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It's more than just a ticket. 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, I'm your host and today I am going to share with you yet another of the many things that over time I have realized I was wrong about previously.

And today's topic is specifically the topic of having and maintaining a vacation home. Now, thankfully this one is more of one of those intellectual "I was wrong, I didn't understand previously" rather than having had a big impact on me. But it has affected my own personal goals. And let me tell you very quickly what I mean.

When I was younger, I observed that many people had vacation homes. From time to time, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the vacation homes of some of my friends. My family, personally, we never had a vacation home. We were not at that level of economic existence. But I was fortunate to be invited from time to time to a few of my friends' vacation homes.

And in that process, I thought about vacation homes. I thought about money and my own goals and things like that. And I asked myself, "Would I want to have a vacation home?" And I came to the very clear opinion that I would not want to have a vacation home.

I still remember an anecdote that I read in some random book talking about money and stuff, etc. And who knows, perhaps it was an apocryphal story or if it was exactly cited. I simply don't know. But the guy was a wealthy guy. It was a Friday afternoon. He was a wealthy guy.

He was getting ready to board an airplane, maybe his private jet, to rush down to Florida where he was having a home built in Florida. And he was really stressed out. He's on the phone with his architect. And somebody asked him, "Why are you doing it? Why do you need this home in Florida?" And he was about to lose his whole weekend running down to take care of this home in Florida, this great nice home, but he's about to lose his whole weekend doing that.

And that story resonated with me even from a young age. It resonated still more deeply with me when I add two additional facts. Fact number one is I have a tendency to appreciate the simplicity of minimalism. I've over the years found that the less stuff that I have, the less cluttered my life feels, and the more I appreciate minimalism.

I've purchased various knick-knacks over the years. At this point, I've gotten rid of virtually all the knick-knacks, even the nice ones that I bought on my travels, and I haven't missed most of those things. I don't have a lot of fancy stuff. And I think always about the costs of money and time that are embedded in stuff.

Usually it comes down to the time. For example, there was a time a few years ago I had something like five cars or five vehicles with engines in them, and I was just annoyed at how much time I was needing to go and take those vehicles to a mechanic.

And I thought, "Man, I don't want to have these cars anymore," not because I can't afford them, not because they're too expensive, but I don't like dealing with the time of taking them to the mechanic and getting them fixed and waiting and working out all the stuff. It just really is annoying to me.

And then a number of years later, I was down to one car, and I thought, "This is great. I just have one car to take care of. This is wonderful." Big fan of this because of the time that it freed up. So I've appreciated minimalism, and when you apply that concept of minimalism to even your own housing, you think, "Do I really want to deal with another house?" And that leads me to the second fact, that I don't personally enjoy dealing with most of the things that are required to keep up real estate.

I find it annoying and frustrating, and I would prefer not to have much to do with it. I like to rent so that I can outsource some of the hassle of that. If I can find a reasonable rental cost and if I can find a suitable property, I would just assume rent most of that stuff rather than actually own the real estate.

So when you put these things together, you can see why I was pretty well persuaded that I would not want to have a vacation home because of the hassle of simply having it. In addition, I am one who enjoys new things. I have a strong desire for novelty, new things, experiencing new things, seeing new things.

I often feel quite alive when I'm in the middle of experiencing new things. And so it's this continual experience of new things that for me is very motivating. And I thought, why would I ever want to go to the same place twice? I'm not one who looks forward to going to the same place.

If I've been to a city pretty much, well, that's nice, right? At least a few years can pass and then I'll go back. But most of the time, especially within a US-American context where it doesn't have that same flair of the exotic that I often enjoy the most myself, I think, why would I want to go back?

I've been to St. Louis, Missouri. Why would I want to go back? I've been to insert any city. I just make it up a random middle of the country city. I don't need to go back. I don't want to go back. It doesn't thrill me with any particular joy at the thought of going back.

And so I imposed that same thinking onto a vacation property. I thought, why would I want to have a vacation property that I'd have to go back to every single year? It's the same property in the same town and everything's always the same, the same, the same, the same, the same.

Now, when you combine the financial analysis, the time analysis, and the sameness analysis, I think you come up with a pretty good argument, which is, again, what I previously believed. I previously thought to myself, well, listen, let's calculate how much the pure costs are of keeping a home. Ignore any kind of investment value.

Let's say you buy a beach house for X number of dollars, and then you take a percentage of that for pure maintenance costs, double it if it's a beach house, to deal with salt corrosion, all of that. That's what your carrying costs are going to be, insurance, additional liability, etc.

Do I really want that? And I compare that against, hey, let's go on vacation. Let's go to a new hotel, and a new town, a new resort. You don't have to maintain anything. The whole hotel has a staff full of people that maintain everything, and you just show up, and you get your room, and you do your thing, and you go.

And next year, you can try a different place. And so then, in addition to the fun of whatever the activity it is, be it hanging out on the beach, or be it playing around on the golf course, or whatever the actual activity is, you get to enjoy the fun of the activity, plus the fun and the novelty of exploring new places, trying new restaurants, trying new things, etc.

And so I was pretty well convinced that for me, a vacation home is not something that I have ever aspired to have. I would just as soon have a home, and I would just as soon go to a nice hotel, nice resort, nice rental house, etc. So what's changed?

What's changed has been watching the world through the eyes of children, and thinking more about legacy, and thinking more about relationships. And there are two things that I want to share with you about, because these are the two things that I previously didn't have the maturity or the experience to actually appreciate.

And these are the big benefits of vacation homes, as far as I'm concerned, and they are the things that have convinced me that in the future, I do desire to have a specific vacation home, even with all of the disadvantages that I've just outlined. Here they are. Number one, let's talk about children.

I'm unconvinced that children "need" a stable environment. Many people look at the way that my family has lived our lives, and they think, "Man, your children must be totally unstable. After all, especially over the last few years, you've basically been traveling constantly, and that must be so disorienting, and it must be so destabilizing to your children." I've thought a lot about that.

I've studied carefully to ask myself, "Is that happening? Is that true?" because certainly it can be. The conclusion that I have drawn, at least thus far, is that even though our outward circumstances have changed, where we live, where we sleep, etc., has changed, I think that my children are not experiencing a sense of instability.

And that's because our family schedule really doesn't change. When we were living in an RV, this was most pronounced, where we never knew where we would be parked on any particular night. I didn't plan very far ahead. We might wake up in a beautiful park in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, and we might wake up in a Walmart parking lot.

And yet, we pretty much had the same routine every day. My children had breakfast with their parents at the same table every single day, with a very small number of prospective dishes that they were going to be enjoying. We have meals together three times a day as a family.

We have our routines. They're sleeping in the same bed, the same place, every single day. And so I concluded that things were pretty stable, even though what was outside of the windows was changing, and the particular people may have been changing. Even when we moved to full-time travel, living in hotels and Airbnbs, I became convinced that they're not experiencing any kind of major instability because our lives are so stable in terms of the relationships, the routines, etc.

