Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets, I am your host.

Today is Friday, and every Friday that I can possibly arrange an internet connection and the appropriate technology, I record a live Q&A call. It works just like call-in talk radio. You call in, ask your questions, and I do my best to give you a useful answer. I don't screen these calls for content.

I don't screen them for questions. You can call, make any comments, have any questions that you want, and I love doing them. The more I enjoy doing them, the more I enjoy answering the questions. If you would like to join me on next week's call, please sign up to become a patron of the show.

Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, just search patreon.com for Radical Personal Finance. Sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and that will give you access to one of these live Friday Q&A calls. We begin with, let's see, oops, hold on just a moment. There we go. All right, we begin with John in Pennsylvania.

John, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey Joshua, thanks for taking my call. I have a question, just curious about your thoughts on having money to remove pain points versus being frugal and having a lot of time for DIY projects. I have more time than ever now, but I find myself, I have more time to work on my own things, but I'm finding it more and more difficult, even with more time, to justify doing some of these things, replacement of a door when I can have someone install it for a few hundred bucks, or even have a big project, paint the house coming up, and I'm even considering outsourcing that a little bit.

Even though some of these things, they give me enjoyment to do them and satisfaction to get them done, but I feel like I'm even more guarded about my time now since a lot of it can be dedicated to spending with my kids. I'm just kind of struggling with that.

On top of that, just being pretty frugal normally and not wanting to necessarily pay for these services. I'm curious about your thoughts on that and how you've kind of balanced that out. I've thought a lot about this. I was raised by a relatively frugal father who engaged with his children in a lot of around the house projects, and I noticed what a big difference that made in my life to have that experience.

I've done lots of construction work. I've been skilled in a lot of those areas more than the majority of my peers. I've been involved in house projects from foundation to roofing, and that's given me a tremendous amount of personal confidence to have those experiences and to have those skills.

By no means am I a skilled craftsman, but I saw it express itself. For example, when I was in high school and we were building our senior class float, I would be there and my fellow classmates were just kind of staring dumbfoundedly at a pile of boards. And kind of the basics of building things, the basics of construction seemed to be beyond their realm of experience, whereas for me it was not that way.

I could do it. And a lot of that was gained as just childhood projects. We built a three-story tree fort and the woods next to our house when I was a kid. But a lot of it came from being involved with projects around the house with my father. Now simultaneously, I have never in my life enjoyed doing a lot of those things.

It's never been something that brought me joy. I find it deeply frustrating to deal with the inevitable problems and difficulties that come with DIY projects. When I work with my hands, much of the time I feel largely inept. I have a friend of mine, a close friend of mine growing up.

He is amazing just with working with his hands. He has almost a sixth sense of how things are created, how to do things, and he has so much experience. Watching him work is like magic. And over the years I've discovered that I get exactly that same feeling when I engage in mental work, when I work with my brain.

My brain is flexible and for me, concepts that are difficult for other people come through very easily for me, whereas other people can't roll ideas around in their head in the way that I can. But I can't roll tools around in my hand the way that other people can.

And so I've learned over the years that projects, DIY projects and construction projects, are a source of significant frustration for me personally. And I would much rather simply earn the money and pay someone else to do them so that they're done and I can do the things that I enjoy, the things that make me money, the things that I just literally enjoy, that I physically enjoy doing.

And as long as I have enough money, it seems like a fairly wise way to approach it if I enjoy it. Now, when you look at frugality and you look at people who have gone ahead of us and shared their wisdom with us, you often see the value of DIY projects.

Whether it's from someone living a conserver lifestyle, someone like one of my favorites, Charles Long, where he wrote the book How to Live Without a Salary. One of the modern people like Mr. Money Mustache, who's inspired many people to build their own things, do their own things. He spends half his time building stuff.

It seems that there's a very good parallel between building things yourself, doing things yourself and economic freedom. I have in my library lots of books of people who move out to the country and build a homestead from scratch, very, very inexpensively, doing the work themselves. I've read accounts of people who've built houses at astonishingly low prices because they built them using materials that they picked up for free and things that they got from the Habitat Restore, etc.

I believe that DIY and doing things yourself is a powerful tool, a powerful method that many people can use to enjoy personal freedom, to enjoy a sense of lifestyle freedom. For me personally, I find them to be more constraining than freedom-giving. If you tell me, "Joshua, listen, you don't have to have a job, but what you need to do instead is spend, say, five or six hours a day working on your own projects, building your own homestead," since it's generally such a source of frustration and annoyance for me personally, I would rather have the job.

I would – now, you'd question which job. I may not want to have a job filled with drudgery. I may not want to be the proverbial cubicle slave. I may not want to have a job that is boring for me and something to which I'm not well-suited, but I can come up with long lists of jobs that I would rather have working for other people versus having personal time freedom and sitting around and doing my own projects.

So as I see it, there are a few ways to think through this. The first thing you can do is recognize, "I'm the kind of person who enjoys doing these kinds of projects. They bring me a sense of personal satisfaction and joy. And so because of that, I'm going to do them, and I'm going to save the money.

I'm going to be the tinkerer. I'm going to get the materials on sale. I'm just the kind of person that's good at this, that enjoys that. I have people in my own family who are that way, and I respect it. I think it's a very powerful strategy." On the other hand, you can say, "I'm not that kind of person." And that's what I'm trying to make clear.

Like I have learned about myself. I'm not that kind of person." So what do you do if you're not that kind of person? Well, one, you can just simply be financially productive enough to be able to pay for the work to be done for you and recognize that that's just part of the transfer.

I feel really good about that. I'm good at making money. I'm very skilled at it. And I feel really good at being able to employ and support other people and have that money flow quickly out into the local economy. And that helps other people to do their work and helps me to do more of what I enjoy doing.

And so I've known many wealthy people over the years who simply pay other people to do things for themselves, but they're financially productive enough to where it's not a problem. The ratios are in line. You might not be super financially productive. In that scenario then, I think that you can think carefully about the kind of living setup that you engage in.

You know, right now I'm living in a rented house. I don't need to do any of that stuff. You can live in Airbnbs, traveling around the world. You can choose to do something where you don't have a house. Maybe you don't mind boat maintenance projects and so you live on a boat or an RV or in a tent or in a yurt, who knows.

And so you can always adjust things on the outside and choose an unusual lifestyle where you don't have to do a lot of those things. And so you can adjust it either way and you should judge yourself and say, "Am I the kind of person that takes satisfaction in these things or am I the kind of person who doesn't take satisfaction in them?" And I think that either one is fine.

Now one caveat I personally have. I value so much what I described in the beginning, the experience that I had as a child learning how to do some things. And I observed how my own father used chores, manual labor, as training tools for his children. Tools to teach discipline, tools to teach work ethic, and tools to teach a very diverse skill set.

And again, I value that from the sense of personal resilience. The fact that I have a diverse skill set fills me with a sense of personal confidence that I'll never be out of work long term. I'll never not be able to support myself and my family. Even if I'm making a basic living, because of the diverse skill set and the diverse jobs that I've done and the many different opportunities that even my parents exposed me to, then that's built my personal confidence.

So as a father of young children, one of the things that I am trying to observe is how can I impart similar skills to my own children? I don't believe it has to be the fact that I do it all with them, but I am willing and desirous of doing things with them simply for the acquisition of personal skills.

They may not be the kinds of things that I personally would do for fun, but I'm willing to do that because it will give me an opportunity to teach my children some skills, give them an opportunity to be exposed to certain things. That doesn't have to all be done myself in my own house.

I can keep an eye open. One thing that my father did really well was he worked hard to try to find work opportunities for his children. And so my brothers and I, we did construction work, but my dad was not a carpenter, but he arranged for us to work at a very young age with a skilled carpenter.

And we learned a lot of skills from that. And so I don't have to do all the work myself, but I'm conscious of the fact that there may be many times where there's something I want to do. I could just simply buy it done for me, but I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to go ahead and do it myself because it'll give me a chance to work with my children and to expose them to some of the skills. So I think it's a balancing act and there's not a right or wrong answer. It's important to identify the fact that doing things yourself is a powerful strategy for saving money and building wealth and living financially independent.

Just for me, what I've learned is that I wouldn't want to do it. I don't want to live that lifestyle. I'd rather have the job versus living that lifestyle, but that doesn't mean it's not appropriate for many people. So I say judge it yourself and balance among those factors.

Okay. Yeah, I appreciate that. It puts in a lot of things that also come up in my mind and that's sort of the problem. All those things are kind of halfway between point. I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing a job done, but I have no real enjoyment of the process generally.

It's usually very frustrating and takes twice as long. And then I say, okay, well at least it's an example to my kids that we do things ourselves and we have the capability to do this, but they're also a little too young to participate without getting bored after 20 minutes.

So do I take on a job that takes me two days or three days, whereas they're only going to engage with it maybe a couple of minutes here and there and is that worth it? And then the balance of the money thing, it's always been, well, when I had a job and I had an income, I could balance it real easily saying, okay, it's going to take me this long or I could make this much over here.

Now that I don't have that, I thought that calculation would be a lot easier to just do it myself, but it turns out to me at the time is worth more than the money job was, so the hourly rate I was getting. So it almost threw it in the opposite direction that I thought it was going to.

