Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Although today I should simply say welcome to conventional personal finance. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. This is a show dedicated to helping you live a rich and meaningful life while steadily working towards the good life, enjoying it both now and achieving your goals for financial freedom over the course of several decades.

Now, of course, that's a different introduction than I usually start the show with. But today I think it is an appropriate one because I want to talk today about the power of conventional thinking and also conventional financial planning. Let me begin with a bit of philosophical introspection that I have been engaged in quite a bit over the last few days and I try to make this a continual bit of introspection, especially over the last few years.

Thinking broadly, I think that one of the dangerous trends of youthful revolutionaries and in that camp, I would count myself at certain times, and also of many leading voices in many industries is we tend to ignore the wisdom of the past. Without question, I myself have been guilty of this at many times in my life.

I come across an idea that excites me. I come across something where I think, "Oh, this is phenomenal and we should just change everything." And then perhaps you go down the path a little ways and you discover that actually there is a good deal of wisdom in what most people were doing.

Over the years, I've shared with you various podcasts and one of those I talked about why I have decided that I am not interested in being a revolutionary. Rather, I'm interested in being a reformer. Now speaking broadly, I have come to the opinion that most revolutions are mistakes. Revolution is exceedingly dangerous.

Revolution takes down one system and replaces it with something entirely new and that something that's entirely new is often untested and sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't. It can perhaps lead to a bold story that indicates success, but oftentimes it leads to a collapse. And I don't think it's safe.

I don't think the outcomes of virtually any revolution are worth the way that they're achieved. Rather, I think that reformation is the proper and productive path. Change is necessary in many parts of society and many parts of a life, but reformation will in many cases lead to better results.

I want to be cautious not to make too many blanket statements. There may indeed be times in your own life where a complete and total transformation, a complete and total revolution does lead to better results, at least on a personal level. But whenever you look broadly, I think that often reformation is better.

Now I've articulated that concept before. Today though, I want to apply it to the concept of simply understanding why certain systems exist. Let me share a business example and then an ecological example from first my own life and also from just observing how systems change over time. When I was in college, there was a book published.

It was never a popular book. It was just a book I found browsing through the bookstore and the title grabbed me. I bought it, read it, and was impressed by it. The book was called "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It." At this point, I don't even remember the author's name.

It was two ladies who wrote this book articulating many people's frustrations with work. They advocated in that book for what they termed a results-only work environment. The idea was we should discard any kind of corporate slavery. We should discard stated schedules, fixed office locations, and we should hold people accountable exclusively for the results that they achieve in their job.

At the time, their success story that they were pointing to was the corporate headquarters of Best Buy. That book impressed me deeply, and the authors articulated certain things that I wanted to be true for myself. At the time, I was working in a salaried job where I was expected to be there from about 8.30 to 5 o'clock, something like that.

I was expected to show up in the office to do my work on regular times, to stay a little bit late and get the work done when I needed to be there. With my personality, that didn't feel great. I remember distinctly something that those authors wrote in that book about how the modern corporate environment causes people to have to lie to their bosses to justify being 20 minutes late to work.

You come in and instead of arriving at 8.30, you arrive at 8.50. "Oh, sorry. The traffic was really bad." In reality, you were sitting at home with your family eating blueberry pancakes, and you just wanted to stay and eat blueberry pancakes. Their point was you're an adult. You should be allowed to do your tasks on your own time.

Now, I succeeded in my own career of moving into an environment, especially an entrepreneurial environment that included complete and total time freedom and location freedom where I didn't ever have bosses. From the time I left that job, now going on 15 years, I have not been accountable to a boss for where and when I work.

That was important to me, and I wanted that sense of personal freedom. Hear me clearly. I like that personal freedom. It means a lot to me. It's something that I would be quite loathe to give up. But having achieved that, I find it fascinating how much my life looks like the life of a conventional employee, a conventional salaryman.

I tend to work from about 9 a.m. to about 5 p.m. I usually work Monday through Friday. I find that working in an office is where I work best. So although I could go and sit at a cafe in some beautiful seaside resort, I choose not to do that.

I don't like it at the moment. I have rented a co-working space for the last few weeks I've been working here in Malta, renting a co-working space, sitting and working at a desk just like I did so many years ago. I don't go to the beach. I don't go to the beautiful cafe.

I don't go to anywhere except a desk in an office. I sit down at the desk. I get up in the morning. My family and I, we have breakfast together. I kiss my wife. I walk to work. I sit down at my office. I work until about 5 o'clock or 5.30.

Then I pack up my stuff and I go home. Now I'm not saying that there aren't days that it's really nice not to have to do that. What I'm saying is when I was 20 years old, I didn't appreciate the power of the conventional lifestyle. I didn't appreciate that people had developed this salaried lifestyle because it was a pretty good way of doing things.

Rather, I wanted to toss the whole thing out on its head. I wanted to be a radical revolutionary and say, "I'm not going to live that way. I'm going to live the four-hour work week." Interestingly, although I haven't followed it closely, I believe that the experiment at Best Buy of their results-only work environment, the thing that the book was written about was a fairly short-lived experiment.

They did it for a few years. They weren't getting good results from it and they scrapped that idea. They imposed more structure and order on the functioning of their company. Fast forward to today in 2021, the entire world has changed. Remote working is the norm. But there are a lot of remote workers who want to go back into the office.

As offices have opened and will open, there are a lot of workers who are glad to go into their desks, sit down at 830 in the morning, work at their computer, and leave at 5 o'clock. There was, perhaps, a list of small changes that needed to happen that have now happened.