We do the same thing. And just because we happen to be in a different hotel room or a different house, that doesn't – I haven't observed any negative damaging effects to my children. If I observed any kind of deleterious effects, I would immediately change. But I haven't observed that.

But what I have come to appreciate is that children gain a deeper sense of meaning when there is a consistency to a place. And of course, I would have acknowledged that intellectually before, but I guess I didn't see it as being the most important thing until I started to observe some changes that happened in my own family's life, meaning that of my parents and my siblings.

When I was younger, my parents had built a large house to be able to house together their large family, and that was a stable point of connection in our family for a significant amount of time. Then as my parents grew older and their children moved out, my parents' parents died, and once my parents' parents died, my parents didn't have the need for that same large house that they had built, and the house itself was quite a burden to clean, to care for, etc.

And so they sold it and they downsized into a small condo. And that was a great blessing in the lives of my parents that I observed. It freed them up from the hassle of maintaining the house, and I thought it would be totally fine because after all, in my family, we have good relationships, stable relationships.

I thought no problem at all. But then over the coming years, I watched how it was more and more difficult for us to get all of my siblings together, all of my nieces and nephews together, and we had to work extra hard to make it happen. And because we lost that natural anchoring point in our family, we started to suffer some missed opportunities to be together, because it was no longer assumed where we would be for a holiday.

It was no longer assumed where we would get together. Rather, we had to figure it out. And it's not been all bad. We've worked at it from time to time. We've rented large houses where we could stay together. We've rented multiple houses in the same place. And so we've made it work.

But I underestimated, when my parents sold the property, I underestimated the long-term effects. And that really made me think about my own children and my own family. And I thought, you know what? I don't want that to happen. I want to make sure that we are investing our money into the kind of family culture that will endure the test of time.

Now, for me, this comes out of one of those key cornerstone Christian beliefs with regard to money upon which I build my life. And it comes from where Jesus says, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." And over the years, as I've pondered and pondered and pondered that within our context, I became convinced that the way that you lay up treasures in heaven is by investing your money into the beings that are in heaven, which is people.

And so anytime you can spend money on people, that's the way that you lay up treasures in heaven rather than laying up treasures in earth where you're investing not into people. And that's brought me a place of peace and a place of clarity to say, "Can I invest money into people?" And of course, who are the people where I begin?

People that I begin are those with whom I have the most contact, those of my immediate family. A man does not care for his own family and especially those of his own household. He is worse than an unbeliever. There's another Bible verse. And so you begin with investing into your own children, your own siblings, your own parents, and then it extends out from that.

Now there are many different ways that you can do that, but as you think about the context of a family and building a family culture that will endure the test of time, I thought, "How can you invest money into people?" And I become convinced one of the ways that you can do it is investing it into a family culture.

And if you're going to build an enduring family culture, you need to have routines, you need to have customs, you need to have memories. And as I've grown older and observed more, I realized how important this sense of familiarity is. And I thought back to other people who had vacation houses and I saw how it affected them.

For example, many years ago I was very fortunate to be invited to a friend's vacation home for a Fourth of July weekend. And this particular home was a beautiful lake home on just a phenomenal lake in Alabama. And I went there and we had a wonderful weekend together. Spent the entire weekend hanging out.

The entire family was together. We spent all day on the boats. There were boats, there were jet skis, there were toys, there was swimming, there was eating, there was drinking, there was making merry. It was a wonderful weekend enjoying all of the Fourth of July festivities. It was so fun.

I only went one year, but my friends, they used that vacation home and every single year that was where you were. And it gave an anchoring point that from time to time the children were able to invite their friends and there would be a big party and it was just a wonderful event.

And that home, the patriarch of that family, he had designated, he died quite young, he had designated that this home was going to be a part of the family's inheritance. And he had designated the home to be held in a trust. There was money to take care of the home, etc.

Well, the heirs had the right to sell it and they went on to sell it. But then I observed from, not from close, but I observed that they're facing the same problems now that my family has faced of not being able to get everyone together as consistently. And now they've lost that corner point.

They've lost that, "Oh, this is the rock that so-and-so jumped off of and broke his ankle." Or, "Oh, look, do you remember that one time that so-and-so got drunk and fell off the end of the dock and we had to go pull him out of the water?" And all those stories that every single year you tell the same story again and again and again and again and again and it becomes part of the family culture.

And I thought about that, I thought, "That's what's needed. That's what's needed is to have that consistency." And that consistency of place and family tradition and culture makes it easier to keep a family together especially as you are going through those times of transition, especially as you're going through that period where your 22-year-old says, "Well, maybe this year I don't really want to go home for Fourth of July.

Maybe I want to go to Europe for Fourth of July." But if they know, "You know what? No, we always do Fourth of July and it's always a great time and my parents expect me to do Fourth of July and we've got the house for it," then it creates a stronger pool and more of a desire to do that.

And so in terms of building a culture and then having that culture extend through time, right? So if you imagine a wonderful lake house with all of the toys that make a lake house great and then you think about the generations growing and even if it's somewhat difficult as grandchildren come along and the family expands out, you still by having that anchoring place you have a commitment to a place.

And I think this also facilitates closer relationships. For example, let's say that you bought a rather modest home and then your family grew and you might figure out, "Well, how could we add more space to the home?" But if everyone's accustomed to the fact that we stay in this home on the lake for Fourth of July weekend or we stay at this home in this ski town and that's where we do Christmas, then what happens is when families as families age, then it's expected that you're going to be in the home.

And even if the home is too small, you're still forced into closer contact which makes for richer family relationships. As we grow, we like to appreciate our privacy more and more. We don't want to necessarily be on top of each other. And so if you think about doing the resort thing, what happens?

Well, you get together in a resort and then you get together for a nice dinner. But of course, dinner has to be this planned affair to get 30 people together for dinner because we have to make a reservation at the restaurant. It's also intense because of the expense of it.

We might have a great long dinner, but then everyone retires to their individual rooms where you don't have that same feel that you have in a home. Whereas if you have your own property, then yes, there's preparing dinner, being together, then there's dinner, and then there's some people retire to the rooms, but there's still the opportunities for those serendipitous encounters in the center of the home.

And so having the house actually facilitates a sense of closeness even as your family grows and even as people get to that point where they'd like to have more privacy. But hey, you know what? Cousin John is sleeping on the couch in the living room because we're just out of beds and the little kids are in a tent in the backyard because we're out of beds and we parked an RV in the driveway to have a few more beds for such and such a family, but it's still more fun because it's a little bit of camp and it leads to those relationships.

And those difficulties, even when there are difficulties, those difficulties are things that forge friendships at a deeper level, that forge relationships at a deeper level. If you think about the friends that you are the closest to emotionally, very frequently they will be friends with whom you have passed through trial or difficulty or discomfort.

And so avoiding discomfort or trial or difficulty is not always the optimal experience. You often don't actually get close to somebody until you have passed through difficulty. So whether that difficulty is pledging in your local sorority or an absolutely catastrophic backpacking trip or going to war together and fighting in the trenches beside each other or starting a business together and failing constantly, those are the things that forge the relationships that endure the test of time.

