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So see your Toyota dealer today. We make it easy. Toyota. Let's Go Places. 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. Today is Friday, April 14, 2023. Today, on this Friday, as on every other Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate recording technology, we record a live Q&A show. Works just like Call & Talk Radio. You call in, ask about anything that you want, make any comments on the show, make any agreements, disagreements, examples, ask any questions, etc.

If you would like to gain access to this show, you can do so by becoming a patron of the show at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Reminder that up through the end of April, I am running personal consultations. You can book a consult with me at a discounted price through here in April of 2023 at radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.

If you can't afford an individual private consultation, then the best way to talk to me personally is to join one of these Q&A shows. You do that again by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. We begin with Kyle in Washington. Kyle, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

Joshua, thank you. I purchased J.J. Luna's book, How to Be Invisible. I haven't cracked it, nor have I cracked the rest of it myself. However, something I've been thinking a lot about is DNA privacy. I've done a little bit of looking around about what to do with these private companies that my family, extended family and the like, enjoy sending their DNA samples to for genealogy reports and things of that nature.

I'm just curious if you've thought at all about that sort of thing and what we can do about it, if anything. Absolutely. I'm going to mute you for a moment. I think you're on a hands-free handset, so if you can go off of that, it would be great. It should be usable, but let's see if we can get off of the hands-free to help me get better audio.

In terms of have I thought about it, absolutely. I've thought a lot about it. There's probably nothing more private than our own individual DNA. Obviously, this is one of those technologies that can be a tremendous blessing and simultaneously has tremendous potential for harm. Let's focus first on the positive side of it.

The tremendous blessing side of it is simply that this is technology that can help to find people who are guilty of crimes. This is technology that can help to free people who are not guilty of crimes. I'm a big fan of the Innocence Project, and I am so grateful to see many people being set free from who have been wrongly imprisoned being set free due to DNA testing, etc.

On the other hand, this can be certainly abused. I read a novel recently. I can't remember the author or the name of it, but I read a novel recently. I'll look it up in my Audible here in a moment. The entire basic point of the novel was based upon the use of DNA testing technology as a foundation for somebody going out and finding people who had a genetic predisposition.

It wound up being a serial killer who was tracking people down through a data leak from an online DNA service. He was going out and tracking people down who had a predisposition to sexual addiction, something like that. Basically, people who would be easy for him to connect with. He would track them down.

It's a very interesting novel, but it's just an example of the potential for harm of this particular technology. Then you think about what could happen if this technology goes farther. I think a lot of people are worried about being falsely imprisoned. You go out and some of your DNA gets left somewhere, and all of a sudden you get falsely imprisoned.

It's potentially quite scary. It's quite scary if this stuff is in the hands of government agents and you get a rogue government. Just imagine what an evil dictator could do with access to this information. I think that I try to keep myself mostly on the plus side. In the past couple of years, there was a murderer who was discovered through the fact that one of his family members had submitted his DNA to a DNA service.

They tracked him down because there was DNA left at the crime scene. I can't cite the name and all the data right now extemporaneously. But that, on the one hand, shows the tremendous danger because you can be tracked down by your family members. As you stated, usually it's your family members who will expose you.

You can do all you want not to have TikTok because you're worried about the Chinese Communist Party harvesting your data. But guess what? They don't come after your TikTok. They come after your teenage daughter's TikTok, and that's where they get the data from. When people are looking for people, it's usually your family members that will wind up betraying you and your location.

My point is I try to console myself by focusing on the positive side and say, "This is a technology that can be used for good. I'm glad that killers are behind bars. I'm glad that innocent people can be set free. I'm glad that there's increasing evidence that can be brought to bear on criminal cases.

I'm optimistic that we can use some of the DNA evidence to provide individualized personal health advice for people based upon their genetic code. This is certainly a new frontier in medicine, and I'm hoping that it will help us to extend people's lives, etc." So I try to console myself by looking at the positive side of all of this because, quite frankly, I have no solution to eliminate it.

The analogy I would draw would be between the use of fingerprint testing or fingerprint dusting and identification at crime scenes. This is a technique that before the technique was invented, there were many people who were not caught for their crimes, or at least it wasn't proven. But then once this technique was invented, then we've been able to identify with greater certainty that such and such a suspect was at a crime scene.

And again, I stand on the side of the rule of law. I want criminals to be in prison. That is the job of the government. The government's job is to stop wrongdoers in society, stop evildoers. That's their job. And so I'm grateful for that. Fast forward, though, you can't do anything about the fact that technology exists except not leave fingerprints.

Now, DNA would give a similar example, but not quite as good. A similar example is at the very least what you can do is not participate, not give your own DNA. So I'm not sending off my DNA to any kind of testing service. I'm interested in my genetic history, but I'm not going to do it.

Maybe in theory, if there were some way I could be certain about the DNA results, then OK, fine. Maybe I would like to have some of that individualized insight, but I can't imagine how I would be satisfied about the safety of the data. It drove me crazy to do COVID tests.

I don't think that I never came across any solid evidence that – or any evidence at all, let me be clear. I never came across any evidence that anybody was using COVID tests to collect DNA evidence from everybody and doing any kind of testing on that. But on the other hand, although I never came across any evidence, I can't imagine why some countries and governments weren't doing that.

When you can collect large DNA samples from a people, from a population, there's all kinds of interesting tests you can do, again, most of which is positive. And so I never liked doing COVID tests because I was conscious about the fact that I'm giving away a sample of bodily fluids that could be used for DNA testing if someone were so motivated.

The biggest – I try to encourage my family members not to do it, but I have no control over what other people do, and I've just come to terms with the fact that privacy is not something that's particularly important to most people. So what I try to – what I really want to make very sure that I do is I want to make sure that I'm squeaky clean in everything I do.

I don't want to be ever on the scene of a crime. I don't want to be – I just want to be really smart and really careful and never be involved with anything. I want to keep my actions above board, and I think if you do that, it's not worth worrying about because you can't change it.

I think there are some things that are smart. So, for example, one of my pieces of advice I give to parents is one of the things I think parents should do, go to the store, get a high-quality – get a brand-new toothbrush, take it home, and make sure you use that brand-new toothbrush and swab your child's mouth and make sure that you do it really thoroughly.

