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 storewide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store. Ralph's fresh for everyone. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host and today I want to create a show specifically talking about what to do when you are facing financial disaster and catastrophe. Now in yesterday's show I talked about the meltdown at the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and I was very aware that it was affecting, it is affecting lots of people.

It's a huge catastrophe for many and I know that there are many in my audience who are being affected. But I just kind of shared off the cuff a few basic very quick things that I hoped would be useful and helpful to you. I had several listeners write to me simply saying thank you so much for the short comments that I made and how much they helped and I want to take today's show and speak directly to you and amplify those comments.

I want to give you a broad perspective on what to do when you're facing financial catastrophe, when you've lost all your money, when all your funds have disappeared, when something bad has happened. I want to give you a broad perspective on this. I want to speak directly to you and give you some useful and actionable and practical advice.

And so this is applicable if FTX, you know, if you're wiped out in FTX and you've lost your life savings and now you're completely penniless, this is applicable. If your business has collapsed for some other reason, this is applicable in many circumstances and many situations. So I want you to sit back, relax and listen because this is going to help you.

To begin with we need to start by putting the money in perspective. This is the most important thing for us to begin with. You have to put money into perspective. Financial catastrophe is a big deal. It is going to dramatically affect your life in many many ways. It is important.

It is exceedingly important. Bankruptcy, poverty, etc. These things affect lives. But it is in no way the worst catastrophe that can happen to you. What I'm about to say is going to sound exceedingly insensitive. But I believe that in the fullness of time you will come to recognize that it is true.

If you have money problems and money problems alone you don't really have that many problems. There's an old saying that if we all came into a room and we took all of our problems off of our backs and we put them on the floor together and said, "Okay, you can pick whichever problems up from this pile that you want." Most of us would probably walk over and get our own problems, the ones that we're accustomed to and be happy then that we have those problems.

I genuinely deeply believe that if you only have money problems you don't actually have that big of a problem. Because not only are money problems... Where do I use? I'm gonna say fake for right now, and I'm gonna expand on that and clarify. Not only are money problems fake, but they are some of the simplest, most straightforward problems to solve.

Because I can lay out for you the plan of how to solve them and you will be able to solve them. No matter how bad and catastrophic your situation is today, for whatever reason, I promise you that you can lay out a roadmap to where you can solve those problems.

And in the course of human history, if you know what to do, even if the road is difficult, knowing what to do and knowing that there is a road means that you can walk down it. The worst problems to face are the ones that are unsolvable. And money problems are always solvable.

The world is full of unsolvable problems. The ones that affect us the most in our personal life usually involve relationships and health problems. Relationships such as marriages that are going awry, relationships with our children that are not healthy, health problems where you're ill, a loved one is ill, you're watching your child self-destruct and go off on a dangerous and deadly path.

There are many more, but those are the ones that usually cut to us the most. And those problems are the most difficult because they are often unsolvable. You may have a child who is grown, you have no legal authority over your child, thus you can't force anything on your child.

Your child is 20-something years old and yet he's going off in a stupid direction, destroying his life, very likely to end in death. There are few things in life that are more painful than those situations. And what makes them exceedingly painful is that there's nothing you can do. And yet you have to watch those things play out.

Or watching a loved one suffer from a deadly illness over the course of years, knowing that this illness is going to result in death. Even in those situations, you can find joy, you can find redemption, you can find God's faithfulness in the middle of them. I think of a close friend of mine a number of years ago, she had a son, and the son had muscular dystrophy.

And it started to present itself, he became aware of it at the age of some years old, four or five years old, something like that, after he had started to have trouble walking. And I was close to the family for ten years, and they knew that this particular kind of muscular dystrophy was going to result in death.

And every day you have to watch, in their case, the son, in my case a young boy that I knew, but I was close, you have to watch this medical condition advance, knowing that absent a divine intervention, it's going to result in death. And that's what happened, died at 15 years old.

That's hard. Health situations, relationship situations, I've had friends whose children committed suicide. It happens to all of us, right? All of us know these things, we know people in them. If you are asked, if you, let me just ask you, no matter how great the financial catastrophe that you are facing right now is, no matter how desperate it is, would you, right now, take all of your money back if it meant the loss of your child over a very long and painful ten-year journey?

The loss of your wife over a long and painful ten-year journey? The loss of your own health, watching yourself deteriorate with some degenerative disease? If there were a health factor involved, would you spend all of your money trying to get your health back? Now, my point is not to say that those situations are hopeless, they're not.

Again, there is redemption, there is encouragement, etc. in those situations. My point is simply to say that whenever I have a money problem, or whenever I am coaching or counseling somebody who has a money problem, let's first get this straight, it's just money. Sounds insensitive to say it, but it's just money.

The next thing that we need to be clear on is you will be able to continue living your life. You will be able to rebuild everything, and you will face nothing like the challenges of the past. If you're living in the year 2022, and you've lost all of your money, and you've experienced financial catastrophe, be grateful that you live in the year 2022.

Because I promise you, you're not going to go hungry, you're not going to die of exposure, your children are not going to go naked, you will be able to do all of the things that you want to do. I promise you. If you're listening to my voice, that is the case.

Everywhere in the world, right now there are still many people who will go hungry. There are many places in the world where if you do not pay a debt, you'll still go to prison today. But in the Western world, we've made tremendous progress, and you are going to be insulated from most of those most dire consequences.

So be grateful. Throughout human history, going broke, losing all your money, has very frequently resulted in the starvation of you and your family, your homelessness. And so, recognize that although what you're going to go through is going to be very intense, it's not the end of the world. It's not the end of the world.

And on the other side of this, you are going to emerge victorious. You are going to emerge with a story. You are going to emerge with hard-won experience. You are going to emerge wiser, more experienced, and you're going to have something to share with others that will be helpful.

Your situation is not unique. The particular circumstances are. But the idea of making a bad investment, taking a risk and losing it all, opening a business and having it fail, these things are normal throughout human history. And many, many wealthy, powerful, and influential men have come before you, have gone through what you are going through, and have emerged victorious on the other side.

You can do this too. Sounds trite, but I repeat it. It helps me. I'm going to give you a bunch of stuff that helps me. You pick and choose from what helps you, but I'm going to tell you what helps me. Whenever I'm going through a particularly miserable situation, I simply try to remind myself, "This is going to give me one of the world's best stories on the other side of it." You're out camping in the wilderness, and it's freezing cold, and your tent is...

water is billowing in the side of your tent, and you're sitting there with nothing to do in the middle of the night. Cold, wet, hungry, miserable, freezing. I just tell myself, "This sucks. This sucks big time." I am going to be telling this story for the rest of my life, about this particular time.

And you'll be able to laugh about it on the other side. So if you know that you're going to be able to laugh about it at some point, then try to put it in its proper place now. Recognize that... just put it in its proper place now. Next point.

Money is fake. It's all made up. We print this stuff on sheets of fabric, and then we spend our lives chasing it. The balances in your investments, the balances in your portfolio, they're digits printed on a screen. All of the profits that you had in your trading portfolio, all the profits you had in your mutual fund account, all these profits, they're all fake.

It's just made up. Now, it's not that they don't have real utility and real use. Obviously, they do. My point is that it was never really real in the first place. The implosion of FTX is obviously a spectacular catastrophe. But I want you to imagine that it doesn't stop there.

I want you to imagine that every single cryptocurrency invented over the last 10 years goes to zero. I want you to imagine that Bitcoin goes to zero. It was always fake. Once you recognize that, you can realize that, you know what? It's all fake. That means that the loss of it is purely a mental game.

