Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. Welcome. 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. Man, it's good to be back on the microphone for a Friday show.

I really want these shows to be every single week. Over the last couple of weeks, I have not been able to get it done. So today we kick it off again. Friday Q&A live call-in show. I'm so glad that you are here for our Friday live Q&A show. If it's your first time, welcome.

These shows work just like any other call-in talk radio show. I've got a listener line full of people ready to call in and talk about questions, comments, anything that you have. I open these shows up today to listeners of the show on Patreon. If you would like to gain access to one of these Q&A calls, you'll be able to call in, talk about anything you'd like.

I'd be thrilled if you'd go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Just search Radical Personal Finance on Patreon. You'll find the page there and I will open these calls up to you. I'd be happy to have you join in for one of these Friday Q&A shows. If you need, I always put timestamps in the description.

So if there's a call that you're not interested in, feel free to flip forward to the next timestamp. But I try to keep them interesting and I certainly enjoy doing them because we get to cover all kinds of fascinating topics on a week-by-week basis. So I will open up the phone line as soon as I can get my computer to stop playing the music.

And with a force quit on the music, I think we are ready to go. John in Pennsylvania, welcome. You are up first today, sir. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. Glad you're feeling better. Thank you. I had two questions. So I'll ask them first one and see if we have time for the second one.

But I had some time to start looking into some projects on my list that had been there for a while, specifically about external citizenship outside the US or permanent residency. Specifically, I was looking at citizenship by descent to one of one or two countries in the EU and potential temporary or permanent residency trying to get that in Mexico, which I, from what I read, is actually quite easy, but I haven't started taking the steps towards either of those.

Citizenship by descent is actually, I'm waiting on some legislation to go through a couple of those countries, which might take quite a while. But as I was thinking about these, I was just wondering, for all the benefits there are for these types of movements, are there any downsides to consider when, you know, kind of adding another citizenship for an EU country or even something as simple as a temporary permanent residency for Mexico or anywhere in general?

What are the big concerns you would look at for why not to do something like that, if any? - Yeah, the biggest reason why you would not want to pursue a second citizenship or a residency program would be that if you have some personal involvement with the military, you have a top secret clearance of some kind, or you're involved in some kind of governmental function, that can be very, very complicated.

It's not illegal to do that, it's just complicated. And it's especially complicated if it's something that you are actively pursuing. So you have a top secret clearance with the US military or you're employed in some kind of government job, and you, you know, your mom is from Russia, and so you qualify for Russian citizenship by descent.

But now, even after you've worked for the military for 10 years, now you start to go and apply for it, it's just going to make your requalification for your top secret clearance much more complicated. So that, I think, is the biggest reason not to do it. Beyond that, if you're not involved with a local government, there are very few downsides.

These will vary depending on the country that is involved. So the second big reason not to pursue a citizenship is going to be if the country that you're interested in imposes some kind of requirement on you or on your children. I think the most important ones here would be things like military service.

So perhaps you qualify for Israeli citizenship, but by becoming an Israeli citizen, your children will be required to do military service in Israel, Singapore, Brazil, Armenia. These are all examples of countries that have mandatory military service, and that may affect you or it may affect your children, right? Switzerland would be another example of a famous country that has that.

And so do you want to burden your children with the requirement to do military service for what is probably going to be a foreign country for you? Now, there is a sliding scale here with all of these options to say what are the specific, you know, sometimes there are opportunities to get out of it, right?

Many times you can get out of it. Okay, look, my child is Brazilian, but they go to the Brazilian consulate in the country of registry and they file the papers and okay, they're exempt from their military service and then they reach past that age. But that's, I think, another thing that you want to be careful of.

In addition, you want to be careful of entangling yourself in a foreign tax net. I think the biggest one here, the biggest problem here is for people who want to file for US American citizenship by descent. If I were an Italian citizen, if I had a consulting client of mine who said, "I'm an Italian citizen, lived all over the world, lived in the United States for many years, but his wife and children were Italian, sorry, were dual nationals, Italian and US American, he was thinking about whether he should get a US American citizenship.

Well, my answer to him was don't. There was no benefit to him of becoming a US American citizen and yet, because of the financial and the tax implications, there were significant downsides to his being a US American citizen. And so, I think there, the United States is one of the worst in the world because of the laws that it puts you under, but there are other countries as well.

It's not just taxes though. So, for example, in the United States, big reasons not to become a US American citizen, the United States imposes a lot of disclosure requirements. They say that you have to report all of your foreign bank accounts. And so, there are many countries that, especially in the wake of the United States aggressiveness on this front, in the wake of the FATCA legislation, many countries around the world have come together to create the Common Reporting Standards, CRS, on bank accounts and information sharing held abroad.

Many countries do not yet impose the requirements of a country like the United States, where they say, all right, if you have an account that's outside of our border and if it's worth more than 10, if you have more than $10,000 in aggregate and accounts that, count value and accounts that you control, you have to report them all to us, then you have to tell us about them.

But countries are moving in that direction. And so, you might want to be wary about getting involved with a country that has such significant disclosure requirements. This, I think, is especially going to be a factor as the cryptocurrency wars become more strong. Let's say that you're a citizen of a country that bans cryptocurrency for its citizens and residents.

That's happening right now. There are major countries right now that are talking about banning cryptocurrency holdings. You see right now the United States this year on your tax returns requires you to disclose if you hold cryptocurrencies. So, that is a factor that you want to weigh carefully. There may be other laws and regulations that are difficult for you.

For example, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a major thorn in the side of many businessmen seeking to go abroad. The basic US-American perspective on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is that bribing people is illegal and you shouldn't engage in it. And so, when you call something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and you say, "Is this a bad thing or a good thing?" then most people say, "Of course, it's a good thing.

We don't want people going abroad and committing foreign corruption." The challenge is that that's a very myopic worldview. Much of the world functions very broadly on gift culture and on social networks as being the primary thing. And so, the things that from a US-American perspective are seen as corruption are not always seen as corruption in other places.

And so, if you sign up to become a citizen of a country that has some kind of legislation like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that can make your business doings very difficult, where you're not able to participate in the local culture the way that things are done. So, that would be an example.

You would also want to be very careful about allying yourself with a country that is, I guess, not particularly popular at the moment. So, in today's world, a good example would be a country like Iran. If you qualify for citizenship by descent in Iran, you could file for it, but it's going to make your life much more complicated.

If you're living in the United States, you're a US-American citizen by birth or by naturalization, and you can just simply say, "Yeah, I'm not Iranian," your life internationally is going to be much, much simpler, not having to deal with the sanctions that many countries around the world have placed upon people of your nationality.

There have been many other examples. You could think back to the 1980s for South African citizens with the international unpopularity of South Africans at that time. So, those would be some examples that come to mind. And I think, finally, with regard to residencies, residencies are a little bit more practical.

You don't have nearly as many requirements placed upon you if you're a resident of a country. So, maybe you love living in Brazil, but you don't want your children to be subjected to mandatory military service. Well, you might just get a residency permit, and because you're not a citizen, you don't have to bother with it.

This is the same thing that I advised my client who was Italian living in the United States. He had a green card in the United States, permanent residency permit. There was no benefit to his becoming a citizen, other than I guess he could vote, but there was no benefit to his becoming a US citizen, but there were many drawbacks.

But as a resident of the United States, yes, he's still subjected to the same laws, subjected to the same taxes, subjected to the same disclosure requirements, but if he wanted to leave, his process and his ability to leave the system and just simply surrender his residency permit would be much simpler than if he was a citizen.

And so, the residency permit can be a good way to allow you to live somewhere without being subject to all of the laws. The downsides of a residency permit are far fewer. They're more practical. Usually, there's the cost of getting it and then the hassle of maintaining it. So, many residency permits require you to spend a certain amount of time in that country, Canada.

If you have a Canadian permanent residency permit, you have to be there for two out of every five years to keep it active. The United States, if you have a US-American permanent residency permit, a green card, you have to be there the majority of your time to keep it active, otherwise they can revoke it.

You know, many places throughout the world, right, you can get a Panama residency permit, but you're supposed to go back, I think it's once every two years, to maintain that residency permit. And so, you may not want to go to Panama every couple of years. This is why I think Mexico is such a good option and why it's one of my first recommendations for US-Americans, because once you get a Mexican permanent residency permit, under current law, which could change at any time, under current law, there is no requirement, there's no physical presence requirement to maintain that permit.

So, you can get a Mexican permanent residency permit, and notice I'm saying permanent resident, when you become a permanent resident in Mexico, you can maintain that in theory for life without physically being president in Mexico at any time. And so, that's one of the reasons why it's so powerful.

The final thing would be cost, right, the practicalities of the cost. There are costs associated with every single one of these options. There's simple costs of plane tickets. You can have low-cost options, right? Mexico is a very low-cost option if you have savings, but you still have to go there, you still have to pay the attorney fees and deal with that.

There's still the hassle factor. Some residency programs are much more expensive. You want to become a permanent resident of Singapore, you're going to be shelling out millions of dollars and sometimes buying things that you wouldn't otherwise buy. And so, it's got to be important enough to you to actually be willing to do that.

So, on the whole, I think that the advantages far outweigh the costs, and if you're thoughtful and careful about the particular nations that you work with, then I think you can diminish those. I guess the last thing I didn't say with regard to citizenship is that sometimes the cost of becoming a citizen of a country that you're entitled to is that you have to relinquish your other citizenships.

There aren't as many of these countries who require, who forbid their citizens of being dual citizens as there once was, but there are still some very prestigious countries that do not permit dual citizenship. So, you know, in the European Union you have countries like, let's see, Austria, I think you have a country like the Netherlands, I think is quite strict about it.

Germany will allow dual citizenship, but only with approval from the German government, only with certain countries. So, you could be a US-American, US-German dual national, but it would be very hard for you if you're from Ukraine to become a Ukrainian-German dual national. They're going to want you to relinquish your first citizenship.

I think that places like Singapore, right, Singapore would be probably the most prestigious right now, the most attractive citizenship that somebody would love to file for, but Singapore does not want you to have dual citizenship. There are certainly, I'm sure, people who do it and just work hard to make sure the government doesn't know about it, but that would be the biggest downside.

I guess probably the biggest country right now would be India, that simply India does not permit dual citizenship. They do have a scheme called the Overseas Indian Citizens. Basically, it's kind of like a second-class citizenship. And so, for people with Indian heritage, they can file for the Overseas, I forget the name of it, but the Overseas Indian Citizen Program, and they're given a quasi-Indian passport that's basically a permanent residence permit that allows them to live in India, but it's not a full-fledged residence.

They can't get a passport that they can travel on, etc., because if we're in order for them to, because India officially forbids dual citizenship. So, in summary, it's worth doing. I think it's one of the simplest things you can do. And citizenship by descent is slow, usually, but it's worth doing if you can, because it opens up tremendous options for you.

But you just do want to be thoughtful and make sure that you're not unintentionally entangling yourself with a foreign government that is going to impose some onerous restrictions on you. >> Yeah, no, I appreciate it. That's a lot of good stuff to go through and to have enumerated, because that's exactly what I want to do, not to stumble into something accidentally just from ignorance.

And those top things, I'd run into the security clearance potential question somewhat recently, but the military for children and other tax entanglements is a good thing to kind of have on my bullet list to check for these particular countries. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. >> I would simply reiterate that I think here today it matters what direction the country is going, right?

So, let's talk where we are today, right? Today is April 30, 2021. I think you could look at it and say, "What is the trajectory that this country is on, and do I want to be exposed to them?" The big topic right now is wealth taxes. And there are many countries around the world that are actively lobbying for and passing wealth taxes, and they're passing them on a citizenship basis.

And so, now South America, right? Right now you have Bolivia, Argentina is talking about a wealth tax, or maybe they passed – no, they passed a wealth tax, I'm pretty sure. So, do I want to claim my – let's say that I'm a Canadian living in Canada and subject to the laws of Canada.

Do I really want to claim my Argentinian citizenship and be subject to the wealth tax that they are rolling out? I'm not so sure, right? If I'm not wealthy, then certainly I do, right? If I'm just a young college student, yeah, I'll claim it. If I've got $50 million in the bank, then no, I don't want to be associated with that.

In that situation, I would not claim an Argentinian citizenship. I would simply go and get another citizenship in another jurisdiction that doesn't have that same covetous nature that the Argentinian government has. And so, I think this is the challenge, especially in today's world, is that countries – I'm trying to be very practical and not be, you know, ideological here, but you want to just be thoughtful about the direction that the country is on.

So, this was why I, you know, strongly discouraged the Italian guy from becoming an American. Why? Because the direction of the United States is the wrong direction. And so, becoming a citizen of the United States for somebody who is poor makes all the sense in the world, right? To gain access to the US labor markets, to gain access to a more high-quality travel document, etc.