But the changes over the last 15 years have looked more like a reformation of sorts rather than a whole-scale revolution. I today appreciate more than I ever did why a company should have a physical headquarters, why many, if not most, employees in the company should be gathered together in a physical space.

I appreciate why we people work better when they're physically together as part of a team, everyone working at the same schedule on the same tasks in the shared space. There's a power in that. And as I think about my own businesses, I'm loathe to actually try to build an entirely remote distributed workforce.

There are companies that are still doing it, but I'm not convinced that it's categorically a superior model. I think it can work for certain functions within a company, but it's not the best way that all companies should be run. It's not. So before we dismantle the old system, we should try to understand it a little bit.

That leads me to the ecological example that I want to use. Over the years, I have come to appreciate ancient cultures far more than I ever did. By ancient cultures, I mean traditional cultures within the recent past, and I mean genuinely ancient cultures. Our forebears were in many cases men and women of tremendous wisdom.

And the systems, the ancient systems of life in a local place often had a tremendous wisdom associated with it. Even if they couldn't articulate why they do certain things in a certain way, the fact that they did those things that way, there was a reason behind it, even if the person involved couldn't articulate it.

And one thing that I get very concerned about in our day is in many parts of our societies, there is something of a revolutionary spirit. People who are operating under the assumption and idea that virtually everything from the past was marred, was broken, was wrong, was wrongheaded. And now we are the enlightened generation, and as the enlightened generation, we should wholeheartedly revolt against the oppression and strictures and bonds of the past and replace those things in the past with a completely better, improved system.

Count me out. It's not that I reject the need for reformation, but before we reform, we need to understand what works about the past and why. I said I wanted to use an ecological example. Before I give a farming example, let me talk about something like cities. I'm fascinated by intelligent engineering and design.

It's a real interest of mine. I have followed for years, there is a Twitter account, and there are many others, but there's a uniquely interesting Twitter account. If you're not following it, I encourage you to consider it. It's called Wrath of Non. I don't know where that particular screen handle, what it even alludes to, but it's called Wrath, W-R-A-T-H of Non, G-N-O-N.

But the anonymous person behind this Twitter account does a very good job of systematically profiling the beauty and intelligence of how towns and cities have been constructed for millennia and of quite rightly pilloring how we do these things in the modern era. And I have been interested over the last couple of weeks, as I said, I've been here in Malta and I have been touring some of the ancient cities here.

And there are some classic cities. What's interesting to me about Malta, Malta is a very hot place, especially here. I'm here in the summertime. It's very hot, it's very dry, and it's an exceedingly unpleasant place during the daytime, at least for someone like me, who is not quite as bronzed of a god as I would like to be, and for whom the sun is oftentimes quite unpleasant.

So you can walk around in most parts of Malta, and while it is without question a very pretty place, it's right on the Mediterranean, the island has curves galore, buildings everywhere, it's got a lovely European culture, it appeals to tourists, it's a very beautiful place. But when you are looking around and walking around, it's a very unpleasant place because of the heat.

And you feel like you're in these different zones. You have the commercial zone and then you have the residential zone. So that is, of course, that you travel to one of the ancient cities, and there are a number of them, but two popular ones are the city of Limdina, formerly the capital of Malta, and the city of Valletta.

And both of these cities are ancient walled cities. They are absolutely amazing to be in. They're walled all around, but what you find is that they are very pleasant places to be. It's not that they haven't been updated. They have been, right? There are now shops with pretty glass windows and whatnot.

They look a little bit different than they would have looked 600 years ago, but they are pleasant places to be in. And what strikes me is the value of something as mundane as very narrow streets. Now having been interested in architecture a little bit and trying to understand this, this is something where I have changed my mind drastically on because now I understand the wisdom that is behind narrow streets.

In 2013, I was living in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida, and at the time, right next to my house, there was a very nice big road. By nice big, I mean classic American four-lane road, easy flow of traffic, easy cars, and it was in the downtown area. It worked really well.

And then one day I come along and there are construction vehicles, and there's a guy out there with a chipping hammer attached to the front of a tractor of some kind, and he's out there chipping and sawing the concrete up in the middle of the road. And the city workers came in, they tore up a perfectly good road, and they put in medians, and they dropped it from four lanes down to two.

And they put in these medians full of bushes and trees and whatnot, and they finished their work and they left. And at the time, I was quite self-righteous about it, and in my indignation, I said, "This is typical. These government people, they just want to spend money unnecessarily, and they come in here and they take a perfectly good road, and they go and spend money wrecking a perfectly good road." And I felt quite self-righteous about it.

I felt quite confident in my opinion. I was wrong, and the engineers who did that were right. Because today, because of the restraint on traffic flow, the fact that now not as many cars can get through, the cars that do get through have to drive more slowly, it's made it a much more pleasant place.

And I found that the city planners and engineers now know this, that if you want to create community, you need to slow down traffic and make it unpleasant for cars to go through. And so one of the best things that you can do to create a center of economic activity is get the cars out, slow the streets down, lower things, make it small, make it tight, restrict the flow of traffic so that there can be life, because nobody wants to do business next to a busy road.

Nobody wants to walk next to a busy road, et cetera. And so now, if you look at modern urban planners and urban design, there will be a greater appreciation of this. Well, to appreciate this, all you need to do is go and look at some of the places that we love to be, right?

