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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ 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 Sheets. I'm your host.

Today, we're going to talk about the basics of living rich while also working towards financial freedom. And I'm going to share with you some ways that I have changed my mind. I'm going to share with you why I have decided to be less frugal in the future than I have been in the past.

Why I'm going to intentionally choose to spend more money, even though that will probably delay the time at which I'll be financially independent. When I created the little tagline that you hear me lead every show with, "Living a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less," I just sat down and I spent some time noodling on the words that really resonated in my heart, of the message that I wanted to share with people around money.

And I tried to put those words into a sentence or a phrase. And what came out naturally was that dual fold mandate, "Living a rich and meaningful life now and building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less." And it simply resonated with me. I started saying it, and the more I said it, the more it resonated, the more it resonated, the more I started saying it.

But it's been a while since I've defined the terms. And so I want to begin with defining the terms as I think about them, and then tell you about these changes that I'm making so that I can focus more on living rich rather than pursuing financial independence. Let's begin with the first part.

You'll notice that I talk about living a rich and meaningful life. I inserted the word meaningful for a very specific reason. It's my opinion that many of the best things in life cannot be bought. They do contribute to a rich life. I'm happy for someone to say they're part of a rich life.

But I want us always to remember that some of the best experiences that we have, the things that we most treasure have nothing to do with money. Years ago, I heard billionaire Ross Perot interviewed by somebody who was talking about happy periods of his life, and they asked him, "Ross, are you happy?" And his answer was, "Yes, I'm happy." But his answer was, "I'm not really any happier now than I was when I was living as a military officer in on-base housing with my wife.

I was happy in both places." And we've heard many, many people who are mega rich say the same thing again and again and again. The way that I like to interpret that for those of us who are not yet billionaires is simply this. Ask somebody when was one of the happiest times in their life.

And if you prod them a little bit, many people will talk about how much they enjoyed their college years. And I also very much enjoyed my college years. One of the things that's common to many of us during our college years is we weren't financially wealthy. I was pretty well broke most of my college years.

I would work to pay my tuition, and then I would run out of money. I would work some more, pay some more, run out of money, borrow money on student loans, and I was working to pay back my student loans. I never really had a lot of money during college.

But I really enjoyed my college years. I'm really grateful for the years that I spent in university. And it was a very important formative experience in my life. I really enjoyed it even though I didn't have much money. And when I've asked people this question, many people have agreed with me that they had a similar experience.

And so I like to probe them, and I like to say, "Well, why did you enjoy your college years so much?" I'll simply give you my answers. One of the reasons I enjoyed my college years was that I had a very active social life. Not as active as some people.

I was busy working and going to school, and that took a lot of time. So I wasn't a professional playboy with no time -- with just plenty of time. But I still had a very active social life. And the college environment genuinely -- generally leads us in the direction of an active social life.

People have very few responsibilities. We're surrounded by people who also don't have a lot of responsibilities. There's lots of people -- if you're living in on-campus housing, there's lots of people of a similar age, perhaps many people with similar interests. And it's relatively easy to do something different all the time.

I remember my freshman year, my roommate and I, who were good friends from high school, we did something different basically every single night of the week. We were always with some friends, always going out, always doing this, always doing that. And very few of those things cost a lot of money.

We'd load up the truck full of people, and we'd go and cruise to the beach, or go drive up and down Palm Beach and run from the cops, or go hot-tubbing, right, all the things that college students do. You do all these things that you're doing because you don't have any money to go out and do all that much, so you wind up having fun together, even in the silliest of things.

We would get together at someone's dorm room to watch a TV show. We were big friends of The Apprentice back in the day. That was during my college years. And we'd organize apprentice parties, and we'd get together and we'd watch The Apprentice every day while we were in school.

And we really enjoyed it. And yet, that just simple social life is very, very meaningful. And, of course, there's more things to it, right? It was easy to travel. Many of us took trips together, and you'd travel to different places. And perhaps you were engaged in sports. The simplest things, go out and play ultimate frisbee, or go out and play on some rec league, play volleyball, et cetera, just really had a lot of fun, even though it didn't cost a lot of money.