And then take that toothbrush, put it in a plastic bag, put it in the freezer, and store it somewhere safe, in a relative's house, something like that. Because I think that parents should have a DNA sample of their children in case you ever have to do – investigate a – you know, there's a body or some other kind of thing where you need to engage in some kind of DNA evidence.

It's important to have a DNA sample available to you in those circumstances. So that's the best I got. I don't see any way around it other than just to hope that it turns out to be a positive technology and that we have longer lifespan and criminals are behind bars.

But I'm acutely aware of the dangers. Fair enough. Excuse me, a frog in my throat. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. As far as I can tell, yeah, the only thing you can do is don't get in trouble and have a good lawyer. But aside from that, I don't know what a guy – yeah, you can't claw back that stuff from when you start reading the terms of service from Ancestry or 23andMe or whatever.

They own you once you give yourself to them. Absolutely. And at the end of the day, I mean, there are so many risks that we all face in our lives of things that could be problems. We are dependent on our fellow citizens. The example I like to use is – well, I mean, just a simple example, right?

You think about – you watch violence, right? Somebody gets killed. There's a shooting in your town or something like that. And it fills your heart with chills and fear. But at the end of the day, the scariest thing is just driving down the road. When you look around, I think the place where we're most vulnerable is just recognize that you drive down any undivided highway.

You're driving 45 miles an hour, 55 miles an hour, and you're passing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people driving 45, 50, or more miles an hour towards you. Any one of those people could take you out. And we're depending on the thinnest of controls, the thinnest of anything to protect you in that situation.

Those kinds of dangers are far more acute than the dangers we face from the loss of privacy of our DNA. That's a kind of a very distant thing. And yet, at its core, we're dependent upon our fellow citizens to drive carefully and do their best. And we know that people are hurt every single day from car accidents.

So similarly, I think we have no choice except to trust our fellow citizens and to hope that in the fullness of time, good will prevail, honesty prevails. People want to live in an honest and just society. I trust juries. Obviously, if I were a lawyer, I probably wouldn't trust juries as much as I do.

But I don't see that I have a choice. What other choice do I have except to trust juries? Again, I just talked about the Innocence Project. We know that juries get it wrong, but we don't have a better system. And so I just hope that in the same way that if a government gets out of hand and they start doing crazy stuff with DNA, I hope that my fellow human beings will step in and stop that.

And so with a combination of the ballot box and the soap box and the jury box and the cartridge box, in some way or another, I hope that our fellow citizens will step up and do what needs to be done in order to restrain anyone who would commit evil with that kind of evidence.

Trey in Texas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. I think it would be probably a pretty quick question. I just want to ask, so we're thinking about moving maybe in about a year or so. And I've got this really great long-term interest rate locked in on the house that I live in right now.

And the house I live in right now is pretty desirable. I think it'll probably sell pretty well in any market. And my market tends to be pretty stable even during downturns. So what I was thinking is I'd hate to give up that fixed long-term debt that you couldn't get now, but also I really want to rent from a distance.

So I was thinking about maybe doing a seller finance that hopefully if rates are still high at the time, maybe get like 8% or 10%. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think it might be a good strategy? Obviously, I would have to pay the mortgage off right now.

But I've got the cash to do that. So it's kind of like a compromise between paying it off and letting it go forever and renting, I guess. I don't see why you would do the two of them together. So let's separate them because I think you're conflating them unnecessarily.

Number one, if the value that you perceive of the mortgage rate is I've got this incredibly low mortgage interest rate, you're right. I don't expect – I mean, who knows? How do any of us know? But from a macroeconomic perspective, I don't expect in my lifetime or at least not for the next few decades for us to get anywhere near the mortgage rates that we've enjoyed for the last few years.

And so if you've got a mortgage rate that's down in the twos, threes, fours, some people, depending on the 30-year, 15-year, et cetera, then I mean that thing is golden. And as far as I can tell, it's probably going to be golden for a long time. Some of the cheapest debt you'll ever have and holding on to that kind of debt – or sorry, debt at that interest rate is probably going to be one of the best financial moves that you're going to have.

So if you want to keep the house and rent it out and get rental income, your monthly payment, the spread is – if you could cash flow that house, it only gets better from here because all of your other competitive real estate investors who are wanting to rent out a house, they're going to have a much higher monthly payment than what you have.

And so over time, I think it's a better bet that rents will increase and your costs as a percentage of your rental income will decline significantly. So if you're asking me, the first part of the question is should I keep the mortgage, if you want to be a landlord and you think this is a decent house for you to keep, I would keep the mortgage.

Now flip that on its head, for you to sell the house, you're not going to be able to sell the house unless you pay off the mortgage. So if you decide you're going to do seller financing and sell the house with seller financing, then what's the point of the first part of the question?

You're going to wind up paying the mortgage off anyway. So I don't think that you should consider doing seller financing because of the low interest rate that you have on a mortgage that you're paying off, unless I'm missing something. Those seem to be at odds. So you'd keep the house.

No, no, you – Yeah, you're right. Exactly. What I was saying, I think it's kind of like the inverse, right? So I've got a low interest rate, which is great to be a borrower, but also on the flip side, because interest rates are up and it's what's driving me not to want to pay off the low interest rate, it opens up an opportunity to potentially make money on the higher interest rates.

But yes, I do agree. Yeah, so if you could do both, I mean if you can keep this house and then somehow figure out the payments so that you could safely swing just buying another house, I think that's a great move. You've got one house to rent, one house to live in.

You've got one nice cheap mortgage that you never pay off early, and you've got one more expensive mortgage that you may choose to chunk money towards. So if it works out that you feel like owning this rental house is a good deal, then great. Just remember, and I'm sorry to introduce confusion, but just remember there's no guarantee that the value of the current house doesn't go down.

And so we don't know what's going to happen, and of course in the next couple of years with real estate prices, there's good reason to think they're going down. I think your phone number's from Texas. There's good reason to think Texas economy's going to be strong. So I guess my guess would be if the numbers could work that you can keep that house and buy another house eventually, even if you rent for a year or something, then do that.

