Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. - Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement that 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. Today is Friday, February 12th, 2021. And today we have a live Q&A show. A live Q&A show wherein I open up the phones, you call in, talk about anything that you want. Questions, comments, anything that you like. (upbeat music) I haven't done these show in a couple of weeks 'cause it's been hard to arrange the internet.

But today I'm sitting here at my desk, got an internet connection, so we're able to get it going. These shows work just like call and talk radio. And if you would like to gain access to these shows, to call in and discuss some topic that's on your mind, ask a question, talk about your situation, it's probably one of the best ways to, and cheapest ways to talk to me personally.

Just go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, search on Patreon for Radical Personal Finance. There you'll find all of the information as to how you can join me on one of these shows. Broadcasting today from beautiful Bogota, Colombia. And so it's fun looking out my window at Bogota. I know that many of you right now are looking for places to go, and you're frustrated that you can't travel, especially most of the audience of the United States is, sorry, most of the audience of Radical Personal Finance is in the United States.

So there is a little bit of a difficulty if you're going back to the United States as to now you have to have a negative PCR test for that. But if you're looking for a place to go, I strongly recommend that you consider going to Colombia. I've been coming to Colombia for many years, and I really, really like Colombia.

Bogota is a wonderful city, right up high at a high elevation, lovely weather, really, really beautiful. And Colombia is one of those places that's had an absolute transformation over the years. I just picked up a new book yesterday called "Un Mensaje Optimista para un Mundo en Crisis," a message of optimism for a world in crisis.

And it was written by Juan Manuel Santos, the last, the ex-president of Colombia. And it's really fascinating. It's basically just an argument from him as to how things have gotten so much better in Colombia over the last 30 years. And so if your impression or your picture of Colombia is that it's stuck in kind of the 1980s drug wars and dealing with FARC and all of that, most of that is in the past.

Not to say there's not still things that are different or things that are troubled. Of course there are, not everywhere we live, right? Every country has problems, but it's really a wonderful place, and I would encourage you to check it out if you wanted to. Hopefully, as we get back to, coronavirus starts to become more predictable around the world as countries open their borders, hopefully we'll be able to get back and do more traveling as we go into the next part of this year.

We begin today with Jeff in Florida. Jeff, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Thanks, Joshua. I am considering a new job opportunity, and both where I'm at and the new one are pretty equal in terms of intangible, but vastly different in compensation structure.

I'd love to hear how you would think through the two different compensation models of private versus government. I could talk about all FARC numbers if you'd like, or we could just talk about tax advantaged accounts and retirement benefits. What would be best for you to talk it through? - Start with the nature of the job, and then give us a little bit about the numbers and the packages that they're offering to you.

- Sure, so the nature of the job is kind of a nonprofit administration. The work is something I've been in for a long time, so I know it well and I'm comfortable in both roles. For perspective, my partner and I were both about six to seven years away from our FIRE goal.

I know it's a big if, but if historical averages are present, and pretty decent stability in both positions. As far as kind of the government job is the one I'm in right now, a little lower stress, maybe a little less stable, but a really good team that we're taking part of.

The private sector one is a little more stable, maybe slightly more stress, but I've been there before, so I know it well. And I'm uncertain of the team dynamics since I've left. So the offers that are out there are, the government job is this kind of step ladder, position as normal.

It's about a hundred, I'll use round numbers, about a hundred K compensation between the 401k or 403d, but the 401k, the 457, the HSA, we're maxing them all out. There's 8K into kind of a 401a plan, but there's some strings attached about how that has to be invested and taken out.

It is matched by about another 8K if I vest, no social security contributions. And so between my partner and I we're saving about 80K annually on about 160K of expenses, or salary and match. Benefits are really great, eight weeks of vacation and holidays, four weeks of sick leave, which multiple people with families have said they've taken them all.

But you have a little less control over your, less savings, less control over your retirement funds. But eventually in retirement, you get health insurance covered at about 5% off per year of work. So after 20 years, you'd be free. I'd probably make it to where health insurance is about 65% off.

- Okay. - The private sector role, the compensation is a little better, would be around 130K. There's a 401k with a 2% match, HSA. There's a pension, it's not COLA adjusted, but it is really well funded. So I'm pretty confident in their security. And the pension is basically 2.5% of your cumulative salary while you've worked there per year.

And then, if we were maxing all of those out and saving the rest to taxable, it would mean we'd have about 40K going into taxable annually and about 90K saved between me and my partner on about 190K of salaries and matches. The soft benefits, five weeks vacation, one week of holidays, or four weeks vacation, one week of holidays, five weeks time off.

About two weeks of sick leave, not totally sure how much people use that. And in that one, there's just more savings, more control over the savings. You were tax advantaged accounts to kind of play with and, but you do have the pension and would be paying into social security again.

But I would need to obtain healthcare in retirement for a family, either through the marketplace or just paying at cost. And I'd probably be there for about five more years and then part-time for another five. So those are the two things. The commutes are about the same. The bosses, I have strong relationships with both.

Work-life balance, probably a little better with the government job and the opportunity for future positions. Probably a little better with the private job. So-- - Do you have children? - And just to, we do, two kids. - And how old? - One is a little over two and the other one is a little under one.

- And on your current plan, if things go as you, as they are expected to go, and if you do become financially independent in 67 years, do you see yourself stopping employment at that point in time? - Yeah, we would, we're, our family's very interested in long-term travel, kind of slow travel.

You know, Columbia sounds lovely, I hear. And so that'd be one option. Also just, we've considered the possibility of potentially kind of negotiating down to where, and it'd be very easy in the roles I'm in to negotiate towards only working while the kids are in school and being more present outside of that and kind of using the time off or going 50% three quarters time and having summers largely available.

But the long-term travel is kind of the big one or downshifting into some careers that are maybe more combinations of life passions as well as some extra side income. - Do you see yourself as an aggressive career builder? Meaning if you took the private sector job, would you see yourself going and applying for another bigger private sector job two and a half years from now where you'd be making $200,000 a year or 250 because of your excellent results at this current opportunity?

- Probably not at one point in my life. That's definitely kind of how I got into the role that I'm in now. But with the family coming on board, priorities have shifted much more towards being present to the family. And also just the relationships I built, as I mentioned, I'd be returning to the nonprofit.

So I have some really strong relationships and in many ways there's been a long-term plan for me to be there. It would be that I'd stick around for a while both out of gratitude and loyalty and also personal family circumstance. - Based upon what you're describing, I think to me the favor, the weight falls on the government job as being probably a better option for you.

And here is what I'm thinking and as far as how I get there. First of all, it sounds like both of these jobs are a good fit for you. If one was clearly not a good fit for you, if you were gonna go crazy and just be bored out of your mind in the government job, but in the private sector job, you would love it.

Well, then that would be obvious. But it sounds like both of these are a good fit. You said you have a good relationship with both of your potential bosses, et cetera. You can't, in my mind, it seems inarguable that government jobs are generally going to be far less stress and require less of you in terms of mental commitment and mental stress.