Go and look at an ancient European city, an ancient Asian city, something preferably more than 500 years old, and you'll find that it looks very different than our modern developments. Now today, we are in a time, which I'm quite happy about, where people think much more about sustainable design.

But what's ironic is a lot of modern sustainable design is quite the opposite, right? There's the greenwashing of many new products and many new ideas. And if you really want to get sustainable design, you should look to the past and understand what worked then, because chances are what worked in the past would probably actually work really well today.

And you walk through a city like Limdina here in Malta, and I wrote to Wrath of Non on Twitter. I said, "I've been in Limdina. You're right. I would love to live in this city. The city is hundreds of years old." It's not been updated. There's some... The walls are the original stone.

They're not been painted. They've not been covered. Most of the streets are... The original streets are a similar style. They didn't take out the ancient cobblestones and put in beautiful tile anywhere. It's just the ancient technology. And I... Yes, they've added electricity, which certainly I would want. I'm sure there's a little bit of climate control, but you walk down those streets and it's a pleasant place to be.

Why? Well, because the streets are narrow, then they're shaded. This is the point. I should have made it more clear earlier. You have these narrow streets. And yes, they were designed in a time before cars. But because the streets are narrow, the streets are pleasant places to be. And I could imagine all of the economic activity that would have occurred in those ancient days right in those streets, because they're narrow, they're shaded, they're cool, they're comfortable.

Modern Malta is not that. The modern streets, even though again, it's because of this ancient development, a lot of the streets are very small, you're forever trying to find a spot of shade. It's just unpleasant. And so you hit about four o'clock, five o'clock in the evening, and now you think, "I can go out." Well, we can improve things.

We really can. But before we go about improving, we would be wise to sit and learn. Number of years ago, I was deeply interested in permaculture design, which is a form of thinking and design that's applied to usually food production, although it can be viewed comprehensively. And I took several classes and consumed dozens or hundreds of hours of instruction by a designer, an Australian permaculture designer named Jeff Lawton, amazing guy.

Had stumbled across him on the internet. He had done this phenomenal, phenomenal video, very old, but still out there called "Greening the Desert," where he went into the Jordan Valley, a place that was completely and utterly destroyed, and he put in a green oasis and just simply used good design to turn the desert into a green oasis.

It was amazing. And when I saw that, it filled me with a sense of optimism because I thought, "If that guy, operating on virtually no budget, can come in years ago, install this kind of beautiful design, there's no place in the world that we can't green. There's no desert that we can't beat back, and there's no ecological problem that we can't solve." I genuinely believe that.

I have no fear whatsoever of thinking that there's any ecological problem that we can't solve because I've seen intelligent designers work miracles, genuine miracles. Well, Lawton stressed in his teaching the importance of understanding ancient designs. Before you go in and you just start cutting everything down, understand why does this exist?

What is it about this place? Before you come in and you just raise an entire forest, cutting every tree, every vine, etc., down and plant fields because there's a lot of rain here, understand the fact that it's the forest itself that creates the rain. And so what happens in a lot of places is you have this modern mindset that comes in and says, "We're going to get rid of the forest, and we're going to replace it with fields because this is a great place to grow more crops, and with our large, massive amounts of agriculture equipment, we can build a huge farm here that would be very productive." So you come in and you cut down the forest and you put in the farm, but then you turn around and a few years later, you're living in a dust bowl.

Why? Well, because the forest created the rain, and you didn't understand the fact that it was the forest itself that was creating the rain. And so that's not to say that you shouldn't have cut down the forest. There's a place and a time to cut down the forests, but you need to first understand how the forest works and then put in the appropriate measures to keep some of the forest.

Maybe you do strip farming, right? You put your farms in other places. You think about what's there, understand how the system works to the best of your degree why it works, and don't come in and be a revolutionary. Otherwise you might wind up with tremendous problems. Now I feel the same way now going the opposite direction.

And as I'm getting older, again, I try, I know I'm not good, but I try to do my best to be a self-aware person, right? To think carefully about what I believe and why, and then to constantly test those things. And I do my best to respect you as a listener and articulate the things that I believe in such a way that you can understand not only what the opinion is, but why it is so.

And then you can decide if that line of thinking is something that serves you. This was what always annoyed me years ago before I started creating Radical Personal Finance. Somebody would say dogmatically, "This is the reason behind this certain..." Sorry, they would say, "You do this, right? Always do this with your money." Instead of articulating, "I think you should do this and here's why," so that I can understand, "Okay, that reasoning, that thinking applies or doesn't apply to my situation." So even now, I look and I realize that same thoughtful respect of the past is important.

So I beat on a moment ago, industrial-level agriculture, right? I do not believe that industrial agriculture should be eliminated. That would be the revolutionary spirit. That would be catastrophic, right? If we came in and I were emperor of the world and I said, "That's it. I can see that these giant monocrop farms, these giant estates, these are bad.

And so as emperor of the world, I'm passing an edict that says they're now banned." People, we would starve, right? We would absolutely starve. I don't want to whole-scale eliminate industrial agriculture. The change should occur at the margin and there should be steady change. So you can look and say, "Why does industrial agriculture work?" Don't just dismiss it until you understand it and then say, "How can we make it better?" And human beings applying their engineering thinking to these problems will improve things systematically over time.

The revolutionary spirit that sweeps something aside is something that may be interesting, it may be entertaining, and there may be some of us who actually do enjoy that, right? Being the revolutionaries. In fact, often perhaps those people are necessary. They're activists, they're agitators, they're people who come in and do something so radically different that they can bring attention and carve out a different path.