And they're not, meaning those are the relationships which when they have that emotional weight, they forge the test of time. And then so stories of difficulty that actually lend a little bit of zest to life. When we think about, oh, you remember that one time where we just had that awful experience and we showed up at the hostel at 2 a.m.

and they didn't have a single bed and we had to hike an hour and sleep at the train station or we went camping and we were stuck in the rain for, I woke up and there was two inches of water in the tent. It was the most miserable night of my life and you were there with me with that wasn't that great.

That builds those deeper relationships. And so even a simple vacation home where there's a consistency to it can be really, really helpful in terms of perpetuating a family culture. And I see this very clearly as children reach teenage years, young adults, they start to have boyfriends, girlfriends, marry off, have children, etc.

Having the consistency of a specific place that we go, I now see as something very valuable that I personally wish to facilitate. And I think it's quite doable. Consider that with regard to your own children. Consider how can I build a family culture. I would note having a vacation home is not the only way to do it.

It's just, I think, a good way for those who decide to do it. And I think that this is accessible to most people if you plan a little bit. You don't have to be crazy rich, just plan a little bit. Put very simply, imagine that you buy a home as a young married couple and you pay that home on a 15-year payment schedule.

You have a child after being in that home three years. And then when your oldest child is the age of 12, your mortgage is paid off. Well, go ahead and buy the vacation home in the place that your 12-year-old is going to really enjoy. Make sure you have the money for the toys.

Make sure you have the money for the jet skis or the boats or the fishing gear or the things that are going to make a home actually worthwhile and stock the home with that stuff. So don't spend it all on a house and then sit there wondering, "Oh, what are we going to do?

Let's play video games." Stock the home with the stuff of adventure. Make sure it's got all the toys that will lead to people having things to do, lots of things to do so they'll even look forward more and more to going there. But go ahead and buy the home.

Take out another mortgage, pay that one, and just imagine, pay that one on a 20-year schedule, and by the time the grandchildren are coming along, that house itself will be totally paid for. So it's doable even on a modest budget. You don't need to be very, very wealthy to do it, but I think that this is a very valuable touchpoint in a family culture.

And I think that one of the things that inspired me on this was some months ago, or gave me a new thought, a listener gave me a new thought. Some months ago, there was a listener who called into a Friday Q&A show, and the listener made the comment, he said, "We've decided to buy the vacation home first." I had never thought of that.

And the basic idea was, we're buying a home, we've got young children, we're buying a home that we think will be our long-term vacation home that we'll be in, but it's not the kind of home that we'll necessarily want to raise a 10-year-old in. It's too remote, it's too resort-towny, it doesn't have the things that you might be looking for for a 10-year-old or 12-year-old, so we're buying the vacation home, and then in a few years, we're going to go ahead and buy the in-town home that's closer to the amenities.

And what do you think about that? I had never thought of it before that caller said it, but as I thought about it, I thought, "That's actually a cool idea. Very, very true, very cool idea." And what I would point out is that you might consider making the vacation home the permanent home, the thing that you own, and then you just simply adjust your other home, your primary home, so to speak, in the way that is appropriate to you at that time.

If my parents had had and maintained a vacation home, and that was where we as a family celebrated the holidays, they could have simply maintained that vacation home even if they sold their big daily home and moved into a smaller condo, and that would have helped the family to facilitate this sense of togetherness.

And remember that, especially if you are the parent, especially if you have the money, this is one of those ways in which you can invest your money into helping your family stay together at that time where it's difficult. Your children don't need your money when you're dead and gone.

They don't need it then. If you have children when you're 25 and then you die at the age of 90, well, if you die at the age of 90, your child that you had at 25, as I stalled to do the mental math, will be 65. That's not the time when your child needs the money.

So the time that your child needs the money is, of course, in the teenage years when you can give your child a richness of experience in order to enjoy and have those memories of a teenage year that help them as that child is going through the process of establishing his own identity.

The time when your 25-year-old child needs your money is when he can just show up with his children to your vacation home and you cover everything. You cover the house, you don't charge him rent, you cover the food, you cover the gas for the boat, you cover the boat, etc.

That child may not be in the position at the moment, nor would it be wise for him to go and spend all the money on the resort fees, but if you can cover that, that's a really nice time to have it. And so don't hoard your money with the goal of setting it aside and leaving it to your children when you're dead.

Spend your money on your children and invest it into them at a time when you can enjoy it with them rather than setting the goal of simply dying with the most money. The next thing I want to point out is related to children, but it will lead me to my other point with regard to people.

One of the things that I have become convinced of, also different from when I was younger, is I've become convinced in the idea that I want to spend my money to have the go-to home for my children. Of course, all of us who are parents, we care about our children and we want the best for our children.

We want to be in a warm, safe, happy, loving environment and we want them to have rich relationships with other children. But we want those relationships and activities to happen in an environment where we can do our very best to make sure that there are age-appropriate activities happening and do our very best in an environment where we can make sure that they are safe and that others are safe.

And while all of us as parents who are listening to this show have that as a goal, we all know that not all parents have the same dedication. And so we're always careful with how do we arrange things and how do we set things properly. Well, one of the things I've become convinced of is I want my home to be the center, to be very attractive so that it will be a great place for my children to have social enjoyment and social engagements with their peers.

And so in order to do that, I'm going to spend my money to have a home that is attractive to children. And it means that I might do things that I might otherwise – I'll spend money on things that I might not otherwise value. I don't want my home to be a sterile environment.

Obviously, I'm not this. But I don't want my house just to have a library. And look, we have thousands of books. And young children, would you not like to come over to our home and read our thousands of books? That's not particularly attractive when your 14-year-old wants to hang out with his 14-year-old buddies.

And so I'm happy to say, "Let's have whatever the gaming thing is at that time. Let's make sure we have the environment. Let's make sure we have the toys." Well, an extension of that is often – or an extension of that idea, that idea of having your home be an attractive place for children and young adults so that those – so you can support your children and your young adults' social lives and also help to make sure that there is a warm, safe environment for your children and for others where there are good standards, good protection for the children in an age-appropriate way, and that rules are properly enforced so that everybody can have a great time, but everybody can be safe.

And I see this as an extension of investing into people as well. The vacation home can also facilitate this. The vacation home can facilitate this to a higher degree. As you reach those times in which – especially with young adults, where it may be more appropriate for your young adult children to invite some of their young adult friends for a weekend, a special event at your home – you can help to facilitate that and also help to make sure that you protect them during what are often vulnerable times.

Vulnerable times when young adults do foolish things that alter the courses of their lives. You can help to make sure that you facilitate their social lives, them being able to have friends and have time with their friends, and then you can help to make sure that it's genuinely productive.

Back to kind of toys and whatnot. If you invest in, say, a great set of stand-up paddle boards that are hanging in your garage at your lake house, you're going to be able to facilitate a far more meaningful sense of personal interaction for your children by simply investing in that equipment.