When you work for the government, you have a certain set of expectations. But because of the nature of bureaucracy, it's very hard for you to be fired and it's very hard for the government to impose upon you lots of excessive demands. So you're expected to be there at nine o'clock, great, you're there at nine o'clock, but you can leave at five o'clock.

And if the work's not done in a government position, you just simply say, well, we're the government, right? They have to accept what we say, the work will get done next week. And this leads to a very clear ability for you to segment your work life and your personal life.

In the private sector, that's much less common, right? In the private sector, there's much more of an expectation that whatever it takes, we get the work done. And this would be why most of us who work in the private sector, we tend to work more. We tend to feel more pressure and there's the pressure of the free market upon us to cause us to perform.

That pressure is probably a little bit, that pressure is less intense in the not-for-profit sector, but I think there's still a difference. And when you compare the benefits across the board, especially the benefits that are important to you as an early retiree, to me, the government job sounds a whole lot better.

It's not a bad compensation rate. You have access to a number of different plans that will help you with everything. The eight weeks of vacation and holiday leave, to me, is probably a much more livable thing for you long-term. If you've got eight weeks of vacation per year, plus four weeks of sick leave, then with having young children, that means that you can do almost anything that you wanna do and still keep working.

So to me, I think the pressure for you to actually quit working in six or seven years would be much lower in that kind of system. I mean, I like to travel for long-term. Two months of travel per year is a lot of travel. It's a lot of travel.

So that kind of job is probably much more livable for you for an extended period of time, and that might mean that you might choose not to quit working in six years or seven years. Might mean that you're comfortable enough that you do it for 10 years or 15 years or something like that.

That's gonna be a cushy, cushy job. And as long as the work is a decent fit for you, you can go to work, you can work your expected hours, you can deliver as your bosses expect, you can go home with a clear conscience and just not worry about it.

And then from the perspective of early retirement, the discounted health insurance is a very, very valuable perk. It's one of the most difficult things to handle in the US-American system for early retirees. And so, especially given that you see yourself as the kind of person who would actually stop working in six or seven years, I think having some discount on the health insurance system would be good.

And then finally, my final comment is this. Going from the government sector into the private sector or into the not-for-profit sector, I think is generally gonna be an easier transition than going from the private sector into the government sector. I can't prove that, it just feels that way to me.

And especially when I think about doing things like part-time work, if you work for the government for the next six years and then you decide to stop working full-time, but you wanna pick up a part-time job, you'll have your contacts and your connections inside the government, and that will be very employable to somebody in the private market.

You can be a lobbyist of sorts, or you can be a consultant. And so those kinds of things would lend themselves very well to a part-time job in the private sector because of the strength of your government resume. So from what you're describing, those are my reasons I think the weight falls in favor of the government job from what you're saying.

- Great, thank you. Yeah, it's been helpful to think through that. And the big thing for me, I agree with your assessment, is kind of wondering about the benefits of taxable funds invested versus manipulating various tax-advantaged funds. But it feels like I have some flexibility with both. - Remember that your investment portfolio, your investment choices are not entirely tied to the system.

So I don't think there's that. From what you described, there is some benefit to the pension, but in that kind of pension program, if you want to create that kind of pension program yourself, you can. That's gonna be a commercial annuity that's funding that particular pension program, and it's just gonna be an overall part of your compensation.

When you're, the health insurance, that's a genuinely valuable business, but you can still do most of the other stuff. You don't have to have an HSA at work to be able to contribute to an HSA. You just need a high-deductible health plan. You can still do lots of other investing.

And with having a salary, you could buy five rental houses in the next five years if you wanted to, just by leveraging your stable government salary to borrow money, buy a house, move into it, do the old nomad strategy for five years, and now you have a giant real estate portfolio.

So I think you can handle the money in an intelligent way. To me, the lifestyle that you described of having eight weeks of paid vacation plus four weeks of sick leave, that's gonna pretty much open up to you the vast majority of travel or anything that you wanna do while you're still working.

And when you also have that compounded with the fact that this is a nine-to-five job, or whatever the hours are that you're expected to work, the point is that it's constrained to those hours, then you won't have a significant amount of work stress with that kind of position. You go to work, you do your job when you're there, you leave, if the children are sick, you say, "The children are sick," and you stay home.

And because of the nature of a government job, you can do that without it messing everything up and without feeling like I'm letting the whole team down and whatnot, which is gonna be some of the pressure that you'll feel in the private sector. - Right there. Thank you so much.

I appreciate the assessment. - My pleasure. - And hopefully you'll know great wisdom to figure out which one is best for you. All right, let's go to Adam in Philadelphia. Adam, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hi, Josh. I hope you're doing well.

I have two questions. I'll start with the first, and we can circle back to the second later. My question has to do with taxes for someone with multiple citizenships, that someone would be me. I'm 22 years old, single. I was born in the US to Hungarian parents, but I grew up in Canada.

Three citizenships, American, Hungarian, Canadian. I went to school in Canada, did all my summer jobs in Canada. I have Canadian bank accounts, Canadian TFSA, RRSP, the whole nine. As of January of this year, I've moved to the US. I'm working for a big Fortune 500 company here. I've never paid US taxes.

I've never even filed US taxes. I'm aware that this is something that I should have been doing since I started working, although I never have. And so I'm concerned that the IRS might be lurking behind the corner, and I was hoping for your advice on how to get compliant.

I know this is something that you mentioned earlier. - You said you're 22? - Yes, sir. - Okay, so in your situation, I think it's fairly simple. What you need to look for is the IRS has a program. I cannot remember the name of it right now, and I can't search for it right at the second, but I'll tell you how to find it.

So do a web search for US citizens tax compliance, and find a tax lawyer who specializes in helping US, here we go, I found it, relief procedures for certain, I'm looking at the IRS website, relief procedures for certain former citizens. No, that's not it. So browse around on the IRS website, irs.gov, and find the section where they talk about the programs that they have for people bringing themselves into tax compliance.

And again, I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of it. But there are, I'm finding lots of resources for expat tax professionals, et cetera, and there are lawyers who specialize in this. And so what you will do is you will contact the IRS, and you will say, I'm 22 years old, I didn't know that I was supposed to be filing taxes, I have a limited work history, and I'd like to bring myself into compliance.

They have a number of amnesty programs that you can participate in. And those amnesty programs will allow you to file tax returns for the previous years when you were not compliant, and then to be free of your legal burden of having been non-compliant. And in your situation, this should be a relatively easy and simple thing.

You probably weren't making much money, you're 22 years old, et cetera. And you'll go ahead, so you'll create tax returns for the years in which you were liable to file them, for the years in which your income has exceeded the filing threshold of whatever it is, $7,000, $10,000-ish, which probably isn't very many years.

You'll create those tax returns, but you will be eligible for the foreign earned income exclusion because you were living outside the United States, and thus you will owe no tax. So your only costs will simply be any legal fees that you would incur to have a lawyer and accountant help you with filing for that amnesty program.

