RPF0655-Friday_QA
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00:00:31.000 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, live Q&A.
00:00:50.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:52.760 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while
00:00:57.200 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, I am your
00:01:01.440 | host, and today it's Friday, and on Fridays I do a live call-in show. Whenever I can arrange
00:01:06.400 | the appropriate technology, I do a live call-in show. My favorite shows of the week, I hope
00:01:10.800 | they're yours too, I hope you at least enjoy them, because we never know what the phone
00:01:14.160 | lines hold.
00:01:22.240 | Friday shows are where I open up a live phone line to the listeners, and I go to the phone,
00:01:26.240 | and then whatever is waiting there, that's what we deal with. So I hope that you enjoy
00:01:29.600 | these shows. Now my life is getting a little bit more stable, my household is getting a
00:01:32.800 | little bit more quiet, so that means that my production schedule will be a little bit
00:01:36.920 | more consistent with these shows. We begin today, however, with Andy in Indiana. Andy,
00:01:42.280 | welcome to the show, how can I serve you today, sir?
00:01:45.280 | Thank you for taking my call. I just had a, I guess, hopefully a quick question about
00:01:51.880 | the kind of financial protection for a less financially active spouse. So my wife doesn't
00:02:02.040 | work outside the home, doesn't earn an income, and is not super interested in finances, so
00:02:07.800 | I guess I've seen a tendency in our lives and our relationship that I end up with more
00:02:14.240 | things titled in my name and more things building my credit and stuff because I'm the one doing
00:02:21.440 | it. I guess I was curious if you thought there was any reason to be concerned about that,
00:02:26.680 | or specific steps to take to make sure, you know, if I were to pass away or something
00:02:32.200 | putting her out on her own, you know, not like handicapping her in the future, if that
00:02:36.440 | makes sense.
00:02:37.440 | Yeah, I think it's a big concern, and definitely it's something that you should be thinking
00:02:41.340 | about and you should be planning for. Probably the worst scenario is often the death of a
00:02:46.720 | spouse. Very frequently relationships will reflect what you've just described, where
00:02:52.240 | there's one spouse that's more interested in money. Sometimes it'll be the spouse who
00:02:56.280 | is the income earner, sometimes it'll be a spouse who's not an income earner, but usually
00:03:01.120 | there will be, or frequently, there will be a spouse that's more interested in money than
00:03:06.280 | the other. And I think that it's probably a good thing that it is that way because I
00:03:10.880 | think those of us who are more on the type A, super control, want to have all the control
00:03:18.200 | over the budget, want to have beautiful spreadsheets over how everything looks. I think those of
00:03:22.920 | us who are in that situation are more likely, we'd probably be pretty frustrated dealing
00:03:27.840 | with somebody who is exactly that same way. Maybe we just have to find peace in the household,
00:03:32.760 | we'd have to have two different sets of budgets put together. And if we had two different
00:03:38.600 | sets of budgets, two different spreadsheets, maybe we could find peace. So the situation
00:03:42.080 | you're describing is the normal situation where there's one person that is more involved
00:03:48.600 | in the money. But it can be a huge problem if one of the spouse, if the person who's
00:03:54.440 | involved in the money, leaves for some reason. Sometimes that leaving can be divorce, sometimes
00:03:59.160 | death. Death is probably the worst one because there's an immediate severing of the person's
00:04:06.200 | input and whatever exists, exists. So I guess my answer to that question, I would cover
00:04:12.480 | two basic things. The simple thing that is the more overlooked thing is actually access
00:04:19.640 | to information. And for some people, this could be more complex than others. Now if
00:04:26.680 | you have one bank account that's a joint checking account that you have at your local
00:04:31.440 | community bank and you do your banking in person down at that local community bank,
00:04:36.720 | then it's fairly simple if you die for your wife to go down to the local branch of that
00:04:40.920 | local community bank and while she's there, she can talk to the banker and they can say
00:04:45.720 | here's the money and yes, you're on the checking account and they can work it out.
00:04:49.520 | I doubt any of our financial lives are all that simple. Most of us have more than one
00:04:54.420 | bank account. At least I encourage people to have more than one bank account. In addition,
00:04:58.640 | I encourage people to have a diversified banking structure, not to just have all your banking
00:05:05.320 | in one local community. I think most of us should have a couple different banking relationships
00:05:10.220 | that are strategically chosen for maximum benefit. A strategically chosen banking relationship
00:05:15.960 | is probably unlikely to be in your town. Maybe your main bank account is in your town, but
00:05:20.680 | you might have other funds stashed in other towns and other banks. I recommend that some
00:05:26.000 | of those banks even be international banks. Now that can be much more complex. As you
00:05:30.840 | say, what can often happen is for ease of functioning, your name might wind up on more
00:05:38.040 | things. I know my wife and I used to register things like cars together, but then if we
00:05:43.120 | were going to sell it or do something, I found it annoying to have both of us have to be
00:05:47.280 | there. I came to the point where if a car is registered in a name, it's registered in
00:05:53.080 | my name because I would be the one who would go and do it. The same with other assets as
00:05:57.360 | well. The same thing can happen with bank accounts. If you're going to go and open up
00:06:01.840 | a bank account in the Cayman Islands or in Canada or in Hong Kong or something, are you
00:06:06.920 | all going to fly there together and do that or does just one of you go and open the account?
00:06:11.360 | A lot of times it's easier for one of you to go, but now here's the problem. How is
00:06:15.320 | your wife, if she's not on the account, how is she going to know about that information?
00:06:20.280 | The first thing I think that needs to be done is you need to have a letter of instruction
00:06:24.440 | and a clear listing of what we own and where. That document, depending on your level of
00:06:34.000 | security and personal paranoia, that document can be stored in a number of different ways.
00:06:39.240 | The first thing is you can resort to the simple paper method where you have a file drawer
00:06:44.400 | with clearly labeled file cabinets. In the file cabinets you would have a section marked
00:06:48.960 | bank accounts and you have a manila file folder for each of your bank accounts. Then you put
00:06:56.000 | the statements in there so at least then when you're dead she can go to the financial
00:07:00.400 | drawer and she can pull it open and find all the information. I think for most people that
00:07:06.000 | would be the best way to do it because in general very rarely are many people worried
00:07:11.520 | about people having access to their information and this is a good way to have all of it there.
