♪ Blessing in the mornin' ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ We got the store to sell ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card.

Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Today on Radical Personal Finance, 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. Today is Friday, August 5, 2022. And today on this Friday, we do live Q&A. Call in, talk about anything you like. ♪ Here at Radical Personal Finance, any Friday that I can arrange the appropriate technology to be in front of a phone line and a computer and a recording software, et cetera, we do a live Friday call-in show.

It works just like call-in talk radio. You call in, talk about anything you want. I would call it open mic or open line Friday, but I can't do that to Rush Limbaugh. I guess in his honor, he's dead and gone now, I should just call it open line Friday.

But it's a great chance for you to call in. You can ask me any question you want. It can be anything related to your own personal situation. It can be anything, any kind of personal question you want to think through. It can be any topic that you're interested in, anything that is spark that you want to hear me talk about, or anything you disagree with me on.

We haven't had much of that lately, but if you disagree with me on something, I'd love to have you on. I'm a big fan of debate, big fan of conversation. So if there's anything on your list that you think would be well served by a conversation, I would love for you to join me on a Q&A show.

To do that, go to Patreon, find Radical Personal Finance on Patreon, sign up to support the show there, and then you will have access to the call-in information. We begin with Ori in Minnesota. Ori, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me.

So I was listening the other day. You had a show where you had mentioned something about your vision and plan for things, and you talked about having like a family farm or an estate, some land somewhere as just part of your preparedness and family goals. I thought that was a really interesting idea and something that's kind of come up in my own family and extended family, talking about having something where we all have something together.

But then you mentioned it wouldn't be something where you're necessarily working it full-time. Maybe you have people employed there. I would just like to hear more about that if you want to share or kind of how you're thinking about that. - Sure. Well, I think it's kind of a classic subject, planning about what you'd like to have and what you'd like to have in the future and what would fit your lifestyle and your vision for yourself and for your family.

And so I'll share a little bit about how my ideas and my perspective has changed over the years and what I desire to have now or at least what I think is useful to have now. When I was younger, I was very much obsessed with-- and by the way, quick other disclaimer.

This is probably the normal maturing process that men go through throughout their life. And for context, I'm now in my mid-30s. I have a number of children. My eldest is nine. And so at this point in time, it's just kind of that natural growth pattern of life. And so my goals don't reflect what they were when they were younger.

So I'll share these things, and I'm trying to make that precise so that any younger listeners can say, "Yeah, you know, this might happen," because the younger you get an idea of where you might be when you're older, the better. So going back, when I was in my 20s and I was super into personal finance, there were a couple of strains that really appealed to me strongly.

The first thing that appealed to me strongly was not working. I didn't want to work. I wanted to be financially independent, and I wanted to get there as fast as possible. The second thing that appealed to me was minimalism and basically having a very carefree lifestyle enhanced by having minimal objects.

And a third thing that appealed to me very strongly was constant or significant travel. Those are three expressions of things that I found very exciting. And so the pathway to get there in terms of a personal finance perspective was, or the pathway I had at that point was, work as hard as I can in order to accumulate money quickly, keep expenses as low as possible by living frugally, and keeping to a minimalistic approach to life so that I would be able to keep my finances under control and not have a lot of attachment to a bunch of physical stuff, and embrace a transient lifestyle or kind of geographic arbitrage, moving around to different places, etc.

And so at that stage of my thinking, I couldn't see the value in a vacation home. I couldn't see the value in really having a big fancy house. I valued more modest possessions, and I loved the freedom that came with renting rather than owning, and with the value that came from those things.

Well, over the years I've realized that, number one, the reason I wanted to quit working was because I was operating from a flawed assumption of work, and I was working in something that wasn't a good fit for me. And so I decided and discovered that it was easier for me to change jobs or careers and move into a job or career that would give me the sense of control over my life that I wanted from retirement, and that that was a better and healthier move than it was for me to focus exclusively on being retired.

Number two, I discovered that while I still practice a... It's hard to say I practice minimalism. I still am not into excessive consumption of stuff, and I find significant quantities of physical possessions to be more burdensome than anything else. What I realized is that consuming and having stuff is a major contributor to the peak experiences of life that we often wish to have.

One of the arguments in favor of minimalism is, well, just have experiences and not stuff. If your stuff is properly chosen and carefully chosen and is not excessive, you're not just a hoarder of silly things, then it's the stuff itself that actually contributes more and more to the peak experiences.

And then when thinking about geographic arbitrage, etc., as I've spent the last almost four years wandering and being a long-term traveler, I have realized that while I do greatly enjoy traveling and I have a restless and wandering spirit, that there's something so special about having a deep sense of home and a deep sense of connectedness and place, and that that's important for me, that's important for my wife, that's important for our children, etc.

So bring all these things down to vision and goals, etc. To me, having a place that is carefully chosen and that enhances your lifestyle can be, at its core, a fundamental part of accomplishing some of these longer goals. And let me give one more comment. To me, what really gets me excited when I think about my goals and my vision and my future is the concept of legacy.

And by legacy, I think of that in terms of impact in the world. Financial legacy has a component of that, but I'm not currently motivated by trying to make my children rich based upon inheritance. I want them to develop the skills of building their own wealth, and I want them to be able to do that as best they can.

I'm not super motivated by saying, "I want to have $10 million to leave behind for them." But I believe that legacy in terms of family legacy, community impact, etc., to me, this is really, really powerful. And a lot of this just comes from my basic worldview. As I look at the world, I see the world as basically at a kind of a middle point of a transition from gross unrighteousness, scarcity, strife, and conflict, and increasingly moving to a world of increasing orderliness, righteousness, justice, equity, and prosperity and abundance, and that that path is not a linear path, but it's a progressive path that is progressively being realized.

And a lot of that is simply tied up in my religious worldview. As a Christian, I believe that Christ is building his church and that that church is steadily and over time transforming the fundamental basis of all of society. If you look back over the last 2,000 years, and you think about where we are as a people today versus where we were 2,000 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, or 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago, while what I'll dub as "positive progress" is not uniform, it is a consistent trend that more and more of the world is increasingly Christian, more and more of the world is increasingly talking about justice and righteousness in all of its various manifestations and permutations.

The world is increasingly abundant, and while there are, and I expect, significant short-term and medium-term difficulties for that, that to me fulfills the classic vision of basically an improvement in the world and a redemption of the world. And so when I think about my place in that, in terms of here I am as one individual guy in a little corner of the world in the year 2022, I want to have an impact in whatever small corner of the world I have the opportunity to impact.

And so that always begins--and forgive the minor sermon here-- but in Christian theology, that always starts with myself, that always starts with self-control, improvement in my own personal being and my own personal character, bringing myself under control, bringing myself under subjection. It expands to my family, bringing my family under control, bringing my family under subjection, and bringing my family to a place where it can grow.

And then it reflects out into my little corner of the community. Wherever I happen to be placed in the world, I can improve this little garden that's around me, and improve it and minister to the hurting people that are nearby, seek to see more justice and righteousness affected in my corner of the world.

And if it ever expands beyond that, wonderful, but there's no need for it to expand. And so with that mindset, there are two expressions of that. The first expression has to do with the people that I can infect the most, which is my family. And then the second has to do with my neighborhood, my community, my village, so to speak.