If the numbers don't work, then just recognize lots of times in personal finance we make a decision and we don't do the "optimal" thing with our money because this is personal finance. You're not a bank. You're a man. You need a house to live in. And if you can't afford two mortgage payments, well then you can get rid of the old mortgage payment and you get another one.

But we do that acknowledging the fact that, "Hey, this might be a suboptimal move, but I don't have the money to buy two houses right now." So this is personal finance. The goal of my money is to fund my life. I don't serve money. Money serves my life. I've decided it's best for my family to move.

And so for that reason, we're going to go and sell the house, pay off the mortgage, buy another house, even though we have a higher interest rate. I think that's perfectly fine. Great. Yeah, that makes sense. And it gets even better than that actually because we're probably going to go live in our vacation house, which is closer to our family, which is where we're trying to get to anyway.

So we wouldn't even hope it. Maybe the market does go down a little bit in that meantime and we get a better deal when we decide to buy or build. Love it. Just always remember that. I mean, at the end of the day, we do suboptimal things with money because it's personal finance.

If our goal was to be the world's greatest misers and accumulate as much money as possible, we'd never do anything that costs us money. We gruel every day to keep calories coming in. We'd never leave our house. We live in the smallest house, etc. So everything is a tradeoff.

Personal finance is not about getting as rich as possible. It's about deciding what we want and the lifestyle that we want to live and then doing our best to make intelligent decisions given the constraints of our lifestyle. We go to Justin in Orlando. Justin, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

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I know you've been extensive travel as a family. You were in the RV in the US or maybe internationally too. And then I know during 2020 and 2021 you were traveling abroad for a long time. And I was just wondering, as a family, what are some of your favorite places you've traveled to?

And maybe if you also want to have any places that you intend to travel to or goals, a place that you want to go with. Places I intend to travel to is everywhere. I intend to. Agreed. I have a chart on my wall that has the great website called travelbible.co, I think it is.

Anyway, they got me with a social media ad and they have this great suite of products for travelers. So I bought their passport stamps of the world chart. And so I have on my wall a chart of every country's passport stamp. And it's a peel off, a scratch off chart.

So I've scratched off of course the countries that I've taken my children to. And eventually in the fullness of time I'd love to take them everywhere. Now obviously I may or may not get to that because traveling like that is a big commitment. But as far as where I'd like to go, I'd love to go anywhere.

Now that leads me conveniently into your second question which is where do you want to go. I personally don't discriminate based upon the kind of travel. I genuinely think that any, what travel does is it exposes you to different and unique sets of adventures. And so there are some that I'm more drawn to.

But for example I like to be where it's beautiful, there's space. I like to be out in nature. I enjoy national parks. And I think with children that works really well. It's very relaxing to be in big parks, national parks, etc. with children and to see beautiful natural scenery.

But if you ask me if I want to take my children to New York City, absolutely. I want to take my children to New York City. Absolutely I want to take my children to Hong Kong or to Tokyo. It's not that I don't want to go to the city.

It's just that, and so if I have the opportunity to go to the city, I'm going to take advantage of it whenever I can. Because my philosophy with children is that by exposing them to a diverse set of experiences, they learn a lot. In terms of travel styles for example, sometimes we stay at five star resorts.

Those are nice. I really enjoy that. Sometimes we stay in really uncomfortable accommodations. I don't enjoy that very much but I'm really glad to give that experience to my children because I want them to be flexible. I don't want them to be highfalutin and think that they have to stay at a five star resort to have a nice time.

I want them to be uncomfortable and to learn what it's like to be uncomfortable. And so I approach that with my own thinking that even when you have really uncomfortable experiences, you're on some third class train overnight, you can't sleep, you're boiling with sweat, etc. That's miserable. It's absolutely miserable.

But guess what? You get a great story to tell and that's probably the thing that's going to stand out to your children. If you go on a camping trip and it rains constantly and everybody is miserable and hot and sweaty and your tent is full of water, etc. and you pack up early and go home, well, guess what?

That's the story that you're going to repeat every single family holiday for the coming years and it just becomes part of your family lore. So I welcome diverse experiences regardless of whether they're my preferred experiences or not. Now let's come back to the first part. Here's what I have learned traveling with children.

With young children, they're not going to remember the destinations. And that can be a little bit annoying because if you're going to go out and spend thousands of dollars taking your children to some spectacular destination or do something that is just an amazing bucket list item, they're not going to remember it.

You take pictures of it and they remind themselves when they look at the pictures. My wife does yearbooks for each of the children so they love to look at their yearbooks. I just mean you should put all the photos together, print it out, put text in there. And so the children love to go through their yearbooks and look at where they've been, but they don't remember it.

It's just they're reminded by the pictures and that's one of the reasons we do it, but they don't remember the place because they were very young. And so don't put a lot of stock. If there's something that's really important to you that they remember and they're young, and by young I would say under six, I'm making that up, somewhere five, six, seven, I've noticed that there's just that big change.

Very few of us remember much that happened before that age. And so they're not going to remember much. Then you get to what can mom and dad handle and what do mom and dad enjoy. There is a major difference in stress of traveling with children depending on the mode of transit, depending on the age of your children.

So I've taken five-year-olds and three-year-olds across the ocean. It's not super fun, especially when they're at an age before they can read, before they can be entertained. Airplanes are not super fun, just not enjoyable. Now you deal with it if that's what you got to do, but it's not fun.

Long, long days in the car are not super fun for parents. And so it's nicer when you have younger children to stay closer to home or to arrange short hops, short airplane hops, etc. I don't particularly enjoy staying in hotels with children. It's necessary and I've done lots of it, but it's not super fun because what are they going to do?

There's not a lot to do and you wind up watching TV or doing -- that's about it. And so you can stay in hotels, but I myself prefer to be in a campground. My favorite mode of transport or of travel with children, the thing that I think is the best for parents, is some form of RV.

And my reason is simply this. When you are traveling, you have a constant string of expenses and decisions. And all your decisions are expenses. And making those decisions and outlaying that money on a daily basis can be very stressful to figure out what to do, especially when you have children.

When you're traveling as an adult or even a couple and you're hungry but there's no reasonably priced food around, you just suck it up. You just deal with the fact that I'm hungry because you're an adult and you can control your emotions. But when you've got three children, or in my case five children, that are little and they're whining because their tummies are full, I tell them, "Suck it up.