And that's what I would do. So if you have the money to go ahead and start paying, I can't imagine your situation, it would be more than a couple thousand dollars of legal fees, but I would go ahead. You may be able to do it yourself, I don't know.

I wouldn't. I would wait until I had the money and go ahead and use an attorney as the go-between and find an attorney who has done, who has helped people to bring people into tax compliance. But that's how you do it, is you just simply, you'll file the returns for the years that you didn't file.

So you'll grab whatever information you have from your previous work, from your Canadian tax returns, wherever you previously filed, and then you'll go ahead and file those returns. But because you were outside of the country and assuming that you weren't making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you won't actually owe any tax.

You have to bring yourself into compliance that way. - Perfect, and then I guess the follow-up to that, and maybe it's better for the tax lawyers, but going forward, is there anything special I need to do to ensure that the Canadian Revenue Agency doesn't come after me when I'm working in the US, being paid in US dollars?

- Yeah, so this is not that difficult. But the biggest thing you want to do is become Canadian non-tax resident in order to eliminate your filing requirements. So, Canada and the United States have an excellent tax treaty, and working in the United States and living in the United States, you can minimize your taxes through that tax treaty.

However, since you're now living in the United States, unless you have some compelling reason to maintain your residential ties with Canada, you would just simply want to become Canadian non-tax resident. So, the non-residence comes down to the basic facts of life, the fact that you're living now in the United States, not in Canada.

You don't have any significant residential ties. You're staying, most of the time, in the United States. What you should look at is just simply look and say, do I have any other significant connections to Canada? So, do I have my RRSP? What should I do with that? And the other things, and look at them.

Do you think that your time in the United States is gonna be for a long time, or is it a fairly short time? What do you think? - So, the work contract I'm on now is gonna take me for about three and a half years. I'll probably bounce around a couple different states while I'm there, and given all three of my citizenships, I also might spend some time in Europe.

I'm not sure if I'll ever come back to Canada, although I'm 22 years old and single, so everything's kind of, I'm open to just about anything at this point. - How much money do you have saved in, how much money do you have saved in your retirement plans in Canada right now?

- Very little. I have a couple grand in the TFSA, and then I have $150 in the RRSP that was just put in there to open it, and for me to feel financially responsible at 16 that I'm saving for retirement, but not much has been put in there. If I were in your shoes, I would go ahead and just simply cash those assets out and sever all of my financial ties with Canada.

I don't think it's strictly necessary. If you had a lot of money in those accounts, I wouldn't say it's necessary, but right now, the cost for you of ending those plans will be next to nothing, assuming, I have the impression that your income is probably not super high, being 22 years old, and just kind of just starting on your work life, so I would just go ahead and cash those out and end my financial connections with Canada.

That way, in the future, you can maintain the benefits. You can always move to Canada, but by becoming fully Canadian non-tax resident and having no ties to the country, you don't own any real estate there, I would just go ahead and end my retirement plans there. If you wanna keep one bank account, that's probably okay.

If you were wealthy, I would say no bank accounts, no credit cards, but since you're just getting started, it's probably fine for you to have a bank account there. If it were me, I would go ahead and just fully extricate myself from the Canadian tax system. You're gonna be in the US tax system, but that way, you're only dealing with one system, and then if, in the future, you wanna go to Canada, you can always go to Canada, become resident and tax resident again, but this way, your tax obligations will be simple, and as a US citizen now, you would have the ability to travel, you would have the ability to do everything with just the US American system, and because of the way that the US American system works, you can keep your entire financial infrastructure in the United States, you have good banking, better banking, lower cost, lower cost investing in the United States than in Canada, and so you can keep your entire infrastructure in the United States and/or choose some other countries that you don't have citizenship in to expand your banking into, but then, if you're outside of the United States, then you could qualify for the relevant, you know, the foreign earned income exclusion, et cetera, for the United States, so if it were me, I would extricate myself from the CRA.

I think the IRS is probably easier to work with than the CRA, and certainly, the United States is probably most Canadians' best tax haven. There's a really good book that I recommend by Robert Keats, which is called "Why the United States is," I can't remember the exact title of it, but it's "A Canadian's Best Tax Haven, the United States," and he makes a strong argument that for most Canadians, the very best, most useful tax haven that they can move their life to in the beginning is the United States, so that's what I would do.

- Perfect, that sounds great for now. I'll stay on the call if you have time for me at the end. Great, if not, then we'll talk later. - Okay, great. - Thank you so much. - All right, move on to Trey in Texas. Trey, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

- Hi, Joshua. I wanted to ask you about inflation and how concerned I should be about inflation in the United States. Obviously, we're creating a lot of money. I saw a stat the other day. I don't know if it's true or not, but it was 40% of the US dollars that are in existence right now have been created in the last 12 months.

I don't know if it's that extreme or not, but it's a lot. So I've got a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cash that I was saving to buy some property, multifamily property sometime in the next one to five years or just whenever the right deal presents itself. Do you have any suggestions on how to protect that in the meantime?

- Is the cash in a bank account? - Yes, sir, mostly. - So my first suggestion, and this is across the board, is that everybody be prepared and have what I call a tunnel set up to be able to protect their assets. So the previous caller was from Canada.

So what I routinely recommend to people is that I think everybody should have at least one offshore bank account. And I usually recommend to most US Americans who aren't accustomed and comfortable getting on an airplane and flying to the other side of the world often, go to Canada and open a bank account.

It's easy to do. You don't need any kind of residency in Canada. You don't need anything except to be able to physically go there to open the account. And that's obviously a problem right now because the Canadian border is closed and they have extremely strict and stringent quarantine requirements now, even for Canadian citizens returning to Canada.

So it is a problem right now. But as soon as you can, go to Canada or to some other place, we'll cut to that in a moment, and simply open a bank account. Now, when you do that, what do I recommend? Well, I tell people go and open a US dollar bank account and open a Canadian dollar bank account.

Why? I don't think that you should, if you're saving money to buy assets in the United States, then I think you should keep your money in US dollars. Right now, the US dollar has weakened significantly over the past few months, and it's probably going to continue to weaken. Many analysts believe that it's gonna continue to weaken, especially with the monetary creation that we see right now.

And so I expect the US dollar to continue to weaken. But when you are living and working and investing in a dollar economy, that's not necessarily a problem. And I don't think that most people should all of a sudden become Forex traders trying to predict, well, if I go ahead and move my US dollars into Swiss francs today, then I'll go ahead and convert them out of Swiss francs three months from now to buy my real estate.

Maybe some people can do it. I think it's a little bit too complex for most people. But what I recommend is very simple. If you will open a tunnel account with an offshore bank account, and open one in US dollars, and open an account in Canadian dollars, now you have the ability to get your money out if you need to.

So how does this work? Six months ago, when we were right in the midst of, I guess it was eight months ago or so, in about March and April of 2020, when everything was looking pretty black, stock markets were dumping off, we didn't know how severe the coronavirus pandemic would be, we didn't know what exactly the economic fallout would be, the US budget is cratering, et cetera, I got extremely nervous about banking stability.

