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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to the Complete Privacy and Security Podcast. I'm Timothy Lovejoy. And I'm Mitch Martin. This podcast will help you become digitally invisible. This is the Complete Privacy and Security Podcast. You will eliminate current and future threats toward your privacy and security and take yourself out of the system.

When taken to the extreme, you will be impossible to compromise. Jesse what's going on man? Are you, please tell me you're recording this from your van. No, not yet man. We're working on it. Trust me. We're getting closer and closer. Almost 100% there. Was that one of your design requirements for the van?

It had to have a podcast studio? Like here's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for like a stove, a sink, a bathroom, a bed, and a podcast studio. Yeah. One of the like soundproof walls and everything else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool man. Cool. I, man, I'm so excited for you guys to get that thing going and, or I mean it's, it's going, but for you guys to, to get into it, just looking forward to seeing how this plays out, man.

It's super exciting. Super exciting deal. Anything else going on with you, man? Anything new? No, that's about it. Just, just me and Cameron trying to, trying to push forward and get ourselves out there. Start seeing this beautiful nation that we have, man. So anybody wants to add suggestions to our site, they're more welcome.

That's up and running. So we're, we're taking suggestions and plotting them on the map for our to-do list and getting ready to start planning those trips. So yeah, I've, I've added a few and to be honest, man, I kind of had to stop myself cause I'm like, man, I've, I could add like probably two in every state, but I don't know if they're looking for that much, looking for that much stuff or not, but I might be back in there at some point.

I love it. All right, man. So I don't really have too much of an intro topic this week. One thing I did want to maybe talk about a little bit was a pretty cool little guide I found for motherboard. And do you, do you remember that? I'm sorry, man.

Do you remember the name of that right off the top of your head? Cause I've actually lost my link here for it. Yeah. It's a little guide. It's the motherboard guide to not getting hacked. And they basically do quick, short little guide and some pretty good beginner guide, if you will.

As far as doing quick privacy and security for you. Yeah, honestly, man, for what it is, I thought it was, I thought it was pretty darn good. I ran across this on Reddit yesterday and this thing has been out for, for a couple of weeks now. It's not brand new, but man, this thing goes through a lot of stuff.

A lot of like, it opens up a threat modeling. It talks about like a lot of the stuff we talk about, like using a good passwords and password managers and keeping your apps up to date and a two factor authentication. And I'm just kind of scrolling down the list here and maybe it's not quite the order that I would put it in, but overall, man, I felt like this was, I felt like this was a pretty good place to start.

Yeah. I like right in the beginning, like, well, sorry, right in the meat and potatoes of it, they have like a quick like do's and don'ts, which is really nice. And then as well, I thought it was pretty interesting when it, when I got into mobile security, it's, they're just simple, get an iPhone.

Yeah, yeah. They do a whole little excerpt and it's like, but I love Android. Fine. Here you go. Yeah, yeah. So, um, they, they, they are very, uh, uh, very dedicated to signal on this for some reason, which, which, which is fine, which is fine. I would like to see, um, you know, wires and option there because they do like very clearly acknowledge the like difficulty of setting up signal, uh, with either your real phone number and having to give your real phone number out or a fake phone number.

And then having to like, you know, all your contacts don't know that's you. So having to get with them individually offline and give them your signal number and, and all that stuff. So, um, they, they do acknowledge that. And I, you know, this isn't exactly what I would write, but man, probably, probably nothing is probably nobody's going to agree a hundred percent with me.

And, uh, this was, I don't know, man, this was just refreshing to see kind of an all in one guide. It even got into a few things that I thought were kind of, you know, maybe a little bit more tinfoil hat than you would expect on, you know, on your average, like mainstream privacy guide.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I, they get into like tour and everything else. And even, you know, one of the things I liked as I talked about device cameras and microphones, you know, like kind of going in depth on that. And, you know, if you want to, you can throw them in the microwave if you're really concerned about what apps and things like that as far as people are recording you and things.

So they do get a little tinfoil hat, which is kind of cool, but not like too crazy, I don't think. Yeah. And I kind of wish they offered some, uh, you know, maybe some middle of the road solutions. Like, you know, they, they have a section on credit cards that, uh, and now this is just turning into you and me picking apart this like totally well-intentioned, uh, overall, very good thing.

But, uh, you know, they're like for credit cards, they're like, don't use your credit cards because credit card companies, you know, give that information over to the government and, and that's fine. I don't disagree. Uh, but their only alternative is Bitcoin. And uh, you know, I, I like, I would kind of like to see something like, you know, like some of the other options we use, uh, privacy or pseudo pay or, or blur or whatever in there for those middle of the road circumstances.

I don't, you know, um, I don't feel like I need to use Bitcoin on every single purchase I make. I don't feel like I need every single thing I buy to be 100% anonymous, but I also don't want to give out my credit card number really for anything. Yeah, absolutely.

It would have been nice to, especially now with all the different options, privacy and blur and pseudo, like you said. But I will say above all, man, they did talk about encryption, full disencrypting your hard drive. Yeah, they definitely did. They definitely did. So, uh, I'll make sure that we have a link for that in the show notes.

And uh, if, if maybe there's someone in your life that's looking for like a really easy beginner guide, uh, maybe that's a good place to send them. I, you know, I know I, uh, well actually Jesse's probably my biggest champion as far as the 30 day security challenge. I know I send a lot of people to that man, but, uh, maybe not everyone responds to, to like that 30 day style and they want to read a full article like this, or maybe not everyone likes my writing style or whatever.

So, um, there, there's a bunch of alternatives out there and overall I think this is a really good one. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think they went too deep in the weeds on the technical side and kept it pretty, you know, um, I don't want to say lame and make people sound like they're dumb, but it does keep it very simple, um, and kind of straight to the point, which is kind of nice.

Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, do you want to talk a little bit about what we're going to do in the main topic today? Um, yeah, man, you know, actually you're, you're just talking about them and the, uh, the credit cards and anonymous payments and stuff. We're actually gonna do a show on personal finance.

Um, and you know, this week's guest is Joshua Sheets from the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. We're going to bring him on and get some questions and kind of do some interviewing with him. Yeah. And, uh, you know, like it's, it's not a joke. Uh, it's, it's not just slick marketing.

The Radical Personal Finance Podcast, uh, really is radical. He has, uh, he's had me on to, uh, and, and basically let me go as far as I want on the privacy stuff. He, he has, uh, just a lot of interesting guests on and kind of some radical lifestyle suggestions.

Actually, Jesse, he just did an episode a few weeks ago about, uh, living in your vehicle and he, you know, he doesn't recommend that for everybody, but he's like, man, if you're, if you're in a situation where you could, uh, you know, you could buy a vehicle with a camper or, uh, you know, buy a van or whatever, you could save a ton of money.

Um, he, he's not your traditional financial advisor and I, I absolutely love his show. And if you're kind of new to the world of financial advice, um, he has a very approachable, uh, manner to him and a very, just a very entertaining show if nothing else. So, uh, I'll quit rambling on about him.

We'll go ahead and get him on here. Joshua, welcome to the Complete Privacy and Security Podcast. Thank you for having me. Hey Josh, uh, welcome to the show. Um, would you mind starting out by telling our audiences a little bit about yourself and your experiences in the, uh, financial planning?

Sure. You know, I was always, uh, interested from an early age in the world of money. I was the nerd who in high school when most people were probably out playing football, I'd be sitting around reading books on money. And so I was a personal finance aficionado from an early age.

Uh, in 2008 that led to my deciding after I got laid off from a job, I decided to go into the actual financial planning business. And so I began my career in the actual world of professional financial planning in about 2008. And I worked as a financial advisor for a total of just under six years.

And during that time, I worked really hard to learn the world of professional finance. I became a pretty highly credentialed advisor. I have a master's degree in financial planning, uh, was a certified financial planner and a chartered life underwriter, a chartered financial consultant, and a half other, maybe a handful of other industry designations.

So I worked really hard on the academic side of professional financial planning. And then in about 2013, I looked around and I became frustrated with the world of, uh, what I saw as consumer level, uh, personal finance advice. It seemed like there was a really great wealth of information related to somebody at the basic level of personal finance advice.

