RPF0687-The_Decade_Past-The_Decade_To

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00:00:30.620 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,

00:00:31.860 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:33.520 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need

00:00:35.720 | to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:38.060 | while building a plan for financial freedom

00:00:39.560 | in 10 years or less.

00:00:41.700 | It is New Year's Eve, 2019.

00:00:44.600 | Today closes out a year and also a decade.

00:00:49.340 | And probably as you're listening to this,

00:00:52.140 | we're opening up into a brand new year

00:00:54.640 | and a brand new decade.

00:00:56.140 | And I am an unabashed fan.

00:00:59.280 | The turnings of the years,

00:01:01.780 | just the marking of the seasons,

00:01:03.780 | I really enjoy that.

00:01:05.760 | My birthday is in June.

00:01:07.160 | And so I have this really mathematically organized life

00:01:11.120 | where I'm always looking forward

00:01:13.000 | either to my calendar year achievements and goals,

00:01:16.900 | or I'm looking forward to my birthday year

00:01:18.700 | achievements and goals.

00:01:19.900 | And in fact, I actually have the blessing

00:01:22.280 | of having an even more organized life

00:01:24.280 | in that my years line up quite nicely

00:01:27.980 | with big round numbers in five-year increments.

00:01:31.880 | I'll turn 35 this year.

00:01:33.420 | And so on the 2020, the decade markers,

00:01:35.920 | I have a nice round five-year birthday.

00:01:38.120 | And then my big decade birthdays come right

00:01:39.920 | in the middle of the chronological decade.

00:01:41.860 | So I think very much in terms of these five

00:01:45.460 | and 10-year increments,

00:01:47.540 | one year, five year, 10-year increments.

00:01:49.460 | And over the last few days, as I've encouraged you to do,

00:01:52.000 | I have, together with my wife,

00:01:53.740 | we've been reflecting back on the last 10 years.

00:01:56.540 | And I gotta say, I didn't expect it to be as much fun

00:01:59.600 | as it is, and it has been.

00:02:01.640 | For us, it's been a really joyful decade.

00:02:06.080 | And I knew that we had done some cool stuff

00:02:09.180 | in the last 10 years.

00:02:10.860 | I knew that we were living our best life

00:02:14.060 | and just really a lot of things are going well.

00:02:17.020 | We've had a whole lot of challenges,

00:02:18.720 | but a lot of things have gone really, really well.

00:02:20.900 | And I knew that, but it wasn't until we sat down

00:02:24.260 | and really made a list,

00:02:26.800 | when I realized just how incredibly productive

00:02:28.840 | the last decade has been for me and for my family.

00:02:33.700 | It's been awesome.

00:02:35.700 | And that has helped to give me just a lot more confidence

00:02:40.420 | going into the next decade.

00:02:42.240 | It's helped me to dream bigger dreams

00:02:44.120 | for the next decade than I was previously.

00:02:46.320 | And it's helped me to feel like I can really accomplish

00:02:49.460 | some really cool stuff in the next decade.

00:02:52.460 | I am constantly missing short-term

00:02:55.120 | or short timeline goals, deadlines, targets, et cetera.

00:02:59.320 | I'm forever failing on accomplishing things

00:03:02.160 | in the short term.

00:03:03.000 | Almost every single day, my to-do list is longer

00:03:05.640 | than I can ever get accomplished.

00:03:08.160 | Almost every single week, there's far more

00:03:11.340 | that I wanted to get done than I actually got done.

00:03:14.540 | And so, I knew this intellectually,

00:03:16.660 | but just even the last few days, I experienced afresh

00:03:18.960 | how what actually is happens is that I focus

00:03:23.960 | on the failures of the short term

00:03:26.040 | and I don't zoom out to appreciate the major progress

00:03:29.920 | in the right direction.

00:03:31.360 | And it's so easy just to reckon, to think of yourself

00:03:33.760 | as I'm always missing that and not getting that done.

00:03:36.320 | And you know all the things that you wanted to get done

00:03:38.880 | this week, this month, this year that you didn't.

00:03:41.400 | And so, it's easy to feel behind.

00:03:42.780 | But when I've reflected back on the decade though,

00:03:45.120 | I realized, wow, no, actually,

00:03:47.460 | I'm making tremendous progress toward my goals

00:03:50.340 | and that's been deeply motivating.

00:03:53.420 | So, what I thought I would do in today's show

00:03:56.700 | is just simply share with you some of my reflections,

00:03:59.760 | tell you a few stories about the last decade for me.

00:04:03.000 | I'll share with you some of the lessons that I have learned

00:04:05.540 | as I've processed some of the accomplishments

00:04:08.160 | of the last decade, some of the failures of the last decade,

00:04:11.040 | and then talk with you a little bit about what I see

00:04:13.380 | in the next decade and some of my big picture goals

00:04:16.200 | and some of the personal systems that I'm seeking to have

00:04:19.160 | in my life that will hopefully allow me

00:04:21.480 | to achieve some of my goals.

00:04:23.960 | So, beginning with some of the biggest impact events

00:04:28.960 | of the last 10 years, the most obvious biggest impact events

00:04:33.360 | for me is simply that I got married.

00:04:35.960 | My wife and I got married within the last decade.

00:04:38.080 | And then of course, we went on to have,

00:04:40.560 | so far we've had four children.

00:04:42.360 | And being married and having children

00:04:45.600 | has basically formed the basic structure of our lives.

00:04:50.600 | And as I was reflecting on lessons learned,

00:04:54.600 | I have no regrets about getting married.

00:04:57.040 | Thankfully, I married my best friend

00:04:59.120 | and my wife would say the same thing,

00:05:00.320 | that she married her best friend.

00:05:01.840 | And so, we've been really blessed.

00:05:04.520 | Many times we talk and I realize that when we chat,

00:05:09.520 | I just realized more and more as we get older

00:05:15.200 | how deeply compatible we are.

00:05:18.160 | And that's a real blessing where I'm more looking forward

00:05:22.000 | to the future than I was 10 years ago.

00:05:24.760 | I'm more excited about our life together

00:05:27.280 | than I was 10 years ago.

00:05:28.760 | And we have a few things that we disagree on,

00:05:32.120 | but in general, she and I are highly compatible,

00:05:34.860 | which just really is a blessing.

00:05:36.460 | I was reflecting with her and talking about,

00:05:39.520 | do I have any regrets about getting married?

00:05:40.960 | So, I have no regrets about actually getting married.

00:05:43.240 | If I do have regrets, which I don't love to worry

00:05:47.280 | about things that are in the past,

00:05:48.280 | 'cause you can't change it.

00:05:49.100 | I don't like the whole idea of having regrets.

00:05:50.800 | But if I were to do it over again,

00:05:52.800 | would I do things differently?

00:05:54.120 | I think one of the things I would probably do differently

00:05:56.880 | if I were doing it over again,

00:05:57.720 | is I'd probably get married younger.

00:05:59.420 | I wish that we had gotten married younger.

00:06:04.200 | We married at 26, which is not exactly old.

00:06:07.480 | It's also not exactly young.

00:06:08.720 | It's the exact median age of many of the people

00:06:11.560 | who do marry in today's world.

00:06:13.360 | It's what all the data would say,

00:06:14.960 | it's a good age to get married,

00:06:16.320 | where you're old enough and mature enough, et cetera.

00:06:18.800 | But I guess for me, when I look back,

00:06:22.200 | I don't know why we waited so long.

00:06:23.560 | My wife probably would have been willing to marry earlier.

00:06:26.180 | I was the one who dragged my feet.

00:06:28.000 | And I think I wish that we'd married younger.

00:06:31.100 | Can't change it.

00:06:32.200 | We both did fine.

00:06:33.700 | Don't have any regrets about anything.

00:06:35.800 | It's not like it's a big thing.

00:06:37.360 | I just wish we'd, I think it would have been nice

00:06:39.040 | to have had more memories together as a married couple

00:06:43.200 | from those years in the early 20s.

00:06:45.840 | I've thought a lot about this,

00:06:47.120 | and I'll finish off that marriage series

00:06:50.480 | that I've neglected for quite a while here,

00:06:52.260 | but I'll finish that off here in January,

00:06:54.800 | about how to find an excellent wife.

00:06:56.820 | I really think that if you're careful and thoughtful,

00:07:00.880 | it has to be careful and thoughtful.

00:07:02.640 | You can't just go in and say, oh, I love this person,

00:07:04.640 | so I'm gonna marry them.

00:07:05.840 | But if you're careful and thoughtful,

00:07:07.280 | getting married young is really, really the way to go.

00:07:12.120 | At least I'm convinced for me.

00:07:13.240 | So that would be one thing that I would change.

00:07:15.320 | Another thing that I would probably change

00:07:16.760 | is if I could figure out a way to do it.

00:07:19.440 | I wish that we'd done something more radical

00:07:23.560 | with regard to our first year of marriage.

00:07:26.440 | Now, a lot of people would say

00:07:27.280 | we did some pretty radical stuff.

00:07:29.000 | We lived, I'll talk about housing.

00:07:30.320 | We lived in our first year of marriage

00:07:31.600 | in this tiny little 234 square foot studio apartment

00:07:34.800 | that we rented right by the beach.

00:07:37.720 | It's about $500 a month, I think, was our rental cost.

00:07:40.360 | And it was great.

00:07:41.200 | We really loved it, and I'm really glad we did that.

00:07:43.360 | One of the things I would probably change

00:07:44.360 | if I were doing it over again

00:07:45.200 | is I'd probably stay a little longer

00:07:46.680 | in that particular place,

00:07:47.760 | instead of moving out into the big house

00:07:50.080 | that we did move into.

00:07:52.280 | But in hindsight, I've often wondered

00:07:55.320 | how cool it would have been to have done something

00:07:58.000 | where we took a longer honeymoon.

00:08:00.360 | We took a two-week honeymoon.

00:08:02.340 | Seems to be a trend, what I'm noticing,

00:08:03.960 | among many of my friends,

00:08:04.920 | that some people aren't even taking honeymoons,

00:08:06.560 | or they're delaying their honeymoons.

00:08:08.960 | I've never quite understood that.

00:08:10.800 | We had a nice honeymoon.

00:08:12.680 | But I wish we'd done something more radical.

00:08:17.680 | If I were doing it over again,

00:08:20.080 | one of the things that I would think about

00:08:21.920 | would be doing something like buying

00:08:23.680 | an inexpensive pickup truck,

00:08:25.000 | putting an inexpensive truck camper on that,

00:08:26.840 | and doing a long drive, maybe down to South America.

00:08:30.260 | Do the Alaska to Argentina drive, something like that,

00:08:33.000 | and do it over the course of a year.

00:08:34.760 | Wouldn't cost all that much money.

00:08:36.300 | I could probably fit out the rig for 10 grand or under.

00:08:39.880 | Maybe do it in a van.

00:08:41.000 | I like the truck camper, but 10 grand on a rig,

00:08:43.700 | and probably 30 grand on travel expenses.

00:08:46.360 | So you're in it for $40,000.

00:08:48.560 | But to go on the road for $40,000

00:08:50.360 | and have a one-year honeymoon,

00:08:51.400 | I think would be pretty cool.

00:08:52.520 | I've followed some people who've done that.

00:08:54.960 | At the time, I didn't have probably the guts to do it.

00:08:58.120 | No one brought the idea to me.

00:08:59.520 | No one suggested it.

00:09:01.040 | And it was a problematic, difficult time for me

00:09:04.720 | in my business, where I was very much

00:09:06.760 | trying to build a financial advice business.

00:09:09.000 | And so I have no idea how I could have,

00:09:12.160 | I don't know how I could have actually done that,

00:09:15.420 | because it would have been dumb for me

00:09:17.180 | to walk away from building a business

00:09:19.640 | because I was just behind.

00:09:21.920 | So the only way I can see that possibly with my children,

00:09:24.720 | what I'll try to help them,

00:09:26.080 | is I wish I'd had more money saved when we married.

00:09:28.920 | I wish I hadn't spent so much money on college.

00:09:31.240 | I don't know if I wish I hadn't gone to college.

00:09:35.880 | That's hard to say, 'cause I'm the kind of person

00:09:37.760 | who's a good fit for college.

00:09:39.540 | But when I think about what I could have done instead,

00:09:41.920 | if somebody had come along and given me a vision,

00:09:44.800 | I went to college just because I'm not a loser.

00:09:47.360 | And in the culture that I was a part of,

00:09:50.240 | the school culture, only losers didn't go to college,

00:09:53.200 | and I'm not a loser.

