As a major research institution, Arizona State University offers the most online bachelor's degree programs, along with world-class faculty and dedicated support. Discover why ASU is ranked number one in innovation for nine consecutive years. Tap to learn more. It's Friday. Today, live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua, and I am your host. Today is Friday, December 4, 2020. Today, we're recording a live Q&A show. Works just like, well, any other live Q&A show. Got one, two, three, four, five callers on the line here. And we go to the phones and we talk about finances or life, financial independence, whatever you want.

Love to record these shows because they give you a chance to talk about anything that is on your mind, any questions that you have, any topics of conversation, any feedback. And I usually, we have a lot of diverse topics. I really enjoy doing these shows. If you would like to gain access to one of these shows, to be able to ask your question in the future or bring up your topic of conversation, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show on patreon.com.

Just go to patreon.com, search for Radical Personal Finance, and you will find me. Sign up to support the show there. And that is how I distribute the codes to these. You should also go ahead and get on some of the other lists every now and then. I haven't done it much recently.

I'll probably do it more, but every now and then I'll go ahead and do a special one of these to the email list. So if you'd like to get on the email list, go to radicalbooklist.com, sign up for my radical reading list. It's a pretty good list of books for you as we'll be talking in the next couple of weeks about things you can do at the end of the year to prepare for the next year.

One of those good things is set out a reading list for yourself to educate yourself on some areas that you would like to learn and to grow into. You can do that at radicalbooklist.com. And then that'll put you on my email list where I'll be able to communicate with you in the future about specials, special shows, et cetera.

So if you don't want to sign up to support the show on Patreon, consider doing that. Also go ahead and join the Facebook group. Sometimes I'll do a live Q&A in there as well. So today we're going to begin with Austin in Louisiana. Austin, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Joshua. I'm doing well. First, I found a resource that I wanted to share with everybody based on your last episode. - Great. - It has been really helpful. And it's called Year Compass. And it's basically a free 20-page workbook for end of the year wrap up and future year planning.

And it's been really beneficial to me. So I wanted to share that with everybody. - Love that. So it's called Year Compass and it's a website? - Yeah. So it's just yearcompass.com. And you can go down to their website and you can download the workbook either in a digital format or a printable format and it's completely free.

- That looks great. So yearcompass.com, download the end of the year workbook and work through the year behind and the year ahead. So thank you for that resource. Go ahead with your next topic then. - So my next question was, is I've just this year started my real estate business.

I've acquired my first property. And one of the things I'm looking at for the future is to kind of scale up, but not being an extremely wealthy person at this point who has hundreds of thousands of dollars of disposable income. I'm wondering if you have any thought exercises or kind of methods for going through what is a reasonable amount of money to, I guess, put into that business development moving forward?

Any percentages of net worth or anything like that, or any thought exercises you have that you might go through if you were in a similar situation? - Are you building a real estate business as an agent or as an investor? - As an investor doing mainly buy and hold single family.

- And when you talk about scaling up, are you saying, how do I go from one property to 82 as quickly as possible? - Yeah, I'm looking more in the range of 10 to 15 properties. And I'm trying to think of, would I be taking on too much risk to highly leverage myself in the short term in order to build that portfolio quickly versus more of a slow play?

- Okay. Well, the word I would use to start with before we talk about scaling would just be to talk about leverage, because I think it puts a good picture in our mind that's applicable to the word scale up. When you think about leverage, leverage is a double-edged sword.

Leverage of any kind, I'm not just referring to borrowing money, I mean the concept of leverage. Leverage will amplify your results. So when you're getting good results, leverage can amplify those good results. When you're getting bad results, leverage can amplify those bad results. So in any kind of business operation, when you're going to use leverage, when you're going to scale, you want to make sure that first you're getting reliable, consistent, very good results, and then scale that.

Now, there's no perfect formula that I know of where you could say, this is how fast you can do it. But what I do think you need to do is you need to be very honest with yourself to identify, am I building something that's going to be genuinely strong and powerful, and do I have all of the kinks worked out?

Usually that takes a little bit of time. Usually it takes some time to develop the processes, to prove them, to perfect them, to work through the problems. And so you want to make sure that you don't go too big too fast. So if I'm counseling someone like you, my answer is one property at a time, right?

One house at a time. You just bought your first one, good. Get your first one, get the whole deal totally done, work out all the kinks of the process, then think about what went well, what could I do better, right? What went well in the process? How did the acquisition process go?

How did the inspections go? Do I have what I need? Did I get good information all along the way? How was the rental process, et cetera? Optimize it, and then do it again. And then just do one at a time for a while. And then after you've gotten through a number of deals, I don't know, three, four, five, I don't know the actual number, then maybe you go ahead and go a little bit bigger.

And you might try, "Okay, I can do two at a time." But what you don't want to do is you don't want to get in too deep too quickly to where all of a sudden you're trying to close six deals and run six different crews to rehab houses, and that'll sink you.

And in a business like a real estate business, there's not really anything that's going to fundamentally change in that business that I can see in the coming years. There may be a market move, right? So maybe you all of a sudden find yourself in a market where you can get a bunch of deals.

Well, if you recognize that and you honestly look and say, "This is a market where I should be buying, buying, buying," then go ahead and speed up, scale up quickly. But the business is not going to fundamentally change. So there's not a lot of time pressure. And so it's very much in your interest to go a little slower if necessary, so that you have a more stable, longer-term business than to go too quick and get in over your head.

I started working as a financial advisor in 2008, and I wound up at a lot of kitchen tables with people who were losing their real estate portfolios that they'd purchased in the last few years. In observing what happened, and I had several close friends who built multi-million dollar portfolios, went bankrupt, lost it all.

In observing it, I could see how if they had gone a little slower, they could have kept their portfolio through that time and been a whole lot farther ahead in 2010 and 2011 and now in 2021 than they were by going too fast. So I think you want to make sure that you have a good system, good processes all set in place before you scale it up.

Now, how you actually apply that, I don't know. But I would say go slow in the beginning and then move. One analogy that I think would probably apply, when you're learning to do something like a certain athletic move or lifting weights, the most important thing in the beginning is your form.

It's not how much weight you move. If you're coaching somebody who's learning how to squat for the first time, if they have perfect form, you know that in the future, they'll be able to squat 500 pounds. But if they have bad form, you know that they're going to be plagued with injuries, problems, slow advancement, etc.

And so in the beginning, all you want to get right is their form. You don't pay attention to the amount of weight on the bar in the beginning. You just want to get their form right. And you want to get their form to the point where they can do it without thinking, where all of their body mechanics are exactly right, because you know that that will scale for a very long time.

So that's the metaphor I think that I would apply or the analogy I would apply in this particular example. Okay. Well, as a former competitive powerlifter, I appreciate that analogy. There we go. So in the powerlifting space, you know that if your form is good, then you can go ahead and go for a heavy lift.

And you can go through a cycle where you're cycling up, cycling back. You can adjust all that stuff down the road. And there's only modest chance of injury. And I would say the same thing applies to real estate. If your form and your skills are good and your processes are good, you can scale it up and there's only a modest chance of injury.

So that would be my answer. Do you have any thoughts on like debt to income ratio and things like that? That's kind of what I'm interested in is that since I'm using this to kind of build and generate wealth is my long-term goal. Any thoughts on a ratio of the amount of debt in relation to net worth or the amount of monthly payments in relation to income?

I've done some looking and I know that the banks have debt to income ratio calculators and things like that. Do you have any thoughts on those? I don't have a ratio or a number. You can use the numbers from the financing system and maybe somebody who's a more experienced real estate investor than I am would have one of those.

What I would do is I would look at my situation. I would imagine my worst case scenario. So I don't mind using leverage to build a real estate business. I think that's wise. I think it'll build it quickly. And I don't mind it building quickly. I've often tell people, "Okay, let's say you need 10 houses or 12 houses." I think you said something like 12 houses or 15.

"All right, so let's do one this year, one next year, maybe two the next year, two or three the next year. And then if you can do four a year, fine." So in the acquisition phase of real estate investing, I think you should not be paying down debt. You should be keeping as much liquid cash as possible, putting as little down on the properties and acquiring them.

But along the way, you need to ask yourself, "What's the worst case scenario?" Now, I think right now in the context of COVID, the worst case scenario is you have a widespread unemployment rate. So I would say, "What was the unemployment rate some months ago? What if 30% of my renters couldn't pay their mortgage?

And what if I couldn't revict them?" Well, that's probably about the worst case scenario you could conceive of. Maybe something worse would be fire, but that would be a risk you would cover for insurance. So I would think maybe 30% of my tenants are unemployed, and they're not paying rent, and I can't evict them and get another tenant.

So what would I do in that situation? Well, I would calculate the cost of the mortgage payments. I would calculate my cash flows, and I would model what that would look like. Now, in a worst case scenario like that, I think you would have negotiating leverage with your lenders and be able to renegotiate your loans and still probably keep the portfolio.

But I would just simply play a scenario like that out, and I would say, "What would I do in those circumstances? So where would I get the income from? How would I cover the rents? What properties would I dump? What properties would I keep?" And as long as you're thinking about some of those worst case scenarios and wargaming them, I think you'll guide yourself properly.

Okay. Thank you. And do you have time for a second question? Go ahead. We'll do it fast. Okay. I have an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine who's about 30 years older about hyperinflation and potential economic collapse. And I might answer this question for myself since I just bought your course.

But I was just wondering, he already has a pipeline into Canada. So we were listening to one of the previous Q&As, and his kind of question, what we were talking about is, "Would you have any more recommendations besides setting up a pipeline into Canada for bank accounts since the Canadian economy would probably be quickly affected if the American economy went in the tank?" Yeah, no question.

That whole course is full of suggestions. And basically in the course, which you bought called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis, I cover any kind of crisis because the way of planning is the same whether you're planning for the loss of your job versus planning for hyperinflation of your local currency that you're involved in.

And there are two basic strategies that I cover in that course. Strategy number one is basically stay in place. How do you stay in place and have what you need? So if you're worried about hyperinflation of the currency, and if you live in a hyperinflated economy, you're better off living maybe on a small homestead on the edge of a small town with good neighbors around that you could set up some kind of security perimeter to secure your neighborhood and grow some food and have some stuff stored in your food storage or whatever so you can get through.

That's a really good system for that. But the other strategy is to flee, is to leave. And so if you can leave a place where there is a massive economic crisis like hyperinflation and go somewhere else, you can avoid most of the effects. And the example that I talk regularly about because it's the most current one, we can go back and talk about Zimbabwe, but we don't know much about Zimbabwe.

Right now, the best one is Venezuela. Venezuela, it was the biggest, most prosperous economy in Latin America, was the jewel of Latin America, the jewel of South America a decade or so ago. And then they started down the path of hardcore left-wing socialism. They had Hugo Chavez followed by Nicolas Maduro.

And we can see the hyperinflation that has completely devastated the country to the point where right now in Venezuela, Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves. I don't know, some of the largest in the world. I don't know how to place it in comparison, but they have massive, massive levels of oil.

But the whole country has experienced horrific gas. And they had so much cheap gas before. The gas was literally a couple pennies a gallon a few years ago. Well, now they have no gas in the country. And they're dependent on Iranian oil tankers to bring gas so that they can have some gas.

And to get gas, gas is something like, depending on where you go, these numbers change all the time, but right now gas is something like the equivalent of about $20 a gallon, if you can find it. In order for somebody to get it, they have to stand in line for at least a day in order for them to get in line, get it.

And you can't get parts to repair your car, et cetera. It just goes on and on. It's horrific. It's an absolutely devastating collapse. But when you study it, you see some lessons. So anybody who left Venezuela a number of years ago and went somewhere else has survived that crisis just fine.

Now they may have lost some money if they still had money there in Venezuela. Their family may be affected if their family was still stuck there. But any Venezuelan who moved to Colombia 10 years ago and now lives in Bogota is not as deep, not very deeply affected by the crisis.

Any Venezuelan who moved to Canada is not affected. It goes on and on. The list goes on. So you can see that you can do well in an economic crisis if you can relocate, if you can reposition yourself. Now Venezuela, I think, so far, I would have to go back and check the charts, but it's turning out to be one of the longest examples of hyperinflation that I've ever studied.

So we'll see when it actually ends, when some kind of change happens. I have my own thoughts about what I think is going to happen, but we don't know. But most hyperinflations don't last for more than a few years, at kind of the maximum of a couple of years, because they can't.

They're too painful. And so no matter what, it basically has to stop because there's no way it can go on and on and on. And so the collapse can go on, but the hyperinflation can't go on and on. And so what I talk about in that course is that if you could leave for a couple of years, you could do pretty well.

