Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's 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, and this is Radical Personal Finance.

And on Fridays here at the show, we do live Q&A. Open phone lines, you call in, talk about anything that you want. We chat about how to live a rich life now and build freedom fast. Each Friday that I can arrange the appropriate recording technology and equipment to be able to record this podcast.

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Looks like I got one, two, three, four, five callers on the line right now. We'll see who else jumps on, but we begin with James. James, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Appreciate you taking my call today. Let me mute my background noises real quick.

All right, there we go. So my question is around blogging. I do a weekly blog that is focused on what I read about history and what I observe from watching movies, taking in popular culture. It's all about giving lessons in leadership and personal growth. And I was curious for your take on how I would think about growing my blog audience.

Right now it's mostly just close friends and a few people I work with, about 60 people that I send a newsletter to each week. And I'd like to grow the audience to several hundred people and kind of start to grow an online community. And you've got a great thriving community with Radical Personal Finance and so a lot of experience with that.

And so I'd just be kind of curious with how you would approach that question. That's a good question. So first of all, let's confirm that blogging is the right medium for you to be focused on. Does writing long form content, does that fit your skills and interests? Yeah. So right now the blog is short form, about 200 to 400 words per piece.

So I guess that would be kind of more medium form. So if I were writing 200 to 400 word essays, I would not write a blog, nor would I host that kind of writing on a blog. I would host that kind of writing on Twitter threads. That would be kind of the ideal scenario for Twitter threads.

And there are plenty of people on Twitter who write about, give their insights on history, current events, et cetera, using in a relatively short format like that, 200 to 400 pages. Sorry, let me rephrase, 200 to 400 words. And I think Twitter there is your most interesting methodology. And this is very current.

So I believe that blogs can be very useful. However, blogs are kind of a 10-year-old technology that I think still have their places, but are not the current and cutting edge. Right now Twitter is amplifying massively threads. People like to read Twitter threads. They like to observe them. There's a very good reading experience.

And most of the time, people who are on Twitter really get annoyed by having to leave to go read some blog when they could turn it into a thread. And so if your writing is medium form like that, or I would say short form, 200 to 400 words, to me that's an ideal format to just simply go with the native platform and share your thoughts there.

It doesn't mean you can't also blog it. It just means that if I had an essay that I wrote for 200 to 400 words, I would also take that essay to Twitter and I would start publishing that as a Twitter thread. I think that if you're going to build a blog, there has to be a reason why that blog itself is the best kind of platform for you to engage in.

And there needs to be some strategy as to why a blog is the best strategy. If you're focusing on writing, you want to start by saying, "Why am I writing?" So let me just ask you, why is James choosing to take his time and spend his time writing these essays?

Why is James doing that? Right. My reasons are I love drawing connections between what I read from history, my own experience, and in dramatic movies and stuff, and then seeing how can we take those principles of leadership and personal growth and grow from them and become better people. And so what I want to do is to, what I've been using the blog for is an outlet for that passion and I love to reach as broad an audience with my ideas as possible.

Okay. All right. Do you have any ambition to earn money with this in some way or to support your personal brand in some way? So I don't have any ambition to make it a living, but it would be nice to make at least a little bit of money to cover my costs with it.

But your costs are nothing, right? $10 a month. I mean, there's no big cost here. Right. Right. Okay. So I just tell you that if you don't care enough, the cost thing to me seems silly. Like when people say, "Oh, help us cover the cost." If you don't care enough about what you're saying to pay for your domain name, annual registration at $14.99 per year and pay whatever, a few bucks a month for web hosting if you have it, you don't believe in your ideas enough.

I mean, any of us should easily be able to support $50 a month of costs just for the value of our ideas. To me, that's a negligible thing. And I think that you can use your writing in many ways to support yourself. There have always been writers who have been able to make a living directly from their writing.

And today, it's actually easier than it has been in the past. Right? I subscribe to a not insignificant number of writers on Substack. I have a number of different Substack subscriptions. These are people who, many of them are anonymous, and I like their writing. I want to pay for it and I want them to write.

And so I subscribe to their Substack. So for a writer right now today, and there have been previous platforms, there are other platforms, but for a writer today, it's never been easier to actually monetize your writing directly. And again, the leader in this right now is Substack. I think that, let's talk through some of the strategic issues.

So first of all, it's very difficult to get people to come to your corner of the universe unless your stuff is really, really good. I want you to imagine that right now, as I record this, I am in the great state of Tennessee. So I'm driving through the hills of Tennessee doing a couple things here.

And I want you to imagine that you have a little farm, a little 10-acre farm out in the woods of Tennessee. You can put up, maybe you might make the very best, you might be the best storyteller in Tennessee. In fact, you might be the best storyteller in the whole world.

But if you're going to sit on your front porch and tell stories, the number of people who you're going to reach with your stories is exceedingly small. Now you might have some neighbors around, right? There's a guy who lives in the next hall or over that he comes by in the evening and he'll sit out on your front porch and he'll listen to your stories.

And that guy has a brother-in-law that he says, "Man, you ought to come and listen to James tell his stories. He's really got some great stuff. You're really going to want to hear him." And so you can have a few people and you might wind up with three or four people that you know personally or who happen to be in your part of the valley who know that you're a good storyteller who will come and listen to you.

But it's very unlikely that those people are going to be able to amplify your message very much. You might be a world-class storyteller, but your neighbor is almost certainly not a writer for the New York Times, right? Your next-door neighbor is almost certainly not a guy with a million Twitter followers who will say, "Hey, listen, James is one of the best storytellers." And so you're not going to be able to attract an audience to your little farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee.

And that's what a blog is, right? A blog is a little farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, and nobody's going to come to that blog by accident. Now can it be found? Well yeah, maybe one day there happens to be a writer for the New York Times, an editor for the New York Times who's on a road trip through Tennessee.

His car breaks down and he's hiking through the woods trying to find help from a nearby farmhouse, and in the evening he comes up to your front porch and you're sitting out there with your corncob pipe telling stories to three of your neighbors, and he listens from the gathering dusk and he's like, "Man, this James guy is an amazing storyteller." And then he comes up and after you finish your story he says, "James, that was fantastic." And then you help him fix his car and get it back on the road, and then when he goes back to New York City he happens to go ahead and write an article about how there's this guy named James telling stories in the middle of Tennessee, and he tells you about—and then some people start to find you, right?

And eventually people start to come, and then when more and more cars are parked by the road then it becomes a thing. And so this is the model that a lot of people have. They think if I'm just sitting out in the wilderness telling my stories people will come.

If I build it and I'm good enough people will come. There was a day in which blogs themselves were more findable, right? This was the early days of web searches, and so if your content was well suited to be scraped by the crawlers who would find your content they would send people to your blog.

But all of those things have changed over the past years, and because they have all changed you have to make a difference. So the first thing I would say is if you have a message that you want to get out and you want to tell stories it makes far more sense for you to leave the rural farm and much more sense for you to go where the people are.

And so maybe you go into downtown Nashville, Tennessee and you start telling stories from the town square. Well you've just increased dramatically the opportunity that you have for people to actually hear you. And so that's what telling stories directly on social media is. So each of the media platforms that you have, you have Twitter, you have Facebook, you have LinkedIn, each of these and others as well, right?

There are plenty of other niche sites. Medium would be a better example of one that could be very useful. But each of these places is like a big town square where there are lots of people gathered there. And so if you simply take your insights and you take your messages to those platforms there's a better chance that people will be able to find you because you're native on the platform.

In addition though what you can do with those platforms is you can go and find the conversations already happening. If you imagine yourself as a street preacher, a street preacher would have a hard time, usually has a hard time attracting an audience. Standing on the street corner preaching about Jesus is coming soon and you need to stand there and you need to repent.

A few people will stop and listen to him. But if a preacher will go and find where something is happening and find something relevant, will find a place where people are gathered together and then start preaching, then there would be more likely that people will listen to him because he has something to say that's relevant.

So this is what social media does. So if you're on Twitter and you observe how, you know what, there was just this election happening in Virginia and we see the leadership lessons, the good things and the bad things from this election, and you go and you start posting about topics that are very current, that's what Twitter wants.

It wants to be very current. And then in addition to that you can go and you can find the places where people are already talking about this stuff and you start talking to them about it. You start responding, replying, sharing, etc. And so you respond to a guy who makes a good point.

You reply back with some thoughtful comment, expand the conversation. He clicks on your profile, starts reading your threads, and he hits subscribe. Now that he's hit subscribe, your subscriber base starts growing and then more and more people will start to see your content and Twitter starts to amplify it across the platform as hey, this is a guy that you might want to be seen.

And so you comment on trending topics and you show up in people's explore tab when they're just aimlessly flipping through. And so I think that there's no way to get around that. That should be your first step. And for much of your content, even if you just hosted it natively on the platform, that's really the best situation.

Don't go to LinkedIn and post a link to your blog. Just go and take your blog and post it into LinkedIn if it's related in some way to leadership and you're posting on your LinkedIn profile. Same thing on Facebook. Now text is not featured heavily right now by Facebook.

Video is king. Pictures are queen and text comes in at a very distant last. But still, it still is more powerful for you to post an actual post, an essay natively into Facebook than to post a link outside of Facebook to your Facebook profile. So I would build that.

And then the other thing that you can do is take some of your content and go to platforms that have a larger web presence. So let's say that you have your personal blog. What you should additionally do though is you should additionally be taking some articles that you would otherwise post on your personal blog and post them to Medium.

Why? Well because Medium has a much bigger presence. It's much more likely to show up in the searches. And so if someone's searching about something that's current, then the Medium search results will come up higher in the list than will whatever your personal URL is. So these are just the tip of the iceberg.

But I think the first thing is don't spend your time telling stories on your front porch in the middle of nowhere. First go to the places where there already are people and start telling your stories there, sharing your insights there. And then from time to time go ahead and refer them back to your front porch, your personal blog.

And that should be, you know, at this, when you're beginning that should be 20% of what you're doing. In the very beginning 80% of your time and effort should be finding people out there and building up followings in the other space with 20% of your time spent building your own real estate.

Then as you are able to send more people to your real estate, then you focus more on your own personal real estate and start moving people in that direction. So that's how I view it, James. Go ahead. Sure. Yeah, just like that right now I share links to the blog on like LinkedIn, but I don't post it directly on LinkedIn.