I personally, by personality, am often attracted to those people. There's a reason my podcast is called Radical Personal Finance. But now that I've laid the foundation, I want to talk about the power of conventional personal finance because if I'm going to be honest and consistent with everything that I have said, then I should apply the same basic principle to my own thinking and say, "Before I come in as the radical personal finance guru, the revolutionary who's going to say, 'Build a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less,' or 'Start your own business and become a multi-billionaire,' or 'Live like a wacko in an RV,' or something like that, I should understand why the systems that be work and what works well about them because only then can I properly identify the changes that could perhaps improve things and then articulate to somebody what changes they might want to consider." So let me begin with financial freedom.

Long-time listeners know that one radical revolutionary idea that I have mostly rejected has been the joy of not working, to steal the title of Ernie Zelinsky's book, which I've read and actually like. I believe that the revolutionary spirit around financial freedom, financial independence, free retirement, etc., is in many cases an overreaction to a modern work environment that can indeed place heavy burdens on its participants.

Now this is not one where I've never been a loudmouth advocate to say, "Don't work," but I wanted to articulate this one because it is something I see around. There are a lot of people who genuinely believe that if they could just get rid of work, they're lives would be better, and I don't think that is true.

Now I have a personal theological conviction that man is meant, meaning designed, to work, and that work is not a curse. Work is a blessing. I do think the use of that word "work" can be a very wide and expansive application. I don't think that work is work only if you receive financial compensation for it.

I don't think that work has to be done in an office. I don't think that work has to be knowledge work or physical work. And so I'm not an advocate that somebody has to stay in a corporate job in order for them to experience all of the joys of working.

That's not the case. There are many people who have become financially independent. They don't need to work for money, and they decide that, "I'm going to invest my labors into something else. I'm going to invest my labors into my community. I'm going to invest my labors into my grandchildren.

I'm going to invest my labors into my garden." The world is open. What I do think is important to articulate is that work is not a curse. And in fact, even some of the most stereotypical work, in my opinion, is actually quite valuable. As I reflected on this, I realized I miss, I genuinely miss the normal corporate work environment.

I genuinely miss going to work and seeing my friends every day. My sister used to say why she goes to work. She said, "I go to work to see my friends every day." And at the time I would laugh at her, but you know what? She's right. I genuinely miss it.

I feel isolated doing the independent entrepreneur thing, far more so than I ever thought that I would be. And while I'm not changing exclusively for that reason, and while I am seeking to make sure that I don't remain isolated, it's funny how when I think about the corporate environment, I think about going and taking a job, working in an office, one of the things that I realize I would appreciate is having that structured social environment.

It's a tremendous benefit, a tremendous, just simple system. And the fact that everyone is all together, the fact that everyone is together at the same time, the fact that everyone's in one place, and that there's a diversity of people at all different levels coming together to work on the same thing, this is fun.

This is something that is useful. Again, my revolutionary spirit, when I was younger, I thought, "Well, the dream is just going to be me and a laptop, because if I could go with my laptop and I can make money around the world, then I can go wherever I want and I can be in the most fun place." And I'm glad that I did it, but I miss the corporate work environment.

So if you're part of a company where you're expected to come to work at a certain time, you're expected to be there, I want to encourage you not to... There's a word. In Spanish, the word is "menospreciar." I don't know how to translate that word. Basically it means to diminish, to not appreciate, to cast off without consideration, to despise.

I guess that would be the best translation, to despise it. Don't despise that. There's a good chance that if you're working a job, diligently salting away your money, planning for the day of your financial freedom, there's a good chance that on the day that you declare your independence, you submit your resignation and you leave that job, you're going to feel a sense of euphoria.

There's a very good chance that a week later, when you're sitting on your balcony, drinking your morning coffee, lazing about, reading books and swiping through your Instagram feed, without the need to go to the office, you're going to be even happier with your decision. And there's a very good chance that one or two years later, after you declared your independence from the corporate system, you're going to look back fondly and wish that you could be on the same schedule as everyone else, sitting in traffic, going back to your corporate job.

So while you're in it, recognize that the conventional lifestyle of going to work is not a bad thing. I remember years ago, I had a meeting with my managing director at Northwestern Mutual, where I used to work when I was a financial advisor. And my managing director was a neat guy.

When I came along, he was at the end of his career. And at the time, I think it's still the case, but at the time, that company had mandatory retirement for all management personnel at the age of 65. And so he knew that he was going to be retired at that time.

And he was a very successful managing director within that system. He had built an insurance office, he had insurance agents working for him, investment office, et cetera. And that business is, as far as I'm concerned, just a wonderful business, because it integrates so many good things. It gives you control over your time, freedom, gives you massive financial compensation, especially in the latter end of your career.

And he was and had been at the peak of his career. He had a lot of money. He earned a lot of money without a whole lot of difficulty. He had all the toys, right? He had the nice cars, a nice motorcycle, had an airplane, had a boat, you know, a nice boat, all the stuff, beautiful house on the water.

He had all the stuff. And he was facing up at his mandatory retirement at 65. And so he retired at 65, but he took a consulting job, continuing to work just as an independent consultant within the same system. And I remember talking to him, we were close, and he made a comment to me about how glad he was to still have that job, meaning the consulting job.

