Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today on the show, I want to share with you some of our exciting plans for this year, my family's plans for these coming at least six months, although time will tell.

To cut straight to it, we're going traveling again. At the moment as I speak to you, my house is full of boxes, stuff is flowing out the doors. We are in the process of minimizing and downsizing once again. We've been living in a rented house for quite a while now, for the last couple of years, and we are getting rid of all of our stuff yet again, keeping just a few things, the important things in life, you know, books and more books and more books, keeping books, but otherwise getting rid of all of our personal possessions and downsizing for our family of six down into just a handful of suitcases again so that we can hit the road.

And in this next month, in May, at the beginning of May, we will be traveling full time. We're, again, getting rid of our house, hopping on an airplane. We're going to begin in the Americas. In May, we will be in Mexico. In April, we will be in Costa Rica.

In June, we will be in the United States of America. And in July, we'll see. We are planning to head to Europe, but of course, there's still some uncertainty there given all of the European travel restrictions. But this summer, and so I can't tell you exactly the countries, but this summer, we intend to spend some time in Europe, spend some time in Portugal, hopefully in France, in Spain, going to go check out Malta, going to go to some in Eastern Europe, planning to go to Serbia, then some of the Balkan countries, possibly along the coast, Croatia, Montenegro.

We may go from there to Georgia and Armenia. I'm interested in what's happening in Georgia and Armenia, possibly Azerbaijan. From there, we may go on and spend more time in Europe, or we might head to Asia via India. I'd like to go to India and spend some time looking around for opportunities in India.

This fall, I would like to be in Asia. So specifically, we'll see. But Hong Kong, Singapore, looking for investment opportunities, finance opportunities, may go to Malaysia, to Cambodia, to Vietnam. And then at this point in time, we'll see. And of course, all this is subject to a number of things.

We may pop down to Indonesia, pop into Australia, maybe go to New Zealand, or we might not. We'll see. So the reason I'm being a little bit cagey is simply that I don't even have tickets yet, and the world situation is still somewhat unknown. We're dealing with the kind of the back end of a global pandemic.

We're dealing with some tight lockdowns and travel restrictions in some of those places, and so that can make immigration, traveling places, tourist difficult. And then of course, also, I need to be cautious and careful about what my family can handle. My wife and I are not strangers to travel, even to extended travel.

In 2018, we did this already. We got rid of all of our stuff and hopped in an RV and spent six months traveling around the United States. And on that trip, we also didn't have a specific timeline. We didn't know if we're going to go for three months. We didn't know if we're going to go for a year.

But we wound up conceiving a baby, and so we needed to be stationary for a time when the baby was going to come along. That was what ended our trip then, and we decided to leave the United States too. So things can happen. My biggest concern in terms of timeline is just how are my children going to respond.

I think that they'll do okay. We have some experience traveling, and so I think they'll do okay. But it might be that they feel displaced. They may not feel secure if we're moving around all the time. And if as a father, I see that, then I want to be free to change and adjust because I do have young children, and I need to make sure that they're healthy and doing really well.

And so we'll see, but that's our tentative plan. And so how does that involve you? Well, first of all, I'd like to share a couple of lessons with you and then share how you can get connected and keep pace with us on these journeys. First lesson I'd like to share with you is simply this.

It's only hard until you've done it. Or related to that, it's only scary until you've done it. We are in the midst of doing something that is for most normal, sane people, scary and difficult. Getting rid of all of your stuff, getting rid of your house, and packing your young, large family into suitcases is for any normal, sane person, scary and difficult.

But while it's not easy, and it's not without some cautiousness on my part, I don't think of it now as scary and as difficult. I want to tell you why that is, and it's simply this. It's because I've done it. I did it. I did it in 2018. And I've done it in testing different ways, different times along the way.

I've tested so much of this that for me, what we're doing, which is certainly the stuff of dreams for many people, doesn't feel all that scary and all that difficult, because I've tested it in micro doses. And I believe that this is a strategy that you can implement into your life if there are plans and things that you want to do, that you would like to do, to make things less scary and difficult.