00:09:54.040 | So obviously, I'm the kind of person

00:09:55.200 | who's gonna go to college.

00:09:56.040 | That was it.

00:09:57.420 | I never thought about not going to college.

00:10:00.120 | It was just simply just kind of a default option.

00:10:04.380 | But what I didn't have was I didn't ever have somebody

00:10:06.720 | who came and said, "You can choose not to go to college

00:10:10.780 | "and not actually be a loser."

00:10:13.120 | So I didn't see clearly

00:10:17.180 | what the opportunity cost of college was.

00:10:19.120 | I didn't know what I was giving up.

00:10:20.620 | No one had done a financial projection

00:10:22.160 | of what my financial life would look like

00:10:24.620 | if instead of taking four years off from work

00:10:27.260 | and going and spending tens of thousands of dollars

00:10:29.500 | on a college degree, I had simply gone and started work.

00:10:32.560 | No one had talked to me about how I could achieve

00:10:34.920 | the same goals with, or the same things with self-education.

00:10:37.900 | No one had given me specific ideas and plans,

00:10:39.820 | and so I went to college.

00:10:41.600 | And it's fine, it worked out fine,

00:10:43.600 | but what it meant was that I was behind,

00:10:46.400 | and I was behind on my money earning too

00:10:47.920 | in those years too.

00:10:48.800 | Nobody told me that I could save 50% of my income.

00:10:51.200 | So I thought saving 10% of my income was a good thing to do.

00:10:53.760 | No one told me I could save 50.

00:10:54.920 | No one told me I could save 90% of my income.

00:10:57.320 | No one told me that I could save

00:10:58.760 | and pay cash for my first house.

00:11:01.120 | And so if somebody had come along

00:11:03.020 | and given me more of those ideas at a young age,

00:11:06.020 | I think I would have been inspired

00:11:07.260 | and actually accomplished those goals.

00:11:09.860 | But I didn't have the creativity

00:11:11.660 | to pursue those goals in those years.

00:11:14.260 | And if I had, then I probably could have been

00:11:16.900 | in a situation where I could take a year off

00:11:19.160 | and take a year-long honeymoon, something like that.

00:11:21.960 | But there was just no way that I could do that for myself.

00:11:24.760 | So those were some of my reflections on getting married.

00:11:28.000 | Glad I did it.

00:11:29.560 | Probably wish I'd done it sooner.

00:11:30.860 | Probably wish I'd taken a longer honeymoon.

00:11:33.600 | Other than that, I'm pretty happy with how it all went.

00:11:36.820 | One of these days I'll record a show on weddings,

00:11:38.460 | but I think my wife and I did a pretty good job.

00:11:41.320 | We spent a little under 10 grand on our wedding,

00:11:43.100 | if my memory is right,

00:11:44.400 | which was much more than we had to spend.

00:11:48.900 | We could have done it cheap, but we didn't cheap out on it.

00:11:51.900 | But it was far less than what we could have spent.

00:11:54.100 | And I feel like that was a pretty decent thing to do.

00:11:57.360 | It was important to me in those times

00:11:58.700 | to have some of the nice stuff.

00:12:01.220 | I wasn't as content with frugal decisions

00:12:04.020 | and whatnot as I am now.

00:12:05.620 | On the children, obviously children have shaped

00:12:08.360 | the course of our lives.

00:12:10.100 | We've had four children.

00:12:11.620 | Our eldest is six, so we've got four children,

00:12:14.020 | six and under now.

00:12:15.560 | And that's been awesome.

00:12:17.300 | I wouldn't change it a bit.

00:12:21.900 | Being a father has been for me

00:12:23.860 | a completely transformative experience.

00:12:26.700 | Not in kind of the hokey trite way where I was,

00:12:29.620 | hey, held my first baby and my life flashed before my eyes

00:12:32.460 | and I saw myself completely differently.

00:12:35.020 | I've never had any of those flash of epiphany

00:12:38.020 | experiences like that.

00:12:39.520 | But it has changed me as a man.

00:12:43.060 | And I think that it's helped me to mature significantly

00:12:47.220 | being a father.

00:12:48.300 | And it's a role that I feel born to play.

00:12:51.420 | And it's helped me when I think about

00:12:54.260 | even just the coming decades of my life,

00:12:56.340 | it's influenced all of my goals.

00:12:58.060 | It's influenced the vision that I have of my life.

00:13:00.660 | And it's really helped me to have a long-term

00:13:03.900 | anchoring point in my life.

00:13:06.460 | And I feel like it's very psychologically healthy

00:13:09.660 | to have those long-term anchoring points.

00:13:12.620 | I have some friends of mine who are the same age,

00:13:16.220 | people I went to school with, people that I'm close to

00:13:18.620 | who've taken a very different path.

00:13:20.420 | And I'm not married, no children,

00:13:24.900 | but I've just pursued the kind of the single

00:13:27.460 | earn income, build a business,

00:13:33.100 | enjoy the fruits of income lifestyle.

00:13:37.580 | And they're different.

00:13:41.260 | Some people really want that

00:13:42.620 | and don't want family and children.

00:13:43.820 | Some people feel like they want family and children,

00:13:45.460 | but they just feel like they haven't found the right person.

00:13:48.300 | Those things are totally fine.

00:13:49.980 | But as I try to look through their eyes

00:13:52.580 | about their lives and compare it to my own,

00:13:54.820 | one of the constant impressions that I come away with

00:13:57.420 | is how hard it is to have a long-term quest

00:14:02.420 | if you don't have children.

00:14:04.660 | Where when I have children,

00:14:06.140 | I'm looking forward to my great-grandchildren

00:14:08.940 | and thinking about, all right, what am I gonna do?

00:14:11.860 | What kind of great-grandfather am I gonna be?

00:14:13.660 | And that gives me this anchoring point

00:14:15.780 | as I look forward over the coming century.

00:14:18.740 | It gives me an anchoring point for my vision.

00:14:20.980 | It gives me an anchoring point for my desires.

00:14:24.460 | It gives me an anchoring point for my finances.

00:14:26.180 | I'm thinking about how do I invest to build a family legacy?

00:14:29.540 | How do I build a family business that can be passed on?

00:14:32.340 | How do we buy assets and then transfer those assets down

00:14:36.100 | through three or four or five generations

00:14:39.180 | in a way that is going to be,

00:14:40.860 | where they're not just not gonna be spent all of a sudden?

00:14:44.300 | And how do we do it in a financially efficient way?

00:14:47.540 | You know, doing some decent financial planning

00:14:49.540 | and estate planning along the way.

00:14:50.860 | And how do we take advantage of investment trends

00:14:53.180 | when you've got a hundred-year investing lifetime?

00:14:55.700 | In terms of my own investment horizon,

00:14:59.300 | everything that I'm thinking about is 60, 80, 100 years.

00:15:03.020 | Because my ambition is never to draw from my investments,

00:15:06.540 | but purely to use those investments

00:15:08.340 | to build a family fortune

00:15:10.940 | that can be passed on through the generations.

00:15:12.780 | I don't ever wanna stop having and generating earned income.

00:15:16.340 | And so the earned income can be something

00:15:20.020 | that will provide my lifestyle.

00:15:23.860 | And so if I don't ever have to stop earning earned income

00:15:27.140 | and live off of money,

00:15:28.180 | then it completely changes the investing focus.

00:15:30.980 | And so that's my focus right now as an investor

00:15:34.060 | is thinking how do I invest over a 60, 80, 100, 120,

00:15:38.580 | 150 year horizon to build a family legacy?

00:15:42.300 | And then that anchors even just the things I do day to day.

00:15:45.340 | Because how do I develop children

00:15:47.820 | for whom money can be a blessing and not a curse?

00:15:50.780 | How do I develop children who are strong of character,

00:15:55.140 | who have the things that they need to build stable lives?

00:15:58.700 | And it just gives me this long-term perspective

00:16:01.220 | that some of my friends don't have.

00:16:02.980 | I've achieved the majority of the hedonistic

00:16:07.980 | things that I've ever wanted.

00:16:09.820 | And I've never had a fancy car,

00:16:11.540 | but that's not really ever been important to me.

00:16:13.460 | Maybe someday in a few years,

00:16:15.380 | I'll go and rent an exotic car in Miami,

00:16:17.900 | something like that,

00:16:18.740 | and say, see what it's like

00:16:19.580 | to drive a Lamborghini on the beach.

00:16:21.500 | But I don't care for the flash.

00:16:23.500 | That's not, I would probably be embarrassed

00:16:25.580 | and wanna put the top up so no one could see me, frankly,

00:16:28.060 | 'cause I don't care for that kind of attention.

00:16:30.420 | For Christmas, I took my family

00:16:35.260 | to an all-inclusive resort on the beach,

00:16:37.780 | and we stayed at a beautiful resort on the beach

00:16:39.780 | and had a great time.

00:16:40.900 | So I've achieved almost all the lifestyle things

00:16:45.500 | that you dream about when you're 13 years old.

00:16:48.340 | And so I imagine, what would it be like

00:16:51.580 | if I were 35 years old,

00:16:53.260 | and I were in the situation that I had right now,

00:16:55.620 | but I didn't have children?

00:16:56.580 | What would be my goals?

00:16:57.820 | And it's hard to know.

00:16:59.180 | Obviously, I would have business goals

00:17:01.260 | and hopefully have some social goals

00:17:03.260 | and some other things.

00:17:04.100 | But children really have helped me

00:17:07.780 | and anchored me very deeply.

00:17:10.820 | Looking forward over the next century,

00:17:12.700 | and that's been extremely important to me.

00:17:16.300 | So have no regrets about having children.

00:17:19.100 | What would I do differently?

00:17:20.500 | I don't think I'd do,

00:17:22.380 | well, the only thing I would consider doing differently

00:17:24.460 | is that being now an expert on birth tourism,

00:17:27.700 | I kind of long for the lost opportunities

00:17:30.660 | of all the passports I could collect from my children

00:17:32.740 | and all the residencies for them all,

00:17:35.380 | if all four of our children had been born

00:17:37.100 | outside the United States.

00:17:38.980 | We did birth tourism for our last baby,

00:17:41.380 | but at this point in time,

00:17:43.180 | but that was just for one child.

00:17:44.860 | And that now the obsessive part of me has all,

00:17:49.500 | I've got it all worked out

00:17:50.420 | and all the countries all around the world.

00:17:51.900 | And I can give you a list of all the countries

00:17:55.500 | that I would have a baby in

00:17:57.020 | if I were gonna have four babies over again.

00:17:59.060 | I told my wife, if we have four more babies,

00:18:00.660 | then I've got it all worked out.

00:18:03.220 | But I honestly don't think that's realistic.

00:18:05.060 | I don't know.

00:18:06.340 | There are people who, for their first child,

00:18:09.100 | are willing to go and do birth tourism.

00:18:11.420 | There certainly are.

00:18:12.620 | I guess Mike and Lauren are the ones

00:18:14.460 | who have a YouTube channel

00:18:15.580 | where they've talked about how they did birth tourism.

00:18:17.780 | They went to Costa Rica to have their first baby.

00:18:19.940 | My hat's off to them.

00:18:21.220 | I don't know that my wife and I could have done it.

00:18:22.740 | I don't know if we would have been adventurous enough.

00:18:24.780 | Having a baby for the first time is so,

00:18:28.140 | it's such a new thing,

00:18:29.100 | and there's so much emotion

00:18:31.100 | and so much planning associated with it, et cetera.

00:18:34.840 | So to add on to that, the internationalization,

00:18:37.740 | instead of being, okay, we're gonna be home

00:18:39.580 | in our house, in our hometown,

00:18:42.860 | but now we're gonna go to the other side of the world

00:18:44.500 | and have the baby, that's a hard sale to make.

00:18:48.420 | So I just don't know how we could have done it up until now.

00:18:51.940 | For our fourth child, it was not easy,

00:18:54.420 | but it was very doable.

00:18:56.540 | But by that time, we didn't have any real concerns

00:18:59.540 | or misgivings about the process of birth.

00:19:01.940 | And so it was more about some of the logistics

00:19:04.360 | of the travel, et cetera.

00:19:05.340 | And it was easy for us

00:19:06.180 | because we were moving from living full-time in an RV

00:19:09.020 | to just simply moving into suitcases

00:19:10.780 | and moving across the world.

00:19:12.580 | So that's about the only thing I would change with children.

00:19:16.220 | Over the coming decade, though,

00:19:19.500 | basically some of my most important goals

00:19:22.220 | involve the education and the nurturing

00:19:24.500 | and the training of my children.