And I got extremely nervous about the US dollar stability. I don't, I believe that the US dollar is very strong and that it's very unlikely that we're going to face kind of a novel, the kind of thing that you would write in a novel about a hyperinflation environment. I think it's very unlikely.

But I acknowledge that it's possible. And so I'm looking for ways that I can protect myself with minimal risk. And so what I advised clients to do at that time was move money from the United States, move money from your US dollar account to a US dollar account with an offshore bank.

In keeping your money in US dollars, you're not taking any currency risk. You're not making a bet on currency, you're just keeping your money in US dollars. You're just moving it from a US bank into an offshore bank. Now, if you do start to see significant levels of inflation, your money is already outside of the country, which can help you to protect against likely capital controls.

When governments face economic instability, they start to impose significant capital controls and currency controls. They make it illegal for you to change your money out of the failing currency into a foreign currency. So you're protected from that by moving your money into an offshore bank. And now the transaction can be easily accomplished.

If you have $200,000 in US dollars at your Canadian bank, then you can just simply, with one click of a button on the website, move your $200,000 from your US bank, your US dollar account to your Canadian dollar account at the current exchange rate, thus freezing your exposure to US dollars.

So that's the simplest, lowest risk plan that I've ever come up with. Create an account offshore, create a tunnel account for US dollars, and you have to have it set up in advance. You have to have it set up so that you can wire money back and forth. And you should go ahead and wire money back and forth so that your banks get used to the fact that you transfer money back and forth.

But you don't have to take any currency risk. You just simply need to have the US dollar account offshore, and then you can go ahead and convert it to a foreign currency. For this scenario, almost any foreign currency is fine. It really doesn't matter significantly what currency it is.

Obviously, there are good reasons to choose one of the stronger currencies, Euro account, Swiss franc account, Canadian account, et cetera. The point is, however, you wanna have your money outside of the country, and you wanna be able with a click of the button on your computer to convert it to a foreign currency that's not going to be experiencing as much inflation.

And then from there, if the facts in the future warrant, and you recognize, all right, I'm moving into Canadian dollars right now 'cause there's massive inflation in the United States, but I don't wanna stay in Canadian dollars because there might be Canadian inflation in Canada then. Well, at least you're out of the country.

You can go ahead and now move into a Euro account or whatever seems to be the appropriate basket of currencies for you to hold at the time. That's my best solution. I acknowledge the fact that that's difficult right now if you don't already have those offshore accounts set up.

This is why I emphasize that the time to plan for disaster is long before the disaster ever happened. Almost two years ago now, I launched my "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis" course, and I emphasized this stuff is easy to do now. Two years ago, you could easily drive across the Canadian border and be welcomed into Canada and do that.

Today, you cannot get in. So if it's not set up now, you need to either find a country that you can bank in right now and set up an account there. This is more difficult than you might imagine because many countries do not have a system where they simply allow tourists to come in and bank.

Canada does. There are other countries that do, but many, many countries require you to have a residence permit or have some significant ties to the country. Many countries get nervous about people coming in and wanting to have bank accounts if they don't have ties to the country. So you can try another offshore jurisdiction, or what I would just say is I wouldn't worry too much about it.

While I think that that kind of planning is important, I'm still not in the hardcore, I don't see significant signs of inflation. I do see the Federal Reserve creating money, but compared to where things could be, I don't think it's that big of a risk right now. So your kind of other backup plan, if you don't do go the offshore banking route, is just simply keep your eye on the markets and then think about what kind of commodities could I move into if I needed to.

So let's say that I did start to see significant levels of inflation. What could I do with that? What would I buy? Would I buy, you would generally buy some kind of hard asset. A monetary asset is ideal, but would you buy Bitcoin? Would you buy gold? Would you buy tools?

There are lots of things that you could buy to protect your money if you got into that system. I don't think the hyperinflationary scenario is likely. I think in the future, some kind of mass inflation scenario, like a 1970s, 8%, 10%, I think that kind of thing is possible.

Probable, I don't know, right? Possible to probable somewhere in that range. But I think that in that scale, I don't think that that level of inflation is the kind of level where you would just all of a sudden go out and buy gold, right? I think that that's a doable level of inflation that you would press forward with your business activities, kind of as expected.

So that's my answer, Trey. - That sounds great. If you don't mind, I'd also like to hang on the call, and if you have time to circle back, I'll ask another one, but your answer was awesome for the inflation, so I appreciate it. - Cool, I'll put you on the list, and let's see what we got time.

John of Pennsylvania, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Joshua, thanks for taking the call. - My pleasure. - I was considering taking a road trip cross-country. I'm in the US, only in the spring and summer. Since we've done so much road travel and camper travel, I was actually considering just doing this in hotels and whatnot, since I'm not set up with a pop-up or anything like that yet.

I was just curious of your advice on kind of both pacing, duration, places to go that were your favorite in the middle of the country, so-called flyover states, you know, to kind of take our time. The only thing I know we're looking to not do is pack and unpack into a hotel every single day, so depending on the full duration of the trip and how far we want to go, maybe a few days at least in each hotel, but I'm really not sure about long-term travel trade-offs, and if there's any advice you have on that or any thoughts you have on that I could use.

- Absolutely. You have, I think, two children, right? And how old are they? - Yeah, two children. The boys are five and seven. - Five and seven, okay. So I'll give you my thoughts on this from having done both of the above, all of the above. I generally, from a financial analysis perspective, I don't believe that RV camping saves most people money.

If you're going on trips for two weeks of annual vacation, three weeks of annual vacation, many people buy a camper and they think that, well, if I have this camper, I'm gonna save lots of money going camping for two weeks a year. It doesn't happen, in my opinion, because campers experience such massive depreciation and there's so many expenses associated with camping of buying a vehicle that can tow a trailer, buying a trailer, buying all the stuff for it, fixing the thing when it's broken, paying the campground expenses, et cetera, that I don't argue to people that camping is a financially efficient thing to do if they're going on two or three weeks of trips a year.

I think that if you're gonna travel for two or three weeks, you can go to nice resorts if you like that and do it. What I do argue is that camping with children is, in my opinion, a really, really ideal way for a family to travel. I don't like going to hotels with my children because there's generally nothing to do in the hotel room that's productive.

And so you go to a hotel room with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, you go, even if it's a nice hotel, you have the amenities of the hotel, hopefully they have a pool, maybe they have some kind of other games and things to do, and then you have your room.

And what do you have to do in a room? Well, you have a TV, you have their books, you have their games, their digital games, their tablets or whatever you're doing, but there's not much to do. There's not a lot of things where children can play. And so you can't generally allow your children just to go play unsupervised in the hotel.

And so I find traveling in hotels with children pretty stressful. It's not stressful if you go to a resort and you have a lot of activities there. But just kind of a standard hotel, I find it pretty stressful because you've got this little itty-bitty room, you've got one or two chairs, it's no fun.