And those things led to a very rich life. I also consider my college experience to have been very important because I had a rich intellectual life. It was a very challenging time for me, a very stimulating time for me. For many people, especially those of us who pursue a liberal arts degree, you think a lot about the big questions of life.

You think a lot about philosophy, and you read many of the great minds, and you spend time talking to smart people about some of these things, and debating things, and arguing things. And, you know, for my personality type, I enjoy that. I always find that an important part of living a rich life.

There are many other things, right? It's frequently common that people of a college age pursue some sort of spiritual quest. You start to test and think about everything that you were taught when you were a child, and you start to pick and choose and sort and try to figure out, "Well, what do I believe, and why do I believe it?" And so it can be a time of great spiritual growth or change, and that can feel very rewarding.

And you learn things. You learn things through the relationships with other people, with dating people, or friendships from diverse backgrounds, and you start to be challenged about things. And yet, none of that involves money. I think we should also acknowledge, though, that one of the reasons why people enjoy college a lot is because they don't have a lot of responsibility.

You have a room that maybe you clean up sometimes, but it's not much. It doesn't take up much space. You've got this humble, humble abode. And there's not a whole lot of comparing among college students. If everyone's living in on-campus housing, yeah, sure, somebody might have a nicer car than another person, but everyone's kind of at the similar social class, and so you can enjoy one another.

And I enjoyed my friends who had fancy cars, and they would let me drive them, and I thought it was great, right, that I got to drive their fancy cars without necessarily having to own them. I was often the DD for my friends, and so the deal was I got to drive their fancy cars, and then I'd be happy to be their designated driver.

And you had a lot of free time, right? If you think about it, a full load of college classes, 18 hours a week, right, 18 hours a week, and maybe you're a great college student, and you really study, and you actually study two hours for every hour of class.

So what, you're up to a grand total of, if my math is right, 54 hours a week? Big deal. And I don't know anybody who would study two hours a week for each hour of class. And so you have usually a tremendous amount of free time, depending on your work schedule outside of class.

So here we are at a time in our life where we probably don't have a lot of money, and yet it's a very rich and fun time of life. I think we need to remember that. But the meaningful life also expands to things that aren't even measured just in fun.

The power of relationships. Last night I stumbled across a clip of Warren Buffett talking, and he was kind of elaborating on some of these themes in a short little clip. And he mentioned that a friend of his thinks about a woman who had lived through the Holocaust and had been locked up in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, that the way that she judged people was whether or not they would hide her from the police, whether or not they would conceal her when the police came a-knockin'.

And he thought, and his answer was, "When you're 70 years old, you won't care so much about how much money you have, but you'll care a great deal about how many people there are in your life who would hide you from the police." I thought, "What a profound way to articulate it." Just talking about the value of relationships.

A meaningful life is one that is rich in relationships. People that love you. People that give you an opportunity to love them. People that believe in you, that support you. People that depend on you. Those relationships lead to a very meaningful life. And I don't personally believe that all those relationships have to be, you know, the perfect loving friendships.

Sometimes the relationships that are the most meaningful might be antagonistic. Sometimes relationships that are meaningful might be needy, where you're helping someone or being helped by someone. But just simply paying attention to the value of relationships and not sacrificing people on your quest for wealth. So that's what I mean by the meaningful life component when I say how to live a rich and meaningful life.

Don't forget those things that are not easily measured in money. But now back to living a rich life. Living a rich life obviously includes many of those things that are not measured in money, but it includes those things that are measured in money. A rich life to me is a bottle of wine and a great sunset.

A rich life to me is a warm cup of coffee and a beautiful sunrise with a friend. Those things are worth paying attention to. They're worth collecting. They're worth building in your own life. You reflect back and you think, "How many sunrises have I actually paid attention to?" And so you make the effort to go and book an east-facing room so that you can get up early enough to see the sunrise.

You make the effort to go and go fishing with your buddy in the morning so you can be out there on the water early in the morning and enjoy all of the early morning beauty. Or whatever those things are for you. Those things are all part of living rich.

I'm going to give you a lot more ideas coming up here about living rich, how to live rich. But it just means enjoying things today, living well. And living well means so many things. Having a little bit of style around your life, having some aesthetics around you that you enjoy, having comfort, things that you care about.

