25.160 | works out better for you.

01:03:27.520 | So here, it's a good question, and it lines perfectly with what I just went through on

01:03:31.760 | the previous call.

01:03:33.320 | Let me lay out five, because of course we all have hundreds, and I could trace things

01:03:38.960 | that I appreciate about all kinds of people.

01:03:40.640 | One thing I am good at is I'm good at reading people that I disagree with and trying to

01:03:47.080 | just learn just a little bit and gain from that.

01:03:49.240 | I don't think that anyone...

01:03:51.480 | I don't have a monopoly on wisdom, and so I try to plunder the Egyptians and take anything

01:03:59.400 | I can from anywhere I can, take wisdom and insight from anywhere.

01:04:05.240 | And I also think that it's hard to overstate the importance of timing.

01:04:09.480 | A lot of people's influences come down to the time at which they're exposed to something

01:04:15.580 | or to somebody.

01:04:17.280 | And so I'll restrict this to finances, but explain just a few influences.

01:04:24.840 | So the first, and I'll do this chronologically in terms of my own thinking.

01:04:29.000 | Some of my early influences on wealth and kind of wealth building were get-rich-quick

01:04:35.720 | gurus.

01:04:36.960 | When I was younger and in high school, I wanted to get rich, and of course it's relatively

01:04:42.680 | easy to find the get-rich-quick gurus at that stage.

01:04:46.320 | And so from the shady ones, I'm going to intentionally avoid naming names, just because I don't wish

01:04:54.800 | to...

01:04:55.800 | Well, I'm going to avoid naming names.

01:04:59.280 | But from the popular ones at my era, there were a number of gurus that laid out certain

01:05:04.720 | things that said, "I'll name...

01:05:07.240 | It's not that all bad."

01:05:08.240 | So examples from the early days would be Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

01:05:11.800 | Robert Kiyosaki was extremely influential.

01:05:14.320 | He came to his height of fame right at the time at which I was paying attention to finances.

01:05:20.800 | And so I remember I was with a whole group of peers that were reading Rich Dad, Poor

01:05:25.480 | Dad.

01:05:26.480 | It was passed all around everywhere.

01:05:27.480 | We were all thinking about, "How do I move into the B or the I quadrant, and how do we

01:05:32.600 | get rich with these things?"

01:05:34.940 | That led me to the world of real estate gurus.

01:05:38.840 | There were other people as well, the multiple streams of income, Robert Allen, kind of the

01:05:42.680 | gurus.

01:05:43.680 | I moved into the real estate guru world from randomly going to a seminar and starting to

01:05:52.480 | move into that world.

01:05:54.080 | And everything was about, "How do you get rich, and how do you get rich quick?"

01:05:57.520 | And that was a big, big focus of mine, is how do I get rich, and how do I get rich quick?

01:06:02.680 | And I'm very appreciative of some of the things that I learned from many of those people.

01:06:07.040 | But today I look at it, and I realize that I didn't know what I didn't know.

01:06:10.800 | I didn't know how to spot danger.

01:06:12.160 | I didn't know how to spot charlatans who were just seeking to defraud me, and who were

01:06:18.440 | painting it as so easy to get rich that I didn't know.

01:06:26.240 | They painted it so easy, and they focused on the lust for wealth rather than the principles

01:06:31.920 | that would lead to wealth.

01:06:33.560 | I remember this so clearly.

01:06:35.440 | When I was in my early years in college, I went to a real estate seminar down in Miami.

01:06:40.000 | It was a three-day seminar that I had gone to, and this was a big and very fraudulent

01:06:44.960 | industry during that time period.

01:06:47.760 | But I went to this seminar down in Miami, and the presenter of the seminar was a—it

01:06:54.040 | was for a Russ Whitney seminar.

01:06:55.800 | Russ Whitney's organization was huge at the time.

01:06:58.680 | It later went on to collapse.

01:06:59.720 | He ran into some legal trouble.

01:07:02.320 | I haven't heard—I haven't followed the cases that have come since then.