With their friends, I mean. It's one thing for your friends to go to somebody's house who has a TV and we can sit and watch a movie together. That's fine. I think we've all done that and enjoyed sitting and watching a movie together. But if you want to facilitate conversation and connection and meaningful interaction for your children so that they can have those deeper relationships with their friends, you're going to need to spend some money on some stuff, and that stuff will have to be strategically chosen stuff that enhances conversation.

So it might be a really nice fire pit out on the lake shore. It might be a nice set of kayaks to go and kayak the mangroves. It might be a great set of extra skis and snowboards so that there's always plenty of equipment to lend to all the friends.

What I'm telling you is these are good ways of spending money on people and on your children and their friends, and it will give you opportunities to potentially mentor their friends in a better way. And so that's also a useful thing. There will be people in your children's social spheres that don't have a loving father figure, a loving mother figure, who can arrange an environment where they're safe and where they might be able to be spoken into and encouraged and built up, etc.

But you can do that. You can serve as that loving mentor, that encouraging wise elder that will be so helpful to some of your children's friends, and you can facilitate that by investing into something like a vacation home. I now want to pivot to your social life. This is the other thing that convinced me.

I underestimated how hard it is for adults, most importantly adults with children, to have meaningful time with other adults with children. You go through this phase where of course you're young, you're single, or you're married, and it's like, "Ah, it's no big deal. Let's go hang out. Let's do all the stuff." And then you start having children and you find yourself incredibly isolated because your single friends don't really know what to do.

They don't really know. They're kind of awkward. They don't feel quite so great. The children are loud or they annoy them or something like that. And then your other friends who have children, all of a sudden now everything changes across the board and getting together becomes really, really difficult.

The single thing that I most enjoyed about being in an RV and living in an RV and traveling across the country with my family was that we were able to get so much time with all of our college friends who also had children because we could take our RV and we could park it in their driveway of our friends' homes.

Then we could put all our little children to bed in the RV, pop on a baby monitor so we could still hear them and watch them, make sure everything was okay. Our friends would put their children down and we'd go inside for a three or four hour night of fun together like we were back in college.

It was wonderful. And that experience made me realize how I want more and more and more of that in my life. I don't want to give that up. I loved those late night chats when I was in college and I'm not willing to give those up just because I got a bunch of little children.

So I need to plan and develop a lifestyle that continues to include that. And as I see how lonely we all get as we continue on, I need more of that in my life. And so I have become convinced that a vacation home can be one of the best ways that you can facilitate that because it's very easy to drop an invitation to a friend of yours and say, "Hey, listen, we're going to be down in the Keys this weekend at our home there.

We got an extra bedroom. Would you guys like to come and join us?" And that's a very wonderful invitation that's easy for people to accept. Now, I used to think, "Well, Joshua, listen, right? You got all this money. You're this rich guy. Why don't you just go ahead and just pay for them?" And I have done that.

But what I have found is that that often can insert kind of a weird dynamic into the relationship because the person knows you're making extra payments for them. And if that person is gracious and there's a good relationship and you can do it without the person becoming – what would be the term?

My wife and I use the term "whale," meaning somebody just depends on you. And "whale" is, of course, not the right word. That's just what we call them, is a whale is someone who's always just kind of mooching off of you and asking for stuff. So if you can help keep the person from being dependent, I guess a leech would be one word, but also keep them – make sure that there's a person who's self-confident enough to receive a gift graciously without it harming their own self-confidence, their own self-image, their own personal pride, etc., then that can work.

But it's still – it's not as easy of an invitation to make. And people know that. So although we've done it successfully, meaning invited a friend of ours, said, "Listen, come with us. We'll go to a resort. I'll cover all the bills." Usually even what I found there is like I had to couch it.

I got a great deal. Would you like to come with us, which makes things simpler. Whereas if you have your own home that's a stable point of contact, then that can be an easier invitation for your friends to accept. It can be much easier because they know they're not adding to your costs.

And then they'll often make an appropriate gesture such as, "Hey, well, I'll pay for the gas for the boat," or, "We'll bring the wine," right? Those kinds of things that are good social customs and graces. And you can have more time with your friends. And it's also by having the gear and the equipment, it means that people want to do it.

They're more likely to want to come with you. And so I now see what I didn't see before. I now see that having the vacation home is an investment into my own social life. And once again, it's a really great way to do it. I would much rather share...assuming we're talking about somebody that you like.

I would always much rather share a house with somebody rather than us be locked away in our hotel rooms because the serendipitous encounters...of course, anybody who needs or wants privacy can just retreat to their own room. But it's easier in a house to make yourself available for socializing by simply going out to the living room.

We all do this. You give the signals and the signs that I'm available and we go out to the living room and, "Oh, look, here you are," and we'll sit down and we'll talk or let's cook together, let's do something together, let's play a game. And it just creates those rich, rewarding experiences.

And by having a vacation home, it can be more of a neutral scenario. Even if it's not that far away, it would be unusual, since most people aren't adept at talking openly about their desire for socialization, it would be unusual for an average family who has an average home and has a friend who lives 30 minutes away to say, "Listen, we'd really like to see you this weekend.

Could you come over and spend two nights with us?" Because the reason we're extending this invitation is because we want to spend...have eight hours of conversation. That's unusual. It's not impossible, but that's unusual. Whereas if you have a vacation home, even if it's something that's an hour away, a little home on the lake, a little home on the beach, whatever's appropriate in your area, I don't know, a desert cabin.

But even if it's just an hour away, you could say, "Listen, we're going to be out at the cabin this weekend. Would you like to come out and spend a weekend out at the cabin with us?" And though it's only an hour away, there's something about the fact that this is the cabin, this is the lake house, this is the beach house, this is the apartment in the city.

We're going to go in and see some shows that facilitate it and makes it easier for them to say yes. And you may be able to add 10 or 15 hours of quality socialization to your schedule by simply having that. And man, if you could do that once a month, that makes a radically more rich and fulfilling life.

And you may be able to be a much closer friend to your friends in time, right, in normal relationships. You spend a few hours with someone, you start to get past the social niceties and get deeper. You find out what your friend's hurts are, your friend's ambitions are, and you can support one another and encourage one another and love on one another in just such a much more powerful way in that kind of context.

So I at this point now see what I didn't see before, that something like a vacation home, while it still has those difficulties that I previously identified, it can be a tool that is a very attractive and very powerful tool. It can just make a big, big difference in the lives of others.

And you can use it, you can leverage it in many, many ways. A couple more examples. You can leverage this even with your friends from other states, your friends from other countries, etc. Many people, quite rightly, will be very slow to want to come to your home where you are for an extended period of time.

It's not that it can't be done, but we all know that house guests of more than a few days add extra pressures that can make things more difficult. But when you have a cabin or a vacation home, and you can extend an invitation to somebody and just say, "Hey, would you like to use our home?" That could be an incredible blessing.

