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Bring the holidays together in a new Chevy. Click to learn more. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. For J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Initial Quality Study Award information, visit JDPower.com/awards. 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.

Welcome to the show. My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host. Quick little in-between-a-sode today. Just a rather simple, straightforward show without any in-depth planning ideas. Thanks for your patience with lack of shows over the last few days. We were busy getting moved into a house. And then unfortunately, since moving into the house, I've been a little bit sick.

Got the sniffles and whatnot. Thought maybe it might -- hope, hope -- maybe it's just some dust, you know, getting stuff out of the storage unit, cleaning up, et cetera. But I've got a mold inspector coming to check on things, but I haven't been able to get through a good podcast without sneezing, et cetera.

So my apologies for that. Hope to get that resolved this week. We'll get a mold inspection. It's fairly common in Florida. By the way, I'm just kind of a part-time -- a quick interlude for you. Years ago, we did not appreciate how important keeping things dry is. Mold, et cetera, is a major, major problem.

Over the last couple of years, it has become much better understood and increasingly popularized how important mold is in terms of the lack of mold, especially to health. And so if this is something that you've never looked into, I would strongly encourage you look into it. And there are a couple of aspects that are very important.

Number one, if you ever have any kind of moisture in your house -- and I don't know if this is exactly the same in, say, Kansas or Nevada as it is in Florida, but if you live in any kind of moist climate and you ever have any kind of moisture in your house, a leak, anything, it needs to be dealt with with massive, massive action.

Do not hang around. Do not take any chances. If you have wet drywall, it should be dried out immediately with tremendous haste and then possibly even removed. If you have carpet that gets wet or something like that, especially if you live in Florida, it has to be dealt with very quickly.

Again, normally, most of us would say, "Oh, it's probably not that big of a deal. I should probably not worry too much about it. It'll dry out pretty quickly. I'll just fix it." But I'm here to tell you, you need to take it very, very seriously. I was ignorant on this in years past, and it's not just now.

Over the last couple of years, I've educated myself on this topic, and it's very, very important. It's very important for your health and for the health of your family. And if there are certain types of mold that once they get going in the house, they can just be really, really bad and very, very harmful to you, to the house, and very difficult and expensive to eradicate.

I've had a number of friends who have had to do mold claims in their homes and do mold remediation. And while it's covered by insurance, it is a major, major problem, very difficult to remediate mold properly, depending on the kind of mold. In addition, some of our natural instincts—by the way, perhaps you can even hear in the last 30 seconds, I've had to pause my recorder three times to sneeze and blow my nose.

So, maybe it's—I try to make it invisible to you using my pause button, but it's not easy to get even a simple recording out. Our natural instincts with mold are to use products such as bleach, right? You see a little bit of mold, and you say, "Oh, that's no good, and I should clean that up," and you grab some bleach or something like that.

But there are some kinds of mold, at least here in Florida, that bleach actually makes it worse. It doesn't kill it. And the mold—what's especially dangerous is that the mold is not just surface. It actually will live in the drywall. It will live in different porous substances, and so it really needs to be dealt with carefully.

So, I'm no expert. I have done a bit of reading on it over the past couple of years. I have—it's risen in importance in my priority list of things to pay attention to. If you're buying a house, especially if you're buying a house in a climate—a humid climate like Florida, I'd encourage you to have a mold inspection done on it.

If you're renting a house, inspect carefully, and if you suspect anything, have a mold inspection done prior to moving in. It's a big, big deal, and it's a major problem to remediate. It's a big hassle. So, we'll see. I'll have the results of that inspection in the next couple of days, and then we'll see.

Maybe moving again, maybe not. I hope not. But if we are, now is the time because there's—every time I'm sick, every time I'm unhealthy, I just am so grateful that, in general, I enjoy pretty good health. And, man, is it—it's pretty—it's not difficult to be productive and get things done when you're in good health, but, man, is it tough to be productive and get things done and make progress on your other goals when you are in poor health.

So, let's all be careful to guard our health. Super important. Now, with that, I've got a lot of things I want to talk about, and I have tried several times to record a series of shows for you. There's lots of news in the financial front over the last few days.

There's news about the OECD global tax revenue. There's the Pandora tax agreement, the Pandora papers that were first started to be published by the Washington Post a week ago today. And I've got some commentary on that about the offshore banking system, tremendous stuff happening all over the financial world.

And today, I just want to—due to how I'm personally feeling and able to focus—I just want to quickly share with you a short little personal update of some wins that have come in language studies. Long-time listeners of the show know that, over the last few years, I have experimented with a couple of different things to help my children be multilingual.

While this is not as important for those of us who speak English as a native language as it is for non-native English speakers, I still believe that multilingualism is a tremendous asset for us to cultivate for ourselves and for our children to also benefit from. If someone is a non-native English speaker somewhere in the world and that person desires to improve his station in life, enhance his career, be able to expand his options, clearly, one of the very first things that he should do to pursue that path is to learn English to a very high level.