Here's how you can get out of debt or here's how you can get a better deal on your cell phone, et cetera. But I was exposed to the world of professional financial planning. Here's how you put together a guaranteed, uh, you know, a grant for your estate planning in order to help this or, or a charitable remainder trust and all this kind of hardcore financial planning stuff.

Uh, but that, and that was well represented in the world of professional financial advice, but I didn't see anything that kind of crossed that gap that brought the world of professional financial planning techniques to the world of personal finance. And a lot of the debates and, uh, arguments that occurred in the personal finance online blogosphere podcast world, I just felt they missed the mark.

So looking at the beautiful new world of niche internet content, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and see if I can do something better. So about three and a half years ago, I shuttered my financial planning business, surrendered all my licenses and designations and launched a show called radical personal finance.

And it's a 100% a podcast focused on audio, uh, information. And what I've sought to do is a tagline of the show is to help people to live a rich life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. And I've tried to bring together the inspirational and philosophical ideas that make a difference, mix them with the practical tactics that are accessible to everyone, and then sprinkle that all over with a framework of hardcore financial planning so that we can do things in a very efficient way.

Uh, so now it's been about three and a half to four years building radical personal finance, just published the 500th episode and going strong and have no plans to stop. Now, Joshua, Jesse and I were talking about this a little bit before the show, and I was attempting to explain to him why your show is truly radical and why that isn't just some slick marketing.

Can you talk about that just a little bit? Well, I try to not have any fear about tackling subjects that are abnormal. Now, I still have the fear because it's amazing how strong the cultural influences are when you have a certain position to kind of say, you shouldn't do this.

But I try to, if I feel uncomfortable about a subject or I feel like, oh, I wonder how I'm going to be perceived about this, I try to suppress that and press on. So those are a few examples. Number one, I try to talk about things that are accessible to many people.

So I've done shows on dumpster diving and I've done shows on how to live in your car and just kind of weird off topic things like that that are not normal for somebody who's a credentialed financial advisor. I also try to tackle the hardcore philosophical ideas and I try to treat them radically.

So I've interviewed people who are tax protesters who refuse to pay income taxes because of their disagreement with how the US government uses that money. I've spoken with and interviewed people who are expatriates who teach people how to spread their assets all around the world in order to provide for themselves.

I also try to talk about some of the more aggressive approaches to financial independence. I keep my foot planted firmly in the world of what's called the financial independence early retirement movement, which is all about groups of people who are seeking to retire not at the age of 65, but in five years or 10 years or 15 years of active working.

And it's a very doable process and so I try to teach those techniques. And then I also cover topics that I think are really interesting. So here's how you can set up your house with a half acre urban lot or a quarter acre urban lot. Here's how you can turn it into a productive micro farm and set up a sideline business selling micro greens to local restaurants and make yourself a very handsome five figure annual profit from that little business that turns your home into a productive source of capital.

Or let's talk about how maybe instead of putting more money in your 401k, you should put more money into insulating your old house. So it's a little bit more energy efficient and that may have a better payoff. So I try to approach these things with the academic rigor of financial planning, but also to focus on strategies that are really applicable to many people.

And I've also observed, I'm probably a bit of a maverick in the world of professional financial advice because I've observed that a lot of what we as financial advisors commonly discuss can work technically, but it often doesn't work because people don't do it. And I noticed that as a financial advisor, we in the professional financial advice industry were, and to be clear, I'm no longer a financial advisor.

So when I was one, I noticed that we in the financial advice industry were very good at helping people who are already rich to care for their money, but we weren't very good at helping people become rich. And so I've tried to tackle these subjects without fear of ideology or dogma, but rather in discuss them in a straightforward way that in my mind, the common person could really understand and find some ideas that they could implement.

Yeah, that's one thing I really appreciate about your show. And I could probably spend the next allotment of our time for this interview talking about favorite episodes of yours. But one thing that you do that I feel like basically people who are super focused in one field or another in all fields do, and we're certainly guilty of this in privacy, is to kind of miss the forest for the trees.

You recently had a listener call in and say, "Hey, here's my income. Here's my assets. And you know, my girlfriend, I want to propose to my girlfriend. So what should I invest in first?" And you're like, "Whoa, whoa, you just skipped over the biggest part of that." If the time is right in your life to get married and to take the step that's going to make you happy, that should be your priority.

And I think it's easy for people that are focused on one particular aspect, like finance or whatever it may be, to focus on that and to the exclusion of everything else. That's one thing I really enjoy about your show. And I just wanted to point that out because the way you answered that question was particularly meaningful to me.

But anyway, moving on to this, let's tie this into privacy and talk about why you're on a privacy and security show. Can you tell us why being financially stable or financially secure, I'm not sure what your taxonomy is with that, but why is that important to maintaining personal privacy?

I think a number of different areas. There are a lot of ways that we could talk about that. First and foremost, if you don't have some degree of financial stability, I think, frankly, any of the, let's just call them intermediate actions that can help to maintain financial privacy are going to be out of your reach.

But also, they're going to be probably just not even worth pursuing. For example, if you want to use a post office box as your way of receiving physical mail, that's going to cost extra. You have a perfectly good mailbox out in front of your house or down in the lobby of your apartment building.

If you want to build a, but if you want to use a payo box, that's going to cost you extra per year. So you need to have that set up and be in a situation where you're able to do it. When you start to get to more advanced financial privacy techniques, you're going to wind up spending more money for many of the things that you do.

For example, let's say that you want to shelter and to title some of your assets outside of your personal name, which is more easily searchable by somebody who's trying to find out information about your personal finances. And you want to title them within the context of an entity of some kind.

Well, that entity is going to cost money. It's going to cost money for the formation of the entity. It's going to cost money for the maintenance of the entity, for all of the appropriate agents that service that entity. So if you don't have some basic level of financial stability in your life, that's going to be really hard for you to pursue long term.

That said, I think it's not as-- there is, as with most things, some really low-hanging fruit. And I, as you say about missing the forest for the trees with the example that you gave, in many ways, we do that with a lot of subjects. And that particular approach to financial planning is especially important to me, to always focus on what's the most important at this phase of time.

Let me give one more example and then swing back to privacy. I learned when I was a financial advisor, when I was selling financial products, that it was in my own financial interest to focus my conversation on specific areas of discussion that would result in my ability to potentially sell a product.

And this is the great downfall and the great challenge of the world of financial advice. It may be all well and good for me to encourage somebody to pay off their debt. And I spent many hours talking to prospective clients about paying off their debt. But it's hard for me to figure out how to get those clients to pay me any money to give them that advice.

And so if you think, however, about what's going to make a bigger difference, somebody putting an extra $1,000 in their 401(k) or paying off their debt, probably, lifestyle-wise, paying off their debt is going to be a big thing. Or another example would be where they live and what they do for work.

If you were to look at the amount of satisfaction and health and stability and well-being, the actual structure of your life that you get from being in a situation where you have extra savings, and you were to compare that to just simply living in a place that you chose because you want to live there, working with people that you like, and having personal people in your life that you like and that you enjoy being around, it's going to be a far bigger benefit for you, lifestyle-wise, to live and work where you want to, rather than to have an extra $10,000 in your 401(k).

So I've given the advice to lots of people. Why don't you stop putting money in your 401(k) and save up $10,000 so you can afford to move across the country? And instead of living in some big, giant city, why don't you move to a ski town in the Rocky Mountains or move to the beach?

They've got jobs everywhere. You don't have to be rich to make this lifestyle change. You just need to actually intentionally focus it. So in the same way, I think that applies in the world of professional financial advice. People miss the fact that you want to focus on those things that are going to give you the most return first, which is something like having a job that's well-suited for you.

In the world of privacy, I think the same thing applies, however, because in the same way that switching to a different job will buy you much more life happiness, something like minimizing the amount of information that you publish about yourself is going to be a big impact on your personal privacy.

So it doesn't cost a lot of money to start pulling back the constant leakage of personal information that we all put out into the world of social media. That doesn't cost anything. You don't cost much to be a little bit more circumspect with all the details and the data of your life that you share with others.

So it's a real balance. And I think that it's important to recognize that you don't have to be rich. You don't have to even be financially stable to start being more careful with the leakage from your life of all of your personal information. But if you want to start to pursue some of the more aggressive medium stage and, as you put it in your book, expert stage strategies, you better be prepared to pay because they are certainly going to cost you more.