A friend of ours blessed us with this the other day at a cabin in Idaho. We were out in Idaho in the RV and we were just traveling a lot. He's like, "Listen, go and stay at our cabin." What a blessing it was to have a whole mountain cabin with a beautiful view and a wonderful deck, etc., where we could park our RV and just enjoy being in a home for a while.

It's something that made all the difference in the world. And then we were able to see it and use it and see our friends. When our friends were able to come to the cabin for the weekend, we went back into our RV and sleeping in the driveway, and then we were able to see our friends.

And so it really just inspired me and I realized, you know what? This is a good use of money. This is a useful tool in someone's hands. So now, if you buy that, I want to give you a few suggestions, some things that I have thought about that I think will be helpful.

Number one, I think it's useful to clarify some kind of destination for the home. It shouldn't be too far away. There's always this challenge, right? If you buy a vacation home that's a 10-hour airplane flight away, you're not going to use it for a spontaneous weekend. Ideally, probably one to three hours away.

Now, that might be a quick and cheap and convenient plane trip. Sometimes it could be a drive. Ideally, of course, in most places it would be a drive, but one to three hours away. You get more than three hours and you're going to have some more significant resistance and it's going to be harder for people to take you up on invitations.

If you imagine what for many people is a typical schedule, you're working on Friday and on Monday and you're going to invite somebody for the weekend. Somebody gets off work a little bit early, 4.30 on Friday afternoon. If you get packed up and get out and you're four hours away, you leave at 4.30, you get there at 8.30, you're not going to have much energy left for much socializing on Friday night.

So then you're just going to have one day Saturday and then on Sunday you may get together on Sunday morning and hang out on Sunday morning, but you don't have a lot of time for a lot of activities because you know, you know what, it's four hours away, probably got to hit the road by say one o'clock to be home by dark and have a chance to unpack from the weekend, unwind to get ready for the work week ahead.

And so something that's four hours or more is just not going to be able to be used as regularly. It may still be able to be used on a special extended weekend or a special kind of weekly vacations, but the number of people that you can invite is going to be much more limited.

Thinking about children, you know, it's one thing to say, "Hey, we're going to be an hour away. Could you drop someone off or can we take them with us?" Another thing to say, "Can I take your 17-year-old four hours away?" That's more of a difficult thing for parents to say yes to if it's at all even advisable.

So closer is better. If it's an hour away or an hour and a half, somebody finishes up work, 4.30, by 6 o'clock they're sitting out on your back deck with a cold drink in their hand, nothing better, right? Making dinner, have a great time, get together on Saturday, Sunday, you got all day.

Around 3 o'clock or so, 2.30, 3 o'clock, they wrap up, they're back home and they're home at 5 o'clock. That is perfect. And so with an hour and a half, if you drew a one to three hour radius around your home or your primary area, in most cases you could really find something in that area.

I do think you want to look for some kind of feature that gives you something to want to do, but it also gives you something that other people will want to do. What I mean here is your own personal desires might be simple. For example, your desires might be as simple as having a sunny patio where you can sit out in the sunshine with a good book and read all weekend long.

That doesn't cost much, and yet for somebody who's an introvert and a reader, that's a perfect thing to do. But you will have a harder time inviting people to that and it being appealing to other people than if there was say something as simple as a lake out back.

And so even if it was a lake and you had a couple of kayaks and some fishing poles, you'll get more people and have more things to do. And so you want to think about what's the story of this house. The story can be any number of things. The story can be there's a lake, water is always attractive, a lake, a beach, etc.

The story can be there's snow, snow season. The story can be there's a beach, something to do, but there's got to be some kind of story associated with it in order for people to say, "Okay, yes, I can do that." And the story should have obviously be something that you like.

But I've known lots of people who will have a house and they don't like the beach, but they have a beach house even though they never go on the beach themselves, but there are people that they invite who like the beach, similar things with skiing, etc. And so just kind of come up with some kind of story for the house and then figure out how to improve that story with the equipment.

Once you decide what the story of the house is, what's the activity of this house? Maybe there's a beautiful national park next door to it. So we're going to outfit this house with picnic baskets and we can hike into the national park and we're going to have binoculars or stargazing or whatever.

Find something and then make sure the house has the gear for it and it has the extra gear. So that way you have it stocked for what you need. If it's a lake house, make sure that you have things that are appealing at different areas. Anybody can have paddleboards, anybody can have kayaks.

They don't have to match. They can be old, they can be beat up, they can be canoes, etc. But having something to go out and do is going to be much more valuable. A number of years ago, I had stayed with a friend at his lake house in Michigan and it was wonderful.

He had kayaks, they had a Hobie cat, they had a power boat so we could ski, we could wakeboard, we could do tubes and all that, which is wonderful. And then also they had all of the house related stuff. Now, in my opinion, the gear is often just an excuse for being together.

So yeah, you got some kayaks, that gives you something to do when you need a little break. We always need a little break from one another. Being together for 10 hours a day straight doesn't work for most relationships. But you can have a great breakfast, then let's go out on the kayaks.

Why don't you guys take the kayaks out? Boom, perfect separation. They're gone for an hour or two, they come back, have a nice lunch. What do you want to do? We're going to go out and lie in the sunshine for a while. Great. We all have our quiet time, come back together at dinner time, and then we go to the fire pit.

So the other thing is invest into something that's going to bring lots of camaraderie in the actual house and make sure that it's appealing in different ways. So the heart of that should hopefully be the kitchen. One of the great things about having people together, physically together, staying in the same place, is the chance to turn meal times from a sometimes 30 minute event into a three hour event of enjoying being together.

If you just focus on eating as is common, especially in the US American culture, we're going to go out to eat and we go for a restaurant and we eat, you're done in 30 minutes. And you barely even got past the niceties and got into really sharing heart to heart.

Whereas if you start by cooking together and we have a glass of wine, okay, let's start cooking, you start cooking together, then dinner's ready, you sit down, you eat together, you have dessert, oh, we've got to clean up. And there's two people, we'll send the moms to the living room, they can sit and visit, dads will clean up the kitchen or vice versa, right?

We're going to send the dads out back to smoke cigars and moms are going to clean up the kitchen or whatever it is. You can now stretch that simple event into a three or four hour dinner party. And again, all of us really want that camaraderie, that connection, that being together, and you can facilitate that with a really great kitchen.

So think about having a great kitchen that's open, that gives space for people, that gives you the space to cook for people, and then of course learn how to use it so that it's not intimidating for you to have 10 extra people over, et cetera. It makes a big, big difference.

Think a lot about having a great place to gather after dinner. And so this might be a wonderful living room with a crackling fireplace, this might be a sitting room with a great view, it might be a back deck, go ahead and put in a fire pit, it's always a winner.

Human beings, there's nothing more universal than our enjoyment of sitting around together and staring at a fire. And so put in a nice fire pit and make it easy to use so you'll use it a lot. You might put in a hot tub, you might put in a pool, put in something, and again a fire pit is ideal.

A nice deck and a fire pit will give you hours and hours and hours of conversation with your friends. And it gives it in a way that is appropriate. I say, stock your house with a really great coffee setup, a nice selection of wines and/or other alcohol, and tobacco.