00:07:15.800 | It's just to have a drawer. I call it, it's kind of a cutesy name, but I call it the
00:07:20.360 | love drawer to make sure that you have everything stashed aside there so all the information
00:07:24.320 | is there. I would ask you if you do the physical paper method, I would ask you to try to make
00:07:30.360 | sure it's secure. Have at the very minimum a locking file cabinet if not putting it into
00:07:35.160 | a safe that's a little bit more secure. The risk of identity theft is very significant
00:07:41.400 | and when you study identity theft this may be changing now but very frequently the person
00:07:46.560 | who steals your identity is somebody who is known to you. It's often a family member or
00:07:52.080 | a friend, somebody who's known to you, sometimes a domestic servant that you've hired, a worker
00:07:57.360 | that's working on your house. If you have your paperwork, especially your important
00:08:01.280 | financial paperwork, easily accessible to somebody I think that's a risk that in my
00:08:05.640 | opinion could be easily overcome by simply using a safe and making sure things are stashed
00:08:09.880 | in the safe. So in that file cabinet you should make sure that you have information on all
00:08:14.320 | your bank accounts, information on all of your insurance policies, information on basically
00:08:21.000 | where everything is, investment accounts, etc. Deeds to property, titles for vehicles,
00:08:28.000 | etc. A good way to do it, what I prefer to do is I prefer to keep that actually as a
00:08:33.560 | mobile, I don't like to have it in a drawer with file folders, I keep it in a mobile kit,
00:08:39.560 | just a, you can use a couple different kinds of file wallets or varying, you know, a bag
00:08:44.920 | of different kinds. But I keep it as a mobile kit so that if we have to leave the house
00:08:48.720 | quickly I can just grab the important documents case out of the safe and we can hit the road
00:08:54.200 | and I have everything that I need right there. So that's one thing to consider is if you
00:08:58.720 | need to leave the house, if there's a house fire, forest fire, you know, family emergency,
00:09:02.920 | something like that, can you just grab it and go. It's a little bit less useful to file
00:09:07.880 | things, but if you bring together having the important documents there with good digitization
00:09:15.320 | of things like statements and accounts and things like that, then you can largely minimize
00:09:19.640 | the need for filing. You can keep this in a digital format as well. I personally think
00:09:25.480 | there's a good argument to be made for keeping multiple copies of basically a list of documents,
00:09:30.800 | keeping them on, you know, movable flash media, USB thumb drive. I'd like it if those files
00:09:37.920 | were kept in an encrypted database, but make sure that your wife has the passwords and
00:09:43.880 | knows how to access that. What I do is I keep it on, I keep the data on some mini SD cards,
00:09:49.200 | and so I have all the data and all the documents digitized in a document tree, and then I keep
00:09:54.240 | an encrypted container on an encrypted mini SD card, and then that little tiny thing,
00:09:59.960 | have a couple backups of those that you update from time to time, and that little tiny thing
00:10:04.520 | is easy to grab and go, and it has everything that she would need with instructions of what
00:10:09.480 | to do if I die. So that's kind of some technical stuff. I think most people probably, I would
00:10:13.960 | like it if everyone were competent enough to do the encrypted digitization. It's probably
00:10:19.100 | unnecessary for most people, but for those of us who are more technically competent,
00:10:23.520 | I think that's a good argument as well. The next thing I think is necessary is good instructions
00:10:28.400 | of a basic general layout of what you would do. So for example, I've tried to talk with
00:10:34.520 | my wife and say, "Okay, if I'm dead, here's what I recommend. Here's how much money you
00:10:38.640 | could expect to have, and here's what I think you should do with it." I try to make sure,
00:10:42.080 | "Here are people that you should call," and so to give her the people that she would call
00:10:46.640 | on for advice. And so if you have a trusted financial planner or a friend who is trustworthy
00:10:54.640 | with money, if you have parents or people like that, make sure that she knows how to
00:10:58.240 | get good advice. Because if you're dead and your wife is dealing with the trauma of your
00:11:04.360 | death, it's unlikely that she's going to be in an emotionally stable situation. So the
00:11:08.580 | first thing that she needs is to know who to reach out to for counsel, somebody who
00:11:15.320 | is a little bit more dispassionate, not so emotionally involved in the stress of your
00:11:20.560 | loss, so that they can give her good counsel. Practically speaking, I think the first thing
00:11:25.620 | to do is to make sure that there is an immediate source of money and funds for your wife so
00:11:32.120 | that she can defer any kind of important decisions. The basic advice that most financial advisors
00:11:39.080 | would offer to a newly widowed woman or a newly widowed man is don't make any big decisions
00:11:45.960 | quickly. And he's going to need to take some time for you to understand what direction
00:11:50.840 | to move. It's going to take time for you to understand where you should go, what you should
00:11:54.960 | do. So don't sell the house, don't immediately downsize, all that. There are circumstances
00:11:59.180 | in which the financial circumstances are so dire that it's, you know, the circumstances
00:12:06.480 | can be so dire that things have to happen quickly. You know, the person has to make
00:12:10.440 | changes quickly because they just can't afford it. But let's not start there. And so I would
00:12:15.920 | say number one, making sure that there's always plenty of money available that's immediately
00:12:20.520 | available. So this should refer immediately to emergency funds. Obviously, your wife should
00:12:25.580 | be able to get her hands on your family's emergency funds immediately, whether that's
00:12:29.640 | physical cash. I recommend that people have substantial amounts of physical cash in a
00:12:33.240 | place where it can be obtained fairly readily but securely stored in terms of bank accounts
00:12:39.000 | that are just set aside for emergency funds. And then access to lines of credit. I would
00:12:43.640 | say the most reliable one being credit cards, having a portfolio of credit cards available
00:12:49.320 | with high credit limits that your wife can use for expenditures if she has to pay for
00:12:53.480 | bills, if she has to pay for medical expenses, etc. or for funeral costs, things like that.
00:12:59.400 | Credit cards are going to be the most simple way for her to do that. Now I'm assuming here
00:13:02.920 | that you also are going to make sure that she has large amounts of money available because
00:13:08.000 | especially if she's not bringing income into the house, she needs to be protected either
00:13:11.440 | through your family's investments or through insurance, life insurance. And so as long
00:13:16.320 | as you have plenty of that, then it should be no big deal for her to have credit cards
00:13:22.560 | to handle the expenses. As long as she's not going to be financially destitute, then because
00:13:28.900 | you have insurance policies or because you have significant assets, then I think the
00:13:32.480 | credit cards are the best move for her to be able to use that and emergency cash to
00:13:37.600 | cover expenses for a while so that she can take time to think and time to breathe. The
00:13:42.040 | reason why having the cash and the access to spending power available is because we
00:13:47.840 | don't know when you die. Do you die in the midst of a recession when the market is down
00:13:51.120 | 30%? Did all of a sudden your real estate properties decline in value substantially?
00:13:57.320 | And so making sure that you have some money so that she can take time to decide what she's
00:14:01.160 | going to do, take time to decide how to adjust the family's assets portfolio, etc. You need
00:14:07.720 | spending money for her to get her through from here to there. So those are some of the
00:14:11.760 | practical things that I think of that I think solve many of the problems. I guess the only
00:14:18.760 | thing I could think of in addition would be making sure that there's no unresolved conflict,
00:14:24.080 | making sure that you can die in peace so that without leaving unresolved conflict and hurt
00:14:28.760 | feelings and regrets and things like that. But those are my ideas, Andy.
00:14:32.200 | Great, thank you. Do you have any, is there any concern as far as like watching out for
00:14:41.200 | credit scores or other things like that besides, I mean I think you know past shows you've
00:14:45.880 | done and some of your courses I think are really good topics on those things, but is
00:14:50.080 | there anything besides making sure that there's money available and she knows how to access
00:14:54.040 | it?
00:14:55.040 | Well I think obviously credit, you need to make sure that credit is taken care of, that
00:14:58.520 | somebody's credit is protected. The simplest way to do that is just simply to have the
00:15:03.640 | credit open, the credit profiles open when you are going through any kind of financial
00:15:09.240 | changes that need to be made. If you're getting credit cards, getting mortgages, things like
00:15:13.560 | that. But once you pass through that stage of life or that phase of your finances, I
00:15:18.480 | think the best thing to do is to have all your credit profiles frozen so that nobody
00:15:23.640 | can have access to it. Now of course you need to make sure that you store the appropriate
00:15:27.040 | pin codes with your important data, that can't be lost. But it's best to just go ahead and
00:15:31.920 | have credit profiles frozen all the time because if your credit profile is frozen, you've largely
00:15:39.920 | taken care of the need for, well you've largely eliminated the risk of theft as far as how
00:15:47.880 | it could impact your credit. Now if there were a more contentious situation, let's say
00:15:52.540 | that you were dying a slow death of cancer and your family is facing significant medical
00:15:58.720 | bills, then we might take a more thoughtful approach to how we structured the family debts,
00:16:04.600 | the family finances, etc. Trying to think about what dies with you, etc. But in my mind
00:16:10.840 | a lot of that stuff is, I mean that's outside the scope of what you're talking about. If
00:16:15.440 | your wife is not earning an income that's measured in finance and money, then there's
00:16:21.360 | not going to be, the only limitation that's going to do for her is number one, that's
00:16:25.680 | going to cause her to not be accumulating things like social security credits, but she
00:16:30.680 | can draw off of your social security profile. So that's not, I don't think that's worth
00:16:36.140 | it for her to work just to accumulate social security credits. But with regard to her credit,
00:16:41.760 | you do want to make sure that her credit score stays high. And so think through that. For
00:16:46.560 | example, there are strategic reasons why one of you would be on one debt, one of you would
00:16:52.280 | be on another debt, etc. But it's probably a good idea to make sure that her credit score
00:16:56.560 | is strong and you can do that regardless of her personal income. That doesn't matter,
00:17:00.800 | it's just a matter of if it's important to you to build a credit score for you and to
00:17:04.400 | maintain a credit score, then do that. Make sure it's the same way for both of you and
00:17:08.720 | then make sure that the risk of identity theft is very low. So those are my thoughts, Andy.