And I find myself wanting to outsource even more. But I think you touched on all the different things that I've been thinking of and I appreciate that. But I think the biggest overwhelming thing is, do I enjoy the process? And I think that's an overwhelming no, even though I enjoy the after effect, the satisfaction of having done it myself.

But yeah, I just got to keep turning through these things. There's no question that the ages of your children make a big difference and you'll do one thing now that you won't do in five years and vice versa. So at the end of the day, the only formula is to calculate the opportunity cost.

Okay, if I don't do this myself, what else will I do? And is it worth the money for me to do the other thing because I have more time and I'm doing something that I would rather do? Or is this a good opportunity cost? Sometimes maybe there's in between.

For example, one thing that you can do when you have more time freedom is you can be more involved in the details of the job without actually physically doing the work. Back to my father. When we were growing up, he needed a bigger house and so he wanted to build a bigger house.

But he didn't want to spend a lot of money, but he was also keeping, he had a job. Now his job provided him with some flexibility, but he had a job. So what he did was he kind of threaded the needle. In the beginning, he hired a contractor to build the shell of the house, but he worked with that contractor providing a lot of assistance so that the contractor's prices were lower.

But the contractor built the shell. Then once the shell of the house was completed, then my dad worked as the subcontractor. In most cases, excuse me, he worked himself as the contractor hiring the subcontractors in most cases and then doing some of the work himself from time to time.

So he saved some tens of thousands of dollars by doing that, by inserting himself into the actual time, but he didn't try to do everything. So let's go back to a house project. Maybe with your painting job, maybe you can use kind of an in-between option. You may not want to actually commit yourself to two weeks to repaint the house, but you might not also want to go and contact a painting contractor and pay a retail price.

So perhaps what you do is you understand what painting work you're going to get done. You go and you purchase all the paint and the equipment needed to prepare the house for painting. You involve your children in that, going with you, choosing the colors, choosing the paints, having everything ready.

And then you hire day laborers and you supervise their labor to make sure that the work is being done well. Maybe you help them here and there, but most of it is just supervision and you kind of split the difference. Maybe you save 30% or 40% of what the contractor would charge you by supervising, but because you're there and you're able to supervise without physically getting involved every single day, you can make sure that the job is well done.

So that might be a way to satisfice these different options that you're considering. Yeah, no, that's good. I appreciate that. I just got to kind of take a step back and think of which parts I want to do and what's worth it and which parts I can outsource. Yeah.

Exactly. I think I appreciate that. Thank you. My pleasure. Always love talking to you, John. Thank you for calling in today. We go on to, looks like Steve in Toronto. Steve, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon, sir. I have a question.

I don't know if you'll be able to provide a whole insight because I'm not sure if it's something that you've done, but I'm hoping your familiarity will be, you'll at least have some thoughts. Recently traveled to Mexico and just had a really fantastic time and kind of have some life changes going on and was thinking about maybe potentially kind of moving down there and starting a business.

So I was curious both on the kind of legal side, like in terms of like immigrating or becoming a permanent resident, kind of what needs to be done there in terms of owning and operating a business. And then also like if you had any thoughts about kind of the potential barriers like you saw someone who's not from Mexico might encounter when trying to like own and operate a consumer facing business in Mexico.

Tell me more about the kind of business that you're imagining. I don't have, I have a couple of different ideas. So one of them would be like a bar and restaurant type business. Another one would be something like an Airbnb or some kind of a bed and breakfast maybe with some kind of incorporated tours or something like that.

That would mostly be targeting Christian and expats. So I can't give you specific ideas on the details of starting the business in terms of the necessary licenses. That would be an appropriate conversation to pick up the phone and talk specifically with a lawyer. Mexico is extremely open and so in general I think that you'll be able to do it.

Virtually any country in the world loves to see businessmen come with money to invest, start a business and build economic activity. And so the basic answer is going to be I'm quite confident that you'll be able to do it. It may be a combination of approaches. You might go ahead and get a residency visa that doesn't allow for employment.

Then you'll change that to some kind of business visa. That short answer is I don't know the specific visas that you will need but I'm confident that you will be able to do it if you simply talk with an attorney and tell them what you're thinking about and bring that to them.

That's your magic key. A businessman can go to virtually any country in the world and if you say I'm here to open a business, especially something like a physical business where they can count the number of employees, you can show them your roster of employees and all of the money that you're investing into the business, they will open their arms and welcome you in.

Okay, that kind of jives with what I was initially thinking. How about in terms of tangling through local regulations and doing all that in something that's not your first language, do you have any thoughts or tips or tricks or anything you would like in terms of how you would approach that problem?

Yeah, so the first thing is call a lawyer. Email the guy that I interviewed recently on the show at sanmigael-legal.com. His website is sanmigael-legal.com. That's a lawyer that I recommend you start with. He can help with the immigration stuff if you need that and then you'll probably work with somebody locally.

If you don't speak any Spanish, you will definitely need to find somebody who can interpret for you, maybe hiring a professional interpreter, might be hiring, working with a local business partner, somebody who can interpret for you. There's no question that will make your life difficult not being able to speak at least basic Spanish.

But there are lots of people who go to Mexico or wherever and open a business and do well. I think the most important thing is just studying the market and making sure that there's actually a demand for what you want to do. And then as with any business, going in with as much investment as you need in order to get the doors open and see what the demand is but without getting in over your head.

That's just generalized business advice. But you're going to be dealing with the local markets, the local rental markets, etc. Now can there be surprises along the way? Absolutely. Every country has its own challenges, its own things that are just different about that country. And that will be the various forms needed when hiring somebody, subscribing them to the local health insurance laws, the local social employment insurance systems, etc.

But most of that stuff is fairly standardized. And I think in general, as long as you're a bit wary, I think that it's just going to be the nature of what happens locally. So you'll figure out the local customs. Just like if I came to Canada and I came to you and said I want to open a business, you would say, "Well, here's the guy that talked to this accountant and that accountant will say here's what you need to do." So I would go to Mexico and I would start looking for a good local accountant and a good local lawyer, somebody who speaks English.

Usually that'll be your best place to start is if you can find a local lawyer who can speak English, who can advise you on the local customs, etc. Pay them some fees just to work for you and then start the process and see what they tell you. Your local lawyer and your local accountant are usually, in my experience, probably the best place to start because they'll have the networks, they'll know the people in the local administration, they'll know the people in the local county government, they'll know the relevant inspectors, they'll be able to refer you a lot of times to the vendors.

And so they're usually the local pillar of the community and that's the support that you'll need when you start. Mad Fientist Awesome, awesome, fantastic. I'm excited to kind of see where this takes me. Dave Great. What area of Mexico are you targeting? Mad Fientist So far I've been to Puerto Vallarta which we liked a lot but going to be going to other places.

Guadalajara and Mexico City are kind of next in line. Dave Okay, awesome. Yeah, I think all of those you can find something that's going to work for you and when you find it, give it a shot. My only kind of closing comment, how much money would you anticipate investing into your business there?

Mad Fientist Obviously that kind of depends on what we decide to go into but we're probably prepared to fund at a six-figure level if needed. Dave Okay, so just remember that all of the power is on your side. All of the demand is on your side. You don't go in thinking that you are a little fish, thinking that you're just the kind of guy that, "Ah, well who wants to hear from me?" You're not.

You are exactly what every politician on a local level wants. They want you to come and invest in their community. Now you shouldn't be arrogant of course. You're Canadian, you're not going to be arrogant. You're going to be very kind but the point is that you should recognize the value that you bring.

I'm not sure if it works this way in Canada but in the United States, let's say that a sports team is looking for a place to go or a business is looking for a place to go. That business will have all of the local politicians coming in and vying for that business to relocate to their specific area and it really is powerful.

So you have the same power. You can do exactly the same thing in the same way that if I'm running, what was it, Amazon a couple of years ago put out bids and they had hundreds of cities saying, "Come here, we'll give you all kinds of tax breaks, we'll give you all kinds of assurances, etc." If you're going to go and open a business and potentially invest six figures into that business, the exact same benefits are going to be yours.

So the first thing I would do is talk to a lawyer in a local area, find a lawyer in Puerto Vallarta, ask him your immigration questions, ask him about the business licenses and then have that lawyer arrange a meeting with you with the mayor of Puerto Vallarta or the relevant other politicians and start to build a relationship there with them and see what they might be willing to offer you because they will offer you things, you just have to make it known.

Don't try to do it all in secret, see what they can offer you. They can help you to arrange a prime location, there might be tax breaks that they'll offer you and a lawyer can help you navigate that. So think of yourself not as, "Well, I'm going to go and ask for permission." Recognize that what you're bringing is exactly what every single politician and every local government wants.

Somebody to come in, build a business, employ local people, build something that's going to attract tourists, that's going to attract other businesses to the area and generally build their town for the well-being of the local people. All right, and with that we move on to the state of Tennessee.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today? Hello Joshua, can you hear me? I can hear you well, go ahead sir. Awesome. You have helped me on a couple of your consultation calls and I want to highly recommend that to some of your listeners. But I have a question or kind of a statement and then a question.

My brother-in-law and I have bought rental properties, apartments, houses, etc. for years and we grinded out on some of these apartments, lower income and it's a lot of work and not a lot of appreciation. Well, we sold them off and we're rolling it. We had to do a 1031 because we've had them for close to 20 years.

