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Ralphs. 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.

Today is Friday, May 26, 2023. And on this Friday, as we do on any other Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate technology, we have a live Q&A show. You call in, talk about anything that you want, ask any questions, raise any topics, and we have a conversation.

If you'd like to join me on one of these Friday Q&A shows, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, and sign up to support the show there, and you will gain access to these Friday Q&A shows. We begin with Annette in North Carolina.

Annette, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Thank you, Joshua, for taking-- for answering these calls. I really appreciate it. I like this setup, too, anyway. I am calling about some tax strategies. I'm 68, and I teach, and I'm trying to figure out how to minimize my taxes or how to create a business with it.

I have an LLC because I was a contract instructor, but they've made us W-2 employees. And I want to keep working, but I'm paying a lot of taxes. And, you know, they say, "Well, have more taken out." I'm doing that, but it's almost to the point where I'm going to just be working for free.

Understood. What is your current income from your W-2 job? Well, I am retired, so I have a pension, and I'm doing Social Security. So my income is about-- with the part-time job, I teach one class online. That's all I do. So it's about $97,000. Okay, so your income from your W-2 job is $97,000.

Is that correct? No, my W-2 from my job is about $14,000. And then I have a pension and Social Security all together. Okay, so $14,000 from the job. How much is your pension income? $55,000. And how much is your Social Security? $32,000. Okay. And in addition to that, do you have other sources of income from the business?

Is the business profitable for you? I don't have a business. That's what I'm trying to-- I understand. Okay, so you previously had an LLC, and you were previously-- No, I still have the LLC, but I'm not able to use it because of the tax law in 2017. So it cut out a lot of those things that you could deduct.

So I don't have those business-related expenses anymore. And so basically, because I'm a W-2 employee, you're no longer an independent contractor. Understood. Okay. For how much do you intend to teach for the foreseeable future, or do you intend to stop teaching at some point? Well, don't laugh. I think I'm only up to about 9 or 5 plus.

Okay. And I like working, and I'm gifted. And so I will be teaching and doing other things. I want to create a course and use my teaching skills like that. I'm just trying to figure out some things. I was approached about teaching for a private school, but we figured it out.

I mean, it amounted to about $12 an hour, because I would have to have so much taken out. Okay. So, by the way, I would never laugh, because one of my heroes is Dr. Leila Denmark. You ever heard of her from Atlanta, Georgia? I have not. Okay. So, Dr.

Leila Denmark, she was a pediatrician from Atlanta, Georgia, and she worked as a pediatrician for almost 75 years. She retired at the age of 103 from active practice, and she lived till age 114. She was one of the first, I think she was one of the first women to graduate from medical school in the United States, and she had an incredible career, amazing woman.

My wife was actually a patient of hers when she was a baby. My wife's mother took her to Georgia to consult with Dr. Denmark as a baby. And so, I'm never going to be the one who's going to laugh at you. I think that Dr. Denmark set the appropriate example for all of us of how to enjoy a career, how to bring meaning and purpose into the world.

So, if you're looking for laughter, you're in the wrong place. (laughs) So, at the moment, you're planning to teach for the foreseeable future, and you have this income. What is your current living expenses? Um, very low, like, maybe $3,000. Do you have the option to suspend your pension payments?

Any idea if you have that choice? I don't know. I might suspend the Social Security, but with the pandemic, you know, it had everybody kind of, you know. Yeah. Okay. So, let me give you the big picture, because the frustrating thing is there's not any great answer for you.

The taxes that you pay are the taxes that you pay for the privilege of living in the United States and working in the United States. It just is what they charge you. And for living and working in the state that you live and work in. There's not a lot you can do in your current financial situation, but I'll tell you what you can do in just a moment.

But just know that there's not a lot. And if you continue to teach, even if you are paying a significant amount of taxes, that could be a very smart thing for you to do, simply because you like to teach, and that's something that makes a difference in the world, and the burden might be the tax burden.

So, let's walk through the different options that you face. When you are an employee, there are very few things that you can do to reduce your taxes owed, other than to fund retirement accounts. So, that should be your first thing, is you should fund a retirement account. Does your company offer you access to a 401k?

Or a 403d? It does a 401k, but I think the fees are kind of high, the last time I checked on it. Okay. So, the fees might be high. They often are in teaching, especially in the 403b space, where they use tax-sheltered annuities that often have high fees. So, the fees might be high, but that's the first thing that you could do.

If you don't need your income, if you are an active employee of a company that has a retirement plan, a 401k, then you can contribute up to all of your income into that 401k. And incidentally, you can continue to do this after the age of 70, what used to be 70 and a half, now it's 72.

So, after the age of which you ordinarily start to receive required minimum distributions, as long as you are working at a company and you don't have more than a 5% ownership interest in that company, then you can defer your salary into a 401k. And that would be the first thing that I would do.

So, sign up for your company's 401k plan and defer some or all of your income, your earned income, into that account. Other than the pension and Social Security income, do you have other retirement accounts, such as an IRA? No, I have a 401k with my pension job. So, an old 401k?

Yes. Okay. What you can do is you can roll your old 401k over into your current 401k. You can do the same thing with old individual retirement accounts, if you had any of those. You can roll those into your current 401k. And then you can, as again, as long as you're employed by that company, you can continue to defer the required minimum distributions, continue to put money in there, and that will eliminate the taxes owed on that current income.

So, that $14,000, if you defer all of it into the 401k, immediately goes away from your taxable income. You're still left with your pension and your Social Security, but at least the $14,000 wouldn't be taxed currently. Make sense? Right. Okay. Now, the second thing that you can do is maximize your deductions.

So, things like charitable deductions. And so, if there's an organization that you want to support, or if you're doing something that could be structured as an organization, there's a lot of room, especially if you are a teacher and you want to work in some area of teaching. Then, if you want to give away some of the money, you could do that.

So, you said, you made the statement, you said, "All my money is going to pay for, basically all my salary is going to pay for taxes." That's not true, because there is no 100% tax rate. The highest tax rate... It just feels like it's a lot. So, it's not true.

Right. But, you could always just simply... One good way of getting rid of taxes and not giving it to the government is giving it away to charity. So, if there's a charity that you want to support and you don't want to pay the money in taxes because you don't need it, you can give as much money away to charity as you want.

And if your itemized deductions, including your charitable giving, are larger than your standard deduction, and you take itemized deductions, then you can zero out your income taxes by giving all your money away to charity. So, if you needed zero dollars of income to live on, and you gave away the entirety of your income, then you would pay no income taxes.

And the same thing can happen with regard to any portion of your income. So, that's something to keep in mind, because you sound like you have a desire to keep on working and being involved in areas of education. And so, it would be normal for someone in your situation to have contact with some organization or some individual that you think is doing good work.

And you can support that organization or individual through charitable contributions, and you get a discount on those contributions. The third thing that you could... Go ahead. I think I thought of that because I'm single, and so basically you have to go over the $12,000. So, I figured for it to be beneficial, I would need to probably do about $17,000, so that you have 17 minus 12, which is about five.

Right. I mean, that's what I figured. Right. So, you can sit down... Am I thinking correctly? Yes. Do you do your taxes yourself with a computer program, on paper, or do you work with an accountant? I've been doing it myself with H&R Block, but I'm going to a CPA and see what they know.

I mean, I've been to a CPA before, but it's the same thing. Yeah. There's not a lot... So, the frustrating thing for employees, there's not a lot that you can do to reduce your taxes other than use retirement accounts. So, let's just be clear about that. There's no magic.

I've spent 20 years searching for the magic of how to pay zero taxes. I've read all the books. I've done all the research. I've learned it all. And there is magic in some situations, and virtually none of those situations are going to apply to you personally based upon the facts that you said to me.

So, there are magical options that can apply to other people, but from what you've described to me so far, there isn't going to be any magic that's going to apply to your situation other than these options that I'm going through with you. So, you can work... If you talk to the accountant, have the accountant show you, and you can say, "Let's pretend I give $20,000 to charity," and then I go ahead and itemize my deductions because of this $20,000 to charity, what would my taxable burden be?

And that's a pretty simple and easy answer to do it. If you have the H&R Block software from a previous year, or you just go in and meet with whoever did it, it's super easy to play with those numbers in a piece of tax software if you have access to that.

What you said is the normal thing. Most people do not itemize deductions. And so, until your itemizable deductions exceed your standard deduction, that's the only place where this strategy comes into play. But if you wanted to give away $20,000 or $30,000 a year, you could do that, especially if your expenses are as low as you described, of about $3,000 per month, and your income, which is coming in from guaranteed sources, is as high as you described, then you could afford to go ahead and make charitable contributions.

And if you put together... If you're giving enough money away, you can wipe out a good portion of your tax liability with that. - Right, okay. So, other than that, I would need to have a business, correct? - Correct. So, that's where we're going next, is, okay, if I have a business.

Now, here's the problem with, quote-unquote, having a business. Could you, in theory, save some tax money by taking business deductions against your income? Maybe, but I'd be very surprised if you were the kind of lady who was gonna maximize that. So, if somebody is very, very motivated to save on taxes, and somebody starts a business that is a hobby kind of business, like, let's say I start a business taking stock photography, and my business idea is that I'm gonna travel the world taking stock photographs, and I'm gonna travel from my home business destinations, I'm gonna plan a trip to the Bahamas, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna stay at a hotel for one week, and the goal of this trip is to take photographs that I'm gonna then list on a stock photography website to create an ongoing residual income source for myself.

Well, when you get into a situation like that, there's a lot of expenses that you can deduct, and there's no rule in the IRS tax code that you can't have fun while you're doing business. But for somebody who's teaching in a fairly conventional format, what can you do? You could deduct a computer, maybe a microphone, some sort of system like that.

If you go to a lot of conferences or events, you might be able to bring some of those things in underneath your business activities, et cetera. But the teaching business is probably not designed to be a really fun business that can maximize your tax deductions. And so, while you could run a business, you're going to need to actually have a business motive.

So there's no reason you cannot keep your current LLC, it's fine. There's no reason you can't simultaneously work for an employer and simultaneously run a business and use your business deductions through that. It's just that the business needs to have a business plan and it needs to be run in a business-like manner.

You need to be able to demonstrate if you're audited that you're taking prudent decisions with a goal of making a profit. And as long as you have a goal of making a profit, if on occasion you have business losses, then those business losses can be used to offset and deduct against some of your other sources of income.

The challenge is in order to do this legitimately, you have to do quite a bit of work. And in order to defend yourself in an audit, you need to keep quite a lot of paperwork. And I don't want to project upon you, but you've probably reached a point in your life at which you're not overly enthusiastic about doing all of that work, keeping all those records, going through all those hoops, just in order to save a few thousand dollars of tax money.

You're probably at a point in your life in which that sounds like a big hassle. And just paying a couple thousand dollars is probably a simpler and easier solution. So it is an option that can be fruitful, but I'm guessing that it's not a really fruitful option for you.

- Okay. - Okay. - All right, actually it's more than a couple, but anyway, I appreciate this. One last question. - I got one more. Yeah, before you go to your last question, before you go to the last question. - That's not on there, this is about you. Did you remember that podcast with the man that helped young guys in his community?

It's a really old podcast. - I do, yes. - What number is that? - Just a moment and I will tell you. While I am looking that up, let me give you one more discussion though. - Okay. - I gotta give my brain a moment to come up with the name of the guy.

The fourth option that you can consider that can save on your taxes would be to defer some of your income. So if I had caught you before you filed for Social Security, I would love for you to not be taking Social Security until at least the age of 70.

I don't remember the rules on whether you can suspend it now that you have started it, but I would go to the Social Security office and I would ask them if you can suspend your Social Security payments. In addition, depending on what they tell you, you might also consider suspending your pension.

