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. Today we're going to talk about philosophy, philosophy of time and money.

Because I believe that if you have your philosophy right, and what I mean by right is right for you, then you'll be more empowered to make appropriate decisions with how you use your time and your money. So in today's show I'm going to give you a menu of ideas that will lodge themselves in your brain and you can use to analyze your actions and think about whether your actions align with your values and with your personal philosophy.

I have found myself amplifying this topic more than almost any other topic in my private consulting work. I find myself talking about time and money. I've mentioned the statement I'm about to make publicly at various times, but I haven't really amplified it in the same way that I'm going to do now.

But I believe it's important and will help you to think about things properly. Goes like this. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. There is no limit to the amount of money that is available. There's no limit to the amount of money that is available in the world at large.

There are hundreds and hundreds of different currencies that have been developed throughout human history. Oh, thousands, I mean more than hundreds if we don't hit through all of history. But there are hundreds of currencies actively in use around the world today. There are many competing hundreds of new currencies being developed and lobbied for and participated in today.

And most of these currencies have no literal end as to how much there can be. Anytime we need more money, we just make more of it, right? We just print more of it. We just lend some more money out and manufacture some more digits on a computer screen and we've got more money.

There's no limit to the amount of money that is available in the world. And even if you want to talk about money not in terms of the number of digits, but simply in terms of a representation of value, there's no limit to the amount of value that can be created in the world.

There's no objective limit to the size of an economy. You could have a country that has a $100 trillion economy and there's no reason in the world why a decade later that country can't have a $200 trillion economy. Money is unlimited. And even if we bring things down to a more personal level, the amount of money that is available to you is unlimited.

You can always earn more money. You can always make more money. You can always gain more money. You bring more value to the marketplace and you can gain more money. And you can do this at any time in your life. The Motivational Speakers folders are full of stories about Colonel Sanders and Grandma Moses and many aged people who hit upon that idea, that thing that they all of a sudden developed to make them exceedingly wealthy.

And they're all true. And I would argue that your own personal experience mirrors this. Throughout your lifetime, there have been many times where you haven't had enough money. And at every single one of those times, you've just gone out and figured out how to get more. That's what people do.

When they don't have enough money, they go out and they figure out how to get more money. And so I argue that money is the ultimate renewable resource. Now let's contrast money with time. My argument is that time is the ultimate non-renewable resource, both on a macro scale and on a personal micro scale.

Why? Well, time has an absolutely fixed quantity. There was a point in the history of this universe when history itself began because time began. There was a point when time began and there will be a point in the future at which time ends. That's on the broad scale. Our entire life's existence is governed by time.

Everywhere in the world, we all have some system of a calendar through which we track the years, the months, the weeks, the days. And every single one of us has exactly the same amount of time on a daily basis. 24 hours and it's gone. And while there are different ways of marking the time, there are different calendars that we could look at to decide what year it is, the reality is that time is a fixed constant.

More importantly, once time is gone, it is gone. You've now been listening to me for five minutes and 55 seconds. And in the last five minutes and 55 seconds, you've experienced something that you will never ever experience again in your life. You've experienced the passage of that specific set of five minutes and 55 seconds.

That's why the most valuable thing that you give to me on a regular basis is your time. I don't worry much about money. I do my best to be a good provider of things for good amounts of money because I recognize that money represents something important. But I feel the pressure every single day to do a good job with your time, to give you something worth thinking about, because that's the most precious thing.

You've got 24 hours in a day. And once these 24 hours are gone, they're never coming back. It gets even worse. That the number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, seconds of your life are absolutely limited. There was a day on which you let out your first cry and you were born.

And that's the marker that we use to identify when time began for you. And there will come a day at which your friends all gather to celebrate your life and they'll all acknowledge you're dead. And that's the marker that we use to identify when time finished for you. Now the things that happen between those two dates are exceedingly important.

And it's how you use the time between those dates that will govern the meaning of your life. For me, these concepts have become deeply important. Just to recognize that money is unlimited, time is limited. Now generally the direct application of this, the reason I find myself repeating this little truth again and again, usually in a slightly more abbreviated format than I've just done, is that there are times in life at which time and money change in importance.