00:19:26.500 | 10 years from now, 20, 30,

00:19:29.440 | if I'm sitting here talking to you, in 20, 30,

00:19:33.060 | I'll have a 16-year-old,

00:19:34.300 | which basically means that I'll have my first adult child

00:19:37.980 | moving out of the house.

00:19:39.240 | Yes, that's not the legal age of majority,

00:19:42.700 | but I think that the legal age of majority, 18, is dumb.

00:19:46.860 | The whole United States of America has no idea.

00:19:49.960 | There's no cultural coherent philosophy

00:19:53.340 | on what makes an adult.

00:19:54.580 | It's just this crazy mix-up

00:19:57.060 | of certain things that you can do at 16,

00:19:58.980 | certain things you can do at 18,

00:20:00.100 | certain things you can do at 21, et cetera.

00:20:02.620 | And I don't place much stock in the age 18 number.

00:20:05.540 | I think that the most important years

00:20:10.220 | from a parent's perspective

00:20:11.940 | are basically from five to about 12 or 13.

00:20:16.620 | You basically have about seven or eight years.

00:20:19.240 | And it's my opinion that basically

00:20:22.060 | by the time a child reaches about 13-ish, 12 or 13,

00:20:26.020 | that's the traditional age of adulthood

00:20:29.140 | throughout many traditional cultures.

00:20:32.340 | The obvious example of that,

00:20:34.060 | the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah,

00:20:35.700 | was not always just a religious ceremony

00:20:38.300 | with no actual meaning.

00:20:39.340 | It was a rite of adulthood, a rite of passage.

00:20:41.980 | You can find some tribes of Indians

00:20:45.020 | who would have rites of passage

00:20:46.460 | into manhood at 13 years old.

00:20:48.500 | And then if you think about what happens physiologically

00:20:51.460 | by, for the child in their teens,

00:20:53.540 | in the US we call it adolescence,

00:20:55.060 | but it's a term that's denoting major changes.

00:20:58.260 | And those changes are where a child

00:20:59.580 | is moving into adulthood.

00:21:01.780 | And obviously there's a transition period,

00:21:03.460 | but my ambition is to hold for my children a vision

00:21:08.460 | to where about that age

00:21:11.080 | there's a rite of passage into adulthood,

00:21:12.840 | where I wanna treat them in many ways as adults,

00:21:16.700 | starting from about those early teenage years.

00:21:19.900 | Now you kinda gotta work around some of the restrictions

00:21:22.980 | in the modern society, they can't drive.

00:21:24.860 | It's a little easier today in a world of smartphone apps

00:21:28.220 | and probably by the time they're 13,

00:21:29.500 | they can just, if they were living in a modern culture,

00:21:32.300 | you can just call up the autonomous taxi

00:21:35.260 | to come and pick you up.

00:21:36.180 | So that solves some of the problems.

00:21:37.780 | You have major problems with figuring out

00:21:39.380 | how to work around all the child labor laws

00:21:41.220 | that make it very difficult for children to be employed,

00:21:44.120 | but entrepreneurship solves most of those problems.

00:21:47.660 | So, and children still need protection

00:21:51.980 | in those teenage years.

00:21:52.820 | But the point is that by the age of 13,

00:21:55.340 | I think a father's role changes.

00:21:57.980 | And the vision that I have is that at this point,

00:22:01.500 | I am a parent, and which means I'm in control

00:22:05.220 | of my children.

00:22:06.080 | But starting at about the age of 13,

00:22:08.300 | and that time from say 13 to 20,

00:22:10.540 | I wanna be in more of a coaching role,

00:22:15.020 | not in a controlling role.

00:22:17.000 | I don't want to control my children's decisions,

00:22:19.940 | I wanna coach them to make good decisions.

00:22:22.500 | So we'll see how that works out in the coming decade.

00:22:24.500 | But for me, the next decade is going to be very involved

00:22:27.700 | with my children.

00:22:30.740 | And a major component of that is education.

00:22:33.300 | I have big educational ambitions for them.

00:22:36.740 | And I'm not quite sure how all those things

00:22:39.580 | will work out in the next decade.

00:22:41.140 | I've got a lot of ideas, but I think that it's easy to,

00:22:46.140 | I wanna be very careful to just look at what's working

00:22:48.800 | and what's not working day by day.

00:22:50.700 | And be open to change and not,

00:22:53.340 | and I wanna be careful not to impose my big ideas

00:22:57.260 | in a kind of a controlling way

00:23:00.740 | where we've got to do it this way.

00:23:02.220 | I wanna be open to the feedback

00:23:03.940 | and be very careful to be open to the feedback.

00:23:06.420 | That said though, I want to hold a vision and hold,

00:23:10.900 | I think that if you have a vision to start with,

00:23:14.900 | then that can be useful.

00:23:16.340 | There can be a danger if you don't have a vision,

00:23:18.060 | then you would probably get subpar results.

00:23:20.560 | So there's a danger of not having a vision.

00:23:23.780 | Then on the other hand,

00:23:24.900 | there's a danger of having such a vision

00:23:26.420 | that you don't look to see,

00:23:27.660 | are we actually getting good results?

00:23:29.340 | And so I wanna find that healthy balance,

00:23:32.180 | but I do wanna give, I have a vision for myself

00:23:35.100 | and I do have a vision for my children.

00:23:37.740 | I want my children to be academically excellent

00:23:41.220 | and to have an educational process of academic excellence,

00:23:45.020 | but I don't want those academics to dominate their life.

00:23:49.420 | I want it to be a small

00:23:50.740 | and very important part of their life,

00:23:52.580 | but I want many more practical skills

00:23:54.960 | to be every bit as important.

00:23:57.900 | So what I see in the future is,

00:24:01.860 | I want my children to do about three hours of academics,

00:24:04.620 | three to four hours of academics every day,

00:24:06.860 | right in the morning,

00:24:07.740 | and then I want their afternoons to be taken up

00:24:10.180 | with things like entrepreneurship

00:24:12.980 | or working, building practical skills.

00:24:16.020 | And it's such an exciting time to be a young entrepreneur

00:24:20.040 | because there's so many opportunities available

00:24:22.220 | that previously were more difficult.

00:24:25.080 | So many entrepreneurial activities in the past

00:24:27.620 | required either a really big local market

00:24:31.320 | or required huge amounts of capital.

00:24:33.440 | But today there are opportunities available

00:24:35.000 | for young entrepreneurs

00:24:36.240 | that don't require significant financial capital upfront

00:24:39.640 | and yet are really big opportunities.

00:24:42.680 | And so I wanna help my children to work a lot

00:24:46.180 | during their young years, to develop businesses.

00:24:49.820 | I want them to build the skill

00:24:51.200 | and the practice of doing some things well,

00:24:53.760 | of failing at lots of things

00:24:54.960 | so they get used to having success and failure.

00:24:59.960 | And I wanna do that where it's a very safe environment.

00:25:04.620 | I don't quite know what the educational environment

00:25:08.040 | is gonna look like a decade from now,

00:25:10.480 | but my ambition is that by the time my children graduate,

00:25:15.480 | for say about that age of 17, 18, 19, 20,

00:25:18.680 | that instead of just having a high school diploma,

00:25:20.560 | if the educational system looks something like it is today,

00:25:23.440 | my ambition is that they have a college degree

00:25:25.760 | or something close to that.

00:25:27.440 | I see no reason for academically competent children

00:25:31.200 | and young people to not just simply swap out

00:25:33.920 | a college degree program instead of high school.

00:25:37.420 | High school has become so stupid

00:25:39.480 | and college has become so stupid

00:25:41.160 | that if your children are academically competent,

00:25:45.440 | they don't see any reason why they shouldn't just do

00:25:47.480 | the college level work during those teenage years

00:25:49.480 | and skip high school.

00:25:51.200 | So we're still a long way away from that,

00:25:52.780 | but we'll see how that works out over the coming decade.

00:25:54.560 | It'll be interesting to see.

00:25:56.800 | And it'll be interesting to see

00:25:57.640 | if I change my mind on that.

00:25:58.880 | I changed my mind on early child education,

00:26:00.900 | so maybe I'll need to change my mind on the college

00:26:05.040 | and trying to pursue the college level stuff.

00:26:07.040 | I just look and see where if you can launch a child,

00:26:10.720 | and with homeschooling, you certainly can do this.

00:26:13.480 | If you can just simply launch a child

00:26:14.760 | at 18 or 19 years old,

00:26:16.480 | and if they wanna go to college,

00:26:17.960 | they just go right into a master's degree program

00:26:21.080 | instead of into an undergraduate degree program.

00:26:23.520 | I see it's hard to see the arguments

00:26:26.000 | against why you wouldn't do that.

00:26:27.840 | And with the ability to get an accredited degree

00:26:31.160 | through distance study, with CLEP exams, et cetera,

00:26:34.200 | it just seems very doable.

00:26:35.520 | It's what I could have done it

00:26:36.920 | if somebody had given me that vision back in those days.

00:26:39.640 | I think the biggest danger of that

00:26:41.080 | is probably the challenge of socialization

00:26:47.560 | is an 18 year old ready to go into an environment

00:26:50.400 | of master's degree students

00:26:51.600 | if they're gonna go pursue a master's degree?

00:26:53.800 | Is there some damage that comes to a child

00:26:58.120 | because they're not around people

00:27:02.040 | who are going through exactly the same program

00:27:03.680 | they're going through?

00:27:05.160 | I don't think so.

00:27:06.720 | I think that you can handle the socialization challenges

00:27:10.400 | without socialization having to come

00:27:12.240 | in the context of academics.

00:27:13.780 | Many people just have this one idea that,

00:27:15.720 | well, the way you socialize your child is in class.

00:27:17.920 | I thought the point of going to class was to learn.

00:27:19.840 | So I don't see why socialization

00:27:21.880 | would have to be the primary goal of schooling.

00:27:25.000 | The primary goal of schooling should be education

00:27:27.640 | and skill acquisition,

00:27:29.160 | and then socialization can happen in many different forms.

00:27:33.080 | I don't know whether I'll still believe that

00:27:34.160 | a decade from now, but at the moment,

00:27:35.600 | that's what I currently think.

00:27:37.100 | I would like to definitely make sure

00:27:40.400 | that I expose my children to lots of travel.

00:27:42.960 | I wanna make sure I raise them to be multilingual,

00:27:45.240 | if possible.

00:27:46.080 | We're finding that very challenging right now,

00:27:48.760 | but we're making progress.

00:27:50.200 | I think it's just challenging at the beginning.

00:27:51.420 | So I wanna raise my children to be multilingual,

00:27:53.520 | and that should be helpful to them in time.

00:27:56.660 | I don't know exactly what all the travel should look like.

00:27:59.600 | I definitely want to, at some point,

00:28:02.600 | take a year off and do another year,

00:28:04.320 | or at least going around the United States and Canada.

00:28:07.600 | It's just such a beautiful place to travel,

00:28:09.560 | so much rich history,

00:28:11.040 | and I want my children to feel culturally connected to that.

00:28:14.040 | So I don't know exactly the year

00:28:15.920 | that will be the best to do it,

00:28:17.120 | but I do know that we spent six months

00:28:20.280 | full-timing around the US last year,

00:28:21.800 | and doing it with a, let's see,

00:28:23.580 | we were traveling with a one-year-old,

00:28:24.800 | a three-year-old, and a five-year-old.

00:28:26.040 | That wasn't the time.

00:28:28.880 | It's not that we didn't enjoy it.

00:28:29.900 | We enjoyed it a lot,

00:28:30.740 | but all the educational stuff was just, woo!

00:28:32.800 | They didn't pay attention.

00:28:35.480 | They didn't read the signs, et cetera.

00:28:37.240 | So I have an idea that basically

00:28:39.560 | seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12,

00:28:41.880 | these are the right years to do something like that.

00:28:44.600 | I think we'll do quite a bit

00:28:45.820 | of international travel as well,

00:28:47.920 | but I want that international travel

00:28:49.480 | to be a mixture of some fun,

00:28:53.160 | some luxury travel, some vacation stuff,

00:28:56.240 | but I really want there to be a much deeper work

00:28:59.240 | associated with that international travel.

00:29:01.080 | I'm still working out how that can look like,

00:29:03.480 | and what can be the anchoring opportunities.

00:29:06.800 | I am starting to enjoy doing business travel

00:29:08.600 | with my children.

00:29:09.640 | I tested that out this last year.

00:29:11.800 | Took my six-year-old son to FinCon,

00:29:14.960 | and really enjoyed that.