But probably I don't, now that you've started it, I don't think they're gonna give you an option for suspension. So I don't remember the Social Security rules on this and I doubt your pension is going to allow you to suspend it. But if you could, there's no reason for you to take extra income from it that you're not required to take under things like required minimum distribution rules if you don't have a clear plan for the income.

And so you might as well just leave it in the account and then have it for the future when you might have more of a plan for it or have it for a time when you have the ability to leave it to beneficiaries or endow somebody that you want to endow.

And I found it. So the episode that you're asking for is episode 398, titled-- - 398, thank you. - How to Invest in Your Local Community for Financial Profit and Community Gain, interview with businessman and investor Tim Yarborough. I should reach out to him and redo it because that was always one of the most interesting podcast episodes that I did.

And I would love to get an update with him. So it's 398 with Tim Yarborough. - Thank you, yeah, it was good, thank you. - My pleasure, anything else? - I'm good, thank you so much. Have a good day. - My pleasure. All right, we go now to Pat in Idaho.

Pat, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hi, I was wondering, I know you've lived in other countries before. And I was wondering how you would transfer your US dollar to that country. Like what is the most efficient way to do that? - Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports.

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Visit Delamo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon, see dealer for details. - I would begin with the question, why do you want to transfer your US dollars to that country? So answer that question first. - Well, if I decided to live somewhere else, yeah. - Are you an American citizen?

- I am. - Born and raised in the United States? - For the most part, yeah. - Okay, and is there any reason you think you would renounce your American citizenship? - I don't think so. - Okay, so if that's the case, I think that the strongest argument is actually simply in favor of your keeping your financial infrastructure.

And this is actually a huge benefit of being an American. Most people, when they leave their home country, one reason they would leave their country would include severing their tax residency in their native country. So if you were Canadian, for example, and you were planning to move to Thailand, then generally speaking, most Canadians would want to end their tax obligations to the Canadian government by moving abroad.

Now, the Canadians have some exceptions but often Canadians want to stay enrolled into the national healthcare system. And so they actually will work to maintain their presence in Canada, in some cases, in order to maintain their enrollment. But separate from that, from a financial perspective, since a Canadian can completely end his obligation to the Canadian government, then most Canadians want to end their tax residency if they leave and move abroad for good.

Or another example, and this is Germans, Brits, really almost any country out there. So each country has a set of rules of how to end your tax residency. In some countries, it's simple, but in most of the advanced Western countries with big tax governments, where most of my listeners come from, those rules are pretty consistent in saying that you need to sever all of your permanent ties with the country.

So the Canadian would sell his house, the Canadian would close his bank accounts, the Canadian would close his credit cards, the Canadian would, in many cases, surrender his driver's license. He wants to demonstrate to the government and the taxing authorities, hey, look, guys, I don't have any connection with you guys anymore.

And by so doing, he can file his exit return and he can never again have to deal with the Canadian taxing authorities as long as he doesn't move back to Canada. For Americans, it's completely different. For Americans, you always have a tax relationship with the government because the government engages in citizenship-based taxation.

Americans are taxed no matter where in the world they live. There are ways that you can eliminate the taxes that you owe primarily through the foreign earned income exclusion, which allows you to generate income outside of the country and up to a little bit, $120,000, I forget this year's number, but around that number, you can generate that income completely tax-free.

And then your other sources of income are taxed based upon dividends, capital gains, et cetera. But the neat thing for Americans is simply that you don't have to end your relationship with the United States. So an American citizen who wants to move abroad could have a mansion in Miami, could have all of his bank accounts, all of his investment accounts, have everything in the United States.

And if he qualifies for the foreign earned income exclusion, he will get the benefits of being abroad without severing all of his ties with the United States. Now, there is a minor quibble here I need to explain. In order to qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion, there are two tests.

The first test is what's called a strict days test. And if you don't spend more than 30 days inside of the United States, meaning you spend at least 335 days outside of the United States, then you qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion regardless of your other activities. So an American digital nomad can put his backpack on his back, can head out of the country, and as long as he just doesn't spend time in the United States, he's gonna get the foreign earned income exclusion.

There is a separate test for the foreign earned income exclusion that allows a little bit more time spent in the United States. And that's the center of life test. So if an American has his center of life in another place, let's say that that guy from Florida actually moved to the Bahamas, and he has a residency permit in the Bahamas, and he owns a house in the Bahamas, and that's clearly where he lives.

Well, in that situation, he can actually go back to the United States and in theory spend more than 30 days. There's no hard limit on it, but possibly as much as even four months per year in the United States, as long as his genuine center of life is actually located outside the United States.

And he still qualifies for the foreign earned income exclusion, thus allowing him to pay no taxes on his first $120,000 of income, no income taxes. And if he works for a foreign corporation, he can eliminate all of his employment taxes. But that American can keep all of his infrastructure in the United States.

He can keep his bank accounts in the United States, he can keep his credit cards in the United States, he can keep his retirement accounts in the United States, he can get social security, he can be enrolled in Medicare, he can get his pension income, all of that stuff can stay in the United States.

And it's immaterial from a tax perspective, it doesn't matter. And in fact, he could actually keep all of that, even if he renounced his citizenship. So Americans who actually go to the point of renouncing their citizenship, they're still eligible for social security payments, they can keep their credit cards, they can keep their 401ks, et cetera.

The one distinction is they often are not gonna be able to get any Medicare care because that requires them to be in the United States. But in theory, they could in theory possibly work that out as well. So with the US government, there's no reason why, even if you leave the United States, you have to move all of your assets abroad.

So now it comes down to a more careful question of, should I move my assets abroad? And if so, why should I? The United States has a world-class banking system. Notwithstanding all of the gurus on the internet who wanna say that the United States is the worst place in the world, the United States has a world-class banking system.

It is a highly sought-after destination for many people outside of the United States to bank, to invest, et cetera. Investment products, world-class. Low expenses, great markets, everything is great. In fact, for foreign investors, investing in the United States is phenomenal because you can, depending on what form your income is received at, you can potentially make a lot of money completely income tax-free.

That's for non-Americans. But the banking system is really good. The credit card system in the United States, second to none. The investment system in the United States, second to none for the kinds of products where it works. Not to say you might not make a fortune finding some little emerging economies, mutual fund in another place.

There's all kinds of options, but the US system is not something to run from. And the US dollar is the global currency of choice. So if you're going to abandon one of the world's best banking systems, which you have easy access to, which you have established infrastructure in, you need to be intentionally going to something better.

There are other excellent financial jurisdictions in the world, but you need to be going to one of those. And so you don't look at it and say, you know what, I'm gonna go to Mexico, so I'll just go ahead and move all my money from the United States to Mexico.

You'd be an idiot to do that. If I moved to Mexico, I would keep every bit of my banking infrastructure in the United States. And if I ever opened even a single bank account in Mexico, I would open just one single checking account and just put a few thousand dollars in it because there's no need for it.

In today's digitally connected world, when I travel the world, I use my American-based credit cards. I have zero transaction fees on them, no foreign transaction fees. I use several debit cards, but I get no foreign transaction fees and I get all of my ATM fees reimbursed around the world.

So I don't move all of my money outside the United States just because I'm outside of the United States. And in fact, I keep the infrastructure in the United States because it's more convenient, it's better, keeps most of my money in the US dollar, which is where I want it.

It allows me, and I want it there, and I just wanna deal with the currency conversion rate at most transactions because the US dollar is probably the better currency for me to hold long-term. Now, where this comes in is, let's say that you're gonna buy a house. So you're moving to a foreign country, you're gonna buy a house, and you're gonna spend $300,000 on a house in another country.

Well, that's where you need to start thinking more carefully about when am I going to exchange the money? And then depending on the specifics of the country that you're going to, there's going to be a clear answer to your question. It's not a matter of, well, let me just go to TransferWise and do it.

That's an option, but it's more a matter of what country am I buying the house in, when do I need to open the bank account, let me go ahead and when's the right time to do it in advance so I can close on the house in the local currency, et cetera.

But I would not encourage an American to go and move all of his assets abroad just because he himself is going abroad. In the fullness of time, let's just say that you move from the United States to Switzerland, right, to pick on a great banking jurisdiction, or the United Kingdom, great banking jurisdiction, or Singapore, great banking jurisdiction.

So you've moved there. You've lived there for five years, eight years, 10 years. You don't ever have any plans of going back to the United States. Well then, at that point in time, I would still keep, generally, keep retirement accounts and things like that in the United States. But at that point in time, you would go ahead and start moving significant amounts of your assets to the foreign jurisdiction because you're living now in that foreign currency, and it doesn't make a ton of sense for you to have all of your money in dollars when in reality, you're living in the Singapore dollar, or you're living in the Swiss franc.

But even there, I wouldn't move 100% of it. I would still keep all the bank accounts open. I would still keep all of the credit cards open. I would keep all of it open. I would just have 80% of my money abroad, and I would treat the accounts in the United States as my foreign asset diversification rather than my primary accounts.

Does that make sense to you? - Yeah, it does. And speaking of the digital world, I was wondering if there would be a lot of friction to efficiency loss if you use crypto to convert your US dollar to, let's say, a different currency. Is that something that is practiced today?

- Well, if you buy Bitcoin at 50,000 and you sell it three months later at 30,000, that was a whole lot more expensive than foreign transaction fees. So you want to be very careful when you're thinking of buying an asset, just like if you buy gold coins and then you carry your money abroad with gold coins in your pocket and you have to sell it and pay a bunch of fees, that's very expensive.

If we're talking about money in the bank, I would just simply search for simple foreign exchange transactions. And there would be a couple of ways that I would do it. Number one, depending on your level of wealth, you can't beat Revolut, for example, phenomenal. Revolut is one of the best modern banking products in the world.

It's wonderful. So you can move your, with Revolut, you can have as many of all the different foreign currency accounts that they hold. They give you a great transfer rate on it. Really, really wonderful. And so for some thousands of dollars, I wouldn't trust my life savings to Revolut.

I don't have any reason to know that they're bad. I'm not saying they are bad, but they're new and I don't trust new. I'm pretty skeptical of things until they've been proven for a very long time. So, but for day to day, for some thousands of dollars, something like Revolut is world-class because you can maintain both.

So you get a Revolut account, you move $10,000 to your US dollar account with Revolut, then you go ahead and convert it into British pounds 'cause that's where you're gonna be living and you keep it there. And whenever you notice the rate is favorable, you go ahead and make your transfer and it's great.

So that's great. There are transfer wise is very well known in the international foreign currency exchange places. And then let's say you can just do a wire. And so what I would encourage you is to start with, start by opening a bank account in your foreign bank. And if possible, don't commit yourself to transfer the money until you're ready.

And so frequently what you can do, especially coming from the United States where you're banking in the dollar, is you can open a US dollar account at your foreign bank as well as a local currency account. And just go ahead and put your money into the US dollar account.

And then when you are ready to buy the local currency, just do that conversion within the bank and you generally get a pretty favorable rate there. So don't go look for schemes like going through crypto or going through gold coins or anything like that, unless you actually need it.

The only reason I would buy a cryptocurrency was because it's something that I am either speculating on and I believe that it's going to increase quickly or it's something that I want to hold long term. Because you have too much of a risk on the fluctuations in value that can immediately wipe out all of any possible savings in terms of fees.

That help, Pat? - Yeah, yeah, that helps. Thank you for giving out some recommendations for converting currency from US to some other foreign currency. - Yeah, my pleasure. What I would say is go slow. There's no reason to make big decisions on stuff like this. Go and spend a couple years traveling outside the United States before you make any big infrastructure changes.

Obviously, you'll get rid of your apartment or something like that, but just go slow. And then after a few years of traveling and spending time abroad, then most of the answers to these questions will be a lot more obvious to you. We'll go to Bob in Arkansas. Bob, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today? - Really appreciate what you do. I found your podcast at the end of April via someone telling me about it and I have been voraciously consuming your past episodes and also just purchased your new course. - Wonderful. - So I have been a two is, thank you, but I have been a two is one, one is none since about March of 2011, but very new to realizing that, that also applies beyond the US.