But if you're wealthy, then the United States doesn't offer anything, and yet the direction is the wrong way. So, we're going in the direction of wealth taxes and increased capital gains taxes, and it just goes on down the road. And so, you want to be thoughtful and you want to choose places where freedom is increasing, where taxation is modest, and where they have an appropriate, you know, mindset around it.

I would take a Singapore citizenship all day long. Why? Because they understand that wealth and money flows where it's treated well. And so, they have a very fair tax regime. They have a territorial tax system, which I think is the most just and fair tax – income tax system that can exist.

If you're going to have income taxes, it should be a territorial tax system. And even that tax system itself is low, and there's a culture of respect for wealth and for business people. And so, I think you just want to be very thoughtful and don't ally yourself with governments where the culture is going in the wrong direction, because you can't change that cultural force, that cultural direction overnight.

Long-winded answer. John, go with – what was your second question? Let's do it fast. Yeah, okay. Yeah, good. No, it's good. And you can't change those forces yourself either. So, that's good to know. The other question was just something that was on my list for a long time, but you can skip over it.

I'd read a book called "Why the West Rules" for now, and I'd seen – I'd read it a while back, and I saw it somewhere on one of your social medias at some point that you were reading it or had started reading it. I was curious what you thought about it in general, but that's probably too open-ended of a question for a quick one.

That would be a fun question for us to talk about, but you're right. We're not going to handle it. We're not going to do it today. It's too much to handle. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for going through the other questions. Thank you very much. My pleasure. It is a topic that I've been thinking a lot about.

You know, where's the trend in the world? What direction is the trend going? And one of the most fascinating things about any book is the way that that book starts. The book that he's talking about is called "Why the West Rules" for now, and it starts with just a fabulous mind experiment, a historical experiment.

I won't ruin it for you, but if you're interested in topics of where's the world going, then I would recommend it to you. All right, we go to New York. Kate, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Thank you for choosing me. I canceled Netflix.

Now I purchased your channel. Great. Okay, so today I have a question. Yes. So today I have a question regarding the wise use of a large amount of cash, either towards early retirement or towards putting down as a down payment for a house. My homework I did is I listened to all of your podcasts on a keywords house and also keywords portfolio allocation.

So I didn't find the answer. So my situation is right now I have in total 400,000 assets in different portfolios. 30% is in retirement stock, 20% is in emergency fund, and 50% this one is a little bit high is in investment silver metal. It's accidental, but when I bought the silver, it was really low.

So I was actually already making about 80,000 now from the silver. I have a belief that the price will go up, but I don't know about that for sure. So I look at my silver metal investment. There are 200,000 there, whether I should take them out and then put it as a down payment for a house.

I would need that as a minimum in this region to buy a house for myself or just take it out and put it in stock market and then grow it towards early retirement. Do you want to retire early? Yes. Yes. I have a strong interest in doing that. And do you want to retire based upon having a stock portfolio, spending three or 4% of your stock portfolio value every year?

Is that your plan? Yes. That's part of my plan and also being able to pursue things that I'm ultimately interested in. Okay. Do things that I love to do. How much money do you need to be financially independent and retire? If I live in my current apartment, I probably need $4,000 to $5,000 a month.

$4,000 to $5,000 per month if you live in your apartment. Would you keep living in your apartment if you were retired? I wouldn't say this is the ideal situation. I wouldn't if I have the choice. Okay. Is your ideal situation, would there be any cost savings? Would you be able to live less expensively in your ideal situation?

Yes. I would like to. And I would actually like to purchase a place across the river because I live in New York City. I would like to find a cheaper place in New Jersey because I like the community better there. If you were financially independent, let's just say $60,000 a year, so you had $1.5 million in the bank, 4% rule, $60,000 per year.

If you were financially independent, you had $1.5 million in the bank, would you live in that apartment in New Jersey? That question needs a little bit of research because I just started to research the community in New Jersey. I find a really lovely city. I can see myself living there long-term, but I'm not sure whether forever I should live there.

Okay. So here is my comment. Number one, I believe that before you make financial decisions, meaning before you decide, "Should I sell my house or should I buy a house?" Meaning before you decide, "Should I sell this silver and buy stock? Should I buy a house? Should I not?" I believe you should solve three things to the very best of your abilities.

Not perfect, right? This is just to get you thinking in the right direction. These are the three questions that will drive the structure of your life. Question number one is, "Who do you live with?" Who do you live with? Who is in your house? Who is in your neighborhood?

Who do you live with? Because the person and the people that you live with is going to make a bigger difference in your life than virtually any other factor. This involves husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends. This involves parents, right? I stretch it out. This involves children. This involves all the way out to grandparents, neighbors, etc.

But the first thing I would look at is I would say, "Who do I want to live with?" and make sure that I've established my ideal lifestyle first. If somebody is not married and wants to marry, I encourage them to make that a top priority and to invest their time and their treasure into making that happen quickly.

If somebody is married and wants to have children, I encourage them to have children. Don't wait until you're financially independent or do some other thing. Just have children if that's what you want. You won't regret it. Have the children. If you want to have mom and dad live with you, then move mom and dad in with you.

If you want to move away from mom and dad, then move away from mom and dad. Because getting the people in your life right will make a big difference. I extend this even to local culture. There are some people for whom living in a small town because the kind of people who live in a small town make them happy.

Other people, big city, right? Or what's the culture that you live in? But the people in your life are going to make a bigger difference in your enjoyment and your experience of life than virtually anything else. And so you should try to make sure that your life is filled with the people that you want to have in it and that the people that you don't want in your life are not present.

Number two question is where do you live? And I apply that on a macro scale but also down to a micro scale. Where do you live in terms of what country do you live in? What state do you live in? What city do you live in? What neighborhood do you live in?

What house do you live in? And so if you would in retirement live across the river, then I would encourage you to ask yourself, "Can I live across the river now?" The answer might be no because it's obvious that right now you need to go to work and across the river doesn't allow that to happen.

But try to live where you want to live now and try to put your money there now. So if it takes you, if you don't like where you live now but there's a place that you could move and you could spend $200,000 getting into that place that you would want to live, I would do that before I would start saving for early retirement because I want to live in the place that I want to live because that's going to be the structure of your life.

Number three question is what do you do for work? What do you do? And I'm convinced that you should, before you spend time building an early retirement plan, you should spend a lot of time thinking and working hard to build the very best plan for a life that you won't want to retire from.

And I think this is given very short shrift. It's given too little attention by many people because retirement seems like the obvious solution, right? It's like, "Hey, I got a job. I'm making X amount. I can live on Y amount. Thus, I can save this amount and in 14.2 years or in 7.3 years, I'll be financially independent." Great.

I'm not opposed to that. I think that's fine. But why don't we start by doing a whole lot of work to say, "Is there a career or is there a job or is there a business that could fit me really well?" In the year 2021 in which we live, we're no longer in the world where there's only three job offers available to you.

And almost anybody can design a life that they won't ever want to retire from. And I've simply read too many early retirement stories from people that prove to me that very few people want to actually just quit their work. And so you can do almost anything. And I think that it's better to invest money into building a life that you don't want to retire from before you start making a plan for retirement.

And so sometimes that just means, "Hey, I'm working a job. I like this job. It's fine. It fits me great." But sometimes it means I should go back to school. I should move across the world and I should get a new degree or get a new certification and get a new job at a new place.

But spend time thinking about it and first invest your money into that before you think about a portfolio. Now, to the degree that you can spend money on any of those three things, I'm convinced you should before you start buying stocks, buying real estate, buying silver coins. I'm convinced you should spend money on those three things because those three things drive the structure of your life far more than any other financial choice or any other financial investment.

And if you live with the people that you want to live with, the people of your dreams, the people that make you happy just to be around, and you live in a place that you love, a city that you love, a country that you love, an apartment that you love, a house that you love, and you do something that you feel genuine satisfaction from that makes you money, then it's really hard to get yourself in the position where you actually want to quit that life.

That feels really, really good. And now I'm convinced that in that structure, your financial results can, in the vast majority of jobs and businesses and whatnot, can really flourish because you bring an energy and a joy to your life because you're living a life that you've intentionally chosen. Now, not all choices will financially flourish.

You might say, "I want to be a park ranger because I really love being out in nature, and so I want to get a job working for the National Park Service." That is not going to financially flourish, but it's still going to be fine. It's going to give you enough money to live on.

You can live in park housing. You can still save money if you're frugal. You can have access to a retirement program. So it's still fine. But I would say that's the minor 20%. The guy who's a missionary or the guy who is a mail carrier or something like that, those jobs are not going to financially flourish the way that most things can.

But most jobs, when you come at them from a place of choice and from a place of thoughtful creation, you can make a lot of money and reach your early retirement goals faster. So you can still do the financial independence plan, but it should come after those three things.

So if anything in your life in those three areas is not how you would dream it to be, and if you can spend money to make it better, then I think that's what you should do. So this is my answer to your house question. Should you buy the house and use the money for a house, or should you buy stocks?

Well, my answer is it depends on whether the house of your dreams that you would love to live in would be there, if you could buy that with a $200,000 down payment or not. And I'm not saying you should spend money excessively. You'll have to decide how frugal you should be.

But if I could spend $200,000 to buy a house that I would love being in, that would be perfect for me and my family, I would do that before I would go and buy stocks. Now, if you're fine where you are and you're living where you would dream to live, then yeah, stocks would be fine.

But I would answer it in the context of the personal side of personal finance. It's not a financial question. It's a matter of a lifestyle. You've obviously worked hard. You've saved money. So I believe that you should adjust your lifestyle to your ideal lifestyle and then go ahead and live that life versus deferring all of those things forever just to reach some vague early retirement goal.

Yes, very illuminating. Make me happy just by listening to you. I would definitely be working on designing a life of happiness and fulfillment instead of thinking more of the materialistic side of life. Good. Good. I think that you could see a common thread that the people who are the best suited for early retirement are the people who haven't sacrificed something that was important to them along the way.

Let me give you an example. If I weren't married and didn't have children, I would not live in a house. I would live in a van or an RV or something like that. But it's not because it would save me money. It's because I think it's genuinely fun and it's a lifestyle that I genuinely enjoy.

Or at least I think I've done it for part time, but I think I would genuinely enjoy it. As best as I can tell, if I were 30 years old and not married, no children, I would live in an RV. But I wouldn't see myself as suffering. I would use as an advantage of it, I would use an advantage of I'm spending just a little bit of money and I'm saving money and I'm becoming financially independent very quickly and I'm building my pathway towards early retirement, but I'm not suffering for it.

It's just simply that's how I'd want to live and that's how I would live before retirement and that's how I'd live after retirement. It'd just be that would be fun for me in most circumstances, I think. And so these are the kinds of decisions that for the people for whom early retirement is right, they're the people who make those decisions comfortably.

They choose to live in a small house because they like the ethic of living in a small house or they like the lifestyle of being a minimalist and not having a lot of stuff and they just enjoy that. It gives them a sense of peace and it has the benefit of allowing them to also become financially independent fairly quickly.

The people who suffer though are those who set this goal to say, "I want to be financially independent. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move out of our big house that we really love that's appropriate for our family and we're going to move in a little tiny house.

And I don't like my job, but I make a lot of money and if I just do this for 8.1 more years, then we'll be financially independent." And they go down the list, right? "Well, we want to have children, but not yet because we're just going to... If we just go a little bit longer, we'll have $2 million and then we can have our children and travel around the world." And listen, we all make our choices and we all live with the consequences of those choices.

But I don't think it makes sense to approach things that way. I think you first start by building your life intentionally. And if you don't want to have children, great, don't have children. If you want to have children, have children. If you want to live in a little house or in a big house, go ahead.

Be aware of the opportunity cost of those decisions. Know them, right? I'm not running from them, but don't build your life around this deferred gratification that someday in the future when I have $2 million saved, then I'm going to go ahead and start living. Because I think you look back and you say, "Well, the last 10 years, right?

I could have had both. I could have done both things." And I say, "Why not do both? Why not live the life now that you want to live while also knowing that in the fullness of time, you can achieve financial independence, which will put you in a different stage of life." I don't see any reason why it has to be one or the other.

- Got it. I think the biggest learning is that if you answer the calling of your life in terms of happiness and fulfillment, then those financial questions will be answered naturally. So I don't need to struggle over because there's no definitive answer. It depends on how you want to design your life.

- Right. And so here would be one exercise that I'll give you as you're thinking about this. And I frequently do this when I consult with people. How old are you right now, Kate? - I'm 42. - You're 42. Okay. So at 42 years old, you have $400,000 saved.