You could survive well enough. And so that's a good kind of starting point to work through is how could I leave my country? The other thing that is important to point out about Venezuela is hyperinflation, I don't think, is contagious. So we see this very clearly right now in Venezuela.

The Venezuelan bolivar is worthless. It's completely worthless. They've done several currency resets, chopped a bunch of zeros off. But even still, if you're trying to deal with bolivars, $10 US gives you a literal backpack full of banknotes. I've used to post pictures of this stuff on social media. I have stacks of Venezuelan banknotes in my house here.

And what they do is they take the banknotes and they wrap them in clear tape, and they handle them as bundles. So they're still used as a medium of exchange. But instead of having a single bill, you hand over about a three-inch stack of the pink ones, or about a two-inch stack of the green ones, and they're wrapped together in bundles of tape.

But what is used as a medium of exchange? Well, the number one most useful currency is the Colombian peso. And so you have a country right next door. You have Venezuelan, Colombia right on each other's borders. And if you were to go to the Brazilian border, you would have a similar thing with the Brazilian real.

But you have the Colombian peso is the currency of choice. And so the hyperinflation from Venezuela didn't automatically spread contagiously to Colombia. It's a centralized thing. It's a nationalized problem. And so I think there's good evidence to believe that although certainly the Canadian economy would be massively affected if there were some kind of hyperinflation in the United States, I don't think the Canadian currency would necessarily be affected in the same way.

If you had a hyperinflation in the US dollar, then I think the Canadian dollar would still be pretty strong. I think that's why I talked about that tunnel option, if you can tunnel out to another currency. Now, if there were actually a situation where there were hyperinflation in the US dollar, I would not be betting on one currency.

I would not be betting on the Canadian dollar. I would be diversifying out into other currencies. But the point is to have the tunnel in place. So let me just close though with any conversation about hyperinflation. There are two things I want to say as I wrap up this answer.

Number one, we don't know actually what would happen if there were a hyperinflation of the US dollar. Because although the Venezuelan Bolivar hyperinflated and that didn't spread to the Colombian dollar, the US dollar is not exclusively a national currency. The US dollar is used all over the world. I mean, all throughout Latin America.

If you do business with a Latin American government, most of the time, prices are often quoted in US dollars. If you drive a car into Mexico and you're going to put your deposit down with the Mexican government for your car, they quote you that in US dollars. In Mexico, massive economy, very successful country, amazing country.

But if you're going to drive down into Mexico and you need to go ahead and get the sticker for your car, then the quote is $300. And the border guard will tell you, you're probably better off to put this in dollars and pay us $300 versus the equivalent in Mexican dollars.

Because if you give us a Mexican dollars, then there's a chance that at the other border, if you're driving out the bottom end or coming back up a few months later or whatever your travels are, there's a problem is that the border will charge you for any variations in exchange rate.

Whereas if you just give us a flat $300 deposit, we'll give you back $300 US dollars whenever you come back. And so the US dollar is truly the world's reserve currency. It truly is global and foreign governments all around the world quote their prices for their services in US dollars because it's more stable.

So what would actually happen if a currency like the US dollar hyperinflated? There's a decent chance it would be more contagious than the Venezuelan boulevard. The final comment that I would say though is I do not expect a hyperinflationary scenario in the US dollar. Even though we have plenty of examples of hyperinflation that we can study, there has never been in the modern era hyperinflation of a large Western currency like the US dollar.

And I cannot conceive of how the Federal Reserve and the monetary managers would ever – how they would or why they would ever allow for a hyperinflation of the US dollar. Is it possible that things could change 10 years from now? Yeah, I think it is. Is it possible that you could have a bunch of bat crazy people kind of involving?

Yes. But I don't see how the interests of the Federal Reserve border served by hyperinflation. So I think it's a very unlikely scenario. It's plannable for it, but I think it's very unlikely. I don't lose any sleep over it. Okay. Well, thank you for your perspective. My pleasure. We go on.

Let's go to Josh in California. Josh, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? I just want to give you a little update and then ask a question. This is about the California to Texas hobby farm transition. I called about a month or two ago. So that's actually in the works.

We pulled into our Airbnb about a week ago, thanks to your suggestion. We completely overlooked that. So we've completely cut ties. We were able to actually triple the size of our house and our mortgage has gone up $200 a month by leaving California and coming out to Texas. And we weren't able to do a proper hobby farm.

We're in a little subdivision, but it's got a large enough backyard that I can aggressively garden. And that was partly based on your insight in that a two-year-old and a five-year-old are functionally worthless in a farming situation. They're worse than worthless. They make everything way more difficult. It's worse than worthless.

It's negative worth. Oh, so much. They are beautiful little logistics. So that's definitely took your advice and comments under much discretion as we went through. So I appreciate that very much from you. So we are moving in that direction and things are going very well. So I do appreciate the advice along the way.

Today's question specifically was on our retirement. During this whole change of address thing, I realized that I have three outstanding 401(k), 403(b) type things from previous jobs. My wife has two others and she's establishing one at the new job. And for that more practical or tactical, however you want to approach it, what should we do with those?

In the past, you had mentioned putting those into an IRA, but practically, how would we move from the old company retirement account into either my current IRA or establishing and then funding an IRA for the wife? Cool. I'll answer that. I wanted to point out a message and I don't have a good way of follow-up for this.

So sometimes when a caller calls in and because I don't have comments enabled on the website, I probably should go back and enable comments on the website so that this conversation can happen there. But after you called in, Andy in the Facebook group had put in this particular input and I encourage you if you didn't see it to go and find it.

But after that call, Andy wrote in and he said, "Speaking into the ether here to Josh in California from the Q&A call today or anyone else who's thinking about moving to the country, if I heard right, you mentioned you're on a quarter to a half an acre, thinking of moving to 20 acres.

I'm guessing you've never owned more than that half acre, so just wanted to share my perspective. I've lived on half, one-tenth, five, and now 26 acres. There's an order of magnitude difference as you go up. If you just want to supply, say, double your own egg consumption, all your fresh veggies and some meat or dairy supplements, you absolutely do not need more than three to five acres to do that.

If you want some woods or just to own land or whatnot, by all means go for it, but you could probably supply 80% of your calories and make 50 to $100,000 on 20 acres if you manage it with the intensity. If you're not managing it intensively and not using it, it'll just cost you more money.

I've got about a third of an acre in gravel. That's not nightmarish to maintain, but it pretty much necessitates a tractor, which is more expensive than a lawnmower. Not complaining, of course, I'm happy with my life, just pointing out that if you just want to do homestead stuff, I think two to five acres would be a much more appropriate size unless you want to buy something with woods in the back for your kids to play in.

Happy to discuss country living more. I just heard that and thought my experience might be helpful. Best wishes to anyone interested in moving to the country. There's some other good conversation there in the Facebook group that Andy sparked when you called in. I think you made a good decision.

All right, back to the IRA question. Let's first talk about the reasons why you would move the money and the reasons why you wouldn't move the money just so we get that clear and then how you actually do it. The reasons to move the money are fairly simple and fairly compelling.

First of all, a lot of times if you move the money from an old employer plan, an old 401k, an old 403b, to an IRA, you now have the free and total market that you can choose from. When you have money in an employer-provided plan, that is simply a plan that has been chosen by your employer from a specific number of vendors.

I used to bid on these when I was a financial advisor. I'd go into an employer and I'd say, "Listen, let us come in and let us run your 401k." It's a business like anyone else, like any other business. You get paid on asset management and fees, etc. And so there's an incentive for companies to come in and say, "Let us bid and let us run your 401k." So the employer will work with a couple of different people.

They may try to cobble something together themselves. We want to hire this TPA, this third-party administrator. We want to use this investment company. They might use a turnkey solution. So there's all kinds of companies that have turnkey solutions where, "Hey, we'll make things simple. We'll do everything for you." There's big names, right?

There's the Fidelities, the Vanguards, and then there's little names. There's the little guy next door. The challenge here is you don't have any control over what's offered to you. And so you sometimes have rock-bottom fees. Sometimes you have very high fees. 403b's are famous for having higher fees, much higher than 401k's.

Some 401k administrators have very low fees. Some have very high fees. And it all depends on what the employer has negotiated. And you don't know whether that employer went out and said, "We're going to find the absolute cheapest person on the market, and that person is cheap and junky, and they don't do a good job." You don't know whether that company is cheap and good.

You don't know whether that company is expensive, but they just have an inside relationship with the owner of the company or with the decision maker, etc. So you don't get any choice there. In addition, you don't get any choice of what funds or what fund companies are available to you.

Now, 401k's at this point are fairly standardized. And so most 401k's have a pretty good company with pretty low fees, and they have a pretty good selection of investment options. But the point still stands that if you go to the open market, you get total control over that. You can choose what provider you work with, what investment advisor, what fund company.

You can control your fee schedule. You can choose a rock-bottom, absolutely cheap thing. You can choose to work with an advisor who charges you money, but you get some other value from them. In addition, you also get total openness of investment options. So you can go to a company that offers the kind of mutual funds that you want.

You can go to a self-directed IRA, and you can start buying rental properties or investing in tax liens or buying gold and putting it in your 401k. You can do anything you want, and you don't have any of those options in your employer-provided plans. So that's the most important and very compelling reason for most people to move their money from an old employer to an IRA.

The other more minor but also important conversation, I think, is just simplicity. If I die, do I want to leave behind four different accounts that my wife has to go through and individually collect from the beneficiaries, or do I want to leave one account? I guess you could make a counter-argument and say that there's risk and there's not a lot of diversification in putting all the money there, but I think that with the SIPC protection and whatnot, I think that's a very modest risk.

I wouldn't be nervous about having all my accounts with one company, at least to a certain point. So you get a lot of simplification. Now, the most important reason not to move the money that I try to point out that I have very rarely heard discussed, and I'd like to get it much more popularized, has to do with asset protection.

Some states, such as the state of Texas, protect IRAs and Roth IRAs, etc., in the same way that they protect 401(k)s. So if you have an IRA in the state of Texas, somebody sues you or you go bankrupt, according to the law, or at least my understanding of the law, never having practiced in Texas, according to the law, that money in an IRA should be just as exempt from bankruptcy courts, should be just as exempt from the claims of creditors as it was in your employer-provided qualified plan.

That's what the law is. And that, I would say, is probably in most states at this point, but not all. Now, a very important exception, because of a huge population, would be California. California does not, at least my understanding, never having practiced in California, just having an information chart in front of me that I use to track this stuff.

California does not provide the same level of asset protection, creditor protection, for IRAs and Roth IRAs as they do for 401(k)s. 401(k)s and 403(b)s are what are called qualified accounts. They're federally qualified accounts. And by federal law, in order for it to be a qualified account, by federal law, any qualified plan is exempt from the claims of creditors.

So if you were still living in California, if I were living in California, I would not move my funds to an IRA. I would always keep my retirement accounts in a 401(k) in order to have the creditor protection, the bankruptcy protection that is offered by that 401(k) account. Again, unless my information on California is mistaken, which I don't think it is, I would not do that.

So what I would do is I would consolidate my accounts to whichever one was the best. So I might move the 403(b) money, which is probably expensively held high fees, I might move that into one of my older 401(k) employer accounts rather than keep it in the 403(b). But I would still make sure that it's always in a 401(k) or a 403(b).

And this is especially important if I were going into a place where I thought I had some kind of elevated risk against creditors for some reason, I'm in a financially precarious situation, I'm starting a business, etc. I want all that money in the 401(k) because that is as close as we get to sacrosanct in the US creditor protection laws.

The IRS will still take it. It can still be lost in divorce court. But with regard to bankruptcy, getting sued, etc., that money is fully protected. The mechanics of this are easy. So if you decide to move it, you just decide where am I going to transfer the money to.

You open an account, and usually you'll just do a custodian to custodian transfer. And that'll be spelled out by the provider that you use. So if you use a discount online provider, use a Vanguard or a Fidelity or something like that, they'll do it automatically for you. If you work with an advisor, the advisor will submit the paperwork.

Most of the times, the firms will use a clearinghouse. And so there's a fairly simple and established system behind the scenes to do a custodian to custodian transfer. That's your safest choice to do that custodian to custodian transfer because then the money doesn't come into your hands and you don't risk having a tax event.

If you can't or don't choose to do a custodian to custodian transfer, then you can have the company send the money to you. And then you have a time period. I think it's 60 days, but it's been years now since I've done any of these transfers. So I could have gotten that wrong.