So I was working pretty hard on that in the US and various contingencies, but just hadn't broadened my aperture to look globally. And so I'm kind of looking for some guidance on other countries to look at. And just as context, I've been at this for about a year. I'm a slow reader and I was really busy up until recently.

So I started with Costa Rica 'cause I'd heard great things about it. At the time I was living in Hawaii and I loved Hawaii other than the government and the people. And Costa Rica sounded like maybe Hawaii 50 years ago and put a lot of time and effort into researching it only to conclude somewhat recently that they're built on a socialist model and they're running out of other people's money.

And I may be wrong in that conclusion and feel free to correct me if I am. So then I shifted to Panama and I put a lot of research into Panama. It sounds promising. I've got a trip scheduled in July to go check it out in person, but I have no idea for number three.

And then also just other places I should be thinking about maybe even for place number two. - Okay. You said you got my course, you've gotten my newest, let me plug it, howtoretiresuccessfully.com. You were talking about my retirement course or my international skate playing course, which have you already purchased?

- Your international escape course. - Perfect, okay. - The idea of two is one, one is none, but beyond just the US. - Right, okay. So my newest course is how to retire successfully and that's available for other listeners who are looking to talk about retirement, but that will not be talking about internationalization.

For somebody who is interested in internationalization, there is no better resource that I can point you towards other than my international escape plan course, which other listeners can buy at internationalescapeplan.com because in that course, I lay out for you a thoughtful strategy of how to go about it. What I don't do in that course, and I intentionally because it changes so much, is I don't suggest any particular country.

I suggest a phased approach to building a plan that can see you through virtually all bad scenarios that I can come up with by doing a little bit of prior planning. And I give a range of options, which range all the way from, you know, have a passport and a credit card and just go abroad as a tourist all the way to the hardcore phase four of moving abroad completely.

So that's for the benefit of other listeners. Now, back to what you said, Bob, why do you think, so let me distinguish, there's a difference between having a backup plan, a plan B versus having a plan A, meaning there's one thing for you to say, I'm living in the United States, I'm gonna live in the United States, but I really like to have a Panama residence permit, so, you know, a bank account down there.

So if I needed to go, at least I could go there versus I'm going to move abroad. Are you looking for a plan B or a plan A? - I'm probably somewhere in between at this point. So the more I see of the US, the less I wanna live here in terms of the direction the country's going.

So initially I wanna find at least a plan B, then the goal is to begin spending at least part of the year there. And then if I like it enough, you know, that becomes plan A and the US becomes plan B. - Understood, all right. So I probably wind up discouraging about 80% of people who think they wanna move abroad from the United States, especially people who may be at your phase of life.

You sound like an adult male who's been successful in life and thinking about what's next. You didn't talk about going abroad to get a job. Is that right? How old are you? - So I'm 56 and I'm not looking for a job. - Okay, so I would generally discourage most people in your demographic from trying to move abroad as a plan A because I think the most of the benefits that you're probably looking for are better achieved by moving somewhere else within the United States or by simply doing some traveling outside the United States versus relocating yourself.

And this is unique to Americans. The advice is consistent with advice I give to citizens of other nations, but specifically to Americans, there's some distinctives. I kind of feel like if I do my job right, I work really hard to discourage people from permanently moving abroad with the idea that I'm just gonna move abroad and I'm gonna find a dream life in Costa Rica or Panama or wherever.

If I work hard to discourage you from doing it and you ignore my advice and you do it anyway, then you're one of the perhaps 20% of people for whom that's the right decision. But with the other 80% who listen to my discouragement, I've helped you, I've saved you years of frustration and effort by kind of laying out the world realistically.

- So let me give you, I will give you some countries to consider, but let me explain to you why that is. You sound like a freedom loving guy and you're a little frustrated about the big government and anti-state trends in the United States. Is that accurate to some degree?

- I would say that's a vast understatement. - Okay, trying to be a little bit politically correct here and inclusive in my language. So here's the problem. Everything that annoys you about the United States is probably worse everywhere else. So in the United States, although right now, liberty loving people seem to be in retreat and there's a massive growth of nanny state government and intrusive big government, et cetera, you've got 150 million people that agree with you.

150 million people that think you're exactly right and who are pissed off at the current situation. Now you've got 150 million people who are opponents of yours and they happen to have the political power and there's who knows 50 million people in the middle that are the deciding vote.

But you've got more allies in the United States than you will have in any country anywhere else in the world. And I have spent a lot of time traveling and looking for a place that's better. And I cannot find a place that is better on everything. For any specific issue, you can often find a place that is better for you on that issue.

But in terms of the totality of the things that probably are important to you because of the kinds of things that are important to me as well, you're probably better off with a different region in the United States than you are going abroad. So I'll give an example. I like Panama.

I think Panama has a lot to offer. I think that, in fact, right now I've been talking with Mikkel Thorup about advertising to my listeners a special event in Panama to go and do a week tour, a special tour for my listeners, limited number of people, and basically have a week tour of Panama and look at the options.

'Cause I think Panama is a great one-stop destination to set up a residency permit, set up a driver's license, set up a bank account, set up a home even. It's easy access. It's a great international hub. I think Panama has a lot to offer. If you were annoyed about COVID in the United States, Panama was 10 times worse.

In Panama, you could only go out and go to the store one, was it one day a week? And it was separate days for each person of your family. And it was based upon the number of your cedula. And so you couldn't, it wasn't just that they closed the stores, it was that you weren't allowed to leave your house except one day a week.

Now, Americans got all upset about the relatively mild lockdowns that various governments imposed, all upset. And Americans had the lightest lockdowns of almost any place in the world, except where culturally nobody cared, right? Some of the countries in Africa where they just never did anything and the government is not a large, strong, strong government.

But I mean, Panama, Costa Rica, all these places had crazy requirements. And in the United States, things like masking, and I'm just making this as a general thing, masking in the United States ended a year and a half, two years before it ended anywhere else. If you had been in Panama in 2022, in fall of 2022, and you had the temerity to leave your condo and go into an elevator without a mask on, you're gonna be written up and have complaints by your neighbors because they're a big, they're just their culture.

Now, on the flip side, there are a whole set of freedoms and things that you can get in Panama that you can't get in the United States. And so, Panama doesn't impose a ton of taxes. You can live in Panama very tax lightly. Panama is the world's, I think, second largest purveyor of, or second largest registry of foreign corporations.

And so Panama is a wonderful place for certain things, but for a guy in your age and stage of life who's looking for a place where it's better, you may find it in Panama, but you're gonna, once you get there, you're gonna find a whole set of things that really annoy you that are better in the United States.

And so, and people often don't appreciate that until they've actually gone abroad and spent enough time abroad. I myself didn't appreciate that until I had gone abroad and spent enough time abroad. And the reason I honed in on your age is this, assuming that you've been financially successful, unless you're starting a new business, unless you're something else that you're doing, if you just have assets and you're living on your assets and your investments and things like that, your tax situation doesn't improve.

Your cost of living is probably not gonna change that much. If it goes down at all, it's only gonna go down in certain categories. And so many of the things that people were looking for by the idea of going abroad, I think are better served in the United States.

And if you don't like the culture around you, you can choose a different region in the United States that offers what you have. So the reason I'm using COVID is it's recent in our memory. But if you think about COVID, your experience through the pandemic was drastically more impacted by who the governor of your state was or who the mayor of your city was than who the president of your country was.

And so in some states, they were putting sand in skate parks. In other states, the governor said, "Yeah, we're not doing that here." And you had total freedom. And it was a state by state basis. But you can move among those states and you could probably find many, many more people who fit with you versus in another place, which brings me to the next thing.

In terms of social life, one of the biggest impacts on your personal life and on your experience of life has more to do with the people that you spend time with and what you consume than anything that's real, anything that really impacts your life. And so the benefit of the United States is there's 100 million people that think like you.

And you can find them and you can surround yourself with those people and you don't generally have to spend much time listening to the people that you disagree with. I myself live in a happy little bubble. I live in a community of people that pretty much think like I do.

We're not group think, but we kind of share the same values. I have isolated myself and my family from a whole lot of the stuff that makes me mad. And it's gotten better. Now, of course, I don't live in the United States, but my point is I could do it in the United States and I could do it abroad.

So it's a matter of, more a matter of what you consume versus than anything that's real and external. So where does a foreign country really come in? Well, if there's something that the country offers from a lifestyle that you really value and you can gain a lifestyle that you want in that country, then it makes a lot of sense.

So if you really wanna be a surf bum, well, absolutely, but you could be a surf bum in Panama, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, and the government doesn't matter that much. It's a matter of finding the surfing community and being there. If you want the big city experience, or there's a certain thing, like again, certain financial regulation, or you wanna live in a zero tax place, okay, well, then you go to that place that's better on that issue.

But in general, as far as the total package, I think that most Americans are excessively critical of their own nation, and they don't understand the many problems and issues that they'll face in another place. So what I would recommend is make a list of the specific issues that most annoy you, and then think about what countries might give you a better solution on those issues.

And you may not need to just go abroad, but rather just spend some time in the countries that you like the most. So have you ever read, have you yet read, I know you're new to this internationalization stuff, but have you read any of the original stuff by the PT theorists, Peter, what did he publish?

Peter Teradish or Grandpa, all the same guy. But have you ever read any of the original PT book? - I have not, I've never heard of that before. - Okay, have you ever heard of flag theory? - I've heard of it in terms of oil tankers. - Okay, similar concept, but for individuals.

Let me give you a mini lesson. First of all, I gave a lesson in the course that you bought on flag theory. It's in, I forget which part it was, you may not have gotten to it, but I covered it carefully in the course. And so for the sake of listeners, now that I've introduced the topic, let me just cover it because this I think should be your first stop before you try to find one country.

So it's commonly called a few things. Today it's most commonly called flag theory. Originally it was called PT theory, and PT was created to stand for, was created as a euphemism that people would apply to a bunch of different stuff. So PT would stand for perpetual traveler or permanent tourist, some variation of those things.

And the basic idea, this was invented back in the '80s by a group of libertarians. The guy, I'm blanking on names, I hate it when I blank on names. The Schultz, the guy who wrote "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World," there were about four of them that were working together.

W.G. Hill was the book, was the pen name that the original book was published under. So they created this idea, and there was a bunch of libertarian playboys that were looking around in the '80s and saying, the big government is growing all around the world, what do we do?

How do we escape this? And so they started by going around the world and looking for better places. And eventually they came to realize that there is no one better place, but rather if we would choose a better place for each aspect of our lives, then we can do that.

And so they created PT theory or flag theory. And Schultz, Howard or Harry, I can't remember his name, he was one of the original publishers on it. And at first it was three flag theory, later it became five flag theory, now there's sites and whatnot. You hear people talk about seven flag theory, et cetera.

The basic idea is you disconnect the different parts of your life and you set them up individually. And stick with me because this is really important to my answering your question. First flag is usually a citizenship flag. So what country do I have my passport from? So do I have a passport from, in the perfect world, you wanna have a passport from a country or a citizenship from a country that's going to give you a powerful travel document so you can travel around the world fairly easily.

You wanna have a country that's not gonna impose on you any onerous requirements, things like military service or taxes on money earned abroad, et cetera. And basically it's just gonna leave you alone, but you have your citizenship in that country. The second flag is your residence. So where is your legal residence?

And ideally you'd like to have a legal residence in a country that will let you live there and that will give you all the documents that are necessary. Some people might need a tax residence certificate, some people might not, but basically a residence permit in that country, the ability to live there.

And then ideally they're gonna leave you alone. You don't wanna have a country that's gonna tell you you can't homeschool your kids. You don't wanna have a country that's gonna tax you on income that's earned abroad, things like that. The third flag is your banking situation. So which you would like a country that serves for you to store your assets in.