The first is to be willing to dream big dreams, and be clear on what you want to do and how you want to live. But if you have a dream and you have a goal, recognize that it's going to be scary and difficult until you do it. And there's no easy way around it.

You have to do it. But as you do it, it will become easier. So let's start with a little bit of backstory. First of all, over the years, my wife and I have traveled in a number of different ways, and we've proven to ourselves that we can be happy, that we can have a good relationship, that we're both pretty low maintenance, and that we can do it in all kinds of different ways.

Over the years, we've slept in cars, we've slept in tents, we've had nice hotel rooms, we've rented luxury villas, we've had big, fancy, expensive experiences, and we've had poor person experiences. We've enjoyed all of it. As children have come along, we committed that we were going to keep on going.

And it's not easy. I don't think any parent would say that it's easy to travel with children. You go camping with your kids, and your kids get filthy, and they get the stuff filthy, but you learn lessons. Our lesson is we take a Rubbermaid tub and dunk the kids in the tub and use it as a bathtub.

It's easier than going to the bathhouse. And you figure things out as time goes on. And then you just keep on going. When we had two young children, we bought our first motor home, and we traveled in that, really enjoyed that. Nothing crazy, just a week and a half.

I think our longest trip in that was two and a half weeks, maybe, something like that. But in that two and a half weeks, we did all kinds of different things, and we learned that, yeah, you know what? We could have a great time with a couple of children and a couple of dogs in this tiny little space.

And then we outgrew that, and we sold that thing, and we kept on going, and we've tried different things. When we went off in our RV trip, we'd already downsized, right? We'd already sold our house. We'd already moved to a smaller apartment, and we enjoyed that. But we were done with the apartment, ready to move anyway, and so we decided to go ahead and travel in the RV.

And traveling in the RV taught us a lot of things about what was easy and what was not easy, what we liked and what we didn't like. There were some things that were wonderful about it, and there were some things that weren't. And so as this information comes, you start to test your boundaries, and you start to see what you can do.

And you build your skills and your capabilities by trying things and by doing things. Well, fast forward. After you've lived in an RV for a time, it's a lot less scary to think of moving into suitcases and living in an Airbnb than it is if you have a big house and you're accustomed to having the big house.

So we sold the RV, moved abroad. When we moved abroad, we didn't really have a really great plan. I had a credit card and a passport, and that was about it. So we just flew outside of the United States. I rented a house sight unseen on Airbnb. I rented a car sight unseen on some random rental car website.

And we showed up, and guess what? Everything was okay. It worked. We went and bought some stuff for the kitchen and figured out how to do things in a new place, but it pretty much worked. And then along the way, we changed a few different things and moved around a couple times and been here, been there, et cetera.

But along the way, we do more and more of it. So today, it was funny that when I was talking to my wife about going traveling in the RV, it took quite a lot of convincing, a lot of time, because she thought it was kind of crazy. Only crazy people did that.

And so we made good progress there. But then remarkably, as we've started talking about this last time, it's been a fairly easy thing. And so having kind of picked up your roots and then having put down your roots in another place has showed us that it's not that difficult.

But what I would say is it's not that difficult for us at this point in time. It's not to say there won't be hard times, right? There's going to be some cranky kids and some fussy flights, I'm sure, and some tiredness and some wastes of money and some not fun days.

That's normal life. What I mean is that psychologically, it doesn't feel hard or scary or difficult to me. And so we're heading into an open-ended trip with one-way tickets and no specific return plan, and I'm going into it filled with confidence, knowing that I can do it. But it's because I've done it.

You say, "Josh, but that's a cop-out. What if I haven't done it?" Well, my answer is you're going to have to do it. And this is the same in anything, right? Your first time buying a house, when you're going into it, it feels so scary. But then when you go into it, "Well, I could do that again." You sell your house and hopefully make a little bit of money and, "Okay, that was good.

I could do that again. I could do that again." It's funny. Imagine just something as simple as proposing. When I was a kid, I always imagined how proposing to a girlfriend and asking her to be your fiance would be the hardest thing in the world. And then you kind of come to that phase of life, and it's not actually that hard.