Joshua's theory on coffee, wine, or other alcohol, and tobacco is that these are excuses that adults use to say, "Hey, can we sit and talk?" In our modern era, especially men, most men have a very hard time saying to one another, "Hey, can we just sit down and talk for an hour?" That's kind of a weird and awkward thing to say.

But if you say, "Hey, you want to grab a beer?" All of a sudden, you're pretty much guaranteed for 20 to 30 minutes of conversation. Two beers and you got an hour. Add a cigar to the mix and you got two hours right there. And so these excuses of, "Hey, let's have a cup of coffee," these excuses of, "Hey, let's have a glass of wine, let's have a cigar," these are excuses that we use with one another in order to say, "Hey, can we talk?" We just don't say, "Hey, can we talk?" because it sounds weak.

So make sure your house is stocked for that with opportunities just for that direct conversation. You'd be amazed at how much more interaction you can have with a great fire pit and a well-stocked wine cabinet, or a great fire pit and a cool espresso machine. Things like that make a big, big difference.

What else? I think have a diversity of things that will also engage other people. So it's unusual that you can get a 16-year-old to sit down and talk to you for hours and hours at a time as well, unless there's something to do. And so make sure you've got a number of games.

Sit down and play Risk with a 16-year-old who understands how to play Risk. Probably you can have some great laughs, right? Ticket to Ride, Risk, Phase 10, some kind of random card game will make a big difference. And if you'll use these tools, you'll be able to get people to sit down who wouldn't ordinarily be able to sit down.

My wife and I were recently guests in somebody's home with our children for the weekend. And there was, I think, an 11-year-old in this particular family's home. And the 11-year-old couldn't stop staring at his phone screen. And we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried. We asked lots of questions and tried to engage.

But the 11-year-old didn't have the social skills to stop staring at his phone screen and spend time talking with us until finally we started playing Exploding Kittens. And he liked playing Exploding Kittens. The phone disappeared. And once we got him into the game, two hours later, we were able to build a relationship.

And while the phone came back later, it was a totally different relationship. And without Exploding Kittens, it would not have been possible. The previous night, we had tried, and it was just a movie. Well, we all sit and stare at the screen. And of course, with friends that you know well, you can put a movie on in the background and then you ignore the movie.

But in this case, because there was still not that close connection, Exploding Kittens was the ticket. That said, I think it's a really good idea to have things that are going to be familiar to people. So video games, wonderful solution. Have a great video game console and some games that are going to be really fun.

But you might choose games that lead to greater sense of togetherness. This was what was so great when the Wii, the original Wii, first came out. It was revolutionary and people bought it because the games that were appropriate for it were more kind of interactive games and they didn't require much skill.

Wii Bowling got you all looking like goofballs in the living room together and it facilitated it. And I knew lots of people who bought that console when it first came out because of that. And so think about it and choose some games for the console and choose some things that are going to be useful.

Same thing with movies. Don't just go to Netflix, although obviously that can be a great thing, but go ahead and stock some really good movies. Some movies that will be fun, they'll be widely appealing, and they'll be appropriate for varied mixed audiences. So that way you can have many different things.

And so if you'll have different things in different parts of your home, now you can really encourage that sense of togetherness. You might have another family out, you've got wine and cigars on the back porch around the fire pit, and you've got the pool table inside with a movie going for the children.

And they're getting the same benefit, but you're kind of breaking down those things that people are not yet mature enough to articulate. It would be an unusual 16-year-old who's able to analyze the social dynamics and recognize, "My heart is really, really desperate for some personal contact, for someone to talk about things and seek me out as a person.

And so therefore what I really need is to talk with my fellow friends heart to heart around something." A 16-year-old can't articulate that. They can't do that. A mature adult can of course recognize, "I'm feeling lonely right now. I need to call somebody." But you can facilitate that same thing happening for the 16-year-old by investing in the appropriate equipment.

So just think carefully about how you equip the house. A couple more comments. Think about how you can sleep more people in an appropriate way. Best thing I have ever seen a number of years ago, I was in the Keys at a friend's house in the Keys. And I went over to the neighbor's house.

And the house was a fairly ordinary house, but they had installed a couple of bunk rooms. And these bunk rooms were not big rooms, but what they had is they had quadruple queen bunks in them. And a quadruple queen, two sets of those bunk rooms just with quadruple queens automatically means that you can host about 16 people without it being that big of a deal.

And they were just bunk rooms. But it was awesome. It was so cool. I remember for me, at first I used to read Coastal Living Magazine. And when I was younger, I'd keep a look book of all the things that I wanted. And I had multiple of these bunk rooms that you would find.

You'd find this amazing beach house and they'd have a bunk room with 12 bunks in it or 14 bunks in it, et cetera. And I think that we as people, we love that. Children especially love that. They love the chance to go to camp and to be in a bunk room with a bunch of other people.

I think as adults, a lot of times we still appreciate certain things about that. And so if you've got a great house, make sure that you're not too limited by sleeping space. So make a plan for it. Install a bunk room and then have overflow. Put a couple of air mattresses.

Maybe get some nice ones for the adults. Figure out where you could pull a room divider across to give a little privacy. Have a couple of sofa beds, et cetera. Maybe have a tent that you could set up. Get yourself a canvas wall tent. And that way, if you wanted to invite, let's say you had a great lake house, but the lake house only has two or three bedrooms in it because that's what's appropriate.

Well, don't limit yourself to just only ever being able to invite one family or two families. Grab a couple of nice canvas wall tents and then invite a few more families and say, "Listen, it's not awesome. I got a canvas wall tent. I got some cots here that we can set up, but you'll be fine.

We'll put a little propane heater in there and you're going to be great." And set those up on the lawn and make it an event out of people because the only thing that's more fun than two families being together is four families being together because now you're not just forced into too close of a contact with one other couple or one other set of adults.

You have more and then you can involve more and more people and it adds to more fun. And now people can swap out. "Okay, I'm going to go kayaking with these guys and now we're going to go out on the boat," et cetera. And so your limitation is often sleeping space.

You can make a kitchen expand. You can get a great table to eat at and not everybody has to sit at a table to eat, but you usually want to have sleeping space. So think in advance, "How can I facilitate sleeping space?" Grab a bedroom and just stuff it full of bunks.

Figure out how you can provide appropriate levels of privacy for people, but actually just some sort of mattress for them and you can have more people and use it more. And especially if you buy the concept that I started with of simply the benefit of having this for your children, it's going to be nicer.

You can invite more children. You can invite the whole youth group or you can invite the whole scout troop or the whole basketball team, et cetera. And you just bring along a couple extra chaperones, a couple extra parents, et cetera. And if you have appropriate sleeping space, then that can be a great way for you to host a whole basketball team, et cetera.

And that can be just such a wonderful blessing for your children in their social lives and an opportunity for you to encourage and mentor the lives of other people. And again, I repeat, what else are you going to do with your money? Spend it on people. Spend your money on people.