Ideally this would be a country that has a really great financial system, a country that provides you with a good solid place to invest your money. Ideally this would be a country that doesn't impose taxes on non-residents so your money can grow without any tax. Ideally this would be a country that has favorable asset protection laws, gives you good privacy around your money, et cetera.

Your fourth flag is going to be your business haven, your business jurisdiction. So here you want a country through which you can operate your business. A country that ideally is going to have a regularized business environment so you can do things like in the modern world, have good merchant processing accounts, access to PayPal, access to Stripe, access to merchant processing accounts, access to good business banking so that you can conduct your business easily in the modern world.

But ideally this would be a country that's not going to impose taxes on you if you don't live there, that's going to just let you there. Or if those taxes are imposed, they're going to be modest. Ideally this would be a country that has good laws that protect you as a business owner from fraudulent lawsuits, good privacy laws, et cetera.

Then your fifth flag is what they used to call your playgrounds. And the playground is the place that you spend time that offers you the lifestyle that you want. And so for those Libertine playboys, it was what countries, if I want to do drugs, what countries in the world can I do drugs and not worry about being arrested?

If I want to hire prostitutes, what countries in the world can I hire prostitutes in? If I want to drive my car at 150 miles an hour, where can I drive my car at 150 miles an hour without being arrested? And basically for every lifestyle desire or for every vice, there's a place in the world that you can go where not only is that behavior accepted, but in some cases it's celebrated.

And so you love to gamble, well go to a place where gambling is celebrated. Or you love to shop, go to a place where shopping is celebrated. But go to those places as a tourist and spend time in the places that you want to be. And so I like to use Europe as an example.

If you, many people want to be a citizen of the European Union and live in the European Union, that's fine, but I think it's a lot better. Go to Europe as a tourist, spend three months there, buy what you want to buy. And when you're on your way out in the airport, you can get all of your VAT tax refunded to you as a tourist for whatever you bought.

And so you can enjoy the European lifestyle, but you don't have to pay European taxes on anything. You know, no European income taxes, no European socialized medicine taxes, no European VAT taxes. It's basically all refunded to you on your way out as long as you come in as a tourist.

So when I was an aspiring libertarian who was annoyed with the anti-liberty direction of my native country, and I came across that theory many years ago, I said, "This is probably the best way "that a liberty lover could actually live freely "in an unfree world." And so I started testing it.

And I'll tell you that it is actually the best way I've ever come up with if you care about liberty intensely. Now, it's not the perfect lifestyle for a lot of people. So it often involves a lot of movement and a lot of people don't wanna move. Some guys really enjoy the idea of going to four countries a year for three months in each country.

You could do it more, you could do it with two, but that's about the minimum number of places you're gonna need to spend time. Two places a year. Three is better, four can be great. So, and that's not gonna work for a lot of lifestyles. But if it does work for a lot of lifestyles, then you can use that model and lens to consider all the different countries of the world and think about the things that you most like.

Now, it's harder for Americans to follow this model because of citizenship-based taxation and because of the deep connection that most of us have to our natal country. And so Americans are, it's very, very hard for us to consider just not doing business with the United States anymore. And I don't think it's necessary, as you heard from the previous caller.

But what is necessary is not to go out looking for the place that is better, but looking for the place that is better on this particular aspect, this particular thing that I'm trying to change about my life. And then just go and enjoy that place. And in the course that you have, International Escape Plan, by talking about that, I talk about how this is, how you can apply this.

And you don't need to search for the world's best place. You're searching for a place that is good enough or the best on this particular thing. So an example with Panama, right? What is great about Panama? Well, what's great about Panama is they have a simple to establish residency program that has very straightforward.

You can come in, you can gain a legal residency permit, and they have a minimum amount of physical presence requirements. So you don't have to go there and spend six months a year there like you do in Canada. So Panama is a great option for that part of it.

Now, do you want to live in Panama? You might, but you would have to check that out and go and spend some time testing it. But you don't need to decide that that's the place that you're gonna go and spend all your time. You talked about Costa Rica. Costa Rica has great things and it has bad things.

One of the things that's great about Costa Rica is it can be a very welcoming place, especially to foreigners. It has interesting flora and fauna, et cetera. What's not great about Costa Rica? Setting up a residency permit in Costa Rica is crazy expensive. And one of the conditions of setting up a residency permit is that, let me be careful with that crazy expensive, it's more expensive than many other places.

And one of the things that gets most retirees they don't realize is a condition of maintaining residency is you have to maintain contributions to the social healthcare system that you're probably never in your life gonna use. And so that adds hundreds of dollars a month to maintain this thing.

In addition, you're not gonna get, the shopping is hard, it's expensive. It's just nothing like some of the benefits that you get in other places. And so Costa Rica can be great, but you can access that without ever becoming a resident and go and spend a couple of months there, get a little beach place if that's what you like and enjoy that, but you don't have to move all your life and infrastructure there.

So forgive the long windedness of my answer, but if you understand that, then it can be annoying because I'm not telling you a country, but I'm telling, in fact, if you just want one country, I'm telling you it's the United States. That's where you're gonna find probably most of what you're looking for.

But what you can do is create some of those backup plans and start testing them out. And then if you find that you enjoy those backup plans, then, and you like spending time, then move more of your life abroad. But if I'm counseling a guy like you, I would encourage you to do that slowly and strongly encourage you that you will make far more progress on enjoying a free lifestyle.

If you turn off the TV, you turn off your Twitter account, you turn off all that stuff, you practice a lifestyle of digital minimalism, you surround yourself with community of people that are like-minded to you, and you pick one or two issues that you care about that you might be able to affect in your local area, and you spend your time working on a couple of those issues rather than trying to go to another country thinking that it's gonna solve your problems.

- So question for you in terms of localism within Panama, in the COVID example that you picked, I have no interest whatsoever in being in a city like Panama City, I'm much more interested in the rural parts. Do you have, do you believe that the same COVID hysteria prevailed in rural Panama that you described earlier?

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Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon, see dealer for details. - Yes and no. So you have a striking, so yes, the same COVID stuff applied in the rural areas because the national government imposed the requirements.

The culture was very different in terms of the culture in the big city versus the culture on the beach. Anytime you go to a more rural environment or kind of the beach town vibe, things like that, you automatically get a much more lax culture. You automatically get a much more, just again, much more relaxed culture.

So the laws were still there, they were just less enforced. But the biggest difference is going to be the difference between you and your American identity. That means your general built-in rebelliousness, your general basic annoyance with being told what to do. That's not the Panamanian culture. Panamanian culture has its own wonderful features, but they don't have a rebellious culture.

They're not founded in that. That's not taught to them from their youth. And so yes, you're gonna have more lax enforcement, and some people like that. Again, there's lovely areas of Panama. You can go to a huge expat hub would be David in that area where it's highland, it's very cool, it's wonderful, there's tons of expats there.

But then you get into just the question, and by the way, these are things to be aware of, and you won't know until you go and spend time there and see what you like. But one of the things is do you want conveniences? David is not a convenient place to live.

You don't have Amazon shipping everything you could possibly imagine right to your door. For one guy, that's a benefit, meaning I can get away from this consumerist lifestyle, I can live a simpler lifestyle, I have my buddies, my friends, we live in a simple place, we live a simple life, and it's great.

For another guy who needs those conveniences, it's a massive downside. So you will have to be the one to do that based upon experimenting. And my answer to your question thing is go and check out the places that you're interested in, and then see if you like them. And you'll know within a month or two kind of the general vibe that you get, and there's no reason to go and do any formalities with the government, just go and do tourist runs, do visa runs for a time, rent an apartment for a few months, for six months, a year, see if you like spending your time.

And the people who are the best candidates for genuinely moving abroad and being somewhere else are those who find a local community and a local culture that they really enjoy and really fit in with. But I think my hard-won experience from my own testing and a lot of consulting on this subject is that Americans significantly overestimate the problems within the United States, and they underestimate the problems abroad, and they get there, and after the emotions settle, et cetera, they realize, you know what, it was actually really good in the United States.

And because the United States is so huge and so diverse, you can find any climate, any landscape, any community, any culture, et cetera, then you'll have an easier time of it relocating within the United States versus relocating permanently abroad. Now, quickly to cover my tracks, like in that course that I gave, I gave a long list of here are some things where I would be out of the United States in an instant.

So I think that everyone should have a backup plan, because one thing I learned is once, and this was a huge deal for me, I have been in your emotional state. My current sanguinity comes from the fact that I don't need to be a US citizen, I don't need to live in the United States, I don't need to have any money in the United States, I could spend the rest of my life and never go back.

And I've spent the last four years abroad, and so now my appreciation of the country has grown increasingly. And knowing that I don't have to be there makes me appreciate it for what it is, with all of its benefits and flaws, and be much more relaxed about it. So if you haven't put in place any of the steps and you're new to this, then I encourage you put in place the basic steps little by little, but don't bite off the whole thing until you've spent some time testing it out.

- Well, appreciate that. I guess one other variable I'll throw in there is I somewhat recently retired from the army, and the person I'm with and I were not co-located for 23 years together. So we essentially have two houses worth of stuff. So that stuff is gonna have to go somewhere, or I could just sit there and I can pay a lot per month to just let it sit in storage.

So in many ways, it behooves us to figure out, place B perhaps more quickly than the average person, just because we have a significant cost if we don't take a plan B. Any thoughts on that? - Yeah, it's a false choice. So with the stuff, you make your own assessment of the stuff, meaning that we all accumulate junk.

And there's a difference between a guy who's got a machine shop that he works in all the time. Like he needs a place for his tools versus a guy who's just accumulated a bunch of random furniture, random stuff. So it's not one or the other. You can downsize from the two houses into one house in the United States, and you can just get rid of 80% of the stuff that's in house B and move the 20% to house A, getting rid of 50% with what's in house A, and you can have a better lifestyle on the other side.

I love international living. I love it. I enjoy so many things about it. One of my favorite times in my life was recently, couple years ago, I guess technically I still own some cars, but I didn't have, anyway, the cars were all, other people had them. I had no cars that I was, although I owned them, other people were all driving my cars.

So I didn't have to deal with them on a day-to-day basis. I had a small storage unit with some personal effects that was just a tiny little storage unit. And I was just living in hotels, Airbnb's, just moving around the world with a couple of, with my wife and children, but with just a tiny underseat bag.

So we could get on any airplane flight, any train. I loved it. And so my, what reason I'm saying that is, you can do the stuff that you're trying to do and you can get rid of the stuff. So your mindset of thinking that you, thinking traditionally of, I have a house in the United States.

I need to find, I'm annoyed by the United States and I need to find another country where things are better. What country should I move to? And then thinking, I'm gonna move to that country. I'm gonna get a shipping container. I'm gonna load everything up and I'm gonna move all my stuff to that country.

I think that's a mistake. It's a huge amount of costs, it's a huge amount of investment and it's a dumb plan to start with. So what I would say is, is your partner still in the army or is your partner also retired at this point? - She's retired. - Okay, so what I would do is, first get rid of one of the houses, choose the house that you like more and get rid of-- - We only have one house.

- Okay. So where's all the stuff is in two locations? - We have two houses worth of stuff and only one house. - Okay, so go through and get rid of half of the stuff. Like there's just no reason-- - I can't, it's not in my possession. In other words, other than just telling the army to send it to a dump.

- Okay, so the army has your stuff stored and the army will ship it to wherever you tell them to ship it, is that right? - Correct, or they will continue to hold it at a certain number of thousand dollars per month. - All right. How much is the value, the dollar value today of, just a guess, of all the stuff that the army is currently holding for you?

If you had to buy it all again, how much would it cost you? - Well, and it also has things like pictures and things that are not replaceable. - Understood. - So that's just the other piece of it. But I mean, if it all disappeared tomorrow, I'd be fine.