So there's really nothing to buy out there. So what we kind of figured out is we did probably eight or nine owner finance situations with Mexicans. They put down a pretty nice down payment and we basically put it 10%. They don't seem to mind paying 10% and they always pay, they're never late.

Awesome. We got a pretty good reputation with them and looking back over the last 20 years, we figured out, man, we're making more money doing that than anything else. So we're rolling all this money from apartments into about 20 to 25, 120, 180 thousand dollar houses and we're just going to owner finance them to Mexicans.

You see anything wrong with that? No. I think that, I mean, probably the only risk would be, so first of all, to clarify, you're doing this in the United States and you're renting primarily to Mexican immigrants. Do you know if those Mexican immigrants are in the United States with the appropriate documents or without the appropriate documents?

No idea. No idea. I have no idea and really don't care. So I think the only risk would be if one of your tenants gets deported. But I think that's, first of all, if you have some collateral, I think that's probably a relatively minor risk. So in my experience with Mexican immigrants to the United States, you're dealing with a really wonderful culture.

In my experience, most Mexican immigrants to the United States will tend to be fairly conservative in terms of their approach. They're very family oriented. They're accustomed to working for opportunity. They're accustomed to kind of the Mexican values of community. Mexico is a very community oriented society. And so I would be thrilled with that business model myself.

I just think your only risk is if one of them gets deported. Now probably somebody else would step in and probably work to kind of keep the deal going. If you've got enough earnest money where it would be pretty expensive for them to be deported, then my guess would be that they would want to keep the contract alive even if one of their friends or relations or coworkers or someone else in that community came in and was willing to take over the contract or willing just to...

Their name is on it, but the money keeps coming in. So no, I think that you can do really well serving a community like that. And it's one of those win-win scenarios where it can be very difficult for an immigrant to get a fair deal in the large commercial space.

It's very difficult for an immigrant with a limited credit history to go and work with a bank. And especially depending on whether you're dealing with what's usually in the sociological analysis called an acculturated immigrant or an unacculturated immigrant. Oftentimes unacculturated immigrants to the United States are taken advantage of very heavily by the overall system.

And so when they find that, "Hey, here's a guy who is fair to us, gives us a fair deal, doesn't take advantage of us. We pay him certainly higher rates than we would pay if we had an 800 credit score and a W-2 job and an H1N1 visa or a green card." Certainly they're paying you for the privilege, but as long as you're treating them fairly, that's wonderful.

And they will help, as you've experienced, to refer you as a good service provider within the local community. So I don't see any risk in it other than the risk of deportation. And I think you've got enough earnest money and enough, as you said, you've got a good reputation.

I think you would fill the house again and be able to sell it again if the worst came. Right. In fact, we actually had a guy probably 12, well, seven or eight years ago that had a house that got deported. And the way the contracts are written up is they're pretty one-sided towards us, that it's more like a rent-to-own situation, even though it's a contract for deed.

So this guy had paid us something like 12 years and he got deported. And we legally, of course, we didn't even consider it. We could have said, "Well, we're just out." But we handed it off to his daughter and she actually got the house paid off last year. So that kind of got us some pretty good will, I think, in that community.

Like you said, we didn't get enough down that if they walked away, we'd be fine. The thing we've noticed is they go in there and they take a $100,000 house and a year or two later, it's a $160,000 house with all the improvements. My experience, I've worked with a lot of immigrants just because I speak Spanish in the United States.

I've worked with day laborers. I've worked – I spent several years working on a farm. And so all of my – I was the only white guy on the farm. And every single one of my coworkers was Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, etc. I worked for several years in lawn maintenance, same exact thing.

I was the only white guy on the lawn maintenance crews. And so I just got a good sense, probably more than most people of the community. And I'm telling you, one of the things that bugs me so much – I'm trying to avoid the politics of this, but in my experience, the kind of people that I want for neighbors are usually the kind of guys and gals that immigrate from Mexico to the United States or from Guatemala to the United States.

They are hardworking guys and that the amount that most guys have overcome – I mean, you got to speak Spanish in order to get them to trust you enough to tell you the story. But the amount that those guys pay to get brought in across the border and the pressure that puts on them, I mean, they are the hardest working guys.

And they understand why they're doing it. They're the classic immigrant mentality. I'm going to go to the United States where I can make more money. I'm going to bring my family as soon as I can. And by the time a guy is ready to buy a house, he's going to have paid off the fees that he paid to get across the border.

I mean, it's thousands of dollars. Even coming across illegally, it's virtually impossible for most of those guys to get into the United States legally. It's just – it's impossible. But even if they're coming across illegally, it's still thousands of dollars that they will pay to the people who facilitate that process.

And so by the time they're coming to you and buying a house, they have paid off that debt. That's the first thing that they do. They will often have paid – done it again to try to get their family back together. And so they're going to be at a point where they're fairly stable and able to do it.

And they're going to be – I mean, they understand the value of what they have. And immigrants, illegal immigrants are abused day in and day out. And so when a guy comes along, treats them fairly, gives them the opportunity to own a house, rent to own is perfect, 10% down, higher rates, you're perfectly legally and morally justified in my view to charge them higher rates for owner financing because of the additional risk.

But when it's a lot – it's cheaper than often what they can get for financing on real estate in other places. So it's a really good deal. And I'm glad that it's working out well for you. And I love to see just people treating those guys fairly. They need the help.

Well, good deal. I appreciate it. All right. My pleasure. We go on to the state of Iowa. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today, please? Hey, Joshua. This is Tanner here. Tanner, go ahead, sir. I guess just a little bit of background on me. I am 25.

I just got married last year. And I'm a CPA. Great. So yeah, I guess I'm just calling just a little bit more for general life advice here because I'm so young. I guess I think I'm struggling just a little bit with direction as far as career-wise. What would you tell your 25-year-old self?

Do you like the work of a CPA? Do you like the business model of a CPA? I like the people. Okay. So as I see it, having a CPA license is an ideal foundation on which to build a career. But the normal career track of an everyday accountant is usually not particularly exciting, and it usually doesn't result in you making all that much money.

But there are ways that you can build on that normal career track to really build some excitement. And so I think it's an ideal kind of foundation to have for a young guy, 25 years old, newly married. I've got a CPA license. Do you have your own practice or do you have a job?

A job. But there's some opportunities to buy in within the next year. So let's talk about a couple of different career tracks that you can consider. Career track number one is what I'll just simply call kind of the ordinary common everyday career track of a CPA of self-employment. There is nothing wrong with this career track and it can have certain benefits.

You can start a tax preparation business. You can start a bookkeeping business. And you can start to attract your own clients to that business. It's a business that takes some hustle at the beginning to get going. But once you've got a stable body of clients, you can build something really phenomenal.

It's a good business. One benefit of the business is that it can be seasonal. Many CPAs obviously work all year long and they don't take much time off. But you can integrate the seasonality into a more interesting lifestyle. If you build your work time primarily around the seasons, if you have more tax preparation clients rather than bookkeeping clients, then you can work heavily during those seasons and have a lot of time freedom during other seasons.

It's a really rewarding job because you have a good demand, but you also have a high degree of flexibility. You can digitize the business. You can do most of your work virtually. You can build a referral network in many different industries. You can choose to target one specific geographic area.

You can target an industry. You can target a certain type of client. There are a lot of areas that you can specialize in and you can build a nice business. Let's say that that and you can do it in a couple different ways, right? You can build it in a solopreneur approach.

Maybe you and one part-time bookkeeper, you and one assistant type of thing, very small, flexible business provides a great living, right? You can have a six-figure living, maybe $100,000 to $200,000 a year would be normal in terms of earnings, somewhere in that range, which is a healthy living and with the other benefits you can do that.

Now you can take the CPA and you can use that as a foundation for other kinds of business approaches. When you are an accountant and you have passed your CPA exam, you can use that as a foundation to say, "I have a high degree of financial intelligence," and you can start to apply that to business investments.

I have known a number of extraordinarily successful businessmen who started as accountants and CPAs, but you need to usually decide that you're going to do that and that you're not going to stay in the comfortable space of working as a CPA. In my experience, personality-wise, most accountants would tend to be more risk-averse.

They would tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less people-oriented people, right? More of people who like the numbers, like the spreadsheets, etc. And so if you're not that, like if you really like the people, you can turn that into entrepreneurship and say, "Okay, I've got a foundation.

Now how can I build a local business that is going to really open up and pave the way forward for me to really invest into bigger deals?" And so having a CPA license that hangs on the wall of your business, whether it's a local franchise, a local business, a factory, a school, who knows, I think it's really, really valuable.

And it gives you one of the powers of a CPA is that accountants and CPAs don't have any of the baggage that other, they have almost none of the baggage that other financial professionals have, right? I have a certified financial planner plaque that I could put on my wall.

And that gives pretty good professional recognition. But there's so many difficult relationships that people have with financial advisors that they're still like, "Well, I'm not so sure. What's Joshua going to sell me here?" If I just have certified public accountant on my wall, people immediately assume this guy is a total expert and he's not a sales guy.