So however you define those, those are important. Now there's no question that we also need to pay attention to the long term. We want to pay attention to building financial freedom. But you'll notice that I chose the word freedom and not financial independence. In years past I've flirted with the FIRE movement, the Financial Independence Early Retirement movement.

I've talked to many of the FIRE personalities. I've admired many of the FIRE teachers. But I've never explicitly branded myself as part of the FIRE movement. I've been frustrated with some of the things about the FIRE movement. I've been inspired by many of the people who pursued financial independence and early retirement.

But I never felt like it was a great fit for me. But I couldn't quite articulate why. There have been times when I've been more vocal. I never released a couple of these shows. But I have pages of outline that I prepared on. One time I sat down and I was like, "Why I'm not part of the FIRE movement?" And I had pages of reasons.

But I just, I sat on it and I said, "No, it's not clear enough to me." But I chose the word freedom very carefully rather than independence. And that's what I want, the heart of what I want to share with you. I chose freedom because freedom is much more achievable than independence.

I define financial independence as the ability to live on the income from your investments and support your current lifestyle without the need to work to generate income. That's my working definition of financial independence. That's what when I use the word financial independence, that's almost certainly what I am referring to unless I clarify it in some other way.

But financial freedom can mean something very different. I believe financial freedom can be achieved in very simple ways. Ask a bum on the street what financial freedom might mean to him. It might be as simple as a hundred bucks in his pocket. Financial freedom for another person might be as simple as getting out of debt or even simply getting caught up on their payments.

Financial freedom for another person might be as simple as paying off all their old creditors so they don't have this cloud hanging over their head where they're not scared to put money in the bank because it might be sucked out by some judgment creditor. For another person, financial freedom could have a very large price tag, millions of dollars in investments, millions of dollars in luxury homes to live in.

You choose it. But I like that word freedom because it's intentionally vague with regard to a personal numbered definition. You pick the number. I also like it because it's something that can change throughout life. You can acknowledge the fact that you're enjoying financial freedom now while pursuing more financial freedom without necessarily being committed to, "I'm pursuing financial independence by this certain date." Now let me share with you something that I've thought a lot about over the last few weeks as I've been on vacation with my family.

I've thought a lot about the use of frugality and whether frugality is appropriate for me. There have been times in my life where I have been an intensely frugal person. I take a great deal of personal pride in my ability to be frugal. I take a great deal of personal pride in my ability to live well on very little.

It's fun for me. I enjoy it. And it's a matter of personal pride in my identity. One of the things that I try to do is I try to make sure that I don't become weak and flabby due to needing excess money. I don't admire people who need a lot of money to be happy.

And so throughout my lifetime, I want to maintain and continue to cultivate my personal ability to be very happy and content with very little. I appreciate asceticism. I appreciate a sense of stoic asceticism where many people throughout history have found that by intentionally putting themselves into difficult situations and by avoiding sumptuous foods or luxurious surroundings, they toughened their personal character.

For me, that's inspiring and true. I find fasting to be an intense--fasting from food. I find fasting from food to be an intense personal challenge and yet really rewarding. When I cook, I enjoy eating luxurious, sumptuous foods, but I also take a great deal of joy in cooking and enjoying very simple foods.

It's really amazing when you get into cooking what you can create with a little bit of simple flour, a rich loaf of bread, and a little bit of butter to put on it, or some olive oil. And you can eat really well. And so I personally--it's important to me that I do this and continue to do it.

I take great joy in enjoying those things. I always take special note if I eat a fast food hamburger for a couple dollars of how good it is. It's genuinely good. You can go to Burger King and order yourself a Whopper, and that is a genuinely delicious hamburger. You don't need to be, you know, uptight and pretentious about, "Oh, only this other hamburger is good." It's genuinely good, and I try to continue to take pleasure in simple things.

One of my personal little pet peeves is I don't want to become a coffee snob. I always enjoy it when my coffee snob friends and relatives serve me fancy coffee, but I enjoy a cup of Maxwell House basic coffee, and I find it pleasurable. And I don't want to be the person who has to have my blue bottle coffee in order for me to be content.