And these are some cool ways that you can do it. The final point is make this easy on yourself. Make this easy on yourself by figuring out what you need to do to make it simple. So if it were me, right, when I buy a vacation home and I choose this is going to be the vacation home, then I will stock it.

I do this in my own home, but like I'm not going to stock it with my finest china. I'm going to go to the restaurant supply store and I'm going to buy 50 matching plates so that we never run out of plates and they're always there. I'm going to buy multiple sets of linens, right?

Just go ahead and get all the stuff. Treat your home like a hotel and so that you have it. Find somebody who can clean the house for you. It is way, way better when you're hosting if you can figure out how to invest your money into a way of making sure that you don't have to do all the cleanup every single time.

My least favorite thing about borrowing people's houses, my least favorite thing about Airbnb right now is the need to clean the houses. It really bugs me because it's difficult. Because at the age of our children we desire, right, we want very much to have a place that's clean, but because the children aren't great at cleaning yet and they require so much supervision, my wife and I often cannot leave a place the way that we would like.

Otherwise, I'd have to sit in the car with the children while she cleans or she's got to take them on a walk while I clean, etc. And so as a host, I think there's just a real hassle if you've got to say, "Well, every Sunday night I've got to stay and clean my house after my guests." That's not going to be great.

But if you've got a great housekeeper where you just know that every Monday morning my housekeeper comes and I pay my housekeeper a flat rate and every Monday morning that house gets cleaned, then you'll feel a lot better about using your home and hosting other people. If you know that, even if you're doing it yourself, if you know when you're getting ready to leave the house on Sunday afternoon, we just toss all of the sheets right in the washing machine, toss them in the dryer.

We don't even have to take them out of the dryer. We just hit start in the dryer when we leave. We've got a whole fresh set. And so open up your closet, grab a fresh set of sheets, change all the sheets, put those in the washing machine, wash, done, boom, we leave.

Tell the robot to go vacuum the floors when you're going out, then it can be a lot, lot better. Stock your home as well. Stock it with all the stuff so that when you're together you don't need to go out. Make sure that you have an extra fridge that's stocked with all the cold drinks.

Put a freezer and make sure you've got all the foods in the freezer that you're going to want. And maybe if it's at the beginning of the season you go out and you spend a couple thousand dollars and you stock up all the stuff so that you don't have to shop all season, that also can be a great thing.

And it'll make your life easier to know you've always got food. There's never a reason for you to not have plenty of food in your house to host a spontaneous 20 person dinner party. It's relatively simple. You keep, even a nice one, you keep frozen vegetables in the freezer, you keep frozen steaks packed up ready to go.

This is one of the things that I do when hosting people is you keep frozen steaks cut up, a little bit of seasoning, vacuum packed in vacuum sealed bags. And so then you just have the sous vide ready to go. So you figure out how many people are going, you drop the steaks in the sous vide machine, go ahead and grab out your frozen green beans, go ahead and grab out your mashed potatoes that are just dehydrated mashed potatoes from a box or from a bag, those last for a long time, and add some seasonings and away you go.

And even if you have no fresh food in the house, all of that's there, add a bottle of wine to that, no one will ever wish for anything else. And so think about that and then develop some simple menus, some ways of cooking for people that you know are reliable.

Again, for years I use this with regard to inviting people to our house after church meetings. When we have a house and we go to different church meetings, we've traveled so much as guests and showed up at places. And one of the things that really shocked and hurt me, especially when traveling across the United States, was how many church meetings we would go to and how few invitations we would get for lunch afterward.

And we would show up when we were traveling in an RV, if we were visiting friends, we would go to, we'd visit our friend's church of course, or if we had some particular reason to be in a place, we would go to a church meeting. But a lot of times we were just traveling and it's the weekend and I want to go to a church meeting and meet with some fellow Christians on Sunday morning.

And so we would go to a local church and my family is not inconspicuous and people would say, "Hi, welcome," et cetera. And I would, "What are you doing?" "We're traveling," et cetera. And I would tell them. But week after week after we're on the road, we got so lonely, just incredibly lonely and really, really wanted for just to have some fellowship, to meet some friends, to talk to some people.

And got to the point, I was like, "I don't care if I ever go to another church meeting in my life. I don't need more sermons. I don't need more singing. Fine, I appreciate that. But what I need is some fellowship." And we would go week after week and it felt like, it's like, "Is anybody going to engage with us?

Is anybody going to do anything other than say, 'Hey, welcome, glad to see you again?'" And it really shocked and it hurt me at the state of American Christianity. And I resolved, I said, "I will never," it's hard when you actually make a resolve, but my intention, right? My intention is that I will never allow somebody to come to a church meeting where I am and find out that they're visiting and not invite them for lunch.

Because it was so hurtful to me and so painful not to have that. And of course, why don't we do it, right? Well, we always either, "Oh, my house is a mess," or, "I don't have any food in the house." But when you're a traveler and you're really lonely and you just want to have some fellowship with somebody, you start to realize that, "I don't care if your house is a mess.

I'm not judging if your house is a mess. My house is a mess. Houses are a mess. That's what happens. It happens to all of us." Or, "I don't care if you have any food. If somebody had just said, 'Listen, our house is a mess and we don't have any food, but I'll tell you what, we'd love to just visit with you.

There's a park down the road. If you guys want to go to the park where there's a swing set so your kids can get their wiggles out, we'll swing by Publix or we'll swing by the grocery store and we'll grab some peanut butter and jelly and a bag of chips and we'll meet you down there in a little bit.'" I would have said, "Yes," every time.

But people didn't do that. Anyway, after that experience, I promised myself, "I'm not going to be in a church meeting where there are visitors and not invite somebody for lunch, even if it's as simple as, "Our house is a mess and we have no food," because I know what it's like to be that way.

It really opened my eyes in a way that I didn't previously understand. So far, I've pretty much done that. In so doing, what I have learned is I just want to always have my house stocked with some stuff that is nice. So again, I'll tell you, I already did it, but sous vide steaks in the freezer, buy a big hunk of ribeye, chop it up into nice thick steaks and vacuum seal and pack them in the freezer.

They'll sit there for six months and be perfectly good. You find a family of two or a family of 15, all that matters is you can get your sous vide pot up to temperature pretty quickly. You need 45 minutes in the sous vide, which is just enough time to get everything else ready and have time to sit and have a glass of wine and visit in the living room for a little bit before dinner's on.

You can go from nothing to a nice Sunday dinner at your home in 45 minutes with some sous vide steaks, some frozen vegetables. I try to make sure I keep something pickled, some kind of little hors d'oeuvres, little onions or little olives or something like that, some nice stuff.

And then whatever else you happen to have, again, some dehydrated mashed potatoes or whip up some bread or something real quick. And you can serve a meal in 45 minutes that's really nice even if you have company and you need it really quickly. So just think about how you can institute things that make your life easy.

And it does take a little bit of skills, takes a little bit of practice, but once you do it, then you can turn your home, you can turn your vacation home into something that's just a blessing for others. And in the modern world we are living through an epidemic of loneliness.