Now, when I compare that to camping in RV parks, national parks, state parks, et cetera, I find the situation totally different. Because if I take a camper into a state park or an RV park or something like that, then now I've got a big, beautiful outside where it's expected that my children can run around and generally speaking, with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, generally speaking, most campgrounds are contained enough where you could feel confident about sending them to the playground.

Or they can feel confident about having, riding around the camping loop. If you bring a couple of bikes, some scooters, some bicycles, you can send your children outside and they can play very happily and very safely outside for two hours straight, just riding their bicycles around the loop and poking around in the woods and catching spiders and whatever it is that children do.

And there's often other children in the campground, which means that often they can have the chance to play with other children in a more, an easier way than hotels. And so I would be willing to spend more money going and camping because it makes for a better environment for me.

You don't just have to sit down in front of the TV and turn on a movie to figure out what to do and how to keep these children from going crazy in the hotel room when they're full of boundless energy. You can just say, "Go outside, I'll call you when it's time for dinner." And then you look out the window, you poke, you peek your nose around, you set some boundaries and generally I think they have more fun.

In addition, camping often has lots of work associated with it that children can help with. So the work of setting up a fire, right? It's really fun for children to have a fire. And so now all of a sudden, you have a really healthy evening's entertainment where you, at 5.30, you get some firewood, you build the fire.

Of course, that's hard to do 'cause the wood is wet, so it takes you 50 minutes to get a fire going, but you teach your children how to build a fire, then they can happily sit and watch the fire and poke it and burn sticks in the fire. Then you have dinner, then you have marshmallows and s'mores, and then y'all just sit around the fire and stare at it and talk to each other.

And so it creates this really healthy environment where you have time with your children, time to spend with them, time to talk to them, instead of sitting around a little itty-bitty table in a hotel room wondering what do we do now, right? It's just very different in that sense.

Similarly, there's other work. Again, the work is you can say to the children, "Go into the woods there and collect dead sticks "on the ground so that we can burn them." Well, there's an hour and a half to keep them busy while you and your wife make dinner. You can say, "Let's wash dishes," right?

"We gotta wash the dishes." So you can easily put the dish pans on the picnic table. Now all of the things that are annoying at home when they start having water fights and blowing bubbles and everything, well, you got time and it's not a big deal if the water spills on the picnic table.

So I prefer camping because of the lifestyle. The other thing of the lifestyle that I really appreciate is the lack of stress, and especially the lack of financial stress. In the United States, hotels are generally very expensive, even for mediocre hotels. So you can drive across the country, and when you're driving somewhere, you're kind of stuck to what's available in a certain place, and you don't know where you're going to be.

And so I drove across the country last year, and I was with a friend of mine, and we're driving across the country, and we're just two adult men driving across the country, and we're driving hard 'cause we were making progress across, we had a goal, but we had to pull in, and I'm finding myself stuck paying $100 a night for this dirty motel in the middle of Texas because that's what's there, and I don't want to drive for another two hours to try to find something else.

And so you're kind of stuck with what's available, and it really bugs me to pay $105 a night for a dirty hotel in the middle of Texas. I don't like staying in those places, and I feel like I'm wasting money. And so now with children now, it becomes even worse because at least my friend and I, we're both adults, we can keep going, but you can't press your children that hard when you're road tripping.

You get to the point where they're done, and you want to get out of the car and do something. And so you pull up to some random hotel somewhere that's gonna cost you 100 bucks for a junky room that you don't really want to touch anything in it because that's where you happen to be, and now there's nothing to do.

There's some tiny little swimming pool out back that's too cold to swim in, or there's too many drunk people, really you don't want to take your children to that environment right now. And so I find that stressful. I find it stressful to be stuck paying whatever is available. However, when I have a camper, I find myself totally at peace 'cause if I have a camper, not a pop-up, but a camper where we can sleep in, then now I know that I can pull over anywhere, and I can be totally fine.

If the children are done, I'll just pull over into a rest area, and we'll sleep in the rest area. Now, there may not be that great amenities, but there's usually some woods, and I can take them and find a playground, or we can go and throw a Frisbee in the woods in the grass while mom gets dinner ready or something like that.

If we're in a bad part of town, we just drive to a Walmart, stay in the Walmart parking lot, and once they're in their beds, then everything is normal. And then because they have their stuff, they have their bed, they have their books, they have their things, it's actually easier to keep them contained and settled.

We're not moving into a new hotel room and you just have what's in your backpack or the suitcase. You have your bed, go, go, go away and read a book. And so you can get some peace. So I love the lifestyle of traveling in a camper with children, and it makes me really enjoy traveling because it's just so low, I find it extremely low stress.

I would pay more if it cost me more to have a camper because I find it with children a very low stress way to travel. Now, I don't think it actually has to cost more. And if you're traveling for an extensive period of time, then it does save you a lot of money.

And so I think back to my hotel example. I think that although you can find a $39 red roof inn in the middle of Georgia, right off of I-75 or something, you can find those things out there. Most of the time, in my experience, I budget for something like $100 for a hotel, just a standard, we're sleeping here hotel, not a resort, in the United States, I mean.

But I'm not gonna be surprised by $129. That's gonna be a standard cost. That goes pretty far if you're gonna be on the road for six weeks. And it goes pretty far in terms of the costs of an RV, a little trailer, a drivable motor home, things like that.

So for the lifestyle reasons, I would pay more, but I don't think you have to pay more. I think that the RV is, for traveling with children, is a cheaper thing to do because you can control your expenses based upon where you stay. If you wanna go and you wanna pay $200 a night to camp at Disney's Fort Wilderness or to camp at a Jellystone RV park and pay $100 a night, that's available and you'll love it, right?

You'll love the amenities of that. But if you don't wanna spend any money tonight because you're just trying to drive across a place where you need to drive, the ability to pull over and spend the night at a rest area and pay nothing for that and not have to go and eat, that's the other thing, is preparing food is also something I find extremely stressful traveling without amenities.

I don't like eating at restaurants 'cause generally you have too much food and it's very hard to eat healthy food in many of those situations. And then the cost adds up. When you're buying four meals at a time, three meals a day. So you can do stuff out of a cooler and whatnot, but it's so much nicer to have your own fridge, your own things.

So I'm trying to sell the lifestyle because I've experienced it. If I were gonna do any kind of significant trip more than a week or two, and if I'm gonna travel across the country with children, I'm gonna buy some kind of RV and use some kind of RV for that.

The best, if you want a no-brainer solution, what I would tell you is if you don't have an RV, go to Cruise America and buy one, try a rent, rent it if you wanna try, but buy a Cruise America former rental. And with two children, you can easily get away with their 25 foot or the smaller one that they have, I think it's 23 foot actually.

They have a 28 foot one that they sell and a 23 foot one that they sell. And it's gonna be something like $30,000, but it'll give you a good solid class C that allows you to drive in it, has all the stuff that you need. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the simplest ways for people just to get an RV that's gonna work and that's gonna need what they need.