That's an interesting, I love your perspective on that. A lot of your financial advisors, they will tell you 401(k), Roth IRAs, everything's for the future. And that whole plan of retirement at that 60-65 age range, you bring up an interesting perspective of, hey, instead of putting that $10,000 in a 401(k), use it to move somewhere else that you enjoy and stuff like that.

So I guess that being said, can you describe what you would consider "to be financially stable or financially secure"? I think it's really a continuum. And we really do need to understand where somebody is starting from. And I'll give you the stages that I look at and that I have mapped out that I teach.

They're on my website at RadicalPersonalFinance.com, and I've covered them in the show. But the basic stages that I see to go from zero to what I call financial abundance work like this. Stage zero is a place of financial dependence. And that's where we all start. We all begin from a place of being dependent on others for our livelihood.

I have young children. They're fully dependent on me. And so every one of us began in that place. And that may be a place of a young person, a young adult who is currently dependent on the financial support of their parents. Or it may be an adult who has hit a rough patch in life, and they've needed the help and care of other people in order to continue forward.

They needed to depend on personal charity. They needed to depend on some form of governmental program. That's a stage of financial dependence. So the first goal is to move from financial dependence to stage one of financial independence called financial solvency. And I define solvency as being able to support yourself on your own income without the aid of others and being current on all of your bills.

So being able to support yourself on your own income without financial support from others and being current on all of your bills. If you can't be financially solvent or if you're not financially solvent, it's very hard to do anything in life. It's really tough. I've worked with a lot of people who are insolvent, and it's the lion at the door.

You can't do much until you're in that place. But once you can get financially solvent, then we can move on and start to build layers of independence and stability. So stage one, financial solvency. Stage two, financial stability is what I've called it. That means that once you're current on your bills, you need to build some sort of buffer account and call it an emergency fund, a rainy day fund, cash reserves, just some kind of money that will start to protect you from the unexpected.

Because no matter what, unexpected problems are already always going to happen. Something will break, something will come up. Or on the flip side, unexpected opportunities will come up, and you need to have money available to you. I don't have any hard and fast numbers on this, but I've actually learned over the years, the hard way, not to encourage people to focus first and foremost on the big picture financial tools that many people focus on.

For example, putting money in an IRA. That's fine, but that's not the first step. And so in this stage of financial stability, building up an emergency fund, I think it's good to go based upon either a few months of expenses, three to six months is ideal. I encourage young people that their first major financial goal should be to build up a reserve account of about 10,000 bucks that's available to them.

Whether that's in a savings account, physical currency that's available to them, about 10,000 bucks. Because if you think about the life change of the average young man or woman, and how impactful $10,000 is, it opens up the world of options. There's almost nothing you can't do if you have $10,000.

In the United States, about half the population can't lay their hands on, I forget, is it 500 or $1,000 cash if they needed to without borrowing it. So the majority of families, if they just put themselves in a situation where they had about $10,000 saved up, would move themselves from the bottom 50% of society to the top 50% of society.

And they would be well cushioned against the vast majority of life problems that come at them. So that's stage two, financial stability. Stage three that I teach is debt freedom. This one is hard to know where to put, but generally if you have debt, for most people, you're going to want to get rid of it.

Now obviously not all debt is created equal, so you need to sit down and look carefully at the debt. But definitely you want to be rid of any high interest rate debt. Definitely you need to have any old unpaid debts cleared off. Definitely you probably want to clear any consumer debt, especially consumer debt that's tied to depreciating assets.

And if you do have any debts on investment assets, like investment real estate or productive business assets, generally you want to make a plan to clear that debt as well. Because no matter who you are and what stage you are, if you are fully debt free, you will simply enjoy greater freedom and independence in your life.

And that's one of the things that most of us are looking for with regard to money. And then quickly stage four is financial security. What I teach is that from now on, you're trying to build up streams of income from investment portfolios, from independent businesses, from savings that will provide for an increasing percentage of your lifestyle.

So I have stage four, financial security, which is a first stage to have your basic living expenses covered by your investment income. I define that as housing expenses, utilities, food, transportation, insurance, just those basic things. Stage five I call financial independence, which means that your current lifestyle expenses, both needs and wants, but your current lifestyle expenses can be reached and covered by your independent investment income.

Stage six I call financial freedom, which is where you've attained any kind of additional lifestyle goals that you would like to have. More toys you'd like to have, things you want to buy or experiences that cost more money. You want to clarify those and then plan to cover those with investment income.

And I consider that to be a place of true financial freedom. And then move on to stage seven, which I call financial abundance, which means that you've accumulated wealth that's beyond the amount that you need to fund your own lifestyle expenses. Then you have a comfortable margin of safety.

And so this is the stage that most wealthy people get to. And this is the stage where I think you can consider somebody wealthy in the fullest sense of the word. And you have to decide, how do I responsibly manage this surplus? Who's it going to go to when I'm done with it?

And how do I control it? And this is where you start to face the really hard problems, which is, what do I want my money to mean? I've got way more money than I need for myself. So now what change in the world am I going to accomplish with the money?

So I look at it as a phased approach. But I think if you're looking for metrics-- and I have no way to define those exactly. But in metrics, I'm convinced of two things. Number one, $10,000 in the bank moves almost anybody from the bottom of society to the very top.

I'm going to guess top 20%, although I haven't verified those numbers. I would guess that having $10,000 of liquid cash available to you moves you to the top 20%. And it opens up almost any life decision that you want. And the second one that I encourage people to shoot for, $100,000-- $100,000 available to you, not locked away in an account you can't touch, not locked up in an investment asset.

But $100,000 that's liquid and available to you really puts you in a position where there's no business you can't start. There's no interest that you can't pursue. There's no place you can't move. There's no life decision that you can't make. You have a huge amount of financial independence. You're not yet independent from your need to work for a living.

But all of your decisions are open to you. And when you reckon with the reality that most people will never want to not work in some form or fashion, we start to see that this financial independence can be achieved much more quickly than most people have thought possible. No, you don't need to have $4 million in your 401(k) to feel like you're doing OK with money.

You probably need $10,000 to $100,000 available to you so that you can make those life decisions. That will put you in the place to enjoy the next 30 years while you're building and saving the money in your 401(k) to get to your $4 million number. I really like that context of this giving you options and this giving you the ability to pursue whatever it is you want to pursue.

We always get to this point when we start talking about certain privacy things, especially at that expert level where it's like this option is not going to be available to every person. This option is not something that we recommend that everyone pursue. And only now do I realize that when I came on your show, I didn't quite have this context and didn't quite have my head around this, but if you have $100,000 in the bank, pretty much anything we talk about is available to you if you want to pursue it and pretty much anything else that you want to pursue.

I really appreciate you putting in that context. So when building wealth, when accumulating money, or just doing your taxes, this is a thing that I'm actually up against right now because my accountant retired earlier this year and you've done an episode called "Don't Trust Your Financial Planner" or "Don't Trust Your Accountant" that aired shortly before the time I came on your show.

And it was about how insecure those services are even though they're managing our money. What recommendations do you have on finding an accountant, a financial planner, a tax preparer, anyone who deals with your finances that respects your privacy and uses some security best practices? That is a hard one.

That is a real hard one. So to answer the question directly, I only have essentially one or two suggestions on how to find one, but I have a bunch of suggestions on how to create one out of the one you currently have. So first and foremost, the biggest thing that I think many people have a misconception over is that they can maintain their financial privacy while also disclosing their ideas and their information to a financial professional.

Many people have the idea that, "Well, I can go ahead and tell my financial advisor, tell my accountant about all my money. I can tell my accountant," as an example, let's talk about somebody who's committing tax fraud. "I can tell my accountant that, well, I had an extra $50,000 on the side that I earned that I'm not reporting to you, but here, just let me report this $50,000 that I do want to report." Well, the accountant may or may not move forward with you depending on that information, but the accountant can, when they're interviewed by the IRS agent, it brings them into court and subpoenas them, the accountant is going to be required to report on the record what you said to them about the fact that you made an extra $50,000 on the side that you're not reporting to the accountant.

Number two, the accountant's files can all be requested and submitted to the court. And this is the same with any kind of financial professional that you work with as a financial advisor. When I did work as a financial advisor, I had lots of people told me all the intimate details of their financial life.