And that helps me to feel strong and robust. However, I think that in the same way that you can be very proud, or you can be so excessively proud about being not proud, that you're actually proud and egotistical about your lack of pride. If you go around one end of a character, you always arrive at the other side, the opposite extreme.

In the same way that I want to—I'm proud and appreciate the fact that I can enjoy life even if I don't make a lot of money, I want to be careful that I don't prioritize frugality more than anything else. And I've observed this a lot in the personal finance space.

I've observed a lot of us who somebody goes and buys a new car, instead of being genuinely happy for them, we just sit back and scoff at them and point our fingers and say, "Ha ha ha, what an idiot. How could they do that?" And I don't think I've done a lot of that, but whatever I have done, I don't want to do anymore.

I'm not going to do anymore. And I want you to be cautious of it as well. One of the things that I'm trying to do more and more, and I'm satisfied with my progress, but I want to do more and more, and I want you to do it as well, is enjoy other people and their perspectives on life without feeling the need to impose your own onto them.

If somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, look at my new car," and they're clearly excited about it, don't try to rain on their parade and say, "Don't you know that you should have bought a three-year-old car?" Just be happy for them and enjoy that they're going to enjoy it with them.

And one of the things that I have realized, though, that's really brought me freedom, is that an excessive focus on financial independence can lead to far too much frugality now, excessive frugality. We talk about financial independence, and here I just want to talk about the path towards financial independence of extreme savings.

Recognize, of course, that there are many paths to financial independence. You can build a giant company that goes public for billions of dollars and become financially independent without ever saving a dollar. That's one good path to financial independence. But many of us have been very heavily influenced by extreme savings.

I have been so helped, and I so appreciate the philosophy of extreme saving. I think this philosophy in the modern era has been very well popularized by Jacob Lund Fisker, and then Mr. Money Mustache, and many others as well. And the concept is very simple. If you'll save a high percentage of your income, you can quickly become financially independent.

I remember when I first understood this. I had done shows on it, and I stand behind those shows. I was a financial advisor, and finally I sat down with Jacob Lund Fisker's book, "Early Retirement Extreme," and I sat and I understood the math. I understood the math behind early retirement in a way that I had never understood, and I was a financial advisor.

And I realized, "Wow, if I can just save 50 or 75 percent of my income, I can be financially independent in 20 or 15 years. That's incredible." To this day, I still feel that's incredible, and I like saving a very high percentage of my income. But I've become clearer on exactly what it is that I most appreciate about it.

Here's what it is. The thing I most appreciate about extreme savings is it offers a pathway to financial independence for people who may not be particularly skilled in the art of making money. I personally feel an intense pressure to make sure that when I talk about things, those things are accessible by almost anyone.

I want to speak in a way that's very egalitarian, that opens up the doors to almost anybody. But I increasingly recognize, and I think it's important that all of us recognize, that it's simply not going to be possible for everyone to have the same benefits. But over the years, I've watered down my own thinking and my own message by trying to speak to everyone.

That's what extreme savings can do. I love that extreme savings can offer the hope for financial independence for somebody who is making 60 or 50 or 30 or $20,000 per year, where you say that, "Listen, even if you're making a modest income, you can set aside a percentage of your income, and depending on that percentage, and just invest it well over time, and you can become wealthy." That's powerful.

It's really amazing and really powerful that that's actually true. However, there's a whole other side of financial independence for those people who are skilled in the art of making money, and there's really no reason for them to pursue extreme savings. There's no reason for somebody who earns a lot of money, and for somebody who enjoys the way that they earn it, to really participate in much savings at all.

And although I feel a little bit silly that it's taken me this long to see it clearly, I'm not sure if I'm articulating it clearly, I'm doing my best, but at least to see it clearly in my head, that extreme savings may be wonderful for some people, but it's not wonderful for me.

I still love the fact that it's a pathway, and I affirm that extreme savings is wonderful for a lot of people, but I've realized afresh, it's not wonderful for me. Why? Well, two things. Number one, I am gifted in the art of making money. I'm very skilled at it, and I intend to be far more skilled at it in the future.