And what I want to emphasize is that most financial problems are far more a mental game than anything else. And so your number one goal to escape your problems is to discipline and control your brain. The good thing about this is that's literally the only thing you can do in life.

You can't actually control anything else in the world. The only thing that you have absolute control over is your brain. And so you can choose the story that you tell yourself. You can choose the meaning and the impact. You can choose the thoughts that you think, the things that you consider.

You are the master of your brain. And it is the only thing in the world that you can master. So when you look at your financial catastrophe, your experience of coming out the other side is going to be driven 100% by the thoughts that you hold in front of yourself, the thoughts that you allow to be in your mind.

There are many paths that you can take, and a middle path of some kind is almost certain to be the correct path. But let me lay out two paths on the extremes. And I want you to recognize that both of these are accessible to you. First, the path of doom and gloom and surrender.

You can look down at your life and you can say, "I've lost all my money. My business failed. My crypto is gone. I've lost all my money. Life is never going to be the same. I had this taste of what it was like to be wealthy for a very short period of time, and now it's all gone." And let's assume that you lever it up.

Margin is wiping you out. You've got debt all over the place. Let's assume that you are completely and utterly and entirely destroyed, 100%. You can allow that to cause you to think thoughts of failure, depression, darkness. You can see yourself as a failure. You can nurse those thoughts. You can imagine how your life is all going to fall apart.

Your wife is going to leave you. Your children are going to hate you. You're going to go out there and you're going to end it all. Might as well just delete yourself from the face of the earth. After all, it's never going to get better. That's the path that, unfortunately, many are probably going to go down.

You see this and virtually all collapses. It's very pronounced in honor societies. It's less pronounced in societies like the United States, kind of Western culture, where we're not so much an honor society. But it happens. And you can start that black spiral. If you feed yourself those thoughts, that's where you're going to end up.

On the other hand, you can feed yourself the positive thoughts. You get to choose. For me, the phrase that is beat into my head is, "Failure is an event. It's not a person." Failure is an event. It's not a person. I am not a failure. I simply failed. And guess what?

Failure is normal. It's normal, especially among high-achieving people. You can win or you can learn. You can learn the lessons from the catastrophe that you're facing. And you can go on and you can live to fight another day. And you can choose the path that the future has. If you have your health, if you have your family, if you have people that love you, if you have the ability to go and work, be it physical work or mental work, etc., all of these things are available to you.

You have everything that you need to start again. And the next time, you'll do it faster, better, and more safely. And you can put this in front of yourself as one of the ultimate challenges. What I like to do is simply pay attention to people who've lost it all and rebuilt it all.

My favorite example to use in the personal finance community is simply Dave Ramsey. Dave's story is remarkable. He was flying high and he lost it all. He fought for years along the process of losing it all to stave off bankruptcy. Eventually, he was forced into bankruptcy by his creditors, declared bankruptcy, and had to rebuild everything from nothing.

And yet, that story, the catastrophe, wound up being the very thing that allowed him to rebuild everything. And the same is possible for you. This story of your personal catastrophe may be the very thing that allows you to rebuild everything. I don't know how, but I promise it's available to you.

Let's pivot to some practical items, and we'll come back to the mindset. But I want to show you what's available to you from the practical perspective. First thing is this. When you suffer a great financial loss, in almost all circumstances, your external life doesn't have to change all that much right now.

There are some people for whom it does. If you had a big business and you were spending a million dollars a year, living a high lifestyle, and your business completely imploded, you're probably going to have to change if you're going through bankruptcy. But many people, especially many people who are hurt by the FTX implosion, many people, they'd never built those profits into their life.

You've lost your trading account. You've lost your nest egg. But you probably haven't lost, you probably weren't already changing to living on that. If you were, there will be lifestyle effects. First thing to do is to sit down and look at your current expenses. Pull out a sheet of paper.

Write down an up-to-date balance sheet. Figure out where you are today. Go through your bank accounts. Go through your crypto reserves. Go through your assets. Write down everything that you own. Everything that you have control over. Everything that you could sell. Make a complete list of all of your assets.

Include everything. Everything, again, from investments, 401k, house. Go through your house. If you have a fancy watch collection or expensive golf clubs you could sell or a gun collection, etc. Make a complete list of your assets. Number two, make a complete list of your liabilities. Who do you owe and what do you owe them?

Make a complete list and while you're making that list, ask yourself what kind of debt this is. Is this a mortgage where somebody has a claim on my house? Is this a credit card where it's an unsecured debt but eventually they could sue me if I don't pay them?

Is this an account to a person, etc.? Go through all your debts. Is it a car loan, etc.? Make a complete list. Then number three, go through your expenses and write down all of your necessary expenses. Your current monthly living expenses. This exercise is often exceedingly difficult to do because it requires you to face reality.

But if you will do it, no matter how bad the numbers are, on the other side of it you will feel better because you took action. I've experienced this myself straight up. You're in a mess. Business is failing, income's kind of there, etc. You're hiding all of your problems and debt.

You come across and you say, "Ah, you know what? I should go do that but I don't want to face the facts. I don't want to look at the numbers." Then you go and you face the facts and you look at the numbers and no matter how bad it is, you're going to feel better on the other side because the numbers will answer your questions for you.

When you don't put the numbers on paper, you're going to be lost in a black haze of uncertainty. The black cloud will be there and you won't know what to do. But when you put the numbers on paper, your path forward is going to be evident to you. It's going to show you what you need to do.

So put all the numbers on paper, all of your assets, all of your liabilities, and write out your living expenses, especially required payments. This is the start of basically a budget. If you currently have income, write down how much that income is. If you don't have income, at least you'll know how much income you need to start generating.

In many cases, just doing this will show you that although you've suffered a serious setback, no question about it, life is not terminal. Imagine you're a guy, right, you're making $100,000, living in the suburbs, married, three children, two children. You got $200,000 in your 401k. You started off with $100,000 in your crypto account.

You blew it up to a million three, and now it was all on FTX and you lost a million three. Well, you were still working. You lost a lot of money. That stinks. But you also didn't have that money three years ago. It was all fake. It was paper profits.

It was all fake. So you can live to fight again. What do you still have? You have a house, you got a wife, you got children, you got a job. You probably are not going to see any outward expression or change on your lifestyle. You can still keep your children in school, you can still feed your family, etc.

Everything's still available. You're going to be fine. What I'm trying to show you is that this isn't going to be mental. You're going to choose the story you tell yourself, and it's all in your head. The single biggest impact of losing money, having a business failure, etc. is the story that you tell yourself.

It's all in your head. It's not in actuality. It's not real. It's the story that you tell yourself. The thing that drives people crazy when they lose a bunch of money is they spend all their time thinking about what could have been instead of what is. But if you'll just simply focus on what is and what is real, you can adapt to that.

In life, human beings are very, very adaptable. In the personal finance world, we usually talk about this on the upside, where we talk about so-called hedonic adaptation. The idea being you get used to a fancy lifestyle, you get used to nicer things, and very quickly it's just normal for you.

You go from a cheap old apartment to a nice big fancy house, and that's normal for you. The good news is that adaptation can happen up, it can also happen down. You can very quickly adapt yourself to difficulty, lack of comfort, etc. And if you'll maintain your brain to focus on what is wonderful about that, you will be fine.

I want to insert a small rabbit trail here to talk to those of us who perhaps haven't lost all of our money in the last few days. Because I believe that training for the loss of all your money is actually a valuable tool of preparation. And what I like to do is not only play mental games, war games, with it, but actually test it out.