So I think, and then I don't have any presence on Twitter right now. So those are, you know, two good action steps I could go ahead and take with it. Remember that you're trying to make things as seamless as possible for your readers. And most readers don't want to go outside of the native platform.

When I'm on Twitter, right, and I spend a lot of time on Twitter, when I am on Twitter, it's very unlike, I don't want to post on an, I don't want to click on an outside link. Now I do it, I do it, but I often don't want to post on, click on an outside link unless there's some real value.

So for a 200 word essay, there's no real value of my clicking on that. Just put that as a Twitter thread for me where I can just bookmark it right on Twitter. Now a 6,000 word essay, don't post that on Twitter. Post that on your blog and then create a Twitter thread telling me the basic ideas and then referring me to your 6,000 word essay where I can go for the long form content.

But you'll just have, you'll have far more, find the most popular people talking about your subjects. Find the people who have the big followings, et cetera, who have the conversations and just start genuinely adding to those conversations. That's the best way for you to start building your public platform.

Yeah, that sounds good. Thanks for the advice, Joshua. My pleasure. All right, we move on to Derek. Derek, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, is this the right Derek? That's the right Derek. Go ahead, sir. Okay, sorry. Hey, so I had a couple of questions.

I'll try to be quick on both. One is regarding the topic of, I'm sure you've been dealing with this with clients, but we bought a house two years ago in New Hampshire. And as you might imagine, it's gone up quite significantly in value. And I was wondering if you've come across any topics lately about people taking advantage of that or leaving that alone because of where that might be going or what you consider good opportunities.

We bought at around 455K and it's just a Zillow score, but they're saying it's like 600K at this point, just after two years, which is mind-numbing and crazy to me. But that's what they're saying. And then the other topic was just about general business starting and some threads to go down as far as if I wanted to start a business and I have a certain amount of capital potentially related to the first question.

So I guess with the first one, have you been talking to a lot of folks about their houses going up in price recently and taking advantage of that? Yeah. So let's talk about the first one and then call back next Friday for the second one and we can deal with that in more detail.

But let me give you a couple of frameworks to consider this. The first thing I would say is look at your house and ask yourself, is this house an investment or is this house a home? Either is fine. A home can be a wonderful investment, but I think there's a different way that you look at it and you operate differently.

If you buy a house as an investment, then it really doesn't have much emotional meaning to you. It's not something that figures into your long-term future. It's just a matter of the money. On the other hand, a home can mean many more things. And when I was younger, I discounted the value of those things more than I do now.

I increasingly see the value of having the home place. I increasingly see the value of being invested into the place that you love. In fact, I think that investing into the place that you live and transforming it into a place that you love is a fundamental component of actually living rich.

A number of years ago, I read the great book that Michael Masterson wrote on basically how to live rich. And he talked through – it's a topic that of course I love. My show was about how to live rich now. And his experience as a wealthy man, he was talking about here's how you live like a rich man.

And it was a very tactical book. He talked through the kind of mattress that you live in, the kind of car you should drive, the kind of clothes that you should wear, the kind of music you should listen to, the kind of house that you should live in. And his basic argument in the house that you should live in was that if you want to live rich, you want to live like a rich man with regard to your house, you certainly should choose a house, a neighborhood, et cetera, that fits you, that likes you.

But the reality is what makes a house the house that a rich man owns is not how ostentatious it is. You can go and you can buy a flashy ostentatious house that feels completely soulless. What makes a house feel rich is when that house is personalized to you. It reflects your life.

And that can be your style. Yes, you spent $100,000 to redo the kitchen, but you redid it the way that you like a kitchen to be. It can be the art that's on the walls or the books on the bookshelves, but it should be your house. It reflects you and your personality.

And I just appreciate that more and more and more. I feel like there's real value to that, and that in the US American culture where we move so much, we often diminish the value of having the home place, having the place that we love because it's ours, it reflects us.

And so in that situation, if you're living in a home that is a good candidate, it has the bare bones that you want, and it's the neighborhood that you like, and it has the structure, then I would ignore the nominal value of the home. Why? Well, because your house is increased in value from $455,000 to $600,000, but that means that if you sell it, the house that was $600,000 a few years ago is now $800,000.

And so if you just sell it and move up, you're going to wind up having the same general inflation that all of the home values have had. And so I think that if it's your home, you basically ignore the nominal value, ignore the nominal price, and recognize that if you're buying and selling in the same market, it's not a deal for you to sell.

And in fact, you're going to incur a whole bunch of expenses, realtor expenses, financing costs, moving costs, the disruption in your life, the time involved packing all your stuff and getting the next house just right and getting the next house's furniture fit because your previous furniture doesn't fit the room quite so well.

I think that if it's your home, you ignore the nominal value and just simply keep it. Now, if it's an investment, here are the arguments in favor of you going ahead and selling. To begin with, you look and say, "Is the increase in my home value due to this particular property or due to the general market?" So if you bought the house for $455,000 and you could sell it today for $600,000, but every other house that you're going to buy has also had the similar increase in value, it's not that much of a deal for you to upgrade.

You're going to wind up with a larger mortgage. You're going to wind up with higher property taxes. You're going to wind up with your own expenses going up. You might as well just sit with the $455,000 house. On the other hand, if you bought a house strategically, maybe you forced up the value a little bit by fixing up something that was messed up, or you bought a house that was strategically growing because it was an attractive neighborhood, and if you have some arbitrage opportunity, then absolutely it can work well.

So I guess the question is, do you have an arbitrage opportunity? Do you have an opportunity to move from a neighborhood that's increasing value to the neighborhood that's going to increase in value next? Do you have an arbitrage opportunity to move from one house to a significantly better house that you've got an angle on?

Do you have an arbitrage opportunity to move from one state to another state? Do you have an arbitrage opportunity to sell now, take some tax-free money, and then wait for a downturn in your neighborhood because your market is artificially inflated in terms of the demand? These are all dangerous games, meaning they're not guaranteed.

You can be priced out of the market fairly quickly, but if you're wrong, and I'll just give you an example, in 2017, I sold the house that I was living in at that time, and I sold it because I wanted to sell it and I didn't want to own a house, but I thought that I was – excuse me, I guess it was 2016.

I sold it because I didn't want to own a house at that point in time, but I had a good bit of appreciation. I wanted to take some profits off the market, and I wanted to move and change my living situation. But I did think that there was going to be a decline in real estate prices in the next year or so.

So I thought, "You know what? Maybe I'm selling six months early, but I'd rather be six months early than six days late," because I thought prices are getting high. I think there's going to be a correction. I think there's going to be a major change. I thought that. I was wrong.

Then I thought, "Okay, 2017, there'll probably be a recession." I was wrong. 2018, yeah, I was still wrong. 2019, there's got to be a recession. Nope, wrong. 2020, all right, maybe there's not going to be a recession, but it's still possible. But then the recession came in 2020. And then two weeks later, the recession was over, and housing prices in my market had not changed at all.

And so now, here we are in 2021. I don't want to own a house, but I've been house shopping. And so I've looked at it, and I'm fascinated to see so many people are priced out of the market. Thankfully, I'm not personally, because I make excellent money, and I'm not broke.

But I've watched, if I didn't make good money, if I were broke, I would be priced out of the market. I have a friend of mine that I've given advice, right? Had a house, sold his house, wanted to get cashed in, right? But now, he's trying to move back to the same place, but he spent the money, and he's priced out of the market.

He's not going to be able to live there because he's priced out. So you got to be clear on your plan and understand, "Okay, if I'm going to play this strategically, how am I going to make sure that it's a win-win?" And I do think that selling, locking in profits, especially tax-free profits with the sale of a house, I think that these are all really good options, but you need to be clear that you're going to invest the money into something better.

Otherwise, often, the expenses are higher than you think, the expenses of time, mental energy, et cetera, and often it's best just to sit tight until your plan changes. Sure. Yeah, so I was actually going, what you were saying was interesting to me, so I didn't stop you. The route that I was kind of trying to lean you towards was not keeping versus selling.

It was more along the lines of opportunities associated with refinancing. But your answer to the first use case of living richly in the house and investing in it, it kind of affirms one of the two routes that I was taking on, taking the $150K, $120K, whatever, and putting it back into the house to make it more...

Because I think that we overpaid for the house. It's not as updated as it probably should have been even back in 2019, but there's definitely a lot that I could do with $120,000 to put it back into the house. And this is definitely a home for us. Good. In fact, we've actually taken on...

We've moved up my parents-in-law to live with us from Philadelphia, and that's been its own adventure, as you might imagine, but we're building quite a location here, I think, as far as inside the house. But you've definitely affirmed the idea of reinvesting into it with the increase in value for me.

If you have the money and it's not going to cost you... If you have the money, then definitely you should reinvest into the home. Number one, this is a very good investment. Investing into your personal residence is a very good investment for most people, and it's an investment that has benefits.

The financing costs of your own residence in the United States, very inexpensive. The tax benefits, massive. The security, the protection from difficult real estate situations are substantial, even including foreclosure. So even if you got into stress, you definitely want to be foreclosed on a house that you own and live in, rather than a rental house, in terms of your legal protections and the bank's willingness to work with you.

And so if you can spend some money and update it, go ahead and borrow it out at low rates, et cetera, and update the house, then do it. And do it while you can enjoy it. One of the things that a lot of us tend to do is we wait until we're ready to list the house or we're going to sell the house a year from now, and then we start spending money left and right, fixing the house up, getting ready for the buyer.

Well, in that case, you don't get to enjoy it because you deal with months and months of construction hassle, and then the house is wonderful, and then you're gone. Fix the house up when you move into it so that you can enjoy the updates, and you'll get more use of your money.

Thank you very much. That was a great thinking on your part. Great to meet you. Good, my pleasure. Call in next week, and we will talk about your business question. All right, move on to John. John, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. We're delighted to serve you today.

Hi, Joshua. I have a question about moving cash around physically. I had a friend a month or so back who had a loss of their, I think it was a grandmother. And the grandmother was moving across country to be with the kids. And she didn't know much about their finances, but the grandfather had a substantial amount of cash in his safe deposit box, presumably for a specific reason, which I kind of thought of, maybe they shouldn't put that money in the bank to transfer it.