01:07:07.680 | But it was a presenter in the Russ Whitney seminar world.

01:07:12.720 | I remember so clearly, in hindsight now, I can analyze what was done at that seminar,

01:07:19.560 | where everything that led was about, "Look at me.

01:07:22.620 | Look how rich I am."

01:07:23.620 | The presenter came in and looked sharp.

01:07:26.360 | He was wearing his beautiful suit and red tie, just the power suit.

01:07:32.080 | He looked sharp.

01:07:33.800 | Everything that started the seminar was all about how much money he had.

01:07:39.600 | It's printed clearly on my memory, the picture that he showed of his provost or prevo, his

01:07:47.080 | big old provost coach, these million-dollar bus motorhomes that he owned, and that he

01:07:52.760 | parked in front of the hotel.

01:07:55.440 | His saying at the seminar was, he said, "My driver drives my bus down.

01:07:59.580 | The driver stays in the hotel, and I stay in my million-dollar prevo bus because I don't

01:08:05.940 | want to stay in the hotel room.

01:08:07.040 | I'm more comfortable in my own space."

01:08:15.040 | Now I can clearly understand the psychological manipulation that was happening there, because

01:08:20.240 | the point of that seminar—it was of moderate cost—was to go on and sell the $30,000 real

01:08:25.320 | estate coaching package.

01:08:28.860 | But I didn't see it at the time.

01:08:30.100 | I didn't have the filters.

01:08:31.680 | I was gullible and naive.

01:08:35.140 | I was looking at this, and then they start showing the deals of, "Here's the picture.

01:08:39.180 | I bought this house for $60,000, and then I flipped it and fixed it up, and I sold it

01:08:43.500 | for $180,000."

01:08:44.500 | It's just this ongoing lifestyle salesmanship that really was influential on me.

01:08:50.620 | It was only by the grace of God and the intervention of my dad, who, when I was about to sign myself

01:08:56.300 | up for $30,000 on my credit card, to join the real estate coaching, who forcefully put

01:09:01.500 | his foot down and said, "Joshua, that is stupid.

01:09:04.860 | Don't do it."

01:09:05.860 | Thankfully, I listened to him and didn't do it.

01:09:07.980 | I'm so grateful for that, because I went on and watched a number of my friends who pursued

01:09:12.580 | it, and two that I've had contact with that went into the real estate business.

01:09:17.220 | Both of them went bankrupt.

01:09:19.820 | One of them fought his way out of it, and one of them didn't.

01:09:24.160 | It was a difficult time.

01:09:28.580 | But there were a bunch of gurus at that time that had an influence on me.

01:09:32.500 | The next person that was influential was Dave Ramsey.

01:09:35.760 | In the midst of all that guruness and all the get-rich-quick, then I was given by my

01:09:41.700 | brother a copy of Dave Ramsey's book, The Total Money Makeover.

01:09:45.140 | I was at the time a finance and accounting major in college.

01:09:49.340 | I read the book, and it was a transformative influence on me, because what Ramsey said

01:09:55.660 | was, he presented a simple plan.

01:09:58.780 | The statement that that book focused heavily on was peace.

01:10:02.980 | His first book, or one of his earlier books, was Financial Peace.

01:10:06.440 | He made the point, he said, "If you don't have any payments, how much money do you have?

01:10:10.580 | If you didn't have any payments in a month, how much money would you have every month?"

01:10:15.940 | At that time, I had put myself deeply into debt with credit cards and student loans,

01:10:21.540 | and that statement just really made sense to me.

01:10:25.220 | His plan was so simple that I understood it, and it spurred me to action.

01:10:33.360 | To this day, I don't think there's anybody better than Ramsey in his ability to give

01:10:40.420 | a simple plan that stirs people to action.

01:10:44.540 | I say that after a decade of combating him as a ... Not a decade, excuse me, that was

01:10:49.620 | a wrong timeline.