00:29:16.920 | He was right on the edge,

00:29:18.480 | where he did a pretty good job.

00:29:20.520 | It was a little bit of a hindrance to me,

00:29:22.980 | and he gained some of the stuff from that trip,

00:29:26.180 | but I definitely wanna do much more of that.

00:29:28.080 | I want my children to be a part

00:29:30.160 | of all my personal business travel,

00:29:32.080 | so that they can be exposed to that world as well,

00:29:36.120 | and then figure out how to support them

00:29:37.840 | in their ambitions.

00:29:39.400 | As they work to develop their skills,

00:29:43.200 | I wanna figure out how to invest into that.

00:29:46.000 | It's my basic operating philosophy

00:29:48.120 | that investing for college expenses is dumb,

00:29:51.920 | and that investing into your child is smart.

00:29:56.920 | I think that the idea that the single best investment

00:30:01.160 | to your child is to open a college account is a giant scam,

00:30:04.400 | and it's far better to invest that money

00:30:06.760 | into your child at a young age,

00:30:08.600 | and then if they wanna go to college,

00:30:09.660 | let them figure out how to pay for it

00:30:11.040 | than to do it down the road.

00:30:12.720 | So I'm thinking constantly and looking for opportunities

00:30:16.280 | of how do I invest into my children,

00:30:18.360 | and hire tutors, hire lessons, give them experiences,

00:30:22.600 | give them exposure, help them buy tools that they need

00:30:24.960 | for the things that they're interested in.

00:30:27.240 | Those tools can cross the board,

00:30:30.080 | but that's, to me, much more important,

00:30:32.880 | and I'm convinced it's much more effective

00:30:35.000 | and a better investment than just saving for college.

00:30:40.000 | Who knows what it'll be 10 years from now.

00:30:43.200 | So those are kind of some of my reports

00:30:44.520 | in the last 10 years, and looking forward

00:30:46.740 | over the next 10 years with children.

00:30:49.320 | Don't know if we'll have more children.

00:30:50.520 | I'd probably like to.

00:30:51.480 | My wife and I, we talk about it.

00:30:53.780 | Just a busy time in our family.

00:30:55.340 | So we'll see.

00:30:59.560 | God knows.

00:31:00.480 | I'll just take it a day at a time with regard to that.

00:31:04.120 | But it'll be an interesting decade.

00:31:06.360 | I certainly feel, when I sit at my dinner table

00:31:09.480 | and I see my wife and my four children,

00:31:12.480 | I feel accomplished and successful,

00:31:15.440 | and I feel pity for people who don't have that,

00:31:19.600 | for men who don't have that.

00:31:20.760 | I feel pity for them because it just seems to me

00:31:24.980 | that that is such a profoundly impactful part of my life.

00:31:29.980 | I wouldn't give it up for anything,

00:31:32.280 | and it seems just deeply healthy.

00:31:37.280 | It seems to be the, it feels, it seems right.

00:31:42.080 | Now, I have theological arguments and whatnot

00:31:44.440 | that could be brought to it,

00:31:45.400 | but just from an emotional perspective, I'm proud of.

00:31:47.800 | Proud of my children's probably the thing I'm most proud of.

00:31:50.000 | And I want more people to experience that.

00:31:54.080 | I want more men to experience that satisfaction.

00:31:56.520 | I could work very happily at some dead-end job

00:31:59.200 | that I don't like if I come home

00:32:01.120 | and feel like I'm doing it with purpose to support my family.

00:32:03.080 | It would bring me a great deal of satisfaction.

00:32:06.700 | Last two decades, or sorry, last decade, let's see, dogs.

00:32:10.200 | My wife and I were talking about,

00:32:11.040 | we have two dogs that we got.

00:32:13.500 | Dogs are kind of in a mixed bag,

00:32:15.280 | where unfortunately, I've grown to really love my dogs.

00:32:17.960 | And I say unfortunately 'cause I never anticipated

00:32:20.280 | that I would love my dogs as much as I do.

00:32:22.440 | I was never really a dog person.

00:32:23.860 | Now I always looked at dogs as fairly,

00:32:26.580 | I don't know, they're there or they're not.

00:32:29.240 | My wife really loves dogs, though.

00:32:30.880 | So we got dogs before we had children.

00:32:33.040 | And at the time, it seemed like a really good decision.

00:32:36.160 | We were living a fairly stable life.

00:32:38.240 | We lived in a house that we owned.

00:32:40.280 | And we had a big yard,

00:32:41.680 | and it just seemed like the right thing to do.

00:32:43.560 | So we didn't plan to get two dogs.

00:32:46.040 | We planned to get one dog.

00:32:47.680 | But then while we were looking for a dog,

00:32:49.480 | we were going around visiting shelters

00:32:50.980 | and looking for a dog,

00:32:52.440 | we stumbled across a neighbor who had some puppies.

00:32:56.240 | And we're just there and looking at these little puppies.

00:32:58.760 | And my wife fell in love with one.

00:33:00.000 | And I liked another one.

00:33:01.400 | And well, one thing leads to another.

00:33:03.480 | And a couple days later, we went home with two puppies.

00:33:06.800 | So it wasn't a whole lot of thoughtful planning

00:33:10.260 | and analysis.

00:33:11.840 | And then they just become a part of your life,

00:33:14.440 | and you grow to really love them, et cetera.

00:33:16.400 | If I were to do it over again, though,

00:33:17.440 | I don't think I would do it exactly that way.

00:33:21.220 | Having two dogs is in some ways a real blessing.

00:33:24.040 | It's nice for the dogs that they always have a friend.

00:33:26.840 | You know, they always have somebody to play with.

00:33:29.040 | The biggest problem with the dogs

00:33:30.800 | is that when there are two of them,

00:33:32.360 | it really does change the dynamic of other aspects of life.

00:33:36.600 | For example, the dogs are a real hindrance

00:33:38.940 | to my geographic flexibility.

00:33:41.560 | And the fact that there are two of them

00:33:43.000 | makes it very difficult to find people

00:33:44.740 | who are willing to dog sit.

00:33:46.440 | It's far easier to have multiple children

00:33:50.320 | than to have multiple dogs.

00:33:52.520 | If you have one dog, you can ask almost anybody,

00:33:54.960 | "Hey, would you be willing to take care of my dog?"

00:33:57.240 | But when you have two dogs,

00:33:58.520 | you're basically limited to people who are dog people

00:34:01.640 | being willing to do that, or who have a really good yard,

00:34:03.960 | because the two dogs just, they take up more space,

00:34:06.520 | they're more boisterous, require more control, et cetera.

00:34:08.920 | And so that really limits the number of people

00:34:12.400 | who are willing to take care of our dogs.

00:34:15.760 | And so that's been challenging.

00:34:17.540 | The other just practical challenge

00:34:19.340 | is that I've reached a point at which,

00:34:21.400 | as much as I love renting houses,

00:34:23.420 | the rental market is not kind

00:34:25.080 | to people with four children and two dogs.

00:34:28.160 | Four children is, you face a little bit of discrimination.

00:34:33.160 | Again, let's see, let's make up a word

00:34:35.800 | that makes us sound pitiable.

00:34:37.640 | Large family discrimination.

00:34:39.400 | The world is not really set up for four children.

00:34:42.160 | If we have more, you're totally not set up for it.

00:34:45.080 | So that makes potential landlords, mainstream landlords,

00:34:48.520 | raise their eyes a little bit.

00:34:49.520 | But when you bring in dogs,

00:34:50.760 | because of the potential destructiveness of dogs,

00:34:53.120 | and you have two of them, it just changes things.

00:34:55.400 | And so it makes it much more challenging,

00:34:57.160 | much more expensive for a family of my size

00:34:59.600 | to be able to go and do something

00:35:00.760 | as simple as renting a house.

00:35:03.120 | That's one of the expenses

00:35:04.700 | that I didn't think much about with a dog.

00:35:06.520 | And again, if you'd asked me,

00:35:08.180 | I guess I probably could have come up

00:35:09.320 | with reasons against it.

00:35:11.100 | But what I thought was that,

00:35:12.760 | I thought, well, I own my own house.

00:35:14.080 | And when you own your own house, then what does it matter?

00:35:16.240 | Well, it's still, those things do add up over time.

00:35:20.060 | The other thing about the dogs is just simply,

00:35:21.560 | I underestimated how expensive their medical costs can be.

00:35:25.080 | I've got one dog that was totally healthy,

00:35:27.640 | and she hasn't cost me a bit,

00:35:29.240 | but her brother has had just this,

00:35:31.920 | all kinds of chronic skin conditions and allergies.

00:35:35.200 | And I'm a pretty practical guy, love my dogs.

00:35:37.940 | But if you came to me and said,

00:35:39.160 | "Hey, this dog's got cancer, and we could do surgery,

00:35:42.240 | "but it's gonna be $5,000."

00:35:44.080 | I'd say, "Hmm, love the dog.

00:35:46.040 | "He's gonna have to either make it on his own,

00:35:48.480 | "but I'm not gonna spend $5,000 on it."

00:35:50.840 | Well, the problem is that I've had

00:35:52.440 | these chronic health issues with this one dog,

00:35:54.320 | and trying to figure out how to get him healthy.

00:35:56.480 | It doesn't come out 5,000 bucks at a time.

00:35:58.520 | It's come out 500 bucks at a time,

00:36:00.120 | and 700 here, and then 300 there, and 600 there, et cetera.

00:36:03.960 | And it just really bugs me

00:36:06.560 | of how much money I've spent on this dog.

00:36:08.760 | And yet it's just this deep,

00:36:10.400 | kind of these deep emotions where I really love the guy,

00:36:12.600 | you know, especially I've spent so much money on him,

00:36:14.080 | I really love the guy.

00:36:14.920 | And he's wormed his way into my heart,

00:36:16.320 | just like dogs have a tendency to do.

00:36:18.960 | So my relationship with my dogs is somewhat conflicted.

00:36:23.800 | But in hindsight, I probably wouldn't get two of them.

00:36:26.440 | And when these guys die, I don't know if I'll replace them.

00:36:28.920 | But I probably, if I do replace them,

00:36:30.240 | I'd probably replace them with one.

00:36:32.480 | It's just excessive.

00:36:33.320 | Now, if I had, and the biggest change

00:36:36.560 | is simply the change of conditions,

00:36:38.560 | that there was no problem when I had a big house,

00:36:41.760 | big yard, et cetera.

00:36:43.200 | But then as soon as I tried to move into other conditions,

00:36:46.840 | and I sold my house,

00:36:47.880 | moved into a house without a yard, et cetera,

00:36:50.320 | as soon as I started to do that,

00:36:54.240 | then all of a sudden those two dogs became more difficult.

00:36:57.440 | And I'm not the kind of person who walks away from dogs.

00:36:59.960 | I mean, I just never,

00:37:00.800 | I guess some people give up their dogs

00:37:03.080 | or put them up for adoption.

00:37:04.120 | I would never even, I've never even considered that.

00:37:06.560 | It just seems like a dereliction of responsibility.

00:37:11.160 | But those are my thoughts on dogs.

00:37:14.400 | What about houses?

00:37:16.880 | Well, we've had quite the interesting housing journey

00:37:20.080 | over the last decade.

00:37:21.360 | I lived at home with my family until I married,

00:37:25.000 | which I definitely really am a fan of, strongly recommend.

00:37:30.000 | It really bothers me,

00:37:31.560 | the kind of the anti-living with family thing that exists,

00:37:36.360 | at least in the United States,

00:37:37.760 | where the idea is as soon as you're 18,

00:37:39.880 | then you're supposed to not live with family.

00:37:41.760 | It's lonely, it stinks.

00:37:44.120 | There's a good chance you make some bad decisions

00:37:45.960 | in those circumstances.

00:37:47.600 | I don't like the idea of adult children

00:37:50.080 | being a leech on their family members.

00:37:53.120 | I think that's a really bad.

00:37:54.520 | So if an adult child is irresponsible

00:37:57.120 | and you're just milking mom and dad,

00:37:59.480 | and I don't think that's healthy at all.

00:38:00.840 | I think they gotta be kicked out in that situation.

00:38:04.080 | But I do, I think that the ideal circumstance to be in

00:38:07.600 | is to live with family,

00:38:09.500 | to be though a productive

00:38:11.040 | and contributing member of the household,

00:38:14.120 | and then to, until you form your own family,

00:38:18.240 | get married and move out.

00:38:19.520 | I think that's a really great way to do it

00:38:21.040 | because you get so many social benefits.