00:17:12.960 | All right. Great. Thank you. Any other follow up questions or comments? I've got time for
00:17:18.120 | another one if you got one. I have a totally different question, if you
00:17:25.280 | want a different question. Go ahead.
00:17:31.200 | So the question, I guess, I see a lot of advice, kind of about emergency funds, I see a lot
00:17:38.160 | of advice from you and other people to kind of build up 10 to 100 to whatever significant
00:17:44.400 | amount of cash savings in a bank under your mattress, whatever, and then have that kind
00:17:50.320 | of an opportunity fund. And you make the comment, if you have $100,000, you can move anywhere
00:17:54.840 | in the world, you can quit and start a new job, you can make any decision. And I guess
00:18:00.760 | I would like to hear your thoughts on kind of how do you go about thinking that? Because
00:18:03.840 | if I save up $100,000, which I have not done yet, and then I decide to go make some $50,000
00:18:10.880 | change that reduces my income temporarily, I've very much curtailed that opportunity
00:18:17.080 | that I built for myself, if that makes sense. So how would you go about kind of deciding
00:18:21.680 | and not just sitting there and hoarding your money after you've accumulated money?
00:18:28.520 | Basically where that came from, from myself. So I was a personal finance aficionado for
00:18:34.840 | many years. I always cared about money and I read a lot of personal financial advice.
00:18:41.800 | And I didn't ever hear people talk about the lifestyle stuff. Most financial advice, especially
00:18:48.280 | at the simplistic level, there are certainly, I mean, I got to be careful because the world
00:18:54.960 | of authors is very broad and there are many people who've given excellent advice on all
00:18:59.480 | different topics. But the kinds of things that I read when I was first getting interested
00:19:04.720 | in personal finance focused on what I'll call just the stereotypical pattern of modern American
00:19:12.520 | life that you're going to get a job and you should save an emergency fund for your personal
00:19:21.400 | hospital, in case your car breaks down or you have a medical bill, and then you should
00:19:25.960 | fund your retirement account because retirement is the number one goal. That was largely what
00:19:30.080 | I consumed. And the challenge was that that was largely, even when I was working as a
00:19:35.200 | financial advisor, that was largely what I taught to other people. And looking back on
00:19:40.120 | it now, I'm embarrassed of how little hope I gave people about their personal freedom
00:19:46.480 | with regard to their saving money. And I could say again and again and again, I would have
00:19:50.600 | clients who would come in and sit in my office and they would be clients that would have
00:19:54.520 | a six-figure net worth, but most of their net worth was tied up in their 401k or in
00:19:59.560 | their house equity or something like that. And they didn't ever really have that spark
00:20:04.320 | of joy with regard to their wealth. They're in the top handful of percent of global wealth.
00:20:11.900 | If we measure all the billions of people in the world, these people with a six-figure
00:20:16.440 | net worth are in the top handful. I don't know the exact statistic, but I would at least
00:20:21.280 | the top 10%, if not the top 5% of everybody in the world. And yet there's no real spark
00:20:26.320 | of enjoying that wealth. There's no real spark of freedom. There's no real sense of personal
00:20:31.160 | freedom or personal autonomy. So one of the things that was very influential on me was
00:20:36.320 | when I finally came across the literature relating to the math of early retirement,
00:20:41.320 | primarily through, for me, it was the first influence was Jacob Lund Fisker and his book
00:20:46.400 | Early Retirement Extreme that opened my eyes to how the math worked. I am a certified financial
00:20:53.120 | planner and I didn't know how the math, I couldn't make sense of how the math worked.
00:20:58.480 | All of a sudden, that spark of freedom became tangible and that changed me because instead
00:21:04.280 | of a mindset of, "Oh, I have to work until I'm 65 years old," I realized, "Oh, if I make
00:21:09.360 | these other changes, I could work for 10 years." But along the way, I had my own unique journeys.
00:21:17.400 | I got married, I have more children than most people in the personal finance space. I have
00:21:22.520 | more of a bent towards entrepreneurship. I'm not one of the models that you frequently
00:21:27.840 | hear of, of a single person living on $5,000 a year or a dual income, no kids couple. I
00:21:36.480 | have more responsibilities. Yet, what I realized is as I started to accumulate more money,
00:21:40.480 | especially money that was outside of retirement accounts, I realized that my life choices
00:21:45.160 | opened up to me. As a father and a leader of my family, when I first had $100,000 available
00:21:52.600 | to me in cash, I realized that I didn't have a dream that I couldn't figure out a way to
00:21:58.920 | finance with that amount of money. That was very different than when it was all locked
00:22:03.880 | away in retirement accounts and I couldn't touch it, or at least I thought I couldn't
00:22:07.800 | touch it because I was drilled with the dogma of don't drain your retirement accounts, don't
00:22:12.920 | use your retirement accounts. In terms of a personal freedom, I realized, no, I'm not
00:22:20.200 | financially independent as measured by being able to live off of the income from my investments.
00:22:28.000 | But I am financially independent in the sense that there's almost nothing I can dream of
00:22:32.700 | doing except stopping working and just quitting and not working ever again the rest of my
00:22:36.720 | life, which I don't dream of doing. I realized there's almost nothing that I can't dream
00:22:41.120 | of doing that I can't achieve. It made me protect my cash a lot more than I ever did
00:22:47.760 | before. Then in reflection, I realized that it could be achieved with a much lower amount
00:22:52.120 | of money. That's where my $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 comes from. They're just round numbers.
00:22:57.560 | There's nothing scientific about it. Just to recognize that even on as little as $10,000,
00:23:02.360 | a single person and maybe a married couple, it's hard once you start having the financial
00:23:07.880 | responsibility of children, $10,000 feels a little bit light. But of course, there are
00:23:11.400 | millions of families that don't have that, that raise their children effectively. But
00:23:16.320 | you can change in life. You're no longer worrying about how do I make my first, last and security
00:23:20.440 | deposit to rent a new house. You're no longer worrying about can I afford to buy a house
00:23:25.300 | because I don't have a down payment. Once you reach that six-figure level of cash, you
00:23:32.740 | can do those things. Then other examples would be starting a business. There are very few
00:23:38.140 | businesses that couldn't be started with $100,000. Now, you might need more money than that,
00:23:42.980 | but $100,000 could be your down payment or $100,000 could be your living expenses for
00:23:48.420 | the first two years until you become profitable. $100,000 in debt-freeness leads you to a place
00:23:54.500 | of a very, very high level of freedom. And yet that's achievable by almost any person
00:24:02.340 | within a very reasonable amount of time, a couple of years, whether that means you sell
00:24:07.220 | your house and you move into a semi-truck and you live in a semi-truck where you become
00:24:13.540 | an over-the-road trucker, that's available to almost anybody without large amounts of
00:24:17.860 | education, without large amounts of credentialization. And you could save $100,000 in two years of
00:24:22.680 | doing that. Whether it means you and your family, maybe you have a family, you move
00:24:27.060 | in and you take a job being a superintendent of a 30-unit apartment building and you live
00:24:34.440 | on nothing, get your free rent because you're the superintendent and save all your money.
00:24:39.140 | You can save $50,000, $100,000 in a couple of years. And then you can pivot almost any
00:24:44.180 | direction. So what's the best thing to do once you're there? Is the best thing to do
00:24:47.760 | to just drain your bank account and spend it? No, probably not. In fact, I'm very loathe
00:24:55.020 | to ever lose the flexibility. In my credit card course, I even teach this, that one of
00:24:59.900 | the worst places to be when you're in credit card debt is to be in credit card debt and
00:25:03.740 | have no money. If you have credit card debt but you have money also, credit card debt
00:25:08.860 | is not really that big of a deal. In that course, I go through some of the strategies
00:25:11.980 | where if you have $100,000 in the bank and you have $100,000 of credit card debt, you
00:25:17.020 | can pay off the credit card debt any day you want. And then thus raising your credit score,
00:25:21.620 | you can apply from, you have options. Now, that would be unusual why anyone would do
00:25:25.820 | that. But when you have cash, you have options. You can lower your debt temporarily to enhance
00:25:30.860 | your credit profile in some way, and then you can raise it back up and restore your
00:25:34.460 | cash. So how you work with it, I mean, I can answer some of the specific questions, but
00:25:39.820 | how you work with it is up to you. But that's basically your funding capital, it's your
00:25:42.740 | seed corn that you never really want to get rid of. But with that seed corn and a little
00:25:47.660 | bit of thoughtful, creative approaches, again, give me the business, give me the real estate,
00:25:54.860 | give me anything that you're trying to do, and I think with that we can have enough to
00:25:58.580 | get you there. And along the way, while you're working towards the ultimate expression of
00:26:04.320 | financial independence, which of course is being able to live on the income from your
00:26:07.980 | investments in comfort, we can experience the joy and the freedom of having independence
00:26:14.060 | of choice, not being stuck, not being stuck at a job we're not well suited for, not being
00:26:19.140 | stuck in a neighborhood that we don't want to live in. So that's my answer to you, Andy.