I understand the skills needed, I understand the business models that lead to high income, I understand all of the principles, and I put those in practice in my life, and I make a lot of money. And I intend to make even more. And I can articulate those principles in a way that's very powerful and very effective.

And so, as such, making money is not difficult. Years ago, I thought that making money was difficult. I thought that those who worked the hardest made the most. And people would say that wasn't true, but I didn't understand it, I didn't get it, I didn't see it. Now I understand it more and more, that making money is not difficult.

It's not easy, necessarily. Let me just say, it's not easy. But easy and difficult is not... Just because something is not easy doesn't mean that it's necessarily difficult. And at this point, after years of thinking about this stuff, years of teaching about it, to me it's the things that lead to making money, making a lot of money, are so blindingly obvious, that I question, like, why didn't I see it earlier?

And you can't force yourself to see things that you're not ready for, but at this point, I see it. And I see no reason to think that now that I understand the game in a way that I never did before, now that I understand the rules of the game, why would I ever lose that skill and lose that ability?

To me, that's been a very transformative thing. It's a mindset shift of something that I didn't... A skill I didn't have when I was younger that I realize I now have. It took me a long time, a lot of hard work to figure it out, but I see it now.

And I feel like it's one of those things that once you see it, how can you ever unsee it? Once you know, you can't unknow. The second thing that's been impactful for me is simply this. Extreme savings is great for people who want to stop working. I, on the other hand, never want to stop working.

And for years I've always said, "But I want to be in a position to stop working if I want to." And that's still true. I still want to add that little addendum. But what's been very apparent to me and real to me as I've thought a lot and reflected a lot over the last few weeks is simply this.

I don't ever want to stop working. Now, this is nothing new. You've heard me say that many times. But here's the question. Put these two things together. If you understand that you... If you understand how to make money, if you have the skill of making money, and you understand the formula, the recipe, the tools, the ingredients, you got the know-how.

If you have the skill of knowing how to make money and you plan to keep working forever, then why would you engage in extreme savings? It's hard to give a rational answer to that question. It's hard to say, "Here's why." Without question, I believe it's still worthwhile to save money.

I want to hasten to add this and make it clear for many reasons. Just because I want to keep working doesn't mean I can't. Sorry, doesn't mean I will be able to keep working. Today, I could suffer a stroke and be left totally incapacitated, dependent on the love and care of my family and our personal resources for the rest of my life.

It's happened to better men than I. Today, something could happen and I could be banned from working. I could find myself in some kind of legal hot water, locked up in prison or in a situation where I'm simply not able to do it. The day might come, as it does for most of us, where we just simply reach a day in time where we can't work anymore due to old age, infirmity, incapacity.

Stockpiling money as insurance against that happening is certainly a wise thing to do. Stockpiling money can lead to bigger opportunities. I'm in a very different situation today with regard to my work opportunities than I was when I was broke. When I coach high-income professionals, I always focus on the fact that it's very important for high-income professionals to have significant personal reserves so that if they lose their job, they have a long runway before they have to get another job.

Once you get a job making a half million dollars a year, you can always get another job making a half million dollars a year. However, even though you're very good at that and you're worth it, I think it's still true that there are fewer jobs available with a salary of half a million dollars a year than there are with salaries of $50,000 per year.

The day laborer who works for $10 or $15 per hour doesn't worry very much if he gets fired from a job today because he can go and replace that job tomorrow. But you don't have the same wage cycle when you reach a higher end of the income scale. So you got to think about that.

When you're involved in big business deals and that's how you make your money, maybe you come in and you do fix-ups for a company and you invest a few million bucks of your own money and you buy a company, you turn it around, you sell it four, five, ten years later, whatever, those opportunities will always exist.

But they're hard to force. You have to wait on the market and so you need those reserves. And so it still makes sense to save money, but it doesn't make sense to just engage in extreme savings forever. Why? You're not going to quit. And so in some ways I feel like, you know those scenes from, I don't know of a specific movie, but the scene where somebody takes a little virus that's a spider and some evil guy inserts it via a syringe into somebody's veins and then it's got to be cut out.