00:38:23.060 | You can maintain these close relationships

00:38:24.880 | with family members.

00:38:26.480 | You're not lonely.

00:38:27.320 | You don't have to stare at some empty apartment

00:38:29.080 | all the time.

00:38:30.360 | There's a useful restraint

00:38:33.200 | by having still that family influence on,

00:38:35.920 | it's less likely to engage in immoral behavior, et cetera.

00:38:39.800 | If you have your families nearby,

00:38:42.860 | I think it could be a real blessing to parents.

00:38:45.600 | I thought seriously about moving out,

00:38:47.080 | but I was paying rent.

00:38:47.920 | So like, why wouldn't I want my rent to go to my dad?

00:38:50.840 | Why wouldn't I want him to have the rent money

00:38:52.880 | instead of it going to somebody else?

00:38:55.560 | So I lived with family until I got married.

00:38:57.680 | And then for the first year that my wife and I were married,

00:38:59.600 | we lived in this little tiny apartment.

00:39:01.680 | Going back, what I'd do differently,

00:39:03.160 | I would probably stay in that apartment longer.

00:39:05.060 | We lived there for a year,

00:39:06.160 | and then we bought a big house and moved into there.

00:39:08.860 | And it seemed like a good decision, and it was.

00:39:11.120 | It seemed like a good decision at the time

00:39:12.860 | because of, well, we could afford it.

00:39:17.860 | I was very careful, I'm very careful in buying the house.

00:39:20.260 | And the house worked out great.

00:39:21.900 | We lived there for a few years,

00:39:23.860 | made a lot of money when we sold the house,

00:39:25.720 | and it was a good deal.

00:39:27.660 | But I think if I were to reflect with some

00:39:32.380 | detachment of time,

00:39:36.460 | I think I was still trying to prove that I'm not a loser.

00:39:41.420 | I was still going down the checklist of,

00:39:44.580 | go to high school, graduate high school,

00:39:47.620 | go to college, get a college degree, get a job,

00:39:50.000 | buy a house, get married, get a dog, have children.

00:39:55.780 | I was still going through the checklist.

00:39:58.360 | Now, it wasn't a clearly articulated thing,

00:40:03.360 | but in hindsight, I can see that I felt this pressure

00:40:05.800 | not to be a loser, to buy a house because I'm not a loser.

00:40:08.960 | Losers sit around and rent forever, and I'm not a loser,

00:40:12.120 | so I'm gonna buy a house.

00:40:14.200 | And the house was nice.

00:40:17.000 | It gave us some nice opportunities.

00:40:19.700 | But it also resulted in such an immediate increase

00:40:22.640 | of stuff to maintain a house,

00:40:26.440 | and it became the time sink that, of course, it is,

00:40:29.840 | that it just, it definitely cut down

00:40:31.880 | on my freedom and flexibility.

00:40:34.240 | And when I sold the house

00:40:36.760 | and started renting an apartment again,

00:40:38.040 | I was very pleased with that.

00:40:40.240 | And currently I rent, and I'm very pleased with that.

00:40:43.640 | So I'm glad that I bought the house

00:40:45.200 | because I could experience all of those emotions

00:40:48.160 | and all of those financial costs, et cetera.

00:40:51.360 | I'm glad that I had that experience.

00:40:53.460 | But looking back, if I were optimizing things,

00:40:58.120 | I would have stayed living

00:40:59.000 | in the $500 a month apartment longer,

00:41:01.640 | and I would not have bought a house to live in.

00:41:04.280 | I would have bought a house to rent.

00:41:06.500 | The biggest financial mistake that I made

00:41:09.460 | over the last 10 years was probably not buying

00:41:12.560 | a long string of rental properties every year.

00:41:16.120 | And it's become my go-to thing,

00:41:19.160 | where I've realized that if I had just done

00:41:21.760 | one thing differently over the last 10 years,

00:41:24.380 | just simply for the first five years of marriage,

00:41:26.640 | my wife and I had done something as simple as buy a house,

00:41:30.200 | just conventional house, conventional financing, et cetera,

00:41:33.920 | buy a house, move into it, live in it for a year

00:41:36.760 | to satisfy the requirements of an owner-occupied mortgage,

00:41:41.760 | and then go ahead and put a tenant in it and move out.

00:41:44.420 | If we had just done that

00:41:45.380 | over the first five years of our life,

00:41:47.280 | that would have been one of the best things

00:41:49.760 | that we could have done.

00:41:51.500 | And it's not that, we're not broke, we're not hurting,

00:41:54.720 | but that's something that I wish I had done.

00:41:57.200 | Once again, someone hadn't sold me on the idea,

00:42:00.920 | and I wish you'd done that strategy.

00:42:05.120 | That's a strategy that I think would have worked for us,

00:42:07.960 | and we could have done house hacking,

00:42:09.360 | put somebody in the house with us too,

00:42:11.240 | but that's a strategy that I wish I had done back then.

00:42:16.040 | So if you are getting married and you're 26 years old,

00:42:19.320 | I beg of you, don't buy a house to live in

00:42:21.440 | in the first year, don't buy a house to rent,

00:42:25.440 | and just move for, do one a year.

00:42:27.440 | It doesn't have to be a lot,

00:42:28.280 | it doesn't have to be a full-time thing.

00:42:29.760 | Just buy one house per year

00:42:31.080 | until you own five or 10 of 'em,

00:42:32.600 | and then let your tenants pay off the mortgages for you.

00:42:35.120 | It's the most profoundly simple

00:42:37.200 | and effective financial plan

00:42:38.840 | that I can possibly come up with.

00:42:41.640 | It's a plan that works the best in the United States

00:42:44.000 | because of the financing market, which is very unique,

00:42:46.720 | and so it works really well in a US context,

00:42:49.240 | but if I could get young couples to do that,

00:42:51.840 | it would just be a big, it'd be well worth doing.

00:42:56.200 | One of the reflections that I've had

00:42:59.040 | of things that have changed for me over the last 10 years

00:43:02.720 | is I've come to appreciate more than anything

00:43:06.800 | how at certain times of your life,

00:43:09.080 | certain things are important,

00:43:11.240 | and they're just not important at other times in your life.

00:43:14.280 | And the key is to get real clarity on those time changes.

00:43:21.480 | And so, for example, one of the things

00:43:23.240 | that when my wife and I bought our first house,

00:43:26.320 | we didn't go extravagant with that,

00:43:30.240 | but again, I do think there was a bit of that,

00:43:32.520 | well, I'm gonna prove that I'm not a loser.

00:43:34.160 | I'm gonna prove to my wife that I'm not a loser.

00:43:35.880 | I can buy her a fancy house.

00:43:37.160 | I'm gonna prove to my friends that I'm not a loser

00:43:39.520 | and show them that I can buy a fancy house, et cetera,

00:43:43.960 | but I was rushing something that we didn't need.

00:43:46.440 | I didn't need a big house.

00:43:48.240 | We didn't have any children.

00:43:49.600 | Even if you got one baby, stick the baby in the closet.

00:43:52.280 | They just don't take up that much space.

00:43:54.080 | They're babies.

00:43:54.920 | They have a lot of stuff, but you can avoid that

00:43:56.680 | and grab a dresser drawer from the side of the road

00:44:00.440 | and put a pad in it and stick 'em in the closet.

00:44:02.960 | It's not that big a deal.

00:44:04.120 | And it's so easy in that phase to just stay living that way

00:44:09.120 | and it makes such a profound difference down the road.

00:44:11.880 | Now, you move on to the phase that we're at right now

00:44:14.220 | with a six-year-old, and now all of a sudden,

00:44:16.100 | you need some more space.

00:44:17.240 | You legitimately need more space.

00:44:18.840 | You don't legitimately need more space to have a baby,

00:44:21.280 | but you do legitimately need more space

00:44:22.960 | with a six-year-old and with a 10-year-old, et cetera.

00:44:25.640 | And so,

00:44:26.480 | I wish that I had done a better job.

00:44:32.000 | I didn't do a bad job, but I could have done a better job

00:44:34.760 | of delaying that gratification a little bit longer,

00:44:38.640 | not trying to live my life based upon this societal script,

00:44:42.820 | but really focusing on investing in the early years.

00:44:46.760 | I could have done more on that.

00:44:48.320 | I wish I had.

00:44:49.880 | Now, what ultimately saved my finances

00:44:51.680 | was that I've had profitable businesses as well.

00:44:54.640 | And so, do you have to make money on everything?

00:44:57.280 | No, and at the time,

00:44:58.800 | if I were coaching the Joshua of those years,

00:45:03.600 | I would have said, "Well, Joshua,

00:45:04.920 | you've got plenty of economic opportunity

00:45:06.880 | in this high-income job or high-income business,

00:45:10.500 | so you don't have to do all these things."

00:45:13.120 | But looking back, I just,

00:45:15.240 | if you have the ability and it's not that hard, why not?

00:45:18.480 | Why not maximize those investments?

00:45:20.500 | Why not go ahead and buy five houses

00:45:22.840 | during the first five years of marriage?

00:45:25.200 | I think it would have been a better move,

00:45:27.100 | and I wish I'd done that.

00:45:28.480 | So going forward, I'm doing it going forward.

00:45:31.220 | When we're talking 10 years from now,

00:45:34.340 | I won't be saying, "I wish I'd bought five or 10 houses.

00:45:36.800 | I will own five or 10 houses,"

00:45:39.780 | because it's just a profoundly simple and effective plan.

00:45:44.480 | I'm still working through

00:45:47.200 | whether I'm gonna buy more real estate in the United States

00:45:49.120 | or outside the United States, et cetera,

00:45:50.880 | but just 'cause something was a good idea back then

00:45:53.560 | doesn't mean it's not a good idea now.

00:45:55.840 | Other interesting things,

00:45:57.640 | we full-time RV'd during the last decade,

00:46:01.640 | which was pretty cool.

00:46:03.320 | I don't often give myself a lot of permission to brag,

00:46:05.900 | but I gotta say, it was pretty cool.

00:46:07.600 | We did some stuff that was pretty cool

00:46:10.000 | and that most people simply don't do.

00:46:12.600 | We got rid of all of our stuff.

00:46:14.720 | We bought an RV and we moved into an RV,

00:46:17.640 | and we had three little children,

00:46:18.920 | and we traveled all around the United States.

00:46:21.400 | The only reason, I thought we were gonna do it for a year.

00:46:23.800 | We wound up doing it for six months,

00:46:25.680 | which was a little bit short,

00:46:26.560 | but the only reason we cut the trip short

00:46:28.840 | was that we did something cooler.

00:46:30.700 | We had a baby and moved outside the United States

00:46:32.680 | and wasn't gonna RV overseas.

00:46:36.060 | So we didn't fail at RVing, and I loved doing that.

00:46:39.360 | It just has a special place in my heart.

00:46:41.400 | It was, in many ways, a fulfillment of a childhood dream.

00:46:44.560 | I always wanted RVs.

00:46:45.400 | I've owned a couple of them over the last decade,

00:46:47.680 | and we really enjoyed it.

00:46:50.320 | I really enjoyed traveling around the United States

00:46:52.760 | that way.

00:46:53.600 | It's the best way to see the United States.

00:46:55.440 | Such an awesome place, such an awesome country,

00:46:57.740 | and the RVing infrastructure is so strong.

00:47:00.620 | It's just a really cool way to travel.

00:47:03.000 | And maybe someday I will.

00:47:05.160 | I could happily move back into an RV and do it again.

00:47:09.960 | The thing that wasn't awesome about it

00:47:12.080 | was just simply that our children were very young.

00:47:14.360 | We were traveling with a one-year-old

00:47:15.800 | and a three-year-old and a five-year-old,

00:47:17.200 | and that's a lot of work.

00:47:19.320 | It's a lot of work when,

00:47:20.720 | especially the one-year-old and three-year-old,

00:47:22.740 | in an RV there's not a lot of physical space.

00:47:25.080 | And so if the children are older,

00:47:27.920 | you just say, "Get out of here and come back at dinnertime,"

00:47:30.080 | and they disappear for four hours.

00:47:32.120 | But when the children are younger, you can't do that.

00:47:33.920 | You say, "Get out of here and go play,"

00:47:35.920 | and three and a half minutes later,

00:47:37.360 | "Mommy, will you help me move this?"

00:47:38.960 | And so we had a big enough RV that it wasn't terrible,

00:47:42.720 | but my wife wasn't sad to move into a house again.

00:47:45.880 | I, on the other hand, did miss it.

00:47:47.440 | I don't know why.