Be tough." And then five minutes later, they're telling me that they're hungry again. And I say, "Be tough." And what we're still working on, "Be tough." And so you're constantly thinking, "Where's the food going to come from? Where am I going to get food?" And you're constantly anticipating as a parent, "All right.

I need to eat. I need to eat. Where are they going to eat? We're going to have food, etc." So the logistics are annoying. When you have an RV, you always know where you're going to sleep and you always know where you're going to eat. Because you have food in the refrigerator, you can stop at the grocery store, everyone's hungry, you pull over on the side of the road, you eat, and you continue on.

And so knowing where you're going to sleep and knowing where you're going to eat takes a huge amount of stress off. So then you're free to focus on what you're going to do today. Where are we going to go? What are we going to see? What are we going to do today?

And it's a much more relaxing way of traveling than any other mode of travel. Now, RVing works really great in the United States and in North America. And so it also works well in Europe. It doesn't work so well in Africa. It doesn't work very well in Asia because you don't have as strong of an infrastructure.

Yeah, you can do it in Latin America. It's possible, but you have a different style of RV. And so choosing where you're going to go for that reason is important. So my recommendation is do some form of RV travel if you have the money to buy a rig or if that fits your vision in some way.

Because you'll enjoy it as a parent more than anything else. You also get good economies of scale. So with children, there are some expenses that scale and some that don't. Airplane tickets, you pay for a ticket for every single one. Restaurant food, you pay for basically food for every single one.

And so you don't get a lot of economies of scale. Hotels, you can fit into hotels. If you can fit into one hotel room with basically up to three children, sometimes four. What I did when we had four would be to stay at the suites hotels. And those worked really well because there are a lot of brands that offer suites.

And they'll usually come with two queen beds and a fold-out sofa. And so I've been able to get great deals on those and that has worked really well. We've outgrown those now. And so now we're in the world of two hotel rooms. And so hotel rooms, they add quite a lot.

And you wind up spending quite a lot of money on that stuff. And when you're traveling and you think about the money, that's really significant. Because a lot of times, things like transportation and accommodation are actually your biggest expenses. So let's say you're going to take a trip to Europe.

And you're going to go for two weeks. And you're flying from, say, the East Coast of the United States. So pretty easy to find round-trip tickets for, let's call it $600. More or less, depending on where you're going, but $600 round-trip. If you're a single person and you're going to Europe for 14 days, and you divide the cost of your $600 ticket over the course of 14 days, that's an average daily cost of $42 a day.

So you add on to that, let's call it $100 to $150 a day for a hotel if you're staying in normal hotels. Add on to that your food, $50 to $100 a day. So you're at a budget of about $200 to $250 a day if you're not trying to just save as much money as possible.

Now do that same exact trip with children. And now, there's five of you, well now you're at $3,000 for plane tickets. And you divide that $3,000 into 14 days, and you're at $214 a day of amortized plane tickets. And then your hotel expenses would be similar, $100 to $150 a day.

And your food expenses would be $100 to $200 a day with the added costs of children's food. So the point is that your transportation tickets wind up being your biggest category. And so the way that you cut that down is by extending your time. So any kind of travel that you can do to extend your time, if you took a 60-day trip to Europe instead of a 14-day trip, then your daily cost of tickets would be $100 a day instead of $214 a day.

So you get a lot more bang for your buck when you can travel slower or travel on itineraries that are lower. And then bring that together with the fact that the best way to travel a lot and then save money is to do it affordably. It's not to choose where you want to go and then go there, but rather choose where it's cheap to go and then figure out what there is to do there.

So this mindset shift, and I'm still answering your question, like what do you want to do? Or what do you like to do with children? Where do you think you should go? This is the mindset shift that allows some people to travel a lot. You get used to, you figure out where it's inexpensive for you to go and you book your tickets because accommodation is pretty much the same everywhere.

Now there's a clear difference between the cost of staying in downtown New York City versus the cost of staying on the outskirts of Kansas City. There's a big difference in terms of accommodations. But big cities are big cities. You know who's going to pay more for hotel expenses. Out of the side of the city is smaller.

So you're aware of that. But other than that, your biggest daily cost, especially with children, is going to be ticket cost. So you figure out where it's inexpensive for you to travel to and then you figure out what's interesting to do in that location. And if you do that, you wind up being able to travel a lot.

And that's where I think the attitude of just simply enjoying whatever adventure emerges along the way and treating them all as pleasant. If you are in a big city, sometimes there's a wonderful zoo and that is a great experience. Or sometimes walking the streets and seeing some spectacular memorial or going into a history museum or an art museum or something like that.

These are really important activities, just like it's important to stay in a national park and have lots of time there to visit and enjoy just hanging out in the woods. So those would be my general approaches is I want to go everywhere. I value all the circumstances. I set aside money and this is how I use this philosophy to try to figure out what's best to do at any one particular time.

So where can I go that's inexpensive or affordable? What style of travel can I handle? North America, RV. Europe, RV or trains. Trains can work, but it's not as good. RV is great. But Asia, OK, I'm not going to be RVing around Asia, at least not me. It's not going to work.

All right. He dropped off. So we'll go to Dave in Texas. Dave, you're up. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, how's it going, Josh? Very well. Awesome. Yes, I'm a financial advisor. Actually, we've had a couple of chats in the past before, but I listened to your deep work pod, just the one you just did and thought it was really good.

And I'm trying to figure out how do I incorporate that as a financial advisor? Right. Because I think about like prospecting and marketing, meeting with clients, just kind of basics. Like, how do I how do I incorporate that in my practice? Yeah. So as a financial advisor, you first begin with what actually drives my revenue.

And there are there are three things. Let's go with two or three things that are going to drive your revenue. So do you do fee only or do you do insurance as well? I'm going to unmute you. Do you do fee only or do you do insurance as well?

Oh, sorry. Yes, I was muted. Yeah, both. So do AUM and insurance. Great. So if you look at if you look at your lines of revenue, then you have two basic lines of revenue. You have insurance commissions and you have fees that come from accounts. So insurance commissions are paid out as a percentage of premium.