So let's put this in and start with $400,000. And let's say that you invest from 42 to 67, would be 25 years, right? 25 years. Let's say you invest all your money in your whole savings into stocks and maybe you make 7% on your money and you don't save another dime for retirement.

Okay. At the age of 67, you would be predicted to have $2,170,000 in your portfolio, given those constraints that I said. Does that make sense? - Yes. - Okay. At 67, would $2,170,000 be enough for you to live on for the rest of your life? - I think so, unless I decide to live until 120.

- I think even if you live till 120, you'd be fine. And I think you should live to 120 and you'll be fine. Okay. So when people have saved a lot, one of the tools that I use to try to get past this mental block is I say this.

Let's say that you release yourself from the responsibility of saving money and you say, "I'm fine. I have enough money saved that if I just put all of this aside and I leave it alone for the next 20 or 30 years, I'm going to be fine for the rest of my life.

I've covered my old age when I don't want to work and when I can't work." And so let's say that we now redesign your life and I give you two rules. Number one, you need to choose for yourself a life that you genuinely want to live and you need to support that life from your daily actions.

That's rule number one. Rule number two is you cannot save any money. You are forbidden from saving any money. You have to spend all of the money that you make. Now, if I give you those rules, could you build for yourself a really cool and exciting life that wouldn't have you deferring forever the fun things that you want to do?

- Yes. Could you explain the purpose of rule number two? - The rule number two is this. The rule number two is this. You have said no for many years to specific consumption items that you would have enjoyed doing because you were pursuing this personal goal of building wealth.

And I think that's fine. By the way, this is a mental experiment. You can do this if you want to. I'm trying to use this as a mental experiment, right? So, what I'm trying to get at is to say that you have denied yourself consumption, financial consumption, that you've otherwise thought would be fun because of your focus on building wealth.

I applaud you for that. I think that's well done. But because of that, you're used to thinking not from an abundance mindset but from a scarcity mindset. You're used to thinking, "You know what? I could fly to... My girlfriend invited me this weekend to go to Colorado with her and go skiing at Vail, but that's going to cost a lot of money.

And after all, I could just see her here in the city. Why do that?" Right? Or I could... So and so, my parents wanted me to come and visit for a family holiday, but I don't really want to spend the money to go see them. And so, I'm just going to not do that.

And you know what? It would be really nice to have a fancy new bag, but I don't need it. And after all, it's silly consumption. So, you said, "No, no, no," again and again and again to things. And so, what happens is it gets you stuck in this mindset of scarcity, where you have your income and you have to save money and you have to spend just as little as you can.

And you're not good at thinking about the things that you really want or the things that you would really enjoy, the lifestyle you really want, because you've said, "No, no, no, no, no," to everything along the way. So, here's my point. You're 42 years old. You may not make it to 50.

You may not make it to 60. You may not make it to any of those things. And so, what if you just played this game and you said, "I'm going to take all the $400,000. I'm going to set it aside. I have it for retirement. And now, I'm going to make money." How much money do you earn right now, Kate?

I'm making $150,000 a year. So, I'm going to make $150,000 per year. I'm going to pay my taxes. I'm going to pay my expenses. And my goal is I... My rule is I have to spend all the money. I have to spend it. Now, I don't have to spend it all this week, but I have to spend it all this year.

If I don't spend all the money this year, then it goes away. And you start funding the things that you would really like to do. Now, the people who are the happiest are the ones who fund all the things they would like to do and still have more left over.

And my guess is you could do that, right? You could save $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year every year for the rest of your life and still spend the rest of it. So, let's play the game slightly different, okay? Let's say that the only money you were allowed to save, right?

You have $400,000 in savings, and you're going to save for the next 25 years, you're going to make 7%. But all you can do is put money in a 401(k). Do you have a 401(k)? Yes, I do. So, you can put... I'm just going to use a flat $20,000 per year into that account, just a flat $20,000 per year.

And I'm ignoring employer matches and anything like that, just $20,000 per year flowing in. Well, now in 25 years, that would be $3.4 million, okay? So, $3.4 million. And that would be more than enough at age 67. And so, if you dial down your savings, then I think you can dial up your lifestyle and you could choose something that you would really want to do.

Now, let's say that you decided, "I would not take this job. If I were financially independent, if I had $2 million in the bank, I would not take this job. I definitely wouldn't." Well, what would you do? And maybe you would say, "I would really love to run a mountain bike shop in the mountains of Italy." We're just talking about Italy, right?

"I would love to run a mountain bike shop in the mountains of Italy." Okay, well, maybe you do that. And then you don't make a ton of money, but you make enough money to live on, and you make enough money, and you have to spend it all because you know you're financially independent.

And so, this way of thinking is my tool to say, "Why should you wait until you're 50 to live like you're financially independent, when you can start living like you're financially independent at 42?" Right? At 42, you're rich. So, when are you going to start thinking like a rich woman?

- I never thought I'm rich. - You are rich. You are rich. You're in the top... I don't have the chart here, but I would say, what, the top 20 to 30% of US American households, in terms of your personal wealth. There is nothing that you could tell me.

There's not a goal that you could put in front of me that with $400,000, I can't figure out a plan to achieve. There's nothing. Nothing. - Yeah, I think I was always having a little bit aspirational anxiety because I didn't really prioritize my life based on what I absolutely love to do.

So, this is really illuminating. - Good. Good. Give some thought to this. Go back and listen to the recording and do that exercise I said. And again, this can all be done mentally. You don't need to change a thing with what you're doing externally. But what I would say is, try some of the exercise.

Okay, if I were financially independent today, what would I do? And here's how I approach that. Okay? Let's pretend that today, you had to stop working. What would you do? Now, give it a year later. Just imagine yourself, you spend a whole year reading, right? I love to read.

If you said, Joshua, you can't work, what would you do? I would go and I'd spend 30 hours a week reading. But I'm not going to do that 30... I mean, at some point, you got to do something with what you're learning. The whole point of learning something is so that you can use it.

It's like, I love to sit... I love to read a novel on a vacation. Give me a big, thick novel for a vacation. I'll finish it in three days. And then I'm ready to be done with novels. I don't want to read any more novels once I've read one for vacation.

And so, give yourself a year in your head to de-stress. Write down everything you would do. I would go to a such and such retreat on the shores of Mexico or wherever you would go. Now, what would you do when you came back a year later? Would you write?

Would you go to a coffee shop? Would you take a job? Would you arrange flowers? Would you restore classic cars? What would you do? So, imagine the kinds of things that you would do. And then ask yourself, what if I gave myself this rule? Instead of working another eight years at this job, this $150,000 a year job I don't like, what if I just went and I worked at this other job that would allow me to live this lifestyle I want to live?

And maybe I make $70,000 per year, but my rule is I can spend the whole 70. I don't have to put in my 50% savings rate. I can just spend the whole 70. What would that allow me to do? And I think that this is a really good way to live.

And it gets at, I think it's a good responsible mental game that gets to the heart of some of the options that really are available to you. - Wow, I didn't even know I've already had this kind of freedom in my life. Because when you're climbing certain corporate ladder, you didn't realize because you always look up and realize, oh, maybe you are not climbing high enough.

And then you forgot to look down and realize, oh, you actually have already have a free playground. You can play a little now. - Right, yeah, you do. And finding the balance that's right for you, I think just takes a little bit of time and practice. But for me, this is some of the change I've gone through, is I used to say, well, it's all about saving for the future.

But I've learned to give myself more permission to just, it sounds so corny, to live in the present. And to say, there's no rule that I have to save a huge amount of my income. It's okay to spend it. And I've seen enough examples of people that I admire that live that way to say, they live better.

And at the end of the day, it's not the amount of money that you die with. The end of the day, it's much more about the life that you live. And so many of us have plenty of money to fund the life that we want to live, but we're stuck in that traditional model.

And in the same way that the classic retirement concept of work, work, work for 40 years so you can retire and live out your 30 good years, that can be a form of bondage. So also can the early retirement model be a form of bondage? It's just a different form.

And so I think that any life plan can be fine for the person who chooses it thoughtfully. But once you've accumulated some basic capital, as you have, I don't think there's any reason to wait to think about more of how you're going to live. All right, we move on now.

Thank you, Kate, for being here. And I'd love to keep, call in in a month and let's chat about it again and see. I have got to go fast. Let's go to Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua, how's it going? First of all, I'll try and make it quick.

I appreciate your podcast that you posted on Wednesday about when things aren't working out. I think that's always great when somebody who seems to have everything figured out can kind of come back down. Because that's what it sounds like when you're talking, you're hearing you talk a lot of times like, man, he just has everything figured out.

This is crazy. So it is always great to hear that. So I appreciate that. Thank you. My actual question comes back to crypto. I feel like I was calling with crypto questions. And real quick, I think I have the idea of what's going to happen. I do a lot of work for cryptocurrency.

I mine, I get paid in it. And I assume with all my taxes, like the way that it works is that I pay all my taxes on income on the crypto when I got it and the value that it was at as like my normal income tax for, you know, just as if I were paid in cash.

And then obviously things have spiked in the past couple of years. And in which case now I assume that if I were to liquidate any of that or, you know, if I were to convert any of that into cash, then I'm also going to have to pay capital gains on on the increase in price of that.

Does that sound about right to you? It does. Okay, cool. That that was, you know, after talking to a couple tax people and reading IRS guidance and all that stuff, that was that is pretty much where I landed at. And so I'm just I'm basically where I'm at right now is I don't need any of my crypto investments in order to live my normal life.

But watching that number tick up and up and up and up, I just wonder, you know, given the United States current current, you know, seeing how how potentially crypto is going to be treated in the future. You know, I just wonder, like, gosh, is this something that I should just leave locked up for a long time and just see, hey, in the next decade or so, you know, what is the landscape going to look like versus, you know, cutting and running now that the price is so high?

My personal belief is that it's going to go a lot higher in the next decade. But but again, just kind of want to hear your thoughts on that. Sounded accurate to you. It does sound accurate to me. I would seriously consider if if it's possible for you, since you are in such a high potential marketplace, I would consider all of the different ways that you could legally change your circumstances in order to change your tax regime, going moving to Puerto Rico, moving abroad, all of those options, you should consider them.

If we assume that you're not going to pursue any of those because they are lifestyles that you don't want to live, then I think that you you yeah, you just press forward. You do as you decide, if you as you've said, in terms of paying declaring taxes on the amount of payment that you receive at the time that you receive it.

That's the basic IRS doctrine. And that's I don't expect them to change that at all. Right. Doesn't matter whether you get paid with Bitcoin, whether you get paid with US dollars, whether you get paid with Swiss francs or whether you get paid with, you know, dump truck loads of apples.

It's all the same. Right. If you are picking apples for an apple orchard and you as a daily part of your pay, you receive four bushels of apples as a benefit of your job. That's not tax free just because it's bushels of apples. The IRS wants you to declare the value of the bushel of apple and to and to pay it.

Now, the benefit I think that you get is with the bushel of apple analogy is the same that you get with potentially crypto. So if you are declaring the value of the four bushels of apples that you receive from the local farmer that you spent the day picking apples for, you can declare that value at the wholesale price.

So you're not taxed on that on those four bushels as if they are being sold one apple at a time at Whole Foods for five dollars a piece, you're being taxed on that as the bushel price that the farmer sells them to the wholesaler for, which is certainly a lower price than you could then go down the road and sell them for, you know, out of the back of your truck in front of the Whole Foods at four dollars a piece.

And so that's the analogy that I understand to be the same with cryptocurrency. It's the same as with apples. If you receive the apples at a wholesale value of two dollars per apple, you know, based upon the bushel price and you go and you sell those from the parking lot across the street from the Whole Foods for four dollars an apple, then when you receive those apples, you when you receive them, you pay, you declare taxes based upon four bushels at two dollars an apple, whatever that comes out to per bushel.

When you then sell them and make a profit, you incur a second tax based upon your gains and that the only difference would be it'd be a capital gain instead of an increase in instead of a business gain. And so then now, should you sell or should you not based upon the tax regime?

I consider the United States very unfriendly to wealth at this point in time, not the most unfriendly country in the world, but I consider it to be unsafe for wealthy people to rely on the United States for the long term. We can see that with President Biden's speech this last week.

He expressed interest in some that made proposals for something like six trillion dollars of new spending programs. He has made verbal proposals for massive tax increases, absolutely huge. And so, at least if you are a person of wealth. And so the question is, what's the direction? Now, first of all, the taxes that are proposed are not nearly enough.

The numbers don't work. Go back and listen to the shows that I did almost two years ago now, where I talked about the ticking bomb that no one wants to talk about or whatever it was, where I talked about the numbers. And then put two years of hindsight into the play and listen to what I talked about two years ago and ask yourself, has this gotten better in the last two years or worse?