00:26:24.540 | If you have a more specific question about how to actually use it, maybe in your situation,
00:26:29.460 | I can help you with that too. But yes, my experience has been that it has opened up
00:26:34.020 | the world to me.
00:26:38.180 | Cool. Yeah, I think maybe I should have phrased that as, do you think that saving $100,000
00:26:45.340 | cash is a better thing to do before pursuing a business or a lifestyle thing? So in my
00:26:52.820 | personal example, I haven't had less than $10,000 cash available basically since a few
00:26:59.660 | months after I started working full time. And I've fluctuated, but I've never really
00:27:03.300 | gone above about $30,000. And then we bought a rental house and sunk a lot of money into
00:27:08.140 | repairing that. We're right now trying to buy an arm that we want to live on. And it
00:27:16.660 | comes up, and then we do have that freedom from having cash available. And then we use
00:27:23.620 | that to go do something. And I guess I'm curious about the counterfactual. I have not pursued
00:27:29.340 | that extreme move into a truck and do something kind of extreme for a couple of years to get
00:27:36.420 | a bunch of cash and then move on. And just sort of curious, I guess, if you could comment
00:27:41.220 | on do you think that is a better way or worse way? Or should I prioritize more towards blowing
00:27:48.500 | up a bunch of cash or just kind of continue making what so far seem to be good and successful
00:27:54.860 | choices in lifestyle and business?
00:28:00.220 | Based on what you're saying, no. I don't think there's any reason why you should change what
00:28:06.380 | you're doing just to build up $100,000 of cash. And I doubt that there would be any
00:28:10.980 | one specific thing that would cause you to, that would cause your life to be dramatically
00:28:18.260 | different if you did indeed accumulate that level of savings. The person, there are a
00:28:23.660 | couple of people that I'm trying to reach with my message about even those examples
00:28:29.020 | that I gave. First, Andy, your experience of never having had less than $10,000 since
00:28:34.920 | you started working is not the common experience either of anybody in the world or of most
00:28:43.220 | US Americans. Most people don't save any money no matter how long they've been working. The
00:28:49.140 | few people who do save some money usually don't do so intentionally and there's just
00:28:54.180 | a relatively small percentage of the population that actually does have significant savings
00:29:00.460 | and you're in that percentage. It's not that hard to do but it's a different mindset than
00:29:05.180 | most people have. And so you were blessed from an early age to have a wealth building
00:29:09.460 | mindset and that's clearly served you well. But most people aren't there. And so what
00:29:14.420 | I'm trying to do with my message of save $1,000, save $10,000 is to try to get people who are
00:29:21.100 | adults earning adult incomes to recognize there's no reason why a half to two-thirds
00:29:26.940 | of the US American population shouldn't be able to put their hands, can't put their
00:29:31.140 | hands on $1,000 if they need it. That's ridiculous. It may not be ridiculous if we're working
00:29:37.100 | in Zimbabwe but it's ridiculous in the United States of America. And so by giving a very
00:29:42.820 | feasible goal, my hope is to inspire them. Then with $100,000, my hope is to help people
00:29:48.780 | who are basically working in jobs that they may not have chosen all that intentionally,
00:29:54.180 | may not be all that thrilled about, may not be all that well suited to, who are putting
00:29:57.900 | most of their money into retirement accounts which are viewed as sacrosanct, who are not
00:30:03.180 | experiencing the level of personal freedom. They're not experiencing freedom of their
00:30:07.500 | choices. They're stressed about money. They often don't feel like they can do anything.
00:30:11.420 | They don't think they can afford to change jobs. They don't think they can afford to
00:30:13.980 | start a business. And my hope is to say, yes, you can. You can do it. You just need to have
00:30:18.820 | some money and then work your way through it. Now, if you're already pursuing that,
00:30:23.060 | you're buying rental properties, you're moving to a farm, etc., no, I don't see any reason
00:30:27.100 | for you to stop that because the point of the $100,000 is that it can buy you freedom.
00:30:33.000 | So should you stop with $30,000 and just never save cash again? No, of course not. You should
00:30:40.220 | continue to build up cash. But if you see an opportunity, something that's going to
00:30:43.580 | be a free choice, something that's going to move you in the direction of your vision for
00:30:48.180 | what you think would serve you and your family better, then I think you move on it as quickly
00:30:52.020 | as you can comfortably do so. What I would do is I would just make sure that I did everything
00:30:58.140 | possible to not lose my cash. I would just want to make sure that I didn't get into a
00:31:03.060 | bind where my back's up against the wall where I'm going to lose my cash. So if I had $30,000
00:31:08.100 | of cash and I wanted to move on to a farm, but I had to use the $30,000 of cash to put
00:31:13.420 | as a down payment to buy land, I wouldn't do that. I would lease land because I want
00:31:18.460 | the $30,000 in cash so I can get the business going because I'm not going to lose my freedom.
00:31:23.220 | I'm not going to lose my ability to pivot and change. For me, especially being a father,
00:31:28.700 | that has been the number one thing for me is I've recognized that I can start things,
00:31:34.140 | they can fail. My businesses can fail, my investments can fail, but as long as I keep
00:31:38.820 | some cash on hand and as long as I have the ability to work, then I can always provide
00:31:43.340 | for my family even if my businesses fail and we're not going to be sleeping on the streets.
00:31:50.140 | That wasn't as important to me a decade ago as it is today. So I guess for me, it's built
00:31:55.340 | that security. But I wouldn't change and I wouldn't say no to a good opportunity just
00:32:00.300 | because I've got to have $100,000 in the bank, but I would just keep working towards healthy
00:32:03.860 | amounts of cash. My pleasure. Any other questions or comments, Andy?
00:32:14.540 | Andy Wertheimer I actually have a whole list of questions
00:32:18.180 | I've been building up. I thought I was going to have a full call of callers, but every
00:32:23.740 | time a caller jumps on, they just drop off all of a sudden. So right now, it's still
00:32:27.220 | you and me. So go ahead.
00:32:30.460 | All right. So this again would be kind of towards your philosophy on wealth building.
00:32:38.820 | I was listening to your show on, I don't remember the title of it, but when you did a month
00:32:43.940 | or two ago about not retiring and not needing to retire. And you know, I'm talking about
00:32:50.820 | it, but you've talked about that idea a lot. And yet still prioritizing building wealth.
00:32:57.260 | And at the same time, I see you from my very limited vantage point, you seem to be pursuing
00:33:03.340 | a lot of other non-traditional goals, such as having a larger than average family, your
00:33:10.380 | wife being able to stay home and focus on the children, international travel, things
00:33:16.620 | like that, that probably reduce your ability to just grow wealthy. And so I kind of come
00:33:25.100 | from the aspect of, I guess I want to be wealthy, like who wouldn't want to be wealthy, but
00:33:30.500 | I don't feel like necessarily my wife shares that. And it's hard for me to articulate
00:33:35.740 | if I don't want to ever stop working, why would I be making these choices that pamper
00:33:44.380 | today and tomorrow and 10 years from now in order to be wealthy, you know, 20, 30 years
00:33:49.780 | from now, instead of just focusing on more, I mean, I have lots of non-traditional interests.
00:33:55.340 | I'm interested in privacy stuff. I'm interested in eco-friendly stuff. I'm interested in parenting
00:34:01.020 | stuff, like, and all of those to be outside the norm costs money. And I'd like to hear
00:34:07.820 | kind of your ideas on how you reconcile those things, if that makes sense of the question.