I had lots of people who would share with me, as they probably needed to, all of their account statements. They had detailed records on everything that they had. Now, pretend for a moment that I had a client that sat down with me, gave me all of the information about their whole financial picture.

And then two years later, this client starts to go through a divorce. And in those divorce proceedings, they don't fully disclose all of their assets and all of the financial information to their spouse's attorney. Well, that spouse's attorney can subpoena me and can subpoena my files. And if those files are demonstrating a different story than that person is telling their divorce attorney or is telling the other divorce attorney, they're going to have a problem.

So it's important to always recognize that, first and foremost, your financial relationships with people who are your financial service people are not fully private or secure. And I think that it's important for people to recognize that. Now, so specific suggestion, about the only specific suggestion that I could give would be if you have the opportunity to work with somebody in an attorney relationship, that may possibly provide you with a little bit of protection for something like I've described because attorneys do indeed enjoy attorney-client privilege.

There are not many attorneys, and especially the practicing attorneys, practicing in the world of financial advice. So that one's harder. But in the world of tax preparation, there is a small organization of accountants who are licensed both as CPAs and as attorneys. And so you might consider, if privacy is important to you, you might consider pursuing somebody who has that dual structure.

And you might consider working with somebody who can work with you in an attorney-client relationship, especially if you have a troublesome financial problem, so that you can enjoy that attorney-client privilege. Beyond that, the only way that you can really approach it is to be careful about the person that you work with.

Try to find somebody who will honor your privacy. And I don't know how to do this, other than to say you've got to watch your gut. To toot my own horn, I always tried really, really hard to protect fully my client's privacy when I was an advisor. I tried very hard to never talk about anybody.

I would never say even if someone was a client or not, because I think that's really important. But my observation has been that there's a wide range of people's commitment to privacy. And at every company, at every firm, there is a proverbial water cooler. And especially if you are somebody with a high profile, there's a good chance that your information may be discussed, which is why I think it's very important to shop and to consider somebody who's going to be circumspect.

If you're a celebrity, if you're somebody who has a high profile and you're sharing all of your information with somebody, that person may respect it to a degree, but they can also open their mouth and start to share some things. So you have to judge the character of the person.

And then the only way I know to really handle it is to compartmentalize, to compartmentalize the information that you share with somebody. And this is hard, because the best advisors are going to want and to frankly need the most complete information. But you have to decide, am I ready to turn over this information?

And so sometimes you can generalize. For example, if you are purchasing an insurance policy and you are soliciting advice on how much life insurance to buy, then you can generalize the amount of assets that you have for the life insurance advisor. You don't need to share with them where everything is.

But at the end of the day, sometimes you're probably going to want to keep your mouth shut and not talk about the bucket of gold that you keep in Uncle Joe's basement or the valuable collection of personal artifacts. You're just going to need to mentally tag those things yourself and compartmentalize.

Now that's the big picture in terms of the actual professional. I do think that you can do a better job of working with your actual service providers as they are now, just simply by asking and by trying. One of the things that amazed me, and I think it's probably improved in the last few years, I've not been active in the business, nor have I been licensed for about four years now, but I think it's probably been improved in the wake of the Snowden revelations, in the wake of many recent high profile data breaches, such as the Equifax breach.

I think there's probably more of an attention being paid to the security of communications. But when I was actively working with clients in this space, I had many clients who would push back against the most basic step of using encrypted email. We had a very simple encryption program set up where when I sent an email that had personal financial information, I would always encrypt the email.

It was very simple. And yet, many clients did not want to use it and did not want to learn how to use it. And if you are interested in that, just work with your provider and say, "Hey, I'd like to use a secure form of communication." Make sure that you're using an encrypted email program.

And many of the big firms have that established already. If you're working with a small independent practitioner, just move over to one of the more accessible ones that are simply available. You guys are big proponents of proton mail. I think it's fantastic that anybody can use a proton mail setup and especially get them to move their business to that and try to get their clients to use that so that you're using an encrypted email program.

In the world of encrypted communication apps for voice and text communications, there's no reason not to be using a more secure communication solution. The next thing you can do is just ask. For example, very few people ever ask anything about how their data is being stored. And so, many times, your financial professionals will think that people don't care about the fact that we all have file cabinets with all of your information right there, copies of your statements, copies of your mortgage, copies of your home address.

Well, nobody ever asks about that. So ask. Ask what are the locks like? Do you encrypt information? How do you store information? Make sure that your advisors are storing things digitally. It's far easier to protect information digitally with a good, high-quality encryption system that's mandated by the larger firm than it is to protect file cabinets, frankly.

You can get into most file cabinets with a bobby pin. So just by asking, that will start to raise it to the awareness of your providers. Also, try to opt out of sharing information. In all the years that I worked with people, I only had one person who, when filling out a life insurance application, asked me, "Do I have to give my Social Security number?" I had never known if you had to give your Social Security number or not.

I assumed you did because it was there on the form, but I didn't know. So I went and I asked, and I found out that, no, this particular client didn't need to give me their Social Security number. Now, certainly, it's convenient for the insurance agent and it's convenient for the insurance company to have your Social Security number.

But the problem is, number one, now that Social Security number is sitting on your advisor's desk on a piece of paper, that's probably going to stay in the file right on top of the desk overnight while the cleaning crew comes in and cleans up the office and empties the trash.

But also, that Social Security number is now going to be used and it's going to be tied to your account. So you're giving out information that's going to make it much easier for your information to go into the centralized medical information bureau database. There's a special database that, as an example from the world of insurance, all of your medical information is stored in this medical bureau of information database.

It stores all of your applications for insurance. It stores your physician's reports. It stores all of the medical information so that it's more convenient for the life insurance companies to do medical underwriting on you. And that's going to be tied to your Social Security number. And so if you can just pull back and you can get a policy without that, then do so.

Now, not all companies will have that same policy, but at least try. I think my observation has been we get what we deserve. We give up all the information because we can and we don't think about it. And it's only going to be in the day when people start saying, "You know what?

This is abuse of me for you to get all this information. Facebook, you're abusing me by taking this, my original content, and monetizing it. Physician, you are abusing me by asking for all this information." For example, when I fill out forms, and I encourage other people, when I fill out forms at the doctor's office, these forms are usually made up just simply to cover every base all at once, and you don't have to sign everything.

So when you're filling out forms, read every line and cross every line out that you don't agree to. Or another example would be something like HIPAA notices. HIPAA notices, everybody goes around and automatically signs the HIPAA disclosure forms thinking that what they're signing is actually something that says that they're protecting my personal health information by my signing this HIPAA form.

It's the exact opposite. There's nothing that you're signing that says that by signing the HIPAA form, you are not saying that your information is going to be protected. You have no way to protect your personal health information by signing or by not signing the HIPAA form. What the HIPAA form says, it's a disclosure that tells you that we're sharing your information with all of these different companies and all of these different people who have the opportunity to participate in it.

You're not legally required, neither by the letter of the law, you're not legally required to sign the HIPAA release. And if you do sign the HIPAA release, and if you ever need to sue your medical provider for sharing your information, then you've lost it by signing the HIPAA form.

So simple example, like don't sign the HIPAA forms. And when the person at the front desk that doesn't have any clue how to do it or what it says, says, "Yes, you have to." "No, I don't. It is not the law." And I think that the majority of this information, it goes out because people don't know.

Nobody knows. When I used to open investment accounts, the average investment account paperwork system is about 200 to 300 pages. Do you think anybody in their right mind is going to sit there and read 200 to 300 pages? Of course not. It's just all by the big lawyers who write every single thing in there.

And you have to go at a certain point with good faith and say, "Well, my advisor is going to tell me if there's anything bad in here." I always tried to point out, for example, the arbitration clauses and the important points in the paperwork. But nobody reads it. Nobody does it.

And until we start paying attention and sitting there and saying, "If I'm going to sign this, I'm going to sit here in your office and I'm going to read it." I've done that when I signed a mortgage one time. I told the mortgage provider, I said, "You better send the paperwork over in advance because I'm not just going to sign, sign, sign, sign, sign until I've read it.

And if you don't and they didn't, well, we're going to sit here in your office and you can sit here right with us and watch me read every single line until we start cleaning this mess up and actually having legal documents that make sense and actually protect the information of the people involved." But until then, just say no and stop participating.