And the answer is, it's gotten far worse than even the most pessimistic prediction would have been two years ago. And so the numbers are even worse now. And I'll give an episode number here in just a moment. The numbers are even worse than what I said two years ago.

Standby. All right, found it. It's episode 628 and 629 of Radical Personal Finance, published in March of 2019, called Federal Debt, the Ticking Bomb that No One is Willing to Diffuse. So the problem is even worse than what it was then by a massive order of magnitude because of the coronavirus pandemic and all of the spending there, all of the declines in tax revenue there.

And then now there's a massive political change. Now, let's just play this from-- this isn't exactly what you said, but it's a topic of interest, I know, to you and to all listeners. What can happen from here? Well, let's say, first of all, the cultural wins are in the favor of the tax and spend crowd, not in the favor of the let's not tax and not spend crowd.

There's not a lot of actual weight that the words of any fiscal conservative has at this point in time. President Trump presided over one of the largest increases in federal debt of anybody. And most Republicans didn't open their mouths because of the heavy consequences of doing so. And so I don't think that people who were in the fiscal conservative camp have much credibility at this point in time to talk about much.

And so Republicans somehow seem to do better when they're in the opposition rather than the leadership. And so maybe they can slow down spending a little bit. That was the example with President Obama. President Obama wound up being an extraordinarily fiscally conservative president, not because he wanted to be, but because Republicans were in opposition.

And once he lost his majority in Congress after the first two years, then he basically got nothing done. And that seems to be the way that politics in the United States goes at this point in time, as you have gridlock, you can have a change. President Obama had two years of a Democratic House and Democratic Senate, and then everything changed.

President Trump had two years of a Democratic House and Democratic Senate, and then everything changed. And so President Obama got nothing done except his Affordable Care Act. President Trump got basically nothing done, I guess, except the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. That was about it. And so we'll see what President Biden does in the two years.

And if history is any indication, there's a good chance that he'll lose maybe the Congress, but maybe the Senate, depending on what happens two years from now. And then he'll be stymied in his efforts as well. So you have political gridlock, but the general theme is more spending, more spending.

It just always goes up. So what can happen? Well, I think let's just play it with three scenarios. The first scenario would be all of the people who for the last 50 years have been ringing the bell and saying, "This is unsustainable or right." And there's some kind of massive crisis, massive financial crash of some kind.

And somehow everyone's all of a sudden proved right, that you can't spend, you can't borrow $28 trillion, it's just going to continue on, and there's a massive crash. Okay, well, that would certainly be a crisis, and you should be prepared for that. But that's probably unlikely. On the flip side, let's say that the people who say there's no limit to the amount of money that you can spend are right.

I'm currently reading, what's her name? The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. I have here my thing, The Deficit Myth. And this is the best, it's funny, we basically all in the modern world, we basically accepted what's now called modern monetary theory. And so I've been trying to grab my hands around, is there any actual theory to this?

And early results are not promising, saying there's any actual theory to this. Basically, as I understand where we are right now in 2021, really nobody knows what's happening or why things are the way that they are. And there's not really anybody who can give a cogent explanation as to why everything hasn't collapsed.

And so the direction we're going is in the direction of, well, it doesn't matter, governments can just make up as much money as they want. Because after all, government has unlimited taxing ability, unlimited spending ability, etc. I think some kind of middle ground morass is most likely. I don't think that in the long run, at least the US American people are going to go for a hardcore, "Okay, we can just spend as much money as we want." At some point in time, there's some limit.

I do not believe that we're living in a fundamentally new world where there's simply no limit, as Ms. Kelton would say. I don't believe that's true. I don't believe that makes any sense. And so while I might be the voice crying in the wilderness, and I might be embarrassed for the next five years, I still personally retain my conviction that you cannot tax and spend and tax and spend and make up money and expect that to be a long-term, you know, best interest.

I'm actively questioning myself if I'm right, but I still don't believe it. But I also don't think a massive just collapse is likely, because I think there's simply too much raw horsepower at the moment under the hood of a country, a powerful economy like the United States and like many countries in the world.

What I think is likely is I think is more likely is the constraint. I think it's more likely that you have just this ongoing morass where everyone is upset. You don't have enough ability to lower taxes to get, you know, a widespread economic engine going, but it's not so bad that people are leaving in droves.

Although I see it, the thing's picking up, right? There are a lot of people moving out of California and a lot of people who are doing actually doing it that I wouldn't have expected to do it. And I think that even people who haven't done it yet are thinking about it.

I watched this show. I watched this YouTube channel called Producer Michael, and it's this guy, I forget his last name, but this music and film producer named Michael so-and-so, British originally, lives in California. He's a big luxury goods consumer, and it's fun to look at his millions of dollars of watch collections and things like this.

And even he was recently saying that he's looking at options of how he can move outside of California, looking at different options. And I thought, man, if this guy who is a Hollywood producer who lives, you know, the straight-up Hollywood lifestyle, if he's talking about how awful it is, then this must go farther than I thought.

It must go farther than I thought. And I see tons of people moving to Puerto Rico. There still aren't many people disentangling themselves from the United States, but there are a lot of people moving to Puerto Rico, and I got to imagine there are a lot of people making plans.

So, let me land this plane. What I'm saying for you is I wouldn't worry too much about the long-term taxes because they're unpredictable. I don't know, but I think the taxes are probably going to go up. And so, what I would – and also, you live in a volatile world.

I would just look at it and I would say, "All right, at every level, is there a point to level up? Is there a point at which I go ahead and cash out some amount of this and stabilize it? Because with this, I can always be free." My best analogy that I use is think about who wants to be a millionaire.

In "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," there were times in the game where it made all the sense in the world to play, and there were times in the game where it didn't make any sense in the world to play aggressively because you had those ratchet points. So, in your first few questions, there was no reason not to just guess randomly on a question because you wanted to get to the first level of money.

And so, for someone who doesn't have a lot of money, there's no reason not to be hardcore aggressive. Balls to the wall, everything in crypto, risk it all. Why not? Because the risks, you know, if you do fall, you don't fall that hard because you're falling down to zero.

But there are certain points in your lifestyle where you reach certain ratchet points where it would be really tough if you actually went down below that. You know, once you become a millionaire, you don't ever want to not be a millionaire again. And so, maybe you reach and you've got $2 million of crypto, but you know that your $2 million of crypto could turn into $200,000 overnight.

Well, I'd like, once I'm a millionaire, I'd like to be a millionaire for the rest of my life. And so, think about, all right, if things win, what would that do for me versus if things lose, what would that do for me? And just be thoughtful about the big swings and what could happen over the long term.

And then go to your portfolio and make the decisions from that perspective, not the tax perspective. - Cool. That sounds great. And I mean, that's basically what I'm doing right now is just, and talking to you is a piece of that, like, okay, let's just get another person's opinion on the landscape, what could happen, tax implications, and just pulling from many sources.

So, I appreciate your thoughts on it. I mean, take up so much time. - No, it's not you, it was me. I just thought it was, it's an important question that people are asking and it's something I'm actively thinking about. Again, I don't like to be wrong. Of course, none of us do, but I don't like to be wrong and especially don't like to be wrong publicly 'cause it hurts my pride.

But when I'm wrong, I wanna know why, because if I can learn from it, then I don't waste the experience of being wrong or of failing. And so, whenever I get something wrong, then I just wanna know. And so, my question is this, why is it that fiscal conservatives, and I identify myself as a fiscal conservative, why is it that fiscal conservatives have been screaming with terror for decades about every trillion dollars of increased debt and yet there has been no disaster?

Why have they been wrong so far? Is it because they were completely wrong? And maybe Stephanie Kelton is right? Is it because they were just wrong until now or what is it? And I still don't have the answer, but that's why I just take a moment to talk about it, 'cause I think it's good to acknowledge why have we been wrong so far when talking about the disaster.

And that's why I don't personally think there's gonna be an overnight disaster. I don't think the United States is Zimbabwe. I hope that the United States is not Venezuela. But having watched Venezuela and having seen how fast things can collapse in a 10-year period, I do get increasingly concerned by the day.

And when you see the sea change with regard to your own taxation, depending on how many figures are in your crypto portfolio, if President Biden's proposals become law quickly, your tax bill just got a lot bigger. And when you have something as insane as the concept of taxing people on their capital gains, what did the US government do to deserve a piece of the pie?

They didn't provide anything. They didn't do anything that would in any way cause them to deserve a piece of the pie of the growth of your crypto value. Then you see how insane it is. I just think that's a... You should consider it, count your numbers, think about your plans, and then make whatever decision's right for you.

- Well, and one last thing on the crypto note too, of at least kind of my strategy going forward as well, is looking at how there's so much clamoring for proof of work and now how proof of stake looks like it's gonna be... Probably going forward is gonna be more of a popular option and then using what crypto assets I do have in a proof of stake model.

And then potentially, basically using that as something that's gonna generate revenue for me with the amount of crypto that I have. So that's one of the other models that I'm looking at going forward as well. - Go for it. - But yeah. - Love it. - Yeah. Anyways, I'll stop the crypto talk for now.

- Oh, good. Have a great day, Eric. Appreciate it. All right, let's go to John in Chicago. John, welcome. How can I serve you today, sir? John in Chicago, are you there? Going once. Jeremy in Ohio. Welcome, sir. How can I serve you today, Jeremy? - Hi, Joshua. So for the past 12 years, I've been teaching at an American public school, but recently accepted a job teaching abroad.

And so once I leave the current job, I have to decide what to do with the money I have in Ohio's pension system for teachers known as STRS. And I was just hoping you could provide some guidance on how I should approach the decision and potentially offer your opinion on what I should do.

- Is this a defined benefit pension or is this a defined contribution program where you have an account? - Benefit. - Okay. What options are they giving you when you leave that job? What are they proposing to you? - Yeah. And I guess to provide some context, there's approximately my account withdrawal value is $140,000 in the pension system, which I could just rolled into a pre-tax retirement account.

My wife and I are in our mid thirties. We don't have kids. Our net worth, not including money in the pension is around $900,000. - If the rest of your money that you have is invested in stocks, in stocks and real estate, what is the rest of the money invested in?

- The stocks bonds. - And when you move abroad, will you be earning a good income for your labor? - Yes. - How stable do you think the Ohio pension system is? - It is 76% funded, which doesn't seem great to me, but I think is pretty close to the quote unquote gold standard in the space.

I'm quite confident it will never be any better than it is today. It will only get worse, but it's hard to say. - Do they offer you, if you don't take the $140,000, what's the benefit that they're offering in the future? - Every year it sits there, it earns 3% interest each year.

And then potentially, when I cash out. - But don't they have an income benefit that, "Hey, John, if you're 65 years old, you can take this amount of money." Or sorry, Jeremy, "You can take this amount of money." - Oh, yes. - Okay. So what is that figure? - And that's, yeah, it's so, currently, if I were to not work another day, 12 years, it's about, it's 20% on the average of my highest five years, which annually, sorry, that's like very hard to do.

- That's okay. That's good enough. - Let's say 12. - Okay. So what I, I can't tell you, of course, what to do, but I'll tell you how I would get to what to do. So let's start with the non-math answers. Non-math answer number one is the catastrophist model.

The catastrophist model says, "The state of Ohio is dumb. The whole world is going to collapse. People are leaving Ohio. It's poorly managed. I'm just going to take my money and run." I don't think that's the case, but like that, some people, their reasons for leaving a place are pretty clear.

And without question, pensions, government pensions, are number one, they're a political tool, and they are sometimes poorly run. And that varies on a state-by-state basis. And so the first thing I would do is I would try to get a little bit of understanding of how well run is the Ohio pension system, and how likely is this thing to fall apart?

My answer is the chance is not zero, but it's not too high, right? There's going to be some benefit there. So now I go to your overall portfolio. If you only had $140,000 in savings, then I would say, "This is a really big deal to get right." In your situation, though, you and your wife have been financially productive enough to save quite a lot of money in other sources.

And so here, I'm not so concerned, because even if that pension did go completely belly up, which is, of course, very unlikely, but let's say it went completely belly up, you're going to be fine, right? You would still have enough other assets growing. You're young, you have time, you have other assets that can grow potentially significantly, you're good savers.

I'm not too worried about it. And so I wouldn't just take the money and run. What I would do is I would try to get a sense of what this pension is actually worth in the open market. So you would take the value and you'd say, "Okay, let's say I took $140,000.

What would I do with it?" And here's where you need to do some math. If I take $140,000, roll it into an IRA, what would that money potentially grow to by 65, using what I understand to be appropriate numbers? And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a sense of how good the returns that are being promised to you are.

So you need to project, "All right, at 65, they would pay me $1,500 per month. Is that affected? Is there an inflation rider? Is there not an inflation rider? How much of a return would I need to get from my stocks if I take the $140,000, put it into the stocks in order to have the same amount of money available to me for my portfolio?" I would also compare this to a private annuity.