An international businessman, an investor, somebody in this current world who does not speak English is at a major disadvantage in the job space, in the investment space, just really in the knowledge space. It's a really, really big deal. If you think about and you study the number of books published every year, and there's no doubt that there are a lot of books published in languages that have a high number of native speakers, such as Mandarin Chinese, but the most important influential books in the world are published, the most current, timely, cutting edge, are published in English and/or translated into English immediately as the first translation.

There are many other languages that have a very strong written tradition. For example, German is a language that punches far above its weight in regard to the written tradition, but it is not possible in the modern world to be a serious academic, to be a serious business person. It's just not possible in the modern world to do that without speaking English.

For those of us who are listening to this show and a part of this community who already are either on that path or already doing the right thing and the important thing, but I still think that it's valuable to add in other languages when possible, even if somebody already speaks English.

I have shared on the podcast in the past about how I have worked to teach my children Spanish and some of the techniques that I've developed based upon studying what works well, but then trying to figure out the limitations that I have myself and what can I do and what can't I do.

The summary of that is that I have used very effectively the simple tool of purchasing books in a target language and reading to my children using books as a primary tool for helping them to learn a language. Now, we started with Spanish and again, I kind of stumbled into this.

Neither my wife nor I spoke Spanish to the children, didn't have any Spanish speakers, but I decided, you know what, we're going to fix this. And so I started buying books in Spanish and reading to the children and translating, reading to them, translating, reading to them, translating. And then I sought to fill the house with Spanish books for them so that they could start to be exposed to it.

And with my eldest child, who is as yet my only reader, it worked amazingly well. Where really in under a year, with only a little bit of external Spanish input, primarily through reading, he acquired the Spanish language to a pretty high level fairly quickly. I did at a time, I did hire a Spanish speaking nanny to spend some time with him so that he had a chance to speak to somebody in Spanish and a Spanish speaking housekeeper for a time as well so that he would have some opportunity to speak written Spanish.

But I haven't enrolled him in a Spanish speaking school, in a Spanish country, anything like that. So that was a good success. But as we all know, when you're testing a hypothesis, the question is, can these results be duplicated fairly quickly? Or can they be duplicated yet again? And so starting at the beginning of this year, I wanted to repeat the process using the French language.

And so I went ahead and I started buying books in French and I started the same thing. Now this was difficult for me because while I found it easy to read to my children in Spanish because the pronunciation rules are so simple. I can take an English reader and in about five minutes teach all Spanish pronunciation so that that English reader who doesn't understand a word of what he's reading can successfully read in Spanish with probably a not great accent but an understandable Spanish accent.

But I find that much more difficult in French because the French pronunciation rules are not as consistent as Spanish is. So French pronunciation rules are a little bit more orderly than English pronunciation rules but they're closer to English in terms of the unpredictability of certain pronunciation rules than is Spanish which is quite predictable and quite consistent internally with its pronunciation scheme.

And so we started but man we got off to a slow start. I was really struggling and I could not find the stuff that I needed. And here's where basically what I'm trying to share with you is one of the wins of our European travels has come simply from being able to get books.

But I couldn't find anything. I was reading online. I bought graded readers and I started reading my way through graded readers. And that was okay. The children started to enjoy it but they weren't really engaged the way that I wanted. They were struggling to get it done. So this summer we went to France and one of the major reasons I wanted to go to France was to work on this project.

I wanted to have a chance to be in a French speaking environment, have the children have a chance to be in a French speaking environment but more importantly I wanted to have books. And so we were able to, thankfully they let me into a bookstore and I was able to buy books.

And it was just amazing the difference of being in country for me to find the kinds of books that I need to accomplish this project. We did this both in Spain and in France. And I was able in both places to find really good literature that has been really good for our language acquisition purposes.

I know that many of you are working with your children kind of doing similar things. Let me tell you what I have learned to look for. The first thing that I have learned to look for is primarily books that have a story. What I've discovered is that as a non-native speaker of a foreign language trying to teach my children, kids books and story books are actually quite difficult for me to read.

Many times even adults think, well if I pick up a book, a story book, a picture book that will be great because it's simple. But it's really not good language material for you to study because usually children's books are written for native speaking children of a language. They're written to children who already speak the language and as such frequently the language in children's books is not itself simple.

The plot lines of the books are often simple. They often do have beautiful pictures and they have their place but the language is not particularly simple. The other challenge with children's books from my experience is that the language is, there's not a lot of language in it. There is a story but there's not a lot of language in it.

Imagine for example trying to learn English with three different picture books versus trying to learn English with one hundred page novel. The picture books simply don't have enough density of text, don't have enough density of words for you to be exposed to enough of the language for it to make a difference.