And long-time listeners have heard me say this repeatedly, try out different things to see what it's actually like. One of my favorite experiences of the past few years of my life was when I took my family traveling in an RV. And I did that because I wanted to go in an RV with my family.

I thought it sounded like fun. I always wanted to try out the perpetual traveler nomad lifestyle. And I wanted to show my wife and I hadn't traveled much, we'd been having babies, it was inconvenient, it just seemed like a great thing to do. I wanted to try living and working on the road.

I did it on the cheap. I bought a, round number is a $6,000 travel trail and a $6,000 pickup truck. I loved it. I loved it. And one of the things I loved about it was seeing how much I could enjoy a very simple, minimalist lifestyle. We had a 30-foot travel trailer, bunkhouse travel trailer, queen-size bedroom up front, four bunks in the back for the children, little tiny living room area, little tiny kitchen, little tiny bathroom, little tiny dinette, that was it.

Cheap old trailer. One of my favorite places to be was in that front bedroom because it just felt so cozy. And some nights we would be parked in a spectacular location. I'd get up in the morning, open up the shades, look out the window and just think, wow, I get to sit here and look at this.

Some nights we'd park in a parking lot, Walmart parking lot, little tiny living room area, cracker barrel, et cetera. I loved that just as much. And what it showed me was simply how you can go from a nice big house and all of the joys of that to something totally different and enjoy all of the joys of that.

And that's a skill that I think is worth practicing. I love nice houses, big houses, all the amenities, et cetera. But if you only ever can experience and enjoy nice things, you're a very weak person. You don't have to have all that to enjoy it. And so let's talk about another example.

Let's say you've lost all your money. Let's say you wake up, you've lost literally all your money. You have no, you have nothing, right? A few hundred dollars here and there. You had everything at FTX or whatever it was. You had to put it all in your business and your business has collapsed.

Not only that, but you have bills, but you can't make those bills, right? You're not gonna, a few months from now, you're not gonna be in your apartment or a few months from now the mortgage company's gonna foreclose on the house, et cetera. And you're gonna be left with nothing.

You're gonna wind up literally homeless. But you know what? Even if you were quite literally homeless, and I mean, when I say literally, I don't mean non-literally literally homeless. Guess what? You can live better and you can live well today. You can live better today as someone who is quite literally homeless than in many cases the wealthiest person in the world could have a century ago.

I call it my tent experiment. If I went literally homeless, first thing I would do would be to get my hands on a tent. A nice one, like a nice wall tent, something comfortable to be in, put some cots in there, et cetera. But if my family and I wound up in a 10 by 20 wall tent with a bunch of cots, do you know how amazing the world we live in is today?

If we're cold, I can get a heater. 50 bucks, 100 bucks, grab a heater, tank of propane, little wood stove to go in the tent. If you don't have any of this stuff and you have literally no money, your friends will help you out, your family members will help you out.

They'll lend you a few bucks and you can get yourself a wood stove for your tent. You can be warm. You won't die of exposure to the cold as millions have throughout history. You're not going to go hungry. You can go today to any grocery store in the United States and for 20 bucks you can buy enough food to feed your family for a couple of days.

How do you do it? Buy flour, buy a bottle of olive oil, buy a little thing of salt. If you can afford it, buy a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly. But flour, salt, oil, you got calories, you can fill your children's stomachs, you can eat for pennies a day.

Not only that, but of course your town has an abundance of food pantries, free food, set-aside for you in your time of need. You can apply for food assistance programs where you'll be able to feed yourself and your family with other great food from the grocery store. There are friends, people around who in your time of need will be happy to step in and support you.

Barring that, go dumpster diving. You'll find all the food that you need right from the dumpsters in your local area. Plenty available. You're not going to starve. In terms of everything else, grab yourself a battery, grab yourself a little solar panel. If you got one, a little generator, charge a battery from someone else's.

If you got a cell phone, you need a cell phone, but you got free Wi-Fi at your local library. You got free Wi-Fi everywhere these days. You got a free computer at your local library. All kinds of stuff. With that, you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips. All the books basically ever written for free available to you.

You need to cook, grab yourself a camping stove. You need light. It's all available. We like to joke about glamping, but one of the things that's remarkable about glamping is how convenient everything is. The last missing piece, by the way, has been solved now. Starlink. Starlink is in the middle of revolutionizing the world.

I used to think about this because I came across years ago this story of a coder, a programmer who was living in a tent in the woods and he was a programmer working on his own thing instead of working for a company to make his bills. He was, I think, tethering to a cell phone, but of course that was difficult a few years ago.

If you go and you look at his system, today you can live so well. I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole, but I just want to encourage you that even if you were literally homeless, if you've got a few thousand dollars, if I woke up and I was literally homeless, had lost everything, and I had four or five thousand bucks, I'd go buy a nice tent.

They call them solar generators, bad name, but battery system to run on, that I can use to run my lights. You can use to run electronics, et cetera. I have electricity. I'd buy a nice camp stove, bunch of bottles of propane, grab some coolers to keep my food cold, and go set up a camp in the woods.

This is the normal human experience, and we're so far from this in our modern world, and yet it's all in our head. It's all, and what I'm trying to drive at is to show you that this is in your head. Throughout virtually all of human civilization, this is how people lived.

They slept on the ground with nothing, and this was a century ago or less. I always think about this, you remember the story in the Bible of Jacob, when he is traveling, he ran away from his brother Esau after taking his brother's birthright, and he's traveling to his uncle's house.

Remember it says what he used for a pillow when he was traveling? A stone, right? I love that because this is the classic example. Here's a guy who's traveling. It means a dude wearing a robe or a blanket around his shoulders, a small bag of some things he can carry, and when it gets cold at night, he lies down on the ground, and he pulls up a stone for a pillow.

Fast forward. I've been listening to, with my children, reading the Lord of the Rings. We've been listening to the audiobooks. By the way, if you don't have it, get the Andy Serkis recordings of the Lord of the Rings. It is the best audiobook I've ever listened to. Incredible actor.

It's better than reading it yourself, and I don't usually say that about audiobooks. We've been listening through it as a family. We're in the second book right now, and we're off on this journey, and what I do is I picture how they were traveling. Now, they had, in some cases, basically, you most of the time just have what they could carry, but recognize that when they lay down at night, they didn't have a tent.

They had a blanket that they rolled up in. That's it. That's how they lived. Go back to the far west, in the cowboys, which you see in a western. What does a cowboy have? He's got a bed roll, blanket, little canvas cover he can put down on the ground, lies down around the fire, sleeps in the open air.

To this day, there are millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world who are still living like this. Want to go to sleep? You lie down on the floor in the corner. My dad told me stories. My dad grew up in the mountains of Colorado, and his family was in California.

This would have been back in the 1950s, I think, and so they would drive back and forth on occasion. I don't know if it was annually or biannually, something like that, between Colorado and California. They didn't stop at a hotel and pay $100 a night for a holiday in Express.

They drove along the desert. When they got tired at night, they pulled the car off into the desert. My grandmother would sleep in the backseat of the car. The men would go and lie down on the ground and sleep. In the morning, they'd wake up, get back in the car, and go on their way.

You can do this. Just share a personal story. About 10 years ago, more than that, 12 or 13 years ago, I went and I spent a month in the Philippines. We were traveling, doing some missionary work, preaching in some very remote churches in the middle of nowhere with some very poor people.