So you want in order to maximize your revenue for every hour worked, you want to have the highest possible insurance premiums. Insurance premiums come from serving wealthy people who have big problems. So if you go and sell a fifty thousand dollar burial policy to some not wealthy person, you make a little bit of money.

If you sell a twenty million dollar whole life policy to a wealthy person, then you have the chance to make a lot of money. And so the driver, as you well know, is I want to serve the wealthiest people possible and then as many of them as possible. Then you flip it to money under management.

We have the same exact thing. So your fees that you charge on AUM are based upon account size. And so every customer that you have, every client that you have is going to require a certain amount of your time and attention. Generally speaking, your least wealthy clients require the most time and attention.

Your wealthiest clients require less time and attention and you earn a lot more money. And so this is the classic move in financial planning as to why do we want to work with wealthy people. Wealthy people have big financial problems for us to solve and because they have big financial problems, they value our input.

Poor people, they don't value the insight of a financial advisor. They don't value the work, etc. Wealthy people do because they have big problems to solve. So the first thing of my answer is you need to get very good at solving big problems. And so that's where self-education comes in.

So when a wealthy person is looking to hire you, you are leading with your knowledge. So the way that you implement deep work is you become extraordinarily competent and knowledgeable at everything that your clients can do to solve their problems. And there's a lot that comes under that rubric.

So that's everything from understanding the ins and outs of every insurance policy that you deal with, every company that you deal with, and every competitive company that you deal with. Knowing where you can save fees, knowing where you can help someone get a better deal, knowing where you can get a product design that's better, etc.

When you look at it on the side of your investments, that becomes very skilled at knowing how to cut investment costs as much as possible. Knowing how to deal with the very best investment options that your firm gives you access to, etc. And then you start adding on and layering on all those other skills that cause a client to really value you.

Tax planning, estate planning, budget planning, advice on inheritance issues, family office type issues, family planning. All of that stuff comes in. Internationalization, etc. Everything that you can do to bring more and more value to a client enhances the client relationship. It increases your referability, your marketability, etc. So the first big answer is in education.

Education makes a big difference. Now, assuming that you're strong on education, that you can give really good high quality advice, you've studied everything related to money that you can possibly focus on. Now let's go and look at your day. So the only productive thing that you do on a day that actually makes you money is you either meet with or service existing clients or you prospect for and meet with prospective clients.

That's it. And so in the life of a financial advisor, everything else is a waste of time. The only time that you're actually working, other than education, which we talked about, which you do not during work hours, the only time that you're actually working is when you're meeting with prospects and clients or working on their situation specifically, fulfilling the promises that you've made, or you're prospecting to meet with, you're working to meet with prospects and clients.

And so then you say how efficiently, how many prospects and clients can I meet with on a daily basis? So the guy who can sit in his office and has the knowledge base, the product set, and the attractive power to bring in a long string of customers, and the guy who can get seven meetings done four days a week is going to make infinitely more money than the guy who gets three meetings a day, four days a week, just because of the amount of time spent together.

And then when we look at prospecting, you figure out how can I bring in the highest quality clients or prospective clients, how can I bring them in in the most efficient way possible? So this is why people do media. This is why people do seminars. I don't think seminars, I haven't heard big success stories these days from seminars, but that was a classic thing.

If I can get 400 people in a room or 40 people in a room, then that's more efficient than one-on-one. And so I can't tell you exactly with your market, your skills, qualifications, et cetera, how it works. But what I would focus most of my time on is to say what is the most efficient way that I can be in front of the highest quality prospects and clients on a daily basis.

If you have qualified yourself with knowledge, expertise, and experience to serve very high-level clients, then I think the most important thing, the most important way for you to meet other prospects and clients comes from your current prospects and clients. So if your current prospects and clients are of the caliber that you're capable of serving, where they buy big insurance policies and they have big investment accounts, then you should spend most of your time trying to network from them to other people.

Because when you come in as a referred lead and you are genuinely knowledgeable and your clients are happy, et cetera, then you can have a much easier time bringing in new prospects and filling your calendar with those new prospects. If not, you have to go, if you're not working in that marketplace, then you have to qualify yourself for education and then figure out how to break into it.

So then we come back to your calendar. If your calendar is full and you have all of your meetings full, deep work in the financial advice space is education and it's having back-to-back meetings and so that you have a very full calendar. If your calendar is full, then that means that you have solved your pipeline problem and et cetera.

Assuming that your close rates are normal for the industry at least, if not good, then you've solved the most important thing. So then from then on, the only upgrade you can make because you're limited by time, the upgrade that you make is by upgrading the market that you work in.

And so you take a look at where you're succeeding and where you're not and you look to say, is there a specialty market? A guy might have his calendar mostly full of "normal work" and then he might build a Coley business on the side. He spends a lot of time really getting involved and goes out and starts selling corporate-owned life insurance and very big policies that take very long to close.

And there's a three-year sales cycle, but at the end of it, there's a nice payday. And so because you're limited by time, once you've maximized the amount of time per week that you're in front of prospects and clients, then you use education and prospecting to upgrade the level of the person that you are talking to.

And that's the formula. It's not easy, but that's the formula. All right, thanks. Appreciate that. My pleasure. All right, we go now to Andrew in Maryland. Andrew, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Andrew, you're up. We'll come back to you in a moment. We go to Houston, Texas.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? All right, Andrew jumped on with a different number. Andrew, can you hear me? Go ahead. Hey, Josh. Can you hear me? Yep. Sounds good now. Yeah, it's a pleasure to finally connect with you. I just had two questions. One on just general career advice and the second on just understanding insurance policies a bit.

All right, so I guess I can start with the insurance policy. So I have a current policy currently and I ended up picking up a IUL policy. And when I picked up the IUL policy, I was trying to get an idea of the benefits of it. And I had a good walkthrough with the insurance specialist that I work with.

But one of the things I was trying to just figure out when it comes to payouts and a lot of that information of, God forbid, something happened or if I need to actually use and tap into the insurance policy. Is there any statistics or anything I will look for to understand what's the likelihood of a payout, the percentages, what are some things that do or don't result in payouts?

So to clarify, you have a term life insurance policy and you also recently bought an indexed universal life policy. That's what IUL stands for. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay. And why did you buy the indexed universal life policy? Yes. So I bought the indexed universal life policy because as the specialist walked through with me, so it has two components.