And of course, I'm speaking about this metaphorically. In our modern world where we're all over the place, sometimes the people that we're closest to are not our next-door neighbors, but this is how it makes sense in my head. So in my family, I want to build a family culture of permanence.

I want to birth children, I want to raise those children, and I want to raise those children so that they can stand on the shoulders of the giants that have come before them. And I want to be very, very diligent of sowing into them all of the good things that they will need to flourish because at its core, my fundamental qualification for leadership in the world has to do with my success of leadership in my family.

And in a man's castle, he has the most fertile ground to be able to affect and to minister, to adjust, and basically you can fulfill almost any view or any vision that you have in your own castle. So that's my primary priority, especially at this phase of my life that that is my almost sole priority.

So if I think about what tools I need for that in a perfect world unencumbered by the constraints of how much is actually in my bank account right now, I want to build a vision. And that vision has to do with what do I want my family life to look like and to feel like.

I want it to be a family life full of love, full of joy. I want it to be a safe place. I want my children to be uninjured by others, unharmed by those who would come and seek to do them injury on various levels. I want them to grasp the vision that has come down from my forebearers and has passed along.

I want them to see themselves as part of a dynasty. I want them to have a vision to say that we are men and women who are part of a great chain of faithfulness and of those who are seeking to labor in the world for the improvement of their fellow man.

And so as part of that, they have a responsibility. And so forgive me if this sounds pretentious. It's not meant to be. But I tell my children, "You are the children of the king," which means that my expectations for you are always going to be much higher than the expectations of those who see themselves as the children of a commoner.

So you may not understand why I'm going to place significant levels of responsibility on you, why I'm going to push you as hard as I can to maximize your potential, but I'm going to do it because you are to be prepared to be the next generation of leaders. And I'm going to seek to lead by example, but I'm also going to be preparing you because that's part of it.

So back to place. What does place have to do with this? I've worked through this. Part of that place for me has been to disconnect myself from the vagaries of any particular nation-state. And so that's why that was at a time I woke up and I realized that I was very constrained to one particular nation-state and that I wanted more opportunities in other places.

And so I did that. Well, that came with a sense of wandering and a sense of unsettledness that I don't think is a great way to live. I never did think it was a great way to live, but there are good things about it that I have enjoyed and appreciated.

So as I see it, place can facilitate that vision in the world. And so place can be facilitated in a number of different ways. Number one, place will make a big difference in terms of your future. The way that I've talked about it on the show is I think it was Jim Rogers who talked about how if you were in 1800 in London, then you were at the core, the epicenter of the world.

And if you were at 1900 in New York City, you were basically at the epicenter of the world and you were kind of caught up in the growth of what was potential in terms of all of the changes that would happen in the 19th century and the growth of the United States.

In 2000, Jim Rogers talked about it. In 2000, if you were in Singapore, that was the center of the world. My question has been, "What is that place in 2050 or in 2100? Is that place Singapore? Is that place New Delhi? Is that place New York City? Who knows?" And so over the last few years, I've been exploring that to try to get a sense of what is the place of the next hundred years.

And for a while, I didn't think that place would be the United States of America. I'm a lot more sympathetic to the United States of America than I was two years ago. And so maybe that place may not specifically be New York City, but I think that the Americas are still going to be very, very powerful in the coming decades.

And there are other regions as well. But it's more difficult. I still don't know exactly what that place is going to be in the year 2100. Of course, who knows if anyone knows. But metaphorically, if you knew what that place was going to be, then being in that place could be a major part of your family's vision.

And so for me, part of it is not just, "Oh, I want a lake house and a farm in the middle of nowhere," but it's that I want to have places that are in these scenarios. Meaning, I want to have places that facilitate and foster this basically global vision that I have.

And I'd probably never be able to affect it as much as it is in my own head, but a part of my international wanderings has to do with setting up several homes in different places so that my children can have opportunities and feel comfortable and at home in multiple cultures.

I've questioned this a lot. I'm not entirely convinced. There's a whole movement of what's called "third culture kids," meaning children who are raised in a culture that is not their own native home culture and what that does to their psychology, to their outlook on life, etc. Because what happens is, if you are, say, an American family who picks up and moves to Bogota, then you'll never lose your American identity and you'll never truly be genuinely, authentically Colombian.

Your children will be from a third culture, and they'll find themselves most at ease with international persons who float among cultures. And so I've read a lot about it, I've thought a lot about it. Is this what I want for my family? And I'm not sure, but at the moment I've tried to embrace this global vision.

We've very intensively engaged in multilingualism, doing multilingual, multicultural education, traveling a lot as a family. But now, what about a retreat? What is that place that gives you that basic sense of home? Where's that place that you come back to for the holidays, etc.? And so for me, there are a couple of components of that.

I don't want to live in the country on an ongoing basis. I think that while I myself have succumbed to that kind of golden age fallacy that country living is all that, I don't think that living in the country, while it's not bad, it's just not in line with the trends of our day.

In terms of the global trend involves people all around the world migrating from the countryside to the city. And there are many compelling reasons for that. And so I want to be where the people are, which means that I want to be present in the city. But there's also something very special about having a country retreat, having a place that you can go to.

And so for me, I think that the ideal often comes down to the classic ideal for a capable, wealthy person. And that excludes a lot of people. But the classic ideal comes down to the gentleman farmer. There was a reason why Thomas Jefferson, who is one of my personal heroes, envisioned the United States as a land of farmers, as a land of even gentleman farmers.

And I think Jefferson is such a beautiful hero to look at his lifestyle and understand what he did and who he was. He had an intense interest in the benefit of a riparian lifestyle, and he was involved in it very closely. But that wasn't his core focus, right? He wasn't just an uneducated country bumpkin.

He was a wealthy statesman who had a rural retreat. And I think that this is still possible. I don't know if I haven't figured it out yet. One of my models on this, a guy that I admire very intensely on this, is Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the "Here in my Garage" fame from a few years ago.

Tai Lopez has become just an incredible businessman, an incredible leader. And one of the things that's so fascinating is he brings these, for me, worlds together that I love. He's super into the regenerative agriculture space, which I also am really, really interested in. And so he has a significant number of farms all around the world, several farms in, I think, Virginia and the surrounding areas, doing organic produce, raising animals, etc.

But he's also very, very involved in the world of international business. And he kind of goes between these worlds very consistently. And that's my ambition. My ambition is to enjoy an expression of that life, of having time. Tai lives, his primary domicile seems to be Puerto Rico. So he gets on his private jet in Puerto Rico, flies to his farm, and goes to his Amish house.

And then he gets on his jet and flies to London. So that's the lifestyle that I think is really neat. But Tai doesn't have, he has one son. He doesn't have children. His son doesn't seem to be a visible part of his life. And so for me, it's more about, though, okay, what could be a center for my family?

And so I think that having a place that is a sense of home, where this is home for our family, at least one place, and that's probably going to be in a city, is important. But then in addition to that, having a secondary location, for all the reasons that I've talked about of having a vacation home, I think is a really powerful part of it.

So if you have a really wonderful farm, a place where it's just full of peace and relaxation, a really wonderful vacation property, it might be a ski chalet, it might be a cabin in the wilderness, it might be on a lake somewhere, and you start to build that as a place of your family culture, then I see that place as facilitating those close bonds and relationships that you're seeking to build in the early years to continue the family connection through the later years.