00:34:14.340 | So in my mind, there are a couple of, here's my personal philosophy on it. So first, I
00:34:23.060 | think there are a number of significant and serious risks of focusing on wealth and financial
00:34:33.300 | wealth, being rich, as a primary goal. Now this is driven for me primarily out of my
00:34:40.420 | religious ideology that is a controlling influence in my life. But there are a number of very
00:34:48.420 | serious warnings in the Bible about the desire for wealth. Jesus said, "Woe to those of you
00:34:54.660 | who are rich in this age, for it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
00:35:04.280 | than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." There are repeated biblical admonitions
00:35:10.880 | and warnings against pursuing wealth, against desiring to be rich as a primary thing. There
00:35:19.780 | are also a lot of biblical instructions about wealth being a virtuous thing. There are many
00:35:28.540 | proverbs, you know, "A virtuous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
00:35:35.220 | A righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. And the wealth of the
00:35:39.020 | sinner is stored up for the righteous." So some people, of course, would say, "Well,
00:35:43.900 | these are contradictory. Why should we give any thought to it?" Well, I don't take that
00:35:48.980 | viewpoint. I say there is something here that maybe it appears self-contradictory in the
00:35:55.220 | first moment, but there are truths here. And the way that I've understood those truths
00:36:00.980 | and the way that I've reconciled those truths could be encapsulated in the idea that money
00:36:06.820 | makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master. So I want to guard my heart against wanting
00:36:12.700 | to be rich against all odds. I want to guard my heart against pursuing the allure of wealth,
00:36:18.700 | because I can recognize and see in my own life and in the lives of many people all around
00:36:25.620 | us, of course, that when money becomes the number one goal, it has a destructive effect
00:36:32.700 | on other things. An example of this that comes to me. There's a writer who I like and admire.
00:36:40.280 | His name is Mark Ford. He wrote for years under the pen name of Michael Masterson. He's
00:36:45.300 | written a number of books. He's written a number of books, even on finance, that are
00:36:50.460 | quite excellent. I'm struggling for the names. I think one was called Wealth for Grads or
00:36:55.000 | something like that. But if you look up Michael Masterson, his books on money were pretty
00:36:58.180 | good. He wrote one called Seven Years to Seven Figures, which I thought was excellent. I
00:37:03.620 | had a domain name registered at that for a long time, because I thought it was so good.
00:37:07.820 | And he interviewed people who had set out and were able to become millionaires over
00:37:13.460 | a seven-year period of time. So Michael Masterson reports in his personal writings about his
00:37:19.220 | own experience. He writes about how he decided at an early age that his number one goal was
00:37:27.000 | to become wealthy. He was attending a Dale Carnegie seminar, and the instructor at the
00:37:31.300 | Dale Carnegie seminar said, "You've got to decide what your number one goal is." He didn't
00:37:35.700 | really know what it should be, but he decided, "I'm going to become wealthy." And so he went
00:37:39.220 | on to become very, very wealthy. But in his later years, he has written, I think he's
00:37:43.820 | in his late 60s now, something like that. But in his later years, he's written about
00:37:47.900 | how although he was very successful with that goal, he became very wealthy. He doesn't think
00:37:54.800 | at this point that it was good, because it cost him some significant relationships, it
00:37:59.820 | cost him a number of trials. There were just things about it that weren't good about that.
00:38:04.940 | So he doesn't write a lot about that. But in that, I'm taking just from his public writing,
00:38:11.180 | that sense of regret that when you make money, you're master. When you make money, you're
00:38:14.180 | number one goal, you miss out. And I think most of us in our lives could see this. For
00:38:19.220 | example, if I make money my number one goal, and over the past few months, I have been
00:38:25.980 | more frustrated with my family than I've ever been, because I feel like I can't do the things
00:38:32.580 | that I want to do that would make my business flourish to the degree it's capable of flourishing,
00:38:38.620 | that would allow me to experience the professional success that I would like to experience. It's
00:38:43.940 | been tough. Even just finding a time that is quiet enough for me to record a Q&A call
00:38:48.700 | has been really tough, really challenging. And I feel constantly hamstrung by the obligations
00:38:54.380 | of my young children, and it causes me to not be experiencing as much professional success
00:39:00.740 | as I'm capable of. And I look at that, and I look around, and I think, "Man, this would
00:39:06.020 | be a whole lot easier if I were single. This would be a whole lot easier if I didn't have
00:39:10.220 | children. I just think we could come and go. I would have no problems whatsoever." But
00:39:15.980 | it's in those moments that I remind myself that those aren't my goals. That's not my
00:39:21.420 | life. That's not what I've set out. I've not set out to pursue wealth and financial independence
00:39:26.900 | and professional success as my number one goal. And so because of that, I have damage
00:39:32.660 | to my wealth, my financial wealth. I have damage to my professional success because
00:39:36.940 | my goals are more encapsulated, broader than that. But when I look at the wealth of my
00:39:41.980 | children and I look at the lives of older people, I have known a number of very rich,
00:39:48.340 | very lonely, very miserable, very unfulfilled old people. And I have noticed that there
00:39:54.560 | is a high correlation between personal satisfaction and happiness, between the quality of one's
00:40:02.260 | family as compared to the size of one's bank account. It's not to say that those who are
00:40:07.420 | childless or who are unmarried can't be happy. Of course not. But when I think about me lying
00:40:13.040 | on my deathbed and I reflect back, I don't wish to have the biggest bank account. I wish
00:40:18.700 | to have a very rich life. So it starts with presuppositional philosophy. Now, I believe
00:40:26.300 | that wealth is a natural result of a life of integrity and wise decisions. I believe
00:40:34.140 | that wealth is a natural result of a virtuous life. It's not a guaranteed result. For example,
00:40:39.940 | somebody could come and steal your wealth anytime, whatever the nature of that thief
00:40:45.340 | is, we don't know. But a virtuous person, I believe, in time should accumulate wealth.
00:40:52.340 | And the only offsetting factor would be if they consciously chose to give away all of
00:40:57.780 | their money along the way, which I have known a number of people that do that. They don't
00:41:01.340 | have any money to their name, but they're very people of deep virtue and deep integrity
00:41:06.500 | who have simply chosen throughout their life to give away all of their money whenever it
00:41:11.140 | came into their hands. And the reason I say that is because there are virtues and personal
00:41:16.100 | character qualities that I think naturally lead to wealth. So things like industriousness,
00:41:22.660 | being hardworking, being industrious, for me, that's a biblical character trait. It's
00:41:28.100 | something that's mandatory for Christians to be industrious, hardworking people. It
00:41:33.060 | embarrasses me when I see people who are not that way, who proclaim the same God that I
00:41:38.220 | proclaim, but I want to encourage people to be hardworking and industrious. Well, in a
00:41:42.380 | free society, in general, people who are hardworking and who are industrious wind up doing more,
00:41:48.260 | and they wind up experiencing the benefits of flourishing businesses or of higher wages
00:41:53.120 | because of their higher productivity. I think when you bring the concept of being a servant
00:41:58.460 | into it, then it becomes even clearer in terms of the success that I would expect somebody
00:42:04.700 | who was an effective servant to experience. Jesus taught that he who would be greatest
00:42:09.980 | among you must be the servant of all. And so the basic ethic, one of the basic ethics
00:42:16.580 | is service. The one who serves the most effectively, the one who serves the best, serves the most,
00:42:24.100 | is the one who ultimately receives the most rewards. It's not from coming down from the
00:42:30.020 | top down trying to extract, trying to force someone and stick a gun in their ribs and
00:42:34.660 | say, "Give me, give me, give me, give me your money." You can go out on the street and put
00:42:38.780 | your gun in someone's ribs and say, "Give me your money." You'll get a little bit of
00:42:42.060 | money, but you'll get far more if you go out and say, "Here, how can I serve you so that
00:42:47.340 | you'll be happy to give me your money?" And so the ethic of service applies in the workplace.
00:42:54.260 | The person who serves their boss most effectively is the one who is very likely to be promoted.