It has a component that if I were to be disabled and I had any health issues, I'd be able to tap into that. So it's like a combination of a term and a component of IUL. So that was the main reason just to kind of, if I had any issues before, God forbid, death, like terminal illness, I can use the funds for that.

So that was the main thing that attracted me to the policy. Okay. So first, let's just back up a little bit and explain kind of what is this idea. So the term life insurance is simple and simple to understand. You pay a premium every month or every year. And for as long as the company said they'd give you insurance, if you die during that period and you've continued to pay premiums, your family will get the death benefit from the policy.

And if you don't die during that period of time, the insurance company will keep your premiums. When you purchase an indexed universal life insurance policy, we need to pull apart those words to understand what they are. So let's start with universal life. Universal life is a funny, extremely complex, very flexible insurance product that brings together some of the components of term life insurance mixed with some of the components of what is traditionally called whole life insurance.

And the way it works is you have a life insurance policy. And that life insurance policy, every single year, can be renewed for another year up through the date of death. Inside the policy, there is an annual premium that is assessed to the policy. And each year, because you're getting older, the cost of that premium goes up.

Now, you put premiums into the policy. You make payments to the policy. And those payments that you put into the contract start to accumulate in what are called cash values. And those cash values are invested. We'll talk in a moment about how. But those cash values are invested into the contract.

And every single year, the internal premium that the life insurance policy requires for another year of existence needs to be paid from those cash values. If there is enough money in the cash value to pay for the next one year policy internal to the contract, then you'll have insurance for another year.

If there's not enough money in the cash value, then you'll get a big bill that you'll have to put more money in. And so if there's not enough money, then the policy will lapse. So universal life insurance can be kept for your entire lifetime. But you have to keep a very close eye on the numbers to make sure that there's always enough money in the cash value in order for that premium payment to be made each year to keep the insurance in force.

I don't have a statistic on this. I'm making an opinion statement here. Most universal life policies do not last for life because people don't put enough money into them. Now, again, I don't have an industry statistic, so I could be mistaken on that. That's just been my professional experience and my observation.

So most universal life insurance policies, people don't keep them forever, often because they don't put enough money into them in the beginning. So let's talk about putting money into them. Yours is an indexed policy. What does indexed mean? Well, it means that each year inside the contract, the contract is going to refer to an index, usually a stock market index, to determine how much interest gets paid inside of the contract.

The way that this index is calculated is that there is a floor. Usually that floor is 0%. So if there is a year in which, say for example, the S&P 500 is negative for a year, then your insurance value, your contract value, is not going to go down because the lowest is capped.

Whereas if the stock market performs underneath 0%, then it stops at 0%. If the stock market returns this year 3.2%, then usually your insurance contract will participate in that 3.2%. So your account will be credited by 3.2%. And then usually there's a ceiling, a maximum cap. And so if the stock market goes up by 24% this year, your contract may be capped at, say, 10%.

And so you'll get a 10% interest rate that's credited to your account this year. This is not a direct participation in the market. So this is different than variable universal life, where you do have direct participation. You have an indexed universal life policy, so your account is indexed to the market.

But you don't participate in the high highs and you don't participate in the negative years. So your account value is going to be credited each year by some percentage based upon how that index performs. So if you put a lot of money into the insurance contract and then that money is growing based upon the performance of the index, then you can build a large cash value in the insurance contract.

And that cash value represents money that you could access prior to dying. There are a few ways that you can access it, but that's the money that you could access. So in this policy design, that's how it works. Now there are advantages and disadvantages. I don't want to be the guy to say that anybody shouldn't do something.

Because to be clear, I don't know anything about your situation. I don't know anything about what you did. I'm just trying to speak generally. I don't like indexed universal life insurance contracts. I've never sold one. I've never bought one. And I'll explain to you why. In my opinion, when you buy an indexed contract, the reason people buy indexed annuities or indexed insurance contracts is because they're trying to participate and they're trying to exercise their greed in order to participate in the upside of the stock market, but they don't want to have any downside risk.

That's why people buy them. I want the upside of the stock market, but I don't want any downside risk. And so they feel really good by saying, "Hey, I'm getting a high performance, but I'm not getting any downside risk." The problem is this. The stock market, the way it works, generally speaking, equities, they function by extremes because there are large swings of panic and euphoria and they function by extremes.

And so if you slice off all of the negative years, but you also slice off all of the positive years above 10%, frequently, whenever I've done the analysis in the past, you wind up with a pretty mediocre investment product. It's just pretty mediocre. The value from the stock market comes from the volatility.

The reason that stocks pay more than bonds is because they have to, to compensate people for the risk, the volatility. And so when you invest into stocks, you do that knowing I'm going to stomach the volatility because I'm hoping to get paid for that volatility with higher performance returns.

But if you slice off the top range of performance returns, because your index is limited to say 10% or 7% or whatever your contract says, your actual returns are pretty anemic. They're pretty low because you have a lot of years of 0% and you've got some years of 3%, 4%, but without those big 25% years, then the actual performance is pretty mediocre and pretty anemic.

So that's the reason I don't like indexed policies. I think, and so then we pair that. I don't like indexed universal life insurance policies because they don't have any of the securities of whole life. Whole life insurance of the traditional whole life contract gives you a guaranteed or gives you a premium.

Let me be careful. That is generally guaranteed. There is a guaranteed premium depending on how you design it. And the policies are built on very conservative assumptions. They are generally not going to perform as high as an equity based market based insurance contract because generally stocks should outperform life insurance because life insurance is invested in fixed income.

But what they do is they give you certainty and predictability. So if you want a life insurance policy that's going to last forever, then that's why you buy whole life insurance. And if you want predictable cash value growth, you buy whole life insurance because as long as you pay the premiums, then the policy values don't go down.

They continue to go up and over time they work pretty well. And so I think that most ordinary people should do stock market investing in their IRAs and in their 401ks. And then if you want whole life insurance, buy whole life insurance rather than an indexed universal life insurance contract.