And then I also see it as basically solving that kind of last desire for being prepared for the end of the world as we know it. If we look throughout history, you see that throughout history there are various things that can come that can upset people. You go back to World War I or World War II or any of the various revolutions that you track around the world, and you'll see that the wealthy elite of those societies had their lives upended.

And so what were the keys for them being able to come through that period of hardship in the healthiest way possible? In some times of hardship, the key was to be able to draw on the strengths of multiple nation states. That's where multiple passports, multiple countries, multiple languages, multiple cultures, and multiple kind of home bases was a big factor.

If you found yourself part of a persecuted political minority or a religious minority or an ethnic minority, your ability to pick up and go from one place that was being targeted where you were being targeted to another place where you were not being targeted was a big deal. The other component was simply having a safe place to go if you were not personally being targeted but there were things happening all around the world.

And so having a farm that produces food and is productive on it where you can know you can go and be safe and have food for your family, that's a big deal in times of famine. Having a place that is away from potential nuclear attacks, that's a big deal at certain times in human history.

For me, I haven't done it yet, but that's kind of what I'm looking for is to say I want to have a couple of bases around the world in cities and cultures where I think that the growth is positive. And then I want to have at least one or two retreat places where you have this sense of family tradition.

One of my heroes, also heroes on this, would be Bill Bonner. Bill Bonner, the founder of Agora Publishing, well-known in the financial newsletter space. He and his family, they have just this really neat sense of properties. And what I like about Bill is he's a traditionalist who is sufficiently philosophically self-aware to be able to comment about the things that he does.

And so his family is primarily based at this point in time in Maryland where they have their business and have had involvement. But for many years, they were in Europe, and so they maintained this very intense dual kind of bicultural, bilingual expression. And so they lived in Europe for many years.

He has this wonderful stone chateau in Europe that he talks about how he bought it and he's built it. And it's just this ancient building that gives this ancient sense of place. They also have a family, basically a rural family property, I think in Virginia if memory is right, of this classic farm where they go to.

And then he also has a large ranch in Argentina that they also go to. And so as part of their family culture, they use these places to facilitate different things. So imagine you have a 23-year-old child who just got out of a bad relationship and lost his job and he's not sure what to do.

Well, being able to say to the child, "Why don't you go to the farm in Virginia for a few months or go there and work on your book?" or something like that. Having that sense of these family resources where you can support the members of your family and then having these as the center of family traditions.

In the summertime, we go to Argentina and we go to the ranch. And then at Christmas, we're always on the farm in Virginia. And that place impacts and influences the culture. And to wrap up this monologue, I would say that I used to think it could be done without place.

When I was younger, I saw it and I was like, "You don't need a place. You can do it without that." And now I think that the place really facilitates it. I hate to say this publicly because I find myself commenting on public issues. But basically, I wonder today if I would name my show Radical Personal Finance if I had to start it over again.

Because when I was younger and I chose that working name, my idea was that there were radical ways to accomplish what people used to have to do the old-fashioned way. And I was very influenced by the Tim Ferriss approach of, "You don't need to be a millionaire. You just want to live the millionaire's lifestyle." Well, today I have a podcast outline that I've created.

I haven't recorded and released it. But here's the title. The title is, "What if you just always did what the rich do?" And I've come to appreciate in the same way that I've come to appreciate the value of conservatism. Meaning, before you go and try to explode a system, make sure you understand why it really works.

I've come to appreciate the traditional aspirations of finance. And I look now at wealthy people. And instead of looking at them and thinking that they were dumb, and that I was smarter the way that I did in my more arrogant youth, I now look and I realize that there was a wisdom and I hadn't been there yet.

I hadn't experienced what they'd experienced. Why does a wealthy person own a home? Why does a wealthy person often want to have a vacation property? Why does a wealthy have a ranch in Sun Valley or a ski chalet in Jackson to go along with their property? Why do the wealthy keep a place in Palm Beach and a place in New York?

And so today I appreciate those things and I see them and now I desire them more and more for myself. So that's a fairly long-winded answer. The goal is to say, "How can I acquire assets that will help build my family culture so that the family culture will endure, impact the world around, that the children will be strong, the grandchildren be strong?" And looking out throughout generations, how do you build a legacy that endures?

That's my vision. Thank you so much, Seth. Definitely a lot to unpack there. I appreciate the wisdom. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same stage of life, mid-30s, two children, similar ages, and thinking about all these same topics. So I appreciate all that you're doing and thanks again. We all think together and then come to conclusions and encourage one another in the process.

Nick in New York. Nick, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi, Joshua. I have a question regarding stock investing. Most of the people I read and I watch on YouTube regarding personal finance, they all say, "Don't try to beat the market. Buy a broad index fund, DCA into it and sort of live your life." I wanted to ask you if you agree with that approach or if you believe that there is a place for individual stock picking.

And if you do, how would you recommend someone who doesn't know anything about stock picking to go about this? How could I educate myself if that's a good option overall? I do agree with that advice. It's hard as a public figure or an advice giver. It's hard to fight against the significant amount of data that has been collected over the years demonstrating that most people aren't great investors, most people aren't great stock pickers, etc.

And so when you give advice that's not personalized, you tend to say, you kind of revert to the mean. You tend to say, "I'm just going to tell people to do what's safe." And so choosing mutual funds, choosing passive investments feels safe and the performance of those asset classes is so excellent that it's basically been traditionally a safe bet.

I myself believe that there are plenty of people who can beat the market. Hopefully you hear the quote-unquote "beat the market." And I think that there are plenty of people who should, with great safety and great security, take full control over their portfolio. I've simply known and worked with too many to believe that...

I don't believe in what's called the strong form efficient market hypothesis. I believe in a weaker form efficient market hypothesis. The problem is, in terms of giving advice, it's hard to know how to tell someone where to begin. So what I would say to you is that if you have to ask me for advice on where to start, you probably are better off just buying an index fund.

Because if it's not of sufficient interest to you that you've already read a couple dozen books on it, then probably that's your place to start. I think that if I were to think of an example, right? If you think of someone like Joshua Kennan. Joshua Kennan is very little known.

But he, for years, he was kind of a... I don't want to call him a prodigy. But for many years he wrote a dummy's guide on investing. He wrote for about.com on investing stuff. And he started when he was very, very young. And he blogged many years for his personal blog at joshuakennan.com.

And he would talk about what he does. So if you go and you read some of his personal blog entries, you'll basically see the mind and the mindset of somebody who I think is a very talented and successful personal investor. And what you would see is somebody who genuinely loves and is obsessed with business reports.

With following businesses, with creating mental models, with figuring out kind of what to do. I mean, he will sit there and for him his favorite activity is reading 10Ks. And so he'll go through and just read 10Ks and go in and spend hours and hours and hours and hours doing it.

And he loves it. And so for many years he was just a private investor. Now he has an investment management company. And guys like that are the ones that I think absolutely do, quote, unquote, shouldn't keep saying that, they do beat the market. And while they may not consistently always be able to do it every single year, they have a substantial advantage.

And when you're a relatively small player, it can be even more. There are people that I've interviewed in the podcast that I've worked with. They just genuinely love sitting and studying trends or studying charts and doing momentum trading or various approaches. And so you need to recognize about yourself and say, that works for me, I'm that kind of guy.