00:47:48.900 | It seems so dumb to even admit,

00:47:50.760 | but it was just such a cozy way to live

00:47:53.200 | that I genuinely liked.

00:47:54.720 | In the beginning of our trip,

00:47:55.560 | we mostly stayed in campgrounds,

00:47:56.600 | but towards the end we were doing more just traveling,

00:47:59.300 | and we wound up staying in Walmart parking lots.

00:48:01.920 | And I genuinely like pooling into a Walmart parking lot

00:48:06.320 | and going into my house and setting up.

00:48:10.040 | And it's something really special to me,

00:48:13.800 | really cozy, and I really enjoyed it.

00:48:16.760 | I think we'll do it again when the children are older.

00:48:18.840 | I definitely think we'll do it again.

00:48:20.360 | I'm not committing to a specific timeline

00:48:22.480 | because I did really enjoy it,

00:48:24.360 | and I wanna do it more,

00:48:25.560 | especially when they can really engage

00:48:27.680 | with a lot more of the activities

00:48:29.960 | and a lot more of the educational opportunities

00:48:31.840 | of that kind of travel.

00:48:33.680 | I don't think I'll do it again soon though.

00:48:36.320 | And the biggest cost of that RV trip

00:48:38.480 | was just simply in my own productivity.

00:48:40.840 | I thought that I was gonna be able

00:48:43.480 | to be very productive from the road.

00:48:45.540 | My whole podcasting setup, my laptop,

00:48:48.100 | and everything just fits in a backpack.

00:48:49.480 | And so I thought that I was gonna be able

00:48:51.440 | to be very productive and do my business

00:48:53.680 | and that it wouldn't be a major problem.

00:48:55.920 | I underestimated the cost though

00:48:58.080 | of how much help my wife needed

00:49:00.160 | and how much it took to care for her

00:49:03.200 | and to make sure that she had what she needed

00:49:04.920 | and to care for the children.

00:49:06.240 | And so that just simply cut into my work time.

00:49:08.520 | And because it cut into my work time,

00:49:10.340 | it was a major cost to me and my business

00:49:12.840 | of the stuff that I didn't get done

00:49:14.920 | that I should have gotten done.

00:49:16.560 | And so it was in many ways,

00:49:19.200 | that year was in many ways a lost year financially.

00:49:24.340 | It was a lost year in my business.

00:49:26.060 | And that, it was an expensive trip from that perspective.

00:49:32.420 | It didn't cost us a ton of money

00:49:34.700 | with the simple cost of living.

00:49:37.480 | We spent about the same amount of money traveling

00:49:40.600 | as we did sitting still.

00:49:42.880 | But it was expensive in what I couldn't get done

00:49:45.520 | in my business.

00:49:46.360 | And so that was the problem.

00:49:50.760 | So I've learned that I need to be more stable

00:49:55.620 | in order for me to get more work done,

00:49:57.120 | which is important for me at this point in time.

00:49:59.640 | So it's not gonna happen,

00:50:00.520 | I'm not gonna go back to RVing in the next couple of years

00:50:02.860 | until I can get my business more systematized,

00:50:06.060 | get more help, so that even if I did RV,

00:50:08.440 | that my business continues to grow.

00:50:10.240 | 'Cause I don't like it when things shrink.

00:50:12.620 | I don't like losing money, I don't like it

00:50:13.960 | when things shrink.

00:50:15.460 | Glad I did the RV adventures.

00:50:16.640 | One of the biggest things that I've learned

00:50:18.940 | is I've bought and sold a bunch of stuff

00:50:21.000 | over the last decade.

00:50:22.060 | And that's not something I did when I was a kid.

00:50:24.260 | I wasn't a wheeler and a dealer.

00:50:25.500 | My dad wasn't a wheeler and a dealer.

00:50:27.040 | I didn't grow up in a wheeling and dealing household.

00:50:29.300 | And so I've had to intentionally embrace

00:50:33.220 | buying and selling stuff.

00:50:34.700 | And in the first kind of transactions,

00:50:37.900 | it was scary to me to buy stuff

00:50:39.980 | because I didn't wanna make financial mistakes.

00:50:42.420 | But now I've come to the point

00:50:43.860 | where I trust myself a lot more.

00:50:45.300 | And like even my RV adventures.

00:50:47.220 | I've basically broke even on all of my RV adventures.

00:50:50.520 | And there's a bunch of vehicles thrown in,

00:50:52.860 | a bunch of trailer, a motor home.

00:50:56.260 | And I've come to trust myself

00:50:58.660 | and my ability to buy and sell intelligently.

00:51:03.300 | My ability to buy a deal

00:51:05.020 | and to just be willing to say, that's a good deal.

00:51:07.020 | I know it's a good deal and here's the cash

00:51:09.060 | and I'll just buy it.

00:51:10.140 | And then my ability to sell on the other side

00:51:12.700 | and make a profit.

00:51:13.740 | I've made a profit on some transactions.

00:51:15.500 | I've only lost money on a handful of transactions.

00:51:17.540 | But overall, that's really helped my personal confidence.

00:51:22.540 | And the neat thing about it from a financial perspective

00:51:25.220 | is it opens up opportunities.

00:51:28.260 | The retail market for toys stinks.

00:51:31.060 | You know, the idea that, listen,

00:51:33.060 | we got a dual income household and we want to,

00:51:35.900 | so that's a brutally dumb financial perspective as well.

00:51:40.900 | So, but we got two jobs in the household,

00:51:43.500 | but we want an RV.

00:51:44.460 | So let's just go and we'll go buy a new RV

00:51:47.300 | and put it on payments and we'll buy it

00:51:49.420 | and we'll use it for a few years.

00:51:50.540 | And you turn around and sell it three years later

00:51:51.920 | for 50% less.

00:51:53.620 | And that's just a terribly expensive decision

00:51:56.420 | because you lose so much money on the depreciation

00:51:58.980 | and you can't be losing that much money

00:52:00.700 | and actually be on a,

00:52:02.060 | gonna have a breakout trajectory on wealth building

00:52:04.180 | for financial planning, for financial freedom I mean.

00:52:07.540 | But if you change that out,

00:52:09.260 | and let's say that you have a capital account.

00:52:11.620 | Let's say you got 50 grand or 100 grand.

00:52:14.140 | Let's make it 100 grand.

00:52:15.460 | You got 100 grand and this is the 100 grand

00:52:17.460 | that we spend on stuff.

00:52:20.900 | We're gonna have $100,000 worth of stuff

00:52:23.420 | whether those are cars, boats, RVs, motorcycles,

00:52:26.700 | airplanes, et cetera.

00:52:28.540 | Then, and you just say this is the amount.

00:52:31.260 | You can do things in a totally different way.

00:52:33.580 | Or you say, hey, let's own an RV for a few years.

00:52:35.420 | And so you wait for, you do your research on what you want.

00:52:37.940 | You wait for a good deal.

00:52:39.340 | You buy the thing at a deep discount.

00:52:41.620 | You use it for a few years and then you flip it.

00:52:43.820 | And whether you go and buy it at a repo auction

00:52:46.680 | and flip it, flip a new one,

00:52:48.940 | whether you buy one from where you take over the payments

00:52:51.340 | from somebody who's in distress and you bail them out.

00:52:53.820 | Who knows, like everything is different.

00:52:55.620 | Or you buy something old that's just gonna

00:52:57.340 | maintain its value.

00:52:58.180 | You buy an antique that's gonna go up in value.

00:53:00.620 | Whatever the deal is, when you can buy cheap,

00:53:04.620 | hold, and then sell at a profit or only a small loss,

00:53:08.020 | it totally changes the ability to access toys

00:53:11.100 | and to have a bunch of fun stuff

00:53:13.340 | without it hurting your finances.

00:53:16.820 | So for me, that's been a big change

00:53:18.340 | that I've learned over the last decade.

00:53:19.580 | Where I'm willing to have just about any toy,

00:53:21.860 | but I'm not trying to say I'm gonna have

00:53:23.180 | this certain thing forever.

00:53:24.700 | And I'll just buy the thing.

00:53:26.060 | I'll make sure that I'm super careful

00:53:27.540 | about getting an awesome deal on it.

00:53:29.460 | And we'll enjoy the toy for a time and then we'll flip it.

00:53:32.020 | And the goal is always make some money.

00:53:34.060 | But not to be a lot of money,

00:53:35.060 | but make some money on the flip.

00:53:37.100 | And that allows me to have all the fun stuff

00:53:39.860 | without feeling like I'm harming my wealth building.

00:53:43.340 | And so I wanna help, one of my parenting goals,

00:53:46.580 | I wanna help my children to wheel and deal a little bit

00:53:49.820 | and help them to have the confidence

00:53:51.860 | of doing some flipping themselves.

00:53:54.420 | So that they can have the fun toys that they want

00:53:56.820 | for themselves and their families.

00:53:59.380 | And be confident about it without them feeling

00:54:02.260 | like they have to go out and pay retail.

00:54:04.660 | We've built some pretty cool photo albums

00:54:08.540 | over the last decade.

00:54:09.380 | We've traveled a bunch of places.

00:54:10.540 | We did the math.

00:54:11.420 | I've been in the last decade, I think,

00:54:15.620 | to a dozen international countries.

00:54:18.940 | So that's a pretty cool accomplishment.

00:54:22.100 | It's such a blessing to be able to do that.

00:54:23.300 | And I have never, never set travel goals.

00:54:25.300 | I don't have any formal travel goals about the number of,

00:54:29.420 | I wanna go to this country, et cetera.

00:54:31.420 | I have a list of destinations I'd like to go to

00:54:33.100 | and I look for opportunities.

00:54:34.820 | And I'm always attracted to the idea of,

00:54:36.700 | I'm gonna travel to every country in the world.

00:54:38.260 | And then I try to rope myself in and say,

00:54:40.540 | Josh, you don't really care about that.

00:54:42.940 | But we've just done some awesome stuff.

00:54:44.940 | We've been so blessed to do big fishing trips

00:54:49.540 | and camping trips and just some really cool stuff.

00:54:52.300 | I went to see the solar eclipse.

00:54:54.180 | That was one of the things that I wish I'd taken my family,

00:54:57.100 | just didn't work out.

00:54:58.100 | But I went and I was right in the black zone,

00:55:01.380 | I think Georgia, I guess it was in Georgia,

00:55:04.300 | for the solar eclipse, which was really cool.

00:55:06.220 | And the next one, I'll definitely make a real event

00:55:09.900 | out of taking my children and making sure

00:55:11.780 | that we're right in the middle of that zone

00:55:13.980 | for the solar eclipse that's coming up in a few years.

00:55:16.980 | And there's more I could say on some of that stuff.

00:55:19.140 | In business, pivot to business now,

00:55:21.860 | it's been a great decade.

00:55:24.340 | In the beginning of the decade, I was a financial advisor

00:55:26.620 | and I was building a financial advice business,

00:55:28.900 | which was a really rewarding experience.

00:55:32.740 | Then I left that to start Radical Personal Finance,

00:55:35.180 | which has been a transformative event in my life.

00:55:40.180 | Probably, obviously probably one of the biggest things

00:55:45.180 | that has allowed me and provided me with the opportunity

00:55:48.020 | to live just a really awesome lifestyle.

00:55:51.500 | It's allowed me to level up my freedom,

00:55:53.940 | my personal freedom, really substantially.

00:55:56.860 | And it's been a very difficult road.

00:56:01.980 | You know, it's interesting.

00:56:03.340 | I often believe that people can do things.

00:56:06.540 | And so I wanna be an encouraging person.

00:56:08.980 | Then sometimes I reflect on how impossible some things are

00:56:11.820 | and I get scared and I was like, nobody should ever do this.

00:56:14.180 | Like it was, starting Radical Personal Finance

00:56:16.660 | was just flat out stupid.

00:56:17.820 | I have no idea how it worked, but it did.

00:56:20.740 | It was a lot of work, a lot of work, but it's worked.

00:56:25.740 | And I've achieved many of the things

00:56:29.820 | that I thought I could achieve.

00:56:32.000 | It's been probably the most rewarding thing for me

00:56:36.700 | is that I feel like there's a near perfect alignment

00:56:41.700 | between my skills and my interests and my daily work.

00:56:47.180 | Today's a little bit rough.

00:56:49.540 | I've got this weird cough and congested sinuses

00:56:54.020 | that my family has had it for the last couple of weeks

00:56:56.820 | and just trying to kick it.

00:56:58.020 | But it's, so I'm a little off my game today.

00:57:00.100 | But in general, when I turn on a microphone,

00:57:03.380 | I feel like I'm doing something that I'm very good at.