For an entire month, I didn't see a bed. I slept on the ground like everyone. That is very normal in the rural Filipino culture where we were. Usually, the local people would sleep in what's called a nipah hut in the local parlance which has soft bamboo floors. I wound up sleeping on a plank floor with nothing.

They usually have mats. I think I got a little braided mat at some point in time. The first couple days, the hardship was sore. After a few days, I adapted. I spent a month sleeping on a hardwood floor, plank floor, nothing. I adapted, got used to it. One of the things is recognize that even if you lost it all, you wouldn't lose it all.

You would be fine. You'd be able to rebuild. You'll figure out a way. I'm using that extreme circumstance for a reason. If we start with the worst case scenario, you'll see that every step up is better. I don't want to go and sleep on a tent in the forest if I can avoid it.

I'll go and buy an RV. I'd rather be in an RV than in a tent in the forest. If I can't have an RV, I'll go and I'll get a $500 a month apartment. It may not be great, but it's better than the tent in the forest. More convenient.

You just systematically upgrade. Hopefully, what I can do is just change your perspective a little bit. The vast majority of us who lose it all, lose a bad investment, et cetera, we're never going to wind up in that hardcore scenario. You probably can keep your home. You've got months to figure it out.

Let's say that you're facing foreclosure because you don't have any money you lost at all. They're not going to kick you out for at least several months. That gives you time. You can go get a job. You may not be able to pay everything. You may not be able to pay the car, the truck, kids, private tuition, et cetera, but you could probably at least pay your mortgage.

Buck up. You're going to be fine. Recognize how bad it could be. Then you'll be more grateful for the fact that you're not there. If you think that you're there, recognize that even there is probably pretty good. Next, when you're thinking about the assets that you have, recognize that those assets include people.

If you're a normal person with normal relationships, you probably have a huge network of people that would be thrilled to help you. What would keep you from accessing that help? Answer is your pride. That's what will keep you from it. Once again, we come down to the fact that this is all a mental game.

If you're proud that you're not there, if you're proud and unwilling to admit that you made a mistake, it's going to be a long and difficult road. If you can simply own up to yourself and recognize, "I screwed up. I made a mistake." Or if you didn't make a mistake, maybe you didn't make a mistake and the market was against you.

I don't think you're stupid for trusting FTX. I don't think you should think you're stupid either. By all accounts, this was a good business. Would it have been great if you held your own keys? Yeah. But even if you held your own keys, there's still no guarantee. Even if you never invested in some popular token, maybe you only invested in Bitcoin and you held all your own keys, there's no reason to say that Bitcoin itself doesn't go to zero.

There's no guarantee. Don't play a game with yourself. Don't let yourself be shamed. Just say, "I screwed up." Or, "The market turned against me. I didn't do everything right in business." And the whole thing can come right against you. Just imagine, right? Two years ago, you were running a great business.

The government comes in and shuts your doors and says, "You can't have people here." And you did everything right. You didn't make the pandemic and they come in and they bankrupt you. And they go on to make fun of you two years later when you take out money from them shutting you down and they use you as a political pawn.

So the point is, don't beat yourself up unnecessarily. Maybe you could have avoided it if you'd held your own keys. Yeah, but maybe you couldn't have. Again, we don't know. It's perfectly plausible that two years from today, Bitcoin would be completely worthless. And all the people that are poking fun at you for having your money on FTX because you didn't hold your keys, they're also wiped out and totally broke.

So don't, just ignore them. Ignore that. Recognize it's all in your head. So humble yourself. Humble yourself. Acknowledge the mistake and you'll find around you or acknowledge the loss. And you're going to find around you loads of people anxious to help you out. Why are you never going to end up in a tent in the forest?

Because your parents would be thrilled to offer you their garage apartment. There's no shame in taking it. Your buddy will say, "Hey, I got a cheap car. Why don't you just take my car and drive it for six months?" All of what you need to rebuild your life is at your fingertips.

As long as you can conquer the pride and the emotions and the craziness in your head, you'll be able to rebuild your life. Next, if you're not currently employed, then the most important step for you to take is to get a job. As quickly as possible, get a job.

Most of you who have been wiped out probably are still employed. So this advice affects most likely someone who's lost his business et cetera. But if you're not currently employed, a job is going to change your world. One of the biggest benefits of the job is going to be for your mental health.

As a man, you must work. You will feel good when you are at work. If you have work, you have a good, honest, upright, morally helpful work, work that benefits society. No matter how menial, you can find great meaning and significance in your work. Whatever job you take, it doesn't need to be the 10-year job.

You just need something. Because something, even if you start from nothing, some kind of income will make decisions. The most difficult place to be in from a financial perspective is unemployed. Because if you don't have any revenue coming into your household, then you can't know what decision is right.

You can't know whether you can afford $2,000 a month of rent or $500 a month of rent or $0 a month of rent. Thus, you can't tell whether you should go to a remote wilderness to live in or whether you should go to your dad's garage apartment or to his garage and put your tent inside of it or whether you should go to the local rent-by-the-week hotel room or whether you should go and get a perfectly ordinary apartment for $2,000 a month.

You don't know. So you have to get a job. And as soon as you have a job, you can start making those decisions intelligently. And as your job changes, you can change all those situations. The job will give you structure for your days. It will allow you to not be alone, which is deadly for you.

It will allow you to produce in society and feel like you have an opportunity to contribute. So you've got to get a job. Now, you shouldn't just go out and get the first job, right? Check your runway. This is why we go back to your assets and liabilities. Maybe you quit your job and you're a full-time trader and now you've lost all your money through a bad trade, right?

You were day trading and boom, it's all gone. Okay. If you've got three months of runway, then do an intelligent job search. You don't have to just go and take the first thing, but focus on it quickly. Go after it. One of the biggest assets you have, especially for my primarily American audience, is you have access to one of the world's biggest and most robust labor markets that is right now desperate for workers.

There are jobs galore available to you in the United States. So if you have the legal right to work in the United States as a US citizen or a resident of some kind with a work visa, you have everything you need to rebuild your financial life. I promise you.

It's not always great. You might be doing entry-level, but you have everything you need to rebuild your financial life. And if you're listening to this podcast, that tells me that you're the kind of person that no matter where you start, six months from now, you can be far ahead of where you start.

I'm convinced that a good, honest, hardworking person can go into any kind of just entry-level retail job and in six months be a manager of the place. There is such a dearth of work ethic, responsibility, reliability, kindness, social skills, etc. that if you just have normal, ordinary qualifications in those regards, you can completely separate yourself from the competition.

So get yourself a job. If your job is very low income, let's assume that you find something and you're making $15 an hour. It's going to be tough to make it on $15 an hour. $15 an hour times 40 hours is $600 a week. Hopefully you can get more than 40 hours, but $600 a week, that's $2,400 a month.

So let's assume that you started there. Well, if that's all you got, then now at least you know what your budget is. You know what you can do. You ain't going out renting an apartment for $10,000 a month. You're going to be possibly putting a tent in your dad's backyard.

But at least you have a starting place. And you can go on and start making decisions. So get to work. Do not allow yourself to be alone. And most importantly, do not allow yourself to be alone, sucked into the electronic vortex of a social media feed. I find this to be a major problem in my own life.

If you fight against it, 80% success. The 20% failures though, make me miserable. You sit there on Twitter following this thread, that thread, this thread, that thread, whatever your platform of choice is. And it just, it makes you feel worse and worse and worse and worse. Real life is not like that.