And he said, "I derive a lot of satisfaction and a significant degree of my self-worth from my identity as a businessman." Articulated just like that. I'll never forget that because the older I get, the more I've seen that. Especially, I think this affects men more than women, but there have been so many times where I've coached with a retiree, right?

Somebody who's 64 years old. And that person, you know, that man is at the peak of his career, is at the zenith of his achievement. He's respected, he's admired, he's well-paid, he is appreciated, his perspective is appreciated. And then often he'll retire. Pull out of that system. "Hey, what do you do?" "I'm retired." Loses contact with friends, loses contact with people in that business social circle, loses a sense of contribution to the community around, the company at hand.

It's not a thing to be taken lightly. How much more if you do that at 30? What's the next thing that perhaps the power of conventional thinking? Here I would say the conventional power of a job. I don't see myself as the kind of person who is well-suited for a job.

I don't. I like being an entrepreneur. I like the freedom, I like the flexibility, etc. But there's not a week that goes by that I don't think very carefully and ask myself, "Am I wrong? Couldn't I just go and be better off having a job?" A job is a wonderful thing.

A job is one of the most rewarding things that you can do because it simplifies your life. When you are a boss or an entrepreneur, you come in so frequently, you sit down, look at a blank piece of paper and you have to figure out what plan, what design, what to build on that piece of paper.

I find that frequently overwhelming. I don't know. And even though I'm very good at goal setting, I'm very good at saying this is what I want, even though I'm a world-class planner and can often see pathways through complex situations, I look at a blank sheet of paper every morning and sometimes I just can't figure out what to do.

And I long and I wish, I just wish somebody would tell me what to do. Because then if somebody would tell me what to do and then I simply do it, I can have the confidence knowing I've done what I needed to do today. When I was a boy, my dad said, "Joshua, when you go to work, find out who your boss is, figure out what your boss wants and figure it and make him happy and then you're done." And I've always applied that, right?

And as an employee, it's a wonderfully simple thing to do. You go into work, find out what your boss wants and you do it. And when you do what your boss wants, your boss is happy, you walk out of work feeling like I did a good job, I'm done.

And you can leave the office with a clear heart, clear head. The lifestyle of an entrepreneur is not that way. As an entrepreneur, you come to the office, you sit down, you try to figure out what to do, you do it, you wonder, is this good enough? But who do I ask?

There's no one that I can ask. I'm the one that's responsible. I'm responsible for everything, the vision, everything. So I'm here to tell you that having a job where you're an employee is actually a really wonderful thing. In addition, it's a wonderful thing in your personal finances. I don't withdraw from my opinion that if you want to become wealthy, one of the best ways to become wealthy is to build a business that makes a lot of money and/or build a career that makes a lot of money.

And in fact, most of your first investments should be into your income. I believe that's true. And as far as I can tell, it's almost undeniable. However, there are so many things that are better in a conventional path, a conventional path of simply having a salary, having a paycheck.

Let me articulate some of those so perhaps you'll appreciate what you have. The first thing is you have the ability to plan. For me personally, since the time that I was 21 years old, I have never been able to do a budget in the traditional sense. Took me years to be okay with that because when I was a teenager, I'd read books about doing a budget.

You do zero dollar budgeting. You sit down, you figure out how much money you have coming in, figure out where it's going, and then you write down what your thing should be. And I remember when I was in college, I had an income and it was wonderful. I would sit down, I had my income, I knew how much it was going to be, I was a salaried employee, I would do my budget, I'd pay my bills.

I remember it was very simple. I'd pay my rent, I had a certain amount for gas, but it was really predictable in terms of how much I was driving. And I think I had my food bill, as I remember it was $200. And so I would just put $200 of cash in my wallet and I knew that for food and fun, I'm going to spend $200 over the course of this month.

And it was so freeing to go out to eat, knowing that if there's money in my wallet, I can spend it. And if there's not, I can't. It was so freeing to know that if there's money here, I can do it because there'll be more money next month. And I could spend money guilt-free because I had planned where the money was going to go.

Well, then I became an entrepreneur. And there would be some months where I would make $0 and there would be some months where I'd make tens of thousands of dollars. That's a crazy thing to deal with on a daily basis because it makes it very difficult to know where to draw the lines.

And you have this tension between frugality and enjoyment. You want to be frugal because you know that frugality is a useful tool along the journey to wealth. But on the other hand, you want to enjoy your money and you want to spend on peak experiences and on peak things.

And a lot of times, the times that you want to spend the money don't line up. Maybe you have a $30,000 month and you're thinking, "Great. Awesome. I've got a $30,000 month. This was great." And so you go out to eat. Okay, fine. Maybe you go out to eat, nice restaurant, spend money, feel really good about it.

But then what about the next month? You had a $30,000 month the previous month. The next month, you have a $0 month. Do you still do it? Well you're thinking, "Okay, well I made $15,000 between the two months." But then what about the fourth month? You know that in the fifth month, you could make a hundred grand.

But in the fourth month, now your wage is averaged out. If you had a $30,000 month that took you for four months, now you're down to like seven grand a month. Now you don't feel so flush. I've lived this since I was 21 years old. Now I like it.

I like it because it inspires me with a confidence to know that whatever it is that I want, I can make a plan to do it. If I went back and took a job, it would annoy me because I would not know how. It's like, "Okay, I want to buy a new toy.

I want to buy a fancy thing. I want to buy, I don't know, a Ford Raptor pickup truck, something fancier. I want to buy a Tesla or I want to buy a boat." Well, in my world, I can look at a boat. By the way, I found this. Beneteau makes this center console cabin cruiser boat.