I feel like that's almost kind of what I'm doing in my own philosophy. I'm excising this little virus from myself called extreme savings because I feel like it's kept me trapped for a number of years. First, I have, here's why, I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who've engaged in extreme savings.

I deeply respect Jacob Lundfisker or Mr. Money Mustache. I deeply respect Charles Long or some of these guys that, probably the older guys that have done extreme savings. I deeply respect them. I respect what they've done. I respect what they do. And I respect that the path they've chosen is right for them.

Second reason is I respect and I love the fact that extreme savings works for anybody with an income. To me, it makes me feel so powerful as a financial planner that I don't have to walk into a room of people making $40,000 a year and say, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, the only way that you can become wealthy is if you can make $400,000 per year." Because I have to admit that although I believe everyone can do it, I know that everyone won't do it.

One of my either great virtues or great vices is the fact that I believe that everyone can do it. When I, for a short time, recruited financial representatives when I worked in the financial advice space, I didn't do management. I did personal production. But for a short time, I did management.

And I ran a college intern program for a summer. And I had this disease that I was just impressed by every single person that came through my room, came across my desk. And I would sit there and I'd be like, "Man, this guy has got it going on." Or like, "This girl, man, she's awesome." And I was so convinced that they were going to do great.

And then I would contract them and they would fail. And my manager would be like, "Was it not obvious to you? Do you not see it?" And they would tease me because, "Oh, Joshua thinks everyone can win." Well, I do. I think everyone can win. But maybe I'm getting mature enough to realize that not everyone will win.

And so extreme savings allows you to walk into a room of people making $40,000 a year and say, "Listen, if you'll save 10%, 15%, 20% of your income, you can live really well on $35,000 a year, on $30,000 a year. And if you'll save $10,000 a year, very quickly you'll build wealth and here are some things that you can do with that modest amount of money and you can do it.

It's awesome. You can do it." But just because extreme savings is-- there are extreme savers I respect. Just because I love the fact that extreme saving can work in a very egalitarian way doesn't mean that it's right for me. But the times in my life when I read about extreme savings were times when I wanted to quit.

There were times when I wanted to stop my job. There were times when I was working jobs where my escape was my lunch break and I'd leave the office and I'd go to the bookstore and I'd sit and I'd read every book in the bookstore that I could find in personal finance or investing or whatever the thing I was interested in at the time.

And all I could think about was how I could escape. I'd run the math, how I could escape. Or I'd sit there and browse the computer and I'd think about how I could escape. But over time I feel like I've solved the job problem to the point where I no longer want to escape.

So why do I need extreme savings? It doesn't serve me. But it's still been that little virus in the back of my head that has caused me to continually say to my wife, "You know, well, tell you what, let's choose this other place over here that's a little bit cheaper.

It may not be exactly as nice as we like, but it's a little bit cheaper. Let's do it." Now, to be clear, I shouldn't even give so many disclaimers, but important to me, you can live well on little. But there's been a few experiences in my life over the last few years.

I remember a couple of years ago we were living in an apartment, and it was a perfectly adequate apartment inside the doors. It was a nice apartment. It was big, had enough space. My wife decorated it beautifully. I enjoyed being there. One day I looked out the window and I thought to myself, "The view out of every single one of my windows is ugly." We weren't living in the hood, but it was just ugly.

It was ugly. A fence with algae on one side and kind of an okay garden, but not a really great one. Kind of a road with some mediocre houses on the other. A neighbor with unpainted old windows on the other. And I thought, "This is ugly. I don't want to live like this anymore.

I'd like a little bit more aesthetic beauty in my life." But there's still that little voice, right? "If I do that, I'll exceed my X percent savings ratio. And then how will I hold the candle, hold the prize for being the most hardcore saver out there?" Here's what's worse.

There have been a lot of times where those frugal decisions have cost me money. A lot of money. I remember I was doing this with my phone system a number of years ago. I know quite a bit about technology and phone technology and I studied it all out. So a few years ago, I came up with an amazing system, if I do say so myself.

Had it all figured out. I had my smartphone all loaded up. I used prepaid SIM cards for my phone, which I loved because there was no contract. I don't like contracts. And I had this beautiful system. I had moved everyone away from direct phone calls. I had moved everyone to messaging apps.