01:10:52.340 | After a decade of influence, I spent six years as a financial advisor, and I was really disgusted

01:10:56.900 | with Ramsey during that time, because I would have all kinds of technical arguments with

01:11:01.100 | him.

01:11:02.100 | I would be upset at the technical financial planning statements he would make about investments

01:11:05.780 | and investment returns, or about insurance.

01:11:11.220 | I sold whole life insurance, and he hated hates whole life insurance, and different

01:11:15.020 | things like that.

01:11:16.660 | Those technical things are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme.

01:11:20.140 | He is brilliant at creating a simple plan.

01:11:25.300 | In my earlier years as a financial advisor, I thought, "Well, the technical argument is

01:11:29.020 | the key one."

01:11:30.020 | Like in the previous call, "Well, it's all about putting money in the Roth IRA."

01:11:32.980 | No, it's not.

01:11:34.500 | If you just put some structure in place, you can use a Roth or not use a Roth, but that's

01:11:38.340 | not the thing.

01:11:40.180 | His baby steps were so influential in my life.

01:11:44.020 | They led to my getting out of debt, which was really important at a certain stage.

01:11:53.060 | Without his baby steps, I couldn't have become a financial advisor, because I would have

01:11:57.340 | been in debt and not been able to make the lean early years as a financial advisor.

01:12:03.980 | His influence was really, really important.

01:12:06.700 | To this day, Ramsey does so much good.

01:12:11.780 | If somebody just followed the Ramsey plan, it's hard to see the error in it.

01:12:18.460 | It's really hard to see it.

01:12:21.500 | The technical side of me wants so much to argue with him and to talk about, "Look, I

01:12:26.060 | can make it better, and I can do this trick and that trick."

01:12:28.660 | What I've learned is it doesn't so much come down to tactic and technique.

01:12:32.940 | It comes down to behavior.

01:12:34.940 | He does so much good.

01:12:36.460 | I've wondered at various times if I should go and work or try to go and work with him.

01:12:40.540 | I don't have any contact.

01:12:41.980 | I met him a few years ago when I was in Nashville and talked with a couple of his team, but

01:12:45.500 | I have no contact with his organization.

01:12:47.540 | They do so much good that today, even though I might have a good friendly argument with

01:12:52.180 | him in terms of his approach and some of the technical things, he's brilliant.

01:12:59.580 | I love how he helps people focus on behavior.

01:13:04.600 | If people just followed his plan, there aren't a lot of errors in it.

01:13:09.940 | He was very influential to my financial philosophy.

01:13:13.820 | As a financial advisor, in interacting with people, I started to see how the solutions

01:13:19.620 | weren't technical.

01:13:20.660 | They were behavioral.

01:13:22.180 | For a long time, I would buy his books by the case, and I would give them to clients

01:13:25.780 | that were in debt that I couldn't afford to help.

01:13:27.860 | They didn't have any money.

01:13:29.340 | I couldn't help them, so I just gave them a book and said, "Here, maybe this will help

01:13:32.140 | you."

01:13:33.140 | The other influence in the financial perspective was Tom Stanley.

01:13:35.860 | I'd been aware of Tom Stanley at an earlier age in terms of—I forget the year in which

01:13:43.180 | Millionaire Next Door became popular, but it was about the time that I was paying attention

01:13:51.100 | to this, maybe a little bit before me.

01:13:52.940 | That was one of the canon of personal finance literature that was influential with me.

01:13:58.620 | What I went on to do was I didn't stop with The Millionaire Next Door, but I started to

01:14:02.060 | read his technical books.

01:14:04.340 | He wrote three books prior to Millionaire Next Door, or I don't remember the timeline,

01:14:09.300 | but he wrote three books.

01:14:10.380 | One was called Marketing to the Affluent.

01:14:12.700 | One was called Selling to the Affluent.

01:14:14.340 | One was called Networking with the Affluent.

01:14:17.300 | Those books, as a financial advisor, were helpful to me in seeking to build my—I tried

01:14:25.780 | to use them as a platform for my business to try to understand who is the millionaire

01:14:30.300 | next door and try to work with those millionaires next door.