And what I find, I cross out all the lines on the doctor forms and whatnot. They look at it and they say, "But you have to." I say, "No, I don't agree to that." That doesn't mean just because I don't agree to these egregious overbearing legalese doesn't mean you can't treat me today.

You can treat me and I'm not going to agree to this form. That's some interesting information, man. I didn't know that about the HIPAA. Definitely going to have to question that more so going forward. And I agree with you. Everything's written nowadays. I mean, it's kind of like the terms of service anytime you want to open a new account or anything else nowadays, the new millennium.

Everybody just agrees, "Yes, I have read and understand the terms of service," and just kind of move on. And if there's a blank for it, we fill it in and we just say, "Okay." So I like that fact that start questioning and give pushback and compartmentalize out of all that.

Just kind of continue with the privacy aspect of things. One of the things that we talk about as far as the financial side of the side of privacy is telling people to utilize trusts, LLCs, and other legal vehicles for privacy. As a financial advisor, in your opinion, which is better for privacy and which is better financially for the person itself?

And are the two at odds or can they actually work together? Probably if I were going to identify one area where there's more mystique around it, I would have to identify this area of entities, the idea of a trust or an entity, an LLC or a corporation, et cetera.

There's a lot of, I would call it mystique around it where people think that, the phrase often, "Well, I'm using an LLC for the tax benefits," or "You need to use an LLC for the tax benefits," et cetera. And I try to push back really hard about this. I've done a bunch of shows on the taxation of business entities, et cetera, to try to help people understand you don't need to be intimidated by these terms.

There are no fundamental tax benefits for an LLC because, as an example, an LLC can choose to be taxed as a personal entity, as an S corporation or as a C corporation, and you just file your election with the IRS. There's nothing magical about an LLC versus another type of corporate entity.

It's a big question. And so, my answer to it would be more in terms of structure rather than specifically. When you get into the world of entities, and let's just call it an entity because an entity includes any kind of trust or corporation or other business structure, they all have certain features.

And an entity will be written to take advantage of certain features based upon the way that it's structured, based upon the way that it works. There are certain things that you can do using an LLC to hold a business, business shares, for example, that you can't do with an S corporation or with a C corporation.

There are certain things, however, that you can't do vice versa. And so, the most important thing to all of these is to look and say, "What am I actually trying to do? What am I actually trying to accomplish?" And then, there's no way around it. You either have to do a huge amount of research or you need to speak with a knowledgeable expert in this particular area to figure out what's the appropriate way for me to set it up.

With taxes, there are a lot of misunderstandings with regard to taxes because you can have a trust or a corporation and that can either affect the taxation or it can not affect the taxation. And in certain circumstances, you may want to affect the taxation or you may want to not affect the taxation.

The big principle with regard to business entities is you'll either have what's called flow-through taxation. This can be the same for a business or for a trust. You'll either have a flow-through taxation where the income shows up on your personal tax return or you can have taxation that occurs at the entity level where the income doesn't show up on your personal tax return but it shows up on the individual entity's return.

That doesn't have anything to do with privacy. It doesn't affect it one way or the other. It has more to do with the particular tax strategy that you're trying to pursue. Sometimes you really don't want to have taxation at the entity level. For example, trust tax rates are very, very high.

They automatically go – if you're being taxed on assets that are held in the trust and the trust itself is being taxed, you basically automatically go with very low amounts of income to the highest marginal tax bracket in the personal tax code. So sometimes that's a very bad thing and it would be much cheaper for you to pay those assets personally, to pay those taxes personally.

But there are times where you gain other benefits from that. For example, maybe by moving the asset into a trust, you've removed it from the personal ownership of the individual and that's helpful for estate tax planning or it's helpful from asset protection planning or it's helpful for some other reason and you want to go ahead and pay that higher rate.

So it's not either/or. The key is to look and understand that there's going to be a tradeoff and a balance between taxation, privacy, control over the assets or control over the business and even the distribution of the assets. And once you get clear on what you want to do, then you can decide on the appropriate structure.

I would here emphasize however that for most people, it's fine to keep it simple. As an example, the best, simplest form of asset protection planning for most people is to use what are called qualified accounts such as your 401(k) or 403(b) or IRA to use a qualified account to hold significant assets and then to use the homestead laws in your state for your real estate.

So two examples for me being in Florida. If I have a million dollars in an IRA and I own a million dollar home, free and clear of any mortgage, then I now have essentially ironclad asset protection for my IRA and for my home. So you can sue me, I can lose the lawsuit, but money that's in an IRA or a 401(k) is not available to the claims of creditors.

And it's basically ironclad. It's as close to ironclad as you can get. And that's cheap. And also my home, if I own the home, then that's also ironclad. In the state of Florida, we have an unlimited homestead exemption. So you could have a $20 million personal residence that you're homesteading and you can be sued and nobody can take that $20 million residence away from you.

Now, the problem is that both of those things are very un-private. The qualified account is very un-private, specifically to the government authorities. And the house is very un-private because it's going to be listed in my name in the local tax database. And so every stage that I move to get to privacy, if I take money out of the IRA and I put it into a safe at home, now I've got more privacy, but I'm giving up that guaranteed asset protection.

Or if I move my house into a trust, depending on how I structure that, I may or may not give up that homestead protection. So it's important to look at each one and recognize there's probably going to be a trade-off between these taxes, privacy, control, distribution. And let me look at my specific situation and be practical about it while also getting good advice on how to actually structure it.

That's my general answer. If you want to ask any specific questions, I can try to do better and home in on a specific asset or asset type, but that's a general answer to the question. No, I think we could—I think we can probably work with that. Thank you for such a detailed answer on that.

So one thing I'm personally very interested in is actually building wealth and actually moving up your various stages there. So how do you prioritize where to put money? And with the understanding that this is balanced with actually living life, but that $100,000 you talk about, obviously a savings account maybe wouldn't be the best place to have $100,000 parked.

What's your recommendation as far as cash on hand, money in a savings account, certificates of deposits or a CD ladder or stock market real estate, gold and silver? What say you? So I have a—shockingly enough, I have an episode of Radical Personal Finance, number 481, called Where Should I Keep My Emergency Fund, where I walk through that in a detailed format over the course of about an hour.

So you'll want to link to that in the show notes, episode 481, Where Should I Keep My Emergency Fund? But the short answer to it is going to be it's always a matter of tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs are fine, but it's important to recognize that you have to look at this individually.

So let's walk through this with an extra focus on privacy, but recognize that privacy is not the only thing. Now, with regard to saving—having $100,000 in a savings account in your bank, that is actually a fine plan because, assuming that's an FDIC-insured account, it doesn't get much safer than that.

About the only risk that you would be exposed to from the perspective of safety of your money with having $100,000 in your savings account is inflation. And generally, we're not going to worry about that on a short-term basis. So it's really secure. The FDIC insurance is really important and really valuable.

The bank is going to protect that money. That's not so much money where you're likely to be targeted. So that is going to be very secure. But you're not going to have a lot of accessibility to it. If you need to go and get money out, it's going to start to be recorded transactions.

You start taking out $20,000 of cash. Now we're going to have currency transaction reports, et cetera. So it's not going to be very private, and it's not very accessible. So let's just walk through each of them. And I'll encourage you that every one of these actually has ways that you can use it.

And I think they all have their place. So with regard to cash, I think most people should keep-- and by cash here, I mean physical currency-- I think many people should keep physical currency available to them much more than they do. We've got a disease, the disease of the plastic, where most of us are accustomed to just swiping for everything.

And I'd like to see that reversed, because if we don't use cash, we may lose the ability to lose cash. The so-called war on cash, I think, is often overblown, but it is real. And I don't want to lose the ability to use cash. And so I encourage people, whenever possible, just spend with currency.

I want to encourage the cash economy so that we can always maintain the anonymity and the privacy of cash transactions. You can store a huge amount of cash very privately. $100,000 in $100 bills, I mean, you vacuum wrap it. I think that'd take, what, probably four inches. A four-inch stack of $100 bills would be $100,000.

So that would be very easy to conceal. That would be very easy to store safely. And that could be very doable for many people who want to keep cash. And I encourage people, especially when I've done consultations with people who are in extreme adverse negotiations with creditors, people who are very behind on their bills and they're working to catch up.