I mean, that's the reality that I think you're getting at is if it all burned up in the storage places that it is, my life would go on just fine. - Right, okay. So then we have personal mementos and personal effects. That's not gonna be more than, in the end, a couple of Rubbermaid totes worth by the time you get it all sorted through.

And the rest of it is just miscellaneous stuff, some toys, some hobby stuff, some furniture, utensils, all the normal stuff of living. So what I would encourage you to do, and I'm speaking very broadly, of course, here in a generalized context, and I'm gonna move on here 'cause I got three other callers waiting, but what I would encourage you to do is have the army ship all the stuff to your house.

Host, pull out all of the personal mementos and all of those things, all the personal papers, all the personal mementos, all the personal books, things like that. You know you don't need the furniture, et cetera. So just post an ad online and sell the furniture. Sell it cheap, collect the $4,000 that you have for it, or whatever that is.

All the stuff, the dishes and clothes and things like that, just get rid of all that stuff. Then set yourself a one-month project to store digital copies and organize your personal effects. And I think if you set it as a one-month project, you're gonna be working hard for a month, but you can get it done in a month.

So with your pictures and things like that, you can digitize those pretty easily. So what I did when I was going through this was I bought a good quality duplex scanner. The specific one that I have is called a ScanSnap iX500. I don't know if that's still the best scanner or not.

It was at the time, it's a $500 scanner. So go and do a little research, get yourself a good quality duplex scanner. What a duplex scanner is, it's a device that as you feed things through it, it will scan both sides of the paper automatically, and it'll do about 30 pages a minute.

So just about as fast as a good quality copy machine can spit out copies, it's pretty fast. 30 pages a minute is pretty quick. And so what you can do is you can get all your papers, everything like that, lined up, and just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and you can get scans of all of that.

And it can do mixed media, it can scan pictures. Those fast scans are not gonna be archival quality of pictures, but that would be something so that you have a digital backup. And I'm not encouraging you to get rid of all of the pictures. But with all the pictures, buy a whole set of giant set of matching photo albums, put all of the pictures and albums so that they'll be stored, put them in big rubber made totes that are gonna be really heavy, but that are gonna be simple to store and keep things out of it, keep them clean and protected, et cetera, and then find a place to store that stuff.

So all your personal stuff. If you have a huge book collection, this is work, but what I did was I scanned my entire library. That's a big project. It might be premature. Books are easy to store. They go in books pretty well. But what I did was I did destructive scanning.

I whacked off the spines of all my books. I passed them through the duplex scanner and I digitized the entire library so it's on my computer. If you need help, just go to the internet about living a paperless life and all this stuff and it's out there. There are services that you can hire if you wanna spend money where they'll professionally scan all your photos, provide everything to you digitally.

Then all that stuff, put it away. And then if you have very valuable personal mementos, things that really matter, maximum maybe two storage totes of that stuff. Your mother's favorite thing and the other thing. Just pack that stuff out. Rent out your house. Rent out your primary house. Find a friend, someone at church or someone in the army who's retiring who needs a year to land somewhere.

Rent out your primary house so that the house is occupied and taken care of. Don't rent it on the open market. Find someone who would be trustworthy who just needs a place to live so it covers the housing expenses. Load up some suitcases and go travel the world for a year.

Spend a year on the road traveling to all the different places that you think could be interesting. Go spend a month in Panama. Spend a month in Costa Rica. Spend a month in Colombia. Spend a month in Argentina. Hop on an airplane, go to Europe. Travel around Europe. Go to Eastern Europe.

Go to Western Europe. Pop through Turkey. Get on an airplane, go to Asia. Spend some time traveling for a year or two. And while you're on that trip, make careful notes of the things that you like and the things that you don't like. And on that trip, spend time with expats, people who have moved there and immigrated to those countries, and find out what they like and what they don't like about the places where they are.

And then see what resonates with you and see what your experiences are. What can happen for you on that trip is as long as you will stop browsing Twitter and stop following the news, is you'll forget about most of what's happening in the United States, and you can just be immersed into a new and very present life.

And your income should handle that. Your finances should handle that, especially if you have whatever expenses you have covered, and you spend a month or two stocking stuff away. And you'll come back, and you'll have so much more clarity on your life after that experience. You'll have clarity on what you missed about the United States, and you'll have clarity on regions that you wanna explore more.

And then if at that point in time, you realize, you know what, we really enjoy Turkey, or we really like Colombia, or we really enjoy France, or something like that, then you can go ahead and go farther and go ahead, rent an apartment, ship a pallet of stuff in from the United States that you want, and do that.

But one of the best things you can do is free yourself from the physical possessions. And when you realize how free you can be, it'll add to your sense of mental freedom, political freedom, et cetera, by recognizing I'm not tied down in this one place. I don't have to be here, and I don't have to find kind of the world's perfect place.

It doesn't exist. I don't think it exists. There are different places that are good for different people. But on the whole, you can be very free if you have the legal background that I described with flag theory, and you can be very mentally free if you focus on what you want in your life, and you focus on ignoring a lot of the stuff that you don't want in your life.

- Thank you very much for your time, and I apologize for confusing your courses. As I think about it, I was listening to an older podcast where you announced it, 'cause I've been listening to your new ones, and your old ones intermixed. - There we go, all good. - So apologies for that, that will mix up.

- All good, my pleasure. Check back in in a couple months. I'd love to hear from you in a couple months on a Friday call and see how things are going and see what of this advice has worked and what doesn't. Sam in Chicago, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

- Hey, Joshua, thanks for taking my call. - My pleasure. - I was thinking recently about putting together a digital library, just a personal digital library. I've heard you talk about Caliber for like your eBooks, but I'm also looking at wanting to archive a lot of the paid subscriptions that I have, like premium podcasts and audio books, and even things like your courses that you have.

So like a lot of your older courses are no longer available to be purchased. And I'm just thinking about having an offline private library, so I'd like to get your thoughts about that, to what extent you have locally saved content. And after you go through that, I'd also like to get your thoughts on, once you have something like that, it could be a pretty valuable asset.

So how do you think about sharing that with your family, your community, and sort of along those lines? - Yeah, it's a big question. Let me give you a fairly brief answer. And by the way, your call was intelligible, but the audio quality wasn't great. It was, it seems like a slow connection.

So, oops, wrong button. Is there anything you can do to improve that while I give you an answer? So you can do it, and there's plenty of advice out there. I'm not the world's best guy. And here's why. Over the years, I've been interested in so much stuff, and I consume so much information, and I've tried to archive it all and collect it all, and it creates just this giant issue.

It's so hard to manage. And you say, what for? And I think of it as one of those things that, if I put, am I really gonna access this stuff again? And at the moment, I have largely chosen to simply trust my brain. My brain can usually give me the answer, and in the times when it can't, with the power of modern search engines, et cetera, I can usually get close enough to my answer.

So earlier in the call, somebody told me, or somebody asked me the question of what episode was it. I couldn't remember what the episode was called. I couldn't remember the guy's name. It took me a couple minutes to think of it and go and search for it. But at the end of the day, it's a lot easier for me to do that versus taking all of my podcasts, having all of them transcribed, and trying to create this comprehensive thing.

And so I think there's value in just letting stuff go. And there's value in not trying to keep everything that you're trying to keep, but just letting stuff go so that you can systematically move on to what's new and what's better. I do like to have stuff stored, but creating a huge thing.

I remember a few years ago, I bought a new computer. I got a new personal brain software system that I was convinced was gonna be the world's greatest thing. I started filling it up, and it's like, why? Why am I doing this? Is this really how I wanna spend my time, or can I just trust myself to learn what I need to know?

Even when things are really valuable, let's say that my courses that you've bought are the most valuable things in the world, and you learn so much. Realistically, and by the way, of course, that's exactly what they were. But realistically, things hit you at a certain time. A piece of information hits you, and either you do something about it or you don't do something about it.

And if you do something about it, you got most of the value from the piece of education, and you're probably not gonna go through it three times. I'd like to believe that all my stuff was worth going through two times, but realistically, you're not gonna go through something three times, you're gonna grab what's appropriate.

And so in the information age, when the sheer volume and quantity of information is increasing so much, we have to develop and implement careful filters on the information that we consume. And my filter is action. So I believe in just-in-time learning, not for children, et cetera, but I've had to adjust my own learning style.

When I was younger, it always served me well to, it always served me well to learn everything, about everything, and try to know everything. But it can result in too much learning and not enough action. And so over the past years, I've really tried to discipline myself to do just-in-time learning, and to learn towards a specific goal when there's something that I, when I can know and articulate the problem.

And there's a good chance that a lot of the stuff that you're archiving and holding onto, you're not gonna be able to have that there forever. So with regard to library management, I digitized my entire library because I wanted to go and travel. And I did that. I have since repurchased a lot of other books, and in hindsight, I would probably keep more books, just because books are relatively, they're not super inconvenient to have.

You can put them in boxes and stick them away somewhere if you don't have shelf space. So I would just, and what I've learned is just, I guess I've become less concerned with trying to create complete archives of everything. I do have a hard drive that is full of stuff.

And so if you could do that, my courses, I've always tried to make it so my students can just download it. I don't talk a lot about that, but it's always there that you can download it, my stuff. I don't put rights management and encryption and anything on it.

Mostly, I always provide the files so it can be downloaded to your personal archives. So if my platforms disappear, you have that. And I think because of the inexpensiveness of storage, that it's simple to do. And obviously, digital storage is not such a big deal, but I think it does still weigh us down, just like physical storage.

I have a friend of mine who was a massive DVD collector. And this guy, a single guy, lots of money, his entire house is a four-bedroom house that's entirely devoted to his stuff. And over the years, he just bought so many DVDs, and I find his collections oppressive. And I'm like, dude, why do you need all this?

Now, of course, I'm a millennial, and just watch it or skip it. But I guess what I'm saying is, a lot of it doesn't need to be stored. If you are gonna store it, what do you need? Well, I think the answers to it is you would create a RAID configuration of redundant disks.

I can't remember all of the data on this. I looked into this deeply sometime back, but I decided not to do it. But you create a RAID system. There's software that does it, so you have multiple large hard drives that are put together. There's mirrored backups, et cetera. You can create a Plex server that has all of your media on it, and you can put that into a system that is indeed quite valuable.

I have a friend of mine that has a huge, he is one of these pack rats, of good information. I'm not accusing him of being a hoarder, like of good information. He has something like 14 terabytes of information stored on a device, and it's in a Pelican case, et cetera.

And I have considered making him a five-figure offer to purchase it because a lot of his information is technical stuff, et cetera. And there is huge value in it. So if you do it, go and look for an array. I wish I remembered all the software off the top of my head.

I could get you that at some point. But you would create an actual storage system, and you would do it in a very disciplined way, and it's going to be a significant amount of time. So I guess I'm hedging my bets and kind of quibbling here, but on the one hand, move lightly through life.

You didn't come into the world with anything. You're not taking anything of the world out of it. Most of what you need to know is in your own brain. Don't burden yourself down with trying to archive everything when you're probably not gonna use it. A lot of my stuff may be obsolete three years from now, as well as everything else that you did.

And so the costs, especially, one more comment. I have found, I used to obsess about this stuff because I wanted to be good with money. I wanted to be frugal. I didn't want to go and purchase another copy of a book that I already owned, et cetera. But as you move through life, your financial condition improves if you're focusing on the right stuff to the point where it really doesn't matter.

So I've repurchased certain books multiple times. I had a physical copy of it. Yep, that physical copy is gone, or I have it scanned, but I'll go ahead and I'll grab it on Kindle, I'll grab it on iBooks or whatever it is. I'll grab the audio book, and it doesn't matter because if something is really valuable, so what if I pay $80 for four copies of it?