Maybe they should just physically move it. I'm not sure what they really did. I didn't really follow up, but it kind of brought that question to me about how would you, not crossing international borders, just going a far physical distance away within the United States, what would be the best way to move that money, if not just physically transporting the cash, which can be bulky, not really educated on the transition costs, carrying things to gold and back to make it more compact, or things like, obviously, there's Bitcoin, if it's a short term, maybe that's a viable way to transfer the value across the country.

But what would your take on that be? I think the value, by the way, was somewhere, my best guess from talking to them was somewhere in the range of like 50,000 to, I don't know, I can't imagine it was over 250,000, but I'd say it's somewhere in that range.

So 50 to $250,000 is not that big of a deal, right? This is money that can fit into a small, a few envelopes, more than a few envelopes. Right, well, a van full of cash. It's not that much, right? If we're talking millions of dollars of cash, then it gets very different.

But 50 to $250,000 is not that big of a deal. So I'll give you two, the two methods that work is to take it, and you can take it, you can take it on an airplane, you can take it on a car. I'll talk to you about the advantages and disadvantages of both, and/or to mail it.

And mailing it is a very good way of sending cash as well. So I'll describe both of these, both of these things, and I'll give you the rules that you would follow if you chose one or the other. To begin with, there is nothing illegal about having and moving around with significant amounts of cash.

There is no law being broken. There's nothing illegal about it. The concern that there is, is one small concern, and that concern is confiscation by a police officer. That is the concern. Now here, it's hard because that concern can be quite overblown, right? I did a show, I talked about this in a podcast recently where I explained how, when a police officer confiscates money, I'm blanking on, what is it called, the seizure, help me out John, what is the term, the technical term?

>>John: I think it's just seizure of assets. >>Steven: Yeah, but there's a technical, it'll come to me in a moment as I'm speaking. But there is a seizure process that the, this is bugging me, hold on a second. >>John: It's the end of the show, so you'll have to remember.

>>Steven Yeah, okay. So, civil asset forfeiture, and sorry for the blip, I bumped the wrong button on my recorder in just 20 seconds while I was looking it up. Civil asset forfeiture. The term is civil asset forfeiture. So what is civil asset forfeiture? In the United States, in most states, there's one or two minor exceptions like the state of Maine, et cetera.

But in the United States, there is a risk of what's called civil asset forfeiture. Basically, if a police officer comes into contact with a large amount of currency, physical currency, that police officer can seize the currency until or unless you can prove its legal provenance, right? You can prove how you came by it legally.

That's the law. Now, this law is the worst civil asset, one of the worst civil rights abuses right now in the United States that happens. But how often does it happen? It's not, I don't know how to describe it, right? It happens frequently, but it's not like every police officer is out there searching every person and saying, "Oh, here, you have 20 bucks on you.

This is gone." So what are the rules, right? Well, the first thing is generally $5,000 is considered to be the number. So if you're in possession of more than $5,000 of physical currency, you wind up having a risk to the possession of that currency, and it could be subject to civil asset forfeiture.

But most police officers, first, they're not going to come into contact with it. Number two, they're not necessarily going to take it, especially if you've got a good explanation. So if you look like a drug dealer, you smell like a drug dealer, and you've got a suitcase full of cash like a drug dealer, yeah, they're going to take it.

And then you're going to have to sue them to get it back. And the suing process is a real hassle because you have to prove it to their satisfaction order for them to get it right. You're not innocent until proven guilty. You're guilty until you can prove that you're innocent.

So it is a serious risk, but we also have to put it into a framework of recognizing that it's not like you could just never carry $50,000 in a bag. You could carry $50,000 in a bag. But that is the risk. That's what you have to be concerned about is the civil asset forfeiture.

So what would you do? Well, if you wanted to move $200,000 of currency from one side of the country to the other, you have two ways to get-- again, we're going to talk about taking it there and then mailing it there. The other way would be taking it there in a car.

So you say, I'm going to drive from one side of the country to the other. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. There's no law being broken. You're not doing anything suspicious. It's your money. You can do whatever you want with it. So what could you do in order to improve the likelihood of your getting it to the other side of the country without it being seized by the police?

The first thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that there are no indications on your car that would wind up having you run a risk of being pulled over. So the first thing that you do is you check your automobile, and you make sure that your automobile is a legal automobile.

By legal, I mean it doesn't have green-colored lights on the front, which in some states would be illegal. By legal, I mean it doesn't have a radar detector sitting in the window, which in a couple of states is illegal, and it gives them cause for them to pull you over.

By legal, I mean it doesn't have tinting that's too dark, which a police officer can pull you over because the tinting is too dark. By legal, I mean that the lights work. There's two lights on the license plate. The license plate is not obscured. It doesn't have a border around it.

You can't have a border or a cover, even a translucent cover on a license plate in most states. By legal, I mean all the lights work. By legal, I mean you have tires that have the proper amount of tread that are properly inflated. By legal, I mean your car is not covered in Bondo and sagging at the back because one of the shocks is broken.

It's just a normal, appropriate automobile. If you will drive a normal, appropriate automobile without all of these indications of your being either poor or a crook or having some weird thing going on, "Hey, the back of that car is too low," then your likelihood of being targeted by the police is extremely low.

You definitely don't want to load up three of your buddies and drive across the country with four of you sitting in a car, crew cab style, when you have a bunch of cash. That is a major reason why a police will pull you over. They'll pull you over because there's four guys in a car, especially if you're young.

If you've got four guys riding crew cab style in a car, you're going to be pulled over because there's a very good chance that a police officer can find a warrant on one of you. You go with a couple or one person or a family, not four young males in a car.

The next thing is you just drive appropriately. You drive the speed limit. Probably best in most places, three and a half miles an hour over the speed limit. You drive safely. If you speed, you can get pulled over. If you go too slow, you can get pulled over. If you drive too carefully, if the speed limit is 60 miles an hour and you're driving 60 miles an hour, you can get pulled over because this guy is driving too carefully.

He's probably trying to hide something. If you don't run a stop sign, you just drive properly and your chances of being pulled over are very, very low. You should prepare for being pulled over. What do you need to do to prepare for being pulled over? Make sure that the car has a clean title, that it's not wanted by somebody, that it wasn't stolen, it doesn't have a stolen tag because then it alerts on some automatic license plate reader system, "Hey, there's a stolen car.

Get pulled over." If there's any question about there being some kind of problem with your car, you got a problem. Make sure that you don't have any warrants. Check your driver's license. Make sure there's no warrants out for your arrest. Make sure there's no giant stack of unpaid parking tickets, et cetera.

If a police officer pulls you over and runs your driver's license, that there's no problem there. Make sure that you're clean driver record and a clean car. Then you want to prepare your automobile defensively in case of search and/or seizure by the police. What do you do? First, you want to make sure that your automobile is clean, that there's no reason why a police officer would want to search your car.

It would be a good idea not to carry around a gun visible on the back seat. Police officer walking up to your car, sees a gun sitting there, that's a problem. Or any indications of that, spent ammo or something like that. It'd be a good idea not to have to make sure that your car is clean of drugs so there's no odor of marijuana coming out of the car.

You want to make sure that there's no reason that would create a suspicion in an officer's mind. In order for an officer to search your vehicle without permission, which we'll get to in a moment, the officer needs some level of reasonable articulable suspicion for some searches and/or some level of probable cause.

With probable cause, the officer can search your vehicle. You eliminate anything that could lead to probable cause or its junior neighbor, reasonable articulable suspicion. You make sure that there's nothing there. I would drive with the vehicle totally empty inside. Or if you had something, it would be something innocuous.

It would be a car seat strapped in the back. Something innocuous, not full of junk, not full of things that go, "What's that down there? Does that look like a marijuana roach down there?" Things like that. Make sure the car is clean and empty. Doesn't say too much of a story about you.

You want your cash to be in a locked container in a separate locked compartment of the car. Now, here I'll give you a couple of the things, but some of these are harder to do. But there are levels of search. When a police officer has searchability, the levels of search are based upon the amount of probable cause that he has.

For example, in any state of the United States, if you're walking down the street and a police officer stops you, the police officer can do what's called a Terry Frisk. A Terry Frisk is a very simple outside of the clothing pat down or wipe down to make sure that you're not carrying large obvious weapons.

This is where if a police officer says, "John, will you please step out of the car?" You step out of the car. A police officer has the right to search the outside of your clothing. This is known as a Terry Frisk for officer safety. What the police officer cannot do is start going through all your papers.

You can't pull out your wallet and start digging through your receipts to try to figure it out. This is a pat down for officer safety. Now if a police officer has additional cause, then that police officer's search—again, this is all without consent. If you give consent, it's all over.

But without concern, the officer's search can go farther. So let's say that the officer is concerned about officer safety and pulls you over on the side of the road and says, "John, step out of the car." The officer can do a Terry Frisk on your purse, can move you to the back of the car, and can do a quick visual inspection or maybe a quick look underneath the front seat, etc.

What the officer can't do is open up a locked trunk because the locked trunk is not a concern, is not a threat to officer safety. If the officer has probable cause that you might have some kind of illegal substance in your trunk, for example, if the officer has called out a canine unit and the canine—the dog has alerted to the presence of drugs in your trunk, now the officer has probable cause and can force the search of your vehicle with a warrant.

But if there's no probable cause, then what's in your trunk is not going to cause the officer any safety concerns. So you want to create separation. And you want to make sure that there is a locked container. In addition, you want to heighten your expectation of personal privacy. So if I were transporting the cash, I would get some sort of locked container.

It could be a locked briefcase. It could be a locked toolbox. It could be a locked Pelican case. It could be a locked—any kind of—anything that's locked because this adds weight to your legal argument that you have a heightened expectation of privacy. I would have a locked container, and then I would keep that locked container in a separate locked part of the vehicle.

So if you have a car with a trunk, that's ideal because you have a separate locked trunk. Now if you were doing this every day, if I were transporting cash for some business or something like this, maybe, for example, you are running a marijuana business in a state where marijuana—the sale of marijuana is legal.

Licensed marijuana dealers have a problem right now. Their trade has been deemed legal in certain states. They have a license from the state. They can have a marijuana dispensary, whether it be for medical marijuana or for recreational marijuana. So their business is legal in the state, but because marijuana possession is still illegal on a federal basis, they have a very difficult time getting bank accounts.