But you have a 60-day window to be able to put the money into the new account. So they can send you a check. You can choose to not have taxes withheld and they can put it in. But it's better to do a custodian to custodian transfer unless for some reason you need the money.

There have been once or twice where I've recommended this as a bridge loan for somebody who was desperate for financing. Have the company send you the money, spend it, do what you need to for 30 days, and then figure out how to get it back together and get it back into the next account before that time period goes up.

But your new custodian will give you all the instructions on how to actually do that transfer once you're getting the money into the IRA. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. The simplicity and the various options, I think, is the biggest factor for that. So I definitely will be working on that this afternoon.

Good. It's kind of a weird spot for you to give advice, but for any of the online managers, we're kind of agnostic to who we use. Do you have any front runners that you would suggest? The big ones? General Fidelity or Vanguard? Yeah. I mean, I hate to ever give a specific company advice because if I'm going to advise one over another, I want to have some compelling reason to do it.

So I would just say just pick with those. Between Fidelity and Vanguard is fine. They're both rock solid. They both have bottom price funds. If you're a diehard Boglehead or you're becoming one, Vanguard is wonderful. They're just absolutely awesome. If you like some of Fidelity's options, they're also good.

And there are many, many good solutions as well. So I don't have any reason to support one over the other. I think they're all equally good, and I'm not aware of any reason why you would choose one over another. Awesome. I think that was it for me. Thank you so much.

Have a great day. All right. We go now to Andrew in Georgia. Andrew, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. I have an education question for you and two brief tax quotes if we have time. Let's do it.

So my first question is I have a daughter that I'm thinking about starting kindergarten early. She's pretty bright. And number two, keeping up with the number one child already in the number one child's kindergarten work. But have you found any resources? I know you've done a lot of reading about education that might inform that decision.

We're not in a position to do homeschooling right now. That may be a part of the equation in the future. It's a private school. I think they would be flexible on the state's rules for when kindergarten can be started. But I was curious if you could recommend any resources for considering the decision of whether to start a child in kindergarten a year early.

Do you have the money to pay for a private school? Yes. And it is a private classical school. Okay. Well, there are a couple of different... So when I've looked into this, I don't have a PhD in education. I'm just an interested absorber. You have a couple of different perspectives that you'll hear represented when you start digging into it.

There is a perspective of aggressive early education. Now, that can even go all the way down to educating babies. And so you would have, I guess, Glenn Doman would be the most famous kind of person who name attached to that, "Teach your baby to read." A very big fan of even as babies teaching children academics.

What I think I'd point out before I go on is that it's not kindergarten though. Like if you look at Glenn Doman or "Teach your baby to read," it's a five-minute session while the child's finishing up their cut-up peaches in their high chair. It's a five-minute session of flashcards.

It's not sitting in a classroom and doing kindergarten. There are other people who are advocates of early child education. So if you look at government education, you see a big push towards free kindergarten for everyone and enroll your children early. I haven't seen anything that has persuaded me that that's a good idea for me personally.

I think that the push towards early kindergarten is much more a matter of indoctrination and conformity than it is what's in the best interest of the child. And so when I look at, "Hey, this country is rolling out free kindergarten for all three-year-olds and we want to get everyone into three years old," I'm very uncomfortable with those approaches.

Now, that's kind of the starting early phase. On the other side, you'll have people who vigorously defend the idea that it damages children to start academics too early, that it's bad for them. Many of the big names will say, "Start at seven," which is of course later than is the custom.

So my opinion on it is that there's not really any clear reason as to why one age versus another age would make the difference. If one of my friends comes to me and says, "Hey, look at all this stuff I'm doing with my three-year-old and we're teaching her all these just incredible things, and look, she knows 562 Chinese characters," I say, "That's awesome.

Great." And if I have another friend that comes and says, "Ours is just not ready. He's six, but we're not worrying about it. We're just going to wait a little while. He's not into it yet." I'm okay with that as well. I'm to the point where I really am.

So I want to trust the parents to look at their child and say, "Hey, my child is expressing these interests, and so therefore, she's ready for this certain thing." So that's what you're doing. So in that context though, I'm uncomfortable with pushing academics too early. And if you're not going to do homeschooling, what I would say if you were going to do homeschooling would be just read as much as possible.

Grab a couple of workbooks that you think your daughter will think is fun. If you want to do a math workbook, great. If you want to do something else, some skills thing, go for it. But otherwise, just read as much as possible. And if your daughter wants to learn to read, teach her to read.

There's no reason why you shouldn't teach someone to read if they're early. But don't stress about it. Do it. And I think that there's a big reason to say that play is really valuable and really important. So if I had a three-year-old that I was looking at and saying, "Hey, she's ready for…" Yeah, she can already basically read as a three-year-old.

So if she can already read as a three-year-old, then what I would say is my instinct is to go in some kind of more play-oriented, like a Montessori school. I might put her in a Montessori school for a year, a couple years, something like that, and then transition to the classical school myself just because of my concern about it just being pushing her down.

But if you look at it and say, "You know what? She likes to read. She's interested in it. Try a couple of workbooks. Is she going to like bookwork? Talk to the teacher at the classical school and put her in. And if she doesn't like it or it's not doing well for her, then pull her out.

If it's not doing good for her, then pull her out." But that's my answer is I would be more inclined. I'm not a Montessori acolyte. I appreciate a lot of things that they say. But I think one of the things that they do a good job of is giving for a good environment where there's a whole lot of play, which I think is really important at that age especially, at every age, but especially at that age.

Yeah, those are some great thoughts. And every kid certainly is pretty different, aren't they? If you will just simply trust yourself as a parent, and you and your wife are talking, and you're looking at your child, and you're saying, "Okay, is this good for our child?" Then just trust yourself.

And if it's not, just commit that you're going to pull it out. That's something that I didn't have with the first time through. We didn't have that conference. Finally, it took a little while because I was like, "Okay." I think a lot of those times, those of us who homeschool feel this like extra pressure, which we shouldn't feel, but we still do, this extra pressure to say, "Wow, I'm doing this thing that's still uncommon and out of the ordinary.

I need to get really great results. And I'm an overachiever." And so my wife and I, we didn't... I don't want to say we pushed our eldest, because I don't believe we did anything bad, but we were just... We were diligent. We were trying to get him focused on school.

And we reached a point where we just said, "This isn't working. He's not ready." And we probably... With the first time around, we were probably a couple of months late in recognizing he's not ready. And so we stopped. We just quit, and we just let him play. We read to him, and that was it.

We didn't do anything. Then we came back. We were moved to a different situation. We came back, and we started bringing more in. And it was so fast and so easy. And my siblings who homeschool their children, have older children, they'd all warned me that this was going to be the case, but I didn't really believe them.

Well, now with the second time around, my second child is in kindergarten technically, but we just allow her to do what she wants to do. And we... Meaning that we have some books for her, and she's excited about them. And if she doesn't get something, we don't even worry about it, because I know that she will get it, and I'm not going to waste any time pushing her.

I'm not going to get into any conflicts about you got to do this. She's five years old. There's no reason to push anything at this age. And so everything is easier when you wait for the proper age. I think that if your daughter is demonstrating herself to be very bright, then you should challenge her.

And so just trust... I trust you and your wife to look and say, "Hey, here's what's working." So my only caution would be, don't be committed to one certain course of action. Do something. If it works and you get results, keep going. If it doesn't, then just quit, stop, and do something else.

Well, very good. Sounds like the next step will just need to be, is it even a possibility with particular schools? But okay, if I shift gears and ask you two brief tax questions. Let's do it. Go. First is something that I find difficult to find information about online. In 2017, I had some charitable contribution carryovers.

My income on paper is actually pretty low, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what I can do with that and does that expire? It was about $12,000 worth of charitable contribution carryovers that the tax software spit out. This year, I'll be doing about a third of my...

I think that's when you get over 50% of your income in charitable donations. This year, I'm only going to be doing about 30% of my income, again, paper income in charitable contributions. So is that not a factor for me if I never hit that 50% threshold again? I do not remember the rules on that.

I'm sorry. I don't remember the rules. It's pretty technical and I think it's probably even changed since 2017 with the tax law changes. Yeah, you'll have to consult a qualified professional on that. I don't remember. Fair enough. Okay. Last question would be, I'm starting a business helping people with home security and I've bought some items to help me with that and to create some training and example materials this year.

I haven't really done a lot else with the business except to write some draft papers and training and that kind of thing. But it's only about $3,000 worth of stuff and as far as I can tell, it'll only be about a $300 difference in my taxes. So I didn't know if there's any advantage in just declaring those losses this year or just waiting till the future.

So you're saying, "I've got the equipment. Should I wait to deduct the equipment until in the future when I actually have income or should I try to deduct it now?" I mean, I don't think I can do it in the future. I have to either declare it as losses this year.

But is there any advantage to not starting the paperwork until later since the losses are so small now? No, I don't see why you wouldn't start it now. Okay. Yeah. So you've got the limitations on deductibility of startup expenses. So I'd read those rules. But with what you're talking about, it doesn't sound like that much.

I think you'd be under the $5,000 limit on deducting startup expenses. So I wouldn't see any reason why you wouldn't start it now if you're actively in business. And if these are ordinary necessary expenses, then why not deduct them to the extent that they're possible? I see no reason why you would wait.

And especially that you're probably – with this kind of business, you're probably going to be doing cash accounting. If you don't deduct them now, again, read the startup expense rules. But if you don't deduct them now, you're not going to be able to deduct them in the future. So I don't know why you wouldn't just go ahead and deduct them now.

Well, great. Can move forward on all those things. Thanks very much. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you for calling in. All right, we go now to Jason in Washington, DC. Jason, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Joshua, long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for taking my call.

So my wife and I are having an inheritance and we're trying to get an idea of how to – and I know this question may be broad – how to integrate it and what to think through and where to put certain things. So it's just the top numbers would be like $300,000 from a TSP and then a home that's paid for.

And we're trying to get an idea of how to integrate it for growth and for future wealth and what we have. Are there any kind of supporting details that I can give you that would help kind of spark a little bit of that conversation more? What is the value of the home if it's sold?

$325,000. We have a family member, a grandmother, who is living in there that we anticipate we would allow to live there for the duration. But that still is part of what we're trying to do. But that still is part of what will be coming over. Okay. How much is your current net worth more or less, just ballpark, big picture?

So we own a home, I would say maybe $150,000 after debt and everything is taken out. Other than a home mortgage, do you have any significant personal debt? No, we have $8,000 in debt, which is credit card and a medical bill. Everything else is free and clear. And in the home, I'm sorry.

Household income is how much? $205,000. Okay. How old are you and how old is your wife? 44, 45. Do you have children? One child, but he's independent, 19. And do you – whose parent or whose relative died? My wife's aunt. Okay. Well, in a situation like you're describing, certainly it's a significant gift compared to your net worth, right?

Just the TSP alone is an effective doubling of your net worth if your household net worth is $160,000. So that's fantastic. With the fact that it's the TSP and the house, now it's very significant as compared to your personal net worth. It's not such a significant event as compared to your income.

If your household income is $205,000, the TSP is a little over a year's worth of income. And the paid-for house is – again, put all together, it's three years' worth of income. So I think the first question I would have is from your age and from your income, I would ask you, are you doing a good job accumulating wealth?

For you to have a household income of $205,000 to be in your mid-40s and to have a net worth of $160,000 is a little bit light. Now, I don't think it's a fruitful conversation for us here. There could be good reasons for it. You could have recently increased your income.

You could have – this could be a new thing. You could have dug out from underneath a million dollars of business debt or something like that. It doesn't matter. But it's a little bit light. That ratio there is a little bit off for somebody. What it indicates to me is that maybe you haven't – it's possible that you haven't been as good with money before in your life as it would have been nice to have been because it would seem like your net worth should be a little bit higher with a $205,000 income.

Now, what you need to do is not tell me about it. What you need to do is analyze and say, "Where am I in my wealth-building journey? Did we make a lot of mistakes or not make a lot of money earlier and now we're doing well?" In that situation, then I would just say you continue doing more of what you're doing.

So if you're in a place where we're making good decisions, we're earning well, we're saving well, we're living within our means, we have a chance now to really get ahead, then I would just bring and fold the inheritance in to your overall plan if you have one. If you haven't been good with money – and my fear is maybe you haven't been great with money in the past – then you need to be very suspicious of this and you need to say, "I better not screw this up and so I need to move really slowly." In that situation, I would keep the money segregated for a time.

I wouldn't rush to go ahead and start receiving income from it and I would do what you're doing now, which is solicit some good advice and get a very clear plan for it. So I guess I do need to probe a little bit. Have you been good with money in the past?