And so you can build that really powerfully and you can apply that into any other business. I skipped over the job, right? You can work and get a great job in the corporate world if you like that. You can get a corporate, a great job just simply working in a CPA business, becoming partner.

Those paths are all sketched out for you. And then finally, I would just point out that as a CPA, you can also take that and leverage that into many different areas of other businesses, right? When I, a good guy here would be, look at Mark Kohler, right? Mark Kohler is an attorney CPA, but he's built a good business practice with people doing legal work, people doing legal work and doing accounting work.

But then he's got this huge information business, selling books, selling courses, etc. And so if you like the business, I would recommend you do that and incorporate an information and consulting practice into your CPA work as well. So as I see it, having knowledge in accounting and having a CPA license is a phenomenal foundation upon which to build your career.

And it's just up to you as far as which of those kind of paths appeals to you more. You don't have to stick with any one of them. You could stick with what you're doing now for a couple of years. You can go to law school, get yourself a law license, do something like Kohler has done, go and start buying a local franchise or buy out a local business and start using your business skill and building your skills as an entrepreneur.

Any of these options are open to you. - Okay, wow. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm gonna have to listen to that back. There's a lot in there. - Good, good. - Yeah, just recognize that your investment and the time and the knowledge is good and you have a good stable job.

Perfect. Now, where do you wanna go from here? I will encourage my children to learn the skills of accounting, to consider getting a, this is one of the ones on my list, learn the skills of accounting and possibly get a CPA license. It's easy enough to do and it's one of those good professional licenses that really serves as a foundation.

So use that foundation and then go on and see what it opens up for you. There are lots and lots of options available to you. All right, we go on to Toledo, Ohio. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hi, Joshua, can you hear me?

- Sounds good, go ahead, please. - Hi, this is Alex. My wife and I, Danielle, have consulted with you before and we've done just exactly as you said we would. We've just continued to grow wealth and with COVID and everything last year, I basically busted my keister and now I'm basically, my role has become remote and I'm absolutely loving having the littles in my life with obviously the struggles of working from home, learning to adapt.

But it's been quite an experience and I just can't thank you enough for your advice in the past and listening to your podcast, it's been very, very, very beneficial to myself and my family and just wanted to, first off, thank you for that. My question today is rooted around basically us trying to get to that next stage of life and purchasing a home.

We've been saving very diligently over the past few years now. We're living in a condo that we rent from a family friend at a very generous rate given our area. So we've accumulated quite a large sum of money. But it's just been difficult for us to pull the trigger in the market that we're in today with just how inflated everything is.

We've been considered looking at land and trying to purchase land and then possibly build maybe live around because things just, again, seem so grossly inflated right now. Do you have any advice on, is it worth it for us to dump today's money at today's rates now or is it worth it to try to wait and see where the next couple of years may go?

Brett, just so you have an understanding of our living arrangement, the condo we're in right now is technically a two bedroom, but I converted an office that was upstairs into a nursery. So we've kind of made it like a three and we have two littles, one that's just over one and the other that's approaching three.

So children of that age do not require a lot of space. So we've been able to condense and over the past five years or so make it work. But we're definitely starting to get a little cramped in our shell and I'd like to move on to the next stage and purchase a house and take those next steps.

Do you have money saved? And if so, how much? Probably a little over $150,000. And how much do you earn per year? Do you want myself or? Total family income? I would say probably around $180,000. And do you have any outstanding debts? No debt at all. So first of all, financially, it's obvious that financially, yes, you can purchase a house.

So this is more not a question of whether you can afford it. This is more of a question, is this the best thing to do at this stage in your life? So tell me, how would owning a house improve your life and lifestyle? So I believe the first issue that we've come across is just space in general, space for the kids to play because basically the one main room we have on the main floor is a hybrid between living room, dining room, kitchen, it's kind of all in one.

And granted, we've made it very friendly for them with all the kids stuff that comes along with children of this age, but it's always a constant battle between trying to keep the place somewhat clean and have space versus allowing them to do what children should do is just play and use their imagination.

So space has been the primary issue for us. We've considered, okay, we could leave our current condo and maybe rent a house or something versus having to buy. But I'm just, the cost benefit analysis of going to a larger place at probably much higher rate than what we pay.

I mean, we pay out the door $10,200 a year for living costs for just rent alone, rent and I guess basic utilities, water's included. So it's relatively cheap where we live and the association is fine, the little condo is fine, but aspiring to have something larger, a larger place for the kids to play.

I mean, we adventure around to the local parks or whatever, but it would be nice to have a large fenced in backyard to allow them to play, et cetera. So you are now working completely remote. Is your wife still working in the local area? She is, yeah. She's in the local area.

She's within healthcare. So she's actually dropped down after we had our second child, she was able to drop down to 20 hours a week. So I'm basically fully remote. Essentially, I have to go to the office maybe once or twice a month for larger meetings or conferences or if they need me for an engineering endeavor, I show up to the office for those.

But otherwise, I'm basically remote. In your area, if you bought the kind of house that you felt would be suitable for your family, about how much money do you think that would cost you? Probably in the ballpark of 400 to 500,000. And what city is this? Roughly the city in which we're looking to build or buy.

Yes. Northville, Plymouth, or Canton, primarily are the three towns or townships we've been looking in. So this is the state of Ohio. And in your area in Ohio, you can't find... Not Ohio. Not Ohio, it's Michigan. Michigan, okay. I actually live in Michigan. I just have a legacy number.

That's fine. All good. So that's what I was trying to figure out. So in your area of Michigan, you couldn't find a suitable house that would be a substantial upgrade on your condo and provide you with more room that would be a comfortable lifestyle for $250,000 right now in the market?

For 250? We've looked, but relative to our market, it's just... At that sort of price point, it's a house that's so outdated, I know how much work that I would have to probably put into it to get it to an optimal living standard, I guess I would say. It's just surprising to me because in Miami, Florida, I can buy a very nice house for $500,000.

So it's surprising to me that the difference between Michigan and Florida in your area. Now you know the local market, I don't. So that's a little surprising to me. So let's talk through your options. Number one, can you buy a house? Obviously you can. You have lots of money saved, you make a high household income, you can easily and comfortably afford to purchase a home that is more comfortable for your family.

Is that a good idea? Almost certainly yes. Almost certainly yes. Why? Number one, at this stage of life, you will be able to appreciate the space much more than previously. You'll be able to appreciate what you're doing, the time, the family time. It'll provide a good grounding for your family to say like, "This is our family home." You'll be able to enjoy some of the many benefits of home ownership.

You can make the home how you like it. You can have the joy of building equity, of having kind of all the benefits of home ownership. And almost certainly 10 years from now, if you buy a good house, a wise house that really fits you, almost certainly this is going to be a great financial move.

Almost certainly. Purchasing your own home and owning your own home is a good thing. And you guys are in the place where you can easily and comfortably afford it. So is there any hesitation whatsoever? I think the hesitation is just whether you are content with that normal traditional path of good traditional money management, or whether you want something a little bit more aggressive.

And if that more aggressive path fits into what you're doing. I would guess that almost any house that you purchase, especially if you need to buy something in the $400,000 to $500,000 range, you're going to be paying more than $10,200 per year of pure expenses. I mean insurance, interest, tax, I would guess.

Now I don't know that for certain. You should test that and find out. If I go and buy a $400,000 house, let's say you do an FHA loan, you put down a modest down payment, how much would you actually be paying in pure expenses? I would guess it would be much more than $10,200, something more than $10,000 a year.

But perhaps your insurance rates are extremely low in that area. The interest rates would be modest and your taxes are low. That's possible in the Michigan area. I don't know your market. But if you had an aggressive path towards financial independence, then buying a house may not be the best plan.

Maybe you said, "We're making $180,000 a year. We're spending $40,000 a year saving every single dime we can. And our dream is to move to Portugal in four years and set up kind of a remote lifestyle living in Portugal as semi-retired people." Well, in that situation, I would say, "No, don't buy a house.

Stay with a rented apartment. It's inexpensive. You can deal with the frustration of the small space for a few years and you've got an aggressive financial independence goal." I haven't heard you say that, but if that is your goal, you should consider it. Now what else could you do?

Well, you could say, "I have an aggressive career plan, a career goal. We're earning $180,000 between us now, but I'd like to make more money." In this situation, I think that often owning a house is one of your bigger impediments towards career flexibility. Many people earn far less than they're capable of because they own a house.

And thus, they don't look for opportunities to move for a better job. They don't aggressively and actively grow their careers because they're tied to one place. Now, if you want to be aggressive in your career, I don't know what your share of the income is, but let's say you're making a hundred and – if your wife's at 20 hours a week, maybe you're making 120 and she's making 60 or 50 or whatever.

Right? Well, if you want to go – That's about right. Good. So 120. If you want to say, "You know what? I've been doing well at this and I like my career. I'm well suited for it. My goal is four years from now, I want to be making 320, not 120." Well, in that situation, you're probably not going to do it in your local area.

You're probably going to need to be more aggressive in your career search. And so in my experience, this is the most disregarded area of financial planning. People don't actively build their careers, but when they do start doing it, there's usually going to be a geographic move involved. So are you the kind of guy who if you could facilitate a job offer over the next three to five years for $320,000 a year, are you the kind of guy who would move to take that job offer?