So let's pretend that I were running a very successful marijuana business and I hadn't hired an armed guard service to move my cash, which would be the obvious solution. What would I do? I would have a vehicle that has a locked trunk, and I would make sure that the trunk of that vehicle is on a separate key and that the remote release of that vehicle has been disabled.

So if you go back and you study police searches over the years, if a police officer has reason to search your car and there's a little trunk release there, then the officer can just pop the trunk release and can pop the trunk open and find whatever's in the trunk.

But if the trunk release has been disabled and the officer doesn't have a key for the trunk, well now he has to have a higher level of proof to get a warrant to actually impound the car. Years ago, there was a case, and I looked for this story. I read the story in one of the resources that I had found, but I looked for the case and I couldn't find it.

I read a story about a drug dealer, a guy, like on the street drug dealer, who carried cocaine in his car. But what he had done was he had installed a private safe in the trunk of his car, meaning just like a house safe. He had bolted it into the trunk of his car and he carried his cocaine that he was dealing in that safe in the trunk of his car.

Well it so happened that the drug dealer got pulled over, got arrested, and his car was impounded by the police. But it was impounded by the police and it was in the impound yard for several days while the police were trying to figure out how to get into it.

By the way, when you're arrested, then your car is searched either with a search incident to arrest or with an inventory search. When the police confiscate something, they do an inventory search of the car so they know what's in it. So this can put you in a vulnerable position.

So police did an inventory search of his car, but they couldn't get into the safe. They couldn't bring in the safe cracker to actually get into the safe. So the guy got out of prison within a couple of days. He bailed out, bonded out, et cetera. And he went and he got his car back and the police never found the cocaine that was in the safe in the guy's car.

So that's the basic concept that you're trying to follow, legally speaking, is you're establishing a heightened expectation of privacy and then you're putting in place these hurdles so that if you are subject to search non-voluntarily, that there's no reason why a police officer would be able to invade your privacy, which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, would be able to invade your privacy in order to confiscate, to find and then confiscate the cash.

So the final piece of all of this is you never consent to searches. You do not consent to searches. And so if you just simply know how to not consent to searches and you don't consent to searches, then this practice, while civil asset forfeiture is a legitimate threat, and I would be concerned driving across the country with $100,000 of physical currency in my back pocket, if you put these things into place, then there's virtually no chance that your cash would be actually confiscated.

Because in order for it to be confiscated, you would have to have come to the attention of a police officer, in addition to coming to the attention of the police officer, the police officer would have to have some sort of cause, some sort of probable cause for pulling you over in a traffic stop.

That police officer would have to have some kind of cause for forcing a search. If you refuse a search of your vehicle, then he has to have some kind of probable cause to get a search. If he's got probable cause to search inside of your vehicle, okay, maybe, but he's got no probable cause without a warrant to actually invade something like a locked container held inside of a locked container such as your trunk in a separate compartment from the vehicle because he cannot argue that there's any threat to officer safety from something that's held in a separate compartment of the vehicle.

So if you put that in place, that will exploit the laws that are in place for your protection and that will allow you to assert your constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy in your person's papers and effects against the police search. And I think in that situation it'd be very safe.

Now you also need to think about, okay, what would happen if this cash were actually confiscated from me? Can I prove in a court of law where it came from such that I can get it back? Good chance that probably not. You can't prove it right now. If this was your grandfather who 30 years ago sold a house to some guy for physical currency and he put the money into a safe or a safety deposit box at the bank, you probably don't have those records.

And so you would want to be very thoughtful about that. And if it's a concern, you take these more heightened steps. Now at the end of the day, I think it's still fairly safe. But if there were really a concern, then you would do multiple shipments, right? You would split it up.

Maybe you'd do $100,000 one time and $100,000 a second time. And so that all of your currency is not exposed to one potential confiscation. I think the risk is very low if you do all the stuff I've described, but it does still exist. Now, can you fly with it?

Absolutely. You absolutely can fly with it. So let me give you a couple of ways that you could do it. I don't think I would because when you pass through the airport system, you are giving up your personal rights to privacy to a degree. Generally this is not a problem, but you're generally giving up your personal right to privacy.

So if I were doing this, I absolutely would keep it on my person. And I have flown with significant amounts of cash, never $100,000 or even $50,000, but I've flown with tens of thousands of dollars of cash. And it's not that big of a deal. You do want to make sure that you find a way to secure it in your effect so that it's safe, so you don't just leave it somewhere, leave your bag somewhere accidentally.

But generally speaking, it's not that big of a deal. Why? Well, the time when you're most vulnerable is passing through a security checkpoint. But the TSA officers who are examining the security, who are studying the security thing, they're looking for bomb making, things that look like bombs, explosives, firearms, or edged weapons.

They're not looking for paper. So you can have just a stack of paper, and a stack of paper looks like a stack of paper. And as long as there's no other indications, the X-ray machine is not going to have any problem with it. They say there's drug residue on basically all physical currency.

I doubt that that's a real concern. And so I think that you're fine traveling with it. And the time at which somebody is most likely to see it, it really doesn't matter. In addition, TSA agents are not police. They're not in the business of, in the United States. Maybe in some other countries they're in the business of confiscating money, but in the United States they're not in the business of confiscating money.

And so there's nothing illegal about having it, but you do have a greater concern because it does exist. Now, if you had some kind of history in your past, let's say that you had a warrant out for your arrest or something like that, then absolutely that would be completely unacceptable.

It would be unacceptable because you have reasons to be brought to a police officer's attention. But me personally, I mean, I guess I'd be a little nervous at a hundred grand, but I wouldn't bother me too much to travel with 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars. And I would just look like the kind of person who had reason to have 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars.

I would secure it in my personal papers. I would make sure that it is in my bag, in a bag where it doesn't have to be opened up, kind of with stuff dumped into the bin exterior and just can be transported. I wouldn't try to hide it. I don't try to hide it when I travel with currency.

I want to make sure it's in a wallet, so it looks like it's a wallet. And so in that situation, I would have like a passport wallet with a zippered compartment where it's very clear that it's just sitting there. This is cash. And the TSA agents probably in many cases know what it is.

In the past, I have flown with things like travel money wallets, money belts, et cetera. Everyone knows, they know it's cash, but their job is not to find people with cash. Their job is not to be the IRS. Their job is not to be the customs officials, et cetera.

That's different at an international border. At an international border, when you go through a scanning device, there you have a customs agent and it is the customs agent's job to identify the cash. Now could you fly with it in checked luggage? Obviously this would be a kind of a foolish thing to do, but there are times, at other times when you may have other things that you need to, that are valuable like cash that you can't bring with you.

And so what I would encourage you to do in that situation in the United States is to fly with a firearm. So there is a way in US law that if you want to fly, you can fly with a locked suitcase and not one of those stupid TSA locks that every single security agent has access to and anybody who has a 3D printer or anybody who can go online can just simply download the schematics and file your own little key out of a piece of aluminum foil.

So if a suitcase has a TSA lock on it, that suitcase can be opened by practically anyone. It adds virtually no security whatsoever. You can buy all of the keys to those TSA locks easily online. But what you can do is you can put on a proper lock on your suitcase if you fly with a firearm.

And so let's say that you needed to travel from Pennsylvania to Florida with the cash and you wanted to, or with something else, again the cash I think should be on your person, but you wanted to travel with a locked suitcase. How do you do that? The answer is you fly with a gun.

Because the way that the law works on flying with a gun is you go to the airline, you need to have the gun unloaded, and it needs to be in a locked case. Now a lot of times you can see people fly with a visible gun case, but there's no clear requirement by the TSA on the specifics of that locked case, other than it has to be a locked case.

And by law, the lock must be a lock that the security agent does not have the key to. That's the law. I'll get to the actual practice in a moment. But the law is that you have to travel with a locked case the security agent does not have the key to.

So in this situation, the way it works is you go to the counter, you declare your gun, you say I'm flying from Pennsylvania to Florida, I'm flying with a gun today. You need to go and you need to demonstrate to the airline agent that the gun is unloaded and that the ammunition is held in a separate box case and the gun is unloaded.

Then you're supposed to be conducted to a private security checking. So you have an agent that does a private security scan, verifies the firearm, then in the presence of the security officer, you close the case, you lock the case, and then the bag is sent through checked baggage. That's the law.

And then that bag cannot be opened again by law until you're at the other end. Now what happens when people do this is about half the time, the security agents will want to open the bag again and they wind up cutting the lock off with the bolt cutters or cutting the case apart to get into it, etc.

And so while that is the law, the law seems to be very poorly applied in most circumstances. And many times when people travel with guns, they wind up having their cases opened and their locks tested. But if you're traveling with things, right, where you have a bunch of electronics, you're traveling with 30 iPhones or something like that that you have to transport to an event or a bunch of computers or etc.

This is your secret, is fly with a gun. Now here's what's interesting. There may be times where you may not actually want to have a gun. You might be flying from Florida into JFK, right, and you're going to be in downtown Manhattan, and your destination is in Manhattan. Well that would be, in Florida you might be fine with your Glock 19 that you carry all the time, and if you were flying from Florida to Texas, then of course you'd have your Glock 19 that you could carry in Texas and in Florida.

But that's very troublesome in Manhattan. So how do you fly with a gun? If you read the TSA regulations on what is characterized as a gun, it includes a number of important pieces. So the key ones are replica pistols are often characterized as a gun. So if you have some kind of stage replica, not the kind of stage replica that Alec Baldwin might be holding and playing with and shooting people with, but rather a stage replica that doesn't actually accept ammunition.

You can do a starter pistol, and a starter pistol won't accept live rounds, but some kind of stage replica will work, and that can often get around the rules of a very restrictive place like Manhattan. In addition, my two favorites are a flare pistol, so a flare pistol for like boating safety.

A flare pistol, even an empty flare pistol with no flares with you, that is legally speaking a gun. And so if I were wanting to do that, I would have a flare pistol, bright orange safety flare pistol, no ammunition, so I don't have any explosives, and I would go up to the agent and I would say, "I'm flying with a firearm.

Here's the firearm," and the whole legal process applies, but you don't have to necessarily travel with your Glock 19. In addition, kind of the final piece is you could take a modular firearm like an AR-15, and the legal firearm piece of an AR-15 is the lower, right? So you could just take an AR-15 lower, which is, for the uninitiated, simply a piece of metal that has a trigger assembly on it, but there's no barrel.