01:14:34.900 | In doing that, I came in contact with a lot of millionaires next door.

01:14:39.500 | I realized that what I wanted in terms of their wealth or what I wanted in terms of

01:14:45.620 | finance, I didn't want to be the ostentatious, flashy real estate guy.

01:14:51.660 | I wanted to be the guy who—I think so clearly of a friend of mine.

01:14:57.620 | He was a real estate investor.

01:14:58.620 | I've tried and tried to get him on the show.

01:15:00.060 | He refuses, but he was a real estate investor.

01:15:03.260 | He just basically lived his life in a pair of cargo shorts and a polo shirt and a pair

01:15:10.980 | of boat shoes, has a nice yacht, has a nice normal house that he lives in, but he's

01:15:14.820 | insanely wealthy.

01:15:15.820 | I know a bunch of these guys that are insanely wealthy and their life and their lifestyle

01:15:20.740 | of freedom based upon true frugality and outward frugality, it changed me because I recognized

01:15:29.860 | that's really, really valuable.

01:15:31.660 | They don't have the baggage of public wealth.

01:15:36.700 | Rather, they have the enjoyment of wealth without it coming with any curses.

01:15:43.300 | Usually, they do it in all different businesses.

01:15:45.660 | They do it in all different industries, but I learned that from Stanley.

01:15:48.900 | Stanley and his profiles of people were really, really impactful.

01:15:54.480 | His later work was also really good.

01:15:56.620 | I wish that he were still around.

01:15:59.740 | It's my regret that I never, although I had a little interaction with him, I really

01:16:02.780 | wanted to get him on the show and oh well.

01:16:07.620 | Stanley was helpful to me.

01:16:08.620 | Someday soon, I'll do a show.

01:16:10.420 | The title is Lifestyles of the Frugal and Obscure because that really is, I believe,

01:16:16.620 | transformative.

01:16:17.620 | The next person who was influential in terms of a chronological impact for me was a man

01:16:23.820 | in Gary North.

01:16:25.100 | I stumbled across Gary North in my interest in economics when I was a financial advisor.

01:16:31.060 | This was probably almost a decade ago.

01:16:34.100 | I stumbled across his website and I started reading his stuff.

01:16:37.720 | Because I was interested in his economic analysis, I became familiar with his work.

01:16:46.260 | In reading his work, he would make allusions to things that didn't make sense to me but

01:16:51.540 | that I was attracted to.

01:16:53.460 | Specifically, his hardcore writing on the intersection of Christian theology, economics,

01:17:00.980 | and personal finance, that that intersection to me was fascinating because I'd always had

01:17:06.500 | an interest in economics.

01:17:07.980 | I had enjoyed economics classes in college, although I was trained from a mainstream Keynesian

01:17:13.380 | perspective, just like most college economic students are.

01:17:16.860 | I'd always had an interest in personal finance, but much of the personal finance work was

01:17:21.540 | outside of Christian theology.

01:17:24.900 | And then much of the personal finance work in Christian theology was so mediocre that

01:17:29.460 | it's just, I had a hard time relating to it.

01:17:33.060 | Larry Burkett, for example, was a long-time Christian guy in the world of Christian financial

01:17:38.740 | advice.

01:17:39.740 | He did a good job.

01:17:40.740 | I'm not accusing him of being mediocre.

01:17:42.140 | But it seemed like most of my interest would wind up with secular writers or writers who

01:17:48.940 | didn't explicitly appeal to Christianity.

01:17:51.540 | And I always felt like there's something more here.

01:17:53.580 | There's something deeper.

01:17:56.080 | When I read the Bible, it's like there's something that I want to understand a little bit deeper.

01:18:01.660 | But I couldn't find, it was hard for me to access.

01:18:04.580 | And it seems like the trouble with reading the Bible and reading any particular verse

01:18:11.820 | is you can often find any verse or two that lays out what you want to believe, that appeals

01:18:17.180 | to your own confirmation bias.