And this makes sense to me. First of all, we don't experience all units of time the same and we don't experience all units of money the same. Let me sketch that out for you with an example. I have children and one of the things that's fascinating about having young children is watching how important the days of their lives are to them.

Most importantly, of course, their birthday. And I was recently reminded my five-year-old has been asking again and again and again, "Daddy, how much longer till my birthday? How much longer till my birthday?" And it's funny because this didn't begin a month before the actual birthday. Rather, it was more like a month after the previous birthday.

We make a modest celebration of birthdays in my family. I like to acknowledge the day and fet the child on that day. But I wouldn't call it anything over the top. We don't do pony rides and clown shows. We just celebrate the person on that day. We have a modest party and we give a modest number of birthday presents.

As an adult, you look at it and you say, "It's a birthday, right? We're happy to celebrate the child." But it's nothing over the top. It's nothing that is really worth looking forward to for an entire year. But for my children, their birthdays are very, very important. Those specific days are a big deal to them.

And as I've watched that, I've reflected on why I think that is. And to me, it's simple. It's simply to acknowledge that for a child, the passage of one year, let's say you have a five-year-old child. For your five-year-old child, the passage of one year, 365 days, represents one-fifth of their lived experience.

They don't have a lot of previous experience to compare it to. And so that year is a very significant chunk of time because it represents a large percentage of their total lived experience. Whereas perhaps you're 50 years old, that same year is now only one-fiftieth of your experience. Instead of it being 20% of your life experience, it's 2% of your life experience.

So while that year is still important, it's a smaller percentage of your lived experience. So to me, it makes sense why children have different perspectives of time. But of course, it's also true that time, while fixed in objective reality, can change its nature dramatically depending on how we're experiencing it.

The minutes flow very slowly when you're dancing up and down outside of a bathroom, desperately trying to make it in the door before everything lets loose. On the other hand, there are times when you're having a peak experience and the hours just disappear. So our experience of time is different.

Now these arguments, I think, also apply to the field of money. For example, the experience of somebody going from totally broke, zero dollars of savings, to having a thousand dollars of savings, that's a very, very important event. It can help somebody to gain a significant level of personal freedom.

Perhaps an adult-level version of that might be $10,000, right? To go from zero dollars of savings to $10,000 buys somebody a significant amount of freedom. That $10,000 means a lot more than going from $100,000 of savings to $110,000 of savings. The first million counts for a whole lot more than going from $30 million to $31 million of savings.

And so our experience of money is different depending on where we are. But because our experience, because of the way that we acquire money, generally speaking, we always have to take into account the interaction, the interplay of time and money. This is most commonly understood just simply that when you're younger you have more time, but when you're older you usually have more money.

And so when you're younger you might do certain things, do certain tasks that are very time intensive because you don't have money to solve them in some other way. But when you're older, all of a sudden you realize the shortness of the days and you don't want to spend your time doing that, but you probably have more money.

And so you buy those tasks done for you by someone else. We're accustomed to thinking about that. We're also accustomed to thinking about money as a representation of time. When I was younger, my father taught me that time, sorry, money is simply stored up time. That when you take your time and you spend it to gain money, then you can save that money and now you have units of time saved that you can then use to pay other people to do other things for you, which saves you time.

I think there's some usefulness in thinking about money as stored up time, as something that you can do for yourself. I think this is useful when you think about working and not working. If you have somebody who works to earn their living and they earn $100 and they spend $100, they need to keep working to earn their living.

But if you think of somebody who works to earn $100 and saves $50 of that, they can now stop working for the same amount of time that it took them previously to earn the $100 and spend the $50. And so having time, having money buys you time. It buys you freedom from work.

Sometimes I think we miss the elegant simplicity of this concept by simply acknowledging if you'll save 50% of your money for every year that you work, you can afford to take a year off. That's a powerful concept, extremely powerful. But I want to go a little deeper because there are times in your life in which money is more valuable and there are times in which it is less valuable.