How are you as far as accumulating wealth? Are you good at it, not so good at it? How would you rate yourself? >>Jaymee So we went through the whole Ramsey debt paying off thing. So that 8K pretty much is the last of it. So it was basically paying off debt.

So we are good at now obviously managing money, not spending it beyond our means. I think we're transitioning into how do we now that we have this amount of income that we're basically saving one and a half full paychecks, how do we start to build off of that now since we're out of the debt, out of the Dutch, you know, digging out from under.

>>Tavis So you need an investment plan now, which is not easy. It's not easy to give you, but that's what you need. You need an investment plan and you need to figure out what can I invest this money into where it's going to make sense for us in the long run.

Do you have an investment plan of some kind? >>Jaymee We don't. We have been talking to C-only planners and then also certain broker dealers to try to get an idea of what a plan should be. I was wondering if you had any suggestions on that subject as well. >>Tavis I would start with my friend David Stein.

He runs the podcast, blanking on his name is embarrassing, Money for the Rest of Us. His book, his podcast is called Money for the Rest of Us and he wrote a book a year ago called Money for the Rest of Us, 10 Questions to Master Successful Investing. I would start with that book.

Go ahead and read that book. It's a very well-written book and it talks about things very broadly. David's been on the show way back in the early history of Radical Personal Finance. I interviewed him and he has a background in money management. He used to run some large funds for some corporate clients and he does a lot of investing and a lot of it is stocks, which I think are wonderful solutions for investing, but not exclusively.

I think that would be a good place to start. The biggest question you're going to have to face, give you just a quick little speech on investing, biggest question you're going to have to face is what do we want to invest in now? Because this money basically brings you very quickly through the end of Dave Ramsey's seven baby steps and brings you to the point where now you are effectively financially independent.

Not saying you can just stop working, but you're effectively financially independent and you can make any choice that you want. That's the thing about this gift is you have enough cash from the TSP, first of all, that you can make any choice in life that you want. The first thing that I would do before I started digging into stocks, et cetera, is I would ask myself questions about my life and my lifestyle.

The most important ones are, you've heard me talk about my big three. Number one is, who are you with? You're married, so you're with your wife, but don't change that. Do you live with people that you want to live? Do you live near parents? Do you want to live near parents?

The second thing is, where do you live, which are usually related, but the geography of where you live is usually one of the most important things. If you just hate the Washington DC area and you've always wanted to live in a little mountain town in Colorado, what I would do is I would use the money to facilitate my move out of the little town in Washington DC or out of...

That didn't come out quite right. I would use the money to facilitate my move out of Washington DC to the little mountain town, out of the big giant metropolis swamp of Washington DC to the little mountain town of Colorado. I would just use it to facilitate that. I'll make smart decisions along the way, but if you've been dreaming about living somewhere else, go for it.

Now, if you decide, "No, we're happy here. This is where our home is. We love DC. I think DC is a great city. From a cultural perspective, it's hard to imagine a better place in the world to live." But then the third thing is, "What about my work? What about my job?

What about my income? Am I doing work that's really a good fit for me?" I think it's useful to have inherited this money because I would say, "What if it were $10 million?" I would pretend it was $10 million myself, and I would say, "Let's say that we all of a sudden inherited $10 million.

So now we're totally financially independent. What would we do? What would we do with our lives in that situation?" The way I like to do this as a journal activity is imagine that you inherited $10 million and then fast forward a year. Just give yourself a year to go out and do some of the hedonistic things that you've always thought would be fun, to buy a Harley Davidson and ride across the United States or go travel around the world for a year, staying in five-star hotels or whatever, those kinds of things that you would do.

So then imagine forward a year. You've gotten most of that stuff out of your system. So what would you do a year later after you had inherited $10 million? It's Monday morning a year later. What would you do on that Monday morning? And I would really spend a lot of time analyzing my career and thinking about what kind of work I would do, what kind of business I would run, where I would live, et cetera.

And then I would personally invest this money into facilitating those lifestyle transitions first. So if I've always imagined that I would love to own a little coffee shop in the mountains of Colorado, then I would go and I would buy the coffee shop and I would open it in the mountains of Colorado.

If I've always imagined I would go and get a PhD in philosophy and become a philosophy professor, then I would go and get a PhD in philosophy and become a philosophy professor. I would invest in myself first and into my lifestyle before I would invest into stocks or real estate, et cetera.

Then once you've made those big three decisions, which could be a total life transformation, all of a sudden you and your wife are running a little bed and breakfast on the beaches of Portugal, maybe that's where you are a year from now and I would use the money to pay for that.

Or on the other hand, it could be you're doing exactly what you're doing now and you're living where you're living now and you're totally content. Then I would go ahead and say, "Well, how do I invest the money for financial growth? Do I buy stocks? What kind of portfolio do I build?

Do I buy real estate? Do I buy a business?" et cetera. But I would think really hard about that lifestyle change and go ahead and get us into the lifestyle that we don't want to retire from before I would go ahead and start buying financial investments. So that would be my advice as to how you proceed.

I appreciate it. I love the thought process and I'll definitely re-listen to this to go through that step. Outside of the book recommendation, do you have previous podcasts that you maybe say, "Hey, Jason, listen back to one of these that maybe covers an aspect of what will be coming up or a similar situation?" It's sprinkled all throughout where I've talked about it.

I haven't done a whole series on investing. At some point, I can and I should. But basically, you'll get three different – when I talk about investing, I always divide it into three categories. The first is active business. Most underrepresented, but I think it shouldn't be, but the most underrepresented category is active business.

If you want to take a sum of money, you want to take $600,000 and you want to turn it into a lot of money, the most reliable way for you to do that is to invest into an active business, to buy a business or to build a business that's going to be productive and profitable.

Your highest return on investment is generally, in almost every circumstance, going to come from business. So that can be something very simple. You can buy a Subway franchise or buy a McDonald's or buy a carpet cleaning franchise or something like that. I use franchises because they're simple to understand.

But if you took this money and you started opening Papa John's franchises, it would be very productive for you in terms of the financial return. That even just franchises where you don't have to come up with a business idea, you don't have to come up with a business structure, you just buy the franchise and operate it.

It's wonderful. Now, if you have something else like your own independent idea of a business that you would like to run, that's also – if it's done well, it's also going to be profitable. So that's always going to be your highest return on investment is with active business. The downside is that active business is going to require your time.

So you want to make sure that that's something that you actually want to do. If you don't want to leave your job and run a business and your wife doesn't want to leave her job and run a business, then don't. So then you move on to the other two.

So you first have active business. The second category of investing is we can either say real property and we can use the technical accounting definition of real property, which is often real estate, or we can just use what I like to do speaking big picture of tangible property. We can invest into stuff.

We can buy stuff. So that stuff can be collectible knitting needles. That stuff can be antique firearms. That stuff can be gold and silver coins. That stuff can be giant commercial buildings. So there's a whole world of buying and selling stuff that we can talk about. And there's mainstream stuff like seeing like three bedroom, two bath houses in suburban neighborhoods like condos and downtown areas.

That's all mainstream stuff where there's a really good market for it. It's very predictable. There's good financing for it. Or you can find really offbeat off the wall stuff. You can become an expert in 16th century French gold coins. And that's your world of stuff that you're involved in.

There's no limit to the stuff that you can buy and invest in. And then the third category is paper assets. And so a paper asset is something that draws its value based upon the performance of something else. And so I'm going to use this very broadly. Paper assets would obviously be stocks and their derivatives.

We could have mutual funds. You could have options. You could have all of the various things representing ownership or trading in the ownership of shares of companies, bonds, lending money to people, lending money to companies. You can do other paper investments though. You can invest into – you can do hard money lending.

You can invest in tax lien certificates. You can write foreign mortgages for missionaries overseas. There's no limit to the kind of paper investing that you can do. So active business requires a high use of your time. It's very demanding on your time, generally speaking, but it's very profitable. Real property is demanding on your time but probably less demanding on your time than active business.

If you have a business buying and trading antique firearms, well, that takes time, right? You're going to gun shows on the weekends and you're buying inventory and you're wrapping inventory and you're dealing with accounting. But it's not quite as time intensive as running a pizza franchise or running a Jimmy John's.

But it is intensive in time. But it's also probably more profitable than some other things. It's more profitable than buying a CD at your local bank. Paper investments, depending on your strategy, are often going to be your least time required, right? You can take all the money. You could trundle it down to Vanguard and buy a total stock market index fund and have a very high quality, pretty decent investment with that money.

It's not going to require any time and it's going to be pretty good. It's just not going to return anywhere near as what you would expect those other categories to return. So that's why I say you start with your lifestyle design. Start with how do we want to live, how do we want to set up our life?

And then from that, then go on to what would be an investment that would fit what we're doing. I think that if you'll buy an investment, again, depending on how satisfied you and your wife are with your careers, etc., if you'll buy an investment that gives you the lifestyle that you want, you'd be much happier with that than working in a job that you would actually retire from someday, meaning that you wouldn't do it just for free.

So I think it's better to buy an investment that gives you the lifestyle that you want than to keep working a job that you don't like and buy stocks. That's my answer. If I inherited $600,000 and I were working in a job, I would go and I would buy a campground, right?

Or I would buy an Airbnb – I keep saying Airbnb – buy a bed and breakfast or I would buy a restaurant, something like that because I enjoy those kinds of social things. Or I would go and do any number of franchises because it'd be more productive and I would enjoy that lifestyle more than I would enjoy working a job and having money pile up in a stock market account.

Okay, great. Thank you. Just one quick question based on a previous user caller. You mentioned Vanguard, Fidelity, and you mentioned you had no issues with those. Would that include a swab as well? Correct. Or I don't know if you… Correct. Okay, great. Yeah, I don't follow that market very quickly, but I think they're all fine.

They're all competitive. It used to be that a company like Vanguard had a big competitive advantage. When Vanguard was first founded, the big competitive advantage was fees. But what's happened is the whole market in that space has responded. And so, the fees have dropped across the board. And so, Vanguard has put pressure on all of the companies – on Schwab, on Fidelity, etc.

And so, all of them offer now lots of investment choices that are very low fees. And so, I don't know of any… I'm not committed to any particular competitive advantage of one versus another. I'm fine with all of them. That was the point. All right, we're going to move on.

Let's see. Who do I go to next? One, two, three, four, five. I'm going to have to go fast. Let's go to Peter in New York. Peter, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi, Joshua. My employer is going to offer a 457(b) plan and it looks like a no-brainer to me, but I just wondered if there were any pitfalls I'm missing here.

No pitfalls. It's a no-brainer. I would participate up to the max that I could afford. I think it's a wonderful solution. All right, that was easy. Have a good weekend. You too, sir. I like that. Let's see if we can do it again. We go to the great city of New York.

New York, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? New York City, 646 area code. Go ahead, please. Hey, Josh. That's you. Go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, hey. No, thanks for taking the time. I'm really enjoying the show. I'm trying to leave my corporate job. I make about 225 plus bonus.

I've been working on a part-time, other stream of income, basically selling options premium, getting about 2% a month pretty consistently, but on a relatively small account, not enough to leave my job. So I figure I need to grow this to probably about 400,000 to cover our monthly expenses. And as you know, the Northeast is still pretty expensive.

We're trying to sell our apartment in New York City, which is tough with the pandemic. Everyone's leaving, but we're expecting at about 500,000 from that, that I can contribute to some of this strategy. So just wanted to get your thoughts on some things to think about when trying to leave corporate America, because I know you've done it.

I mean, I have one kid, another kid on the way with the wife, the family of four. And so one of the things I'm thinking about is the health insurance costs, which I know are going to be pretty high because we're going to stay in the Northeast after we sell.

But just curious what other things you would think about or plan to do. How old is your oldest child? Two years old. Okay. Well, what you will find as you trace this through is the prison of the corporate experience is entirely in your head. And what I mean is you have a set of constraints that you are choosing to operate under.

Now, notice I'm being very precise in my language. I'm not saying you've adopted them, right? They may have been imposed on you by the society around and you unconsciously adopted them, or you may have chosen these constraints, but they are constraints that you are choosing to operate under. And what I want to do is I want to make them clear to you so that you can make a conscious choice as to whether you want to accept them or not.

You have a certain lifestyle that you live and a certain set of things that you do, a certain set of expenses that you have that you're concerned about and planning for, and I applaud you for that. That's not a bad thing. But every single one of these expenses, every single one of these things is entirely negotiable, completely negotiable.