Why don't I talk about it more? Joshua Sheets is not that guy. That stuff drives me nuts. I would much rather go and read the history of the Roman Empire than read a 10K. I'm not interested in it to that level. My interest has always been in personal finance, partly because of the impact of personal finance on society and sociological perspective and all that stuff.

That's what you hear about me. So if you're interested, then I would say just start somewhere. You can start anywhere. Grab a book of recommended books and read through them. But if you're not willing to dig through, you're going to wind up reading dozens and dozens and dozens of books.

You're going to wind up studying and studying this topic. So pick up. If you're not the kind of guy who picking up a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham turns you on, then you probably know this isn't for me and you're better off just picking either a mutual fund, either of the active or passive variety.

And let the guys that really love it, let them earn their money doing what they love to do. You see this more as a binary thing. You either go all in or you stay all out and you do an index fund. It's not like if I put X extra hours, I will get them Y extra return.

I hesitate to say I see it as a binary thing in this sense. If I woke up as an heir to the Walton fortune and all of my money was in Walmart stock, I wouldn't not sleep well at night. If you're choosing quality companies and if you own quality companies, you got a great thing going.

You got a great portfolio. So I initially kind of rejected the binary label. But in the sense that you're applying binary, meaning that could you add 50 basis points to your performance by putting in five hours a week of study? I don't know. I doubt it. I don't know, but I would say that there's probably a corner that you could find, a corner where you could compete.

So just always recognize that most people who teach about something generally do that so that they can make significant amounts of money from the teaching, not because they've had a breakthrough performance. And so you want to be really careful. I believe that there are good performers who also teach, but this world of how to make money and how to make money from sitting at home and trading on your computer is one of the most -- it's fraught with trouble.

It's fraught with scams. It's fraught with bad advice. So I would say that investing an extra 10 hours a week into your investments and into your business life would undoubtedly pay off massively. But it may or may not pay off with your ability to pick stocks. It may simply pay off with some other expression of personal finance.

So picking stocks is classically a very difficult marketplace because you're dealing with the world of the most public information where there are the most people going after the smallest market. The number of companies that is listed on a stock exchange is -- I mean let's say that you had a total sample set of 5,000 companies that you were going to look through.

The amount of attention that's paid to the 5,000 companies that are listed, that are most prominent listed, is absolutely huge. There are millions and millions of people around the world who are studying every single movement and piece of news about those companies. So in order for you to really succeed in that, I think you really need a passion and a desire to narrow in on that, which is why traditionally people have gone after markets where there has traditionally been less competition.

Compare 5,000 stocks and the information about those stocks and trading those stocks being accessible to anyone in the world who can find information. Compare that to your local real estate market where just within 5 miles of your house there's more than 5,000 properties. And those 5,000 properties, there's no centralized system.

There's no centralized database. There's no centralized players. And there are only a couple of hundred people who are targeting that 5 square mile basis. So this is why if you're looking for ways that you can profitably invest your time, many people would say you're better off investing in a market like your local real estate market where that time can pay off versus you thinking that somehow you're going to have a leg up on the analysts on Wall Street.

I think there are other markets that you find a similar expression. You might find some other interesting trading strategy. This is what was so interesting about the crypto world and probably still is, although a lot of scams are being weeded out. But if you were to go back eight months ago, six to eight months ago before the total collapse of the crypto markets, there were basically little corners of the markets where there were only a few hundred people or a few thousand people that were even studying it or involved in.

And people were manipulating that to find inefficiencies and find massive trade opportunities. And so that's just a mental model to say that when you say stocks, you're dealing with the reason the efficient market hypothesis exists is simply it's a recognition of the fact that throughout the last century, these publicly traded companies on the leading exchanges of the world have traditionally been the most scrutinized, most studied markets.

And so they have become very efficient because of that. Now, one final comment. There is a continuum that basically says that if everybody accepted the efficient market hypothesis is true, then it would no longer be true. Because the reason the markets have been so efficient is that they have been so studied, so analyzed, and they're so carefully monitored and tracked.

And so if that ceased to be the case and people weren't studying them so much, then we would find ourselves in a world where the opportunities are there again. And I don't want to be so arrogant as to say that those opportunities aren't there. Just simply to say that look at yourself and ask yourself if you're truly the guy who is, if you're that into it and go in your area of interest.

If your area of interest is to read 10Ks at night, go for it. You can get rich being Joshua Kenan. You can also get rich raising cows. So if you want to be Joel Salatin and raise cows and write books and be a farmer, you can get rich that way too.

And for Joel Salatin, his lifestyle is the right one for him. And for Joshua Kenan, his lifestyle is the right one for him. A good part of good advice on this subject is doing some self-examination and figure out which part of the marketplace I'm more likely to be happy in.

Got it. Thank you, Joshua. My pleasure. And with that, we go to Matt in North Carolina. Matt, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Thank you so much for the chance to be on Radical Personal Finance. Again. Again. For the uninitiated, Matt has been on the show as a guest, interviewed guest, at least twice, maybe three times now, and has regularly showed up to ask interesting questions on the Q&A shows.

Well, thanks. This was a little bit different one. Kind of in our relationships, we recently ran across a Ukrainian entrepreneur who has successfully arrived in the United States, fleeing the war that's going on there in Ukraine. And basically, I wanted to call in today, with your permission in advance, to access the listeners of this show with her story, just very briefly.

Her name is Nada. And she is a former business owner who also was doing research in memory care treatment in Ukraine. And as part of her immigration process, is seeking a collaborator, I think ideally locally to North Carolina, but I don't know whether that's a strict requirement or not.

So I thought I would ring up today, just knowing your passion for immigration and helping people who are going through hard times and let your listeners know about her need. Okay. So she is, look, so back up, she is a research scientist who was doing research in Ukraine on memory?

I don't know whether, so the answer to that is yes. I don't know what her formal training level is, whether she is a master's level or a PhD level. But she has been working through studies on memory care and actually wrote a short description of her work, which I've shared out to my LinkedIn and am seeking to kind of amplify that by 20,000 or more listeners here on Radical Personal Finance this afternoon.

Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. And so this lady, what specifically does she need? How is she to be helped? Yeah, absolutely. So she is seeking an MD, a medical doctor collaborator, who is already doing research in this area. I don't know exactly what the, I don't know how to articulate the need better than that, except that this is an opportunity for her to, I guess to say it this way, to short circuit a longer term immigration process by getting a project up and going versus having to go through a traditional channel.

Okay. So for her immigration. She needs to be sponsored by an American company or firm as a researcher so that she could get visa status to stay in the United States. And she's currently in the US as a tourist. Is that right? No, she is here. So she writes, let's see, I'm looking at her post here.

She is here on the Uniting for Ukraine program. So this is something more substantial than a tourist visa. Okay. And I think she is going to be able to obtain permanent residency and work status over time. But this would be an opportunity for her to actually continue work that is already begun.

So I. So here's the, here's, I think the easiest way to handle it. I will, I've got a note to your LinkedIn here, and let me just read a few paragraphs here so that the listeners are included in. And then I'll just leave a note to your LinkedIn in the show notes and I'll tweet it out as well.

Wonderful. Hey friends, recently we were introduced to Natalia Bondarenko who relocated to the United States from Ukraine a few weeks ago and now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. A lot of us want to do something to help those hurt in Russia's war on Ukraine. Maybe this is your chance.