And those times change, similar thing with time. Time is more valuable, time is less valuable. I don't have a perfect formula to teach you other than to simply point some of these things out. The first thing I would point out is a lot of times in the modern conception of financial planning, meaning the proper layout of a life, the proper ordering of a life, a life well lived involves going to school, going to college, getting a good job, building a good career, working at that good job, saving money, and then retiring when you're 65 in order for you to live out your golden years.

That concept ignores certain things that are time bound, most importantly the raising of children. I'm very conscious of this, of course, because I have four children. And I think about this on a regular basis and I realize that just like I'll never get back the last five minutes in my life, I'll never get back the last year in my children's life.

Once my eldest goes from five years old to six years old, he or she's never going to repeat that particular year. Once your first child graduates from high school, he or she is never going to graduate from high school again. Once your first child catches that first touchdown, he's never going to catch that first touchdown again.

These moments come and then they're gone. And so one of the things I find myself reminding people is, "Listen, why are you saving money in the first place? Why are you actually stockpiling money? You're stockpiling money because you have these certain things in the future that you want to achieve.

But what you need to realize is the things that are the hardest for you to ever get back are usually sitting in front of you." So my little speech often to parents is, I just look down and I say, "Recognize that you've got X number of years left with your child." Even if you use the age of 18, I usually don't.

Because while certainly in the United States culture, the age of 18 is an age of legal majority, children change earlier than that. During adolescence, a child's attention tends to go from being focused on mom and dad and their personal family to focused on their own life, their friends, more outward focused.

And so your relationship with a 10-year-old daughter is going to be very different in nature than your relationship with a 15-year-old daughter. Whereas your relationship with a 17-year-old daughter, I think, is in many ways going to be very similar to your relationship with your 19-year-old daughter. The age of 18 is not the age in which the changes happen the fastest.

It's adolescence, it's puberty. So you got to be aware of that. In thinking about your family things, over the last weeks, I've been thinking a lot and talking with my wife. I'm thinking, "Okay, what are we going to do in the coming years?" I'm intensely conscious of the ages of my children, recognizing that there are these things that are happening due to time that I don't get to change.

I don't get to change the passage of time. And so I need to make the money fit the time, not the time fit the money. In application, I think the time is often most valuable when you could be using that time to make money. I'll give you an example.

I have thought through whether I regret not working more when I was younger. Sometimes I read accounts of very young people who come across the concepts of fire and extreme savings and such, and they're fabulously effective at it at a young age. And I've often thought, "Man, if only I had known then, if only I had known then, if only I had known what I could accomplish if I were 15 years old." I've taught and consulted with people and they teach you how to be financially independent when you're 25 or when you're 30.

And I believe those things have value. The problem is this. How do you compare the value of being financially independent because you've worked a lot and saved a lot with other values? How do you compare those things? There's a man that I admire named Kevin Kelly. He is the former editor of Wired Magazine.

And Kevin is just this eclectic person, really interesting guy, very eclectic, very well informed. But he writes and tells stories sometimes of his travels when he was younger. And he writes and talks about the years that he spent in Asia, back in the 1960s, I guess, '70s, when it was difficult to be there.

And I always think about these stories when I hear people tell them of, "Oh, I spent three years in such and such a place, and I was totally broke the whole time, but the experiences that I had, the things that I learned from that." I personally never approached my life in that way.

I was always kind of a goal-focused person. The idea of just going somewhere and hanging out was incompatible with my orderly life, with my structured life. And so I think about that contrast. And I think, "Well, do I regret not living more freeform like that person?" I remember one time I had a...

when I was a financial advisor, I had a client, and he talked about... he was in his mid to late 50s, and we were talking about his finances. He said, "I chose to spend all my money when I was younger. And I realized that I was going to have more financial problems down the road if I didn't save money then, but I wanted to spend my money when I was younger.

And I wanted to have those experiences. And I'm glad I did. And now I wonder if I did the right thing or not, because I don't have as much money saved as a lot of my peers do, but I'm glad I did." You think about that. You think, "Well, is one right or one wrong?" And of course the answer is, "Well, right or wrong for whom?