If so, you might be better off just simply renting, but renting a bigger house than buying something, perhaps. Now, what's the other side? You say, "No, Joshua. Listen, we like it here in Michigan. Where our family is here, our friends are here. I'm content with my career. I might take some promotions, but I'm not going to do this aggressive thing.

I'm not going to move from here to Dallas or from here to New York City just to make more money. We like this. We like the Michigander lifestyle and we want to stay here." Totally fine. In that case, the weight is on your buying a house. The third thing that you should consider is, am I buying a house for now or am I trying to buy a house forever?

Now, obviously forever is a very long time, but let me explain. The biggest regret that I have from my younger years is that I did not intentionally buy a portfolio of houses for me to live in using the Nomad real estate strategy. Now, there are a couple of real estate strategies that have acquired some names.

The one here, the Nomad strategy basically goes like this. You buy a house and you move into it. You finance the house with a residential mortgage, just a standard everyday house purchase. You live in it for the amount of time necessary to fulfill the terms of your mortgage, usually about a year.

And then after a year, you get some renters for that house and you go and buy another one and purchase another one. Your renters move into the house. They pay off your mortgage for you over time. You repeat this process the number of times that you want to until you own the number of houses that you want or need to to fulfill your long-term investment goals.

And I love this strategy. And for a guy like you with a high six-figure, almost multi-six-figure household income, with stable W-2 employment, and with lots of cash and no debt, this is a perfect wealth building strategy for you. And it's a very low-risk wealth building strategy that you can implement.

The biggest cost to you is the frustration and the hassle of moving regularly. Now, if you're coming from a small apartment, I would say you can certainly do this. If you're thoughtful, you don't acquire too many things, and you just go into it knowing this is the plan. So if you really care about big long-term wealth building, what I would encourage you to do is not try to say, "I'm going to buy the forever house.

I'm going to buy the half a million dollar house with a water view and a nice little lake and a community with a good school system where we're going to be for the next 20 years." If that's what you want, you can do it. You can afford it. But what I would love to see you guys do is say, "Our goal is to accumulate five houses.

We've got very young children, and so we're going to buy traditional three-bedroom, two-bath houses with a two-car garage and a backyard in a safe, traditional suburban neighborhood." And you go in, and you just start doing that. And your goal is buy the house, first house, with the minimum money down that you can get good terms on for your mortgage payments.

Put down the minimum amount of money, move into it, live in it for a year, and then buy another one. Move into it, live in it for a year, buy another one. Rent these out. It's 12 o'clock. And then after about four years, maybe five years, you now own five houses.

Then go ahead and move into the bigger house. And then over the coming 20 years, let your tenants pay off the mortgages for you. If you have excess cash flow, then you might pay off the mortgages one by one. 20 years from now, you'll be in a situation where you have, say, five rental houses all paid off, providing you with a good rental income, and you'll be in a really good situation.

So I think that any of those options are available to you, and you and your wife will just want to think about, "Well, what fits our goals and dreams? Are we ready to have the nice house?" If so, you could probably afford it. Do we want to be flexible to move for a better job?

If you're going to do that, don't buy a bunch of houses in Michigan if you think you might wind up in Florida. On the other hand, if you're willing to do that, and she'd be willing to say, "Let's move for a few years," then set yourself a target and say, "Let's not buy one house.

Let's buy three houses. Let's buy five houses, and then go ahead and buy that nice house on the lake." So just consider some of these alternative views and see if any of them appeal to you and your wife. >>Joshua Foer: I greatly appreciate it, Joshua. That's one thing that we've been mulling over is the option of doing that.

Last time we consulted with you, we had discussed that, and we looked into a few of the different areas, because as with most major cities, there's areas that are worth trying to purchase a house of that scale and invest in and leapfrog, and there's other areas that aren't as advantageous.

So we've been trying to figure out which are the best areas for us to actually cherry pick from. And just with COVID and this housing explosion and just the cost of even those houses have risen so dramatically that it's kind of pushed us away from it a little bit.

But we'll definitely revisit it and see if we can find something that works for the plan. >>Steve: My summary statement, to make it very clear, would be from my perspective, without question, you can afford a house, and you probably should buy a house. You will appreciate the space, you'll appreciate those things, and it'll make a substantial improvement in your lifestyle, and you can leverage it in many ways.

So hopefully that's a clear enough place to leave it. Let's stay in the state of Ohio. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? 513 area code. Yep, that's you. Go ahead. >>Joshua: Thank you, Joshua. You recently mentioned you had a conversation with President Veep Jadlata of Leverland.

I might have mispronounced the last name there. >>Steve: When I asked him, hold on, hold on. It was funny, right when we were sitting down to do the interview that you heard, I was sitting there, I was like, "Okay, now precisely please tell me how to say your last name." And he was like, "Josh, don't even just try.

Just don't even try. Just call me Veep." That was why I had that awkward introduction. I'm like, "I'm here with Veep, President of Leverland, instead of a properly pronounced last name," because he wouldn't tell me. He's like, "Don't even bother." My check was not up to snuff. >>Joshua: You said that you actually had an interview.

Did you record that and publish it? >>Steve: I did. >>Joshua: Am I missing some... >>Steve: That was immediately prior. I published it on June 3 into the podcast feed. So since we're recording this on June 4, you may not have seen it yet. But yes, it's there for you now.

>>Joshua: Okay. Well, we might be recapping some stuff. But as far as what you understand, can you rate the project of Leverland on a scale from novel proof of concept to is it just actually got some potential if they get some sort of agency as far as being recognized by other countries?

And where do you see that agency coming from as far as... I'm assuming a very small GDP, not a lot of trade, not a lot of constituents. Do you see this as a promising project that can be built upon and is just waiting on people that just take the risk, I guess, waiting for Mayflower?

>>Steve So let's talk... yeah, I love the question. I'm so grateful that you called in to talk about it because it's something that is really fascinating to consider. And we simply don't know. When you think about what is a country, what is a nation state, which are not synonymous terms, these can be very interesting concepts.

And there are a lot of so-called micro nations that have tried different things over the years. There are today micro nations. And so let's talk about land, right? Leverland, the current land is very small, the amount of land that they have. But that's not necessarily a problem, right? That's not necessarily something that makes a nation.

There is a nation that does not have any land. It's called the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta, something like that. The Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta. And so this nation is an official nation, it's an official country. It has observer status at the United Nations.

It's recognized by over a hundred countries all around the world. But this country has no land. It has a legacy. It's 800 years old, something like that. But it currently has no land. It has a leased property on the island of Malta. It has an office, I believe, in Rome and a building somewhere else, like a third building.

Now, is this a real nation? Well, yes, by many, many cases, it is a real nation. But is it a real nation that provides all of the services that you might have as, say, a US American citizen? Answer is no, it's certainly not. But there are lots of other nations that are small but do provide more of those services.

For example, the most common one to look to is Monaco. Monaco is a real country. Monaco has thousands of inhabitants. Monaco has citizens that live there, that work there. They have a bustling economy. They have a prince. They have a government. They have passports. They have international recognition. But they're extraordinarily, it's a small nation.

They have no military. They have, the borders are totally open, even though they technically have them. And so is it a nation? Well, yes, certainly. What about other small countries? Singapore, right? Very small when you compare the land mass of Russia to Singapore. Obviously it's night and day, but Singapore is a very real country.

So could this little island and a little bit of land out in the middle of, on the border between Serbia and Croatia, could this become a nation? Certainly. Now, what I thought was interesting, I've previously laughed off the project. And by the way, you need to be, you should be skeptical of these projects because there is a long history of, what's the right word?

There's an adjective that I'm wrestling for. There's a long history of unique people. I hate it when my language abilities fail me. Of just unique people that are, iconoclasts would be one word we could use. There's a history of iconoclasts saying, "I'm going to do this certain thing." Right?

You think of the history of sea land, for example. The nation, the principality of sea land, where a guy goes out and he colonizes this offshore oil rig in the seas by, was it by England or Ireland, the Netherlands, somewhere in that area of the world, and creates the principality of sea land.

Well, okay. He did his thing for years, sold passports for sea land, et cetera, but never went anywhere. So certainly there's a long history. And all throughout the world, there are hundreds and hundreds of small little, you know, Pogestan and Abkhazia and all these different little enclaves of people that started.

But then there's even places like Taiwan, right? So Taiwan, is Taiwan a country? Well, it's a matter of tremendous international debate. And so people don't even believe that, many people in the world don't even believe that Taiwan is a country. Is Palestine a nation, right? So what is a nation is actually a very difficult question to answer.

So could this little island and other strip of land between Serbia and Croatia, could it actually, you know, be a country? Well, Vite would say it is a country. He has diplomatic relations with Somaliland. And as we said in the interview that you haven't listened to yet, here's Somaliland, here's a nation of 5 million people with borders, with government, with an economy, but still most of the world does not recognize Somaliland as a nation.

So is it or not? What I think, and then I'll go on for just a moment more, right? We're so tied to the land, to the concept of land. Well here's the reality though. A country like Liberland might get its start with a small island, but in reality, that particular country doesn't have to stay with a small island, right?

He, Vite has organized and they have arranged the purchase or the lease, I'm not sure which, of a parcel of land from the nation of Serbia where they are establishing a free trade zone. And so in that free trade zone, they have the ability now to expand the territory and they can build more parts of their nation.