But I would personally choose the RV because of the lifestyle of traveling with children across the United States. - Okay, yeah, I appreciate that. That's great advice. You wouldn't have concerns about buying a rental RV as far as, had a lot of drivers and been beat up and all that stuff.

I mean, I guess one of the reasons I had concerned going hotels, I remember hearing your discussion about, RVs do cost a little bit more, but I understand your argument for, I kind of sympathize with all those arguments and having a slower pace and giving things to kids, things to do.

One thing I had said I didn't wanna do is, buy a whole new car, truck to pull a pop up or a trailer. So, having the trailer is one cost, but having a whole new car that we don't need was another cost. But I guess I can think about buying smart and reselling it when I get back and all that stuff.

But the cruise America thing is something I'll have to look into off the, once they're buying one of their old ones, if you think that's a good route. - Yeah, so it's an unlimited conversation. So I have, so I'm, to be clear, what I'm saying to you is regarding traveling with children.

Now, I've given the exact opposite to couples who were older, who didn't have young children. And I would give the different advice, possibly to people who didn't, who had older children. Right, if there was somebody who had older children, and maybe they were gonna do a mixture, right? They were gonna go ahead and have a tent that they were gonna use, set up tents in a national park, and also stay in hotels, then I think that can work really well, right?

I wouldn't be scared about that. If I got a 12 year old and a 14 year old, we could load up in tents and it'd be great because they can do the work and they're useful. But a five year old and a seven year old are very minimally useful.

And so that kind of stuff just creates a ton of work for you and your wife. For an older couple who can go to a nice hotel room and enjoy just simply being in the hotel room, and they're not running around, needing to get their wiggles out. And the fact whether they go to the pool or not, like now all of a sudden, and then they're often comparing it to saying, well, either I buy a $100,000 RV, or we travel for six weeks a year in hotel rooms.

I think you can make a good argument for the hotel rooms in that situation. But I don't enjoy being in hotel rooms with my children, unless it's a place where it has a resort and it has lots of activities, which is not kind of what you're describing traveling across the country.

So on the RV setup, if you're willing to deal with the hassle, I don't think they have to cost that much. Your cheapest thing to do is buy a travel trailer. And you can go down all day long and get a travel trailer for a used travel trailer in good condition for 15 grand.

Something in a 25 foot range, 20 with two children, you can get away with 20 footer, something like 20, 25 foot, you can get those all day long for 15 grand that are five to nine years old. Your maximum depreciation, if you kept it for a year or two, let's say you lose three grand, four grand, something like that.

That's not that much. And I don't think you have to if you can buy smart. If you stick with a trailer in that size range, something that's a 5,000 pound trailer, an eight, 7,000 pound trailer, which there's tons of them in that range. Then if you need a car, just go get a $5,000 F-150, something like that.

You can do an SUV with that size of trailer. I wouldn't do a pilot, I would do a bigger, but an expedition can work, something like that. And so I would just grab a $5,000 F-150 and a 10 or $15,000 25 foot or 20 foot trailer, depending on how big you want.

And I think you're good. And so let's say you use it for a year or two and you sell it, you'll sell the F-150 for, if you pay eight grand for it, you'll sell it for seven. If you buy the trailer for 12, you'll put $1,000, $2,000 into kipping it up and then you'll sell it for 10.

So when I had my rig, I did the whole thing and I came out basically even. And so I think all the same principles apply. Now, if you do the Cruise America route where you buy one of their rental RVs, I'm not concerned about buying one of their rental RVs because while I do believe that people have used them and used them hard, vehicles are made to be used.

So somebody drove their RV at 70 miles an hour or 75 miles an hour across the Arizona desert. I mean, they're not, no one's joyriding an RV. No one's spinning donuts in the parking lot. They're just driving fast and maybe pushing the gas pedal down. The cars are built to handle that.

And then those rental RVs are built to be tough. They're custom built for Cruise America. They're built to be tough and they're used. They're well used, but they're adequate. And so I would look at that as, if you wanna get into a drivable RV where you're inside of it, it's your class C, basically it's, I can pay 30 grand for this RV that's a rental, it's got a hundred thousand miles on it.

It's built tough, but it's five years old. It's got a good roof. It's got a generator, it's got all the stuff that works. I can probably go and sell it because it's a rental. It's not gonna have a strong resale. So maybe I can sell it for 23 or 24 at some point in the future.

That's different than going and paying 65 for a five-year-old class C. So if you can find a good class C that's being sold for cheaper, I think you can come out better ahead because it doesn't have the baggage of the rental RV. But if you want something that's just fast, that's a fair deal, that you're gonna lose five grand in depreciation, I think the rental RV is something worth considering.

- Okay, yeah, I appreciate that. That's great stuff. And I fully agree, I mean, especially for keeping the kids busy and all that stuff, we plan to do at least a little bit of car camping, but we may consider that, but yeah, just keeping them busy with the fire, basically what I do in the backyard anyway, is just want to extend that across the country.

So I think it's a good plan. - If you're willing to do the tent, and with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, it'd be fun for them. I think the biggest thing is how much work is it for your wife? If you're willing to do the tent, then I think a mixture of the two can also be something that you should consider.

So when I was growing up, we did this a lot. We had a pop-up camper, but we didn't all fit in the pop-up camper, so we also had a tent. And so what my parents would do, we would travel across the country. We never traveled full-time. Our longest trips were three and a half weeks, right?

We went from Florida to Maine or from Florida to Montana, things like that. But, and we did it in three and a half weeks, which is fast. But what we would do is we would go to a national park or a state park, and we would set up at that national park and that state park for several days.

And when you have a tent and you're setting things up, that works fine. And then in between, if we were in a city or we were just traveling, then we would stay at a hotel. And so there were many times where we're leaving Colorado and we got to get to Florida in two and a half days.

Well, we're not stopping and setting up the tent or trying to find a nice park. We're just staying at one of those hotels. And so if you don't want to own an RV or you don't want to own one yet, then I think you could handle that. It's just really hard to do that for weeks and weeks and weeks.

So if you've got enough friends that you can stay with or family, and that could just be one thing, then yeah, you don't have to buy another car, get a nice tent, get some nice cots or whatever it is that makes your family comfortable. And then just don't go too fast.

If you set up a tent and you stay somewhere for two or three nights, and then you travel from there, you do the hikes, et cetera, I think that's a good way to do it. And with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, I think they could handle that. I've got babies, and so tent camping with babies is a much bigger hassle 'cause they're just dirty all the time and it's frustrating.

But you don't have babies anymore. - Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much. That gives me so much to kind of go on and plan out and consider the cost of all the options. I got some homework now, so thank you. - My pleasure. My pleasure. I didn't mean to cut you off, but I did.

All right, we go to Lucas in New Jersey. Lucas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Josh, can you hear me okay? - Yes, sir, sounds good. - Okay, great. Hey, so I had a question about HSAs. So I'm engaged to be married.