For whom are we doing the analysis?" That's what you have to answer. I don't regret the decisions that I made, but I also acknowledge the fact that I may have missed out on certain experiences because I didn't engage in that more just exploration, as perhaps somebody might call it.

So there's time that's valuable. Is it valuable to have a lot of money as a young person? Well, maybe, but then it's also valuable just to reflect on having time. And if you use all that time and you gain a bunch of money, you can't necessarily go back and have those same experiences.

My experience now, even if I had all the money in the world, my experience now at a different phase of life of going to Asia and bumming around would be very different than if I had done it when I was 20. The most important application for me though, and for many of my listeners, perhaps even you, is how this stuff applies with our children.

See those most productive financial years are somewhat peskily in our modern economy. They're somewhat peskily situated right in those most important years of parenting. I've often thought, "Man, wouldn't it be great if when I was young, I could have just worked when I was single, then got married, maybe worked a little bit more and then stopped working for a job while taking care of children and then I'll go start working again." I genuinely frequently find myself speaking to empty nester couples and saying, "What do you have to do other than work?" Working 40 hours a week or 30 hours a week or 50 hours a week, these are not bad things.

An empty nester couple can move into a small apartment and love it. Small apartment right in the middle of the city, all the nightlife all around, working a job. It gives a structure to life, a sense of contribution, sense of enjoyment. So I don't want to elaborate too much on this, but just the point is when you think about when the money is important, I often find myself saying to people, "Recognize that you can always get more money, but you can't always get more time.

You can always get more money, you can't always get more time." So don't trade those things you can't get more of unnecessarily or in an out of balanced way for those things you can always get more of. Why would you do that? It makes no sense. And yet we do it frequently.

We trade time for more money. Now I think there is an appropriate element of balance in all these things. I'm sitting here at my desk working today. I could go downstairs and be with my children, but is it just time that matters? No, I don't think so. I don't think that my personal goals would be enhanced any more by saying, "I'm going to spend this particular hour with my children instead of working." Why?

What am I going to do? What's the activity? What's the reason? What's the purpose? I'm happy to take more time to be with my children when there's purpose in it, but I also believe that what I'm doing right now is important and there's purpose in it. And there's purpose both in the simple practicalities of earning a living, but also in the grander scheme of things, the meaning of my life.

And so it's important to be balanced. It's important to have an appropriate perspective. But that perspective needs to change at times. If you find yourself out of balance, out of whack in something, then that perspective needs to change. For example, if you find yourself working nonstop, 100 hours a week, never seeing your eight and 10-year-old children, you need a slap in the face to say, "Extra money isn't going to help anything." You need to take care of your eight and 10, assuming that you have money already.

Now if you were totally broke, I would also, you're totally broke, you're sitting around living like a bum, but you're with your eight and your 10-year-old, I would want to also give you a slap in the face and say, "You need to go to work. There's a balance here that you need to pay attention to." But what about when it comes to living rich versus getting richer?

Well, to apply this to some of the concepts I spoke about recently, where I talked about my ambition, which is to live less frugally and to live more richly, I think some of these things apply. Where sometimes we've gotten so focused on the money that we've lost track of the value of the time and the value of enjoying the time, gaining meaning of the time.

I think we see this often tragically when we hear about somebody who dies right on the cusp of retirement. It hits us hard. I heard from a friend of mine, there was a guy who worked for the government, local government employee. He was very much looking forward to retirement.

Of course, he'd worked for his 20 years to be enrolled in the government pension. He had just bought his new RV to celebrate his retirement years, and he was looking forward to it. And then he got sick. This particular guy was coronavirus, got COVID-19, and he died. And so now that pension goes back into the system to provide a bigger paycheck for somebody else and it goes back and his RV will go to someone else.

It feels tragic oftentimes. But what feels to me tragic about that story, which again, I heard about a week ago, is a lot of times because of my perception of that kind of work. I have several friends of mine who work for governments, and they're often not brimming with enthusiasm about the great meaning and the grand scope of the impact that they have on a daily basis at their work.

