>> Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast, Episode 1. I'm your host, Josh Rascheitz. Today's episode is simply going to be an introduction to the show. I'd like to share with you my vision for the show, where I see it going, the type of content that I plan to produce for you, and some ideas.

I'd like to, at the end, ask you for some ideas. Ultimately, I'm creating a podcast simply because I haven't been able to find one that fits the niche that I would be interested in. So I warn you, first and foremost, if you choose to listen to my podcast, it's going to be a little bit off the wall.

Hopefully the title is telling you everything that you need to know about radical personal finance. But radical is a word that tends to describe my own personality a little bit. I tend towards extremes, and we're going to get into some radical topics. I personally would love to find a podcast, if it already existed, that gave me a ton of information, a ton of inspiration, and simply didn't speak down to me.

I see a niche that is available in the personal finance world. The personal finance world of financial advice and financial magazines and financial books and radio shows and TV shows is absolutely a huge world. Obviously with CNBC and Personal Finance and Money Magazine and Suzy Orman and Jim Cramer and Dave Ramsey and all of these people, there are a lot of great people competing in this space.

When you add on to those people the personal financial advisors from the big names and the small names and the financial planners and the accountants and the insurance agents and all of the people that are working in this space, you would think that we would have a high personal financial literacy rate in this country, this country being the United States where I'm from and where I live.

Unfortunately I don't perceive it to be so, and I would like to do my part to help fix that. Now first let me tell you kind of what my problems are with the personal finance world and how I hope that I can be of help and hope to fix it.

First and foremost, most of the personal finance world in my opinion seems to be largely focused on consumer level personal finance. So that means that if somebody has a personal finance question, it has to be answered within five minutes on a radio show or on a TV show or sometimes two minutes or the most you'll get is maybe a five-page article on something in a money magazine.

Ultimately that type of financial, I don't know whether to call it advice or information, tends to fall short. On the other hand, a lot of the really deep technical personal finance information is so complex and so technical that it's just simply boring in my opinion to read through and to look at, and yet that's kind of what you have to do.

So if you have a finance question, if you have a tax question as an example, the first thing that you have to do is go to IRS.gov and start wading through all of their publications. By the way, the IRS does actually in my opinion have some really good publications that are pretty clear, but you've got to do quite a bit of wading.

Forget it if you need to go to the actual tax code and start pulling together information from there. Thus we have the reality of massive armies of attorneys and people and judges in courts to interpret the law. I think that there's a need for an in-between source. I think there's a need for, I don't know what to call it, maybe introductory information, broad overview information, and there's also a desire for maybe a little bit deeper information.

I'd love to learn that information, learn it with you, and share it with you in an audio format. I've got a challenge in front of me as far as learning how to communicate financial information that's compelling, that's accurate, and to do it in an audio format. Finance tends to be something I think that works best in a print format, but number one, there's already a lot of really great resources in the print world, and I'm not convinced that I can add a lot of value there.

Number two, however, is that in the day-to-day of our lives, I think that there is a little bit more access to audio information. I, for one, in the past have spent a lot of time in the car, and I've always loved learning detailed audio information. I've spent thousands of dollars on CDs and seminars and audio books, and I love learning.

So I think that there's a need that's not being met in that world, and I'd like to do my part to help build that. I'd like to help build financial literacy in this country. I think they went bankrupt a couple of years ago, but Cy Simms, who was the founder of Simms Clothing Store, used to shop there when I was a kid, and as a young adult they had good deals on, I think, pants was what I usually bought there.

But they had as their corporate motto that an educated consumer is our best customer, and I think that that's nowhere more true than in the financial space, is that if you are financially literate and knowledgeable and feel comfortable with the words, the topics, the decision points, you can make a rational decision and make good, intelligent buying decisions.

One of my other beefs with the finance world, so to speak, is that it seems that many content providers tend to talk down to, just to be personal, talk down to me. I can't quite handle listening to most finance people, and the reason is because a lot of times they get their personal opinion confused with fact and logic.

I've got this belief that ultimately all of us are probably pretty intelligent and we're probably pretty rational, and if we understand the pros and cons of various courses of action, most of us are going to make a decision that is in our own best interest. And that decision is going to be very personal to us.

There are very few rights and wrongs in the world of finance. Even the things that might seem black and white, seldom are. And personally, I feel that what is needed is simply information. You know, if I'm going to make a buying decision or a saving or investment decision, all I want is the facts.