01:18:18.740 | And it's much harder to take it as a whole and say, "Well, what's happening as a whole?"

01:18:23.580 | And so I started to learn that from North, and I started to read his economic commentaries.

01:18:29.580 | He wrote, so his background, he started when he was in his early 20s, in his mid-late 70s

01:18:34.180 | at this point.

01:18:35.180 | But he started writing an economic commentary on the Bible in his mid-20s, and he's worked

01:18:39.960 | on it for 50 years.

01:18:41.580 | He's written something, I mean, he's written 60 books, something like that.

01:18:44.900 | But he's written a verse-by-verse commentary on the economics of the Bible, and he wrote

01:18:55.100 | 30,000 pages to prepare for his ultimate last few books, which he's been writing, which

01:19:00.900 | are basically the capstone books, summarizing and synthesizing what he learned from his

01:19:06.340 | 50-year study of economics.

01:19:08.700 | And his work was very helpful to me philosophically and financially because of various philosophical

01:19:15.900 | conflicts I had.

01:19:17.340 | When I was in college, I had socialist professors, I had some conservative professors, but conservatism

01:19:25.680 | as a political philosophy has never made sense to me.

01:19:28.180 | I can't understand it having a firm foundation.

01:19:32.000 | So I had a bunch of socialist professors, but I also started reading in libertarianism.

01:19:36.540 | And I didn't know how to interact with these things.

01:19:40.140 | And North wrote extensively on an interaction with Jim Wallace, who is a prominent Christian,

01:19:49.180 | a mainstream Protestant Christian who is very prominent in an aspect of Christian theology

01:19:53.220 | that's called--not liberation theology--anyway, very prominent in kind of a socialist Christian

01:20:00.540 | message.

01:20:01.540 | And I always struggled to figure out, how on earth do I integrate that with what I see

01:20:05.300 | in scripture as well?

01:20:07.160 | And so North's writing through that was influential to me and helpful to me.

01:20:11.820 | I have struggled with a lot of what he has written because he exposed me to a number

01:20:18.420 | of things that I disagreed with but couldn't argue against.

01:20:23.860 | And I still struggle with that.

01:20:25.380 | I've read his recent books on Christian economics, and it's kind of one of those things where

01:20:31.220 | I wanted to believe, I want to--my confirmation bias wants me to accept what he says, but

01:20:37.140 | I have a hard time embracing it fully for various reasons.

01:20:41.020 | I've been intending for a long time to get him on the show and ask him some of my questions,

01:20:44.340 | and I intend to do that if he'll grant the interview.

01:20:47.440 | But he was influential for me in a period of time, kind of buttressing my willingness

01:20:52.680 | to defend intellectually things that I believe personally and not to shy away from basing

01:21:01.440 | everything on a biblical worldview.

01:21:03.540 | It was through North's writings that I wound up being exposed to an aspect of Christian

01:21:10.340 | apologetics that was championed by a man named Cornelius Van Till, who defended--he's dead

01:21:17.080 | now, but he defended a method of Christian apologetics that is called presuppositional

01:21:23.680 | apologetics.

01:21:25.120 | And that led me--I'd studied other apologetics methods as well, but it was the work of Cornelius

01:21:30.760 | Van Till, which was popularly championed by Greg Bonson before he died, that led me to

01:21:38.600 | kind of a deeper interaction with the intellectual presuppositions of political philosophy, and

01:21:46.640 | especially as it relates to finance.

01:21:48.400 | So you'll often hear some of that in my discussions, and those are the influences that were helpful

01:21:54.140 | to me.

01:21:55.140 | Let me move on.

01:21:56.560 | Finally, the fifth probably very influential person for me was reading Jacob Lund Fisker's

01:22:02.640 | book, Early Retirement Extreme, and his website.

01:22:06.740 | Because what Fisker unlocked for me was the mechanics of how financial independence could

01:22:14.640 | be achieved without relying on get-rich-quick schemes.