It might not be the most efficient thing, but I'm only doing that when there's 800 or $8,000 ideas in there that I need at a certain time. And so most of that stuff has become, not a rounding error, I don't want to sound arrogant, but it's just not a big factor to my finances.

So if I've got premium stuff that has DRM on it, no big deal, I'll just rebuy it somewhere else. So those are my thoughts. - All right, quick follow-up. So how's my audio? - Better now, thank you, you fixed it. - Okay, awesome. So if I could get you to touch on sort of your view on sharing content as a content creator, if I were to have a library like your friend here with, I could see gathering upwards of 10 to $20,000 worth of paid content.

And how would you view offering that as a service? So like, let's see, Herbology, Srinivasan, has a book called "The Network State" and he talks about, are you familiar with that? - I haven't read it, no. Or I, sorry, actually, hold on, sorry, forget. I have a copy of it, I am familiar with his project, I have a copy of it in my files that I have not read.

So there we go. - Okay, so it's kind of like having groups of communities that are connected online that would act sort of as entities or like a state would. And so in something like that, you could have something like a van life community where they're all connected by their hobby of van lifing, but there could be certain perks and stuff associated with being a member of the van life state.

And one of the perks could be being a member of a massive library that's greater than any one of the people could come up with on their own, but it could be sort of a public resource. What would your thoughts be if, let's say you found out that like all of your back catalog of courses were in something like that too, not freely distributed on the internet, but in a private library that was shared?

- Yeah, that's an interesting question. So first, let's begin with the legal perspective. What you are describing is illegal under US American law. I am pretty skeptical that American copyright law should be how it is. I'm pretty skeptical of it. I don't go deep into it. I don't have a thesis ready to present on it, but I don't think that current copyright law, the way that it's applied in the United States is the way that it should be.

I am opposed to it. So if all the copyright laws were disbanded or if they were severely modified, I've never dug deeply into the history of how Disney screwed up copyright law, et cetera, but I think there's enough smoke there for me to think. I'm of the opinion that there's fire there, but I've never dug into it myself.

But I've read enough essays basically against the concept of modern copyright law for me to be convinced that it probably should be thrown out. With regard, I myself, I try to be careful 'cause I don't wanna get in illegal hot water, but I take liberties on occasion with copyright law.

I've read far too long of passages from books and things like that. And what I always try, the way I myself manage that is I always try to think of what I think the intent of the author would be. And I think that, so if I read, what would be an example?

I read extensive portions from "Climbing Parnassus" some months back. Here's a book that I clearly took great liberties with the copyright. But as I look at it, the book was old, 10 years old or something like that. The book is not a big bestseller or a big seller. There's virtually no appeal for these ideas in the modern era.

And so as I see it, I'm trying to spread the author's ideas. The author isn't making, it's not a latest greatest thriller where the author's making millions on it. The author wrote the book out of a passion for ideas. And the author is trying to spread these ideas. And I'm trying to serve the author in spreading the ideas.

And so of the tens of thousands of people who listened to some portion of my reading that those excerpts that I did, there are, I'm sure there were hundreds of people who said, you know what, this really resonates with me and went and bought the book. And then there were thousands of people who never bought the book, listened to it, and the ideas impacted them, but they never would have read it in the first place.

And so I don't think the author was harmed in any way by my reading extensive portions of his ideas in public. I think the author was helped because the ideas are advanced and I would bet that if he were answering the question, he would say, yeah, I'm glad that you did it.

And I didn't ask him. And if he wrote to me and said, Joshua, please take this down, I'd be off immediately. So back to my stuff, I kind of think of it the same way. I don't worry too much about piracy 'cause pirates are losers. Like people who go out and don't pay for stuff, they don't amount to anything, they're just losers.

And I have no interest in, if they get onto my content or they take a course of mine, maybe they won't do that anymore. But I mean, they're just pitiful people who don't pay for stuff. They're losers, they're not able to be successful. It's a terrible mindset. The idea of not paying people for their contributions in some way is, again, it's a loser mindset.

But those people who don't pay for my stuff, who find it some, I would guess that some of my stuff is out there on some torrent site, et cetera, 'cause everything is out there. But I don't worry about it for a couple of reasons. Again, the people who do that and don't find a way to find the current stuff, they're losers.

And I figure, hey, if they take my stuff, maybe it'll help them something. And at some point, they'll come back and it'll all work out, they'll pay me at some point. And more importantly, they can't keep up. And so I can produce new, better content far faster than anyone can rip it off.

And they can't keep up with me, they can't keep up with my brain and with my learning and my ability, et cetera. And if I released a course three years ago and I took it off the market, well, the reason I did it is because the current one is way better and I've made it better.

And the most valuable thing that somebody has in their life is time, not money. And so when I was young, I consumed lots of, I had lots of bootleg stuff. I grew up in the era of Napster and whatnot. But I guess I still probably have a lot of those files, but I have gone on to spend thousands and thousands of dollars with the people who impressed me the most.

And so if I went through the names, it doesn't, these are just digital files that got passed around and I didn't stay a loser who just tried to get free information. I used the free information that I got. And then I wound up paying those people thousands of dollars and purchasing their other stuff.

And I'm loyal customers of many people. So I don't myself worry about it. I wouldn't care much. I would just, I don't, I'm not interested in spending my time trying to argue over pedantic stuff like that. I'm interested in going on building, getting better, bigger, et cetera. And so I don't have strong opinions on it beyond what I've described.

- Well, that was very helpful. Thank you. - Yeah, my pleasure. Anything else? - I think that'll do it. I'll probably call back. - Yeah, love to speak to you again. And I should spend more time digging into the copyright arguments and whatever and to be able to prepare, to have a coherent argument on it, but I've never, I just haven't gotten around to it.

Go to the great state of Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, I am a Pennsylvania area code, but I am actually in the great state of Washington. - Even a better state. Pennsylvania is for losers. Great state of Washington. That's where it's at.

- I love them both. So I'm gonna take this into a slightly different direction. And I don't know if you've spoken on this before, but sometimes you say, ask me anything. So I'm going there. This is about family and about keeping my siblings together. I have two brothers and we are very strongly loyal to one another.

And now we are facing that time in life when our parents are needing some help and are aging. And so, there are some things coming up for people that are difficult. And I just wanted a little bit of advice from you. So specifically what's happening, mom and dad are aging.

Mom probably needs to go into assisted living and dad is mostly fine. He'll be fine and that's good. I'm trying to get my brothers over the denial of mom is, mom is just fine. She's not fine. She's had some strokes. She has some areas of fine and then some confusion.

And they don't really want to hear any facts from me. There's a dynamic there where my success makes me untrustworthy to them. It's a white collar, blue collar thing. So there is a dynamic there. And I've learned that it's better for me not to try to be expert at anything when I'm with them.

So, or even nudge toward expertise. Hey, go look at these resources, not good. So what I said to them was, hey, let's get an attorney. I'll pay for an hour and let's just ask them questions to see what can happen, which I think is good. In response to that, one of my brothers is a little bit concerned about retirement.

He thinks he's gonna do some things with real estate. I think he's gonna be fantastic. I think it's a great thing. But what he did was talk to dad and got dad to change the will and put the house in his name only, instead of split between the three siblings, which was a backhanded move.

He kind of did it in a bad way, telling dad he loves the house, but really he just wants to rent the house. So I feel like that's like a little bit of a red flag. And then he talked about maybe having dad transferred into his name to save on taxes.

Well, that can't happen. And I talked to dad and the reason is 'cause dad needs to live there and it's not gonna be a lot of taxes. We're not in a position to have to worry about that amount of taxes and all that. And what if we transferred into his name and he died to rent the house, or he gets into a terrible accident and needs a lot of healthcare and has to sell his assets, then where does dad live?

Like it's a whole, and there's not gonna be a house anyway. Probably dad is so healthy, if he drops dead, there will be a house. If he has any end of life care, that house is gonna pay for it. So I briefly talked to dad and gave him, I'm dad's advisor.

First I said, "Dad, am I still your advisor? "I know that was the legal agreement "that you asked me to be," and all of the things in his, for healthcare, which I've had to do a couple of times and other things, and he said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, I just wanted to let you know, "like I know you wanted to give Joe the house." And he said, "Yeah." He got real fired up.

And I said, "That's good. "I understand, but also maybe don't do," and I explained a couple of things about my concerns about why he should keep the house in his name for now. So dad's on board with that. I'm left with the situation where my brother, my brother, I don't know what he's gonna do next, who he's gonna convince of what, and I wanna bring him, and he is an ethical person.

I think he is making a mistake right now. I think he might be getting some bad advice from a friend who I haven't met, but I intend to meet. And, oh, my earbud is going, so I'm changing earbuds, sorry. - All good. - Sorry, sorry. My earbud, my earbud.

- I know what it's like. They run out. My count is two hours and 45 minutes. That's how long mine lasts. So if you're, we're at an hour and 40 minutes into this call, you've been waiting on hold, so it's understandable. No problem. (laughing) - So that's fine. So what I'm trying to do, so I got the name of a great lawyer, and I told the same brother, I said, "You know, I feel like you will be head of household one day.

"I want you to think of yourself as a leader of a family "because when the next generation, "my kids and our other brother's kids, "as they grow, he's probably, "he's been in a physical labor job. "He's always been physically fit. "He may live the longest, most likely." So I'm trying to build him up into what I see as his potential as leader and try to steer him toward good decisions.

That to me is the real value here. My daughter is great. She makes great decisions. She could guide the family if I passed or something like that, but also I'd love to keep everybody together and keep everybody whole. So I got the name of a great lawyer from a friend that helped and he said, "Oh, I called that lawyer "and never called me back, "but I have a lawyer from my friend." So I think it's a friend advising him to do a little underhanded thing.

So is it really a lawyer? Is it, I don't know. So I said, "Okay, let's do that." Make the call, get the call set up. So I'm putting it in his bucket to do that, but time is marching on. So I may have to take another path myself to get mom in good shape.

But I still wanna keep this whole thing whole. And so then he said to me, "Hey, Meg, do you have dad's will, this, this, this, "like the advanced directive, "like all the different things?" And I do, and I'm dad's designated person. Our other brother is mom's designated person. And we all agreed we would work together to make decisions and to keep everything well.

And we have a process for that where whoever's in charge makes the final decision. And we all support that person 'cause mostly worried about my baby brother with mom having like guilt feelings or something, if he should make a decision or having concern that others in the family may give him grief, and we're gonna stand next to him no matter what he makes the decision.

We'll do legwork if he needs it, but we'll stand with him. But you see, like there's this whole dynamic. And I think to myself, Joshua is gonna have a really great perspective on this, but I don't know if he's been there yet in life to think it through. So it's, yeah, okay.

- Yeah, one of the benefits of working in this stuff is you accumulate experience. When you work in an industry, you accumulate industry far, you accumulate experience far beyond your years. You could be a 25-year-old, you could be a 25-year-old attorney, but if you've worked in divorces, you have an 80-year-old life experience in terms of relationships and relationship dynamics.

And that's what has helped me so much is working in this, in addition to some personal experience. So first, I have some more questions I wanna ask, but I wanna just make one thing really clear. So let's assume the best about your brother, meaning he's a man of integrity, ethics, et cetera.

He's doing stupid stuff because the idea that any father should ever transfer a house into his son's name while the father is living is dumb from a tax perspective, from a legal perspective, et cetera. The only reason I could ever think why you would do that would either be some kind of scheme to lower the parents' assets for Medicaid planning, et cetera, and that's a dumb way to go about it.

You're not doing proper Medicaid planning in that scenario. Or it's some kind of fraudulent desire to basically steal a house from your parents. From a legal and tax perspective, the most important thing for your father to do with something like a house, even if he wants to completely inherit that particular son, is for him to own the house until he dies.