And so even in terms of foreign missions, right? Vite has succeeded in attracting a team of diplomats for the nation of Liberland all around the world and they're establishing foreign missions in other countries. There are communities around the world of Liberland people living together and building communities in local areas.

And so just because a nation starts very small doesn't mean that the nation can't grow. And it doesn't mean that if the nation is going to grow that all of a sudden they have to start fighting a bunch of wars, which of course would be completely antithetical to the principles and philosophy of a nation like Liberland.

What's interesting, you start thinking about these topics all around the world, there are countries that are spread across the globe. The United States, right? What does the United States have? The United States has the continental US, but then there is an exclave of Alaska that's completely separate from the United States, but is considered by everyone to be part of the nation of the United States.

And Alaska came via land purchase from Russia. You have islands like Hawaii, but then you have other parcels of the United States. You have the Marianas Islands or American Samoa, Puerto Rico, these different parts of the United States that are spread all around the world. And it's the same with almost any nations, right?

You got Russia, but then Russia owns Kaliningrad in Europe, which is part of continental Europe, completely separated from Russia, but it is Russia. So a nation like Liberland, if they have people, they could buy land, they could expand. The nation of Liberland today might be a few square miles starting from this island, but then the nation of Liberland for 20 years from now could be very different.

So the answer is it depends. And it depends upon what the found, as I see it, it depends upon what the founders of that nation are able to do. So what Vite needs right now is he needs people to be more involved in building the economy of Liberland. He needs people to physically locate their businesses in the free trade zone that Liberland has established in Serbia.

He needs people, they've negotiated a community that they're building, and they've had an architect draw up plans for property. And so he needs people to actually commit to building houses there and living there, etc., to establish the nation of Liberland. It's great that they can have the houseboats right now and they're having parties and events, etc.

And I think obviously what else could you expect at this stage, but it has to continue on and grow. And so I've thought a lot. Do I believe that this kind of thing could have a future? My answer is yeah, I do believe it. I'm not going to stake 100% of my future on this particular project.

Vite, as he's traveling around the world, he's not, even though he holds a Liberland passport, he's not traveling around the world exclusively on his Liberland passport. He has his Czech passport, right? But he's still active and he's still building it. And so the answer as to whether or not it could succeed will depend, in my estimation, on his and other Liberlanders' ability to attract people to their personal project and people's willingness to commit.

I told Vite about, I don't think he'd read it, but I shared with him a number of years ago I read James Wesley Rawls' novel called Land of Promise. And I think it was his most poorly written novel compared to his Patriot series that was, even with all of its idiosyncrasies, was a much more well-written series.

But the concept of it was basically this concept. The concept of that novel, Land of Promise, was that people would go take a very undesirable piece of land – in this case it was an undesirable desert in Africa – and committed people, people that were committed to the cause, would establish a new nation.

In Rawls' book Land of Promise, it was committed evangelical Christians and Jews that wanted to build a free state with a strong influence of Christian principles. And so they go to this nation in the middle of nowhere and they start building the country. And they have to come up with new technologies to actually physically settle people there.

They came up with an unwanted piece of land between borders. That was how the novel developed. They sold citizenships in that passport and they came up with services that the country could offer. And of course it was a novel, but that was where I first started thinking about it a number of years ago.

So I think it could work. Is it going to work? Time will tell. If you think about the US-American experiment, there was a time at which you would have been laughed at if you thought that the United States of America could succeed and flourish. You know, what, 50 or 100 guys are going to come together.

They're going to agree on these principles. They're going to unite some delegates from all these different colonies and they're going to come together and they're going to face off militarily and fight off the largest army in the world. Like, that's insane. It's ridiculous. And yet that's history. And so I want to support it.

You know, I'm now, I've made my application for Liberland residency, waiting to see on the approval and everything like that. I paid for it with Bitcoin, which is exciting to me. And if I wind up sending them a few thousand dollars and nothing comes of it 10 years from now, I won't regret it a bit because I want to see people experiment with these things.

I want to see these concepts and these ideas grow because if you believe in the concept of freedom and right to self-governance, et cetera, then there should be an ability to do that. And in the modern world, I think that we're going to see more and more nations start to compete with one another and there's no fundamental reason why 50 years from now, Liberland could not be a well-recognized country.

I mean, put it in conclusion, right? If Taiwan still fights for recognition, if you have, who was the actor that came out and apologized for saying that Taiwan is a country, like the ridiculous stuff this last year, if Taiwan, this independent powerhouse of a country, is still fighting the world for recognition of its status from China and every day is wondering whether China is going to come and occupy them again militarily, then a lot of these concepts are not as set in stone as you might think.

And largely it's a matter of what will people accept. If somebody's going to accept that, you know, Nauru or Palau are independent nations, then why can't Liberland be an independent nation? But there's a whole lot of diplomatic work that's got to happen for that to happen and it'll depend on the community that's attracted to Veet's project.

What do you think? >>Jay: Right on. I just recently been opened up to the possibility of checking it out, so I don't have a fully formed opinion. I think I'm very interested in it and I see it almost as, this is probably the wrong way to say it, but a charitable move as far as it just sort of gives me hope that something like that is out there and the only way it's going to work is if people make it happen.

So being one of the first to make it happen in no way is a, you know, something you would recommend your average person, but it was someone with the capability of doing so and that sees a little bit of promise there or hope. I think it's something that I'm willing to learn more about and I'm not sure if that's enough to go on there, but I also have another question if you've got time.

>>Trey: Yeah, go ahead. We'll do it quickly. Go ahead. >>Jay: Okay. As far as looking at C-State, which is like the opposite of a new country, it's more removing yourself from any country than going to participate in starting a country. And in that instance, you have, I guess, even less agency because it's you versus whoever would like to trespass on whatever you see your rights are.

If you are not associated with military or rule of law, I've heard some stories of like contractors working down even in Antarctica, you know, where you would imagine things would be somewhat civil, but where workers' comp cases or disability is just, you know, completely ignored because there's no jurisdiction.

So who are you going to go to? So what do you see as, I guess I'm trying to say stepping into both of them, C-Stating and stepping into if you were to actually go and try and engage in commerce in this free trade area, you're sort of stepping into the legal void, obviously C-Stating more so than actually doing trade, you know, on land with somewhat of a government.

Do you see the risk of stepping into that extremely high, something that can be hedged against or more or less, you know, with proper planning, you know, you're good to go. If you were to get involved with C-Stating, would you try to join one of the communities that's already trying to build such a project?

Would you do this independently? Would you just, are you talking about you living on your sailboat bouncing around the world? What would that look like for you personally? As far as joining, I would probably join a community because I have seen instances of people setting up their own little floating domicile in international waters and just the closest government decides to come up with reasons why that can't happen.

So like I said, it's kind of the C-Stating alone is you versus potentially anyone. So I definitely would not go that route. I don't have much of a formed opinion. I think that all these ideas are interesting and I respect the iconoclasts and curmudgeons, that was the word I was looking for earlier.

I respect the iconoclasts and curmudgeons who decide this is for me and I'm going to be, you know, the guy who does this. Perhaps it's my children, almost certainly it is my children, but I'm not quite that radical. I don't, and I'm pretty bored by it, right? For me personally, like when I think about living on a sailboat even.

Someday I may do it, but honestly whenever I think about living on a sailboat I just think of total boredom and I'm like, "I want to go out and live on a sailboat and bounce around in some lagoon day after day after day and go from beach to beach to beach." Like that doesn't sound super attractive to me and appealing to me.

Most people it does. And so seasteading, like there's nothing, there's no real freedom that I can't, there's no real freedom that I need to do that kind of approach that I can't get in a simpler way. There are a few freedoms that are important to me and they're pretty basic and pretty easy to accomplish and I don't have any, and I have found the most practical of these is just simply the concept of PT theory or flag theory.

To me that's the most practical approach because I could live really almost anywhere in the world and because I'm not doing much that I require government approval for. And so even people who do, right? If you want to do drugs, right? Go to a place where drugs are legal.

There's lots of places where you can do that. You don't have to go and do drugs on your sailboat. You can just go to a country where there's no problem. If it's any vice that you're involved in, gambling or shooting automatic, this is not a vice, but you want to shoot automatic weapons, go to Belarus and hang out with some guys and shoot some automatic weapons or go and find someone who's got the appropriate licenses in the United States and do it there.

There's plenty of options available to do almost anything that you want to do without going to those extreme areas. Things that are important to me, right? Are pretty simple. I want to be free to educate my children in the way that I believe is best. Now I don't have to go offshore to do that.

I might need to move from Germany to the United States or from Germany to Mexico or something like that, but that's pretty easily done. Whereas going offshore is a little bit harder. I want to be able to say what I think is right. But generally speaking, virtually all of the world has a significant level of freedom of speech and so I don't need to go and live offshore for that.

I want to be able to serve God and love my neighbor, right? But I can do that even in the middle of a totalitarian dictatorship. And so for me personally, people are worried about medical freedoms, right? To put in your body what you want to put in your body.

You can do that in most places in the world without having to go offshore. And so I'm just not going to... Sometimes libertarians are an odd bunch. And a lot of times people are so interested in the theories of libertarianism and maximum freedom that they get lost in philosophical analysis and they don't actually do anything.