00:57:06.340 | And that's really rewarding to do something

00:57:09.060 | that you're very good at.

00:57:10.700 | And I have the opportunity to use a huge amount of knowledge

00:57:15.700 | that I've built and use it to help people.

00:57:18.580 | I was reflecting on my educational accomplishments

00:57:21.140 | in the last decade.

00:57:22.340 | In the last decade, I got a master's degree

00:57:25.720 | in financial planning.

00:57:27.180 | I got my CFP designation, Certified Financial Planner,

00:57:31.700 | became a Chartered Life Underwriter for life insurance,

00:57:34.580 | Chartered Financial Consultant with the American College.

00:57:38.100 | I became a Chartered Advisor in philanthropy,

00:57:41.900 | which was a really cool set of courses that I did

00:57:44.300 | with a bunch of other professionals.

00:57:46.940 | I became a, let's see, a Registered Health Underwriter,

00:57:49.940 | a health insurance specialist,

00:57:52.500 | Registered Employee Benefit Consultant.

00:57:55.340 | I got a certification in long-term care planning.

00:57:57.860 | I think there was one more, I can't remember.

00:58:02.420 | And I had to go find all the diplomas in my attic.

00:58:04.860 | But that stuff helped me qualify

00:58:09.860 | to be an accredited estate planner.

00:58:11.180 | Never got the designation,

00:58:13.100 | but I had all the qualifications.

00:58:14.740 | And that stuff was pretty cool

00:58:18.120 | because it helped me to have this really interesting

00:58:21.480 | set of knowledge, of facts and information.

00:58:25.060 | And then to do what my dream was,

00:58:27.040 | which was to show people how they can achieve their goals

00:58:29.060 | more efficiently with this formal technical knowledge

00:58:32.060 | that is just really boring.

00:58:34.100 | And so to do that just feels really good.

00:58:39.580 | And so it's really,

00:58:41.740 | I see, I have tremendous alignment

00:58:46.260 | between what I want to do, what my unique ability is,

00:58:50.260 | and what I do on a daily basis.

00:58:53.820 | I'm personally convinced, at least for now,

00:58:55.860 | that my unique ability is to be a taxonomist of ideas

00:59:01.860 | and information.

00:59:03.220 | The thing that I do really well is I can take a subject,

00:59:07.120 | I can start to study it,

00:59:08.780 | I can consume a vast amount of information

00:59:10.820 | about that subject,

00:59:11.980 | and then I can organize that information

00:59:14.140 | in a way that leads to solutions really, really quickly.

00:59:18.400 | And this comes naturally to me.

00:59:21.100 | It's what I've always done.

00:59:24.620 | My friends joke, you want a 10 minute answer?

00:59:26.800 | Just ask Joshua a question on something and he'll tell you.

00:59:28.580 | But the problem is, yes, it may be a 10 minute answer,

00:59:30.700 | which I always say, do you really want,

00:59:31.940 | do you want the answer or do you just, do you care?

00:59:34.540 | But the 10 minute answer should, ideally,

00:59:36.780 | if I know what I'm talking about,

00:59:38.340 | it should lead to saying, here's what you need to know now.

00:59:41.020 | Here's how you go through this in an orderly way

00:59:43.500 | that's not stupid,

00:59:44.340 | so you don't make a bunch of expensive mistakes.

00:59:46.420 | And here's where you do this.

00:59:48.820 | It was with somebody yesterday

00:59:50.740 | and we're talking about buying gold.

00:59:52.740 | And so many people approach these questions

00:59:56.380 | in what I think is a really dumb way.

00:59:57.820 | Should I do this or should I not do it?

00:59:59.380 | Well, it's not a matter of should you or shouldn't you,

01:00:01.700 | it's a matter of when should you?

01:00:03.900 | When does it make sense for you to do this certain thing?

01:00:06.860 | And so we need a few facts about your situation,

01:00:08.980 | but here's the basic timeline

01:00:10.940 | at which this particular thing makes sense.

01:00:13.780 | And I've grown in my confidence in that a lot.

01:00:18.140 | Simultaneously, I've grown to be,

01:00:21.580 | to feel like I'm falling behind.

01:00:22.960 | One of the big ambitions that I have for the next 10 years

01:00:25.900 | is I, over the last few years,

01:00:27.400 | especially with all the travel and the work

01:00:30.620 | and the children, et cetera,

01:00:32.020 | is that I still read, I still study,

01:00:34.580 | but I'm far below what my former good study habits were.

01:00:38.480 | And so there are a bunch of new areas

01:00:40.620 | that I wanna bone up on,

01:00:41.800 | that I wanna be able to help people in.

01:00:43.420 | And I often get intimidated

01:00:44.980 | by the things that I'm getting rusty at.

01:00:46.700 | I've gotten rusty at some of the things

01:00:48.140 | in financial planning.

01:00:49.280 | I've lost that working knowledge

01:00:51.380 | of some of the important facts, et cetera.

01:00:53.220 | And I don't wanna be rusty.

01:00:54.460 | And so I'm gonna majorly,

01:00:56.420 | over the next decade, I'm gonna majorly

01:00:58.540 | tackle a bunch more,

01:01:00.420 | just studying.

01:01:02.780 | I'm just gonna be studying a lot more.

01:01:04.940 | So, why did I get into that?

01:01:07.220 | It's exciting to me because radical personal finance

01:01:10.000 | has given me a huge amount of freedom.

01:01:13.580 | And that's been really rewarding.

01:01:15.020 | And it's so gratifying to get the stories that I get,

01:01:18.020 | the emails that I get,

01:01:19.260 | and to feel like my work is making a difference.

01:01:22.220 | As a human, we're gonna spend

01:01:23.920 | the vast majority of our life working.

01:01:25.980 | That's what we do.

01:01:26.980 | So, when you get to feel like your work matters,

01:01:30.240 | then it just gets even better.

01:01:31.780 | And that's how I feel.

01:01:32.900 | I feel like my work matters.

01:01:34.300 | Changes though, there have been a lot of growth pains

01:01:38.700 | over the last 10 years.

01:01:40.380 | My biggest frustration is just my lack of excellence

01:01:44.140 | in a lot of things.

01:01:45.780 | I don't like to not do things well.

01:01:47.620 | It's frustrating.

01:01:48.460 | And of course, I know that you have to do

01:01:49.660 | not do things well to do them.

01:01:52.300 | Better done poorly than most things

01:01:55.420 | but not done at all.

01:01:56.580 | And so, I've practiced that.

01:01:59.180 | But it does get really frustrating

01:02:01.580 | to not do things really well.

01:02:03.840 | And probably the biggest change

01:02:05.340 | over the next 10 years for me,

01:02:06.500 | when I started radical personal finance,

01:02:08.520 | I was looking basically to escape, to get out.

01:02:12.140 | And I wanted to build a lifestyle business.

01:02:13.860 | And how I defined a lifestyle business was,

01:02:15.900 | I wanna build a business that provides me

01:02:17.580 | with a comfortable income that I can do

01:02:19.620 | from my laptop without anybody else.

01:02:22.200 | I didn't want employees.

01:02:23.180 | I didn't want a business, a big business.

01:02:25.260 | I just wanted something that I did with my laptop

01:02:27.700 | that made a comfortable income.

01:02:29.160 | My goal was $100,000.

01:02:30.740 | I'm just gonna make $100,000.

01:02:31.940 | If I can make $100,000 from my laptop,

01:02:34.020 | that covers what I need to do.

01:02:36.860 | And I did not want a big staff.

01:02:39.300 | I didn't want a big infrastructure.

01:02:40.700 | I just wanted me and a laptop

01:02:43.220 | and I was okay with it being small.

01:02:45.060 | Well, I did that.

01:02:46.580 | I built that business.

01:02:48.020 | And then I sat down and I said,

01:02:49.340 | well, I realized that it didn't feel right.

01:02:53.740 | It didn't feel like I was doing what I felt called to do.

01:02:58.740 | And so what I've come to realize

01:03:02.300 | is that I need to build a much bigger business.

01:03:04.740 | In order for me to do what I want to do,

01:03:07.860 | to have the impact that I want to have,

01:03:10.100 | I need to build a much bigger business.

01:03:12.340 | And that lifestyle business thing dogged me for years

01:03:16.260 | of basically saying, that's not your goal.

01:03:18.340 | You'd stay small, stay small.

01:03:20.620 | But it's just not,

01:03:23.020 | I basically came to the point where I said,

01:03:28.220 | no, I gotta build something bigger.

01:03:30.100 | So in the coming decade,

01:03:31.540 | I'm going to build a much bigger business,

01:03:34.460 | hire more people to work with me,

01:03:36.740 | to expand my ability to keep me working in my unique ability

01:03:39.660 | and to expand out or to deliver more excellence.

01:03:44.060 | I want people to get results faster.

01:03:47.300 | I wanna get better results and I can't do it by myself.

01:03:51.020 | So that's probably the biggest thing.

01:03:53.660 | And it's been, I had to look for a number

01:03:56.340 | of different things before I was willing

01:03:58.020 | to commit to that in my head.

01:03:59.460 | You know, a few years, sorry, a few months ago,

01:04:03.620 | I traveled back to the United States

01:04:04.900 | and I went and look at a farm that was for sale.

01:04:07.260 | And my ambition for a number of years

01:04:09.020 | is to be a gentleman farmer.

01:04:10.500 | There's still my ambition is to be a gentleman farmer.

01:04:12.860 | I may wait till I'm old, I don't know.

01:04:14.820 | But I wanted to have a farm and live on a farm

01:04:18.540 | and not a big commercial farm,

01:04:20.900 | but just a small little hobby farm.

01:04:23.020 | And, but I didn't want to make,

01:04:25.140 | like I've never wanted to make farming my full-time thing.

01:04:28.780 | I think it's an awesome lifestyle for some people,

01:04:31.060 | but it's not for me.

01:04:32.620 | Just wanted to live on a nice little farm out in the country

01:04:35.380 | in a nice little community, et cetera.

01:04:38.460 | So I went a few months ago,

01:04:40.140 | I traveled to the United States to look at this small farm,

01:04:42.020 | about 20 acres, it was for sale.

01:04:44.300 | And it's just sitting out there.

01:04:48.420 | It's out in a rural area of the United States,

01:04:50.500 | one of my favorite areas up in the Rocky Mountains,

01:04:54.660 | Northern Rocky Mountains.

01:04:55.700 | And I was sitting there, I walked out in the pasture

01:04:59.260 | and this place had basically everything.

01:05:02.020 | Big house, the family had been there,

01:05:03.820 | raised children in it.

01:05:05.180 | They were moving on, their children were grown

01:05:07.420 | and they were moving to another farm.

01:05:09.260 | You know, they'd been self-sufficient,

01:05:11.700 | they raised beef cattle and chickens

01:05:14.220 | and a bunch of big garden, et cetera.

01:05:16.580 | You know, a bunch of Mennonite and LDS neighbors

01:05:21.580 | and just like big homeschooling community and whatnot.

01:05:25.540 | And it was perfect.

01:05:27.340 | And I just sat out there and I sat in the pasture

01:05:29.740 | and I thought like, is this me?

01:05:31.060 | Is this what I'm gonna do?

01:05:31.900 | I'm gonna buy this farm.

01:05:34.660 | And I came to the conviction that like, I can't do it.

01:05:37.380 | I couldn't do it in faith, that it just wasn't,

01:05:40.220 | it would be Joshua running away and hiding

01:05:46.300 | and disappearing and does nobody any good,

01:05:49.220 | which is not how I'm interested in living my life.

01:05:52.180 | So I've abandoned that

01:05:54.740 | and I'm focusing on building a business.

01:05:57.020 | And so one of the things that I have realized with that

01:06:00.940 | is the importance of having good local infrastructure.

01:06:05.780 | Back to RVing.

01:06:06.900 | RVing was very damaging to my business

01:06:14.220 | and my ability to be productive.

01:06:16.020 | Not because I couldn't have leveraged it.

01:06:17.460 | You know, I could have leveraged it for publicity.

01:06:19.260 | I could have posted all our pictures on social media

01:06:21.540 | and done the like, hey, look how cool we are.

01:06:23.140 | We're doing these things and here's how you can do it too.

01:06:24.660 | I could have done more with it,

01:06:26.900 | but I just didn't necessarily want to.

01:06:29.860 | And it wasn't that it just hurt me

01:06:32.380 | with like the things that the foregone opportunities.