It doesn't accept a magazine. There's no stock. It's just a hunk of metal ground out, but it has a serial number on it. Because that piece has the serial number on it, that is technically considered a firearm. And so you could grab yourself a $30 or $50 lower, and that's a gun, and now you can use that gun to actually secure your suitcase and actually travel through an airport with it.

And so those are my tips. So I don't think you should do cash, but if other people have valuable items that they did need to actually run the risk of checking, those are some of the tips for you. I would encourage you, though, not to check items that are valuable if you can possibly avoid it, because those who have done this and are doing it, again, frequently, even when the person uses high-quality locks, a high-quality locked case, et cetera, they wind up having their items opened, their locks cut off, their cases destroyed.

Sometimes they can't get the locks cut off, and so they just destroy the case to get it open. So you're not supposed to do that, but that's what is happening now when people are doing it. Finally, let's talk about mailing money. Mailing money is a really good way of moving money.

Now in this case, I would use the US Postal Service, not FedEx or UPS, because you actually have more protection from the US Postal Service than you do with FedEx and UPS. First of all, FedEx and UPS are spies for the US government, and they are charged with reporting anything that is suspicious to the US government.

They scan all documents, all packages, et cetera, and if they are aware of something, you grab a FedEx envelope and you put $100,000 of cash in the FedEx envelope, it's not going to make it to its destination. It will be referred to a federal agent of some kind for investigation, so you cannot use one of those.

But USPS is actually good. First of all, there's good legal protections for the US Postal Service. Those legal protections are that it's only the Postmaster General and the US Postal Inspectors who are legally allowed to open mail. One technique that you can do, which is legally speaking, if you have very important documents, and in this case, one of the tools that you could use, if I were flying with mail, is if you secure those documents in an envelope that is addressed, properly addressed from you to a recipient, properly stamped, some people argue that that mail is protected even from search by law, from search by regular police officers, et cetera, because legally speaking it's supposed to be the Postmaster General and/or the Postal Inspectors who can access the contents of that mail.

I'm not aware of ever having that having been tested. I don't know if that's ever actually been tested, if anyone's ever sued it. I just know that technically speaking, that's a little loophole that I've read about that is supposed to be in case, and if I were flying with $100,000 cash, I would make sure that that's probably one of the wrappers that I put on the cash to protect it for all the reasons that I've just said.

But beyond that, the point is that mail that's in transit is secure. Now would I send all of it in one envelope? Absolutely not, but you can very easily, even just sending $100 bills, you can pretty easily send a couple thousand dollars in first class mail and it's really reliable.

It's pretty good. So in that situation, what do you do? Well you make sure that you cut out, remember mail's going to be scanned and it's going to be scanned both by the US Postal Service machines in the United States. By the way, a couple of quick things on mail security.

In the United States, all mail is scanned and those scans are saved. So you have the sender and the recipient of all mail is scanned and stored in a database. And then in addition, the actual envelopes are scanned. And if there's some reason why the Postal Service has a reason to open your mail, they can do that.

And then of course, the mail could be scanned by somebody individually who's trying to steal from a mailbox. Your aunt receives her social security check in the mail. Somebody knows that the social security check arrives on the first of the month, opens it up. It's a social security check.

People have had their mail stolen for years. But within those constraints, if I were wanting to send $100,000 across the country, you just take it out and divide it into say $3,000 or $4,000 a piece. That's not that big a deal with sending $100 bills. Wrap it up in torn out pages from a magazine, put it in a security envelope.

Probably good to do this spread out over a period of time. Probably good to make sure that you're sending it to someone with a secure mailbox, not just sitting on the street. But you can easily send thousands of dollars back and forth by the mail with just bills in between magazine pages or whatever, and it's very safe.

And so you might want to use a couple names, couple addresses, etc. if you have those available, or just do it over a period of time. But I think that's a very reliable way to do that. I learned all that from JJ Luna, who being a privacy aficionado, he believed very strongly that to send, he wrote a book on how to hide your money, your cash, whatnot.

And he believed very strongly that the best way to move physical cash was just simply with the US mail. And I've tested it and it works fine. It works great. So those are probably more than you expected, John, but those are my pieces of advice on how to do it.

I guess for sake of completion, I would simply add that in many cases it may be better for you to choose something other than physical cash. And so there are financial systems that some people have, I forget the specific name of it, but basically let's say that somebody is sending remittances.

I've used this to get money into places for relief work that we couldn't get money in other ways. And I wish I could remember the name of it, but there's a specific name for it. But the idea is in many cultures, let's say that I'm trying to send money into a place where that money is not being accepted.

I'm trying to do something that is morally right, but legally wrong. So I'm sending money and food and medical supplies to help people who are in need, but the government of a certain place says you can't do it. What do you do? Well, you find somebody who has a family connection or a friend connection in that local place.

And so you go to the person, let's say that you're in the United States, you go to the person in the United States that has a family connection there and you say, "Here, here's $50,000 or $5,000." And that person says, "Okay, I'll take the $5,000 of cash." Then that person speaks to their family member who's in the restricted country or restricted place and says, "Okay, I've got $5,000 cash.

Go ahead and give the intended recipient the money." And obviously they're going to charge money for it. Usually it's quite steep, 20%. You might pay a 20% fee for the conversion. But this allows you to actually transfer the money from one place into another place without having to physically send the money.

There's no physical transfer of money. There's no even digital transfer. The money never changes. It's just held in the accounts based upon the honor and the relationship of those people involved. And so the guy in the restricted country knows that he's got a $5,000 credit with his family member living in the United States.

So that's another system that can be used in situations where you have to do it. But I don't think that any of that is practical to your needs. So there you go, John. Hope it helps. John Ligato: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. It's as thorough as I expected it to be and very, very much on brand.

Thank you. Dave: We're on brand for radical personal finance. Exactly. All right. Two other callers. Two, six, seven, eight. Welcome to the radical personal finance. How can I serve you today? Joshua Steinberg, CFO Alphabet and Google: Hi, Joshua. I have questions about designing a sovereign lifestyle that really fits in well with your how to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis course.

Dave: Okay, great. Joshua Steinberg, CFO Alphabet and Google: Basically, I want guidance on inexpensively living in Florida and then Asia for the next few years, waiting for assets to appreciate with the current COVID restrictions and inflation expectations. And quick background is basically six months ago, I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

It really gave me a deep understanding of the legacy financial system in addition to Bitcoin. And I currently have 565,000 in Bitcoin. 300 is in a traditional self-directed IRA. 75,000 is in a Roth self-directed IRA, and then 190,000 in taxable accounts. So I am currently doing a Roth conversion on that 300,000, which will result in me owing an additional 105,000 this coming April 15th.

For assets, I have a home worth 293,000 without a mortgage. I'm currently downsizing the personal belongings in advance of the sale. And then so 105,000 of that will go for the Roth conversion. And I'd like to use the remaining amount to live on for the next few years until the Bitcoin appreciates.

And in addition, there's 115,000 in gold coins, depending on how they are graded. There's one very special Liberty head that could be worth $50,000, and the rest are St. Gaudens or modern Olympic or American Arts medals. And I have no 16, in addition, there's 16,500 in cash and no credit card debt.

And are you a single man or are there other family members living with you? I'm 51 years old, unmarried with no children. The only physical limitations are a past lower back injury that prevents me from lifting heavy items. And my 81 year old father who lives with me, he's in good health and he's joined me down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

And whether I go to Florida or Asia, he wants to join me. It's like we're looking forward to this together. Awesome. So I think this is great. And so the idea is you want to live frugally for the next few years, not work, but live frugally while you wait for Bitcoin to appreciate.

That's the plan, right? Well, I'm not opposed to working. I left my job in September, my job of 17 years in September. Basically, if we're staying somewhere that's very low, low cost, I'd like to spend the time studying whether it's I've been looking into Salesforce admin certification, several of the IT certifications.

And just I generally like to learn more about Bitcoin and lightning and IT just to just to secure my own assets so they can't get taken. Right. Are you willing to live in an RV at least for a time or seasonally? That is not something that my father enjoys.

No. And I'm a person we do enjoy Florida. But when I went to Asia several times, it's like that really speaks to me. It's the I apologize. It's the the interest in social cohesiveness, the politeness. I'm kind of a type B person, but very driven. And it just spoke to me well.

So that that that is where I'd like, you know, that's where I ultimately want to live. And the goal is to, you know, when the Bitcoin finally appreciates it, it'll be picking up the residencies and citizenships. And ultimately, you know, I'd love to say goodbye to that U.S. citizenship.

OK. When you think about going back and forth from Asia and Florida, is it important to you that you do it regularly, meaning you want to spend six months in Florida, six months in Asia? Or are you willing to spend longer amounts of time in one of those two places?

Definitely not. It would it would it would be I would see coming back to the U.S. when maybe, oh, we've been out there two years, maybe three years and we just missed missed the U.S. I mean, the immediate thoughts were to move to Florida to establish residency there because current my current state has a state income tax, establish a mail forwarding service there and just get a small storage unit for for minimal personal belongings.

May or may not even keep the furniture and then decide what to do about the cars. I mean, I would love to live kind of a permanent tourist situation for the near future just to see if dad's comfortable with it. If if he if he's not, you know, we come back to the U.S.

and at least then still have possibly the cars and the furniture and not have to recreate that. But if but if abroad is is what's suiting as well, you know, next time we come back, it'd be just sell everything except for the essentials and have it in a very small, small storage unit.

And dad has Social Security income. Does he also have other regular forms of income, such as other pension flows or investment flows? He does not. He has he has just his Social Security and a minimal amount of personal assets. So the goal is is just for for him not to not to have to to to pay down on any of that.

And there were there were areas I know it's not open yet, but Dumaguete in in in the Philippines just seems like a nice it's a college town where food is inexpensive. You know, housing doesn't appear to be bad and health care is affordable. And it'd be a nice, nice springboard for Southeast Asia, you know, with with our eyes on, you know, in the long term, more of a Malaysia residency just just for the for the lifestyle and and and the fact that they don't don't tax your outside income.