I had moved everyone from messaging apps to-- I'm sorry, to various messaging apps to communicate with them. I still had-- I'd moved all my phone numbers using a combination of Google Voice and Skype and Sudo and some of the different communications apps. I had everything figured out. And so I had a phone set up that I had full connectivity any time I had Wi-Fi.

And so I would drop the-- I'd play it around. There were weeks at a time where I didn't even bother to renew my monthly service plan because I just didn't need it. I just had Wi-Fi wherever I needed to go and I was good to go. So I had a virtually free-- I can't remember if I was paying $0.99 a month or something for something.

But I had a free cell phone system. And I had this planned for international travel because my plan was, all right, I've got this cheap phone or I've got this-- I've got a nice phone, nice iPhone with all these communication apps. And so when I go abroad, I will-- I'll pop in a foreign SIM card.

And wherever I go, I'll just grab a prepaid SIM card. I'll pay cash, pop that thing in, and everything will work. So that was the plan. So in February of 2019, I got on an airplane and left the United States with my family. And I got a local SIM card.

I popped that sucker in my phone and everything broke. Everything broke. Along the way, I got locked out of my Google account. I still can't get in-- I've lost three Google accounts. I couldn't authenticate in. And so sudo broke because I put in a SIM card from a country that sudo didn't support.

Skype couldn't work with a Skype out. I could call out, but I couldn't call in because they couldn't confirm my number. And WhatsApp broke. Just everything broke. And I worked hard to, like, cobble some things together. So then I said, "Okay, well, I can solve this." And so, you know, some months later, I went back to the United States.

I bought a couple new phones, did a couple things. And I'll go ahead and tell the details because I think you'll find it interesting. So along the way, I was like, "Well, maybe I should go ahead and get a traditional phone number from one of the big carriers." But I think I can do this better.

So along the way, I realized that now Wi-Fi calling, instead of it being a unique thing, Wi-Fi calling is a good thing. Sorry, it's a standard thing. So I said, "All right, here's what I'll do." So I was in the United States. I bought another just cheap Mint SIM, Mint Mobile SIM for, you know, their deal, $180 for a year's service or whatever, super cheap.

And I said, "I'll set up this phone number, and I'll just be able to do Wi-Fi calling from anywhere in the world." Because I've done Wi-Fi calling for years, used Google Voice for years, even used it when traveling internationally. So I said, "All right, I'll save the money. I'll get this thing." And I got Wi-Fi calling.

So I set it all up in the United States, set up my new phone, set up my Android phone. Test it every single way that I can. I tested on a couple different Wi-Fi networks, you know, airplane mode, Wi-Fi only, make the calling, et cetera. And then I go and leave the United States, fly home, fire up my phone, super proud of myself.

Got my U.S. phone number, everything's going to work. Fire it up, join it to my home Wi-Fi. "We need your E911 verification." E911 verification? So I try to do it. "We can only do this if it's over the network." And I -- again and again and again. And I was so frustrated.

And so I went on another trip to the United States. I bought another phone. I was committed. "Okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this." Finally, like I'm skipping half of the frustration. Every time I thought I had a solution, it was good. And so finally, you know, some time back, I was in the United States.

I walked into an Apple store. I said, "Give me that phone." I hiked over to a flag carrier. I signed up for a phone plan, and I just said, "I'm done with it. I need a phone that works." And when I think about what an idiot I was, you know, pursuing that little frugal decision, partly for the fun of it, right?

I enjoy it. It makes me -- it gives me something to laugh about and something I can laugh at myself. But partly also to keep my costs down, right? I'm doing this extreme savings thing. And how much time I wasted on that and how many missed opportunities. It just -- it was ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.

Since I got that and bought a new phone, put it on just a standard service, my life has been easy, easy. Big lesson in there for me. I share it with you in case it helps you. But I've dickered around with so many little things over the years, and because of wanting to do extreme savings, and it's hurt me on the top end.

So those are -- you can laugh at me, feel free. It's just, you know, a few stories. But I want to close out today's show by simply saying this. For me, while I love extreme savings as a solution for people who don't like their job, for me, I've made the conscious decision that I'm going to cut out, going to excise that little virus of extreme savings that's kept me from living better, spending more money, living more rich now.