01:06:36.180 | And now living outside of the United States,

01:06:39.380 | I tell you, like I love where I live,

01:06:41.420 | but everything is easier in the United States.

01:06:44.900 | That's the biggest thing,

01:06:46.140 | that if you're an American living in the US,

01:06:48.980 | if you're ever tempted to complain about something,

01:06:50.940 | just reach out to me and I'll set you straight.

01:06:53.980 | I'm happy to do that.

01:06:55.340 | Everything in the US is so stinking easy.

01:06:58.940 | It's so cheap to live there.

01:07:01.460 | Everything is cheap, everything is easy.

01:07:04.180 | And you think I'm being hyperbolic there.

01:07:05.860 | I'm not, like it really is that way.

01:07:08.100 | Now I've complained plenty, just like you do,

01:07:10.460 | about the things that aren't cheap

01:07:11.580 | and the things that aren't easy.

01:07:12.460 | And there's a long way to go.

01:07:13.540 | But when you compare to so many places around the world,

01:07:16.780 | there are places that have a few things better,

01:07:18.700 | but on the whole, things in the US are just cheap and easy.

01:07:22.620 | And so when it comes to running a business,

01:07:24.060 | there's this major challenge

01:07:25.460 | that I haven't figured out the answer to yet.

01:07:27.460 | If I go back to the United States,

01:07:29.500 | which my guess is that I'll probably wind up

01:07:32.060 | back in the United States in the next year or two.

01:07:34.260 | But if I go back to the United States,

01:07:37.100 | it comes with this whole set of benefits.

01:07:41.340 | Raising children is easy.

01:07:43.420 | Homeschooling is easy.

01:07:45.540 | Business, having the business infrastructure

01:07:47.420 | and what not is relatively easy.

01:07:49.180 | But it's not necessarily the best in the world

01:07:50.900 | and it's not necessarily cheap.

01:07:52.300 | So I could go to another business location

01:07:54.380 | and set up things in another place.

01:07:56.780 | But then it's hard.

01:07:59.060 | Some things are cheaper and some things are not cheaper.

01:08:01.340 | So I haven't solved all those problems yet.

01:08:03.780 | But my point is just simply that

01:08:05.140 | I just came to the firm conviction

01:08:06.660 | that I can't play small.

01:08:08.660 | I'm not gonna play small.

01:08:09.860 | And so I am devoted to doing as much as I can

01:08:14.860 | to serve as many people as I'm capable of

01:08:17.540 | just with the skills and abilities that I have.

01:08:22.700 | I still struggle to figure out the progression

01:08:25.940 | of how to do those things.

01:08:27.260 | I don't want to...

01:08:32.580 | I've learned as I get older,

01:08:36.460 | I'm learning to be more careful

01:08:37.660 | with the words that come out of my mouth.

01:08:38.980 | The classic entrepreneur problem

01:08:40.420 | is having a billion ideas

01:08:41.660 | and not being able to execute on them.

01:08:43.540 | And that's been always the challenge of my life

01:08:45.780 | is there are so many ideas.

01:08:47.540 | And then I struggle to execute

01:08:49.180 | mostly because I haven't built the right team

01:08:51.540 | that helps me to execute on them.

01:08:54.100 | And I get embarrassed when I say,

01:08:56.420 | "Hey, look, here's this great idea.

01:08:57.660 | "Here's this thing I'm gonna do."

01:08:58.620 | And then I don't execute on it.

01:08:59.700 | So I'm gonna...

01:09:01.300 | I was going to talk about kind of what I'm planning to do

01:09:04.940 | over the next years.

01:09:06.140 | But I'm just gonna be quiet on that for now

01:09:09.140 | and work a focus on executing and not talking about stuff.

01:09:12.540 | So we'll see.

01:09:14.420 | I don't, if I think about a decade,

01:09:16.980 | I don't think I'll be doing radical personal finance

01:09:19.860 | a decade from now.

01:09:20.900 | I just don't think I will.

01:09:24.740 | My goal is to do, is to create something.

01:09:27.180 | And I'm still a year,

01:09:28.060 | probably a year away from my thousandth episode.

01:09:31.700 | But my goal is to create something

01:09:34.420 | in a set of somethings truly useful to help people.

01:09:38.060 | And that's gonna take me at least several more years

01:09:41.620 | to do that and to really expand.

01:09:43.740 | And who knows, maybe I will keep going for longer.

01:09:46.900 | But then I think I'm gonna change to something else

01:09:49.500 | probably within a decade.

01:09:52.420 | So I don't know exactly how that's gonna look.

01:09:55.140 | Maybe it'll look like I'll do this business

01:09:57.940 | for another six years, seven years, eight years,

01:10:01.140 | and then I'll close it.

01:10:02.900 | And we'll buy a sailboat and spend a few years

01:10:06.340 | sailing around the world with my family.

01:10:07.620 | I don't know.

01:10:08.860 | But I do know that I'm not done yet.

01:10:11.420 | So, and I've got a lot of work to do

01:10:14.300 | over the next few years.

01:10:15.380 | And I'm excited about that work.

01:10:16.420 | Most of what I've done in the last months

01:10:19.460 | and what I'm gonna be doing in the coming months

01:10:20.940 | is just simply orienting myself around my work

01:10:24.300 | is that I really take great joy

01:10:27.180 | in and I wanna produce better work,

01:10:29.340 | more helpful work, more useful work

01:10:31.420 | that serves more people.

01:10:33.300 | I'm not gonna be a workaholic, don't worry.

01:10:35.060 | I'll still do plenty of fun stuff.

01:10:36.260 | But when I think about and dream about my future,

01:10:40.100 | I just still feel a responsibility and a burden

01:10:43.540 | to produce more useful work

01:10:45.300 | here in the context of radical personal finance.

01:10:47.580 | There's some other brands,

01:10:48.420 | other things I'd like to delve into.

01:10:50.460 | I got a whole bunch of domain names.

01:10:52.460 | And so we'll see.

01:10:54.060 | And I don't wanna just do information publishing.

01:10:55.980 | I like info publishing,

01:10:58.020 | but there's basically a set ceiling of info publishing.

01:11:01.260 | And I wanted to use that info publishing

01:11:05.260 | to help people develop more things.

01:11:07.100 | 'Cause I've come to think

01:11:09.020 | there are certain benefits of online businesses,

01:11:11.660 | there are certain benefits of information publishing.

01:11:13.380 | They really do open up a lot of options.

01:11:16.900 | But if I were starting over again,

01:11:18.820 | I can't say that I would start with online business.

01:11:21.740 | I've come to see so many more opportunities

01:11:25.500 | with local brick and mortar businesses, et cetera,

01:11:28.380 | than just doing everything online.

01:11:31.820 | And maybe we'll dig into that some other time.

01:11:36.820 | I think I've shared with you

01:11:40.340 | most of what I intended to share.

01:11:41.780 | It's been an awesome decade for me.

01:11:44.220 | I'm excited.

01:11:45.460 | And I guess probably the most important thing would be,

01:11:48.540 | maybe this is common to all people.

01:11:50.580 | I don't know.

01:11:51.420 | I've never been this age before, but I do know this.

01:11:54.100 | That I feel like I'm hitting my stride.

01:11:56.700 | And that's really, really a great feeling.

01:11:59.300 | Having lacked self-confidence so much in the past

01:12:05.100 | and having felt like I was in these places

01:12:07.700 | that I wasn't a good fit for, et cetera,

01:12:10.140 | it feels really good to feel like I'm hitting my stride

01:12:14.340 | and to feel confident in my skill, my ability,

01:12:19.340 | and my clarity of thought, et cetera.

01:12:22.020 | And that's really gratifying.

01:12:23.660 | And so that's a place of confidence

01:12:27.140 | I think we all should operate from as much as possible.

01:12:29.980 | And it just leads to a totally different set of experiences.

01:12:32.860 | Now, not to say that you can't mess it all up.

01:12:34.700 | Obviously you can.

01:12:35.940 | But I've solved most of those problems

01:12:38.260 | with good financial planning.

01:12:41.100 | So it's just really exciting to feel that way.

01:12:45.100 | And when I think about the phase that my family's at,

01:12:47.540 | when I think about the phase that I'm at,

01:12:48.900 | it's exciting to me.

01:12:50.180 | And I'm incredibly excited about the future.

01:12:54.340 | You know, this is gonna be such a fascinating year

01:12:56.740 | in our cultures.

01:12:58.820 | It's gonna be such a fascinating year

01:13:00.980 | in the United States, an election year.

01:13:03.340 | That's gonna be quite the ride.

01:13:06.380 | And it's gonna be, you know,

01:13:07.980 | there's so many big financial stories going on.

01:13:11.180 | There's interesting, you know, the stock market,

01:13:15.020 | the decade from the wonder decade.

01:13:17.900 | You've got these tremendous financial numbers,

01:13:21.740 | but yet also incredible angst and concern.

01:13:25.580 | You've got an incredibly more and more polarized society

01:13:29.020 | with just increasing public battles on just crazy stuff.

01:13:32.620 | Politics and cultural arguments, et cetera.

01:13:36.700 | It's gonna be a remarkable decade

01:13:39.220 | that we're gonna live through, I think.

01:13:42.420 | And yet in the middle of that,

01:13:44.460 | there's never been a time that I've seen more opportunity

01:13:47.540 | for individuals.

01:13:49.060 | As noisy as the world is,

01:13:54.940 | and as many things pull at you,

01:13:57.260 | it's never been easier to be free, to live freely,

01:13:59.420 | as far as I can see.

01:14:01.220 | I'm anticipating here in the beginning of January,

01:14:03.380 | I'm gonna lead the year off with this series

01:14:07.260 | called "Seven Rings of Freedom."

01:14:09.260 | Where if you care about being free, you can do it.

01:14:13.580 | And I'm not gonna steal my thunder from that,

01:14:17.400 | but it's gonna be an amazing decade.

01:14:19.660 | And when I look around and see the opportunities

01:14:21.580 | for making money, just that in and of itself,

01:14:25.340 | for making a difference in the community, local community,

01:14:28.740 | there's just so many opportunities.

01:14:30.860 | And so it's a very exciting time to be alive.

01:14:34.300 | The world is getting flatter and flatter all the time,

01:14:37.820 | and it's exciting.

01:14:39.300 | And one of the things that I want very much to do,

01:14:42.260 | one of the reasons why I didn't buy that farm,

01:14:44.500 | is I just sat here and I said,

01:14:45.780 | "You know what, this is just gonna stick me out

01:14:47.220 | "in the middle of nowhere, and I'm gonna be,

01:14:49.660 | "yeah, I'll have the benefit of the local community,

01:14:52.240 | "but I won't be involved with where the growth is

01:14:56.900 | "in the world, and I can't run away from people.

01:14:59.340 | "I can't run away and be a hermit.

01:15:02.220 | "I need to be where the growth is."

01:15:03.940 | And so even just in my travel, in my investments,

01:15:08.080 | in my business activities, I wanna be more involved,

01:15:10.600 | especially with an international focus.

01:15:12.260 | And so I'm gonna be trying to figure out how to do that,

01:15:15.720 | 'cause it's totally new, it doesn't involve,

01:15:18.620 | go buy a mutual fund, I gotta figure,

01:15:20.700 | I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm gonna try to learn.

01:15:23.620 | And I wanna engage my children in that.

01:15:26.780 | And when we think about what's happening

01:15:29.020 | culturally all over the world,

01:15:30.300 | when we think about what's happening

01:15:31.180 | with the big empires all over the world,

01:15:33.020 | when we think about what's happening

01:15:34.300 | with the religious trends all around the world,

01:15:37.060 | it's gonna be a pretty cool decade

01:15:41.820 | with a lot of stuff happening.

01:15:43.460 | And so I'm excited to be there with you

01:15:45.800 | and to be doing it with you.

01:15:48.920 | Thank you, I just wanna close today's show

01:15:50.840 | with just a simple thank you.

01:15:52.480 | Thank you for being here.

01:15:54.000 | I've said it already, but I find this work

01:15:58.640 | to be enormously gratifying.

01:16:01.600 | And it's deeply encouraging to me

01:16:06.280 | to know that my thoughts, my ideas

01:16:09.320 | have had an impact on your life.

01:16:11.920 | And I get so much feedback that I just,

01:16:15.020 | it's such a blessing.

01:16:16.220 | So thank you for being here.

01:16:17.400 | Thank you for listening.

01:16:18.600 | I appreciate you and I appreciate your being here.

01:16:22.420 | Happy New Year, 2020.

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RPF0687-The_Decade_Past-The_Decade_To_Come