When you're in that situation, you basically have to take extreme measures. And one of those extreme measures is you lose your ability to really participate in the bank account world because your creditors, if they are able to gain a judgment against you, put themselves in a situation where they may be able to clear out your account.

And so I've often encouraged people who are in contentious, antagonistic relationships to say, "You've got to protect yourself because you want to talk about heartbreaking. It's really heartbreaking to be working with a young family who has $5,000 to their name and they keep it all in their bank account.

And then the credit card company goes in and wipes out the $5,000 to settle an old balance. And now they start balancing their mortgage. They're pushed out on the street because they don't have the money, et cetera. So you've got to be strong about it. So cash is very, very helpful and very, very valuable.

You do face problems with cash. How do you keep it secure? And how do you keep it secure in a way that it's not going to be stolen, that someone's not going to know about it, et cetera? But it has a really good possibility for you. When you get to the world of bank accounts, savings accounts, et cetera, you get a huge amount of security and you can get some privacy depending on how you do it.

So number one, most of the time with a bank, you're going to be protected by the privacy laws of that bank or the state that's governing that, but that bank. And for most things, that's pretty private. In general, in the United States, if you know I have a bank account at, make it up, Bank of America, you can't really call Bank of America, especially you can't like you used to be able to, to call Bank of America and social engineer your way in to finding out the information on my account.

It used to be easier to do that. It seems to be a little bit harder now, I think, in my opinion. But there are risks to this, and these risks are more widely known around the world versus just in the United States. I recently, a few months ago, had somebody in my life who traveled to Mexico and heard firsthand from some people who were living in one of the very difficult areas of Mexico.

And one of the tools that the local drug cartel used is they had people on the inside of the local Mexican bank, and they would use this inside information for somebody who worked for the bank, who would then of course have access to the bank's computer systems, to find out how much some of the wealthy people in the town had in their bank accounts.

And if they knew that somebody had $50,000 in their bank accounts, then the cartel would take that information, they would go and kidnap the person's child, and the ransom demand, they would line it up with how much money was in the bank account. So they would require a $50,000 ransom, knowing that there was a much stronger chance that person was just going to go ahead and pay the ransom, because they could, without involving the police, without involving other people, and they would pay it quickly to get their child back.

That's a really rough situation. And if I lived in Mexico, there's not a chance in the world I would be keeping money in a savings account like that. Now I think there are strategies for privacy that you can use with savings accounts. Number one would be diversification and compartmentalization.

There's no reason not to have four accounts at four different banks. I think it would be valuable to have accounts at banks that are slightly less prominent. If you have, for example, a company like Bank of America, there are going to be thousands of people who may have access to your, to be able to look up the customer account records and find out who has such an account here.

I don't know what their internal controls are on that, but most big companies will have thousands of people who would have access to that information. If you banked with a local credit union, on the other hand, there may only be a handful of people who would have access to that information.

Now your profile is going to be bigger at your local credit union than it would be with Bank of America. And this is where we get into the world of trade-offs. If I'm at the local credit union, everyone knows I have a million dollars in my account. Well, I'm the local millionaire.

Whereas a Bank of America, I may just still be a number on a screen. So I think that it's valuable to consider diversifying your bank holdings using some larger national banks, but also there's benefit to local, regional banks and credit unions that are more likely to be a little bit more private.

And then I think international banking comes into play here as well. That it's relatively easy, although it's harder for US citizens than it once was, it's relatively easy to establish internationally held bank accounts. For US Americans, the simplest and easiest access to the banking system that would be abroad would be Canada.

Very easy to establish Canadian bank accounts, and I've encouraged lots of consulting clients to do that. I wouldn't be very confident about banking in Mexico, but there are other low-hanging fruit that you can start to establish banking relationships abroad. When it comes to something like precious metals, again, you get into a world of trade-offs.

The great benefit of precious metals is you can store a huge amount of value in a very small space. And that huge amount of value can be stored in a very small space that is completely private. Nobody knows how much money you have in your private secure storage when it's held there in the form of physical currency.

It can't be hacked. It can't be opened up. It's going to be very, very private. Now, of course, there are disadvantages with the value of the metal. May go up, may go down. You may be dealing with a volatile market, but it's very, very helpful and you can store that for a long period of time.

The trick when it comes to buying and selling precious metals privately is to approach it in the right way. And there are two different phases. You have to think about the buy and you have to think about the sell. So and we have to think about the amount of money.

It's one thing if you want to buy $1,000 worth of silver bullion. It's another thing if you want to buy a million dollars worth of-- there would be no way to store a million of silver bullion-- a million dollars worth of gold bullion. So the first thing is you can still-- if you want to get very private, there is almost nothing that is as good as precious metals.

You can buy with cash. And you can buy precious metals with cash. You can walk into a coin store or a coin dealer and you can plop down $100 bills and you can buy with cash. Now, the first thing you want to be careful of is the-- it's about a $10,000 reporting rule that the coin dealer will be subject to.

That if you do a transaction that is higher-- any kind of cash transaction that's higher than $10,000, in general, the person that you're going to be working with is going to be required to file a form with the US federal government indicating that you have engaged in a large cash transaction report.

And that's the same at your bank. If you go and deposit large amounts of cash, that's the same at a coin dealer as well. So if you could go in and buy $100,000 worth of, let's say, gold American eagles from your local coin dealer, and you could pay cash, but they would be required to report that transaction if you did it with over $10,000.

So your two solutions to this of buying things privately so that there's not a reported transaction is number one, keep your amounts significantly lower than that $10,000 number and make sure that you're careful of structuring. You don't want to go in and in the morning make an $8,000 transaction and in the afternoon an $8,000 transaction.

The coin dealer would be required to report that as a structured cash transaction exceeding $10,000. So either do it small, once a week, go and make a $5,000 transaction, and pretty quickly you can set some serious money aside, or use a bank wire or a bank check. And if you use a bank wire or a bank check, now you have the ability to make a transaction, a private transaction, to purchase precious metals in a way that is not reported to the tax authorities.

However, of course, now that you've involved a bank wire or a bank check, there will, of course, be a record in your bank account. So that's when you are buying. Skipping to the sell, when you get into the world of selling gold and silver, then you've got to be clear on what you're selling and understand what the rules are, whether it's able to be private or non-private.

So let's say that you have $100,000 of precious metals and you go into your local coin dealer and you want to be able to sell that to them privately. Well, you've got to read the rules about which types of assets are going to be your best to go with.

Your American Eagle coins are exempted. They're totally private. You can sell any quantity of American Eagle coins without that being a reported transaction. No matter what amount, as long as you're dealing with a one ounce, half ounce, quarter ounce, or 10th ounce American Eagle, those are not reportable to the IRS when you sell them.

That's really, really helpful to know. Also, you can do that with American Gold Buffalos and Gold Austrian Philharmonics are very valuable coins that you can sell any amount of without there being a transaction. So those are your most private ones. With American Silver Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, and Austrian Philharmonics are your private silver coins.

Now on the flip side, some of your other forms of gold coins have to be reported depending on the certain amounts. So Canadian Maple Leafs, South African Krugerrands, Mexican Onzas, those are gold bullion coins that if you sell more than 25 of them, that will be a reportable event which will be reported to the IRS on a 1099.

And then when you move into the world of bullion bars, if you're selling bullion bars that are greater than a kilo, you're going to have a reportable transaction. Same thing with silver rounds, et cetera. So that was probably way too detailed. But every single aspect of precious metals has certain benefits and certain disadvantages.

And you want to look at that and understand how does this help. And especially you have to be careful with the volatility of precious metals. To wrap up, a couple other categories, stocks and things like that, your ability to hold them and own them will depend on the ownership.

And most of the time, you're going to have a relationship with a broker who's going to help you with the ownership of that. And that may or may not be private. Real estate can be purchased privately, depending on how you're approaching it. There are other assets as well, though.

For example, insurance policies, cash value life insurance policies have the benefit of being outside of the banking system. And so in that way, they're a little bit more private. And generally, most of the transactions, as long as the policy stays in force, most of the transactions with a life insurance policy are not generally reported to the IRS.