I have two HSAs to my name from two different employers, and I know already that I take them with me. That has happened, but they're still with two separate accounts. What's the C word that you would use to describe those? I can't think of it. - Yeah, I'm not sure.

- Anyway. - Go ahead. - Anyway, so two separate HSAs, and my fiance has one. And we were talking about it, and just wanted to get some guidance on what we should be doing with these HSAs. Is there any reason or ability that we would want to roll those into one?

What benefits might I lose? And more importantly, when we do eventually get married, is the reimbursement length of an HSA only go back as far as the original account holder? Because obviously, well, not obviously, but I'm a couple years older, and so my HSAs tend to go back further.

So would we want to keep those so that we can eventually submit reimbursements against for them for older receipts? I'm trying to piecemeal how to optimize multiple HSAs for different age holders. - Understood. Are you using your HSAs in a normal way, as in you're putting money in them, and you're using them for expenses?

Or are you using them in the aggressive, mad scientist, using HSA to fund your early retirement way? - More along the mad scientist idea of submitting expenses 20 years from now once the interest has accrued. - Okay, got it. So I think that you, I don't think you can roll over an account from your HSA into your wife's HSA after you're married.

I don't think that can work. - Okay. - If you set up a joint account, I'm not sure you can transfer it into that. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know. That would be, I think, what I would do is I would call the custodian, I think that was the C word you were looking for.

- That is. - I would call the custodian and ask them that question. They should know those laws enough to answer the question. I don't know the answer to it. What I would think I would do is if she has an HSA and I have an HSA, I don't see any real benefit to commingling them.

So I would just probably leave those accounts there as long as they're not having high expenses associated with maintaining those accounts. I'd probably leave them alone and I would just start a new joint HSA because of that issue of rolling money over. I don't know. My guess would be that you can't roll it into her account, but you probably could roll it into a joint account and then and co-mingle it later, but you have to ask the custodian.

I don't know the answer. With receipt question, I think this is one of those areas where there's the letter of the law and then there's what's practical. So on the letter of the law, it would go back to, yeah, you would have your oldest account. And so that would also would be a good reason if you're doing the hardcore, mad scientist, use your HSA as a retirement account plan, then I think keeping the original account with that initial inception date would be what you needed to do 'cause that would give you the maximum timeline.

But I honestly think that a lot of that stuff will just come out in the wash. I haven't heard stories of the IRS auditing people because they submitted their receipts on their HSAs. Now, maybe if you accumulate $200,000 in your HSA and then you turn 55 years old, and then one year you submit $100,000 of receipts from the 1980s, or that was too extreme.

You're in the year 2045 and you submit $100,000 of receipts from the year 2012, maybe that would get audited. But I think a lot of that stuff would just come out in the wash. Here's the receipt, here's the account, and how are they gonna find the records on that stuff?

So in summary, I don't know the specific answer of moving it to a joint account. My guess is yes, but ask the custodian, and I would probably just keep the old account with the initial inception date unless there was some compelling reason to move it into a joint account, such as lower expenses on maintaining the account, something like that.

- Okay, great, thanks. I will talk to the custodian, and thank you also for the recommendation of The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. I've gotten it started and it's going real well so far. - It's a great book. It's one of those things that I think every business owner should have on their nightstand, or on the corner of their desk, or on the little stand next to their toilet or something, where they could just pick it up and flip through a chapter and then think about it with regard to their business.

I'm glad that you're finding value in it. - Thanks a lot. - All right, we move to, who was it? Uh-oh, our other's dropped off. So Luke's listening, we'll go to Trey. We'll go back to Trey, I think. Trey, you had another question, go ahead. - Yes, sir, it's another travel question.

- All right. - It seems popular today. So we are expecting our first child in August, and I just kind of want to sanity check. My wife works for the VA, she's a pharmacist, and the federal employees have 12 weeks of maternity leave paid, and then you can use up to another four weeks of sick leave.

So she's gonna be off for 16 weeks. And I've, on your recommendation, actually, moved into a work-from-home scenario with my employer that I thought would have never been attainable until everything that's transpired over the last 12 months. And so I've got that flexibility, and I never having a baby, certainly never having traveled with a baby, would I be crazy to pick a couple of places and stay for maybe a month at a time in nice Airbnbs and just kind of use that as an opportunity to explore some different areas with a newborn, or is that just too wild?

- I think it's very probably too wild. I think that would be really hard on your wife. (sighs) The first time around for a new mother, it's hard to learn to be a new mother. It's hard. It's a brand new set of skills. One of the things that I have some standard speeches that I always give to any of our friends who are expecting their first baby, and one of the aspects of that is we talk about birthing.

Here's what you should know. Here's our advice. Here's some things, the resources that we found helpful. Here's some ways that you can think about the kind of birth experience that you wanna have, et cetera, but one of the things that I always try to emphasize is that what I was underprepared for when I was a first-time father was the fact that the birth was only one thing that we needed to prepare for, but the time after birth was much more difficult than I expected.

We planned a lot for the birth, and we were ready for what happened after the birth, for the new baby, but it was harder than I thought it would be. So things like breastfeeding, right? Assuming that your wife would intend to breastfeed her baby, it's hard for most new mothers to learn how to breastfeed a baby.

It's a whole set of skills that they've never experienced previously and probably don't know, and so it's, even if you have the world's, so first of all, even if you have the world's greatest and smoothest childbirth, you have a natural vaginal birth, everything goes great, you have a glowing story of how smooth and easy it was, you still have to remember, and it's very important for you as a husband, you have to remember that childbirth is a traumatic medical event.

It is a serious traumatic medical event when everything goes well, and so you need to, it's very important that you plan, in the first couple of weeks, to do everything for your wife and to make sure that she is well cared for, because one of the things that, especially, again, first time moms can happen, is they're like, "Well, I feel great, right?

"We had a great experience, here's the baby, "I feel great," and then they push it too hard. They do too much physical activity, and because the wounds of childbirth are internal, it's hard to see, right? You don't think of your wife as being sick because, well, she looks fine, she's happy, she's full of endorphins, like, everything's good.

No, she still needs to be in bed, she still needs to rest, she needs time to simply rest. Then she needs time to get to know the baby. She needs time to just snuggle and enjoy the baby, and the baby needs that in order to build the proper emotional bonds, and so you want her to be in a very comfortable place, to be in a place where she has everything she needs around her, and to be able to properly bond with the baby.

She needs to bond with the baby in the first few weeks, and so moving around a bunch is not a good plan. Now, sometimes everything does go easily, and I think that for, again, future babies, probably so, right? My wife, having had four babies, has more experience now, and to me it's very obvious that dealing with a newborn is actually pretty easy, right?

So if we had a baby, another baby, and that baby was a month old, I mean, with our fourth baby, we traveled when our baby was three weeks old, four weeks old, something like that. We got on an airplane and we traveled, so, and it wasn't a big deal.

You still have to protect for that first few weeks, but you still need to make sure that she has time to learn, and so the skills of breastfeeding, the skills of caring for the baby, all of those things take time for her to learn. In addition, I would just point out that a lot of times babies have weird little problems that take time to figure out.