I don't believe that you always have to have some kind of sense of passion for, "Oh, I'm passionate about this work." I think that can be a false god. I think that you can be passionate about how you do work, and I honor anybody who is productive. I honor a man who goes to work at a job that he doesn't love on a daily basis and does it because that's how he gains his living.

That's an honorable thing, and it's worthy of admiration. We shouldn't put someone down who engages in honest labor, even if it's working in a government job. But we also acknowledge sometimes that there are some people who work in a job like that who aren't there because they chose to be there, but they're there because that's where they ended up.

I have a number of friends like this, where they work in these jobs, and they just, "It's what I do. It's just a job. It gives me good health insurance. I got a pension." And you get this sense that they're just looking forward to the day when they can get out.

They're looking forward to the day when they can escape, when they can retire, when they can have the big retirement party. And for that reason, it feels particularly tragic when somebody who's right on the cusp of escaping dies. I think, "Oh man, I don't want that to be me." You think, "Here's this person that saved for years, and they scoped out this really exciting time of their life, and now they're not going to get to it." It feels really tragic.

But it doesn't have to be that way. First, you don't have to defer to the future a sense of enjoyment today. I think this is where we often are, I'm too extreme in how I talk about it. It's not that it's a bad thing. You can enjoy your work, working for the local county government.

You can enjoy it. You can enjoy the actual work. You can enjoy the fact that your job has meaning. You bring order and structure to your local community. You serve your local community. You can enjoy the daily nature of your work. You can find a sense of satisfaction from doing a job well, even if it's something that is not particularly fun.

There's a sense of satisfaction of doing something well, of solving, of cleaning your little corner of the world, making something run smoothly, working hard, being effective in what you're doing. You can find a tremendous amount of fun. You go out on the boat with your family on Saturday. You gather with your friends at church on Sunday.

It's a meaningful life. I want to not be one of those who dismisses the great sense of meaning and satisfaction in an ordinary everyday life. There is a lot of meaning in it. But then of course, it's also possible that the job could be changed. If somebody really didn't find a sense of meaning and satisfaction in the common ordinary things of life, then they can change those things of life and go in a different direction.

That's always been where my focus has been for me, because I always thought that can be solved quicker. Why wait to retire to do that when you could do that at ... Why wait to retire to do that at 60 when you could do it at 40? When I see it, people who do things earlier are in a different order.

To me, it seems really powerful, much more engaging. I'll use an example. There's an RVing channel that I enjoy called Keep Your Daydream. The hosts are Mark and Tricia Leach. They have this channel called Keep Your Daydream on YouTube. They started it something like three or four years ago.

They had at the time a 16-year-old, I think a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old, something like that, three children. They didn't have a big RV. They just had a half-ton truck and they bought a travel trailer, but they decided they were going to go and RV the country with their children.

They sold their stuff. They sold their house, put their stuff in storage, and they went out and started RVing the country with their children. A number of years later, their oldest daughter went to college, then they continued with their other two sons. Then their second son went to a boarding school to finish out his high school career, and so they're on the road still with their third child who's almost 16, who is probably going to transition out of that and do his own thing at some point here in the future.

Now, along the way, they've been able to build a business that made them money in doing it, but I've often wondered, what if they didn't? What if they just took the money from their 401(k) and they said, "We're going to go RVing with our children, and we're going to spend our retirement on this anyway." You ask a financial advisor that question, and what are we financial advisors going to tell you?

"Don't do it. That's just too risky. Too risky to do it. Too risky to take the money from your 401(k) and go and spend it on three years of RV travel with your children. Too risky. Don't do it. After all, don't you know that your children don't want to support you when you're old?

After all, you can't be dependent on other people." Now, is there an element of truth to that? I think so, absolutely, but life is risky. The other guy that I just talked about, I don't know his name. It was a friend of mine. The friend was talking about his friend, but the other guy, we'll call him Tom, Tom died.

He had all the money in his 401(k) and then he died. How would his children feel showing up at his funeral if all they had to say was, "Dad just worked and worked and worked and saved and saved and saved, looking forward to his retirement. Now he's dead." That's tragic.