Nata is an entrepreneur, business owner, and mother displaced by this conflict. Before leaving Ukraine, she worked on cognitive therapy for memory care patients. Some folks we know are providing Nata and her family with housing, food, visa sponsorship, and other necessities. And then Nata writes, she says, my name is Natalia Bondarenko.

I am a Ukrainian entrepreneur now living in the United States thanks to the Uniting for Ukraine program. Let me introduce my cognition improving program I want to reestablish in the U.S. And she gives a bunch of information. As applying for a grant to research on my methods impact, I am seeking for a local North Carolina collaborator who is a medical doctor and/or researcher.

So I'll link that and then maybe we can help Nata out. It sounds super interesting. I've become really obsessed recently with memory and learning, learning techniques and memory techniques and kind of some of the science and some of the best practices around that. So that's been a recent obsession of mine.

And so I'm interested about all this research that she's citing in the post. Well, cool. Thank you so much for the chance to come on and just share this tiny piece of her story and maybe make something a little more personal that we so often just read in the headlines.

Absolutely. Thank you, Matt. All right, we go on to Unknown Caller. Welcome, Unknown Caller. How can I serve you today? Hi, how are you? It's Vinny from The Box. Welcome. Hi. So I actually have a two part question. I don't want to monopolize your time. So, of course, you know, you know, whatever you can answer, that would be great.

Otherwise, you know, so my first the first part of my question is, you know, I'm 40 years old. I've made a bunch of financial mistakes in my life. And my first question is, how do you get over them? You know that, I guess, ruminating on those past mistakes and what you could have done with the money that you made and the time you invested.

And then the second part of my question is, as a result of making those mistakes, I'm now in a state of what you would call or should say in a state. But I now hyper analyze things to the point where, you know, I'm in a state of analysis paralysis when it comes to making decisions.

And then, of course, you know, when you don't make any decision, that's a decision in and of itself. So I guess that that's that's what I want to know. I appreciate your time. What kind of financial mistakes have you personally made? Well, you know, funny story. You know, when I was, I think, 20 years old, I worked an entire summer, you know, actually had two jobs.

I made three thousand dollars and I lost every single penny in the stock market because I made some dumb moves. You know, I had bad, bad business ideas, bad investments, you know, selling things at the wrong time, buying things at the wrong time. You know, I mean, even some such mundane things as getting a parking ticket or, you know, you know, hiring someone to do work.

And, you know, they they end up doing the wrong job. And I should have noticed it at the time. Just a series of things, any any number of things off the top of my head. OK. And how old are you? I'm 40. OK. And at the moment, you're in a place where basically you're starting over again and you don't have a ton of money.

No, no, I'm in I'm in decent shape. I mean, thank God I have a good job. My wife, we both have good jobs. We have a decent house. You know, it's just I guess, you know, basically when I when I seek to make a future decision, I think back about the mistakes I made.

And that that kind of in other words, I get caught up in the mistakes I've made in the past, which then prevents me in the future from making decisions. For example, instead of investing in the stock market now, I like gold because I, you know, the stock market, you know, I've lost a lot of money back in the day.

It's tough to time it. I don't you know, with index funds, I mean, there's certain things like, you know, yes, it goes over time, 7 percent. But then some years ago, down 30 other years, you know. So in other words. You know, it's tough for me now to to basically take a step back and be like, OK, over the course of 90 years, the stock market's returned X.

But, you know. I guess I'm trying to say is I get caught up in, you know, the decision and I say this could happen, that could happen, and it's tough to make a move. OK, here are some thoughts that I hope will be helpful to you. Obviously, it's a big and wide ranging question, and there are going to be many, many answers that will emerge from time to time to time.

But to begin with, I think that it is important to develop a proper way of thinking about what we call a mistake. And it's interesting and ironic or rather appropriate that even just the context, what I just said about what I just said about memory. And let me explain.

I said I've been super obsessed recently with memory, researching memory and trying to understand kind of how it works. And I've been recent. I was watching this talk by a university professor well known in the memory space named Robert Bjork from UCLA. And he recently gave this talk or didn't recently, but he gave this great video where he says how we learn versus how we think we learn.

And I guess it's I just found it here at six years old, so it's not new, but I recently watched it. And one of the things that he talked about in that talk, two points he made in the talk that are really interesting. One point he made is that most people, especially laymen who look at the field of memory or intelligence, they think that forgetting is a problem that needs to be avoided.

So you say, how can I develop a better memory? Well, I've got to figure out how to stop forgetting. But he made a comment, something like that those who are knowledgeable in the space of memory space understand that forgetting is a core part of how you even remember. And I immediately knew what he was talking about because of an experience that I had in first grade.

This is how clear you'll see and you'll stick with me. You'll understand where I'm going in just a minute. When I was in first grade, I was learning about numerals and I was learning how many digits there are. And I had a test in which the question said, how many different digits are there?

How many numerals are there? And I thought to myself, aha, they want me to say that there are 10 digits and therefore that there are 10 digits on this. But I know that the number 10 is composed of two different digits, the digit one and zero. And so I know that there are only nine.

And so I very happily was very thrilled with my intelligence that here in first grade. And I promise you, I'm not embellishing this at all. I vividly remember going through this thought process in first grade. So I very smugly wrote nine that I was smarter because I knew that 10 is not a numeral.

And I wrote nine and I went on. Well, then I come back and I get my paper graded back and I got a big red X. Then I find out, no, there are 10 digits. There are 10 numerals. And I forgot zero because zero is a numeral. And so therefore my whole answer was wrong.

And what's interesting about that is that when I got the wrong answer, I got the wrong question, I forgot the answer. It put a memory very, very clearly in my head that is something that will never go away. And it's because I, it's just, it's a word that will never go away from me.

Sorry, it's a question that will never go away from me because I understand that because I got it wrong is the point. And then later in the talk, he was talking about testing. And I was very interested in this because I have a bias against testing, meaning in school settings.

I don't understand why it's necessary if a teacher has a close relationship with a student. I don't understand why it's necessary to administer tests to a student. As a teacher, you should understand what you, what, where your student is and be able to appropriately, you know, know where they are without administering a test.

So, he was talking about this and his point was that testing is actually a form of learning. And he indicated that, he gave a bunch of examples of where they have done this, that rather than doing more studying, you should actually use testing as a pedagogical tool for learning.

And this is very interesting to me because it answers that question that I have about testing. But it shows that sometimes getting stuff wrong matters. Having the test is what matters. So, two comments on the testing comment. He talked about this study where they gave two people an exam.

And they, with group A, sorry, two different study groups, not two people. With group A, they administered, they gave them a piece of information and they allowed them four different five-minute study sessions followed by a test. So, they gave them some information. Here's some information about the lives of dolphins, underwater lives of dolphins.

And they would read the information, they gave them a five-minute study session to study the information. And then they gave them a test, then they gave them another five-minute session, then they gave them another five-minute session, then they gave them another five-minute session, and then they gave them a test.

And then a week later, they came back and they tested them again on how much of the information they had retained. So, then the second group was a group where they gave them five minutes of study time to study the information. And then after five minutes of study time, they gave them a test.

And so, they tested them, then they came back and they tested them again, then they tested them again. They tested them three times with only giving them one five-minute study session. And the question is, who did better, the person who just studied more or the person who was tested more?