So, you need to face that and then make the choice intentionally. So, living in the Northeast, you choose to live in the Northeast for reasons that are important to you, but personal reasons. You could choose to live in the Northeast or you could choose to live somewhere else. Now, if you choose to live in the Northeast, because, again, most likely this is where my family is, where our friends are, like this is where our community is, that's obviously an entirely valid constraint, then you choose to live there and that brings with it certain baked-in costs to life, certain lifestyle benefits, certain costs associated with those benefits.

I hope that you're hearing my tone. I'm not saying those are wrong choices. I'm saying they're choices. You could choose to move somewhere else, right? You could choose to move to Mississippi and for the cost of your small, you know, the apartment in New York, you could buy a mansion in Mississippi.

So, you may or may not want to do that. Some people couldn't imagine living in Mississippi. Some people would do it in an instant. You could choose to do, if you're trading, if you're selling option premiums, you could do that anywhere in the world. As I like to famously, not famously, but I like to say, you know, you could load up your family, you could get on an airplane and you could fly to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and where you can live like a king on the beach in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a thousand dollars a month and pile up all of the extra money if you wanted to make a radical lifestyle change.

Now, let's assume that you don't want to make a physical move, which I think you should consider. You know, if I were a trader, if I were trying to make a change from a corporate job to working as a trader, I would very seriously think about things like Puerto Rico with the Act 22 individual, the tax benefits for investors, the potential to massively adjust my taxes would be a major incentive to me if I'm moving into trading, the lifestyle.

Some people would love it. Some people hate it, right? You have to think that through. So I would very seriously think about it. Myself, I would rather move quickly and not live under a $200,000 a year requirement until I had gotten my piggy bank very full. So if I talked to my wife and I said, "Honey, why don't we live on the beach for a few years?" And she said, "Okay, I could do it." I'd move to Thailand.

I'd live there for a couple of years while I'm getting this thing going so that I never have any concerns about the actual trading strategy that I'm totally good. And then I would go ahead and move back to New York if I wanted to at that point in time.

Now, there may be a cost. Maybe you want to be close to parents and you need the help in your family. Again, totally reasonable things. I'm just analyzing from a financial perspective. Now, if you say, "I want to stay," the other aspects that you're choosing, most of the costs that we choose are costs that we've adopted, the kind of apartment that you live in, the size of the house that you have, the kind of ways that you spend your time and the things that you go, where you go.

And so all of those things are chosen. You could live in an apartment that was half the cost of what your current one is. You could spend half the money that you currently spend. And then that might change your lifestyle in some way. It might change your operations. So I don't want to go on.

I want to point out that all of these things are entirely of your choosing. And so for you to believe that you have to make $400,000 from trading in order for things to work, that's nonsense, right? That's a choice. You might say, "I want to make $400,000 in order for us to live the lifestyle we want to live in," but you don't have to do any of that.

So once you break those prisons in your mind and you realize that these are all intentional choices that I make, then you can use the appropriate language, which is, "I'm choosing to continue in my corporate job," or, "I'm choosing to do my trading strategy until I reach this certain point because that's the way that I want to live." Totally fine.

Now, as far as strategy, I personally think that when you're making a move like that, the more conservative your move can be, the better you'll feel. I don't think it's necessary to be fully conservative. There's lots of people who have started a business and who have done it with big personal expenses and been totally fine.

I think you can do that. Me personally, I always feel better when I am more conservative, when I have lots of wiggle room. And so what I would do is I would run a couple of expense scenarios, and I would say, "Let's say I spend $200 a year. Let's say I spend $100 a year, and let's say I spend $50." And then I would model the size of my portfolio, my expected gains, and I would ask myself, "What would be the benefit 5, 10, 15, and 20 years from now if I live at these different lifestyles?" And if my wife and I could look at one of those outcomes and say, "Hey, look at where we'd be 10 years from now if we could get these returns that I've been getting and proving, and we could have this much extra money and this extra capital to smooth out some of the risks," I've always found it easier to change expenses.

And I think it's important to recognize that you'll never be as free as you are right now in the future. Your two-year-old doesn't care where he or she sleeps, and your baby's not going to care where he or she sleeps. Your wife will care, but you can work with her and find a solution that works for the two of you.

But that's very different than if you have a 15-year-old. Because if you have a 15-year-old, now you've got a whole other set where you're like, "Well, my child has friends, and is it right for me to take my child out of her school and go somewhere else?" But right now, you have total freedom of choice.

You're totally unencumbered. So I think that's a special time in life, and that if you're going to make this move, I think that, again, if your wife is open to it, I think that you should do something that allows you to make it quickly and just cut your expenses through some useful strategic system in your personal expenses so that you can make the move quicker.

That's what I would do. That's really helpful. I appreciate it. Lots to think about. Yeah. In general, if you can find something that's exciting versus something that's a trade-down. So in trying to help people break these prisons of their mind, what I have come to do is I've realized that you have to give a good story.

And so years ago, I remember I had a client of mine. He was a highly paid sales executive, and he got fired. I don't remember why he got fired, but he was living the lifestyle. And I remember just the sense of panic that he had about the idea of downgrading his lifestyle.

And he eventually didn't have the money to pay for the kids' private school, and he had to pull the kids out of private school. And he felt like such a failure as a father because he had to tell his children, "I can't pay the school tuition. I got to pull you out of school." And he really struggled with his self-esteem with regard to his friends because he'd always done well.

He'd always made a lot of money, and he'd always had – he'd always done well. He'd always made a lot of money. He'd always had the ability to be perceived as someone who was a winner, which he was, right? He just didn't save a lot of money. And so when he got fired, he was left with a short with a difficult – in a difficult financial place, and he couldn't find a job quickly for some reason.

So what I learned is that the most important thing to cover in this kind of planning is the story that you tell mom and dad, the story that you tell your children, and the story that you tell your friends. And I've learned that if you can make up some story that is true, but that is the kind of story that's socially acceptable, but also has the side benefits that you want, it's a lot better.

So I've often counseled people who are leaving a job, right? Like, "Listen, is mom sick? Why don't you just say – instead of saying, 'I'm leaving the job because I don't like you,' just, 'I need to take care of mom. I need to go spend more time with my mom,' or, 'I have personal family things that I need to attend to.'" It's much more socially acceptable to say things like that.

If you're going to – if you need to – if you ran out of money and you've got to quit your job, or you're running out of money and you can't afford your house anymore, can you make some, like, crazy move? Like, "We're going to move into a tiny home because we're becoming green minimalists, and we're going to buy everything in reusable containers and stop using plastic because we're wacky, like, green minimalists, not we're broke." That's a much more socially acceptable thing to say than we're broke, and it can solve kind of this problem.

So, if you decide that you're going to do something extreme so that you can make your business jump faster, if you need it, you've got to create some kind of story that you and your wife are really going to buy into and that you can tell your friends so that it's a matter of, "Hey, here's the exciting new thing that we're doing.

We're moving to Thailand, right? This is exciting." Not, "We're moving from living on $200,000 a year to living on $15,000 a year just for two years so that I can build up my portfolio to a million five, and then I'll be totally, you know, then I'm set for the rest of my life." So, think about the story and craft some story that is true, or at least true enough that you can say it and not feel like you're lying to somebody, but that is socially acceptable so it keeps your options open.

>>Yeah, that's great. Yeah, the other piece is my wife's dad is in a facility, and we were going to move him into our house. But I do like the idea of, say, the Puerto Rico potential, just kind of leave it all and head down there for the tax advantages and the nice weather.

>>If I were a trader and if I liked, I mean, you got to like Puerto Rico. You got to find some place that you like because you got to be on the island, you know, at least six months a year. But if I were a trader and I knew it was unlikely for me to give up my US citizenship, I can't see why I wouldn't take advantage of those tax considerations.

It just smooths. Once you start getting some tax efficiency in your life, which you haven't had in a very long time living in New York City, right? But once you start getting some tax efficiency in your life, you realize that often one of your biggest enemies in this stuff is tax.

And it gives you such an advantage where you can pursue different strategies. It's compelling. So, you got to build a lifestyle that you like. And so, I would not live in Puerto Rico if I didn't like it. And if my wife didn't like it and we weren't happy, it's just not worth it.

Saving on tax is not worth being unhappy. But if you could build something where everyone was happy and you enjoyed the sunshine and you visited New York in the winter, sorry, in the summer, things like that, then it's really compelling. And the cut of the lower costs of living from the cost of living, the lifestyle changes and the tax benefits is really compelling, in my opinion.

>> Yeah, thank you so much. >> My pleasure. Good luck to you on things. I hope that it continues to be a winning strategy for you. That's awesome news. And tell you what, talk about the dream of being able to make a living from around the world. Being an independent options trader is awesome.

All right, we go now to Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Illinois, 630 phone number. >> Hi, Joshua. This is Silpa. >> Welcome. Tell me your name again, please. >> My name is Silpa. >> Silpa. Okay, go ahead. >> Yes. I'm a big fan.

I have listened to a lot of your beginning podcast. First time caller, thanks for taking our call. And actually, we are from Cincinnati. And this question is regarding a house that we are living in right now. So this is a four bedroom size house. We need bigger house. And we already liked one.

We already have signed a contract for one. All that is going good. The question is, should we keep this house, because we can afford it, put it on rent, and keep living in the new house? That's option one. And option two is, of course, sell this house and move on.

So we bought this house four years back, and whatever details you need, I think I'm ready with those. >> Is the house a good house for renting? Would it rent at a high market rent? Is it a good rental house? >> Yeah, in any case, this house is sort of good house in the sense the location is really good.

The school district is one of the top most in just in country or at least in Cincinnati for sure. So it's very much this location and there are not many houses on market, of course, anywhere, but at least in this area, in this right bucket that we are looking at.

We bought this house four years back, we are getting decent equity out of it. So in either case, renting or selling, in either case, we will, so if we rent, right, the estimate is that, conservative estimate is that we'll get $2,500 a month. And with that, we can say this house, the mortgage on this house will get paid off from that rent and then we'll save some money, which we can use for the newer house, like for the mortgage of the newer house.

>> If you sold this house and took the equity that you have, what would you do with that money? >> Yeah, so that's the case. So we can, I mean, first thing is we will pay some amount of mortgage on the new house, right, we'll at least do 20% or maybe a little more than that.

Right now we are making 10% down payment. So we can definitely pay back some more mortgage. And then we are planning that, I mean, our initial calculation shows that we'll still have 100K left over. So right now the rough plan is that over the span of next one year, we'll keep investing in market, just because we don't know what else to do.

>> Well, let me talk through this and tell you the factors that you can consider as you make this decision. There's not a right or a wrong decision, and it sounds like either one of these decisions would be fine. So you're not going to have a clear, yes, I should do this or no, I shouldn't do this.

Because from what you're describing, it sounds like either decision will be fine for you. But what you can think about is as I go through some of these factors, does one of these speak to me, does one of these feel better than another? The first thing that you want to think about is, do I actually want to be a landlord?

Do I want to own a rental house? For some people, the answer is yes. For many people, the answer is no. For many people, they say, I want to just live in a house. I want to do my investing in my 401k and buy mutual funds. My mutual funds don't call me at night.

My mutual funds don't disappear in the middle of the night when I have to go and find new renters. My mutual funds are simple, and that way we have a house we live in. We have 401ks with mutual funds in them. It's enough money for us. And we like to have our hobbies and hang out with our friends on the weekends.

I don't want to be in real estate. If you don't want to be in real estate, then you should sell this house and then feel free to put the money into your next house or do something else with it. That's the first thing. The second thing has to do with, would I spend the money in some way?

So for example, you could sell this house and take the money and invest it into something else, invest it into your new house or invest it into another business or another investment or buy more stocks or whatever you want to invest the money in. Or you could say, I want to spend it.

So if you want to spend it, then of course you sell the house and spend the money. But let's assume we're not going to spend the money. And so we're trying to figure out what should we do while investing the money. In general, I would like you to own more investment assets.

So I like the idea of you're keeping this house if it's a good rental house. There are many houses that we might choose to live on that are simply not good rental houses, or at least they're not good rental houses compared to the alternative. You might live on a beautiful rural property with a big barn and all these wonderful facilities.

It's perfect for you to live in. But if you go and try to rent it, you can't rent it for very much because the number of people who are interested in renting that house from you is very small and they don't have much money. And so there are some properties that are simply not good rental properties.

They're better for owners. And so you ask yourself, is this the kind of property that's a good rental property? From what you said, it probably is. The other thing you want to ask yourself is, is this a good time to own a rental property? You want to do an analysis of the values that houses are selling for versus the cost of the rents.