And yet, think about how Mark and Tricia Leach, the Keep Your Daydream family, what if they did spend all their money on that trip with their children? What if they didn't wind up creating a new business and a new career? What if they did spend all their money and then the children went off to college and they started over?

Imagine you're a 50 year old parent, you're a 55 year old parent. Ask you a question, how quickly could you rebuild if you needed to or wanted to? If I were 55 years old and my children were all out of the house, I could probably do and I'm not there yet, but if I'm coaching a 55 year old, I bet I could coach a 55 year old to in 10 years replace what previously took them 30 years.

And I often felt that to myself when I walked away from my financial planning business. I've thought, "Man, how long would it take me to rebuild?" Well, I did it for six years. Today, I could probably rebuild in two years what I did in six years. I could do it faster the second time around.

So what makes more sense? Spend the 401k RVing with the children, build memories that they're going to treasure, build an actual genuine close relationship with your children or ignore the children to fund the 401k? Clearly that's a false choice. Doesn't have to be one or the other. Clearly it's a false choice.

I simply want to show you and focus on the fact that when you prioritize, recognize what you're giving up and then plan appropriately. It's perfectly fine for you to look at your children and say, "I'm happy with what I'm doing and I don't need to go spend the 401k on RVing for three years." Perfectly fine.

Not everyone should do those kinds of things. I simply personally happen to enjoy those kinds of ideas and think about what happens if you do them. And so those are the examples that I give, but it's perfectly fine not to do those things. My dad never did that with me and I don't feel like I suffered.

So I don't wish that he did. That's not the point. The point is that in time between money, recognize that once your children are gone out of your house, they're gone out of your house. You can still have a relationship with them, but that relationship is going to be very different.

So don't miss the things that cost money that are going to dramatically transform what you can do in favor of things that down the road will never be available to you again. That time will go. I want to give a few other examples because I feel like this is very practical and if I give you some examples, you'll be able to assess your own life in an appropriate way and make sure that you're living congruently with it.

When I talked about extreme savings, I realized my epiphany that extreme savings is a very effective tool. Frugality, extreme frugality is a very effective tool of escape for people who don't like their job, but it's not necessary for those who do like their job. There's an example that for me was important that I recently was touching into.

I've mentioned this particular individual before, not by name of course, but years ago when I was a financial advisor, there was a new young advisor who joined the firm that I was with. I thought this guy was going to be a total loser. I thought he was going to be a total loser.

I looked at him and I dismissed him quickly. He was a kind of a preppy frat boy, not preppy, but like a frat boy kind of guy, big partier, very good looking, dressed sharp, the modern sharp dress, came from a wealthy family, had all his parents play things, had his dad's $1.5 million boat that he could take out on the weekend whenever.

Parents were wealthy lawyers and didn't really have much to worry about. Here he comes in after college into my office and he's going to start as a new financial advisor. Here's Joshua Sheets, the financial nerd. I've nerded out about financial stuff for a long time. I thought this guy's not going to last.

You ask him a question, here he is a financial advisor, you ask him a question about a Roth IRA, he can't explain a Roth IRA, has no clue how anything works. I thought this guy's not going to last. I pegged him as a total failure. I was completely wrong about him.

I was completely wrong. And I've often thought, why did I get it so wrong? Where was I wrong? Was I jealous of him? Was I wrong about what made a good, a successful financial advisor? Was I jealous of the fact that he'd had everything handed to him or I was, and I wanted to justify my own perspective of, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work your way through, et cetera.

I don't know. I don't know why I was wrong. All I know is that I was wrong, totally wrong. Fast forward today, this guy continues to be an extraordinarily successful and productive financial advisor. And he's in his early 30s. He makes a lot of money, drives a Bentley to work every day now, always drove fancy cars, right?

Started in a BMW, but right now drives a Bentley to work every day, has been groomed to be one of the leaders in the financial advisory space. Very, very, very, very successful, makes a lot of money. And I've thought a lot about that over the years because it was just such a striking foil to me and to who I was.