Real life is engaging. And so one of your goals needs to be to get around people as much as possible. Get around people at work, even get around people physically. If you're single and you've lost everything, don't sit at home in your apartment. At least go to a coffee shop and work there, even if you don't buy anything, or go to a park, or just be around people so you don't feel isolated.

If you've got family, wife, children, parents, whatever, get around them. Get around friends as much as possible. Be with real people who can look you in the face, commiserate with you, empathize with you, encourage you, slap you in the head. Don't be around the digital hordes of people who you know nothing about, who pump into you nasty stuff.

Be around real people. Look at what you're going through as an opportunity to change everything. One of the things that's interesting about life, people talk about, you've heard the old saying that, you know, the first million is the hardest. I think it truly is. And there's a real financial reason to it as well, right?

Once you've got a million bucks, you can, the second million is going to be easier because you got a million dollars the first time, you can just do a lot more. But one of the things that's interesting is I want you to reflect on your life and ask yourself, if I had to start all over again, what would I start?

What would I do? And I've played a lot of these games publicly with things that I've recorded for the podcast, etc. But to me, it's obvious that most of us, if we went back a decade to relive the previous decade, we could completely do everything totally differently and be back where we are much, much quicker.

I'm telling you, no matter how bad the scenario, you're probably three to five years from a very ordinary looking life. Let's go in this direction first. We're going to go in terms of like physical stuff, but let's go into finances. If you find yourself in a giant mess, creditors on all sides, you borrowed money on your credit cards, you maxed out your mortgage, you borrowed money on your credit cards, you invested all that money into risky stocks on a margin account, you got margin loans and you lost everything.

All right, let's assume that you're in the worst case scenario. You're probably, number one, you're some months from resolution of the whole situation and you are three to five years from a very normal looking life. Let's talk about resolution. In the United States, we are very, very fortunate to have a wonderful institution called bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy was invented to help people be willing to take risk and not be saddled with that risk for the rest of their lives. For many years, I myself wrestled with the question of bankruptcy. Let's talk about it for a moment. The reason I wrestled with it is first of all, I'm a Christian and in the Bible, people are clearly commanded, not just Christians, all people, right?

But of course, Christians are generally those who say I'm going to take the commands of the Bible very seriously and seek to conform my life to them, but commanded to pay your debts. Commanded to pay your debts. In fact, it says a wicked man doesn't pay his debts. So the Bible is very clear about pay your debts.

In addition, I myself had a major personal family example of somebody who didn't declare bankruptcy because of this sense of honor. My grandfather was a farmer. He was born and raised as a farmer, but he was also an entrepreneur. Many farmers are. And there was a time in his 30s where he got involved, in addition to his farming operations, he got involved in a road construction business.

And he had a business partner and he and his business partner built their road construction business. They had a lot of equipment, etc. My grandfather's from Colorado. They got a contract to go to Texas and build a road. And so they took the contract. But when they went to Texas, they found something that they had not planned on, which was the Texas soil.

And long story short, as I understand it, the dirt, the Texas soil that they were building a road in basically destroyed their equipment. It was so... What's the adjective? Sandpapery, basically rough. It was so abrasive that it destroyed their equipment. And they wound up struggling massively to even finish it.

And in the middle of the thing, they lost all their money. They lost all their profit. They were in huge amounts of debt. And my grandfather's partner walked away and said, "That's it. I'm out. I'm done with this. Bob, I'd encourage you to be done with it too and declare bankruptcy." But my grandfather refused to do it.

He went deeply into debt. He refused to declare bankruptcy. And he... And he fought his way out of it. It took him decades. But he finally was able to fight his way out of it, finish paying off all of his creditors, etc. And he never declared bankruptcy. And he did that because of honor.

He didn't want to be one who declared bankruptcy. And so having that as part of your family heritage was obviously a big thing. Because I want to be that kind of honorable man. But over the years, I've thought a lot about this. And I've come to this conclusion. I believe that it is perfectly, morally acceptable for you to declare bankruptcy if you can indeed not pay your creditors.

And my reason for that is in the modern era, we all go into a contract with one another knowing what the law is. The way I think about it is this. If I went to my brother and I said, "Hey, brother, lend me $100,000." And he lends me $100,000.

And I go broke. That's very different than if I go to a commercial lending company and I say, "Lend me $100,000." And then I go broke. Because the commercial lending company we have clearly spelled out in our contractual agreement what will happen in the result of non-performance. So if I don't perform on my car loan, the car lending company will come and collect my car.

If I don't perform on my mortgage loan, the house, the mortgage company will come and they'll repossess my house, foreclose on my house and sell it. If I don't perform on my credit cards, then the credit card company will come, they'll sue me in court, and they'll take my assets if they get their judgment against me.

Bankruptcy laws are created. They're public, they're clearly understood, and they're a fundamental foundation of contract law. And declaring bankruptcy thus is not an immoral thing to do. It is contractually expected with all of its pros and cons and difficulties, etc. It is understood that this is part of the basic agreement of a debt.

And it's the same with your brother or with a company, but it has a very different scenario when you're dealing with a commercial lender, which is where most of us face our bills. So if you are in that worst scenario, and I've wrestled with this for years, but at this point I feel confident, bankruptcy court is perfectly available to you, perfectly reasonable, and in many situations is the right solution.

Don't rush to declare bankruptcy. Do not rush to declare bankruptcy. In many cases, you should just simply stop paying your creditors first for a time and then work it out, try to set up a workout plan. In many cases, bankruptcy doesn't save you anything. But you should sit down and do the triage and figure out where things are going to be.

So let's assume that the worst happens, right? You're deeply in debt, you've borrowed everywhere, put money into your investments, your investments have been struck down to zero, and now you've got debts everywhere, nothing going for you. You're going to declare bankruptcy. You're going to lose all of your assets, except those assets that are exempt according to the bankruptcy laws of your estate, and you're going to start over again.

You'll probably have some debts that come through that survived the bankruptcy, right? The debt to your brother or something, a debt that you create a workout plan or maybe a mortgage that you cover so you can stay in the house. But on the other side of bankruptcy court, you can start again.

And most of those debts will be cleared. Bankruptcy is going to stay on your credit. You're not going to have any access to that. It's going to hinder some of your financial opportunities, some of your job opportunities, because you're not going to be able to get certain jobs because you've declared bankruptcy in the past.

But that's okay. The world is full and available to you. And again, you're going to go and you're going to get a job, you're going to have income, you're going to start saving money. Once the whole legal process is settled, you'll know what you owe your creditors, how much to whom.

Maybe you'll be working with a bankruptcy trustee to work your way through, depending on what chapter of bankruptcy you file, whether it's a total liquidation or not. You'll be working your way through those debts and you'll systematically work your way through the problems. It's not the end of the world.

And based upon your new situation, it'll take you six months to save some thousands of dollars. You'll start to establish yourself. You'll need to rent an apartment. You may have to furnish it. You have to get transportation. You have to get your children's clothes, etc. But you're three to five years, in the worst case scenario, you're three to five years from living a perfectly normal life.

Five to ten years, probably save enough money, buy another house, etc. And what'll happen is you'll do it much smarter and much faster the next time around. If you combine all of those personal finance moves with what we talk about here on the show, about increasing your income, decreasing your expenses, being thoughtful and strategic, even optimizing your lifestyle, which I'll get to in a moment, this transformation, this massive setback, can turn out to be one of the biggest blessings of your life because you have to redesign your life.

It usually doesn't feel like that at the front end, but on the back end of it, you'll often come off the other side with recognizing that it turns out to be a blessing. Let me give you just two stories. I've not been bankrupt, or at least not yet. I hope I don't, but hey, if I do, that's life.