I'm going to cut it out because I don't want to quit. It doesn't mean I'm going to spend 100% of my income. It doesn't even mean I'm going to spend 90% of my income. But when I spend lower amounts of income, it's not just so I can quit work, I don't want to quit work.

I'm still going to save. I'm still going to be prudent. I'm still going to prepare for opportunities. I need to save money for opportunities. But along the way, I'm going to live a lifestyle that I want to live. I'm going to live rich now, even if it costs more money.

Because the more and more over the past months and years, I guess, I don't know how long I've been -- I'm able to articulate it now, but this is not a recent change. But over the months and years as I've kind of moved more in this direction, what I find is that that frugal mindset, that extreme, hardcore savings mindset, it really keeps you trapped in a world of scarcity.

It keeps you trapped in a world of scarcity. And maybe I'm just dumb because I like to prove things out for myself. And maybe -- I've heard people say that, right? But I couldn't believe them. But it really does, right? It keeps you trapped in a world of scarcity.

But one of the things that's transformed for me, and I can't pin my finger on exactly every way that it's done, that it's happened, but that there is no scarcity of money in the world. I find myself saying day after day after day to clients and to my -- just to clients and friends, money is the ultimate renewable resource.

There is so much money available in the world. There is an unlimited amount of money available in the world, literally. Anytime we need more money, we just make more. We just print more out of nothing. There's an unlimited amount of money available in the world. There's an unlimited amount of money available to you and to me.

Think about it. What have you done in your life whenever you've needed money? You just went out and got some more, right? You just went out and got some more money. You needed some money, so you went and got some. Guess what? That's always how life is. And when you understand that money flows based upon value, when you understand that money flows based upon service, that those who serve the most effectively, serve the most the best, have the most, when you understand that those who give value are those who have the most money, then the whole money equation completely changes.

There's an unlimited amount of money available in the world. And although I read all the books talking about, you know, financial mindset and abundance mindset, I didn't get it like I think I do now. And so sometimes the little frugal things are good. If you're broke, you got to do that stuff, right, because it buys you freedom.

But what got you here won't get you there. That's the lesson for me. I'm thankful for the path that I've gone on because it's gotten me to here. But what got me here won't get me there. And so I need to systematically identify those things that served me for a time but don't serve me anymore.

They served me for a time, but they don't serve me anymore. That's life, right? If your mindset and your mentality, your philosophies, your principles are exactly the same as they are, exactly the same today as they were 20 years ago, I really question how you've been growing. It's not to say you may not still be committed to some bedrock principles, some things you believe.

For example, I'll finish this show and happily record another show about frugality and how important frugality is because frugality really is a foundation, a foundational financial concept. But that word frugality needs to be measured through the specifics of a situation. And there are times when it pays to be frugal and times when it doesn't, and so it needs to be doled out carefully.

So you may have some principle that you're committed to. That's fine, but you still need to upgrade your mindset and recognize that if I'm going to make room for something new and different this year, I need to get rid of something that just was fine for before, but it doesn't serve me anymore.

Sometimes we don't do that consciously. Sometimes we just go through life and we keep the same philosophy that we always had without examining and asking, "Does this still serve me?" If it does still serve you, keep it. But it may not still serve you. So for me, this year, one of my personal intentions is to focus heavily on living rich.

Focus heavily on living rich and building the kind of life that I don't want to retire from. I encourage you to do the same. Thank you for listening to today's show. Lots of things coming in the days ahead. For now, I'll just simply remind you that if you'd like to speak with me personally, I guess there are two ways that you could do that.

Number one is you can join my Patreon page. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance and support the show there, and you'll be welcome to join me for a Friday Q&A show. There should be a Friday Q&A show tomorrow. So I'd love to talk to you about anything that you have, specific questions, financial planning questions, whatever you want to talk about.

In addition, though, if you'd like to speak with me personally, I offer consulting appointments. I think I have some of those available starting in February. I've worked through some of the backlogs. So go ahead and go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, and you will be able to book a call with me, radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.

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