But then once you've done it, once you've gotten married, I often think, "If my wife died, it wouldn't be that hard to do again. I'm sure I could do that again." You see people repeat this kind of thing all over the world. And so it's only hard and scary until you've done it.

But once you've done it, it opens up the thrill of the thing to you, and you can take advantage of those times in life. I've got some specific plans for our traveling. A lot of them involve you. Not necessarily meetups. I don't know how many audience members I have in Serbia.

I'm sure a couple. We'll do a meetup in Belgrade if I can get there. But what I do think a lot about is your opportunities. Where can I send you for opportunities? And very much what I'm interested in is partly – I'm a big offshore and international diversification advocate these days because as a performer – I guess technically still a – I could still call myself a professional financial planner.

As a professional financial planner, it just solves so many problems for people. It's simple things, whether it's offshore relocation, whether it's just simply banking offshore, if it's investing offshore. It solves so many problems so elegantly. I'm amazed how little most professional financial advisors and most professional counselors, countenance and such, actually know about offshoring.

Last couple of months, I'm part of a Facebook group that has a bunch of financial planners. There was a financial planner that came in and said, "I've got this client – forget – mid-20s, making a couple million dollars a year with an online business. I think it was Amazon FBA.

Here's his things. Here's his setup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Does anybody have any great ideas about how I can help him save money because his tax bills are too big?" I'm reading all these dozens of responses and it's just all the same old effective stuff for US residents and whatnot, but kind of same old, same old.

I kind of piped up and I said, "Well, you ought to at least – I think you owe him a professional obligation to let him know that he could run that business pretty much 100% tax-free if he just left the United States and put into place some offshore stuff." Over the years, I've seen the magic of it and I've done the magic of it and I've looked for effective solutions and I found a lot of the international solutions effective.

There are so many more places in the world today where you can make money. Right now, my biggest thrust personally and professionally is in the subject of investments. I am deeply frustrated with the US investment conversation because where we basically devolved to as a society is the fact that you and I who have worked hard and who have saved our money are basically – if we're to believe popular financial advice, we're supposed to tuck it into a computer-run index fund and we're supposed to sit back and be happy with 6%.

Meanwhile, we get 0.3% on our savings accounts. I find that utterly unacceptable and I've tried to handle it over the years by focusing on the value of investing in your own business where you can make thousands of percents of rate of return if you have the right business opportunity.

But at the end of the day, even if you are in business, you still need a place to park your money and you still need some better asset management strategies than just sticking your money in an index fund and getting 6%. And of course, who knows about the 6%?

Maybe it'd be higher, right? Long-term history of the US stock market is of course higher than 6%. But then of course, there are legions of sophisticated, responsible people telling us we should buckle in our pants and settle for low growth prospects in the future. Well, I don't buy it.

I think that's a uniquely Western constraint and there's no reason not to go and search for higher return. Now when I sit and look at my investing lifetime, I mean let's just do some math, right? Let's just pretend you're 30 years old, right? You've got $200,000 of present value in your portfolio.

You're investing $20,000 per year in between 401ks, etc. And you've got a 35-year investment time horizon and let's put it in 6%. Well, at 6%, you can get rich, right? You can have $3.9 million in 35 years. But at 12%, you can get really rich, right? You can have $20 million, $20.2 million at 12%.

Well, I'm not interested in sitting around and taking 6% if I can have 12%. I'm willing to get on a few airplanes. I'm willing to go and look for some more interesting markets and I'm willing to learn a few languages and I'm willing to learn some new skills in order to get me to the $20 million instead of the – and you hopefully – to the $20 million instead of the 3.whatever million dollars.

So those are some of my purposes professionally is that I'm going to be doing a lot of work along the way. I'll of course be podcasting, creating videos, creating content, creating courses, talking to you, teaching you, answering your questions, sharing what I'm learning along the way. But I'm looking for opportunities because the world is full of opportunities for those who go looking for them.

You can sit back and just wait and be shocked when only a couple of opportunities come along or you can go look for them and be amazed at the sheer volume of opportunity that the world offers for you. Now there's no question though that part of what we're doing is just fun, right?