So the key is to lay out what am I concerned about? Am I concerned about the IRS? Am I concerned about a creditor? Am I concerned about an ex-wife? Am I concerned about a political enemy? And then to develop a strategy that's appropriate. I think it's important to emphasize that there are different scales to these things.

If somebody has $10,000 of value, there's no reason to do anything other than to keep money in a local bank account and to keep some amount of currency on hand. That would be crazy to get into the world of saying, I'm going to go and buy Gold Eagles because I can buy them and hold them privately.

Somebody has a few million dollars, and you're trying to shelter and set aside a couple million bucks privately, you're not going to go down to your local coin dealer and deal in the world of millions of dollars. You're going to go and open up a bullion storage account with an international bullion storage company.

And so you've got to be clear on where am I, and then get the advice that's appropriate to your specific financial life stage. I think Jesse and I had the exact same thought at the exact same moment when you were talking about looking at who you're trying to hide this from.

And this is basically threat modeling for your finances, deciding if you want to be private from the IRS or the bank or whom. I appreciate the depth you went into on precious metal, because that's something I've not actually dipped my toe into yet, but that's probably the next thing that I'm considering investing in completely off the privacy stuff.

How wise an investment is that? I think it depends on the approach. There are a couple of major problems with the world of precious metals. Number one, you're dealing with a very volatile market, especially the silver market. The silver market is extremely volatile, and the gold market as well.

Number two, you're dealing with basically a pure commodity whose value is measured only by supply and demand, and that's really hard. In many ways, if you said, Joshua, would you rather have a $100,000 house or $100,000 of gold, I'd rather have the house, because the house has the ability to earn income.

Gold, silver don't have the ability to earn income, and so they have a real disadvantage when it comes to that. If you were to total the whole amount of gold that's available in the world and put it into a small geographic area, it would be a very, very small amount.

So in terms of true wealth, it's hard to use as true wealth. That said, gold and silver have a bunch of major advantages. It's possible, especially in times of financial insecurity, it's possible that their values may increase, and it's possible that their values could increase substantially. Depending on who you're talking to, you'll find all kinds of gold bugs and silver bulls who will talk about the fact that all the silver is being used up in electronics, and so therefore silver is going to massively adjust, or the value of silver is at an all-time low in terms of the gold-silver ratio, and that has to adjust.

And so many people believe there's a big upside in silver. Personally, I'm not convinced, but many people believe that, and they make good arguments for that. With regard to gold, similarly, gold has certain benefits that could work out in terms of growth in the investment market. The things that concern me about gold is that it's not an asset.

It has a huge value because gold is what central banks own. Central banks own and stockpile gold, as well as Chinese and Indian people who have a culture that's devoted to gold. In the U.S. American market, I find it hard to see the value of gold. Very few people have ever held a gold coin.

Very few people know the value of it. So what I look at gold and silver is it should probably be a relatively small percentage of your net worth. It's very reasonable to say, "I'm going to keep five or, I don't know, five to 10% of my assets in," I would generally encourage the majority gold, in gold and silver.

And it is a useful insurance policy. Many technically created investment accounts will allocate a small percentage, usually about 5%, to commodities, especially precious metals. And I think the other benefits of gold are for the worst case scenario, the disaster scenario. I think a lot about the portability of money because I have both seen historically and also in current day how bad it is if all of your money is locked up in one place and you can't get it out when you need it.

So if you go back and you think about what was it like if you were a Jew in 1930 in Germany, there was plenty of time to get out. But there was only time to get out if you could get out quickly. And so the people who had gold and silver and jewels to get out, that was really, really valuable.

In the modern world, it's a whole lot harder to see how – it's a whole lot harder to walk down to your local airport and plunk down a one-ounce gold eagle and pay for your airplane ticket out. But I tell you what, still to this day, if any country in the world, if I needed to get out, I would always want to make sure that I had some gold coins handy to get me out.

I'd always want to make sure that I had some that were in another place. I think the big reasons to pursue gold is the portability. The fact that it is the most universal – well, other than the US dollar, it's one of the most universal assets. You can walk into any coin shop, any pawn shop, any jewelry shop, anywhere in the world, no matter what the official sanctions are and the buying and selling of gold and silver, you can plunk down a gold coin and you can get a good quantity of the local currency.

I think that's a real value. And you can do it in a very compact form of wealth. And it allows you to have money that should maintain its purchasing power over time that's held privately. So you think about what it would be like to hold certain assets like gold coins or silver coins that are securely vaulted, securely stored and privately owned.

You can own those for decades and nobody would have any idea. That's a real value that you don't get with other assets. So I hope that that lays out the positive case. I think there are a lot of reasons for it. But I think it's best to look at gold as insurance and as kind of worst case scenario stuff and to focus on cash and other investment activities for real growth.

Because at the end of the day, the value of gold and silver is only determined by what someone's willing to pay for you. It's an unproductive asset. Well, Josh, when you were talking earlier and you keep talking about cash and I love it, I agree with you in the fact that we have a plastic-- I forget what you call it-- but an issue with people utilizing plastic too much.

And we need to go back on the cash. I tell you when you fill out a home loan mortgage and you got to give them the last two, three months of your bank statements, it's definitely a huge pattern of life that banks are holding on to about us, not just our money, but also a pattern of life where you spend your money.

All this talk about coins kind of puts you on the spot, kind of a different question that probably a lot of financial advisors don't get. But what are your thoughts on the current talk around the fireplaces and stuff like that about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Wow, is there a more contentious topic as we record this?

Bitcoin made the news for making $10,000. I am very optimistic with the future of cryptocurrencies. If you think about the best case scenario, the way that some people describe cryptocurrencies as cash for the internet, that is really exciting to me because I am very concerned about the loss of privacy of everything being digital transactions.

And it would be wonderful to have increasing amounts of privacy available for digital exchanges. So I am very optimistic about that. I am concerned about Bitcoin, although I am hoping that it continues to work out. The founders of Bitcoin, or like the original people, and they talked about the way that the inflation would go and then the steadying out.

We will see if that happens. But the problem is that as long as any of these currencies are being hoarded for their future increase in value, it diminishes their ability to be used as a stable source of exchange. And that is a real problem with Bitcoin as I see it right now.

There are a lot of people who are buying Bitcoin, but there are not a lot of people who are doing a lot of transactions on Bitcoin. Now, I also see the marketplace developing. There have been a whole bunch of changes specifically to Bitcoin where there are more people accepting Bitcoin locally.

There are more people doing things on a local basis so you can actually spend it. But it is kind of like the same problem of buying and selling gold and silver coins. You can do some really cool stuff with gold and silver coins. For example, you want to have a private financial transaction with somebody with a significant amount of money exchanging hands.

In some ways, it is hard to get better than using a gold or silver coin or a variety of them as appropriate to the monetary unit. The problem is what do you do with it then? Somebody pays you in silver bullion coins, silver rounds for your services that you have provided.

What do you actually physically do with it? Where do you go and spend it? It is harder to do that. And you are dealing with a very small subset of the population that would even know the value of a silver round or even know the value of an American Eagle and be willing to incorporate that in their transaction.

I think the same problem applies to Bitcoin as things stand right now. So I do not know which currencies will turn out to be the currencies of the future. I do think we have a huge opportunity going forward. And then finally, I guess from a privacy perspective, the other concern is that with the exception of some that are focused on privacy, you actually have in some ways, you have the opposite of privacy where every transaction is recorded in the blockchain.

And so it is all a matter of can I get in privately and out privately? Because anytime that money transfers out of the crypto world into your bank account or into some other scenario, you lose the same privacy that you had internally. So all that say, I am very optimistic.

I am excited about the future and I want to do everything I can to encourage the proliferation of currencies. From a practical perspective, this would be a political philosophy and an economic philosophy. I would like to see every single state government out of the money business. And I would like to see money be a competitive environment where individuals choose what to accept for themselves.

And so that is what I see as ultimate economic freedom. I am hopeful that we can continue to move towards that because today that system where somebody would say, well, how would I, if it is not a US dollar, then how should I know its value? Most people find a lot of confidence and trust in the fact that the US dollar is printed on a Federal Reserve note and they think it is an output of the US Federal Government.

They think it is a product of the US Federal Government because of the power of the state, they feel confident in it. I would love to move to a world where people had more responsibility and they bought and sold using all kinds of currencies and let the market sort out which currency is the best.