So I've never sold a policy like that. I've never recommended one. I'm open to them being in some cases, but there are, there's recommendations. Now the next, that's just my general perspective and that's why. The next thing you need to be careful of with any kind of universal life insurance contract or frankly any insurance contract is that there is an expense ratio that is then charged on the money.

And so each year in your insurance contract you'll have a mortality and expense charge. And that mortality and expense charge is billed alongside the insurance premium to your contract. And so if that mortality and expense charge is high and you're billing, getting that billed plus the premium for your one year term contract, and then all of that's being taken off of a capped index.

I think that overall the performance of that is pretty anemic. So I would only want you to be participating in this contract after you are fully funding 401ks, 403bs, solo 401ks, SEP IRAs, whatever you have access to, and Roth IRAs for yourself and HSAs. After those accounts are all full, then we come back to some form of cash value life insurance.

The next component of your question is, well, what about getting it in terms of in form of disability, etc. Now I'm not quite clear on exactly what you have, but you're mixing up a number of things that they could be. So let me just generally talk about what your options could be.

First, when you have cash value in a life insurance contract, you have the ability to access that cash value at any time for any reason that you want. There are a few ways that you can access it. The first way you can access it is by simply doing a withdrawal.

So you can call the insurance company and you can say, send me cash value and they'll send you cash value. The first cash value will come in in terms of what's called a return of premium. That return of premium will come to you tax free because it's return of premium.

There's no gain on it. And then if you surrender the policy and you have gain that's coming to you, they'll lower your insurance amount and you'll pay tax on it. You can also do a policy loan. So you can call the insurance company and say, hey, listen, I got 50 grand on this insurance contract.

I need 40 grand to go and close on a house. Send me 40 grand. They'll loan you from the policy $40,000. You go close on the house. You refinance the house later and then you send them a check for $40,000 and you put the money back in. You can do it for any reason that you want.

You don't have to wait for disability or sickness or anything. You can do it any time for any reason. The cash values are yours to do that with based upon the terms that are written in the contract. You may also have some form of waiver of premium rider on the contract.

A waiver of premium rider says that if you become disabled, language varies, but usually it's totally disabled or presumptively totally disabled. So totally disabled means you can't do any work depending on the company. It might be any work for by which you're reasonably suited to training experience, et cetera, or any work at all.

That's where we get into the contractual definitions of disability. The insurance terms for these are any occupation or own occupation, and there are varieties of these. So any occupation means you're disabled if you can't do any occupation at all. That's a hard one to meet because most people can say, "Hi, welcome to Walmart," or "Here, come on through the door," et cetera.

Own occupation means you're disabled if you can't do what you're trained to do, what your job is at the time of disability. If that's the case and you're totally disabled, then they'll pay the insurance contract for you. That's called a waiver of premium rider. You may also have some form of rider on the contract that's something like an accidental death and dismemberment rider.

So there may be an advance. Sometimes there's a rider of some form of terminal illness rider where you can get an advance on a death benefit if you're diagnosed with a terminal disease or some variation of that. So what I'm pointing out is if you're just talking about having access to the cash values, you have no need to wait until you're disabled.

You can just gain access to the cash values at any time. If the insurance agent talked to you about some clause related to actual disability, then it's likely a waiver of premium, which means that they would waive the premiums, meaning you don't have to pay them if you get disabled, or some form of accidental death and dismemberment or other terminal illness rider for an advance death benefit, et cetera, something like that.

Let me pause there. Do any of those terms make sense? Do you want to ask a clarifying question now based upon what I've said in big picture? No, it really helped. I don't have like the policy written for me at the moment, but everything you mentioned, it makes sense.

And for the situation, it's a rider, and I believe it's an accidental death rider. So I think everything you're saying makes sense. Now, with that, with the IOL and having that as a rider, I guess one of the concerns or one of the things I was wrestling with was I have the policy now, and I already had a term policy before I had that one.

But the main thing that drove me to that was that illness and disability, and that kind of sold me. So I still had the term, and the term, I could just name places, the terms was Northwestern Mutual with the other company, and this one was National Life Group. And when I did that, the other insurance provider kind of reached out to me.

They were thinking that I was going to leave the other term with the Northwestern Mutual. So they kind of showed me or mentioned to me how I shouldn't do it, and they kind of presented their own analysis as to what the risk would be to go to that insurance company.

So I guess that's what kind of made me dig deeper to kind of even see that concern about would the insurance provider pay out if, God forbid, something happened to me and I was disabled or alive. Like, is there a likelihood they wouldn't pay that out? And it sounds like there might be some extreme examples where, or good examples where they wouldn't unless it's a particular illness, like a list of them.

But if it's just generally, oh, you know, I can't, you know, my eye hurts or I literally can't see anymore, it may or may not be, right? It just depends on the fine print. So there are a few things. First of all, I would love you to talk to a couple more insurance agents because there are some insurance-based solutions that will solve your problems, and I would probably be more comfortable with a variety of solutions different than what you're describing here.

I'm no longer a licensed insurance agent, so this is just generalized education. When I was an insurance agent, I worked for Northwestern Mutual, so I am biased in favor of the company because at the time I felt like I was working for one of the finest companies that had really good, strong products.

And I really understood their product set and I really understood their value proposition. And I could happily, if I went broke, I could happily go back and work there again. But there are a few things that you need to identify. First, if you're concerned about having money if you became disabled, you should not buy a life insurance policy.

You should buy a disability income insurance policy. That is the most important thing. Because if you are disabled, you need income and you're not going to get that income from a life insurance policy. Even if these riders that you have purchased all function at their highest beautifully, it is not going to provide you with income.

So if you are concerned about what would happen to me if I got sick or hurt and couldn't work, go and talk to an insurance agent and examine, get advice from an insurance agent on disability income insurance. That is what it is for. If I could only own one kind of insurance, I would not buy life insurance, I would not buy health insurance, I would buy disability income insurance.

It is the most important kind of insurance for you to have. Period. That's the first thing. So talk to an insurance agent about disability income insurance and understand the differences and ask the agent about the differences between disability income insurance and your indexed universal life insurance policy with the riders that you have purchased.

Take the contract that you have purchased to a different insurance agent and ask that insurance agent to explain to you the riders that you have and just make sure that you really understand them. Or pull open your contract and read the contract. The contracts are actually pretty clear. I used to, when I sold insurance, I would always just beg my clients, "Listen, read the contract.