There's no question. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to traveling the world with my children, showing them the world, right? I really appreciate the concept of world schooling. For me, my experience traveling the world has opened my eyes to many things. I really appreciate the concept of world schooling.

My wife and I, we do home education with our children but we don't fit into any neat bucket. I just draw inspiration from different philosophies. We don't have one easily definable philosophy that controls our approach. But I really believe that there is value in exposing your children to the way it's done in different places and to the opportunities that exist all around the globe.

And so that's important to me. And what is also very important to me is take advantage of the freedom that you have in life. This is a big deal for me. From my story, I've wanted to be a guy who could make his living on a laptop since I was 15 years old.

I'm not kidding. I was a 15-year-old who was buying e-books about how to make money online. That was important to me. Now it took me a lot longer than I ever thought it was going to be to figure it out. Today I could figure it out a lot faster.

But that said, I figured it out. But along the way, I've given up a lot of opportunities to keep certain kinds of freedom. So there are different kinds of freedom. There is financial freedom, how much money you have, and that is a very important freedom. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Making more money will gain you a higher level of personal freedom. You'll have more choices. However, I have sometimes made choices in life where I give up financial opportunity to keep time freedom and geographic freedom. And so I would rather earn less money but have full control of my daily and weekly schedule and of my physical location than earn more money and be locked into a specific location on a specific schedule.

That's the choice that I have made. And yet when you do that, I think you really got to take advantage of it, right? And that's what's a little bit funny. Over the last couple of years, I've been fairly stationary and I work on a fairly normal schedule. I go to my office 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

And I've often wondered, "Well, Joshua, when are you going to take advantage of this freedom that you have?" Well, it's time to take advantage of this freedom that you have. And I would encourage you, when life gives you opportunities, take advantage of them because you can't always connect the time and the money.

But if you can connect the time and the money, just recognize there are some things you can do in life that you can't do at a different time in life. There are certain times at which you can spend time with your children and times you can't. There are certain times when you can take a break from your career and certain times you can't.

And so you want to really focus in and do the things that are most appropriate at certain times in your life. How can you apply this? Well, if you have a job, I encourage you, be prepared for when that job ends. Take a little mini retirement, a few months off, maybe a year off.

Take a little retreat, a little sabbatical. That means save money so that when you get laid off, you have money in the bank and you can take a little sabbatical and go and do whatever it is that you've been wanting to do. Pay attention to those inflection points in your children's ages.

Maybe they're finishing up at their elementary school and they're enrolled in elementary school but it only goes through sixth grade and they're going to have to change schools anyway. Well, why not pull them out for a year and go spend a year bouncing around Europe showing them the history of Western society instead of – and then go ahead and enroll them in the school next year.

Things like that. Look for those opportunities in your life. And so at the moment, we've got a good opportunity where it kind of fits in our life and timing where we're going to go and travel and I think it makes a lot of sense. Then remember this, that if you're looking for a way to travel and if you're interested in long-term travel, remember that if the costs of travel are added to your current cost of life, then those costs can be pretty substantial.

But if you can just simply replace the current cost of life with the cost of travel, then they're often pretty moderate. So if you look at your home and you probably won't want to do like us where you give up your home, but if you look at your home and you say, "We're going to keep this home," look at renting it out.

Put it on a vacation swap, home exchange away kind of home away or home exchange kind of site. Look for that. Or go ahead and sell your home. Maybe you have some profit in it. Take some profit, go travel for a time and come back and buy another house.

Maybe you need to upgrade your house since that's a good time to sell a house and go on. Just look for these opportunities in life. Don't be scared to do something just because you haven't done it yet. Work your way towards it with little baby steps along the way.

Now how does this involve you? So along the way I'm going to share with you a lot as much as I can. I'll do my best to bring you really useful content. When I go to Mexico, I am going to Mexico and I'm going to interview a Mexican immigration attorney for example.

I'll bring you an interview with a Mexican immigration attorney. I did this with a Canadian immigration consultant and many of you went back and downloaded Brandon's book. You signed up and started working with him and are in the process of building your offshore plan by immigrating to Canada. I think Mexico is a really wonderful opportunity.