And try to ask yourself, is this a renter's market? Is this a buyer's market? Is this a seller's market? For example, I'm renting the house that I live in right now. I'm renting it from somebody. It's a beautiful house. It's a large house. I have a large property. I have a beautiful garden.

It's a beautiful house. I would never buy this house. Why? Well, because in my local market, the house would sell. If I bought this house, it would sell for something like $250,000. My rental cost on it pre-COVID were $1,000 a month. Right now, my rental costs are $600 a month because my landlord cut my rents during COVID.

So I have this large, beautiful house and a big property that I'm renting for $600 per month. It would be crazy for me to buy this house considering the fact that I can rent it for $600 per month. So you do a market analysis in your local area and say, is it good for us to buy houses, to sell houses, or to rent houses in the current market?

And that's just a practical example of what I mean when I talk about analyzing your market. Is this a good time to own a rental house? It's entirely fine to be an investor and to look down at your portfolio and say, "You know what? If I look down at my portfolio and I see that somebody is willing to offer me a crazy high sum of money because houses are selling like crazy, then you sell." You sell when someone wants to give you a lot of money.

You put the money in the bank and you wait for a few years. And then when the market changes, you go ahead and buy. Now, it doesn't feel like that's going to happen. It always feels like, "Well, I can't sell now because I'm not going to be able to buy again." Eventually, things will change unless there's some underlying current or trend where things eventually change.

And so I wouldn't be scared to sell the house and then just simply sit on the money and wait to buy if the house prices are overvalued at the moment in my current analysis. So you need to look at that. The next thing that you want to look at is you want to consider the costs of selling now versus the costs of selling later.

You should be aware of the fact that if you bought this house six years ago and you have a good bit of appreciation in the house, you can sell it and get that appreciation tax-free, up to $500,000 for a couple married filing jointly. That's powerful. And I like the idea of taking tax-free money.

So if you have $150,000 of appreciation and you can sell with modest selling expenses, minimal realtor costs, minimal selling expenses, etc., and take that money in appreciation, then that would be really great to have that money tax-free because now you have a gain that you'll never pay tax on.

And then I would go back to the real estate strategy and I would say, "What would I be willing to do? Would I be willing to buy more properties with this money?" So let me tell you what I think would be kind of okay, a good decision, a good decision, and a great decision depending on what you wanted to do.

I think an okay decision would be to simply sell the house because you want to sell this house and take the money and put the house, put the money down into your next house. That would be okay, especially if you didn't want to be involved in real estate. Totally fine.

That would be a totally okay decision. A good decision would be to keep this house and buy the next house and keep this house as a rental because everything's already squared away with it. You know the house, the house has financing already done. It's a good decision. And now you own more real estate and now you have a rental income that can pay the mortgage and pay and give you some extra money.

That's a very good decision if you're willing to deal with the hassles of renting the house out or having it rented for you. I think a great decision would be to try that and then say, "Okay, we want to do real estate." And then I would say, "How can I leverage this house to expand my real estate investment portfolio?" So one option might be to sell this house, take the money tax-free, and put the money in the bank, and then next year buy one or two or three other houses that are rental houses.

Because if I could take $150,000 tax-free and then use that $150,000 to buy three other rental properties, put $50,000 down on each of them, and I could leverage my gain in this first house to now own four houses, the three rentals plus the one that I'm living in, that's a better solution than owning only two houses.

And with those other houses, being able to do that with my tax-free money would be a really good way to invest it. If you thought that this house, however, is a perfect rental house and you don't want to have the selling expenses, you don't have realtor fees, etc., of selling it, then you could also just take it and maybe increase the mortgage on it and use that mortgage to go ahead and buy another property.

So in summary, any of these are fine decisions, and what you choose will probably depend on whether you see yourself as being a real estate investor or not. If you do, you could use this house to launch you in that direction. If you don't see yourself as being a real estate investor, then it's better for you to simply go ahead and just sell this one and move into the next one.

Shruti Gupta Okay. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. But if we, and as a person, I don't want to be in real estate, and I'm sure my husband, he also, I mean, we like our jobs. We are very comfortable and we like what we do. So considering that we don't want to be landlords, the bigger question is, then what do we do with that extra money?

Because the thing is, I believe in diversification and diversification of assets. We already have so much in the stock market and some in cash. So I mean, is there any other better asset that we can own? Am I missing something? Dave: You'll have to think through those three asset classes that I discussed previously in today's show and ask yourself, am I excited about owning any of those asset classes?

Is there something else that I'm excited about owning? If the answer is yes, then you should invest in that. There may be many things that you could, you can invest in all kinds of things. But if none of those are exciting, there's nothing wrong with just simply investing in the stock market and paying off your house.

So what I would say is if you don't want to be landlords, sell the house now so that you can get the tax-free gain on it and have that tax-free appreciation. And then just go ahead and if you don't have anything to invest the money in, just go ahead and pay off your mortgage on the new house or pay down the mortgage on the new house.

That way it's still in real estate. It's still diversified. You'll have protection from the asset protection due to it being your personal residence. And then when your mortgage is paid off, you will still have to decide what to invest the money in later, but at least you'll enjoy having a paid off mortgage.

I think that's fine. Okay. Okay. Thank you. My pleasure. That's a great topic. Thank you. Congratulations on all your success and thank you for calling in. All right. Two callers left. We go to John in Pennsylvania. John, welcome to the Chalk and I serve you today, sir. Hi, Joshua.

Thanks for taking my call. You may think you're famous for telling people to move to Chiang Mai, Thailand, but in this house, since your show two days ago, you're famous for the 10 minute bath of four children. I think that's more impressive than anything else I've ever heard you say.

I could give you my whole checklist if you want. It's challenging. I continually find a stray. There's always a stray that's just wandering downstairs to go find a stuffed animal or lingering over dinner. My biggest problem right now is my eldest has developed the habit of lingering over dinner.

I've got the other three in and out and I'm like, "Where's number four?" I keep doing it. I keep working on it. That's the most impressive credential. I think companies should be studying your efficiency and optimization. That's very kind. My mouth hit the floor when I heard that one.

Anyways, sorry. On to my question. It's a fairly boring one this time. Last year, I had to roll back Roth contributions because I wasn't planning correctly for the income limits we were hitting, which was a fine thing. We had to roll it back and we got it all sorted out.

Recently, my company... After that, I looked into, I think they're just called Back to Roth and found that that wasn't going to be a good solution for me because it required you to not have any other assets in a traditional IRA, which I did. It looked like it was going to be very complicated or cause a big taxable event to move those things out, which I didn't want to do.

I shelved it and said, "Okay, that's not for me or it's too complicated or just not worth it." Then my company recently has announced that they're allowing additional after-tax contributions to a Roth and they're enabling this through a program at work. They're going to take all the hardship out of it to do this mega Back to Roth, where we can contribute these additional after-tax dollars.

Then there's a mechanism set in for into the program where it'll automatically roll it into a Roth and makes it pain-free to do this mega Back to Roth. Seems like a no-brainer. I'm probably going to do it. There seemed to be something in there, though. There was a hitch about a five-year, I don't know what you call it, a maturing period of five years where the gains are not tax-free.

I'm wondering how that works and if that's the same mechanism that's talked about in Roth conversion ladders. It seems like it's the other side of the same thing, but I'm not really sure what's going on internally there and how it could be problematic. And really, the last question about that or related to that is, I read a show a long time ago saying basically contributing to a Roth or basically qualified plans in large part can be good even if you think you're going to be withdrawing it early and have to take the penalty or something like that.

I think you had done some math from a caller that said it's really advantageous even in the worst case. So that's kind of why I was going to jump on doing this mega Back to Roth. And I'm not sure if there's anything about the mega Back to Roth that does not apply to what you had said about go ahead and contribute even if you think you have to take that later.

In order for you to make your mega Back to Roth contributions, will you be reducing your traditional contributions or are you maxing your traditional contributions and this will be in addition to those contributions? In addition with the caveat that I guess just since I'm disqualified this particular year, I won't be giving to a normal Roth IRA for me and I'm sorry, yeah, Roth IRA for me and my wife because I'm disqualified from those.

So understood. Yeah. This will be an addition to the other. We don't have 401k matching, but we have a 401k, so I'll be matching that up. Right. So your answer to this question is important for your allusion to my show where I talked about how it's better to put money into a traditional 401k and then withdraw it when you're not working for early retirement and pay the 10% penalty than it is to put money into a taxable account at which you could then use to pay for early retirement and not without any penalty.

So specifically, my opinions are that number one, any employee, anybody who has a fairly normal expected wealth distribution coming from a job should contribute to a traditional 401k and not contribute to a Roth 401k. So that's for a 401k only. I'm not talking about traditional IRA versus Roth IRA.

I'm saying any employee who has a normal expected financial picture, which is I'm going to work my job, I'm going to take some percentage of my income, put the money into the investment account. At some point in time, I'm going to stop working, I'm going to retire, and I'm going to live on that portfolio.

My answer is anybody who's in that situation should not fund a Roth 401k. Rather, they should fund a traditional 401k from a tax perspective. It's better. Now, I'm still okay with Roth IRA contributions. And so who should contribute to a Roth IRA? Well, anybody who is qualified for a Roth IRA should contribute to a Roth IRA because a Roth IRA, notice I'm not saying Roth 401k, I'm saying a Roth IRA has some things that are different than just tax savings, most specifically the ability to withdraw the contributions with no penalties, and that's helpful and valuable.

So if I'm coaching an 18-year-old, my 18-year-old son who has an earned income of $15,000, well, first of all, of course, my 18-year-old son has no income tax on $15,000, but I'm still going to say put the money in the Roth IRA, even if that's just simply his emergency fund.

I'm going to say put your emergency fund in a Roth IRA because you can always take the money out for emergencies, and now you get creditor protection and you get tax benefits with that account. If my 18-year-old is earning $100,000, I'm going to say max out your 401k, if available, and put money in the Roth IRA.

If my 18-year-old is making $200,000, let's say I'm doing a good job as a parent, right? My 18-year-old is making $200,000. I'm going to say max out your 401k, but now you don't qualify for a Roth IRA. So now the question is, in addition to the 401k, is there something else that we can do?

Well, now we could do a backdoor Roth or we could do a mega backdoor Roth, which is what you're talking about. So the mega backdoor Roth is an employer-sponsored plan that allows you to make after-tax contributions which become a Roth contribution. So now your question is about the five-year rule for those contributions.

Agreed so far? So the question on the five-year rule, first of all, for the five-year rule for Roth IRA withdrawals is to determine if the earnings from those withdrawals are tax-free. And so in order for them to be tax-free, it has to be on or after the date that you turn 59 and a half, and then it has to be at least five tax years after the first contribution to any Roth IRA you own.

That's the rule there. On the mega backdoor Roth, just hold on, just went all cloudy in my head. I think I know what you're... So I have a statement in front of me. Yeah, go ahead. It says five years from each in-plan Roth conversion is rather than the first.

Right, right, right. Which is five years from the first Roth, yeah. Right. So I guess the technical detail just went cloudy right as I was talking about it. So let me just say this. I see no reason not to participate in the mega backdoor Roth, even with the five-year rule.

The five-year rule is not going to change. It's the same no matter what. So even with the five-year rule, I see no reason for you not to contribute to the mega backdoor Roth as long as you are separately maxing out your traditional contributions. And then that situation, I think it's an awesome plan and it would be great if everybody offered it.

I'm not sure that this is going to hang around very much. I think that the backdoor Roth and the mega backdoor Roth, I think that this goes against the political ethos of our time. People say it smells of things that only the rich can do. And I think that the Roth IRA rules are so nice in terms of tax freedom forever.

And I think that there's so many big Roth IRAs being created now that I think that this is a tax exclusion that's probably going to be tightened up in the future. So I would participate now and do it. I don't expect this to last around for very long myself.

Yeah, thank you. I agree with all that. I was just trying to figure out if there was some hook as to what I wasn't thinking of. And I know these can be rolled back if they don't meet the qualifications or some kind of, I can't remember what they call it.

There's something for highly compensated individuals if they don't get enough of us rank and file people to contribute, then they get disqualified and all have to get rolled back if only the executives do it. But yeah, that sounds like a good plan. I appreciate the context and to solidify my decision here.

So I appreciate it. My pleasure. All right. For our last call of the day, we go to David in the location of none. Well done, David. My screen has you completely geographically anonymous. So welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi Joshua. I was calling to get a recommendation on what I should do with a pretty large brokerage account is over a million from an asset privacy and an asset protection point of view.

Now, I don't own a business or really do risky things and just a regular employee, so I don't expect any type of litigation. And I do like to keep my finances pretty simple, but it is a large amount that's not protected. So I just wanted to see what you thought about the pros and cons and does it make sense to do some type of offshore trust or any other structure?