And what they found was that on the test, the people who had been given four study sessions performed much better on the test that was administered immediately. They retained more of the information versus the ones who just simply studied, studied, studied. Sorry, that was wrong. Those who studied, studied retained more of the information on the immediate test versus those who had been tested several times on the information.

But when they came back a week later and they administered the follow-up test, the people who had had less study time and who had had more tests performed substantially better on the test a week later. They retained more of the information than those who had just simply had lots of study time.

Okay, what does this have to do with you and with finances? I believe you have to change your mindset. And the first step, you said, "How do I get over financial mistakes?" You get over financial mistakes by completely reworking your mindset around even the concept of a mistake. Classically, we have known for a very, very long time that mistakes are one of the best ways of learning.

And one of the basic flaws, one of the reasons I'm against tests is that I don't want my children who I school, I don't want them to think that making mistakes is a bad thing. Making mistakes is a great thing. Making mistakes is an entirely normal thing. Making mistakes is how we learn.

So people who are older and they're scared of making mistakes, they don't ever do anything interesting with their life. They don't ever accomplish great things because great things are only accomplished after tons and tons of mistakes. Rather, you have to demonstrate to yourself that making mistakes is a classic part of learning and that it's a fundamental part of learning.

I will never forget how many digits there are because of a question that I got wrong in first grade. And back to Robert Bjork's comments on memory, sometimes the more mistakes you make, the worse it is, the more you remember a lesson. One more funny example where I noticed this principle that he was teaching in my own learning.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of reading in my foreign language studies. And there's this one French word that's been driving me crazy. And the word is, I'll use the English pronunciation, it's haricot. It's the French word for bean. And it's using the English pronunciation. And this word is something that I could not remember, could not remember, could not remember.

Whereas other words, I could remember much more easily. But there's a difference between passive vocabulary and language learning and active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary is when you can see a word and recognize what it means. Active is when you can summon it to your mouth when you want to. And you can actually speak the word out.

Well, this word, haricot, right, this French word for bean, drove me crazy because I forgot it so many times. But because I forgot it so many times, now that word is in my active vocabulary where I can summon it up in the middle of a podcast on finances. Because there's tons of other words that I easily recognize and I learn them easily that today I can't, that I couldn't summon them if I wanted to.

So, to financial lessons, when you make mistakes, you learn lessons that will go much deeper. And they will actually be an incredibly important part of your learning process. You will gain the information from them in a better way. And I intentionally use this even with my children. I, with money, right, I want my children to waste money.

I make sure that they have money so that they can waste it. And because I want them to understand what wasting money feels like. I want them to understand viscerally on an emotional level how stupid you feel when you waste money. I want them to know how stupid you feel when you lose money through a mistake.

And I want them to do that early so that they'll learn the lessons from it. Because I believe that mistakes are often some of the best teachers. So, you can change your mindset around those mistakes by recognizing that these mistakes have been a blessing. These mistakes are an important part of learning.

And making mistakes is often the key to actually learning a lesson very, very well. If you don't make mistakes, just like if you aren't tested and failing on a problem, then you are probably not learning very much. You need to be tested. You need to make mistakes. And so, you want to install that into your memory.

And you want to – sorry, install that into your operating system, your mental operating system, and transform the entire concept of mistakes. That's why I use the little cliche, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn." That every time you lose, every time you make a mistake, it's an opportunity to learn.

And if you go through life saying, "I'm a learner. I'm a person who learns." That mindset is so bulletproof that you can go into any situation and be grateful for it. The next thing that you can install is that problems or trials or mistakes or losses, they're a blessing.

They are a blessing. And you can see this on various levels. I've talked to many people who go through difficult circumstances in their life. When enough time has passed, they will often reflect back upon those circumstances and say, "You know what? That was a blessing." When I myself make a list of some of the hardest experiences that I've had and some of the biggest mistakes that I have made, I today look back at them, and I look at them and I say, "That was a blessing." That they were genuinely a good thing in my life.

They were blessings because I can gain the lessons from them. And the lessons that come from the bad times, from the hard mistakes, are often the best, the most powerful lessons for all the reasons previously discussed. The caveat here is just simply you try to avoid the wipeout mistakes.

If you make a mistake that winds up ending your life, there's no coming back from that one. And so we're talking in the realm of mistakes that are not life-ending. So as long as you haven't ended your life, then it's all good. You can get up and you can go on and do something else.

And so recognize that these mistakes or these bad experiences, these trials, are going to wind up being a blessing. This should also be easy. One common on this. This should be easy, especially for people who are Christians. I preach this all the time, that one of the things that's so powerful about Christianity is you can go through life believing genuinely that the universe, as you commonly dubbed, or I say God, that the universe is conspiring against you to teach you all the things that you need.

And so I make fun of the word "universe," but the Bible says that if you have trials in your life, welcome them as friends, knowing that they come to test you. And so no matter what you face, whether it's a blessing, meaning something that you like and you're fairly happy with, or whether it's a trial, meaning something that you don't like, it's divinely conspired to be for your good and that you can learn something from it.

And it's a good thing in your life. And so you can take it as a matter of faith. You can take it as a matter of experience by reflecting on your life experience, the experience of others. And you can recognize that the hard times, the mistakes are going to be part of your overall formation.

And you're going to learn the lessons from them. The next thing that you can install into your operating mindset, the past doesn't exist. Because quite literally, the past does not exist. Think about it. The past is gone. It doesn't exist. And so you should never give weight to something that just doesn't exist.

And people go through their life with all this stuff from the past, all this baggage, all these things that affect them. And one of the things you got to do just sometimes say, "The past doesn't exist." I repeat again a little cliche that for me has been so helpful.

But when I was a teenager, I listened to Zig Ziglar and it beat into my head. And I use it so much that failure is an event. It's not a person. Failure is an event. It's not a person. Yesterday ended last night. It's gone. Today is a brand new day and it's mine.

Failure is an event. It's not a person. Yesterday has ended. It's gone. It doesn't matter. Today is a brand new day. The only thing that actually exists is today. In this moment, that's the only thing that you can affect. So install that into your mindset. And I'll give you one more.

It could go on all day. I won't. But I'll give you one more. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. There is no limit on the amount of money that's available. There's a little money cliche that we use where we say, "Eh, it's only money." But that comment reflects a deep truth.

It's only money. It's just money. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. There is no limit to the amount of money that exists in the world. There is no limit to the amount of money that exists and is available to any one person. There is no limit to the amount of money that you can go and get.

And so if you lose a bunch of money, you make a money mistake, it's only money. There's no limit to it. So don't think that you live in a world of scarcity where there's only a certain amount of money that we can have. There's only a certain amount of money that's available to me.

You don't. It's not true. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. So if you made mistakes that wound up losing all of yours, that's okay. You can go and get some more. And if you start studying financial histories of people who are currently rich or are rich when the stories are written about them, what you'll see is there are often major ups and downs in their life and in their money.

And that usually it seems like wealthy people wind up losing all their money at least a couple times before they figure out how not to do it. And so if that's happened to you, okay, move forward and let's figure out how to get it back. And then start to study stories of people who have come into money quickly and recognize that you don't need 40 years to build a fortune.