In fact, basically any North American who talks to me, I basically always say you should go to Mexico first. That should be one of your first internationalization options. And so I'm going to go to San Miguel de Allende and interview a Mexican immigration attorney there and bring that interview to the show with you.

So that will be coming to you in May. Also I'm going to be going to Andrew Henderson's Nomad Capitalist Live in Cancun in May. I would imagine some of you will be there. I really respect and admire what Andrew has built over the years. He was on Radical Personal Finance years ago.

All the way back in episode 67 in September of 2014, Andrew Henderson was on the show. He'll be back on the show very, very soon. I have recorded the interview, just editing it and will be releasing that interview for you soon. And then I'll be going to Cancun to Nomad Capitalist Live May 12 through May 15.

And then again following that, we'll be heading to Costa Rica. I am planning, stay tuned for the next couple of days for the information to be up, but I am going to be hosting an event. One of the big goals that I had for 2020 was to start hosting more live events.

And I want to do these in the United States and elsewhere. But of course, the pandemic made that difficult. So I shelved that. But I will be hosting a live event in Costa Rica in May. So if you would like to brush off your passport, Costa Rica is totally open.

No COVID test needed. Coming in, they just have a simple health form that you can complete. You will need to have health insurance, but that shouldn't be a problem. It's not expensive if you need to buy it. So this should be an easy country for you to get to.

And then of course, you'll need to think about getting back into your other countries. If you're going to the United States, you'll need a COVID test to get back in the United States or elsewhere. Follow up with your own details there. And then, like I said, in June in the United States and then July in Europe, TBD as far as all of the destinations.

In closing, I would love to invite you to come with me on the journey. I want to give you some ways to do that. So a couple of new things. Number one, I am launching a new text message opportunity to connect with me. I want to encourage you to send a text message.

And perhaps you've been seeing this more and more people are doing texting, but I've set up a thing where you can text me directly and it comes right to my phone and I'll answer you and I'll respond. But I'm going to use text messaging as a way of announcing where I'm going.

I'm going to be using it as a way of announcing where I am. And it just gives you a chance to ask any questions you want to have, et cetera, to reach me directly. If you'd like to text me, I'll give you the number. Grab your phone, I guess.

Pull out your phone. Here's the number, 561-468-3158. Again, 561-468-3158. Send me a text message there and ask me any question you want. Give me a hello and that will get you signed up for my text messages. In addition, of course, you can sign up for the email list. The best way to do that is go to RadicalBooklist.com, sign up for my Radical Booklist reading list and that'll get you signed up for my email list.

I'd love to have you there. Go to RadicalBooklist.com. In addition, please make sure to follow me on all of the social profiles. One of the things I didn't do when we traveled around the United States is at the time I wasn't posting on social media. Well, I've decided to change that.

I'm going to open up and I've walked away from a lot of privacy and I'm open up to a lot more sharing. So you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @JoshuaSheets on all of those platforms. I'm easy to find. J-O-S-H-U-A-S-H-E-A-T-S. Find me on those platforms. I'd love to follow up, be connected with you there.

Hoping to do some video and show you some interesting places, show you some interesting things along the way. Stay tuned for details on that as well. In closing, in addition to those things, I just did ask you, I'd love it if you would leave a review for Radical Personal Finance.

So wherever you listen to the show, if you listen on Spotify, if you listen on iTunes, just take a moment and just drop a rating and a review, a couple of words, a few sentences is great but that would be really, really helpful to the show. I'm committed to continuing to serve you and helping the show grow.

I hope to see you this year on the road but in closing I would just encourage you and say it's only hard, it's only scary until you do it. And so if there's something that you want to do, start figuring out what are some micro things that I can do to do certain aspects of this.

You may not be ready to get rid of all your stuff and say, "Oh, this is going to be easy." It's not, it's not. But maybe you can take a trip. That's a good start. Get your passports. Just start. But start taking micro actions in the direction of your dreams and I promise it's only hard and scary until you do it.

Text me, 561-468-3158.