Right. Right. So let me walk you through this first. I would encourage you at this stage, based upon what you have described at this stage, I would encourage you to spend to not worry too much about the paperwork of, you know, second citizenship residency permits. Yes, we do need to pay attention to.

But there would be little reason at this stage for you as a US citizen to take the very significant step of renouncing your citizenship. A few years down the road, yes. And the yes, maybe is the question. The yes, maybe is based upon why do you need to renounce citizenship?

If the question is tax planning, the biggest thing that you need to pay careful attention to, contrary to what you hear on the Internet, is that you need to pay careful attention to the fact that significant amounts of your personal Bitcoin investments are inside of IRAs and Roth IRAs.

This is not bad. I'm not saying it's a problem. What it means is that your tax planning considerations are very different than other people. And in fact, renunciation of citizenship for those assets when they're held in IRAs is not a good solution. And the reason is that on the day that you renounce citizenship, all of your assets are marked to the market and taxes are due.

But there's a difference here between how your IRA and your Roth IRA assets are treated as compared to your personally owned capital gains assets. So let's pretend that I'll just add zeros to what you described of your asset mix just to make things interesting in terms of what you're hoping for and what you're anticipating could possibly happen with your Bitcoin holdings.

Let's pretend that you were 55 years old and you had $3 million of Bitcoin in an IRA, $750,000 of Bitcoin in a Roth IRA, and then $1.9 million of Bitcoin in a taxable account. On the day of your citizenship renunciation, you would incur $3,750,000 of ordinary income that is all fully taxable to you on your final tax return because the Bitcoin assets are held in your IRA or your Roth IRA.

So that would obviously be the worst possible thing that you could do, meaning to generate a taxable income of $3.75 million immediately puts you into the top tax bracket. And then that's all ordinary income. It's not capital gains income. Now if you wait until you're 59 and a half and then you renounce income, that plan would be different.

So for example, at that point in time, your Roth IRA assets would be received tax free. And then if you continue to do Roth conversions, perhaps even by then all the money is in your Roth IRA. But at the moment, definitely you would not renounce citizenship. And you would not renounce citizenship even if you have assets in the Roth IRA until you're 59 and a half.

Because if you renounce citizenship, all of the assets in the Roth IRA get turned into ordinary income, which is then fully taxable because it's not a qualified distribution from the Roth IRA. And so it's a bad, bad move for you based upon what you're describing to be considering renouncing citizenship at this point in time.

That may change after 59 and a half. If you have not seen it, go to Nomad Capitalist channel and find the video that I did on Peter Thiel's $5 billion Roth IRA and how Peter Thiel could renounce US citizenship at the age of 59 and a half, take his $5 billion that's in his Roth IRA, and potentially, according to my understanding of the tax law, could potentially have that money income tax free.

Because that could in theory apply to you. The challenge is you're 51 years old, and I expect that law to change within the next eight years. But you should pay attention to it and see, because as you approach 59 and a half, if you complete these Roth conversions, such that virtually all of your Bitcoin, or at least all the Bitcoin that's currently in the IRA, goes into the Roth IRA, and if Bitcoin does do what you anticipate and does massively increase, then potentially you could follow the path that I described about Thiel in that video that I did for the Nomad Capitalist channel of the $5 billion Roth IRA.

So it's not something that you should ignore forever, but it is something that you should ignore for now. You definitely will not want to renounce citizenship, as from my perspective, until you're 59 and a half. And as an American, in your current asset structure, there's really no reason to renounce citizenship at this point in time.

There are enough other things that you can do that most likely you would be the guy who would be best suited for, yes, getting a residence visa for the Philippines or Malaysia or something else, but maintaining your American citizenship. If you do wind up with massive increases in Bitcoin values, then what I definitely would do is I definitely would go ahead and purchase a second citizenship.

I mean, here, not today. Today you don't have enough assets to make it the best move. But if you wound up with millions of dollars, then definitely I would purchase a Caribbean citizenship from one of the Caribbean Citizenship by Investment programs, so that you would be positioned to renounce, but don't go down that path right now.

There are some unique tax ramifications of your IRAs and your Roth IRAs that would make that plan a bad plan for you. So let's go back from that. Just finish it out. What could you get? What should you get? You probably should get a residency permit from a country in Asia that you would want to be in.

I think here, definitely, the Philippines just redid the rules on the retirement visa, but I think the Philippines would be a wonderful place for you to start. I think that the Philippines, culturally speaking, is a very comfortable place for English-speaking Americans. I mean, the Filipino culture is just generally so pleasing for Americans.

There's just a good cultural connection there, and the Filipinos are very nice. They like Americans. They're very welcoming. There's a good cultural fit. From a language perspective, the Philippines' English is so widely spoken that I think it would be wonderful. From a cost perspective, it's very doable to live very inexpensively in the Philippines.

You've got great tax benefits of the Philippines and a pretty easy residency program using one of their retirement visas, which certainly your father could get and you could get. And so I think that's a good place to start. Malaysia, they've been dickering around with their My Second Home program, which was probably the world's best option and is now different, but they're fighting about it.

So I think some time would wait to see, and they've been slower to reopen than the Philippines, so you may just need to wait on that. But I think that if you set up a base in the Philippines and then just traveled from there as a tourist, that could be a really good way for you to get to know more parts of Asia and see, do you enjoy more being in Dumaguete?

Do you enjoy more being in Malaysia? Do you enjoy more being in Vietnam? I mean, it's just benefits of all of the above. So practically speaking, here's what I would say. The reason I asked about the part-time part-time is you can save a lot of money and live very well in Asia as long as you're not trying to come back to the United States every few months, because the airfares are generally pretty significant.

I mean, you can find deals if you're willing to be, but basically it's a thousand bucks back and forth, and the flights are not fun. You know, 16 hours, 14 hours, 13 hours, it's not fun to do those flights regularly. And so it's music to my ears that you say, "We want to try going to Asia and spending time in Asia and just be there, and then, hey, in a couple of years, if we want to come back, we want to come back." So what I would encourage you to do if I were in your shoes is I would store my furniture and my cars on Craigslist or on Facebook.

I would not store them in a locally rented storage unit, especially right now with the high values of used vehicles. Sell your cars. No question, sell your cars. In addition, sell your furniture. Unless, I mean, most people, it's just not worth it. Those things should be sold, and you should store your cars and furniture in the form of cash, and just set it aside if you need to, or in your case, you'll buy more Bitcoin, but just set it aside and know, "Hey, I can always buy a car." Cars and furniture are easy, but yet having them will be one of the biggest frustrations to you personally.

So when I got ready to travel the world, I did a few things. First, go through your personal effects. I scanned my entire library. I scanned thousands of books. You may or may not need to do that. In fact, I recommend you probably don't. It's a lot of work and a real hassle, and unless you make a living like I do from the knowledge that's in your head and you need the ability to pull up your books because your brain can see the page that you need to look at from time to time to remember something, then you probably just get rid of all that stuff.

Get rid of all your personal belongings, except just a few mementos, et cetera, and get whatever is really, truly necessary, and be as minimalistic in your approach as possible. If you do this, it makes traveling easy, because what you haven't yet grasped since you've been living conventionally is that you can live very well, especially as two single men, you can live very well even just on short-term arrangements, short-term accommodations.

So when I'm traveling, even with four children, I basically plan, depending on where I'm at, I basically plan in my head that I'm going to spend $100 a day on accommodation. Now I'm traveling with four children and a wife, and we work from home, we homeschool, et cetera, and so I'm generally spending quite a lot more money than I used to when I was a backpacker.

I'm staying in normal business class hotels. I'm staying in upscale Airbnb apartments. I'm not roughing it because of the family considerations. But for a lot of people, paying $3,000 a month on rent is not, I mean, that's about what it winds up being. And so I can travel with my family of four for more or less about $3,000 a month of accommodations, even just using short-term accommodations.

Now you want to live frugally, and so if you're going to places that are generally less costly, places like the Philippines, places like Southeast Asia, you have access to a whole raft of hostels, guest houses, hotels, et cetera. The nightly cost there, you can do very well at $30 or $40 a night.

You can find budget options at $20 a night. So if you traveled on a budget of $50 a day, you wouldn't be suffering as long as you guys are willing to embrace the adventure. You can do $50 a day. You can do $75 a day total all in with accommodations, transportation, et cetera.

And so that's the kind of budget that you can do. If you give yourself $100 a day, $3,000 a month, maybe, again, depending on your personal constraints and how much you care about living frugally versus how much you care about living fancy, then you can do very well on that as long as you're not doing your plane tickets back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

So I would dump the furniture in the cars, sell those things, and store them in the form of money so that wherever you wind up going, you can buy new furniture and buy new cars there. And especially even in the case of a move to Florida, are you going to put your stuff in a storage unit where home is now in whatever state it is now?

Well, if you do that, then you're paying storage unit there. Are you going to drive it to Florida? You wind up paying truck rental expenses. I mean, most people, if they're doing an out-of-town move, should probably get rid of most of their stuff, especially most single people, most flexible people.

The reason I'm articulating this difference is simply that it's different. You have different needs if you have a bunch of children. And so family needs are different. But in your situation, you and your dad should be able to live very simply and just simply go to Florida. And if you could get by with just a very small storage unit, with monthly rental of, say, $10 a month, a little 5x5 locker, something like that, stuff that you could fit into just a standard rental minivan or a standard rental car, then you're in the range at which it's no problem to keep that, to keep your mementos safe in a storage unit.

And then you're totally free. And you can follow your interests wherever they go. And this could be just the greatest adventure ever imaginable with your dad. Because the two of you traveling together, you have camaraderie, company, et cetera. And this just, I can't think of a better way to spend time with my 81-year-old father than what you're describing.

But you'll want to be light, as light as possible. And so I would get rid of that stuff so that you don't have $200 a month of storage fees for stuff that, I mean, just imagine, right? If you're paying $200 a month for a big enough storage fee to store your furniture in a car, maybe, there's no way to ever recoup that if you're gone for two years.

$30 a month, absolutely. Do that. If you're going to buy a 5.5 locker and put all your stuff in there, do that. But don't do a storage unit for furniture and cars. >>Steve: Good, good. Do you have any advice? I've heard you speak about gold in the past, about how to get rid of the gold.