I would sit down with an insurance salesman, and I would run some numbers on an annuity. Because I think that if you run numbers on an annuity, you're getting an apples to apples comparison. The problem with just saying, "I'm going to take the money and put it in stocks," is that a pension is much more valuable than a stock account.

Because a pension has a guaranteed income benefit. It comes in every month, no matter what happens to the stock market. It comes in every month for the rest of your life if you take it as an income. Whereas the stocks, you can outlive them. It comes in potentially every month for the rest of your life and for the rest of your wife's life.

It comes in oftentimes with a cost of living adjustment rider on it, inflation rider. And so it's extraordinarily valuable. And so what I would do, if possible, if you can find an insurance agent who will quote some annuities for you, is I would try to get a sense of what the annuity cost would be for me to get an annuity that's equivalent to this annuity that they have for you.

Probably a lot higher than $140,000. Most of the time it is. So in general, when you run the numbers, usually what you find is that your employer pension is much more valuable than almost anything else you can do with the money. Because the numbers of that guaranteed benefit work out really well.

So I would guess, this is just a guess, but having done this a number of times, I would guess that the answer is going to be keep the money in the Ohio pension system, just leave it alone, and it's going to grow to be a good amount of money.

Assuming that Ohio doesn't go bankrupt, which I don't think it is, it's not as poorly managed as say Illinois, then it's probably going to be fine. And then this will provide you with a very useful backup plan to the rest of your portfolio. And potentially you just view this as some of your fixed income or some of your cash of your overall portfolio.

And I think that being in your mid-30s with another $760,000 of investable assets, I think that's plenty to have available to invest in stocks. I'm probably going to keep it. I'm going to leave it alone. I'm just going to have it there as a long-term retirement benefit. Okay. That's very helpful.

I was just curious, is there a quick resource or formula I could search for to find the total cash value of my pension, like looking at projected benefits and things? No, you would have to, you mean the current present value of those benefits down the road? Correct. There's no quick formula.

You can put it into a, I mean, I could do it on a financial calculator. So if you can find someone who can run a financial calculator for you, you can do it. You can build a spreadsheet for it and do it that way. It's not hard to do.

All you need to do is, I mean, no, I'm not going to do it right now. Call me up on another show and I can do it for you on the show. And it's kind of a semi, it'd be pretty boring audio. All you need to do, okay, so it's just two, if you don't know how to run a financial calculator, you're a teacher, go ahead and do it.

Actually, someone is telling me on the chat, John says on the chat of this call that ChooseFi just did an episode on Monday on pension calculations. So go check out what they did. Maybe that would be helpful for you. Oh, okay. Perfect. What I would do is take your stream of payments and let's just say, okay, at 65, I'm going to get $1,000 a month.

Then use, decide what time range you're going to choose to value that as. So I'm going to take it from 65 to 75 or from 65 to 105. Then what you need to do is you're going to do a present value calculation starting at the age of 65. So you calculate your stream of payments, your terminal value is zero, so your ending value is zero.

You calculate your stream of payments, you adjust those payments based upon whether they have a cost of living adjustment in them. So if they have a 3% benefit or something like that, you maybe you inflate the payments at 3% to get your total present value. So you first calculate...

This one does not. Okay, so then it's even easier. So calculate your present value at age 65 and then discount that present value to today, to your current age, say 35. So you take a 30-year discount for today to $140,000 and that'll give you your projected rate of return over the course of the next 30 years.

So it's just two very simple present value calculations. You first do a present value calculation of the pension stream at the date of receiving income, say 65, and then you discount that. You make that your future value and then you discount that today based upon your discount rate. Okay, great.

Great. And where are you going to teach? You said you're going abroad. Where are you headed? Tokyo. Fun. Enjoy. Very cool. A lot of people love Tokyo. I hope to be there potentially later this year. So we'll see what happens. All right, we go now to... Just a moment.

We'll go back to John. John has his headset. Should have a headset. John, are you there? Hopefully. Yeah, you're in. 50/50. You're in. How can I serve you today, John? You kind of touched on it when you were talking to Kate earlier. So I just recently got out of the military last year.

Basically tripled my income overnight. Kind of grew up poor, so it's been completely disorienting being able to afford everything that I've ever wanted. Wanted resources, books or whatever on kind of dealing with that mindset shift, I guess. Yeah, don't know how to better phrase it than that. I don't know if it's books.

I'm blanking on a book just to say that... Yeah, I don't know if there's a book. But what I think there is, is just simply you basically make your own. You recognize the changes that you're experiencing in your own life and then my strategy is simply get it out of your head.

Get those experiences, get those thoughts out of your head to where you can actually analyze them. So you write them down. Are you struggling with spending too much money? Are you struggling with saving too much money? Is there some way that you feel you're handling this transition poorly? I'm definitely overspending and that's curbed a bit.

But yeah, I don't know. It's hard to describe other than just disorienting. I was making like $50,000 a year six months ago. Right. And now you're making $150,000? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know that it's a bad thing to splurge a little bit. I really don't. As long as a lot of those splurges don't kind of lock you in.

So maybe we'll just talk about a few of the things that happen. You can recognize, first of all, recognize that what you're going through is common to lots and lots of people. But you personally are handling it better than lots of people handle it because you're listening to a personal finance podcast like mine I'm sure you're listening to others looking for other resources and you're doing something like calling in and talking about it with someone like me.

And so just that you should give yourself a pat on the back right there because just that act, that practice is probably enough to avert disaster for you personally. When people come into a lot of money, there is a temptation to start spending it all. And my answer is spend some but not all.

I think that there can be danger points, kind of like two gutters of a bowling lane. Gutter number one on the left is don't spend any of it. And that can be really frustrating because you've worked hard to take yourself from an income of $50,000 to $150,000. And I don't see why you wouldn't reward yourself for that hard work.

But gutter number two is if you go from $150,000 and now you lock in $180,000 per year spending lifestyle, then now all of a sudden that's also going to be a disaster. And certainly that's your bigger risk. And so how much money have you spent in the last six months?

How much money have you made in the last six months and how much money have you spent in the last six months? Oh God, I'd have to do the math. I mean- Ballpark. Six, yeah, 6,400 after taxes every month and then I've maybe saved 10 grand of that. Okay.

So you haven't spent more than you've earned in the last six months. Is that right? Right. I think so. You don't have more debt today than you had six months ago. Is that right? With the exception of a mortgage, yes. Okay. So mortgage is kind of a unique thing.

So the first thing that you want to do is you want to avoid debt or at least you want to avoid debt that's not secured by property. So you want your net worth to increase. Has your net worth increased over the last six months? Oh yeah. Good. Okay. So you're doing the things right.

So that's the first thing is as long as your net worth is increasing, you're doing okay. The second thing I would say is what you want to be cautious about is am I buying things that are going to go down in value or buying things that are going to go up in value?

So if you've gotten a mortgage and that's a good asset and there's good debt associated with it, then you've bought something that's probably going to increase in value. That's different than going out and buying a new car that is going to go down in value and having debt on the new car.

So where people really screw it up is if they lock themselves in and they start buying stuff that's going to go down in value, furs, jewelry, cars, things like that. So avoid that. I think the other thing that you want to look at is am I locking myself into a higher level of expenses for life or for a long time or these temporary consumption items?

So I would spend $6,000 to go skiing for a week if I wanted to go skiing. That's a one-time expense. I know I'm spending a lot of money. I'm going skiing and I'm going to have a great week of vacation. This is going to be fun. But what I wouldn't do is go out and sign myself up for a payment on a new car of $1,200 a month because now I'm going to be paying for that for the next six years.

And so that's going to be kind of a lock-in. And yeah, so those are the errors to avoid. Where I think you solve it is the same. It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter that you grew up poor. What it comes down to is what's my vision going forward?

What are my dreams going forward? What's the kind of lifestyle that I want to live? You heard me when I mentioned with the first, I think the first or second caller, I talked about the three questions and I talked about getting yourself settled. If you've gotten yourself into a much higher earning job, then I think the first step is, number one, who do I want to be with?

Number two, where do I want to be? Number three, what kind of work do I want to do? And make sure that those things are right. Ask yourself, do I like this work? If I like this work, great. Buying a house, great. Settle your life. And then after you settle your life in as best you can, then build a financial plan up.

I'm just going to, I'm going to save 20% of my income. And it should be pretty easy for you to save 20% of my income. What I would suggest for you is, I think just because of the simple rule, there's nothing magical about it. Save half, spend half. So if you went from 50 to 150, recognize that what you can do, I'm ignoring taxes here, but save half of the increase and spend half of the increase.

So if you've added $100,000 to your income, then set up your finances now so that you're saving $50,000 per year, and then add another $50,000 per year of spending. And to me, that's the right number, is you double your lifestyle, which will be a big, very welcome, fun change.

But you also are increasing your savings. And I don't, I think that's kind of the prudent middle road. It's not too extreme where you're living like a miser. It's not where you're spending too much money. Just as your income goes up, save half, spend half. That way you double your lifestyle and you double your savings.

- Gotcha. Makes sense. - Anything else? That's all I got. - No, I wish I had more. - Well, Colin, let's keep in touch as you work it through. And by the way, congratulations. What kind of work, so you went from the military, what kind of work did you go into out of the military?

- Yeah, so I was a network engineer in the military, jumped into software. - Perfect. - Yeah, dropped out of college, got a bachelor's and master's in the military. So - Well done. - Weird path, but it turned out. - Well done. I'm glad it worked out for you.

- Thank you. - All right, we go on to Memphis, Tennessee. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, Josh, I missed the first part of your call. I hope this doesn't repeat any questions. I got a stock market question for you. - Go ahead.

- I just broke a million dollars in the stock market. It's 70%. Yeah. The 70% stocks and about 30% treasuries. I've been 100% stocks for 20 years. I feel like the market's their value. And I'm not on Facebook, but I've gotten the impression that you've been talking to people on Facebook and that you're out of market.

And I was thinking about Dallio's all weather portfolio and the permanent portfolio theory, which we talked about before. And so my question for you is, you know, Dallio's negative on Barnes now. What do you think of Dallio's all weather? What do you think of the permanent portfolio in today's market?

And whatever value or is it just reflecting inflation? And then I want to know if you're out, where'd you move your money? - I am not competent to say what the market is going to be some months from now or not. I tend to look at things and it feels if where we are right now isn't a bubble, then I don't know what a bubble would feel like or how you would predict a bubble.

That's where I'm at right now. So if I just see too much evidence to say that, to look at the world and just, again, I said it the way I want to say it. If where we're at right now is not inflated, if we're not in some kind of valuation bubble, then I don't know what a bubble would look like or what it would feel like.

So maybe the things are different, right? I've asked myself a lot of these questions over the last couple of years. Maybe things are different now because there's more people participating in the stock market than ever before. I don't know. I think that there's a lot of money in stocks because there's not really, there's a lot of money forced into stocks because you can't get any return on your money in the bank.

That's part of the whole reason why you have interest rates at these artificially low prices. It doesn't make sense to me from the perspective, broadly speaking, a lot of things don't make sense to me from a fundamental perspective. But because I don't know whether, where we're going to be, three or six months, et cetera, the only safe place I've ever found to plant my feet in any of this is what I call financial planning, which is simply the old, the same wisdom reflected in the idea that you invest money in the stock markets that you're not going to spend in the next five years.

So where are we going to be five years from now? If I had to bet, I would bet that markets will be higher five years from now than where they are today. That doesn't mean, however, that they were going to be higher a year from now. And so I'm happy to bet that they'll be higher five years from now.

And so if you've got a five-year time horizon, I wouldn't run away. The second thing is, if you're going to get out, you've got to have something to go to. So you've got to have some kind of personal strategy, some kind of personal plan that makes sense to you of what you're going to go to.

Getting out to go to cash, unless you have a specific metric that you're watching, a particular strategy that you have in mind of, or a specific company that you want to work in, just doesn't work. That kind of fear-based run for the hills doesn't work when you get to investing.

And so if you need some money in the cash to sleep well, maybe you've got a million dollars and you need to put $200,000 in the bank because that's the money that makes you sleep well at night so that you could let the other $800,000 ride, go for it.

Again, I can plant my feet very firmly on these personal financial planning techniques to say, how much money do you need in the bank to sleep well? Now, where do you go? I think that you need to develop something that would make you feel good. If you feel good having an all-weather portfolio, I think you should do that.

If you feel good having a permanent portfolio, I think you should do that. I think that those portfolios can make a lot of people feel better than a 100% stock portfolio because they solve these needs, they solve these fears. If I know that I've got $200,000 in gold coins sitting somewhere, and if I know that I've got $200,000 in long-term treasuries, and if I know I've got, going on down the list, if I know I've got $200,000 in cash, then I'm not worried so much about all the money in the portfolio.