But that hundred page novel, you could re-read a hundred page novel again and again and again and again and again and again and it has enough words that you could learn an entire language from a hundred page novel. I find this interesting because as we have traveled around I look at other languages and I think about how easy it is to get materials for the language.

For example this summer I was in Malta in Europe checking out Crypto Island. It's a somewhat well known tax haven, very interesting in the European context, very active in the cryptocurrency space and I was reading about the Maltese language. And what's interesting about the Maltese language is it's a very minor language.

It's like a half a million native speakers, something like that, losing its power and its influence. And I was poking around in some bookstores in Malta trying to figure out how can I acquire materials in this language if I wanted to learn it, just interested in that topic. And what I found is that it's a difficult language because of the difficulty of acquiring materials.

So the major languages don't have that problem but you still have to acquire the right materials. And so what I have found is that picture books, children's books are interesting and useful and the children enjoy looking at them. And I buy them, we read them, they have a place but they're not the best fundamental tool.

And so I wasn't able to find on the internet anything that was working great because I didn't actually know, hey, what works so well? And so when I went to France though I was able to go into the bookstore and I was able to find a bunch of books that made the difference.

Let me tell you about what I was looking for in case you're looking for something similar yourself. I was looking for stories, stories that are simple stories but that are written to children. I want stories that are long enough to really grab the attention of my children but short enough to be manageable.

So a good example in the English language would be the Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warren. This series I find is just fantastic, in English of course. They were perfect material for my budding reader in English to develop his reading skills very, very quickly in English. And so they were really useful for that.

Short little books, perfectly written to be of interest to children, kind of fluffy, predictable for us as adults but just the right level of language. I did find the first five or six of these translated into Spanish. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any more than those original five translated into Spanish.

But those first five are available in written Spanish and also on Audible with the Spanish audiobooks. And so these have been a stable, a standard part of our portfolio of the audiobooks. I play these over and over. The children don't yet seem to tire of them. And I have the audiobook with a really good narrator.

He speaks slowly, clearly, and they love the stories. The audiobook versions of these are under two hours start to finish. So I'm able to play them for the children when they're tired, when I don't want to read. I can put on the audiobook or we can have the written versions for those who are reading.

So use that as an example and consider it for your English readers or for your language learners in Spanish. That would be a good example. Now for those that are a little bit advanced or learning a little bit more. The next series that I found in print that made such a big difference was an Enid Blyton series in Spanish called Los Cinco.

In English it was originally published as The Famous Five. And it's the adventures and solving mysteries of these set of children and their dog. And my eldest just loved these. And so I wound up buying the entire Spanish translations of these books and the whole 21 set series. And he loved them.

They're about 150 to 170 pages each. And that made all the difference in his Spanish ability. I haven't been able to find these in audiobook versions. And so I hired a native Spanish speaker to create for me my own custom audiobooks. I hired her to simply read them, create a recording of them, and then I play that recording for my children.

Because my younger ones who are not readers, I want them to be exposed to the verbal language as well. And so that's something that I had to do because I couldn't find, I haven't been able to find great, really good Spanish audible material of what I am looking for.

In Spanish another series that I've been able to find is Los Felices Hollister, The Happy Hollisters. Which is another series of older children's books written back in the 1940s and 50s. And I was able to find a bunch of these. What was fantastic about being in Spain is the used bookstores, right?

I go into the used bookstores and that's where I can find them. I can find the series in five or six from this series, etc. And so that's been a phenomenal series. Now in France, similarly, I was able to find locally the materials that I needed. So the first set that I started buying was La Cabane Magique, the Magic Treehouse books in French.

And these have been the best. Written by Mary Pope Osborne, of course well loved in English. They're these simple adventure stories, relatively short of these children who play in a magic treehouse that transports them through time and through location to all kinds of different eras where they can see all kinds of different things.

This is perfect. This is perfect language material for young students because the stories are interesting, they're simple and the prose is simple. And so even with my translation, because we're still at the point with French where I read in French, I translate to English, read in French, translate to English.

There are still lots of words that I don't know, but the words that I don't know, I only have to look them up about half the time because half the time I can get them in by context. For example, I also bought a bunch of books from another series that looked really cute when I was in France.

I bought the translations of, I think it was originally published in English as Dumpster Dog, in French it's Champory. And so I got these Champory books because they looked really cool, they looked interesting, great illustrations, looked like they would engage the children. But these are really bad language materials for this stage of our learning because the books are filled with language jokes.

They're filled with these little double entendres in the prose and so it makes it very difficult to read. I had to look up so many words in these books that it's frustrating and annoying. Someday we'll be ready for them, someday we'll understand the little inside language jokes, but at this point it's not great material.