00:43:00.360 | And if you're not promoted above your boss, you'll be at least promoted alongside with
00:43:03.580 | your boss, so you'll come up through the ranks. The one, if you're in a company, of course,
00:43:08.300 | you serve your clients, your customers. And so the company that serves their clients and
00:43:12.260 | their customers most effectively is the company that's ultimately going to experience the
00:43:16.820 | most success, experience the most income. And if you add this income to caring for the
00:43:22.140 | bottom line and making sure that you're profitable, then you should be ultimately the most effective,
00:43:27.100 | the most profitable. The biggest and best companies in the long run are always going
00:43:31.140 | to be the ones who serve their customers the most effectively and who do it on a broad
00:43:37.580 | basis. People will tell others about them. So it's the ethic of service, not the ethic
00:43:41.540 | of coercion, but service that should guide my thinking. And anything that I do, then
00:43:48.020 | if I serve effectively, serve more effectively and serve more people more effectively, then
00:43:52.620 | ultimately that should come in with the highest level of compensation, of remuneration. And
00:44:01.620 | then of course you could add in other important ethics, like the ethic of stewardship. Now
00:44:05.500 | we can talk about stewardship from a financial perspective, but even just stewardship of
00:44:08.700 | the resources that you're given. One of the most important Christian ethics is just stewardship
00:44:13.020 | over what you've given. So if that's your stewardship over your body, stewardship over
00:44:16.700 | your money, stewardship over your house, stewardship over your property. So if you think about
00:44:21.420 | this, you mentioned farming. So let's use an example of something like farming. It's
00:44:26.620 | not okay to come in and rape the land and destroy it and strip it of all of its nutrients,
00:44:33.300 | everything out of it, just so you can make a quick buck. That might work. You might make
00:44:36.740 | a quick buck, but you're not going to achieve lasting wealth the same way as if you come
00:44:41.380 | in and you steward the land and you take care of it and you build it and you invest into
00:44:47.580 | it. The farmer who comes in and invests into his land and doesn't destroy it, but who cares
00:44:54.420 | for it and who cultivates it is going to be established for their long-term, dare I say
00:45:01.180 | it, financial security for their entire lifetime, if they care for the resources that are there.
00:45:06.980 | So whether that's caring for your land, caring for the animals, caring for the water, whatever
00:45:12.300 | it is that you have, you have to demonstrate that ethic of stewardship and care over the
00:45:16.740 | resources that you have control over. You can't go and tell someone else what they should
00:45:20.940 | do with their resources until we first demonstrate that we're being effective with the resources
00:45:25.580 | that you have. And I think this is reflected in almost anything. I've been convicted in
00:45:32.020 | the past about something silly like washing my car. I didn't used to care how dirty my
00:45:35.820 | car was and I realized, no, this is valuable. This is an important component of my stewardship.
00:45:41.660 | I need to take care of my car. Yes, I've always taken care of it mechanically, but I need
00:45:45.900 | to also just make sure that I care for this car. Does my house reflect the ethic of stewardship?
00:45:51.740 | When I first bought a house, I didn't care so much. But now I've realized, no, this is
00:45:55.940 | a reflection of the kind of steward that I am. Well, what happens if I'm going to go
00:46:01.540 | and rent from an apartment? A guy I know, very wealthy guy, rents a lot of apartments.
00:46:06.380 | The first thing that he does when he has somebody who comes and wants to rent an apartment from
00:46:10.780 | him is he goes and he inspects their car and he looks in their car to see how they're caring
00:46:14.820 | for their car. The second thing that he does is he always manufactures some kind of excuse
00:46:20.380 | for him to go and see their house, see them at their current place of address. Oh, some
00:46:25.580 | paperwork, some signature, et cetera. So that way he can see how is this person caring for
00:46:30.260 | their car and for the house that they're currently renting. And if the person is not being a
00:46:34.380 | good steward of those resources, he's not going to rent to them. And now he gives good
00:46:39.100 | apartments at good rates, et cetera, but he's not going to rent to them because they're
00:46:41.780 | not a good steward. So if I'm being a good steward of the resources that I have, I'm
00:46:45.940 | caring for my body, I'm caring for my car, I'm caring for my property, it looks like
00:46:50.940 | I take pride. It doesn't look like a redneck shack. Then that's going to reflect and it's
00:46:57.060 | going to be reflected throughout my life. Things like that, these ethics matter. And
00:47:02.260 | I see no reason why in a free society that the people who most model these ethics shouldn't
00:47:09.220 | be experiencing the most success in its fullest sense of meaning. Now, these are virtues,
00:47:15.540 | these are character traits. But let's flip the coin and study the obverse. Now, what's
00:47:22.540 | the opposite of honesty? Dishonesty. Well, if I cultivate dishonesty, if I cultivate
00:47:28.780 | a sense of, if I lie to everybody, if I'm known as a charlatan and a fraud, is that
00:47:35.060 | going to lead to success? Clearly not. Maybe in the short term, again, I can run a Ponzi
00:47:41.260 | scheme, but in the long term, it doesn't. It prospers for a short time, but in the long
00:47:46.780 | term it never does. So integrity matters, honesty matters, truthfulness matters. What's
00:47:53.780 | the opposite of industriousness? Laziness. Well, what kind of, who's going to pay a lot
00:48:00.560 | of money to somebody who is lazy? Who's going to pay a lot of money to somebody who is,
00:48:07.140 | shirks their work, who doesn't just roll in their sleeves and get things done? What's
00:48:11.180 | the opposite of frugality? Well, profligacy. Does anybody want to hire somebody who's profligate
00:48:17.100 | with their money? Am I really going to be offered a job as the vice president of a company
00:48:22.660 | because I'm known as being bad with my money? The way that I handle my money is going to
00:48:27.620 | reflect on how I handle my boss's money. And so frugality is going to be extremely valuable
00:48:32.540 | as a virtue, but no one's going to promote me or advance me because I'm a spendthrift,
00:48:38.900 | because I'm wasteful, I'm extravagant. What's the opposite of stewardship? Destruction.
00:48:45.180 | Should I really be destroying something? Somebody comes by and sees that my car is destroyed,
00:48:49.100 | my house is destroyed, my land has been destroyed, I've raped the physical resources that I had
00:48:54.660 | to start with, I'm obese, I don't care for my body, I don't care for my animals. None
00:49:01.020 | of these things are character qualities that are going to lead to success and advancement.
00:49:05.260 | Frugality is a virtue. It's something that is a character trait and a character quality
00:49:10.300 | that I wish to cultivate in myself and I wish to cultivate in my children. Well, if you
00:49:14.940 | combine hardworking, industriousness with frugality, there should be a surplus of money.
00:49:21.480 | You have income, you have low expenses, so now there should be a surplus of money. What
00:49:25.300 | do you do with that? Well, another virtue that I wish to develop in myself and in my
00:49:29.920 | children and to teach to others is the virtue of looking for how do you invest wisely. There
00:49:36.580 | are many, many scriptural instructions, which again is where I draw my ideology from, which
00:49:41.940 | we're talking about wise investments. And then things like soliciting counsel, so wise
00:49:46.580 | investments would involve involving others. So I need to develop a board of advisors,
00:49:52.940 | people to help me to make sure that I'm investing money wisely. Well, it makes all the sense
00:49:56.800 | in the world to me that if somebody is hardworking and industrious and they're frugal, they should
00:50:03.540 | have money. And if they're pursuing wise counsel on how to invest their money, they should
00:50:08.660 | start to make proper investments. And then in time, as that cycle is repeated year after
00:50:13.700 | year after year, wealth should be the natural result. And there are all kinds of ways where
00:50:18.100 | I believe that should be enhanced by the development of personal virtue. Honesty, if you become
00:50:22.580 | an honest person and are known as somebody who is an honest person, then in time that
00:50:28.980 | has certain results. You start to be trusted with larger projects. You start to be entrusted
00:50:35.040 | with larger sums of money. You start to be trusted with personal information. Generosity,
00:50:40.860 | becoming a generous person, one who is continually giving to others of your time, of your talents,
00:50:46.340 | of your money, somebody who is generous generally will tend to develop relationships in their
00:50:52.860 | local community and will generally have other people who are looking to help them. And that
00:50:58.700 | generosity, even under the law of reciprocity, that generosity will usually be returned by
00:51:04.880 | other people. So now if you're known as a generous person, other people often tend to
00:51:09.340 | reciprocate and be generous towards you. And as you start to work and to labor in the lives
00:51:14.520 | of others to help other people succeed, well, many times people want to see you succeed.