We've explored PCGS, but we don't know if we should mail it into them. Do we bring the good ones there to two of the events that are coming up? What's been your experience with gold in the past? >>AJ: I think that the question would be, do you want to store it and keep it in the form of gold, or do you want to try to convert your gold to Bitcoin?

I would rather you not be 100% all in on Bitcoin. I feel like that's not the right plan. I don't want you to be 100% on Bitcoin. That's just foolish. Even the most bullish Bitcoin maximalist, being 100% all in, especially at your age, your father's age, et cetera, unless you have very marketable skills, which you're talking about, educating yourself, I think it would be foolish to be all in.

I would like to see you keep the money in the form of gold, and I would also like to see you make sure that you keep enough cash. I don't mean here currency. I mean working bank accounts, so that you could at least resettle yourself in the United States and get another job if you needed to.

When you're traveling, you should have a resettlement fund. You should have an amount of money that you've said, "Hey, dad, if I... Let's say that you go to Asia, your dad dies, and you're totally broke, and Bitcoin goes to zero. You need to have a resettlement fund where you could move back to the United States." It's the single most important reason why you keep your US citizenship at this point, is because there is no better job market in the world for you than the United States.

If you came back to the United States as a US citizen, you can get any job in the world that you want. But if you are not a US citizen, and there's a total crash of some kind and you need a job, you will have a very, very hard time.

And while you might make it as a bartender at some beach bar in Dumaguete, Philippines, it would be a whole lot better for you to move back to where you're from, where you have a network, and get really any job, and kind of rebuild and get going forward again.

So keep a resettlement fund, keep an amount of money available to you where you can buy yourself a plane ticket back home from anywhere in the world. Keep a resettlement fund enough to get your first, last insecurity on an apartment. Keep a resettlement fund enough for you to buy yourself a used car, to get yourself some furniture, etc.

And keep a resettlement fund of an emergency fund that's big enough for you to have several months of living expenses so that you could find a job. And so if you imagine Bitcoin going to zero and everything falling apart, if you had, I mean, with those numbers, let's say 15,000 to 20,000 of cash set aside as like an emergency fund, a last-ditch emergency fund to get you home, get you employed, get a roof over your head, to me that would be the smart move.

And then on top of that, of course, you'll need your petty cash for traveling. But I would always keep that aside. And then in this case, I think I would store my gold. I would find secure storage here, I think in your case, just a bank safety deposit box would work fine.

It gives you some protection. As long as there's no legal risk that you have right now, then I wouldn't worry too much about the banking relationship. Otherwise, you could sign up for private storage where there's no bank involved. Do private storage on your gold. Keep it set aside as kind of your return home fund as well, and then wait and watch and see over the coming years.

But I would do that before I would go and try to ship it. Thank you so much for your guidance. These are just the kind of problems that I, or questions that I see you come alive at. And this has been a long time coming. And yes, the podcast you did about Peter Thiel with Nomad Capitalist and Andrew Henderson, it's just keep doing what you're doing.

It's just you are speaking to that remnant and the ones who are out here and are listening are gaining so much from few other people. I mean, I did initiate the Roth conversion actually just today after speaking with my tax man. And he's an accountant, lifelong friend of my father's, and he actually had no clients who have self-directed IRAs.

So I guess the more I absorb, I think that everybody else must be getting all this that I am, but I'm still that outlier and that weirdo. Even given the changes that are harder and harder for everyone to ignore with the inflation, with the questions over there that quickly switch from taking the income of the rich to taking the wealth of the rich, and then changing the definition of what is rich.

It's just, it's scary. Yeah, I don't disagree. It's funny because we all get into our own echo chambers and then we think like, "Well, we're just like all of our other people." But when you look at the civilization broadly, all of our neighbors, like, "No, they're in their own echo chambers." But there are very few people who actually do this stuff, which is what many of the Bitcoin aficionados see.

They're like, "Well, this seems logically inevitable." And so it's just people are paying attention as people pay attention. Let me give you one last tip before I go on to my final caller. You mentioned moving to Florida. I think that that can work, but here's what I want you to know.

First of all, you should check your state. And if you're not going to be physically present, then in most states there's probably no reason why you have to actually move your residence to Florida. Because if you're not going to be physically present, most states will exempt you completely from taxes.

Some states do not have those rules and some states do. I recently was looking at California, right? California does not have an explicitly stated thing such as, "Hey, if you qualify for the foreign earned income exemption because you're out of the United States for 330 days per year, we'll also exempt you from state income taxes." They still go based upon, "Well, we're going to look at all these factors." And so if I were living in California and going and doing what you're describing, I definitely would move from California to a free state such as Florida or Texas or South Dakota and move my residency to one of those states before going abroad.

But that's not necessary with every state. And the downside that you're going to face is that when you move your residency to Florida or to South Dakota or to Texas, and these are all three states that we talk about because they all allow nomad residents. They are no state income tax states and so they don't mind having people registered in their state as a resident who aren't paying taxes because they don't charge state income taxes.

They'd rather have more residents than fewer because it enhances their personal standing, etc. And so that's why these states are used by, say, full-time RVers as a place to set up a home base. You can do it. But the problem is that there are some downsides that come with it.

So things like credit card registrations. Your credit cards, you will have a hard time getting new credit cards if you register your address to a postal service in one of those states. You will have a very hard time getting new bank accounts if you register your address to a postal service in one of those banks.

Registering your address in one of those places is completely legal. You can wind up with a driver's license that says your state of residence is Texas and everything is good. But the banks and the credit card companies are picky, which is one more reason why banks are zeros, right, to play the Bitcoin game.

And I don't mind it. But what you'll find is that those banks and credit cards are quite useful to you still in the current world while you wait for the new world order with regard to currency to be created. And so what I would rather see you do is choose a trusted relative to simply move your affairs to.

Choose a trusted relative and then you and your dad move your address to that trusted relative's home and register that as your address as long as you can look at the rules of your state and they might clearly exempt you from state income tax due to being abroad. The other thing that would be useful about it is that if you do that, whenever you need to handle administrative stuff, it'll be easier for you to handle administrative stuff, right, like renewing your driver's license.

And so you should do all of that. You should renew all those documents as much as you can now. But if you need to renew your driver's license, if you don't know anybody in Florida and you're just going to Florida or just going to Texas to renew your driver's license, that's not such a fun trip back to the United States as it is going back home, wherever home was, staying with a friend, spending a few days, renewing your driver's license, getting new bank cards, et cetera, things like that.

So just a thought for you is check the laws clearly. In addition, just as Josh was moving abroad thing, lesson's hard one, okay, make sure your banking infrastructure is all set up. Make sure your credit card infrastructure is all set up. Make sure your communications infrastructure is all set up, depending on what you're going to need there.

Otherwise, in the moment, there's no truly global option from the United States. So the only option that I recommend is that you have redundancy. So you might go with a Google Fi or a T-Mobile plan, et cetera, but they will both eventually cut you off if you don't come back to the United States and if you're using lots of data.

So they're a good option for you, but you should additional probably have a Google voice number and/or some other VoIP service as well, and then use your local SIM cards. You will want to move as many of your contacts and friends over to messaging services rather than phone calls, whether that's iMessaging, WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, Facebook Messenger, whatever email, whatever you're using, get them accustomed to speaking with you so that you can continue those relationships.

Also, from a practical perspective, before you leave, what you want to do now, especially for residency stuff, you need to go down and for both you and your dad, get about five to ten original copies of your birth certificate and have them apostilled by your estate. So get your apostills done now and have those with you.

Additionally, I would encourage you go to your local sheriff's office, get about five to ten, I would encourage ten, but ten sounds excessive, I have ten of all this stuff, go and get ten copies of your fingerprint cards that you can send in for your FBI background checks, because with every residency application, you will have to send in a current background check for law enforcement, and that's really inconvenient to go and get fingerprints done in Dumaguete, Philippines and then send those into the FBI.

So go and get ten copies of your fingerprint cards made for you and of your dad. They may or may not always be accepted, depending on how your local sheriff's department dates those forms, but it's much better for you to have those and leave those with a trusted friend.

So original apostilled birth certificates, extra copies of your FBI fingerprint cards, original apostilled copies of marriage certificates and/or divorce records. So you won't have apostilled copies of divorce records, but if either you or your father have been divorced, get the marriage certificate and then get the divorce records and have those.

Transcripts can be useful, so call your alma mater, go ahead and order an extra sealed copy of your college and your high school transcripts, get those sent to and hold those somewhere with a trusted friend. And let me think, birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce certificates, fingerprints, those are the main ones that you need.

And then academic records. Then what you should do also is you want to work out a system with your bank for doing bank records. And this is also something you need to be careful of with so much money of your money in Bitcoin. Almost any visa program that you're going to do is going to require you to demonstrate a certain amount of income and/or a certain amount of assets.

And they're not going to accept the first three passcodes for your cold wallet. They want to see money in a bank. And so especially right now when you have money in a bank, you need to be strategic with the sale of your house as to what you do. So you're going to want to see that money seasoned and in a bank.

And that's when you're going to want to do your residency applications. So sell the house, put the money in the bank, let it sit. Defer your tax bill for the largest amount of time. And this is the time when you need to line up your residency applications. You'll get bank statements, and in some countries you'll need to get those bank statements apostilled.

This is a process that most Americans are unfamiliar with. They don't know, they've never had anything apostilled. So check your state, but the way it works in most states is you'll need to get a notarized copy of a bank statement or a letter from your bank saying, "Hey, we see that so-and-so has this amount of money and they've had an average balance in his account of XYZ or an average income of his account of XYZ." So you'll get a notary at the bank to notarize that document.

Then you'll take that document to your state, and the state will apostill the authenticity of the notary stamp, and that will be good enough for the countries that require apostilled bank records. Some other countries have an automatic process of apostilling bank records, but the United States does not. And so you'll need to understand how to get that notary signature apostilled so that they'll be willing to accept your documents.

And then just be careful with that, because that's going to be the key thing. If you wind up with $30,000 in a bank account and all the rest of your money is in Bitcoin, and then you got to try to go to apply for Malaysia's My Second Home program, it ain't going to work.

And so Philippines, I think you can get it done. I think the Philippines is the best state place for you to start. And then I would just tell you that you probably don't need many more residencies than that. If you're willing to move around, I would only worry much with a residency.