I was the guy who, when I was a financial advisor, I was uncomfortable with the image of being a shark, right? So I intentionally downplayed my image. I didn't dress like a shark. I didn't dress sharp with all of the, a sharp suit I would dress in khakis and a blazer, right?

And kind of downplay the image. Right or wrong? I don't know, right? I don't know. I had reasons why that seemed to me to be the right thing at the time, but it was congruent with my personality. But I've often thought, maybe I got it totally wrong. Maybe I should have gone the other route.

I drove conservative cars. I didn't want to pull up in front of somebody's house and then say, "Oh, look, you try the fancy car." Well, you know, my friend drives a Bentley. He can pull up anywhere and basically say, "I'm a financial advisor, man. I'm supposed to know what we're talking about with money.

I'm not scared of you." It worked for him. It worked for him. There's no question about that. But I thought, like, why was I trying so hard to save? Why was I trying so hard to live modestly? Why was I trying so hard to be frugal and save money?

It was unnecessary. Why not drive a Bentley when you're 30? Now the answer is that that particular job, at least the way I was doing it then, wasn't a good fit for me long-term. It was boring. I didn't like it. And so I wanted out of it. Once I got out of it, things could change.

Whereas, as I understand it from my friend, this guy, it's a good fit for him. He likes it. It's a good lifestyle for him. And that is one of the images that has really stuck with me. If you're trying to get out of your life, if you're trying to get out of a job that you don't like or get out of a life that you don't like, then saving all the money in the world so you can change how you're using your time, it makes sense.

But if you like how you're using your time, then saving all the money in the world doesn't make sense anymore. Why? Why go through years and years and years, scrimping and saving and scrimping and saving just so that you can leave a bigger estate when you die? What's the point?

Again, let's be careful of our false dilemmas. Doesn't mean you may not leave a big estate when you die. That's fine. There are lots of people who are totally content with what they're doing, very productive financially, have no desire to spend more money, and yet are going to continue to accumulate money.

I don't think it's morally superior to spend all your money. Just saying from a practical perspective, why the excess focus on getting rich if it costs you to be living today in a way that you don't like? Doesn't make sense. So my basic argument that I desire to advance is this, saving money has to have a purpose.

There needs to be a purpose behind it. You get to choose the purpose, but there needs to be a purpose. When you're saving money and you're building up more and more money in the bank, get clear on what that purpose is and make sure that you've identified it and that it fits with what is important to you.

Without question, there are many people in the world whose lives would be dramatically improved if they saved more money. In my listening audience, though, there aren't many of those people. In my listening audience, there are a lot of people's lives who would be dramatically improved if they spent more money.

Don't let the blind collection and compounding of money keep you from doing something now that's important for you to do. Don't let just a little bit more keep you from living well today, living richly today. Up to you to decide what you want to buy with your money. You can buy the satisfaction of paying off your neighbor's mortgage or your mom's mortgage or your daughter's mortgage or whomever.

You can also buy the satisfaction of a fancy new car or anything in between. But don't just think, "Oh, I just have to have a little more money for down the road." Recognize that time is the thing that you never get back, whereas money itself is completely and totally renewable.

Don't let your personal habits of life be those that have been forced onto you by people who don't even know you. This is kind of what I've realized has happened to me. I've shared many times, and I'll share again, how shocking it was for me when I first started talking to people personally about their money.

The question I always used in an initial interview with somebody was, "Is there a point in time at which you'd like to not to have to work if you didn't want to?" I didn't like to say retirement, but I would say, "Is there a point in time at which you'd like to not to have to work if you didn't want to?" Everyone would, the common answer about 50% of the time, "Well, absolutely.

Sure. You're today, right? Or tomorrow." One of those two. We'd give a polite laugh. It's a polite laugh. Then, of course, I would say, "Okay. No, tell me. Really. What age?" A shocking number, I would guess, 75%, 70%, something like that. The majority of people would say 65 or 60, 60 or 65.

I would go farther and I'd say, "Well, why 65?" The vast majority of the time, it was like, "I don't know. That's the Social Security retirement age, right?" I'd say, "No, it's 67.2 for you." I realized we're all kind of group creatures. This whole concept of retirement didn't ever exist in the context of human history.