That has been a total failure for the last 50 years in the world of state run and state authorized currencies. But I am hoping that in the future with the cryptocurrencies that there would be an opportunity to move to that competitive environment for currencies where currencies are competing against each other.

Time will tell. Sorry to put you on the spot there with the cryptocurrencies and stuff. I know it is not normally financial advisors going down that road with us, but it is an interesting topic right now. I guess another thing we like to do on the CPS Podcast is kind of the elevator pitch.

I guess what is one thing that you could tell our guests or listeners right now that they can do to start down the road to financial freedom, just get them started? Probably the biggest thing for anybody who is interested in financial freedom will be to become and remain debt free.

I can give all kinds of arguments about the value of debt and those arguments are to a point valid, especially financially. They can be very valid. When you get down to it, if you do not owe anybody any money for any reason and if you have no payments, no guaranteed payments that you have to make on every single month that you have to make, that gives you a level of freedom that is truly powerful.

It gives you a level of choice that there is almost nothing you can do in your life, that nothing you cannot do in your life. I worked with a guy one time who was a very wealthy bond trader, made almost half a million dollars a year trading bonds. This person said to me, "I owe nobody any money and the benefit is if my whole business collapsed, I could work at the local grocery store as a bagger and I could earn enough money to support my lifestyle." If you get down to what the ultimate purpose of money is, it's supposed to be useful to us in our life.

One of the major things that money is supposed to be used for is to provide for our needs and the needs of others and also to buy a certain level of freedom and independence. If you start with that freedom or make that a high priority and you become fully debt-free and you stay debt-free, your life is open to you in terms of any option you want to make.

If you look back on somebody who is 70, 80, 90 years old and you were to compare somebody who got into debt and stayed out of debt and the choices, the interesting life choices they could make versus somebody who was deeply in debt and the constraint on them, I think you'd find someone who's much more satisfied who was out of debt.

I'll share this one story to prove my point. When I was a young financial advisor, I didn't know what was going on and I would go out and meet with people. I met this one person who really deeply impressed me. It was a local business owner here in South Florida.

I started in the business in 2008, which was, of course, a very difficult time to be in the construction business. I probably met this guy 2009, 2010. I don't know. I sat down and we were talking money and he was sharing with me basically a little bit of his story.

He said, "This isn't the first recession I've been to. It's the third or fourth." He said, "So here's what I do. Number one, I don't owe anybody any money and I never borrow money. Number two, I keep my business lean and mean. As many of my employees as possible are contractors instead of employees.

That minimizes my long-term obligation to try to pay the guys on the job, et cetera. We keep our fixed expenses really low." This guy was working in his office, was in the back of a run-down gas station, just a little corner hole in the wall that he ran his business out of.

It was a big business. He said, "I always keep cash on hand so I can take advantage of the opportunities." He had just recently bought a deep-sea boat, a nice big boat, from another contractor who had leveraged up his lifestyle during the boom time and things were falling apart.

He bought this $85,000 boat for about 50 grand. He said, "So what I do during recessions is I go and fish every day. I turn my recession into my mini vacation. I just go and fish. I'm enjoying this new boat. I take my family out on it. This is the time when I'm really pulling back.

When the construction market turns around, then I'll go ahead and get busy again. I'll go ahead and build the business up again." It really impressed me because I had never thought of it that way. I had always been of the idea that you got to have more, you got to do better, you got to have more, you got to do better, you got to fight, fight, fight for as much business as possible.

I had forgotten about the fact that you could just sit back and roll with the market to an extent. This guy basically had for himself a sabbatical or a mini retirement when the market was down. Instead of spending all of his time stressed out selling stuff because he borrowed a bunch of money and trying to figure out how to keep my business going, he was out fishing every day and just had his business on the barest of minimal input.

It really affected me and I realized that if we all ran our lives like that, we'd be a lot closer to freedom and independence than the way that most of us run our financial lives. That's fantastic. Joshua, thank you so much for being here. This whole thing has been absolutely fantastic and I've enjoyed every second of this.

This has been full of information. Before we close, can you tell people where they can find out more about you? RadicalPersonalFinance.com, which is a website that serves a podcast. Since you're listening to me on a podcast, if you're interested in hearing more, there are about 600 hours of free audio available.

Just search the podcast directory on your phone for Radical Personal Finance and you'll find me. And I will second that. Radical Personal Finance is one of the first podcasts in my feed that I go to. If you're not a subscriber, head on over there. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

Josh, it's been a pleasure. I've enjoyed it. Keep up the great work, guys. Thank you for having me on. Wow, man. That was an absolutely fantastic interview and he's answered actually quite a few questions that I've had, including some of the more tinfoil hat things like why I should own a few gold rounds here and there.

I agree, man. What's great about it is us sitting here taking notes. I got a couple of pages of notes just from sitting back and listening to him. I know we ran a little bit long. This is going to be a huge episode for you guys, but I didn't want to cut him off if you didn't.

Yeah, man. I feel like I could have asked him a few more, but I wanted to be respectful of his time there. So should we go ahead and jump into listener questions? Absolutely, man. I'll throw you on the hook for this one real quick. The one I got is, "Justin, how secure is PayPal?

Is there anything else I should be concerned about with PayPal?" Okay, cool. Since this is a financial episode, PayPal is very secure, I believe. I say that based on the fact that I don't even have a PayPal account anymore because I kept getting locked out of it so frequently.

That's a big problem if you want to take your privacy to an extreme, is you will have problems with PayPal. If you want to access PayPal from a VPN, you're frequently going to have issues logging into PayPal. Very secure, I believe, but it's not very private. PayPal shares your information with a bunch of different parties, and that's kind of a problem when we get into these online payment systems.

Just like privacy.com, PayPal and these online payment services have to verify your identity because of banking regulations. So it's kind of a drag, man. There's not a lot you can do. I've looked at some off-the-wall ones, the privacy policies of ones like Dwala and Skrill. I think if I had to go with one of these, probably Skrill looks the best because you can opt out of a lot of their data sharing.

It's not ideal, but they seem to have good security. They seem to have put security and privacy kind of at the forefront of what they're doing there. But man, all of these are really going to be a devil's bargain. The problem with going with those off-the-wall ones like Dwala and Skrill is that not a lot of places accept those.

So this is kind of tough, man. I really don't recommend PayPal at all if there's any way around it. Yeah, I'd say it's kind of tough, man. When you're dealing with your own money, you obviously want there to be some of that know your customer and least shady kind of stuff, but you also want to protect your privacy in the same aspect.

It's kind of tough. Yeah, it really is, man. I understand why most of these services, if you get locked out, want a selfie with your ID. They don't want just anyone to be able to take my ID and get into my stuff. But at the same time, I don't want to send them my ID and a selfie.

So tough decision, man. I guess I would say the best case would be don't use PayPal. So anyway, moving on to the next question. My bank does not offer two-factor authentication. What best practices do you recommend for securing my account? Man, that's tough because aside from switching to another bank, there's not a whole lot of financial institutions that actually do have two-factor authentication going on twofactorauth.org.

My big things that I do to focus on mine is, one, utilizing points of contact information with my bank, whether it be my email address and a pseudo number or something like that, that I don't give out or give to anybody else. It's solely for my banking institution and has never seen anything else.

The other aspect is if they allow you to use a random generated username, definitely start there. Making your password as tough and complicated, or your passphrase, excuse me, as tough and complicated as possible. And then I think another overlooked aspect of security is the security questions. I think every bank or every kind of account tries to have that, and they're not checking up to make sure that, "Oh, you entered your mother's maiden name correctly." So to me, also randomizing that information so it can't be socially engineered or found anywhere else as well.

I think all those kind of combined give you a little bit warm and fuzzy, not as great as twofactor, but definitely add some heightened security and should actually be your normal practices with everything else. Absolutely. Agree. So unless you have anything else, I'll go ahead and close it out, man.

This has been a long one. Yeah, that's it, man. All right. If you have not read the Complete Privacy and Security Desk Reference, check that out on Amazon.com. You can check out Jesse at HopalongRVing.com. You can follow me at operational-security.com, or you can follow me on Twitter @OpSecGuide. And of course, you can follow Michael at privacy-training.com.

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