And so I like those strategies. I like any strategy that somebody believes in that makes sense to them based upon their numbers because what you've got to make sure you have is a plan that's not made in the heat of battle but that's made beforehand so that when the market starts tumbling, you know what you're going to do with it.

So if you told me I'm going to take a million dollars and I've got my eye on 10 companies that I've worked out a value estimate of what I think these companies are worth per share, and so I'm going to just wait and I'm going to watch my pick list, and when their value is go below – when their share prices go below what I think they're worth, I'm going to go ahead and start buying.

I'm convinced, yeah, that makes sense. But I think that you want to go in that direction instead. My reasons for getting out of the stock market were primarily personal financial planning reasons and personal philosophical problems, not valuations. I sold stocks far below what they are now. So if we're counting how Joshua's stock getting out of the stock market thing did, I got out lower than where they are right now.

But I don't regret that personally because I didn't make the decision based on valuations. I didn't predict a crash and then get out. I made the decision because I object philosophically and morally to many of the actions that the companies were taking with my money and I didn't want to have their blood on my hands.

And number two, when looking at my personal financial plan, I realized that stocks were much less likely to ever make me wealthy than other things that I could do. And so after years of selling stocks, I realized that stocks very rarely make anybody rich, meaning mainstream stocks. And so what I decided to do was to pursue – I guess we could call it a barbell strategy, right?

Where – no, that wouldn't be the right characterization. I basically decided to say, "I want to bet on myself and on my personal abilities, not the stock market. I want to bet on my own businesses that I can build. I want to bet on my own businesses that I can turn around because I believe that I can make tens of millions of dollars per year if I invest my own money rather than giving it to Wall Street to invest." And so when that's compounded with my own personal philosophical frustrations with the way that many large companies conduct their affairs, then I'm satisfied with my decision.

But I don't think that's right for most people. Make sense? Yeah, it does. I appreciate it. Yeah, I can sympathize with the moral positions of the companies that you're on a part of. That's a part of it, but it's more that it seems like there's a great deal of exuberance that there's about the markets and there's a time to make a decision and be now rather than at the most depressed points of the market.

I don't disagree with you. And one thing – forgive me for interrupting you. I am trying to – I'm trying in my response to you, and I want to make this crystal clear because an expert investor will recognize what I'm doing, but I'm trying to respond and tread a very thin line here.

All academic research indicates that the average investor has no ability to predict the direction of the markets, generally speaking. So that's the general academic consensus. And because I'm somebody who believes in the power of academic research, who believes in the power of good data, that influences my decisions, is that I always question myself.

Do I think I'm smarter? Do I think I can time the market? The data indicates that I probably can't. Now, the other fine line is that I have spoken to many people who can make good investment decisions. I've known enough people, clients of mine, listeners of mine, who are very keen traders.

But the key is you have to have a strategy that you understand and know what you're doing. And so I feel a sense of professional responsibility that if you're not calling me up – and like the people who can do it aren't calling me and asking me if the stock market is overvalued.

They're just doing it based upon, "Hey, I've researched this. I understand this strategy. My metric says that this is not a winning strategy, and I'm going to pay it, bail and go out." And so this is a very complicated world for me to live in because if the average person calls me up and says, "I got a 401(k)," well, the answer is buy and hold, right?

Buy and hold. But buy and hold really sucks a lot of times, and it's really painful, and I don't believe that you have to buy and hold to win. And so I'm trying to thread this narrow path between these to say, "You need to understand your own strategy. I personally think stocks are overvalued, but since I don't have any skin in the game in the moment, it's easy for me to say that because my businesses are doing fine, and I'm not interested – that interested at the moment – in buying more stocks because I think that there are far more interesting ways and places to make money in the world than the U.S.

stock market." So I hope that that's clear. I'm trying to make it very obvious that I'm trying to thread a line between the academic research that says you should buy and hold and we shouldn't try to predict whether stocks are overvalued while also recognizing that I think individuals can actually look at their situation and say, "Hey, this doesn't make any sense," and then it's your money.

No one's going to care about it. You do what you need to do to sleep well at night. Right. There is some psychology there because if the stock is not a true value, then trying to sell is to capture a gain. It wasn't really yours to begin with. So I can understand the psychology of the buy and hold.

It doesn't really matter if it goes up or down. Eventually, it's going to reflect true value. It just may be a number smaller than what you have right now. But I was trying to think of something that was a little bit more durable and less fluctuation at the height.

Do you have any idea why Dallier is so negative on bonds right now? Is he talking about government bonds or is he talking about corporate bonds? I haven't followed exactly what he has said, but the reason why anybody would be negative on bonds right now is obvious. With interest rates at depressed historical lows for a very long period of time, with expansionary money supplies and economic crises, it's hard to believe that interest rates can be kept down for the long term.

If interest rates rise, then bond prices will fall. So prices of bonds – sorry, value of bonds and interest rates always work in an inverse correlation. If interest rates go up, the value of bonds fall. If interest rates fall, the value of bonds increase because that's the relationship between them because it's on what companies can refinance themselves at.

So any investor who's looking at the world would say at some point in time, interest rates are going to have to increase, whether that's because we're in an inflationary environment due to excessive supplies of money. You can argue your own thing, but then in that scenario, bond prices would fall.

So that would be, without having seen what Dallier has written recently, that's the answer as to why any person would be bearish on bonds at the moment. Okay. Yeah, that was a gist of it. Okay, I appreciate it. Thanks for your help. Yeah. So my only comment would be I do like these structured portfolios like all-weather portfolio, like permanent portfolio, because they're designed to solve these mental problems you're wrestling with.

You can think about what you think is the best, but they are fundamentally designed to try to alleviate this sense of agitation that you have because they allow you to say, "Listen, we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but we know that by diversifying our assets across these different asset classes, we can participate in where there's growth, and we can limit the decreases where there are declines, and they allow you to sleep well at night." And so you need to find a model that you believe in that will allow you to sleep well at night so that also fits your personal financial goals, your personal financial constraints.

You need to find something you believe in so that when the market goes up and down, you're going to be happy and comfortable with it. And whatever that model is, is up to you to decide, but that's what you need so that you don't bail at a bad time.

Thanks, Joshua. I appreciate it. Always enjoy listening to your insights. My pleasure. Thank you for being here. All right, two callers left. We go to California. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? I think that's me. My name is James. Tell me your name again, please.

James. James, glad you're here. Go ahead, sir. Yeah. So I'm in California. I have concerns about California and the US. I'm not looking to move. I'm running the family farming operation, but I'm looking to build ties to other countries specifically and kind of understand where I should go with that.

I kind of got two ends of this. My wife is from Belarus and I enjoy Eastern Europe and that, but I don't really see any opportunities there. The visa stuff and that's not real appealing. There's also countries like Panama and Malaysia and whatnot that offer appealing visa and investment things, but I don't have any particular ties to these countries or other interests in them aside from these programs they offer.

So I'm kind of going back and forth between these things and wondered your thoughts on building ties to other countries and how to pick where to go to. Okay. So let me give you a couple of models that you can apply. So the first thing is you are living in California.

You're running a business that simply cannot easily be relocated. You're running a farm and you're happy doing that. And while you might be a little bit annoyed with some of the trends that are affecting you personally, while you might be a little bit concerned about the future, you're not going to pick up and go and start a farm in Belarus.

Okay. So if that's the first, agreed, do I understand correctly? That is the situation. Perfect. Okay. So in this situation, we're just simply doing plan B planning, right? While things are not bad enough that we want to leave, we could actually understand that in theory, there's a point in time at which things could get bad enough that we would actually want to leave.

And so if that happened, it would be better to have a plan in place beforehand rather than waiting for the last minute. We don't want to be on the last train out wondering if we have enough pieces of jewelry sewn into the lining of our coat to bribe the guards to let us out.

Right. Better to be a little bit early and not be on that last train. So we're trying to do plan B planning. Okay. So let me break it into some components because the reason this is overwhelming to you is simply that you don't, first of all, it needs to be broken down into small pieces and then you need some ideas that are available to you.

So I think the most useful opportunity for you with regard to personal international planning, sorry, the most useful model is simply the classic five flag theory. The classic theory that Harry Schultz invented back in the 80s of the PT theory, flat flag theory. And so what he would teach is that there are five basic flags that you can plant around the world.

And so you have your citizenship flag, what country are you a citizen of? You have your residency flag, what country are you a resident of? You have your banking flag, where do you store your money? You have your business flag, where do you operate your business? And then you have, they would call it your playground flag, which I'm happy to use.

You can just simply call it your living flag. Your playground is what they would say. Where do you like to go and spend time? And so the challenge is when you do international planning is that right now all five of those things are related. So you have your citizenship in the United States, you have your residency in the United States and in California.

You probably have most of your money in the United States, your business is in the United States and you spend most of your time in the United States. So you can start to decouple those one at a time. So with regard to citizenship, you probably don't have to have a second citizenship.

But I do think it's very valuable if you could have it. If things got really bad, the most important thing for you would be to have a residency. And so you might want to just think about where would I actually want to go? Let's say that things got bad in California.

Imagine a scenario in which it would be bad enough to make you want to leave California. I don't know what it is, I don't know what you're worried about, but just imagine a scenario where you say, "If they did this, I would leave. If they did this, I would leave." And then ask yourself, "Where would I want to go?" Now, if you don't have an answer for that, then just say, "I don't know where I would want to go." And start looking around.

Would I want to go from California to Nevada? Would I want to go to Utah? Would I go to Colorado, Montana? Would I go to Texas, Florida, South Dakota, North Dakota, et cetera? One thing you can do is you can just very easily diversify some of your life and your business inside the United States.

So you might have most of your property in California, but maybe you could afford to buy a little bit more land. Maybe you buy a little piece of land in another state. That would be one option for you. If you don't know where else you would go, then think about more broadly.

Do you like going to Mexico? Do you like going to Canada? Do you like going to Panama? Have you ever been there? If not, if you haven't ever been to any of those places, then the first thing to do is just book yourself a vacation and get on an airplane and go.

And go spend a little time in Alberta and say, "Well, maybe I would like to buy a ranch here in Alberta. Maybe I'd like to buy some farmland in Mexico. Maybe I'd like Panama City, et cetera." And just think about some different places. And if you're going to get residency, try to get residency in a place you'd actually want to spend some time because you might actually wind up spending some time there.

The easiest flag to move is your banking flag. It's very easy to go and open a bank account. It's not hard at all. You just simply choose a country that will allow you as a tourist to come in and open a bank account. You go there, you open a bank account, then you fly home and you wire money into the bank account.

And so everybody should have at least one account outside of their country of residence. If you have substantial reserves, you can think about moving more of those reserves. Now, this gets complicated depending on how those reserves are held. If you have a million dollars in your bank account, you can move easily a million dollars from the United States to a million dollars in a foreign bank account in practically any high-quality banking jurisdiction in the world.

If you have a million dollars in your 401(k), it doesn't work so well. And so you have to look at what assets you have, but you have to think about where you store your money. With regard to your business, you want to analyze your business and say, "Is there an opportunity that I have to move my business or any part of my business?" So, do I want to have something going in Mexico?

Do I want to have something going in Guatemala? Do I want to have something going in Brazil? Do I want to buy farmland? Is that the kind of guy I am? Or if not, let me just ignore it for now. This is hard with farming because you're trying to use a productive piece of land, and usually farmer's shadow is the best fertilizer.

So, it's not the kind of thing that's easily run from abroad. But there can be the kind of thing where you might set up operations in other places and move some component of your business. Residency, you could, if you were going to buy land, you can often use land to negotiate a residency for you.

So, there are many places in the world that if you have money and you want to buy some farmland, you can come in and you can use that purchase to actually get yourself a legal residency. So, you can come and go back and forth. I don't know if that works with the style of farming or with your personal lifestyle interest, but that's something you can do.

On the citizenship front, there's no downside to having a Belarusian citizenship. Your wife is Belarusian? Yes. I've looked into it and it doesn't look like there's a way I could be without moving there for like a decade. Right. Yeah, they're probably pretty tight given the culture of Belarus. So, can you get a residence permit in Belarus?

I don't. I should look into that further. I think I'd have to be working there too. Because I'm married to a citizen, under the current rules, I could go there on a tourist visa and then file paperwork once there to stay there and work. There's no way I've found to line it up in advance.

Of course, no guarantee they won't change the rules, but those are the current rules. Right. So, if possible, I would try to go ahead and negotiate a residence permit for you, simply being married to your wife, so that if you ever did need or want to go there, you have that as an option.