Do you have other assets in addition to this brokerage account? Yes, but in retirement accounts. Okay. Do you have any significant litigation risk or credit risk in some way due to your day-to-day business dealings? No. I don't know whether I should ask it. You're living in the United States under US law or are you living in the United States?

Yes. Okay. So your choices are a few. So first of all, you should ask yourself, is there an asset or a series of assets that are excluded from the claims of creditors that I'm interested in owning? So can I max out my 401(k) this year? That would be really great.

Is there a state that I can live in? So for example, you don't need a trust if you live in Florida and you buy a million dollar house to live in. You live in Florida, you have a million dollar house, that million dollar house is protected from the claims of creditors.

Maybe in Florida you could take advantage of the annuity laws and life insurance laws. You could buy a million dollar annuity and if you are a Florida resident, then that annuity will be exempt from the claims of creditors. It's an exempt asset. And so you should look at are there any exemptions that I can take advantage of?

If there are exemptions, that's going to be your simplest way that you can invest the money that's going to provide you with the asset and creditor protection that you're looking for. So it's very important to always focus on exemptions because those are the cheapest options. When you start establishing asset protection trusts, those asset protection trusts come with a set of fees and costs.

And so you need to be aware of whether it's worth it based upon your overall profile. If you don't have a high profile or you're not engaged in a litigious business, my guess is it's probably not worth worrying too much about asset protection. Insure properly, have an umbrella liability policy on your primary house.

But if you're just a normal person, I'm imagining you're a computer programmer, you write a little bit of software, you don't have a big public facing business, there's just not that much risk. So if you get in a car accident, could somebody sue you for that? Yes. But it's easier to go ahead and just buy ample liability protection on your car insurance policy and to purchase, again, an umbrella liability policy on your home than it is for you to establish an offshore asset protection trust.

So think about exempt assets. Number two, ask yourself how it would work for you with a strategy of privacy versus a strategy of protection. So remember that when planning for asset protection, privacy is a valid strategy. It's not ultimately a legally winning strategy, but it is a winning strategy for a long time.

If you take the million dollars and take it and buy gold coins or a gold brick and you put it in an offshore gold depository somewhere, and it's not a bank account, that's not reportable to the IRS, not reportable to the government, just sits there, just sits in an offshore vault.

So you're engaging in a privacy strategy here. That asset is not going to appear as something that's available to a creditor. So if a plaintiff's attorney is doing an asset search on you to try to figure out if you're worth suing or not, they're not going to find the gold bar sitting in an offshore vault.

It just doesn't exist. And so they're more likely to turn down the case because you're not a big fish. Now, if they sue you and if they win, and if you're now subject to a judgment creditor's legal deposition of how much money do you have, that would be the point in time which, of course, you have to decide, "Am I going to tell the truth?" But there's very compelling persuasive reasons to tell the truth.

And in that situation, you would tell the truth, you say, "I have the million dollars." They would force you to deliver it up if they have control over your person. And then you now lose the money if they won the lawsuit. But remember, that's at the very end of a long set of lawsuits.

So any kind of private asset or privacy-focused asset has a significant level of creditor protection. It's just not legal protection. So if you put the million dollars into a cryptocurrency that was a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, if you put the million dollars into buying a beautiful villa offshore, for US persons, the rules are that you need for it to be totally private and to be outside of the country offshore, it needs to be a physical asset, a physical asset that doesn't generate income because the income, you legally have to report the income.

So physical asset that doesn't generate income would be physical property, real property, works really well, a house that you live in, a couple of houses around the world can work really well, maybe some land, a ranch somewhere, a couple of ranches, things like that, where they're oriented towards long-term capital gains appreciation rather than generating current rents.

Also, any kind of physical property such as gold coins, silver coins, gold bricks, diamonds, Stradivarius violins, physical currency held offshore has no reporting requirements, etc. So that gives you asset protection. And then, of course, you can move into the—sorry, that gives you privacy. Then, of course, you can move into the world of cryptocurrency, especially some privacy-oriented coin.

So those are some good options for privacy. Now, the next thing is, do I need the trust? And so will the trust start to give you some form of actual legal protection? Yes. But what I would say is for either a privacy-oriented strategy or a strategy that involves a trust, you should be prepared yourself to move offshore as well.

So the ultimate thing to remember is that even if you have a trust and you could—if your state has authorized the domestic asset protection trust legislation, that's a fruitful area of research. You could set up an offshore asset protection trust, talk to an attorney, talk about the custodian fees, what assets, what are we going to invest the money in, etc.

You can put in place a springing strategy. That's a personal favorite of mine is go ahead and have a domestic-oriented trust, which is cheaper to own, but then have some clauses in there where if you come into danger and if you can't file a report with the trustee that you're free of any legal danger, that that trust springs offshore, that's a good solution.

I just think a million dollars is a little light. I don't think it's enough money for it to be worth it here. Your mileage may vary. I think it's not worth it with a million dollars. So I would pursue a privacy-related strategy and probably skip some of the legal protection, and then I would just be ready to move myself offshore if it were an extreme circumstance and I needed to do that.

So always remember that even if you do go with some kind of offshore asset protection trust, you still need to be ready to move offshore yourself because what happens, the game of asset protection is a continual tug between a judge trying to rule in the interest of creditors, which judges don't like creditors getting not happening.

Judges do not like if somebody sues you because you've wronged them and the court issues a judgment saying you owe this person money because you've wronged them. You lost the lawsuit. You've wronged them. You owe them money. The judges don't look kindly upon someone saying, "Well, I'm sorry, judge.

This money's just sitting offshore in an offshore asset protection trust, and I can't touch it." What does the judge do? Judge grabs you, tells the bailiff, "Take this guy to prison," says you're going to sit in prison until you cough up the money, and you have no choice because they have control over your person.

So if you recognize that that's the case with an offshore trust, even with the highest paid attorneys, with the best things, with a million dollars, I think you're in the direction of just simply pursue a privacy strategy with some of the investments, and then just simply position yourself that if you needed to disappear, disappear, and it's better to be free living offshore to let your attorney set a legal problems than for you to be stuck in some prison cell rotting where you can't do anything, can't make any money, et cetera, while you're working out the solution to settle the case.

Did I answer your question, or did I just ramble on for 10 minutes? No, no. That's really helpful. That's really helpful. Yeah, my opinion, it didn't quite make sense to go with the hassle, not only from the cost, but also maintaining it for a million dollars itself. So that makes sense.

I did want to ask you, do you think that doing consulting work, does that increase the risk or is having some type of errors and omissions insurance be enough to protect from that liability? It depends on how thoughtful you are about the advice that you give. So I was formerly a licensed financial advisor.

I had errors and omissions insurance, right? So what could somebody sue me over successfully? Because there's, in my opinion, I'm very concerned about the litigious society in the United States. I think it's a challenge, it's a problem, it's difficult. But I often think that the risk is overblown by people who profit from manufacturing this culture of concern, right?

Earlier in this show, I answered a question on hyperinflation. I think that hyperinflation is a legitimate risk of any currency, but I think the hyperinflation of the dollar, is it a legitimate risk? I think it's a very legitimate risk. I think it's wildly overblown in terms of its likeliness and its severity by those who profit from hyping it extensively.

And I'm not accusing people of doing it in bad faith. They might be, many people believe in what they're saying. I just think they're wrong based upon my analysis. I could be the one who's wrong, they could be the one who's wrong. So when we go to things like litigation risk, I think that a lot of it is overblown.

Again, I read all the asset protection planning books, I study them, and I observe that the authors always point to specific cases that it did go the way they said. But it seems a little bit excessive to say, is it risk really that high? So let's go to errors and omissions, right?

So I formerly was, I'm no longer, I don't have any licenses, but I used to be a licensed financial advisor. I used to give professional advice in that context. So let's say that I gave somebody bad advice. Well, if I gave sincere bad advice, if I gave sincere advice that just happened to be wrong because I couldn't foresee the future, I have no legal liability for that.

If I said to you that I think that this stock is going to go up, and I'm a stockbroker, and I say that XYZ Corporation, I think there's a good reason that XYZ Corporation is going to go up. They're doing really well, they're in a business that's good. I think they're going to go up.

And I recommend that you buy it. And I sell you a thousand shares of XYZ Corporation, and I make a commission on those shares. And then all of a sudden tomorrow, the news comes out that XYZ Corporation is going bankrupt and you lose all your money. You can't sue me, and I'm not liable to you for that advice as long as there's no fraud or there's no evidence of my somehow dealing in it, right?

There's the prudent man rule. The question is, would an independent prudent man who is observing this data and this situation, would that man have made that recommendation? And if so, I'm safe, right? I don't owe you. My errors and omissions are not a... I'm not liable for being sincerely wrong.

I'm liable for fraud. Absolutely. So if I had an inside deal and I knew it was going down, and I was just trying to do some pump and run, pump and dump scheme, and I told you it was going to go up, I sold it to you, and then it crashed, and then I turned around and I participated and colluded with others to buy it out at the bottom of the market, totally, I'm wrong.

But even there, errors and omission insurance doesn't insure me against that. It doesn't insure me against fraud. It just insures me against errors and omissions. And so it's a very narrow... If you read your insurance contract, it's a very narrow definition. So I'm not liable to be... I don't have a legal duty to be right in everything that I say.

What I have a legal duty to do is to be prudent in everything that I say. And so the advice that I've just given over the last two hours on this Q&A show is exactly the kind of advice that I would give you if you were a private consulting client.

And as far as I can tell, I've been careful in what I've said, I've been thoughtful in what I've said, and I've not given any advice that is imprudent. And I've done a good job, or I try to always do a good job of disclosing if I think, "Well, here's where I think the errors might be." So in the financial space, the biggest concerns come down to representing insurance policies, right?

So I don't tell people what to do with insurance. I don't sell insurance. I don't tell people to cancel insurance. I explain how insurance policies can work. I analyze them. I can do that work. And I have no... There's no liability there as long as I'm being prudent. When it comes to investments, the biggest thing comes down to forward-looking statements.

So the statements that you make, do these statements... Are they prudent and are they acceptable? Which is why investment advisors operate under constraints that some people don't, to use accurate numbers, etc. So I guess in summary, I think that consulting is a relatively low-risk business as long as you're not committing fraud, as long as you're not participating in the marketplace in a crazy way, and as long as you're being actually prudent in your words.

And errors and omission insurance specifically doesn't protect you against fraud, right? There's been lots of get-rich-quick gurus who have gone to prison, put there by the FTC because of their content. And were all of them right? I don't know. I haven't reviewed all the cases. But what I'd say is that if you're a prudent person, being a consultant doesn't raise a significant level of personal risk.

You can't sue me because of anything that I've said here today in the last two hours. I've been thoughtful. I've been careful. I've been prudent in what I've said. There's no danger zone, no gray zone in anything that I've said in the last two hours. - Thanks. That was very helpful.

Can I do one very quick follow-up? If I were to move, or would it be a good idea to move that brokerage account at least to like an international jurisdiction if I wanted to keep it in equities as opposed to getting what you were mentioning about real estate offshore?

Would that help at all in terms of the privacy aspect? - By move, you mean move outside of the United States or move to a different state within the United States? - No, move the actual brokerage account to like a company or a bank that's in another country like a Swiss bank or something like that.

- Yes, it does give you some benefits, but it does give you some drawbacks. So the first thing is, if you're moving the brokerage account and you're keeping it in either a brokerage account of some kind, a stock account, a trading account, or you are keeping it in a cash account of some kind of bank account, then you cannot own that privately under US tax law.

You have to report that to the government. So it's entirely legal for you to take a million dollars and move it to a Swiss bank account, if they'll take you as a US person. It's entirely legal for you to take the money, move it to a Swiss, you know, actively invested account and have them invest the money and trade it for you.

What you cannot do is not report that to the US government. You will have to file your annual disclosure forms for having offshore accounts and so the US government will know about that. Now here's the question, is that still a net gain? I don't know, right? In theory, and in practice actually, the United States is actually a tremendously private market, financial marketplace.

So the United States of America is the world's biggest tax haven and one of the best tax havens in the world, largely due to privacy rules and privacy laws that are actually enforced to a higher degree than in some other places. I get very frustrated about the lack of financial privacy in the United States, but I have to concede that there's more privacy in the United States than in many other places in the world and that the privacy in the United States is more actively enforced than many places in the world.

There are other jurisdictions that have higher laws, but those laws often aren't enforced. And so from a privacy perspective, I'm inclined to believe that the United States is actually not a bad place for you to have the money. Now does the US, so you have to ask who am I trying to have the privacy from?