I've not been bankrupt, but I have been laid off. I'll tell you a story in just a moment about someone who has been bankrupt. I have been laid off. I just remember so much how, and most, many of us have, right? This is not unique to me, but when I got laid off in the first couple days, I was angry about it.

After a couple, after a year, a couple years, I look back and I was so glad that I had gotten laid off because it gave me a chance to reset, and the decision was made for me. It's not a decision I would have chosen, but the decision was made for me.

In my case, I got laid off in the fall of 2008. I had been planning to leave the company I was working for in January 1 of 2009. In hindsight, I don't think I would have had the guts to leave because the world was falling apart. And so the fact that they laid me off, and sorry, it was the summer of 2008, in July, June or July.

The fact that they laid me off in the summer of 2008 turned out to be a blessing because the decision was made and I could go forward, and even though I was facing a bad economy and a recession, et cetera, I was able to go forward because my hand was forced.

You hear this a lot of people when they get divorced. Before the divorce, they say, "Oh, I don't want to." It's this impending thing that's over their head, but finally when the divorce is finalized, they accept it. You accept, the divorce is done. I've got to press forward and I've got to build a new life.

And in many cases, talk to them a few years later, and while they wouldn't choose that path, they can reflect on the blessings that they've received from that path, and they can say, "Okay, I'm going to press forward and I'm glad for these things." The story I was going to tell you was one of my favorites, Dan Sullivan, the great strategic coach founder.

Dan Sullivan, I think in the '70s, he was a young man. He got divorced and declared bankruptcy on the same day. He'd had a bunch of problems. He said that he, let's see, he did divorce in the morning. Literally, he went to divorce court in the morning, finalized his divorce, went out, had lunch, went to court in the afternoon, finalized his bankruptcy.

Divorced and bankrupt on the same day. Now, when you hear him talk about it now as an older man and he reflects back on it, he looks back to that as a tremendously difficult thing, but also as one of the great blessings of his life because he was forced by circumstances to recognize that he's screwed everything up and he's going to have to do something differently.

He made a certain number of life decisions that from now on, I'm going to live my life this way. Well, fast forward decades later, he's exceedingly wealthy, married, wealthy, huge business, huge prestige and influence all around the world, lives a dream life. So bankruptcy is not the end of the world.

That's, in the Western context, that's the worst that you're facing financially is bankruptcy. Now, if you're not bankrupt, again, you're probably still three to five years away. So, some people faster, but if you're more than five years away with a non-bankruptcy plan, then usually bankruptcy is going to be a better situation.

But your next time through, even if you've lost everything, your next time through, you're going to do it smarter, do it better. You're going to make wiser decisions. You're going to be more aggressive. You're going to make more money. You're going to keep lower expenses. You'll quickly rebuild your accounts.

You'll focus on making wiser investments so you don't lose them. Step by step by step, you're in a much better situation. 10 years from now, you can be financially independent. That's what we talk about here at Radical Personal Finance. 10 years from now, you can be financially independent, financially free.

Various paths open to you, but you can do it. One of the best things about, let's talk for a moment about a truly dire circumstance. I want you to imagine, I mentioned on yesterday's show, I want you to imagine you're Alex Jones. You've been found by a court. Oh, what was it?

I mean, they should have just said trillions of dollars, but $1.5 billion, something like that, final settlement, awarded him another $437 million judgment yesterday. So here's what's interesting about this. So you're clearly bankrupt. The question is what form of bankruptcy you are and what the ultimate payout winds up being.

How do you do it? So I don't know what Jones is going to do. But the reason I say that is that when you go bankrupt because of a court order, that's very different than some other bankruptcies because there are certain super creditors that can intervene. The IRS is treated differently.

Tax debt is treated differently in a bankruptcy proceeding than if you just had credit card debt. I don't know the intricacies of law that he's facing with regard to a court order. But even if you wind up facing a debt that you can never pay, even this is an option for you.

My favorite story on this regard is the story of Randy Alcorn. Back in the 1980s, Randy Alcorn was involved in an anti-abortion movement called Operation Rescue. Randy Alcorn is a Christian preacher. Planned Parenthood and various pro-abortion advocates were very successful at that time in passing a wave of new laws about special protections for abortion mills.

Alcorn was arrested for protesting in front of these abortion mills and he wound up losing his case. So in the court case, he was forced by the judge and the judgment to make a huge payout to Planned Parenthood, millions of dollars. And Alcorn, due to his conscience, said, "I will never pay Planned Parenthood a cent.

"I'm never going to do it. "I'm not going to pay them anything." If you go back and you read his books, he's written a number of excellent books on money, it's quite interesting because that moment to him was such a freeing moment where in order for him to never pay that judgment to Planned Parenthood, it meant that he could not have any money.

Because if he had any money, Planned Parenthood had a judgment against him that they were going to be able to come and collect from it. And so for decades, until the judgment expired, for decades, he could never earn more than minimum wage because he had a minimum wage that was protected by the laws of his state that the predator could not garnish.

And so he was protected. But that freeing, he found it an incredibly freeing feeling to say, "I can't accumulate any money. "I cannot accumulate money "because otherwise Planned Parenthood will come and take it "and I will not contribute to their evil." And so he was guaranteed to be poor.

But it was an incredibly freeing thing for him. And I myself actually use this as a standard coaching question when I coach people. One of my favorite ways that I phrase the question is this. I say to people, usually we'll talk about, "Hey, if you were wealthy, what would you do?" etc.

But the way that I phrase it now is this. I say, "Let's play a game. "I want you to assume that I'm your accountant. "And I call you up and I say, 'Listen, Joe, "'I got bad news for you. "'Bad news is this. "'I know you thought I was doing a good job "'in preparing your tax returns properly for you, "'but in reality, what I've actually been doing "'is I've been filing false tax returns with the IRS "'and I've been embezzling and swindling the money "'that I've been getting from them.

"'And so you, unfortunately, Joe, "'are now in the situation "'where you owe the IRS $58 bajillion. "'And I'm sorry, but this means that "'for the rest of your life, "'you're going to have to pay this debt.'" And, "Yeah, I know, but they caught me. "I'm going to go to prison, but I promise you, Joe, "there's no way to get out of it." "You owe the IRS $58 bajillion." So what that means, Joe, is you're never going to be able to own anything for the rest of your life.

Because if you own it, then the IRS is going to come and they're going to seize it. You're never going to be able to accumulate any money. Because if you have any money left in your bank account at the end of the month, then the IRS is going to swoop in and they're going to take it.

So my question, Joe, is if that happened, what would you do? What would you do if you knew you could never retire? What would you do if you knew you could never accumulate any money? What would you do? How would you live? If you find yourself at the moment destitute financially because of a business loss or an FTX implosion or whatever, I urge you to think about that.

What would you do? I could tell you exactly what I would do myself. First thing I would focus on is, where do I want to live? And I would choose to live in a place that I loved. I said I would live in a place that I loved. I would choose to live in a place that I loved.

Myself, I'd probably choose a mountain town somewhere, Utah, Colorado, something like that. Kind of a ski town type of thing. Montana. I'd live in the United States in that scenario. As long-time listeners know, although I think there are many places in the world that have a lot to offer, I think the United States has a lot to offer.

That would be the first thing, is I'd choose carefully a place to live that I loved and offered me a really cool lifestyle. Second thing that I would focus on is making sure that I'm around people that I like. I want to love my neighbors. I want to be with the family members, etc.

that I like. And the third thing I'd focus on is I'd focus on getting a job that was well-suited to me. I myself, I'd probably go and be a teacher. If I couldn't be a college professor, that would be ideal. I don't have a PhD myself, so I don't think I have the credentials necessary to be a college professor.