You can build it much more quickly if you take the right activities. Let me go with one more. No, I'm going to stop there. I could go all day. I won't go. So let me flip to your second question. Okay, how do I hyperanalyze? Am I hyperanalyzing the problem, the issues?

First, my answer is install a stronger mindset. Build a more useful personal philosophy. Build a framework in your mind of philosophy, of truths, of a mindset that actually serves you and benefits you. Things like mistakes are great. They're good teachers, all the stuff that I've already talked about. Then look at problems and break them apart into their actual components.

If you're facing a problem, you're analyzing something, don't let some weird, unexamined, emotional event from the past affect your life now. If you're trying to figure out, should I invest in gold or should I invest in stocks, you have to ignore what happened in the past and approach the question fresh.

That question should be the most obvious question in the world. What does gold do? Nothing. What do companies do? They make money. You should invest the vast majority of your money into companies that make money versus gold that sits there and does basically nothing. But you should probably have some money in gold.

That's what I think. Now, you might think differently, but to put all your money in gold is crazy, especially if it's because of an unexamined opinion or belief because you think that somehow I'm afraid of something that's happened in the past. Your personal philosophy is ultimately malleable. You've heard me when I talk about stocks.

I don't use the word risk when I mean volatility. I say volatility when I mean stock prices going up and down, and I use risk to refer to specific types of risk that can affect stocks. One of those risks is market risk, meaning the stocks happening are more or less valuable based upon their market sales price today than other times.

But use proper language and study things out. But if you'll do that, then you'll figure out how to approach your own situations and solve your own issues. But don't let it be something, "Oh, I made mistakes in the past, and now I can't do it." By the way, we all have areas that we do this in.

If you're skinny, recognize how stupid fat people philosophy is where they say, "Well, I ate a bite of pizza, so now I got to eat a whole pizza." That's what we fat people do. If you're successful in some other area, take your philosophy that's worked in that other area and then apply it to your money so that you can start to build a healthier philosophy.

That's the best I got, Vinny, to get you started. Hey, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I'm going to chew on that for a little while. My pleasure. All right, we go for our final call to the great state of Florida. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hello? Yep, go ahead. You're up. Hey, Joshua. This is John. I really wish I wasn't asking this question, but two months ago I was in the hospital bed. Over the course of these two months, we've received a lot of donations and support through various resources, the biggest one being GoFundMe.

There's also been some raffles and T-shirt sales. All the money coming in is fabulous. I'd give anything to not have the money and just not have my daughter go through what she's been through. But I guess it's kind of a two-part. Is there any tax implications with all of the donations, specifically the GoFundMe?

And then with not knowing what the immediate medical needs will be or even what the lifelong medical needs will be, is there somewhere to kind of just set the money aside for a while that would make more sense than just an inestimated amount? Yeah. So I need to ask a clarifying question because your cell phone went hard to understand right at the most crucial moment.

What happened to your daughter? She was hospitalized. She'd gotten coli, developed HUS, which shut down her kidneys. And then she went into cardiac arrest. And yeah, it got bad real quick. Two and a half hours of CPR, 42 doses of epi, put on life support. And she's coming back to us very slowly, but she's going to need lifelong physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy.

She suffered an anoxic brain injury. So. Wow. How old is she? 18 months. Wow. No, that's heavy. Very, very heavy. Very, very difficult. May God continue to give you strength as you as you fight for her and as you as you seek to press forward. So the specific questions you asked was, number one, tax implications.

And number two, what should I be doing with the money? Where should I put the money? Is that is that correct? That's what you asked me. In the gist of it. Yeah. I mean, for right now, the immediate medical expenses have been extremely minimal, thankfully, despite, you know, a two month hospitalization.

But I know as as things progress and insurance has changed and the expenses will come on, I just don't know when that will be. OK. And about how much money has been donated based upon these various grants, et cetera. As of right now, it's about $60,000. Five zero thousand?

Six zero. Six zero thousand. OK. All right. And how much have you received? Have you actually received the disbursements and you have something like $60,000 in your accounts? Roughly, yes. Minus what GoFundMe kept, I've got about 45-ish thousand from GoFundMe and then another 10,000 from other sources. OK, so I would I would dearly love to check on this, but I'll just go ahead and say what I really think is true.

So the tax the tax needs are the tax question is going should be fairly simple. It's my understanding that organizations such as GoFundMe or other various platforms that the underlying tax questions simply follow the ordinary tax doctrines of the IRS. So what is at its core GoFundMe? Well, GoFundMe is simply a merchant processor that is allowing people to make donations to you and to your family.

So as far as I can see, there should be no tax consequences because anybody can make donations to you with a couple of caveats. So the first thing to be aware of is the annual exclusion amount for gifts, meaning the amount of money that any one person can give another person without having to file any form of gift tax return.

And that number is like 16 grand now. It's 18. Anyway, it's more it's more than $15,000. It's like $16,000, something like that. I checked the 2023 numbers. But it's it's so as long as no one has given you more money than that individually, even through GoFundMe, then it's just not a thing.

So if somebody writes you a check for $100,000 for it to you personally, there are tax implications for that. It doesn't mean the money is taxed, by the way. It just means that a tax return needs to be filed on it. But through GoFundMe, most likely the $60,000 is representing a lot of different individual donations.

And so because it's a lot of different individual donations, the money should simply flow to you without any tax consequences, as far as I can tell. Quick comment for you, if you wind up on the $100,000 question. Any individual that gives another individual more than the annual gift tax exclusion amount, which again is either probably 16 grand now, that then a gift tax return has to be filed.

But there is an exception for the direct payment of medical expenses and/or educational expenses. So let's say that something happened and you wound up with a $100,000 medical bill. And somebody wanted to give you $100,000 to pay for the medical bill. Tell that person, "Thank you very much," and have that individual go and pay the medical bill directly to the hospital.

That way, there is no gift that's occurring, and there's no gift tax return that needs to be filed. So file that away in your memory if you're ever in the position of medical expenses or educational expenses. Those kinds of funds should be paid directly to the hospital or to the educational institution.

So in terms of tax consequences, I don't think you need to worry about it. And certainly, it's not something that needs to be worried about right now. Let me explain. When you're in the middle of a crisis like this, the taxes are just something that needs to be done down the road.

Now, clearly, why you'd be asking is, "Do I need to set aside tax money?" But at the end of the day, taxes can all be figured out later. Right now, you just need to deal with the current scenario. So now, second question, "Should I do something with the money in some way to provide for her, etc?" Right now, no.

It's far too early to have any clear sense of what is necessary, what she needs, what the money needs to be for, anything. It's just way too early for any of that. So right now, I would just put it in a bank account. Make sure it's an FDIC-insured bank account, and just make sure that it's just sitting there and use the money for paying and providing for the things that your family needs.

My plea would be for you that you not make some kind of artificial line of the money, meaning the money is there for her, but the money is there for your family. So if you need to use the money to pay for your rent, pay for your rent. If you need to use the money to pay for takeout food because you're at the hospital all the time, do that.

Whatever you need to use the money for, it should just be part of your family resources. Because if you had had $60,000 sitting in a savings account available for this, and then this happened, you would use the money for your family's needs. And you wouldn't just arbitrarily say, "Well, I'm not going to spend my savings for this." And so these donations should be treated in the same way.