Who am I trying to have, who do I want to have privacy of the money? Am I concerned about a plaintiff's attorney having privacy of the money or am I concerned about the US government having privacy of the money? Those are two very different scenarios. I don't believe you're going to successfully hide your money from the US government unless you're doing a physical, and you're not, let me say this precisely, I don't believe you're going to be successful hiding your money from the US government.

The US government, if you're a high priority target, the US government has almost unlimited power. If you're on the top 10 most wanted terrorists in the list in the world, the US government is filtering and reading every email that's sent around. They've got wiretaps all around the world. It's stunning, the level of spying that the US government engages in.

And so if you're a high profile target, I don't believe that you are going to successfully in the long term successfully hide from the US government. Now, if you're not a high profile target, can you successfully hide? Of course you can. There's people who do it all the time.

But I think the risk is not worth it because it's hard to sleep well at night if you have that floating over your shoulders. I'm convinced for those who want to hide from the US government, the simplest thing is just get the US government out of your life. Go get another citizenship, move to another place and renounce your US citizenship.

Do it legally, get rid of them, and then you can be done with them. And it's much, much simpler to do it that way and much less risky in my opinion than trying to hide money. The US government has the whole world basically hooked around its fingers with FATCA.

When FATCA passed, it changed everything. And everyone's, you know, most of the banks still want to do business in the United States. It's such an important financial hub that, you know, the old days of the 1980s, that stuff doesn't exist anymore, at least that I can find. Maybe I'm not rich enough to access it and it's still out there, but it doesn't exist anymore.

So, if you're hiding money from the US government, I don't think it's possible and I don't think it's a worthy use of time. I think it's better if you're at that level, it's better to get rid of the US government, eliminate your obligation to the US government by formally renouncing citizenship, and then go on and live as a free person instead of being under the thumb of the US government.

Now, in terms of hiding from a plaintiff's attorney, that can absolutely be done, but I think it could be done in many different ways. So, what's unclear to me, because I've never worked in it, is I've always tried to figure out what mechanism is there for a plaintiff's attorney to actually disclose the asset, to actually find the asset.

And there's a lot. I have a book on how to do asset searches that I read, which is specifically related to... It's written for fraud examiners, and it's specifically, "Here's how you do an asset investigation, how to do financial asset investigations." You're welcome to read it if you want.

And so, I went through it and I thought, "Man, this stuff is really good. So, how do I avoid it?" And what I was amazed at is it all comes down to the... If you're a high enough target, it's eventually hard to do, and especially if the person can get the courts on their side.

But you can still keep money in accounts in the United States, and just diversifying into different states, keeping your money in different banks in different states, smaller banks in different places, smaller investment firms. You get a lot of privacy there, and the privacy laws are enforced and increasingly enforced.

If you were to go back five years ago, it was very possible for an investigator to... Not fish. What's the thing where you basically impersonate someone? To just basically push against a bank representative and call in real quick to check the transactions and check their balances. And there were lower safeguards where impersonation was a very viable technique.

With most large banks today, it's very hard for me to see how you can do it, right? With two-factor authentication, with multiple back and forths, with very strict separation. A lot of those techniques have died. And so you've got a lot of privacy in the United States. You don't have privacy from the US government, but you do have a significant amount of privacy.

Now, does going abroad help that? Yes, it can, because the world is a very big place. If you have a bank account in the Cayman Islands, unless somebody knows to look in the Cayman Islands, are they really going to find your bank account? Not really. But when you actually get into this level of investigation, there are a lot of things that can be done where literally you have an investigator that is hired to chase you, who will follow you to the airport and see that you're going to the Cayman Islands.

There's the old strategies. I read a bunch of old private investigator stuff where they talked about how to... You get people to file certain checks and you send people all this stuff. And so those are the things that expose you with those offshore accounts. So I'm not willing to take the risk of going offshore and not reporting that to the government.

And so if you say, "Well, if I'm going to do that, then is there a benefit of going offshore?" I apologize that I've gone around in circles. And in summary, yes, I believe that there are additional benefits to be gained in going offshore. I believe that if you go offshore, you need to make sure that you file every single form properly with the US government to disclose that.

And I'm not sure about the security of that information. I'm not sure where that goes. I'm not sure whether there's about security of that information. And so that's a difficult road to navigate. If you are offshore, I think you do get some additional protection from local investigators. But you need to make sure that you actually need it, want it, and are willing to incur the costs for it.

I'm a fan of it, but it's not easy and it takes some time to set up the appropriate infrastructure. And I'm still doing it. I'm still testing all the stuff, trying to work it through so I can give better advice on it from personal experience. I guess it's just not the panacea that a lot of people have made it out to be.

I think the biggest detriment comes down to dealing with the United States. If you could just not deal with the United States, all of this stuff is simpler. And so when I look at it, I think that unless you, you know, if you're living and working in the United States and that's where you are, of course.

But I think it's a lot of times better off to keep your infrastructure in the United States then. If your concern is the United States government, I think the best solution is just follow the legal path, renounce citizenship, and cut off the U.S. government. And then the world is much, much freer for you.

The last thing I would say is I do think that international diversification, going the other way, is actually a very compelling tool. So you can keep your infrastructure in the United States, and this is actually one of the things that I recommend for non-U.S. citizens especially, you can set up an infrastructure, financial infrastructure, in the United States.

Once you set that up, because of the very high privacy laws in the United States, you can now go elsewhere in the world and through international credit cards, etc., you can have a very high degree of privacy. So if you decided to leave the United States, you have all your money in the United States, but you just do something as simple as having a U.S.-based credit card, and you go and you move to London, England, but you just always swipe your credit card from the United States when you're in London, England, you now have a significantly higher level of privacy than anybody who's based in England has.

Because in order for the English government to serve you with some kind of investigation, they have to go to some intergovernmental thing, they have to prove that it's worth it, etc. So internationalization of finances is a very compelling strategy for those of us who care about privacy, but the laws have changed so drastically in the last decade with the U.S.

government of tightening up across the board that to me it doesn't seem worth it to try to build privacy from the United States. That's my summary. Okay, thank you. That was really, really helpful. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Anything else? No, that's it. Thanks. Cool. We'll keep it up. David from nowhere, and I enjoyed the question.

These things are fun to talk about. I don't like to dog on the United States. My goal is not to dog on the United States. It's just frustrating to me as a U.S. citizen, currently speaking anyway, as a U.S. citizen, being somebody who cares about privacy and being somebody who cares about privacy, being somebody who cares about freedom, it's quite humiliating for me to care about freedom, care about the mythology of the United States, now land of the free, home of the brave, and all that stuff, and then have to say what I've just said based upon honest analysis, right, that you have the largest spy empire in the world and the world's worst.

You have simultaneously the world's largest, most effective tax haven for everyone who's non-U.S. citizens, and you have simultaneously some of the most strict, egregious, privacy-limiting actions of any government in the world. That's really humiliating to me. Now, the critic would quickly say and would rejoin with simply this, "Well, Joshua, if you're just following all the laws, then everything's fine, right?

Just report everything. Report everything." And to me, I find that infuriating, right? I am very, very, very careful to follow every law that I'm possibly capable of. I don't intentionally break laws. I follow every law. The problem is that even with that, number one, you know where things can go, and yet there's just such a complete and total lack of coherence to the theories.

Think about the right of privacy, right? This is a very contentious topic. Do you have a right of privacy? And in the U.S. Constitution, you have certain rights of privacy, right? Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, rights of privacy. I care about those, defend those very, very deeply. You've got the right of privacy that was famously expanded to sexual privacy, abortion privacy, things like this.

But then you have the Patriot Act. Then you have FATCA. Then you have this global empire that basically ignores people's privacy and it never gets reined in. And so, even if you follow the laws today, when you recognize how quickly things can change, you don't give somebody that kind of power.

You don't give it that. And when I look forward at the United States, you have an empire that's increasing, you know, fine for right now, but an increasingly bankrupt empire. You know, tax and spend crowd all over the place. It's just a difficult relationship to want to be in.

And yet, it's such a deep relationship where for most of us, this is your country, this is your home, this is where you live, this is where the people that you love are. And I find it really maddening to try to go through it and very humiliating to do the analysis as I have done.

I guess I just wish for, I wish for, I don't know, governments like Singapore, Hong Kong, especially before the Chinese, where you have governments that say, "Listen, we honor those who are productive and we want to provide services to you. Instead of, we're going to use our military might, we're going to use our spying infrastructure, we're going to use our law enforcement infrastructure to build this oppressive place." So, I'm sorry.

I don't mean to be anti-United States. There are many wonderful things about it. If I had to be stuck in one country for the rest of my life, I would still choose the United States. I'm going back to the United States next week. And yet, it's just really humiliating to me to try to match the rhetoric, the brand up with the reality.

And you feel cheated. You feel cheated when you actually do the analysis. So, your mileage may vary. But I go through significant swings in my own thinking where some days I'm like, "Oh, it's not that bad, Josh. You're being an extreme. It's just not that bad." And then there are the days where I'm like, "Oh, it's not that bad.

I'm just being an extreme. It's just not that bad." And then there are the days where I just say, "I want out. I don't want to be a citizen of the United States. What benefit do I get? All I get is this giant spy apparatus. I'm always worried about, am I breaking some law that I don't know about in the millions of pages of laws?

Am I doing something wrong?" I remember just the sense of peace and freedom that came when I finally got rid of all of my investment licenses and my insurance licenses. And again, you know me, right? I try to be so careful. Even when I was talking earlier about liability, I try to be so careful.

I try to be scrupulous. I try to be really knowledgeable and careful. The problem is this. When you know what you know, you also know what you don't know. And so, you always realize where your danger zones could be. And I remember, I would always think, "Okay, have I said something?

Have I done something? Are my notes good enough? I'm going to get audited by the SEC and they're going to come in here and they're going to say this thing." And I remember when I got out of and I got rid of them and I could officially come to the microphone and just be a person again, instead of a regulated individual.

I forget the language now. It's been so long. Instead of a... I think it's a regulated person, something like that. And I could get free of them. And I look at it and I say, "I do so much better now. I give better advice. I do more good than when the SEC was looking over my shoulder.

And I'm worried about a FINRA audit." And I feel like the same thing applies with regard to this governmental stuff. Problem is, it's a whole lot easier to get rid of a license and to get another one. If I wanted to go back and get another license, three months, I could have them all back again.

There's no big deal. It's not the same way when you're dealing with a country. You're dealing with a citizenship, and especially in the United States. Any other country in the world, you can leave. You can go elsewhere. And for the most part, generally speaking, some exceptions. China's changing what they're doing.

The last couple of years, major changes. Some of the Five-I countries, major, still some changes. But it just seems unfair. It's frustrating. So I share that. That's not a very hopeful tone to share that. Well, let me close on a hopeful tone. I hate to close a show on an unhopeful tone.

I'll say this. For all of my black thinking and all of my frustrations and all of that stuff, here's the reality we have to acknowledge. And I think this is honest. We have to be honest with the actual facts. You and I today can live more freely than almost anybody throughout human history.

We have more freedom than almost any time in human history. Even with all the erosions, even with all the things that are easy to look at and feel bad about, as individuals, there are more opportunities for any individual person to just simply make free choices. And there are many good reasons for that.

But let's focus on those positive sides. And let's try to keep a good, firm grasp on reality, not get locked into tunnel vision. Let's appreciate the benefits of the things that we do have. And let's make decisions that what I try to do is always try to keep myself anchored in a firm, big-time grasp of life, not just say, "This is the thing that I don't like, and I'm going to leave because of this," but to say, "Let me look at all the factors." Because we truly do, as individuals, there have never been more opportunities.

We're living, and I really mean this, we are living in a golden age of mankind. We're living in a golden age of mankind, and it's just going to get better from here. We're living in a time of more prosperity. We're living in a time of more peace. We're living in a time of more opportunities, of more freedom, more competition among countries.

We're living in a golden age. And I want to be one who focuses on the opportunities and the practical solutions to those things, not one who just sits around and cries. So I hope that's a good, positive way to end it up. Happy Friday to you. Looking forward to be back with you next week.

A series of shows coming next week, and then I'll be on vacation for the rest of the year, and I hope that you will as well. So I wish you very well. If you'd like to join me on next week's show, make sure you go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Just search Patreon for Radical Personal Finance, and I'd love to have you on next week's show.

God bless. Talk to you soon. The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back! The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life. A three-game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket. Buy today and you'll receive an additional game for free. Don't miss out. Visit lakings.com/holiday today.