Most of those places you can do perpetual tourism, and as long as there's not a pandemic on, I think you're good to go with minimal residencies. So those are my thoughts. >>TED: Thank you for answering the questions that I didn't think to ask. That's awesome. >>TED: Well, if you want to know how I learned all this stuff, it's been extremely expensive.

>>TED: Extremely expensive and hard-won advice. I literally have had so many bank accounts declined. I've had to fly. I've been back to the United States so many times to work out this stuff. And you do that enough times, you want people to have their problems solved first up. All right, we finish off the call in 360.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? >>ROJAS: Hi, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call. >>TED: My pleasure. >>ROJAS: This is Rojas. >>TED: Hi, Rojas. >>ROJAS: I have a question on when would be a good time for my wife and I to talk with you as far as a consulting call or take on a financial planner?

And there's three sub-factors on that. I've already received so much good advice that I haven't used yet, and there's still so much I need to put into practice. So is it worth talking with someone more specifically when there's advice I haven't done? And also, our scale is still pretty small.

We're earning under $70,000, $80,000 a year, and we only have under $200,000 of net assets. But we're not seeing the progress we'd like to see, or we're wondering, "Hey, could we speed things up?" Do you have any wisdom on how to view our scale and when to talk with an expert?

>>TED: Yeah. So it's a good question, and obviously it's kind of a softball for me, but I will answer it with as much objectivity as I can. To begin with, if your $70,000 to $80,000 per year is wages, earned income from jobs, and if your $200,000 of assets are invested in the traditional ways, it's home equity, it's money in your 401(k) at work, some money in your bank account, et cetera, then there really isn't much that most financial advisors can offer to you that you can't do with self-education.

How do you reduce your taxes? You put money in your 401(k), that's it. If you're an employee, all you do is put money in your 401(k), and at $70,000 to $80,000 per year, your tax bill is not that significant. There's not much you can do. You can go and you can figure out, well, how do I enroll in the commuter credit so that my employer can give me the $120 a month of commuter credit, the money that's tax-free, but it doesn't matter.

All that stuff really doesn't matter much. How do you save money on your taxes as an employee? You put money in your 401(k), and you focus on increasing your income. Now, when you can get your income up, then things change a little bit, but the average financial advisor can't do much for you there.

In addition, most of your investment products at this scale are not really that impactful. I don't know any financial advisor who makes a business of going around and opening $5,000 Roth IRAs for people. There's no reason to do it. They'll do it for you as a convenience, but the whole time, they're gnashing their teeth, right, of like, "I've got to go and do all this work and print out 87 pages just to do a Roth IRA." It's just there's not much.

Here I think at this stage of wealth and this stage of investments in the financial planning world, this is your best as a DIY investor, right? Open an account at Fidelity. Open an account at Vanguard. Fund a Roth IRA. Fund your wife's Roth IRA. Put your money in your 401(k), et cetera.

This is a better solution. What you do probably need to do is talk to an insurance agent. Here I think you can be helped by an insurance agent, but the insurance is going to be fairly straightforward. At this levels of wealth, et cetera, you need some term life insurance if you want it.

You didn't mention children. People always say, "I don't need life insurance." I figure you should have some, so maybe you purchase five times your income of term life insurance. Here, I think there's no reason not to use a proper insurance agent. Can you go online and buy it yourself through one of the websites?

You absolutely can. The problem is you're not saving any money and you're just not getting any personalized advice. I think that you should talk to an insurance agent, just buy it from an insurance agent, so at least you can have a little bit more time and the agent will earn his commissions by actually spending time explaining stuff rather than doing everything through automated forms.

How old are you and how old is your wife? >> Steven Rubinstein 30 and 25. >> Tavish McGrath So at 30 and 25, the other reason to talk to an insurance agent if you want life insurance is that you should be purchasing annual renewable term insurance, not level term, annual renewable term insurance.

That's a more specialized product that is vastly superior from a financial planner's perspective but it's not widely sold nor is it widely understood. I would call up Northwestern Mutual, a New York life agent, and I would buy annual renewable term from one of those companies and for there you'll actually talk to an agent because they don't sell that stuff on any of the websites.

When you start to reach around 45, that's the point at which I switch to level term insurance for your term insurance needs. You'll also want to look at your disability coverages. If you're employers, employees, you probably have some disability insurance already in place with your employer and that's probably good enough or you might supplement it a little bit.

So I would talk to the insurance agent about disability income insurance as well. But there's really not much more that a financial advisor can do for you at this scale of where you are, meaning that traditional, like a certified financial planner, etc. Now does that mean you shouldn't consult an advisor?

My answer is no, it doesn't. The key is to consult the right kind of advisor. And so I like to believe and I have proven many times that I am worth the money even for somebody who is just getting started. And so I firmly believe that if you pay me for a consultation, you go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, you put in your name, your information, and you sign up and book an hour with me, that's 500 bucks.

I firmly believe that I can give you in excess of a 10x return on the 500 bucks. Because the key to implementing advice is not so much have I implemented all of the advice that I've been given. I have not implemented all the advice that I've been given. I have so many loose ends in my life, we all do.

None of us ever do all the stuff that we'd like to do. The key is am I laser focused on the most impactful area of self-improvement or the most impactful things right now? And do I have I firmly looked at my opportunities and built a plan for them? And so if your household income right now is 70 to $80,000 and you're in your late 20s, early 30s, then your number one area of focus needs to be to 10x that income in the next decade.

Because if you'll go from 70 to $80,000 of household income to 70 to $800,000 of household income in the next 10 years, then that will make more of a difference than ever. But how do you find the right advisor for that? I think that I'm pretty good at that.

I can lay out the game plans for you, but realistically I don't know many people who do that. And so that's the kind of thing where it's harder to get an expert's consultation. I think your best bet at this stage of your game is to spend most of your time and most of your money on books and make sure that you're regularly investing in books.

And then as you sketch out a game plan towards your goals that you then invest into public seminars and/or classes. Right now we're going through an absolute revolution in web classes, et cetera. I can sit down and I can invest three days of time and three days of teaching into something and then I can afford to sell it for 200 bucks, 400 bucks, 600 bucks.

And that's a much better use of your money is to spend your money on educational products that people that you're modeling or people you admire create for you. Best bang for the buck is going to be books in terms of the total amount of knowledge and ideas that you can acquire.

The problem is that books are super time intensive and they're usually not customized. And some of the most impactful stuff is simply not found in books because books are not current enough. And so right now the revolution that's happening in the educational space where world class experts are creating their master classes and putting together seminars and you can buy it for a seminar, this is where the current cutting edge stuff is.

And so that's where probably most of your time and money should be made. And then what I would say is that you can coach yourself. You can coach yourself. The key is make sure that you have your priorities laid out and that you have done an analysis, an 80/20 analysis of those priorities and the pathway to get there to say what are the things that are the most impactful.

And then look for the best teachers in that space. So I would be happy to do a private consultation with you. If you ever get to the end of a call with me and you say, "Josh, well that wasn't worth my money," then I'll return 100% of it. I 100% stand behind my work and I'm happy to return 100% of it.

I've only ever made one partial refund to one client. Actually, sorry, that's not true. It's now two. I've had two partial refunds to a client out of hundreds and hundreds of clients. The first partial refund was from a guy who was doing some shady stuff and I spent most of the time yelling at him saying he shouldn't do shady stuff that I thought was morally wrong and he didn't appreciate my using his time and he asked for a 50% refund.

The second was I gave some wrong advice to a guy who was doing a Roth IRA contribution and I missed a law. I missed a technical thing. He wound up doing what I said and I had made a mistake and he wound up having a tax bill that was unexpected and had to spend money to unwind it and I made a dumb mistake.

And so I refunded. I can't remember if it was all or partial, but I refunded his money. Those are the only two. I've never had someone, even young getting started guys making 30 grand a year, I've never had someone walk away from one of my consulting calls and say that it wasn't worth their money.

So I'm here to serve if that would be useful. If you want the cheapest thing though, just stay a patron of the show. Call in every Friday. I don't set a limit on how much you call. Call in every Friday and systematically week by week I'd be happy to talk you through as public content, coach you through all the stuff that you're doing here on these Q&A shows and I'd be your best bang for your buck as well.

Very helpful answer. Thank you Joshua. Good. The only thing I would just say as we close is that you are doing the right thing by looking for the answers. The thing that is pretty astounding that so few people do is so few people actually spend time looking for the answers.

But if you will dedicate yourself to just looking for the answers, you'll figure out the advice to put into place. And then I'll tell you that over time you can figure out the lens of scale for yourself. You figure out, hey, what's meaningful right now? What works for me right now?

But I just would beg you that right now the goal of every – this is one of the reasons I left kind of the normal world of financial advice. The goal should be that you spend 80% of your time increasing your income and then saving that difference. That's it.

The technical financial planning for someone in your situation is very simple and you don't really need an advisor. The do-it-yourself world is so good, right? We've got Vanguard. We've got Fidelity. You don't need anything else. You can go and open your own Bitcoin account. You don't need anybody else.

Talk to an insurance agent. Invest a few hours of your time. The insurance agent won't charge any money. He'll just make a few hundred bucks a commission when you buy your life insurance policies and he's happy. And then you can go and do a lot of other things. You buy your life insurance policies and he's happy.

And so you don't need anything else. What you got to do is be laser-focused on increasing your income. And so if I were in your shoes, I'd be spending courses related to businesses that I thought would be interesting. I'd be buying Gumroad products left and right. I mean you should see my Gumroad account.

You should see my Udemy account. You should see my – I got folders of all of the dozens and dozens of courses that I buy and whatnot because it's the best form of education. It gives you the ideas. And you see a payoff in spades in your own life and you want other people to have the same thing.

So that's where I would be spending my time and my energy. Thank you all so much for listening to today's Q&A. Remember that if you also would like to talk to me and if you don't want to pay me 500 bucks for that opportunity, then you can help me create public content here with Q&A show.

To do that, go to Patreon, find the show Radical Personal Finance, sign up there and you will receive the invitation next time I do a Friday Q&A show. If you would like to work with me personally and go over with some laser focus, do that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult. You just heard my ad for it that my listener pitched me a softball there.

Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult and I guarantee you – and I don't use that word lightly – I guarantee you I will give you your money's worth and you will be happy or you will have your money back. radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.