01:22:19.740 | And it's hard to describe how stupid I felt--I've described it in previous shows, but I felt

01:22:28.160 | so stupid when here I was, a financial planner, the CFP and a master's degree in financial

01:22:36.340 | planning and blah blah blah, I know how to run a financial calculator, and I had never

01:22:40.460 | sat down and understood the chart of two financial freedom and financial independence.

01:22:49.140 | And that was basically the final--that was one of the most influential things on me,

01:22:55.800 | where I understood the separation of income and expenses and how that related to wealth.

01:23:01.160 | And his work was so influential on me.

01:23:03.760 | It was also influential because I appreciated his engagement with other topics.

01:23:09.800 | His engagement with conservationism, environmentalism and conservationist approaches, his engagement

01:23:17.980 | with a bunch of things.

01:23:20.640 | And so Fisker was very influential to me and really, really helpful because he kind of

01:23:26.480 | made that final unlocking of things.

01:23:30.760 | And so if I were to go back and I were to trace my own--the development of my own personal

01:23:38.140 | opinions, those would be the intellectual thought leaders or the intellectual people

01:23:45.360 | that had profound influence on me.

01:23:49.300 | One was all the get-rich-quick gurus, two was Dave Ramsey, three was Tom Stanley, four

01:23:54.640 | was Gary North, and five was Jacob Lund Fisker.

01:23:57.640 | And then that was all buttressed by my academic studies in financial planning, where I was

01:24:04.040 | exposed to new areas as well.

01:24:06.640 | But those would be the five people that I would trace as having been deeply influential

01:24:10.600 | on my own financial philosophy.

01:24:13.400 | Oh, that's--yeah, that's an excellent way of actually thinking about things chronologically

01:24:21.400 | too.

01:24:22.400 | It's encouraged me to sit down and actually make a note of that as well, to think about

01:24:27.360 | it from a chronological perspective.

01:24:29.040 | Because if you were thinking about just a top five right off the top of your head, you

01:24:32.640 | would not think of the earlier years, because that's obviously--it's shaped and molded who

01:24:39.040 | you are today, but it wouldn't be who you would choose if you were telling me, "Here's

01:24:42.720 | the five people to go study."

01:24:44.840 | You know what I'm saying?

01:24:45.840 | It's an excellent way of looking at it.

01:24:47.800 | Right, right.

01:24:48.800 | And that chronology, I could trace the various challenges and struggles that I've had in

01:24:55.560 | different areas of my own philosophy.

01:24:57.240 | Let me give you an example.

01:24:59.920 | When I was younger--let's start with the Get Rich Quick guys, Get Rich Quick gurus.

01:25:04.200 | The Get Rich Quick gurus advertise hedonism as their primary advertising mechanism.

01:25:15.480 | It's all about, "Look at me, look at the car I drive, look at the house I live in," et

01:25:19.640 | cetera.

01:25:20.640 | I was raised with Christian parents who were not hedonists.

01:25:23.660 | My parents always gave a huge amount of money, gave significantly, and they met the needs

01:25:30.160 | of their family, but they never focused on consumption.

01:25:33.480 | But in that normal kind of adolescent and post-adolescent reaction against that, I was

01:25:38.800 | interested in getting rich so I can have fancy things.

01:25:41.960 | I used to make my lookbook of my $150,000 cars and my mansion on the water and all of

01:25:49.480 | that stuff.

01:25:50.480 | That was important to me.

01:25:51.560 | But then there was a time where, going through college, when I was born again towards the

01:25:55.460 | end of college, that my heart totally transformed.

01:25:59.000 | And then at that point in time, I was left struggling, saying, "Well, I don't have this

01:26:04.160 | desire anymore to get rich quick, but I don't know what to do."

01:26:08.200 | And so that kind of naturally led into some of those other influences.

01:26:12.280 | And so it was in understanding that frugality, for example, that I could be very content

01:26:20.360 | with frugality, but recognizing that there was no reason in the world why I couldn't

01:26:27.880 | earn $2 million a year, live on $50,000 per year, and give away or invest intelligently

01:26:36.040 | the other remainder.