Give me the facts and then I'll look at my situation and I will be the one to consider what I'm trying to accomplish. So my goal with this show will be to simply present facts as I understand them, and information that you can then use to make rational decisions about your specific situation.

I don't want to provide superficial or abstract financial information, but I also don't want to go unnecessarily deep. One of the things that I've thought about as far as how to talk about finance is that there's so many layers. And this is my first podcast, as you can probably tell.

This is my first podcast and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to accomplish all of, not sure how I'm going to accomplish appropriately dealing with each of the layers. But I do have some ideas. My plan is to produce some very simple shows that are appropriate for, you know, a sixth grader or somebody just getting started with financial planning in their own lives.

I'd also like to produce some more maybe moderate shows for people who have a good grasp on the basics and want to go a little bit deeper. And I also think it would be valuable to produce some extremely technical, very detailed shows that can be accessed on an archived basis for people who are looking for information that goes a little bit deeper or trying to understand what's right for their situation.

Money and personal finance are both, money and personal finance is a topic that's both simple but profoundly complex. Simple in that the great truths are not going to change from day to day. The end of the day, here's my personal, here's my own personal finance formula. Make more than you spend or spend less than you earn.

Take that difference, invest it wisely so that it grows for you and repeat that process on an ongoing basis. Protect yourself from the major risks that can happen and think carefully about your own personal goals and apply rational common sense to your methods of achieving those personal goals. Pretty simple.

I could probably make it even shorter and say spend less than you earn and invest the difference wisely. That's it. But on the same hand, we live, each and every one of us, governed by a tax code that is tens of thousands of pages long with financial products that are marketed to us and bought by us each and every day that are profoundly complex.

We have investment opportunities that are deeply complicated and it becomes overwhelming especially when those decisions are made in the context of an active, busy daily life. So unfortunately, the topic can be neither simple nor complex. It has to be a combination of those. So I envision over the coming episodes giving a lot of shows on philosophy, talking about different philosophies about money, philosophies about personal finance because ultimately philosophy I think drives a lot of our behavior.

Also envision digging into personal experiences. I hope to do many, many interviews with interesting people. My interests are widely varied. I hope to do interviews with people who are homeless, out of work, unemployed, on the ropes. I also hope to do interviews with people who are profoundly successful both financially and otherwise because I believe that everybody has a story and everybody has something that they can teach us.

I'd like to consult with experts. I am not an expert. Let me say that again. I am not an expert. I'll share with you the best I've learned but I'm going to make mistakes along the way. It's going to be up to you which I'll give you probably some kind of legal disclaimer that's required in this space and I'll give it to you at the end as far as my version of that.

But it's your money. No one else is going to care about your money more than you care about your money. Ultimately it's your money. You're the one who has earned it, been given it, been trusted with the stewardship of it. You're the one who decides what you spend it on.

You're the one who decides what you invest it in. You're the one who decides how you handle it. And we've got to take personal responsibility for our money in every way. So my goal is to simply provide ideas, ideas and information that you can then use to apply in your life to meet your goals.

Over time I'd love to create an archive, a vast audio archive of quality information that's practical. I'd love to create courses. One of my own personal beefs is that we go through in this country years and years of school but yet we don't spend a lot of time with all of the – we don't spend a lot of time learning financial literacy.

Going through high school and college I personally took maybe a half a year of a personal finance class and that was in high school. I studied finance at the college level but I found that for the most part those topics tend to be theoretical rather than practical. So ultimately I'd like to create strings of shows that would be appropriate for elementary school students, high school students, college students, young adults, advanced even.

So why me? I don't feel qualified to do this podcast. I wish somebody were doing it but because I haven't been able to find somebody else doing it I've just decided to do it myself. So if you could put up with my bumbling and my stutters and my stammers we'll learn together and we'll work towards creating that quality content and I'm sure I'll get better with time.

I personally live by the motto that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first meaning that most people aren't truly excellent at something until they've done it for quite a while. In the past few years Malcolm Gladwell, the business author, has popularized the 10,000 hour principle. Others have written about it previously and since but he's the one who's brought it to the forefront of our society recently at least in my understanding.

And the 10,000 hour principle basically says that it takes about 10,000 hours of focused dedication to truly be a master at something. I'm not a master at these subjects. I do have some education but I'm not a master of these subjects. But who knows perhaps on episode 10,000 of the Radical Personal Finance Podcast by then maybe we'll start getting good at this and start being able to provide information that would be helpful and be able to do it in a compelling manner.