But I was able to, in a bookstore in France, see the whole Treehouse, little Treehouse series of something like 30-something books right there available for sale on the shelf. I only started with the first five in person, but I will order the next 25 probably over the internet or I'll fly back to France and pick up the, clear out the bookshelves of it because this is perfect.

By the time I get through reading to my children this whole La Cabane Magique series, Magic Treehouse series, they'll speak French. And we'll probably do five of them with my translating and then the other 25 I'll just read them in French and without translation and their brains will pick it up.

And then the other thing that has happened which has been so great is that my eight-year-old reading child started picking them up and finishing them himself. And so again, my six-year-old is not yet reading, still working on it in English and then my younger children are not yet reading.

But I just salted these books all around in the house and my eight-year-old picked them up and started reading through them. And I have no idea, I cannot figure out what's going through his brain. I don't know and I don't test him on it, I don't try to suss it out, I just let it happen.

But he'll sit up and he enjoys the books even though I have no idea what percentage he's understanding. I have no idea what his internal accent is but he reads the whole books and he knows the story of the plot of the book and that's easy in a language like French.

Another series that I was able to find which was great is I was able to buy a bunch of that same Enid Blyton series called Le Club de Cinq, The Famous Five. And so I was able to start these and again these are perfect because now I can take a familiar story that they have read and loved in Spanish and now I can read it to them in French and it's long prose that simple stories that they'll be able to understand.

Then there was the Geronimo Stilton series, what was this in English? I guess it's just called the Geronimo Stilton series. The first one here is La Sorrida de Mona Sorrisa. So like the smile of Mona, I don't know what it says in English but the smile of Mona Lisa.

It's about some mice. So we haven't read this one yet but I also think this one's going to be pretty good. We'll see when we get through it because lots of good pictures but a simple story and lots of text that is narrative text where sentence follows sentence and it makes sense in their brains.

So if you are looking and you're working on a project of trying to teach your children a language and you're struggling for material, my answer to you is get on an airplane, go to the country where they speak your target language and start browsing around some bookstores in that country.

Look in new bookstores and/or look in used bookstores. I like the used bookstores because I like some of these older series. For example, I really like all of these old books from there was one syndicate, the Stratmire Syndicate who published all these novels, the Hardy Boys, the Nancy Drew, the Bobsey Twins, those were all published by the Stratmire Syndicate.

And when there's foreign language translations of these, I think that these are really ideal material because they're older, they're quaint, they're simple and my children really enjoy them. Lots of newer stuff is available too. I'm very satisfied with these series that I have found and they're just making all the difference.

And so this was a major boost to us. We struggled in the first four or five months of the year. In fact, for about two months, I just kind of gave up the French project because I knew I was like I need books but I don't have them. We're going to France in the summer, we'll get them there and then we'll pick up the project.

And so since being in France where we started reading and I started reading to them every day, by the way, the way that I do it is breakfast, lunch and dinner. When we finish breakfast, I read as they're finishing because they eat slower than I do. I eat and then I read a chapter of the book and then lunch, when I have lunch with them, eat, read a chapter of the book.

At dinner time, same kind of thing and then sometimes we'll read more at night during our reading time. So it's been great and so I'm much more optimistic about the progress that we are making and that we will make. And it was well worth our visit to France to be able to raid the bookstores and come home with a couple suitcases full of books.

This makes all the difference in the world. I still struggle to figure out how to buy this stuff on Amazon. Even now that I know the titles, that was another big thing, I took lots of pictures of all the titles that I found in the bookstore. I was like, I can find these on Amazon.

It's hard to get these things shipped even though you would think it's simple to get it shipped from France or from Spain to me, it's hard to get it shipped. And it's hard to train others to know how to shop for you. I had friends of mine in Spain that I would say, listen, this is what I'm looking for, can you go and find it for me?

But I can't articulate it because I don't know the names. So, point is that if you are on this kind of adventure for yourself and your family, that's what I am looking for. We're making good progress. I'll report back in the future and we'll see what kind of progress we can make with French.

But once again, now that I have finally found the right materials, graded readers were fine for a time. I bought more graded readers in a couple of bookstores as well. I'm not throwing those aside. But now that I've found these right materials, we're making really good progress. And I'm so excited about it.

And I hope that we'll continue. And I'll share the successes and the failures with you. Thank you for listening. And I'll be back with you soon with more serious in-depth content as soon as I'm able to create it for you. Do more together this holiday in a new Chevy.

Take on more adventure in the strong and capable Chevy Silverado. More confidence in the Chevy Equinox. Winner of the J.D. Power Award for Initial Quality Among Compact SUVs, 2 years running. And more value in the all-new Chevy Trax with an available 11-inch diagonal touchscreen. Spend the holidays together in a new Chevy.

Click to learn more. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. For J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Initial Quality Study Award information, visit jdpower.com/awards.