I'm not sure actually what I'm interested in teaching at the college level, but I would love to go and be a high school teacher. I would teach something like economics, history, politics, government, civics, personal finance, something like that. I'd go be a high school teacher. I wouldn't make a ton of money, but I would make enough money to live comfortably on.

And by being thoughtful and strategic and surrounding myself with work that I'm passionate about, meaning to be able to impact people with ideas, to be able to inspire, to be able to teach, etc, I would enjoy going to work every day. And by choosing a job that has a comfortable work-life balance, go to work at 7, get out at 3, do that 180 days a year, the other 180 days of the year I'm off, life is good.

This is a much lower workload than virtually anyone has had throughout history. On my grandfather's day, the standard work week was 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. That would give me plenty of time for other things. If I couldn't earn money, I would take the balance of my time, I would pick a problem in the world that I'm passionate about and focus my efforts on seeking to solve that.

Could be something local, my neighborhood. Could be something in my state. Could be something online, kind of a macro problem. Various ways of solving it. And then I would focus on enjoying being in my local community. I'd join a local church, build strong friendships, relationships, etc. Now, none of that requires you to accumulate money.

None of that requires you to be wealthy. It just so happens that there are some nice things, right? If I went and got a job at a government school being a teacher, I'd probably have a government pension of some kind. That's nice. But I'd try to choose a career that I could continue for a long time.

My goal with teaching would be to be able to teach until I was 85, 90 years old. My grandfather taught until he was in his early 80s. So, that's doable. You think about it, but the point is that money is not necessary, being wealthy is not necessary for you to live a great life.

So play that game out. You're sitting in your room thinking your life is over because you lost all your money. My friend, it's not. You don't owe the IRS $58 bajillion such that you'll never be able to save money. You're 3 to 5 years away from a radically different life.

Everything is available to you. It's not the end of the world. Let's go on and talk about some disciplines. I mentioned yesterday on the show things like exercise, sun, etc. What I've tried so far in this show to emphasize is that the war is in your own head with your own thoughts, not external.

I can solve all your financial problems, coach you through all the right financial decisions. Anyone else can too. It's not me. Get the money stuff on paper where you can look at it, sit down with an informed person. If you're broke, bankrupt right now, I encourage you to write out all the numbers.

Create a balance sheet, cash flow statement, etc. Find somebody that is around the money business. Local accountant, buddy of yours who's a businessman, attorney, financial advisor, insurance agent, somebody who's around the business. Sit down and say, "I need to talk to somebody. I need some help. I've screwed up.

I lost a bunch of money. My business went broke. What do I do? What would you do in these numbers?" Start getting counsel on that. The point is that the number stuff is easy. What's not easy is winning the war in your head. In order to win the war in your head, you need a variety of tactics.

Positive thinking isn't enough. It's a good start. Failure is an event. It's not a person. It's a good start, but you can say that to yourself and still be in a pretty bad spot. Let's talk about at least what I focus on. I'm no psychologist, psychiatrist. They probably have more things that can help you, but here's what I focus on.

Number one, you need to be honest, and you need to be free, mentally free, spiritually free. Honest with yourself. That's what the process is, but honest with others. If you lost a million dollars, and that was the family's life savings, you can't keep that to yourself. You got to go to your wife.

You got to go to your husband. You got to go to whomever and acknowledge it. If other people were involved, you got to say, "Here's what happened. I screwed up." You got to clear it out and be honest. The very first element of forgiveness is confession. You must always confess your sins, confess your mistakes, confess those things.

You need to focus on identifying and admitting where you were wrong, what you did wrong. If you made a mistake, try to identify why did you make the mistake? What did you do wrong? This honesty is important for yourself so that you can learn from the lesson. The only thing that makes a horrible mistake worse is not learning anything from it and going through it again.

So when you make a mistake, when you screw up, learn from it. At least that way, you got some benefit from it. And so identify what it is. If you defrauded somebody, you need to go and acknowledge, "I defrauded you. I swindled you." If you've just simply made a mistake, you may acknowledge it.

Acknowledge where you are so that you can build for the future. By acknowledging it out loud, verbally, confessing it if you're single, find a friend that you trust and acknowledge what's going on. Don't try to maintain a facade of who you are. Be honest. Almost all things can be forgiven.

First of all, certainly all things can be forgiven by God. And if you have God's forgiveness, what else matters? But even by other people, when you are honest and you honestly acknowledge what you've done wrong, again, if it's on the level of a moral level, such as fraud or something like that, acknowledge it.

If it's just on the level of mistake, acknowledge, "Here's the mistake I made. I trusted FTX. It seemed smart, right? Tom Brady said I should." Well, now we've learned a hard lesson. This sucks. It really sucks. But this is-- Now we learn, I shouldn't have trusted. But acknowledge the mistakes and confess them.

Get them out there clearly. Learn the lessons from them. And by acknowledging them, you can bring yourself to a place of peace. It's not to say the road ahead is going to be easy, but the worst thing is to still have that stuff in your head or be harboring secrets or trying to maintain an image or a facade of the way that you want people to see you instead of acknowledging it.

When you do that, it may feel like it, but it's pride. It's stupid pride. And what it does is it keeps anybody from stepping in and helping you. So the first step is acknowledging it. Think of how effective this is in the AA and various anonymous groups. You step in and you say, "This is who I am and this is what I've done." And everyone else says, "Yeah, we know.

We've been there too." So acknowledge it. Acknowledge the problem. I'm not necessarily saying to broadcast it. You should acknowledge it to people who love you and can help you. But in terms of acknowledging it, you want to be focused on actually acknowledging it. By verbally, openly acknowledging where you are, you can achieve peace with the situation and start to rebuild.

You can eliminate the mental torture. You can face the facts honestly and forthrightly. No matter how ugly those facts are, at least if you can face them directly, you can achieve that mental freedom to know what to do next. But if it's all wrapped up in your head, then it ain't going to work.

Next is get counsel. We've talked about that extensively, but the point is don't try to fight it alone. So get advice, get counsel. That advice and that counsel could be specific to the situation. You may need financial advice. You may need to talk to a bankruptcy attorney. You may need to talk to a friend in business, kind of determine how and best to fight through.

You may need to talk to an accountant. You may need to talk to your landlord, explain that you're not going to be able to pay your rent. Get advice and counsel. But also in terms of your brain, get advice and counsel. Speak to a friend. Explain to your friend what you're going through and how the world is black.

Talk to your pastor. Talk to a psychiatrist. Talk to a counselor, a therapist. Seek out counsel that is appropriate so that you can verbalize the problems and not try to solve them all in your head. Next, I fundamentally believe that exercise is one of the most important habits to build in.

I have failed at this again and again and again in my life. When I succeed, as thankfully I'm succeeding myself at the moment, I see the positive impact. But as a human being, you need to set up a system of exercise for yourself. That should probably be just simply going out and walking.

Leave your phone behind. Find a nice place to walk, a nice park or wherever you have appropriate and go out and walk 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes. Get your brain right. And moving will affect your brain. Tony Robbins' thing for years, that your mental state can be produced-- your mental state can change your physical state, but it goes the other way as well.

So you can change your mental state to affect-- excuse me, change your physical state to change your mental state. You can do his exercises. You can do other people's great exercises if you're hardcore. But just focus on physical exercise. A man who has physical daily activity, a hard walk, hiking the hills, a hard session with the weights, going to the boxing gym, etc., is going to be better in all of these situations than the man who sits around and mopes in his own misery.