We're going to dive deep and we're going to be radical. Tim Ferriss who's a popular author of the 4-hour work week, the 4-hour body and his most recent book the 4-hour chef. I think I first heard it from him and some of his concepts. He's a fan of studying the outliers.

His claim to fame as far as some of his tricks that he uses in his writings or at least his contention is perhaps a better way of saying it is that you can learn more by studying the outliers than by the people in the middle. So if you have somebody for a simple example who's extremely short and they are highly compensated and a very successful NBA player, what makes them so good?

It might on the surface seem obvious as to why somebody who is 7 feet tall and very large is successful in the NBA but what did the shorter person do that was more effective? Or what is the – on the other hand I guess, what is the very large horse jockey do that makes – that's very successful do that makes him successful?

By studying the outliers, I think you learn a lot. So I see going through the course of this personal – Radical Personal Finance podcast, I'd like to study the outliers. What can we learn from somebody who's homeless and lives in their car for 6 months or a year about their financial strategies?

What can we learn from people who have so much wealth that they could not possibly even if they tried spend it all in their lifetime? What can we learn from people who pay no income taxes and what can we learn from people who pay massive amounts of income taxes?

What can we learn from all of the outliers and then the average "ordinary people"? Again, I'll endeavor to – I'll do my best to simply be a good host and to be on this tour of curiosity with you. I'll do my best to share with you information and ideas that I think are compelling and interesting.

I'll do my best to be a good teacher of the things that I – that I'm qualified to teach and to do – be a good student of the things that I need to learn so that I can share them with you as a fellow student. I won't talk down to you.

I won't ever insult your intelligence. I'll point out things as I see them to be but I'm never going to talk down to you. In a sense, that's the summary of my podcast. That's where I hope to go. Now again, I haven't done this before so it's going to be a learning process together.

Very likely you're going to want to skip the first, I don't know, 500 or 1,000 episodes but I'm going to do it and I'm going to consistently work at it with you and I'm going to try to provide information that's going to make sense and be helpful to you.

What I'd love to do is I'd love to hear from you what kind of information would be most helpful to you. Here are some of my ideas. Number one, I love saving money. One of my biases is – I'll state it right up front for you – I'm a very frugal person in many things and I love saving money.

Part of my personal identity is frugality and I enjoy that and I enjoy talking about things that are going to save money. Now this type of information is very temporary. It's applicable only on a timely basis. It would be unusual if you were going to go back to 1982 and listen to an interview with somebody about how to save money on a personal computer.

It would be unusual if any of that information were relevant today. To save money on a personal computer you've got to do your new research practically every week. Even things that are more common have just changed dramatically. So I love topics like that. I love to do shows on things like that, interview experts.

That type of information is going to be temporary. We'd like to talk about topics such as tax planning. There's a lot of really good basic information that consumers and citizens need to know about tax planning. Tax planning will be one of those things where there may be some ongoing threads that are going to be consistently true but there are a lot of things that are going to change year by year.

So that would be a combination of overarching truths that don't change but then each year the Internal Revenue Code is going to change. It's going to change depending on where you're at but yet there are going to be some great truths of investing that you might find are constant and never change.

One of my favorite investors is Sir John Templeton who founded the Templeton Funds. One of the greatest investors in my opinion of all time. One of his quotes that I enjoy was "Some of the most dangerous words in investing" this is loosely paraphrased. Some of the most, I think the four most dangerous words in investing are simply "It's different this time." The more things change the more they tend to stay the same I guess would be the other cliche that would be applied to it.

There are some radically cool lifestyle changes that are available to people. Whether it's popular topics such as geo-arbitrage which is developing a flex of the idea of developing a flexible lifestyle that allows you to go and be where you want to and especially go and be in places where your money is going to be stretched a little bit further than it is where you are from today.

The world is so open with so many opportunities. Times are changing so fast but that means there's a world of opportunities and there's tremendous options for really cool lifestyles that are available that have never been available. The internet in my opinion has opened up contact with people that previously never would have been available.

So today we can speak and you and I probably will do this together in the form of interviews. We can speak with people from around the world that we never could have had contact with 30 years ago. We can find out what works for them and what doesn't work for them.

So the show is going to be varied. My hope is to do this as a daily show. I'm not certain that I'll be able to maintain that schedule but that would be my goal. My hope is that this would be a resource for you that would allow you to make better decisions for yourself and that it would be a constant resource that would put information and inspiration that would be useful to you.

I'll finish with two things. Number one is probably my qualifications. Oftentimes I'm interested in hearing people's qualifications. Why do they feel qualified to speak to me? In a sense there are two answers to this. There's the resume answer which I'll come to in a moment but I'll probably short circuit and then there's the reality answer.