And if he owns the house until he dies, then the house as capital gains property will receive a step up in tax basis, and the son will receive the house completely tax-free. Or alternatively, if he's trying to give the money to his son, don't give the house, sell the house and give the money.

And so even if he sold the house and give the money, that itself would be a superior structure from a tax perspective. Now, there are potentially a couple of facts I didn't investigate. I'm not gonna investigate all the details. Maybe your father just owned this house. Maybe it has a high tax base, et cetera.

There could be a few things, but your brother is doing stuff that's actually dumb. Like the idea of somebody writing, first, let me do a bit more fact finding. Has your father and mother lived in this house for a significant amount of time? Thus, they probably have a significant amount of gain in the house?

- Yeah, well, it's their second house. Mom and Dad kind of live in different houses, but honestly, it's in central Pennsylvania. Dad bought the house for $12,000 and now it might be worth $60,000. So we stand to gain hundreds of dollars if we go back. - I understand. - You know what I mean.

- So I guess the point is that if your dad bought the house for $12,000 and it's today worth $60,000, if your dad signs over the house to his son, his son inherits a $48,000 of taxable income upon which he owes taxes. Now, obviously the numbers here we're talking about are modest, it doesn't really matter, but your son would have to wind up owing a tax bill of $15,000 that he otherwise wouldn't owe if he would do something smarter.

So what could be done? Dad can sell the house, Dad will then get $60,000 for it, Dad will get the money tax-free because he's lived in the house, and then Dad can give the son $60,000 and he can go, or Dad can will the house to the son, and then Dad dies and son receives the house, sells it for $60,000 and gets $60,000 tax-free.

So clearly the numbers are modest, but people go out all the time trying to do smart stuff that they think is smart, and due to their general ignorance, they don't understand that this isn't the smartest thing to do. So just, he needs to be super careful because if his friend is giving him advice, his friend is not giving him great advice.

So those are the technical tax details on that one particular thing that you described that may be useful to you at some point. Now, let's move to the general perspective. I wouldn't confront your brother with that information. If he winds up running into it, or if you can discuss it in a very casual way that he discovers his error, fine, but people don't like to be told they're wrong, and they especially don't wanna be told they're wrong by their fancy-pants sister who makes all this money and has this white-collar job, et cetera, and who they have conflict with.

And so that's clearly something you need to be careful of. And you're doing really smart stuff, I think, as a woman, and trying to push your brothers, trying to honor them, trying to raise them up. Like, this is smart move on your behalf in terms of how to encourage them.

Couple of big-picture things. First of all, is your family, are the relationship dynamics in your family capable of sustaining a peaceful family meeting with three children and your father together in one room at the same time? - I mean, it's possible, but it's also possible that it could go sideways.

And the other thing is they both have, my baby brother has a wife, and my younger brother has a fiance who'll get married this year. And they have opinions, but they're not necessarily based on fact. Like, they're based on emotion, and they want to be heard. So we had a third brother, and when he passed away, I did the project, let's call it the project management of the funeral for everybody.

I came back, I did all the project management, and I brought all the decisions to the family to say, what decision would you like to make? I did the legwork, here are our options, what decision would you like to make? And it so ired everyone that they had a little discussion with me about, I have to be in charge.

So I said to them, no, I don't have to be in charge. I loved Tom, and I did the right thing here, but I don't need to even be at the funeral. I'm happy to let you all do all of the legwork and make all of the decisions, and I will attend or not attend, and I can be released from this.

And they were terrified. So they said, oh, no, no, no, you keep going as you are. So I started making inroads with having them understand that I'm really not trying to be in charge of anything. I am the worker and benefiting from all of my labor. But we did have one meeting with the women involved, and they're wonderful, lovely people, and I love them dearly, but there was no, it was chaos.

There was no one single topic of discussion. There was no result from anything. It was just a lot of people talking at each other around all kinds of topics. And that is a therapy session. That is not a decision body. So I'm afraid that that kind of a thing could happen again too, where people don't have a lot of experience in collaborating with other people and understanding, okay, I'm only gonna talk if I have something to add.

I'm gonna give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I'm gonna state my case if it's different. None of that is happening at all. So it could go well or it could go poorly. I don't know. I might have to, I might be able to enlist one of my sisters-in-law to be a mediator if I can get some time with her and lay it out, but I don't know if that will work or not.

I don't know. - Yeah, and you definitely face-- - If I can get one of them on board. - Yeah. From what you've already described, you face a danger of building resentment for your own personal effectiveness and efficiency. And there's already some feelings based upon what you described. And so you face the danger of increasing that.

What is the current net worth of your parents? Big picture, just big picture. What would you guess is the current net worth of your parents? - I would guess it's probably $80,000 or 100,000, very little. They have the other house. They, something terrible happened and they lost it and then they bought it back.

And I think that, and it just, stupidity reigns. I think that there's probably very little, very, very little, if even that much, I don't know. - Got it. - 50,000 in the one house, maybe a couple thousand in the other, maybe nothing, I don't know. - Okay, as far as your personal financial situation is, if you received a one third share of $100,000, would that change your life in any way, meaningfully?

- No, and you know what? I would give it up in a heartbeat. The only, right now, the reason I'm working is to help my niece and nephew get to college. - Of course. - That's my dream for them. - Okay. - So, if I don't get the money, I don't care.

- With regard to your two-- - I would give, yes. - With regard to your two brothers, would it change either of their lives? - Yeah, I feel like it would help, like the one who wants to do some real estate investing, I think it would help him start with that, get some property started, and the other one, I think it would change his life.

Maybe he would do something with his family, like, I don't know, remodel his kitchen or something like that, or maybe he has some other dream involved, but I think it could, I think it would be something that would impact them very positively. - Okay, so I just want to get clarity, 'cause it's one thing if somebody has $100,000 estate, it's another thing if somebody has $100 million estate.

And so, with $100,000 estate, and with the fact that it's not gonna change your life, then we don't need to worry too much about nickels and dimes, we need to worry about maintaining relationships, and I don't think you should just walk away from inheritance. If you want to receive an inheritance and give it away, that's fine, but be careful of just saying, like, I don't want the inheritance, 'cause that could grow more resentment.

- No, I agree. - Right, so I think-- - I agree. - You should receive that. - 100% agree. (laughing) - Yeah, it took me a little while to get there, but probably from listening to you, my brain got there, it's like, wait a minute, what I really care about is, I really do want that blessing from my father, and then if I could bless somebody else and say, you know what, I'm giving it to you, that is more honest, yeah.

- Right, and that's something that you could do separately. So, it's nice to know that the money is immaterial to your life, but you shouldn't volunteer that the money is immaterial to your life, or say to them, oh, I don't need any inheritance. It's just a starting point for me to understand what we're working with.

Now, number two, let's divide the issues into two separate things. So, there's financial, and then there is care of mom and dad, and if I were approaching the situation, I would try to get buy-in on a few basic principles, and what I want to get buy-in on is the idea that as the children of our parents, our duty is to care for them, and our responsibility and our corporate desire is to see to it that in their final years, they are well cared for, that they are well cared for.

Just leave it there, and make sure that everyone agrees on that, and I think from what you're describing, everyone would agree. Now, there's a lot of talking about what that means, but then if you can get buy-in on that fact, that our duty as children for our parents is to care for them, and to make sure that they are provided for and cared for to the best of our ability in their final years, and we agree on that, then we can move on to say, do we also agree that the first resources that should be used for that are their money, that this is their money, they have given us money before, they can do whatever they want with their money, but this is their money that needs to be provided for their care, and so here's where I think most normal people who are not, most normal ethical people would agree with that, that the first purpose of our money is to care for ourselves.

- That's so good. Yeah, because my brother, the same brother, has this idea that we could get mom into a place and then each chip in a couple hundred bucks a month, and it covers her, which is just like, it's cute, but it's not reality, I mean, even if she's probably gonna be a Medicaid case, and even if that's the case, even if we did chip in a couple hundred dollars a month now, she has had strokes, she's gonna need memory care, and so it goes up to 8,000, 10,000, friends of mine are looking at $16,000 a month here out in Seattle area, but for mom, it might not get that high, but $5,000 or $8,000 a month is certainly more than we're gonna be able to do splitting among the three of us.

So we really do need to think, so my brother has some of these ideas that are just not well-formed or not well-informed, which is why I wanna get the right attorney to say, by the way, the way it really works is, you know. I've tried to get into visit places, I told him a place that she would really love to go, where her mother was, and I said, "Why don't we," I said, "I'm gonna visit there," and he's like, "No, no, no, I'll set up the visit." I'm like, "Great, you set up a visit.

"I don't even have to be there, I can be, you know, "I can be Zoomed in if I'm not in the same state." - Right, right. - So I'm trying to get them to understand that, but I think that's a key point. Their money should be used for that first, and that's probably a key point we need to establish with the attorneys, because if we, I already have heard that if, say he did sell the house or give the house away, and then within five years, needed to go into assisted living himself, if it's a Medicaid case, then that's, within five years, they look back five years, and that something bad happens.

I don't know exactly what, but you can't just, you can't just give your house to the kid and say, "Hey, state, pay for me." You know, you really have to use your assets. - Exactly, it's fraud, it's fraud. They will claw back the money, and they will require you to pay the money that was given away within the last five years.

So it's fraud. - Okay, and that's what I'm worried about with my brother. - Exactly. - And that's what I'm worried about with my brother. Yeah, that he's gonna get himself in like this bad situation that now we have, you know, that he's not really foreseeing. - Right, and again, I would say that from what you described about, "Oh, dad can give me the house," he's acting ignorantly.

He doesn't have the confidence, the education, the experience, et cetera, to know the facts. He doesn't know how to consult professional advisors or sources of self-help information, and he doesn't have the capacity or the experience to understand all of what he doesn't know. This is the biggest flaw of ignorance in anything, especially in finances, is that you don't know what you don't know, and therefore, you don't know the questions to ask.

And this is always, this is the key with ignorance in any field is that we don't know, if we're not experts in the field, we don't know what we don't know, and we don't know what to ask, so therefore, we make decisions based on limited information and often, if we had more comprehensive information, we would make better decisions.

And so that's kind of the challenge that he's facing. So let me move quickly. Number one, I would encourage you to establish with your brothers, and again, this is one of those things where this probably doesn't start with your dad, but if you can talk about it with them and if you can sustain a healthy conversation, I would try to get buy-in on a couple of things.

Number one, do we all agree that our priority as sons and a daughter of our parents whom we love and we're good, honest people who love our parents and wanna work together, that our priority is to do what's best for mom and dad? Yes, of course, we wanna do what's best for mom and dad.

Everyone agrees to that. And then do we also agree that mom and dad's assets should primarily be used to do what's best for them? And we're all hoping that when they die, we get a million dollars, but until that happens, we're going to make sure that all of mom and dad's assets are used to do what's best for mom and dad and to provide for them what they need.

And I can't imagine any reasonable moral person disagreeing with that. It may be through with gnashing of teeth, right? I may just be drowning in debt as a son and desperately need money, but I'm at least gonna acknowledge that what I've said is correct. Then the next thing to do is to create some very simple data points.

And so what you can do is if you have access to your parents' affairs, you need to create a current balance sheet, very simple, right? Here's their house, it's house number one is worth $80,000, house number two is worth whatever. You need to create a simple statement of affairs to understand where they are, and you need to create a simple understanding of what their income is.

So they have social security, if they have any other sources of income, they need to be understood what they are. And so because what happens in these family situations is often there's not even understanding of the actual facts because as children, we're all busy, none of us really wanna get involved with our parents' lives, we all have our own concerns, et cetera, and so if you can create a simple balance sheet of here's the assets that mom and dad have, here's the debts that mom and dad have, here's the income that mom and dad have, and here are their expenses, then at least we can start from the same place.