And so I feel like that's probably the case with things like Sealand. Maybe it's things like Liberland. And it's not strictly necessary in my opinion. I think that, at least for me personally, I've found that I can have pretty much all of what I want with multiple countries, PT theory, etc.

And then, you know, frankly I could live pretty well in the United States too. I'm much more open now that I know I don't have to live in the United States. I'm much happier with many things in the United States now and I could live happily there myself. So I love the experiments happening.

And if you look at the experiments, you know, a bunch of visionaries who want to do an experiment can wind up influencing the world. Whether it's the founders of the United States of America, whether it's visionaries involved in other areas. But I'd rather personally right now, for freedom, I'd rather personally be involved living in, you know, like I did in yesterday's show.

I'd rather be living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, working on how do I create systems of money and financial exchange that serve the tens of millions of inhabitants of Ethiopia in a way that the international banks just simply aren't doing. And I feel like that will do more to encourage freedom than seasteading.

I'd rather be involved in the 3D makerspace community, teaching people how to print plastic guns in their basement. That'll do a lot more for freedom than me going and, you know, necessarily, you know, settling in sea land or something like that. So I guess I'm a little more practical than some others are at this point.

Being extremely unproductive. But I love talking about it. Thank you so much for calling in and giving me a chance to talk about it. And I do hope personally to go, hopefully this summer or fall, I hope to go and visit Liberland. And I'll talk about how the borders go and how the travels open up.

We finish out today with Stephen in Maryland. Stephen, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. My pleasure. Just calling in to get a sanity check on our current family of plans, making sure that we're on the right path.

You'll hear a lot of corollaries with the last caller from Michigan. So kind of give you a background. You know, I've been listening to you for a number of years now. I've actually taken steps to implement a lot of the concepts that you talk about on the show, including insurance.

We're exploring potentially homeschooling our children, getting involved with real estate investing. And as of recently, I've been able to secure a 100% remote job situation for our family. And my wife is taking the steps now to step away from work and become a stay at home mom. We have a lot going on, a lot due to the show.

So to kind of give you background on our plans now and where we're coming from, we have two children, a three-year-old and a one-year-old, both boys. We've been living in our townhouse since 2013. We're starting to feel a little bit cramped, not having a yard space that we're accustomed to.

You know, my wife and I grew up with very large yards. And a lot of our family lives in South Carolina, and a lot of our family is moving to South Carolina. So we're very connected to our family. We want to stay connected. And currently we have about a quarter million dollars in the bank, and we're about $50,000 away from a million dollar net worth.

So we're considering selling the townhouse in Maryland. We played around with the idea of renting it, but trying to rent it from South Carolina doesn't seem like a great situation. So we're thinking about selling it and then establishing about six to eight months' worth of Airbnb contracts. And so we were thinking about living in Florida near Disney World for four months, and then maybe four months of Airbnbs in the state of South Carolina to get a feel for the area and see where we would want to settle down.

And part of that move would include trading our very expensive Jeep that I bought pre-listening to your show. It's fully paid off. Trading that in for a minivan, selling the second car, putting all of our stuff in storage, and like a pod situation, and then executing on that plan where we stay for four months in Florida and then four months of Airbnbs throughout the state of South Carolina.

Some concerns that I have with that plan that my wife also has with that plan is the Florida aspect of the Airbnb is going to be very expensive. You're talking about spending my entire paycheck, essentially, take-home pay, after fully funding the 401(k)s and HSAs and stuff like that. We would pretty much spend everything that we save.

Not a huge deal because we have a lot of money in the bank to execute a purchase of a home or whatever we decide to do after this trip. The other concern that we have is very short-term. We're talking eight months of Airbnbs, and then what? What if we don't like South Carolina?

What if there's some things going on right now that maybe we can't live in South Carolina in terms of my job? So there's that aspect of it as well. And then during this trip, there's a chance that my wife gets pregnant. I think you've mentioned on your shows before where it's very important that she has a very comfortable space where she can do doctor's appointments and she can be comfortable.

And then, of course, when the baby comes, it's important to be in a long-term situation. And then the other thing that we're concerned about is losing out on the rental income. There's this question of do we rent? And what the long-term impact on our wealth and financial goals will result as this plan is executed.

So that's the plan in a nutshell. The other aspect that we're thinking of, and maybe this is a part two question that if we have time we can get to it, is we're interested in settling down somewhere sooner than later, if not Maryland, South Carolina, because based on what we learned from your show and some other shows, we want to start buying that portfolio of investment real estate.

And part of the plan there was to actually buy that dream house, that lake house or that beach house first as a way to... It's kind of like the nomad strategy, the nomad real estate investment strategy you just talked about. But rather than just traditional rentals, we thought, "Okay, if we buy that lake house or we buy that beach house first with good terms and conditions based on the mortgage, then we can potentially turn that into a portfolio that we live close to and then go settle down in the more traditional neighborhoods." So that's kind of part two of the question, but really just focused on how risky is it going to Florida and then South Carolina with six to eight months of Airbnb and not really having a long-term plan.

I could hear the hearts of four-wheelers and overlanders all over the world sink when you said, "I'm selling a Jeep and buying a minivan." People say, "Jobstone, what's wrong with you? Don't do it. Don't do it. No. Tell Steven not to do it." So I do have some thoughts, and I think first of all that you should acknowledge that most of these, while it's important to talk them through and think them through, you have worked hard to put yourself in a situation where most of these things are pretty simple.

They're pretty easy to do. All of these moves, you have enough money and you have income, and so you have the freedom to do any of these things that you want, which is awesome. And I want to applaud you for doing that because a lot of times people who are in this situation, they don't stop and think about what they want or go explore for it or go and look for it.

They often just say, "Oh, I can't do it." But you've worked hard, you've saved money, and you've worked hard to get a remote job, and so now you can do that. I say, "Awesome. Well done." Now, when you go to Florida, you mentioned Disney. Is it important to you to be close to Disney the whole time, or is that just, "Oh, we'd like to go a few times," or do you want to be in Orlando or Kissimmee?

Yeah, so it's funny. We never really thought we were Disney people until we went to Disney. It's one of those things we want to live in while we're there, be on a resort-style setting where we have the splash pad and all the amenities within the neighborhood, and then within driving range of the parks because during that time, there'll be Christmas, my son's birthday, and of course Halloween.

We thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool if we could go to the parks and really give our children that opportunity?" So close, but not on the gates or on the border. Okay. Yeah, it sounds awesome. It sounds really cool. So the first thing that I think is obvious to me is, number one, you should probably spend some time looking into house-sitting.

If you have two children, do you guys have any animals? We do. That's what's making this a little bit harder. So we have a chocolate lab, and so of course the price goes up when you look at Airbnbs with a pet. No question, it goes up substantially. So is there somebody who may be able to pet-sit for a few months where the pet is happy and they're happy, and you guys know that you're not abandoning your puppy?

Is there a family member or somebody who could take care of the dog for a few months? I don't think that's going to be an option. Okay. Well, then it's going to be more complicated. First I would say house-sitting is not necessarily out of the range of possibility. You don't need to do it, but you should think about it because house-sitting or pet-sitting might be something that you could do that could defray some of the costs over the course of a month or two.

I don't know. I would imagine there's quite a lot of demand in the Orlando, Kissimmee area for that kind of service, but you should look for it. Number two, I know the Orlando area extremely well. Depending on where you want to be, right, and what you envision. Now you have the money.

If you want to stay in a resort, you can stay in a resort, and that will come with certain things, but the area, the range of towns and places that you can live that is within easy driving distance to Disney is very high. There are a lot of towns.

And so you might, if you're just looking in Kissimmee and Orlando on Airbnb, that's one thing, but if you start bringing in Claremont and Lakeland and Winter Haven and some of these other towns, then all of a sudden your options will be much, much bigger. And so if you want to lower the cost while still being within easy driving distance of Disney, there are a lot of options available to you.

They may not all be on Airbnb, but even Airbnb rentals, there will be a lot of them. And now, will it provide you with a resort, splash pad, et cetera, all that? You'll have to look at the amenities of each individual community and judge exactly what you need. But you're not restricted to what you can find on international drive, right?

You don't only have to rent a house in, what's the name of the community? There's like a own developed by Disney, this awesome community that, anyway, it's like, it'd be cool if I could summon the name. Anyway, Celebration, there we go. I knew it had it. You don't only have to rent a house in Celebration.

If you're not familiar with Celebration, it's this really phenomenal community that's very close to Disney. It's awesome. Really, really neat place. But you're not restricted to renting a house in Celebration to have easy access to Disney. You can be 30 minutes away in Winter Haven. You can go north, you can go south, you can go east, you can go west.

And they're all within easy striking distance. Anywhere along the I-4 corridor is totally doable. So if you want to defray the cost a little bit, you should consider that strategy. I think the other thing that you should consider is, and again, this won't fit with your, with your, your resort idea, but you should consider just simply having in your back pocket a little bit of camping.

If you've got a Jeep, then you're probably the kind of person who enjoys going back off roads. You know, a teardrop trailer and a ground tent for the Jeep, a pop-up camp or something like that. Florida is a wonderful place during the winter to camp and it's really beautiful.