The reality answer is you're the one who's going to choose whether my qualifications are sufficient based upon the good job that I do. If I'm boring and uninteresting and I guess academic and you don't listen, well no matter how smart I may be or no matter how widely read I may be then it doesn't do you any good.

On the other hand I may be the most entertaining person but if I don't have any grounding in the facts, well I guess it's entertainment which has some value but it's not going to help you when you undergo an audit or when you find yourself contrary to some law or rule that you weren't aware of.

So it's up to you to judge my qualifications. My first qualification I'd like you to judge me by would be the fact that I'm a student. I'm a learner, hopefully just like you. This podcast I'm going to enjoy doing it even if nobody ever listens to it. I don't have huge aspirations for this podcast as being a career for me or something that's going to make me millions of dollars although obviously I'm open to that.

I'm going to do this podcast for my own enjoyment, my own learning. I'm also going to do it in hopes of helping you. At the end of one's life I think one is going to look back on their impact on the world and I feel that one thing that I enjoy doing more than many people do is I enjoy learning and I enjoy learning, combining and then diffusing information to others.

My personal friends in daily life probably get a little bit annoyed at me for doing that constantly with them but I do it anyway. I try not to be annoying with it but I do it anyway. Perhaps this podcast would be helpful to some of them. So I'm hoping to be a student along with you.

I'll share with you what I've learned. I'll correct the record, set the record straight when I'm wrong. I guarantee I'll be wrong and I'll do my best to quickly in certain things and I'll do my best to quickly admit those wrongs and straighten them out. This is going to be a learning process.

As far as my other qualifications, at some point in time I may go into them. Very simply though, I've been interested in the topics of personal finance for a very long time. I've read probably hundreds of books on the subjects and the principles of personal finance. Some of them I've gained a lot from, some of them I've just simply learned what not to do from.

I've got a background and a history in the financial services industry. I have some formal qualifications, some formal education achievements and things like that that are useful that would pretend to say that I know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to emphasize those things. Maybe at some point in the future that will change.

I could sit here and bloviate about how great I am but at the end of the day you're the one who judges. So I'll do my best to provide good information. I'll do my best to cite each and every source that I use. I'll do my best to share with you where I've learned things if I'm able to so that you can check me out and you can do your own work.

What I'd love to hear from you is what would you like to learn about in finance? What questions do you have? Are they straightforward, simple questions, surface questions? Or are they maybe deep calculation questions, things like that? I'd love to learn what you'd like to learn about. I've got a lot of interests and obviously those will be reflected in my episodes of this podcast here.

But ultimately more important than my interests are you, the audience. And I'd like to be your fellow learner on the path towards the truth and the information that we need in life. That's it for episode one. I think that provides a good enough introduction. Who knows, perhaps in the future I'll re-record an introductory episode as things kind of come more clear as far as exactly what this podcast is going to look and sound and work like.

But for now this should at least give you an idea as to what I hope to achieve with my show. I'm going to insert here a legal disclaimer. The topics of finance are heavily regulated and it's very challenging for people to give good information in a straightforward way but yet not run afoul of the laws and things in case they make a mistake.

Here's what I'm not ever going to do in a forum like this. I'm never going to give financial advice. I'm never going to give personal financial advice. I'll give ideas, strategies, try to share the laws as I understand them. But I'm a layperson. I'm not an expert. So don't take anything that I say as being something that you should run out and act immediately upon.

I'll try to give you information but at the end of the day it's your money and some random guy on the internet shouldn't be the source of what you do with your money. You should take the information that I share with you and you should study it, learn it, pick it apart.

Number one, show me where I'm wrong. Number two, learn it for yourself so that you can take it in. You should consult with your own qualified experts, people that have a duty to you. Unlike some random guy on the internet recording a podcast, you should probably generally consult with professionals, people who know what they're doing and then have a legal and moral and ethical duty to you to give you solid information.

I'll do my best to give you good information but at the end of the day I'm a random guy on the internet. I probably should at some point put forth some more definite legal disclaimer. I hear it on the other shows and information. So for now consider this entertainment and at the end of the day it's your money.

You should care about it more than anybody else does. So take good care of it. If you take care of it, money has a way of providing for you and being there when you need it. With that, this is Joshua Sheets. Thanks for listening. Again, I'd love to hear from you.

Here's my email address. Shoot me an email. My email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Again joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Shoot me an email. Let me know how I can make the show be of service and of value to you. Bye bye.