Inactivity and sedentary lifestyle will make everything you're facing worse. And so find something that's available to you. I think it's ideal if it fits for you to do something that is social. So joining a local boxing gym or being at a gym where there's people, especially if there's friends or there's a class or something like that, can again help to activate that social connection to where you're not alone all the time.

Don't be alone all the time because everything is worse when you're alone. Next, sunshine. Make it a specific habit to make sure that you're getting abundant sunshine. Your brain and your body need sunshine to feel good. And so figure out how to regularly get consistent sunshine. And there's more that could be said, but I've covered it and I'll be repeating myself.

Social connection, go to church, go to be with people, have an anchoring point and don't try to fight it alone. As human beings, we're not meant to be alone, and you can work your way through it. I believe that concludes everything that I want to say. I didn't have a tight outline for this show, so I hope that my comments were sufficiently coherent to help you.

I just want to remind you and inspire you that this is all doable. And let me talk for just a moment about the black path. Do not kill yourself. I've tried to discuss and I've tried to put this into proper perspective by saying it's only money. That's been my focus.

Many times people with money kill themselves, and people kill themselves for other reasons too. What's remarkable about our brains is how even when things are going well, we wind up doing stupid stuff. And I don't even pretend to understand what people who are suicidal go through. There's clearly a wide variety.

But I guess what I want to say is what always stands out to me is you can be one of the most successful guys in the world and still put the gun in your mouth. So it's just astonishing. Probably the biggest one for me, because I always loved him so much, was Anthony Bourdain.

Here's a guy who has the dream life and yet still winds up... It's sad. So just recognize that ending the pain the way that you're thinking of doing it, if that's your situation, it's not going to end anything. It's just going to make more pain. First of all, recognize very clearly if you commit suicide, you are murdering someone, which is a grave sin.

You must never murder someone, especially yourself. Don't do it. Acknowledge also that it's going to make everything worse for everyone around you. One of the most selfish things you could possibly do. And the only reason... If you're suicidal for some other reason, again, I don't understand it. I've been in pretty black places, never contemplated suicide, so I acknowledge that.

But if you're there because of money, if you're thinking that, "Oh, financially this is going to fix everything, because I got a life insurance policy or whatever," it's not. It's going to be far worse. And what pisses me off so much is when people don't just open their mouth and talk about it, because we can fix it.

I'm hoping to convey to you the confidence that I have that you can fix the finances. There's no financial problem that you can bring me that I can't fix. I can't guarantee you're going to be a billionaire, obviously. What I mean is you can live a really great life no matter how deep your hole is right now.

So this is all a mirage, all this mental game of, "Oh, I lost all my money, so I'm just going to kill myself because it's over." You idiot, it's not over. Don't be stupid. Don't be a coward. Step up and fix it and make yourself someone to be proud of by facing your problems and tackling them and fixing them.

Don't be stupid and a coward and think, "Oh, I lost all my money, so there I'm going to go and kill myself." That would be the stupidest possible thing you could do. As a human being, a creature made in the image of God, put here on this earth to rule and to reign here and now, you owe it to yourself to use your setback and transform yourself.

And you owe it to your fellow travelers who are also facing tragedy, in many cases vastly worse than the tragedy that you're facing. You owe it to them to be an inspirational example of somebody who presses forward and solves his problems rather than sitting back and taking the coward's way out.

Just think for a moment, how many men, a guy like Dan Sullivan, has inspired over the years with his story of divorce and bankruptcy on the same day. Think of how big his impact has been. The premier entrepreneur's coach in the world coached thousands and thousands of high performers.

The hardship, the tragedy, is the tool that can be used to better the world. Think of the story I told you about my grandfather. Just imagine my grandfather, failed in business, bankrupt, etc., puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. What does that do to your family legacy?

Versus here's a man who spent decades, I think something like 30 years, the next 30 years, paying off these debts systematically. And think of the legacy. So I have no idea what I'm supposed to say to people who are suicidal. I don't know how to do it. I don't know what to say other than just to be honest and to say you are stupid if you think that killing yourself because of a financial loss is a smart thing to do.

You're behaving stupidly. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself and stop it. We can fix all your problems. The next week, I don't know, I guess probably I should say I'm opening up consultations here. If you're suicidal and you're thinking that killing yourself is the solution, book a consultation with me.

I won't charge you a dime. I'll yell at you for being stupid for thinking about it and I won't charge you a dime. And then I'll fix your problems for you. I'll tell you how you can do it. Again, I can't do it for you, but I'll tell you the path.

So book a consultation with me. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult. So I'm activating that again for a limited time here in the next few days. So the point is don't be stupid. It's just money. It's only money. It's only money. It's all fake. Easy come, easy go. It went. All right, sucks.

Would have been smarter to sell out, learn the lessons. But you can get it all back and times a bazillion times because it's only money. It's the most unlimited resource in the history of the world. Get out of your head, however you do it. Again, I'm not a psychiatrist.

I don't know what I'm supposed to say to people who are suicidal. So go talk to someone who knows. But that's what I tell you is it's only money. We can fix it. And this trial, this catastrophe that you're facing, if you will allow it, can be the seed of a transformed life and everything can be better.

Guarantee you it'll be hard to work your way out. But you know what? Hard is actually rewarding. Some of the most rewarding work that we do is the hard work. Think of how you feel after a long, hard day of physical labor. Come in at the end of the day, been out mowing the grass, trimming your trees, digging a ditch, working.

Your body aches. You sit down in a chair and you feel satisfied with hard work. My favorite quote on success is, or happiness, I think it was W. Clement Stone who said, "Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." "Happiness is the successive or progressive realization of a worthy ideal." The journey is the point, not the destination.

Anybody who's achieved any goal in life knows that the destination is never the point. You've graduated high school. You thought, "Oh, I graduated high school. It's going to be great. It was great for two days." And then you felt lost. The journey is the point. It's not the destination.

It's not the goal. It's the struggle. That's the entire goal. That's the point. And so if you struggle to dig your way out of this hole that you're in, embrace it. You're going to rebuild it. Just remember that no matter how rich or how poor you are, at the end of your life, it's all gone anyway.

You don't take it with you. If I could snap my fingers, right, poor Sam, what's his name? Poor Sam. I mean, obviously, he deserves a huge amount of criticism, but even he. Here's a guy who overnight becomes a multibillionaire, and then overnight he's not a multibillionaire anymore. But guess what?

Even if he remained a multibillionaire, the end of his life, it's all gone. 30 years later, who knows, right? It's money. It's not that big a deal. What matters is what you learn in the process and how that affects other people. The money is not the point. It's the path.

It's the journey. It's the work. It's the labor. It's the toil. That's the point. This is why some of the best, happiest people, those are getting out of debt, even if they haven't faced catastrophe. They're just focused on getting out of debt. The journey is its own reward. I don't have anything more useful to say.

I just want to say that my heart's with you. If I were with you, I'd cry with you. It sucks. Have a good cry. Get it out of your system. Build a plan. Look at the numbers. I promise you it's not the end, and you will look back on this.

Three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, you will look back on this as an exceedingly valuable part of your life. I promise you. I love you. If I can help you at all, like I said, I'm not planning to open up consultations, but if you need a free consultation, I'm here to serve.

Just tell me. Email me, Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. If you're destroyed, I'll help you. Have a good weekend. 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. Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction. Check our app for details. Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. (upbeat music)