And so if you're the kind of people who are at all outdoorsy, which I'm projecting that because of the Jeep, you might be a little bit outdoorsy, then that can be really interesting and fun. Now it's hard work on your wife with children that young, but it is possible for you.

I affirm what you're saying from a financial planning perspective. I'm convinced that you, you, when you come to a place in your life where you're thinking about making a change, you ignore the money, you ignore other investments and you focus on getting the people in your life right, the place right and then the work right.

And then you go back to the traditional financial planning. And so the people that you mentioned are family members and I would lean on them a little bit in the process. Could you see, is the townhouse paid off? Do you have expenses on the townhouse? Yeah, so a couple of clarifying points there.

Maybe I was a little bit unclear. So the townhouse still has a mortgage on it. It's relatively easy for us. So our average expenses for the month, the household, I'm sorry, housing expenses for like utilities, things like that, it's roughly 2,500. So it's really low in our budget. And then, you know, looking at some of these Airbnbs, the price goes up, calculated up to be almost $7,000 a month, which is just crazy.

And then the $250,000 in the bank, I'm projecting based on the equity that we have in the house, that will be the cash that we have on hand for the purchase of a future house or multiple houses depending on the steps that we take. But currently it's $90,000 less than that.

But using the equity from the home, that will be the cash that we have on hand. Right, right, right, right. And you mentioned this resort. Let me just clarify. When you picture resort living, tell me what you're picturing. So when I say resort living, it's mainly just a community that has amenities.

The splash pad for the kids, the home itself. You know, I don't think we really care if it's a townhouse or a single family house or like an attached duplex or something as long as you're looking at the pool that comes with the house. Typically it's, you know, screened in, it's got the covering and the patio.

Maybe we're just really interested in having the amenities. One of the reasons why we're so, you know, focused on getting out of our current neighborhood at the very least is we want to be feeling great in the house, but there's no amenities. There's nothing to do in the neighborhood.

We're starting to get very bored. We want things to do with our children. And so we kind of want to see what that lifestyle was like living in a community like that, that provided all of those amenities. Right. Well, I would say $7,000 a month on Airbnb is a bit steep.

And while you could do it and you could afford it, certainly I'm not sure that you would enjoy it as much as you might think. What I would encourage you to do is expand your search around Orlando a little bit. So the first thing I would do is I would look and say, okay, what can I, let me go a little bit outside of Orlando.

Let me look a little, little bit outside of Kissimmee and let me not look just on Airbnb. But what does a seasonal rental look like in, you know, Winter Garden or down in Lakeland, Winter Haven, Auburndale, Cypress Gardens. These are all communities where you could come in and you could rent a beautiful, you know, a beautiful four bedroom house with a pool in a gated community for $2,500 a month, $3,000 a month with most of that stuff.

And then expand your activities to beyond just the Orlando area as well. Orlando is awesome, but it's easy to drive in from any of those places. So anywhere along the I-4 corridor from Tampa to the East Coast is easy, is an easy place to be. Anywhere north of Orlando you can find all kinds of options.

And so all of these within 45 minutes of the park. And let's say that you went from a set of $7,000 a month on Airbnb to $3,000 a month for a seasonal rental. And you can get a very nice three month rental on a nice house. Well that leaves up, let's say you spend another $1,000 a month on actual hotels at Disney when you go.

And the cost of Disney, you're still in the whole thing with just more options available. So consider that and see what you find. I've lost any of the other questions that you had. Did you have a specific question that I haven't covered? Yeah. So the concept of your nomad real estate investment strategy, but sort of lake house.

Yeah, the VRBO aspect of it. So buying that really nice lake house or beach condo first with the good terms and then potentially moving to a more normal suburban house that you would go to live in. Yeah. I love the idea, especially for someone who's going to work remote and especially with children the ages of your children.

I think that could work really beautifully for you. The reason why most people don't do it is number one, of course, employment. A lot of times the most desirable places to have a lake house or a beach house don't offer you the kind of employment that many people need.

Since you can work remote, then you can handle that. The second reason why that often doesn't work is kids schooling and or kids social networks. So with homeschooling, you shouldn't have too big of a problem with schooling, but even with regard to social networks and homeschooling co-ops and things like that, a lot of times those types of communities are more available to you in a bigger city.

So I like the idea a lot and I think it could definitely work. You come in, you have enough money, you come in, you finance the lake house as your primary residence, you get good terms on that and then live in it, enjoy it for a time and then go ahead and put it out as a vacation rental and move to a place that might be more of what you're looking for.

Would you do that in South Carolina? Have you looked at any of the lake communities in South Carolina? >>Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously with post-COVID and certainly it feels like a bubble that we're in. It seems like it's just out of reach, but I'm sure things could potentially change.

Regardless of the price, I haven't really sat down and ran the numbers. And so if the numbers work, even in an inflated market, based on the expected rental incomes, then it works. It's just something that we have to look into. But back to the South Carolina thing, the concern is we do this six to eight month Airbnb adventure, for lack of better terms, it's an adventure.

But what if the concern that my wife is having around potentially getting pregnant and not being able to find that long-term house, potentially we hate South Carolina. And then we sold the house to Marilyn and me too, we're concerned. Okay, then what? Do we just keep up this Airbnb strategy or just find a long-term home and settle down for a year and figure it out?

>>Dave: Yeah, you just rent a house. My answer is you just rent a house for a year and figure it out. It's not that difficult. Most of this stuff is just a matter of ... There is certainly a concern, right? You want your wife to feel settled when that time comes, but you have plenty of time.

She's not pregnant now, let's say she becomes pregnant immediately, then you have six months, right? Easy six months before you really want to be stable so where she can have everything in a comfortable position for herself. And so if you don't find something, then you just simply rent a house.

And you have enough money that this is not that big of a deal. And you're looking at areas where this is not that big of a deal. And because you can work remotely and because you have money, even if you ... Let's say your family is all in Charleston.

Charleston is a wonderful town, right? You can easily find a rental that would fit your family and a very comfortable price based upon your budget and be close to your family members. But in a worst case scenario, let's say you need to be 30 minutes or 60 minutes away from family just because that was where you found the house that would work for you for a year.

I think you're in great shape and that this is not difficult. It's not crazy. It's not a hassle. Your money and your remote income will smooth all of these things out for you. I'm not scared of the plan at all. Fantastic. It's good to hear. I appreciate it. Yeah, that's what I'm doing.

I guess maybe you've heard me say recently, it's only scary the first time. And same thing with almost everything, buying, selling houses, renting this, renting that. It's really only scary the first time. And once you've picked up and moved and kind of bounced around a little bit, then you'll understand what's great about that and you'll understand what's not great about that.

And my answer is just keep some kind of backup plan. My biggest fear as a father with children, caring for my wife and children, my biggest fear is I get stuck. And I get stuck in a place where I've got to rent something for $7,000 a month and all of a sudden I don't have the money.

So I always look for what's a backup plan in that situation. What are the backup plans? Number one is savings, right? Making sure you have money. And then number two is flexibility. So if I get stuck somewhere for $7,000 a month, okay, maybe this was great for a month.

We loved this Airbnb and the community with the fountain and all the stuff. But something just happened. All right, let's go to an hour outside of Orlando and let's go where we can get a big comfortable house for $2,000 a month on a three-month rental and just kind of square things away.

And by the way, one of the things that I think you could definitely do is find a place on Airbnb and/or use Airbnb as a listing. And of course this violates their terms of service. But find a property on Airbnb that you like and then contact the owner privately off of the platform and see if you can negotiate a three-month rental directly.

And there are many Airbnb tenants, sorry, Airbnb landlords that would be happy to negotiate a three-month rental for you of just, "Hey, the Airbnb price would be $2,500 a month. But if I just pay up front cash, would you take $6,000 for a three-month rental?" That gives you the time to stabilize your family.

There's plenty of amenities in all of the communities around. There are municipal splash pads in most places. There are community pools. There's wonderful parks. You have day trips to Weekee Wachee Springs and all the stuff available to you. So I don't think it's crazy at all. The only thing that you want to be careful of is being stuck in $7,000 a month Airbnb rentals because that'll stress you out.

So I say use them, but then recognize that you're not stuck there. You can go to South Carolina. You can go back and forth. The options are there. And so that's the other reason why I like the camper option, even if it's just a temporary thing. So let's say that maybe you go ahead and sell the Jeep, but maybe you...

Because I think you'll have a much more comfortable trip with the luggage that you need with a minivan instead of the Jeep. But keep a tent, a nice tent. And Florida has some really wonderful parks. And as a way of temporarily lowering the cost, and you got a one-year-old and three-year-old, it's a little young to really enjoy that.

But just keep something in your back pocket to where you have low expenses and more options available to you. Sounds good. I'll take that under advice and we'll execute and hopefully I'll see you and let you know how it all turned out. Congratulations on all your success. And if it doesn't turn out well for this particular one, recognize that you just simply rent another house or you buy another house.

There's plenty of them available and it's not that difficult to do. That brings us to the end of today's Q&A show. I want to thank you all for calling in. I love doing these shows. And as you see, where else do we talk about seasteading? Seasteading. How's that for an out of the box conversation?

Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful weekend and I will be back with you very soon. (upbeat music)