01:26:38.760 | There wasn't any reason why I couldn't do that.

01:26:40.880 | And that solved for me some major personal, intellectual, and philosophical inconsistencies,

01:26:47.800 | things I struggled with to try to figure out, "How does this reconcile?

01:26:51.440 | How does this go together?"

01:26:53.160 | And so basically, how I have found that I learn is, when I have a question, I start

01:27:00.360 | studying the question.

01:27:01.560 | And then all of a sudden, I'll often find somebody who speaks to that question.

01:27:05.360 | It may have been somebody that's speaking today, or it may have been somebody that spoke

01:27:07.800 | 1,000 years ago.

01:27:10.960 | But often, before you ask the question, you didn't need the answer.

01:27:15.240 | And so it's once you ask the question that you come along and there's, "Oh, okay, I see

01:27:18.880 | this.

01:27:19.880 | Here's how this can work out."

01:27:22.760 | And so for me, each of those people, I can identify for you now, post hoc, I can identify

01:27:30.680 | the specific struggle I had, the problem that I couldn't fix, that each of those men influenced

01:27:38.960 | me in, that helped me to reconcile the seeming contradiction.

01:27:45.200 | Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time today to explain that.

01:27:52.080 | And thank you for taking my call.

01:27:54.520 | My pleasure.

01:27:55.520 | Well, thanks for calling it, and we'll look forward to your questions in the future.

01:27:59.560 | Thank you for being a faithful caller to these Friday Q&A shows.

01:28:03.000 | I always enjoy the interaction that we have here.

01:28:06.760 | As I hit the music, my closing comments would be this.

01:28:12.080 | If you are facing a question or a challenge, don't be scared of it, but lean into it.

01:28:20.920 | Don't be scared of questions.

01:28:22.440 | Now, I say that out of a philosophical conviction that truth exists.

01:28:28.760 | It exists outside of the human experience.

01:28:31.080 | And so that means that there should be nothing that it needs to be scared of.

01:28:35.900 | Truth exists independently of human knowledge and independently of human existence.

01:28:42.040 | That's given me that philosophical and religious presupposition has given me always the confidence

01:28:47.240 | to press forward and try to say, if I'm having a problem understanding an interaction with

01:28:54.960 | something, I can fix it.

01:28:55.960 | It can be solved.

01:28:56.960 | I just need to understand what the question is.

01:28:59.920 | So in your own intellectual journey, I have many questions of my own still today.

01:29:04.160 | And I think everyone I've talked to who's old and learned usually winds up at the end

01:29:09.560 | of their life, they wind up learning that they have many questions.

01:29:13.960 | You don't ever resolve all your questions.

01:29:16.600 | And I don't expect to ever resolve all of my questions.

01:29:19.040 | What you can do is you can use the study of the questions that you have, of the contradictions.

01:29:23.600 | You can use the studies that you have to help you to look at your questions, help you to

01:29:29.600 | answer them, and help to advance the total knowledge of humanity and help to lay a marker

01:29:38.040 | down for others.

01:29:40.200 | If you come along and if I were to trace some of the influential thinkers, whether it's

01:29:43.880 | religious, financial, philosophical, whatever, you can come down and you can look and you

01:29:50.560 | can trace the threads of conversation over thousands of years that have influenced who

01:29:55.680 | you and I are today.

01:29:57.560 | Now some of those threads are true and valid and some of them are not.

01:30:00.720 | Don't be scared of them.

01:30:01.720 | If you have a financial problem, lean into it and start studying.

01:30:05.520 | And I think that you'll be able to trace those thinkers for yourself.

01:30:09.080 | I wish you all a very happy Friday, a very good Friday, a very happy good Friday.

01:30:14.080 | And thank you for listening.

01:30:15.080 | I look forward to speaking with you on next week's Q&A call.

01:30:19.000 | Call into RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and join us next week for our Q&A call.

01:30:25.240 | RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

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RPF0537-Friday_QA