It didn't ever exist in the context of human history until the modern age. It was invented as a political experiment in the modern age. Then it has been successfully marketed, but now 75% of the people that I talk to say they want to retire at 65. There's something magical about 65.

I can talk about the fact that the majority of people at that time, according to life expectancies tables, were scheduled to be dead by 65. That was where the age was invented. Then you start playing with it. You can say, "Why 65? Why not 55?" "Well, I guess so at 55." "Well, why not 45?" "Well, I guess so." You continue this forward and then you get the power of the modern fire movement.

"Well, when would you like to be retired?" "Well, as soon as possible. Five years, 10 years, seven years, by age 30, free at 40." "Okay. That's awesome. Then what?" Some people have a good answer. I'm not here to dump on anybody. I believe that we should live well-examined lives to the extent that we're capable of it.

There are some people for whom the plan of working hard for a number of years, engaging in extreme savings, and then living off of their investments, that seems to be a really good plan. Had lunch with somebody yesterday who did that and enjoyed it. I think that's great for those people.

But I think there's some of us, like me, who kind of fall into that way of thinking without actually examining it. It's just as much a group herd impulse to say, "I want to be fi at 40," as it is to say, "I want to retire at 65." That's what I realized for me.

"Wait a second, Joshua. That's not you. You're not going to stop working. That's not you. You don't want to do that." A lot of the lives of some early retirees to me sound dreadfully boring. Some people like it. Again, I'm not criticizing you if you like it. If you want to sit and work in your garden, if you want to do involved in your local charity, if you want to spend your time slow traveling the world, do it.

Go for it. But that's not for me. Those things bore me. So each of us should pick our own path, and to the extent possible, we should do it in an examined way. Let's do our best to appreciate things from the examples of others, and then articulate our own personal philosophies of why we do what we do, why we're living the way that we're living.

Recognize in that money is not the thing that's in shortage. Usually time is. If you don't have any money at all, money is probably the thing that's in shortage. I've continually found myself, I have friends and family members who, for reasons I can't comprehend, don't go and get jobs.

They just, "Oh, I'm doing my thing, doing my business. I like being free. I don't want someone else to have control over my schedule." I look at them, I'm like, "Bro, you're broke." That sucks. To be broke, but to have all your time, to me, that stinks. That's just not fun.

So going from zero to, I don't know, $10,000 in the bank, that would be a high priority. If I had zero dollars, I would go get a job. But then things change quickly. Going from $100,000 to a million dollars, is that the ticket? When are you going to start living?

When you have $10 million? When you have $10 million, when? When? That's the question. I don't know that there's a right answer, but there's probably a right answer for you. Always begin with the end in mind. Recognize that at the end, your time is limited. Your feet will be in the casket just like mine.

And so at that time, what's going to matter? Your money is going to have some importance at that point in time. Your money is going to have some importance to your wife, to your children. A friend of mine died of COVID. Was that a young man? Young, had children, they were teenagers.

He was at his funeral last week. I should say funeral with air quotes, right? Funerals in the time of COVID. We all got together in a big field and there were little bubbles all around the field to try to remember his life. I just was thinking afresh about death, right?

Money matters at that time. It matters. But the time in between, right? The dash, right? The dash between the two dates, that matters way more. And as I listened to the testimonies of the friends and loved ones who spoke at a friend's funeral and talked about how the impact that he'd had on them, there wasn't a whole lot of money involved, but there were a lot of activities.

There was a lot of time. There was a lot of presence. The C, presence. Judge accordingly. I think I've said all I need to say. Thank you for listening to today's show. Remember, if you would like to invest in yourself with one of my courses, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. If you'd like to invest in yourself with my personal advice, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.

Radical personal finance.com/consult. Be with you soon. The Hartford Small Business Insurance knows that running a small business is a big time commitment. So this holiday season, they're celebrating hardworking small business owners with a chance to go to I Heart Radio Jingle Ball in Miami on December 16th. Nominate yourself or another small business owner for a chance to win a trip for two.

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