00:51:18.400 | So you might get the phone call about the good job or you might get the phone call about
00:51:21.600 | so-and-so is selling his farm, etc. And then by being an honest person, the friction of
00:51:26.980 | your investment activities can be diminished. If you need money and you're known as an honest
00:51:31.620 | person who is not a thief, you can call up somebody who has more money and say, "Listen,
00:51:36.340 | I've got a deal over here to buy this farm and I need money. Will you please lend me
00:51:40.440 | money?" And that person will say, "Yes." And you don't have to go through all of the systems
00:51:45.460 | that are necessarily built for people to try to figure out who's honest and who's not honest.
00:51:49.760 | If you've cultivated these personal virtues and characters, then they have a multiplying
00:51:53.660 | effect throughout your life. And so now you can say to somebody, "I need money. I can't
00:51:57.640 | tell you what it's for." And they'll say, "I trust you. Your word is your bond. You're
00:52:01.380 | a man who stands good. You're not a thief. You're a man who will pay back." And that
00:52:05.260 | person will give you money. It's happened to me. Been there, done that. It happens the
00:52:08.940 | same thing with employment. When I was in college, when I came back from Central America
00:52:14.500 | in college, I dropped out of school and I didn't have a job. I picked up the phone and
00:52:17.940 | I started calling former bosses of mine. The first boss I called, I said, "Hey, I need
00:52:21.580 | a work. Will you hire me?" He said, "Yes." And gave me a job. And to this day, I believe
00:52:26.020 | that at every single job I've ever had in my life, save one that ended badly, at every
00:52:31.400 | single job save one, I could call any of my former bosses and get a job today. Well, that's
00:52:36.140 | not... I don't say that to toot my own horn, just to say that that's something I can prove,
00:52:39.980 | that if you're hardworking, if you're honest, if you're a man of character and virtue, then
00:52:44.820 | you can develop these strings of benefits and privileges behind you that start to insulate
00:52:52.140 | you. Now, extrapolate that out over years, wealth should be the natural result. So I
00:52:57.060 | expect throughout my lifetime to become increasingly wealthy, financially wealthy, wealth in relationships,
00:53:05.780 | wealthy in experiences, wealth in time, etc. I expect that to continue throughout my entire
00:53:10.380 | lifetime. Now, it's possible that a different plan might be ordained for me. It's possible
00:53:14.740 | that everything will be taken from me. That's happened to many wealthy, virtuous people
00:53:21.540 | where everything has been stolen from them. Okay, if that happens, that happens. I'm not
00:53:25.300 | going to worry about it. It's possible that I could be called upon to give everything
00:53:28.620 | away. That's happened to many people that I've respected who have become very wealthy
00:53:32.460 | and the Lord has told them, "Give it all away." Fine, I'm okay with that. But for those reasons,
00:53:39.140 | I see that if you develop virtue, if you develop character, and if you develop those qualities
00:53:47.420 | that lead to successful relationships, etc., then there shouldn't be any reason, barring
00:53:54.260 | some of those extenuating circumstances that we can't control, there shouldn't be any reason
00:53:58.060 | not to become increasingly wealthy throughout your lifetime. And then if you cultivate the
00:54:02.860 | next generation of your children, of communities, etc., and you consistently invest in your
00:54:08.140 | children, you invest in your community, you invest in your friends, then now there are
00:54:11.780 | many more opportunities. And so, it doesn't have to be an either/or. It doesn't have to
00:54:17.500 | be one or the other. It's just in moderation. I'm not going to let my personal hobby consume
00:54:24.000 | all my money, because if I spend all my money on my personal hobby, then I'm not going to
00:54:28.380 | have these other benefits. But I think in most things, even that you're talking about,
00:54:33.380 | there are ways in which you can wisely invest and spend money on the things that are important
00:54:37.300 | to you, and do it without harming your overall wealth accumulation. So, that's my philosophy.
00:54:43.940 | Andy, did that answer the question? Any follow-up questions?
00:54:47.300 | Thanks. I think that's good. I kind of would have guessed that that was about where your
00:54:54.240 | philosophy was, but I didn't feel like you'd ever fully lay it out. So, thank you. I appreciate
00:54:59.080 | that. And I guess as a word of encouragement, I can't speak for any other listeners, but
00:55:05.000 | I know for myself, it is evident to me that you are prioritizing things that you value
00:55:10.680 | more than being rich, as far as family and things, and that that does interfere with
00:55:17.480 | business growth, and that you choose to continue focusing on what you value. And that, to me,
00:55:24.480 | is something that I admire about you, and one of the things that makes me want to support
00:55:29.000 | you and listen to your advice. So, I don't know if you hear that encouragement often,
00:55:33.600 | but hopefully you hear that from me at least.
00:55:36.060 | I appreciate it. It's certainly been something that I have wrestled with, because even today,
00:55:42.340 | I'm sitting here wrestling with… I just think… You look at it and I certainly do
00:55:49.940 | struggle with how do I do this. And at the end of the day, the thing that I always look
00:55:54.580 | at is maybe it's not good for my bank account, but I always just think about what am I going
00:56:00.980 | to be more satisfied with on my deathbed. Am I going to be satisfied because I have
00:56:07.500 | an extra zero… Sorry, an extra comma or a couple of extra commas on my net worth statement,
00:56:13.980 | or am I going to be satisfied because of the impact that I was able to have on the lives
00:56:20.100 | of a few people that I love and the lives of a few people in my local community. And
00:56:24.660 | to me, when we start with the end in mind and we recognize that at the end of our life,
00:56:33.860 | when we reflect back from that place on our deathbed, you read the books. There are a
00:56:38.180 | lot of interesting sociologists who've gone and who've interviewed old people and people
00:56:43.220 | in their deathbed, etc. It's crystal clear that money is never the number one thought
00:56:49.800 | that anybody has. And so why would any of us be so foolish as to prioritize money and
00:56:56.380 | personal riches over those other things that are important? And then I imagine myself standing
00:57:02.540 | before the Lord and saying, "Give an account of yourself." It's very hard for me to,
00:57:07.740 | in that circumstance, say, "Well, I didn't say what I felt needed to be said because
00:57:14.660 | I thought it would hurt my wealth," or "I didn't say what I felt needed to be said,"
00:57:18.740 | or "I didn't go and love that person or encourage that person or give to this thing
00:57:23.500 | over here because I wouldn't have enough money." It's very hard for me to want to
00:57:28.180 | stand before Christ and say that. So I think we can all, I think most of us, regardless
00:57:35.220 | of if you share my background, I think most of us, when reflecting on it, would recognize
00:57:40.660 | that to be the case. But in order to be there, it's a lot easier to say that when you have
00:57:46.500 | money. There's a proverb that, I can't quote it perfectly, but that I've always
00:57:50.820 | liked, that basically, "Lord, may I neither be poor lest I steal, nor rich lest I forget."
00:58:03.220 | Anyway, being poor and being very poor and being very rich are both really difficult.
00:58:08.740 | And so I think most of us are blessed to be in that middle range where we don't want
00:58:13.480 | for anything, we're not worried about anything, we have no personal concern. If the tire blows
00:58:19.140 | up, it's not a big deal. And that allows us to have that more long-range perspective.
00:58:23.860 | It's a lot harder for those who are living on the poverty line to have that long-range
00:58:28.420 | perspective.
00:58:29.420 | >> Andy Winkler Yeah, I like that proverb as well. I also
00:58:36.020 | can't quote it, but I've always appreciated that one.
00:58:38.580 | >> Dave All right, I got time for one more. If you
00:58:40.780 | got any more, Andy, otherwise I'll wrap it up here. Any other questions or comments to
00:58:44.080 | round us out?
00:58:45.080 | >> Andy Winkler All right, yep, I'll give you one last one.