Our second child was extremely sick as a baby. She had GERD and, what's the other one? And colic, she had GERD and colic, and so she was just a miserable little baby, and so sometimes you have a miserable baby, and those first few months are brutal, and then the final thing I would point out is that your wife will not want to go and travel and go and see sites when she is taking care of a newborn, just simply because of the amount of round-the-clock care that the newborn requires.

So babies eat every three hours, every four hours, 'cause they have itty-bitty tiny stomachs, and so they need to eat every three or four hours, and that's around the clock, and so her sleep patterns will be messed up, all of that stuff, so you want her to be in the most comfortable place possible.

You want to make sure that the place that she gives birth is where she's totally relaxed, totally confident, and you want to make sure that she has the time and the space to nest with the baby, and that she's just totally comfortable so she can bond with the baby and learn those new skills of motherhood.

So I would not try to go around a bunch of places. Now, would I go somewhere for a birth, like birth tourism? That's hard. I think it's really hard for a first-time baby, but I think there are people who do it, but even in that situation, I wouldn't go to many places.

I would have one place. I would set up a really nice environment there, and then just plan to be in that one place so that she can be cared for and protected during those first few weeks of the baby's life. - Man, that's great information. I appreciate that. So probably what we're gonna do then is not plan anything, and since she'll be off for 16 weeks, we'll just see how she feels towards the end of that, and then maybe we could pick one place if we wanted to go, and maybe it's just to go visit family for a week or two.

- Yeah. In the past, when we have been expecting a baby, I put everything on hold because you just don't know. You just don't know, and so you do everything you can to prepare for the optimal circumstances, but you don't know. You don't know if the childbirth is smooth or the childbirth is very difficult.

You don't know if the baby is perfectly happy and healthy or if the baby is sick or handicapped in some way. You don't know what the baby is gonna experience in that first few months, and then again, it takes time. It takes time for you to learn the skills of caring for a new baby, and it takes time for her to learn the skills of caring for a new baby, so I would not, I wouldn't make any plans.

I would keep the schedule wide open. I would plan that we're gonna stay at home, and we're gonna hang out, and we're gonna be together, and we're not gonna go anywhere, and then if at some point, you find that everything is going well, mama's healthy, baby's healthy and happy, and you're working things out, then yeah, then you can travel, and so at this point, I consider a newborn a relatively easy baby to travel with.

It's easier to travel with a newborn than it is with a two-year-old, but that's after some experience of working with newborns. - Great, that's what we'll do then. Thanks so much. - Good deal, all right, we'll go back to Adam, and we'll finish up with Adam. You said you had another question.

Adam, go ahead, please. - Yes, sir, so similar vein having to do with me moving from Canada to the US. I was hoping if you had any advice on how to quickly build my credit in the States. I've read a lot of the sort of standard advice, and I plan on following through with most of it.

I think the unique situation that I'm in is that I do have very good credit, at least for a 22-year-old, good credit in Canada, excuse me, and I was hoping that maybe I could leverage that some way. I have an existing account with American Express, and so I know they have both a Canadian and a US subsidiary, likewise with my Canadian bank.

Any words of wisdom in this area? - Those are good ideas. I've never done this personally, moved from Canada to the United States, and I've not worked with someone, nor have I researched it. So my advice is simply from a generalized knowledge, but I think I would start with both of those ideas.

I would call American Express, and I would explain to them, I would apply for a new American Express card under my US Social Security number. I don't know the best way to do it. I would call them and talk to an agent, explain the situation to them, and maybe have them do it manually.

It would be hard, I think, to fill it in on the website in an appropriate way, but since you already have an American Express card in Canada, I would go ahead and apply for one of the blue cash or something like that that's easy to get with American Express under your US Social Security number.

And then the same thing, if your Canadian bank has an American subsidiary or partner, then I would talk to that, and I would explain again the situation, and just simply apply under your US Social Security number. Those two things, I would guess, would probably work. If it doesn't work, then I would say, just simply start the standard process of the standard advice.

If necessary, start with a secured credit card, nothing wrong with that, and then just simply be aggressive about gathering new credit cards and applying for new credit cards in the United States. And you can do it very quickly. A few months of a secured credit card, I mean, starting with zero, do some research on some of the credit cards that are designed for new borrowers, some of the credit cards that are targeted at college students.

Open an account with a bank, a new account with a US American bank, and get their credit card. Open an account with a credit union and get their credit card, and in four or six months, something like that, you could get any credit card that you want. And then just follow the advice that I teach in the credit card course about systematically expanding your credit lines, systematically building your portfolio, and keeping your credit score high, and then making sure you have the infrastructure there for that, and yeah, you can do it very quickly.

In addition, you should consider for maximum credit score, then you might consider going ahead in the beginning, borrowing some money with some line of credit other than a credit card. So take out a small car loan, take out a small student loan, something like that, a couple thousand dollars is sufficient, that will massively increase your credit score very quickly, and then make getting credit cards very easy.

- Great, that's perfect. I'm working through your career and income planning course now, and I think the credit card is gonna be the next one up. Thank you very much. - Good, awesome, my pleasure. All right, that rounds out our calls for today. Thank you all for calling in.

A bunch of good questions, let me see what closing comments I have for you today. I think the closing comments that I would just simply focus on is in what I said with regard to how you need to plan ahead. I think that was probably some of the more important ones, but just simply planning ahead.

Notice that the inflation concerns, there are inflation concerns. The caller is correct on what he said about the amount of money that is being created right now in the United States. It's bad. We've just reached a record where the total national debt equals the total annual budget in the United States.

It's bad, and it's gonna get worse. So again, I'm not a catastrophist or an extremist. I'm not predicting impending doom. One of the things that I have become convinced of is that the Mad Max scenario, everything falls apart super fast, it's just not realistic. Last night I was watching some videos from a Venezuelan YouTuber, and I think his name is Juan Guerrero, something like that.

And he was in Caracas in Venezuela, and here you are observing, it was in Spanish, so if you speak Spanish, go and watch it. But what you see in a total financial collapse is the fact that everything looks pretty normal. There's tremendous problems on all sides, but it doesn't look like Bosnia, at least not in a place like Venezuela.

It doesn't look like Bosnia. There's tremendous danger, tremendous physical conflict, lots and lots of violence, but it doesn't look like Bosnia. It looks much more like a wacky, messed up system. So I have spent a lot of time over the years trying to caution people about how difficult things can be and about the fact that we all need to prepare for things to be difficult.

And I believe that that is absolutely true. We do need to prepare for things to be difficult, and we need to be protected against those things happening. But it's not Mad Max, it's not. So set up your infrastructure in advance, and then you'll have the best, those are the best solutions that I have for those scenarios.

Thank you all so much for listening. I'd love to talk to you next week. If you would like to join, go to Patreon, search for Radical Personal Finance, and join me on next week's Q&A show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back.

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