And then I would look and see how worth it is to get at other places. My answer is, if you're in California, you should get a Mexican residence permit. I think that's the obvious first step. You go to the Mexican consulate, you say, "Look, I have enough money in the bank.

I can get a person of means visa." They give you a person of means visa. You go into Mexico, you do the conje, turn it into a temporary permit. You go and take your vacations in Mexico every year for five years, you become a permanent resident of Mexico. Now you can always go to Mexico.

So, that would be, I think, the simplest thing to do. And then, as a farmer, there'd probably be a lot of options for you in terms of potentially moving things to Mexico. Where I would spend most of my time is I would just spend most of my time not on necessarily each of these details because they're so hard for you as a farmer, but I would spend time investigating and saying, "Is there more opportunity somewhere else?" Probably it's going to be hard for you to find.

Farming is a pretty good deal in the United States, especially in California, you've got great weather, you've got tremendous subsidies, tremendous support. You're probably not going to be the guy who's going to be out leading the front on international relocation. But what you might do is just simply look and keep your ears open for other opportunities.

Maybe a year or two from now you buy some farmland in Venezuela. Maybe, I don't know, but if you don't have something better, there's no reason to leave where you are, work your way through those five flags and see, "Okay, can I get another citizenship somewhere? Do I qualify for something in my own family?

If not, am I willing to pay for it to buy one? Is it worth it to me? Do I think that the concern is significant enough? What if I just get a residency permit?" I think for most people, having a residency permit in Mexico or in Panama or someplace simple like that, maybe you get yourself a little condo in Colombia, get a residence permit there that can lead to citizenship.

I think that's sufficient for most people. But think about how you would get out of the farm at some point in time if you needed to. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, that's helpful. I've looked all over the world and done business in Chile and in Spain and haven't found anything better but then have concerns with where I'm at.

So I've been trying those two. >> It's really hard. And it's a lot easier for a guy like me with an internet business to just trot all around the world and to wax eloquent about how great internationalization is. I like it, right? But that's very different than if you're a farmer and you're tied to land.

The last thing I was going to say is you should consider disentangling yourself from the land. So I don't know with your particular farm whether this would work. And this is also hard because of the taxes usually embedded in most farm property. But if you see that things, let's say that you're looking at it around and you're saying things are going badly, all right?

What you do is start stripping your equity from the place where things are going badly and try to move it to a place where things are going better. And so here, the obvious example is can you go ahead and mortgage up your farm and then go ahead and move that money somewhere else?

You don't want to endanger your business, but if you can mortgage up your farm and move that money somewhere else, then that could potentially be very helpful for you in the future. And that would help to protect your biggest asset. So I would look very carefully at mortgaging my farm and see what I could do to strip some of the equity there and if I have a better place to put it.

Okay. For sure. All right. Well, that was my question. I've got some things to look on. If I remember right, Harry Schulte has wrote a couple of books on Flagsters. Is that correct? Yeah, it wasn't Schulte himself who wrote them. It was another author. I'll look up his name here for a moment.

W.G. Hill was the name he wrote under. He wrote a number of books. He wrote a book called PT. He wrote a book under that label. He wrote a book called The Invisible Investor. He wrote a book on second passports, etc. Later under another pen name, he wrote a book called something about escaping big brother.

But they're good. You can find them online. You can find them. I read them all and they're quite fun. They're just at the end of the day, your constraint is going to be your farming operation. You're not a good candidate. You're not a good candidate for that kind of globe-trotting lifestyle if you are required to be there with the land.

And so your options are more limited than they are for some other people. What do you do? Let me run through them again real fast. Okay, number one, you can strip the equity off your farm, move the equity somewhere else if you have to be there. You can redesign your farming operations so that they can flourish without you physically being there and you can start another operation somewhere else.

Maybe you can start a farming operation in Chile and then you spend 20% of your time in California, 80% of your time in Chile. Or you can just be prepared and watching for what those factors would be when things got bad enough that you would actually would want to sell your land and move.

But I think the biggest challenge is you're tied to the land and so the threats would have to be pretty big for it to be worth it for you to pull the trigger, sell your land, move your equipment operations elsewhere. They have to be pretty big. Okay, well thank you much.

Wish I had better answers. And with that, appropriately enough, we move on to, well you said anonymous, we'll go with Kevin. It's easier. I feel a little bit weird saying welcome to the show anonymous. So go ahead, Kevin. Kevin's good. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'm not so into, yeah, absolutely I can hear you.

It makes me feel more normal talking to Kevin than it does talking to anonymous, like my screen says. Perfect. Well, I'll be Kevin then. Good. So I guess two questions. I'll give you what might be the shorter one first. Going into a business with a family member, close family member, no concern that they will up and leave or rip me off or anything.

They will be full time working toward this business before, well, coming up here pretty soon. And in terms of compensation, would it be beneficial for me to pay them out of, in another way, via a tax free gift or using other funds or to have them as a registered employee of the business?

What would be the advantage of doing either? What is the relationship between you and the family member? It's a parent. Okay. So let's stick to the letter of the law to start with. Okay. When somebody works for you and they receive compensation, then that's compensation. Compensation is compensation no matter how it is structured.

And the way that they should be compensated is very carefully and legally defined. For example, if so and so is a contractor, there are a set of guidelines that you can look at and say, yep, this person is a contractor. On the other hand, if someone is an employee, there are a set of guidelines that you can look at that are pretty clear.

This is an employee. There's not a lot of gray zone between who is a contractor and who is an employee. And so it's fairly self-evident. If you read the criteria for a contractor versus an employee, it's fairly self-evident. Now, depending on someone's relationship with you in the business, then the way that they're compensated from the business will be fairly obvious.

You can make them an employee of the business or you can make them an owner in the business. Either is fine. But the actual legal impact of each of those decisions is certainly self-evident and obvious. If they're an employee, they're going to receive wages. If they're an owner, they're going to receive profits and dividends from the company.

And so all of the tax characteristics of that transfer are going to be quite obvious. The only benefit for a family member working for another family member, I guess we should note that if you have a minor child who is working for you, then there are some tiny little benefits.

For example, you can avoid paying employment taxes for a minor child that's working for you in a sole proprietorship and maybe in another structure too. I can't remember the rule on that right now. But that's not going to apply with a parent. What you can, of course, do is you can have somebody who is working for you that's being paid a relatively high wage for a relatively easy go of it.

Now, you can't abuse it. There's the old saying, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered." And I think the same thing applies here. If your father is working for your business and he shows up to the office one hour per month, but he receives a paycheck of $100,000 per month, then as wages, he's not earning $100,000 for his one hour of work.

Now, if he's showing up to the office 20 hours a week and he's doing some stuff for you here and there, running some errands, and you're paying him $5,000 a month, no one's going to bark at that, even if it's better than he could make somewhere else. So it all comes down to, all right, what benefits am I getting for him versus someone else?

Well, the first thing is, if the amount of compensation that you're paying him is the same with whether you have a college-aged child working for you or your father or your sister or whatever, you can pay him an amount of compensation that's relatively low from a tax perspective for him, but yet is significant in terms of its tax deduction for you.

So let's say you're paying him $30,000 per year. Well, he's not going to be incurring a lot of income taxes of $30,000 per year working for you, but you can lower your tax burden by $30,000 of money that otherwise you would gift him. And so in this scenario, it would actually be better for him to be working for your business, probably, than for you to be gifting him $30,000 per year.

Let's say that you're making $300,000 per year. So your top $30,000 of income is being taxed at a fairly high bracket. I don't remember the bracket off my head, so let's just say it's being taxed at 30%. Okay, so that top $30,000 is being taxed at 30%. But if he gets $30,000 of wages, he's probably at an effective 10% bracket.

So by paying him $30,000 from the business to show up to the office a couple times a week, run some errands for you, do some work from home, et cetera, be available to you when you need him, then you are moving $30,000 from a 30% bracket to a 10% bracket in my example.

Same thing you can do with a college student, right? You want your child to go to college, and you want to pay for it, but you'd like to be able to deduct it. Well, how do you deduct your child's college tuition? Well, your child works for you, you pay them wages, and then they use those wages to go and pay for the college tuition.

And so again, you want to make sure that there's enough evidence that they're actually working for you. Otherwise, in theory, if you get audited, then this can certainly... And they just say, "Well, you're paying them $30,000, and they never showed up. They don't have a business phone. They don't do anything." What do they do for you?

"Well, it's just tax fraud, buddy. We're going to tax you on this at the 30% rate. We're going to disallow this $30,000 deduction because they're not genuinely an employee." So it's probably better for you to have your dad as an employee versus giving gifts. Now, let's talk about gifts.

So any person can give another person a gift. The question always just comes down to, is it actually a gift or is it not? So you can have your dad as an employee, and you can also give him a gift. You would just want to think about how and what is better to structure at it and make sure that there's enough...

Make sure that you can look yourself in the mirror and say, "Yeah, this is actually genuinely structured the way that I want it to be structured, and that it's actually honest, so I don't have to worry about an auditor trying to undo something." But that's how I would approach it.

Did I answer the question or did I muddy the waters? No, you answered the question. To be clear, they will be doing real full-time value-added work, but since it is in its infancy stages, this business, I wasn't sure if there was a better way to do it without incurring a lot of additional costs that I don't need just yet.

Yeah. So if they're actually doing work for you, then you just want to have them do the work for you. And it all comes down to how much the profit is, right? If you're thinking about this from a tax optimization, which I don't think you should always think about, I think that you should focus first on a lifestyle optimization.

So having your dad work with you or your mom work with you could just be awesome because it's fun, you're able to work together. Sometimes you can deliver them from a really bad situation. They have a job they don't like, well, why don't they come and work with you and have a job that they like better, where they just is a better way to work with your parents.

I would much rather see my parents working with me versus working with someone else, as long as I could provide something that would be appropriate for them. But if the business is just getting started, I don't think you have much of a tax consideration. And then you have to...

So there can be reasons to do it both ways. Look at your financial plan, your business plan, your tax plan. Look at your parents' situation and tax plan. And then it should probably be fairly obvious what the best move is. If your dad has a $100,000 a year pension income, and he's coming to work with you and you're building kind of a struggling little company, you don't have any taxes, well, then it would be silly for you to start paying him wage income in exchange for his work.

He doesn't need any more income. He's in a high bracket because of his $100,000 a year pension. He just wants to help you. In which case, I think the better situation is you go ahead and put him on a nominal... Maybe he works for free, but you put him on a nominal salary.

And then you take him on a nice family vacation every year, or you buy a boat and your dad gets to use the boat whenever you want to do it. On the other hand, if you're in the high tax bracket and he's in the low tax bracket, now it makes a whole lot more sense to go ahead and pay him wages and whatnot because of the tax arbitrage opportunity that I said.

So it's the same with any family member. These are tax shifting strategies. Remember the classic tax planning shows I did way back in the beginning where you have shifting strategies, timing strategies, and conversion strategies. So here, you're simply trying to engage in a tax shifting strategy, and you're trying to move the tax liability to the lowest cost taxpayer.

Very clear. Thank you. My pleasure. Anything else? Last one. I have scoured... Well, what I thought was scoured, the annals of radical personal finance for a show on universal life insurance. And I've come up empty-handed. Is there one that you can point me to that explains why someone might choose that form of life insurance over another?

Yeah, let me do it right now. So the answer is no. I started to do some life insurance stuff. Universal life insurance is one where a visual makes all the difference in the world. But I can answer the question for you right now in a way that'll make it simpler for you.

Why would somebody choose universal life insurance instead of... Well, I guess let's go two directions. So first, why would somebody choose universal life insurance instead of term life insurance? Well, they would choose universal life insurance instead of term life insurance because they wanted the ability to keep the life insurance for a longer period of time, and they wanted the ability to have some kind of cash value inside of the life insurance policy.

But yet they wanted some flexibility. So you can look at it... Let's say you look at a life insurance planning program and you say, "I think I'm going to need life insurance for 20 years, but I could buy term insurance, a flat 20-year term policy, or I could buy universal life insurance for 20 years.

And I can fund the universal life insurance policy with these higher premiums. And then in 20 years, I'll just cancel the policy. I'll take whatever cash I have, and it'll be lower than the net cost of the policy that you had from a term perspective, lower than the premiums of the term perspective." In order for that plan to work, you need to get high enough returns on the universal life insurance policy where it makes sense.

And you need to... The opportunity cost of the universal life insurance policy needs to be low enough that it makes sense. But you can do that, right? You can structure a universal life policy, keep it for 20, 30 years, cash it out, and then be on your way. Why would somebody buy a universal life insurance policy instead of a whole life policy?

They would buy it for flexibility. Whole life insurance policies are not flexible, generally speaking. But a universal life insurance policy is. You can change the premium every year. You can frequently change the death benefit. They're designed to be flexible. They're designed to give people options. So with that flexibility comes, in my opinion, the major problem with the universal life insurance policy for most people.