And sometimes people feel guilty about that. "Someone's giving me money. I've got to use it for medical care." No. Use it for the things that you need. And especially with these numbers, $60,000, you're not going to put it in a trust. It's not going to be anything like that.

This money should just be a cushion fund that is available for you to decide what happens next. And I'll give you some more thoughts on that in a moment, but let me pause. Is that helpful? Do you have follow-up questions or clarifying questions? I really appreciated that last statement because, yeah, it kind of was down the line of the same.

I mean, we have other savings, and right now the money is not of a concern. But, yeah, it was – we kind of really kind of separated everything to just have this money available for the medical – unknown medical expenses. Right. Right. But clarifying that note line in the same, it's not.

Right. And I think that's laudable, right? But you'll agree that there's a big difference between saying, "Hey, I got $60,000. I'm going to go buy a new sports car." There's a long way between that, which, of course, would be morally wrong, right? All of your donors would not be happy if you just went out and bought a $60,000 sports car with the money.

There's a long distance between that versus using it for your household expenses while you keep your family together while also seeing to your daughter's needs. And so I want that to be very clear that you should not impose an arbitrary artificial line in the sand and say, "Well, this money is for her medical expenses." Okay?

Next thing I want to say has to do with what the money should actually be spent on. You said that she is receiving good care, and the medical expenses are largely being absorbed by insurance at the moment. Is that true? Yes. Okay. Right now, I'm in the military, and most of the expenses have been completely covered.

Wonderful. Okay. This is more general advice for whenever you find yourself in a financial crisis. So this won't be totally applicable to you, but it's something you need to be thinking about and also for other listeners. When you're in this kind of situation, you need to be a little bit… what word should I use?

Sneaky is not the right word. Maybe conniving, scheming. Basically, you need to play defense. And so what I mean is when you have a financial emergency, you have to engage in a prioritization system. You have to prioritize your… you have to engage in priorities. And this is often hard for normal people, because normal people are accustomed to thinking in advance about the expenses that they have.

They're accustomed to earning money. The money comes in. They budget the money. They allocate the money. And there's always enough money to cover all of their expenses. That's very different than, like, wackos. That's very different than, you know, addicts, compulsive gamblers, or drug addicts, or something like that, who they're always just thinking about what's the next thing.

And if you ever dealt with somebody who is just either an addict of some kind or somebody who is untrustworthy and dishonest with money, what you'll see is that the person who is an addict or dishonest and untrustworthy with money is really good at is figuring out how to just solve the next problem.

They're not going to worry about how to pay their rent. They know that if they don't pay their rent, they'll have 45 days of grace period before they're actually on the street. So they'll say, "Okay, I'm going to go and buy drugs," or "I'm going to go ahead and do the thing that's more appropriate." And this is hard for those of us who don't think that way to do, to get to.

But when you all of a sudden wake up and life has dealt you a giant kick in the gut, then now you have to say, "Whoa, wait a second. I don't—everything is out of whack. Everything is off kilter." And in that situation, the way you're best served is to be very, very thoughtful about your prioritization immediately.

So what do I mean? If I were in a situation which was a medical emergency and I had a little bit of money in savings, I'm never going to pay a hospital bill before I pay my rent. Because the hospital bill, based upon the way the hospital billing system works, I can get around to paying that when I can.

But my rent, the landlord has property rights to expel me from the property if I don't pay my rent. I'm never going to pay a credit card bill if paying the credit card bill means that I can't pay my car payment. Because the car payment company will come and repossess my car, the credit card bill has to go through a long process of sending me nasty notices and then getting around to suing me in a year or two.

Hang on, I got to sneeze. So basically what I'm saying is, in essence, what you want to do is focus in on very, very carefully prioritizing what's more important now, what's less important. And pay those things that are more important and if anything can be pushed off to the future, push it off to the future.

Now, because the medical bills themselves are being mostly covered by insurance, I don't think you're going to have a significant problem on this topic. But it is something you need to be careful of that you don't wind up paying a bill that could be pushed off and then it gets the wrong scenario.

So don't pay medical bills before you pay household expenses. Pay your power bill, pay your lights, pay your all that stuff. Keep stability. And then last comment, do you and your wife have other children? Yes, we've got another daughter five years old. Great. So what you want to focus on also is stability.

You want to focus on as much stability as possible for the rest of your family. So from a financial perspective, you want to keep your daughter in the same school that she's in or the same daycare that she's in or with the same schedule that she's in as much as possible.

You want to keep the same house and stability so that you can try to minimize the things that are exposing with your ill daughter. And then try to keep her and be aware that when people go through a -- that when families go through a major -- the death of a child or a major sickness, et cetera, it can really destroy the family relationships if you're not really careful.

So be really proactive about it and use some of the money to take your wife on date nights. Use some of the money to hire a house cleaner. Use some of the money to try to make sure that you keep your family tight because this is going to be something that you're going to be dealing with for a very long time.

And the only thing that would make it worse is divorce. The only thing that would make it worse is for your older daughter to go into some, you know, psychological spiral because of the stress and the trauma. So work really hard to maintain a solid environment as best you can.

That's great advice. Thank you. Anything else for now? Not that I can think of. I appreciate that information. That was a different thought process. And thank you. Good. My pleasure. What is your sick daughter's first name? Scarlett. Scarlett. Beautiful name. And she's in Florida? No, we're in Louisiana. Louisiana.

Okay. New Orleans. All right. We will -- let me pray for her right now and we'll continue in the days to come. But Father, I thank you for this trial in the life of my listener, Lord. And while he never would have asked for it nor would any of us ever have placed it upon him and his family, I praise you for it.

And I pray that it would have a mighty positive effect in his family as has so often been the case. Lord, I pray for Scarlett first of all. I pray that she would be healed of these issues. I pray, Lord, that she would -- I pray that she would be healed.

And I pray that the damage that her body has suffered would be minimized and that you would use the youthful body that is able to recover and that she would recover beautifully and grow to be a happy and wonderful little girl. I pray for her family, Lord, that you would bind them together.

And as they face this tragedy and this stress, I pray that they would be faithful at every moment to press through it, Lord, confident that this was something that was placed upon them for their betterment. And I thank you for giving Scarlett to a father who is responsible and who is faithful and to a family that can love her and care for her.

And I pray that you would give them great wisdom in the years to come. Amen. All right, my friend. Call me back. Call me back every week if you need to. And even just to chat and reach out to me anytime. And may God give you great wisdom. All right?

Thank you. And with that, we wrap up today's podcast. Thank you all so much for listening. Remember that if you would like to join me on a future show, you can do that by going to Patreon. Even with that last caller, if your daughter is not in the hospital, if you're not facing a life-threatening trial, be grateful for that.

The comment that I made right before that caller, right, was saying it's only money. Financial problems can have very, very real impacts in the world. But one of the things that I tell myself when I'm looking at problems is simply this. Is this a problem that can be solved by money or is this a problem that can't be solved by money?

And I have trained myself to say if this is a problem that can be solved by money, it's not actually a problem. It's just a circumstance. Life is full of real problems and there are financial problems. But that listener would give everything he could just to have a financial problem.

Which would you rather face, a life problem or a financial problem? You quickly see that the financial problem is just money. It's only money. So I hope this has been useful for you. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back with you very soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions. Ralph's. Fresh for everyone. We've locked in low prices to help you save big store-wide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store.

Ralph's. Fresh for everyone.