We are living through an epidemic of loneliness and we have more ways to contact each other instantaneously and yet we spend more time alone than ever before. And so host that, encourage that. Final thing, this one is dangerous. Think about some ways to encourage that physical, not physical contact, that's a deluded term, think about some ways to encourage that face to face interaction.

And so it might be as simple as it might be something where you just facilitate it by having the appropriate games and things. You might put a basket, put a Faraday cage, a basket, a little box at the front of your property, put your cell phones here. You might not have internet at the property unless you specifically turn it on and plug into an ethernet cable.

But help people to arrange in an appropriate way, arrange just a break to be together. I think here's where being in a remote cabin is really wonderful because they expect it. The Faraday box at the front door is a little intense but it can be something where people really look forward to it.

If you have the personality to pull it off and just to say, "Hey, here's the cell phone room. Here's a charger right here. This is where your cell phone is. If you need to talk on it, this is where you do it. But cell phones don't come into the rest of the house," something like that.

And help your guests have a break from it. It's just a wonderful way to do it. I'm not so hardcore just simply because I use my phone as a camera and I like to take pictures, etc. But I understand and I appreciate it when people are intentional about it because it makes a better environment for everyone around.

So these are some ideas that I've had over the years. I wasn't wrong, as I see it now, I wasn't wrong about the downsides of a vacation home but I hadn't yet arrived at a point in my life where I could appreciate those upsides. And so at this point in time, I now appreciate those upsides in the ways that I have just described to you and I encourage you to consider them and if they are applicable, go for it.

There are so many of my listeners in this audience who are continually fighting the urge to spend money. "I want to be frugal. Should I really go and spend the money? Should I really go and buy a vacation home?" etc. Because after all, I could be richer. I just say, "Friend, I'm all for you getting richer but I want you to live a rich life now." Being the richest guy in the graveyard doesn't really matter.

It's kind of a waste. And so to the extent that you want to build more wealth and to the extent that you see that minimizing your expenditures will help you, great. Obviously, that's a proper form of analysis that you should do. But what's the point of money except to use it to buy the kind of life that you want to live?

And if you reflect back, the thing that you're going to remember and look back on is not what the particular balance of your bank account was at any point in time. You're going to reflect back on the experiences that you had. And you can spend money in order to facilitate those experiences.

And I don't see that there's really any better use of money than that. It's funny, there's another weird parable that Jesus taught. I've puzzled about it for years and I still don't understand it, but it's the parable of the lazy servant. And it's got this funny verse in the Bible about it where basically, paraphrasing it, Jesus tells this parable about there's this king and he has a wicked servant and the wicked servant just doesn't do much good.

And the king's really angry with the servant because the servant was a bad servant. And so the servant's like, "What am I going to do?" So he's still a servant of the king. So he calls all of the king's debtors and he says, "Listen, you owe the king $10,000, right?" And the debtor says, "Yeah, I owe the king $10,000." And he says, "Quick, mark this down here.

I'm going to change your balance from $10,000 to $2,000. And then the next one, I'm going to cut your balance from $100,000 to $50,000." So the king calls the servant for him and finds out what the servant has done. The servant's given away all the king's money and the king says, "This is a shrewd, shrewd servant." And then there's this weird statement.

I should have looked it up, but I didn't. But this weird statement where it says, "Use your unrighteous mammon to make friends for yourself on earth." And while I have a hard time quoting that as gospel truth, it's something that I often say. The whole point of money, you should spend money to buy friends for yourself on earth.

Not in a weird way, not in the prodigal son just spending all his money not to buy real friends, but if you can use money to facilitate friendship, if you can use money to invest into people, what more valuable thing is there? And so often people just think, "Well, the only way I can do that is to go and give my money to buy a cow for somebody in poverty-stricken Africa." Well, that's fine.

And I think that's wonderful. But there's a lot of lonely people around you right now who if you invited them over for dinner and you put out a really nice dinner for them, you could really encourage them. And there's a lot of lonely people around your 16-year-old. Your 16-year-old has some friends that right now are scheming and researching ways to end their life.

Your 16-year-old have some friends that right now are trying to figure out what to do in the future. And so if you can use your money and among other things can put in place some infrastructure that's going to allow you to spend more time with people, I think that is a very, very good use of money.

I forgot this earlier, so I'll just add this as an addendum. One final thing. I think having a vacation home can be a wonderful sense of security for your children even as they go through periods of their life. Having a second home that if your son or your daughter gets fired from a job, you can say, "Listen, son, why don't you move into the lake house for a little bit?" Or your daughter wants to write the world's best great novel, but she has no way to make any money on it.

"Listen, why don't you move into the lake house?" Obviously, your own home might be available, but having a kind of that stability for a family member, for your children of knowing they've always got a home, there's always an extra house available, can be a really nice thing. And I think sometimes those of us who care a lot about responsibility, we spend so much time thinking about trying to create responsibility in our children that we don't think enough about supporting our children.

And if you study the children of the wealthy, one of the things you find is that the children of the wealthy have a very different psyche than do children who grow up in poverty, because they understand that it's almost impossible for them to fail. They understand that if I fail, it's okay, because I've still got a nice trampoline to fall back on, mom and dad.

And I think that's a very valuable thing, because knowing that you have a support system, a trampoline, means that you can take bigger risks. You can try more interesting flips on a trampoline than you do on a hard concrete basketball court. And so you have more opportunity and you can take bigger risks, etc.

So I think that's a really powerful thing for your children, and it can also be a wonderful thing for your ability to help your friends as well, friends who are in need. "Listen, I've got a vacation home. You can't stay there forever, but I'd be happy for you to stay there for a month and give them some kind of interim housing which can really take the bear off of someone's back." So I hope these ideas are helpful to you.

If you've got additional ideas, I'd love to hear them from you. But those are the best that I've heard. Remember that if you would like to speak to me personally, I'm available for consulting at the moment. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult and you can book a consulting call. We can talk about whether you can afford a vacation home or not.

What's funny is that in a lot of consulting calls, I actually do wind up giving an abbreviated version of this speech that I've just given you, basically saying, "Listen, why do you have so much money? I'm glad that you're rich, but you've got way too much money. How can you invest your money into your children?

How can you invest your money into your friends?" And I frequently find myself telling the stories that I've just told you and saying, "Go and buy a vacation home. Go and buy a lake home. Invest into your grandchildren's life in this way by providing that." And this is something that grandparents especially can do.

Your children aren't going to ask you to do it, but if you've got the money and you can set up a really great place that your children are going to want to be at and your grandchildren are going to be at, you can invest into some wonderful time with your grandchildren.

Which, by the time you reach grandparent's age, you generally recognize that what I want is time with people. I'm telling you. You can spend your money and you can buy that time back. Not by paying someone to spend time with you, but by paying for things that make it easier and more attractive for someone to spend time with you.

And if that happens and that also results in a deepening of the relationship, I consider that a pretty good thing. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.