For most people, universal life insurance is the single most complex insurance product that exists. And this is especially complex when you get into a world of an indexed universal life insurance policy. It makes people's eyes glaze over. Non-insurance agents simply don't understand how permanent life insurance policies work. They try.

They don't get it. They don't understand. And so it's hard for a lay person, a non-sophisticated person, to fund a universal life insurance policy high enough for it to really work out for the long term. And this is where, when I used to sell life insurance, I would generally try not to sell universal life insurance to an unsophisticated person.

Because what happens in the sales scenario is that, generally speaking, the person, most people, if you sit down with the average person and a good insurance agent, if I sat down and I proved this time and again, I'd have the biggest Dave Ramsey fan sitting across from me. And they'd be like, I'm only going to buy term life insurance because Dave Ramsey says whole life insurance sucks.

I'm only going to buy term life insurance. And my deal was always, listen, I think it's fine. I said, but let me just explain to you how it works. And I would go through about a 10-minute presentation. I would explain how term life insurance works. I would explain how whole life insurance policy works.

I never had somebody, I guess maybe, I almost never had somebody come and not want to buy whole life insurance at the other side of it. Because a good whole life insurance presentation is really compelling when you actually understand it. So the vast majority of people want to buy whole life insurance when it's compared to term life insurance.

Now, I had many people that didn't buy it because they shouldn't have, and I told them they shouldn't. But I would also just have people, well, I'm just going to buy term life insurance and invest the difference. Fine. But when you understand how, when you get a good whole life insurance presentation, you understand its options, it's very hard not to want to buy the product.

So what's the problem with whole life insurance policies? Well, the premiums are just scandalously high. And I would always make them scandalously high, right? Here's a million dollars of term life insurance. Here's a million dollars of whole life insurance. A million dollars term life insurance, $600 a year. Whole life insurance, $11,000 a year.

And so nobody can afford the $11,000 a year. So this is where universal life comes in. And there's a very slippery slope here, where for both the agent selling the policy and also the buyer buying the policy, they want the whole life, but they can't afford the $11,000 a year.

So the agent says, well, what we could do is we could get this universal life policy. We could start it with six, and then down the road, you could go ahead and put 15 once your income comes up. Now, can you do it? Absolutely. But what happens is the buyer is thinking about all those great benefits of the whole life policy with the $11,000 a year premium.

Meanwhile, they're paying the $6,000 a year premium for the universal life insurance policy. And in the very beginning, the agent shows them, they say, look, this policy will blow up in 47 years. There's not going to be enough money in it if you only put in $5,000. So you can put in five or $6,000 now, but you have to put in more money down the road.

And the person says, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is going to be easy. I'm going to be making more money. It's just going to make all the sense in the world. And so then what happens? Well, there's a big incentive for the agent to sell the universal life insurance policy instead of the term policy because they make a lot more money on commission.

$600 a year term policy, maybe the agent makes $450 of commission. $6,000 a year universal life policy, $4,500 of commission. Feels a lot better to get that paycheck. There's also a big incentive for the individual to buy the universal life insurance because they're getting the feeling, the dopamine hit of, yeah, I'm saving for my future.

I'm going to buy this and it's going to be great. But underneath in the policy, as the cost of providing the death benefit increases, it eats up the cash values. And then the policy starts to run out of money right when the individual often doesn't have any money. They get in their 70s, they're retired, they forgot all about it.

When they were 55, they had $182,000 in the policy, but now they wake up at 75 and they're getting a bill from the insurance company saying, "You owe us $4,000 this year to keep this insurance in force." And now they're just angry across the board. "What do you mean?

This was whole life insurance I was going to have." No, it was universal life insurance. And if you still want the coverage, you need to pay a payment of $6,000. So they come in and they say, "Why is this policy falling apart? Why is it that my cash value last year was $172,000 and I sent in my $5,000 premium and this year it's down to $164,000?" And then you tell them, "Well, you need to put in $20,000 this year to catch the thing up." And so this is the slippery slope with universal life insurance, why I don't personally recommend it for unsophisticated people.

Now, universal life insurance is the very best tool in a financial planner's arsenal for a sophisticated buyer, somebody who understands, somebody who's managing a business deal, and they want to put in $3,000 for the next six years, but then they want to put in $33,000 for the following 20 years.

Well, universal life insurance is your ticket. It's really good for a retirement program, right? If you're funding kind of a Coley, some kind of retirement benefit. Well, universal life insurance with the flexibility allows you to change the premiums every year based upon the overall structure of how much money is available, how much profit is available from the company.

Universal life insurance can be a very useful tool for estate planning because of its flexibility. Again, "Okay, we're going to start this policy now. We're going to use our crummy limits to get money into the trust. We're going to fund the policy with these crummy donations. And then in the future, we're going to have these other assets come in." And then we go, "Well, universal life insurance is the ticket." So it's an incredible, flexible approach to life insurance, but it only works for somebody who is sophisticated enough to understand how to arrange the premiums.

And so in general, I caution against it. If somebody walks in and says, "Should I buy a $500,000 universal life insurance policy or something else?" I would say, "Buy $400,000 of term insurance and buy a $100,000 whole life policy," because then the whole life policy works as intended. It doesn't fall apart.

It doesn't blow up. You always have the money there. You pay your flat premium until the premiums go away. It just works. It's 150 years old. It works every single time, whereas the universal life insurance policy only works if you get your predictions right, if you get your growth rate right, if you get your premiums right, and if the person understands.

And very rarely do you find someone who's actually willing to come along and put a lot more money in in the future. The hell, or did I lose you? Impressively succinct. It's probably the best description of pros and cons I've heard. Good. It didn't feel succinct, but I did my best.

It's, yeah, I hope it helped. What you're not seeing is my three hours and three hours plus of research into the topic. All right, good. I'm coming up with those results. Good, good. Thank you for that. Yeah, my pleasure. It's one of those things that for the right, this is where, I mean, just talk to your insurance agent, right?

Insurance planning is usually fairly obvious, just like all, I mean, really all financial planning is pretty obvious to an expert. Now, I'm limited in what I can do for you here. I always try. But if you sit down with an insurance agent and you say, here's what I'm trying to do, right?

I'm trying to use the insurance policy for these financial planning purposes. I need the insurance for this period of time. This is the money that I have available. This is, here's the situation. Here are my assets. Here's my plan. Then the right policy is a fairly obvious choice in general.

There may be a little tweaking here and there, but it's really fairly obvious. And so once you realize that, it should take it out. And then I would just say is that don't do another three hours of internet research. Go talk to an insurance agent. That's what they do.

And you're clearly armed enough to make a good decision. Talk to a couple if you need to. But this is what, it's just simpler if you can find someone who could say, tell me your situation and then, yeah, tell me your situation and here's what fits. It'll save you the time to do it.

So I'm not opposed to a universal life insurance policy, but it's got to have a whole lot of caveats and there's got to be a very clear understanding. And I'm personally very skeptical that most people can understand it enough to be, so that 20 years from now, where they haven't seen their agent retired 20 years ago, they haven't seen it, where they actually understand, oh, you know what?

When I was 73 years old, that was the time that I was going to go ahead and cash this policy in. And yeah, I don't have much money in it, but that's okay. It's just a refund and my other assets worked out. And so this, everything happened like it was supposed to.

So that would be my recommendation for you. And I tell this to insurance agents, right? And here's things, every now and then I do training and talk to like financial advisors. And the comment that I make is simply this. I used to, when I got into the insurance business, I was excited and motivated to learn how to be a good salesman.

I had read, I forget the name of the guy who wrote it, but he wrote the book called How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. And I had read this book when I was in my late teens, early twenties, super excited. I'm going to go learn to sell and I'm going to learn to be a salesman.

And I read all this stuff on sales and I was like, I'm going to learn how to do the closes and I'm going to learn how to do a one call close. I would take sales books and study sales techniques and what, cause I thought it was all about sales.

And then I got into the business and I realized that it wasn't about that kind of selling. It is still selling, but it's much more of a consultative selling. And I realized that the insurance game, the insurance business is very simple. It's so simple is that when you're an insurance agent and you're talking to someone, you're simply asking yourself one question.

You're simply asking yourself, is the sale presenting itself to exist? I know it sounds wordy, but that's how I think about it. Like, is the sale presenting itself to exist? And so when an insurance agent is out doing an interview with a prospective client, they're taking all the facts down.

They're simply thinking like, where's the sale? Is it here or is it not? And sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. And so the first question is, is the sale presenting itself to exist or is it not? And if it's not, then they move on their way. I try to give some advice.

I used to carry around Dave Ramsey books in my trunk. It's like, okay, I'm here with you. You're deeply in debt. You don't have any money. I can't help you, but here, take a free book and read this and do this and then come back in a couple of years and I can help you.

Right. But there's nothing I can do. Then if the sale reveals itself to exist, then you're simply asking yourself the question, what is the sale? What is it that's going to fit this person's need? Is this a disability insurance sale? Is this a life insurance sale? If it's a life insurance sale, is it a term life insurance sale?

Is it a whole life insurance sale? Is it a universal life insurance sale? Is it a second to die estate planning deal? Is it a buy-sell agreement deal? Is it a policy on my kid? What's presenting itself? And it's rather obvious to an insurance agent with a little bit of experience, what's there and what's not there.

And so, it's funny, people still talk about the high pressure insurance stuff. Maybe it does still exist, but I think that's much more of an artifact of like the 1970s and the 60s that has somehow flowed over into 2021. I don't think it really exists anymore. And so, if you sit down with an insurance agent and you just say, here's what I'm trying to accomplish, can I do it?

They'll tell you if you can do it and they'll tell you what the best way to do it is. Don't do any more internet research, talk to a couple insurance agents, this is what they get paid for. Great. Thank you, Joshua. My pleasure. And with that, we wrap up our final call of the day.

As we go, I guess I would just say that this is one of those things that does that I think you can do. I was just talking with someone earlier about kind of a sense of sometimes I get the sense of frustration working with professionals, right? I'm suspicious of a lot of professionals.

But the older I get, the more I learn to be less suspicious of people and just to talk to them and ask for their opinion and get an expert's advice. And so, I think being armed with information and expertise is good, right? Doing internet research, reading books, these things are all good.

I'm glad you're here listening to me. But at the end of the day, the older I get, the more I just want an answer and I want to pay someone for their answer and just simply get advice that goes straight to the point. And I think that's what professionals in many industries give you is they can summarize their years of learning and give you an answer that's clear and that's direct and that makes sense.

And so, if you're the kind of person who's scared of financial professionals, financial advisors, financial insurance agents, et cetera, you're scared to be sold. I understand that. I used to feel that way before I got in the business. But then once I got into the business, I found that there were a lot fewer sharks in the water than I ever thought.

Now, are there sharks in the water? I think there are. I think there really are, especially when you're money. Money is like blood in the water to a shark. I guess that was a myth. The MythBusters busted that one. But money does attract swindlers. It always has. But in today's world, I think that if you go out and you talk to a couple of financial professionals and you just tell them your problems and what you're working on, they'll probably be able to point you in a better direction than hours and hours of internet research.

And I could and probably will make this into a whole show, but I'm in a lot of financial groups, a lot of retirement groups, money groups and whatnot on Facebook. And I often see people ask these questions and I think, why are you posting the question here in a Facebook group?

Now, on the one hand, I love the opportunities that we have to get people's feedback. And you can get some good advice. The problem is this. Most people don't have the ability to discern good advice. And most people in the Facebook group are simply reflecting the general culture of that group.

This is the buy term, invest the difference group. This is the whole life insurance group. This is the bank on yourself group. Well, you can take the same question and you can go and you can post it in the personal finance group and in the bank on yourself group and you get two opposite answers, just absolutely obvious opposite answers.

It's not because everyone's well-meaning, it's just people coming at it from a very different perspective. And so what you need often is personalized advice. I don't know how you can get that other than from a professional, to find a professional, someone who's knowledgeable and who give you personalized advice.

Sometimes that professional can be someone you know who's well-read, great. But even there, I think there's often a lot of biases that are just simply unknown. And I really think more and more, there is a lot of value in professional advice. It's hard to tell you how to find it.

I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. Like you just heard, I did my best to give you an answer and say, heck, here's the pitfalls, here's what can happen. But at the end of the day, don't waste too much time on research. Do the amount of research that you need to do to get comfortable and then talk to the professional so that you can potentially save yourself some time because the ultimate limited resource that we all have is time.

And with that, I will close it out at two hours and 20 minutes. I hope that this last two hours and 20 minutes has been a good use of your time. I thank you for listening. Have a great weekend and I will be back with you very soon.