My entire life, I have lived in South Florida and I've never understood since I don't enjoy fishing. I have never understood why everyone buys center console boats. They're uncomfortable unless you're fishing. They're designed for fishing. They're great for fishing. But the thing is people buy this fishing boat and they use it 90% of the time for partying and they use it 10% of the time for fishing.

I don't like center console boats. I finally came across this last week across the Beneteau line of basically small cabin cruiser. You can get a 34-foot boat. It's got two small cabins on it. If you're into boats, you're looking for a lifestyle boat to put behind your Fort Lauderdale house, check out the Beneteau.

I forget the brand name on it. But anyway, I can come across that and I can look at that and I can say, "This boat is awesome." Right? "300 grand? All right, no big deal. Okay, how am I going to make 300 grand?" I think it was 300 grand, something like that.

To me, I love that sense. I love that sense of excitement to know that there is literally nothing that I could say to myself that I want and don't have that I can't figure out how to get because my income potential is unlimited and it allows me to live in this very pleasant, dreamy world of opportunity to go around the world and to be completely and totally unencumbered by constraints on my financial thinking because I know that no matter what the thing is that I want, I can figure out a way to do it.

It's awesome. It's also brutal, right? Because there's those other times when things aren't going well and you really love to know when you're going to be able to achieve the goal. And a normal person can say, "I want to pay off my $300,000 house," and you can sit down and you can calculate, "All right, if I'll pay an extra $2,000 a month, I'll have my $300,000 house paid off in four years." And you can scrimp and you can save and you can be frugal and you can feel really good about that because you know you're making progress towards a goal.

You can say no to yourself. Like one of the things that I used to do, I used to, if I said no, I'd go out to eat and I wanted to buy a $9 glass of wine but I just felt like, "Eh, that's a little excessive. I don't need to buy a $9 glass of wine." And so I would pull out my phone and I would transfer $9 from my checking account to my savings account.

And I'd be like, "Okay, I didn't buy the glass of wine so there's $9 more available in my financial freedom fund." That's a nice thing to know that you're going to achieve it. And then you hit it. And you have the joy of knowing, "I hit that goal." And the ability to plan a fairly direct path from here to there through budgeting because you have a regular salary is a wonderful thing.

The ability to leave your work and go home and feel good knowing that, "Hey, the work was there," is a wonderful thing. Even if your job is difficult, even if you don't like it, I'm going to encourage you if you don't care for your job to change to a different job.

I just want to tell you that the conventional thinking behind having a job is not wrong. There's a lot of wisdom behind it. What about the good life? There are a lot of people whose parents have been very wealthy. I remember years ago I read Tom Stanley's book and he talked about how there were so many – I forget which one it was.

May have been the Millionaire Mind. May have been – I don't remember which one. But he talked in that book about how there's so many very wealthy entrepreneurs that encourage their children to become professionals serving the wealthy. It's very common that you'll have – Dad builds this mega awesome business.

He's got dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. But he encourages his son, "Son, why don't you go to dental school and become a dentist? Son, why don't you become a lawyer, a state lawyer serving the wealthy people?" I didn't understand. I was like, "Why do they do that?

Why wouldn't you, if you had been very successful in business, why wouldn't you look at your son and say, 'Son, why don't you become an entrepreneur and make yourself a couple hundred million dollars?' After all, the entrepreneur is the one who's done it. You know it's possible because you've done it.

Why would you tell your son, 'Go get a job,' basically a highly paid job?" Well, today I understand it. The entrepreneur knows how if just a few things had changed, the success wouldn't have been there. If she hadn't met the right person at the right time, she would not have made it.

If the bank had not given three extra months of grace period, everything would have collapsed. The entrepreneur looks at someone who makes $400,000, $500,000, $800,000 a year and says, "You can live a great life on $300,000, $400,000, $800,000 a year. You can do really well. You can be really wealthy.

You can have all the toys. You can have it at a young age. It's almost a guaranteed path. And the work is great." You know, the entrepreneur knows that the idea that somehow you're going to work four hours a week and make millions is nonsense. The entrepreneur knows the weeks of family vacation that you miss because you're putting things in.

The entrepreneur knows the early mornings, the late nights, the flying, getting on a flight to go and have breakfast with a guy that you don't really want to go and see but you got to do it. The entrepreneur knows that. The entrepreneur looks at it and says, "Hey, listen.

You're telling me office hours are from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. four days a week and there's a $300,000 paycheck sitting there at the end of the year from a business that's fairly stable? Two-thirds of the revenues come in from government payments? All of a sudden, that sounds like a pretty good deal." So don't let my radical thinking cause you to menos preciar, to despise what you got.

It's pretty good. And I could go on forever. I want to give you a few more examples. Living a stationary lifestyle. Right now, my family and I are living out of suitcases. As I have described previously, we have a total of seven bags. We have six under seat personal item rolly bags and one backpack and that's it.

Everything else is sitting in the storage unit. We're traveling the world. We've been in one, two, three, four, five countries on this particular trip and on the road for several months. I love it. I really, really enjoy it. I really love some of the experiences. I really enjoy it.

It's tough. It's tough. Right? COVID has made it especially difficult. You're always looking and saying, "Where do I want to go? Where am I going to go next?" In the same way that I learned that years ago I wanted to be able to live in any country of the world and then I've realized that's too big.