And what, and your father also, again, I don't wanna, people sometimes just through no fault of their own, but they don't, they're not rational. So the idea that a guy with $100,000 net worth can give away his house when his wife is heading into memory care, and when he himself is strong and vigorous and likely to live for another 20 years, this is crazy.

Like, no, you need this $100,000, and it needs to be in the bank so that you have some money to buy the things that you need. And to me, it will be obvious that if you put that on paper, you'll understand that no significant changes should happen here financially.

No big gifts should be made, no anything should be made. And the reason you need to communicate on paper is to get aligned with the other brother, if necessary. Just with the facts, not-- - Oh yeah, he's a little bit upset that he was like kind of pushed out, and he's like, well, nobody asked me about the house, and that, you know, and the other brother was like, oh, well, and my dad was like, I just started.

So we will unravel that in time. I feel like that's a comma, not a period. - Okay, do you have, how do you and your brothers communicate, do you have a group text message, you know, a WhatsApp group? What do you have, a group text message? - We have group text, and yep, and then I, and they're in Pennsylvania, so I visit Pennsylvania, I also have a daughter in Pennsylvania, so I visit Pennsylvania every couple months, and we sometimes talk on the phone.

And I also individually talk to each of them in email. I have a lot of communication. - Good, wonderful, okay. - And with their wives and with their kids, like I keep it all going. - Good, so you might consider, you might consider, with your group text, you might consider creating a group text with you, your brothers, and their wives.

You don't need the kids involved, just you, the brothers, and their wives, so that everyone's on the same page. And having their wives in the group, I think, can be helpful to minimize some of that brothers against a sister dynamic. It's important to have women and men fully informed of all the facts, et cetera, so they can talk about it with their spouses, et cetera.

Moving quickly, the next thing I would say is you need to get a clear understanding of what is likely to happen with mom and what is likely to happen with dad. So if you have, have you already had a professional review by a medical professional of your mom, a report made by a professional, an assessment?

- No, but she's clearly in need of help. Like, this is pretty clear, yeah. - So it's clear to you, but it's not clear to your brothers, right? - Right, right. - Okay, so you need to commission an assessment, a formalized assessment, by a consultant, an expert, a doctor, a memory care, I'm not sure, I don't remember the name to use, but somebody, have them assess your mother, create the medical assessment, and have the medical professional create a recommended care plan for her.

- Okay. - And you need to know that as a starting point. And that needs to be an actual document, 'cause then now you and your brothers have something to talk about. If you just give your opinion, and your brother's a blue collar worker, and he sees your mom once every four weeks, and like, well, mom doesn't seem that bad, but when you're there with your mom, you're there with her for four weeks, and you understand all that's happening, you need a professional medical opinion that you can then take it off of you, and you can discuss what the medical advisor says.

And that would be the first thing I would do. And then you need to understand what, so based on that medical opinion, let's assume that your mother is heading for a memory care unit. The next, well, before we go to the memory care unit, you need to ask yourself and talk about, is there a way that we could provide care for mom?

And, 'cause this may be something that you could do. So your brother, for example, especially the brother who wants to have the house, it may be the case that he and his wife could provide a high level of good care for your mother and your father, and maybe he would want to do that.

On the other hand, maybe they have no space, no desire, can't do that, et cetera. So I don't, you know, we don't, none of us wanna institutionalize our parents, and that should be the last resort, although it can be a very necessary step with a severe case of dementia or Alzheimer's.

So you need to understand the options and talk about them as based upon the professional report. Then with those options, then your next task is to bring in professional knowledge of the state of Pennsylvania with your state's Medicaid laws and what paths are available. So I would hire a Medicaid attorney, an elder law attorney in the state of Pennsylvania.

I would describe your parent's situation. That's where you put down the balance sheet. Here's whose name is on the house. Here's the thing, here's whose name is on the bank accounts, et cetera. What are our options under the Medicaid laws of Pennsylvania? Very clearly, your mother is a candidate for Medicaid, and that will happen either by spending down all of their assets, and your father will be left with his social security payment, and the assets will be spent down to pay for her care in the memory unit if that's where things go, or there may be an ability for you to set aside and separate the assets so that he has the house that he can live in.

I don't know Medicaid law in Pennsylvania, but normally he would be able to retain a house that he lives in, and normally there would be able to be an allowance for his personal effects, et cetera, and then your mother would qualify for Medicaid. And then your next step after that is to figure out can we actually get care in our state under the Medicaid program?

Just because there's an ability for the program to pay for it doesn't mean you can actually get care. Lots of people who are fully qualified for Medicaid, they can't actually get the care that they need. And so you'll want to explore the options. Medicaid in some cases does provide in-home care.

And so if you can get some kind of in-home care that is sufficient for your mother's needs so that she can stay home with her husband, that would be great. If you can't get in-home care, understand the facilities, et cetera, all the stuff that you're doing. So that would be the process that I would go down, and I think that where you can serve your brothers will be for you to be really good at what you are good at, of presenting the data, the research that you're skilled at collecting, and then trying to bring it to a family meeting of what do you all think would be best for mom and dad, and trying to get agreement on these basic foundational issues.

And if we're dealing with normal, ethical people, then the answers will emerge pretty obviously from that data that you've collected with the professional assessment, with the Medicaid lawyer's advice, with the actual statement of accounts, the actual assets and income of your parents, et cetera. The decisions should emerge. The right answer should emerge from that data.

- Totally makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. And even if they are good, rational people, we're dealing with emotions here that come up in difficult times. So having all that rationality and having the women involved too, the wives, I think that will help as well. 'Cause even if people fly off the handle initially or have opinions or something, cooler heads will prevail in time, maybe the next day or something like that.

And I think it's a fantastic thing 'cause one of the wives, her mother, will probably be in a similar situation in not too long. And if I can present a way that, like a path, here's what I did, can we do the same thing for your mom? To get her set up well, I think that would go over well as well.

That might be my angle to get her to, not necessarily agree with me, but think clearly of her own right and come up with her own assessment. 'Cause honestly, she's great in difficult situations too, I've noticed. So she has a lot of common sense. - If my wife's hand touches my arm in the middle of a discussion, there is a deep volume behind that simple touch.

So I think it would be wise for you to bring everyone together in those conversations. - Yeah, it's such great advice. Thank you so much. Just really appreciate this. - My pleasure. - There's not a lot of people to talk with about this. - No, there's not, there's not.

But I think that you're doing the right stuff and I hope that those steps will help you. I think the most important thing is just for you to be careful. I was gonna ask you, and I'm gonna move on here, I was gonna ask about who's older, et cetera, but there's no question that when you get into a situation like this, the tensions between brothers and sisters and the resentment about miss successful and male and female dynamics, all those things can be there.

But if we begin by believing the best, we all love each other, we all love mom and dad, we want the best, and we commit to articulating what that would look like, then we can work systematically through the specific decisions. - Peter in New York, thank you for your patience, sir.

You are up and you are the final one today. How can I serve you today, sir? - I'll try to make it quick. I think I got ripped off by someone offering a online service and should I try to sue this person to get my money back or is there anything else that I need to take stock of in a situation like this?

- How much money? - 750 bucks. - Can you do a charge back on a credit card? - I think it's been so long that I don't know. I'm not sure what the time limit is on that 'cause the payment was made about 18 months ago. - So I don't know, but I would start with a charge back attempt.

That would be the first thing. And then are they communicating with you at all? - Periodically, yes. That's what's sort of frustrating is it was this service that I just don't think got off the ground. I don't think it was a straight up scam, but it's one of these, hey, we're having cash flow problems, I'll get back to you.

So it's intermittent, but yeah, it's one of those, the person hasn't totally ghosted, but quasi-responsive, I guess is how I would say it. - I guess, I mean, in theory, so number one, try a charge back on your credit card. That would be number one. I've never actually looked into how long ago you can do that.

So I don't know what those laws are, and I'm ignorant to that. I should go and study that a little bit. But I would start with a charge back on the credit card. Obviously, I would talk to them, and I would ask them for a refund. I would ask them for a partial refund if they won't give you a full refund.

And so if there's some kind of scenario where they delivered 20% of the value that they were expecting, listen, guys, could you refund $400 of it or something like that? That's reasonable. Being in the position of selling stuff online, the thing I want is I want happy customers. And to me, having some guy's money that doesn't like me and doesn't like my stuff is not worth it if it means that the guy could go and write a nasty review or publish a website or something about me.

I don't go and look for that stuff. I hope that there's nothing out there. I've never kept someone's money who wanted it back. I've never, 'cause I just don't want, I don't want it on my conscience, first of all. It's just a man, and I don't want it on the internet.

I don't want people writing nasty stuff about me and saying, well, I didn't get this. And so whenever anyone has ever asked me and expressed any form of dissatisfaction, I've immediately refunded their money or immediately made it right in some way. And so now if this guy has sold something that he can't deliver on, and he has cashflow issues, he may wanna do that, but the money may be gone and spent.

And yes, could you sue him and whatnot? Yeah, you could. I wouldn't waste my time with $750, because here's the way I look at it. If it's $750 and $750 is a big deal for you because you're poor and broke, and I know you're not, but if you're poor and broke, then you don't have time to mess around with trying to get $750 from somebody.

You need to go and make money. And if you're rich and successful, it's $750. Screw it and move on, and just next time, think of a different solution. I would never bother with trying to go with $750. I would never bother trying to go and do that. Maybe you write a review, write a review, make a report with Better Business Bureau, something like that, put a review on his Google reviews or on his Facebook reviews, et cetera.

Provide enough detail so that it's there to warn other people of the bad service, but that's as far as I would go. - Okay, that sounds good. I'm gonna try to charge back. That's interesting. I'll see what the deal is with that. - Yeah, and then I think, I don't have much to add.

I just wanna clarify. On the reviews, I think any normal, rational, experienced person understands that we can't make everyone happy. And so, when I see five-star reviews, one-star reviews, et cetera, we can't make everyone happy. And so, I will do business with people who have unhappy customers because people don't like us.

We screw stuff up. But if in your review, there is an allegation of fraud, then that is really important. So I always pay careful attention to the way that reviews are written. So if you can provide an accurate assessment, and then if you can just make sure that you have whatever history or records that you have to protect yourself.

If somebody comes after you and sues you for libel, I don't think that, there's no way in the legal system to do that. But just to know that you have support for it, if you write an accurate review, I think that's the way that you can do it. Write off the $750, take it as a business loss.

And I'm serious, it's totally a loss. And take it as a loss, and then do your service to the community by leaving an honest review in some format where it can be there as a warning to other potential buyers in the future. - I will do that, sounds great.

- Great, anything else? - Nope, have a great weekend. - Thank you so much. And with that, we conclude our show for today, Mammoth Show today, but I haven't been able to do Q&A shows the last couple weeks, so I'm glad to do it. I wanna thank you for listening, thank you for being here.

If you would like to ask me one of these questions, I tell you what, all my listeners got some free advice. (laughing) Some of these calls and whatnot were pretty long and pretty extensive. Usually, I've had to charge people a lot of money, but I keep telling people, if you want a cheap way to talk to Joshua, just call in for a Friday Q&A show, 'cause it gives me content, allows me to teach others, and everybody benefits from it.

Thank you for listening. Remember that for four more days, you can enroll in my newest course, which is How to Retire Successfully. You can do that at howtoretiresuccessfully.com, howtoretiresuccessfully.com, four more days. At the moment, I haven't reached my number, so registration is still open. In addition to that, you heard me mention the International Escape Plan course.

Internationalescapeplan.com is available to you, internationalescapeplan.com. With regard to Bitcoin, I had a caller that talked about, should I put money into Bitcoin as a way of moving to a foreign currency? You heard that my advice was no, but I do still think you should own Bitcoin. And if you'd like to own Bitcoin privately, go to bitcoinprivacycourse.com, bitcoinprivacycourse.com.

If you'd like to be on next week's Q&A show, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Have a great 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.

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