00:58:48.520 | So I have taken your career and income course, which I would definitely recommend to other
00:58:53.480 | listeners. I will admit I have not followed the advice super well yet, but I feel like
00:59:00.000 | I've been focusing on other things. One thing that I don't feel like maybe was addressed
00:59:05.320 | in there that probably is something specific to me and I've never really heard anybody
00:59:09.560 | talk about is I don't feel like I personally am a leader, an entrepreneur, not to say that
00:59:18.680 | I can't do those things, but I don't think that I am the type of person, and there's
00:59:24.320 | any evidence in my life, particularly that I'm the sort of person that wants to run out
00:59:27.440 | and start my own business and be the commanding, in charge, do it this way, start the business
00:59:34.160 | kind of person. But I do feel like I've seen throughout my life that I am a very good supporter.
00:59:41.480 | If I have a boss that I understand and can get behind and push or even just a small job
00:59:49.800 | helping and volunteering something, I feel like I do a much better job as kind of the
00:59:53.240 | number two guy than the number one guy or the number one million guy. And I'm curious
01:00:00.680 | if you have any thoughts on how to even identify where you could find that sort of job where
01:00:11.120 | you're, I guess, the medium fish in a small pond. A lot of the resources I was saying,
01:00:17.200 | you're a good example of someone who has gone out and built a business and is not hiring.
01:00:22.040 | I can't come, "Oh, I'll just go work for Joshua and he'd be the sort of person I'd
01:00:25.240 | want to work for," because it seems like most of the people I read about and hear about
01:00:29.680 | that do that sort of thing are entrepreneurs, want to do their own thing, don't want large
01:00:35.720 | organizations or medium-sized organizations. Does that make sense?
01:00:43.040 | It does. I'm not sure that I'm best suited to be in the number one slot either. And I
01:00:51.000 | think, I can't remember if I put it into the outline for the career and income course or
01:00:56.920 | not where I talked about being a number two. But I think being a number two guy is a wonderful
01:01:03.360 | strategy for success. I think it's a fantastic strategy for success and it can be very rewarding.
01:01:11.120 | It can be much less stressful than being out in front. It can be very remunerative. It's
01:01:18.040 | really, really wonderful. I think there are a lot, it's an unsung benefit to being the
01:01:23.440 | number two guy. And I think that it's something that many of us would be wise to recognize
01:01:31.640 | and just simply pursue being somebody who is alongside of one of those people who has
01:01:38.160 | that kind of push for leadership versus not. I'll tell you just a short story because you
01:01:44.200 | talk about coming along with supporting a business, etc. There is a well-known, very
01:01:54.160 | popular personal finance personality who was in this space long before I was, who I really
01:02:02.080 | like, I respect, and I get along with very well in terms of philosophy of money, etc.
01:02:10.760 | And I didn't really have any personal problems with him. He's free-thinking enough to embrace
01:02:22.480 | some of the things that I embrace, etc. And I talked to him even before I started Radical
01:02:29.120 | Personal Finance, right at the very beginning. And he offered me a job to work with him as
01:02:33.680 | a quasi-partner. We didn't spell out any details of exactly how we were going to work
01:02:39.720 | together, but basically he said, "Listen, come and work with me. I've got this large
01:02:42.480 | established brand. I've got all this infrastructure in place. I've got all these readers. I've
01:02:49.640 | got all these listeners. I've got all these people who are calling me. You and I could
01:02:53.760 | go far together. We have skills that are compatible, etc. And we could go a long way together."
01:03:01.640 | And I very, very seriously considered it. And to this day, I'm not sure whether I should
01:03:06.960 | have told him no, which was eventually what I told him no. But basically what happened
01:03:11.920 | is I thought it through and I realized that if I was going to go through the very excruciatingly
01:03:19.080 | expensive and difficult decision to walk away from the business that I had already built
01:03:26.920 | that was going to provide me, that was, you know, in order to gain something that was
01:03:35.000 | more free, I wasn't going to be content with a halfway level of freedom. And the biggest
01:03:40.240 | thing for me was having to censor what I thought about certain subjects. When you are working
01:03:48.960 | for somebody, you owe your boss a duty to either support them and to censor your own
01:03:56.800 | opinions that don't align with the duty of, or with the overall structure of the company,
01:04:02.920 | or you owe it to them to leave. It's very hard for me to see how it's right for you
01:04:09.160 | to be disloyal to your boss, to your company, and to publicly say things that would be in
01:04:18.240 | contradiction of the company philosophy. And I recognized that that was always the problem.
01:04:24.480 | When I worked for a company, then I always had a duty and a loyalty to the company, to
01:04:29.160 | the industry, etc. And so I had to censor my opinions, censor my thoughts out of respect
01:04:38.160 | for the company and the industry that I worked in. But yet, to leave that with the, again,
01:04:44.920 | the expensive decision and difficult decision to do, and then to not be at that place of
01:04:49.400 | ultimate freedom where I would either live or die by my own words, to me just wasn't
01:04:55.280 | going to work out. I decided not to do it. But to this day, I'm still not sure that was
01:05:00.520 | the best decision. And even today, I think that there are people in, I think that I would
01:05:10.920 | be well served, me personally, by not being at the front of the line. Even today, I have
01:05:16.960 | thought many times when I get to my thousandth episode of Radical Personal Finance, do I
01:05:21.960 | keep doing Radical Personal Finance or do I do something else? When I started this show,
01:05:26.200 | I could not go and work for, I couldn't have gone and worked for someone like Dave Ramsey.
01:05:33.360 | Today, I could go and work for Dave Ramsey. Dave and I don't have to agree on the value
01:05:38.760 | of cash value life insurance. I'd happily kiss that goodbye and never talk again about
01:05:42.640 | cash value life insurance. But when I look at organizations like his in the personal
01:05:47.880 | finance space and I see how much support they bring to people, someone like me, I have very
01:05:55.400 | seriously considered reaching out to people like him or to his team or to other, I've
01:06:00.760 | thought about talking to other radio people, etc. Because when you're on the front line
01:06:06.360 | and you're trying to do it all, it's not a good, you can't do it all. You have to specialize.
01:06:11.880 | And so then you have to build the team yourself. And then the question is, is that one of your
01:06:15.400 | skills, is building the team one of your skills? And for me, it has not been a skill that I
01:06:21.880 | have shown that I'm very good at, to build the team. The very best teams, and you can
01:06:26.200 | read about this in some of the entrepreneurial books, but I think the very best, most successful
01:06:30.520 | opportunity is when you have maybe one person who's the visionary, who's the front line,
01:06:35.080 | but you've got to have somebody alongside who can handle the administrative stuff. And
01:06:39.080 | what has hurt me in my business activities is I have not found or developed that person
01:06:44.500 | on the side. And it's, so to your point that yes, I think that being that number two would
01:06:51.040 | be great. And if you have skill sets that are complimentary, a lot of times people who
01:06:55.320 | are out in front desperately know they need help, but they just don't know how to do it
01:06:59.680 | because their skill set is being the visionary or being the loud mouth in my case. And they
01:07:05.400 | know that they can't do both very well. So yeah, I think it's a good strategy. And to
01:07:11.760 | this day, I think I would be much more able today to give up some freedom in order to
01:07:18.720 | make a bigger impact than I would have been a number of years ago. So that's my personal
01:07:23.360 | story and I think the number two strategy is an excellent one. We lost Andy there at
01:07:27.640 | the end, but I think that's enough. Andy, thank you for calling in. I really enjoyed
01:07:31.280 | all the good questions. I hope that the audience, I hope that you listen to them. I guess I
01:07:34.360 | should say if any of you are, I don't really, I'm not looking for a job today, but if any
01:07:39.600 | of you are in the Dave Ramsey organization or other, there are a couple of the media
01:07:42.920 | organizations that are large that my brand could fit under, then feel free to reach out
01:07:47.320 | to me. You never know what a couple of years from now might hold. So here I'll close with
01:07:53.200 | reading the proverb that Andy and I alluded to. This comes from the Bible Proverbs chapter
01:07:58.440 | 30 verses seven through nine. Two things I ask of you, deny them not to me before I die.
01:08:05.520 | Remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with
01:08:13.920 | the food that is needful for me. Lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord?
01:08:20.280 | Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. That's the proverb we were
01:08:25.880 | alluding to. Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope that you enjoyed it.
01:08:29.440 | I wish you a very happy Friday and an excellent weekend and I'll be back with you very soon.
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