Right? A human being is not capable, is not equipped to say, "I'm going to live in any country of the world." It's mind blowing to have that ability and then you look at the world and it's a classic problem of too many choices. It's like, "I can't do this.

I just want – give me three choices. Let me choose among the three best options." So, the travel is great but travel makes you appreciate home. As a kid we would go camping and without fail my mom, every camping trip and my dad would always say, "The reason we go camping is so that you appreciate home." I think they're right.

The reason I travel is so that I appreciate home. For years whenever I've gotten on an airplane and gone somewhere I've always come back home and had a totally new appreciation. Every country it's something different. When I was in Costa Rica in college I came back home and I had been cured of my car lust and I knew that, "Hey, just having a car is awesome." I was in Haiti.

I came home from Haiti and I just was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude about how easy it was to get a job and how amazing it is to simply have a job. What a vastly better life to have a job versus being unemployed. Go home from – I'm here in Malta.

Malta is a wonderful place. If I were to go back to the United States I would look around and I'd be like all the simple – the little things. We have air conditioning in our bedrooms and our hotel room but not in the main room. Everything here is done with a mini split system.

I like mini splits but sometimes you just want your house to be a consistent temperature or you want your water faucets to be mixed or you want to be able to buy a meal for less than 12 euros. That's what, 15 bucks or so. All these little things. It just goes on and on and on.

When we were in the United States a few weeks ago after spending time in Mexico and Costa Rica and after two years of living abroad I was just flooded with this sense of everything is easy here. I tell my wife, it's like everything is easy here. I think very frequently about moving back to the United States and whenever I do it I'm mixed with this – I have these sensations.

Number one is everything would be so easy. If I just moved back to the United States everything would be so easy. But then maybe I'm taking the coward's way out, right? I'm taking the easy way out. Is that really me? So travel, right? Someone's living the dream but the dream is full of a lot of stress.

Not trying to dissuade you from it. I wouldn't do that. I'm not one who listens to most people when they try to dissuade me from things. I'm one who likes to go and learn from experience. But what I do want to do is I want to articulate some things so that if you're in a phase of your life where you don't particularly want to get on an airplane just recognize be here now and enjoy this particular phase of life.

The conventional lifestyle – having a house, having a yard, having a swing set, having a driveway, having bikes in the garage, having a minivan – this is a really great lifestyle. It's really great. And if you don't understand why more people don't want to live in their car or why more people don't want to move to a tropical island somewhere, just recognize it's because – it's not because people are stupid.

It's because that traditional conventional lifestyle is really good. The reason that most people live fairly conventional lifestyles where they go to work and they buy a house and they work a job and they do that for decades at a time is because it's a really good way to live.

Let's not be those who are so convinced of our perspicacious radicality that we just wave our hands and say, "We should dump all of this." Suburbia exists for a reason. Suburbia exists because there have been many, many people who have looked around and said, "That's the kind of lifestyle that I want to live." Don't despise the wisdom of other people.

Don't think that you're the only one who's got to figure it out. Having a house, living in the suburbs, commuting to a job – these are good things. These are a good lifestyle. Go on down the list. Let's talk about things like investments. I am one who is interested in finding the highest returning investments.

I understand the mathematical power of good investments. But if you came to me and you said, "Joshua, I've got a job that's a good fit for me. I feel satisfied with my work. I make $100,000 a year. It's enough for us to have the luxuries that we enjoy. It's enough for us to be out of – we're not in the poor house.

We don't struggle with financial insecurity. What should I invest in?" My answer is probably going to be, "Yeah, probably your 401(k) with some mutual funds." I'll talk to you about some other options. But the lifestyle where you got a job, you make six figures, you put aside 15%, 20% of your income into a 401(k), you do that over the course of a few decades, build up a few million bucks in reserves, this is a really great lifestyle.

There is no easier investment plan than simply buying mutual funds. It works. It works. Will it work as well 10 years from now as it has in the last 10 years? You and I don't have a clue. Reality is it works. It's good. And it's low stress. I would ask you if you were in that situation, I would say, "Well, you could go into it pretty heavy, right?

You could go and say, 'I'm going to buy 10 rental houses,' or 'I'm going to start a side hustle.' But do you really want to spend Saturday morning going and taking care of your properties? Do you really want to take time off from work on Friday morning to go meet with a banker and see if you can qualify for another mortgage just so you can have a few more million bucks down the road?

Or would you rather just go ahead and buy a ski boat and Saturday morning load up, go down to the lake and spend the day out on the water? Do you want to be sitting in your office on Sunday afternoon reading stock reports or messing around learning how to figure out what the candles on a trading chart mean on Sunday afternoon?

Or would you enjoy simply sitting in your den, cold drink in hand, watching a football game? It's a really good lifestyle." I could go on with these examples for a long time. I simply want to say that there have been many times where I have engaged in that youthful, revolutionary spirit of just waving my hands and casting off the good things that other people have.

Reality is if you live in a country, a wealthy country like the United States, Canada, etc., living well is not that hard and the conventional formula for success is not entirely broken. Going to college will help you to have an easier entree into the job market. If there is a disruption, a recession, the data from all the past recessions and disruptions has been that people with a college degree had a significantly lower unemployment rate than those without a college degree.

Going to college is not a bad decision. Getting a job is not a bad move. Getting a job can work. Investing your money in mutual funds, buying a house, buying a car, putting mortgages and car payments on them and then just steadily paying them off. None of these are bad things.