They're not that hard, they're not that long, it might put you to sleep a little bit, but just pull it open and read it because it describes in plain language what you have and what you don't have." So if you want income in case of disability, you need disability income insurance.

If you want to invest and you want to invest in the stock market, then your first thing should be to fund your retirement accounts and to buy stocks in your retirement accounts if you can handle the volatility. Because you can get better stocks that have higher possible returns and in a better tax-advantaged way inside of all of the retirement accounts that are available to you.

Now if you have studied the stock market and you have decided that it's not for you and you've decided that, "No, actually what I want is I want upside benefits with no downside risk," or however the marketing stuff says it. Okay, that's fine, it's your money. And if you've decided that's what's best for you, then that's your prerogative.

And that's where you would come back to some form of indexed insurance policy. It could be an indexed universal life insurance policy or an indexed annuity. I'm not a fan, but I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying I think that you should train yourself to handle volatility. And so I have always tried to teach and to show that if you practice good financial planning, having proper amounts of money in savings, having proper insurance coverages, having a diversified perspective, etc., then you can do better with good financial planning and training yourself to be a good investor versus buying insurance products that appeal to fear.

Like the indexed products do. There have been a few occasions where I've reviewed some of these contracts and I said, "That was really good." I remember years ago when I was an insurance agent, I shared the same opinion then as I do now, that indexed products have a very limited usefulness.

Client brought in this indexed annuity that he bought. I went through it with another advisor with fine-tooth comb. The promises that that company had made to him were extraordinary. And I told him, I said, "I've never seen a contract this good." And by the way, it wasn't available anymore.

I said, "Don't ever let anybody replace this, etc. Don't ever let anyone replace this. It's a goldmine. If the company can stay in service, this is the best contract you've ever had." And so I try to be careful making sweeping statements. I'm seeking to share with you very clearly what my opinion is, but not make any statements since I have not reviewed the contract, I have not reviewed the insurance company, I have not done that, and I'm not going to.

But I've shared a little bit of philosophy and trying to tell you how to approach it. Two more comments. Number one, recognize, you sound like a young man, recognize that financial products are not going to build wealth. They're not going to get you wealthy. Financial products protect your income.

That's what disability income insurance does. It protects your income for you if you're disabled. That's what life insurance does. It protects your income for your family if you die. But the most important area for your focus to be on is on increasing your income as high as possible and investing at the highest possible return that you can find for your investment capital.

And usually, if you are indeed a young man based upon the sound of your voice, usually you will have a lot of opportunities that are closer to home for you. Purchasing a home, great move. Purchasing a rental property with leverage, often a great move. Investing in your own business, upgrading your career, upgrading your credentials, and maxing out your retirement accounts.

All of these are really good moves. Where financial products really come in to start to shine is when you get into your 40s and your 50s, you still have good earning years ahead of you. You're at the top of your career and you've pretty well maxed out. You don't see any kind of big options.

There aren't any good places in your career to spend a lot of money. You know, you can't benefit from more credentialization or from joining the elite mastermind group, et cetera. You kind of maxed all that stuff out by then generally. And you have an income that is high enough that it causes all of the tax deferred buckets, retirement accounts, et cetera, to not just be significant for you.

If you're making $100,000 and you can put $50,000 aside into a combination of various retirement accounts, well, you do that. You're making $800,000, all of a sudden you just can't get enough money into retirement accounts to make a difference. And so if your income is high enough that you still want to be investing a lot of money after you've maxed out retirement accounts, that's where I think you start to look at this world of more exotic insurance contracts.

And that's where it can be really interesting. But before that, I don't think it's wise to deal in this world. The second comment I was going to make is this. If you've replaced a contract that you had previously, that's -- first of all, you did replace it. That was why you heard from the rep on your original term insurance contract, because they were replacing a contract.

That means that you bought a contract from the first company and it was fairly recent, and then somebody came along and was replacing that contract with a new contract. So if you've replaced the contract, you do have rights of cancellation in your contract. So if you've just been delivered the contract or if you're still going through underwriting, et cetera, you can cancel the contract if you choose you don't want to have it, and you can get all your money back.

Or you can -- and then if you're out of that two-week free look period or different depending on your state, then you would have other rights. So just take a good look at what you're doing. It doesn't sound to me like something that's a perfect fit for you, but I would refer you back to your insurance agents who have the legal duty to help you with that carefully.

That help? That helps. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. My pleasure. And with that, we come to the end of our Q&A show. I hope the insurance discussion is useful to you. My closing comments on that would simply be this. Always remember, insurance products are a marvel of our modern era.

If we went back a few hundred years and you couldn't buy a life insurance, it's so hard to provide for your family without it. And in today's world, the ability for a man to buy a life insurance policy to protect his wife and children if he dies, what a blessing.

Insurance contracts are a marvel. They're a marvel that is broadly oversold. So you need to think carefully and understand what you're buying. I don't myself make blanket statements like some financial pundits do. Always buy this, don't buy this, et cetera. Because I have enough experience in financial planning that I can design, I can tell you exactly where almost any financial product will fit in the kind of person.

And I believe that financial experts should recognize and esteem, respect the individuality of each person. Just because a product may not be right for me doesn't mean that it's not right for someone else. Just because I might be comfortable with stock market volatility doesn't mean that somebody else is.

And so we need to respect other people and their choices, but we also need to be careful. And so I try in all these questions to describe why I would proceed in the order possible and not, and why I would go in different directions. So I hope that was helpful to the rest of you.

Just don't make broad sweeping statements about products, but educate yourself and understand exactly why you're going to do it. There is no more complicated insurance contract that you see in personal finance than an indexed universal life insurance contract. And whenever there's complications, it can be easy for people to misunderstand.

Whole life insurance is bad enough to understand. There's so many moving parts, it's very difficult to explain a whole life insurance policy to someone who's uninitiated and have them come away feeling like they really understand it. Universal life insurance, and especially indexed universal life insurance, is twice as complicated.

So that's why I spent so much time going through it. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to join me on next week's Friday Q&A show, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. If you'd like to book a consultation with me right now, there's a little over a dozen left, I think 15, something like that.

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