There are a lot of us who, whether it's a personality, whether it's a feature or a defect, I don't know. There are a lot of us who are just going to be happy to chart a different path. While I can appreciate so many things about a conventional lifestyle, right, the conventional financial planning path, I'm trying to articulate those things so that you know I genuinely do think they're good things.

I'm unlikely to go back to it. But if you are enjoying that, don't feel like it's wrong. I don't talk a lot about some of those conventional pathways just because I'm not that interested in them. But if you are enjoying them, you're not wrong. Don't think that someone else is wrong.

I don't have buyer's remorse for the decisions that I have made. All of us make, at every stage of our life, the decisions that we believe are best. I want to talk about that for just a moment outside of even the context of financial planning. This is one thing that bothers me and I'm trying as I get older and recognize I'm seeking very diligently to do my best to be less critical of other people and to be more cautious with my judgments of others.

I think it's important that we acknowledge both intellectually and then in reality that other people are doing the best that they know how. Our parents, they did what seemed best to them. Our friends, they're doing their best. Politicians, they're doing their best. You can disagree with somebody without seeking to...you can disagree and honestly disagree with somebody without impugning their character.

Believe the best about other people. Consider others to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So when your dad gave you the advice to go to college, get a good job, and you've come to the point where you wish you had gone a different path, don't blame your dad for that.

Recognize he did the best. He did and said what seemed best to him. When your financial advisor said, "Put money in your Roth IRA," and you wish instead of doing that, like I do, you wish that you had taken it and started a business with it, don't blame your financial advisor.

Financial advisor gave you the best advice, right? Said the best that he knew how at the time. When our city planners looked around at these narrow two-lane roads or one-lane roads and said, "You know what? Our life would be better if we had some bigger roads to fit our cars better," and they put in four-lane roads, they did what seemed best to them.

And then we've learned that, you know what, four-lane roads are really great in some applications, but in other applications they're not so great. So let's be those who don't pursue radicality as some kind of pre-commitment. You can indeed get great results if you are committed to a different path.

You can get faster results. You can become financially independent quicker. Be inspired by the radical approaches, but recognize that those radical approaches come with a cost often. So don't be scared to embrace the things that seem conventional. I don't intend to live as a nomad for the next, you know, 10 years of my life.

It's not an ideal way to live with children. It's not. I'm not sure. It's not great for them. It's fine for a time. I'm enjoying it. But what I'm doing is I'm embracing where I am. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm taking lots of pictures, lots of video. I'm embracing the disruptions.

Maybe I can't work today because I'm going to go on an excursion, or I don't get as much done tonight because I'm going to the beach. I'm going to embrace where I'm at right now. But then I think my guess would be in six months or a year I'll be living in a house again and what I want to do is I want to embrace where I'm at at that time.

I don't want to be longing and just saying, "I wish I was on an airplane living out of a suitcase again." I want to look back fondly and appreciate the living in a suitcase while appreciating how much easier life is in a house. And then there'll come a point in time in which I'll move out of the house and I'll move back into an RV and then I'm going to appreciate the RV.

So similarly with a career, I'm going to appreciate when things are going well. I wish I had taken more time to appreciate previous jobs. Who knows? I don't intend to take a job in the future, but maybe at some point I'll take a job. When I've got that job, I'm going to appreciate everything that comes with it.

When I'm working in a business, I'm going to appreciate everything that comes with it. When I'm by myself working from a house, I'm going to appreciate that. When I'm in an office with a bunch of people on a structured schedule, I'm going to appreciate that. My life is but a vapor and it's gone.

Life is a vapor. Gone. Let's not be those who spend so much time wishing we were somewhere else that we don't appreciate where we are today. There is power and intelligence and thoughtfulness in the things that are conventional. The ancient ways of living were not stupid. The design that's gone into the modern way that we live is not stupid.

Don't be a revolutionary who just wants to reject everything because it's that way. Appreciate the things of the past and then systematically reform and adjust the things that are in your own life. I'm not saying don't take radical action. I don't intend to walk away from being willing to take radical action.

But if you're one who listens to Joshua talk about all the things that you could do, don't feel any guilt or judgment because you honestly look at those things and say, "It's not for me. I don't want to quit my job in five years. So although I could save 80% of my income and quit my job in five years, I don't want to do that.

I want to save 20% of my income and quit my job in 25 years." Totally fine. If you're one who says, "I recognize that I could potentially make millions if I started a business. I don't want to start a business. I just want to put money in my 401k and I want to live a good life now." That's totally fine.

I'm going to continue to bring you as much clear-headed radical thinking and as many radical ideas as I'm capable of. I'm going to continue to test as many things as I possibly can to be the human guinea pig who does wacky weird things to try them out and see how they work.

I'm going to continue to tell you honestly that the things that sound awesome often have a lot of awesomeness associated with them, but there is also a lot of difficulty that's usually associated with them. I want to do my best to articulate the awesomeness and the difficulties so that you can have a more balanced perspective.

I'm not changing the name of Radical Personal Finance to Conventional Personal Finance, but I'm going to try to continue to highlight the wisdom of conventionality for you and for me. Get in zone, AutoZone. Welcome to AutoZone. What are you working on today? I got to change the oil in my car.

Right now, get five quarts of Pennzoil Platinum Full Synthetic with an STP Extended Life Oil Filter for only $36.99. What do I do with my old oil? We can recycle your used oil for free. And do you have oil for my old work truck? You can find the right high mileage oil to help it go farther right here at AutoZone.